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In a recent blog, Google reports that “the time has come to retire the Content Keywords feature.” Content Keywords were the primary method webmasters used to see how Google viewed their site, as well as if Google was able to crawl their pages or if their site was hacked.

Why We Don’t Need Content Keywords

The blog’s author, John Mueller, who is Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, lists several newer features that have been developed over the years that allow webmasters to accomplish what Content Keywords used to do:

• Google’s Fetch and Render tool – “Easily check any page on your website and see how Googlebot fetches it immediately”
• Search Analytics – “Shows you which keywords we’ve shown your site in search for”
• Other Google notifications – “Google informs you of many kinds of hacks automatically”

In addition to the number of tools that render Content Keywords obsolete, Mueller also states that users were often “confused” about what they found in Content Keywords. Google’s elimination of Content Keywords will eliminate this confusion.

Remembering Content Keywords

Back when Search Console was Webmaster Tools, the Content Keywords feature allowed webmasters to view valuable information about their website. This section would list the keywords, how many variants were found, as well as the keywords’ “significance.”

Here’s what it used to look like:

(Image credit: Yoast)

Moving Forward

Mueller stresses that, although the Content Keywords feature is gone, keywords are still important for Google’s and users’ understanding. He also offers a few words of advice: “While our systems have gotten better, they can’t read your mind: be clear about what your site is about, and what you’d like to be found for.”

Image via Unsplash

There has long been a debate among businesses as to how their buyers buy, largely expressed in the terms of business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C). A business purchase, such as selecting a blog software, is very different from a consumer shopping for a road bike.

Or is it? Jay Baer has said, “Our personal and commercial lives have collided in unprecedented ways.” The behaviors and attitudes we’ve adopted in recent years—thanks to our daily exposure to smartphones, social channels, and other tech advancements—are blending into our business lives.

In other words, our expectations of companies when we’re in the role of “business buyer” are advancing along a similar path as our expectations as consumers. A recent study by Salesforce Research, “State of the Connected Customer,” validates this idea in a new set of research, proving all buyers have the same fundamental expectations regardless of the type of purchase.

This research surveyed more than 7,000 consumers and business buyers globally. In the report, consumers reported “their personal purchasing, service, technology, and engagement preferences,” while business buyers self-identified as “employees having purchasing power on behalf of B2B companies.”

The study shows that B2B marketers can no longer afford to tell themselves that B2C marketing trends don’t apply to them. (highlight to tweet) It’s not that B2B and B2C audiences are the same, but rather, the research reveals that consumers’ expectations of companies are very similar for both B2B and B2C buyers.

Here are three ways that business buyers’ expectations align with consumer expectations in ways that could be mislabeled as “B2C marketing” trends.

1. 80 Percent of Business Buyers Expect Real-Time Communications

While “real-time interactions” in the B2C world may point to social channels, the ability for B2B companies to respond immediately is no less important. In fact, 80 percent of business buyers expect companies to respond and interact with them in real time.

The amount of time business buyers are willing to wait for a response varies by channel. It may surprise you that 67 percent of business buyers expect a response via email within one hour, and 15 percent of those actually expect an immediate reply.

Despite the high bar set for real-time email response, B2B marketers’ use of marketing automation is still lower than you might guess. The “2016 State of Marketing” research shows that only 11 percent of underperforming B2B marketers extensively use marketing automation—but even among high-performing B2B teams, only half (49 percent) say the same.

2. 65 Percent of Business Buyers Will Jump Ship without Personalized Interactions

As consumers, we’ve witnessed how retailers apply the data they know about us to personalize marketing. For instance, we’ve all received offers personalized with our name, gender, location, or recommendations. But as B2C marketers raise the stakes for personalization, B2B marketers would do well to follow suit.

Why? Not only do three-quarters of business buyers expect companies to send their company personalized offers, 74 percent agree that receiving these personalized offers has a major or moderate influence on their loyalty. This is even higher than the percentage of consumers who say the same (65 percent).

That’s not all: Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of business buyers go so far as to say that they’d likely switch brands if a company didn’t make an effort to personalize communications with their business.

But are marketers living up to those expectations? From the “2016 State of Marketing” research, we know that only 37 percent of B2B marketers are leveraging predictive intelligence/data science to create personalized emails. The percent who trigger real-time emails based on events is even lower (30 percent).

When it comes to personalizing advertising, B2B marketers gain some ground. Sixty-eight percent use demographic data (e.g., age or gender), 74 percent use customer data (e.g., email or phone data), and 69 percent use website activity data (e.g., retargeting cookies) to segment or target their company’s advertising.

3. The Age of Ultimate Empowerment

While shoppers who are showrooming may be B2C marketers’ worst nightmare (especially heading into the holidays), B2B marketers must realize that today’s business buyers are likewise more in control than they’ve ever been. Eighty-three percent of business buyers agree that technology has kept their company more informed about choices than ever before. And the more readily business buyers can use tech to understand all of their options, the easier it becomes to take their business elsewhere (82 percent of buyers agree).

The implications of this are simple but immense: Your business buyers expect the same level (if not higher) of real-time attention and personalized interactions as consumers. If they don’t see B2B marketers making strides toward delivering that, they’re well-positioned to find another provider who will.

To successfully market to business buyers, B2B marketers need to stop feeling immune to these changes in the customer mindset. As a B2B marketer, keep these three things top of mind heading into 2017:

• Be there for your business buyers to interact in real time.
• Personalize as much as possible along every step of the customer’s journey.
• Remember that your buyers have never held more power to choose.

Will we use the term B2B or B2C in 2017? Yes, certainly, but what about the next few years? The data from Salesforce Research proves that no matter what they are buying, or how they buy it, customers have a core set of expectations. They expect to be engaged in real time, and on a personal level. This is now the baseline of expectations, which all businesses must reach, no matter how complex the buying cycle or miniscule the purchase. Without the focus on the individual, relationships cannot be built—and as this research shows, those relationships are very powerful.

Failure to acknowledge this will result in missed opportunities and a significantly declining customer base. Moving forward, try to strike the terms “B2B” and “B2C” from your mind, and remember that despite what you’re selling, your customers are individuals who demand to be treated as such.

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The holidays are a great reason to connect with your customers and show them a the personal side of your small business. Of course, every business is promoting sales, discounts, and limited-time offers, but there are softer ways to engage your clients without asking them to make a purchase. Blogging is a prime way to provide timely, valuable content to your readers that speak to the holiday season and keep them coming back for more helpful tips and material.

If you’re wondering how to position your blog for increased traffic and subtly generate sales, this is the article for you! Try these four tips to successfully blog for business during the holidays.

Create Gift Guides

Everyone is shopping during the holidays. Create gift guides for your target audience as well as a personal wish list. Your readers will appreciate the help and enjoy learning more about you. If you have employees, have them generate their own wish lists or gift guides so your blog can reach different buyers and audiences. It’s fun to see what other people want and it often spurs new gift ideas for the readers.

To get you started, here are a few sample guides:

• Gifts for Moms
• Gifts for The Tech Savvy Friend
• Gifts for The Travel Aficionado
• Gifts for Colleagues
• Gifts for Your Pets

Gift guides allow you to connect with your audience and share about the people behind your business. It gives a glimpse into the personalities behind your brand, and if appropriate, provides a way to promote your products and services. However, tout your products carefully. Blog readers want honest articles, not promotional content disguised as objective commentary.

Share Customer Testimonials

The holidays are a wonderful time to boast about customer satisfaction and a job well done. If you have a fantastic customer testimonial on hand, write a post featuring that customer and their experience with your business. Tell the entire customer story and how your business supported their needs while over delivering and exceeding expectations. The more unique, the better as people remember surprising stories better than those that seem familiar.

Make the customer the focus of the post. With the customer as the hero, it subconsciously conveys your business principles about customer satisfaction and doing right for each client and interaction. These are invaluable sentiments that will only resonate more deeply with your readers during the holidays.

Offer Up Your Holiday Traditions

Holiday traditions are what make the season so special. Take this occasion to share your holiday traditions with your readers. You can discuss favorite recipes, family outings, decorating tips, and anything else that is nostalgic and meaningful to you.

This is another chance to engage your employee and ask them for their holiday traditions. Having a smattering of perspectives and traditions makes for a robust and engaging blog post. You’ll have as much fun writing it as your audience does reading it. Consider it as another means of opening your business to your readers in service of building relationships. It’s a way to humanize your business. and establish loyalty with your customers.

Highlight Your Charitable Side

It’s highly likely a charitable organization holds a special place in your business’s heart. Spread the word about your cause of choice on your blog! Tell your readers about the organization, why your business got involved with it, and how the brand supports the organization during the holidays and throughout the year.

Do you collect coats for a winter clothing drive or adopt a family and fulfill their Christmas present wishes? Or volunteer at a soup kitchen and provide hot meals to those in need? However you volunteer or give back as a business, share it on your blog. It increases awareness for your beloved cause and shows your customers what causes and efforts are important to the business. It’s an unexpected behind the scenes view of your brand, and one that readers want to see. Include photos from your efforts to create a visual of your goodwill. This will make an imprint on your readers and keep your business in their minds throughout the holidays.

Your business blogs should be inspiring and uplifting during the holidays. Give your readers a reason to come back week after week because your content is so captivating. Address these four areas, and you’ll have a month’s worth of content in no time.

Every month or two, Facebook asks its engineers to take the day off from their regular duties to tackle any project they want.

These so-called hackathons aren't unusual among Silicon Valley tech companies — Google is famous for them too. For Facebook, they often lead to important products, including its first video player, its developer platform, and its chat system.

After Facebook's engineers prototype their ideas, they present and vote on them among their colleagues. The highest voted ideas get presented to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the executive team.

As Facebook product chief Chris Cox puts it, "This is like our 'American Idol.'"

For Facebook's most recent hackathon, the most popular ideas were shown to Zuckerberg, Cox, and other top company execs during a livestream on Zuckerberg's personal Facebook page on Monday. Not all of these creations will become real products or features, but it sounds like Zuckerberg is already ready to greenlight some of them.

Here are the "hacks" that Facebook employees created:

• Hand controllers for the Oculus VR headset that get physically hot and cold: An employee from Facebook-owned Oculus demoed modified hand controllers for its headset that simulate the feeling of heat and cold in virtual reality using embedded thermal coolers. "This is quite warm," remarked Zuckerberg while warming his hands at a virtual fire.
• Location requests in Messenger for when a friend is missing: If you can't find a friend and become worried about their safety, Messenger could one day let you send a request to see their location. A timer would begin on the friend's phone that gives them a chance to approve or deny the request. If the timer expires on its own, their location would be sent to you automatically.
• GIFs are coming to Facebook comments: Soon you'll be able to comment with GIFs in comments on Facebook. "“I think this will be widely used," Zuckerberg said.
• Offline messaging: A Facebook engineer demoed offline messaging in the company's stripped down Messenger Lite app for emerging markets. Once implemented, the feature will allow people without internet access to message each other using the WiFi signals in their phones. Zuckerberg seemed to really like this idea during the demo and even said that “this is something that I’ve thought we should build for awhile."
• Shared photo and video galleries based on what people post in a person's comments. Facebook engineers demoed the use of machine learning to automatically create shared photo and video albums based on what people share in the comments of a post. So if you ask for photos people took at a wedding, what your friends share in your comments would be turned into a shared album for everyone to see.
• An update on Zuckerberg's personal smart home AI assistant: After the hackathon demos, Zuckerberg shared on update on the artificially intelligent assistant he's been building for his home all year. “It can do a bunch at this point," he said without getting into specifics. He plans to give a full demo before the end of the year. (No word on whether it will indeed be voiced by Robert Downey Jr. of 'Iron Man' fame.) 

SEE ALSO: Facebook is working on a plan to pick news from favored media partners like Snapchat

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A Facebook bug was telling people they died

Approximately 90% of businesses are using cloud computing in some form, and 82% of them use more than one cloud service. These figures are rising year-on-year. With cloud solutions available for so many areas of a business, some businesses are already going ‘full cloud’—using cloud servers for all of their programs, services and data storage.

But is this safe? Can a business really run on cloud alone without opening itself up to new and unknown risks? We look at each area of a business the cloud may be used for, and whether or not it is secure.

Accounting

Financial figures and bank details may well be the most sensitive data any company has, so handling them on a cloud-based program seems risky. Despite this, startups and small businesses in particular are increasingly favouring a cloud-based solution for their accounting tasks. The benefits of cloud-based accounting for startups include the real-time tracking of financial data and cash flow, and the easy management of client information.

But are these benefits worth the risks?

As it happens, most experts say there are no risks. Or at least no more risks than there are associated with non-cloud accounting. According to The Guardian, cloud servers face the same security issues as local servers. Either of these could be hacked; neither is more vulnerable to the other. Xero argues that using a cloud system can actually be more secure for accounting, as it allows for agencies and businesses to work together in a safer way. Through cloud accounting platforms such as Xero, accountants can send invites to companies, allowing them to view and assess their finances, through a system that is safer than sending emails.

Data backup

Cloud accounting may be safe, but what about data backup? Backing up data is one of the cloud’s primary functions, and it is crucial to the survival of many companies.

According to a disaster recovery study, 40% of businesses that suffer a critical IT failure close within a year. This is often due to loss of client and business data. One way to avoid this worst-case scenario is through restoring your business’ data from a backup.

Companies can backup and encrypt their data on an external hard drive or, of course, on the cloud. However, a detailed survey revealed that data recovery from the cloud can sometimes fail.

Fortunately enough for cloud users, cloud backups are no more likely to become lost or corrupted than hard drives. PC World examined three leading cloud backup services and found them to be just as secure as local backups if users take requisite precautions.
Encrypting files with your own password is one key tip, as it means even if someone hacks the cloud server, they cannot access the files. The downside of this, and perhaps the cause of recovery failure for some businesses, is that if you forget the password, the data is encrypted forever.

File storage

Storing files is slightly different than backing them up. Whereas backups, cloud or not, can be encrypted for maximum security, regular files need to be easily accessible to employees for daily use.

Offline file storage involves using local programs such as Word or Excel, and saving finished documents to a local hard drive or network. Cloud file storage is nearly the same, but an off-site server accessed over the internet takes the place of the local one.

Cloud storage providers like Google, Dropbox and Microsoft are in charge of your files’ safety if you use them. There is little you can do to make a difference on your end. Alphr recommends using a two-step security process whenever possible to ensure no one breaches these platforms. As their article points out, the user, not the storage provider, is the weakest link when it comes to cloud security.

