When you’re negotiating, the more information you have on the issue the better. This simple trick makes the other person feel heard and earns you more info to work with.

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Mike Stelzner, Founder & CEO of Social Media Examiner, is back for his second appearance on the podcast. Social Media Examiner is the largest online magazine focused on social media marketing with more than 1 million visitors per month. In this episode, you’re going to learn why Mike launched a physical conference called Social Media Marketing World (SMMW) and how it has grown to be – THE mega conference in social media. Tune in to discover five compelling reasons to attend SMMW 2017 which is taking place March 22 to 24, 2017, in beautiful San Diego, California.

History of Social Media Examiner & SMMW

Social Media Examiner started seven years ago and has grown to be the biggest online magazine on social media marketing. In addition to the extensive content delivered through their multi-author website, Mike hosts a weekly podcast called Social Media Marketing and holds a live video show on Fridays at 8 am U.S. PT (11 am ET).

Five years ago Mike came to the realization that there wasn’t a big conference for social media marketing, so he launched Social Media Marketing World. The event is built on three pillars, networking, discovery, and fun. Structured networking is mixed with fun and organized by category (i.e. blogging, podcasting, SEO, Facebook, Twitter, B2B, analytics, etc.). Pre-conference networking starts through Slack groups organized by topic. The discovery pillar is all about learning the newest trending strategies, tips and hacks in social media marketing to boost your results and your career. And the fun, is everywhere starting with the opening night party on an aircraft carrier. On the second night there’s karaoke on a huge yacht. There are morning walks/runs every day of the conference at 6am. There’s even a chorus performance comprised of musically inclined conference attendees, and so much more. This year’s event is expected to attract 4,000 attendees.

What to Expect

The event is laid out in a track format, where one ticket provides access to all of the tracks. Twelve sessions on a variety of different topics will run simultaneously throughout SMMW 2017. This year Mike and his team have added a creator series track for anyone who creates content. The will be 40 sessions within the creator series with 10 each for bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers and live video producers. Each ticket also includes recordings of all the sessions! On the first day, SMMW offers 90-minute workshops that are included in the ticket price too! The workshops cover everything from networking for introverts to opening an agency.

Customer service at Social Media Marketing World is top notch. Mike set out to create a Disneyland-like experience anchored in service. Look for “the white shirts” people if you need any help at the conference. Don’t be surprised when the person you approach walks with you to help you get exactly where you’re going and leaves you smiling.

Speakers

Selecting speakers for Social Media Marketing World is different than most events. There is no application process. All of the speakers have a relationship with Social Media Examiner and are hand-recruited to speak on their topic of expertise. Mike and his team are constantly working to improve and diversify their lineup of speakers by pulling from different industries and backgrounds. Mike is the opening keynote speaker, where he will reveal the findings from their State of Social Media Marketing report, as he has in years past.

Networking

Mike’s own networking experiences at other events had a significant impact on how SMMW is structured. He wanted to take networking to a new level at his conference. Before the event even begins, the networking starts. Last year there were 78 Slack groups that attendees could join by topic of interest before the event. There is also a LinkedIn group that allows for pre-event networking.

SMMW also provides stickers that serve as a conversation starter. Attendees pick a few stickers displaying various interests that they attach to their name badge. For example, stickers are available for areas such as blogger, Facebook, podcaster, B2B, corporate, freelance and others. This way when you walk up to someone you can look at their name badge and see if you have any commonalities before even speaking. Another clever way SMMW fosters networking is at the opening night party where Bingo cards are distributed to everyone. Guests fill the spots in with Twitter handles of people that fit each space in response to the topic called for in each space. It’s a fun experience that takes networking to a new level.

“I wanted to build an event unlike any other by taking networking to an entirely new level.” @Mike_Stelzner #sbeshow
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This will be my third year attending SMMW, and I’ll be leading a panel. The title of my panel session is: How to Get Your Employees to Engage in Social Media. I’ll be joined by three brands who will discuss how their employees engage in their social media activities, and the benefits they enjoy as a result.

Attending SMMW17 will empower you to boost your social media marketing results and boost your career. If you need help convincing your boss to let you attend the event, download their convince the boss letter. I hope to see you there!!

Featured On This Episode:

• Mike Stelzner or LinkedIn and Twitter
• Social Media Examiner’s website
• Learn More About Social Media Marketing World 2017
• Join our Social Business Engine community
• Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
• Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine
• Social Business Engine video channel | YouTube channel

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Discover why B2B professionals are raving about our social selling online courses for sales professionals, entrepreneurs and executives.

Let’s be honest, taking the time to do an accurate, quality job of mapping your customer’s journey – well, it’s not a “lay-up”. It takes patience, dedication, and time is often not on your side as market offerings change and influence customer perceptions.

But as someone who has traversed this terrain for many years, I am here to tell you that there are three important benefits from customer experience journey mapping that make the “view” definitely worth the “climb.”

Diving Below the Iceberg

Let’s begin by acknowledging the obvious value derived from journey mapping. First, the result is a visualization of the customer experience from their perspective of what they actually receive, rather than what you believe they are experiencing. As a result, chronic problems and opportunities for competitive differentiation reveal themselves. Evangelists of journey mapping typically stop right there, as if this alone is enough to make the case. But in our experience, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger insights lie below the waterline:

1. Explaining the ending by revealing the beginning: This happens every time we complete a journey mapping project. Often a manager charters a team to improve some attribute in the experience that survey data suggests you are behind on. Pick your poison; pricing; cost-to-serve; negative trending first call resolution results – it can be a long list. Well, if you narrow in on one of these issues before understanding the larger picture, you are often treating the symptom rather than the cause. True story: we were working with a retail bank that was struggling to have customers sign up for their Bill Pay product. There was a big payoff in solving this because customers that used Bill Pay were far more profitable. When we mapped the entire experience, we discovered the culprit: The account opening process actually discouraged front line employees from taking the time to demonstrate Bill Pay and set up a new customer. Rather than continue to throw marketing dollars to drive up adoption, a simple change to the account opening steps drove up Bill Pay usage and allowed reallocation of those marketing dollars.
2. Making the invisible, visible: There is nothing magical about this other than the opportunity you may uncover. We worked with a quick lube retailer locked in a pricing war with a competitor. By mapping the customer journey, we discovered something that was truly invisible to them. During peak periods when it got busy, the manager worked alongside employees to speed up the line, but no one saw that the third car waiting to be served would wait for about 10 minutes and then leave if the line didn’t move. We saw it at literally every location we visited. The solution? A simple electronic cable that alerted the team inside the garage that the third car in line was waiting and a fail-safe alert to encourage them to engage with the customer before the 10-minute The impact? A 33% increase in Same-Store Sales within 9 months.
3. From optimizing costs to leveraging value: Although we all serve customers, we report to shareholders. It is all of our responsibility to be good stewards of the dollars shareholders entrust to us. This includes ensuring optimizing things like cost-to-serve. When you look at the transactional cost of self-service channels over a direct call, it may be tempting to hide that customer support number deep into your website for only the truly desperate customer to find. One healthcare provider we worked with found, the reason why some older members tended to use their call center over other self-service channels, wasn’t because of some outdated stereotyping that they didn’t know how to use a computer – It turned out they were lonely and just wanted to talk to someone. Getting this balance right is challenging, no doubt about it, but with a documented understanding of customer value by segment, mapping the customer journey can reveal low-cost channels that may actually deliver more value to certain customers, to optimize both costs and the experience. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

The Most Powerful Tool For Outpacing Competitors

If you are still reading this blog then I must have struck a chord. Here is the deal: journey mapping is no longer a tool limited to Design Thinking types, or those who get enthralled with unleashing their graphic talents to create attractive depictions of the customer journey. The goal isn’t to create something worth framing. Done well, customer journey mapping is nothing less than the most powerful tool I know for reinventing your business and outpacing competitors.

Perhaps, it is not so obvious, but without question – worth it.

Digital marketers are more enabled than ever to do pretty much anything on the web in their pursuit of getting more eyes, leads, and eventual customers. Countless tools exist that are intended to make a marketer’s life easier and more efficient, but no two products are exactly the same. How does a marketer differentiate between one and the other?

Demos, blog posts, and product features are intended to show off the best aspects of a tool, but they all sound the same or too hard to believe. What’s worse, marketers are being berated with “the next best thing” on a daily basis, which makes committing to one tool near impossible. Let’s make this all much easier, clear up the confusion, and dive into the best performing tools, no fluff.

Much More Than An Email Marketing Tool, Seriously

With a crowded email marketing and automation tools industry, GetResponse is a breath of fresh air. GetResponse is an all-in-one marketing tool that includes email marketing and automation, webinar platform, A/B testing functionality, mobile-ready landing pages, and a repository of 500+ form designs that’ll make any marketer pleased. With plans starting at $15/month and maxing out at $145/month, GetResponse is a steal for marketers on a budget.

Plan your workflow with the GetResponse workflow planner feature

Stalk Yourself, Your Competitors, and Everyone Else

There’s no joking around when it comes to spying on pretty much anyone with BrandMentions. Keep up when you or anyone else is mentioned on the web using names, words, websites, and any other combination of characters. With a clear break between content mentions and social mentions, BrandMentions makes stalking way too easy. Receive notifications as often as you’d like and make sure you’re staying ahead of the game. Currently in beta, BrandMentions is free! Start using it now before that changes.

With BrandMentions, find out any mentions on the web for a keyword or brand.

Get Insights on Truly Deep Competitor SEO Strategies

Whether you’re keeping tabs on competitors or just trying to keep up with your own efforts, SEMRush is an incredibly powerful tool. Get insights on your competitor’s best keywords, ad strategies and budget, display ads, and even video ad campaign strategies. If you’re only worried about yourself right now, dive into all of that and much more with keyword research, deep backlink analysis, and localize your ad campaigns. SEMRush is one tool that offers almost too much power. A freemium tool, SEMRush starts their Pro plan off at $69.95/month, but most SMBs can easily get away with the free version.

With SEMRush, get insights into your own keywords or that of competitors.

Personal Assistant for Your Content Strategy? Check.

Creating content for a small business isn’t just about writing a blog post and publishing it. Real content requires discovering topics, planning your calendar, hiring freelancers, creating or editing the content, publishing it, and amplifying for results. You could use a few different tools to get all of these steps done and try to connect them with a few other tools, or you can use ClearVoice. They’ll do it all for you, including hiring freelancers. ClearVoice aggregates all the information that you need to make a decision and even helps you make a choice.

A Packaged and Personalized Social Media Domination Tool

There is a lot going on in the Twittersphere. How’s a marketer with a small team keep up with who and what matters to them? Enter Followerwonk. A tool built by none other than fan-favorite, Moz, Followerwonk helps marketers deeply analyze their Twitter network and connect with new thought leaders and industry influencers. This tool analyzes when you lose and gain followers, enabling you to mimic the positive behavior and ditch everything else. Go ahead and try it free for 50 days, or sign up immediately with up to 3 profiles for just $29/month and up to 20 profiles for $79/month.

FollowerWonk’s user dashboard gives insights into performance and more.

Never, Ever Leave Your Buffer Queue Empty

Buffer is already a powerful tool that we’re sure you’ve heard of, but Hiplay is the extension Buffer that your existing content needs. Repurpose all of your evergreen content with ease using Hiplay. Hiplay is a set-and-forget tool. After you connect your social media profiles and select your evergreen posts, Hiplay takes care of the rest by filling up your Buffer queue on a daily basis with your content. What else? Plans are $5, $10, and $25/month! That’s the cheapest social media intern you’ll be glad you hired.

The Hiplay app automatically selects and sends selected category articles to Buffer for social media distribution.

Transform Your Simple Screen Recordings Like a Pro

The best part about Camtasia? Everything starts and ends in one place. No need to download multiple tools to record the right video, learn to use a fancy (and expensive) tool to edit it, and yet another tool to make it look beautiful and professional. Camtasia takes care of everything from A-Z, to turn your screen recordings into compelling videos.

Users can edit audio and visual separately, incorporate webcam voice and video, and add in additional videos throughout the process. Take control of your screen recording videos for $99 on Mac or $299 for PC, which is truly an amazing deal for such a robust video editing tool.

Camtasia’s Techsmith allows you to do everything from one dashboard to make compelling videos.

Get Content Ideas Instantly

Enter your keywords and a wise man in a gray cable knit sweater (aka the Seeker) will give you content ideas in the form of questions. Not only is this tool fun to use and beautiful to look at, but it also gives countless suggestions, saving any strapped marketer loads of time. You’ll never run out of ideas using Answer The Public, whether you like it or not. It’s a free tool that can expedite your content planning sessions by as much time as it probably took to knit that cable knit sweater.

Content ideas generated by “the Seeker” just from your keyword input.

Easily Attract and Sustain Your Ideal Twitter Following

Building a legitimate and useful Twitter following is no easy task in an age of countless bots and never-ending spam. Narrow helps–a lot. Using keywords, hashtags, and locations, Narrow helps identify your target audience and attracts relevant users to your profile. After all that, analytics help to improve audience retention and track overall performance. In their own words, “no-fluff analytics” is music to a marketer’s ears. Account-based pricing means $19/month for one account and $49/month for up to three accounts. Not bad for someone trying to build a social media following.

Build a legitimate and value-add Twitter following with Narrow.

Get on the GIF Train, No Excuses

GIFs aren’t just for Reddit anymore! Join the GIF revolution with ease using ezGIF’s crop, resize, optimize, and effects tool. This tool is free to use and offers a hefty handful of features that many others don’t, including a GIF split and PNG optimizer. Stop switching between different windows of free tools to get one job done and start using ezGIF.

This Isn’t Just Another List

I promise. This is the honest truth about some of the best tools out there for SMB marketers. Investing your budget in the right marketing tools the first time around is high priority, and I get that. These are proven, well-known, and incredibly powerful tools that will equip any marketer to take on the digital world with ease. Use your new powers wisely!

I have no affiliation with any of the companies listed in this post, and I do not benefit in any way by including them. These tools are mentioned only because they’ve been researched, used, and found to provide value to entrepreneurs, small, and medium-sized businesses.

Times are changing. Women now have a significant presence in many industries, including sales. LinkedIn statistics indicate that women represent 41% of the active sales workforce — and this number continues to grow. World-class organization know there is a strong business rationale for ensuring gender diversity on their sales teams because women bring different skills and perspectives to sales. As a result, companies with a sufficient female presence on their sales forces outperform less diverse companies.

As more women seek to advance their careers and move up the corporate ladder, we have compiled a list of 21 tips from Women Sales Experts.

Here are 21 tips from female sales experts on how to succeed as a woman in sales:

1. Learn agility

Jill Konrath

Keynote Speaker and Bestselling Author of More Sales, Less Time, SNAP Selling and Agile Selling

“Want to succeed as a female in sales? With our ever-changing business environment, the key to success is learning agility. Personally you need to keep up on trends, stretch your knowledge, develop new skills, and experiment with fresh approaches. Also, create an environment that challenges your reps and managers to grow and find better ways. Before long, with everyone working at the edge of their comfort zone, you’ve up-skilled your entire team. Plus, you’ve captured their spirit; they’ll work harder and feel good about it.”

2. Have a sponsor within your company

Lori Richardson

President, WOMEN Sales Pros and CEO of Score More Sales

“Understand the difference between mentors and sponsors — and have a sponsor within your company. Mentors can be very helpful in building a sales leadership career to improve specific skills or learn to maneuver within corporate politics. A sponsor is a senior leader with power and influence within an organization who can get your name in front of others with power and influence. This is critical as a woman leader because someone may not consider you for a new role or project simply because you are not on their radar.”

3. Distinguish yourself

Kendra Lee

President of KLA Group and Author of The Sales Magnet

“Successful female sales pros distinguish themselves. Differentiate yourself from other people in your sales role, both within your company and outside it. Figure out what you do really well and perfect it. Become known for it. Be the person that everyone turns to for advice on how to do it. Your leadership and peers will seek you out. Customers will recognize you do it well and value you for it. Your differentiation may be as broad as using a collection of prospecting strategies to gain access faster and more creatively than your peers. Or, it may be as specific as using social selling to research and foster relationships with target prospects.”

4. Ask questions

Shari Levitin

CEO and Professional Speaker at Levitin Group and Author of Heart and Sell

“One thing that helped me succeed as a female sales professional is remembering that anything that can be told can be asked. You may have heard the term “bossy” is a gendered word. Women are often labeled as “bossy” when using the exact same phrases as their male counterparts. So what’s the solution? Rather than making accusations or statements when you disagree or intend to motivate, ask questions. Stop talking. Listen empathetically to the response. Statements trigger logical and even fear responses. Questions, on the other hand, trigger creative thinking and emotions. Don’t you think?”

5. Keep up or get left behind

Colleen Stanley

President and Chief Selling Officer of SalesLeadership Inc. and Author of Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success

“Growing up in a family with four brothers taught me quite a few lessons — one that has helped me throughout my career both as a seller and a leader: Keep up or get left behind. Gender doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can keep up with the top players’ pace and activities. I am comfortable selling to both men and women because my focus is on ‘keeping up’ and staying relevant. Buyers don’t have time to waste and if you aren’t adding value to the conversation, you will quickly be left behind.”

