Let’s take a walk through the automation landscape and look at 7 different examples of technologies in use today to sense where the future is headed. McDonald’s Announces Kiosks. Facing rising human costs, McDonald’s reduces the need for front-line staff with kiosk-based ordering. Eatsa expands. In San Francisco, a city famed for an insanely high […]
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It’s no secret that CRM technology is crucial to a modern sales organization’s process. Whether you’re talking about the role of a Sales Operations Leader, a Sales Director, or a Demand Generation manager, having a role devoted to managing data and process, with a few Salesforce hacks along the way, is a must.
Even though a CRM like Salesforce is a data-hub for all modern sales organizations, it helps to have a few tricks up your sleeve to help your team fully and appropriately integrate it with your modern sales engagement process. From gathering your data, to cleaning it and reporting on it, each step impacts how easy it is for your sales team to reflect on their performance.
Cindy Hancock, Demand Generation Manager and self-proclaimed “Sales Nerd,” is here on this week’s episode of SDR TV’s Sales Tips to discuss some of her Salesforce hacks that have helped her gain more efficiency in the data process. Watch the video below to learn more about these Salesforce hacks from a resident SalesLoft sales nerd, and get the most out of your CRM:
Hi, this is Cindy from SalesLoft. Wanted to give you guys a couple Salesforce tips today. One will help increase your productivity and the second will give you better insights in your pipeline review. So, let’s dive in.
First, I want to show you how you can directly search your Salesforce instance from your Chrome browser. First, you want to open up your Chrome browser, add a new tab, right click your search bar, select Edit Search Engines. Once you get to the settings page, you’re going to see other search engines at the bottom. Type in the name of you Salesforce instance, the keyword, this keyword will be used as a shortcut when you’re searching in the Chrome browser. Enter the URL for searching your Salesforce instance. You will see the URL at the bottom of the video. Make sure to change “na #” to “na + the number of your Salesforce instance” and add it to that right-hand column there. Click done.
Now you can test it out. Open your Chrome browser, type in your keyword. In my instance, it’s SF + space, then type in test or the name of a dummy account in your Salesforce instance and it will pull it right up. So, what we just did was add your Salesforce search bar directly into your Chrome browser. This is going to help you streamline your day-to-day activities.
So, the next hack is using the power of one.You can use the power of one to create multiple reports, but today we’re going to dive into a pipeline review report. On the account, create a custom formula field equal to one, and then create a second one, which we’ll call Active Contacts. Once you’ve got these formula fields in place, you can now pull a report. Pull the report on the the account and contacts object. If the contact has been touched within the last 30 days, make the formula equal to one, if not, make it equal zero. You can use this in reporting to see how effective your sales reps are selling.
So, that’s all the time we have for today. I hope you found these Salesforce hacks valuable. For more information on this topic, check out our SalesLoft Salesforce e-books. And remember, happy lofting.
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Download your free copy today and start getting the most out of Salesforce. While CRMs weren’t built with modern sales tactics in mind, but remember: a team with solid data in Salesforce crushes numbers, while teams that just wing it barely hit quota.
The post Salesforce Hacks with a SalesLoft Sales Nerd {Video} appeared first on SalesLoft.
For salespeople, the cliche that there’s not enough time in a day can’t be truer. The work isn’t linear and there are a lot of things that pop up—each demanding immediate attention throughout the day.
Even the most disciplined person can be bogged down by the intensity and abundance of work that comes in as a salesperson—but the sales force has to deliver! So everyone—especially quota-carrying salespeople—are out to get as much as possible out of a day.
So, here we are. Another list of productivity hacks...but this time tailored to those who work in sales.
Ready to reclaim your time? Let’s go.
Here are productivity tips for sales professionals.
What’s your source of motivation? Be it money, family, responsibilities or your goals, motivation can be tough to keep and sometimes even hard to find. We’ve all had moments where we just can’t be bothered to work—but we have to anyway. Feeling lazy, disorganized but still wanting to get everything done is an awful feeling!
What do you do when this strikes? I’m sure you get up early in the morning and create a long to-do list for that day. Follow up with this prospect. Brush up on the new product update. Clean out your CRM. But the truth—and you know it—is that a long to-do list can actually be more harmful than helpful! It can stop you on your tracks and actually act as a demotivator instead than the opposite.
Here’s what you should be doing instead:
Write down the “big stuff” or most important tasks on a short to-do list the night before. Limit your list to five items. That’s it.
You have more than five things you have to get done? Panicking?
Ask yourself: When was the last time you actually ticked off all things on your list. I thought so.
Writing tasks before you sleep is also a time to asses what you did for the last 24 hours.
Now, all we want to accomplish here is for you to get in the habit of prioritizing your tasks and GETTING THINGS DONE.
Try it. You’ll wake up with purpose and sleep more peacefully.
Anything left out is easy to add at the end of the initial list. Have you ever caught yourself saying, “I had so many things done now I have to be more productive.”? There you go.
I actually learned this from Neville Medhora, copywriter and online entrepreneur. Watch this video of him explaining this to-do list hack.
Do clutter and chaos keep you on your toes? I doubt. It’s true: Where you work affects the way you work. A distracting environment takes your focus and keeps your energy scattered throughout the day.
For most sales reps, the desk is the only haven. It’s where your tools are—phone, computer, photo of your family, little trinkets and snacks in your drawer. You spend most of your time in front of the screen and most—if not all—of your tasks are accomplished in your workstation. If you want to be productive, you must ensure that your desk is inline with that goal.
Here are some quick tips you can do today to lessen clutter and have an overall clean, organized station:
✔ Computer
✔ Phone
✔ Files for today
✔ Notes
✔ What you need today
✔ Keep supplies you don’t need every day inside the drawer
✔ Ensure that your drawers are within your reach and are easily opened even from your seat
✔ Keep a waste basket within reach. You don’t want to fill your desk with trash of the literal kind.
✔ Keep trinkets on the wall of your workspace. Photos and calendars go to the wall and should not take space on your desk.
These may seem like small, insignificant things but an organized workspace will do wonders for your time and productivity.
Who likes meetings? Meetings have gained such a bad reputation that the first thing that comes to mind when they’re mentioned isn’t the work that’s supposed to be easier because of it but the time that’s wasted sitting around waiting and being unproductive.
Successful meetings are few and far between, at least in the shared experience of today’s professionals. In 2013, $37 billion was wasted in the USA just on unnecessary meetings.
See, having productive, quick and snappy meetings will benefit us all. Right now, most you can do is fix meetings you have say for though and these are usually meetings with clients.
Meetings are costly and could be unsatisfying when it amounts to nothing. Client and company meetings can rack up so many hours: for a full-time worker, from 520 hours to 1,664 hours can be spent just on meetings.
A big change you can effect in your own workflow is scheduling client meetings in clusters—and this can only be done with conscious and early planning. Lay out your day’s schedule. Estimate the hours and the schedules that make sense for all your other tasks outside client meetings. Then, let’s get to work.
See, it’s true that there are best practices when it comes to the hours we ask for calls or in-person meetings with clients—but the truth is that when we have a definite time in mind, it’s easier to get them to agree. So, having a planned schedule where you cluster your meetings isn’t really counter-productive or preempting the customer. If in case a customer chooses a time outside the window you set for the meetings, it’s still a win. A bit of movement in your daily schedule, but you still keep the win of getting an appointment.
Guilty of checking your email every five minutes? So many unread email and you don’t even know half of these people?
Of course, salespeople are more forgiving of random emails falling into the inbox—cold emails are a vital part of sales. However, there is a long list of things you can do to reduce emails. Not only the ones you have in your inbox now, but those that are incoming.
The idea is to set a set number of times you will check email in a day. I found that three is a good number but you might need to adjust according to your need. The thing is sticking to this number. Each email check is limited to 10-15 minutes.
Now, you’re thinking this is impossible! Before you freak out, here are the things you need to do to prepare for email freedom.
* Setup a day each month where you go over all your subscriptions and unsubscribe from half or more of them. Just do this. I know my email inbox and tabs are bursting at the seams. You probably open one or two emails for the lifetime of your subscriptions—so just get rid of half of them. Do this monthly and not only will you find that you get less emails but you also get more conscientious with which sites you subscribe to.
* Unsubscribe from social media notifications. Do you really need to be notified each time someone comments on a post on Facebook or when someone connects with you on LinkedIn? You actually visit those sites anyway and this is just redundancy you don’t need in your busy schedule.
* Filter out FWD: emails. These emails are usually office banter, political emails or chain mails. They’re sent out by some funny people in your email list but you can’t really be bothered by these emails during your day. Just go ahead and filter them out. Maybe check them during weekends. This is easy using Gmail. If you’re using different email clients, I’m sure a quick search will net you instructions.
* Write smarter emails. Yes, you know how sending one email results in a chain of emails where half of them really aren’t useful? The Asian Efficiency Blog calls this problem the Email Boomerang Effect.
Best practices:
✉ Think thrice before sending CC’d emails. It’s a series of replies waiting to happen. Should these persons really get this email?
✉ If it applies, send emails that don’t require replies. For setting meetings with colleagues, include a sentence that says: “No reply means we’re good.” or “If I don’t hear back from you by tomorrow, I’ll assume that’s fine.”
✉ Use FYI (For your information) and NRN (No response needed) in your subject lines. If you’re just circulating a memo or some information that needs no discussion, use these liberally.
✉ Don’t send emails. If you can pick up the phone, do that.
There’s a plugin, an app, an extension for everything. Technology is on overdrive and creative minds are continuously looking for ways to make our lives easier. For salespeople, the tech star is the CRM. For all the tips that are listed here, though, there’s a piece of technology that can help you out.
If you’re thinking twice about using apps to help you reclaim your time and become productive, you’re not alone. Of course, people are skeptical. For a lot of people, procrastination and the lack of discipline are manifested through extended use of tech: smartphones, social media, gaming consoles, websites. But tech is meant to make our lives easier—and these tools usually demand very low levels of commitment anyway. There’s nothing to lose when you use these tools, only some or a lot of time to gain. Alongside productivity tips for sales professionals, these work great.
Emails:
Zero Self-learning email app that puts your priorities first
Unroll.me One email. Once a day. All your subscriptions.
To-do list:
Todoist Accomplish more, every day. Managing millions of tasks. Loved by millions of people worldwide.
Focuster Be more productive in just minutes a day. Let Focuster automatically manage your schedule for you.
All you need to do is focus on the next thing.
Streaks The to-do list that helps you form good habits.
Meetings:
Assistant.to Book meetings with one email. No back & forth. No double bookings. And it’s free!
TimeBridge Simplified, beautiful scheduling.
World Meeting Time A tool to plan your meeting in other time zones.
X.ai Personal assistant with artificial intelligence.
Dr. Vivian Lee, the dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Utah, pulled up a slide with a Google search.
Typed into it were the words "radiologists are..." The top auto-fill result? Parasites.
It's easy to see why the conclusion could be made: procedures like MRIs or CT scans can often be costly, and the array of tests and images that are run during a doctors' visit can seem excessive, almost as if the goal is to make money off each report, so the more the merrier.