If employees create strong passwords, there should be no problem with cloud file storage—and it can actually make collaboration with other employees easier as documents can be accessed by multiple users across platforms over the cloud, and even sent to clients in cloud form.

Stumped on finding the perfect holiday gift? Look no further.

The team at INSIDER compiled 100 awesome gifts that are all under $100.

From a wine glass that cannot spill to a beautiful log vase from Chip and Joanna Gaines' home goods store, these are all gifts that we are dying to get — and we think you'll feel the same. 

Now start shopping!

A stylish umbrella

Bring some color to a gray, rainy day with this rainbow umbrella.

Color Wheel Stick Umbrella, $50

Indoor herb garden

Finally, a way to grow an herb garden without actually having to gow an herb garden. The Click & Grow does all the work for you. You just plug it in, and it lights and waters your plants for you. You should go from seeds to basil in just a few weeks.

Click & Grow Indoor Smart Herb Garden, $38

Perfume Sampler

Why settle for one perfume when you can have 15?

This sampler — which is one of our Sephora hacks — features an assortment of Sephora's most sought-after smells, as well as a gift certificate for a full-sized bottle of your scent of choice.

Sephora Favorites Perfume Sampler, $65

Paid Content by

HISTORY

When people find themselves stranded in the wilderness, they need to get creative with how they use the resources at their disposal while they try to survive the elements. Innovative wilderness hacks are staples among the participants in HISTORY’s hit survival show Alone. The series follows the day-to-day lives of survival experts as they try to last as long as possible in Patagonia, Argentina — so they know a thing or two about making the best out of an extreme situation.

While the hardcore survivalists on Alone aren’t allowed to bring any technology with them when they’re dropped into treacherous and remote locations, odds are you would at least have your smartphone on you if you ever found yourself stranded with no signal. Read more...

What to avoid when looking for Ecommerce payment solutions

For most ecommerce retailers, payment gateways are seen as a necessary evil. Yes, they help you accept payments from your customers, but they’re not at the top of your list of organizations you like working with. They’ve developed a reputation of being sleazy, money-grubbing middlemen that take advantage of retailers, both big and small.

Some modern payment gateways, like Stripe, Braintree, and Sezzle, are finding ways to create more value for retailers and they’ve developed good reputations because of that. But problems remain. And if payment gateways want to shake their negative image within the e-commerce community, these are the five things they should focus on improving first.

1. They’re too expensive.

Payment gateways have long been rebuked by retailers for their high processing costs. The average rate today is 2.9% + 30c per transaction for online, or card-not-present, transactions. These costs have slowly increased for retailers, while the underlying cost and risk associated with processing these payments have decreased for gateways. How does that make any sense?

To put this in perspective, Europe recently passed legislation capping the interchange fees on credit and debit cards to the point where these fees are now 2-3 times higher in the US than they are in most European countries. Yet, payment gateways and issuing banks are still making enough money to continue operating profitably in Europe. Hmm.

2. They like to keep their fee structure hidden.

Payment gateways and processors have long played the hidden fee game. This is one area in which modern gateways like Stripe and Sezzle have made progress, by using simple, blended pricing models, but big problems still remain.

Merchant processing fees generally fall into one of two categories: (1) wholesale fees, and (2) markups. Wholesale fees are the interchange rates set by issuing banks and credit card companies. They are consistent regardless of which gateway you choose, so don’t waste your time trying to shop around for lower interchange rates. Markup fees are how your processor and/or gateway make a profit from your business. With the right gateway, these fees will be modest, but with the wrong gateway, you’re in big trouble. Some gateways make it as difficult as possible to know how much markup you’re paying by using bewildering terms and pricing models that would baffle even the most experienced business owner or retailer. Just a few examples include PCI fees, early termination fees, monthly minimum fees, statement fees, IRS report fees, and batch fees.

If you’re a large enough retailer, finding an interchange plus pricing model is usually the most transparent and cost-effective. Tiered pricing is traditionally the murkiest, including the most hidden fees. The newer gateways are using a blended model that keeps pricing simple, but costs tend to be higher for high-volume businesses, especially on debit transactions.

3. They haven’t figured out mobile yet.

StatCounter reported earlier this month that in October more users around the world accessed the internet from mobile devices than from desktop computers, the first time in history that has occurred.

In addition, a recent Business Insider Intelligence report stated that by 2020, mobile commerce will make up 45% of total e-commerce. Personally, I think that will occur sooner than 2020, but you get the point. More and more people are using their mobile devices to access the internet, and to shop online.

Most ecommerce payment gateways, however, were developed to accommodate a payment network built on physical cards. At their core, cards are not mobile-friendly. They consist of multiple bits of numerical data that are difficult to memorize, and people are increasingly leaving their wallets and purses behind in favor of mobile phones.

Some gateways, like Apple Pay and Sezzle, have leveraged new technology to enable biometric and two-factor authentication for online payments. These technologies are much more mobile-friendly, requiring fingerprints, eye scans, or short PINs and texts to complete transactions. Let’s hope the trend continues.

4. They treat merchants unfairly on disputes and chargebacks.

Overall, chargebacks and fraud account for less than 1% of all transactions globally. However, the rate is higher for e-commerce transactions, and it’s growing. A typical e-commerce business offering physical products should see a 0.10% - 0.30% chargeback ratio, and a little over half of those will be for fraud. If you sell a non-physical product online, you’re likely to see a little higher ratio. And if you’re offering a subscription service, it will be higher still.

Chargeback fraud, also known as friendly fraud, is also a major problem for e-commerce retailers. This occurs when a consumer makes an online purchase, and then requests a chargeback from their issuing bank after receiving the purchased goods or services.

When a chargeback is approved, the merchant is accountable, regardless of the measures they took to verify the transaction. To add insult to injury, gateways will charge merchants a penalty when a chargeback occurs, because of the cost and risk to their own businesses (gateways can be shut down if their chargeback rates get too high).

Make sure you read the fine print in your gateway contracts, to better understand what the chargeback process looks like and how much you are penalized when a chargeback occurs. As a general rule, credit cards are most favorable to consumers when they request a chargeback, debit cards are in the middle, and bank payments are most favorable to merchants.

5. They haven’t figured out recurring payments yet.

A major shift is taking place in our economy, from a pay-per-product model to a subscription-based model. While recurring revenue provides businesses more steady cash flows, it requires companies to better manage a direct, complex, responsive, multi-channel relationship with its customers. Customers are absolutely key in this relationship, and rather than putting the focus of the business on the “product” or the “transaction,” subscription economy companies live and die by their ability to monetize long-term relationships rather than shipping products.

This poses a major challenge to payment gateways as well. Subscription-based companies typically see between 15-20% of recurring payments fail due to expired or canceled credit and debit cards. This is known in the business as “incidental churn.” Companies like Recurly have sprouted up to help businesses combat churn, but the fact is, cards are not an optimal payment method for recurring payments. An interesting solution some gateways are employing, including Sezzle and PayPal, is to enable customers to pay businesses directly from their bank accounts, which significantly reduces churn due to the fact that most people rarely change checking accounts. Many gateways are still behind the times, though, and for the subscription economy to continue growing, recurring payments must get better.

I would love to get your thoughts on these problems, and any more that I may have missed. Please reply in the comment section below. Thanks!

Thanks to Paul Paradis for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Paul is Chief Business Development Officer of Sezzle You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Late in 2016 Deloitte published a fascinating market profile[1] of the millennial generation, basically anyone born between 1980 and 2000.

Considered as an important demographic, millennials will be the largest adult segment by the end of the current decade.  That’s three years from now.  And not just in the West: Already nearly two thirds of Asians are millennials. 

Millennials are entering their peak years for earnings, consumption and investing.  They are coming not just in numbers but with documented differences in the way they think about money.

From where I sit, the financial services industry doesn’t know how unready it is for the millennial wave to break.

Companies in every industry commonly hire for the operating environment that is about to expire.  Everyone concerned relies on their expert judgment of talent.  It is a judgment formed in the old world and so they fish in the old talent pools.  And they hire the wrong people.

In an age of talent shortages this costs them money and constrains growth—not just future growth but growth right now.

Recently Wholefoods, the big US grocer, conducted a search for a senior HR executive who would “hack our people practices.”  Grocery retailing is far removed from the clients we serve at The Options Group, but I know exactly what Wholefoods is after.  I’d like to see a similar kind of impulse among financial-services firms to get themselves ready for the long wave of millennials coming down upon them.

Here are some big ideas for doing just that.

Generation cautious

As they enter the most dynamic phase of their adult lives millennials will be building college funds and retirement nest eggs.  And they’ll be looking for ways to be self-sustaining to an unparalleled degree.  More than half plan to start new business.  More than a quarter already have.  To a degree unprecedented in history they will have inherited wealth as their baby boomer parents pass from this earth.

But bear this in mind: Millennials appear to be generationally cautious, and with reason.  Terrorism and financial crises have occupied a large part of their lives.  According to Deloitte, as a group the demographic is leery of stocks (which are less than a third of their net worth).  They are attracted to alternative investments—whatever those are.  Millennials, according to Deloitte, acknowledge a broad lack of basic financial knowledge.

Given what appears to be a generational predisposition toward caution, trust will be an essential quality in millennial relationships with their financial-services firm.  The capacity for building trust beyond conventional fiduciary obligations will require formation of authentic personal relationships different, perhaps, from the established conventions of what we’ve learned to think of professionalism.

Millennials are digital natives.  They are not merely comfortable with technology.  They assume technology.  The implication for financial firms is that they will need to recruit for skill sets, naturally, but also recruit personalities who can simultaneously build relationships and think in innovative ways about investment products.  Successful financial talent for the next 30 years will understand the intersection of technology and investing, certainly, and be simultaneously adaptable to the challenge this intersection poses to the industry’s conventional revenue models.

This is a new talent profile for the financial-services industry, one most of the industries managers are not (yet) accustomed to recruiting.  Ready or not, the industry is about to join the world of Big Data and talent analytics.  And not a moment too soon.

Breaking with convention

The promise of Big Data solutions like predictive analytics does not lie in collecting information.  That’s the least of it.  The promise lies in using advanced statistical techniques to find previously obscured patterns and uncover hidden value.

Recently, for instance, a large financial-services client asked my firm to add assessment of cultural fit to our search activities on its behalf.  It is a comparatively easy modification of our intake process that we’ve done before.  It allows us to sort candidates better and faster, and focuses the client’s attention on metrics aside from job history.  It is a kind of baby step toward predictive analytics.

The conventional recruitment process is full of noise, to use a term of data scientists.  The noise comes from resumes, job boards and hit-or-miss personal references.  Then there’s human element—the interviewers.  The interview process trusts in serendipity to an unnerving extent.

It’s no secret that humans have a hard time with objectivity, and that even the most modest among us value our own opinion more highly than we should.  It’s well documented that even “experts” are susceptible to conscious and unconscious filters[2]—and not the obvious prejudices either, like race and gender.  It’s been demonstrated again and again that the long-term unemployed, for example, make committed employees and yet the prejudice against them persists.  Humans like to make quick decisions, after all.  How much simpler to check a CV for a brand-name university and an uninterrupted job history.

Going in the direction of growth is harder when the experts running things all understand the world in pretty much the same way.  My experience of the financial-services industry is that is a closed network in which the same strategic world view and the same measures of success are agreed upon.  Management teams reflexively replicate the current generation of industry leaders in the hiring process.  As they do with the suits they wear they prefer talent with a traditional fit.  They hire the familiar.  They hire themselves.

Just compare the profiles of leaders at fintech firms with those of established Wall Street investment bankers.  I have, and the differences in background and personality type is stark.  We find it hard, to put it plainly, to see beyond our own reflections in the mirror and spot what may be nontraditional candidates but who are exactly who we should be looking for if only we knew it.  That’s where talent analytics will be transformational.

The promise of talent analytics

A conventional CV or a LinkedIn profile is a list of jobs held and skills acquired.  By harvesting such lists every organization of any size has built a process for culling and tracking applicants.  These processes might be called beginners analytics.

Lists of credentials, though, do not capture signals about talent and future performance—qualities like motivation, cultural fit, learning style, comfort in collaboration and the distinctively human capacity for resilience and persistence.  A CV or a LinkedIn profile won’t surface predictive variables that none of the parties involved even realizes is a predictive variable.  For example, Gallup discovered that a group of military trainees in a particular unit were 1.5 times more likely to complete a rigorous training program if they had a friend or family member who had served in the unit.[3]

One day soon talent analytics will be understood as a profoundly strategic tool.  It is not hard to imagine, for instance, “talent modelling” with an analytics tool to directly address strategic questions like the probability of success for specific kinds of talent under different kinds of market risk.  Or the right match of talent to alternative futures for an organization—the investment patterns of millennials, say, versus those of their parents.

Predictive analytics are not yet commonplace even in large organizations.  Right now they are largely a Big Data phenomenon.  To justify their cost they are likely to be available only for large scale search needs—for the present.  It is not hard at all to imagine a day sometime soon when even small firms have access to pools of raw data and the software for finding predictive patterns in it.  When that happens talent analytics will become a commonplace feature of the search and recruitment process.  Analytics will not be a standalone tool but one married to the human genius for framing problems and pursuing answers.

Predictive analytics will never wholly remove human wisdom from the talent-management algorithm, nor should they.  Any algorithm is only as good as the questions it was developed to answer.  Asking questions is what humans do best.  Questions like, "How do I serve a demographic different in important ways from any I’ve ever served before?  A demographic that’s going to dominate my business for the next 30 years?"

Richard Stein is chief growth officer at Options Group in New York. 

[1] Millennials and Wealth Management: Trends and challenges of the new clientele. Kobler, Hauber & Ernst. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (UK).

[2] Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. Paul E. Meehl.  University of Minnesota Press, 1954.  Cited in “Minds and Machines: The art of forecasting in the age of artificial intelligence.” Guszcza & Maddirala. Deloitte Review. Issue 19. July 25, 2016.

[3] Hiring Decisions: Big Data Isn’t Enough. Rigoni & Nelson. Gallup Business Journal. February 25, 2016.

SEE ALSO: China's demographic future has a big problem

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The article posted here is about how businesses are being pulled to be more transactional or create much higher value. It filled up my inbox with questions about how you are supposed to differentiate your offering when you are in an industry that is perceived as being a commodity. The fact that the question is being asked provides the answer. The person asking is missing something.

