Rnordman

Every year, the Arcaid Awards honors the best architectural photography of the year.

This year's finalists capture the intricate geometry of buildings in interior shots, as well as towers that loom over landscapes in exterior photography.

The winning photographer, Matt Emmett, photographed the underground majesty of the East London Water Works reservoir in London. Here's what it looks like, along with the other 19 finalists.

Emmett's photo of London's Covered Reservoir is the first time the prestigious award was given to a historic location.

This photo of China's Shanghai Tower soaring into the smog and clouds has a strong color contrast.

The Musee de Confluences in Lyon, France, has a dappled, reflective surface that can be studied endlessly.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Just about everyone knows that you should never text and drive, and that you should stop, drop, and roll if you catch on fire.

But life can also throw situations at us for which we don't have a quick, handy response.

Commenters in a recent Quora thread about life-saving facts offered their best tips, which are easy to remember and could have a huge impact if you ever find yourself in a dangerous situation.

You might want to save these for later.

SEE ALSO: 6 animals that attacked critical human infrastructure

Your brain can't handle walking and using your phone at the same time — so look up.

Safety adviser Murali Krishnan points out that walking and using your phone both demand large amounts of cognitive effort. 

As a result, you can't fully focus on both at the same time in the same way you can with walking and gum-chewing, for instance. You'll suffer "inattention blindness," where you may see an object but not process that it's a car speeding toward you.

Eliminate your car's blind spots by adjusting your mirrors properly.

Blind spots aren't inevitable in all vehicles, argues user Kristen Rush. 

By adjusting your mirrors so that you barely see the edges of your own car, you can effectively eliminate the blind spots on the sides of the vehicle. The rear-view mirror should be able to locate any car behind yours. It's worth the few seconds it takes to adjust these when you get in the driver's seat.

Heat transfers faster through liquid than gas, so keep warm by staying dry.

There's a connection between being wet and getting cold, and vice versa for heat, says engineer Lia Lavoie. 

To ensure your body temperature doesn't fall too quickly in cold environments, invest in clothes made of wool instead of cotton — they'll absorb more moisture so that dampness doesn't linger on your skin. And, of course, do your best to stay dry.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The other day, a friendly Norwegian BMX pro named Didrik Dimmen popped by the Business Insider office to show off a handheld smartphone stabilizer called the FlowMotion One.

It's designed to keep your smartphone perfectly stable no matter how much you move your hands, and it has some pretty nifty features to set it apart from other smartphone stabilizers out there. 

The FlowMotion One is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign — so far, it's raised $215,000 of its humble $30,000 goal at the time of writing, and it has 40 more days to raise even more funding.

The FlowMotion One will have a full retail cost of $299 when it's released in March 2017, but there's still a few of the $199 packages left on Kickstarter.

Here's what's so great about the FlowMotion One:

SEE ALSO: There's a setting in Spotify Premium that makes your music sound better — here's how to turn it on

This is the FlowMotion One, a smartphone stabilizer.

 

 

It holds your phone and keeps it stable no matter how much you move your hands.

RAW Embed

 

It lets your smartphone record ultra-smooth video without the shaking or jittering you'd normally see when you hold it with your hands. (That's Didrik running, by the way.)

RAW Embed

We tried a prototype of the FlowMotion One, and the results were very similar to the GIF above. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Amazon Prime members can now subscribe to HBO and Cinemax for $15 and $10 per month respectively  —  The great cord-cutting revolution continues today with the news that HBO and Cinemax are now available to Amazon Prime subscribers for $15 and $10 per month, respectively.

Conventional wisdom suggests that marketers should emphasize the novelty of new products to get people to buy them. However, research is starting to show that this might be the wrong approach.

Despite the fact that firms spend billions of dollars on developing and marketing new products, these products face persistently high failure rates — often up to 40% to 90%, depending on the product category. More interestingly, these odds seem to have remained stable over the past few decades, suggesting that transient factors, such as the economic climate, cannot fully account for the high rates of failure.

We sought to investigate whether more stable, psychological factors, such as consumers’ desire for control, could act as barriers to new product acceptance. Results from a series of experiments (forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Psychology) suggest that the greater someone’s desire for control, the less willing they’ll be to accept new products.

Desire for control is the innate motive or need to personally exert control over one’s surrounding environment. Psychologists have long recognized it as one the most fundamental human needs, and have therefore developed personality scales to measure its strength across individuals. Marketers, too, have long tried to tap into consumers’ desire for control. For instance, you can find an ad for a Maserati sports car insisting, “My car has to be fast, smooth, and give me a sense of control”; and you can see Micro Focus, a multi national IT consultancy company, emphasizing on its website how its products allow consumers to “Take Back Control.”

In our first experiment, we recruited 264 members of an online panel of American consumers and measured their desire for control using a personality scale that has been well-established in the psychology literature. Then under the guise of a market research study, we provided all of these participants with generic information about a toothpaste product (e.g., minty taste, non-fluoride, animal-friendly). We led half of the participants to believe that the toothpaste was new (positioning it as “The New Formula Toothpaste”), while the other half was led to believe that it was classic (“The Classic Formula Toothpaste”). We asked everyone to indicate how willing they would be to try the toothpaste.

Among those who evaluated the “new” toothpaste, willingness to try the product was reduced as desire for control increased. However, for the “classic” toothpaste, the extent to which participants wanted control did not influence their willingness to try the product. This preliminary evidence suggested that consumers with a higher desire for control are more hesitant to try new products.

While desire for control varies from one individual to another, a given consumer may also experience different degrees of needing control across different contexts. For example, consumers feel a stronger desire for control when something threatens their sense of control (e.g. getting a flat tire). So in our second experiment we investigated whether such events could also change consumers’ willingness to accept new products. We ran the experiment among 123 consumers from the same panel used in the first experiment.

First, we experimentally increased participants desire for control. We asked half of them to recall a past situation in which their sense of control was threatened (e.g. “I felt out of control when someone stole my cellphone”), and we asked the other half to recall a situation where their sense of control was enhanced (e.g. “I felt in control when I got two job offers and could choose freely between them”). This let us see whether participants who recalled a control-threatening vs. control-enhancing situation would therefore feel a stronger desire for control.

Then we had them weigh in on Frito-Lay’s recent “Do Us a Flavor” marketing campaign. We created four pairs of potato chips flavors, with each containing one classic flavor and one new flavor (e.g., one pair contained “Traditional Wavy Ranch” and “New West Coast Truffle Fries”). We made sure that the flavors in each pair were comparable on dimensions other than novelty (e.g., perceived quality, etc.). Participants then chose which of the two flavors in each pair they would buy. We found that participants whose desire for control was experimentally increased chose fewer new flavors than participants whose desire for control was decreased — which again shows that desire for control can act as a barrier to new product acceptance.

In our third experiment we presented 103 students from Columbia University with an ad for the Pebble Watch smartwatch that had just launched on the market. The ad included an image of the smartwatch and a headline. We kept the image constant across conditions; but half of the participants saw a headline that emphasized the product’s novelty: “A new approach to time with the Pebble Watch.” The other half saw a headline emphasizing the product could give people greater control: “Take control of your time with the Pebble Watch.” Participants then indicated their attitudes toward the watch, and completed a personality scale that measured their desire for control.

The results revealed that different headline framing did not influence product evaluations among those with low desire for control. However, participants with a high desire for control evaluated the smartwatch more favorably when it was advertised under the control-increasing headline than the novel-product headline.

Some additional data that we have collected suggests that there are cross-cultural differences in desire for control and acceptance of new products. We wanted to know more about the two largest Asian markets: India and China. In one study we found that Indian-born participants living in the U.S. reported greater desire for control relative to Chinese-born participants. In another study we found that among Facebook users who were Chinese or Indian, Chinese participants did not differ in their evaluations of a new (blk.) versus traditional (Voss) brand of bottled water, while Indians evaluated the new brand less favorably. A third study found that students at a university in China were not sensitive to a control-increasing versus control-reducing framing of Cinnamon Altoids Mints (these were not available in India or China at the time), while students in Indian universities evaluated the product more favorably if it was advertised with a control-increasing frame.

These findings are important for any firm concerned with the success of a new product. They stand in contrast to the conventional wisdom that marketers should emphasize the novelty of new offerings. Doing so may actually be problematic, especially for those markets and consumer segments that exhibit higher desire for control.

Additional communication strategies may also increase the acceptance of new products among people with high desire for control. In our studies we merely changed participants’ perceptions of the product novelty. In reality, however, many new products often include some new attribute or functionality. In this case, marketers may want to explain how these new attributes can help consumers achieve a greater sense of control. Repositioning or reframing new products as control-increasing may also be an effective communication strategy for introducing innovative products.

Our results also suggest that once high-desire-for-control consumers become used to a certain service experience (e.g., a certain routine for paying their bill), they may be hesitant to change that routine. This could be particularly relevant for new digital products and services (e.g., Apple Pay or chatbot-based customer support), where well-established behaviors may discourage adoption among high-desire-for-control customers. Firms must ensure that they are clearly explaining any changes in service procedure in order to reduce the threat to feelings control posed by service novelty.

A key skill for today’s leaders is to learn how to enable teams to take initiative and make decisions so that they can adapt quickly as things change.

This is a primary theme of General Stanley McChrystal’s book, Team of Teams, New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, in which he lays out the tactics he’s used to empower subordinates to take the initiative and make decisions.

His advice goes far beyond military situations. Across industries, the business environment is changing at a rapid pace due to the adoption of mobile devices and the social sharing of information.

Teams that are unable to adapt quickly are not prepared for the challenges when they arise – whether we’re talking about a retail organization, a financial institution or a law firm. This is a key tenet for all organizations to keep in mind, regardless of size or industry.

Here are three key things you need to do to enable your teams.

Ensure overall alignment

In his book, Gen. McChrystal refers to team alignment as “shared consciousness.” In other words, leaders must have clear goals and everyone needs to be on the same page, without any confusion.

To accomplish this, there must be transparency, information sharing and trust.

A few months ago, my team at FileMaker organized over 130 events in 12 countries. This event series was a great opportunity so we focused on making the most of it. To succeed in this undertaking, frequent communication was a necessity, taking place through video conferencing and face-to-face meetings.

When goals are in alignment and your team has established a shared consciousness, your team can drive what matters the most. It allows your team to collaborate fully and therefore drive to the core mission of the team. A clear team mission helps everyone evaluate together how to respond to a change in the environment, be it a windfall or a pitfall.

Share information

The importance of information sharing cannot be overemphasized. By following this leadership model, you ensure your team, especially those who are closest to the problem, to have the information they need to solve problems as they arise.

This can be accomplished in different ways. For our recent project described above, my team created a central repository – in this case, an event management website – to capture all of the information. The planning was led by a cross functional producer whose role it was to empower the rest of the team by ensuring everyone involved had all the information they needed at all times, so they could collaborate and assess opportunities and risks in real-time.

Provide modern tools

Tools can be as simple as old-fashioned whiteboards or spreadsheets. At FileMaker, we make a platform for creating custom apps. When it came to our own collaboration needs, it seemed a no-brainer to use the very tool we have right at hand. Thus, when it came time to create a new product plus services offering, the team created their own custom app using FileMaker to manage the process.