Lee, a radiologist herself, was speaking at the Radiological Society of North America's annual conference about bringing value to healthcare.
"There are clearly some questions about the value of our role and the value of our field," Lee said in the talk Monday at the conference.
Right now, a massive shift is underway as the heathcare industry moves toward "value-based care," which aims to improve the quality of care and cut costs. In essence, payments to providers — be they doctors, hospitals or pharmaceutical companies, for example — are tied to the effectiveness of the treatment. The primary beneficiaries, in theory, are patients and insurers. The latter, for example, are in some cases negotiating to pay for a new drug only if it works for a particular patient.
It's something the government in particular has been pushing for. In 2014, 20% of Medicare was connected to value-based payments. In 2016, that number was 30%. By 2018, HHS wants 90% of payments to be tied to value.
The transition is essentially moving healthcare from a fee-for-service care to value-based care. Here's a simple explanation of the difference:
This switch is key as economic pressures in the healthcare industry change. Healthcare is facing a significant crisis in the US, Lee noted in her talk. She cited a chart that showed healthcare costs rising 50X more than wages have over the last 50 years.
A lot of that, Lee said, could be attributed to healthcare not understanding its costs. And that's something she hopes radiology can help change.
"These are the areas I hope our field will contribute to: drive the value of imaging by using imaging to assess the value of new tests, new drugs, and new devices, and integrate imaging into better clinical diagnosis and better decision making," she said.
SEE ALSO: 5 innovations in radiology that could impact everything from the Zika virus to dermatology
Calls for teamwork in health care are as persistent as they are hard to heed. Over the past decade, a growing number of observers, ourselves included, have called attention to the need for providers to coordinate better across specialties, shifts, departments, and even organizations (for example between primary care and urgent care facilities) to produce safe, affordable, high-quality care. Cross-boundary teamwork is particularly important when caring for patients who have chronic conditions and multiple additional diseases, increasing the need for collaboration among diverse providers. This type of teamwork is also critical in making the customized, time-sensitive care decisions required in busy emergency departments staffed around the clock by over-stretched clinicians. Prior research in health care and other industries makes clear the importance of team stability for team performance in general, yet stable teams are not always possible with chaotic 24/7 operations and heterogeneous work schedules.
Told to form and act as teams, most clinicians will agree with the spirit of the request but will struggle to make it happen given well-documented challenges of communicating across shifts, expertise areas, or hierarchical levels. For years, the basic model for managing coordination in health care delivery has relied on what organizational scholars called role-based coordination. The premise is that professional training imbues “role occupants” (say, an emergency physician, or a scrub nurse) with the expertise needed to execute a part of a larger production or service operation. The model assumes that role responsibilities and boundaries are clear, and that crucial interdependencies between roles are sufficiently scripted to unfold appropriately.
Unfortunately, role-based coordination theory faces important limitations in practice. First, although roles specify who is responsible for which tasks, role occupants often focus narrowly on their own responsibilities, neglecting the larger shared goal; this risk increases when their interdependent partners are difficult to identify or when accountability around the larger goal is ambiguous. Second, people in different roles are trained to think and communicate about, and value, different dimensions of performance, which further complicates coordination. Thus, even though roles are meant to clarify who is supposed to do what, they rarely guarantee the kind of teamwork across role boundaries in which people actively communicate about progress, exchange ideas, and help each other.
We have studied these challenges for years – separately (here and here) and together – and we suggest that health care providers focus on implementing effective teaming, rather than traditional bounded teams, to improve care coordination. What is needed is fast-paced communication and coordination on the fly, among constantly shifting partners in care who don’t have the luxury of forming stable, well-bounded teams.
There are structural and managerial ways to support this kind of teaming. In a study of teaming in a busy urban hospital’s emergency department, we found that implementing minimal role-based structures – which we call team scaffolds – helped people in different clinical roles collaborate effectively despite working together only temporarily. In that ED, coordination was given a boost – and made more like real team behavior – with the help of scaffolds that clarified fluid boundaries, provided an explicit shared goal, and ensured the availability of roles (skills) to accomplish that goal.
Prior to the redesign, the hospital used ad-hoc groupings in the emergency department; any available nurse would triage a patient, then return the patient’s chart for any available resident, who would then leave the chart for any available attending. The nurses did not know which doctor was working on which patient, and vice versa, which led to inefficiencies and a lack of perceived accountability to one another. Schisms between professional groups also hampered communication.
The redesign divided the ED into four pods, each of which had the necessary equipment to treat any type of patient. One attending physician, one or two residents, and three nurses were assigned randomly to a pod at the start of each of their shifts. Patients were doled out consecutively to the four pods, with the staff of each pod having ultimate responsibility for a queue of patients. Because of the staggered and differing shifts, the entire team composition could change over in as little as five hours.
Although the scaffolds lacked stable membership, they triggered significant changes in teaming networks and behaviors and improved operational performance. The doctors and nurses were co-located, making it easy to know who was on the team. They were collectively responsible for getting the patients through the ED. And their teaming improved: They held each other accountable, actively updated and helped each other, and explicitly prioritized their shared efforts.
Despite this noteworthy success, we’ve found that team scaffolds can underperform if they’re poorly managed. Thoughtful leadership is needed to implement them well – explaining the goals, engaging people in helping work out the details, and framing the entire endeavor as a learning journey. If scaffolds are simply imposed on people to make them “work as a team” without engaging them as equal partners in improving how work is done, the new structures are unlikely to enhance performance.
For team scaffolds to work, leaders from different role groups – say medical and nursing directors – must collaborate with each other and with the staff to design, pilot, and manage the new structures. To get started, leaders should elicit and use feedback from the staff about the new design. They must invest in training people in the new system, for example operating a pilot scaffold in parallel with the existing processes for a few weeks, allowing people to practice working as a team in the new structure. Using this iterative approach, by listening and learning together, real teamwork can take hold.
When I first started out with digital marketing, I was blown away by the sheer amount of online marketing resources and social media classes.
I read hundreds of articles and enrolled in as many marketing courses that I could possibly get my hands on. Even today, millions of resources continue to be published online every month.
It’s enough to wonder …
Where can you go for the best, most useful marketing information?
I’ve had the chance to test out and research a huge amount of resources, and I’m excited to share with you 37 free marketing and social media classes that you can enroll in to upgrade your skills across the board.
Let’s dive in!
The list here includes free online courses in a number of social media-related topics and disciplines. If you’d like to dig into one area in particular, here’s a quick table of contents so you can jump to the section that’s most important to you:
Offered by: Coursera
Created by: Northwestern University
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
“What Is Social?” is a massive open online course (MOOC) for business owners, executives, and marketing professionals who want to significantly improve their abilities to grow their social media strategy using effective, proven methodologies. In short, it’s a really awesome, action-based intro to social media.
The exciting part with this hands-on class is that you not only get to hear about ways to grow your professional persona using social media, but you will actually do it! “What Is Social” is the first in a six-course specialization offered by Northwestern University (a top university in the United States). Once you finish this first course, you can continue on with the next steps of the track: Social Media Marketing: How to Profit in a Digital World. (The first course is free; the full track costs $426.)
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Offered by: Alison
Created by: Advance Learning Academy
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Alison is a similar to Coursera as a site that offers a huge range of classes and certifications, including several in the marketing space. Their free social media class covers the use of email marketing, affiliate marketing, using social media tools such as Twitter, blogging and podcasting, and how to use Facebook to create a business page and get it noticed by current and potential customers. So you’re likely to get a social media foundation plus a handful of other digital marketing skills to boot.
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Offered by: Coursera
Created by: Eric Schwartzman
Topics include:
Skill level: All Levels
About this course:
This free social media class on how to monitor what your audience and customers are saying online is for marketers looking to keep a finger on the pulse of their community. Whether you’re just starting out in social media or are a seasoned veteran, this course has actionable social monitoring takeaways for people of all skills levels.
The course provides detailed examples of monitoring in action, allows you to get an overview of the different social media monitoring tools available for use, and strategies for how you can use what you’ve learned and apply it to your own social media program.
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Offered by: Coursera
Created by: Northwestern University
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner – Intermediate
About this course:
“The Business of Social” is for businesses owners, marketers, and social media managers looking for ways to tie social media directly into real business growth objectives. In other words, those looking to drive real, measurable value from a social media strategy and program.
Instead of focusing on how marketers can create great content for social media, this class more focuses on how exactly to measure your social investments in terms of time, cost, and opportunities.
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Offered by: Coursera
Created by: Eric Schwartzman
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Have you ever wondered what it means to use social media effectively and ethically? This free course on “Social Media Ethics” provides the framework for social networking and engaging in ethical conversations online for all professionals and employees. Touching on local, State, and Federal laws, it takes the guessing game out of what is and is not legal on social media for employees of businesses.
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Offered by: Udemy
Created by: Brian Yang
Topics include:
Skill level: Intermediate
About this course:
The tagline for this social media class is “picking up clients with social media in 48 hours or less.” Which points to the fact that this instructor dives into intermediate social media strategies. Moving beyond more beginner tactics like setting up social media accounts and basic posting strategies, this class assumes that you already know those things and provides details on how to best use the channels that you’re already familiar with.
All you need for this course is an active Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit account and you’ll be on your way to learning the secrets behind picking up clients on social media.
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Offered by: Facebook
Created by: Blueprint eLearning
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner – Advanced
About this course:
Perfect for small businesses, marketers, agencies, and advertisers, Facebook Blueprint is your one stop shop for everything there is to know about running successful advertising campaigns using your Facebook Business Page. This huge resource of free, self-paced social media classes will cover best-practices and top strategies used by the world’s largest brands.
With Facebook becoming very much a “pay-to-play” platform, this is the perfect opportunity for businesses and marketers to fully grasp everything there is to know about ensuring that your advertising dollar stretches as far as possible.
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Offered by: Constant Contact
Created by: Constant Contact
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
All social media managers and marketers start somewhere. This free social media class from Constant Contact is a great resource for those who are looking to dive into the world of social media without all of the complications. It offers a step-by-step guide to building a presence on almost every social media platform you can think of.
For those unsure if social media is right for you or for your business, this class is a great way to dip your toes in and start small with social media marketing. Who knows, you may find that social media is just right for you!
Offered by: Skillshare
Created by: Mailchimp
Skill level: Intermediate to Advanced
About this course:
Marketers and social media professionals with a basic understanding of how email marketing works will love this free online course from Mailchimp. Perfect for those of you on the go, it’s a 25-minute, highly tactical class on developing the basic email marketing principles that you may already be familiar with.
By the end of this email course, you’ll have a great understanding of how to create engaging email marketing campaigns and how to optimize your strategy in order to increase business revenue.
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Offered by: Coursera
Created by: University of Illinois
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
“Marketing in a Digital World” is one of the most popular free marketing courses on Coursera – with more then 100,000 students enrolled to this date. Taught by a professor at the University of Illinois, this class focuses on the transformation of marketing strategies an tactics into a digital-first world. Specifically, how technology is putting the power of marketing into the hands of the consumer.
