Rnordman

Marketing operations has become the epicenter of marketing activity. Businesses look to their ops team to align people, processes and technology in ways that create maximum business value. These leaders wear many hats, move at the speed of light, and constantly strive for both macro- and micro- improvements that will impact the organization.

While there are some valuable resources to help marketing ops professionals refine their strategies, great ops work goes beyond copying someone else’s playbook. If you really want to advance your ops career, you first want to understand the traits that make ops leaders invaluable and then integrate those traits into your marketing DNA.

After working closely with some of the best ops pros in the industry, we’ve boiled game-changing marketing ops work down into six core traits. These are the skills up and coming operations professionals want to master.

Process Innovation: Making marketers more productive and effective every day

Every ops pro I know is obsessed with process. Not just defining it, but refining it again and again until it runs like a well-oiled machine. As Ashleigh Davis at TrendMicro says:

“ Process innovation is a main key—with the breakneck speed at which organizations are moving, there is no shortage of things to do. That said, finding ways to remove or automate steps, streamline processes, etc. is super critical.”

Ashleigh often talks about the importance of micro-movements and how those changes, particularly when applied on a global scale, reap big results. While it can take a lot of hand-holding to get teams to adopt new processes (many of us are still trying to figure out how to get sales to enter the damn data into Salesforce), the rewards are truly worth the pain.

MarTech Mastery: Applying marketing technology to create business value

With the sea of technology options available today, it’s important not to get enamored by the newest shiny object. Game changing ops leaders know that MarTech decisions must be purposeful. They evaluate any new tool from a broad perspective and gauge how it fits into their organization’s marketing tech blueprint. They’re building tech stacks that enable demand- and marketing- orchestration so their demand generation counterparts can engage increasingly higher numbers of targeted prospects and drive more qualified opportunities into sales pipeline.

Data/Performance Obsession: Delivering actionable insights to drive performance

Every ops team member is managing data to some degree, whether it’s preserving the company’s database or analyzing monthly pipeline growth. But for the drivers inside marketing ops, it’s about much more than just managing data. It’s defining the key metrics that make an organization successful and constantly measuring performance against those definitions. Leslie Cocco Alore of Iron Mountain puts it best:

“A big part of my role is to define the measures that matter to marketing (tactical, campaign and operational), set marketing targets for each marketer, forecast outcomes throughout the year, measure performance and help marketing leadership manage performance against targets. It’s not unlike the sales performance management process but even more important and more complex (in my opinion), because there are multiple levels of performance indicators that need to be adjusted, and more variables at both the top and the bottom on the funnel.”

Cross-Department Integration: Building cross-functional and departmental trust

Marketing and sales alignment has always been a common focus for ops teams, but the strongest players are expanding their impact to every corner of the organization. Initiatives are spreading from sales to customer service to product development to accounting. Many ops leaders are investing energy into building alliances across teams and breaking down departmental silos.

Strategic Vision: Shaping and executing strategy to deliver on the company vision

The umbrella that encompasses ops’ roles and responsibilities is growing as well. Spanning beyond tech and processes, operations leaders are being asked to conceive and drive overall marketing strategy. Tom Kahana of Infusionsoft says this is because:

“Ops leaders often sit in a position of “neutral” observer and are not biased by initiatives focused on individual groups (such as demand gen vs corporate MKT vs content creation etc).”

CMOs are looking to ops leaders to not only help develop the company’s marketing strategy, but identify and execute the tactics that will bring that vision to life.

Customer-First Focus: Developing a culture of external and internal customer focus

Marketing’s number one mission has always been to delight customers and prospects but great ops leaders infuse this mentality into the culture of the entire organization. With every tech implementation and process adoption, they constantly evaluate how the customer is impacted. They use data as key to understanding each customer’s story, extracting insights that will enhance outcomes and experiences. The game changers in marketing ops are vigilantly aware of the balancing act between revenue and customer satisfaction, but they know the end game is about the customer.

In conjunction with Heinz Marketing, Integrate is setting out to recognize the Top 33 Marketing Ops Game Changers – professionals who are driving innovation and making a big impact within their own organizations and the industry at large.

It won’t be an easy task. We could easily name more than 33 ops leaders that we work with at Integrate who would make great candidates. But there are thousands of other pros leading the ops charge. So we’re accepting open nominations for marketing operations professionals from now through January 31^st.

To help us identify the game changers, we’ve gathered a panel of expert judges who are intimately connected with marketing operations. We’d like to send a big thank you in advance to these great leaders for lending their expertise to this program:

• Scott Brinker, ChiefMarTec.com
• Adrienne Weissman, G2 Crowd
• Brent Adamson, CEB
• John Donlon, SiriusDecisions
• David Raab, Raab Associates
• Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing

In early February, these folks will score and rank all the nominations received to determine the professional who will ultimately be recognized. And then Integrate will work collaboratively with the #B2BGameChangers to create high-value content that will help B2B marketing pros up their ops strategy.

So if you know someone working in an ops role (yourself, someone on your team, clients or peers from other organizations) who exemplifies any of these six traits, nominate them today to make sure we know about the game changing work they’re doing.

Welcome back to our series on marketing performance management. In this series we present a comprehensive guide for managing marketing via reporting end-to-end performance in terms of opportunities and revenue.

So far we’ve covered how to set up foundational reports needed to get the most relevant and accurate pulse on the revenue efforts of marketing. We’ve also outlined team reporting for managers running marketing programs and campaigns.

This chapter covers the paid media and search engine marketing channels. It provides a detailed view of the best reporting practices for marketers who care most about revenue and ROI.

Let’s get started.

Introduction To Paid Media Reporting For Marketing Performance Management

Demand generation marketers who invest in paid media are often faced with the difficulty of connecting their data to down-funnel results. Because each ad network or social platform is siloed (the data can’t be cross applied across sources), paid media marketers can usually only generate preliminary lead conversion metrics and cost figures.