The Problem with a Great Product

The problem with having a great product is that you believe the product is supposed to do all of the work for you. You want to rely on the product’s features and benefits. More than anything, you want it to be better than your competitor’s products. This is the sin of trying to make selling easy.

Think about this: if Apple has to put on a big show to sell their products, then it may be unreasonable to believe that your product is going to sell itself, isn’t it?

Your product is good. Your competitor’s product is also good. Your company has a good reputation, and so does your competitor. When all things are equal, your dream client is right to choose the lowest price. It’s your job to make all things unequal. Your product isn’t going to do that.

You Are Worth Paying More. Unless You Aren’t.

You are now the defining differentiator. You are the unique value proposition. Fortunately, you are one-of-a-kind original, the like of which the world has never seen. Unfortunately, that by itself isn’t going to be enough to create a preference for you, your product, your service, or your solution.

Let’s say your price is 8 percent higher than your competitor’s price. Everything else is equal.

What do you know that is worth an 8 percent delta over your competitor’s price?

How do you create greater value through the process that justifies the decision to choose you over anyone else?

What about your caring and your execution that would create a defensible case to pay you more money than someone else?

Your Dream Client Will Pay More

Your dream client will pay more, but only if you justify your higher price.

If you don’t know that you are the value proposition, that the value you create is what makes you worth paying more, then you aren’t going to be able to command that higher price.

If you don’t have the chops, the business acumen, and the situational knowledge, you will look to the product to do the heavy lifting for you. If you are unaware that you are the value proposition, you won’t sell in a way that creates a preference for you as a partner.

This is the new reality in business-to-business sales. In an age of accelerating disruptions, you are going to be the defining differentiator.

The post You Are the Defining Differentiator appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Just when organizations have finally gotten comfortable designing tech for Millennials and hiring them, it’s already time to focus on the next generation and how they will affect the tech industry. Generation Z are those born in the mid 1990’s through the mid 2000’s, and they actually outnumber Millennials in America with over 60 million enjoying technology and entering the workforce.

As the first true digital natives, their impact cannot be underestimated. Here is how the tech industry must adapt to Generation Z.

Privacy and Trust

Generation Z has grown up with more connectivity than any prior generation, and as such they are on hyper alert when it comes to digital privacy. While Millennials are aware and worried about privacy issues, those in Generation Z are even more concerned, with 63% worried about protecting their identity. Tech companies need to recognize this increased concern for privacy and take it into account when creating new apps, devices, and programs.

When it comes to trust, Generation Z relies on personal references over traditional reviews and is skeptical of outside influence. For a tech organization that is looking to hire the oldest members of this generation as they currently graduate college, this is of the utmost importance. A solid employment reference program can help encourage any Gen Z employees you hire to bring their friends aboard. More broadly speaking, when selling and designing tech, this level of trust also affects the social component of any program or technological device.

Social Media

The influence of social media on Generation Z is one of the biggest factors in how its members should be approached. Open to divulging many private details, they want the power to decide which personal facts to share and where to share them. They prefer communication that doesn’t leave trails, such as Snapchat, and are more likely to use smartphones in social settings. 42% say that social media has a direct impact on how they feel about themselves.

This relationship with social media means many things for the tech industry. Once again, it is information that must be taken into account as new technology emerges. In order to succeed, social aspects must be written into new applications and software. Implementing stringent user privacy controls with transparency specific to social sharing is also essential. Generation Z will be looking for this in any emerging tech that they decide to use or cast aside, and their collective decision can spell success or failure for a product launch.

Given their digital nature, many in Generation Z may be more inclined to consider online learning over traditional learning in looking to further their education. Online learning may feel more intuitive to them as nearly all of the social interactions in online programs happen digitally. This predisposition to social media and technology also necessitates a closer look at Generation Z as potential tech employees.

Hiring Generation Z

As Generation Z begins to graduate college and enter the workforce, it is absolutely essential to consider them in a new light when it comes to hiring. These new workers value benefitting the larger world, immediate benefits, and customized career paths. Such desires need to be taken seriously and attended to in the hiring, onboarding, and ongoing employee management process.

Make clear how your organization contributes to society, whether through direct operations or by providing paid volunteering time off to your staff. Consider offering partial repayment of student loans. Enact a mentorship program for new employees so that they can be guided into the personalized career path they want by experienced managers. Encourage work life balance in their new IT role. In other words, think outside of the box and away from stale practices. Ensure that Generation Z feels like they can fit into a new job, and they will reward you with their talent and expertise in all things digital.

Adapt to Generation Z

While it would surely be easier for a company to put off considering Generation Z, it would be wise to instead plan for the future that they will bring to the tech industry. Change can be difficult, but if an organization takes charge now before the full force of Generation Z ages into society, then that change can be a positive one. The digital intuitiveness that the next generation will bring, both as tech consumers and IT employees, will breathe a new life into an evolving industry.

Clients will often ask,“What’s the ROI of getting a LinkedIn profile makeover?” Now, in many cases, the profile makeover itself will not drive revenue opportunities (although there are exceptions like Single Point of Contact – click here to read the case study.)

Building a strong LinkedIn profile that communicates business value to prospects is only the first step to socially selling your way to more clients and revenue on LinkedIn – it’s the next step actions that will move prospects closer to working with you.

However, those next step actions will be ineffective if prospects do not quickly see your differentiated value. How you communicate your business value and your competitive advantage on your LinkedIn profile will determine if a prospect actually connects with, if they accept your Inmail, if they join your LinkedIn community and more importantly if they engage in a sales conversation with you.

By changing his profile from a resume to a complete sales and marketing tool, Ian Aguilar (Schneider’s Director of New Business Development):

• Took his social selling index from 30 to 85!
• Increased connection conversions by 400%
• Number of unsolicited connection requests from key industry decision makers and influencers increased by 500%
• Using his Linkedin profile in his email signature increased his outbound-email reply rate from 30% to 60%+

Let’s take a look at his profile and why Ian’s profile is enabling him to create and leverage more relationships that can turn into revenue opportunities:

First, we communicated a differentiated business value right from the start. As you will notice in the picture below, we discuss the size of the supply chains that Ian is targeting and that he provides clients with continual ROI improvement. Through our discovery session with Ian, we found that most companies can only provide ROI improvements the 1st year as they are only focused on monitoring how products are getting shipped from point to point B instead of focusing on the complete supply chain.

The summary shares Ian’s story and how he understands the risks that’s involved with not having the right supply chain management vendor (the impact of loss exceeds $50B annually for the industry as a whole!) He discusses how he believes it’s because supply chain vendors and their clients don’t have the supply chain management visibility they need for continual account performance and improvement – and he talks about the visibility he had at UPS was mostly “transportation visibility”, meaning monitoring from point A to point B. He talks about how there was zero optimization at UPS and how you cannot have continual ROI improvement without optimization. So he’s challenging the industry and his peers and showing the differentiated value that he and Schneider can provide.

From there, he talks about the results that can be achieved when you have complete visibility. Read the summary in the image below to see what I mean about Ian challenging his peers, differentiating himself and communicating his unique business value:

As a Content Marketing Institute study shows – case studies can be the most effective content marketing tactic, we filled Ian’s profile with case studies. For example, check out Ian’s project section (which also have active links to complete case studies):

Ian’s experience section is not a resume. As a New Business Development Director, his profile needs to attract new sales opportunities not potential employers. So, I don’t understand why sales leaders have resumes in the experience section rather than use this section to talk to different audiences.

In the experience section for Ian, we show why he can help organizations achieve savings across their supply chain and that he can provide clients deeper supply chain cost cuts by going beyond the tactical aspect (comprises only 15% to 20% of the supply chain cost) that most firms focus on. Ian focuses on focus on the strategic aspects where 60% to 70% of supply chain costs lie, the tactical aspects and the operational aspects where an additional 5% to 15% of the costs lie. Notice how we continue to demonstrate Ian’s competitive advantage in the position shown below:

In the experience section he also goes into more detail on how he’s offering “real visibility” to achieve continual account performance and how he helps centralize supply chain management processes to reduce costs by nearly 35%.

Now, when you look at the profile copy, do you see why supply chain management VPs and decision makers are accepting Ian’s connection and inviting him to connect? Can you see why prospects getting outbound emails with Ian’s LinkedIn profile in the signature are checking out his profile and actually responding to his messages now?

Ian’s profile has become the foundation for his LinkedIn marketing and social selling efforts. It has become the foundation for his challenger sales process that Schneider will be using on LinkedIn. And, as a result 0f the successes that Ian has seen already, Schneider will be moving forward with our LinkedIn Profile Makeover Training for Sales Teams, our LinkedIn strategy program, our content strategy program and our managed LinkedIn program.

You can get even more information on how to give your LinkedIn profile a makeover that drive results by watching this on-demand profile training.

Ever since the turn-of-the-century we have seen the emergence of new business megaliths, the cost of starting a company drop from $100k+ to less than $10k, and the average lifespan of a company shorten immensely.

With all these huge changes in business practice too few people are acknowledging the novel business models which succeed the most and have almost become expected with Millennials and Generation Z.

Looking towards the most successful companies and business models out there can be a source for inspiration for new and old companies you are affiliated with. This however requires you understand what the best business models are and the proper way to incorporate them into your business.

1. Mobile-Friendly

One the most successful apps in the app store and the recipient of the coveted Apple Design Award in 2015, Robinhood, is a mobile-centric investing platform. The founders of Robinhood understood that millennials want to use their phone for almost everything they do, but also that they only had a matter of seconds before users would lose interest in placing a trade. The result was Robinhood spending immense time on perfecting a user interface and user experience that could execute a trade in seconds.

The first major consideration for a mobile-centric business model is to understand your user experience. Robinhood knew that millennials wanted to spend less than 30 seconds on the app and be able to manage all their stocks. However, if your platform is meant to be a bit longer of an interaction, going all in on mobile is probably not the best call.

Even if you are not a mobile-centric platform, becoming mobile-friendly at the least is essential. Fix your site and make it easy to use and aesthetically pleasing on a phone. All of this requires understanding the user interface and user experience for your site and or app.

2. Subscription-Based

Between Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s, which mail consumers razors monthly, there has been an explosion of subscription-based products, but not all of them are ideal. DSC and Harry’s succeeded in competing with Gillette since the two understood that consumers hated going to the store all the time and inevitably were using old, dull, rusty razors. Furthermore, looping consumers into subscription models changed the necessary metrics for profits and so allowed them to drop prices, adding even more value to consumers.

If you want to use a subscription-based platform with your business you need to think about if your product is something that consumers are consuming each and every month. Eliminating monthly trips to the store for any product will be the driver of your success, even more so than any major drop in pricing. Conversely, if consumers are not buying it each month then you are going to struggle with convincing individuals to make such a huge commitment.

3. Freemium

When you think Freemium, you should think Pandora and Spotify: services anyone can access but are better when you pay a bit each month. These two companies also display the best and worst ways to execute Freemium. Pandora is a failure because as a radio-based music they were unable to completely remove ads under their premium model. Too many people continued to skip since it was never the perfect song and this drove costs up. Unfortunately, people do not want to pay for ads, so it has hurt financially.

Alternatively, Spotify not only succeeded in structuring a freemium model with ads subsidizing the free model, they also understood that free customers can be talked into the premium-side if the entry point is lower (even if prices rise to the full amount later).

Using this logic Spotify introduces sales for high-use customers who are most likely to see benefit in the premium account even if they currently think it is not worth the expense. Understanding the stratification of your customers, what their separate desires are, and how to subsidize the free users are the keys to launching a successful freemium platform.

4. Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has exploded into many aspects of business in the past few years and understanding each route is extremely important for any company before moving forward with this business model. Firstly, “product-based” crowdfunding, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, is more like “story-based” crowdfunding. For these routes to work you need to spend months planning out a story to get consumers behind you and your product.

Remember that nothing binds you to fulfilling and so backers have a big risk in not knowing what they will actually receive if anything. Your company needs to be product and story focused for this avenue to truly be successful.

Secondly, “social good-based” crowdfunding such as GoFundMe honestly just requires loving and preferably generous friends and family. This route does not have many business opportunities but also is not even the best for all social causes. Olympians raising money to go to the Rio Olympics struggled meet to their goals in some cases. You need a strong story with strong promotion since again you are convincing people to give you free money and that takes salesmanship.

Lastly, the newest crowdfunding opportunity, which popped up after recent Congressional legislation in 2015, is “equity-based” crowdfunding. This model on platforms such as Slice Capital and WeFunder allow companies to become SEC-registered private companies and exchange equity for small amounts of money. What most companies wrongly assume is that this is an easy way to get investor funding for a new idea.

The SEC requires companies to be post-revenue and disclose a good amount of information so as to protect customers, so you will need to have already built up the company and prove you will protect investors.

Furthermore, this will likely require you hustling your friends and family into investing and blasting the link around social media to drive the investors. After you seed the campaign with early investors, more organic individuals will follow since no one wants to be the first to jump on an investment.

A leading energy consulting firm had a proprietary methodology for significantly reducing energy costs (think seven-figure savings, each year). Though the company’s proprietary solution was extremely powerful, it was communicated in such a seemingly straightforward manner, that many prospective clients thought – mistakenly –they could build a comparable energy-savings program on their own. This misconception was the number one objection during the sales process, and a major roadblock for the sales force.

The solution to this DIY dilemma? A brand that made it simple for prospects to see just how complex the solution really was. After the brand launch – and with the sales force empowered with new messaging – the we-can-do-it-ourselves objection ceased to be a major issue in closing sales.

Simple vs. Simplistic

It has become a mantra in the branding world – and even in the world at large – that simple is better. Time Inc.’s Real Simple magazine has more than two million subscribers. And the desire for simplicity is understandable. We live in a complex world in which we’re bombarded by messages 24/7. Cutting through the clutter is easier when you have a simple message.

But there’s a fine line between simple and simplistic. In the B2B world, where the purchase decision can be a lengthy process involving multiple influencers, touchpoints and inputs, a simple brand message can dilute the impact of what you’re selling.

Consider a company we recently partnered with in the identity management space. Its main competitors are big, global enterprise software providers that include identity management as part of their overall bundle of solutions. The company focuses exclusively on identity management and communicates a much more sophisticated approach. Essentially the big enterprise companies are telling the market “Identity is no big deal. That’s why we include it as a minor component of a much larger offering.” The brand for our client communicates just the opposite: “Identity IS a big deal, it’s complex, and only a complex solution can handle it.” The brand makes it simple for prospects to understand just how complex identity management – and the right solution – really is.