This course is perfect for marketers looking to understand where the marketing field is today and how you can leverage new-age strategies to attract customers. And for those who are keen to continue their learning, this course is part of a larger Digital Marketing Specialization for the University of Illinois.
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Offered by: QuickSprout
Created by: Neil Patel
Skill level: Beginner – Advanced
About this course:
This awesome (or should we say huge?) set of classes from the one and only Neil Patel is a great place for marketers looking to learn about a huge variety of online and digital marketing tactics. Class topics range from beginner SEO and content creation strategies to advanced social media, email marketing and paid advertising.
What makes this course is that Neil Patel presents the information in very easy-to-learn and snackable ways. The lessons are presented in video format and range anywhere from 3:00 – 12:00 minutes. Each video also comes with a full transcript allowing more visual learners to follow along.
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Offered by: HubSpot
Created by: HubSpot
Skill level: Beginner – Advanced
About this course:
HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification is full of super actionable, hands-on learning material that allows marketers to take their general inbound marketing know-how to the next level. The certification consists of 12 different classes and more than 4.5 hours of learning material in both video and text format.
You’ll learn all about SEO, blogging, landing pages, lead nurturing, conversion analysis and reporting come together to form a modern-day inbound marketing strategy. This free online marketing course is presented in different modules, where after successful completion of all the lessons and tests, you’ll be HubSpot certified!
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Offered by: Coursera
Created by: University of Pennsylvania
Skill level: Beginner – Intermediate
About this course:
Taught by University of Pennsylvania Professor and best-selling author, Jonah Berger, this free online marketing course helps to answer the mystery of why some ideas and products become popular and why others do not. It’s perfect for social media managers and marketers looking to put a “science” behind their content marketing method.
You’ll start with an understanding of why things catch on in the first place and how you can use those lessons to create viral content online. Then, you’ll move on to spreading your new and creative ideas through social media and other digital marketing channels.
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Offered by: WordStream
Created by: WordStream
Skill level: Beginner – Advanced
About this course:
PPC University is a fully free online learning resource created by WordStream, to help build your PPC and digital marketing skills. The format is presented in three streams of learning plans which offer lessons for beginning to advanced users, with additional modules for social advertising.
You can also access a number of webinars and white papers to enhance your digital marketing expertise, and best of all, everything’s mobile-friendly so you can learn on the go, whenever you have time!
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Offered by: Alison
Created by: Google
Skill level: Intermediate
About this course:
This “Diploma in E-Business” course is a comprehensive resource for marketers, business owners, and advertisers who would like to get the most out of their digital marketing efforts. You’ll learn things like the fundamentals of promoting your business online, using various Google-powered tools, and how to track and make sense of the vast amounts of data available to you.
Whether you have a deep knowledge of how to market your business online or are just getting started, this course is an awesome way to strengthen your digital marketing skills.
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Offered by: WordStream
Created by: WordStream
Skill level: Beginner – Advanced
About this course:
Learning the ins-and-outs of all of the marketing tools that Google offers is quite the task. But marketers and business owners have seen the direct benefits of mastering the various Google advertising platforms in terms of business ROI. This course offers a direct line to always-updated resources for everything Google.
This course is also a part of a Online Marketing Challenge from Google. Students that plan to take the Online Marketing Challenge are encouraged to complete the Digital Marketing Course first. Marketers looking to learn everything there is to know about Google (and advertising), this is a great place to start!
Offered by: Buffer
Created by: Buffer
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner – Intermediate
About this course:
While not a social media “class” in a traditional sense, Buffer’s Week-of-Webinars covers everything from content curation to social media analytics to getting your content seen in the Facebook News Feed.
The great thing about this series of online marketing webinars is that no registration is required to sign up and you can view all five of the videos at your own convenience. And we’d love to hear what you think of these webinars in the comments below!
Offered by: Udemy
Created by: Jigsaw Academy
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
This “Introduction to Analytics” course is a great starting point for marketers looking to understand what the field of analytics is all about and how to apply it to a variety of businesses and situations. If you’re looking to go beyond the very popular marketing spreadsheets, this course is perfect for you.
This class is broken up into 12 videos of varying length – anywhere from 5-30 minutes and will take you about 2 hours to complete from start to finish.
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Offered by: Google
Created by: Google
Topics include:
Skill level: Intermediate – Advanced
About this course:
Google Analytics Academy is an incredible online resource for marketers looking to up their game in everything Google-related. With the importance of tracking and incorporating data into your marketing strategy, there has never been a better time to learn all you can about one of the most data-rich resources in the world.
Some of the most popular modules from the Google Analytics Academy include Digital Analytics Fundamentals and Google Analytics Platform Principles. Both of those courses will give you a solid foundation of how to implement data into your strategy and how you can use the platform to best inform your decisions moving forward.
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Offered by: Coursera
Created by: Copenhagen Business School
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner – Intermediate
About this course:
I put this fantastic course on Neuromarketing under the Analytics and Data section because it really gets into the nuts and bolts of why people make the decisions that they do online and in real life. Understanding that can help marketers and business make decisions based on data and research.
You’ll be taken on a journey through the basic brain mechanisms in consumer choice, and how to stay updated on these topics. The course will give an overview of the current and future uses of neuroscience in business and how you can apply it to your own social media and marketing strategy.
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Offered by: Udemy
Created by: UpSkill Ladder
Topics include:
Skill level: Advanced
About this course:
I have the tendency to cringe when I hear the words “Excel PivotTables.” But I also understand how important the use of PivotTables can be in diving into your analytics and making informed decisions about marketing.
This course will teach you how to do Data analytics with Excel PivotTables effectively and efficiently. At the end of the lessons, you will understand the concept, various scenarios and types of Business analytics. Along with that you will learn, how to use one of the strongest features of Microsoft Excel, which is the PivotTables.
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Offered by: Coursera
Created by: University of Illinois
Topics include:
Skill level: Advanced
About this course:
Taught by Kevin Hartman, Head of Industry at Google, this free marketing course on “Digital Analytics” focuses on the specific data collection, analysis, and visualization techniques used by the world’s top brands. Unlike some of the other analytics classes offered online, this one focuses specifically on marketing.
This course will set you up with a full understanding of how to properly approach data analytics in marketing and how to make informed decisions based on your finding. In short, you’ll be a data wizard!
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Offered by: edX
Created by: University of California at Berkeley
Topics include:
Skill level: Intermediate
About this course:
In this marketing class, you’ll learn the best approaches and practices for marketing measurement, including how to use metrics to measure success. The professor, Stephan Sorger, presents hands-on examples of how to identify market trends, how to predict future conditions, and how to put those into action.
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Offered by: Quintly
Created by: Quintly
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
As social media continues to drive traffic and revenue for businesses, the need for marketers to fully understand the “why” behind social success (or downturns) will increase.
This free social media class from Quintly covers the basic principles of social media analytics both for beginners and for marketers who want to refresh their knowledge. It aims to help anybody involved in social media analytics, no matter whether you are working for a brand, an agency or in the media.
Offered by: Udemy
Created by: Eric Schwartzman
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner – Intermediate
About this course:
This SEO Training class is perfect for social media managers, executives and entry-level employees. This SEO course will help you increase the search rank of your corporate website, you blog or LinkedIn profile.
Learn how to figure out which terms your customers actually search and how to create online content that is most likely to rank high in Google search engine page results. For most organizations, search engine optimization presents a greater conversion opportunity that social media outreach.
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Offered by: Open2Study
Created by: Frankie Madden
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Knowing how to write well is an important skill for just about anything, but knowing how to write for the web is a whole different ball game. It takes clear and concise copy to gain the attention of your readers in just a few seconds.
This course will help just about anyone – from journalists to technical writers to developers to aspiring bloggers – create content that really engages and converts online. It also will teach you the skills needed to accommodate the requirements of online readers through web design, writing style, structure and SEO.
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Offered by: Skillshare
Created by: Contently
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Have you ever wondered how all of those great bloggers get writing gigs for brands online? This course provides the framework for starting a successful freelance career if that’s something you’d be interested in. Taught by Brian Maehl of Contently, “Writing for Brands” is an actionable, 30-minutes writing course that breaks down the process into simple steps.
Whether writing turns into a full-time career for you or just a fun project to tackle on the side, the folks at Contently are happy to help prepare you to pitch your content ideas to brands both big and small.
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Offered by: Udemy
Created by: Moz
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Optimizing a web site for search engines requires looking at a ton of unique elements both on and off your website. This course on SEO from the folks at Moz will help you to start making sense of it all. Most importantly, it will help you form consistent SEO habits that you can implement long after this course is over.
If you’re interested in getting started with optimizing your website for search engines and how social media has the power to fit within that strategy, this is a great place to start for beginners.
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Offered by: Udemy
Created by: William Flanagan
Topics include:
Skill level: Intermediate – Advanced
About this course:
B2B companies, products, and services often require a slightly different approach to content marketing. Customer sales cycles are more drawn out and require various, targeted content types to help assist decision-makers to the next stage.
The entire set of classes in this content marketing course lasts roughy 35 minutes. You’ll learn how to get inside the mind of your market and build content that interests them in a short period of time. Allowing you to get back to running your business!
Offered by: Coursera
Created by: University of California at Irvine
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Writing great copy that is meant to drive people to take a specific business action is a unique and valuable skill to have for marketers and business owners alike. This “High-Impact Business Writing” course is aimed at helping you get your thoughts on paper in a clear and concise manner.
Structured as a 4-week class, you’ll start with the basics of businesses writing, including why it’s important, and move to more advanced topics such as preparing business documents and translating ideas to more informal channels such as social media. In short, helping to to become a business copy whiz!
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Offered by: Copyblogger
Created by: Copyblogger
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
With the tagline, “you don’t have to be a genius to master internet marketing,” this 20-part email course from the folks at Copyblogger offers a great starting place for those new to the marketing field. What’s unique about this course is that it digs deeply into the areas of direct response copywriting and relationship building.
It’s set up in “4 Pillars” takes you through various topics such as customer relationships, writing, content marketing and delivering something that’s worth selling.
Offered by: Skillshare
Created by: Smithsonian Design Museum
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Have you ever wanted to get started with design so that you can create your own images for social media and marketing? This “Graphic Design Basics” from will set you up with a solid foundation to branch out as a beginner designer.
In this 35-minute class designers Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips walk students through what it takes to create great designs. Including, the 5 important and fundamental aspects of design and how you can apply those to every one of your projects moving forward.
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Offered by: Udemy
Created by: Inoshiro Design
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Did you know that in 2016, visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content? Today, it’s becoming important, even crucial for marketers to have at least some basic knowledge of key design terms.
This course does a deep dive into the five steps for better visual communication. These components include creating ideas and applying them to your design, communicating ideas effectively within the design, and having a consistent design look and feel.
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Offered by: Unbounce
Created by: Unbounce
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner – Intermediate
About this course:
Curious about the power of landing pages in marketing campaigns? Unbounce has the art of a perfect landing page down to a science. And in this comprehensive online marketing class, they share all of that knowledge with you, no questions asked.