6. Own the success of you

Trish Bertuzzi

President and Chief Strategist of The Bridge Group, Inc. and Author of The Sales Development Playbook

“The rules of success for achieving as a salesperson are no different for a man than they are for a woman. The #1 tip I would tell anyone moving into the sales profession is to set goals for yourself that are outside of your quota and make sure one of them is perfecting your craft. If you rely solely on your company to provide you with the skills that you need you will be sorely disappointed. You own the success of you.”

7. Stop trying to be something you are not

Ann Davis

VP of Sales at Journey Sales

“Most female sales executives, at some point in their careers, get caught in the trap of thinking, believing, or acting like they need to be part of the boy’s club. Focus on being your authentic self. Understand your skills, strengths and areas of development and most important believe you bring qualities to the team which makes everyone better. Being a valued member of the team and making others better is something female executives do very well. Don’t be afraid to take risks, trust your gut and reach beyond your comfort zone as you are often very surprised at the positive results you can achieve.”

8. Be both confident and curious

Bridget Gleason

Executive Advisor/Consultant at Sumo Logic

“Be both confident and curious. Many studies have shown that women feel the need to ‘check all the boxes’ before applying for a job or taking on a new challenge. Men don’t have that same inclination. In order to lead, a woman must exude confidence, and be comfortable with the fact that she might not have all the answers and that mistakes and failure are part of the package. Equally important is the quality of curiosity. Curiosity strengthens relationships. It fosters agile thinking. It facilitates deeper insights.”

9. Get rid of the head trash

Liz Cain

VP of Go-To-Market at OpenView Venture Partners

“Want to succeed as a female salesperson? Get rid of the head trash. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to be something you’re not; trying to fit the mold of the ‘sales persona’ the tech industry has coined. You cannot listen to the nay-sayers, care about the stereotypes, or consider reasons to doubt yourself. There is no inherent difference that makes women less qualified or able to do the job. Wipe the slate clean and focus on being an exceptional leader – invest in people, care about the customer, and relentlessly drive to results.”

10. Have a sales mentor

Christina McQuillan

Client Engagement Manager at Peak Sales Recruiting

“If you want to succeed as a female in sales, I highly recommend finding a sales mentor. Having a sales mentor has been a key factor to my success. The benefits of a mentor are endless: it helps boost your self-confidence as a sales professional, provides you with the insights needed to tackle aggressive goals, and helps you take control of your career. Consulting with industry experts will allow you to gain valuable guidance and challenge your perspective.”

11. Know your product

Dianna Geairn

The Irreverent Sales Girl

“The fabulous thing about being in sales is that it is a merit-based profession. If you make your numbers, exceed your goals, get more sales, you will be a top performer – no matter whether you are a man or a woman. Personally, I have always made it my business to know my product better than anyone else. I also have studied, studied, and studied the masters. And, I’ve gotten to know myself well. Know your strengths, play to them, and never stop learning or trying. If you adopt a “whatever it takes” attitude, nothing can stop you!”

12. Be curious

Joanne Black

Founder of No More Cold Calling and Author of Pick up the Damn Phone! and No More Cold Calling

“Want to succeed as a female salesperson? Speak your mind with confidence, tout your ideas, and come prepared to defend them with data. Ask for advice from people you respect. Your most important trait is curiosity. Be curious about your company and how it will grow. Be curious about your clients. Learn their businesses, broker innovative solutions, and continue to learn and grow based on your curiosity. Above all, be genuine. The best way for women to succeed in our profession—and any other—is to believe they have what it takes and then prove it.”

13. Keep the faith

Bernadette McClelland

Founder and Director of Sales Leaders Global Pty Ltd

“It’s the road less travelled in many instances for women in business — in sales or leadership — and most times we second guess ourselves based on so many different factors — feedback, lack of feedback, uninvited feedback. My advice to women who are emerging leaders or established leaders is to keep the faith. Keeping the faith, to me, is a knowing. Just knowing that by putting one foot in front of the other and with an intention that is to make a difference, you will succeed.”

14. Be visible and vocal

Natasha Sekkat

VP of Sales Development at Turbonomic

15. Don’t wait to speak up

Emmanuelle Skala

VP Sales & Customer Success at Digital Ocean

“Don’t wait to speak up until you have all the answers. No one wants to be wrong – but women tend to care about this more than men.  Women will hold back until they are 100% certain while men are ok with tossing out some hypothesis and guesses.  This leaves you out of the conversation.  Don’t wait until you have all the facts – your judgement and instinct are your assets so use them.”

16. Emulate a top leader

Janice Mars

Principal and Founder of SalesLatitude

“As a female sales leader in a male-dominated sales world, you still have to make your numbers and keep your margins down but your leadership presence will be more scrutinized. Think about the meetings you’ve attended. Is there someone who listens intently, and when they do provide their insights, everyone in the room hangs on to their every word? You know the leader I am talking about. Be genuine to yourself, but to the best of your ability, emulate that leader.”

17. Play your strengths

Mary Jacobs

Director of Center for Sales Innovation at St Catherine University

“My recommendation for women in sales is to play to their strengths as good listeners and strong communicators. Don’t be afraid to let your intuition and instincts guide you in decisions when you are reading a situation and people in a sales meeting. Your gut reaction is usually right on.”

18. Take up more space

Juliana Crispo

Founder of Startup Sales Bootcamp

“By nature as women, we take up less space and space plays a role in the energy in the room and one’s confidence levels. So physically force yourself take up more space than you normally do. By this, I mean stretch, spread out, and hold your head a little higher. Once you start doing that, your confidence will increase and the results will show up in the quality of your work.”

19. Excel at being excellent

Alice Kemper

Founder of Sales Training Werks

“In order to succeed as a female sales leader you need to do 5 things. Firstly, you must excel at being excellent — don’t settle for mediocre. Secondly, you need to get recognized. Toot your own horn and be your own champion. Do not leave this up to others. Thirdly, Get out of the office and into the field with your reps. Build your team with them in the real world. Fourthly, talk with your reps often. Learn how to have effective and efficient conversations for great coaching and the unplanned conversations. And finally, hire a coach. Your time to performance escalates and you’ll end up in fewer land mines.”

20. Lead like a woman

Jane Gentry

Principal of JaneGentry & Company

“Want to be a top sales leader? You don’t need to lead like a man – gaining compliance through rewards and punishments. Although this has been a successful leadership style in the past, Millennials, who will soon be the majority of your workforce, respond well to a more authentic, collaborative, transparent kind of leadership – a leadership style more naturally attributed to women. Historically, women have made accomplishments in business through influence or inspiration because they didn’t have the authority to make things happen. Now that you do have the authority, don’t fool yourself into thinking you need to behave like a man. Your natural leadership style will make you very successful – embrace it!”

21. Stand up for yourself

Barbara Giamanco

President and Social Selling Advisor at Social Centered Selling LLC

“Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself. It is not uncommon for women to share an idea in a team meeting only to have a male counterpart subsequently take credit for it, whether accidentally or on purpose. Don’t let that go. Additionally, always be confident in your abilities and when you believe in a clear path forward don’t be afraid to stand your ground, even if others don’t agree.”

Put these 21 tips to use and visit the Peak Sales Career Blog for the latest actionable insights on how to advance your sales career.

The post How to Succeed as a Female in Sales: 21 Tips from the Experts appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

It's fair to say Donald Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos aren't on the best terms.

Trump has often attacked Bezos for using his Washington Post ownership to keep taxes low on Amazon and free of antitrust allegations, famously saying, "if I become president, oh, do they have problems."

Bezos, meanwhile, called out Trump for his accusations of mainstream media bias, saying he's "eroding our democracy," and suggesting Trump take a trip to space instead.

Now that Trump will become the next US president, Bezos and the companies he own — Amazon and The Washington Post specifically — may have to brace themselves. These are the areas that could face increased scrutiny under Trump's presidency:

Taxes

Trump seems to believe Bezos's ownership in The Washington Post (a company owned by Bezos himself, not Amazon) is somehow helping Amazon keep its taxes low.

He once called Amazon a "big tax shelter" and suggested Bezos is using The Post's unprofitable business as a means for tax deduction on Amazon. He also said Amazon is getting away with "murder" because Bezos is using Washington Post's influence to keep politicians away from taxing the company properly.

It's unclear what actions Trump will take to prove his case, but it's not hard to see him threatening to put more pressure on Bezos and Amazon by asking the IRS to increase its scrutiny. 

"[Bezos] bought this paper for practically nothing, and he’s using that as a tool for political power, against me and against other people, and I’ll tell you what, we can’t let him get away with it," Trump said in an interview with Fox News in May.

Amazon paid $273 million in income taxes in 2015. The company has historically had very little profit and only about $14 billion in cash, a small amount compared to other companies of its size.

On the other hand, if anything, Trump's proposed tax policy could help Amazon. Trump plans to lower the business tax rate from 35% to 15%, and cut the tax rate on income held overseas to 10% from the current 35%.

Antitrust

Trump once claimed Bezos has a "huge antitrust problem."

"What he’s got is a monopoly, and he wants to make sure I don’t get in," Trump said.

It's true that Amazon controls a big chunk of the online retail and cloud computing market, but making a case for antitrust could prove difficult for Trump.

Antitrust laws clearly state that the main goal is to protect consumers from unfair price hikes due to the lack of competition. But Amazon is all about offering every day low prices and putting customers first in its business. Amazon also owns just 15% share of total US retail and 20% share in e-commerce — hardly anywhere near a monopoly.

There's a chance Amazon could potentially raise prices in the future, but its history suggests that's unlikely. Amazon continuously offers discounts and big sales days, while its cloud service AWS is the driving force behind an industry-wide price war, even after offering 52 price cuts so far.

The Washington Post

Perhaps Trump's biggest concern seems to be Bezos's ownership of The Washington Post. He believes Bezos exerted influence over the paper's editorial voice in order to reduce Trump's chances of winning the presidency. In the run-up to the election, The Post did break a number of stories that tainted Trump's image.

Bezos has repeatedly disputed this claim and made it clear that he is not involved in the editorial process. He's also criticized Trump for not welcoming more media scrutiny.

“An appropriate thing for a presidential candidate to do is say, ‘I am running for the highest office in the world, please scrutinize me.' That’s not what we’ve seen. To try and chill the media and threaten retribution and retaliation, which is what he’s done in a number of cases, it just isn’t appropriate," Bezos said.

We don't know what Trump will do to The Washington Post, but the paper has a long history as a political watch dog, so this is an area to watch.

Investors

Amazon's stock is down 2.6% as of Wednesday afternoon, but most investors believe Amazon won't be much affected by Trump, largely because it's still growing fast with a lot of long-term growth potential in front of it.

"The drivers of Amazon’s business are broad — secular growth trends in online retail, cloud computing, and media distribution — that it wouldn’t seem to me to be at risk unless the government specifically began to regulate those industries with impediments to growth, which seems unlikely," Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian told Business Insider.

Mizuho's analyst Neil Doshi also noted he remains bullish on Amazon because its market share is "far from displaying monopolistic characteristics" and growth remains strong.

"We remain buyers of Amazon's stock given its growing market share of retail dollars shifting online, strong flywheels around its core business, and continued strength and profitability coming from its AWS cloud segment," Doshi wrote.

Amazon's representative wasn't immediately available for comment on this article.

SEE ALSO: Here's how much the highest-paid actors make from the shows by Netflix, HBO, Amazon, and Hulu

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I’m on a mission to convince B2B sales professionals that social media is just a communication and engagement channel. On a recent blog post on Social Business Engine I summarize 8 reasons that B2B sales professionals should be using social media to succeed.

78% of sales people who use social media perform better than those who don’t.

The stat above comes from a HubSpot article. I actually think it’s actually closer to about 98%. Think about it, if you use the phone to talk or email to communicate, of course you’re going to use social media to communicate. My point is that social media is simply the third leg in the communication stool of the past 100 years. It’s only logical.

Said another way, if B2B sales people are not engaging with buyers where they go to seek information, they’re missing out on sales conversations. We know that 75% of B2B buyers use social media to conduct research for products and services. So, why wouldn’t you engage them there?

But, remember your buyers aren’t on social media waiting for you to sell to them. So, how does a B2B sales person start a sales conversation on social media?

I discuss this on episode 23 of Poolside Sales Chat:

Be Useful to Your Buyer

Know thy buyer. Know your buyer’s journey. Post relevant content that addresses each stage of the buyer’s journey to be discoverable and get discovered. Address each aspect of the buyer’s journey through the content you post. You can curate content just as effectively as creating content as long as it’s content that is useful to your buyer.

Insert yourself into the buyer’s research process by being desirable to the buyer. I mean desirable because you’re a source of valuable and relevant information to your buyer. Follow conversations in LinkedIn and Facebook Groups. Using discretion, insert yourself by engaging in conversation, looking for the right moment to take a conversation offline through authentic engagement.

Similarly, follow hashtags streams on Twitter to discover online conversations that can lead to offline conversations.

Download 8 Reasons B2B Sales Professionals Must Use Social Media to Succeed.

Email marketing is still one of the best performing digital channels, beating out Facebook and Twitter by 40X according to one study.

So what’s the problem?

The number of emails that our subscribers are getting continues to balloon. Billions are already being sent daily, and the average person will get about 140 daily emails in a little over a year.

That means we’ve never had more competition than ever before.

And it gets worse, as email service providers like Gmail are trying to reduce the amount of promotional emails that actually hit someone’s inbox.

Here are 5 tips to escape their clutches, break through the noise, and increase click through rates across your campaigns.

Tip #1. Prune Subscribers with Low-Engagement that are Holding You Back

Sending email isn’t difficult these days. Actually getting it delivered is, according to an excellent Wired article.

It discusses how MailChimp uses sophisticated techniques like sending large campaigns in tiny batches initially to test subscriber reactions. If Open and Click rates are low, with high unsubscribe or complaints, they’ll kill the entire campaign before sending to everyone else.

The reason they’re so strict is because modern email service providers like Gmail and Outlook now use Reputation Scoring – analyzing the quality of an email campaign based on who it’s being sent to and where it’s being sent from.

That’s one of the reasons why your promotional or newsletter-based email content automatically gets filtered to the Promotions tab in Gmail. So even though it’s technically getting to your subscribers, they’re probably not seeing it among all the other stuff in there.

Chances are, your current email list is full of old subscribers that have little-to-no engagement. They haven’t opened an email from the last few campaigns, or over the past few weeks, and by continuing to send stuff to them, you’re risking high unsubscribe and spam complaints that will only further jeopardize your deliverability (or chances of actually reaching the good people).

Most email marketing software providers will provide the ability to go in and create new segments, where you can select criteria like recent Opens or Clicks and determine who might be ‘dead weight’ that is on the brink of opting out soon.

Tip #2. Make it Harder to Join in the First Place

Another counter-intuitive starting point is to make your current email list harder to join. Crazy as that might seem, there’s data that backs this up.

We’ve already seen that MailChimp has a few strict policies. And unlike many others, they require and force you to use a double opt-in sequence for new subscribers.

That means after people give you their email address on a website or form, they also have to go into their email inbox and confirm their subscription before they’re added to your list.

Obviously, that extra step and hassle cuts down on the number of people who opt-in. But… it ensures that those who do REALLY want to hear what you have to say. Based on their research and analysis, lists with double opt-in members have higher engagement with click rates and lower spam complaints over time.

(image source)

If you’re a service-based business that uses a bigger offer like a free consultation, you should probably also increase the number of fields you’re asking to get additional information. Some platforms, like HubSpot, give you the ability to save or ‘bank’ answers against a contact’s record so that you don’t have to ask them for that information again.

While this might also cut down on the number of people opting-in, it should help you disqualify those who’re ‘on the fence’ and make way for the ones who’re eager and ready to get started (i.e. the quality vs. quantity argument).

Tip #3. Segment Your Email Campaigns Instead of Broadcasting

Sending a newsletter-style campaign to a big list of subscribers is fine if you’re just trying to deliver general information and stay ‘top of mind’.

But if you’re aiming to drive new leads or sales, segmentation is the key.

Automatically sorting your database and sending timely emails that are personalized to each subscriber can deliver a 451% increase in qualified leads, with a 34% increase in average sales.

Start with a specific objective or milestone hit, like a product added to someone’s cart or just recently purchased. You now know a lot of specific information about this person, what they were just looking at, and what they’re trying to do next – and you can use all of this information to your advantage.

Again, even relatively inexpensive software like MailChimp allows you to create these automated ‘workflows’ that will send out specific emails at predetermined intervals once someone completes the action you’re looking for.

Some more advanced tools, like HubSpot, will allow you to create sophisticated follow-up sequences based on what someone DOES or DOESN’T do.

For example, if someone doesn’t click on the link then send them this email. If they do click, then we can send them something else.