Branding Along the Spectrum

How do you communicate complexity without overwhelming your audience? The key is knowing whom you’re speaking to. Engineers like to lift the hood to understand how a product works; a brand targeting them needs to focus on the “how.” If the CFO is the decision maker, or even an important influencer, the brand needs to communicate an acceptable ROI – the “what.” If the CEO or marketing team is in the mix, the brand needs to convey a powerful benefit, even a sense of purpose: the “why.”

In B2B, where all of these audiences can be involved in the decision making process, a brand needs to work across the spectrum, from “what” through “how” all the way to “why.” That’s a tall order, and one that can’t be reduced to a simple catchphrase or slogan.

Think Big

Now, we’re certainly not arguing against clarity and focus. But too often B2B companies attempt to boil their value proposition down to the lowest common denominator in the name of simplicity. For example, we partnered with a global consulting firm that tackles the most complex challenges imaginable, including cybersecurity work for the US government and mission-critical projects for major utility companies. In the interest of “simplicity,” its legacy brand downplayed the scope and scale of the issues it tackled and the human capital behind the work it undertook. As a result, prospects (and even clients) didn’t appreciate or understand all that they did or the true value behind their offering.

The consulting firm’s new brand focuses on “big” things – the game-changing transformations that only supremely intelligent, deeply experienced and relentlessly dedicated professionals can bring about. Brand messages make it crystal clear – even simple – to grasp the incredible complexity of the work they do.

We live in an ever more complex world. But it’s important not to let the lure of simplicity shortchange your brand by watering it down to something that may be simple to grasp – but communicates, to put it simply, very little.

This post originally appeared on BrandEd, a B2B branding and marketing blog from DeSantis Breindel.

According to Gallup, only 29% of B2B customers are engaged with the companies they do business with.

Let that sink in. That means 71% of your customers are likely not committed to sticking with your company or, even worse, are actively seeking to move their business elsewhere.

This problem is not new. Too many companies ignore the voice of the customer, blast cookie-cutter emails to all the names in their marketing spreadsheets, and lack the right survey and interview tools to gauge the health of their customer relationships.

Customers expect the companies they do business with to understand them as individuals and connect with them in ways that are valuable. Doing this in the age of big data is more complicated and competitive than ever, requiring a thoughtful approach. Companies need a strategy focused on the future growth of the relationship as well as the bottom-line value for both parties. They need ongoing, two-way interactions and a willingness to invest in listening, to get personal, and to create a shared vision for success.

Here­­ are four elements of strong, lasting customer engagement.

Ask Yourself the Right Questions

Strategic customer relationships require thoughtful interactions, which start with companies asking themselves the right questions. These include:

• How well do we know our customers as individuals?
• How do our customers want to interact with us?
• What do we know about their challenges, priorities, and needs?
• How and where are we interacting with customers today, and how can we make those interactions more valuable to them?
• Are our customers committed to us, or could they move to our competitors without much difficulty?

You’ll find the basic answers to these questions in your data, but more insight will come from the conversations you have with customers. Their answers will inform where you should double down, whom you should target for which type of engagement, and where there may be gaps in your approach.

With our clients, we’ve found that a 30-minute call — clearly defined as a strategy discussion rather than a sales call — is a good place to begin gathering these answers. The discussion should be focused on the client’s top strategic areas, whether those areas are related to your business and offerings or not.

Understand Customers as People

Part of knowing your customers as individuals requires understanding them both digitally and offline. The customer you talk to on the phone is slightly different from the one you encounter on social media or through email; no channel gives a full picture. Look for opportunities to learn more about the client’s professional interests and goals. If you know what the client hopes to accomplish, you can find ways to help them do it.

For example, at IBM, if we know a client is trying to advance their efforts with analytics, we can connect them to our analytics work to help them build their expertise. This method can be used by companies of all sizes in all industries. It’s about understanding what matters most to the customer and providing a way for them to attain it, through either your company or your connections. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be about something you sell.

Align the Entire Organization Around Client Engagement

Every organization has a degree of client engagement, especially in client-facing roles, such as marketing and sales. But the whole organization must be focused on delivering value to customers at every touchpoint, including UX design, customer support, and the C-suite. How do you do it?

• Align cross-functional teams to specific customer-experience goals that give them a common purpose.
• Define metrics that are focused on customer experience — Net Promoter Score is one, but they can be even closer to the customer. Invite a small group of customers to help you define your success metrics.
• Empower teams to take action on what they have learned about the customer experience. Give the cross-functional group the power to change things as needed.
• Talk to customers. All too often we make assumptions about what the client wants or what the problem really is. Engage a few customers throughout and use their feedback to break down any silos in your company.

At IBM, this focus on the customer and client engagement comes from all levels in the organization. We build cross-functional teams focused on customer needs and have a defined client engagement model, led by a senior leader, to ensure that all parts of the organization are aligned around the customer’s goals. In many ways, the customer serves as a simplification principle for helping us align around the right set of goals at the right time.

Create Customer Advisory Boards

Customer advisory boards are a powerful way to engage clients and advance the relationship on both sides. They offer a forum for identifying what reciprocal value looks like, understanding your customers as unique individuals, and creating a future together. Advisory board members can even become your best advocates.

We use customer advisory boards to hear from senior executives at our client companies, who can advise us on their businesses and share important insights on their challenges and priorities. We have received valuable input on our business strategy and go-to-market approaches, strengthening our relationships with the advisory board members in the process. Additionally, the board members help us figure out where our clients are going and how we can help them get there.

Using these four strategies can help companies keep their customers engaged, which ultimately means more value for both the vendor and the customer.

If my recent experience is anything to go by, sales playbooks have overtaken sales analytics as 2017’s “must do” sales performance improvement initiative. It’s not hard to see why. CEOs and sales leaders are frustrated that – despite all their investments in CRM and sales training – there remains a significant and persistent performance gap between their top sales people and the rest.

Now, some of the difference can be attributed to the fact that many top performers display a set of personal attitudes and attributes that are missing in many other sales people. But that’s far from the only (or even the main) explanation – much of the difference is actually down to learned behaviours – behaviours that their colleagues can copy.

And it’s this discovery that has sparked a wave of interest in sales playbooks and in the technologies that support them. But – just as everybody ought to have learned with CRM – simply throwing technology will not by itself solve the problem…

It’s probably best to think of any sales playbook technology merely as a convenient container for the accumulated wisdom of your sales organisation. And, of course, as with so much else, it’s the content that matters. All the technology can do is to make it easy to consume.

So what are the essential elements of a great sales playbook? I think we need to take the basics as given – all the product presentations, data sheets, case studies and other collateral produced by your product marketing and marketing communications teams. Granted, it’s an essential foundation, but it’s not going to seriously move the sales performance needle.

To be truly effective, your sales playbook needs to guide every sales person in the winning habits and hard-won experiences of your top performing sales people. Your playbook needs to be much more about how to sell than what to sell.

Every situation is different. But here are my top ten recommendations for the essential elements of a truly effective sales playbook:

• A regularly updated, issue-led sales presentation that sales people can individually customise to meet specific customer situations
• Ideal customer profiles for each of your key offerings that enable every sales person to accurately identify and qualify potential accounts
• Comprehensive stakeholder maps that help every sales person to anticipate and address the key issues, concerns and motivations of their prospect’s decision team
• Opportunity qualification checklists and scoring guides that ensure that all sales people consistently and accurately assess sales opportunities
• “Cost of Inaction” models and calculators that enable all sales people to make a compelling case for change to the key decision makers in their prospects
• Clear value frameworks for each of your offerings that enable every sales person to articulate a tailored value proposition to every qualified prospect
• A well-defined sales process that makes it clear what every sales person needs to know and do at every stage to maximise their changes of winning
• Clearly defined milestones that allow every sales person to consistently and accurately judge where the prospect is in their buying process
• Deep competitive analysis that enables sales people to anticipate the strategies other vendors are likely to adopt and how to counter them
• Well established frameworks that make a clear connection between our prospect’s most compelling issues and our most powerful capabilities

Those are my top 10. Yours may vary a little – but the essential elements are defined above.

The specific capabilities of your playbook technology platform only matter once you’ve assembled enough compelling content to make it a “must use” resource for your sales people. Having a great platform is no substitute for having great content.

But once you’ve reached that critical mass, the ability of your chosen platform to deliver the appropriate information whenever and wherever it is needed becomes a critical consideration.

So – is your organisation ready to take full advantages of the (potential) power of sales playbooks? I suggest you download this 10-point checklist to let me know how well you believe you’ve done.

The quest to contain health costs while improving the quality of care typically focuses on service delivery, such as reducing unnecessary or harmful medical procedures. But changes in health care financing are pushing some health systems to take a more holistic approach and address social factors that directly impact patients’ health. Think of it as the “community cure” for health care.

The rationale for thinking outside the clinical setting is compelling. According to a recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study, only 20 percent of the factors that influence a person’s health are related to access and quality of health care. The other 80 percent are due to socioeconomic, environmental, or behavioral factors –including unhealthy housing, poor diet, inadequate exercise, and drug and alcohol use.  As federal and state reforms prod payers to move away from traditional fee-for-service—which pays for volume, not outcomes—and toward a pay-for-performance model that rewards keeping people healthy, the economic argument for addressing social determinants of health becomes clear.

Poverty, for example, is associated with an increased prevalence of asthma; homelessness drives up emergency-room visits; and urban “fresh-food deserts” where it’s hard to find affordable, nutritious foods stoke the incidence of type 2 diabetes.

Doctors are adept at treating us when we’re sick, but not at keeping us well. But the U.S. health care system has been slow to move beyond pills and procedures. Only a handful of pioneers have begun to address patients’ “upstream” social needs to improve their health and reduce costs.

Insight Center

Kaiser Permante Southern California is one such organization. Kaiser, one of the nation’s largest managed-care organizations, has found that just 1 percent of its patient population accounts for approximately 25 percent of its annual medical costs and that these costs are often related to social and behavioral issues that drive the need for care.

To address those factors—challenges around diet, housing, hygiene, and other issues—KP Southern California has teamed up with Health Leads, a national nonprofit that places volunteers at “family help desks” in outpatient clinics, emergency rooms, newborn nurseries, and health centers, where they collaborate with physicians, social workers, and other care providers to screen patients for a range of needs and connect them to community resources and social services. One of Health Leads’ first assignments from Kaiser was to work with high-cost diabetes patients, more than half of whom had two or more social needs—such as for better housing or counseling—a prevalence much higher than Kaiser expected. While it’s too soon for conclusive results from this effort, Health Leads’ program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has contributed to improved cholesterol and blood pressure levels among adult patients.

While Health Leads helps patients cope with a variety of health-related social issues, ProMedica in northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan has chosen to focus its attention on the health effects of hunger and poor nutrition. ProMedica, which serves 1.5 million people, decided to act after a study showed that a large proportion of patients subsisted on low-cost junk food diets—things like pizza, tacos, chips, and soda. As a result, they suffered higher-than-average rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and back issues.

ProMedica now screens all patients for hunger and poor nutrition. “When you look at poverty, there are so many [overwhelming] issues—education, crime, underemployment, and so on,” said Randy Oostra, ProMedica’s president and CEO. “But hunger [and malnutrition] was something we could get our arms around. We can screen every single patient we touch for hunger.”

In the program’s first nine months, the organization screened nearly 36,500 patients and found 1,500 (4.1 percent) suffered from chronic hunger. To address this problem, ProMedica is setting up a number of food “pharmacies” (essentially on-site food pantries) for low-income patients, offering nutrition counseling, and opening a supermarket in a low-income area that previously had none.

For others to follow, pioneers pursuing the “community cure” for lower costs and better care know they shoulder the burden of proof. For its part, Kaiser is measuring results by looking at factors like use of health care services, total cost of care, health outcomes, and patient satisfaction. Since its effort focuses on the highest users of care—the top 1 percent—there is some hope that it can demonstrate cost savings reasonably quickly. With its food and nutrition initiative, ProMedica is not counting on short-term cost impact. Rather, it is laying the groundwork for estimating return on investment by doing research to establish patients’ current experience with hunger, quality of life indicators, and medical care, as well as the cost of that care for a sample of patients.

Optimism about what the evidence will show led Kaiser and Health Leads to convene leaders from a dozen US health systems last year to explore what role their organizations should play in addressing social needs. And ProMedica—working with the AARP Foundation, the American Hospital Association, and others—has started the national Root Cause Coalition to engage health care systems, businesses, nonprofits, and government in tackling hunger and food insecurity.

The health care leaders we talked to believe their efforts will have an impact on the bottom line, both in terms of cost and patient health. “At the end of the day, health care executives have to run the business,” said Dr. Ross Wilson, chief medical officer of NYC Health + Hospitals, a public system that serves roughly 1.4 million people. “If the work on social needs reduces utilization and emergency department visits, you start to find a business model that is effective.”

We’re a company of builders. Of pioneers. It’s our job to make bold bets, and we get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers. Here are just some of the innovations pioneered by Amazon, and we’re always looking for the next one. – Amazon

Every industry is ripe for disruption. It’s what you do now that defines your future and legacy.

One of the most exposed industries to disruption at the moment, among many, is the retail sector. From the internet of things (IoT) to sensors to beacons to displays to apps and everything in between, each new trend introduces new challenges and opportunities to compete.

Technology trends however, do not solely define the future of retail. People count for everything. How they shop today versus how they want to and will shop in the future is the source of meaningful innovation. Technology changes. People evolve. That’s digital Darwinism at work. But there’s more at play.

Mobile, social, and every popular app or device that become the next big thing constantly push people further and further toward new and exciting experiences. Digital payments too, such as PayPal, Square, Venmo, ApplePay, Google Wallet, et al., are conditioning consumers to rethink the relationship between physical cash and transactions. With that said, even transactions are open to new dimensions.

On-demand companies such as Postmates, Uber, and the like, are hiding payments and transactions and packing everything together as “an experience.” Add everything together, and those paying close attention will see how outside forces are influencing new customer behaviors, preferences and expectations day in and day out.

Business as usual is no longer ok. Taking new tech and tying it down to old perspectives and processes is not innovation. It’s iteration at best and dangerous in common practice. Retail and e-commerce not only face new pressures to innovate, but also must explore co-existence and even collaboration to re-imagine the meaning of “space.” The reality is that competition can come from anywhere.

What’s the difference between iteration and innovation?

Iteration is using new tech to do the same things better or differently.

Innovation is doing new things that create new opportunities and value.

Only one sets the stage for a new normal.