The Landing Page Conversion Course takes you from “Landing Page 101” right on down to “Copywriting” and even “Testing and Optimization.” If you’ve ever been curious about the power of landing pages and how they can help you grow your business, this course is the perfect one for you.
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Offered by: ALISON
Created by: XSIQ
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner
About this course:
Great design starts with the fundamentals. The free course from ALISON examines various design elements including line, shape, form and texture and design principles, covering composition, balance, contrast and hierarchy. If you’re interested in exploring graphic design, industrial design or the design process in general, this free graphic design class is perfect for you.
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Offered by: Udemy
Created by: Design and Art Direction Mason Gentry
Topics include:
Skill level: Intermediate
About this class:
Are you interested in deepening your knowledge of graphic design or how graphic design can be applied in the real world? The class “Graphic Design 101” is specifically for developers who may know a little about graphic design, but would like to learn more.
Many students who take this class have the ability to recognize a good design when they see one, but may not know WHY it’s a good design. This free online design class looks to help answer the “why.”
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Offered by: Skillshare
Created by: Nicole Farb
Topics include:
Skill level: Beginner – Intermediate
About this course: Video marketing is making a huge splash online and on social media. But one thing what we consistently hear is that marketers aren’t quite sure where to start. Yet, videos have the potential to engage an audience in new and exciting ways – Just look at BuzzFeed Tasty for an example of the power of video!
In this short class, Nicole Farb shows how you can create your own video in a scrappy, easy, and high-quality way and how she has seen huge success with it in the past. Perfect for marketers and social media managers just getting started with video.
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As Malcolm Gladwell said in his book Outliers, “It takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field.”
Malcolm’s quote just goes to show that with enough effort, patience, and practice, you can learn anything you put your mind to. We hope that this lists helps you to find some great online social media classes and marketing resources.
Have you taken any online social media classes or marketing classes recently that you truly loved? We’d love to hear them!
Please feel free to leave us a comment below and we may add it to our list!
An internal poll of LinkedIn users revealed some surprising insights into extending conversations and converting sales leads on (and off) the platform.
More than ever – especially in today’s fast-paced, always-online marketplace – people want to do business with other people.
Not a logo.
Not a brand statement.
Not a faceless avatar.
This timeless truth of marketing wisdom is more true today than ever: People want to do business with people they Know, Like, and Trust.
When it comes to generating that critical “Know, Like and Trust” factor with a personalized, 1-on-1 marketing approach on a social network like LinkedIn, there’s an often-overlooked marketing method that is proving more and more popular with the social media network’s nearly 500 million users: Podcasting.
New data recently released by LinkedIn revealed a promising increase of podcast usage among its users, which means, if you’re not already using podcasts, you should be adding them as another instrument in your “Know, Like and Trust” toolbox.
(Related: How “Personal” Should You Get on LinkedIn?)
Here’s why it works: Not everyone has time to sit and read blog posts, whereas a podcast can be consumed during a commute, a workout, or walking the dog.
With a podcast, you can literally “get in someone’s head,” and that person takes your voice along (via ear buds, car stereos, etc.) wherever he or she is headed at a particular moment in time.
LinkedIn shared a recent infographic that demonstrates 35% of it’s users globally are regularly listening to podcasts, and that the level of engagement with podcasts increases significantly with seniority.
“Amongst department heads, VPs, owners and C-suites, 44% are listening,” LinkedIn noted in a post related to the data.
This means if you’re not using podcasts, you’re missing an amazing opportunity to grab a captive audience of decision makers, who can listen to you and what you can offer.
Podcasts are a richer medium, which means they can communicate your message more effectively. Using LinkedIn Messages and Posts to talk business is great, but you lose important cues like tone of voice and other additional words that help you communicate — not to mention your personality!
Just as I coach my clients on using LinkedIn to generate new business not to scrub all traces of personality and individuality from their profile page, photos, or posts, a podcast is an excellent chance for your clients and prospects to get to know the real you.
Using a Podcast to build in those “know, like and trust” factors works so well because people trust you more when they hear the sound of your voice. They also feel your emotion, passion and expertise in your respective area.
You can also embed podcasts on LinkedIn using SoundCloud, and with LinkedIn’s enhanced features you have the ability to publish native blog posts along with embedding everything from podcasts to tweets to training videos right inside the platform as well.
You can also use your podcast as source material for a LinkedIn blog post.
Using a tool like SpeechPad.com, for example, you can also easily convert that audio into written posts. For example, I recently interviewed expert David Newman talking about public speaking tips, and had it transcribed to turn into a series of blog posts.
It’s also been shown in numerous marketing studies that multiple pieces of content are consumed by prospects before a purchasing decision is made.
Offering longer-form content, like giving away a free book or doing a podcast are examples of content marketing and “extending the conversation” outside of LinkedIn invites and messages.
The goal is to make yourself memorable, relatable, and likable with every piece of content you share on the network – so get to it!
Ron Miller / TechCrunch:
Amazon announces a virtual private server service called Lightsail, starting at $5/month, aimed mainly at non-technical users — AWS fired a shot across Digital Ocean's bow this morning at the AWS re:Invent conference when it announced new virtual private servers starting at just $5 a month.
Amazon today announced the launch of its new Amazon AI platform at its re:Invent developer event in Las Vegas. This new service brings many of the machine learning smarts Amazon has developed in-house over the years to devs outside the company. For now, the service only makes three different tools available, but the plan is to add more over time. Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy… Read MoreThere are still stark differences across Europe's various countries when it comes to labor markets.
Eurostat recently released data showing the expected durations of working life in European states for 2015, which uses demographic and labor force data to estimate the number of years a person aged 15 in a given nation is expected to be "active" — so, employed or unemployed but looking for work — in the labor market throughout his or her life.
Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the UK are among the countries with the longest expected durations of working life — greater than 38 years.
On the flip side, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Hungary are among the countries with the shortest expected durations of working life in Europe — less than 33 years.
Check out the full map below, which was shared by Deutsche Bank's Torsten Sløk.
SEE ALSO: This chart highlights one of Europe's biggest problems
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: The 3 worst things you do when you wash your face — according to a dermatologist
Coming from the right orator, words have the ability to shape society and the future.
It's no coincidence that the most powerful leaders in the world — from Barack Obama to Bill Gates to Vladimir Putin — are gifted speakers who win support, shape minds, and even stir controversy with their words.
Though his speaking habits are unconventional — and often contentious — US President-Elect Donald Trump now joins the same ranks as these powerful leaders. As the new face of the world's foremost superpower, Trump's words will carry more weight than ever before.
Scroll through to find out what Trump and ten more of the world's most powerful people have to say about ambition, command, and leadership.
Melissa Stanger contributed to an earlier version of this post.
DON'T MISS: 25 books by billionaires that will teach you how to run the world
SEE ALSO: 40 quotes from business visionaries who are changing the world
Managing pipelines is a primary responsibility for every sales manager. But, a study by Vantage Point Performance and the Sales Management Association recently revealed that sales leaders are struggling. The same study also showed that organizations with effective pipeline management focus on the fundamentals:
My friend Jason Jordan is a partner at Vantage Point Performance and shares some of his key takeaways from this study below. For more tips from Jason, check out his Amazon.com best-selling book “Cracking the Sales Management Code” or follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn. Here’s the article from Jason:
Since so many companies have sales pipelines, you’d think that there would be a well-worn set of pipeline management best practices for sales managers. Even if that is the case—and I don’t believe it is—do you know how many sales leaders struggle to manage their pipelines? An overwhelming majority, apparently.
In recent research we conducted with the Sales Management Association, 56% of executives confessed that their organizations were ineffective at managing sales pipelines. Their companies waste a lot of time staring at pipeline reports, but this effort yields no increase in sales performance.
Not good news. Fortunately, you don’t have to do a lot of head scratching to improve the effectiveness of your team’s pipeline management. Our research also revealed insights that provide a solid framework to do just that.
We discovered that sales teams that invested the time to define credible standardized sales processes demonstrated the best pipeline management. More specifically, these teams had sales processes with clearly defined stages that were universally understood by all their salespeople. There was no guesswork as to which stage a deal belonged in, and everyone felt confident about the data in the CRM tool. In short, there was a strong backbone for effective pipeline management and a solid sales process with clearly defined stages.
Building on a solid sales process, the next step to effective sales pipeline management was a focus by front-line sales managers to spend enough time managing. In fact, companies in our survey that spent at least four hours per month managing each rep’s sales pipeline realized 14% greater revenue growth than those that spent less than one hour per month.
Unfortunately, many sales managers believe they spend a lot of time managing their sales pipelines when they really spend a lot of time creating forecasts. There are some significant differences. If you are spending your time discussing close dates, probabilities, and deal sizes, then you are forecasting. Period. However, if you are spending your time discussing the overall health of your sellers’ pipelines and how they can shepherd more deals to successful closure, then you are managing your pipeline in a productive way, and you’ll likely see improved sales performance.
Our research discovered that 61% of executives admit their sales managers have not been adequately trained to manage their sales pipelines. This is a revealing admission. Sales teams that say they have properly trained their sales managers in pipeline management strategies and techniques reported 23% greater revenue growth than those who had not. It’s simple logic. How can we expect our sales managers to do something well when we haven’t trained them how to do it?
So, the lessons from our research are very clear. Most sales forces are not good at managing their sales pipelines. However, those that are lay a foundation of processes, training, and management that lead to better-managed pipelines and superior revenue growth. They define solid sales processes that are clear and credible. They set aside time to actively manage their sales pipelines and not just forecast revenue. And finally, they train their sales managers on how to manage their sales pipelines. Look at this formula for successful pipeline management and ask yourself how your sales force stacks up.
The post Grow Your Pipeline And Revenue With These Fundamentals appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.
As any new industry takes shape, technical fragmentation occurs. The connected car is new and hot and, like markets prior, there’s a huge land-grab unfolding in front of all consumers. It feels very much like the early days of smartphones: Everyone was trying to be a player. All companies built their own flavor of software and, as a byproduct, all hardware (smartphones) was weak, at best. Read More
Most salespeople spend hours in their inbox every day: Writing emails, scheduling them, reading them, and organizing them.
If you could save just 10% of this time, you’d have more time for actual selling. In the long run, that means better results for you and your prospects.
To shrink your email investment by 10% (or more), try these five effective email time management hacks.
Tags and folders help you stay organized and find emails again when you need them. But sorting and categorizing every message also consumes precious time and mental energy.
The solution? Set up inbox “rules” so emails are automatically saved to the appropriate folder based on key characteristics.
Here are the instructions for Gmail:
1. Click the “gear” icon and select “Settings.”
2. Click the “Labels” tab.
3. Create a new Label or Category.
4. Click the “Filters and blocked addresses” tab and choose “Create a new filter.”
5. Enter the appropriate specifications. For instance, you might want to label every email from your sales manager as “Important” or every one that contains the words “demo” as “Respond ASAP.” Click “Create a filter with this search.”