Tip #4. Try to Keep Your Subject Lines Short, Sweet & Punchy

People are receiving an overwhelming amount of emails each day. And unfortunately, many of yours are probably getting stuck in that dreaded Promotions tab.

That means you’ve got a ton of competition for attention.

For example, average click rates are around 2.5% for the ‘Marketing and Advertising’ industries according to one study.

After analyzing over 280,358 email subject lines from a few years, we noticed that some of the best performers contained only a few words.

For example, “50 Ways to Get Customers in 2014” 9.10% click rate (which is 2-3x better than industry averages). We also found similar successes with “3 Killer SEO Resources” and “Why Comments are Useless”.

Beyond keeping the subject line to 30-40 characters though, you’ll also notice that these headlines use strong, vivid language that jumps out at you (instead of generic, overly bland stuff).

Another take on this approach comes from Susan at 500 Startups. She advocates using common email language that we’d expect to see from a colleague or friend, like the abbreviations:

• FW:
• Fwd:
• RE:

(image source)

Another critical detail in the image above is the sender’s name. Here, you’ll notice the friendly “Alison Powell”, even though it’s from HubSpot (the company), because they want you (the reader) to emotionally engage with the email.

In addition to a person’s name, adding the company name too (like “Alison from HubSpot”) also increases click through rates as opposed to those lifeless, dreaded “noreply@” ones.

A final tip is to include extra context to the ‘Preview Text’ area that will show up just next to the subject line in your inbox. Here you can expand on the contents of your email a bit, or add some intrigue to build anticipation.

5) Utilize & Experiment with Timing to Influence Click Rates

For years and years, an age-old ‘best practice’ has been to send email newsletters out on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

It’s become a generally accepted marketing principle – regardless of industry.

Years ago, HubSpot set out to verify this and analyze the best time to send an email campaign. And the results were surprising…

(image source)

That’s right. The campaigns with the highest click-through rates were over the weekend on Saturdays and Sundays!

The worst day of the week for click through rates? Tuesdays.

That wasn’t the only surprising thing, though…

(image source)

Unsubscribe rates also jumped on Tuesdays, which is a terrible signal in this case.

The reasoning? If consumers and businesspeople alike are receiving an overwhelming amount of email on one day, the chances of them opening and clicking are lower, while the chances of them getting frustrated and unsubscribing is higher.

That lead HubSpot to recommend testing “contra-competitive timing”, or doing the opposite of what others in your industry might be doing.

One way to do this is to simply send campaigns at different days and times to see what works best for your own audience. Some tools however also allow you to A/B test day and time. So you’ll send the same exact campaign, to half of your audience at one time and the other half at another. For example, MailChimp will allow you to select Opens or Clicks as the winning metric and then show you results afterward.

Timing also comes into play as discussed in Tip #3 with segmentation.

One good example highlighted by a HubSpot article saw that Eater Boston sent out a “Where to Drink Beer Right Now” email at 6:45PM on a Wednesday, just in time for all those people leaving work and heading out for the evening.

Conclusion

It’s never been more difficult to get an email delivered successfully to a subscriber.

Which means it takes a few different techniques and approaches to boost results.

The starting point is to evolve your approach and make sure only the best, most interested people are able to join your list in the first place.

The next step is to segment your future campaigns to make sure that the right person receives a tailored message at the right time.

And last but not least, make your emails as personable as possible (from the sender address to the subject line and preview text).

Because after all, whether we’re talking email or the phone or Twitter or Facebook, people want to connect and hear from other people – not nameless, faceless corporations.

As the saying goes, “actions speak louder than words.” Unless you’re in sales, that is – then you have to nail both. For example, you can say all the right things on a call, but if you can’t scale that activity, you still won’t hit your quota. Similarly, you can send a million emails, but if they don’t convey the appropriate message, your efforts will be futile.

So how can your sales team ensure that they’re delivering the right messages at the right momentum? And what can you as a sales leader do to support them in their quest for more effective communication? Here are 5 important strategies guaranteed to help your team kick its sales communication up a notch.

1. Balance Personalization & Productivity

Research by Experian shows that emails that are personalized deliver 6x higher transaction rates than those that are not. Yet if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a sales email riddled with “sir” or “madam” and “your business,” you know that with reps sending out hundreds of cold emails a day, truly personal messages are few and far between.

Rather than having to choose between reps hitting their activity metrics or getting clicks and conversions, there are tools that exist to help achieve both of these goals. For starters, instead of making reps bounce back and forth between CRM and inbox, choosing a sales platform with the ability to integrate the two can save time better spent adding a small personalized touch to individual notes.

Another tip is to select a solution that enables both email templates and merge tags. This allows your team to send personalized emails at scale by leveraging pre-written text and inserting tags like “first name” or “company name” that your system will automatically fill in using stored lead and contact information.

2. Record All Sales Calls

If you’re like most people, you probably don’t like listening to your own voice back on recordings. But just like singers who have to play back their records or politicians who have to watch their speeches to improve their performance, salespeople must also make a point of listening to their calls to hone their craft.

Sales platforms that provide automatic call logging and recording make it easy to access and review calls for both reps and managers. By consistently playing back their calls, reps will learn how to better field certain questions and anticipate the flow of conversations. Similarly, even if managers can’t sit in on all their reps’ phone calls, they can still go back and listen to provide coaching and tips for next time. Finally, good calls can be reviewed and emulated by the whole team.

3. Put Notifications to Work for You

It’s been proven that companies that are able to respond to leads within one hour are 7X more likely to qualify the lead than those that reach out after two hours. The instantaneous nature of social networks and Google search has accustomed consumers to receiving real-time answers and attention. But with hundreds of prospects in your funnel at any given time, reacting in real-time is a pipe dream; the secret to making this approach work is to spot key areas of influence and focus on taking the most impactful immediate actions.

To achieve this, leading businesses are employing sales platforms with real-time, custom notifications. Reps and managers alike can go about their daily business and receive alerts notifying them of activities or occurrences that they have defined as important and warranting immediate action. They can then reach out within that coveted one-hour timeframe with highly relevant and timely information. Examples of effective notifications might include when a prospect views a sent document or replies to an email with negative sentiment.

4. Keep All Communication in Context

As a salesperson who sends hundreds of emails and makes dozens of calls each week, without the right tools to help organize your communication, it can be easy to lose track. Did you respond to that prospect’s note? Did your voicemail say you’d call back later? Was it Prospect A or Prospect B who asked for a demo? Mixups like these can damage prospect trust and harm your team’s image.

Instead, leverage an all-in-one sales solution with the ability to capture all communication in the context of each account. Rather than sorting through your inbox, call logs, calendar and CRM to piece together conversation threads, this type of solution makes it easy to refer back to previous interactions and avoid awkward exchanges.

5. Track Team Activities

As renowned physicist Lord Kelvin once said, “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Measuring the cadence and outcomes of your team’s communication is definitely critical to optimizing for success. For example, logging the number of reps’ calls, emails and meetings and then measuring their productivity against their conversion rates enables you to determine the ideal number of activities your team needs to hit to make its quota. It also gives reps a fast and easy way to monitor their progress.

What’s more, the ability to track and view the outcomes of these activities, such as email opens or clicks, helps managers identify coaching opportunities and leverage team talent. For instance, say Rep A is visiting twice as many prospects as Rep B, but only converting half as many. Not only can you as a manager provide Rep A with some additional pitch training, but you can also ask Rep B to provide the rest of the team with her top closing tips.

Time to Kick It Up

Refining sales communication is a process that takes time and dedication from both reps and managers, but starting with these 5 strategies will give your team a definite head-start among the competition. For additional strategies to improve your team’s performance, download our free white paper: 5 Reasons Why Your Reps Don’t Want to Use CRM (But Should!).

EDMONTON – Alberta is proposing two new business tax credits to try to diversify the economy and create jobs.

“We are sensitive to the fact that many Alberta companies are struggling. This is why we are seizing this opportunity to support Alberta businesses as they diversify and expand,” Economic Development Minister Deron Bilous said Tuesday.

Bilous introduced a bill in the legislature to create the credits which he forecast would lead to thousands of new jobs.

The first would offer a 30 per cent tax credit to investors who provided capital for small businesses in areas such as interactive digital media, proprietary technology, digital animation and post-production and tourism initiatives.

The budget is for $90 million over three years and Bilous said it’s expected the credit would support 4,400 new jobs and add $500 million to the GDP.

The second initiative would encourage large-scale capital investment projects that would create both direct and spinoff jobs. It would offer a 10 per cent non-refundable tax credit up to $5 million, and would be available to companies involved in bolstering manufacturing, processing and tourism infrastructure.

The government believes the two-year, $75-million program credit would support $700 million worth of investment.

The credits are part of a larger plan by Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP government to diversify Alberta’s oil-and-gas-dependent economy and create more jobs.

On Monday, Bilous outlined programs and plans he said have already created jobs and will create thousands more in years to come.

The province is providing more money for loans to jump-start business and is investing billions of dollars more in infrastructure projects. It expects a shift to renewable energy will also boost the economy in the long run.

Opposition politicians question the projections. They say the government increasing the minimum wage and implementing a carbon tax will kill economic progress rather than boost it.

“The fact is the NDP government has brought forward a full slate of policies that have taxed and regulated jobs and businesses out of existence,” said Wildrose Leader Brian Jean.

During question period in the legislature Tuesday, Progressive Conservative Leader Ric McIver dismissed the government jobs forecast.

“(These) are mere estimations of jobs they hope will exist at some point in the future, like a unicorn … which is of little comfort to the tens of thousands of currently unemployed Albertans,” said McIver.

Alberta has experienced job growth in each of the last three months of about 25,000 positions. However, in the last year 47,000 full-time jobs have been lost.

The unemployment rate in Calgary hit 10.2 per cent in October and Edmonton’s stood at 6.9 per cent.

The post Alberta introduces two new business tax credits to grow, diversify economy appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Image via Unsplash

Every day, the average social media user is inundated with a ton of posts. Most of these might be from friends and people she follows; the others are from brands vying for her attention. Considering each link posted to social media enjoys a half-life of around three hours, brands must search constantly for novel ways to promote their posts to keep them relevant for longer. (highlight to tweet)

Although social media is a great platform to tell your brand story (which is the best way to market your brand, as humans love stories and can relate strongly with them), many brands have really not figured out how. Social media still is a great native distribution channel, and if we can master its complexities, we can generate more attention for our content. We want to maximize the reach of our content through more clickthroughs, likes, and shares. This will help us gain an edge over our competitors.

Here are a few tips to keep you ahead of the social media marketing curve.

1. Using Open Graph Tags on Facebook

Google uses the schema markup to understand how web content is organized—this is how it shows results. Rich snippets of recipes, ratings, and events are examples of how Google understands the schema markup of web content and displays results accordingly.

Similarly, Facebook has its own specialized tool called Open Graph Protocol, which shows content in a highly structured way. If you can master this protocol, you can increase the engagement of your Facebook posts and also enhance the way in which they are distributed.

2. Create Different Posts for Different Channels

Every social media channel has its own unique way of presenting content and, thus, has its own loyal audience who like to consume content in that fashion. Users will appreciate that you have taken the time and effort to adapt your content according to the demands of that particular platform.

On Facebook, for example, you will be better served if you post content that is informative and entertaining—something that is instantly shareable. Create attention-grabbing headlines and content that will form an emotional connection with your audience.

LinkedIn has a professional audience. Your content should be crafted so as to add value to their professional lives.
Twitter is known for its witty, trending updates. Share content that is catchy, interesting, and curiosity-inspiring.

Instagram is a visually-led platform that thrives on stunning photos. Can you create great visuals of any part of your content? If so, do it, and post it on Instagram.

3. Add Call to Action Buttons

Create posts in such a way that your CTA button is prominently displayed, enticing readers to take action. It could be as inane as “Learn More,” taking the reader to your blog post, or a more ambitious “Subscribe Now.”

Readers are more likely to click on these buttons, and their success can be tracked through UTM parameters. If you see good traffic coming through from that post, promote it more to get more traction.

4. Ask Your Sources to Share the Posts

You have likely written a great piece of content that mentions someone or quotes someone. Once you post it, send an email to the source, telling them that you have posted this content that mentions them and asking them to share it with their audience.

A simple tweet will also do.

Does the person you mentioned in your post have a substantial following? Sharing your post with their audience is a great way to promote your work.

5. Get Your People Involved

Social media isn’t necessarily the sole domain and responsibility of the marketing department. Every employee is capable of contributing to your social media accounts. Employees from different departments are experts in their field and can bring a unique perspective and depth of knowledge to your social media content. It also imparts a feeling of importance and team effort when employees are allowed to share content on the company’s social media accounts.

Customers will appreciate when brands post well-researched and interesting content. It can be difficult to produce quality content consistently—involving employees with different expertise will make your job much easier. Such high-quality posts are bound to get good traction and drive user engagement.

This also makes promoting new posts easier. If employees are involved in social communication, they can be encouraged to share the posts with their own personal networks. This can get your posts substantial traction.

6. Use Industry-Specific Hashtags

One of my previous posts on this blog talks about ways you can find relevant hashtags for your business. Using hashtags that are specific for your industry in your posts is a great way to promote them.

The travel, tourism, and hospitality industry, for example, uses a host of different hashtags like #travel and location-specific hashtags, like #”country” (#spain, for instance), #”city”, #”airport”, etc. There are also popular chats hosted by different people that discuss specific topics. On certain days of the week, travelers post themed content. For example, #BeachThursday attracts beach-themed pictures and videos of beaches.

It was my quest on one such Thursday afternoon that I stumbled upon Playa del Carmen. Their hashtag-perfect post was what led me to this relatively under-the-radar beach, where I had the holiday of a lifetime snorkeling with turtles and cenotes, exploring ancient Mayan ruins, and watching the Caribbean sunset.

7. Ask Questions in Your LinkedIn Post Titles

To get traction out of a LinkedIn post, convert your post title into a question. The aim is to stimulate conversation, and what better way than to ask a question and let readers share their thoughts on it.

If you keep on participating in the conversation actively, you can keep your post at the top of your feed and keep on promoting it for as long as you want. This strategy can be used on any platform, not just LinkedIn. An intelligent question is too much to resist, and more often than not, it will induce a conversation.

Social media has overwhelmed the very fabric of our daily existence. With the average lifespan of social media posts decreasing by the day, it is imperative for brands to find novel ways to get attention for their posts. What works for one brand might not work for the other, and it is only through strategic trial and error that you find how to promote your social media posts better.

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Advertising legend David Ogilvy once said, “Five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

Like a headline for a blog post or news article, the subject line for your email needs to capture people’s attention and convince them to open your message. A subject line can make or break the performance of your email, so it’s important to spend extra time crafting one that’s memorable and effective.

Good subject lines get to the point, create a sense of urgency and are relevant to the subscriber, but it’s easy to make mistakes when writing them. Committing these subject line sins can drastically reduce your open rates, but avoiding them is easy if you know what to look for.

Here are five of the most common mistakes people make when writing email subject lines, as well as tips to improve them and boost your open rates.

1. Using ALL CAPS or too much punctuation(!!)

Imagine receiving an email with a subject line like this in your inbox: GET 40% OFF YOUR NEXT PURCHASE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chances are you would take one of three actions: ignore it, delete it, or mark it as spam.

Before pressing send, keep in mind that USING EXCESSIVE CAPITALIZATION AND PUNCTUATION SCARES AWAY SUBSCRIBERS AND KILLS OPEN RATES!!!!! It can come across as though you are yelling, which can have a negative impact on your email performance. So you should use capitalization and punctuation cautiously.

Occasionally adding phrases like “Free” or “Act Now” have been shown to improve open rates, but I recommend using them sparingly to avoid diluting their impact.

On a similar note, be sure to avoid using too much punctuation. You have limited real estate for your subject line, and multiple exclamation marks can come across as spammy. Special characters such as * % & # and ^, have been known to trigger spam filters, so be sure to use them sparingly as well.

Do this, not that:

Now that we’ve gone over the punctuation mistakes to avoid in your subject line, you may be wondering which characters leads to more open rates.

The answer? Question marks, exclamation points and periods.

According to Touchstone, two to four percent of email subject lines should end with a full stop or a period. They also found that subject lines with exclamation points can expect an open rate that’s one to 20 percent higher than average – just as long as you don’t use them in every message.

While this can vary depending on your industry, your audience, and the content of your messages, I recommend testing multiple subject lines to see which forms of punctuation your subscribers are more likely to respond to.

Here’s an example of a subject line from Enchanting Marketing:

By using simple language, asking a question, and using proper punctuation in her subject line, founder Henneke is able to pique the reader’s interest and entice them to read the message.

Exclamation points, periods, and question marks are all part of a healthy email marketing strategy, so don’t be afraid to mix up the punctuation you use in your subject lines.

2. Using Spammy Words

Adding certain trigger words to your subject line can activate a recipient’s spam filter, even if the message you’re sending is legitimate.