Using an attribution solution that is integrated within Salesforce, paid media marketers can have clear visibility into the down-funnel effects of their work.

Account-based marketing requires a new type of tracking that most traditional, siloed channel platforms don’t accommodate. It’s critical to loop your channel performance data into your CRM and track touchpoints to their respective accounts and contacts. This requires a process known as “lead-to-account mapping” or “contact-to-account mapping.”

Most advanced attribution solutions are able to perform lead-to-account mapping, which assigns leads to their respective accounts, along with the touchpoints associated with those leads/contacts. This feature enables touchpoint data to be sorted by account and account grade, as well as by channel, campaign, keyword, etc. Lead-to-account mapping is the solution required to solve ABM reporting problems when it comes to paid media channels.

But, how do you take advantage of these advantages that attribution provides when you’re creating reports in salesforce to assess paid media performance?

Recipe 3.1 — Paid Media (AdWords) Revenue/Pipeline Report by Opportunities

This report shows the AdWords channel impact on closed-won customers and open opportunities. This report uses a W-Shaped attribution model, which assigns 30% of the revenue credit to each stage conversion (first touch, lead creation, opportunity creation) and 10% of the credit to various touchpoints in between. This allows a marketer to see the effect of their channel’s impact all the way through to the opportunity stage.

Problem:

How do paid media marketers connect top-of-funnel paid media activities to down-funnel metrics?

Solution:

Create a channel & campaign/ad/keyword report using W-Shaped attribution.

This report in Salesforce shows the total influence of the AdWords channel on down-funnel opportunities. Whether the AdWords touches on these accounts were key stage transitions (receiving 30% of the credit) or middle touches (receiving < 10% of the credit), all opportunity-level impact from AdWords is represented.

Paid media managers can use this report to show, on a channel-by-channel basis, how well their marketing strategies are performing with respect to down-funnel metrics.

To create this report start with an opportunity report in matrix format. Set the Account Stage field as the row grouping and bucket it so that you have one bucket that includes closed-won opportunities (customers) and another bucket that includes all of your open opportunities (pipeline). Then, set the Ad Campaign Name field as the row subgrouping (alternatively, this could be Ad Name or Keyword) and Account Grade as the column grouping. To populate the table, drag Revenue into the middle of the matrix.

To filter campaigns from a single paid media source, such as AdWords, create a filter: Touchpoint Source equals AdWords. These parameters might look different for you, depending on how your company has set up their Salesforce Org and related tags and campaigns. Take a look at the report below.

Ingredients:

• Account Stage (Bucketed)
  • Ad Campaign Name
    • Sum of Revenue (W-Shaped or other attribution model)
    • Sum of Opp Count (W-Shaped or other attribution model)
• Account Grades
• Touchpoint Source or Marketing Channel equals [Paid Media Channel]
• Time Frame: Based on Touchpoint Create Date

(You’ll notice that the screenshot is also filtering by an ABM parameter of account grade, but that’s simply because we’ve moved our Salesforce Org to an ABM strategy, so the reports we create for paid media are filtered by account grade.)

Recipe 3.2 — Touchpoint Engagement by Subchannel & Grade (Account-Based Marketing)

This is a report that shows touchpoint volume (read: engagement) by paid media subchannel, organized by account grade, within a certain span of time. This is an excellent way for a paid media manager to assess the overall quality of account grade engagement with their paid media channels.

Problem:

What report should account-based marketers use to see granular engagement metrics on all subchannels?

Solution:

Create a touchpoint engagement report that is filtered by touchpoint source (or marketing subchannel) and account grade.

A paid media manager’s channels include paid search, paid social, and other ad networks. This report shows one month’s engagement of contacts from accounts within grades A, B, and C.

Start by creating a contact report in matrix format. Set the Account Grade field as the row grouping and Touchpoint Source as the row sub-grouping. To see how the data changes over time, set the Touchpoint Date field as the column grouping and choose to group it in one-week segments. Finally, drop Touchpoint Count into the middle to populate the table.

To only see touchpoints from A, B, And C accounts, add the following filter: Account Grade equals “A, B, C.”

Ingredients:

• Account Grades
  • Subchannels or Touchpoint Source
• Touchpoint Record Count
• Time Frame: Based on Touchpoint Create Date (last 30 days for monthly reporting), grouped by week

Whether you lean more towards account-based marketing or demand generation, every marketer can benefit from understanding how to track the entire sales cycle.

Stay tuned as we continue our series of marketing performance measurement and reporting. You can get the entire e-book to conveniently read anytime by downloading it using the link below.

While live website chats are most commonly looked at as a customer service tool rather than part of the B2B lead generation process, savvy businesses have begun to look at them as also offering a new source of conversions. Sites with live chats apps gain a 20% increase in conversions on average, and customers using live chat apps spend 60% more per purchase. In fact, chatters are 2.8x more likely to convert than other website visitors and 62% of customers say that live support would make them more willing to buy online. This week’s infographic is from WhosOn. It offers key points of strategy for before, during, and after a live chat session with a prospective customer, to help your business take advantage of these rich sales opportunities. Let’s see what they recommend.

Before the chat:

• Train your operators. Of course, you’ve already trained them to offer great customer service, but how much sales training have they been given? If you want your live chats to become an effective sales channel, your chat agents will need to be trained in up-selling and cross-selling!
• Add a live chat link to marketing emails. Putting a live chat button right in front of your customers makes it easy for them to reach out and inquire about your offer – far easier than making a phone call and with faster results than putting together an email.
• Track, then talk. If you track a user’s activity on your website before opening a chat window, you can offer a more personalized invitation that addresses their searches.
• Use prospect detection. Not sure which visitor is a real lead and which is just passing through? There’s an app for that! Smart chat software uses a feature called prospect recognition, which can help you identify the visitors that you should be reaching out to for a chat.
• Get relevant data. Having customers fill out a pre-chat survey can not only help a chat go smoothly, but the data can also be sent to your CRM and added to your lead database.
• Route the chat to the right operator. Your chat agents will likely have differing levels of expertise on the various products and services that you offer. To give potential customers the best level of service, make sure that chats are routed to the right operators with the right set of skills.