In our mobile world, you need a platform for your team to create custom apps that allow them to share information. The app should be able to be quickly modified by your team as new opportunities and challenges arise. When choosing a platform, select one that allows your team to use their expertise.

By ensuring that everyone is aligned, sharing information and providing modern tools, you can help ensure that your team succeeds in today’s complex world.

A new series of platform updates, robots(!) and more are about to make your ability to connect and engage sales prospects on LinkedIn even easier.

If you were thinking of asking Santa for a robot that would give you the right words to type as you network with others on LinkedIn, schedule meetings and make reservations – looks like can take it off your list.

Microsoft’s $26.2 billion investment in LinkedIn earlier this year carried the promise of an enhanced user experience, including making it easier and more efficient to do business and network with other professionals on the platform.

I, Robot

A recent article on Inc.com highlighted several new LinkedIn features, which include a chat bot that is supposed to assist you with tedious, time-consuming tasks like scheduling meetings and finding open calendar slots when networking with others live or online.

Chat bots are a hot new feature in the consumer tech world, where companies like Facebook, Apple and Google are already racing to offer useful services based on artificial intelligence. As a first step, LinkedIn says it will soon introduce a bot that could help someone schedule a meeting with another LinkedIn user, by comparing calendars and suggesting a convenient time and meeting place.

The new bot will be part of an online messaging service that LinkedIn is gradually expanding to make it easier for users to communicate without opening a new screen or switching to email.

Messaging Made Easy

The new LinkedIn desktop interface, which has already rolled out in beta mode to several power users and is rumored to be released to all 500 million worldwide members any day now, features a complete overhaul to the messaging experience.

For instance, your LinkedIn inbox will appear as a chat box window, allowing you to remain on a page reading long form articles, listening to podcasts, watching webinars or consuming other content on LinkedIn while you send and receive messages.

The smart messaging window also adapts as you navigate LinkedIn, to help you communicate with relevant contacts specific to the current context. LinkedIn demonstrated some of these features on video during a recent press conference.

For example, you might be reading an article you like on LinkedIn, and want to send it to a colleague, because perhaps the article gave you some ideas about generating more business for your company using LinkedIn. You can message him or her right from “inside” the article, without having to leave the page or go into your LinkedIn inbox.

Another example: Perhaps you’re looking for a job opportunity, so you click on “Jobs” and see one that might be a good fit. As you move deeper into the posting, LinkedIn’s messaging tool will overlay on the page, pulling up a list your specific connections within that specific company, then place the job posting into your message, automating part of that networking process for you. The messenger will even suggest phrases to help you craft the perfect message to that contact who works at the company you want to apply for a job with.

Meet Me on LinkedIn – Robot Style

If your goal is to set up a meeting with another LinkedIn member, the bot will enable a search of both of your Google or Microsoft calendars and schedules to find a meeting time and place that works to carry on the conversation.

You will also receive a push notification 15 minutes before your meeting with some insights about the person you are meeting with – what school he or she attended, what he or she has written about recently on LinkedIn, and so on.

This level of automation follows along the same path as some of the existing, third party automation tools out there like LinMailPro, which allows you to automate AND personalize your invites and messages with prospects you encounter on LinkedIn.

Real Talk

All robot jokes aside, this recent move means that LinkedIn wants its users experiencing more “real-time” conversations on the network.

Like the new, chat-like inbox for messages, LinkedIn’s new desktop rollout will also show people in real-time typing messages back to you, and the messages will pop up on your profile page so you can chat in real-time.

It will make it even easier to personalize your 1-on-1 interactions with your ideal sales prospects on LinkedIn, and to move your business forward with setting up meetings, demonstrations and so on.

It’s a welcome move, and one that ensures LinkedIn is doing its best to keep pace in today’s “always-on” business environment.

In a November article for Men's Fitness, Mark Cuban shared his best leadership advice.

Cuban, who regularly guides fledgling companies as an investor on "Shark Tank," is also the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

Asked for his best advice for young people taking on their first leadership positions, he wrote:

"Pay attention to what's happening around you. Don't think there's just one way to do things — context is everything.

"I'd also say work to reduce the stress of the people around you. If you walk in the room and the stress levels go up, you're doing it all wrong — and vice versa."

Cuban wrote that most of the best lessons he's personally learned about leadership came through experience, not necessarily through instructions or mentors. "It's amazing how quickly just about anyone can learn leadership qualities by just paying attention to what works and what doesn't work," he said.

Read the full article in Men's Fitness »

SEE ALSO: Mark Cuban's best investing advice: 'Don't'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A psychologist reveals a trick to stop being lazy

 Amazon is hosting the second of two major keynotes at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas today. TechCrunch has received detailed notes on the contents of today’s keynote, which will be delivered by Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. We already knew he was going to talk about DevOps and containers today, but here are a few more details of what to expect. The keynote is scheduled to… Read More

In the 500th episode of her podcast, So Money, personal finance expert Farnoosh Torabi reflected on some of the most impactful money lessons her guests have shared.

"I'm not just the deliverer of this information," Torabi said of hosting the show. "I actually go and incorporate a lot of what our guests say into my own life and it really has been, for me, a great practice in fine-tuning my own finances."

One of her picks was from her first-ever episode, when she interviewed life coach Tony Robbins, author of "MONEY: Master the Game."

"Do you have rituals that are financial, Tony?" Torabi asked. "Obviously, habits are important for maintaining whatever it is that you want to achieve in your life, but speaking strictly financials, are there habits that you have that help you keep your money safe and protected?"

Robbins replied (emphasis ours):

"For me personally, it's really looking for, and never believing you have all the answers. One of the reasons I wrote this book is, I spent 21 years coaching one of the most brilliant guys in the world who never loses money. But I learned so much. I figured out how little I knew. The best people on Earth, they all say, 'What don't I know?' 'cause the world's always changing."

The man Robbins is talking about in that quote is Paul Tudor Jones. Robbins found Jones, and other wealthy, successful people like him, were constantly looking to learn more about money. He told Torabi:

"It isn't about the money! That's why I call it 'MONEY: Master the Game.' It is a game. A lot of people get offended by that, like 'Oh my God! How could he call it a game?' It is.

"The wealthiest people in the world know it's a game, and the reason they succeed is they know it's a game. They know there's certain rules. If you know the rules, you can win and if you don't you're gonna lose. Rather than be pissed about it, learn. "

Listen to the full episode of So Money »

SEE ALSO: Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, and 28 other successful people share their best career advice for people in their 20s

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: TONY ROBBINS: What you need to do in your 20s to be more successful in your 30s

Being a content creator is more than putting words down on paper or shooting a video. It’s about telling a story in a structured way so that when people come into contact with your work, they grasp what you’re saying. Whether creating a novel, a million-pound advertising campaign or a 140-character tweet, the objective of producing content is to get your message heard and understood.

Know your audience

If you start producing content before you’re aware of your target audience, you’re giving yourself a mountain to climb right from the off. Without knowing who you want to appeal to, how can you guarantee that what you’re doing is hitting the mark? How will you know what information to include, what to leave out, and what is likely to resonate?

Creating quality content is rarely a quick process. Whether it’s a blog, infographic, podcast, video or article, it takes time and effort to go from inception to completion. However, the number of hours you’ll spend tweaking and modifying your work will reduce drastically if you know exactly what you’re trying to get across and to whom.

The first question you should be asking yourself is ‘which type of people do I want to reach?’. If you could guarantee your work would be seen by a particular segment of society, who would that be and why? This is a crucial first step in the content production journey; once you’ve decided who you’d ideally like to be reaching, you’ll be able to consider what to produce.

The first question you should be asking yourself is ‘which type of people do I want to reach?’

It’s also important to find out what your audience needs. Why will they be interested in your content? What are they hoping to achieve with the help of your work? If this sounds like a long-winded process, fear not! We have a solution.

We call it persona building.

Personas

By designing a persona you put a face to your audience; and we mean that quite literally. By creating a detailed illustration of the kind of person you want your content to influence, you’ll give yourself some focus and direction. You’ll be better equipped to visualise your perfect recipient, and will therefore be giving your content the best chance of being successful.

Personas can be based on all kinds of information, from fairly basic demographics such as age, location, profession or financial status, to more complex factors such as attitudes and behaviours. The more detailed you can be the better; the aim is to really understand what makes that kind of person tick.

It may take some time to put together a perfect persona – although you could always ask us to do it for you – but the payoff is certainly worth the effort.

Different strokes for different folks

When you know who you’re writing for, you’ll find yourself better positioned to tailor your message so it’s as alluring as possible; you’ll know what to say, and how you’re going to say it. You wouldn’t go into a debate without having a firm idea of your beliefs and objectives, and the same attitude should apply for any content you produce. Remember that you’re not just trying to create a strong piece of work; you’re attempting to portray yourself in the best possible light, too.

It goes without saying that everybody consumes news and information differently; every individual has their own views and opinions, and they also have favoured communication channels.

When you know who you’re writing for, you’ll find yourself better positioned to tailor your message

Did you know, for example, that around 62% of adults get their news from social media? Or that by 2017 video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic? Being aware of the channel or content medium you’re going to use will go a long way to influencing what you are going to produce.

Divide and conquer

We’ve spoken in the past about the concept of content shattering, and it’s something we continue to advocate. Just a few weeks ago Tor Goldfield, our Head of Content, wrote a blog on this very topic. In it, she said:

“Rather than engaging in a never-ending hunt for new topics and angles, it is far more effective to identify one subject or theme that really resonates with your chosen stakeholders. More often than not, that will involve helping them solve a problem, do something more efficiently or try something new.

“Once you’ve found that big idea, the next job is to work out what kind of content to produce. This is where many companies miss out on opportunities. One great idea shouldn’t lead to one great piece of content; it should be the foundation for many pieces of great content.”

People get their news and views from a huge range of places, and there is no one uniform content medium that appeals to one and all. By communicating in a variety of forms, you’re helping your message to spread in a number of different directions. You’ll be speaking to people in a way that they appreciate, and ensuring your work is seen, heard and listened to.

The importance of voice

Once you’ve taken steps to understand your audience and define your message, the next stage is using the right voice at the right time to get your work acknowledged and understood.

Do you want to come across as formal or informal? Would you like the reader to see you as an authority figure, or would you prefer to speak in the manner of a friend? Will your audience appreciate technical terms and business jargon, or would it be better to write in a way that is succinct, simple and direct?

Your voice should remain consistent rather than rigid. You want the reader to get to know your business, and that means producing work of reliably high quality that retains a dependable and unvarying personality. That personality can, just like your own, have an array of traits and quirks, but an overarching level of constancy is essential.

Your voice should remain consistent rather than rigid

If you’re writing an article, keep your reason for producing the content at the forefront of your mind. Make sure everything is relevant, appropriate and moves your overall aim forwards. Do you want to make a sale, or would you be happy just to see your message shared over social media? Think about your objectives in detail, because that’s what ultimately makes the whole content production process worthwhile.