What’s clear now is that customers do not want compromise. Yet, they’re forced to compromise in many ways throughout the customer journey. Innovation in shopper experience is all the work you do to conform to expectations and aspirations of people as they evolve instead of making them conform to your legacy perspectives, assumptions, processes and metrics of success.

Physical retail space, operations, and everything behind the scenes are your opportunities to disrupt and at the same time, thwart disruption and competitive threats.

Amazon Sets The Bar for a New Level of Customer Experience…Again

Amazon made news when it opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore to challenge everyone’s idea of what a bookstore could be in the 21st century. Now, Amazon opened a beta version of what a grocery store could be. Introducing Amazon Go. Opened only for employees in Washington at the moment, this 1800 square foot pilot demonstrates exactly how retailers need to rethink the future of retail beyond beacons, magic mirrors and apps.

What is retail?

That’s a serious question.

We tend to base the answer on retail as we know it. It’s a form of cognitive or validation bias if you will. When we consider new possibilities, they’re centered on a common perspective of today’s functional environment. We don’t start from a new center and as such, we unintentionally wrestle with iteration vs innovation.

But not Amazon…

This is a company that often starts with a blank slate, customer-first perspectives, and different questions:

What if…?

Might we…?

Why…?

Amazon is yet again, demonstrating that the future of retail is left to imagination. It seems that more and more, the path to innovation is tied directly to the ability to appreciate, but also see past, iteration.

So, what is Amazon Go?

Let’s start with what it isn’t…a traditional retail store.

Amazon is beta testing a grocery store for the 21st century that reconsiders space and transactions in a world that blurs mobile, online and spatiality. It all takes place in a new 1,800 square foot space at 2131 7th Ave in Seattle.

It all starts with an app…Amazon Go. You “check in” via the app when you walk in the store. Using a combination of sensor (fusion), computer vision and deep learning, the smart shelves track what’s removed and returned creating a virtual cart of sorts. When the shopper is finished, they…wait for it…just leave. There is no check stand, register, or clerk waiting to take your money. The app charges your account and sends you a receipt.

Brilliant.

In a statement, Amazon explained the inspiration for Amazon Go:

Four years ago we asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no lines and no checkout? Could we push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to create a store where customers could simply take what they want and go?

Our answer to those questions is Amazon Go and Just Walk Out Shopping.

At the moment, the store is open to employees only. But it’s just a matter of time until it, or something like it, opens to the public. Make no mistake, analysts and strategists everywhere are now forced to rethink the future of retail from a new perspective…starting with adapting customer experiences to connected consumerism. Retail now has a new normal.

It’s smart brick-and-mortar retail fused with Amazon Prime built upon a new perspective for physical and virtual space all with the frictionless transaction model of Uber. All it takes to re-imagine the future of retail is to explore the experiences consumers love outside of the industry. Then and only then, can you balance iteration with innovation. As Steve Jobs once famously said, “Start with the customer experience and work backwards from there.”

Please read X, The Experience When Business Meets Design or visit my previous publications

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The post E-Commerce and Apps Pave the Way To The Future of Retail: Inside Amazon Go, A New Retail Experience appeared first on Brian Solis.

We've all had bad days at the office. Maybe even a bad week or two.

But if you can't remember the last good day you've had at work, it might be time to seriously consider quitting.

Of course, you'll want more to go on than this, which is why we compiled a list of signs indicating it may be time to quit your job.

If you've noticed a number of these issues for at least a few months now, you should seriously consider packing up that miserable desk for good.

You're bored all the time

"If you're no longer challenged in your position and have tried communicating with your boss to no avail, this may be a sign that it's time to leave," says Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert, leadership coach, and author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant."

Although boredom is a very standard feeling, researchers believe prolonged feelings of boredom while at work are a warning sign that you are not doing what you want to be doing and are searching for more meaning.

If you're spending most of your workday on the internet shopping or playing games, or if you're checking the time frequently at work, those are key indicators, Taylor says.

Your skills aren't being tapped

We all know that sometimes you have to take whatever you can get, stick it out for a while and, hopefully, prove to your boss that you're capable of managing more responsibilities.

But if you've been doing this awhile, and you're still stuck in a position that doesn't allow you to utilize your skills, then it's time to start considering other options, Taylor says.

"When you know you have more to offer the world, don't second-guess yourself — get ready for change," she says.

Your employer's goals and your personal mission don't match up

People don't stay put in a job for as long as they can stand it anymore, former GE CEO Jack Welch and Suzy Welch, a best-selling author and business journalist, wrote in a LinkedIn post. These days, people consider whether they are investing their time at the right or wrong company.

As Business Insider previously reported, the Welches suggest asking yourself if your company "jibes with your life's goals and values." "Does it require you to travel more than you'd like, given your chosen work-life balance? Does it offer enough upward mobility, given your level of ambition?" they say.

How you answer these questions could signal whether it's time to move on.

You constantly feel overwhelmed

Work can be taxing for everyone, and we all occasionally feel weary after a long day at the office, but if your life is a chronic state of stress and exhaustion thanks to work, you're probably suffering from job burnout.

A major sign of job burnout, which can be taxing on your physical, emotional, and mental state, is that you're no longer able to handle even little setbacks. Stress at work is inevitable, but every moment shouldn't feel so completely overwhelming. If you get upset about every little thing that's happening at work, it may be a sign it's time to move on.

You're not growing

"It's easy to get stuck in a job and, if you love what you're doing, getting stuck can be comfortable," Travis Bradberry writes on LinkedIn. "However, it's important to remember that every job should enhance your skills and add to your value as an employee."

Bradberry warns if you're not learning anything new and are simply doing the same thing every day, it's time to look elsewhere.

Marc Cenedella, founder and CEO of career resource Ladders, agrees, noting that if you haven't picked up a new skill, viewpoint, or way of doing things in the past six months, it could be a sign that it's time to go.

"Because the modern economy, and modern employers, value responsiveness so much, it's important that you not only learn new things, but that you keep learning, all the time," he tells Business Insider.

You feel like you can't ever win

In a LinkedIn post, Robert O'keane, an international search consultant for Charles Francis Cooper, warns against ignoring the feeling that you can never win at work.

"Your job should make you feel exhilarated and challenged — like you are succeeding in something, rather than like you are fighting a losing battle and not achieving anything," he writes.

You always watch what you say

Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and cofounder of Ellevest, confessed on LinkedIn that she's stayed in a few jobs that she probably shouldn't have. One of the signs it was time to quit she says she ignored was that she thought — and rethought — every word that came of her mouth.

"How would this sound? How would this be interpreted? Was this statement too far off the other views around the table?" she often wondered.

"I've worked in cultures in which 'no idea is a bad idea' and in ones in which you had to watch what you say," Krawcheck notes. "I am very over the term 'authentic,' but if you can't be 'authentic' at your job, it's time to look for another job."

Your company isn't invested in you

Employee engagement is one of those buzzworthy management phrases we hear all the time, but there's a reason it got to become so overused: employee engagement matters.

As Gallup notes, engaged employees are passionate, creative, and emotionally connected to the mission and purpose of their work, while disengaged employees are indifferent toward their jobs and can destroy a business.

If your company doesn't seem to care about your engagement, you'd be better off working elsewhere.

You worry about money — all the time

It's true that most of us worry about money often, but if this worry is constantly on your mind and it's not because you're a shopaholic, then maybe you're not getting paid enough.

If you've been at your current company long enough, request to speak to management about this. Make sure your argument as to why you should be paid more is applicable. Then, ask for an evaluation.

If the company doesn't agree that you need to be paid consistent with your workload, then it might be time to find a company that doesn't make you feel like they're doing you a favor by paying you, Taylor says.

It looks like layoffs are coming

There are several signs mass layoffs may be coming, from previous rounds of downsizing to recent acquisitions and mergers. 

"There's no need to go down with this ship," Taylor says. "Put on your life preserver and get in the water."

You can't picture yourself at your company in a year

As previously reported on Business Insider, the Welches say a year is about how long it takes to find a new, better job. That's why they suggest trying to look forward to 12 months from now and picturing where you'll most likely be in the organization, what work you'll be doing, who you'll be managing, and who will be managing you.

"If that scenario strikes you with anything short of excitement, then you're spinning your wheels," they say.

You've got serious trust issues

If you don't trust your boss or company because you believe they engage in unethical activities, or worse, expect you to partake, you know it's time to go, Taylor says.

"You should never feel pressured to comply with activities that could hurt your career," she says. "And if you've lost trust in your boss, due to anything from lying to false promises, it's hard to stay put."

You've got the boss from hell

As the management professor Merideth Ferguson once said, most people quit bosses, they don't quit jobs.

Whether your boss is quick to blame but slow to praise, they play favorites, or they micromanage, according to Taylor, their bad attitude doesn't just affect your time at work; it actually affects other important aspects of your life.

If you've tried everything to make it work and your life is simply unbearable, then it's time to visit your favorite job board, she says.

You dread Mondays

"We all get a case of the Mondays from time to time, but if even thinking about your job fills you with dread, it's probably time to leave," Bradberry writes.

While the "Sunday night blues" are quite common, one of the biggest signs you're burned out at work, according to burnout specialist Ben Fanning, is when your weekend feels more like a liberation and you deeply fear your return to work.

"You know you're really stressed when you truly feel like you've been freed when the weekend rolls around," he says.

You've started popping Tums like they're candy

It's surprising how far-reaching the side effects of work dissatisfaction can be. But just as a poor working situation can hamper your mental and emotional state, it can also wreak havoc on your body.

Researchers have found a link between job stress and acid reflux symptoms like heartburn and nausea. If your stomach's constitution isn't what it used to be, this could be a sign that your job is taking its toll on your body, and very few jobs are worth sacrificing your health.

You can't laugh out loud at work

"Yes, I know, 'work is called work for a reason,' but in most of my jobs, I've had a comfort level that we could have the occasional 'laugh until you cry' moment," Krawcheck writes. "When that's gone, it's a key signal."

Nothing you do is ever enough

Even though you're the first person in the office, the last one out, you're constantly checking your work email, and you're far exceeding all your colleagues' workload combined, sometimes you get stuck with a boss that still, believe it or not, expects more from you. 

If your boss relentlessly pushes for more no matter what, there's likely no end to the madness in sight, and it may be time to go somewhere that can appreciate all that you do — and some boundaries.

You've stopped trying to get your friends to work with you

"If the thought of pitching your present employer to your friends fills you with dread, it could be a sign that you've lost the love for your current gig," Cenedella tells Business Insider. "If there's something deep down inside telling you it's not a place you're proud to introduce to your friends, maybe that's a sign that's it no longer a place you're proud to be a part of."

The grass is actually greener

Whether you're looking to move up the ranks and there's nowhere in your company to go, or you want to keep doing what you're doing but at another company, there's no better way to tell if it's time to quit than by doing some good old-fashioned analysis.

If you compare your current job with a job prospect head-to-head and your current job just doesn't stack up (compare tangible things like salary, benefits, and employee reviews on sites like Glassdoor), you really can't deny the data.

You have another gig in place

"One of the criteria for knowing when it's time to quit, ideally, is having the next thing already lined up," says Tyler Parris, author of "Chief of Staff: The Strategic Partner Who Will Revolutionize Your Organization."

He tells Business Insider that, whether you're going into business for yourself and need to build a certain amount of the business before you take the leap or you're simply moving from one job to another, it's always best to have your next move lined up before quitting. That means it could take months of job searching or business building before you finally know it's time to move on.

You just know

When it comes to knowing that things are amiss, your gut can be your greatest ally.

If you've been actively researching job listings, talking about quitting for some time, and you feel it's the right thing to do — even if you're scared of the unknown — it may be time to listen to that little voice and go for it.

Vivian Giang contributed to an earlier version of this article.

SEE ALSO: 27 signs you're burnt out at work

SEE ALSO: 25 signs your company is about to conduct mass layoffs

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A behavioral economist reveals when it's time to quit to your job

With unprecedented access to information at their fingertips at all times, customers are now in complete control of their buying journeys — browsing, communicating, and purchasing wherever and whenever they desire. The sum of this shift doesn’t merely amount to a highly-informed customer base that knows the competitive landscape — it’s far more fundamental than that. In fact, according to the “State of the Connected Customer” report, fifty-eight percent of consumers and 77% of business buyers agree technology has significantly changed their expectations of how companies should interact with them. To survive, let alone thrive, in this new dynamic, businesses must not just keep up with these changing customer behaviors and demands, but stay a step ahead of them

So, how can sales teams, in particular, innovate to stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated customer expectations? It starts with elevating the sales role to one of a personalized consultant — a trusted advisor with the customer’s unique requirements at the forefront of all that they do. Seventy-six of consumers and 83% of business buyers say it’s very important or absolutely critical to work with someone focused on helping achieve their needs, not just on making a sale.

The need for change isn’t lost on sales teams. In the “Second Annual State of Sales” report, Salesforce Research discovered trends on how sales teams are taking steps to be more customer-centric. Here are some findings that stood out to me:

1. Understanding the Customer Journey Is Now a Top Priority

Today’s sales teams are taking action to truly understand their customers not just in the context of sales interactions, but also their interactions across different departments. Sixty-five percent of sales teams report increased focused over the past 12 to 18 months on being more informed about a customer’s history with the company, inside and outside of sales, and 74% are more focused on being a trusted advisor. What’s more, customer experience/success has been elevated to the top category of KPIs used by sales teams use to define success.

2. Performance Is Mapped to Organizational Alignment

While focusing on the customer experience is one thing, excelling at it is quite another. Paramount to conquering such a massive undertaking is obtaining buy-in from leadership. High-performing sales teams — those at companies with significantly increased revenue performance — are:

• 2.4x more likely to be part of companies that are aligned on how to empower sales to exceed goals
• 2.1x more likely to be part of companies that are aligned on changing customer expectations
• 2.4x more likely to be part of companies that are aligned on the resources needed to engage customers

3. Top Teams Empower Reps with Advanced Capabilities

High-performing sales teams are on top of positioning their reps to understand, and exceed, changing customer demands. Successful teams leverage emerging technologies that empower customer-centric transformation, and train their reps on how to get the most out out of them. Advanced capabilities such as process automation and predictive intelligence, for example, can save reps time on manual tasks, help translate insights into action, and enable a focus on customer success. Compared to underperforming sales teams, high-performing teams are:

• 2.1x more likely than to rate their single view of the customer capabilities as very good or outstanding
• 2.7x more likely to rate their process automation capabilities as very good or outstanding
• 2.4x more likely to rate their analytics and insights capabilities as very good or outstanding
• 2.8x more likely to rate their predictive intelligence capabilities as very good or outstanding
• 3.5x more likely to rate their mobile sales capabilities as very good or outstanding

The customer climate is changing, and the nature of sales must change with it. Quotas and revenue goals will always remain important standards for sales teams but to truly be successful in the modern age, sales organizations must prioritize the customer in order to hit and surpass their numbers. I invite you to learn more about how top sales teams are embracing customer-centric strategies by downloading the full “State of Sales” report.

