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I first heard of the Net Promoter Score from Fred Reichheld, one of its co-developers, in a talk he gave at a vendor conference. When he stated that “the NPS is the best predictor of business growth,” my interest was piqued. Why? I have never found evidence in my 20+ years of experience to support that statement. Since his talk and the release of his book on the same topic, I have conducted many studies to examine the merits of the NPS claims. Additionally, other researchers, from both industry and academia, have conducted research on the NPS. Our basic conclusions: the NPS claims are not true and there are a lot of problems with their research claims.

My research addressed several issues surrounding the NPS claims, not just the original claim. Based on mine and others’ research, I present my list of 5 NPS myths. Additionally, I present evidence that debunks each myth as well as what you can do to improve how you measure customer loyalty. You’ll see that the NPS is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

5 NPS Myths

Myth 1: NPS is the best predictor of growth

Fact: The NPS is not the best predictor of growth. Keiningham et al. (2007), looking at the personal computer industry, found that satisfaction is just as good as the NPS at predicting growth. They also found the same pattern of results in other industries (e.g., insurance, airline, ISP). In all cases, satisfaction and NPS were comparable in predicting growth.

What you can do: Use other loyalty questions. The use of the other two common loyalty questions, “Overall sat” and “Buy again,” result in the same conclusions as when you use the NPS.

Myth 2: Net scores are easy to understand

Fact: Net scores are ambiguous; You can arrive at the same NPS score using different Promoter and Detractor scores. Net score creates a metric on an entirely new scale (from -100 to 100) that is different from the original customer rating (0 to 10). Additionally, CX professionals exhibit bias when interpreting summary metrics. Also, the segments used to calculate the NPS are arbitrary. Specifically, while the NPS formally defines Promoters as customers who gave ratings of either 9 or 10, we found that Promoters could also include respondents who gave a rating of 8, 9 or 10.

What you can do: Use mean or top-box scores as summary metrics instead of net scores. The use of the mean keeps the group metric on the same scale of measurement as the original ratings (0 to 10). Train your employee on statistics and statistical thinking (long-term).

Myth 3: The NPS is the only loyalty question you need in your survey

Fact: Customer loyalty is multidimensional; it is not a single thing and you simply can’t measure “loyalty” with a single question. There are really three different types of customer loyalty. The three types of loyalty are: Retention, Advocacy and Purchasing. In a nationwide study asking over 1000 customers about their current network operator, different loyalty questions were predictive of different types of objective business growth metrics:

• Retention loyalty questions were the best predictor of future churn rate
• Advocacy loyalty questions (including the recommend question) were a good predictor of new customer growth
• Purchasing loyalty questions were the best predictor of Average Revenue per User (ARPU) growth

What you can do: Measure all types of customer loyalty that are relevant to your business. Consider the different ways your customers can contribute to the bottom line and ask about those types of loyalty behaviors. Here is a more comprehensive list of customer loyalty questions you can use in your next customer survey.

Myth 4: High correlation between NPS and customer experience (CX) illustrates importance of CX in driving recommendations

Fact: The correlation between NPS and CX is artificially inflated because both are measured using the same method (a survey asking for self-reports; both use similar rating scales). The true correlation between CX satisfaction and customer loyalty is much lower than what is indicated when self-reported metrics are used to measure both variables. As your loyalty metric becomes more objective (asking about number of people to whom you recommended, for example), the correlation between “recommendations” and CX decreases significantly.

What you can do: Use objective loyalty measures in your analysis. Integrate your disparate data silos (e.g., CX system, CRM, Mixpanel) to link objective loyalty metrics (e.g., number products purchased, amount spent) with CX metrics (satisfaction with product, service). When you analyze these data, the results will be a better reflection of reality.

Myth 5: The claim that “NPS is the best predictor of growth” is widely accepted by CX professionals

Fact: In a survey of CX professionals, Only 25% of CX professionals said they believe the claim that the NPS is the best predictor of growth. This finding is more remarkable for CX professionals from loyalty leading companies. Of CX professionals from loyalty leading companies, only 14% agree with the NPS claim. Of CX professionals from loyalty lagging companies, 42% agree.

What you can do: Share your concerns about the NPS (along with the supporting research) with your CEO and CMO. Sharing the alternatives of the NPS with them to help move your loyalty measurement program forward.

Summary

This post summarizes scientific evidence that debunks the popular beliefs about the NPS. I presented 5 popular beliefs about the NPS and show why those beliefs are not supported by evidence. The evidence shows that the NPS: 1) is not the best predictor of business growth, 2) is difficult to understand, 3) is insufficient in capturing all the components of customer loyalty, 4) inflates the importance of CX on loyalty and 5) is not widely accepted by most CX professionals. These myths are presented in Table 1.

Your job may require you to use the NPS. Your livelihood might depend on selling the NPS. If you want to keep using, supporting, loving the NPS, go ahead. I really don’t care what loyalty metric you choose to use. What I do care about is sharing evidence-based conclusions and helping companies optimize the use of their data. The quality of your customer analytics is only as good as the metrics you analyze. In this post, I shared the empirical evidence regarding the myths of the NPS and what you can do to overcome them.

References

Hayes, B. E. (2008). Net promoter score debate: The measurement and meaning of customer loyalty. Business Over Broadway.

Hayes, B. E. (2008). Customer feedback programs best practices: An empirical investigation. Business Over Broadway.

Keiningham, T. L., Cooil, B., Andreassen, T.W., & Aksoy, L. (2007). A longitudinal examination of net promoter and firm revenue growth. Journal of Marketing, 71 (July), 39-51.

Morgan, N.A. & Rego, L.L. (2006). The value of different customer satisfaction and loyalty metrics in predicting business performance. Marketing Science, 25(5), 426-439.

Netpromoter.com (2007). Homepage.

Reichheld, F. F. (2003). The One Number You Need to Grow. Harvard Business Review, 81 (December), 46-54.

Reichheld, F. F. (2006). The ultimate question: driving good profits and true growth. Harvard Business School Press. Boston.

Professionals with excellent backgrounds in sales are in-demand for their ability to generate traffic, capture interest, and most importantly, close deals. They have a solid understanding of what consumers want and need and the intricacies of how a sales process works. This enables them to efficiently attract potential customers using a variety of skills and techniques. In most cases, your business can benefit from the guidance of numerous types of sales-minded individuals who have expertise in marketing, lead generation, and various forms of online optimizations.

Types of Sales Professionals

Since there are many unique ways to gain the attention of potential customers today, it’s difficult to summarize every possible element of what a sales professional can do for your business. Below are several of the most popular categories:

Lead Generation Expert

Lead generation professionals use various forms of marketing outreach to find ideal customers and create interest around the brands they’re representing. In the digital era, there are many different types of lead generation experts with backgrounds in areas such as search optimization, social media marketing, paid search, website optimization, mobile marketing, and email.

Outbound Sales and Telemarketing

Outbound sales professionals reach out directly to fresh leads in order to gather information, identify needs, and ultimately close sales. Telemarketers perform the same types of services while cold calling consumers and businesses that may have an interest in the client’s products.

Sales Consultants

A sales consultant advises clients on how to streamline their sales process. Sales consultants are often highly successful former sales reps that bring an in-depth understanding of how to generate more leads, find new revenue streams, and increase conversion rates.

Inbound Marketing Professionals

Inbound marketing consultants have a vast amount of knowledge on creating sales funnels and converting website visitors into active leads. These professionals use data-driven metrics to continually test and improve the performance of their client’s website. Some may also have design or copywriting skills to further enhance campaigns.

How Sales Professionals Work

Sales professionals usually specialize in just one of the previously mentioned areas of expertise to give their clients the greatest possible chance of success. At the same time, however, it is common for clients to build a sales force consisting of numerous sales consultants, inbound professionals, lead generation experts, telemarketers, and other career types in order to achieve a comprehensive strategy for reaching new customers.

Additionally, most freelance sales experts work remotely for their clients and use technologies like VOIP and video conferencing. An average workday could include anything from creating a sales presentation to studying consumer data or contacting customers by phone or email.

Sample Project Description

In order to locate the best possible sales professional for your needs, it’s important to share as much information about the project as possible from the start. This allows professionals to better understand your needs and determine whether or not they’d be the right fit for your project and company.

Below is a sample of how a project description may look. Keep in mind that many people use the term “job description,” but a full job description is only needed for employees. When engaging a freelancer as an independent contractor, you typically just need a statement of work, job post, or any other document that describes the work to be done.

Title: Seeking Motivated Sales Professionals for Boutique Marketing Firm

We are on the lookout for talented, goal-oriented sales agents that have a passion for helping their clients succeed. You’ll be following up on leads generated from our website and getting potential clients excited about the branding/marketing strategies that we offer. Qualified professionals can expect a generous commission structure (up to $10,000 per sale) with the potential for long-term residual income, and the ability to pursue as many leads as you want. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, please read on to learn about us.

XYZ Company is a full-service online marketing firm with vast experience in helping companies define their online identities. With over 89% of today’s consumers performing a web search before visiting brick-and-mortar storefronts, having a great web presence is no longer optional. We help our clients build an amazing online presence that naturally attracts new leads and converts them into long-term customers.

Skills Requirements

• Expertise in tele/online sales with excellent customer service skills
• A solid understanding of online marketing and the desire to learn much more
• Experience with web design, SEO, or PPC marketing
• Great communication skills via phone, online chat, and email

To submit a proposal, please tell us about a recent sales experience where you exceeded a client’s specific needs in a creative way. Also tell us a little bit about yourself and why you feel like you’d be an ideal fit for this project.

Read this article for more tips on how to write a great project description.

Selecting the Best Sales Professional

It may be necessary to consider several different sales professionals depending on your overall sales and marketing goals. But regardless of how many experts you ultimately engage, there are a number of traits you may want to look for that are common in all great sales professionals:

• The ability to clearly articulate your business, product, and value proposition
• A positive attitude with a winning personality
• Great overall presentation and interpersonal skills
• Confidence in the brand, the products, and your marketing
• A strong desire to achieve success on your project

Since many of these traits will not become readily apparent in a proposal letter, it’s often a good idea to conduct interviews via phone or video to really get to know interested professionals and the unique skills that they can provide. Also, do not be afraid to ask tough questions or to put professionals on the spot; how they perform under pressure will give you an excellent preview of how they would represent your brand to consumers.

Get more work done, faster with freelance help. Post a job today and get started!

You need content – and lots of it.

But you’re faced with only so many hours in the day and a finite number of content marketing team members. Most people will advise that the best way to get all that content is to outsource it.

You post a job listing. You pick the lucky applicant from the hundreds of proposals, assign an article, and offer a few insights on the subject.

You get a first draft … it’s lackluster at best (and unintelligible at worst).

Managing outsourced workers effectively comes with a learning curve. To adapt more quickly, you can take several steps to improve the quality of content you receive from your freelancers.

And when you want the kind of content that’s so brilliant, engaging, and revolutionary that it instantly brands your company as the leader to watch in your industry, freelance writers still can be a great option, but it takes more investment from you.

Whether you’re new to working with freelancers or an experienced pro, stop wasting money on outsourced content that doesn’t meet your needs. Start understanding what your freelance writers need from you to create content that’ll truly support your business.

Set the foundation for quality outsourcing

In 2007, Tim Ferriss highlighted the concept of outsourcing with his book, The 4-Hour Work Week. Though he oversimplified the process, Tim covered how to master outsourcing, although it’s something few have done well.

Communication is one of the biggest challenges. To act on your behalf successfully, your freelancers need to understand what you want them to do and how you want it done. That means providing them with:

• Background information:
  • What does the writer need to know to write for your project successfully?
  • Can you recommend any good learning resources to help the writer get up to speed?
• Content specifications:
  • What length should the content be?
  • What tone or style should be used?
  • Do any specific keywords need to be included and, if so, at what frequency should they be mentioned?
  • Does the piece need images, internal or external links, heading tags, bullet lists, or other formatting features?
• Audience:
  • What can you tell the writer about the people who will be reading the article?
  • What do these readers need to take away from the piece?
• Funnel position:
  • Does the content piece need a call to action? If so, how does the article fit into the sales and marketing funnel?
  • How is success defined relative to the article’s performance?
• Project deliverables:
  • When do you need articles completed?
  • Do you have a preferred document format (for example, Google Docs or Word Docs)?
  • How will you communicate feedback and revision requests?

If you find your projects are clearly defined but you still aren’t getting good results, you may need to improve how you are recruiting writers. Here are some ideas.

• Look for writers with web experience: Web writing is one of the few forms of professional writing that prioritizes engagement and action over simple education. Not all writers understand the difference. Look for those with a history of successful writing specifically for content marketing.

• Find writers with subject-area expertise: Plenty of generalist writers can cover multiple topics successfully with a bit of research. But the best results generally come from those who have spent significant time writing about your industry and are familiar with its ins and outs.