6. Select “Apply the label as” or “Categorize as,” then choose the label and/or category you just created.
Here are the instructions for Inbox by Gmail:
1. Click “Create new” in the left sidebar.
2. Title your “bundle” (a.k.a. folder.)
3. Click the gear icon next to your new bundle’s name in the left sidebar.
4. Choose “Automatically add messages,” then select the appropriate specifications and press “Save.”
Here are the instructions for Outlook:
1. Select "Settings" and "Options."
2. Under the Mail sub-menu, find "Automatic processing," and click "Inbox and sweep rules."
3. Click the "+" icon to create a new rule.
4. Enter a name (for example, "CRM Notifications") and the appropriate criteria. Under "Do all of the following," choose "Mark the message" > "with a category."
5. Select a category.
6. Press "OK."
Reading an email without responding immediately is a waste of time. Replying later requires opening the message, reading it, and formulating your thoughts all over again.
To get this time back, don’t close a new email until you respond. If you get a message and you’re not ready to answer, wait to open it until you are ready.
Sometimes responding right away is impossible: You’re waiting on another person, don’t possess the necessary information, need to double-check your answer with someone else, and so on. In these cases, draft as much of your reply as possible. When you do respond, you won’t be starting from scratch.
Using templates can save you hours per week. Instead of typing out variations on the same email 50 times to 50 different prospects, you can take a general message and customize it to the specific recipient. This process is far more efficient -- and it makes personalizing your emails easier as well.
While templates definitely come in handy for prospecting and follow up emails, you should use them for any type of message you send repeatedly.
To give you an idea, here’s a sample list of templates:
Navigate your inbox faster with keyboard shortcuts. Most email providers come with their own built-in shortcuts. Although you might be tempted to memorize them all at once, you’ll probably have a hard time retaining any of them. Focus on memorizing five to 10 instead. After you’ve gotten those down, you can always add more to your repertoire.
Turn on keyboard shortcuts in Gmail:
Here’s the complete list of Gmail shortcuts.
1. Go to your Gmail settings.
2. Find “Keyboard Settings” under the “General” tab and choose “Keyboard shortcuts on.”
3. Go to the “Labs” tab.
4. Scroll down to the “Custom keyboard shortcuts” box and click “Enable.”
Turn on keyboard shortcuts in Inbox by Gmail:
Here’s the complete list of Inbox by Gmail shortcuts.
1. Hold down the Shift key while pressing the ? key.
2. Flip the “Keyboard Shortcuts” toggle to “on.”
Here’s the complete list of Outlook shortcuts. (Shortcuts are automatically turned on.)
How often do you type the same short string of words or sentences? For instance, you might write, “Are you free for a call at [date and time]?” approximately 20 times per day. This snippet is only part of a larger message, so you can’t templatize it. However, there’s still a way to reuse it (and other brief strings) so you don’t need to constantly retype them: Text expanders.
Fortunately for Mac users, Macs support text expansion.
1. Go to “System Preferences."
2. Choose “Keyboard."
3. Select the “Text” tab. Enter the text you’d like to save along with a shortcut. As an example, “Call” might represent “Are you free for a call at [date and time]?”
Windows users will have to download an application. PhraseExpress offers a free option for text expansion, although the creators ask you to buy the paid version for commercial use.
Each of these hacks might save you a few seconds -- and in the long run, those seconds will add up. The more time you spend on actual selling, the better you'll perform.
Here are 8 observations about high performing sales organizations:
The post 8 Things High Performing Sales Organizations Do appeared first on The Sales Blog.
The poorest performing IT reseller companies are the most opportunistic. In the words of the famous business strategist Michael Porter, “To the company without a strategy, everything is an opportunity”. Poor performing resellers chase their tails, and every opportunity that comes along. Long-term high performers invest time in building their strategy, then invest resources in dominating their chosen markets. It comes down to maturity, focus and commitment.
Much of the under-performance of channel partners can be explained by the lack of a coherent company strategy. We’re not talking about functional strategies like a marketing, product or sales strategy. Those things need to come later. The problem is that most channel marketing partners (often driven by well-meaning Vendors) put the cart before the horse. They often develop marketing and product strategies in complete isolation from any corporate strategy or direction.
And yes, I recognise that most channel partners are not “Corporates”. I understand that the majority are SMB’s, often led by the technically-focused company founders. And this makes the need for a company (or corporate) strategy even more critical. I should know…Ridge Consulting specializes in strategy development for technology small and medium business (SMB’s). This is our world.
Let me give you just one example. You are no doubt already familiar with S-curves which explain technology and business cycles.
As the graph shows, successful high performing companies need to be able to transcend the regular business and technology cycles. As one cycle ends, they need to have already found the next one and have adapted their internal resources and business model accordingly.
However, if (and I have multiple experiences of seeing this in the channel myself) their entire company strategy is built around “Technologies A from Vendor X”, then it is almost impossible for them to seamlessly make that transition. As the cycle ends their business goes into flux, revenues fall off a cliff and staff and business relationships suffer, often irrevocably. All of the marketing plans, product plans etc. were built around a small solution set rather than a wider mission of value delivery over the long term.
This happens regularly, worldwide and it is totally unnecessary. All that is required is for leadership teams at resellers (and their Vendor counterparts) to stop, analyse and start planning.
Ideas are easy, but execution is tough.
Can you relate? Do you have lots of ideas but aren’t sure which ones to pursue? Or maybe you start working on something, but then a new idea comes along that piques your interest. You jump to that one and then struggle to bring either project to completion.
Ninety-two percent of successful B2B marketers value the craft of creativity (compared to 74% of the overall sample of B2B marketers), but how do you move from ideas to execution when you’re feeling overwhelmed and your to-do list is overflowing?
92% of successful B2B marketers value the craft of creativity, compared to 74% of overall sample. @cmicontent
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While, of course you need to have a laser focus on your content marketing mission, goals, and audience, how are you going to make the time — and find the mental space — to get the work done?
This post includes tools, tips, and ideas you can start using today to gain control of your ideas and make time to create something meaningful.
There are four main steps you need to take in this specific order:
While ideas are essential for great content, addressing too many at once can be paralyzing. Think of all of the new ideas showing up in our inboxes and in our meetings.
And, as the idea list grows, it becomes increasingly tough to focus. We start to think about one idea, and then jump to another. And then we don’t want to give up any ideas that we have thought about because of the time we’ve invested — and the promise of what could be. Jessica Abel (who I recommend you follow if you are interested in your creative practice) calls this idea debt:
Idea debt is when you spend too much time picturing what a project is going to be like, too much time thinking about how awesome it will be to have this thing done and in the world, too much time imagining how cool you will look, how in demand you’ll be, how much money you’ll make. And way too little time actually making the thing.
How do you get past this cycle of idea debt? Start by centralizing all of your ideas in one place.
#Content execution tip: Centralize all of your ideas in one place, says @MicheleLinn.
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There are a lot of ways to do this — starting with a simple notebook or spreadsheet — but I’m personally a fan of Trello. Not only can you list all of your ideas, but you can add notes to each one as you think about them in more detail — and then prioritize them with ease.
Once all of your ideas are listed in one place, you need to decide what to remove.
While I am far from a pack rat when it comes to stuff, I sometimes have trouble getting rid of ideas because I think “There could be something there,” or “I might as well finish what I started.”
But, I recently took my own advice and spent time truly going through all of the ideas I had listed and getting rid of A LOT. Some good reasons for shedding an idea:
One of the thoughts that helped me let go of a lot of ideas came from Arianna Huffington, in her book, Thrive:
I did a major ‘life audit’ when I turned 40, and I realized how many projects I had committed to in my head — such as learning German and becoming a good skier and learning to cook. Most remained unfinished, and many were not even started. Yet these countless incomplete projects drained my energy and diffused my attention. As soon as the file was opened, each one took a little bit of me away. It was very liberating to realize that I could ‘complete’ a project by simply dropping it — by eliminating it from my to-do list. Why carry around this unnecessary baggage? That’s how I completed learning German and becoming a good skier and learning to cook and a host of other projects that now no longer have a claim on my attention.
Next, it’s time to review what’s still on the list and decide what you want to tackle next. As mentioned, everything you do needs to support your content marketing mission, goals, and audience. If they don’t do this, they need to come off the list — unless they can be reframed in a way that would support these key tenets. Of course, a documented content marketing strategy helps keep you focused.
If your ideas don’t support your #contentmarketing goals, they need to come off the list says @MicheleLinn.
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Here are a couple reasons for prioritizing an idea:
I ended up with a few lists when I was finished:
Now it’s time to create! Oh, this is so much easier said than done — and so much has been written about how to do it. But, here are some of my favorite ways to make time and actually create.
A couple of people on the CMI team told me they spend a bit of time at the end of each day choosing five things they want to accomplish the following day (not coincidentally, this article was on my list of five things for today). There is no one right way to do this; find what works for your system.
Clare McDermott uses a system called the Emergent Task Planner. Cathy McPhillips evaluates her to-do list at the end of each work day and chooses three to five things she wants to accomplish first the next day. She jots these down on a sticky note she puts on the cover of her planner. The next day, she won’t start on anything new until her list is complete. I use Trello for my to-do list and recently added a column called “5 Things for Today” to which I simply drag the tasks on which I want to focus.
At the end of each day choose five things to accomplish the following day says @MicheleLinn.
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A few notes about choosing your five things:
The Pomodoro technique is a widely used method of focusing chunks of time throughout the day. You turn off all distractions (email, phone notifications, IM — everything) and work on a dedicated task for 25 minutes, take a five-minute break, then repeat. (It’s what I’m using right now so I can complete this article.)
This is a great visual of the Pomodoro technique from Chris Bailey:
If you want to take this method even further, I highly recommend this article from Chris Winfield: How to Work 40 Hours in 16.7.
If you are trying to make headway on a specific project — or if you simply want more time to create — make it part of your daily schedule. It’s a simple (yet not-so-simple) way of making something a habit.
If you don’t think you have any time to add one more thing, consider this simple concept called 100 blocks. The premise is that each of us has approximately 100 10-minute blocks in our day, which is 16.67 waking hours (you can add or subtract depending on how much you sleep). Once you start looking at your day in these 10-minute chunks, opportunities arise, as it’s so easy to whittle away 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there. Chances are, if creating something is important to you, you’ll likely be about to find three blocks in your day.
If you need some reinforcements to stay on track, many apps and programs can help. Some disable websites where you find yourself wasting time, while others track your time so you can truly see where it’s going. I like the recommendations from this article by Stephen Altrogge: 14 Tools to Help You Avoid Distractions and Stay Focused at Work. And, this quote stuck with me as well — and I hope it helps you, too:
Researcher Matt Killingsworth found that distractions actually make us less happy. Those who are able to give their focus to one thing at a time are much more satisfied with life. Distractions are destructive.
Yes! Having that time to focus on something creative truly makes me more satisfied and excited about my job. So choose a project (even if it’s small), turn off all distractions, and get to work.
Over to you: Does this seem doable or just one more thing to do? What tips do you have to accomplish meaningful work?