No one truly wins a bidding war. Even if you’re the salesperson walking away with the business, you’ve shrunk your profit margin and lowered your product’s perceived value. You’ve also shown you’re willing to make extreme compromises -- which may cause your buyer’s future referrals to seek similar bargains.

But despite the danger of “race-to-the-bottom” tactics, many reps still find themselves embroiled in competitive deals they feel they can only win by cutting price. Successful salespeople avoid this trap with the four techniques outlined below.

1) Don’t Talk About Price Right Away

HubSpot Research found nearly six in 10 prospects want to discuss pricing on the very first call. But introducing cost into the conversation before establishing value can commoditize your product. Rather than thinking, The first option does A, B, and C, while the second does A, B, and C -- and D, E, and F as well, your prospect thinks, The first option costs X, while the second costs 2X.

This mindset hurts you and the buyer. He’s thinking about sticker price instead of ROI.

To satisfy your prospect’s desire for pricing information without shooting yourself in the foot, delay talking about price until you’ve shown him how your product can benefit his business.

For example, you could share the typical results of clients who struggled with similar issues. Once the buyer understands the potential impact or cost savings of your product, you can move to a price discussion.

If the buyer immediately asks about price before you’ve gotten the opportunity to establish value, HubSpot Director of Sales Pete Caputa recommends defusing this question with some humor. For instance, you might respond, “It costs more than a Snickers, less than a car. Should we discuss benefits and potential use cases before we talk about cost?”

The pricing discussion can take place as early as the connect call. In fact, talking about price early on helps you disqualify prospects who can’t afford your product. If your expectations are completely misaligned, it’s better to discover that information as soon as possible so you can avoid wasting each other’s time in fruitless conversations.

2) Highlight What Sets Your Product Apart

If your prospect knows exactly what sets your product apart, you won’t need to drop its price to close.

At some companies, the marketing department helps the sales team hone in on those competitive differentiators. At others, sales leadership is responsible for identifying them and training their reps to sell on those features. At others, individual reps rely on their experience and product knowledge to run their own playbooks.

But what if you don’t have help from Marketing, your manager, or years of experience? You can find differentiators on your own by reviewing your competitors’ websites to find benefits or capabilities your product has which theirs do not.

It’s also helpful to look for benefits their products offer that yours don’t: The absence of a feature is sometimes an advantage. For example, maybe a competitor’s product provides three different ways to accomplish an objective, while yours provides just one. Your product is therefore probably easier to use. Some prospects might be looking for a more robust solution, but your product’s ease-of-use will appeal to the right customers.

Once you’ve gotten some ideas from reviewing competitor websites, talk to your current customers. Ask why they chose you over the competition. Certain trends should emerge -- and if none do after numerous conversations, that’s a fairly good sign your offering hasn’t reached product-market fit. Perhaps buyers were drawn to the quantity and quality of your integration partners, or how you built a particular aspect of the product.

Even if you have feature parity with your competitors, you can still find meaningful differences to capitalize on. For instance, your company might have an extra responsive support team, lead the market in thought leadership, or host more customer success events than anyone else.

Once you’ve found your differentiators, figure out which resonate with each of your buyer personas. A startup employee who wears several hats will appreciate your product’s simplicity, while a corporate employee with a single function will like how customizable it is.

3) Position Your Product Strategically

Although badmouthing other companies will make you look insecure and unprofessional, you can -- and should -- ask your prospect which other vendors she’s considering. Her answer tells you how to position your product.

For example, if she’s looking at a product that’s similar but lacks in-person implementation services, mentioning the value of your complimentary on-site implementation will help you get ahead of the competition.

There are several ways to phrase this question. When it seems like the buyer has just begun investigating their options, you might ask, “Are you exploring any other strategies for solving [pain]?” Follow up with: “What about other vendors in [product] space?”

If your prospect is further along in their buyer’s journey, it’s highly likely they’re researching at least one other seller. Find out to which options they’re comparing your product by asking, “Out of curiosity, which vendors are you evaluating besides us?”

Prospects on formal buying committees are usually obligated to review and/or get quotes from multiple sellers. Whenever you’re working with a committee, you should ask, “Which prospective suppliers have you requested proposals from?”

4) Help Your Prospect Define Their Purchasing Criteria

If you’re selling a highly differentiated product, the buyer doesn’t have much experience in their current role, or they’ve never attempted to solve a particular business challenge before, it’s possible this is the first time they’ve bought a product in this category.

That gives you a fantastic opportunity to help them define their purchasing criteria. You automatically add objective value, which makes you seem more trustworthy and lends your product more credibility.

Let’s say you sell employee training programs. In your experience, the most successful programs include a variety of content, are split up over several days, and are customized to the customer’s industry. You pass along this insight to your prospect, who incorporates it into their decision -- and ultimately, chooses your business.

Of course, you should never mislead the buyer to make your offering seem more appealing. Make sure you’re giving them an objective list of considerations.

Wondering how to broach this conversation in the first place? During discovery, say, “Could you tell me about your experience buying products in [category]?”

Participating in a pricing war hurts your profits, your reputation, your relationship with your customer, and even your competition. With these tactics, you’ll win on value -- not because you offered the lowest price.

As our clients and blog readers will know, Kayak’s team members are big proponents of applying buyer personas to marketing goals in order to understand the various audiences on the receiving end of lead generation efforts.

For us, it’s a matter of common sense: if you don’t know the individuals who will purchase your products or services – and the people in their lives who serve as influencers – how can you hope to create content and offers that motivate them to act?

It’s not secret, however, that many people (and some experienced marketers) tend to confuse personas with demographics. That’s understandable because the two are related, but they certainly aren’t the same thing.

To understand why, and why the difference is critical to comprehend, let’s take a look at some of the details…

Demographics are Essentially Statistics

Demographics are useful in putting together marketing campaigns (online and off), but they should be used as a starting point rather than a guiding principle. The numbers help you draw an important picture, but they don’t fill in the details by themselves.

As an example, let’s take some hypothetical data that a client might give to us about their typical customer:

• 43-year-old Male
• Divorced
• College-Aged Children
• Homeowner
• $80k Annual Income

All of this is useful information. It might give us a sense of where this person lives, where they get their news, which establishments they are likely to frequent, and what sorts of solutions they can afford.

None of this data, however, tells us anything about background, motivation, or intent. And without those pieces of information, we either have to make assumptions or simply operate in the dark.

Neither of those is going to be a great choice when marketing budgets, careers, and the future of a business are on the line. That’s why personas become so important. They add depth and colour to the demographic outline, making things more real – and more actionable – at the same time.

Personas are About Detail

Let’s see what happens when we go beyond the demographics and turn our persona into an actual person. Let’s imagine for a moment that we have spoken to some of our customers, built in some of the details, and gone beyond the most basic facts.

What we might come up with is a persona I’m going to call “Joe.” Notice that we give our marketing personas names, because our content and offers have to appeal to people, not statistics. It’s easier to think about them as a fully-formed individuals when we give them lifelike monikers.

Back to Joe. A little bit of homework tells us that he is the 43-year-old divorced father of three girls that he absolutely adores. The first two enter college soon, and the third is only a few years away. Knowing that, what do you think will be the most pressing issues on Joe’s mind?

College expenses will be near the top of his list of concerns, of course, but the biggest influences on his decision-making aren’t going to be strictly financial. You can bet Joe is going to miss his daughters. As they go off to college, one-by-one, he’s going to worry for their safety and security.

And, he’ll probably be a little bit nervous thinking about how often he’s going to see them, given that the time he could spend with them will overlap with the time devoted to their mother, their friends, and even new boyfriends. There are only so many Thanksgivings, New Year’s holidays and Reading Weeks to go around.

Deeper yet, Joe is going to wonder what kinds of friends his daughters will make as they settle into school. Will they spend their time focusing on their studies, or partying their education away? More importantly, what can he do to put them on a path toward success and happiness?

There’s also Joe’s own happiness to consider. What will happen when he finds a new girlfriend? Where is his career headed? Now that retirement isn’t as far off as it once seemed, how can he balance planning for that with a desire to provide for his daughters?

Each of these factors is a big weight on Joe’s mind – even if it’s on a subconscious level – as he looks at your content and evaluates your offers. None of this is strictly evident from the demographics, but it’s all relevant when it comes to figuring out what Joe really wants and needs from the world.

If the statistics told you what he might be able to afford to buy, the persona shows you what he truly desires and the lengths he will or won’t go to in order to satisfy those psychological needs.

Ultimately, Buyers Make Emotional Decisions

It is well-known that human beings make decisions based on emotion and then rationalize them with facts. When you understand that, it’s easy to see why personas matter more than demographics, even if one is built upon the other.

Accurate statistics help you build detailed personas. Those, in turn, help you to understand the buyers and influencers you need to attract to your website. When you can “get in their heads” and really feel the struggles and challenges they are facing, you’re ready to start creating offers that get a response.

Don’t fall into the trap of confusing personas with demographics. You need them both, but without enough detail in your buyer profiles, your inbound marketing campaigns are always going to be hit-and-miss. To make sure you have enough detail when you start your next campaign, download our free checklist for aligning your campaign with your buyer’s persona.

To get a better understanding of if and how companies are helping their sales professionals succeed, Training Industry Inc. and Richardson went to the source. In the fourth quarter of 2016, they conducted a study in which 228 companies participated by completing a confidential survey on sales competencies alignment with training initiatives.

The first post in this two-part series, “Are Companies Setting Up Their Sellers for Success?“, touches on market conditions that led to this inquiry and the focus of the questions. Part two switches gears from responses to insights.

It is undeniable that today’s sales environment has dramatically changed how customers and sellers interact, with both pros and cons. On a positive note, buyers are better informed about products and services than ever before. This can shorten the selling cycle, as customers may already be aware of which product is best-in-class and have eliminated other potential buying options before engaging with sellers.

Conversely, product positioning – and, by extension, positioning the company – and marketing collateral have grown in importance because they may form prospects’ first impressions as they search for options. In this complicated environment, sellers of all tenure in the profession must be armed with the competencies to meet customers where they are in their buying processes.

Sales Competencies Research Insights

Key to setting up sellers for success is the alignment of sales competencies with learning initiatives. Among the insights emerging from the recent survey are the following:

• Learning and Development (L&D) needs to carefully consider the modalities used in presenting training, matching their methods to the ways sellers can most easily consume learning content. While survey respondents named on-the-job training and video-based learning as the two most common modalities, most companies also utilize additional methods, such as classroom training and e-learning.
• Respondents ranked customer needs as the most influential driver of sales competency strategy, even though other stakeholders, such as sales managers and sellers, may also factor heavily in a company’s approach. Similarly, “understanding customer needs” was rated by respondents as the most important competency for sellers to develop, further underscoring the criticality of customer needs to the sales environment.
• Sellers interact with customers at every stage of the sales cycle. Although 82 percent of respondents agreed that sellers first interact with customers at the prospecting stage, this research also found that 64 percent of the time, sellers first interact with customers to follow-up on sales. These results suggest that not only is the ability to identify a customer’s stage in the sales cycle a critical competency, but sellers need to leverage the appropriate competencies to move the customer along to the next stage. Accordingly, L&D must align competencies to address the sales skills necessary to navigate customer engagement at any point in the cycle.
• According to the survey results, the effectiveness of training to reinforce sales competencies does not correspond to their strategic importance. At least half of the companies represented were “extremely” or “very” effective at training in sales competencies, but in nearly every instance, gaps existed between each competency’s importance and the effectiveness with which companies are developing them. The competency areas identified as those which companies should focus on to close gaps in training effectiveness included targeting buyers, prospecting opportunities, knowing the market, understanding customer needs, effective presentation skills, and expanding current accounts.
• The biggest challenge to L&D departments is consistency of training across employee functions and across geography. Additionally, implementation of sales training is often hampered by operational complacency, trouble identifying employees with skill gaps, and issues in fostering learner motivation.

Sales training and sales effectiveness have been cornerstones of many company initiatives to grow profitable business, increase revenues, and drive efficiencies – and these elements are no less important today. In order to set their sellers up for success, L&D must help them master engagement strategies that adapt to where customers are along the path to closing a sale so they can participate in shaping opportunities and positioning their offerings accordingly.

For more information about how you can narrow the gap between your organization’s critical selling competencies and the training programs designed to support the development of these competencies, contact us at info@richardson.com, or download the free research report by clicking below.

The post The Importance of Aligning Sales Competencies with Training Initiatives appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

Real estate is about selling the dream of home ownership. At least that’s how Melissa Kwan sees it. And she’s all about helping people accomplish their dreams – so when her background in real estate combined with her entrepreneurial bent, she was off in a flash to create something to help agents and customers connect and make that dream happen.

The outcome is Spacio, Melissa’s startup company that aims to make the way real estate open houses are done a better experience for prospective buyers and a better sales opportunity for agents. She believes that if she can help the people on both sides of that equation, everyone wins. You’ll enjoy hearing Melissa’s energy and passion expressed, on this episode.

What has taken the real estate industry so long to get on the technology train?

If you think about the way real estate open houses are done, it’s pretty laughable. What other industry has people show up, in person, to a sales demonstration and relies on a paper and pen lead capture device? Yet real estate agents all over the country continue to run their open houses that way. But when a sleek, modern, easy to use digital interface is used instead, so much more is possible after the event and the home-buying prospects who visit the open house immediately see the agent as more advanced, more effective, and more skilled. Melissa Kwan talks about how she’s stepped into the real estate industry to provide help agents sell the dream of homeownership, and buyers to feel like they’ve met an agent they can trust, on this episode of Real Relationships.

Tapping into the magical part of meeting someone face to face – through technology.

To Michelle Kwan, meeting someone face to face has a magical component to it. The interchange, the opportunity to learn about the person’s background and core values, the ability to laugh together and share an experience – they’re all things that contribute to the first steps of a real and potentially lasting relationship. That’s one of the main reasons she’s stepped into the real estate industry to make the possibilities of open houses into more of a relationship building exercise than a sales experience, and she’s doing it through software. Find out how technology is fueling relationships and profitability at the same time, on this episode.