To prevent this from happening, Mequoda recommends avoiding certain words, phrases, and symbols like “$$$,” “100% free,” “cash off,” “cheap,” “weight loss,” and “serious cash”. Even if your email makes it into the inbox, it can come across as spammy to your subscribers.

Do this, not that:

To ensure your readers take your emails seriously, choose the language of your subject line carefully by avoiding some of the trigger words and symbols listed above.

Finding the right verbiage for your subject line can be tough, especially with the sophisticated spam filters out today. Luckily, HubSpot put together an exhaustive list of email trigger words to avoid when composing your subject line, so reference it before sending your next message.

While there are plenty of recommendations for words to avoid in subject lines, there’s no hard and fast rule for ones to include; what works for one industry may not work for another. Be sure to try different variations of words to see what resonates best.

I also recommend focusing on specific words that tie back to the content in your email. Check out this example from our friends at Social Media Examiner:

The subject line tells you exactly what you’ll get by opening up the email. And by focusing on that, it eliminates the risk of including words that might appear spammy.

3. Making It Too Long

Consider the environment in which your subscribers are reading your emails. Chances are, they’re on-the-go or quickly scanning their inboxes between work meetings.

Since you have only seconds to capture their attention, you want to make sure your subject lines aren’t wordy or redundant.

Long subject lines look spammy and get lost in cluttered inboxes, especially if readers are using mobile devices.

Do this, not that:

Our favorite rule of thumb is one recommended by our friends at Litmus, who say to keep subject lines no longer than 50 characters. To do so, aim to get your message across as quickly as possible and cut any unnecessary terms or phrases.

As important as it is to get your message across quickly and clearly, make sure it expresses a complete thought and offers value to the reader – you don’t want to write a subject line that’s too short, either. Avoid one-word subject lines and strive to be helpful and relevant to your subscriber.

Professional photography blogger Courtney Slazinik conveys her message concisely with the following subject line:

By building a message around a numbered list and including the word “secrets,” Courtney offers value and creates a sense of mystery around her content. As a result, this subject line is easily skimmable and irresistibly clickable.

4. Writing misleading content

Let’s say you send an email with the following subject: Get an exclusive 50% discount on our entire inventory!

But when the reader opens the email, it’s a pitch to sign up for a webinar or free online class.

Not only is this tactic dishonest, it also tends to backfire. No one likes to be deceived, especially when they receive an email that promises one thing and delivers another. You might get people to open your email initially, but this alienates subscribers and can hurt your open rates and spam rates in the long run. If your subscribers lose trust in your emails, they’re more inclined to ignore future emails and mark you as spam.

To build and maintain trust between you and your subscriber, make sure to align the content of your email and your subject line.

Email Overload Solutions also recommends avoiding subject lines that include RE: or FW:.

These tend to trick the reader into thinking the email was part of another conversation, which doesn’t leave a positive feeling with subscribers.

Not including this text also gives you more room to work with in your subject line, which can be used to convey helpful and relevant information instead.

5. Including spelling or grammar errors

Subject lines (or any other content in your email) with typos, misspelled words, and misplaced punctuation look unprofessional and can hurt your open rates.

Emails are an opportunity to establish your brand as a helpful source of information. Subject lines with spelling or syntax errors make a bad first impression, and undermine your ability to establish trust with your subscribers.

Do this, not that:

To optimize your email open rates, be sure to review your emails for grammar and spelling prior to hitting send. No one will take the time to read your email if the subject line is loaded with grammar mistakes, but basic copy editing can prevent these errors from slipping through the cracks.

Crafting subject lines that sweep subscribers off their feet

The subject line is one of email’s most important components, so it’s important to get it right before you send your emails. And by avoiding the mistakes above, you’ll be well on your way towards improving your email engagement.

Do you have any subject line best practices that weren’t listed in this article? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Imagine you are investing in a fantastic sales automation tool. It’s a multimillion dollar investment. It takes some time to implement the system and get it fully productive, perhaps 7 months to a year, depending on the complexity of your operations. Once it’s in production, it drives the results you expect. But after 18-22 months, you decide to abandon it, you decide to go through the same process again, with the same levels of investment with a new sales automation tool.

Most of us would consider that insanity!

Why would anyone invest multimillions, go through a long implementation process, start seeing results produced, then abandon it and start all over?

Perhaps you sell products or services that require this level of investment. It could be capital equipment, it could be professional services for a large project, it might be a major software (web or premise) system. It could even be embedded products critical to your customers new products. You know your customers evaluate those investments very carefully. It’s a complex decision-making process, they want to make sure they are investing in the right solution, they want to minimize risk, they want to make sure they get the expected results.

Once they make the investment, they make sure they have a sharp implementation plan, minimizing the risk of project failure. When they go live, they make sure it’s producing results. They keep the system, maintaining and improving it so it can continue to produce results and get the return expected.

It’s simply good business to look at maximizing the return of these investments over as long a period of time as possible. It would be unimaginable to abandon it after a short period of time–unless they made the wrong decision in the first place. But that’s why they are so cautious in their buying process. They know they can’t afford to make a mistake. If they do, they know it can cost them their jobs.

Right now, you are saying, “OK Dave, we get it. We’ve known it forever, it’s what we face when we sell our products and solutions. What’s the point you are making?”

Glad you asked…..

Now look at your people. More specifically, look at how/who you recruit, how/who you hire, your onboarding process, your ongoing coaching/development, your retention strategies.

For complex B2B sales, each investment we make in a sales person is multimillions of dollars. Over their “lifecycle” it could be $10’s of millions.

Why are we so cavalier about the process of hiring, onboarding, coaching/developing and retaining these multimillion dollar investments? We wouldn’t do this with any capital investment, any major services project, but we seem to do this with great regularity with our sales people.

Some of you are saying, “Dave, you have it all wrong, at best it’s only a couple hundred thousand dollars.” (I’m really cheap, so even that statement has me on edge, why are we cavalier about that?)

It’s dead wrong, this thinking only looks at the direct expenses we make in recruiting, training, and salary/earnings. What it neglects is the huge opportunity costs from the revenue we are losing.

Think of the revenue drain—for most B2B sales people we are looking at revenue expected revenue production of at least $1M, more commonly in much more. So we have huge opportunity costs:

• Open territories, while recruiting. Customers aren’t stopping buying because we don’t have someone to sell to them.
• Revenue loss while onboarding. The sales person isn’t fully productive. There are opportunities they are missing, there are opportunities they are losing because the aren’t yet competitive.
• Revenue loss because they are bad sales people. This can be huge–both in the short and long term. If the sales person isn’t performing, we are losing opportunities to competition. If the sales person pisses the customer off, they may not buy from us for years, and they may share their bad opinion with colleagues and other organizations.
• Revenue loss because we aren’t addressing performance issues. Bad performers aren’t maximizing their share of customer or territory. Customers are diverting their spending to competitors or other projects.

All totaled, the potential lost revenue can be in the millions of dollar (or whatever your favorite currency is–in the case of the old Zim dollar, it’s trillions).

For managers that we are hiring and onboarding, the impact is even greater, if they can’t maximize the performance of their team, multiply the revenue drain for each sales person across the entire team. Think of the impact of high performers leaving because they are frustrated with bad leadership.

So far, this should be a huge wake-up call about the value of our people—but it gets worse.

Data shows (CSO Insights, CEB, other) average onboarding time of 10 months for sales people in complex B2B sales, for some it’s much longer. So they don’t get productive for a long period of time (go back to looking at revenue loss while onboarding).

Then the real killer is average time in the job is 16 months for SDRs, 18 months for managers, and about 22-26 months for sales people! We get a maximum of 4-16 months of full productivity in these multimillion dollar investments!

We would never do this with capital equipment or large service contracts, but why do we persist in doing this with our people?!?

Why do we rush through the recruiting process, selecting the best available candidate, rather than looking for the right candidate?

Why do we ignore the onboarding process, wishing our new people good luck as we give them their territory, quota, laptop and passwords? If they have to figure it out themselves, they will take much longer time ramping up, losing much more opportunity. Or the really good ones will leave, going someplace where they can be successful.

Why do we ignore retention through ongoing coaching and helping them grow in the job and their contribution to the organization? People want to grow–not just in their earnings, but in the responsibilities and what they want to do. If we aren’t providing them that development and those opportunities, then they will leave and go someplace that does provide those opportunities.

What are we doing to make our company the best opportunity around? It’s not just compensation, but people are looking for great challenges, great leadership, inspired teams and workplaces. They are looming for opportunities to learn, grow and develop, They are looking for opportunities where they can succeed.

But too often, I don’t see leadership teams focusing on these. They seem to have a “disposable” mentality, or they accept they will be way-stations for people as they look for better opportunities. Somehow we look at these time in job numbers, accepting them as given, rather than recognizing how damning they are of the job we are doing in leading our people.

We would fire any person making bad decisions on multi-million dollar projects and investments. Yet we let this happen every day through bad leadership.

It’s insanity!

Our sales people–SDRs, Sales People, Managers are our most critical “production assets.” We need to treat them as such, maximizing the return we get from them over time.

In the past month, I’ve received around 60 voicemails from 20 salespeople. This was by design: I signed up for free trials, filled out forms, registered for webinars, and requested to speak to sales specialists so I could learn how reps at different companies and industries left voicemails.

Despite the variety of products, verticals, and target markets, most salespeople left the exact same voicemail:

Hi Aja, this is John from Company X. Uh, I’d love to talk to you about how [product] can help you with your [business area] goals. Can you give me a call at 907-867-5309? That’s, uh, 907-867-5309. I look forward to hearing from you. Have a good day.”

These messages were boring, generic, and completely devoid of value. In addition, the salespeople usually sounded like they were reciting a script -- which would have made me feel even less motivated to call them back if I was actually looking to buy something.

As this experiment shows, the typical rep doesn’t leave engaging voicemails. But there’s a simple exercise they can use once a day …

The Daily Routine That’ll Vastly Improve Your Voicemails

Sales coach and speaker Paul Castain says reps can dramatically boost their voicemail chops in fewer than five minutes per day.

“At the start of your day, call your voicemail and leave yourself a message,” he writes.

You can practice leaving a voicemail for a real prospect or a hypothetical one, whichever you prefer. Castain recommends sticking to 30 seconds or less: Effective voicemails get to the point quickly. In addition, the shorter your message, the sooner you can return to your other tasks.

Around noon, listen to your voicemail. Reflect on what you did well and where you could improve.

At the end of the day, call your voicemail and leave yourself another message. Listen to your morning message followed by the one you just recorded. Is there an improvement? Did you apply the insights from your mid-day reflection?

Do this five times a week, and your voicemail skills will get noticeably better.

What to Look Out For

Listening critically to your messages isn’t productive if you don’t know what to look for.

Here’s a checklist you can use to evaluate your messages:

• Tone: Do I sound like I’m leaving a voicemail for a friend? Is my tone conversational and natural, or overly enthusiastic and “salesy”?
• Content: Have I enhanced the listener’s life in some way -- by providing a tip, asking them a thought-provoking question, or letting them know I’ve emailed them something of value?
• Length: Is my message as brief as possible while communicating everything it needs to? Does it come in under 30 seconds?
• Salesiness: Would I personally hang up at any point before the message is over because it feels like I’m being sold to?
• Specificity: Could this message apply to almost any buyer or is it tailored to a specific prospect?
• Call-to-action: Is my CTA clear and specific? Will the listener know exactly which action to take next (whether that’s returning my call, checking their email, talking to team member, etc.)?
• Superfluity: Does every line in my voicemail have a purpose, or do I add throwaway phrases like, “Have a great day,” or “I look forward to speaking with you”?
• Details: Did I leave my phone number twice? Is it easy for my prospect to hear, or do I rush through it?

Once you’ve gotten into the habit of leaving yourself hypothetical voicemails and analyzing them for weaknesses, your ability to leave real ones will get markedly better.

Do you have tips for improving your messages? Let us know in the comments!

Social sharing and social conversations on LinkedIn will get you noticed. A variety of social shares will get you remembered.

While everyone you know in business is on LinkedIn, for many LinkedIn is a place to connect and share a digital resume.

The secret of keeping your personal brand alive on LinkedIn is with social sharing and social conversations that consistently confirm and remind others of your career focus and invite further review of your profile and call to action.

In a previous blog post I presented 9 Ways to Social Refresh Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn. Here I present even more [less obvious] ways to build your personal brand.

12 More Ways to Refresh Your Social Activity on LinkedIn.

1. Career confirmation idea sharing.

LinkedIn is a great place to social share your original thoughts and ideas as an original share, a reaction to something in the news (or trending topics), or in response to the social shares of others (preferably as a re-share rather than a comment).

Invariably, this kind of social share makes a great social media networking conversation starter, especially in a career-related LinkedIn Group.

However, be cautious in sharing ideas that may be viewed as associating your personal brand with negativity, controversial topics (such as religion or politics), or unrelated to your career focus.

Also, you should include a question as a conversation starter to encourage others to respond with their own related ideas or feedback.

Advanced tip: share your sincere ideas without a web link, so that others won’t dismiss your social share as an effort to self-promote your blog post or to sell a product as a solution.

2. Crowdsourcing for ideas and feedback.

Conversely to sharing an idea or personal experience, you could directly ask for help or feedback in the form of a question. I call this social crowdsourcing ideation.

For example: “Can someone recommend a good _____?” Or, “I am thinking of using _____. Does anyone have any feedback or other recommendations?” Or, “____ or ____, which is best for ____ and why?”

Direct your questions to your connections or to the appropriate LinkedIn Group members. And, never use this to lead into a sales pitch or self-promotion.

Advanced tip: if you blog, then crowdsourcing is a great way to get feedback in the form of a pretest of alternate potential blog titles. Or, you could more generally ask what topics your LinkedIn network would most like you to write about.

3. Career confirmation through employee advocacy.

If your company is advancing or succeeding, then by association, so are you and your career.

Thus, it is important to show your company pride and employee advocacy by social sharing major announcements, news, community involvements, and accomplishments about your employer, management, or co-workers.

Advanced tip: always use a @companyname/tag and @employeename/tag and include a link to a press mention, a press release, LinkedIn company page, or company web page for more details of the accomplishment.

4. Career confirmation humblebrags.

As with employee advocacy announcements, individual accomplishments should not dominate your social shares on LinkedIn.

However, your LinkedIn network should be in the know about your major career advances, awards, certifications, recognitions, quotes in the media, career milestones, new projects, or publications.

Again, these social shares should be used in moderation and should leave the details in an appropriate section of your LinkedIn profile or a web link to a press mention.

Advanced tip: such shares also provides an opportunity to humbly thank and @name/tag those that gave or shared the recognition or assisted in its receipt (the organization that gave you an award; the co-workers that assisted or should share in the recognition, mentors or those who inspired your accomplishment, etc.)

5. Positive personal/professional experiences and reviews.

This kind of social share gives you an opportunity to share what you have learned from your own career related personal or professional experiences. You could social share career related advice, recommendations, reviews, or positive consumer experiences (tried new product, read new book, discovered new blog, love new app, etc.).

However, only social share your positive experiences. Save your negative experiences and reviews for customer service and your more private relationships rather than as a public share on LinkedIn.

Advanced tip: Always, give @name/tag recognition to those involved (a mentor you learned from, the book or blog author, the company that made the product, etc.).

6. Career-related or inspiring quotes as snackable content.

Everyone loves quotes, especially those that provide humor, inspiration, or motivation.

A social shared quote may be for more general inspiration or motivation from a source such as Brainy Quote. Or, may include more career specific content quotes taken from a career-focused blog post you have read. This is often called snackable content.

Regardless of the source, always specifically give credit to the author of the quote and provide the source link. If sharing a quote from a LinkedIn blog, you can highlight the quote and click on the arrow to the right. This will pull the quote and source link into your LinkedIn “share an update” box. Alternatively, when using Buffer in Google Chrome to social share, you can highlight the quote, and then click the Buffer icon to schedule the LinkedIn update.

Advanced tip: make a quote graphic using Adobe’s Spark Post or Buffer’s Pablo, and post as a native attachment that others will more likely want to re-share. If it is your quote from your original blog post, you should also add a personal name or blog name signature in the bottom corner of the quote graphic to subtly lead others to your blog (as an example, see my signature in the blog title graphic for this post).

7. Kudos as private mentions.

LinkedIn makes this easy.

Just monitor the “ways to keep in touch” in the top right section of your home page (or as a “My Network” pop-up in your LinkedIn app) and add personalized comment and specific congratulations to the connections that you personally know or work with.

This is truly a way to easily and sincerely renew a connection, be remembered, start a conversation, and build relationships.

Advanced tip: it is somewhat fake, robotic, and insincere to simply like or use the default comment provided by LinkedIn, especially if it is a connection that you don’t know personally. Instead, always add a personalized comment as a social media networking conversation starter.

8. Kudos as public mentions.

Some accomplishments by your connections are shared publicly as an Update (see humblebrags above).

As with private mentions, when the news is about a connection that you know personally or about your employer, client, or school, you should do more than just press the “like” button.

Exercise your digits and add a relevant comment or congratulations.