• Change up your hiring sources: Hundreds of places exist where you can find freelance writers; if you aren’t happy with your current writers, it could be that you aren’t sourcing from the right location. I typically find the best results on industry-specific job boards like the ProBlogger Jobs Board and Carol Tice’s Freelance Writers’ Den Job Board.

• Ask for referrals: Here’s a secret: The best writers rarely advertise their services, and they rarely respond to job-board listings. To find them, ask around. Not everybody will reveal the name of the ghostwriter handling their content creation, but you may get lucky and find a few good leads this way.

Rethink your outsourcing expectations

What happens when you’ve gone through all the steps above, and you still don’t get the results you want from your freelance writers? It’s time to explore some of the more advanced challenges that can derail freelance writing relationships:

You expect your writer to deliver primary data

If I had a dollar for every client who told me, “I want something like Brian Dean publishes on Backlinko,” I wouldn’t have to take on clients that expect me to write skyscraper-level content out of thin air.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes Dean’s skyscraper technique content in demand. He created epic-level content (Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List) to trump other resources in his industry and earn the coveted “authority” publisher status. As a result, he increased his search traffic by 110% in the 14 days after that post was published.

In many ways, the post put Dean and his Backlinko blog on the map. He generated data, he made assumptions based on that information, and he gave his recommendations a clever name that caught on within the marketing community.

The key to his success, though, is that he created something new.

Now, imagine you told your freelance writer, “I want you to create a post like Backlinko’s skyscraper technique article that’ll help our company get noticed.”

Chances are good that your writer doesn’t have a massively popular website with enough traffic to run tests and draw conclusions in your industry. Your writer probably isn’t testing new strategies on their own or developing recommendations about what does and doesn’t work in your industry.

If you posted a challenge similar to the skyscraper technique success to your freelancer, they have a couple options: 1) surf around top industry websites to see what other experts in your niche are saying, or 2) work from any primary original research or data you have.

If the writer pulls from what’s been written, at best you’re going to get content that rehashes existing articles in a creative, unique way. It’s never truly going to be the kind of revolutionary, expert-level content that launches a brand to Backlinko-style success.

Now, imagine that you’re able to tell your writer, “Here’s some data I’ve gathered in my work and how I see it could be applied in the industry.” With your combined powers, you and your writer are more likely to create something special.

But that brings me to my next point.

You aren’t willing to put in any effort

Forgive the expression, but hiring writers isn’t like a Ronco Showtime® rotisserie oven. There’s no set-it-and-forget-it option. Outsourcing is not a hands-off transaction. I frequently see that the companies that put the least effort into their content outsourcing engagements are the ones that are least satisfied with the content’s outcomes.

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Outsourcing #content writers is not a hands-off transaction says @ConquerContent.
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Here’s how one of my clients takes a hands-on approach to outsourcing with me and my team:

• At the start of each month, the client provides information on the general subject areas he wants his content to focus on over the next 30 days. We use those directions and what we know about his business to brainstorm potential content topics, which he then approves or declines.

• Once the idea is approved, we outline the framework of what we plan to cover and share with the client. He adds copious notes, either changing topics we planned to cover or adding personal anecdotes or data points to incorporate in the final draft.

• We send the client a completed draft. The client adds notes where he’d like to see more content (often providing the added details himself), as well as where phrases or sentences need to be reworded to better suit his voice. We go through a few rounds of revisions.

Once the client is satisfied, the final version is published (though it’s not uncommon for him to come back weeks or months later to add something he thinks will take the piece to the next level).

Are you that involved in the creation of your content?

It’s certainly not necessary in all outsourcing cases, but it’s certainly a contributing factor in the regular praise this client receives for his exceptional content and his rising profile in his industry.

A good writer can get you 70% of the way to great content – and in some cases that C grade may be good enough for your purposes. But truly, the best content results come from a collaboration between freelancer and client.

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When using a #contentmarketing freelancer, the best results come from collaboration says @conquercontent.
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You expect your writer to drive your marketing strategy

This is another big problem I see in content outsourcing. Marketing department leaders have been told over and over, “You need content marketing.” They run out, hire a freelance writer, and tick the content marketing program off their to-do lists.

Let’s see how this winds up in practice:

A client approaches a writer, and says, “I need to do more content marketing.” The writer happily accepts the project and asks the client what kind of content they’d like to have created. “Oh, I don’t know – whatever you think will work best.”

You are, essentially, asking your writer to drive your company’s marketing strategy. And unless you’ve hired a writer for his content marketing strategy skills, your writer likely doesn’t have the skills or experience to create your company’s content marketing strategy successfully.

In my nearly 10 years of experience doing this kind of work, I’ve seen that the most successful companies are the ones that understand exactly how and why they’re using content marketing. They are the ones who are more likely to operate like this scenario:

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The most successful companies understand how & why they’re using #contentmarketing says @conquercontent.
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Before ever contracting a writer, the client develops a strategic plan that details what the company hopes to achieve with content marketing, as well as how the individual content pieces will support the desired outcomes. When a writer is hired, the client is able to clearly say, “I need this piece of content, created in this way, to help achieve these goals for our company.”

Conclusion

As I mentioned, the best freelance writing outcomes occur when there’s a true partnership between the company and the writer. If you view your outsourced writers as a way to get as much as possible, while giving as little as possible, the quality of the work is virtually guaranteed to suffer. But if you view your freelancer as a valuable asset to the business with whom you share what you know while detailing your expectations, the content will be far more likely to succeed.

Certainly, this list isn’t comprehensive. A number of challenges can derail a freelance writing relationship or even prevent one from getting started in the first place. Share your challenges and/or solutions in the comments.

Want more tips and insight into how to operate a successful content marketing program? Subscribe to the free daily CMI newsletter.

Cover image by Startup Stock Photos via pixabay.com

The post Why Freelance Content Writers Aren’t Getting the Results You Want appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

If you could game the system, would you do it?

Users on the question-and-answer website Quora recently shared their "best" unethical life hacks that could score you everything from free Chipotle to major savings at grocery stores.

But be warned: These hacks are uniformly unethical. Some veer into fraud. They should be regarded as informational and for entertainment purposes rather than as actual suggestions. You shouldn't do them. If you do them, you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

Keep reading to see the 17 unethical life hacks.

SEE ALSO: The unorthodox productivity hacks of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg

"Buy an appliance that's identical to the one you broke, swap them out, and then return the broken appliance for a refund."

- Jay B.

Take advantage of “grace periods” in ticket-entry car garages.

“Most of these garages will have a grace period so that if you pull in but you didn’t really ‘park,’ you can leave and pay nothing. […]

"Next time you park in one of these garages, grab a ticket like normal and go park. When you’re ready to leave, pull your car close to the entrance, and go push the button to get a fresh entrance ticket, time stamped to that moment (when you’re ready to leave). Then, just go to the exit and put your brand new ticket in the machine or hand it to the person. If you’re within the grace period, you will be charged nothing and you can leave. […]

"Even if you’re a few minutes over, you’re paying for minutes rather than hours or days."   

- Anonymous

Weigh all of your fruit as apples at the self-checkout station.

“Go to a self-checkout and weigh [everything] as apples. If you're worried about getting caught if someone checks, ring up organic [apples] as regular [apples], fuji apples as red delicious, etc. Voila, your grocery bill went down.” - Leigh C.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Welcome to Finance Insider, Business Insider's summary of the top stories of the past 24 hours.

Fixed income, currencies, and commodities traders are back in the ascendancy on Wall Street.

The FICC business is expected to post an increase in 2016 revenue, in contrast to the equities business and investment banking. And according to an annual survey by the Wall Street recruiting firm Options Group, total compensation for FICC workers in the US will be up 5% from last year on average.

Elsewhere on Wall Street, a small hedge fund manager threw shade at Tesla's Elon Musk at a private conference and said the stock is going to zero. Steve Cohen is paying $135 million to settle an insider trading case from his old hedge fund. Hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson thinks Donald Trump conned his supporters.

And Jefferies has "not been operating at normal levels" this year, but is well-positioned for 2017, according to CEO Rich Handler.

In markets news, bonds are getting demolished. Investors can profit from rising rates using high yield, according to AllianceBernstein. And the OPEC deal is a sign of "tough economic circumstances."

US manufacturers crushed expectations in November. The economy continues to grow across much of America, according to the Fed. The central bank also confirmed some of the most troubling trends in Manhattan real estate.

Preet Bharara, the "sheriff of Wall Street," has met with president-elect Donald Trump, and said he'll continue to serve.Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren scorched Donald Trump's Treasury secretary as "hypocrisy at its worst." Trump's pick for the role, Steven Mnuchin, has made a career out of being lucky, according to Jesse Eisinger.

A pattern is emerging with Trump's deals to save US manufacturing jobs, according to Matt DeBord. and the Carrier deal shows what Donald Trump understands about the politics of jobs, according to Josh Barro.

Here's your first look at Rolls-Royce's new SUV. Cadillac has a new race car that looks like the Batmobile.

Lastly, here are 12 gifts the modern gentleman actually wants this year.

Here are the top Wall Street headlines at midday

Allergan CEO: "I worry today that pharma has a false sense of relief or security" with Trump presidency - Investors betting that Donald Trump is going to lay off the drug industry might be in for a surprise, according to the CEO of Botox maker Allergan. 

BAML: The S&P 500 could soar 400 points - and that may be a terrible thing - Stock market strategists are getting more bullish, and while that may be a good thing in the short-term it could lead to problems down the line.

Salesforce is on track to become a $100 billion company in 3 years, says analyst - Salesforce is down about 5% over the past two weeks, despite reporting a solid beat-and-raise quarter on November 17.

November auto sales are beating expectations so far, but with one big exception - Most companies have reported sales growth that was better than expected. However, a 14% year-on-year plunge at Fiat Chrysler could weigh on the overall rate for the month, according to Bespoke Investment Group.

Caterpillar says Wall Street is too bullish on its sales for next year - Caterpillar on Thursday said analysts' consensus estimates for sales and profit next year were "too optimistic," taking into account the challenges it expects.

21 technology tipping points we will reach by 2030 - From driverless cars to robotic workers, the future is going to be here before you know it.

SEE ALSO: North America is going to get a new billionaire every 6 days

Join the conversation about this story »

There are a lot of buying process flows depending on your company’s culture, size, IT staff, influence and many other factors. Most software purchases typically go something like: “Hey have you seen this app? It can do this and that and this – isn’t it cool? Let’s get a few licenses for the team.”

In larger companies the process seems to be more detailed but in essence it is the same. “CEO wants a new reporting system, let’s get IT to do a short list of software vendors and have some meetings with all of them, get purchasing involved for pricing, etc. It is mostly based on whats available. Should we pick one vendor since it is a better fit and we already know them? Should we pick this other vendor because our competition uses them?

The issue in purchasing software is that it starts from the awareness of a potential supplier. If the buyer is not aware of a product then how can they contact them to request more information, include them in the purchase decision, or even test the product?

This makes it difficult for new, innovative and potentially cost effective products to be included and potentially selected in the buying decision as they rarely have the market presence and resources to be listed in the first page of Google, on airports or on top of buildings across major cities.

One way to be aware is to use comparison web sites that can surface them and that you should at least use before making your purchase. I have used them several times to decide which Virtual PBX software to purchase and which HR system to purchase and they provided invaluable information and even led me down to changing my mind and exposing alternative vendors.

1. GetApp boasts close to 5000 applications in their business directory and a nice trending apps overview as well as a “best fit” criteria selection, which although misleading at times could provide you with a starting list of vendors. I like the fact that there is a filter/search on the left side for pricing, devices supported, I also like the comparison tool.

2. Capterra has over 400 categories of business related software however I find at times the best way to use it is to type the name of one application that I know does the job and from that one look at the category (or categories) to identify other potential applications. It provides a nice company overview as well as a video or screen captures. People can register their reviews and comments as well as providing a 5-star rating system.

3. IT Central Station provides a more technical/IT point of view on all systems from a number of IT professionals. Think of it more like a LinkedIn approach to software review (in fact you can login using your LinkedIn account).

4. G2crowd leverages user reviews and trusted peers to build their comparison and valuation pages. It is very well categorized and professional. Using something they call “The Grid” which is a very similar approach to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to place vendors in a Satisfaction/Market Presence grid. Much like its Gartner counterpart, the grid is subjective and potential non-significant as for example Market Presence is not really a customer driven selection criteria (more appropriate but also not primary would be criteria such as # of customers or industry coverage).

5. AlternativeTo is a crowd sourced recommendation engine and in essence it is actually one of the best as it starts with the premise that you have some type of software that you would like to replace with something else, hopefully better and cheaper. AlternativeTo goes beyond business software and it includes even games and navigator add-ons. The quality of information may be poorer than others listed here but it definitely gives you a wider rang allowing you to potentially discover new applications that you were not aware existed.

One final note on all of the above comparison tools, which is generally applicable to anything you read on the internet: even sites such as WikiPedia where we place trust on others to provide us with information you should always assume that what you read, especially from user reviews and third party provided information, is biased.