How to build your business by helping people get where they want to be.

As Michelle and I spoke about the way she’s been able to build her business so quickly she was not shy to say that she hasn’t attained her present level of success because of her own razor-sharp intellect or good looks. It has all happened because of the relationships she’s been able to build that have, in turn, led to introductions that have moved her projects forward. Her firm belief is that if she’s busy trying to help other people get where they want to go, they will be equally eager to help her get where she wants to go. So far it’s working out pretty well. You can hear her story by listening to this conversation.

The reason doing business is simply about building relationships.

We’ve all heard it before: People have to know, like, and trust you before they will do business with you. And none of that happens through marketing emails or cold calling alone. These days there has to be a connection between the people behind the transaction that fosters those things. Selling the dream of homeownership as a real estate agent is one of the places where those relationships can be advantageous to both buyer and agent. A home purchase is one of the most important financial investments most people will make in their entire lives. Doesn’t it make sense that they’d want to travel that journey with someone they trust? Michelle Kwan explains how she’s helping agents do business founded on relationships, on this episode of Real Relationships.

Outline of this great episode:

• [0:31] My introduction to Melissa and why she started her company.
• [3:30] The lack of digital integration in Real Estate open houses and why it’s taken so long for the industry to move digital.
• [6:41] How is an agent going to use the data they get from using Spacio?
• [9:55] Effective tactics successful agents use to follow up on an open house.
• [15:20] How Melissa has been able to quickly infiltrate the Real Estate space.
• [22:24] The biggest challenge Melissa is facing right now.
• [23:03] Melissa’s best piece of advice from this interview.

Image via Unsplash

There has long been a debate among businesses as to how their buyers buy, largely expressed in the terms of business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C). A business purchase, such as selecting a blog software, is very different from a consumer shopping for a road bike.

Or is it? Jay Baer has said, “Our personal and commercial lives have collided in unprecedented ways.” The behaviors and attitudes we’ve adopted in recent years—thanks to our daily exposure to smartphones, social channels, and other tech advancements—are blending into our business lives.

In other words, our expectations of companies when we’re in the role of “business buyer” are advancing along a similar path as our expectations as consumers. A recent study by Salesforce Research, “State of the Connected Customer,” validates this idea in a new set of research, proving all buyers have the same fundamental expectations regardless of the type of purchase.

This research surveyed more than 7,000 consumers and business buyers globally. In the report, consumers reported “their personal purchasing, service, technology, and engagement preferences,” while business buyers self-identified as “employees having purchasing power on behalf of B2B companies.”

The study shows that B2B marketers can no longer afford to tell themselves that B2C marketing trends don’t apply to them. (highlight to tweet) It’s not that B2B and B2C audiences are the same, but rather, the research reveals that consumers’ expectations of companies are very similar for both B2B and B2C buyers.

Here are three ways that business buyers’ expectations align with consumer expectations in ways that could be mislabeled as “B2C marketing” trends.

1. 80 Percent of Business Buyers Expect Real-Time Communications

While “real-time interactions” in the B2C world may point to social channels, the ability for B2B companies to respond immediately is no less important. In fact, 80 percent of business buyers expect companies to respond and interact with them in real time.

The amount of time business buyers are willing to wait for a response varies by channel. It may surprise you that 67 percent of business buyers expect a response via email within one hour, and 15 percent of those actually expect an immediate reply.

Despite the high bar set for real-time email response, B2B marketers’ use of marketing automation is still lower than you might guess. The “2016 State of Marketing” research shows that only 11 percent of underperforming B2B marketers extensively use marketing automation—but even among high-performing B2B teams, only half (49 percent) say the same.

2. 65 Percent of Business Buyers Will Jump Ship without Personalized Interactions

As consumers, we’ve witnessed how retailers apply the data they know about us to personalize marketing. For instance, we’ve all received offers personalized with our name, gender, location, or recommendations. But as B2C marketers raise the stakes for personalization, B2B marketers would do well to follow suit.

Why? Not only do three-quarters of business buyers expect companies to send their company personalized offers, 74 percent agree that receiving these personalized offers has a major or moderate influence on their loyalty. This is even higher than the percentage of consumers who say the same (65 percent).

That’s not all: Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of business buyers go so far as to say that they’d likely switch brands if a company didn’t make an effort to personalize communications with their business.

But are marketers living up to those expectations? From the “2016 State of Marketing” research, we know that only 37 percent of B2B marketers are leveraging predictive intelligence/data science to create personalized emails. The percent who trigger real-time emails based on events is even lower (30 percent).

When it comes to personalizing advertising, B2B marketers gain some ground. Sixty-eight percent use demographic data (e.g., age or gender), 74 percent use customer data (e.g., email or phone data), and 69 percent use website activity data (e.g., retargeting cookies) to segment or target their company’s advertising.

3. The Age of Ultimate Empowerment

While shoppers who are showrooming may be B2C marketers’ worst nightmare (especially heading into the holidays), B2B marketers must realize that today’s business buyers are likewise more in control than they’ve ever been. Eighty-three percent of business buyers agree that technology has kept their company more informed about choices than ever before. And the more readily business buyers can use tech to understand all of their options, the easier it becomes to take their business elsewhere (82 percent of buyers agree).

The implications of this are simple but immense: Your business buyers expect the same level (if not higher) of real-time attention and personalized interactions as consumers. If they don’t see B2B marketers making strides toward delivering that, they’re well-positioned to find another provider who will.

To successfully market to business buyers, B2B marketers need to stop feeling immune to these changes in the customer mindset. As a B2B marketer, keep these three things top of mind heading into 2017:

• Be there for your business buyers to interact in real time.
• Personalize as much as possible along every step of the customer’s journey.
• Remember that your buyers have never held more power to choose.

Will we use the term B2B or B2C in 2017? Yes, certainly, but what about the next few years? The data from Salesforce Research proves that no matter what they are buying, or how they buy it, customers have a core set of expectations. They expect to be engaged in real time, and on a personal level. This is now the baseline of expectations, which all businesses must reach, no matter how complex the buying cycle or miniscule the purchase. Without the focus on the individual, relationships cannot be built—and as this research shows, those relationships are very powerful.

Failure to acknowledge this will result in missed opportunities and a significantly declining customer base. Moving forward, try to strike the terms “B2B” and “B2C” from your mind, and remember that despite what you’re selling, your customers are individuals who demand to be treated as such.

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Ecommerce Retention Rate is often overlooked, but it’s an important metric. Since customer acquisition is the most expensive thing an online business has to do, profits depend on how you can profit from each customer after you acquire them.

So you need to do everything in your power to convince your clients to keep coming back after their first purchase. 

If your Retention Rate is low you’re putting extra pressure on acquisition channels to bring ever more customers through the door. Putting pressure on acquisition usually ends up driving up customer acquisition costs and profitability down.

Ecommerce Retention Rate case studies

In ecommerce, your goal should be to maximize Average Order Value (how much each client spends in one purchase) and promote repeat purchases (or Ecommerce Retention Rate).

We’ve separated a few famous case studies of companies that have successfully applied retention strategies that give them significant competitive advantages:

Personalized emails – Amazon

Typical email newsletters from ecommerce sites have a very low click-through rate and, as a consequence, a very low impact in customer retention.

However, according to a study done by Überflip, online retailers using automated and personalized emails have been enjoying a very positive impact in their sales and retention:

Amazon is one of the best cases of Ecommerce Retention Rates and have been following this strategy for a long time. As Brad Stone, a author of “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” argues in his book, Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO) is:

“(…) prepared to cut prices to the bone and add all those freebies to cultivate customer loyalty and drive sales growth. Then he reinvests it all in more low prices and further expansion, driving additional customer loyalty.”

Most of the emails you’ll get from Amazon are part of a selection of products based on your activity on their site, aimed at keeping you coming back. This is an example of an email I received from Amazon in 2013, while I was looking to buy a digital SLR camera:

Personalized Emails

Amazon has a massive inventory and a product recommendation engine. This allows them to create automated email that cross and upsell to their customers. The recommendations are based on their previous searches and purchases.

By doing that, Amazon maximizes their Customer Lifetime Value and, on top of that, sells their store in addition to the products in it. This is an important distinction.

When Amazon “sells their store,” it means that they’re giving a great reason for people to return to Amazon. In doing so, they are building a brand that will get users coming back for all of their other needs (and not only when they run out of whatever they first bought).

This approach short-circuits the acquisition process. Instead of having to re-acquire their customers every time they need a new product, Amazon becomes the go-to brand in their minds for whenever they need to buy something, effortlessly.

Lead by Amazon, many small and medium online retailers have also been following the same path, with extremely good results. Here are some key data, taken from BrainSINS clients, on the impact of automated newsletters in their KPIs:

• Automatically recommended products had 73% more clicks than hand-selected products.
• Product recommendations in newsletters generated 46% more revenue than handpicked products.
• The time to create a newsletter dropped by 30 to 90%.

The results are clear: less effort and improved sales and user engagement. So consider nurturing the leads generated by your acquisition efforts with a personalized email strategy.

Read more about the different ways Email Marketing can help improve Ecommerce Retention Rate. »

Customer service – Zappos

As Zappos has demonstrated, customer experience is not just about making customers happy. A great customer experience creates and sustains customer loyalty, which in turn contributes to a higher Customer Lifetime Value.

At Zappos, 70% of sales are generated from repeat customers, leading to an extremely high Ecommerce Retention Rate. When so many customers keep coming back to shop with you, their lifetime value is so high that the cost to acquire them barely matters.

The secret behind such an astonishingly high Ecommerce Retention Rate is their amazing customer service. Zappos has achieved this by focusing the company’s entire culture on delighting the customers at every interaction. This culture can be seen in their list of company values, where the very first one is focused on exactly that:

1. Deliver wow through service.
2. Embrace and drive change.
3. Create fun and a little weirdness.
4. Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded.
5. Pursue growth and learning.
6. Build open and honest relationships with communication.
7. Build a positive team and family spirit.
8. Do more with less.
9. Be passionate and determined.
10. Be humble.
    

It has been reported that a customer service representative from Zappos physically went to a rival shoe store to get a specific pair of shoes for a woman staying at a hotel in Las Vegas when Zappos ran out of stock. They even have launched a “School of Wow,” where they teach other businesses how to follow their customer service culture.

Consider wowing your customer at their first purchase. Do it by exponentially improving customer service and UX. Try adding more personality to your social/email communication with them. If you’re successful, your customers will be so loyal that you may even be able to charge more for your products, which in turn will have an even bigger impact on LTV.

Recommendation engine – Netflix

In the case of consumer subscription products, price is a big concern. So companies such as Spotify, Dollar Shave Club and Netflix need to charge low monthly prices to be able to acquire users. For this strategy to be profitable, Ecommerce Retention Rate must be incredibly high.

Netflix’s monthly subscription is on average $8.14 per user. They have an estimated Customer Acquisition Cost of around $18 and a profit margin of around 33% ($2.64 per user per month). This means that if they have an Ecommerce Retention Rate anywhere lower than 7 months, they are losing money. Not to mention the fact that to sustain their business, they need to acquire tens of millions active users.

So the only way to keep a viable business is to make sure their Ecommerce Retention Rate is extremely high.

Netflix has done that by acquiring and producing amazing content. But because “amazing content” varies greatly from person to person, Netflix had to build a massive content library (estimated at 13,000 titles).

They then made sure that each piece of content reaches the right audience by building a sophisticated recommendation engine that keeps people watching more and more.

The end result is an average retention rate of 25 months per user, which in turn generates an average Customer Lifetime Value of approximately $66. That number, compared to the average $18 Customer Acquisition Cost, is what makes Netflix such a profitable business.

Subscription model

Consider adding a subscription option for your customers (read more about it in this article). But, whether you’re a subscription business or not, consider recommending the right product for your user to consume after their first purchase. Read more about the benefits of implementing a Personalization and Recommendation engine in this article.

Creating a habit –  Facebook

Many people fail to realize that Facebook’s secret for its unprecedented growth isn’t virality, but retention rate. According to Alex Schultz, Facebook’s first VP of Growth, Zuckerberg determined from the beginning that the main metric Facebook should be optimizing for is DAU (Daily Active Users).

Zuckerberg knew that, as an ad-based business, Facebook needed to generate a huge amount of impressions from targeted users to be successful. According to Nir Eyal, author of the book Hooked, Facebook did that by becoming what is now being called a “habit forming product”.

That means Facebook is engineered to become a daily habit in the lives of their users. Exactly like brushing your teeth or putting your clothes on, Facebook is an integral part of the your routine without you even realizing it.

Nir Eyal developed a framework that explains how Facebook does that. It’s called the Hook framework, and it involves 4 steps:

Engineering habits

The idea is to create an association between your product and “internal triggers” in users’ minds. When that happens, your users will not need any external prompting to come to your site. Without having to rely on paid marketing, habit-forming products get users to use them by attaching their brand to the users’ daily routines and emotions.

In the case of Facebook, when users subconsciously think, “I’m bored,” Facebook’s site or app comes immediately to mind and the action of checking their news feed is done almost automatically.

As a result, Facebook has more than 900 million daily active users (65%), who spend an average of 700 minutes per month on the social platform. Each day 35 million people update their status. This not only gives Facebook’s clients, the advertisers, an amazing pool of consumers to reach out to, but gives them rich demographics and behavioral information to target them in the best way possible.

If you have an ad based business or not, consider using Nir Eyal’s framework to turn your product into a daily habit in the lives of your target market. As an engineer of habits, you’ll be able to generate retention rates that will generate a great Customer Lifetime Value. 

This strategy can also work for Ecommerce businesses too. For me, Amazon immediately comes to mind when I’m in the mood to buy a new book. Accessing Booking.com is my habit when I’m stressed and need a vacation.

How to Measure Ecommerce Retention Rate

Calculating retention is a little complicated. First you need to decide how often do you want your customers to come back to your store. You can change month for week, month, 3 months, 6 months or a year, if that suits your business better.

For example, if you run a travel website, yearly retention is probably more appropriate. For everyday items monthly retention is probably a better fit.

But, thinking of a monthly time period, you need to know the following data to calculate your retention rate:

• Number of customers at end of the month = NC
• Number of new customers acquired in that month = NN
• Number of customers at the beginning of the month = NB

The formula is: Retention Rate = ((NC-NN)/NB) X 100.