The more you know about your audience, the easier becomes to make decisions that will shape your work. You’ll have a firm idea of content length, the mediums that should be used and how it should be presented. And the more you know about your audience, the more likely it is you’ll get them interested, keep them engaged and guarantee they’ll keep coming back for more.

At 22, you were just graduating from college, entering the "real world," and embarking on your professional journey.

Looking back, maybe you'd rewrite your past — or, perhaps you're content with the decisions you made at that time in your life. Either way, there are probably a few things you wish you knew then that you know now.

That's exactly what LinkedIn asked its network of top minds across all fields to write about for its "If I Were 22" editorial packages.

Successful thought leaders — also known as Influencers — shared original posts filled with pearls of wisdom for young people based on what they wish they had known at 22. Here's what 17 successful people had to say:

SEE ALSO: What Donald Trump and 24 other successful people were doing right out of college

DON'T MISS: The unglamorous first jobs of Donald Trump and 24 other successful people

Angela Ahrendts: Honor humility

If the Senior Vice President of Apple Retail were 22, she writes that she would frequently thank her family and friends, regardless of how small their gesture was.

"The world is not here to serve me, rather I am here to serve the world," Ahrendts writes.

Read her full LinkedIn post here.

Suze Orman: It's OK to take time to figure out what you want.

When the personal finance guru was 22, she and a few friends left Illinois and headed to Berkeley, California, where she spent her days helping clear away trees and brush.

"That was followed by a seven-year stretch of waitressing," she writes. "It wasn't until I was 30 that I landed a job — as a stock broker trainee — that put me on the path that leads directly to where I am today."

She says she wouldn't suggest that every 22-year-old take eight years to find the path they want to pursue — but she does hope that they give themselves the time and space to figure things out.

"That's not a license for laziness. I worked, and worked hard, in my 20s. And I wouldn't trade the experiences I had during that time. But if there is a 22-year-old out there reading this and feeling adrift, I have this to say to you: Been there, done that. And look at me — it all turned out better than fine, right?"

Read her full LinkedIn post here.

Jim Kim: Get to know people from every income level and understand their worlds.

When the president at the World Bank turned 22, he was quite unhappy. He was just two months into his first year at Harvard Medical School, where he spent every night memorizing anatomy out of a textbook. "It seemed a real letdown," he writes.

In his late 20s, Kim travelled to Haiti, Peru, and Siberia to work in poor or disadvantaged communities. While many of the people he met there had almost nothing and were illiterate, he says they were incredibly wise, and you would be ignorant to underestimate them.

"Listen to the poor because their aspirations are as high as anyone's and all of us will need to face the task of making the world more inclusive and just," he says.

Read his full LinkedIn post here.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Slack has hired Dropbox's Kevin Egan as its new head of North America sales, bringing in a seasoned veteran with over 10 years of enterprise sales experience, a source with knowledge of the matter told Business Insider.

Egan, who served as Dropbox's head of North America sales for the last four years, is the second high-profile sales hire this year for Slack, the $3.8 billion startup best known for its viral messaging app.

Earlier this year, it hired away Robert Frati from Salesforce as its first sales chief, after relying mostly on word-of-mouth without a big sales team to achieve its rocketship growth during its early years.

Prior to Dropbox, Egan worked at Salesforce for over 10 years in various sales positions. He will be reporting to Frati at Slack once he joins the company in January.

Both Slack and Dropbox declined to comment on this story.

Stiff competition

The move comes just as Slack faces stiffer competition from the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, and Atlassian.

Microsoft just launched a Slack-like messaging app called Teams last month, while Facebook came out with its own workplace service in October. Atlassian, the maker of another business messaging app HipChat, went public last year.

Egan's hiring should help Slack better-position itself in selling to the bigger enterprise companies. Although Slack likes to brag about its growth without a dedicated sales team, it's nearly impossible to sign big contracts unless you have direct salespeople on your team.

It's also a signal that Slack's long-awaited enterprise product may be getting closer to launching. The enterprise version of the service has been in development for two years, and is being tested among some large customers. But there have some question marks around its status and Slack's homepage still says its enterprise product is "coming soon."

Slack has over a million paid users and over four million daily active users. It said it's on track to generate $100 million in annual recurring revenue this year.

It's unclear what exactly made Egan want to leave Dropbox. But according to an article by The Information last year, Egan was demoted to a smaller role after the hirings of COO Dennis Woodside and global VP of revenue Thomas Hansen, as the company shied away from traditional enterprise sales tactics for a more reseller-focused approach.

SEE ALSO: An ill-informed salesperson sent this email pitch to Amazon’s CTO

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The pros and cons of drinking protein shakes after exercising

With Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, the results are in and it’s clear that there’s a new kid in town. Google’s new Pixel smartphone, released just last month, cracked the winner’s circle, while the incumbent Apple devices have seen better days.

The Thanksgiving Weekend Winners Are….

We analyzed both Android and Apple devices to see which experienced the highest lift in new device activations since Thanksgiving, as well as which specific day of the holiday period had the most device activations.

The Google Pixel emerged as the ultimate victor as it experienced a 112% growth of new devices activated as compared to the average of the activations from the previous four weekends.

While this huge lift may surprise some, it will also confirm what many have believed since the device was released in October: the Pixel is a very impressive device. While already receiving critical praise, the Pixel models are also beginning to meet analyst’s sales expectations, which is very good news for Google.

Also of interest is the fact that 46% of the Pixels that were activated over the weekend were through Verizon, which is trying to become the exclusive carrier for the device, and offered a generous discount (nearly $400 less than retail prices) over the shopping holiday. But, that means the remaining 54% of new Pixel users purchased the phone from Google or from a retailer and settled for the smaller discounts being offered by other carriers like T-Mobile. This is a testament to the strength of the Pixel and requires a highly motivated buyer.

Android fans should also be encouraged to see the Samsung Galaxy S7 in the second spot of weekend winners. With Samsung unable to rely on the Galaxy Note 7 to get them through the holidays, the company was forced to shift its focus to the older Galaxy S models. Samsung reiterated the safety of the devices, and retailers such as Best Buy offered some impressive deals for Android addicts.

Apple devices filled out the rest of the top 5, thanks in large part to offers from retailers like Best Buy and Walmart on the 9.7 inch iPad Pro, iPhone 7 and iPad mini 2. Apple historically does not offer major discounts on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, though this year the company did offer gift cards on full priced-items.

Apple’s Newest Devices Show Lackluster Holiday Performance

Apple released the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus this past September and both models had impressive early adoption. The great early start seen by these models might explain why the holiday weekend wasn’t entirely impressive, as those who really wanted the device had already purchased it.

Still, the iPhone 7 saw a respectable 13% lift in new device activations versus the prior four weekends, but the iPhone 7 Plus only experienced a 1% lift.

During last year’s Black Friday weekend, the newest Apple models fared much better. The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus saw lifts of 36% and 29% respectively.

When we look across all Apple device activations over the holiday weekend, there are a number of interesting takeaways. First, the iPhone 6 and 6S models saw lower activations versus this time last year which is not a huge surprise given the minimal deals being offered on each model. Additionally, the iPhone 5S was the only phone to have a positive lift in new device activations year over year, which is somewhat surprising given that this phone is more than 3 years old. But, Target was offering it for almost $250 less than the regular retail price.

Similar to last year, iPads had a more impressive showing than iPhones. While not as striking as the lifts of last year, all iPad models saw positive lifts in new activations versus the prior four weekends. With impactful iPad deals from retailers on Black Friday, the holiday weekend once again gave consumers a reason to buy the more extravagant tablets.

Highest Device Activations Reported on Thanksgiving Day

Interestingly, Thanksgiving Day saw the highest number of new device activations with 22% of the total, narrowly beating out Saturday which came in at 21%.

In recent years, retailers have pulled in holiday shopping deals to begin earlier, and this year was no exception. Giant retailers like Amazon and Walmart increased their sale offers dramatically in the week leading up to Thanksgiving and clearly it paid off with many folks cashing in before the holiday arrived.

Saturday coming in second place should not be too much of a surprise as consumers are setting up their recently purchased devices from Black Friday and trying out apps on their new models. Cyber Monday falling in last place also should not come as a surprise, since consumers purchasing devices online have to wait sometime until they receive their device and are able to activate it.

Mobile Marketers Must Capitalize on the Influx of New Devices

With another holiday shopping weekend come and gone, it is now time for brands to evaluate how their apps fared. New devices tend to bring about more churn of apps as users decide which apps to bring to their new device. As such, apps need to be ready for any and all devices, in experience and performance, to convince those users they are worthy of making it onto the new device. And more importantly, apps need to protect their relationships with mobile users by being smart about how they engage with those users. Only those apps that offer the best experience and the most value to users will survive the inevitable “app purge” of the holiday season.

Methodology

Localytics is the leading mobile engagement platform across more than 2.7 billion devices and 37,000 mobile and web apps. Localytics processes 120 billion data points monthly. For this analysis, Localytics examined the percentage increase of new devices on Black Friday Weekend (Nov 24th – Nov 28th) to a baseline of the prior 4 weekends in November (Oct 27th – Oct 31st, Nov 3rd – Nov 7th, Nov 10th – Nov 14th, Nov 17th – Nov 21st). A new device is defined as a device that is seen by Localytics for the first time by downloading one of the apps incorporating our SDK. For the analysis on which day had the most activity, Localytics examined the most popular Apple and Android devices and determined the total percentage of new devices for these models on Thanksgiving (Nov 24th), Black Friday (Nov 25th), Saturday (Nov 26th), Sunday (Nov 27th) and Cyber Monday (Nov 28th) from the total number of active devices for these days. To establish the difference between Black Friday 2015 and Black Friday 2016, Localytics took the published numbers from the report published last year and compared them to the data collected this year. Data is based on the US.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So - is your organisation ready to take full advantages of the (potential) power of sales playbooks? I suggest you download this 10-point check-list (there are no forms to fill in), and then drop me a line to let me know how well you believe you've done...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the Founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B sales process consultants. Following a successful corporate career spanning start-ups to established corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of B2B-focused growth-phase technology companies, helping them to perfect sales playbooks that drive predictable revenue growth.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

• A Simple Guide to Compelling Messaging for the Complex Sale
• ADOPTED: A Structured Approach to Opportunity Qualification for the Complex Sale
• Our Guide to Identifying your Ideal Customers

By Mark Schaefer

Shawn Van Dyke was in a heap of trouble.

His wife had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. His job running a small construction company afforded a lot of flexibility, but didn’t provide the medical benefits he needed to cover his rising bills, or the salary level he needed to feed his five children. He had a stack of invoices he couldn’t pay.

“I was frustrated,” he said. “The more broke I became the harder I worked. The harder I worked, the more irritable I became. I was digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole financially, mentally, and even physically.

“I didn’t like the person I was at home or at work and I knew something had to change. I had a few job offers but none of them worked out. In most cases I was trading one kind of insanity for another. I was at a loss about what to do with my life.

Talking with friends and a career coach helped Shawn get clear about his strengths. He loved the construction industry and sharing his business expertise with others. He sensed there was a huge need around teaching construction professionals how to run their businesses more efficiently. He needed something to work and didn’t have a lot of room for error, so he decided to test the water before committing his precious time to a new venture.