During the chat:

• Be prompt. If you delay, you can lose a potential sale. Nearly half (48%) of shoppers abandon purchases if they have to wait too long for answers to their questions. Try to respond within 60 seconds, and make sure to have answers to FAQ ready in advance to save time.
• Offer real-time translation. This will help you serve customers around the globe.
• Connect with your CRM. By pulling user information into a session, you can provide a more personalized level of service.
• Offer video chat. This will allow for product demonstrations and visual assistance.
• Be human. Little touches like introductions and real avatars can help create a better connection with customers.
• Be slick. Come across as professional by taking advantage of spelling and grammar tools – your customer service reflects your company.
• Preview the chat. Many chat programs all you to preview a user’s responses before they hit ‘send’ in order to have answers ready for them.
• Analyze chats for sentiment. Sentiment analysis can detect negative or positive feelings in real-time. This can help you figure out which leads are most worth pursuing.
• Co-browse. Screen-sharing helps you offer better and more in-depth assistance.
• Enable file transfers. This way, you can send users contracts, brochures, and other documents right away, making it easier to close the deal.
• Keep on top of workload. Make sure agents aren’t doing too many chats at once, or too few. Find that sweet spot where they have access to enough sales opportunities, but aren’t too bogged down to provide high-quality support.

After the chat:

• Offer chat transcripts. Chances are, your shoppers don’t take detailed notes during their chat session. Make it easier for them to refresh their memories about your products by providing transcripts of their chat sessions.
• Click to call. Once the chat session has ended, make it easy for customers to reach out and call to make a purchase by giving them a Click to Call button.
• Use chat feedback. Have your users fill out post-chat surveys in order to find out how satisfied they are with the service and what they would like you to change in the future.
• Sync chats to your knowledge base. A lot of your chats will contain examples of outstanding customer service or particularly effective pitches – hold onto them and add them to a database so that you can reuse them in the future.
• Analyze, analyze, analyze. As always, it’s important to monitor key metrics in order to figure out what works best, and what needs work.

I work online. My clients are all over the world and my work is done via networked computers in virtual space. My life is online.

Sometimes I marvel at the materiality of other people’s work. A restauranteur has to transform food into a high-quality culinary masterpiece – each and every night, for each and every customer. A custom home builder has to fashion rough building materials into stylish, finished living spaces – over and over again, for each buyer.

My inability to fathom the materiality of their work is often mirrored in their inability to grasp the virtuality of mine.

I help people increase their visibility in online social networks, through development of thought leadership and cultivating real relationships with influencers. But first, people need to understand that social networks exist, that they are places that people go to interact and share information and that if you’re not there talking to your clients and prospects chances are someone else is.

Kind of makes you want to pick up a tool belt and make something, eh? Not me. I’m just not that good with my hands.

Virtual tools of the trade

Every few years I write an article about the tools I use online. I do this both to make an inventory of my own tools and, hopefully, to help others by sharing my experience.

Not all of these tools will work for you in your situation. But there might be one or two that make a big difference. Let me know in the comments any feedback.

1. Gmail

Gmail is Google’s free and paid email service. I’ve been using Gmail for at least a decade. Formerly I was an Outlook user, probably for the better part of 20 years. I grew to hate Outlook, for too many reasons to list here, and jumped on Gmail as soon as I realized I could put Outlook behind me forever. (Confession: I still have an Office365 Outlook account or two lurking around.)

Lots of people dislike Gmail and I can understand why: the user interface can be challenging. But, for me, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

At the top of Gmail’s benefits is that it exists in the cloud. No more downloading copies of email to your home computer. This is not such a novelty now (even Outlook has a cloud version), but 5-10 years ago it was a huge advantage. My email is always available and searchable online, no matter where I am or what computer I am using.

And that brings up email sorting. I don’t sort my email into folders. Some people do, but this seems like a complete waste of time to me. If you want to retrieve an email, then just search Gmail. After all, it’s powered by the best search technology out there and it finds needles in haystacks all the time.

Email is still the foundational technology of online life. Gmail just works.

Cost: Free or $5/account/month

Benefits: Gmail is conveniently cloud-based, always accessible and I (almost) never have to use Microsoft Outlook.

2. Google Calendar & Google Contacts

The allure of Outlook (back in the day) was the integration of an email manager with a calendar and contact manager.

I find that Google Calendar is an excellent replacement for Outlook’s integrated calendar. I can do everything I need to do when booking appointments, such as book recurring appointments and inviting others.

Google Calendar has a nice integration with Google Maps, so that the address of an appointment is easily mapped for my convenience. On my iPhone, I even get prompts to leave for appointments in advance of their start times based on the traffic and distance.

There are a variety of other calendar benefits that will be described below, mostly based on how easily Google’s cloud-based calendar integrates with other online tools and services.

When it comes to Google Contacts, I’m less enthusiastic. The Google Contact application is less than satisfactory in a variety of ways, but that is not as much of an issue for me because of some other tools I use, such as Nimble. Even LinkedIn is becoming more and more of a contact manager, allowing me to track when I connected with someone as well as keeping notes on what happens in my relationships.

Cost: Free

Benefits: I don’t have to use Outlook ever again and Google Calendar integrates easily with other tools.

3. Nimble

Nimble is a social customer relationship management (CRM) system. I say “social” CRM because it integrates people’s social network identities together into one comprehensive identify profile. You can populate the contact records with the emails, phone numbers and street addresses you have, then Nimble supplements each person’s social accounts.