In general, we as human beings, are biased to begin with by our culture, background, and experience. But in addition to our own biases there are vendors that spend a lot of money influencing directly or indirectly many of the sites on the internet related to their industry.

User reviews are the most common place to influence you, and vendors that have the resources to enlist their current customers or that can hire “fake” reviewers in mass to flood post on Facebook, twitter, comparison sites and many other channels, will do so.

Look for comments that are specific to a feature or that truly provide constructive criticism of an application before believing the entire rating.

A final suggestion: there is no better way to select a software than to try it yourself for a few days or weeks. Install it, configure it, see what it can do or not and create your own assessment. Do not rely on others to spoon feed you the answer – they will not be on the hook when the software does not do what your business needs.

I hope the above helps you on your quest to identifying the right software for you.

Transferring as much knowledge as possible during training can feel like the right thing to do, especially during onboarding, when an employee is brand new to your organization and has so much to learn.

However, without a concurrent focus on behavior change, this knowledge will quickly go the way of the dodo. The forgetting curve is real, folks.

If a company does not focus as much or more on changing behaviors as it does on developing knowledge, its training dollars will go to waste.

How do you shift your focus to behavior modification? First, you have to be willing to put in the time. Changing behavior is a more lengthy process than transferring knowledge, but it is worth it in the long run.

In addition to devoting sufficient time, you need to employ the right tools. But what are the right tools?

Behavior Modification Tools

It is important to give new hires a clear idea of what to expect over the course of their training period. This not only prepares them for what they will learn, but it also starts the relationship out with a healthy level of transparency.

Breaking training up into increments over a period of months can also be helpful. This slower approach allows managers more time to observe new hires’ behavior and issues that are identified early on during a safe period are more easily corrected.

Providing opportunities for new hires to apply knowledge from training as soon as possible is another tool for supporting behavior change. If eighty percent of learning happens during application, it would serve any company well to implement application activities as part of training and as follow-ups to training. The sooner employees begin their work, too, the sooner you can identify which of their behaviors need to be changed.

Management support, mentorship, and team cooperation are essential because they provide feedback loops embedded in human relationships. When new hires have a person or team to go to with questions, they will consistently be reminded of what they learned during training. Likewise, with these relationships in place, management and mentors will have more success in communicating with employees when behavior modifications become necessary.

A study involving a U.S. government program from World War II reveals some important behavior-modification tools. The goal of this program was to convince American homemakers to include sweetbreads in the meals they prepared for their families (sweetbreads being a euphemism for all of the things we tend to leave out of meat—heart, tongue, throat, etc.). You can imagine it must have been a tough sell. You won’t regret reading about the details, but here I’ll just point out the three main behavior-modification tools uncovered in this study: providing incentives, overcoming the obstacles to change, and allowing trainees to take part in discussions about the behavior change (i.e., trainees should be participants in training, not mere recipients).

Incentives

Incentives can be extrinsic, including money or prizes, or intrinsic, which are a little trickier. To offer an effective intrinsic reward, you need to find out what really motivates the trainees. In the sweetbreads example, the intrinsic reward for these women was that they felt they were doing their patriotic duty. If they ate the meat castoffs here at home, the soldiers overseas would have more to eat.

Perhaps an important part of employee onboarding could be finding out what incentives will work for these particular new hires. What do they value? What will you be able to reward them with in exchange for the behavior modifications you require?

Overcoming Obstacles

Why is your team resisting a particular change? You need to learn the actual reasons and target those points of resistance. Finding out such information is facilitated by a mentorship structure that begins early on. Relationships of trust will not only help uncover the obstacles but also help to specify the unique solutions to overcoming those obstacles.

Discussion

The sweetbreads study suggests that when participants take part in behavior discussions rather than just sitting through a lecture, they are five times more likely to change their behavior. Part of this may be that adults like to be in charge of their own learning, but this kind of discussion may also serve as a public commitment to change. This can serve as a powerful incentive.

A strong mentorship program and teamwork mentality can be invaluable to such discussions. These human connections encourage give-and-take discussion above one-sided teaching.

Conclusion

Focusing on behavior modification rather than just knowledge development takes time. But the reality is that employees typically take about eight months to feel comfortable in a position. Use that time wisely by implementing tools that will expedite behavior modification down the road. Use mentorship and other relationship structures to find out what motivates your employees and to facilitate training retention.

How can you best make interactive media convert leads?

1. Tailor the Message to Different Personas

Interactive media should be created to meet the unique needs of each type of customer who buys your product. For example, we tailor messaging to moms with images and video that speaks to their unique needs, which is different than the messaging we use for seniors. We call these “personas,” and interactive media will convert at a higher rate when it’s customized for the audience who sees it. – Andrew Thomas, SkyBell Doorbell

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2. Have a Clear Call to Action

We just put together a publication quiz that helps narrow down which publications you should be trying to get published in based on your audience and topic goals. At the end, we provide the option for quiz takers to call us for more information. We wanted to make it as straightforward and easy as possible to ensure those interested knew that we could be a great resource for them. – Kelsey Meyer, Influence & Co.

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3. Determine Where the Majority of Your Leads Come From

It’s a bit like the “chicken and the egg” because you need to properly target your audience in order to generate leads. But when you do receive a huge amount of traffic, you need to know where these individuals are coming from. If you can determine where the leads come from, you can determine their need and the sort of language necessary in order to generate serious business. – Cody McLain, SupportNinja

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4. Create Measurable Value

There are two key aspects to effective interactive media: value and measurability. Ensure you’re providing a clear value for your customers, whether it’s entertainment, calculation, education, etc. Internally, you’ll want to be able to measure that value via some sort of engagement metric such as time of use, percent of completions, number of shares, etc. – Ross Beyeler, Growth Spark

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5. Provide Visuals of Your Product

I’ve found the best way is to provide great value through interactive content. My business sells marble, which is a visual product. People want to see what it would look like in their home or office. If consumers can easily imagine how our product would look in their setting, they’re more likely to buy it. – Volkan Okay Yazici, Stonexchange

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6. Combine With Retargeting and Email Marketing

Use interactive media to capture the cookie or email, and then target these users via your retargeting and email marketing sales funnels. Interactive media belongs higher up in the sales funnel, and can be used as a way to gain “permission” to market to your users. Make these lists hyper-focused based on interests in order to deliver personalized messages to move them down the buying funnel. – Marcela De Vivo, Gryffin

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7. Use Advanced Targeting and Creativity

Target past customers, visitors to your site, and people who match multiple data points similar to those you usually convert. Once you have the right audience, you must stand out from the crowd. Appeal to a person’s emotions by focusing on important aspects of their lives such as happiness, sex, death, or desire. Emotions have a greater chance of prompting action, making converting easier. – Robert De Los Santos, Sky High Party Rentals

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8. Keep it Simple

The basic tenets of effective content have not changed despite the proliferation of interactive media and the evolution of technology. You need to be useful, helpful, entertaining, actionable, valuable, or a combination thereof. So don’t reinvent the wheel. Do what works. Create content that serves your market in some way, and remember to take a stance on issues so your voice cuts through. – Ismael Wrixen, FE International

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9. Invest in High-Quality Content

Web users are swamped with innovative, high-quality calls on their attention. It takes a lot to stand out from the crowd, and timid or unoriginal interactive media will simply be ignored. I advise businesses to invest in creative and technical talent, because that’s the only way they’ll stand out and generate interest. Make it smart, relevant, original, useful and targeted. – Vik Patel, Future Hosting

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10. Focus on Benefits, Not Services

You have to offer value and focus on benefits, not services. Tailor content to what your audience wants, and offer them value to engage with your brand. People are bombarded with different offers every day. Incentivize them to convert. – Michael Mogill, Crisp Video Group

Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole, Scribner, 352 pages, $26.00, Hardcover, November 2016, ISBN 9781501145605

I’ve always found it curious that science fiction and fantasy are lumped together in the same genre. One imagines new worlds, looking inexorably toward the future of humankind. The other creates fanciful, mythical, and apocryphal versions of our past. One is devoted to the imagined technology of our future, the other the imagined magic of our past.

Steven Poole’s new book, Rethink, has nothing to do with that, but it brought to my mind the idea that the present moment in a perpetual push and pull between the future and the past, and of existential longing in both directions. And it reminded me that, rather than being diametrically opposed, magic and science exist along a continuum. For instance, alchemy is today derided as black magic, but some the greatest scientific minds, including Isaac Newton, dabbled in it. Poole tells the story of how, a decade ago, an American chemist named Lawrence Principe followed the alchemic instructions and created something that looked very much like a golden tree in a glass egg, perhaps what alchemists called the philosopher’s tree. So, it was basically a science experiment with a wonderfully fanciful name, and it wasn’t the only one science historians have found to be real:

 

According to a 2015 study in Chemical & Engineering News, for example, “Historians have now figured out that dragon’s blood refers to mercury sulfide, and ‘igniting the black dragon’ like means igniting finely powdered lead.” Alchemy was not anti-science superstition; it was the best science anyone could do at the time.

 

And there is this passage that seems to be an account of the near future:

 

[A] fleet of electric taxis—known as hummingbirds for their characteristic engine sound—worked the streets of London. The commissioner of Metropolitan Police approved of their potential to solve the cities burgeoning traffic problem … Similar taxis also touted for trade in Paris, Berlin, and New York … They were much more popular than gasoline-powered cars. They were less noisy and had no polluting exhaust.

 

The time period Poole is writing of is the end of the nineteenth century, when “by the turn of the century,” he tells us, “more than thirty thousand electric cars were registered in the United States” Well before Henry Ford’s Model T, and over 100 years before Elon Musk began work on his electric car, the electric car was king.

Many of the most cutting edge ideas today are, in fact, old ideas. For example, leeches are once again being used in medicine, to reduce pain and inflammation during skin grafts and other medical procedures, and to relieve symptoms of osteoporosis. Centuries old meditation practice and mindfulness training is being used by many to help them deal with the pressures and speed of the modern world. Psychotherapy and other talking therapies are now being shown to be just as important and effective in treating mental illness as the latest designer drugs. And even drugs themselves are often based on traditional herbal remedies; Tu Youyou found the basics of the recipe for her Nobel Prize winning, wormwood based antimalarial drug in a fourth century textbook.

In business education, Professor Jochen Runde, of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, has turned to Francis Bacon and the dawn of the scientific method for lessons, developing what he calls “a Baconian approach to management decision-making.” Bacon also posited the idea that meat could be preserved with ice, though sadly his experiments in doing so led to the pneumonia that would kill him in 1626. The first successful commercial attempt would come almost 300 years later, in 1924, when Clarence Birdseye started the General Seafoods Corporation after witnessing Inuit fisherman flash freezing the fish they caught in the depths of a Canadian winter.

But the book doesn't only look to the past. Poole also offers prognoses for the future, such as a universal income. The idea of a universal basic income has been recently brought to the fore in political and business circles, especially Silicon Valley business circles, as both blue and white collar jobs are being automated into nonexistence by increasingly intelligent machines. But the idea of a guaranteed income dates back to at least 1796, when Thomas Paine wrote in his pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, that poverty “is a thing created by that which is called civilized life,” and argued all members of civilized society should receive some capital endowment upon turning twenty-one, and a pension at fifty. Countering the argument that this would create a disincentive to work, he cites a five-year project done in Manitoba in the 1970s, which showed that only teenagers pursuing their education and new parents worked less when receiving guaranteed income, and argues that access to basic capital is actually a prerequisite to joining the labor force, rather than the reason we do.

Poole goes on to question why any notion of this kind of economic planning is considered utopian, while the belief that unfettered free markets will create unplanned perfection is not. He argues that it is, in fact, utopianism, “but utopianism based on sheer faith rather than forethought or planning.” And yet, he seems rather unfazed that there is not much common ground between these two visions of utopia, and that it may not be entirely clear which one is right. In fact, most of the book is an argument that ideas are never inherently right or wrong, but rather right or wrong for their time, an argument for the interchange of ideas and the hopeful belief that good ideas time will come.

 

If we can make better electric cars and better antimalarial drugs, surely it is not beyond our ability to make better political systems. All it takes is a little rethink.

 

He also explores some really controversial and potentially dangerous ideas, like eugenics and designer babies, cautioning us that an idea once used for evil ends is not necessarily evil in and of itself. He uses the example of nuclear weapons, which threaten our very existence on this Earth, but could one day protect it by intercepting and asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

At the heart of all his writing is the value of deferred judgment, whether applied to intelligence gathering and spycraft, value investing, or contemplating the existence of the soul. Speaking of Warren Buffet’s patience in investing and applying it to ideas, he suggests:

 

Perhaps it’s also worth avoiding knee-jerk reactions when considering whether to buy or sell stock in an idea. In our modern liberal societies it is considered wrong to be too “judgmental” about people and their lifestyles. But many people are happy to be judgmental about ideas. It is common to dismiss ideas quickly as stupid or vicious, as obviously wrong or trivial. But … that dampens the imagination.