Free content opens the door

“I conducted a study to confirm that indeed, paperwork was the biggest problem … and I also identified a host of other needs like HR management and job planning. I had enough ideas to develop a year’s worth of content.

“To stand out, I did something crazy. I decided to write an eBook and give it away. It was a risk, but I thought this was a way to become known — by giving away extraordinary value.

“Things started to happen. My free book helped me land a spot as a guest on a podcast. People were paying attention to me! Now my audience could hear my voice for the first time and my traction continued to grow.

But things were still moving too slowly for Shawn. He didn’t have the luxury of building an audience patiently over time. He had medical bills to pay. He had mouths to feed. He needed to put a rocket behind his efforts and that’s the perfect time to engage with influencers as part of a personal branding strategy. When you don’t have time to build your own audience, borrow someone else’s!

Enter the influencers

We live in an amazing time when power and authority have been flipped. The seats of influence no longer reside behind a news desk, on Wall Street, or in the corner office. Today, anybody with an Internet connection can create content and have the opportunity to have a voice, create power, and find an audience.

Trusted influencers with enormous power to “move the needle” are emerging in every market vertical. And by paying attention to the people in his market, Shawn found a key influencer in the construction space.

“I had been following a well-known builder in Boston who had established a huge online audience,” Van Dyke said. “He was doing great work and was obviously spending a lot of time connecting to people on Instagram and Snapchat. I looked for opportunities to engage with him by commenting on his posts for a few months. I felt sure he knew who I was so I took the next step and asked him a few questions over email. That went well, and it led to a follow-up phone call. So I was building on this weak social relationship from the Internet and I was becoming a real human being to him.

Moving the needle

“As popular as he was, I could tell that he had opportunities to improve his business. In the spirit of creating amazing value, I offered my consulting services to him for free, with no expectation of getting anything in return.

“I was providing so much great value to him that he started talking about me on his social media accounts. He re-posted pictures of my advice and labeled me as ‘his coach.’ That was the validation I needed! My social media audience exploded all at once.

“This worked so well I identified a few more influencers in the construction space and invited them to a private Facebook group. My connections in this group led to my first invitation to speak at a national building supply show. All of this opportunity came about because I was genuinely helping people. My content isn’t about selling me. It’s about serving others.”

Van Dyke probably didn’t know it, but a large part of his success was due to a psychological principle called “reciprocity.”

Humans have a deep psychological need to re-pay a debt or kindness. If somebody gives you a gift, you probably look for an opportunity to return the favor. If a couple invites you to a party, you probably feel a little guilt until you can invite them to something in return.

This deep-seated need for reciprocity is so powerful, that after intensive study, sociologists such as Alvin Gouldner report that there’s no human society that does not subscribe to this rule.

So when Van Dyke provided his consulting services for free … well, something HAD to happen. In return, the famous builder promoted Shawn and his work, an event that led to more exposure and his first speaking invitation. He scaled this by offering free services to the influencers in his Facebook group.

This first success began a cycle of generosity and reciprocity that rapidly made him well-known in his industry. Van Dyke began turning up on lists of the most influential people in the U.S. construction industry. He probably could have earned this himself with many years of work, but the golden touch of his influencer connections helped him advance his timeline.

The results

This story has a happy ending.

Focusing on becoming known for his construction business expertise freed up time for Van Dyke to spend with his family. His priority is creating family experiences and the memorable events they need to enjoy before his wife’s terrible disease takes this chance away. The momentum of his brand is building, the money is starting to come, and the stack of bills is getting smaller.

“The most encouraging part of this for me has been receiving messages from people who tell me my advice has changed their businesses, and their lives. My fuel is knowing that I am making a difference.”

Free tools for finding influencers

How do you find influencers that can make a difference to you? Here are five tips to find the people who are having the biggest impact in your field:

1. Use BuzzSumo’s (free) influencer search tool. You can use keywords and find Twitter handles of accounts sharing similar keyword-related content. Filters will let you sort them by reach, authority, influence, and engagement.
2. Try Followerwonk, a free app on the Moz site. This tool will let you search Twitter users based on keywords in their bio and sort results based on their number of followers and social authority. You can also compare influencers, which will allow you to decide which influencers you want to align yourself with.
3. Twellow is a very useful site that can help you build your audience in several ways. It allows you to search influencers by industry and further breaks it down based on location, subject matter, and profession.
4. Perhaps you want to find people in a specific social network? Go onto each platform and perform searches based on keywords that would suggest a common interest. You’ll need to dig a little bit. Look at their profiles — see how they are engaging with people, who they are engaging with, who is following them, and who they are following. Pay attention to the types of conversations they are having and what they are saying. That will say a lot about who they are and if they are someone you want to align yourself with.
5. Check out industry-related conferences and scan the speaker list. These are probably well-known and influential leaders.

Making the connection

Once you’ve created a list of influencers, it’s time to start finding ways to connect with them.

• Don’t “pitch” influencers. Befriend them.
• Help influencers before you have any expectation of them helping you. Subscribe to their blog or video channel, follow them on Twitter, like them on Facebook. Look for opportunities to engage through a blog comment, a congratulatory message on LinkedIn, or a tweet. Nothing says “I love you” more than a re-tweet now and then.
• Mention them in your own blogs and content. Highlight great work they’ve done. When you link to their work in your own content, there’s a good chance they’ll get a notification of that (called a “ping”) and probably notice that you did it.

All of these little touchpoints add up. Every little favor, tweet, and mention adds to your bank of social capital. Don’t try to make a withdrawal from that bank (like asking for a favor) until you’ve made some contributions of your own.

How have you established connections with people who have helped you build your audience?

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

The post Case Study: Using influencers to quickly build an audience for your content appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Author: Jeff Coveney

According to B2B Marketing and Marketscan, only 32% of marketers pursue a data-first strategy, and less than half of marketers feel prepared for a data-driven marketing future. So it’s no surprise that a question I hear often is: “How do we gain insight into the effectiveness of our marketing efforts?”

Many companies aren’t able to report on marketing and sales efforts due to data and process issues. It’s like trying to put the pretty siding on your house before the foundation is built. The end result is reporting that doesn’t make sense–or does it?

Most likely, there’s an underlying problem that’s preventing those reports from providing positive intelligence. In reality, the reports and dashboards might function great, but bad processes and bad data will result in inaccurate reporting.

I’m a baseball fan so I’ll use a baseball analogy to break down the problem. How do we know that Ted Williams is one of the best hitters that ever lived? (Williams is the last player to hit over a .400 batting average, batting .406 in 1941.) Baseball’s efforts are measured in a consistent fashion and recorded properly.

What if there was no process for the scorekeeper to record statistics? What if one scorekeeper considered errors to be hits? What if the scorekeeper called in sick and didn’t record the stats of the game? All of these inconsistent processes and data issues would result in inaccurate measurement–just like what many businesses experience.

Let’s dive into the root causes of three common reporting challenges and how you can get back on track:

Challenge #1: Bad Data Equals Inaccurate Results

Many times, companies are trying to report on results when no data exists or the data is poor. For example, let’s say you want to break out all of your revenue by country to gain insights on which geography is producing the most revenue or generating the most leads. If you don’t capture the lead’s country or you’re using inconsistent values like United States, USA, and Lisa (yes, we’ve seen data like this), your reports won’t provide you with the metrics you need.

Before your reports can produce positive insights, you must improve the underlying data behind them to get the vision you need. Data management is a big picture initiative but here are a few tips to get started.

• Pick ten important fields (Lead Source, Country, Industry, etc.) that your organization leverages and perform an audit.
• Assess your data quality by running field-specific reports to understand the gaps that exist. Is data blank? Which data is incorrect?
• Normalize the data that matters. For example, if your “Country” field has values of USA and US, adjust that data to a single value like US.
• Fill in the blanks. Don’t have the data you need? Consider appending the data with a data services partner.

Challenge #2: Lack of Process

To understand how their efforts translate into revenue, B2B marketers need to perform closed-loop analysis across the customer lifecycle. How many new names turn into qualified leads? How many qualified leads then turn into customers? How many customers continue to buy additional products and services? These questions are important, but the answers require massive process consistency in both sales and marketing. Unfortunately, some companies don’t have the processes in place that will drive the insights.

For example, if marketing generated 100 trade show leads, yet sales never contacted them because they were stuck in the system, there would be no way to gain vision into those funnel metrics. Or, maybe a sales rep created a duplicate record for a new deal when the original record had all the marketing intelligence. The end result would be that marketing activity would not be tied to the deal’s success, and marketing wouldn’t get any of the revenue attribution.

Process definition and change management are some of the most difficult initiatives a company can tackle, but they’re critical for ensuring your reporting is accurate. As a next step, begin working on processes that can set the foundation for long-term reporting success.

• Document every piece of your lead flow process. Which forms do leads come in from? How do list imports affect data? How do you account for leads generated from your CRM? You will be surprised by how many gaps you’ll uncover.
• Develop a lead lifecycle process that both sales and marketing can agree on (and follow).
• Define roles within your marketing organization to ensure consistent process is followed. For example, define who sets up trade shows in your marketing automation platform and who imports the data. Too many cooks in the kitchen can cause process inconsistencies.

Challenge #3: Measuring Successes Instead of Efficiencies Gained

When you first get started on your advanced reporting journey, set expectations that process and data issues will arise. Consider shifting your thinking to efficiencies gained rather than successes measured. For example, we recently engaged with a client to provide better vision into their marketing and sales successes. Instead of finding the successes, we collectively identified $250,0000 worth of efficiencies that the client could gain with several process enhancements and technical adjustments. This change in mindset put the company on a path for long-term success and set benchmarks for future comparison.

Identify process and data gaps in order to improve your insights for the long-term. Ask yourself:

• Is sales following the proper process for moving leads through the system?
• Are marketing qualified leads thrown over to sales without anyone following up?
• Is the marketing team following a process for attributing successes to programs?
• What data is considered good and bad?

Your reports don’t suck–it’s the data and processes underneath that need improvement. This is not an overnight process so the sooner you start, the better your long-term vision will be.

What other reporting issues have you come across and how did you fix them? Share your insight in the comments below!

---

3 Reasons Your B2B Marketing Reports Stink and How to Fix Them was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 3 Reasons Your B2B Marketing Reports Stink and How to Fix Them appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Startup marketing can be a challenging journey, especially if you are starting from scratch. With so many digital channels to invest in and thousands of experts offering you multiple strategies, it is hard to make an informed decision.

The difference between startups and established businesses is the fact that the former is highly concerned with customer acquisition and retention more than anything else.

An established business might have the budget to burn cash for awareness and branding, whereas a startup’s major concern is more likely paying customers that can be generated without that cash burn.

A popular article in Huffington Post reads:

A lot of entrepreneurs get too excited or maybe they just don’t have clarity of direction yet. On the other hand business owners that do have an overall plan and get all of their strategies pulling the same way, are thriving.

I couldn’t agree more with the above statement.

Sean Ellis, the first marketer at Dropbox coined the term growth hacking, with an entire science behind it focused towards technical startup marketing.

This post talks about how popular startups understood the startup marketing funnel and applied successful hacks at every level to reach where they are today.