Nimble also has a simple capability to track leads and a sales pipeline. It’s not as sophisticated as some other cloud-based CRM systems, but it does the job for me.

Nimble fills a need for me that Outlook and other traditional CRMs don’t. It’s integration of the social networks where more and more of our communications take place is very powerful. People are no longer only reachable by email, phone and mail. We are on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. We are messaging each other through these services, as well as email. Nimble collects communications through all these channels and displays it in one unified inbox.

Social CRM is the way of the future and Nimble is a great way to start.

Cost: $15/month

Benefits: Nimble offers me robust and easy monitoring of key contacts in my networks.

4. Calendly

One of the inefficiencies I was noticing in my work was all the time I was spending setting up meetings with people. You know the way that works. You start with an email saying you’d like to have a meeting and you suggest some dates and times. Then the person you’re trying to meet with responds with another set of dates, since none of yours work with their schedule. You pick a date that works for you and finally you have a mutually convenient meeting date and time. All of this takes a few emails back and forth to set up, but these emails could take minutes to days to be exchanged. Meanwhile, your calendar may have changed.

Calendly fixes this problem. It is integrated with my Gmail Calendar so it knows when I am free and when I am busy, without showing outsiders any of the details of my calendar. I can set dates and times when I am available for meetings and blackout dates when I will be traveling or otherwise unavailable. I can even set different kinds of meetings, based on type or duration (eg., a quick 15-minute catch-up call versus a one-hour coaching session).

When I want to set a meeting with someone, I just email them the link to my calendar and they book a convenient slot. Sure, I could hire an assistant to book appointments for me, but that seems so old-fashioned.

Cost: $10/month

Benefit: Easier and faster appointment scheduling.

5. Box

I store all my work and client files securely in the cloud using Box.

Like many similar cloud-based file storage applications, Box installs on my computer and looks like a folder on my hard drive. However, the contents of my Box folder are synchronized with the Box server and then synchronized with every other computer that I use. I have Box running on my desktop computer, my notebook and on other devices that I use occasionally.

No matter what device I am working on, I get access to all my client files, all my work in progress, everything.

I used to use Dropbox for this, but I read some articles about its security and was concerned so I switched to Box. (Dropbox may have resolved some of these issues, but it’s too late now for me. I’m using Box and happy with it.)

There are other tools out there that do similar things. I’ve used Cubby a bit, Dropbox as mentioned, and iCloud for personal files, but I really like Box for its transparency and ease of use.

Cost: Free (up to 5 Gb storage)

Benefits: Always have offsite back up of business critical files, always have access to client files remotely.

6. Lastpass

I have hundreds of passwords for online tools, websites, software, etc. There is no way I could remember all of these passwords, especially if they are strong passwords.

Lastpass is a password manager that stores passwords securely, as well as making it easy to login and logout of sites. Lastpass relies on an application that you install on your computer and access with a master password. It is important to make your master password very strong.

[More information on strong passwords]

Lastpass offers browser extensions for all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and these little tools help Lastpass recognize when you need to login to a site. When you go to a login page, Lastpass recognizes the site and prepopulates the login and password field. All you have to do is click the login button.

In this day and age of security concerns online, you need to have a password manager because the options are just unacceptable. You can’t use the same password for all your sites and you can’t use easy to remember and decipher passwords – they’re just not secure enough.

There are lots of password managers on the market – 1Password and Dashlane both seem to have some nice features. If Lastpass is not for you, find one that works the way you like and use it.

Cost: Free, plus $12/year for mobile access to Lastpass.

Benefits: Manages many passwords while allowing you to maintain strong passwords.

7. WordPress

WordPress is my web publishing platform of choice and has been for years. It is freely available, open source software that can be customized to perform a wide range of website functions.

What I love most about WordPress is the availability of many professional designs that can be customized for use in a wide range of situations. Sites like Themeforest offer a marketplace of WordPress themes, each with a live demo version.

WordPress is one of the easiest and most powerful tools for maintaining a personal or professional website or blog. There is a large global userbase so there are lots of skilled developers that can support you.

If you need specialized functionality on your site, WordPress offers a wide range of plugins that can do custom tasks. Say you want to add simple online shopping functions, increase security, or set up complex, customized forms, there is a plugin to do that on WordPress – some paid and many free of charge. Vaultpress is a paid plugin that allows you to maintain a site backup, for instance.

From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, WordPress is very well-designed out of the box, but the Yoast SEO plugin adds additional functionality.

Cost: WordPress is open source software that is available free of charge through many Internet Service Providers. For instance, WordPress sites can be hosted at GoDaddy for about $10-15 per month. WordPress.com is a hosted version of WordPress offers by Automattic at prices starting at $0.

Benefits: A world-class web publishing platform for merely the cost of hosting it.

8. Buffer

Easily my favorite tool, Buffer is one of the tools that I used daily to do my job. I help clients manage their online social platforms and curate content for sharing within their networks. Buffer allows me to manage multiple social accounts and the sharing of content to those accounts.
What makes Buffer so special is the way you schedule future update via Buffer. You can schedule any share for a specific date and time, or you can create a queue for each social account and then just drop new content into the queue. This is Buffer’s killer app.

I describe it like an automated pitching machine, the kind you’d find in a practice batting cage facility. You load it up with balls and turn it on and the machine fires the balls at you at set intervals. You can adjust the timing of the interval, but all you need to do is keep the machine loaded.

Same idea with Buffer – load it up with awesome content you want to share and away it goes. You can program Buffer to share to your Twitter feed 5 times a day, say every 3 hours, and you can program it to share to LinkedIn and Facebook once a day. Convenient extensions for all browsers allow you to curate and queue up sharing while you are reading content online.

Buffer can also help you manage the discovery of great content to share, but its key functionality is in the distribution of shared content.