 

It is, of course, common to dismiss an idea as old, as having been tried before, or as outlandish and impossible to implement. Poole’s basic argument is one in favor of epoché—a skeptical suspension of both belief and disbelief. He suggests we become less convinced of what we know, less confident in our own rightness and the status quo, of the wrongness of whatever the other side may be. You’ll find that common sense is often nonsensical, and what seems like nonsense in one era is what powers the next.

Fantasy and science fiction really do go hand in hand. Whether the idea is a fire-breathing dragons or fire-breathing rocket, we should maintain a healthy intellectual distance so as to not get burnt, but believe in it enough that we can latch on for a ride when it is going the right direction. 

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Tech giant IBM has been working on making itself a global leader in developing blockchain use cases for financial services, and on Wednesday, it announced yet another project.

IBM will develop a blockchain-based supply chain finance solution with Mahindra Group, one of India's largest conglomerates, according to Bezinga.

The new platform will use a permissioned blockchain and be designed to optimize processes involved in supply chain finance, with particular emphasis on invoice discounting.

Supply chain financing is typically laborious. Many transactions between suppliers, buyers, and any financing parties involve paper invoices that have to be mailed and require the manual inputting of documents into each participant's respective system. This greatly increases processing times and the risk of human error.

Blockchain technology is well placed to help mitigate both issues as it can be used to create a shared, immutable ledger that each participant can update instantly, while also limiting each party's access to the parts of the contract related to them. This can reduce human error and operating costs, as well as ensure transparency and the protection of sensitive data. 

IBM has long been upping its blockchain offerings. It's been particularly focused on producing real-world applications for the technology — including in the areas of financial services and trade finance. IBM has made open-source contributions to the Hyperledger Fabric, and in April, it made blockchain services available to its IBM Bluemix cloud users so they could build and test blockchain-based solutions.

We think it likely that its real-world approach will give IBM an edge over groups or consortiums working on blockchain technology. In addition, its structure is less fractious, which may make it easier for the firm to specialize and focus on particular use cases.

Blockchain technology, which is best known for powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is gaining steam among finance firms because of its potential to streamline processes and increase efficiency. The technology could cut costs by up to $20 billion annually by 2022, according to Santander.

That's because blockchain, which operates as a distributed ledger, has the ability to allow multiple parties to transfer and store sensitive information in a space that’s secure, permanent, anonymous, and easily accessible. That could simplify paper-heavy, expensive, or logistically complicated financial systems, like remittances and cross-border transfer, shareholder management and ownership exchange, and securities trading, to name a few. And outside of finance, governments and the music industry are investigating the technology’s potential to simplify record-keeping.

As a result, venture capital firms and financial institutions alike are pouring investment into finding, developing, and testing blockchain use cases. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, have begun researching the technology in-house, or have helped fund startups with products rooted in blockchain. 

Jaime Toplin, research associate for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on blockchain technology that explains how blockchain works, why it has the potential to provide a watershed moment for the financial industry, and the different ways it could be put into practice in the coming years.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Spending on capital markets applications of blockchain is expected to grow at a 52% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2019, according to Aite Group, to reach $400 million that year.
• Banks and major financial institutions are working both collaboratively and independently to develop blockchain tech. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, like R3 CEV or Chain. And many are investing in the technology on their own as well.
• Putting blockchain to use for real-world transactions is likely not that far off. If working groups' tests are successful, firms could be using it to transact real value as early as the end of this year and we could see widespread industry application within the next few years. 

In full, the report:

• Examines the funding increases that are pouring into blockchain
• Assesses why blockchain is becoming so popular and what factors are driving up increased research and development
• Explains in full how blockchain technology work and what assets make it valuable and vulnerable
• Identifies pain points in the financial industry and profiles how various firms are using blockchain to solve them
• Demonstrates the challenges to mainstream adoption and their potential solutions

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
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The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of blockchain technology.

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As a program executive with Salesforce, I am fortunate to be at the forefront of driving innovation and transformation for our most ambitious enterprise customers. As I continue my journey, I wanted to share a few key observations on the art and science of executing an innovation strategy for enterprises.

Sustained innovation requires top-down leadership and a framework for defining success

Identifying leadership, engagement, and a great business model are fundamental to innovation within an enterprise.

Consistent leadership, passion and sponsorship are fundamental to executing innovation-led priorities for the enterprise. Leaders who represent qualities commonly referred to as ‘Founder’s Mentality’ are more capable of driving sustained competitive advantage in the market place. Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff are inspiring examples of leaders who represent these qualities.Hereis a great article from Harvard Business Review (HBR) that provides some additional context and research on the concept of the Founder’s Mentality. Leveraging this, and committing to continued innovation as a source of competitive advantage not only creates long-term value for appropriate stakeholders, but also defends against ongoing market disruption.

In addition, leaders require a sound framework that can be leveraged to communicate their vision and drive value proposition. One of the best tools I have found that does this effectively is a business model canvas created by Alexander Osterwalder. The business model canvas provides the ability to capture key elements for creating a thriving enterprise in a systematic way. It also helps define dynamics across customers, channels and competitors in ways that pressure test the core ability of the business model and validate competitive advantage for the current and future state of enterprise.

Defining the future while performing today is a deliberate practice

A thriving enterprise should focus on future growth while also concentrating on value creation in the present. An approach, therefore, to re-evaluate the current business portfolio becomes a necessary practice for a maturing enterprise. Geoffrey Moore provides a great model for this evaluation. In his recent book, Zone to Win, Geoffrey offers a documented blueprint on how best to address challenges that enterprises face while trying to establish next generation growth. Further, the most important aspect of this framework is that the team driving core growth and source of stability (productivity zone) for the enterprise in the current state, is fundamentally different that the team driving innovation / experimentation for future growth (incubation zone). Understanding this, and executing the framework accordingly becomes an immense responsibility for the leadership team.

Reframe the operating context from cost to value and ROI drives investment

Making key investments in skillful resources, optimized processes and technology enablers is a critical decision for any C-Level executive. This makes innovation and transformation a key value driving decisions within the enterprise instead of terming it a cost or an expense. In addition, appending an ROI to every major investment builds the discipline of data driven decision making and allows a C-Level executive. to prioritize key initiatives while optimizing non essential costs across the enterprise. The best way to change the context from cost to value, is by conducting a current state assessment of the existing landscape. Doing so, brings to light misalignment and inefficiencies that can drive the backlog for change and provide a measure for value once those changes are enabled. This can then help with driving ROI decisions within the enterprise for any net new change implemented and investments made.

Leverage user centered design principles to foster ongoing customer impact

Leveraging user-centered design thinking along with strategic priorities and a comprehensive technology platform ensures relentless focus on being “customer first.”This article from HBR describes the fundamental shift facing modern enterprises today. Design thinking also supports an empathy first and human aligned balance allowing for enriched experiences while building useful and usable solutions. This is achieved by providing a framework that appeals to understanding user experience and emotions, while building prototypes and tools to explore solutions.

‘Do’ leadership by way of Experimentation is required

There is a profound partnership between a visionary C-Level executive and the execution team responsible for the strategy. A high performing team requires focus on getting things done in nimble, agile and constructive ways. Continuous learning, openness and a willingness to be scrappy and tactical helps drive measurable results. It is important to pay attention to quality and scalability all while building a flexible process to evaluate and change as priorities shift. The best way I have observed “Do Leadership” in action is when teams enable the process of experimentation. Finding areas of experimentation allows teams to validate ideas that have been previously prioritized. Surveys, prototyping tools, and A/B testing all provide effective ways to conduct experiments and present concrete evidence in relatively short time frames, allowing teams to thrive and move on to the next stage / or experiment without significant costs.

Become an innovation brand by sharing successes

Storytelling is the most impactful way to relate and understand needs, ideas and initiatives. It provides an anchor to drive success internally and externally and brings a level of excitement and energy that drive continued innovation. Leveraging the momentum of user groups, industry conferences, sales meetings are important “brand builders” internally within the enterprise, and externally within the ecosystem. I personally witnessed the announcement and launch of Twitter at the South by South West (SXSW) interactive conference. The founders were able to leverage the momentum of a conference well known for driving disruption. The awareness, growth and scale with like minded users and early technology adopters was a fundamental launch pad of success and Twitter benefited significantly.

Engage passionate employees to make a cultural shift

The best part about my job is changing lives. Being purpose driven and helping people become impactful change makers is the most fulfilling byproduct of driving innovation. I am fortunate be able to expose our culture of innovation to our customers, our partners, and stakeholders. Focusing on fostering a culture that is open to diversity, equality and gender parity can be a significant factor in driving innovation within the enterprise. It provides a sense of belonging, and builds current and future trailblazers within the enterprise.

Driving and executing an innovation strategy is both personal and strategic; disciplined and organic. There is no quick formula that tells us how to do it best, and each enterprise is unique in its approach to defining what it means to them as a core value.

Regardless of what products or services your business offers, chances are, there are a million other brands selling the same stuff by running similar promotion campaigns. So how do you go about setting yourself apart from competitors?

According to an article on ISPO, 90% of purchasing decisions are made subconsciously. This means nurturing deep customer relationships is critical in taking your revenue to the next level. At any given time, a happy or disgruntled customer will opt to share their experience with the masses. With the ubiquity of social media, failure to meaningfully connect with customers will turn people off faster than they can hit “unlike.”

Ever notice how some brands just have that “it” factor? Here are some things you can do to get that same reaction and turn business “likes” into “loves.”

Keep Your Image and Reputation Spotless

Ok, no reputation is without at least a smudge or two, especially in the age of the internet. But some are certainly cleaner than others. I like to think of reputation as glass – you might be able to wipe off stains, but once it is cracked, it can never be repaired.

Your brand image serves as the first impression to your audience. Make sure it is sharp, vibrant and brings good vibes to your business. For example, Apple has a profound reputation of creating the highest quality innovative products on the market – and that’s about it. This image has contributed to Apple having one of the most loyal customer bases in the world.

Make Customer Experience a Priority Process

A Walker report titled Customers 2020 found that 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. However, you can provide a better experience to your customers only if you turn it into a relentlessly improving, omnipresent business process.

If you want your customers to see value in your product or service, make sure it is obvious that their interaction with your brand at every touchpoint is a top priority. Bear in mind, you’re selling much more than just a product or service: you’re selling an experience, a journey from A to Z. In 2017 and beyond, this experience is built brick by brick, by

• interacting with customers on multiple channels and platforms of their choice
• enabling problem-solving with the use of technology, both hardware and software

Going forward, the importance of quality multi-channel service will only increase. Creating an awesome consumer experience is more than a one-man job and cannot be done overnight. It requires careful inter-departmental coordination.

Luckily, there are a lot of great tools out there to help with these types of complex processes – WorkZone is one of my personal favorites. It can help marketing, sales or customer care teams complete cross-project tasks and communicate across departments, with auto-generated, personalized to-do lists to help them stay focused on priorities.

All the while, managers can see progress in percentage terms and provide appropriate real-time feedback.

Don’t forget that “tools” are now synonymous with “apps.” Smartphone use has skyrocketed over the past few years and customer expectations are doing the same. Flurry reports that Americans spend 90% of their mobile time in apps. This means making UX as simple and easy to navigate as possible in terms of browsing, seeking testimonies, buying options, and support.

Therefore, looking ahead, investing in mobile customer experience needs to be your top priority. The best example is Uber, which since its inception in 2009, has essentially re-written the act of taking a cab. This is due to its unique but simple customer experience. It solves a fairly common problem and turns it into a convenience. So much so that “the Uber of …” has become somewhat of a cliché.

Be Transparent and Trustworthy

One of the most difficult tasks in business is having to re-establish the trust of your customers. In Understanding Customers, Ruby Newell-Legner reveals that it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one negative experience. You read that right: 12, 1.

Consistently keeping customers in the loop about changes to products, services, or policies is a great way to build trust. Generally speaking, customers do not like surprises in business, regardless of whether they are good or bad.

The value of honesty and transparency in today’s marketplace cannot be overlooked. It is critical to do everything you can to build and preserve a trustworthy relationship with your customer base. Patagonia, for instance, does a great job of with their “Footprint Chronicles” project. They’ve made detailed videos of their production that show the great lengths to which the company goes to ensure that no harm is being caused at any point to the environment or community.

Patagonia also encourages customer feedback on ways it can improve. At the end of the day, this type of good-natured transparency is what keeps the people coming back.

Invest Time and Efforts in Creating Engaging Content

Customers like to feel “connected” with the brands they interact with. One of the keys to getting the masses to view your brand as an elite is to produce content that leaves a lasting impression. This goes beyond just pushing your product or service.

And it is far, far easier said than done. A lot of good brands lose their edge simply because their content fails to connect with consumers. The process of creating loyal customers and brand advocates starts with the ability to speak their language. If your brand was a person, what would they be like? How would they act? What are their core values?