Understanding the startup marketing funnel

The marketing funnel for startups is based on the AARRR model. Here is what it stands for:

Image Source: Growth Rocks

Let’s dive into them with some more details:

1. Acquisition: For startups, this would mean how you can gain the necessary awareness in order to see results from your marketing efforts.
2. Activation: Once people know about your business, why should they convert? This step talks about how to move people further from the awareness stage.
3. Retention: Why should someone keep using your product or service when there are multiple options available in the market? Retention explains how to keep your customers for life.
4. Referral: Nothing is better than word of mouth marketing. This stage talks about how to get more customers out of your existing customers.
5. Revenue: Finally, after executing all the above steps, understanding how your business will maintain a positive cash flow and growing profits is the key here.

Now that we are clear with the different steps of the startup marketing funnel, I am going to illustrate all these stages with examples from popular startups.

1. Acquisition: How Airbnb generated the right awareness for their product

After raising some initial funds for their business, the founders of Airbnb Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, started to analyze better ways of scaling their business other than paid acquisition.

They narrowed down their market research to one question.

Where does the target audience that looks for something other than a standard hotel experience hang out digitally?

The answer was Craigslist.

In order to get more traction for their listings, Airbnb decided to give an option to their site visitors for sharing their listing on Craigslist as well.

With a smooth marketing message, they encouraged people to share listings on Craigslist as well.

The results?

Using this hack, Airbnb received the attention of thousands of users from Craigslist, and since their listings were much more attractive with better descriptions and photographs than Craigslist, this led to a viral growth cycle.

Image Source: Growth Hackers

2. Activation: How PayPal activated users

Paypal was one of the most successful startups of the late 90’s.

Their phenomenal growth story involves going from 1 million users in March 2000 to 5 million users in summer 2000.

They started activating users by paying them to sign up. With every sign up, Paypal paid you $20 to sign up (and also $20 for a referral). As the value of their network grew, they reduced the bonus to $10, $5 and eventually nothing.

This was a classic example of activating users by giving an incentive.

Paypal tried a lot of advertising but this method achieved them the lowest CAC.

Image Source: Quora

3. Retention: How Groove reduced their churn rate by 71%

A major problem SaaS companies face is high churn rates.

Churn rate is the percentage of people exiting out of your subscription based business.

One such company that was struggling with churn rate was Groove.

Groove is a simple help desk software for businesses which comes at $15 per user.

Despite a healthy flow of new users, Groove’s 4.5% churn rate was making the business model unsustainable.

The folks at Groove analyzed the difference between users who stayed for more than 30 days and the ones who quit before that.

They divided people in the following categories:

After a lot of analysis, Groove decided to send targeted emails to people who spent less time on the platform and were likely to opt out after 30 days.

People with sessions under 2 minutes were sent this message:

Image Source: Kissmetrics

Someone who logged in fewer than 2 times in the first 10 days was sent the following message:

Image Source: Kissmetrics

The results?

Using this conversion optimization strategy, Groove was able to reduce churn rate by 71%.

Key Takeaways

Understanding where people might be struggling with your product/service and addressing the same could get amazing results.

4. Referral: How Dropbox fueled their growth with referral marketing

Dropbox is probably one of the most popular tech startups. The success behind it’s viral growth is referral marketing.

With paid marketing, Dropbox was spending $250 per customer for a product that was priced at $99.

“Dropbox went from 100,000 to 4,000,000 users in 15 months”

Here are the steps Dropbox used to boost their growth…

Every friend you referred to Dropbox will earn you 500 MB more storage. You can earn up to 16GB of free space using the strategy.

Image Source : Referral Candy

They also made sure that inviting friends was easy to do .

Image Source : Referral Candy

The key takeaway from this story is that word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful strategies.

If you can incorporate referral signups/purchases in your business model with a valuable incentive for customers, it can be a strong driver for growth.

5. Revenue: The growth engine of PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a startup in one of the most competitive spaces – photo editing.

However, building a great product with a freemium model has done really well for them.

Millions of users join every month and billions of photos are edited.

People can access basic filters for free. For advanced filters and tools, people have to pay $4.99 on a monthly basis.

And hundreds of thousands of users pay that subscription price.

Image Source: Fortune

The company makes millions and the CEO mentioned that the growth is 40% year over year.

The major takeaway from this is about building freemium models.

If you offer a part of your service as free, users will learn how good your product is.

This will help them understand the value they could get once they purchased your product or service.

Going freemium with your products or services can do well for business growth.

Wrap

As a startup, you need to understand which part of the AARRR funnel does your business lie in.

Maybe you are at the initial stages and awareness is most important to you.

Maybe you need to improve customer retention and focus your energy there.

Whatever be the case, evaluation of your current scenario and taking action based on that is something that will drive substantial growth.

Think about every boss you’ve had since you were a kid, even including the parents of the kids you babysat, the owner of the greasy spoon where you waited tables, and the director of the camp where you were a counselor.

Were any of these bosses so inspiring that whenever they come to mind, you recall how much you wanted to be like them? What behaviors clued you in that these folks belong to a special category of successful leaders?

How to Spot a Good Leader

Whether they focus on the community, an institution, a cause, their values, or the very work itself, the most beloved leaders don’t operate out of their own self-interest or self-aggrandizement. Their teams have no fear of arbitrary punishment or attack; instead, their people strive never to let them down. These bosses don’t even have to be particularly social, like the proverbial leader you’d want to have a beer with, but they know how to build and maintain relationships, and under the right conditions, they usually have a sense of humor.

Successful leaders reduce both risk and fear for the people they lead. They know there’s rarely any need to play at being the Alpha by strutting, bellowing, or taking all the best bits and leaving only crumbs for others.

Rather, they create a sense of security by making it clear that they know where they’re going — and that they’re committed to bringing the organization and its constituents along with them. They step back to look at the big picture without losing sight of current details; they generate alternatives at the proper level and in the appropriate areas. They take the blame when something goes wrong, and they’re comfortable shouldering the responsibility.

4 Steps to Being a Better Leader

Here are some of the things you may have seen your best bosses do — and that you may want to try for yourself:

1. Approach people with full attention: Turning squarely to face them means you’re giving them your focus rather than withholding or trying to sidle away. Don’t declare your opinions first, interrupt, or cut others off. Ask, ask, and ask again to show you want their input. After they’ve finished speaking, restate their comments to show that you understood. And manage their expectations by giving them a practical sense of where you’re heading.
2. Practice two kinds of acknowledgment: First, listen attentively to demonstrate interest, caring, and empathetic support for their humanity. Second, give explicit recognition, appreciation, and an occasional standing ovation to show that you value both their capabilities and their participation. Point out how and when others contribute, run interference for you, pick up the slack, take the heat, or experiment.
3. Avoid huddling with colleagues you already know well. Instead, share yourself with everyone. If you’re any good, they’ll want you; if they don’t want you, you’ve probably demonstrated that you’re not up to the task — whether by omission or commission. You’ll learn more about what people actually want and need, and they’ll give you more in return.
4. Give up the need to have all the answers. Instead, lead people to find their own, and then compare and contrast your ideas with theirs to come up with joint, robust decisions.

Above All Else, Know Thyself!

If you hope to manage others well, the true first step is to know and control yourself. It takes work, but it isn’t difficult.

Note how you’re feeling — not to parade it or explain it, but so that you can make it conscious rather than letting your emotional reactions bleed into your thoughts and actions. Remember, your goal is leadership, not your personal satisfaction. If you’re feeling driven and urgent, overly intense, or over-excited, check yourself for excessive ambitiousness, fear, or anger to prevent lashing out, imploding, or withdrawing.

But it’s not enough just to manage your own behavior. Be sure to hire people who also have a track record of self-awareness, acknowledging others, and interacting with empathy. And screen out those who don’t make room for others’ contributions — or who show preference for the folks who make them feel big.

Adopt these practices and intentions, and some day you may be the inspiring leader who comes to mind when your team members think of their best bosses.

Empathy has never been in more explicit demand from corporate leaders — particularly after a divisive U.S. presidential election and amid continued economic uncertainty around the globe. As the newly released 2016 Empathy Index demonstrates, empathy, which is about understanding our emotional impact on others and making change as a result, is more important to a successful business than it has ever been, correlating to growth, productivity, and earnings per employee.

 

The Empathy Index seeks to answer the question: Which companies are successfully creating empathetic cultures? These are the companies that retain the best people, create environments where diverse teams thrive, and ultimately reap the greatest financial rewards.

Methodology

This year’s index builds on the methodology of last year’s. We updated our model to reflect a deeper understanding of empathy, adjusted our criteria, and expanded the sources of data used.

We break down empathy into categories: ethics, leadership, company culture, brand perception, and public messaging through social media. Our publicly available metrics including CEO approval ratings from staff, ratio of women on boards, and number of accounting infractions and scandals. This year we added a carbon metric. The financial information came from S&P Capital IQ, and the employee information from Glassdoor. We analyzed 2 million tweets from between September 27 and October 16 this year. An additional source of qualitative data expanded the survey: We used a panel selected from the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. The leaders were asked to rate the companies’ morality.

The index focuses on global companies, with an emphasis on UK and U.S. companies and 10 Indian companies. It was not possible to analyze Chinese countries as we hoped, due to a lack of publicly available information. Additional geographies, including Africa, will be added in the next report, in March 2017.

Results

The top 10 companies in the Global Empathy Index 2015 increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10, and generated 50% more earnings (defined by market capitalization). In our work with clients, we have found a correlation as high as 80% between departments with higher empathy and those with high performers.

Empathy, we found, is correlated with ethics, and any ethical failure can prove costly. This is evidenced by the drop in Deutsche Bank from 40th in 2015 to 110th this year and by Wells Fargo plummeting from 20th to 130th. Both falls came in light of the two companies’ recent scandals and poor brand perception, both factoring into our index.

The tech sector continues to lead our ranking, now accounting for an even bigger share of our top ten (60% in 2016 versus 50% in 2015), with Facebook knocking Microsoft off the top spot, owing to its focus on improving its internal culture and the introduction of the Empathy Lab.

Creating a More Empathetic Company

How do you go about infusing your company culture with more empathy? Start by identifying the trouble spots — the activities and behaviors that communicate a lack of empathy — and addressing them. Ryanair did this with its “Always Getting Better” program in 2014, scrapping unallocated seating and many hidden charges and reducing carry-on luggage restrictions. CEO Michael O’Leary said, infamously, “If I’d only known being nice to customers was going to work so well, I’d have started many years ago.” The result was a rise of 13 places in this year’s index and a net profit increase from €867 million the previous year to €1.24 billion ($1.39 billion) in the year to end-March 2016.

Taking the first step does not have to be dramatic or costly. One way to promote empathy in an organization is to deliver small “empathy nudges” systematically. The nudges may seem insignificant in isolation, but in aggregate they can have a big impact. One idea from a European bank is to create an “empathy fund,” a small pot of money that retail staff can use at their discretion to engage with customers, for example, by sending a sympathy card to a bereaved client. At an automotive company, micronudges have included allowing salesmen to go tie-less and displaying signs that detailed the benefits of vehicle features to drivers. These and other small gestures have been credited with goosing sales by 23% compared to dealerships that did not adopt the empathy program.