Advanced tip: when you see this type of news from outside your LinkedIn Updates stream (another public media source such as a newspaper or another social media), then social share the link to this news along with appropriate comment and @names/tags so they will receive a notification of your social share.

9. Relationship check-in as a LinkedIn Poke.

Another private social activity is to direct or private message a connection that you know personally though you have not recently communicated with. I call this a LinkedIn Poke.

You could reactively let the social shares in your LinkedIn home stream trigger this relationship check-in.

Or, you could proactively drop into your list of LinkedIn My Network>Connections to find a random someone to renew contact.

Just click the private Message button and ask: “John, how is the new job going?” Or, “Jill, are you going to the ____ conference in LA?” Or, “Bob, can you recommend a _____?” Or, “Jennifer, how’s the career going?”

And, never turn it into a self-promotion or sales pitch. Never. Ever.

Advanced tip: this works very well to renew or maintain relationships. It is a good habit to do two or three LinkedIn Pokes a week.

10. Private thanks and reciprocation for endorsements or recommendations.

It may seem obvious to thank an important career stakeholder for a LinkedIn recommendation (if not, then shame on you).

However, when someone that truly knows you and your abilities and gives a legitimate endorsement of a skill, you should undoubtedly thank them for that, too.

Why?

One, such an endorsement(s) may open the door to request a guided recommendation (and a LinkedIn recommendation may lead to a reference letter).

Two, an endorsement also opens the door for you to respond with a conversation starter and the potential to renew or strengthen your relationship with a connection and potential career stakeholder.

Advanced tip: if appropriate, review your connection’s list of skills to see if you can sincerely return a skills endorsement (reciprocate).

11. Write, repurpose, or republish your original content with LinkedIn Publisher.

Whenever you write an original blog post in LinkedIn Publisher (Home>write an article), your connections and followers will receive a Notification of your publication (or as a social share in their Updates stream).

If your published blog post is relevant, informative, and helpful to your connections (not a sales pitch, announcement, or self-promotion), and many respond by liking, commenting, or sharing within a few hours of posting, then the LinkedIn robots may take notice and flag the post for review by human editors.

While not always easy to accomplish, the editors may tag or promote your blog post in one or more of the LinkedIn Pulse sections. Then your social sharing goes out to a much larger audience with the potential for new followers or connections and engagement.

Advanced tip – you don’t have to write a blog post exclusively for LinkedIn. Many repurpose blog posts from their WordPress blog (change the title and some of the content), and others simply republish blog posts with a link back to the source of their original post.

12. Career confirmation in LinkedIn Groups.

Many of my previous 9 + 11 ways to social share on LinkedIn can be shared in a targeted career focused LinkedIn Group.

Just as you want to build your personal brand with your connections and those reviewing your public LinkedIn profile, so it goes with LinkedIn Groups.

LinkedIn groups provide an opportunity to learn from, converse and showcase your personal brand to professionals in your career field. This social sharing and social conversations effort can lead to new connections and job and career opportunities.

Moreover, what you share in a LinkedIn group is also shared to your connections (make sure this is turned on in Privacy & Settings). This reinforces your personal brand identity with the career focused social share and association with a career focused professional group.

However, you should be aware that much of the activities in the poorly moderated LinkedIn groups are often overwhelmed with self-promotions and spam. Thus, it takes some effort and research to find those career valuable groups that truly invite, encourage, and add value through social conversations.

Advanced tip: when you do find these best-in-class professional moderated groups, join the conversation, don’t sell or self-promote, and show social gratitude for what you learn. Some of my best social learning and engagement in groups has come from a social share that asks for sincere feedback and does not provide a link that could be misread as just another self-promotion.

The Take-Away.

Social sharing activity on LinkedIn can build a personal brand, confirm a career-focus, and jumpstart conversations that lead to online and offline relationships.

Sporadic or impulse social sharing is inadequate to keep your name and image in the Updates stream of your connections and profile visitors. Regular social sharing is needed.

Boring or repetitive social sharing is inadequate to maintain interest and continued engagement with your connections. Variety of social sharing is needed.

So, mix it up.

With regularity.

Image credit: Denny McCorkle

What have I left out? What other types of social shares have you found successful for building your personal brand on LinkedIn

This article originally appeared on Digital Self Marketing Advantage and has been republished with permission.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on Captable.io’s blog.

It’s a lot cheaper getting your startup’s stock option process correct from the beginning than fixing mistakes later. Fines, legal exposure, upset employees, and delays preparing for IPO or acquisition are just some of the consequences of screwing this up. To avoid problems like these, founders need to understand and own their startup’s stock option process.

Your lawyers can provide support in setting up your stock option plan and taking care of specific legal tasks, but only you know when your hiring plan changes or when you need to make an offer to a new employee.

You can have the best legal team on earth, but they can’t read your mind.
– John Bautista, Partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP

To a busy founder, owning this process can seem like yet another distraction from building a great company. However, this doesn’t have to be complicated. This post outlines an effective four-step stock option process:

1. Setup
2. Maintenance
3. Making Offers
4. Finalizing Grants

By following these four steps, you can avoid common stock option plan mishaps.

1. Setup

This section describes the upfront investment you’ll need to make in order to issue options to your first set of employees.

• Develop your philosophy. Your stock option plan is an expression of your company philosophy. How you design and communicate this important incentive to your future employees is worthy of discussion with your co-founders, board and advisors. How much of your company do you plan to share with early employees? How do you want to reward people who join later? How standardized do you want your grants to be? How do you want to balance cash versus equity compensation?

• Paper it. Adopt your stock plan and option agreements and get board and stockholder approval. You can get this paperwork done for as little as $200 using the service provided by Clerky.

• Make it official. Work with your lawyers to obtain all relevant state permits for your option plan. Employee stock option regulations vary significantly from state to state and you will need to comply with each state that you have employees resident in. California is one state in particular where careful attention must be paid to compliance. See section IV. “Blue-sky issues” in this article from WilmerHale for more about individual state requirements.

2. Maintenance

This section describes items you’ll need to monitor on an ongoing basis.

• Stay current on your 409A valuation. Initiate a new 409A process if your valuation is more than 12 months old or if you’ve hit a significant milestone, whether it’s financial (such as a closing a financing), product, or sales-related. (A 409A valuation allows you to determine the exercise price for stock options in order to meet IRS guidelines, which includes using a bona fide third party 409A valuation company.)

• Create your equity budget. Design a hiring plan for the period until your next funding event. Determine the total number of stock options that will be needed as compensation for new employees.

• Size the pool. With board and stockholder approval, create a stock option pool of the appropriate size.

• Track the pool. Monitor your stock option allocation over time. Is your pool still sufficient for future hires that you need to make? If not, you need to raise this issue with your board and re-plan.

3. Making offers

This section provides a checklist for making a prospective employee an option grant.

• Check your budget. Before making an offer to a candidate, confirm you have enough unallocated shares in the pool to cover the offer. This is a simple and very common mistake. ‘Uncovered’ options are invalid and repairing this mistake later can impact the value of the employee’s grant and expose your startup to legal risks.

• Confirm employee details. Confirm the residency and work visa status of your prospective employee. Can they legally work for you?

• Check the grant size. Note that any new employee whose total ownership or equity represents more than 10% of the company must have a strike price that is 110% of the 409A price-per-share valuation, not 100% as usual.

• Deliver the grant. Provide an offer letter to the prospective employee including details of their stock option grant. The grant should be identified in terms of number of shares, not percentage of the company. The offer letter should clearly state that the grant amount and exercise price is subject to board approval.

Rule 701: This rule provides an exemption from the registration requirement of the Securities Act of 1933 for the issuance of securities to employees by private issuers. To comply with this exemption your startup must issue stock within the constraints of rule 701. Joe Wallin has an informative post on rule 701, including state exemptions.

Rule 701 includes limits on the total value of stock options you can issue in one year. The total value being the total number of options issued × their respective exercise prices. In order to comply, this total value cannot be greater than the larger of the 3 measures below.

• $1,000,000
• 15% of the total value of assets on the company’s latest balance sheet
• 15% of the issued securities of the same class being offered, (not counting securities issued under Rule 701)

Here are some useful example calculations for the Rule 701 total value criteria above.

Also, if the total value of options issued is greater than $5M, you will need to provide specific information about your company to the new employee. For details on the information required, see the section “Disclosure Rules” in this article by the National Center for Employee Ownership.

4. Finalizing Grants

This section describes the dotting of the i’s and crossing of the t’s.

• If your current 409A is still valid, i.e. is less than 12 months old or there has been another valuation event (like a priced financing round), then no action is required. However if there has been a new 409A valuation since the last board meeting this needs to be reviewed and approved by the Board prior to or simultaneously with the approval of the employee’s stock option grant.

• At your next board meeting, you need to ensure that the board approves the employee’s stock option grant. If there are any material differences from your standard company offer e.g. vesting schedule, the recorded board approval needs to note these differences.

• The employee’s stock option agreement needs to be processed and executed.

• The company cap table needs to be updated with details of the new stock option grant.

One of the most common mistakes I see is where companies have forgotten to give the final, executed stock option agreement to the employee. Fixing this simple error may require the board to re-approve the grant at a later date. If the option strike price has changed in the interim this can impact the employee’s proceeds in the event of an exit. — Frank Vargas, Partner at Rimon, P.C.

Conclusion

Founders are busy. There are hardly enough waking hours in the week to work on your core mission, never mind spending time on administrative tasks. However, this stuff matters. Running your company well can sway investors, help you hire great employees, and reduce the chance of missteps that can hurt or even kill your startup.

A significant theme in the four-step process outlined above is managing information correctly. Tracking against your hiring plan, tracking the number of remaining options in the option pool, keeping your 409A valuation up to date, knowing whether you are hitting any regulatory limits on total options issued, etc.

Cap table management software such as Captable.io can be a useful tool for managing your company’s equity information and your employee stock option process in a time-efficient way.

Further Reading

Best Practices for Option Grants by Venture-Backed Companies

• https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandnewsdetail.aspx?NewsPubId=87005
• http://www.startuplawblog.com/2010/11/01/stock-option-grant-checklist/
• http://thestartuplawblog.com/rule-701-math-the-15-of-shares-test/
• http://thestartuplawblog.com/rule-701/
• https://www.nceo.org/articles/exemption-securities-registration-rule-701

The post A Four-Step Plan for Setting up and Running Your Startup’s Stock Option Process appeared first on OpenView Labs.

There are a few things robots are starting to do better than humans:

• Move items around a stockroom (Amazon has a fleet of robots that have increased operations from 100 items per hour to 300 items per hour for workers)
• Accomplish missions in dangerous scenarios, such as dismantling land minds or bombs
• File, package, and dispense prescriptions
• Paralegal and doc-review-focused work (such as searching hundreds of documents for mentions of certain items or concepts).

Their bandwidth, power, and automated processes make sense in these roles, and can out-perform the manual efforts of humans.

We can draw a parallel here to the task of Account-Based Everything. There is no doubt that some things, such as building relationships with target buyers, injecting personality into our messages, and adding a personal touch to client engagements can never fully be replaced by automation.

But a critical component of account-based sales and marketing is identifying which accounts are at a greater propensity to buy.

We’ve discussed earlier the data and steps that need to be taken to build a target account list, and some organizations choose to execute this process manually using gut feel and basic scoring.

Others rely on predictive analytics.

Using Predictive Analytics to identify your target accounts

In the real world, many factors contribute to a successful sale – much of which is invisible to your teams. Predictive Analytics is, at its core, a way of processing far more information than humans can process. This can be used to build models that better predict the propensity to buy, out-performing manual selection and scoring.

“The majority of ABM programs have a list of targeted accounts in the 500 to 2,000 range, so that’s still a lot of activity to track manually. Predictive is one thing that enables companies to scale their ABM efforts, something which was not possible even a few years ago.” – Megan Heuer, SiriusDecisions

How to use predictive scoring in Account Based Everything

Just as Netflix predicts which movies you’ll like based on the ones you’ve already watched, Predictive Analytics chooses the companies most likely to buy by analyzing the ones who have already bought (or become opportunities).

Predictive Analytics takes data about accounts that have progressed to a certain stage of the buying process, and uses it to highlight other accounts in your market that most look like these.

Models will often include all the firmographic (company information), technographic (what technologies are used at that company), intent (meaningful behavioral data from that account) and engagement data (how engaged your company is with that account) that you might use in a manual scoring model.

What’s different in a predictive analytics model is your ability to include many more dimensions and data points – often in the hundreds or even thousands. In fact, a big part of the value of predictive vendors is they do the data collection and cleansing work for you.

“Yes, you need to look for intent signals. But I’d hate to try to build a predictive model on it exclusively – there’s just not enough of it in the market compared to companies that t and companies you’re already engaging with.” – J.J. Kardwell, EverString

Shifting the conversation from argument to data-driven decisions

In many cases, the most basic approach – working with sales reps and their gut intuition to create a target account list – is enough to see value from Account Based Everything. But it can lead to arguments about who is truly qualified.

Unlike these manual processes to build target account lists, predictive models don’t go in with any biases or hypotheses. They simply analyze the data, building the model around any characteristics that best correlate with eventual success.

“Predictive Analytics looks at indicators at a level that humans just can’t understand. It’s not realistic to expect that you will come up with your best target accounts simply by having sales, marketing and product sit in a room. This reduces so much friction and allows everyone to feel like you’re making data-based decisions instead of having people bickering around a table.” – J.J. Kardwell, EverString

Partial landscape of predictive analytics vendors

Though not an exhaustive list, consider partnering with organizations that provide predicative analytics solutions, including:

• Leadspace
• EverString
• Lattice
• 6sense
• Mintigo
• Infer

No matter if your process is manual or predictive, your target account selection will be the most important component of your account-based strategy. Be mindful, and get it right.

Have you been successful with predictive analytics in your account-based strategy? Do you have any tips to share with our readers?

Conversations. You wouldn't think they'd need to be so complicated. But somehow when it comes to talking with prospective customers, businesses get all tripped up. We bobble the timing. We totally mis-assess interests. We throw up hoops to in an attempt to "qualify."

We fail again and again to connect buyers with the right person, at the right time. Frankly, we fail to connect with them at all. Although we strive for personalization in our touches, we often create a clumsy, impersonal mess.

It's not that businesses want impersonal communications, but there’s a lot of guesswork when it comes to connecting with prospective buyers at scale. You have to get the person, the timing, the context, and the experience just right.

Advancements in marketing and sales technology have made conversations at scale possible, but often with the side effect of making them less personal. Mass emails and auto-dialing have done serious damage to the vendor-prospect relationship. Despite making headway in delivering more relevant and well-timed communications, lead forms and marketing automation have yet to truly bridge the gap of creating a one-to-one conversational experience.

But those limitations are starting to shift. Before we dive into what’s becoming possible now, let’s take a look at how consumer behaviors and expectations have changed over the last few years.

Identification Isn't as Simple as a Phone Number or Email Anymore

Businesses have been trying to get to a place where they can treat a person like a person for a long time. With limited context, however, businesses often over-index for the thing that gives them access to the person rather than for the person herself.

In the days of cold calling, this boiled down to the phone number. Sales reps would do everything possible to get a list of phone numbers, then smile and dial their way down the page to turn those phone numbers into connections. But the problem with treating a phone number as a “contact” is that phone numbers come with no context on the person behind them -- and result in uninvited and poorly timed calls.

Marketing software tried to address this context problem by creating a way for prospective buyers to request information and provide additional detail on their timing and interests through forms. In the era of marketing automation, email addresses became the new de facto contact identifier.

However, while this method does add context to make communications more relevant, email will always be an asynchronous and less efficient form of communication than true, real time conversations.

The problem with both phone numbers and email addresses as identifiers is multifold:

• They can be bought and sold unscrupulously.
• They are still just a proxy for identity -- not identity itself.
• Increasingly, there is no one at the other end of them.

Today, connecting with prospects is still listed as the hardest part of selling by sales reps. In offices all over the world, desk phones are going away, inboxes are getting better at filtering out uninvited or irrelevant emails and the role of starting the conversation is moving from the marketer or salesperson to the prospective buyer.

In addition, people are adopting new channels for communication at a breakneck pace. Today more than 4 billion people use messaging apps every month to talk with friends and businesses alike. And thankfully there's simply no way to purchase a list of messaging users.

These changes are all positive for any company that cares about the customer experience. However, they also mean that businesses will need to adapt to make sure those prospective customer conversations don’t go unanswered.

Timing Has Moved From Asynchronous to Instantaneous

"Is now a good time to talk?"

" ... How about now?"

"Do you have 15 minutes this week to connect?"

If you're a salesperson, you've undoubtedly used one of the questions above or a variation in your prospect communication. Unfortunately, the answers are almost always "no".

It's not that people are actually busier than they used to be. It's that the act of scheduling time to have a conversation is becoming passe. Buyers control their own schedules. They want information when they need it and only then.