Most importantly, have a clear vision how the content you create will address customer’s priorities and challenges while creating awareness and deeper understanding of your product.

While there are tons of brands who’ve cracked the content code, one of my favorites is video conferencing and webinar service GoToMeeting. Their content strategy is closely aligned and crafted around the problem their product solves – meetings. GoToMeeting has a video series on YouTube called Meeting is Believing, which does a great job in capturing and showcasing the values they hold and the message they want to send to their customers.

Again, there are a lot of great tools out there to help in this process. Apester offers a lot of different options in terms of content format, including polls, quizzes and interactive video, to help shape your storytelling abilities and engage your audience on different levels.

The name of the game is to humanize your content as much as possible.

Encourage and Act on Feedback

One of the biggest sins you can commit in business is failing to listen to customers. Two-way dialogue is one of the many great trends brought on by the digital age. Your customers are the heart and soul of your operation.

Another shining example here: NASCAR has made a significant comeback in recent years owing in no small part to its efforts to incorporate the fan-base into operations. Having given a reverberating voice to its community by establishing an Official Fan Council, NASCAR has truly become one of the most fan-centric sports brands on the market.

If you haven’t started listening to customers yet, it isn’t too late. There are tons of ways to gather consumer feedback:

• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Customer Service
• Focus Groups
• Forums and Communities
• Reviews

The question is, what do you do after you receive feedback?

Showcase reviews.

No surprise here. Customer reviews are incredibly powerful: a recent survey found that the buying decisions of 9 out of 10 consumers were influenced by reviews.

Use good feedback to your advantage and showcase it on your digital properties to bolster your online reputation. Customers who’ve engaged with your brand can have a huge say in bringing more buyers on board.

Incorporate feedback into the big picture.

When it’s all said and done, customers are the true experts on your product or service, as they are the ones using it in their day-to-day lives. Make it a point that their feedback is a driving force in determining the future of product as well as your brand. Willingness to actively listen and act on customers’ ideas will not only boost your profits, it will also show that you truly care about them.

Reward customers.

Customer karma is a real thing. If a satisfied shopper took time out of their busy day to give you quality feedback, be sure to return the favor. Discounts and perks are a great way to say you value their insight.

As already stated, customers like to feel engaged with the brands they support and buy from. A simple “thank you” goes a long way!

The Last Word

The age of the customer is in full swing. There are innumerable brands out there competing for the same custom. How can you think outside the box to put yourself above the rest? Developing a strong customer service foundation is the answer to this crucial question. Consistently finding ways to create and increase the value you provide to them is a surefire way to gain the love of customers everywhere.

Evaluating customer satisfaction is always ongoing and a never-ending process. When a customer does business with a company for the first time, a new relationship begins and it can move in many different directions. So how can you make your B2B (business-to-business) customers swoon for your business and fall in love with you? OK, maybe they won’t be swooning, but here are some ways to turn customers into advocates who love working with you…

Be NICE and respectful – It’s crazy to think that this should even be listed here but to be honest it’s completely necessary. As industry expert Shep Hyken says, 80% of customer service is just being nice. We’ve all encountered people in our lives that we’ve “heard good things about” only to be treated rudely or even disrespected. At the end of the day always stress to your support team that these people are your customers; if they are reaching out to support in the B2B (business-to-business) world they may be in a high pressure situation or instructed by their management to do so. Make them feel comfortable, respect their time, and of course don’t forget to say thank you (in a personalized way if possible) after each interaction.

Be genuine and transparent in interactions – This can be accomplished by properly training and having faith in the agents you choose to hire. Encourage them to address customers by name and let agents be themselves. Your support team will enjoy responding more to customers if they can act in a manner that is comfortable to them and it will promote more of a conversational tone instead of one focused strictly on business. This personal touch helps to build strong relationships and shines when matters are important but not urgent – when the latter occurs make sure agents know to be empathetic and punctual in their responses.

Be accessible for a customer but respect their space – It’s usually good to follow up if you haven’t heard from a customer regarding their issues, but don’t bombard them with messages just so you can close their ticket. If possible, have agents who have worked with a company in the past work on tickets for that same company. They will generally be more successful in dealing with the company based on past experiences and they can form a working relationship with people at that company who usually submit tickets.

Don’t make every interaction negative – Be smart with how you interact with customers and remember that every interaction should not be related to a ticket or issue. When you build relationships with customers, reach out to them in different ways – examples include asking for a referral, talking about the industry, and facilitating a formal customer survey. Simply asking questions shows you value their opinion and perspective, but make sure you listen to their feedback and implement it when appropriate or else they will feel like their voice is not being heard.

Effectively communicate changes – People are generally averse to change, even if it’s for the best, so it’s a good idea to let customers know in advance when something significant will change. This communication also helps your support operations because fewer “why did this change” tickets will be sent in. When you make these noticeable alterations, make sure you build a communication plan as to how these changes should be conveyed to the customer. Many organizations use a multi-faceted approach with multiple touchpoints for major changes – email, webinars, social media, etc. – and will keep reiterating the message several times. Having a customer hear about a change twice isn’t a huge deal, having a customer not hear about it at all can be a big problem.

In short, communication and trust are key in making your B2B customers fall in love with your company. Be kind and authentic in conversations while being respectful of their space as a customer. Make sure to mix in positive interactions and don’t forget to be smart when communicating changes to customers. These things will help in turning customers into advocates that will make you love them back when they help refer business to your company and improve your bottom line.

You should never sell your morals or your ethics. If what you sell is at odds with your moral compass or is in some way unethical, don’t sell it. No matter what it is, and no matter how much you stand to gain, it isn’t worth your character.

Never sell anything in any way that might be illegal. You can make more money on the outside of a minimum security prison than the inside. Ill gotten money isn’t real money because it isn’t really earned.

Never sell something you don’t believe in. If you don’t believe what you sell will benefit the people to whom you are selling it, you are being dishonest. You won’t sell well, and your prospective clients will see through your incongruity. Go find something else to sell.

Never sell yourself short. Never sell to people who don’t value you and what you do enough to pay for it, or to treat you with respect and dignity. Never sell for people who don’t treat you with that same respect either.

Never sell something to someone who will not derive the value from having bought it. I’ve never understood why people would claim they could sell “ice to an Eskimo,” nor have I ever seen anyone who said such a thing sell. Selling isn’t something you do to someone.

Never sell someone less than they really need. If they aren’t going to generate the outcomes they need by buying less than they should, don’t take their money and allow them to fail. You are better off hanging in there and helping them buy what they really need.

Never sell someone more than they really need. When you put transactions above relationships in sales, you end up not having too many relationships. You also end up not having too many repeat clients, and are left with little to no wallet share.

The post What You Should Never Sell appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Selling has never been an easy profession. Sellers have always been faced with rising quotas, pricing pressures, new competitors or competitive technologies, and other roadblocks. But now, there are added degrees of complexity, with buyers just a web search away from answers they used to get from sales professionals.

The selling environment, the tools of the trade, and the sales cycle itself have been forever transformed by technology, globalization, and always-on connectivity. Yet, the foundational sales skills remain as relevant as they ever have been: preparation, needs dialogue, consultative selling, and so on.

Research: Aligning Learning and Development Initiatives with Sales Goals

Sales training and sales effectiveness have been a cornerstone of many company initiatives to grow profitable business, increase revenues, and drive efficiencies. What is needed now is for Learning and Development (L&D) to align the competencies of its sellers with the skills to succeed in dynamic environments. This involves the mastery of customer engagement strategies that are able to adapt to where each customer is along the path to closing a sale so sellers can participate in shaping opportunities and positioning their offerings accordingly.

Are companies currently setting up their sales personnel for success? Are they targeting sales competencies that reflect the 21st-century business landscape? To find answers, Training Industry Inc. and Richardson conducted a study in the fourth quarter of 2016: “Aligning Sales Competencies in Learning and Development.”

Participants

The confidential survey was completed by 228 companies in a range of industries, with 36 percent representing durable goods/consumables, 10 percent technology, and others including banking/finance/insurance, manufacturing, construction, business services/consulting, entertainment/hospitality, and government. The companies ranged in size, with 19 percent having between 500 and 1,000 employees and 18 percent with more than 50,000 employees.

Results: Effectiveness of Sales Training Initiatives

When asked about current sales training initiatives, about one-third of respondents said they were “almost always effective,” 26 percent said “always effective,” and 25 percent “usually effective.” While few companies were rated flatly ineffective, the responses revealed that many companies have plenty of room to grow and improve their impact.

Results: Common Training Modalities

Respondents identified the most common training modalities used as on-the-job training (66 percent) and video (62 percent). This was followed by instructor-led training (45 percent) and, tied at 43 percent, on-the-job coaching and video instructor-led training. Additionally, there was a prevalence of multiple training modalities used, with the majority of companies using up to five training delivery methods to meet the learning needs of their sellers.

Results: Demonstrating Sales Competencies

Sales competencies involve a cluster of behaviors, and participants were asked to rate an average seller at their company in three broad areas:

• Finding opportunities through prospecting and utilizing market knowledge
• Winning opportunities through understanding customer needs, positioning solutions, and closing sales
• Growing opportunities through expanding accounts and fostering client relationships

“Winning opportunities” received the highest response, with a combined 69 percent “always effective” and “almost always effective,” suggesting this cluster is generally the strongest area of sales capabilities across companies. In rating the importance of sales-related skills, respondents said keeping knowledge current and making informed use of sales metrics were the most crucial skills.

Respondents rated three broad categories of sales competencies – selling skills, market knowledge, and customer relations – for both effectiveness of training and strategic importance to sales outcomes. Of note is the fact that more than half the respondents said their companies are providing “very effective” training for all sales competencies examined in this research. This suggests that sales training is reinforcing competencies at the majority of organizations and that there remains plenty of room for companies to improve their training offerings to better align with the importance of relevant competencies.

Results: Barriers to Sales Training Effectiveness

A number of hurdles exist in driving training effectiveness in sales competencies. According to half the survey respondents, the single most frequent impediment to rolling out sales training is consistency, both across employee functions and across geography. Though not as prominent, other challenges included a lack of leadership support, issues with evaluating and sustaining the impact of training, engaging with learners, and resource limitations.

The second of this two-part series discusses insights emerging from the research.

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 Are Companies Setting Their Sellers Up for Success? appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

The delivery of your message often matters just as much as its content -- making confidence crucial to sales success. If you sound calm, collected, and self-assured, your prospects will implicitly trust you more. But if you sound anxious or insecure, they’ll probably doubt what you’re telling them.

In other words, your confidence will inspire their faith in you, your advice, and your ability to improve their business.

One of the simplest ways to sound more confident? Steering clear of these eight credibility-harming statements.

1) “If you could give me a call back, I’d really appreciate it.”

This phrase can throw off the tone of your entire voicemail, especially since it’s usually one of the last things the prospect hears.

First, you sound unsure she’ll return your call. Does every voicemail result in a callback? No. But you should act like you’re confident you’ll be hearing from the buyer soon: Don’t plant the seed she shouldn’t call you before she’s made a decision.

Second, this line makes you sound desperate. You’re the buyer’s peer, not her inferior, so expressing extreme appreciation for her time sends the wrong message. She’s giving up a slot in her schedule in return for your insights and advice.

2) “Would you mind doing X?”

Avoid asking the prospect if she’d “mind” doing anything, whether it’s answering a pre-call survey or looking over your proposal. You’re technically asking if she’d be willing to take an action, not if she’ll actually do it.

This question is also unnecessary. Assume that when your prospect doesn’t want to do something, she’ll tell you so.

Change the tone of this question by rephrasing questions as statements. For example, you could say, “I’m sending you a few questions I’d like you to answer before our Skype meeting so I can tailor the agenda to your situation,” or “Look over the proposal by Saturday and let me know if you have any thoughts.”

3) “Thanks again for speaking to me [yesterday, on X day, last week].”

While the intent behind this line is good, it skews the balance of power. You’re essentially telling the prospect she’s doing you a favor by taking your calls.

If you were spending the entire conversation rattling off product specs, she probably would be doing you a favor. But if you’re spending this time digging into her objectives and challenges, providing relevant, helpful suggestions, answering her questions, and/or guiding her through the decision making process -- in other words, using a consultative approach -- she’s gaining just as much from the call as you are, if not more.

Some reps use this as a convenient segue into a summary of their last conversation. A good alternative is, “Let’s recap what we talked about on X. First, we … ”

If you typically use this line to begin a follow-up email, instead write:

“We had a productive conversation today. Here are the main things we discussed … ”

Then include two to four bullet points summarizing the conversation.

4) “Does that make sense?”

When sales conversations become fairly technical or detailed, well-intentioned reps use this question to make sure their prospects aren’t confused.