Why not make reading the tips, insights, and trends from experts in CMI’s newsletter one of your five things to do? It will be nice to check it off your list without consuming too much time and you’ll learn something at the same time. Subscribe today.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Get Control of Your Content Marketing Ideas So You Can Take Action appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
It’s oddly ironic, we never seem to take the time to do things right.
I could go on and on, but you get the point or you are getting really pissed off.
As sales people or managers, unless we are totally unconscious, we know the things we should be doing to produce the best results. But too often we fail to do them, most often complaining that we don’t have the time to do these things we know to produce results.
Instead of taking the time to do the things we know are right, we take shortcuts. Inevitably the shortcuts don’t produce the same results as doing things right. Then, we take more time to correct things. But since we aren’t doing the right things, we tend to continue to fix problems that probably wouldn’t have occurred if we did what we knew was right in the first place.
The irony, is we always find the time to correct our mistakes and missteps, but we can never find the time to do things right in the first place.
How much time would we free up? How much more effective would we be? What would happen if we started doing the things we know to be right?
Throughout our time in the marketing industry, whether on the professional side, or the academic side, the concept of sales has been routinely brought up as a contentious point.
It is true that when consumers are shopping, they love ‘finding’ the deals. They want to feel like they are ‘winning’ the against businesses and getting the services and goods that they want at a lower price. That is one of the major reasons why Cyber Monday (now, Cyber Week, it seems), Black Friday and so on are so big. Consumers are sitting on their cash waiting for brands to slash prices.
Why should marketers be content that people refuse to buy their products at full price? There’s something more going on there.
During a CNBC interview, a former CEO of JC Penny said that “sales have become a cancer” for department stores. Stores, instead of focusing on the right product and the right target market, are relying on sales to move products and drum up business.
Rather than spend time to truly figure out what consumers want, brands are too worried about bringing in cash. So brands cheapen the value of their products in the eyes of the consumers, and issue sales.
In theory, sales and discounts should be offered on few occasions:
1) Provide an incentive for immediately responding and buying
2) Clear outdated inventory and provide space for new and seasonal product
3) Get rid of otherwise defective products
4) Provide a reason to come in and see other products not for sale that the audience may be interested in
As in most cases, the reality of the situation is different than the theory.
It is not being said that sales are bad. Sales and discounts can be used very effectively. But sales and discounts are used best when used sparingly. Marketing is supposed to provide reasons why our goods and services make the lives of our target audience better. Slashing prices at will for the sake of getting people in all the time, takes away from the message.
There is a rising population trekking to this school of thought.
For example, fashion retailer Kenneth Cole announced earlier in November that it is planning to close all of its outlet stores, and focus on its full-priced boutiques and online presence. It should be noted that the brand is still doing sales online, but Kenneth Cole is also promoting its latest fashion line. So it fits the traditional sales process, while maintaining the integrity of the brand.
On the flip side, you have those brands that paraded the “everyday low prices”, like K-Mart, Sports Authority and others, closing their doors or filing bankruptcy, because competing solely on sales and prices is a very hard thing to do (unless you create economies-of-scale like Wal-Mart, but that’s a different story).
As more consumers become digitally savvy, stores will have to continue reinventing the in-store experience. Online, brands have to find ways to accurately showcase the value of their offerings, so consumers spend regularly, without the need for a sale.
Our marketing community needs to get louder and refuse offering sales and discounts for sales’ sake. We need to do better at protecting the value of the brand.
“Having spent 30 years evaluating and tracking executives and studying the factors in their performance, I now consider potential to be the most important predictor of success at all levels.”
– Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Harvard Business Review
As a Talent Specialist at OpenView, it’s my job to work with our portfolio companies to source and hire the best sales and marketing talent out there. Prior to OpenView, I led a team of recruiters that specialized in scaling revenue-generating teams for growing software companies.
Over the course of this work – recruiting for and advising tech companies from pre-series A to IPO – I’ve come to understand that finding that so-called perfect candidate often has a lot more to do with future potential than past experience. In fact, I think it’s time for more companies to embrace this mentality when hiring.
When looking to hire top performing sales reps, hiring managers usually focus on past performance (average quotas, attainment, biggest deals and logos won, etc.). There might be an emphasis on years of experience as well as education, often with a focus on top colleges and universities. You might perhaps even require a minimum GPA. Hiring managers also tend to look at industry background and verticals in which the candidate has previously sold into.
Though it’s definitely not wrong to seek out candidates who do fall in line with these defined characteristics, hiring managers have to understand that there is only a very limited pool of candidates who will meet these requirements. Moreover, that pool is shrinking all the time as more tech companies scale their teams. By focusing solely on candidates who meet a predefined set of criteria, you’re excluding an entire pool of potential hires who might be very successful at your company.
What’s more is that by putting these strict limitations on applicants, you’re discouraging people from applying as well. So in fact, you’re shrinking your own application pool from both ends.
For companies dead set on evaluating and hiring candidates based on very limited criteria, it’s time to face the ugly truth. Hiring candidates that meet your requirements may end up costing you big time. Experienced candidates who move roles laterally often expect a 10 to 15% bump in their overall earnings. When you do go out on a limb and hire a candidate who doesn’t check all of the typical boxes, you’re most likely to acquire said hire at a steep discount.
As mentioned, the pool of candidates who meet your criteria is shrinking rapidly. Every hiring manager is looking for candidates that check all the same boxes. To build out your team as you scale, you’re eventually going to have to expand your pool of acceptable applicants. In fact, a 2014 PWC survey of CEOs in 68 countries found that 63% of respondents said they were concerned about the future availability of key skills at all levels.
By focusing solely on things like education, years of experience and past performance, you put yourself at risk of hiring the wrong people. It’s estimated that the average cost of a mis-hire is between 25 and 40 times that person’s salary. Putting more of an emphasis on culture fit and willingness to learn (factors that are typically indicators of success), you’ll likely reduce your chances of hiring the wrong candidate.
It’s time to view a candidate’s lack of experience as a positive – especially when it comes to sales. When you consider a candidate with less experience, it’s possible that he or she has picked up fewer sub-optimal professional habits that will likely be difficult to break. They may also be less fearful or cautious when it comes to making mistakes or overlooking potential opportunities. Candidates with less experience also lack extensive networks and rolodexes on which they can rely. They have to work harder to prove themselves. In essence, you’re getting someone with a fresh perspective who has the capability of being flexible and creative – qualities that are important for smaller, growing companies.
Hiring that less experienced candidate also means you have access to a pool of talent that is completely overlooked (ie. not picked through) by your competitors. Plus, you might be uncovering that hidden star.
Hires based on potential are also likely to stick around longer. Extending an opportunity to a newcomer builds loyalty. You’ll be the employer who gave that person a chance (after he or she was likely turned away by others).
It’s likely that many hiring managers are hesitant to hire based on potential because they simply don’t know how to do so effectively. So, to get started you should consider the following:
Hiring based on potential rather than experience can be a scary undertaking. It requires you to in part toss aside long held criteria you’ve used to evaluate each and every new hire. But, with the pool shrinking, it’s time to look outside of your typical talent base. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
The post How & Why You Should Hire Sales Professionals Based on Potential Rather than Experience appeared first on OpenView Labs.
You’ve closed some deals. Cash is finally coming in. So, let’s keep the foot on the gas! Right?
Well, not exactly. There are a few things you need to get in order before accelerating your shiny new Sales engine. The first being figuring out how to learn from and grow with the clients who got you there: Enter Customer Success.
Now, the first order of business for starting your CS team is making the right first hire, which will be critical in the success of your overall organization beyond just the Sales team. Below are the steps you need to take to ensure you get it right the first time.
Think hard before starting your search. What is the true expectation of this hire? Specifically, what problem(s) are you bringing them in to solve?
Will they be doing only some of these? All of these?
The outcome of that analysis will set the tone for your search. Specifically, do we shoot more senior for a Head of Customer Success or junior with a Customer Success Manager? More often than not, you’ll want to bring in an individual who’s done it before that and can build it right, not just someone who can handle requests as they come. This hire will undoubtedly branch to additional team members over time, so process and experience will have a tremendous ripple effect on the team’s work ethic and culture.
As badly as you may need to make this hire, don’t let it make you sloppy. You’re bringing in someone to take a lot off of your plate, but valuing the wrong skills can create more work for you in the long run.
What does this candidate need to have because it’s essential to your business? Past experience in some (or all) of the following:
Which characteristics are you looking for when molding the perfect person for Customer Success? These are the four that myself and other Heads of CS have found to be the most successful:
Entrepreneurs understand that great things come from humble beginnings. At this stage, your product almost certainly hasn’t earned the elusive title of “Enterprise-ready.” Your CS team will be keeping the product afloat as you iterate. They’re an ambassador for the product, the face of your company to the customer. An ability to sell their own self, the company, and the customer experience can make the difference between retention and churn.
Can the candidate think on their feet? Are they able to manage different projects and timelines without getting overwhelmed or dropping the ball? How do they organize their tasks? How do they balance gut instincts and experience? Customer Success involves very little scripting, as the target is constantly moving. New clients, new product features and new processes will be challenging the customer experience you’re offering, both positively and negatively.
Good luck telling a client “You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.” That only works in Fight Club or Full Metal Jacket.
Every client has different mix of needs, goals, personnel and use case. It’s the job of Customer Success to satisfy those with a tailor-made strategy that can be executed within the confines of your product’s capabilities. This isn’t a skill you’re born with; it’s learned from numerous client encounters. A Head of Customer Success who can’t draw upon past experience is bringing very little to the table.
Amazon’s Leadership Principles call this a “bias for action.” Look for someone who can get their hands dirty. No task is beneath them, especially when the job just needs to get done. This person understands the big picture and the effect they have on it.
Look at your own team and product through this lens. Bugs happen. Not every process is automated. Some don’t even exist yet! Starting a CS organization isn’t easy. Find the individual who is up for doing the dirty work because it’ll be better for the company long term.
Make inquiries that will help you evaluate the candidate based on the Ask, Must Haves and Archetype. Do they seem to be a good match in terms of experience, ability and culture fit? Press them — your clients will. Dive into how they’ve managed client expectations, handled product disasters and the occasional over-promise. Humility is important. We all mess up. Ask them about their mistakes and what they’re proactively doing to prevent them from happening again. CS is the glue that connects each department in your company. Get them to open up about cross-functional work and their ability to manage projects.
Great, now let’s see how they think on their feet.
I run a case study in every Customer Success interview staging a client onboarding. The client needs to launch within a specific time box (e.g.: 2 months) and see value during their short term pilot contract (e.g.: 6 months). The candidate is given very little info on the client, basically what you’d find in a contract (e.g.: license count, contract length, products purchased, etc). Taking a bare bones approach allows you to focus on the candidate’s ability to tackle a problem without having all of the necessary info to succeed. Put their discovery chops under the microscope.
For consideration during this exercise:
Follow up by asking how they would evaluate the program, especially when making a case for the client to renew.