Cost: Buffer offers free accounts with full functionality (but limited capacity for queuing up shares), but there is also an affordable “Awesome Account” at $10/month that should handle most of your needs. I use the business accounts which start at $50/month and enable you to manage large numbers of accounts.

Benefit: Convenient and powerful tool for sharing content consistently to your social platform.

9. Freshbooks

Freshbooks is the best invoicing tool I have every used. I love the interface and some of the features. While any accountant will tell you it’s not the best accounting platform, any entrepreneur will tell you it makes time tracking and invoicing so much easier.

What make Freshbooks so compelling to me us the ability to create and deliver an invoice via email. Clients receive a notification of an invoice and log into the Freshbooks site to print it and process it. I can set monthly reminders for invoices that are not paid and Freshbooks will send an auto-reminder email to the client. If you want to accept online payment for your invoices, Freshbooks can easily enable Paypal or Freshbooks’ own in-house payment processing.

There is also excellent time-tracking functionality for projects that require hourly tracking and billing. I can program different services at variable hourly rates, depending on who is doing the work. And the reporting is detailed and extensive.

Freshbooks may have some formal accounting shortcomings, but I am not aware of a better tool for an individual or small company to set up and have a robust billing system in place in minutes, and one that may serve their needs for months or years to come.

Cost: $30/month for unlimited client accounts.

Benefit: Reduces time required to issue and track invoices, plus it’s a pleasure to use.

10. Slack

Slack is a popular collaboration platform for virtual teams to work together. At first glance, it seems like no big deal – but there is something valuable in its simplicity.

In many ways, Slack is an instant messaging application with some enhancements. I use it to work collaboratively with my own team, as well as with some of my clients. We can have quick exchanges, back and forth, in running conversations that are archived. We can easily share documents we are working on. And it has a cool mobile app so that I can always answer a question, clarify an instruction or address an issue in real time.

Slack also supports a growing number of third-party applications that can be used to enhance its functionality, for instance, if you want to have an integrated project manager. Slack is like digital mesh that ties us together into teams, yet remains porous and open enough to easily accommodate new team members, new clients, and new ways of using it.

Cost: Free

Benefit: Quick and easy to set up. Great tool for working with remote teams.

I would love to hear more about your favorite applications and how you’ve customized your own technology stack for working virtually. Please share your feedback in the comments below.

In 2016, 64% of B2B social referrals to a website come directly from LinkedIn. Only 17% come from Facebook, and 14% from Twitter.

LinkedIn is your mini-website. This is the place that people will come to read more about you, and your business. Creating long-term relationships with potential clients inside of LinkedIn will only prove a success, if you have a professional LinkedIn profile that has been expertly crafted.

I have, in the last 5-6 years changed my LinkedIn profile various times to make sure the content on my professional LinkedIn profile is relevant, and as up-to-date as possible.

Are you doing the same?

Regardless of whether you are new to B2B social media marketing on LinkedIn, or whether you have attended a webinar, or read a previous LinkedIn article of mine; there is always something worth learning in everything you read. Here are my 10 steps to achieving a professional LinkedIn profile YOU can be proud of.

1. Your Unique URL

You can customize your public profile URL when you edit your public profile. Custom public profile URLs are available on a first come, first served basis and will help you achieve your professional LinkedIn profile. Don’t know how to get yours? Here is a step-by-step process.

2. Professional Photo

Earlier this year I wrote an article on the do’s and don’ts for a profile picture on LinkedIn. Upload a professional photo which is recent, doesn’t include your friends or beloved pets and represents YOU as a professional. Remember: you are 11x more likely to have your profile viewed with a photo, so make sure it’s a good one.

3. Background Photo

You might not be aware that you can add a “header” background image to your LinkedIn profile, just like you can on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure this is just as professional as your profile picture.

4. Join Groups

Part of using a social network is engaging, and to do this in a professional way, you need to join, and get involved in groups. Don’t join too many, and only join the ones that are relevant to your business interest, and serve a specific purpose.

5. Endorsements

You can endorse a connection for a particular skill by going to the “skills & endorsements” section of their profile, and clicking on the name of the skill, or the + sign next to the skill. Do this for three different connections of yours, and they will be notified via email that you have done this and they will do the same for you.

6. Ask For Recommendations

A recommendation inside of LinkedIn holds a lot of weight so make sure you ask every single person you do business with, if they would recommend your product/service inside of LinkedIn. In return, you can do the same for them.

7. Share Content Regularly

One of the best ways to expand your LinkedIn network and to create a professional LinkedIn profile, is to share great content that is relevant to your audience. I do this on a daily basis and it has helped me build my network inside of LinkedIn.

8. Get Introduced To A Mutual Connection

Inside of LinkedIn you can be asked to be introduced to a contact who is a 2nd-degree connection of yours (you both have a mutual connection). You can do this by going to the 2nd-degree profile, chose the connection from the mutual connections on the right-hand side and “request an introduction”. This is a great way to build your professional network.

9. Keep Your Profile Updated

I mentioned this briefly at the beginning of this article. It is key that you keep your profile updated, and relevant to your current working positions. This will include updating your skills, photo’s and experience.

10. Share Your LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile should act as a mini-website and because of this, you should be sharing it with those you would like to connect with.

Where To Go From Here

I will be running a FREE and LIVE webinar on the 15th November at 7pm on my 2017 B2B survival kit: how to master LinkedIn to grow your business and I would love it if you could join me. You can sign up for this webinar here.

In this post we are going to talk about a very interesting section of your LinkedIn Profile and one of my personal favorites – your Profile Picture!

What? You have No Profile Photo in Your LinkedIn Profile?