Finally, as with all activities aimed at change, it’s important to measure empathy — a task that’s easier than it sounds as long as you measure what matters. We use a variety of public data sources (as we have in the previous indices) that correlate to empathy: the ethics of a company, how a company is led, what the employees think of the CEO, and how many scandals and audit infractions the company has had. The first step to being empathetic is to diagnose where the problems and strengths of the organization are in order to focus resources.

Sometimes it seems that every subject matter expert aspires to be a thought leader. And why not? It seems like a great thing to be, like a “trusted advisor” or a “team player.”

But what does it actually mean to be a thought leader? How do you become one? Is it in fact a good marketing strategy for the professional services firm? The answers to these questions, and more, are what we will cover in this post.

Let’s start with an understanding of what thought leadership marketing actually is.

Thought Leadership Marketing Defined

Thought leaders are individuals or firms recognized for their specialized expertise and their influence on the development of their discipline. They are both subject matter experts and influencers.

Thought leadership marketing is the process of increasing the visibility of specialized expertise and accelerating market influence to accomplish marketing goals, such building brand strength or generating new business.

Thought Leadership vs. Content Marketing

Thought leadership is often confused with content marketing. Content marketing is a much broader discipline. It involves using content to attract, educate and close new business. Thought leadership is a specific strategy within the broader concept of content marketing.

For example, a firm might publish helpful content that explains confusing terms and concepts without offering any innovative or advanced thinking. Another firm may offer entertaining or humorous content. Both of these are content marketing strategies, but neither would be considered thought leadership.

Insightful, Forward Thinking Made Visible

Thought leadership involves more than expertise and an understanding of industry best practices.

It’s being the expert that brings a fresh, insightful perspective to a common problem or anticipates emerging trends. Often a thought leader’s perspective is at odds with conventional wisdom — even controversial. But a successful thought leader can turn that new insight into tomorrow’s best practice.

Now, having great insights is not enough. Those insights need to be widely visible if they are to become influential.

And this is where many potential thought leaders stumble. They have the expertise and the insight, but no one sees it. Think of it as invisible expertise.

Five Levels of Visibility

Our research has been able to identify five distinct levels of visible thought leadership. Each level has increasing levels of influence and impact.

Level 1: The Resident Experts

Recognized as an expert by clients, staff and colleagues that work directly with the thought leader, these individuals are not well known outside of their firm. External influence is minimal.

Level 2: The Local Heroes

Known in their local market or small industry niche, these individual experts’ reputations have moved beyond the boundaries of their firms. Occasionally they attract new business based on their thought leadership.

Level 3: The Rising Stars

These individuals’ reputations are moving onto a regional stage. They are becoming more widely known as influencers and are attracting new business and commanding higher fees. Influence is growing.

Level 4: The Industry Rock Stars

These are the nationally recognized names within their industries. They are influential thought leaders, and they draw top-tier opportunities to their firm. They are sought out as keynote speakers at major industry events and are often quoted in the press.

Level 5: The Global Superstars

These individuals’ visibility and reputation for thought leadership have developed beyond their niche and industry. Their influence extends to many industries and, in some cases, to the general public. Business flows to their firms, and major brands clamor to be associated with them. Their opinions can influence societies as a whole.

How to Develop Thought-Leading Insights

How do you develop the insights that move a field forward? While there is no formula that can guarantee you will become an insightful, influential thinking, there are meaningful steps you can take to take your expertise to the next level.

1. Narrow Your Focus

Our research on high-profile experts shows that narrowing your focus greatly increases the likelihood of deepening your expertise. The narrower your focus, the faster your ascent to leadership.

The reason is pretty simple. Going narrower almost always allows you to accumulate experience and insight faster. That accelerates the process.

1. Do Original Research

Conducting original research on a topic gives you a huge advantage. High-quality research produces new insights that can be applied to clients’ challenges and shared with others. It is one of the key paths to thought leadership. New research findings are the raw material of thought leadership.

1. Take a Contrarian Perspective

A fresh perspective is another hallmark of thought leader level thinking. Perhaps it’s taking a client’s perspective on a challenge when everyone else is viewing it through his or her own lens. Or when everyone is headed in one direction, you explore the opposite view.

A contrarian perspective doesn’t mean being quarrelsome or negative. It means looking at a problem from a novel angle.

1. Mash Up Your Expertise

Sometimes great insight comes from applying the methods and thinking from one discipline to another: putting two seemingly unrelated fields of expertise together. For example, what happens when you apply design thinking to accounting services?

1. Interact With Other Experts

Having a good working relationship with other experts helps you in a couple of important ways:

First, it gives you access to the most advanced and influential thinking. Influential thought leaders talk with each other. You help each other get smarter.

Second, your colleagues become your amplifiers. They add credibility to you through their association with you. You are a part of “the club” of influential experts, and they will often share your latest thinking or refer new business to you.

Making Thought Leadership Visible

The challenge with expertise in general and thought leadership in particular is that they are invisible. You can’t tell a thought leader by how they look.

Nor does declaring yourself a thought leader make you one. It could just as easily backfire.

Instead, thought leadership must be demonstrated. Generally this happens in one of three ways:

1. Direct Interaction

This approach involves working with people directly, perhaps as a client or coworker — interacting with colleagues in meetings, in educational settings or at conferences. The interaction, however, must allow the professionals to demonstrate their competence.

Interacting at a cocktail party or networking event probably won’t cut it.

The interaction needs to be substantive enough that people can sample the thought leader’s expertise. Think of it as an expertise appetizer.

1. Writing

Writing the definitive best-selling book on a topic is the gold standard of thought leadership. But if a book sounds overwhelming, there other ways that you can convey your expertise through writing. Articles in trade publications, blog posts, white papers and executive guides can also communicate your insights and build your reputation.

Of course, not all writing builds thought leadership. As a matter of fact, if done carelessly, it can easily reveal a real lack of leadership.

1. Speaking

Public speaking is another good way to demonstrate thought leadership. For many experts, speaking engagements are their single best source of new business leads.

Live speaking events are also a great way to meet new people and get fresh input. Sometimes audience questions can be a source of new insights and inspiration.

Sharing Your Thought Leadership

How do you spread the word about your thought-leading content? There are a wide variety of potential techniques to share the insights you are developing. A good cross section of the most popular techniques is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Online and offline marketing techniques

Notice that the figure illustrates a balance of traditional offline techniques, such as networking and speaking engagements, and their newer online counterparts, such as social media and webinars. Interestingly, for each offline technique there is a corresponding online technique.

The most successful firms understand where their potential clients look for thought leadership and make their content visible in those channels.

How Your Firm Benefits From Thought Leadership Marketing

Thought leadership not only benefits the subject matter expert but also the professional services firm they are associated with. Many of these are intuitive, but our recent research study on high-visibility experts has documented them in some detail.

1. Faster Growth

Thought leaders’ single biggest impact is their ability to drive firm growth. Highly visible thought leadership attracts clients who want or need greater expertise. The leads are more qualified and easier to generate. Prospects close more quickly with less effort and greater success.

1. Higher Billing Rates

There is a direct relationship between the visibility of a subject matter expert’s thought leadership and the billing rate that expert is able to charge. This relationship is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Relative hourly rates buyers will pay, by Visible Expert level

1. A Stronger Brand

If you can combine thought leadership with greater visibility your brand will become significantly stronger. That brand not only drives growth and profitability, it also creates a more valuable firm.

And when you make thought leadership one of your primary marketing strategies, you create a strong differentiator (specialized expertise) and a powerful strategic focus.

1. Attract the Best Talent

The best people want to work with industry leaders. Thought leadership is a great way to demonstrate the quality of your firm and attract employees who themselves want to become thought leaders. In a time when top talent is in high demand, thought leadership is a potent recruiting tool.

1. The Best Opportunities Come to You

Leading subject matter experts not only attract the best new clients and the most talented people, they also yield the best strategic partners and business relationships. When other organizations look to an industry for potential partners they look first for thought leaders.

Leading brands tend to want to work with other leading brands. High visibility experts report that they have their pick of teaming relationships, marketing partnerships and other strategic business opportunities. Thought leadership marketing not only helps you get ahead, it also makes it easier to stay ahead.

Singapore's deal-focused digital buyers appear to value low prices and sales above all else when it comes to online shopping. Case in point: A growing share of consumers there planned to partake in Singles Day sales this year.

If you are wrapping up the fiscal year, one of two things are happening. You are either feeling really good about how your sales team is finishing up 2016 or you are trying to figure out how not to repeat the same problems next year.

Research shows that using a third-party expert to customize and ramp up your organization’s sales processes, tools and content will drive high-impact results. Research conducted by the Aberdeen Group shows that best-in-class sales organizations are 61% more likely to turn to outside consultants or trainers for assistance in coaching their reps to success.How do you make sure your investment dollars are well spent? Here are some key things to think about before picking a partner to help you reach your sales goals.

Customized to Your Company

Any sales initiative needs to build on the foundation you already have in place. Think “draft in”, not “rip and replace”. Cookie-cutter approaches may work to an extent, but to drive real results you need something that is customized to your sales organization and your unique buyers. Keep what’s working. Fix what isn’t.

A Focus on Cross-Functional Alignment

Your customer engagement process is a critical component to the success of your sales organization. With today’s subscription economy and the digital buyer, it’s never been more important to ensure that your entire company is aligned behind the value you provide, how you capture that value, and what makes your solution different than your competitors. In order to drive lasting results, any partner you hire should build synergy between sales and other customer-facing departments such as marketing, services, product, etc.

Drives Executive Ownership

When executives own the process, they can drive the necessary results. Executives and managers should play an integral role in the content and planning that surrounds the initiative. This ownership also allows company sales leaders to analyze the value of the partnership on an ongoing basis, while ensuring continued engagements match your organization’s culture and contribute to overall goals. Your sales transformation partner should help drive success, but the ownership of the initiative should remain with internal sales leadership.

A Plan to Measure Success

Ensure your partner has a defined way to measure success of the initiative. Measurement should be built in to the offered methodology to ensure you receive a comprehensive program that continually provides necessary feedback to benchmark success. If you’ve got a plan to measure results, you lay the groundwork for implementing true change and not one-off success.

Remember, a third party needs you to thrive in order to sustain their own success. If they can’t provide references or proof of results, they aren’t going to be able to drive new business. They also have the benefits of executing patterns of success. They know what needs to be done to replicate the success they’ve achieved in other companies. True transformation partners are committed to your results.

This past November, I had the great honor of participating in SiriusDecisions‘ Tech Exchange. Specifically, I was asked to share collective thoughts from OpenView on the ever-evolving sales and marketing technology landscape. Here, I’ve provided a sampling of the most insightful feedback gathered from across our firm.

What are the biggest changes in the B2B sales / marketing tech market you’ve seen over the past few years?