For consideration during this exercise:
This hire is the keystone of your retention strategy, which could make or break your company’s long term success. There’s no true silver bullet for hiring Customer Success when it comes to past experience. Focus on your core needs, but keep an open mind along the way. Make your Customer Success team a force to be reckoned with.
The post How to Crack the Black Box of Customer Success: The First Hire appeared first on Sales Hacker.
This past Friday, you probably received countless Black Friday emails touting incredible, once a year savings and deals. A friend of mine who cleared her Inbox on Thursday had received over 80 ‘deal’ emails by early Friday. The email I received from Tortuga, a high-end backpack retailer, stood out for me (i.e. I read the entire email a few times and appreciated the email).
As with any good email – the title caught my attention.
Why We Don’t Do Black Friday Sales
Right away, I knew Tortuga was not trying to hawk anything. I was open to actually clicking into the email.
The opening paragraph of the email quickly explains the model that constantly feeds the loop of endless sales and clearly positions Tortuga outside that model.
Businesses are too dependent on sales to move inventory, and we, as consumers, have become addicted to them. We don’t want to be on the fast fashion treadmill of constantly introducing new products every season (or made up season) that quickly become obsolete.
The email then addresses transparency and value.
At Tortuga we know that bags which become obsolete quickly are shitty bags. We get as attached to our luggage as you do to yours. I don’t want to upgrade my backpack every year.
Let’s stop playing games and have an honest conversation about what stuff costs and why you should buy it.
Here is an honest number: The Outbreaker costs us 123% more to make than the Tortuga V2 did. But you can buy it for just 25% more.
That’s the ‘money shot’ of the email. The opening paragraph has separated Tortuga as a premium brand. The above set of paragraphs underscore that and talk to production costs. We’re making an even better backpack but we’re not trying make obscene profits off of you, the consumer.
And finally, the closing argument:
As a vertical commerce brand, Tortuga can make highly technical packs with the best components on the market. We sell our bags online directly to you to manage costs. We don’t have to be dependent on parasitic business models that profit by selling other brands’ products as a discount.
Our site will be shoppable today. We added gift cards to the site if you’re thinking of gifting an Outbreaker.
But, no – we aren’t running a Black Friday sale. Not this year. Not next year. Our team is taking the day off.
Tortuga reinforces their premium brand position and highlights the quality of its backpacks. And yes, the Black Friday consumer can shop, but in a nod to its own balanced culture, the Tortuga team is taking the day off.
Yes, I did visit the Tortuga website after receiving the email. No, I’m not in the market for a backpack. No, I’m not a world traveler. But if backpacks or travel come up in conversation, I’ll be sure to mention Tortuga. Email to ‘word of mouth’ to potential sale.
Tortuga’s email rocked. In a few short paragraphs, Tortuga was able to highlight their value, uniqueness and culture without trying to sell me anything. I appreciate that. Could your company do something like this?
A worker at a Canada Goose clothing factory in Toronto. (Galit Rodan/Bloomberg/Getty)
Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz’s story of the Canadian economy has been sent to rewrite. There are no sleeping beauties in the revised tale: if the factory in your community closed during the Great Recession, it is likely staying closed. (Although if it has exposed brick, some hipsters might come along and turn it into shared workspace.) If there was a Prince Charming who thought he could make money doing whatever that facility used to do, he probably would have shown up by now. It is time to move on.
Poloz, who, like every other economist, has struggled to explain our post-crisis reality, was in Toronto on November 28 to set the stage for the Bank of Canada’s last scheduled policy announcement of the year, on December 7. The governor went on television with Bloomberg’s Amanda Lang, he spoke at an event hosted by the C.D. Howe Institute, and he held a press conference. Poloz used these venues to tweak his narrative. When he was appointed three years ago, Poloz assumed non-energy exports and business investment would take over from household spending and housing as drivers of economic growth. That hasn’t happened to the extent the central bank thought it would. Officials have spent a lot of time this year trying to understand why their assumptions were off. It appears Canada suffered from a lack of champions; companies and entrepreneurs with the combination of guts and capital to make it in a tougher global economy. But if Poloz is right, the wait may be over. Canada’s heroes have arrived.
Poloz said through Lang that if anyone is using a “sleeping-beauty model” to think about exports, then they are misguided. Many of Canada’s exporters already were struggling to keep up and the financial crisis finished them off. That event wiped out billions of dollars worth of manufacturing potential. (in his speech,Poloz put the figure at $30 billion.) Think of it this way: if Canada’s manufacturing industry was once a full-sized pickup, it now is a a compact SUV.
Stéfane Marion, chief economist at National Bank Financial, noted earlier this month Canadian factories currently are using 82% of their production capacity, a historically strong number that is seven percentage points higher than the corresponding capacity-utilization rate in the United States. Canada’s manufacturers should be investing in new machines and building additions to their factories. But they aren’t. Statistics Canada reported on November 18 that the value of the capital stock in manufacturing was essentially unchanged in 2015 from 2014. (Ontario remained in free fall, as the value of the province’s capital stock in manufacturing dropped to its lowest point in 41 years, according to Marion.) Weaker global demand is an insufficient explanation for the lack of investment. The value of American manufacturing capital has surged in recent years, so there must be opportunity out there somewhere. “Clearly, currency depreciation alone is no panacea for a quick revival of Canada’s manufacturing heartland,” Marion said in a research note. “New policies from both provincial and federal governments are required to improve competitiveness and make Central Canada the manufacturing engine it once was.”
Poloz may agree with Marion’s assessment. He told Lang that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should pursue new free-trade agreements. In the meantime, it is reasonable to expect the Bank of Canada to favour an interest-rate setting that keeps downward pressure on the value of the currency. That is because the central bank has identified a new Prince Charming. Poloz’s narrative now stars the services industry, and in particular information technology (IT) and tourism. The central bank surveyed a group of IT companies and found they were more confident than the average Canadian company, probably because most of them were reporting sales growth in the double digits. Tourism spending has been rising steadily for more than two years.)
The central bank governor reckons Canada has a comparative advantage in services. “We have the necessary ingredients: a highly educated labour force supported by strong universities and colleges; entrepreneurs with access to business incubators; a beautiful and interesting country that many would like to visit; a multicultural workforce that helps us to serve domestic and international markets,” he said in his speech. That advantage is enhanced by a depressed currency. The weaker dollar isn’t an unambiguous gain for a Canadian company that wants to make things. Modern manufacturing requires buying robots and other expensive equipment and building facilities overseas, so Canada’s exchange rate makes expansion harder for some companies. But for IT firms, consultancies, and tour guides, the exchange rate is a windfall. Said Poloz: “That comparative advantage has been strengthened by the decline in the Canadian dollar in the past couple of years—a symptom of falling resource prices, and a facilitator of the rotation of growth from resource production to other sectors.”
There are reasons to resist organizing economic policy around services. Theoretically, lawyers, coders, engineers and bankers should be able to support a strong economy, but they tend not to in practice. And the U.S. election just has demonstrated what happens to societies that lack rewarding jobs for those without fancy degrees. Poloz used his speech to challenge the old cliché of Canadians as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” (He titled his talk, “From Hewers of Wood to Hewers of Code: Canada’s Expanding Service Economy.”) Yet the counter-narrative—the fact that most Canadians have been employed as service providers for decades—is also a cliché. Not all jobs are created equal. Benjamin Tal, an economist at CIBC World Markets, published a report this week that suggests the overall quality of employment in Canada has deteriorated since the late 1990s. Among his findings was the percentage of jobs that pay below the Canadian average has increased to 61% from about 58% in 1997. “The decline in employment quality over the past two decades does not mean that we have turned into a nation of ‘hamburger flippers,’” Tal wrote. “Rather, it suggests that the distribution of employment in Canada is not as favourable as it used to be, looking strictly at compensation.”
But maybe the rise of companies such as CGI Group Inc. and Shopify Inc. will change the equation? They and other service-oriented companies currently are doing most of the work in filling the hole in gross domestic product left by the Great Recession. It only makes sense that they would start to receive more the central bank’s attention.
MORE ABOUT SERVICES, EXPORTS & THE ECONOMY:
The post The Bank of Canada sees services, not manufacturing, as Canada’s future appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.
Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) cover a lot of theoretical ground, from whether smart robots will eliminate jobs (and/or the human race) to how we’ll all fit neatly into a computer simulation after the singularity. There’s a lot of philosophical meat on those bones to gnaw through.
But before we let our imaginations run too wild, let’s take a practical look at how AI is already transforming the way salespeople are connecting with prospects and closing deals.
By detecting patterns in your emails using natural language processing, AI-enabled CRM tools can begin to anticipate your own responses and write emails for you. These systems can learn to pay attention to names of contacts, relevant dates, addresses, and key phrases (“Ugh, another meeting?”) and begin to fire off responses for, at first, simple things like availability, and eventually more complicated bits of business like finding answers to specific questions or selecting appropriate attachments to send.
2) Managing Your Calendar
This feature merges seamlessly with email: image having all your meetings, lunches, and client calls scheduled for you. You see the fledgling version of this technology now when your phone automatically links phrases like “tomorrow morning” in your texts to your calendar. But it’s getting much more interesting with new emerging tools that can automate time-consuming admin tasks (like figuring out who’s available when) for your whole company. Business AI solutions will essentially give everyone a digital personal assistant.
3) Discovering Your Best Leads
There’s a lot of data flying around during the early stages of a sale, and it can be a challenge to organize, parse, and analyze all that information in a way that actually helps you identify and prioritize the best leads. AI-enabled CRM solutions can assemble the data and, with predictive lead scoring, indicate for you where you should focus your attention, when, based on the frequency and type of interactions leads have had with your company, how likely they are to buy, and how desirable they are as customers.
4) Enhancing the Customer Relationship
Companies have a lot of blind spots when it comes to their customers. They get to know them when the customer buys or subscribes, and then again when it’s time to update or when there’s a customer-support issue. While companies would like to build deeper relationships with customers, the resources haven’t been there. Until now. New AI tools can learn about customers based on the massive amount of online and company data that’s available, and then surface up these insights in a consumable format, giving companies a richer understanding of their customer identity and needs.
Discover the many more ways AI is transforming sales in our e-book, AI for CRM: Everything You Need to Know.
Building a successful sales team can be challenging.
Not putting time and effort into building a successful sales team will affect all areas of your business, especially when it comes to meeting your business’ overall goals.
In this post, discover expert insight from sales leaders on how to build a high-performing sales team from scratch.
![Download Now: Sales Training & Onboarding Template [Free Tool]](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/53/1dc09795-02c8-4fbe-a62b-a1d669dec2c5.png)
Anna Taromchi, Director of Sales at PartnerStack, says “Building a successful, high-growth sales team starts with a culture that supports empathy, curiosity, and the persistence to grow.”
A sales culture of engagement is so much more than ping-pong tables, nerf guns, or an endless number of SPIFs. Employee engagement is how employees think and feel about the team they’re on, and how they act (i.e., work) based on those thoughts and feelings.