You may change your mind after you finish reading the five bullet points below! Let me lay down some pointers for you:

• According to LinkedIn, users who have a profile photo, receive 7 times more views than users who don’t have one. 7 times!!!! This is a massive difference!
• Users who have a profile photo have a greater Inmail response rate than users who don’t have one (it is said that users with a profile photo receive a 40% open rate in their Inmails).
• LinkedIn prioritizes profiles of users with images on the search results pages. Therefore, users with profile photos have a far greater chance to be found by relevant parties (hiring managers, future employers, potential customers, classmates, ex business associates etc).
• Having a Profile Picture is one of LinkedIn’s prerequisites in order to achieve a LinkedIn profile All Star Status (All Star Status is an indication that you have a well completed LinkedIn Profile).

• Now to go a step further, a LinkedIn profile with a professional looking photo is viewed 11 times more frequently than a profile with NO photo.

Still not convinced that if you don’t have a profile picture you are not in the “game”?

According to Forbes, “Like a house that’s on sale, the assumption is that if there’s no photo, something’s wrong”. You definitely don’t want your viewers to think that something is wrong with you, and that you are not serious, do you?

Having a profile photo brings your profile to life, enhances your credibility and validates who you are so people can see who they are connected with, who they are about to do business with, who they are about to consider hiring, who their future employer is going to be, who their future partner is going to be………. etc.

But merely having just any profile photo is not enough, you should focus on having a profile photo that is professional & focuses on the people you want to reach!

You therefore need to make sure that your profile picture:

✔ Has a high resolution and is of a minimum size of 200 x 200 pixels and a maximum of 500 x 500 pixels (i would advise it is closer to the upper end of 500 x 500 pixels).

✔ Is a JPG, GIF or PNG file under 4MB in size.

✔ Is taken by a quality digital camera (so that numerous shots are taken before you pick the best one!) or even better: by a professional photographer.

✔ Is a recent photo of you and represents how you presently look like (a less than 2 years old picture is preferable).

✔ Looks serious, professional & clean and portrays you wearing a formal to semi-formal business outfit (suit or casual).

✔ Represents you as approachable, trustworthy and competent. Make sure you are looking directly at the camera and with a warm & likeable smile.

✔ Has a neutral background (preferably white or pale colour, however some people choose green or blue, or blurred backgrounds as well).

✔ Has only one person in it………You!!!

✔ Is showing your entire head and face, together with your upper body.

Ok, now lets lay down some things that should NOT be included in your LinkedIn Profile Picture:

✘ Your Family Members.

✘ Your Friends.

✘ Your Hobbies.

✘ Your Pets.

✘ Your Car.

✘ You wearing a Hat, Sunglasses, T-Shirt, a Bathing Suit, or you without a shirt on.

✘ Cartoons.

✘ Business Logos.

✘ Symbols & Drawings.

✘ Cropped Images.

✘ Low quality (i.e. Dark) Images.

✘ Old Images.

etc ……………….

I think you get the “picture”!!! Your Profile Photo should be about the professional best of YOU and only YOU!!!! And pleeeeease NO Selfies!!! This is a professional Profile Picture at a Professional Social Media Network, therefore it should be treated accordingly.

Your Profile Picture will appear in your groups, messages, status updates, endorsements & recommendations, searches, posts & comments, so take it seriously and find some time to upload one in order to make the best possible first impression!!! Always remember that people judge appearances very strictly and will therefore judge and make relevant assumptions about you from your Profile Picture.

That being said, lately I see more and more individuals with Profile Pictures that are not appropriate for the LinkedIn platform. To those I wish to say: “People, please do NOT confuse LinkedIn with other Social Media Networks”, this is the largest Network of Professionals in the world. Let’s try to act accordingly!

Lastly, i would suggest that you use the same Profile Picture on your website, print materials as well as all your social media platforms (whether it be LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc.). This way, you will not confuse viewers who may visit your profile in different Social Media Networks, thus being very easily recognizable, generating a solid & consistent personal brand image!

That’s it! I hope you implement the above and you create a Rocking LinkedInProfile Picture!!

Everyone loves Slack.

Its incredible founding story, popular CEO, and beautiful app turned the $3.8 billion startup into a press golden boy over the past two years.

But the narrative is about to change.

In just the past week, Slack was hit pretty hard from all angles: a potential marketing blunder, a sudden executive departure, and lagging product innovation — not to mention a new rival in Microsoft.

Even in Silicon Valley’s move-fast culture, Slack’s meteoric rise has been nothing but impressive. And the press embraced it with sweet headlines so far.

But the recent developments show Slack's honeymoon period with the press may be coming to an end, as it faces higher expectations and increased scrutiny — stepping into the most difficult phase of Silicon Valley's "press cycle."

We’ve seen this story with almost every hotshot startup before. Facebook went through years of criticism before turning into a $330 billion goliath, while Uber’s still trying to prove some people wrong about its whopping $62 billion valuation. Dropbox is in a tougher spot, but at least it's in a better situation than companies like Groupon and Zynga, who quickly faded into obscurity after failing to keep up their once beloved brand.

'Silicon Valley Time'

Perhaps the best explanation for this can be found in a blog post by Aaron Zamost, a former Google PR guy who’s now leading Square’s communications.

Zamost calls this press cycle a "predictable arc" that runs like a "clockwork," based on what he calls "Silicon Valley Time." Here's how he describes it:

"A company’s narrative moves like a clock: it starts at midnight, ticking off the hours. The tone and sentiment about how a business is doing move from positive (sunrise, midday) to negative (dusk, darkness). And often the story returns to midnight, rebirth and a new day."

In other words, every big-time startup gets hyped up from a shiny up-and-comer to the "greatest company in the world" phase, before hitting the wall and facing constant question marks that kick it into the ground. The truly great ones, however, overcome the "worst company in the world" moniker and circle back to everyone's favorite toy.