This affects prospect conversations in a handful of distinct ways. For starters, there are no more standard working hours. Whether you're selling locally or globally, business can happen at any point -- 5 p.m. or 4 a.m. -- around the clock. If you're trying to squeeze all of your conversations into eight fixed hours, you are going to miss opportunities.

In addition to expanded query hours, consumer-grade artificial intelligence is priming buyers to expect instantaneous answers. Ask Siri or Alexa for the weather outside and she'll tell you, just like that. Search for information on Google and in 30% of the cases, the search engine will now provide a quick answer box rather than just a list of links to follow.

This isn’t just on-demand information, however, it’s also “as needed.” Increasingly, seekers can get information the moment they need it without even having to ask.

If you operate in any sort of routine day-to-day, you’re probably most familiar with this experience through Google Maps. As Maps learns your habits, it will start predicting your next move and providing helpful information to match it. Step outside your office at the end of a typical workday and Google will alert you to the traffic conditions and travel time to your home. This kind of prediction feels jarring the first few times it happens, but after some recurrence becomes engrained in daily experience and codified as an expectation.

In all of these examples, one thing is clear: Scheduling conversations for a future date and waiting for answers from businesses is becoming less necessary.

The Implications of These Changes for Business-Buyer Communication

Technology is getting better at stripping down the barriers to more personal communications at scale. In the age of direct dials, businesses would go into conversations completely cold, lacking any information about what mattered to the prospective customer (or whether they were in the mindset to have the conversation to begin with). Then, with the advent of landing pages and marketing automation, prospects gained more control, providing businesses with more cues as to their timing and areas of interests.

Today, that exchange of information can happen at a much faster pace. More and more, information gathering about a prospect's timing and interests happens behind the scenes in ongoing and unstructured ways. For example, a single conversational chat with a prospect via a messaging app can generate scores of data points to make future conversations more relevant without the formality of field submissions.

As technology gets better at recognizing patterns and extracting data behind the scenes, conversations will ironically become less robotic and more human. And this is something businesses of all sizes can appreciate.

Imagine a sales engagement process that’s smooth and simple, from the moment you start prospecting, to the moment you handoff a lead to sales. No toes are stepped on, nobody falls through the cracks — just a well-timed choreographed dance from start to finish. That’s what it’s like when you know how to use Salesforce for your sales engagement process.

Angela Kirkland, Team Lead at SalesLoft is a self-proclaimed Salesforce ninja — and not just because of her stellar organizational skills. Sure, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Salesforce are a fine source for account organization, but with an integrated platform for your sales engagement process, they can become data-centers for all sales activity.

That activity, from what leads are currently being worked by other SDRs on the team, to what sentiment or disposition was left on a call, to what phone greetings convert the most calls, can be used to improve individual performance and enhance overall sales development coaching. A sales manager’s dream, Salesforce for the sales engagement process is the fuel for tracking modern sales success.

That’s why we created our newest ebook,“Salesforce for Sales Engagement: Sales Development Reps.” 

Watch the video below to learn how Angela uses Salesforce, hand-in-hand with SalesLoft, to create a seamless sales engagement process that brings her over the finish line, month after month:

DOWNLOAD THE EBOOK TODAY

Video Transcript:

I like to pride myself on being a ninja in Salesforce, so I’ve gotten really good at uncovering little gold nuggets. Within Salesforce, let’s say I was searching for SalesLoft. If I search SalesLoft.com, it’s going to pull up all the correspondence that anyone with that email domain has had. Through the rules of engagement that we have, as an SDR, I know that if that person has been touched within the last 30 days — it’s hands-off. Another rep is already working it.

When I’m no long an SDR or maybe this potential sales rep leaves five months ago, you need to have that information in Salesforce so your other sales rep can quickly pick it up. Within Cadence, we have a pane where you can actually go in and write the sentiment and disposition of the call. Using the dialer through Cadence, that works with Salesforce, gives managers such advanced analytics to how their team is performing. We actually template out option one, two, three, and four of how we’re going to approach a cold call, the first thing we say.

Through that, we had each rep utilize that on a call, and then we could actually run the data in Salesforce and see, out of all of these four options, which one is correlating with the most positive result — which is demo scheduled. That’s amazing information for managers to be able to utilize, and now across the team we know what introduction is going to get us the best chance of actually having a conversation on a cold call.

—

Download your free copy today and start getting the most out of Salesforce. While CRMs weren’t built with modern sales tactics in mind, a few small tweaks to your sales engagement process can make Salesforce a secret weapon for SDRs in any industry.

The post Your Sales Engagement Process, But Better appeared first on SalesLoft.

I've written many blog posts on the fact that cold calling isn't dead. In fact, doing the right amount of research, adding a personalized touch to your outreach attempts, and a lot of persistency will help you get in the door for more prospects than you might think. Using these gold calling techniques will help you have faith in the cold calling process.

Whether you call high quality cold calling Gold Calling or Cold Calling 2.0, there are four primary differences between quality outbound touches and old-fashioned cold calling or “interruption marketing.”

First, gold calling requires the caller to take strategic approach to call planning, including creating a detailed playbook, identification and segmentation your market, developing lead qualification criteria, efficient reporting on your calls, effective call training, and weekly contact between the callers and the team receiving the leads.
Cold calling is all about generating a list of people to call, a script for what you'll say, and spending money with the objective to produce a bunch of leads.

Second, gold calling requires leads to go through a quality control process that ensures each lead passed to the field is solid gold. Progress is monitored so that leads do not stagnate in the pipeline.
Cold calling is about quantity, not quality. Theoretical calculations of return on investment (ROI) or return on marketing investment (ROMI) are used to judge the success of the program without regard to actual results.

Third, a gold calling program requires sales to reviews leads provided to them and either accept or reject them within 24 to 48 hours. What I call a judicial branch of cross-departmental judges determine if the lead meets the criteria and ensures that the lead either goes back to sales or is put in a lead nurturing program. For cold calling, a large percentage of leads are ignored by sales and end up lost in a black hole.

Finally, a gold calling program requires that sales-accepted leads transition to sales-qualified within a one to two weeks or less. Those that do not move to sales-qualified are then reviewed by the judicial branch. It's important to note that no lead is ever left behind. It's either moving forward in the sales process or it is being nurtured. Marketing is evaluated on the quality of the leads delivered to sales and the sales reps are evaluated on their efficient use of company assets, in this case, leads.

Ask most sales reps what percent of leads they close and they will say they close 60 to 80 percent of qualified leads. What they are really saying is that they will close 60 to 80 percent of what they thought they would close. In my experience, I've seen that the average sales force closes nearly 20 percent of sales-accepted leads while best-in-class organizations close closer to 30 percent. That means an average rep is putting themselves on the hook for losing four out of five times. While that might actually be acceptable, few reps are going to allow that level of visibility (not to mention the perception of failure four out of five times) because they don’t have to. Their company does not force them to.

Call it what you want. Gold Calling, Cold Calling 2.0, or cold calling. It is definitely not dead, but your company might be if you buy into the hype.

To execute your sales hiring strategy and achieve your sales targets, you need the right sales talent. Here are 14 sales hiring strategies you can implement today to ensure you hire the right salespeople for your selling environment.

There is a robust business need for objective sales hiring – devising comprehensive strategies to hire salespeople who will hit quota year-over-year and deliver profitable revenue is a critical component of sales management success. Simply put, you need to build a team that will get you to your numbers.

Here are 14 sales hiring strategies for each stage of the sales hiring lifecycle to make your hiring process more effective:

REQUIREMENTS

1. Build Ideal Candidate Profiles to Match the Requirements of Your Sales Strategy

One of the biggest issues that arises in the hiring process happens before candidates are even assessed: As a sales leader, you haven’t defined what you need from your salespeople. Do you need a hunter who can penetrate the market and close net-new business, a lead nurturer who can close warm leads, or someone to overtake and farm existing accounts?

To attain the candidates who will execute your sales strategy and excel in your selling environment, create a clear outline of the skills, experience, and DNA your ideal candidate will possess then build your job description and recruitment efforts around this.

Traits of your ideal candidate can include:

• Behaviors required to sell to your client
• Attitudes required for best fit for role and best cultural fit
• Skill set necessary to excel in your selling environment
• Personality characteristics like competitiveness, resilience, conscientiousness, persistence, or drive

ATTRACTION

2. Showcase Your Company as an Employer of Choice

Top performing salespeople are picky when it comes to choosing who they work for. And they should be: they have the luxury of working for the best because they are the best at what they do.

Some tactics for attracting the best salespeople to your company can be executed in these ways:

• Online – this is likely the first place that potential candidates will look, so make sure your website is professional and the content is up to date.
• Offices – make sure your offices look like a place of where success is celebrated and top performance is expected.
• Interactions – when speaking with candidates, discuss marquee customers you’ve done business with. This is a way to demonstrate your company’s pro sales culture and the value it places on customer relationships – something top sellers want to to see in an organization they work for.
• Reputation – Hire the best and your company will become known for attracting top producers.

3. Stop Relying on Job Boards

Simply put, top performing salespeople are not browsing job boards because they are too busy closing deals and driving revenue for their employer. By posting job descriptions on online job boards, you are advertising to “active candidates” – those salespeople who are likely out of work or going to be fired because they continue to miss quota.  

Relying on job boards to get the attention of the best salespeople in your industry is an ineffective strategy that will only increase your time-to-hire and turnover ratios. Instead, leverage your employee’s existing networks.

4. Use Cash to Attract Top Candidates

One of the secrets of talent acquisition is that great salespeople know other great salespeople.  Salespeople that demonstrate the skills, attitudes, and behaviours that make them a great fit for your company will likely know other people with a similar profile. This is especially true in sales, where networking and relationship building are so critical for success.

To capitalize on your salesforce’s personal networks, develop and implement an internal referral program. The key to making these programs work is to make it lucrative for your team by giving large cash rewards that not only payout when a referral hire is made but when the person referred hits quota.

Salespeople are motivated by money – incentivize them to bring the talented people they know to you.

5. Build a Strong Employer Brand 

In the same way that consumers evaluate a brand before they purchase, potential employees assess the brand of a company before applying for or accepting a job. They will research you as much as you’re researching them. Ensure they are wowed while they are researching your company online.

To attract top performing salespeople, there are several things you can do. When it comes to your online employer brand, be sure to position your company as a market leader. This is important because top salespeople are always interested in working for industry leaders or high-growth companies that are poised to dominate their sector. Respected employers demonstrate their legitimacy by featuring key client logos in the recruiting process and highlight the number of reps making and exceeding quota. By emphasizing your reputation and resources, you gain the attention of top talent.

Further, companies that understand employee branding know that talent engagement is really where employee engagement begins. Engage talent on your website from the first point of contact. Do this by showcasing:

• Core company values
• Testimonials of how your employees are living your values
• Success stories of personal growth, promotion, or role expansion
• Stories of how your employees are active in their local communities
• Employee awards and recognition
• Blogs written by employees about their professional engagement

When you personalize your company values and brand in a way that makes potential candidates feel like they know you, you take a crucial first step to creating a connection with your target candidate pool.

While your online brand is an important place to start, ensure your effort toward attracting top talent includes the interview and assessment, offer, and onboarding stage of your hiring process.

6. Attract Top Performers With Your Company, Not Your Jobs

When publishing an online job description, be strategic about what it is you’re actually selling. The job descriptions for an account executive role at a given B2B company will be 90 percent identical, and yet, some companies struggle to fill these roles while others receive hundreds of resumes for the position.

This is because if you focus on what a candidate has to gain by working at your company – not just simply what they will do as a job –  you won’t have to rely as heavily on the job descriptions to drive candidate flow. The best job descriptions might include compelling stories about long standing client relationships and key accounts. Or, include human elements about the beginnings of your salesforce and how it has grown and evolved the company.  The best salespeople seek challenging and innovative sales environments. Showcase how your company creates this in your job descriptions.

ASSESSMENT

7. Interview for Sales DNA

Instead of simply interviewing based on generic hiring criteria, evolve your assessment process to assess the Sales DNA of candidates from the first point of contact. Peak’s research has found that knowing how to interview for sales DNA is one of the keys to successful sales hiring.

Sales DNA refers to the traits a candidate possesses that will make them successful in their role. Once you have identified all the characteristics of your ideal sales candidate and the DNA that they need to possess, you can test candidates during the interview process by asking specific questions.

8. Introduce Science

Effective hiring leverages the power of science. One way to introduce science into your sales hiring process is by using psychometric testing to assess candidates. This testing is a learning tool for you to objectively assess candidates’ communication and behavioural style. Its purpose is to predict the behaviour, performance, and motivating factors of an individual in a specific context (i.e. an employee in the workplace).

Typically, psychometric assessments measure:

• Aptitude
• Mental cognition capabilities
• Behavioural skillsets
• Motivating factors

Using the data from each candidate’s results, you can identify how someone will fit into your team culture and how they will be received by your customers.

Ultimately, psychometric testing is key to understanding if someone is naturally “wired” to handle rejection, ask difficult or challenging questions, or possesses the necessary persistence to successfully sell.  It’s an objective tools that can be an invaluable part of hiring the right people for your specific selling environment.

9. Don’t Overvalue the Resume

Resumes are not the best source of information about how a candidate might perform in a given role. They are a good source of information on a candidate’s education, years of selling experience, and verticals sold into, but fail to provide more insight beyond that. Extensive research conducted by Google supports this finding, reporting no clear connections between resume contents and employee performance.

10. Assess for Criteria Other Than Experience

Over 50 percent of sales leaders cite “selling experience within the industry”, while another 33 percent cite “selling experience in [an]other industry” as key criterions when evaluating candidates (Aligning Strategy and Sales). While industry experience is an important selection criteria, evaluating a candidate based only on experience is a mistake. In the context of selling, experience is a multidimensional attribute. It may refer to: a customer group, a technology, division of the selling organization, or a territory.

A candidate may have selling experience similar to your product, but your unique selling model, sales environment, and company culture aren’t necessarily transferable from another organization. Don’t simply rely on experience in your assessment process – have a process for how to hire the best salespeople.

11. Start Conducting Exit Interviews  

As counterintuitive as it is to make effective exit interviews a tactic in your hiring strategy, conducting proper exit interviews can help create lifelong advocates for an organization. They provide invaluable information about your sales leadership’s effectiveness. This helps you lower turnover rates, understand where there are leadership gaps, and reduce the cost of sales turnover.

Conducting effective exit interviews that aim to understand the employees’ experience also has an additional benefit of breeding ambassadors for your brand. Employees regularly leave company reviews on sites like Glassdoor.com after their tenure at a company. When they feel heard and understood, they are more likely to produce approving reviews. When you have past employees leave positive reviews of your company, you end up with a channel of organic, favorable online content about your company.

12. Get HR the Tools They Need

HR should be a key player in executing your hiring strategy.

But for for HR to do their job effectively, it’s up to the VP of Sales to communicate what type of seller they need (hunter/farmer), what selling experience is necessary for the role, and the cultural fit required for success in your selling environment.

You can provide further guidance for HR about how the sales organization functions, especially in the areas of:

• Team performance
• Culture
• Hiring timelines and ideal profiles
• Compensation plans
• Individual development plans

Foster your relationship with HR and help them understand your needs so they can more effectively do their job.

OFFER

13. Make Your Compensation Plan the Best in the Industry

You know that salespeople generally have a larger appetite for risk than other workers, so a pay plan that offers reward based on risk appeals to them. Make the rewards of exceptional sales performance a clear part of your sales hiring strategy.

The best compensation plans not only prove above market pay but are also simple and heavily reward the behaviors required to execute the sales strategy. They are further aligned with sales cycle predictability – the less predictable the sales cycle, the lower commision is and higher base.  Ultimately, to attract great salespeople you need to provide a great compensation package that is above industry standard and heavily rewards strong performance.

“Sales reps work harder for the chance to earn a reward than they do after receiving one.”

– Doug J. Chung, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School

RETENTION

14. Make Retention Efforts Proactive

World-class sales organizations don’t think of retention efforts in “one size fits all” terms. Instead, they make retention strategies personal. It’s as simple as asking, “what motivates you?” to your sales reps.

While it’s a given that your reps are motivated by money, understanding how to motivate them in ways other than cash can be a huge differentiator in your employee value proposition. Your A players may be motivated by more challenging accounts, larger or less developed territorries, personal and professional growth opportunities, opportunities for more vacation time, or workplace flexibility. The first step in retaining your top performers is knowing exactly what will keep them working for you.

Building a Top Performing Sales Team Starts with Your Sales Hiring Strategy

While your sales hiring strategy is the key to building a better sales team, excellent strategy that’s met with poor implementation results in failure. As Cespedes explains in Aligning Strategy and Sales, “companies don’t execute strategy; people do.”

You can have an excellent strategy, but if you lack the right people who will implement and execute that strategy, you have a failing business model.

The battle for sales talent isn’t ending anytime soon. You can increase your odds of winning it by leveraging technology, making every touch point of your company world class, and using objective assessment methods in your hiring strategy. With the right sales hiring strategies, you have all the tools you need to build a top performing sales force at your fingertips.