Unfortunately, this question is loaded with three negative assumptions:

1. The salesperson isn’t explaining things clearly
2. The salesperson doubts their prospect’s intelligence
3. The salesperson isn’t confident about the accuracy of their content

Not only does this question damage a rep’s credibility, it’s rarely helpful. The buyer might be embarrassed to admit her confusion -- especially when her peers are present -- so she’ll say, “Yes, makes sense,” even when it doesn’t.

The salesperson should instead ask, “What are your thoughts on X?” If his prospect doesn’t understand, she’ll usually say, “I didn’t completely grasp Y,” or “Honestly, I’m not getting the value of Z.”

5) “I know you’re busy … ”

I see this line pop up in sales emails and calls all the time. The rep tries to indicate respect for the buyer’s packed schedule by saying, “I know you’re busy, so let’s jump in,” or “I know you’re busy, so I’ll keep this under 10 minutes.”

This qualifier sounds silly. If the prospect wasn’t busy, would the salesperson be happy to waste her time? Brevity is important no matter whom you’re talking to.

In addition, the rep is implying he doesn’t have a full schedule. This implication can lower his authority in his prospect’s eyes.

6) “Is now still a good time?”

There’s simply no reason to start a sales call with this question. If the salesperson has sent a email to confirm the meeting’s date and time and provided an agenda, he already knows his prospect is free. Checking her availability for the second or third time communicates insecurity.

The rep should also take it for granted his prospect will speak up if there’s been an emergency or unexpected change of plans and she can’t speak anymore.

Asking this question is even worse when your prospect isn’t expecting your call. Not only does it give them an easy excuse to hang up, but it reminds them of their workload and makes you sound like every other salesperson out there.

The takeaway: Skip this question and go straight into building rapport or setting the agenda.

7) "I'm no expert, but ..."

This typically prefaces a suggestion or opinion, like, "I'm no expert, but offering 30-day free returns can help convert on-the-fence buyers," or "I'm no expert, but my customers often say the issue lies with their process."

The problem with "I'm no expert"? You are an expert. You talk to people in your prospect's position all day, every day. You have unparallelled access into their pain points, goals, and professional responsibilities. You know your industry. You know your product. You've earned the right to call yourself an expert, and denouncing that hard-won experience and knowledge doesn't just harm your credibility -- it's simply not true.

8) "Frankly, we're seeing a paradigm shift, and if your organization can get ahead of this unprecedented change in consumer behavior, the ROI will be astronomical."

This is one example of an unfortunate trend -- using jargon to make yourself seem smarter. As Mark Twain said, "Don't use a five-dollar word where a fifty-cent one would do." 

SAT vocabulary suggests you're compensating. Ironically, you'll seem less intelligent. 

If you want to impress the buyer, speak as simply and plainly as possible. An added benefit? It'll be easier for them to get your point.

Your words have a tremendous impact on how buyers perceive you. Once you’ve eliminated these eight statements from your repertoire, you’ll sound more confident -- and ultimately, more trustworthy.

What is B2B branding? Is it just your logos and graphics? Or is it something more?

Branding is defined as “the process of creating a unique name and image in a customer’s mind.”

B2B buyers are busy. They have to make a lot of decisions throughout the day. And, most of all, they’re human. They try to make decisions based on hard evidence. Sometimes, though, the choices are overwhelming, and they’re just seeking an easier way to make or justify their decisions. B2B branding makes those decisions easier by communicating what makes your brand different or special.

What is B2B Branding?

B2B branding communicates important attributes like:

• Customer knowledge: One of the most important things your B2B branding can communicate is that your brand understands and responds to customer needs. This is especially important in B2B, where the vendor/customer relationship is often more of a partnership than a simple transactional relationship.. Managing customer relationships is critical due to the high monetary value of the relationship over time.
• Passion and purpose: It’s not just what you do, but why you do what you do. Marketing expert Simon Sinek has written that too many companies communicate what they do and how they do it, but the most successful brands always communicate their “why.”
• Culture and personality: These are brand attributes that are commonly associated with the B2C space, but they matter in B2B as well. Your company’s culture guides customer relationships. It determines how employees interact with customers and the “personality” your brand conveys. If your culture emphasizes caring for customers and sharing their values, that promotes a commitment to solving their problems and continuously improving your products or services. Customer perceptions create a more personal connection between your brand and its customers. This can pay off in real dollars: research shows that companies with a strong culture and engaged workforce outperform their competition by 147%.
• Consistency and quality: Especially in B2B branding where large purchase decisions are on the line, brand consistency in the product itself and in the experience of buying and using it is important to customers. When your brand is consistent, how you communicate about that brand echoes across all your channels, materials, and conversations as well as in the customer’s experience of using the product. In the age of social media this means every employee has the ability to impact your brand—and so does every customer.
• Uniqueness or differentiation: What makes you different than similar brands? What makes you better? Why should a customer choose your product or service versus those of a competitor? Differentiation is the factor that determines the value assigned to your brand. If your product is properly differentiated, you can charge more.

In short, B2B branding answers the simple question, “Why should your customers choose you?”

Why B2B Branding Matters

As indicated in the previous section, B2B branding is about so much more than logos. It’s really about developing the space that your brand takes up in the mind of the customer and having a “consistent value system” in how you interact with that customer.

In B2B industries, buyers may give a variety of reasons why they choose one brand over another. Sometimes it’s tangible reasons like price, reliability of service or delivery, or product quality. But sometimes, it’s intangibles like, “they know us” or simply, “we trust that brand.” Creating those intangible perceptions is the goal of B2B branding.

A successful branding strategy results in “brand equity,” the value of a brand over and above the value of similar products. That’s why a solid roadmap to develop and define your brand is so important in the B2B space.

How to Define Your Brand

When companies are first starting out, they’re unknown: they’re products, not brands. Any branding efforts tend to be ad-hoc and inconsistent. Over time, these efforts tend to be systematized and brought under the control of marketing departments, yet they may still only partially accomplish what could be achieved with a smart B2B branding strategy.

As companies scale into the mid-market and enterprise space, they must find ways to convey their brand attributes and values to ever larger audiences. Employees, including everyone from the newest customer service rep to the CEO, must become brand advocates. Customer knowledge and relationships must also be maintained even as the customer base grows.

Here are three steps you can take to solidify your brand as you grow.

1. Cultivate culture and purpose. A company culture that is focused on hiring the right people and empowering them to solve customer problems will result in closer connections with customers and a more positive perception of your brand. Making sure employees understand not just the products or services you provide but the “why” or the reason behind them and the importance of their role, also enhances brand perception.
2. Tell engaging stories. Storytelling is a big buzzword in the B2C marketing world for a good reason: storytelling develops empathy or connection with the brand.his can sway customers to make decisions in favor of your brand. But lest you think that this only applies in the B2C space, remember that B2B buyers are also seeking information that can answer their questions and help them justify their decisions. Storytelling strategies such as the development of media hubs or customer communities, an integrated social media strategy, and even one-on-one conversation are a few ways B2B brands can tell engaging stories.
3. Focus on consistency. Consistency isn’t just about making sure all your marketing materials have the same logo but making sure that everyone in your company knows and understands your brand’s values. This is a function of culture as well as a marketing task. Systems and processes should be developed to help employees understand how to communicate consistently with customers and to ensure that customer experiences, correctly convey the attributes you want.

B2B branding can take your company from an unknown brand to one that becomes recognizable, is positioned appropriately, conveys its personality and views, and is reflected in company policies and operations. B2B branding turns undifferentiated products into brands that are known and asked for by name—and for which customers will pay a premium. That’s the ultimate value of B2B branding.

What B2B branding efforts is your company making? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

(Cartoon courtesy to Kenny Madden)

I once worked with the then SVP, Marketing of a large public company who was frustrated with sales. Big surprise. At one point he got so angry that he offered sales management the following choices for spending a $100,000 budget to generate leads. They could choose one of the following:

1. 200,000 targeted contacts (name and title) in the right vertical (no email addresses)
2. 100,000 companies with up to three executive contacts in the right company (no email addresses)
3. 20,000 companies with multiple contacts and verified technical environment information in the right companies (no email addresses)
4. 4,319 contacts who downloaded a white paper but may or may not be in targeted companies or have any need or authority to buy (email addresses, many bogus and no company firmographics and no telephone numbers)
5. 117 appointments with people in the right companies but may or may not have any need or authority to buy
6. 81 highly qualified sales opportunities with the right contact who has a need backed by some form of compelling event

Guess which one they chose? None of the above. They did not even respond. This offer was made because marketing was providing option #6 above (using PointClear to generate the highly qualified leads), but sales follow-up was poor. If they responded at all, it was with one or two phone calls, without any research and without any compelling message other than “looking forward to talking to you.”  For details on how sales should follow-up on a lead click here.

It would have taken a target market of about 2,000 suspects to generate 81 highly qualified sales opportunities. Alternatively, the same amount of money would buy 4,319 whitepaper downloads. The last time we tested 9,000 whitepaper downloads for the subsidiary of a large software company, 98.2% of these so-called leads were not qualified (either by company or by title). In the case of the whitepaper downloads sales ended up ignoring the “leads”; but marketing said that at $23.15 per download they were too important a source of leads to drop so they kept buying them and sent them directly to sales (who ignored them). A waste of $208,350 per year – I KID YOU NOT!

It is important for everyone in an organization to agree on the definition of a lead, and it is likely that this will not be a joint decision between just sales and marketing. Executive leadership is required for this to get done and work. It is also important to establish a judicial branch to manage exceptions:

1. Any leads proactively returned to marketing by sales – reason? Fix if they are not meeting the lead definition.
2. Leads not progressing from Marketing Qualified Lead to Sales Accepted Lead – reason? Fix lack of effective follow-up by sales.

It is unlikely that you are going to be able to buy a high-quality, sales-ready lead for $50. How much should a lead cost? Probably more than you think but probably a lot less than you are paying.

So you’ve identified a lead, matched it to an account, and now you’re hard at work building a relationship. That’s great. But there are additional stumbling blocks that many sales reps run into in the later stage of the sales game.

In this post, the final in our four-part B2B sales Q&A series, we will answer two common questions about moving leads further down the funnel, and how to take the relationship to the next level.

1. When should I move a conversation from email to the phone?

How to move a conversation from email to phone – or from phone to in-person – is a common concern among salespeople. And unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

When and how to transition to phone calls or in-person meetings depends largely on your business. Peter Thiel discusses a good rule of thumb for distinguishing between high and low touch sales approaches in his book “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.” High touch tactics, like phone calls and in-person meetings, are best used if your solution is complex, niche, or higher cost. Low touch tactics, like cold emailing and inbound marketing, are best used if your solution is cheaper and requires less debate about a purchase.

And if you’re struggling to determine whether cold emailing or cold calling is right for your sales team, RightHello has a good infographic outlining the pros and cons of each.

2. When is a lead qualified enough to hand to an account executive?

Handing off a lead to an account executive is a delicate situation. Without the right information in the CRM, the account exec won’t understand the pain points, budget, product she is interested in buying and more. And often, this lead will become frustrated at the apparent lack of communication at the company, and move on to a competitor.

That’s why it is essential for SDRs to qualify leads well before passing them to an account exec. But too often, sales departments don’t actually have a formal definition of what a qualified lead looks like, to help SDRs make that decision.

According to Close.io, there are four areas that SDRs should consider when qualified leads:

• How well they match the customer profile
• Their needs
• How their decision-making process typically plays out, and who is involved
• Who you are competing against

Asking leads questions pertaining to the topics above will show you whether or not they are qualified, and when they are, they can be passed on to account executives to close the sale.

Author: Patrick Groover

Marketers are always looking for the next best thing. So it’s no surprise that with the evolution of account-based marketing and technologies that enable it, B2B marketers are paying attention and trying to figure out how they can implement an account-centric approach. But as most marketers already practice broad-reaching demand generation, adding ABM to their overall marketing strategy can often seem like the tyranny of ‘or’ versus the genius of ‘and‘.

At the center of an effective ABM strategy is the need to aggregate contacts and accounts into continuously updating audiences that are easily accessible without having to create tons of additional work for your marketing team. Thanks to a marketing automation platform that supports ABM, you can practice both, or just focus solely on ABM, at scale.

Audience Management for Account-Based Marketing 

In today’s digitally-empowered world, buyers are developing their own conclusions about your products and services long before they reach out to your sales team. This means that influencing specific audiences within the evaluation phase is a mission-critical component to delivering on your revenue objectives. As a result, it’s essential to have a solution that will automatically guide marketing interactions based on segments and sub-segments from the very beginning of the customer lifecycle.

With ABM, you’re targeting and engaging specific accounts and prospects within them, so you may need to segment based on multiple dimensions to reach the right people with the right message at the right time. For example, your campaign might target multiple criteria such as verticals, sub-verticals, product-fit, employee size, and more. Without a proper ABM solution, managing, engaging, and measuring audiences on difference channels for each of these dimensions usually means increased manual setup and list management.