Last July, when Zamost wrote the post, Slack was put in the "Hottest company in the Valley" bucket. But based on what we're seeing now, Slack may be going from the "Greatest company in the world!" to the "Greatest company in the world?" category.

Of course that doesn't mean this is the start of the end for Slack. As Zamost points out, companies heading into the darker portion of Silicon Valley Time need to stay focused and levelheaded. And if the business fundamentals are strong, it'll eventually make a comeback and prove all the pundits wrong.

Will Slack be able to do it? At least judging by Butterfield's response to some of the articles, he seems undeterred by any of it, yet.

SEE ALSO: Amazon's CFO perfectly summed up Amazon's greatest strength in one sentence

Join the conversation about this story »

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Most people learn time management the hard way: by trial and error.

Étienne Garbugli, a Montreal-based product and marketing consultant and the author of "Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want," distilled the lessons he wishes he'd known when he was 20.

He created the following presentation, posted to SlideShare, which we've shared here with his permission.

This is an update of an article originally posted by Max Nisen and Jenna Goudreau.

SEE ALSO: 6 subtle things highly productive people do every day

DON'T MISS: 25 daily habits that will make you smarter

In his Forbes article 6 Reasons Why Podcasting is the Future of Storytelling, Chris Giliberti states that “the podcast’s lithe ability to contort itself across myriad activities and settings, venturing where print and video cannot, is ultimately what cements its growth prospects. Not just in our cars, commutes, and meanderings, but center stage in our living rooms and at entertainment venues.

This is why podcasts are like smartphones: they contain a wide variety of tools in a small, portable package. But they beat smartphones in one key way: podcasts are free.

This is great news for sales professionals, because most sales trainings can be very cost prohibitive.

Top 9 Podcasts for Sales Professionals

Since 2013, Monthly podcast listenership has increased 75%. 21% of Americans ages 12 and up have listened to a podcast in the past month. That’s up from 17% in 2015. Here’s how to get in on the action:

1. The Ultimate Sales Hustle Steli Efti delivers sales hacks for startup hustlers, He leverages tactics, strategies, and sales stories from Silicon Valley’s most prominent sales hustlers. The accompanying blog features sales videos, articles, and extra materials related to each episode.

2. The Social Selling Podcast In the weekly podcast, Martin Brossman and Greg Hyer focus on the use of social media to drive sales engagements. They discuss topics like sales enablement, lead generation, prospecting, inbound marketing, and sales/marketing alignment.

3. B2B Growth Podcast Hosted by James Carbary of Sweet Fish Media, B2B Growth is a podcast dedicated to helping B2B executives achieve explosive growth.

4. The Sales Evangelist Donald Kelly’s podcast has been recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine, Huffington Post, Yahoo Finance, South Florida Business Journal and UpStart as a great place to get the education needed to overcome the most challenging obstacles faced by salespeople at every level of their careers.

5. In The Arena Anthony Iannarino hones in on the most current and powerful sales techniques and mindsets from the top authors, salesmen, sales managers, and experts in the fields of B2B and B2C sales to give you the edge you need to move your numbers and profit to the next level.

6. The Growth Show This is HubSpot’s business podcast for leaders consumed with driving growth, whether that’s growing a company, growing a movement, growing an idea, or growing a team. Each week, HubSpot sits down with someone who has achieved remarkable growth to unpack how they did it…and how you can, too.

7. Sales Hero Podcast Joe Girard will expose you to cool stuff about psychology, behavior, and neuroscience that’ll help you create repeatable best practices and systems. He wants to help you build a bulletproof mindset that’ll prompt you to take action and do your best work.

8. Nobody Likes It Cold The tagline of this podcast is: “Sell like you give a f$ck.” So, it’s no surprise that host Luke Davies interviews successful sales leaders, CEOs, CMOs, and sales pros every week to learn about their strategies, knowledge, and path to success.

9. Accelerate Andy Paul shares his powerful game-changing sales strategies and discusses how he’s built successful sales teams with companies, business owners, executives, and sales professionals in order to help transform the performance of you and your sales team.

Oh How Times Have Changed

In October 2014, very few people actually knew what a podcast was or how to listen to one. So Ira Glass (of Serial and This American Life fame) went on The Tonight Show to explain podcasting to the masses (and also had his 85-year-old neighbor explain how to podcast — see video below). Nowadays, there is a podcast for everyone, and almost everyone knows how to find and listen to them.

You might have learned a few local phrases, stashed your ball cap, and congratulated yourself on not sticking out like a sore thumb abroad.

But culture goes deeper, and there are a number of customs and gestures that Americans use without thinking twice. When traveling, these customs will not only out you as a tourist, but could get you in hot water in other countries. 

Inspired by this Quora thread, we’ve rounded up some of the most common things Americans do that are seen as offensive elsewhere.

1. Tipping

A contentious issue even here, both over- and undertipping can quickly make you the least popular person at the table. But in Japan and South Korea, tipping is seen as an insult. In those countries, workers feel they are getting paid to do their job, and take pride in doing it well; they don't need an added incentive.

2. Sitting in the back of a cab

While it's customary for Americans to hop into the back of a cab, in Australia, New Zealand, parts of Ireland, Scotland, and the Netherlands, it's considered rude not to ride shotgun. Whereas cabbies in the US will sigh and reluctantly move their newspapers and lunches from the front seat, in other countries it's a matter of egalitarianism.

3. Throwing a thumbs-up

In a lot of countries, especially in the Middle East, Latin America, Western Africa, Russia, and Greece, a thumbs-up basically has the same meaning as holding up a middle finger does for Americans.

4. Laughing with your mouth open

In Japan, laughter that exposes your pearly whites is considered horse-like and impolite — sort of like noisy, open-mouthed eating is considered rude to Americans.

5. Calling the USA "America"

In South America, claiming you're from America, rather than the United States, is seen as being politically incorrect, as it implies that only the US should be considered America, and that South America is unworthy of the title.