Want more? Visit the Peak Sales Blog for everything you want to know about building a top performing sales team, from How to Close Your Top Sales Candidate, to conducting Faster, Better, Sales Onboarding.

The post Fourteen Sales Hiring Strategies You Need to Build a Top Performing Sales Team appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

What is one tip for doing research into brands that may be similar to yours and therefore potential competitors?

The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

1. Become One of Their Customers

The best way to test their product is to actually use it. I’m not saying buy something from them weekly, but every once in awhile, use their product. Browse their website, sign up for the newsletters, follow their blogs, and definitely download their app and monitor their updates. This will help you see what kind of content they put out, how much content they produce, and how good their product is. – Manick Bhan, Rukkus

2. Ask Industry Insiders for Help

You can get a lot of information using Google’s search algorithm, but talking to industry insiders can give you great insights about other companies, other products, their business models, their value propositions, and their customer demographics. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. And the more people you ask, the better off you’ll be. – Alan Carniol, Interview Success Formula

3. Opt-In For Their Email Sequences

Opt-in for their email sequences to see how offers are positioned, how their leads are nurtured, and how they’re marketing. There’s only so much you can glean from their website. Looking at how they directly communicate with leads can teach a lot about their place in the market. Hint: Most entrepreneurs who do this use a personal email account for stealth. – Kelly Azevedo, She’s Got Systems

4. Find Out Which Brands Are the Best at What

Competition research starts for me by identifying who is the top dog in the market, and why. However, I have also started to understand over the last year that the top brand is not necessarily the best one — certainly not the most enduring ones. I have seen “strong” ones fail while others stay. When exploring the competition, try to see what each of them does best with thought to long-term. – Adam Steele, The Magistrate

5. Avoid Using Similar Brand Names

Before using a new brand name, research to make sure a competitor is not already using a similar name that is likely to cause “customer confusion.” When in doubt, invest in a preliminary legal check to help avoid trademark litigation. It is wise to make sure you are not stepping on anyone’s IP toes before you spend marketing time and money developing a brand name, not afterward. – Doug Bend, Bend Law Group, PC

6. Monitor Mentions of Their Brand

Listen to what others are saying about them online. If customers have an unsatisfactory experience, they will tweet, post a Facebook comment, and even write a whole blog article about it. That’s the time to see where your company can serve them better. Monitor the conversation using tools like Social Mention, Google Alerts and TalkWalker. – Humberto Farias, Concepta

7. Survey Bloggers and Journalists

Professional writers tend to bundle companies they believe offer similar products and services. Talk to bloggers and journalists that cover your industry and ask them who they think your competitors are. You may be surprised by who they list, and sometimes they have inside knowledge about the new product developments from each of your competitors. – Firas Kittaneh, Amerisleep

8. Use the Right Tools

To get the most insight into your competitors, you need the right tools. With SEMrush, you can see their estimated traffic from both Google Organic and Paid, as well as keywords they are ranking for. Use Ahrefs to study their backlink data. Buzzsumo is great to determine what content on their sites has the most social shares. Spyfu is fantastic for studying competitors ads and keywords. – Marcela De Vivo, Gryffin

9. Download Their App

As the founder of an iPhone app, I have our competitors’ apps on my iPhone and I regularly check out their latest versions. In addition to this, we have Google Alerts set up to monitor new developments our competition is making and the new competitors entering the space we’re in. – Brian David Crane, Caller Smart Inc.

10. Research Their Customers, Not the Brands

You can find most of what you need to find about a competing brand just by nature of being involved in the same industry. Competitors tend to know of one another even as early as the planning stages of their respective companies. You’re going to paint a much more definitive picture of their brand by knowing their audience. – Blair Thomas, First American Merchant

11. Follow the Money

Savvy customers have already done a lot of the legwork for you, so you should be constantly engaging them to stay on the cutting edge. Maintaining honest and resilient relationships with your customers — even the bad ones — is an important practice. Other peoples’ perception is your reality, so you need to find out what that is so that you can adjust accordingly. – David Mainiero, InGenius Prep

12. Form Distribution and Sales Networks

Distribution and sales networks can be difficult to form and take time to develop. By looking at sales networks of brands that are potential competitors, you can compile a list of possible points of sale that you already know are interested in products similar to your own. – Peter Bonac, Bonac Innovation Corp.

13. Reach Out and Know Your Competitors Directly

We know most of our direct competitors. I speak to a CEO of a competing company once a quarter, and we talk about strategy, revenues and major challenges. That’s because we all think that we’re competing against the established players and believe our niche industry is not a zero-sum game. – Fan Bi, Blank Label

Defining key performance indicators (KPIs) is the first essential step in tracking and evaluating your progress and thereby allowing you to focus on activities that are important to your business.

Though most business people understand the value of key performance indicators (KPIs), they often fail at the execution. In fact, 90% of business measurements collected are rarely used for decision making.

Think of KPIs as the dashboard of your car: they tell you the status of your performance quickly and easily. Here are 6 useful tips to help you select the key performance indicators (KPIs) that truly resonate with your business.

1. Identify the results that you expect.
KPIs should be directly related to your major goals. If you don’t have your goals written out, you should start there.

Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. In other words, stay away from measuring everything that moves. The secret sauce is to focus your effort and resources on collecting and reporting the data that really moves the needle – data that leads to action and drives positive results.

2. Understand lead and lag measurement differences.
According to the book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, the idea behind the lead measurement is that in order to get the result you want, you first have to create the measure of a strategic action that, when planned and taken, will have the most impact on your goals. In contrast, lag measurements show you the outcome of past actions.

Lag measures are metrics, while lead measures are actions. Always think in terms of actions. For example, if you want to drive overall sales, you first have to measure the number of leads generated and how well you close sales.

3. Focus on quantitative, not qualitative measurements.
Focus on quantitative measurements, or hard data that attempts to answer “how much.” Though qualitative key performance indicators (KPIs) help you understand why something has happened, the problem is they tend to be vanity metrics that are not only hard to track, but also too subjective. In fact, qualitative performance measures don’t truly exist.

4. Don’t measure more than 10 KPIs.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are powerful, yet they come with a cost. That said, it’s critical to keep the list short and sweet so you can invest your time and resources efficiently. I recommend you start with measuring your number of leads, lead conversion rate, average sales, number of transactions, and margins. The remaining 5 should be operational measurements and tied directly to your goals.

5. Measure KPIs weekly or monthly.
Depending on the characteristics of each KPI, the measurement frequency can vary. Update and measure your KPIs on a regular basis, either weekly or monthly. Though higher consistency is better for decision-making, choose the frequency that makes senses for your business. In addition, since the ease of data collection is very important, it’s a good idea to start automating your collection process.

6. Be ready to revise your list.
After a period of experimentation, you will be able to differentiate the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are helping your business from the ones that aren’t. As your business grows and changes, so should your KPIs. Hence, be willing and open to tailor your list of measurements.

Choosing the right KPIs is not always a straightforward process. Every business is different and unique in their own way. With that said, take the time to arrive at the KPIs that are best aligned with your goals and offer valuable insights into how you can drive your business forward.

10 CRITICAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF A BUSINESS OWNER

LEARN MORE about the book.

Editor’s Note: This is the second post in a two-part series featuring Logz.io co-founder and VP of Product, Asaf Yigal. In the first installment, Yigal shares tips about how to win customers over in the crucial first five minutes of product engagement.

Efficiency is a word we use a lot in the SaaS space. It’s something we strive to deliver via our products and solutions, and it’s something we try to achieve on a daily basis with our own teams. But, as often as the word comes up, it’s still frequently misunderstood. Efficiency isn’t about doing more or about doing things more quickly, it’s about finding the shortest route from Point A to Point B, whether that means getting from initial idea to finished product, from the top of the funnel to conversion, or from first touch to brand loyalty.

As the co-founder and VP of Product for Logz.io, Asaf Yigal is always looking for opportunities to increase his company’s efficiency, and he finds them in a variety of areas. In almost all cases, the opportunity lies in “going direct to source” to solve a particular challenge or optimize a particular workflow.

Sales: Go Right to the Pain Point

“For any SaaS product, one thing you need to be clear on is your target audience – who you’re selling to and who’s going to be using your environment,” says Yigal. “And, more often than not, these are two different personas: buyer and user. You want to target the user more than the buyer.”

Based on this philosophy, Yigal and his team take a more bottom-up approach to sales and marketing.

“A lot of the product and marketing people I talk to tell me they’re selling to the CTO, CIO, or CISO, but we’re doing things differently. We send our product to the users – the people with the pain – and then work with them on how to justify the purchase to their managers.”

This approach helps Yigal eliminate scenarios in which a product has been forced on an unwilling user. “Companies who sell from the top down run into the probability of forcing the product on employees, and then you end up with products that aren’t being used,” Yigal says. “We want our customers to use our product, so we work directly with users to make sure they gain value the system. It’s much easier to sell someone from that point rather than having to use a ‘talk-down’ approach.”

Public Relations: Go Right to the Relevant Contributors

PR is a tricky piece of the marketing puzzle because it’s driven primarily by elements outside your control. To complicate matters, many SaaS companies operate in super-specialized and niche areas that aren’t always of interest to the mainstream business or tech media. It often feels like the only way to get any press is to do something a little crazy. Yigal takes a different approach.

“We don’t use PR firms because most of what we do is very technical. We’ve learned that going after the big-shot reporters at major publications is not a good strategy for a tactical product like ours.”

Instead, Yigal’s in-house PR team focuses on hyper-targeting contributing journalists with special interest in the topics related to Logz.io.

“Every major publication will tell you that their reporters are very busy and getting hundreds of pitches each day,” Yigal says. “But, that’s not always the whole truth. Some of them may get hundreds of pitches, but many don’t; and it’s very possible to reach someone who is a contributor to a major site – like Forbes – who doesn’t get that many pitches and who is interested in getting story leads. Identifying these individuals and being able to pitch them directly is a more efficient way of doing good PR.”

Capital Management: Go Right to the Data

“When you run a startup, cash is obviously a big concern,” says Yigal. “You have to be capital efficient. But, many people still make decisions about capital based on gut feelings.” Instead, Yigal advocates for data-based decisions.

“If you make decisions based on gut feelings, you might be right or you might be wrong, and you’ll never know which. If, however, you make decisions based on data, you can backup your gut feelings with numbers and will be able to move forward more quickly, which will lead to a more capital-efficient organization.”

As an example, Yigal uses a simple scenario in which a company is questioning whether or not to request a phone number as part of the registration process. “Sales will want the phone number because they believe that direct contact will help them get the sale,” Yigal says. “But if you go by that gut feeling alone, you’ll never be sure if that was the right decision.” Instead, Yigal recommends A/B testing to collect data that will show how asking for a phone number actually impacts overall volume and conversion.

The same approach works in product development. “For each feature we develop, we measure how many people are using it and what they’re using it for,” Yigal explains. “Without data, you’re just flying blind – spending money and wondering why something that makes perfect sense to you isn’t working for your customers. But if something doesn’t work, there’s a good reason for it; and you’ll see that reason in the data.”

From engineering and PR to sales and capital management, taking the time to find and utilize smart, direct-to-source efficiencies can go a long way toward moving your business ahead. “Efficiency is a big thing,” Yigal sums up. “It’s about being able to make the right decisions quickly because you’ve shortened the time it takes you to learn what will work and what won’t.”

The post A Lesson in Startup Efficiency: 3 Strategies to Get You There appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The road to B2B thought leadership is littered with many failed attempts. Don’t be among the fallen. How can you truly distinguish yourself from your competitors and stand out as as an industry leader? Should you shy away from the forefront if your company focuses on behind-the-scenes work?

Absolutely not! You can succeed and become an outstanding thought leader in your industry, no matter how low-profile your company is.

Read on to discover ways to take your company center stage and get the visibility and credibility you rightly deserve.

Stand Out With Thought Leadership

1. Pick Your Niche Expertise

The biggest mistake some people make is trying to be an expert in everything within an industry. It’s just not possible. This is too big of a goal to reach in the beginning. If you want to succeed, pick a niche within your industry, and then show your expertise.

Stay away from broad topics. The more specific you are, the more attention you’ll have and the more distinction you will have from your competitors. For example, a marketing consultancy doesn’t want to focus on all things marketing. It could end up talking about everything and anything. Instead, if it concentrated on marketing automation or marketing measurement, it could beam in one of those topics. Even better, if it could narrow its concentration down further say to marketing automation for small business or for large companies.

Other time, you can add other notches of niche expertise to your belt.

Thought leadership is more than an article, a book, a speaking gig, or an award: It’s leading a space in thought. –John Hall

2. Start Your Own B2B Blog

This is your outlet to distribute your industry wisdom, and establish a loyal audience. Aim to create value for your audience in each post. Answer questions, provide insight, and start conversations — all from the comfort of your blog!

Keep ahead of the curve by paying attention to what your competitors are publishing, and what posts are getting traction for them. Then, if you can add value and insight to what they’ve written, publish your own spin on it.

Once created, don’t miss the free and pivotal opportunity to promote your blog across your social networks. Also include share buttons to make it easy for your readers to spread your quality content to their own audience.

(Click here to learn about sure fire ways to promote your B2B content.)

Once your own B2B blog is firmly and safely established, it’s time to reach out to guest post on other blogs and industry publications. This expands your audience, and exposes people to your expertise (and leads them back to your blog as dedicated readers.)

You have to present a depth of knowledge that no one else has. — Michael Brenner

3. Never Forget SEO

Now that you’ve created leadership-quality content in your B2B blog, don’t let it fall through the cracks. Consistency and quality are key if you want to maintain search engine rankings for particular keywords. You’ve worked hard to get traffic — you don’t want to idle your content machine and lose visibility. Once people find your high-quality content, they’ll no doubt return for more.

(To find out what SEO mistakes might be holding you back from successful search engine rankings, click here.)

Why invest in thought leadership content, and then dismiss making that content easy to find? –Lee Odden

4. Engage on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is different from other social media platforms. For starters, it has been ranked by 66% of B2B marketers as the most effective social media platform for their business. To ignore LinkedIn would be to leave behind a powerful resource in your journey to becoming a thought leader.

Right off the bat, put time and thought into your LinkedIn profile. This is the first thing people will see when they visit your page. It can make all the difference between a passing glance and a magnetic reaction. Show off your one-of-a-kind personality right from the start, but keep it professional.

(To learn what it takes to create a killer LinkedIn profile that incites people to follow you, click here.)

Don’t miss the opportunity to publish content on LinkedIn’s platform. If possible, distinguish this from your B2B blog — you want people to come specifically for information they can’t find anywhere else. Post unique content that positions you as ahead of the curve. This content will be prominently displayed on your LinkedIn homepage, and could be shared via the LinkedIn newsletter — so it’s well worth the time and effort. If you do publish the same content, include a note at the bottom of your piece saying where the article was originally published and linking to it. ddThat lets Google know that you’re not simply spamming by posting the same content everywhere.

5. Join Conversations

You’re not an island, so don’t keep to yourself. Engage with others across multiple platforms. Look for conversations that touch your area of expertise, and don’t shy away from adding to the conversation. This gets your name out there as an authority on the subject.

Communities like Quora are a great place to start. Here, you can answer questions, and, when appropriate, add links that direct back to your website for more information.

Whenever you see a forum or conversation where you can add value, do so unobtrusedly and politey — you want to come across as an expert, not as a “know-it-all.”

6. Engage the Media

Just because you’re a low profile company does not mean you can’t improve your B2B PR and attract media coverage.

A helpful (and inexpensive) B2B PR tactic is to sign up for HARO (Help A Reporter Out). This free tool helps reporters collaborate with business owners who can provide a quote or insight into a story. Sign up for free and wait for a query to which you can add an insightful quote or your own industry expertise.

(For more cost-effective B2B PR tactics that will get your foot in the door and garner media attention, click here.)

These techniques will take your behind-the-scenes company from the shadows of anonymity to the spotlight of authority. You’ll be in a successful B2B thought leadership position.

The B2B sales process is long and sophisticated. Before a client makes a purchase, they have to be assured that they will be getting the benefits they were promised. They need to feel secure about the salespeople they dealt with, the brand they’re entering business with, and the product they’re purchasing.

Salespeople need to be able to communicate pricing, quality, after-sales services, modes of payment, onboarding, and delivery in the clearest way possible. However, the purchase will not only rely on the salesperson’s ability to tell the prospect about these things–the rep must get the prospect’s trust and confidence; that what they’re saying is true and can be relied upon.

Product knowledge and inside sales

Inside sales teams often deal with high-ticket b2b deals. In order to deliver results, they need to know your product inside and out. This way, they can sell with confidence and be able to get the prospect’s trust through their competence.

Inside sales reps with insubstantial product knowledge will hurt your sales organization. When a rep reaches out to prospects with a limited understanding of your solution, all conversations are hinged on luck. Sure, they might chance upon a prospect who already knows about your product and are okay with a not-so-in-depth discussion–but it’s more likely that this rep will get more losses because they do not have the full armory of features that they can use to show prospects the benefits of using your product.