“There is a lot of fragmentation in the market with players slicing off smaller and smaller pieces of the marketing tech stack. While this does create opportunity for best of breed solutions, increasing fragmentation is frustrating for marketers who need to bring the entire stack together. Essentially, sprawl is creating tool fatigue.” – Blake Bartlett, Partner, OpenView
“The sales acceleration and enablement space went from non-existent to very crowded. VPs of Sales are gaining buying power, whereas VPs of Marketing used to be the main budget holders for both sales and marketing departments. We’re also seeing sales and marketing attempt to work together more closely, and technology is being built to support this new relationship. On the whole, go-to-market efforts are becoming more data-driven.” – Ariel Winton, Associate, OpenView
“Two key trends in marketing tech, mostly around email marketing, have emerged. First, we’ve transitioned from triggered content to personalization and automation. We’re now seeing a demand for more personalized and individualized content that doesn’t just follow a rules-based approach in terms of when to push content to whom. Rather, companies are beginning to leverage machine intelligence to automatically optimize for engagement based on behavioral customer data. Second, we’re moving away from standard email marketing to a new medium for customer interaction. Most vendors simply try to make the next best email marketing solution, but the next generation MarTech vendors have realized that consumer email engagement rates have been on a steady decline. The next channel, not surprisingly, is chat and messaging. Companies like msg.ai and Digital Genius are harnessing this trend by enabling companies to speak to their customers through social apps like Messenger, Twitter, WeChat and the likes, as well as over texting. They have a chance to make marketing sexy again.” – Arsham Memarzadeh, Associate, OpenView
“For buyers in the space, there’s a push-and-pull between whether to simplify into one main platform or go with multiple platforms and best of breed point solutions. Buyers are finding that, on the one hand, startups are becoming more niche and hyper-specialized, and on the other hand, the platform players are trying to round out their portfolios to be a one-stop-shop. Tech giants are taking advantage of opportunities for consolidation across sales and marketing. In the past year alone, Salesforce has made about $5B in acquisitions including Krux (data management) Demandware (digital commerce), Quip (word processing), BeyondCore (enterprise analytics), MetaMind (AI) and more. Adobe recently purchased Livefyre (community engagement) and TubeMogul (AdTech) and has Neolane (cross-channel campaign management) and Omniture (analytics) in their suite of product offerings.” – Kyle Poyar, Market Strategist, OpenView

What are your thoughts on the IPO market and its current / potential future dynamics?

“The IPO market ebbs and flows. We can’t let today’s dynamics inform early stage investment decisions that’ll look to access the public markets five to seven years from now. We don’t worry too much about fluctuations in the short-term.” – Blake Bartlett, Partner, OpenView
“The IPO market is always open for companies with fundamentally strong growth metrics, sound unit economics and a road to profitability.” – Arsham Memarzadeh, Associate, OpenView

What categories within the sales and marketing space do you find particularly interesting?

“Automation and intelligence leveraging categories like AI or machine learning are particularly interesting. Manual rules-based systems are last generation. New companies that will actually have staying power will optimize for you, rather than putting the impetus on the marketer to create yet another set of rules-based workflows.” – Blake Bartlett, Partner, OpenView
“I find software that uses AI to increase CRM adoption (e.g. Troops.ai, Heighten) interesting because collecting data on sales activity is crucial to giving leadership insight into what’s happening and where there’s room for improvement. Products that predict CLV to inform lead segmentation (e.g. Zodiac Metrics, Custora, Simon Data, Amplero) are also really intriguing because they allow marketers to spend their dollars more efficiently. Lastly, software that employs NLP to coach sales reps on their conversations (e.g. Chorus.ai, Gong.io) has the potential to be game changing.” – Ariel Winton, Associate, OpenView
“API-first companies are really interesting because instead of creating yet another tool, they integrate seamlessly with whatever platforms companies are already using. One example is Clearbit, which builds data APIs to help companies understand their customers and prospects. Companies with a product-led growth strategy, because they have very capital efficient growth, are also very relevant.” – Kyle Poyar, Market Strategist, OpenView

What do you look for in a tech company when you invest?

“I look for differentiated tech and large potential platforms rather than small, narrow applications or best of breed features, which is unfortunately what you see today with all the fragmentation.” – Blake Bartlett, Partner, OpenView
“I look for a big vision that can turn into a large and enduring business, a passionate CEO who tells a compelling story, and a large market. Strong product market fit, often exhibited by a clear customer profile and examples of customers who are paying and fit that profile, and early signs of a repeatable go to market strategy are hugely important as well to prove that a company is at the expansion stage. – Ariel Winton, Associate, OpenView
“I look for thoughtfully crafted products that are solving deep and widely felt pain points. When a problem is so acute and common, achieving product market fit becomes that much easier, and scaling becomes that much cheaper. ” – Arsham Memarzadeh, Associate, OpenView

How do you find new candidates for investment?

“I ask the best marketers in the world what problems they have and what tools they use to solve those problems – or ask them what a dream solution would look like.” – Blake Bartlett, Partner, OpenView

“I spend time with people in the community and learn about what software they’re using and excited about. I keep up with news about software companies (through newsletters, online publications, conferences, etc.), and learn about interesting companies from other VCs. Once I identify an area of interest (typically sparked by a company that I’ve met), I try to learn about all of the companies that fit that theme and / or thesis.” – Ariel Winton, Associate, OpenView

The post VCs Weigh In: An Inside Look at What’s Fueling the Sales & Marketing Technology Market appeared first on OpenView Labs.

In the 90’s after internet advertisers filled all the ad space available and nearly ruined the online experience, a new phenomenon swept across the screen. This phenomenon was called “Banner Blindness.” It referred the fact that people learned what advertisements looked like and began to ignored them. This was the beginning of the end for banner ads on Yahoo. Google figured out that people will pay attention to (and click) ads that looked just like content. Thus, with Google Adwords, the age of native advertising was born.

Let’s fast-forward a handful of years. Using a Marketing Automation system, you could send a HTML-rich marketing email, and it was great! Early adopters, like Gary Vaynerchuk, touted he could get a 90+% open rates on an email. It typically had colors and logos and was easily recognizable. It was written with “marketing language.” However, just as consumers became immune to the original banner ads, this spray-and-pray marketing automation quickly became the banner advertising of emails. Now, click-through rates have plummeted to less than 3%. Reply rates are either not even allowed or less than 0.1%.

Recently with the new advent of sales automation, there is a new version of banner blindness in emails. They are not from marketing, but rather from the sales department. There is no real personalization and no thought put into them. As recipients, we are starting to recognize and ignore this kind of email content.

So, what do we do as businesses? The answer is clear. We have to get more natural and blend in with regular email. We have to become native to the inbox.

I believe you can get people to engage with your email and even reply at a rate much higher than the standard rates. The secret is constructing your email content in a more natural way.

I’ll try to illustrate:

Bad Email Play

1. To: Glen
   From: Sales personHi Glen,
   I see that you are the {{title}} of {{company}}. Can I interest you in my product?
   [templated marketing nonsense] Cheers,
   {{Signature of Sales person}}
2. To: Glen
   From: Sales personHi Glen,
   Did you get my email? Were you abducted by aliens?
   Concerned,
   {{Sales Person}}
3. To: Glen
   From: Sales personGlen
   Ok, I give up, you are obviously not interested!
   Sad frowny face,
   {{Sales person}}

Good Email Play

1. To: Glen
   From: Sales personGlen,
   I saw on LinkedIn that you play tennis. Do you play in a USTA league?
   I work at {{company}} and I’m supposed to email you and sell you, but I would rather just ask about tennis. I’m a 4.0 player myself.
   Best,
   {{Sales Person}}
   P.S. I read your blog. I agree the electoral college is lame.
2. To: Glen
   From: Head of ProductGlen,
   I’m the Head of Product at {{Company}}. {{Sales person}} mentioned to me about your blog. It’s cool. I specifically liked {{specific post and a relevant comment on the post}}.
   Anyway, given what you do, I thought you would be interested in {{value proposition}}. I’m happy to share more details. Do you have some time in the Thursday or Friday morning to connect?
   Thanks,
   {{Head of Product}}
3. To: Glen’s boss
   From: Head of Sales{{Glen’s Boss}}
   Hey, just fyi. We are going to invite Glen to a special event we are holding because of what he’s been doing around {{topic}}. He seems like a perfect fit and would add a lot of value to the conversation. Is this cool with you?
   Sincerely,
   {{Head of Sales}}

The difference between the two sets of emails:

Bad Good

Generic language, weak use of title ☹	Researched, natural language☺
Single Target ☹	Multiple Targets☺
Single Sender ☹	Multiple Senders☺
Customized ☹	Personalized☺

If you want to get people to reply and engage, then you need to act more naturally with them.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that this technique takes time. It’s hard to scale. You need to search for relevant information to personalize and sometimes the person has a low profile online. Also, you need to change the current writing style, which is hard to roll out.

However, if it works, it works. Try it on your best Tier 1 target accounts. Try a test and see if the response rate is higher. The reality is that spray-and-pray isn’t a good strategy. It’s just spam. Don’t ruin the channel and the leads.

This blog post was written by a robot named X54. (Kidding!)

Be original. Be natural.

---

If you’re interested in being more natural and writing better cold sales emails, we’ve teamed up with Sales Hacker to bring you a new webinar around exactly that. Register now for How to Not Send Crappy Cold Emails on Dec. 8th at 10am PT.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Steve Jobs

So Steve Jobs didn’t know how he became successful until after the fact. Hindsight is 20/20 after all. The problem is that many of you haven’t reached the same level of success that Steve achieved. Why is that a problem? You don’t know what will work for you until it does. In fact, when you start, there is one burning question above all others: what is a reliable and successful strategy for finding leads to convert into sales? There is no such thing as a silver bullet for your uncertainty. However, there are a few great advantages that an outbound sales strategy has over other techniques for acquiring new leads. I would like you to hear me out on why it’s worth it to implement an outbound sales strategy for lead generation.

Why is it better to start an outbound sales strategy than go for other lead generation practices?

• It is Predictable

  You miss 100% of the opportunities you don’t take, as many a shy high schooler has realized when they are left going to prom dateless, having never asked anybody. If that kid had just asked around, there would probably be at least one person who he or she could go with. Outbound works the same way but with more reliability. In our experience, one out of every twenty people we contact wants a demo. You want another demo? Contact another 20 people. Simple as that.

• It is Sustainable

  A cool feature of outbound is you can continually generate new prospects without going through a dry patch. There are new companies starting and new people moving into positions of power all the time. Unless you have a very limited number of potential clients, there will always be new leads to generate and sales to be made. You don’t need to wait for someone to get interested in your top level funnel. More importantly, you know you are reaching out to someone who can help you, often a decision maker, rather than someone with an interest but no sway.

• It can be scaled through automation

  When most people think of outbound, they think of unscalable activities like cold calling or bulk untargeted messages like spam or flyers. Automation tools like Growbots allow you to multiply the time investment of your SDRs.

It is not even just about the benefits. You have to think about…

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1077046

The opportunity cost of not starting an outbound sales strategy

The current method you use for lead generation may not scale. It may work for now but how well will it work as your company grows? There are certain outbound strategies like cold calling that give people the wrong impression of outbound. No matter how many tools you give your call workers, there is a limit to the number of people they can talk to an hour, usually around 8. By starting an outbound email sales strategy, you have access to a number of tools which have a multiplying effect on your ability to connect with your customers.