Let’s say an organization wants to target the technology vertical with high-level messaging, but also wants to carve out specific sub-verticals like ‘microprocessor’ or ‘semi-conductor’ manufacturers for heightened focus. Without an ABM tool, marketers would need to target the technology vertical, then sort through and route responses on each channel based on sub-verticals once prospects have engaged.

A similar story is true for key account targeting and on-the-spot initiatives. While companies may be able to easily build out a solid vertical focus, carving out the top accounts to go after within it can be a tricky endeavor. This is often the result of challenges with updating account categorization to match your objectives.

The symptoms of audience management for ABM without the right solution are all-too-familiar:

• Hours of pulling and re-pulling lists to match category-after-category of new verticals and sub-verticals
• Disconnected messaging that does not consistently support or connect with the right audience
• Last minute requests for strategic messaging and marketing support that cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner

All of these are symptoms of manual work that cannot be scaled across an organization or over time. Are you turning away the idea of adding new channels to your programs unless you have additional marketing staff? It is essential for the future growth of an ABM strategy to have a marketing automation platform that can manage, engage, and report on audiences while reducing the amount of time needed to support campaign management.

In this blog, I’ll cover three features of a sophisticated marketing automation platform that supports the latest go-to-market ABM strategies:

1. Nimbleness in Building Aggregate Audiences

How many times do you receive last-minute requests to target new trends or hot accounts? How quickly can you respond to the latest movements within your industry and connect relevant messaging to the right audience?

A marketing automation platform gives you the flexibility and nimbleness to respond to requests for account-based initiatives within hours rather than weeks. By decoupling the dependence on pre-coded categorization and assignments, marketers can target the best audiences for their messaging without having to worry about disrupting the day-to-day strategy. As a result, it is possible to align lead-routing, call-center support, and consistent messaging with the right audiences.

Let’s break down the typical process for building and managing an ABM audience to see where sophisticated marketing automation platforms help deliver on your strategy while reducing the amount of manual work. Below is a comparison of ABM execution without automation versus with a sophisticated automation platform:There are a couple of major distinctions here. With automated account-based marketing, you can build rules that automatically associate the right leads to the right accounts as new contacts are identified over time. This, along with the ability to group audiences based on identified criteria, allows you to create self-maintaining and accurate audiences that support your business objectives over time.

Instead of using Excel spreadsheets or rebuilding lists every time a new ABM focus is identified, a sophisticated marketing automation platform with ABM capabilities will allow you to create and then perfect the aggregate self-updating audiences that support your campaign objectives. Since these audiences can be created without a dependency on current relationship mappings in your CRM, it is possible to then deliver and measure focused multi-channel ABM marketing based on historic and new marketing initiatives while removing a lot of the manual work.

2. Lead-to-Account Matching

Targeting high-value accounts requires identifying accounts that may be outside of the standard territory distribution and CRM assignments. Chasing down and managing data outliers within your strategy often makes list management and campaign execution very time-consuming. However, marketing automation can help marketers address this issue by automating the ongoing aggregation and attribution of leads-to-accounts-to-groups.

Think of the last time you developed a vertical strategy and all of the logic that went into grouping individuals with the right target accounts. Imagine setting the right rules, then having to update your lists consistently over time to include new contacts from tradeshows, webinars, and forms. A marketing automation platform that supports ABM leverages user-defined rules and contact-to-account matching logic that maintain audience relationships over time.

Additionally, cleaning and associating leads to the right companies is often challenging. Many times, the marketing team is responsible for normalizing contact-provided information so that all of the right variations on the same company are grouped into the same account—for example, Acme Inc., Acme Co., and Acme International may be the same company. If you are currently manually correcting these associations, there is a much better way to automate this one time with marketing automation, rather than having to clean your lists over-and-over-and-over again.

3. Self-Updating Accounts and Account Groups

While many companies have built very sophisticated methods for grouping lists of target accounts, it is worth considering how easily these groups can be updated, modified, or used for tracking and responding to engagement. While it is possible to manage groups of accounts through basic lists, automating the updates across marketing channels by making a single adjustment to a centralized list can be a huge time-savings and results accelerator for your ABM efforts. Not to mention, your ABM reports will accurately reflect the latest data, without having to spend hours updating them.

While it’s possible to implement account-based marketing without a solution designed for it, it won’t allow you to scale or optimize as your needs and focus shift. By automating your ABM programs, you can reduce the amount of time and stress on your entire marketing team. And with the added capability of self-updating account lists and account groups, you can cohesively engage audiences across channels and consistently report results without having to manually rebuild lists and reconfigure settings for each new campaign.

Are you currently implementing ABM with a marketing automation platform? Share your experience in the comments below!

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How to Automate Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post How to Automate Your Account-Based Marketing Strategy appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

While social selling isn’t a new concept anymore, there are still plenty of companies that haven’t yet made social media a standard part of their sales toolbox.

According to LinkedIn, “Social selling is about leveraging your social network to find the right prospects, build trusted relationships, and achieve your sales goals.” Elsewhere, it’s been defined as the process of researching, connecting and interacting with prospects and customers on social media to make sales.

Social media is a tool not unlike email, marketing automation, CRM software and, of course, the almighty phone call. While it’s not uncommon now for sales professionals to look up new prospects and customers on LinkedIn, for many that’s where social selling ends. So why are so many sales people still wary of using Twitter or Facebook to do business?

The IBM Case Study

Over four years ago, IBM launched their first formal social sales program, which was limited to seven inside sales reps from their cloud computing division. The focus was on intelligent listening, which meant searching out the conversations that were popping up on social media about cloud computing.

Using LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, each program member was given social media training and supplied with both branded collateral and curated content that they could use to engage in those conversations. At the end of six months, the reps had increased their collective reach on LinkedIn significantly, going from 535 to 3,500 total followers. The program was eventually rolled out to all of IBM’s inside sales reps.

There have been several studies done since then to back up the idea that social media is playing a larger role in the buyer’s journey. A study reported in Forbes a few years ago found that 78% of salespeople who use social media to make sales perform better than their peers.

We also know that buyers are heading online to do their own purchase research. From the recently released PwC Total Retail 2016 survey, a majority of consumers said they prefer to research products online, even when they ultimately end up making the purchase in-store. Similarly, most B2B buyers (74%) say they do at least half their purchase research online before either making a purchase or even contacting sales.

Don’t Wait For Your Company to Catch Up

Even if your company doesn’t have a formal social selling program in place, there’s no reason why you can’t get started on your own. Success on social platforms is linked to how often you deliver new content, and how consistent you are in your efforts. Choose your social platforms based on where your customers are likely to be spending their time. Look at niche or industry-specific communities too.

Next, consider the quality of the content you want to share online. Who will find it useful? Is it something you would clickthrough or re-share if you spotted it in your newsfeed? It’s also important not to be overly promotional. Instead, offer a variety of valuable content, and include your own take and insights on any curated content you share.

Social media is all about the conversations, and how you run your social accounts should reflect that. Post content, share links, but more importantly, engage with other platform users. Comment on their posts, retweet their insights, get involved, and have a plan.

Your Social Selling Starter Plan

As with any new project, your chances of success rises substantially if you hammer out a plan beforehand. Here’s a framework to get you started.

• Revamp Your Profiles
  You are 11 times more likely to have your LinkedIn profile viewed if you’ve included a photo. In fact, on every social platform where you maintain a presence, make sure you’ve included your photo and that it meets that platform’s specific size and resolution requirements. Keep your profile descriptions and bios up to date and review them quarterly.
• Build Credibility
  Become a resource by sharing relevant articles and contributing insights to open conversations on Twitter chats, LinkedIn groups or forums like Reddit.
• Start Listening
  Where do your clients go to find info about products like yours? Become a contributing member of those communities and listen to the conversations.
• Get Organized
  Make your life easier with apps. There are apps out there for almost every task you can think of, so put some of them to work for you. Scheduling apps like Buffer or Hootsuite can allow you to set up your posts in advance, which can also help you determine the optimal times or days of the week for posting.
• Measure Everything
  Track your social selling efforts. Depending on your which platform you’ve chosen, you will often have access to built-in analytics tools, like Twitter Insights. There are also lots of tools you can use that will include reporting features to help you track follower growth, click rates and engagement on your posts. Although it might take some time before you start to see results, start measuring right out of the gate so that you have a baseline established.

What platforms do you use for social selling? If you haven’t yet taken the plunge, what’s been holding you back? Let me know in the comments.

This article was originally published on Medium.

Today’s businesses are no stranger to social media marketing. With millions of people joining these platforms, they have turned out to be a goldmine of resources, leads and growth opportunities. While Facebook and Twitter have garnered an immense popularity over the years, LinkedIn has recently emerged as one of the valuable platforms that generate good results.

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools for businesses nowadays. It can be used to post jobs, answer queries and build meaningful business relationships. Therefore, having a presence on LinkedIn is of utmost importance. The good news is, creating and maintaining a LinkedIn profile for your business is inexpensive.

Let’s take a look at some of the best ways you can promote your business on LinkedIn.

Create a Compelling LinkedIn Company Profile Page

The first step to promote your business on LinkedIn involves creating an effective company profile page. Once you have created your personal LinkedIn profile page, log in, go to ‘Interests’ at the top of your profile and select ‘Companies’ from the drop-down menu. On the right-hand side of the screen, you can select ‘Create a Company page’ to get started. You would need to fill in the details accurately to create a complete company profile page. A completed profile becomes more noticeable.

It is always recommended to use a professional photo to make your company profile unique. Many use the business logo as the profile image for the company page. You will have enough scope to experiment with the banner image. You can use an image that represents your business. For example, the interior of your business establishment, a picture of a satisfied customer using one of your products, an image containing the tagline of a recent campaign that your company has started and so on.

Add Showcase Pages

Did you know that LinkedIn has 467 million members? This provides an excellent opportunity to market your products and services. This is where the Showcase Pages become relevant.

You can use these pages to introduce your prospective customers and future employees to what your company does best. For example, if your business is associated with the real estate industry and specialises in creating 3D animations or 3D mobile apps for showcasing properties, you should definitely include that in the Showcase Page.

You can link the Showcase Pages to almost anything. For example, you can use the links to the product demonstrations, how-to guides and so on.

Publish Quality Content

As many as 21% of marketers say that LinkedIn is one of the most important social networking sites that they use for growing their businesses. While marketing your products and services is one of the ways to get the most out of your LinkedIn page, you should keep in mind that LinkedIn is not a direct sales channel. It is more of a discussion forum where industrialists, jobseekers, various kinds of professionals come together to learn more about business trends etc. and share their insights. Therefore, you would need to publish content accordingly.

Visuals and bite-sized contents are quite popular among LinkedIn users. It is wise to create good quality content that can be consumed quickly to make people coming back for more information to your company profile page. Additionally, you can also post company news updates, helpful tips and resources related to your industry to increase the engagement.

Another way to improve engagement of your LinkedIn profile page is by promoting a discussion about the content that you share. For example, if you are sharing a link to a post that contains a list, you can consider asking your readers to add points to the list to make it complete.

Keep Building Followers

You can keep promoting your business by increasing the number of followers on your company profile page. For this, you can consider getting your employees on-board by encouraging them to create their profile pages and adding them to your business page. You can ask your employees to optimise their LinkedIn profile pages individually. You can also ask them to share their insights on the updates that you post.

In addition to that, you can also include the link to your company’s LinkedIn page in your other social media profiles. A follow button on your website leading to your LinkedIn page will also help in increasing your reach.

Monitoring the metrics will help you understand how well LinkedIn is working for your business. This will also help in identifying whether your strategies need any adjustment and you can implement those accordingly.

The importance of lead velocity to B2B marketing is widely understood. However, discussions on the topic, and more importantly, how to increase velocity, often take a back seat to the flashier aspects of demand marketing, such as account-based marketing.

This isn’t surprising. After all, when we speak of lead velocity, we’re simply referring to how quickly marketing leads convert through the various stages of the customer acquisition funnel.

Yet ignoring slowed velocity and funnel blockages can lead to potentially severe marketing problems:

• Unengaged prospects
• Wasted media budget
• Negative customer experiences
• Uneven lead pacing
• Stalled pipeline growth
• Sales-marketing misalignment
• Lost customers and decreased marketing-attributed revenue

Moreover, lead velocity is affected by so many B2B marketing efforts that is should be used as a primary gauge for your demand marketing health.

Here are just a few areas of B2B marketing that, if not up to par, will likely reduce velocity at various stages of the funnel; and if untreated, can result in even bigger problems down the road.

Common causes of slow lead velocity

1. Undefined objectives – Customer acquisition is a relay race with many legs spanning numerous marketing teams and departments. If these various teams and roles can’t agree on lead definitions, scores and when they should be handed off between teams, velocity slows dramatically.

Solution tactic – Focus on frequent communication. In my experience, two tactics help achieve this: (1) Weekly sales-marketing-customer success calls to review pipeline and program data, and (2) marketing regularly jumping on sales calls with prospects.