Product knowledge is essential for any sales organization. To foster positive customer experience and create trust between reps and prospects, showing strong expertise of your solutions is crucial.

Understanding the essentials

To create an army of competent sales reps, you need to instill product knowledge right from the beginning. Salespeople need to be able to answer basic inquiries regarding your product and place it in the context of different business challenges. Here are some questions they need to able to answer:

• How will the product benefit customers in X industry?
• What are the products basic characteristics? (Software type, platform, function)
• How is it delivered?
• What are the conditions of use?
• How much does it cost?

Apart from these basic questions, it’s essential for salespeople to understand why your company is the best choice to get this solution from. Having enough information to set your brand apart from the competition is an absolute necessity in a rep’s toolkit.

Salespeople need to have the ability and resources to relay these details as quickly and efficiently as possible, be it through writing or conversation. Sales collateral needs to be readily available for reps to review and send to prospects as needed. That said, they shouldn’t rely on these documents wholly. B2B prospects are easily turned off by a rep who has to refer to a document in order to answer a simple question. Salespeople need to be able to answer basic questions in a simple and customer-centric way without pulling up files.

However, something to look out for is sales reps talking to prospects in technical jargon. Within your company, it may be common to talk about features and benefits in technical terms. From the prospect’s perspective, they are often only interested in knowing how the product will benefit them in real and practical terms.

Personalizing customer interactions

After a deal has been closed, what the customer often remembers is their experience with the rep. The way a rep acted and talked to them during sales conversations played a major role in their decision to purchase. Customers prefer that they’re not treated just like a lead. This is where the customer service component of sales comes into play. You need to be as interested in helping them solve their challenges as you are in getting the deal.

To bring good customer service into every sales conversation, reps need to have great product knowledge. Why? It is only through knowing products inside and out will reps be able to cater to customers with different challenges. A deep knowledge of how your products work and how they help businesses with various problems is what’s needed in order for reps to provide a tailored experience to prospects.

Highlighting benefits over features

Knowing your solution’s list of features helps your prospect make an informed decision. However, without understanding these features in the context of their challenges, it can leave them swamped with information they don’t see the value of.

Having a deep understanding of your product allows reps to tell prospects how your solution will make a difference in their operations; whether it’s going to make their operations more efficient, their employees more productive, or their pipeline fuller and more active.

Product knowledge training

So how do you train your reps on product knowledge? Here are some ideas.

Explain the importance of product training

Being each product training session with a story or a quote that emphasizes the importance of knowing your product thoroughly. Lookup influencers in the business space. Read their articles and features–find a quote or a short anecdote that demonstrates the importance of product knowledge. Make sure that you’re able to tie back the quote with your reps’ experiences on the sales floor for better recall.

Use games to make product learning fun

Gamifying training is a great way to get your reps involved and have fun in the process. Incorporating game mechanics into product training has been a proven approach–use quizzes, contests, even incentivized games to get better engagement in your training programs. Creating this fun atmosphere around learning about your products will reinforce product knowledge while not adding to the stress of their everyday jobs.

Employ memory exercises

Pop quizzes and other memory exercises should be incorporated into their daily operations on the sales floor. These activities help them be always on their toes when it comes to keeping up with product updates and basic product knowledge. Sales managers could assign a rep each week to enforce these exercises during work hours in a way that doesn’t disrupt operations.

Product training software

Consider using product training software to facilitate learning across the sales floor. Through guided self-learning, your sales organization can save on training costs and maximize rep efficiency. Most product training software also comes with analytics functionality that allows leaders to customize training modules according to the rep’s performance.

Capture customer feedback

Getting the feedback of your customers is crucial in getting first-hand insight into how your reps are performing during their calls. Knowing what your customers really think allows employees to understand what works from the perspective of their prospects. Use surveys, feedback emails, or even follow up calls to directly ask your customers and prospects about the positives and negatives of how reps handle calls. Knowing these details will help sales leaders design programs to improve product knowledge, customer service, and call handling in general.

—–

Reps who are knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the product they’re selling are those who are most effective in delivering moments of delight to customers. In today’s competitive business landscape, it’s important to equip your teams with the necessary information needed to win out clients before your competitors do. Don’t scrimp on training and investing in your reps. As Maurice Clapton said, “Knowledge pays off more than any other investment.”

Every person reading this article has undoubtedly heard of LinkedIn before, and considering that the social networking site now has more than 450 million users, chances are, everyone reading this has a LinkedIn profile as well. The efficacy and frequency of using LinkedIn, however, can vary drastically from person to person and company to company. While the popularity of LinkedIn marketing has increased steadily over the years, it can still be a difficult channel to navigate for those who are unfamiliar with the platform.

There are four primary aspects you should be focusing on when starting a LinkedIn marketing campaign:

• Personal LinkedIn profiles
• Company LinkedIn pages
• LinkedIn groups
• Paid advertisements

This article will break down some best practices for each topic, as well as some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your LinkedIn efforts.

Personal LinkedIn Profiles

When was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile? Chances are, it was the last time you were looking for a job. Many people (marketers included!) forget to regularly update their LinkedIn profile until they have some reason to use it. Keeping your LinkedIn profile professional and current can help with your marketing efforts, however, as it is not only a reflection on you but your company as well.

Here are some quick tips to optimize your personal profile for LinkedIn marketing:

1. Use a professional photo

This should be a given, but it still amazes me how many people have unprofessional photos (or no photo at all) on their LinkedIn profile. You don’t need an expert photographer to make it a good shot, but the image should be high-quality and not pixelated. Your appearance should be neat and professional for your industry, and the lighting in the photo should be flattering. Bright sunlight, casual clothes, and candid photos usually make for bad profile pictures.

2. Keep your profile updated

If the last time you updated your profile was five years ago when you switched jobs, it’s definitely time to give your details an update. By keeping your profile up to date and filled out, you’ll look less spammy when you’re engaging with people or LinkedIn groups as part of your marketing efforts. Make sure each section is filled out and is up to date with your current job, skill set, and any other professional details. Consider adding a header image, listing certifications, and sharing your portfolio or website if relevant.

3. Connect with the right people

Connections are an important part of LinkedIn marketing. When you share, like, or post content to your personal page, your connections and followers will be able to see and share those posts in return. This can help drive traffic to your blog, promote a new ebook, or just allow connections to see an interesting article or piece of news. That being said, throwing out connection requests left and right will make you look like a spammer or a fake profile and deter people from connecting with you. If you do want to connect with people you don’t know or are unfamiliar with, feel free to tell them why in your connection request. This can be anything from looking for local networking opportunities to the fact that you follow and enjoy their blog.

4. Encourage your coworkers to optimize their profiles as well

While marketing and sales employees are usually leading the charge, getting other employees engaged in your efforts can be beneficial to your LinkedIn marketing efforts as well. Engineers and technical staff can bring a breadth of knowledge to discussions or promote themselves as thought leaders in your industry, while your CEO or other executives can help raise brand awareness and promote your company on a higher level.

5. Take advantage of LinkedIn Pulse

Using LinkedIn’s blogging platform is a great way to position yourself as a thought leader, get more followers and connections, and boost your marketing efforts. If you currently have a blogging strategy in place, consider diverting one or two posts a month to LinkedIn Pulse. You can embed relevant links in your post to lead readers back to your website, increasing your traffic and promoting your lead-generation efforts if you divert them toward gated content.

6. Join and use LinkedIn groups

We’ll talk about some more specific best practices for LinkedIn groups later in this post, but because you can only post to groups from personal accounts, there will be a blurb included in this section as well. Joining industry-specific or relevant groups gives you an avenue to start discussions, crowdsource sentiment, or ask or answer questions. This can help build your reputation and promote your company, and it allows you to share your content (but do so sparingly). You should encourage a wide variety of employees across your organization to join LinkedIn groups so that one single person isn’t responsible for all the posts.

Company LinkedIn Pages

Company pages are another important aspect of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. This page will represent your company as a whole and can be used for marketing, recruitment, sales, and more. For the most part, the same best practices that you use on your profile page will apply here but with a few key differences.

Here are some tips for making sure your company page is the best it can be:

7. Optimize your page

Just like how you should optimize your personal profile, you should be optimizing your company page as well. Add a professional image or logo to help with branding and fill out the details section to help people become familiar with your company. You can post careers and news updates as well, to keep people interested in your company.

8. Share content

You should be sharing content to your personal LinkedIn page, but you should also be sharing blog posts, ebooks, and other content that you create on your company LinkedIn page. When followers see and engage with your posts, it will once again help drive traffic, generate leads, and boost your social reach as your content spreads.

9. Add showcase pages

If your company is multifaceted, it might be wise to add showcase pages. These will show the different subsets of your company and help direct visitors in the right direction. This is especially important if you have numerous visitors who are interested in vastly different topics. Google is a good example. Marketers visiting Google’s page might be interested in AdWords, whereas an IT executive might be doing research by using Google for Work. The showcase page allows these different personas to quickly find the content they’re looking for.

LinkedIn Groups

Groups are one of the most compelling aspects of LinkedIn marketing and can be a treasure trove of resources for those willing to take the plunge. Not only do groups make up a valuable marketing tool, but groups can also help you with professional development, networking, and job-seeking as well. There are a countless number of groups dedicated to every industry, profession, and topic imaginable, so every employee at your business should be able to find a few LinkedIn groups that are relevant to his or her practice area or job title. Like we mentioned before, you can only join and post to LinkedIn groups from a personal profile.

Here are some tips for using groups when marketing on LinkedIn:

10. Pay attention to the description and rules

When looking for LinkedIn groups, you might be tempted to join every group you come across. This approach is generally frowned upon, however—and for good reason. You’ll want to choose groups based on a variety of factors such as the number of members, the topic, and the rules. Groups with very few people probably aren’t very active, and sharing promotional content is prohibited in a number of LinkedIn groups. You’ll want to carefully read the description of each group to make sure you’re not infringing on any rules, as well as to make sure it’s aligned with your goals for joining the group. If you’re a marketer, you’d want to join groups relevant to your target audience that also allow promotional advertisements or blog posts.

11. Share content (sparingly)

Just like how it might be tempting to join a plethora of unrelated groups, it also might be tempting to post every blog article you write or ebook you create to each group you’ve joined. This is generally a bad habit to get into for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it makes you look like a spambot. While sharing content to groups is a great marketing tactic on LinkedIn, there’s a fine line between helpful and annoying. Try to target your content to specific groups that might be interested in it and don’t post there every day. The last thing you want to do is to have people grow tired of you or, worse, remove you from the group.

12. Promote discussion

There are a number of ways you can promote discussion, but one of the easiest ways is to do so during your marketing efforts. Don’t just share blog post after blog post to LinkedIn groups—take this as an opportunity to get feedback on your writing and opinions. If you’re sharing a list-based post, ask readers if there are any other features or items they’d add to the list. If you’re blogging about a new product or technology, ask for opinions on it. These will not only give you opportunities to reflect on your blogging but also to see how it resonates with your target audience. Additionally, you can use LinkedIn groups to ask questions of other users. If you’re struggling with a certain aspect of marketing, it might be beneficial to ask for tips or to see if anyone else had trouble with your particular issue.

Paid Advertisements

Paid advertising is one of the most interesting marketing features on LinkedIn. There are a few different options, depending on your needs and goals, including Sponsored InMail, Text Advertisements, and Sponsored Updates. These ads allow you to target your audience based on the wide breadth of demographic data that users provide LinkedIn with, making them a powerful addition to your LinkedIn marketing efforts. This is another reason why it’s so important to optimize your company page, seeing as how paid advertisements can direct traffic back to your company page and drive brand awareness.

A few best practices to keep in mind when advertising on LinkedIn:

13. Write compelling copy

LIke any paid advertisement you’ve created in the past, LinkedIn ads also perform best when there is compelling copy involved. Even though space is limited on advertisements, you’ll want to make sure that everyone who sees your ad has a clear idea of what value they’re getting by clicking on your ad. Vague wording oftentimes will drive readers away and prevent you from getting your desired click-through rate.

14. Include a call to action

While this should be common sense to any marketer, it can be easy to slip up once in a while. That being said, it’s imperative to include some sort of call to action (CTA) in your advertisements. Whether or not you’re offering an ebook download, a free trial, or a coupon code, it’s important to tell readers why your advertisement should be clicked on. What value are they getting out of this offer? It’s your job to tell them.

15. Choose an engaging image

Bright colors can draw the viewer’s eye, but neon orange and bright pink might not be the best choices in ad colors. Make sure your image looks clear and interesting when you preview your ads. Low-quality images or pictures with text can come across as pixelated and unprofessional if you’re not careful; images that are too busy can turn off your audience from reading further.

16. Experiment with targeting

LinkedIn’s advertising features offer a wide variety of targeting criteria. So much so that it might be overwhelming when you’re launching your first campaign. You can add filters such as job title, industry, and location. You can even target companies based on their name, if you want to be that specific. It’s important to start off with a wide net and narrow it down from there. If you’re too specific, you can miss out on a valuable audience. However, if you’re targeting too many people, you can be wasting your ad spend on clicks from unqualified or uninterested users. It can be a tricky line to walk, so it’s important that you regularly review your campaigns and experiment with different audiences to see which options perform best.

17. Optimize often

Just like how you should review and alter your target audience, it’s important to review your overall campaign and performance as well. LinkedIn marketing is just like any other channel or campaign in the fact that you should be regularly updating, testing, and optimizing your ads to make sure that they’re performing to the best of their ability. Try switching up copy, CTA, or image from time to time to make sure that a particular aspect of your ads isn’t hurting its performance. You can also experiment with different offers or products. Just because one ebook doesn’t perform particularly well, it doesn’t mean that your next ebook won’t have stellar results.

While LinkedIn marketing is multifaceted and has numerous nuances, there are a number of best practices that are the same across many aspects of marketing. Hopefully, this guide has given you better insight into how to navigate LinkedIn and why this platform is so important to marketers. Whether or not you’re using paid advertising, or simply just promoting your blog posts to groups, LinkedIn can provide you and your company with a number of opportunities to create awareness, generate leads, and increase traffic—whatever your goals may be.

With over 35% of users accessing LinkedIn every day and 25 million profiles viewed on a daily basis, LinkedIn is the most effective B2B marketing tool.

LinkedIn has, over the last 5 years become one of the leading social networks, and the most influential professional social network. With 2 new members joining LinkedIn every second, you, as a small business could be missing out on potential clients, and sales.

If attracting more sales on LinkedIn is important to your business (just like it is to me) then here are 3 amazing tools that will help you do just that.

Save time so you can focus on sales by using the below three must-have LinkedIn tools to attract more clients.

1. Rapportive

I have been using Rapportive as one of my favourite LinkedIn tools for years. It is a free add-on for those of you who are using Gmail. It works with both Firefox and Google Chrome.

Rapportive works by looking at the latest contact you email, and bringing up their social media accounts, as well as images so you can easily identify and research your contact. Rapportive now allows you to send a personalised LinkedIn invite to a potential connection, without leaving your Gmail inbox.

2. LinkedIn Connection Revealer

Having a large network on LinkedIn means you can reach a larger audience with the content you share. I have over 10,000 connections on LinkedIn and this has allowed me generate a 5-figure sum, just from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Connection Revealer does exactly what it says; reveals connections. When a user has more than 500 connections, it will just say 500+. You can now bypass this with a plugin called LinkedIn Connection Revealer so you can see exactly how many connections someone has. This will only work with your 1st level connections, and is specifically for Google Chrome users.

3. Headlinr

Earlier this year I wrote an article on creating the perfect headline for a blog, and how important it is for you to do this. Whilst Headlinr is a paid LinkedIn tool, it is great for those of us who struggle to write headlines. Just like the above tool, it is a Google Chrome plugin and once you give it your topic of interest, it will give you hundreds of worthwhile headlines you could use for your next piece of content.

Doing this will give you a better chance of your network seeing your content, reading and connecting with you further.

I hope the above 3 LinkedIn tools will help you with your small business marketing on B2B social network; LinkedIn.

Where To Go From Here

I will be running a LIVE and FREE 1 hour certified webinar on 15th November at 7pm and it will take you through his 6 step checklist to generate 3 hot leads over the next 7 days using LinkedIn without SPENDING A PENNY.

WHAT THE WEBINAR WILL COVER:

• My Six step formula to building your profile and generating leads
• Build your LinkedIn network with 500 QUALITY business connections
• Generate 1 Lead Per Day
• How to find potential customers using LinkedIn’s search functionality
• Get to the top of LinkedIn for your specific keywords in less than 60 seconds
• Utilise all of LinkedIn’s features to put you one step ahead of your competition
• How to share targeted and relevant industry information
• Learn 3 SECRET LinkedIn features you didn’t know about
• The Do’s, and don’ts of your profile image
• Design and implement a networking strategy for success

All I ask for is 60 minutes of your time so I can help you master LinkedIn to grow your business, and be a success on LinkedIn. You can sign up for this webinar here.