It looks complicated but it’s quite simple. For example, if last month you sold to 100 people, and 80 out of those 100 customers were new, your NC number is 20. The retention rate of your store would be 100-80/100 =  0.2. This means you have a 20% Ecommerce Retention Rate.

Is 20% a good Retention Rate? That depends on your type of business, products and target market. At Compass, we calculate your Ecommerce Retention Rate automatically and benchmark it against businesses like yours. We then give a report showing if your numbers are bad or good. If bad, we even give you advice on how to fix it.

You can sign up to get your Ecommerce Retention Rate Report clicking on the button below. It’s free and it takes 2 minutes.

The post Improving Retention Rates and Profitability in Ecommerce appeared first on Compass Blog.

A how-to guide for campaign reporting with examples

One of the most important (but often overlooked) aspects of digital marketing is setting up your analytics properly. It’s a little bit technical but easy to do once you understand a few simple steps and see why it’s so important.

Being able to track where your visitors are coming from is a valuable opportunity to improve your engagement and your ROI during the campaign. Additionally, when you benchmark your campaign performance you will be able to improve your campaigns in the future, and budget more effectively. It’s worth investing a little time in analytics!

In this post, we’ll show you how to use Google Analytics to track visits to your website or landing page. This is the critical first step in being able to understand how your campaign is performing.

Once you can accurately see where your visitors are coming from, you’ll be able to build more useful reports such as “goal completions by conversion source” (e.g. how many leads or sales are coming from Bing versus Facebook), or “sales by source/medium” (using Google Analytics’ e-commerce reporting features).

Why track your marketing campaigns?

Marketers at the top of their game always want more data. When you know where your visitors are coming from and how each traffic source is converting on your site, you can make on-the-fly optimizations to your campaign and achieve better overall results.

With this campaign tracking data in hand, you’ll be able to benchmark against it when designing and budgeting for future campaigns, making your future campaigns even better. This is one form of data benchmarking, and it’s a powerful tool for any marketer.

Smart Insights recommended resources

Download Expert Member resource – 7 Steps to using Google Analytics To Improve Online Marketing

Our guide steps you through the setup stages, but focuses on how you use Google Analytics to get better business results - the missing link in most books and the Google documentation.

Access the Using Google Analytics To Improve Online Marketing

Download Expert Member resource – Campaign tracking code creator for Google Analytics

A simple tool to help you standardise campaign tracking codes for email, social media and display ads.

Access the Google Analytics campaign tracking code creator

What if you not thinking this way when setting up your promotions? For example, suppose you are running a contest and you’ve promoted it through print, email, Facebook Ads, Facebook Sponsored Posts, and Google Adwords. Visitors from these sources will appear in Google Analytics as follows:

* These can show up as various sources such as m.facebook.com (Facebook’s mobile web page) and l.facebook.com (Facebook’s laptop/desktop version), depending which devices they use and if they are using http or https status.

In this example, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish visitors from print versus email. Your Facebook traffic will all show up as one stat, regardless of whether they clicked your post or an ad. Traffic from Google will all display as organic traffic, not paid traffic (cost per click).

The trouble here is that you can’t tell what the money spent on Facebook Ads or Google Adwords actually translated to in terms of leads, sales, sign-ups, etc. Did the Google Adwords spend pay off? Did anyone actually find your website through print advertising? You just won’t know. And the next time you plan a campaign, you’ll be just as blind.

But if you had known that mid-way through the campaign your Facebook Ads were converting at half the cost of visitors from Adwords, you could have applied the remainder of your Adwords budget toward Facebook Ads and boosted the overall ROI of your campaign. Or, suppose your analytics could have shown that all of your direct traffic was coming from print, and your email marketing wasn’t working - you could adjust your email messaging to get a better click-through rate there. Perhaps you are emailing to multiple lists (you should be segmenting!). Wouldn’t it be great if you could see your conversion rates for each email list separately?

You can get all of this data, and it’s easier to do than you think.

Download Expert Member resource – RACE Dashboard

The purpose of the Smart Insights dashboard is to help managers to complete a regular weekly or monthly review of the current effectiveness of their digital marketing using Google Analytics with Google Docs Spreadsheets. We use this combination ourselves in our monthly reporting! .

Access the RACE Digital Dashboard – Members instructions page

How to track your campaigns?

We’re using Google Analytics here as it’s so popular, but other analytics tools will have similar features.

When a visitor lands on your website, Google Analytics records that pageview along with the source and medium that the visitor originated from. The “source” is the domain that the visitor came from, and the “medium” is a classification for different kinds of traffic. There is also a “campaign” parameter that can be used to further segment your traffic.

Many tools like MailChimp, Hootsuite, Oktopost and Hubspot have features that let you create tracking URLs, but anyone can use Google’s own Tracking URL Builder.  You can automatically apply tracking parameters to all Adwords traffic by enabling Auto-tagging in Adwords (read instructions about how it works.).

A simple URL looks like this: http://qoints.com

A Tracking URL looks like this: http://qoints.com/?utm_source=smartinsights.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=guestpost

These UTM parameters (everything after the “?”) force Google Analytics to record this data into the visitor’s pageview. In your Analytics Reporting view, under Acquisition > All Traffic, you will see traffic from the above Tracking URL as:

source / medium = newsletter / email

and in the Acquisition > Campaigns report you’ll see this traffic under Campaign = agency-newsletter

Using Tracking URLs for the campaign promotion example above, we’d get this:

* using a simple URL when posting links to Facebook will report people who click the link as facebook / referral by default, but you can use UTM parameters to distinguish different campaigns if you want

The URLs below all go to the same fictitious landing page (http://example.com/), but they have different tracking parameters appended to them:

• http://example.com/?utm_source=mailer&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=contest-promo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=agencies
• http://example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=agencies

So, for each channel that you are promoting through, you should be using a unique tracking URL. This will automatically allow you to report on each channel, as well as reporting on each source, medium or campaign as an aggregate.

Important tips for measurement

•  1. Plan and organize your parameters

Google Analytics simply records whatever it’s told, so organize your parameters ahead of time. It’s best to use a standard set of parameters company-wide. If your company uses a different set of parameters each time an email goes out, you won’t be able to easily report on things like overall traffic from email monthly or year-over-year. Analytics is case-sensitive too, so “Email”, “email”, “e-mail” and “E-mail” will report as four separate mediums.

• 2. Keep it simple

It may be tempting to create unique parameters for all of the variables for each source, but this is not necessary, nor is it ideal. Each channel only needs its own unique combination of parameters in order to be reported on separately.

For example:

These parameters will allow for reporting on all paid traffic, or all email traffic, or all traffic from the whole “summer” campaign as well as reporting on each channel separately by using combinations of the above in a segment or filter.

• 3.  Start now

Any data is better than none. Start simple and grow from there. Optimizing your campaign strategy in response to real-time data is a powerful way to achieve better ROI for your campaigns. Benchmarking your digital marketing data over time is a sure-fire way to improve your future campaigns, too.
Watch our video

Looking to build a truly powerful website in 2017? You know, the kind of site that is an investment, not an expense, because it generates business? Web strategy agency The Deep End has pinpointed ten current web design and user experience trends that you can use to increase leads and sales in the new year and beyond.

Aesthetics, functionality, and strategy all matter. And each plays a part in the tactics you can expect to evolve as trends in the new year.

Aesthetics

• Yes, people respond to the “look” of your website, but it goes deeper than that. Age-responsive design allows you to target specific demographics through subtle signals. You don’t need an entire redesign; combine with custom landing pages (see strategy), and you’ve got a winning package.
• Animation (just a touch) can bolster the impact of your call-to-action button.

Functionality

• Speed matters and skeleton screens give the impression that a site is loading faster.
• Engagement bots are on the job 24/7, answering your prospects’ questions.

Strategy

Nothing matters more than strategy. Consider these tactics in 2017:

• If you sell directly through your website and aren’t using shopping cart marketing, you could be missing out on 10 to 30 percent more business.
• Persuasive video — think simple. Imagine your best customer talking about how much they love your product or services. Powerful!
• No, don’t go! Think someone about to leave your website wants to be interrupted to help you out by leaving their email? Think again! But offer them a discount, free shipping, or another incentive — now you’re talking.
• If you’re relying on a one-size-fits-all homepage as a landing page for your off-site marketing, you’re missing the bet.
• And finally, if you’re wondering how you can fit a compelling image, hot headline, persuasive copy, CTA, and more on the top of your page — don’t even try. With an increasing number of people accessing the internet via mobile devices, scrolling is the new norm.

Check out this infographic from The Deep End Web Consulting for details:

Save

Anton recently talked about funnels.

Specifically, the highest converting sales funnel he uses to grow audiences, product sales, and businesses.

They’re straightforward and easy to understand once you see the setup.

Except… who do you target? How do you get people into these funnels reliably and on a consistent basis?

Here’s how to use Facebook advertising to fill each of those high converting funnels. And to ensure you have a high converting audience (and pay back your investment many times over).

Break Even Funnel: Targeting New Audiences

The first funnel is the Break Even Funnel, whose sole goal is to match new revenue with ad spend.

The result is that the campaign breaks even on profitability. But the goal is to build an audience of verifiable buyers.

This is a critical distinction because you’re filtering out tire kickers, browsers, and uninterested buyers.

These ‘break-even’ buyers are going to be the ones you can target later with your most profitable courses, products, and services.

But… how do you find them initially? Where exactly do you look for new audiences when they don’t already exist?

The first step is to get these people onto an email list.

The best offers at this point are content-based. With content, you’re able to focus on your audience’s problems and pain points. This increases the amount of people who’re potentially interested in what you’ll have to offer.

For example, Drop ship Lifestyle has a free mini-course that teaches newbies how to setup a profitable eCommerce shop. This is the bait that attracts people into the beginning of a longer relationship.

Assuming you already have a good idea for who you’re targeting , your next step is to search for these people online based on their interests. Never skip creating buyer personas or doing the customer research.

For example, an easy place to start is by thinking about where these people go for information. That could mean big magazines, blogs, and other media properties. Targeting their fans and people interested in their content can get you a decent sample size.

The goal is to shoot for an initial audience between 500,000 – 1,000,000 people.

But…

We need to further refine this audience. Otherwise, we’re going to waste a lot of money on unqualified or uninterested people.

So the next step is to use interests intersections and exclusions.

This gets a little more advanced. But it allows us to refine a huge, generic audience down to one that’s much more likely to buy.

For example, if you’re selling a course on “how to get more clients”, your next step would be to target people who have an interest in training, consulting, coaching, sales, etc.

Then, you can even take this a step further and set-up exclusions to rule out certain types of people. This is perfect if you’re trying to rule out those who might be too advanced for your offer or already do what you’re selling.

So you can rule out people who already work in marketing, advertising, design, etc. (because there are overlapping skillsets).

Going back to the initial eCommerce example, you might want to rule out more advanced people (because this initial offer is best for rookies). So you might want to rule out people who are interested in Magento, which is an industry-standard platform for big eCommerce websites.

This sounds time-consuming. It is.

There’s a fair amount of experimentation in finding the right initial audience.

But the good news is that this is the hard part.

From here, it’s all downhill.

Primary Offer Funnel: Targeting Break-Even Customers

The Primary Offer Funnel is where the real money for your business is made.

It’s the several-hundred to multiple-thousand-dollar items that are big ticket purchases for consumers.

In most cases, you wouldn’t want to promote this to a brand new audience. If those people don’t know who you are and haven’t expressed interested in your products, the conversion rates would be too low (and the Cost per Sale too high) to profitably grow through advertising.

Instead, you’re now going to target the specific people who just purchased from your Break Even Funnel.

How?

Custom audiences.

From here on out, you’re going to rely on pre-built, custom audiences for advertising. Then you’re only targeting a very specific audience of people who’ve already purchased from you.

Currently, Facebook allows you to create custom audiences based on:

• Customer Data: Facebook will ‘match’ their user base with email addresses, phone numbers, customer IDs, etc.
• Website Traffic: People who’ve viewed website pages (but maybe not others).
• App Activity: People who have (or haven’t) done something specific inside an application or product.
• Facebook Engagement: People who like, follow, or share your Facebook content frequently.

The most effective custom audiences are made up of specific data, like email addresses.

When you create custom audiences on Facebook currently, you can either upload a file of email addresses manually or import people directly from a MailChimp list.

For example, when people purchase the Break-Even product from you, their email address should go into a customer database or a specific MailChimp list.

Now you can take that data and send it over to Facebook. They will match up user profiles with those email addresses, and run special retargeting or remarketing campaigns against them for your Primary (read: money making) product.

Webinar Funnel: People Who Haven’t Purchased Your Primary Offer

The Webinar Funnel plays a crucial role to nurture leads who’ve already purchased the Break-Even funnel product, but for whatever reason, have held off on purchasing the Primary offer.

Those two sequences are largely automated; meaning that they will use a series of coordinated emails, etc. to automatically follow-up with people over a few days, weeks, and months.

If people have gone through those two funnels, but still haven’t purchased the Primary (money-making) offer, they might need to develop more interest and trust in the offer first.

These potential customers need a little extra hand-holding, face-time, and maybe a few special offers to push them over the edge. So let’s give it to them!

Once again, we’ll be relying on custom audiences to determine who is ‘caught in the middle’ of the two funnels.

One method is to create a pixel on your website that tracks people who visit one page (like the offer or order form), but NOT another (like the ‘thank you’, confirmation page that people see once an order goes through successfully).

Another method is to use more advanced marketing automation platforms like HubSpot or Infusionsoft.

These will help you ‘tag’ people, or set them up in special lists that will automatically pull them off of one automation sequence (if they haven’t purchased within a certain time) and add them to another (so that we can use the webinar to pique their interest and hopefully add more value).

The best part is that these platforms will automatically sync with many popular webinar tools, like GoToWebinar.

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That means you can set-up the integration, create the funnels one time, and the entire sequence should literally be programmed to run on its own.

Conclusion

Advertising isn’t an expense from a marketing standpoint.

It’s an investment.

You should be able to confidently put in $X and generate $X+ at the end of the day. That allows you to continue reinvesting your original amount. And it also gives you a tailor-made audience that is much more likely to purchase bigger, expensive offers (that can grow your business).

Lead nurturing techniques, like webinars, can then also be included to help people ‘on the fence’ get more comfortable and familiar with what you’re offering.

Using sophisticated techniques like this takes work to coordinate.

But it ensures that you’re targeting the most relevant audience possible.

That way, the only people who will show up on your webinar or who see an expensive offer are already legitimate, paying customers who’re pre-qualified.