2. Decentralized lead sources and unstandardized lead data – Lead vendors, website and various landing pages for inbound leads, third-party prospect data providers, events, webinars, etc. are all used by demand marketers to acquire lead info. This diversification is great except for when the time comes to consolidate and inject data into your customer database. This is often a manual, time-consuming process.

Left decentralized, it’s not uncommon for time between initial lead capture and upload to marketing automation or CRM system to extend longer than ten days. That’s long enough for leads to lose interest or engage with a competitor.

Solution tactic – The key here is unifying diverse lead sources into a single location where lead data can be gathered and formatting far quicker. This first requires an understanding of where and how lead data sources converge. You’ll then be able to focus on creating data formatting standards and streamlined workflows to get leads into nurture tracks in a timely manner, which then results in higher conversion rates and faster lead velocity.

Unstandardized, manual processes – Processes left unstandardized result in many redundant, manual efforts. For example, think of all the manual steps involved with getting your third-party-generated leads ready for importation into marketing automation systems:

• Cleansing for fake info
• Deduplicating
• Scrubbing leads that fall short of targeting criteria
• Checking for accurate ranges and completeness
• Returning bad leads to partners
• Formatting lead files so they’re consistent with database requirements

Moreover, most demand generation marketers still have unique processes for each lead vendor they work with, which backs up the processes even further.

Solution tactic – Unifying systems that capture, cleanse, refine, leverage and analyze customer data eliminates a ton of manual processes that waste resources, hurt customer experience and prevent growth. Most marketers have integrations between their marketing automation and CRM systems, but these technologies are often still disconnected from top-funnel lead sources, which allows them to remain procedurally dissimilar.

Ensuring a smooth, automated flow of data all the way up to the top of the funnel eliminates bottlenecks that slow velocity and allow prospect interest to wane (i.e., bad customer experience).

Lead velocity is a critical metric for all B2B marketers. By understanding its impact and, most importantly, how to improve it, you can make a material difference on marketing’s contribution to customer growth and revenue.

Over the past two years, we’ve seen the term “growth hacking” almost double in interest on Google Trends. Earlier this month, it hit an interest score of 100%, which is the highest it gets.

As the approach gains popularity, growth hacking has grown from a vague buzzword to a marketing concept that has brought many products and companies like Gmail, Hamilton, and Dropbox great success.

But now that we know what growth hacking is and how to apply it, which tools can we use to streamline and optimize the process?

In this post, we’re going to get a little meta and growth hack your growth hacking efforts by rounding up all the tools you need in one place:

1) Optimizely

Photo from the Optimizely blog

At the core of growth hacking is a lot of testing. It’s about constantly setting hypotheses, and then testing until you find something that sticks.

Optimizely is a tool that allows you to A/B test your website to compare performance. At Bitly, we use the software to test call-to-actions, website layouts, and more.

Optimizely streamlines the usual steps of experimentation since developers don’t need to create several test pages and track engagement separately. An Optimizely snippet and jQuery work together so that all users land on one page, but they see customized content depending on previously defined parameters.

Before investing the resources into rolling out major updates like revamping a checkout funnel or building a new subscription page, A/B test what users are responding to most using a tool like Optimizely.

2) Typeform

Photo from Crunchbase

What better way to get quick feedback on new products, to identify old products that need improvement, or gauge interest on a potential product than to run a survey?

Typeform’s user-friendly site makes it really easy to build sophisticated looking surveys, quizzes, payment forms, lead gen forms, and more.

Typeform offers powerful customization such as answer piping, where part of a respondent’s previous question is populated into the next question. For example, let’s say we at Bitly are surveying users about their favorite feature of our platform. One user says they like “Audience Intel”. In the following question, answer piping would ask, “Why do you like Audience Intel?”.

Typeform also offers the ability to build responsive forms across all devices and platforms.

3) Marketo

Photo from G2 Crowd
Marketo is a growth hacker’s dream.

The software allows teams to automate various parts of their marketing efforts and track it all in one place. With Marketo, teams can eliminate a lot of the manual work that goes into growth hacking and spend more time testing and innovating.

Marketo houses a range of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, and analytics tools. The software also integrates with many CRM solutions (Customer Solutions Management) to help marketers nurture leads and drive conversions.

At Bitly, we use the Marketo and Salesforce integration to organize and prioritize leads for our sales team, so they can have the right conversations with leads at the right time. Our content team also tracks who’s registering for and attending our webinars. We send follow up emails to all registrants with a recording of the webinar, and identify prospective clients from our registration list.

4) MovableInk

Make the purchasing decision easier for consumers by using dynamic content that populates according to their interests or shopping behavior.

Most consumers (74%) get frustrated when website content appears that has nothing to do with their interests.

Contextual email service provider, MovableInk, allows you to create engaging, immersive email experiences. Email has traditionally been the biggest ROI-driving marketing channel, with a 66% conversion rate.

As VR and augmented reality technology becomes mainstream – research showing that 171 million people could be using VR hardware and software worldwide by 2018 – dynamic email may be the key in keeping consumers engaged.

In addition to hyper-targeting by device, weather, and geo-location, MovableInk also supports live and streaming content.

5) Click to Tweet

Photo from WordPress

This WordPress plugin makes it easy for marketers to turn parts of their content into tweetable excerpts.

The average reader spends less than 15 seconds on a page. This means that most people won’t read all the way through your blog posts. Embedding Click to Tweet blocks throughout your posts maximizes the reader’s engagement while they’re on the site. The key points are highlighted in big, bold text and is easily shareable.

At Bitly, we also use Click to Tweet internally to create pre-written tweet templates for our teams and partners to easily share new content pieces.

6) Moz

Don’t underestimate the power of SEO. Moz helps you organize keywords you’re trying to target, tells you how your site is ranking according to those words, and suggests related keywords that you may also want to target.

Most recently, the Bitly marketing team used Moz to track and optimize our performance on the keyword “Paid Social Strategies.” After a few weeks of tweaking blog posts, we managed to land our “Paid Social Strategy: Ads, Engagement, and ROI” post at the top of the search results.

7) GrowthHackers.com

Kill two birds with one stone with GrowthHackers.com, a forum for sharing and chatting about growth strategies and trends. You can use the site to both growth hack your content and keep up-to-date on best practices and case studies.

At Bitly, we often use GrowthHackers to syndicate related content and to find thought leaders to partner with.

Check their “Top Trending” & “Must Read” lists on the homepage for a quick sampling of the latest growth hacking news, and to get some insight into what kind of content is most likely to gain traction on the site.

8) Bitly

Today’s digital landscape is complex. Americans now own four devices on average, and the average U.S. consumer spends 60 hours a week consuming content across devices. Every touchpoint a customer has with your product or service matters.

In order to get the most bang for our buck, our marketing team uses Bitlinks to track all paid and organic efforts across all channels. We use Bitly Campaigns, a feature of Bitly Enterprise to track how much traffic our influencer marketing drives, which CTAs on our Twitter Ads perform best, how affiliates are performing, and more.

The link can help you see clearly across the Internet.

The Tool Is Only As Good As The Marketer Using It

All this being said, these tools are only as powerful as the strategies and knowledge behind them.

Be sure to spend some time solidifying your goals, learning about best practices, and testing out free trials of these tools (and other ones out there that we might have left out) before locking down your growth hacking stack.

Ultimately, the right toolkit should help you better understand your user base and shape your relationship with them.

Everyone has business ideas.

But it's probably not a stretch to say most of them aren't so great.

"It's relatively easy to sit and come up with a list of random ideas," writes Ramit Sethi in GrowthLab's "Ultimate Guide to Starting an Online Business." "But without the right framework, you can't tell if these ideas will ever hold any weight."

Get started generating ideas with real promise using GrowthLab's questions below:

1. What do I already pay for?

"I lead with this question because a lot of us can’t even fathom the idea that someone would pay them for something," writes Sethi. "But when you think about it, we already pay other people for tons of random stuff."

Maybe you pay a house cleaner, or a stylist, or a dog walker, or a personal trainer. You pay them for a service you need — why shouldn't someone pay you? Begin by listing the services you pay for personally, to "open your mind" to the possibilities.

Now list: 3-5 services

2. What skills do I have?

"Remember, there are no bad ideas here," writes Sethi. "Your list of skills can include anything you want."

Now list: 10 skills

3. What do my friends say I'm great at?

"If you find yourself thinking, 'Ramit, I do not have any skills,' go ask your friends," Sethi says in the guide. "It might seem a little weird, but I bet they'll give you a list of at least 3 things you're amazing at — right away."

After all, you can create a business centered around the skills that come easiest to you, like building Excel charts, giving relationship advice, picking the perfect gift, organizing anything, or even being charismatic in a crowd. Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone can.

Now list: 3-5 ideas

4. What do I do on Saturday morning?

Sethi took this question from his interview with writer and entrepreneur Ben Casnocha, who says what you're reading, watching, and doing on the weekend before anyone makes demands on your time provides a good hint at what you could do on the clock.

Now list: 3-5 activities

By this point, you should have at least 20 ideas, which you can evaluate further using GrowthLab's free "Ultimate Guide to Starting an Online Business."

And if you're finding your business ideas aren't panning out, don't beat yourself up over it. Not every idea is a winner. Sethi writes that the process of finding a killer business idea starts with a simple truth: "You have permission to come up with ideas that suck."

SEE ALSO: An early Facebook employee says Mark Zuckerberg always asked one question when his team had ideas

Join the conversation about this story »

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Chances are, you often find yourself wishing there were more hours in the day to complete everything on your to-do list. At LinkedIn, we know that every minute counts, which is why we want to help you maximize time and be more productive. Here are five simple ways you can use the LinkedIn mobile app to be more efficient: 1. Check your notifications to stay connected every day Notifications are a quick rundown of the latest happenings in your network. From letting you know about your...

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In needs assessment, your primary focus is to find information you can act on. Questions should reveal your best sales opportunities.

No matter how interesting a tangent may be, you’ll want to use questions to redirect the buyer back to topics that will yield sales opportunities. You can’t spend all day listening. You can’t solve every problem. That’s why you need to focus on the sales opportunities you can discover and create with well-crafted questions.

Probe for Sales Opportunities

Ultimately, a seller’s job is to sell. Learning about a buyer’s needs is a means to that end. It is a means that serves buyers well and simultaneously helps sellers to be more effective.

But a seller should never lose sight of the fact that he or she is asking quality questions, understanding buyer needs, differentiating, creating value, building trust, strategically planning and aligning with the buyer’s process so a sale can be made.

Sellers sometimes do forget that part. They get caught up in the needs assessment process and begin to think of themselves as pro-bono consultants to their buyers. The value buyers recognize when sellers ask great questions can be extremely validating. It feels better than hearing “no” and may entice some sellers to camp on the needs assessment phase for prolonged periods of time.

The biggest trap for a seller is pursuing buyer needs that are not actionable. Those needs may be interesting and important. But if the seller cannot offer a solution to a particular need, there must be a reasonable cut-off point to that part of the conversation. That’s why sellers should proceed with caution when asking questions about needs they cannot act on.

How far should the seller go? Since the funnel starts out with broad questions about all types of needs, some non-actionable needs are bound to be raised by the buyer. The seller needs to probe those just enough to have context. The seller should not ignore needs expressed by the buyer – the natural flow of conversation shouldn’t be disrupted, and the topics discussed do have merit for building trust.

On the other hand, the seller doesn’t need to know all the details and dimensions of needs which are unrelated to solutions he or she can offer. This is where using questions to steer the conversation comes into play. The seller, by asking questions true to his or her strategic intent, can redirect without dismissing what the buyer has said.

The first step, then, is to understand the broad need. A seller should listen closely for clues about how he or she can be a part of the solution. Then, after probing the need, the seller must decide if there is a potential link to a solution he or she can provide. If not, then the seller should ask a question to probe another potential need (without moving too hastily to a sales-focused question).

Next Steps:

• To learn more about DISCOVER Questions® and how to get connected in meaningful ways with your buyers, order your copy of this bestseller from Amazon.com
• When you need sales or management coaching, customized sales training, or a dynamic speaker call us at 408-779-PFPS or book an appointment with Deb.
• Check out these resources for sales managers and front line sellers. New webinars, infographics, research, podcasts and more added every month!

The award-winning CONNECT2Sell Blog is for professional sellers who believe, as we do, that Every Sale Starts with a Connection.

Deb Calvert, “DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected” author and Top 50 Sales Influencer, is President of People First Productivity Solutions, a UC Berkeley instructor, and a former Sales/Training Director of a Fortune 500 media company. She speaks and writes about the Stop Selling & Start Leading movement and offers sales training, coaching and consulting as well as leadership development programs. She is certified as an executive and sales coach by the ICF and is a Certified Master of The Leadership Challenge®. Deb has worked in every sector and in 14 countries to build leadership capacity, team effectiveness and sales productivity with a “people first” approach.

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