Don’t mistake satisfaction for engagement, though, as they’re not the same thing. Here’s the difference between a satisfied and engaged employee:
As sales leaders, the most important job is engaging your teams. Aim to do your best to maximize each team member’s performance and motivate them every day. The goal is to have teams lean forward and think like owners, so they can drive business. How do you get them there?
Which of your existing reps embody the elements of the team you’re hoping to build? Think about the reps who consistently meet quotes and drive significant revenue. Think about the traits they exhibit. Are they coachable? Ambitious? Collaborative? Challenging? Hungry?
Those are your points of reference. Every leader will prioritize different traits, but make sure your hiring process is focused on asking questions that help you uncover candidates that possess those skills and will help your team go above and beyond.
Knowing what is expected of them is a key motivator in employee engagement, so ensuring your reps know their priorities is critically important to developing a sales team. Take the time to set expectations for your team based on your overall sales goals so they know exactly what they are working towards.
One way to do this, according to Alex Olley, co-Founder and CRO of Reachdesk, is to “Help them understand what quality work looks like.” You can give reps examples of what it looks like to succeed, so they have a frame of reference. For example, maybe you periodically review extremely successful sales calls so reps can learn from them and model their behavior off of those winning calls.
If you have a sales rep that is focused on outbound calls but you haven’t given them any calls training, provided scripts, or done role-play, you’re not setting that rep up for success because they are underprepared.
Your sales teams need to have everything they need to succeed. Olley says, “Invest in them [sales reps]. Give them the right tools to succeed across multiple channels (email, phone, social, gifting, chat, video, data, etc.). Coach and develop them.”
Championing this tip involves everything from thorough onboarding to on-the-job training to simply ensuring every rep has a place to work that is comfortable, motivating, and allows them to meet their goals on a day-to-day basis.
Aditya Mohta, Platform and Partner Ecosystem Marketing at Webex, believes in this tip as well — “Great team leaders focus on removing hurdles and empowering everyone to achieve their best.”
Jim Blackie, Chief Revenue Officer at ON24, says, “You must be clear on what winning looks like by having a set of vital metrics that you manage and hold everyone accountable to. It is essential to keep these metrics simple, measurable, and visible so that everyone can stay aligned.”
So, for example, say you have a yearly revenue goal. A leader building a winning sales team with this goal in mind may consistently monitor the average length of their sales cycle to ensure that everyone stays on track and doesn’t get stuck on unqualified prospects that clog up the pipeline and increase cycle length.
Few leaders give it the time it deserves but, if you want your team to get better, you have to give them feedback.
Because, without it, reps won’t know what they’re doing wrong, or what they’re doing right. Granted, if they aren’t closing any deals, they’ll know something is wrong, but they won’t know exactly what is wrong.
Periodically taking the time to review sales rep performance and have conversations with them about their performance can dramatically improve sales performance. Reps will know what behaviors to continue doing, know what needs improvement, and, also, feel as though you genuinely value them and their position on the team because you take the time to ensure they can succeed at their jobs.
Behind every cold call is a prospect with a challenge that can be solved — and it’s important to remember that on days when sales feel like a thankless grind.
Consider sharing customer success stories about how your product or service helps your customers and allows them to meet their needs. It can motivate your employees to push through challenges and reminds them, even on the most difficult days, that what they do matters.
Communicating sales expectations is important, but it’s also critical for reps to understand their path forward. Nikita Zhitkevich, Director of Channel Partnerships and Alliances at PartnerStack, says “It’s critical to ensure your team has clearly defined goals and expectations for mapping out growth.”
Encourage reps to think about where they want to be and how their current day-to-day will help them get there. Setting individual development goals can help them stay motivated to remain on track to level up in the future. Olley says allowing salespeople to set their path forward is extremely important — “Let each individual find the right path to progression — don’t dictate where they will go. Not every BDR wants to be an AE.”
Too often, sales leaders use gut feel to make important decisions about the entire team’s performance. No one should do that — not even on small teams.
Instead, sales leaders should pay attention when people at multiple levels of performance flag the same issue. For example, if your top, average, and low-performing reps all mention fairness when they’re asked for feedback around engagement, you know you’ve got a meaningful issue to tackle.
To identify your team’s issues, you need solid engagement data. Otherwise, you’re just stabbing in the dark. Knowing what causes disengagement lets you prioritize initiatives that unlock performance.
While the goal of sales is to drive growth for your business, it's also to ensure that you find customers that will succeed with the help of your business once you close a sale. Blackie says, “To build a winning culture, you need every person on the team leaning in and feeling they can deliver amazing results to the customer.”
Sales leaders want to work with people who love their jobs and welcome inspiration and growth. You can find those people, and you can move your whole team upward by surrounding them with the safety, meaning, and capacity they need to excel at their jobs.
For Western Canada’s oil producing regions, Tuesday’s approval of two major pipelines marks the beginning of the end of a decade of uncomfortable confrontation and missed opportunity.
It’s been that long since the first major and probably most attractive projects, Keystone XL and Northern Gateway, were proposed, in good faith, to transport growing oil production.
Opposition by environmentalists, aboriginals and local communities led to a flurry of other options: Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion, Enbridge Inc.’s Line 9 expansion and reversal (in operation since last year), TransCanada’s Energy East, Enbridge’s Line 3, plus a big build up in costly and dangerous oil transportation by rail. Meanwhile, there were bottlenecks, regulatory gridlock and losses in investment and income.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he is approving the Trans Mountain expansion and Line 3. But he also rejected Northern Gateway and moved to formalize a ban on oil tankers along B.C.’s northern coast.
The approval of the Trans Mountain expansion, in particular, was a courageous step. Trudeau stood firm against dogged opponents in the Vancouver area and elsewhere, arguing he won’t be swayed by political argument.
“If I thought the project was unsafe for the B.C. coast, I would have rejected it,” he said. “It is safe for B.C. and the right one for Canada.”
Reflecting Alberta’s mood, NDP premier Rachel Notley welcomed the arrival of “some morning light.”
“Our province has been brutally slammed by the collapse in commodity prices,” she said in a statement. “It has been a long, dark night for the people of Alberta as a result. We are getting a chance to break our landlock. We’re getting a chance to sell to China and other new markets at better prices. We’re getting a chance to reduce our dependence on one market, and therefore to be more economically independent. And we’re getting a chance to pick ourselves up and move forward again.”
Trans Mountain and Line 3 could add nearly 1 million barrels a day of capacity by 2019.
The new capacity means Canada will have greater control over its oil trade, making OPEC price shocks easier to absorb. It will also mean billions a year in additional revenue.
“This is very positive for Canadian oil,” said trader Tim Pickering, founder of Auspice Capital Advisors Ltd. Oil investors will turn their attention to Canada as it gains access to tidewater and to take advantage of higher returns, he said.
That’s assuming the projects are actually constructed in a timely manner: Ottawa’s next job is to stand behind its decisions while opponents continue to disrupt the projects at construction sites, in the courts and at other political levels. Indeed, some B.C. organizations immediately vowed to keep fighting to prevent the project from being built.
“Today’s decision by the federal government to reject the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and tankers proposal is an important and hard-fought victory, one that paves the way for communities to put a stop to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain project,” Westcoast Environmental Law said in a statement.
The approvals won’t come cheap. Albertans are facing a costly carbon tax and a cap on oilsands emissions that will limit production growth unless there are technological breakthroughs. Enbridge will have to come to terms with the loss of Northern Gateway, after it and its partners spent more than half a billion getting it through the regulatory review. Enbridge said in a statement it is now looking at its options.
Still, they demonstrate Canada is moving forward, and that it’s back as a responsible oil producer.
Financial Post
ccattaneo@nationalpost.com
twitter.com/cattaneooutwest
LinkedIn recently revealed a few specific ways you can get noticed and generate more leads on the platform. Here’s how to take advantage.
Creating (and sharing) valuable, free content with a targeted, niche audience is the price you must pay in order to buy a prospect’s time, attention and interest online.
LinkedIn has long encouraged its members to create and share original content on the platform, and millions do each week. Recently, LinkedIn revealed some new enhancements to the platform that help ensure your hard work gets you noticed by the right audience.Picture Perfect
That old adage “a picture’s worth 1,000 words” is backed up by research that says articles with images generate 94% more total views. LinkedIn has made it easier than ever to enhance your posts. All you have to do is click on the “Add Multimedia” icon, and you can drag and drop images, videos, add links and embed content directly inside your LinkedIn blog posts.
It’s a good practice to break up the text in your articles with a few images as well as subheads, as readers often scan through articles.
In my own work as someone who teaches others how to use LinkedIn to generate business for themselves, I often utilize screen shots or screen recordings to demonstrate an approach or tactic you can use on LinkedIn.
Also, at the end of each LinkedIn blog post, you’ll want to include a Call To Action – be it inviting someone to a free webinar, embedding a video that introduces readers to you or your company, inviting comments on the post or whatever else. (Note: When you add links to landing pages or videos, LinkedIn automatically populates the link with a clickable image or video thumbnail.)
Hashtags are so often misused and misunderstood. They can be quippy and comical, but hashtags actually help people discover your content, and LinkedIn’s new enhancements make it necessary to get these right if you want the right audience for your posts. The platform has made it clear that posts and content including hashtags gets “surfaced” more easily on LinkedIn and is more easily accessed and indexed inside LinkedIn’s giant internal search engine as well.
To discover the best hashtags for your content, think of what keywords or phrases someone would type into Google to get more information on your topics.
Some ideas might be:
You can also “draft” off of specific hashtags LinkedIn might be promoting during a given week or month, such as when the platform kept using “AlwaysBeLearning” to promote the launch of LinkedIn Learning on the site.
Bottom line: You can’t skip hashtags and survive on LinkedIn. They’re here to stay, so include them on every piece of content you publish or share on the site!
It’s in our nature that when we slave away creating good content, we want immediate feedback on how our work is being received.
LinkedIn recently rolled out enhanced reader analytics on its mobile site, and promises to include them on the new desktop edition of the platform once it goes live in the coming weeks or months.
A quick glance at the new reader analytics on LinkedIn mobile helps you better realize who has liked and commented on your posts — what companies they work for, their job titles, where they live, and how they found your post. (This enhancement is also coming to desktop soon.)
To use the insights feature, simply tap on “Me” in the LinkedIn mobile app, and you will find real-time information on the posts you’ve shared the articles you’ve written.
Content Marketing is all about the engagement factor, so make sure you respond to comments and reach out to connect with people who have liked and shared your posts. In my mind, anyone who takes the time to read and engage my content on LinkedIn is a warm lead.
Using the information available on LinkedIn, I can immediately reach out to that person with context to begin a conversation.
It’s the way of the world in today’s online business space, and it’s good to see LinkedIn making it easier for members to utilize content to generate sales leads and win new business.
Even if you’re a night owl, you can still have more productive mornings if you put in a little effort to make getting up easier. Of course, it still won’t be easy, but if you like the idea of a more relaxing start to the day, here are some suggestions to get you started.
Motivated by public hazards associated with contaminated sources of drinking water, a team of scientists has successfully developed and tested tiny, glowing crystals that can detect and trap heavy-metal toxins like mercury and lead.