Of course, you can always ignore outbound and develop another strategy but before you do so, ask yourself this one simple question: how effective is my strategy?

• Relationship building is dependent on a single person

  A lot of businesses start with the founder pressing palms, making deals, and relying on personal relationships. There comes a time when you need to think about scaling. Unfortunately, relationships don’t scale. You will need to hire a new sales rep every time to increase sales this way. That person will have to develop all new relationships to sell. With outbound, you can ramp up a new prospector in a matter of weeks. From there their output is predictable, taking the guesswork out of the equation.

• Inbound takes a long time to start generating leads

  An inbound funnel can be great but it can take about 6 months before you start to see results. As a company founder, you need to ask whether you can survive that long without any revenue or leads for you account executives to close on. With outbound, you can start selling from day one.

So have I got you paying attention? Good because developing outbound can make your life easier.

What problems will you solve when you start an outbound sales strategy?

Think about the major challenges for your company. These are common to both startups and mature businesses.

• You probably need leads to sell to and gain revenue from. You need these leads to come in in a predictable way for the sake of efficiency and future planning.
• You need them in a timely manner to keep a startup revenue positive or a mature business meeting the targets set by its board.
• You want your lead generation to keep pace with the growth of your business.

It’s a tall order to satisfy all those needs.

An outbound sales strategy has the potential to solve all of your problems. It produces leads in a regular and dependable way. You will usually be able to start closing on those leads within a month, bringing in predictable revenue. By buying the right information and using the right tools., one SDR can scale up their prospecting operation meaning that you can increase the flow of your inbound channel as your company grows. Sound good?

Having a dependable and predictable source of revenue come with a number of advantages.

• As a founder, you can pull back from sales and focus on the strategic direction of the company.
• You can iterate your process by bringing on new members of the team.
• It gives you leeway to spend more on product development or developing a less predictable but potentially rewarding inbound channel.

That may sound tempting but not everything is for everybody. That begs the question

Who is it for?

In our experience, the sweet spot for outbound is companies wanting to close deals worth between 1000 and 250,000 dollars, though it is useful for any B2B deal you are willing to spend a few dollars closing. Of course, each company had different goals and pain points. Are any of these issues that you want to solve?

• You want to keep your sales funnel full
• You want a method that can scale with minimal effort
• You are worried about running out of new leads
• You want higher quality leads than your current channels give you
• You need to make your sales/revenue targets
• You don’t want to spend much on landing high-value deals
• You want to gain exposure where you don’t already have access
• You want a predictable revenue stream that you can plan for

Outbound can be a solution to all of these issues. It has worked well with all kinds of our clients, from a sole founder to a corporate sales department. While we have a deal range where it works best, it can work for anything between high margin deals worth only a few hundred dollars to anything above 1 million. So do you now think you would be a good candidate to start an outbound sales strategy? Every business is different and you need to know what the ROI is on your investment so first, you need to know…

http://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/scrabble/r/results.html

What are the results that can be expected?

No matter what your good intentions are, it is results that you are after. After all, your business or your job depend on them. So what can you expect when you start an outbound sales strategy?

One caveat I should mention is that the numbers we provide are based on experiences with fully ramped up prospectors and campaigns. There will obviously be some inefficiencies to start with as you learn. Starting from scratch without any help, it takes about two months to gain the knowledge through trial and error to get these results.

At those levels, your average SDR can generate 10 to 20 excellent leads a month, according to Aaron Ross in Predictable Revenue. He used the automation software that was available at the time (Salesforce) but we have found that with the current tools available, each SDR can feed between 40 and 50 excellent leads a month to their account executives.

So how many people do you need in your operation? Well to start out you really only need one. Using automation tools, this is an approach that can be carried out by a founder. Pretty soon though you will want to expand the team.

It is much more efficient to separate the Prospectors (SDR’s) and the Account Executives (the guys who close deals). If you prospect manually, you will probably need 2 to 3 SDR’s to provide enough leads for 1 account executive.

With a tool like Growbots, you can reduce that ratio to one account executive for each SDR or even 2 SDR’s for 3 account executives. Sounds good?

Let’s Bring it all together

The main thing that I would like you to take away from this article is that outbound sales is within the reach of most sales operations, from a one man founder up to a corporate sales team. You can start selling immediately in a predictable way. There is very little guesswork in the process so it is easy to bring new people into the operation as it expands.

The key to making optimizing outbound to be scalable and successful is employing automation tools like Growbots to speed up prospecting and email campaigns. With these tools, one man can do the work of three and a small corporate sales team can do the work of a large one. All you have to do is take the first step.

While sales development is certainly one of the hardest jobs in sales, today’s Sales Development Reps are better prepared than ever before to deal with and conquer your challenging roles. Tools like SalesLoft alone can make activity numbers that once took an entire day to hit the work of a single morning. So why aren’t sales development teams popping champagne or taking naps in between their great successes? Because the game has changed.

It’s no longer about how many leads sales development teams generate. It’s about how many qualified leads sales development teams generate.

Consumers are more informed, more connected, and have higher expectations than ever before. In this new environment, this modern environment, it’s no longer enough to simply have a sales team. You need to be a modern sales organization. You need to deliver personalization, sincerity and professionalism at scale. That’s where Account-based sales development (ABSD) comes into play and it’s why we create our newest ebook, “The Essential Guide to Account-Based Sales Development.”

---

DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK TODAY

---

According to TOPO research, 72% of outbound teams currently have account-based programs in place, but only half are fully implemented. Why? Because it takes time and the right framework to successfully implement an ABSD strategy.

We created this extensive eBook to answer all your questions about account-based and provide a framework for making the strategy work for your entire sales organization. This eBook includes chapters covering:

• What is Account-based Sales Development
• The Benefits of Account-based Sales Development
• Creating An Account-based Sales Development Strategy
• And much more.

Download your free copy today and start landing larger clients, earning more revenue, and enjoying more sales success.

The post New Ebook: The Essential Guide to Account-Based Sales Development appeared first on SalesLoft.

The stacks are getting heavy.

These days, B2B marketing and sales teams are finding themselves practically drowning in “insights.” Where do you put your trust when there’s a report to support every conclusion? The average sales and marketing leader has more “insights” than they know what to do with.

Information pours in from a multitude of organic and paid channels. Every channel has a report. Every platform it’s own tracking. Marketing and sales have siloed but overlapping tech stacks. Few of the technologies seem to play well together.

According to a report from B2B Marketing, only 25% of B2B marketers say that they’re confident in their ability to effectively use and leverage their marketing data [Bizible].

This unprecedented volume of prospect data available to marketing and sales teams is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity to connect with customers on a more personal, seamless level than ever before. And on the other, it’s a liability: mountains of customer data means more potential to misstep in the maintenance, analysis, and strategy associated with that data. Companies whose marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned run the risk of delivering an incohesive message and coming across disjointed in their efforts to reach consumers.

Of course, it’s not news that B2B companies need to align their marketing and sales teams in order to be truly competitive in a busy market. But what’s the best way to actually ensure that alignment?

The answer more data about your potential customers, but quality data. A good data strategy will spell out the difference between success and failure for many B2B companies in today’s market.

The Importance of Marketing & Sales Data

Both marketing and sales teams use their own—and each other’s—data to inform their strategies.

Marketing automation data is what’s happening in the top half of the funnel: it’s used by marketing teams to improve lead nurturing, improve lead quality, and increase lead generation. Ultimately, marketing automation data is utilized to help marketers gather key customer data points that help the organization to build stronger, more fruitful customer relationships.

Some of these data points include prospect demographics and contact information—name, phone number, email, title, industry, company, etc—as well as more complex data points including prospects’ interaction frequency with different types of content, their past purchases, cross-channel buying data, and more. Marketers collect this data through a variety of tactics, including forms, website engagement, marketing material, and social media.

Of course, marketing automation data isn’t just utilized for marketing strategy. It’s also used to determine which leads should be sent on to sales teams, who then work to convert those prospects into customers.

CRM data, on the other hand, typically makes up the bottom half of the funnel, primarily used by sales teams for reporting and projecting purposes. This data is pulled from a variety of sources, and many key pieces of data are manually entered into the CRM system by sales reps. Naturally, this can lead to inefficiencies: it’s an extra effort to log the data, the process is prone to human error, and without well-defined operational processes, it’s entirely possible for swathes of data to simply never be entered.

Sales teams need accurate CRM data in order to be able to properly qualify and follow up on leads, and prioritize their sales activities accordingly—this includes data points such as the number of interactions that have occurred with a potential buyer, what stage of the buying process they’re in, and what collateral they’ve received thus far.

Data sent from marketing is used to bolster and fine-tune the sales outreach process, and sales data in turn, is used to fine-tune the types of customers that marketing is targeting as well. Clearly, both marketing automation and CRM data are essential in customer outreach and engagement—and they work in concert.

The issue arises when the data in each system does not tell the same story.

Quality Over Quantity

The trap many B2B organizations fall into is an effort to collect as much data on as many prospects as possible, under the false assumption that more data equals more sales. In reality, having more data isn’t necessarily an advantage: having the right data is.

Both marketing and sales databases need constant enrichment: essentially the process of improving the data, from entering more complete contact information to capturing updated customer preferences, to logging a recent point of contact with a prospect.

The reason behind this is simple. Time is the enemy of the contact database: “Individuals are hired and fired. Companies are acquired. New positions are created. Businesses shrink and swell every quarter.” And if all of that new information isn’t in your marketing and sales databases, it effectively doesn’t exist.

Without constant enrichment, both marketing and sales efforts are effectively hobbled: marketing is unable to create and send relevant content, sales isn’t receiving the proper leads for outreach, and customers are the ultimate losers. In fact, when marketers and salespeople reach out to customers based on insights driven by bad data, it can actually damage customer relationships.

“‘According to one survey, 55% of respondents had been sent information about an irrelevant product by a business in the previous 12 months,’ says Nigel Turner, VP of information management strategy at Trillium Software. “‘A large minority (47%) said they are ‘annoyed’ when a business gets their personal information wrong, and 35% said such errors reduce their faith in the organisation [sic] to do a good job’” [Smart Insights].

Lack of quality data is actually a prevalent problem: in a recent survey, Demand Gen Report revealed that more than 62% of organisations rely on marketing/prospect data that is 20 to 40% incomplete or inaccurate. Additionally, almost 85% of businesses said they are operating CRM and/or sales force automation databases with between 10 to 40% bad records [Smart Insights].

Down with Data Silos

All this brings us back to the original point: quality customer data is important to both marketing and sales, and customer data cannot be siloed if an organization wants to meet its growth goals.

Without quality data, it’s impossible for an organization to to scale its processes efficiently, and avoid wasting massive amounts of time or resources—bad data, opportunity cost, inaccurate revenue and lead projections, email deliverability, and more.

So how is an organization to start down the path to aligning marketing and sales with quality data?

Start with a data audit: what is critical to your organization’s marketing and sales process? What data points are missing? How accurate is the data in your system?

Once these base level questions have been addressed, figure out where the data handoffs and manual touch points are between marketing and sales, and where the processes break down.