6. Being fashionably late

Americans often make appointments for "around x" or "x-ish." Being a few minutes late, or, as we even call it, "fashionably" late, is standard to Americans, but unacceptable in many other countries (like Germany) where leaving people waiting is taken as you thinking your time is more valuable than everyone else's.

7. Being on time

On the other hand, many Latin American cultures, notably Argentina, would consider it bad form if you showed up to a dinner party right on time, akin to someone arriving an hour early in America.

8. Having one hand in your pocket

This is considered arrogant in Turkey, as well as some Asian countries, like South Korea.

9. Using your left hand for anything

Not all cultures have or use toilet paper, and tend to use their left hand in lieu of it. Accepting gifts, eating, or doing pretty much anything with your left hand in much of Africa, India, Sri Lanka and the Middle East is like a (disgusting) slap in the face.

10. Opening a present immediately

In most Asian countries, most notably China and India, tearing into a gift in front of the gift giver is poor form. It looks greedy.

11. Wearing sweatpants, flip flops, wrinkly clothing, or baseball caps in public

Sure "athleisure" (stylish sportswear worn outside of the gym) is a hot new trend stateside, but in most countries, notably Japan and most of Europe, this sort of sloppy appearance is considered disrespectful.

12. Altering your meal

In foodie cultures like France, Italy, Spain, and Japan, asking for ketchup, hot sauce, soy sauce, or salt to alter your meal may raise some eyebrows. Before you ask for a condiment, see if there are any on the tables — if not, you should probably refrain.

13. Showing the soles of your feet

In many Arab, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries, showing the soles of your feet is a sign of disrespect, as they're considered the lowest and dirtiest part of the body, since they touch the dirty ground. Men should cross their legs with caution.

14. Keeping your shoes on

While you probably think you're doing the world a favor by keeping your socks under wraps, in most Asian and Caribbean cultures it is expected that you take your shoes off when entering someone’s home.

15. Drinking someone else's alcohol

Apparently, it's rude to drink alcohol you didn't personally bring to a party in Norway. In the US, on the other hand, bringing a six pack of beer to a BBQ allows you access to anything else at the event.

16. Men showing some skin

It's rare to see topless men in South Korea, where men even keep their shirts on at the beach.

17. Eating anywhere that doesn't serve food

In Rwanda and Japan, it is considered rude to eat anywhere that isn't a restaurant, bar, or hotel. Eating a banana on the bus? Ice cream outside? All no-nos.

18. Telling people to help themselves

While you think you're being a host extraordinaire by opening up your home to someone and essentially telling them to feel right at home, in some cultures (like in Asia) this hands-off approach is uncomfortable. To them, hosting guests is a little more involved.

19. Touching

Americans are notoriously friendly, but hugging and touching others, even if only on the arm, is offensive in places like China, Thailand, Korea, and the Middle East. Respect that personal space varies from country to country.

20. Keeping your clothes on in saunas and steam rooms

While not offensive per se, people from Scandinavian countries and Turkey will think you're prude if you keep your clothes on in saunas, spas, and steam rooms.

21. Asking certain questions

Asking "what do you do" is a common American icebreaker, but is often considered insulting, especially in countries with social-welfare systems, like the Netherlands, where people feel that it's a way of pigeonholing them, and of being classist. You might as well just ask someone you just met what their salary is.

22. Refusing food

Americans often refuse food to make it easier for their hosts, but in most Arab countries, like Lebanon, it is considered incredibly rude to reject anything offered, especially food.

23. Not declining gifts

Americans are quick to accept gifts, favors, and invitations, and often without offering something in return. However, many cultures (like in Japan) expect you to decline things a few times before ultimately accepting them. In China, you're even expected to refuse a gift three times before accepting it.

24. Polishing off your meal

To Americans, finishing a meal shows the host how much they enjoyed the meal. In other countries, like China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, it signifies that you're still hungry and that they failed to provide you with enough food.

25. Blowing Your Nose

In countries like China, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, blowing your nose in public is not only rude, but considered repulsive.

Join the conversation about this story »

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You’ve got 975 unread emails…

…Your vital files live locally on random team members’ computers

Your team tell you they never saw the task they were assigned, and you have no way to track their progress.

This sounds like a true nightmare, right? Well, the thing is, it’s a reality for many businesses.

By using these collaboration tools for your business, you can improve your team’s communication, stop losing tasks, and make sure everyone’s accountable for getting work done.

Here’s the categories I’m going to look at:

• Projects
• Development
• Chat
• Cloud Storage
• Design
• Social
• Spreadsheets
• Tasks
• Video
• Writing

Let’s get into it.

Collaborative project management tools

For decades, teams have tracked projects with whiteboards, email, and scraps of sticky notes that end up who-knows-where.

Now, you can use project management tools to store tasks, assign responsibility, and track the progress of a project. Here are three tools of different kinds you should check out:

Trello

Trello is a kanban project management app that mainly works with lists and cards. Every task or resource is its own card, and you can organize them into lists depending on the status (backlog, in progress, done, etc.)

Trello supports integrations with Google Drive, Slack, and over 500 other apps, which makes it easy to use alongside your current set up.

At Process Street, we have a board for every team member, reviewed in meetings by a manger, and a board for every project — e.g. blog posts, guest posting, email marketing.

Premium pricing starts at: $9.99/user/month.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a complete project management suite including file upload, discussions, to-do lists, text documents, calendar events, and even chat.

At Process Street, we used Basecamp to organize graphics creation with Koombea, a design agency. We collaborated over mockups and logo ideas, and Basecamp’s interface made everything easy for the entire team involved to monitor for updates.

Premium pricing starts at: $99/organization/month

BeeCanvas

BeeCanvas is a collaborative whiteboard for drafting out projects, sketching designs, and housing resources from all around the web. It includes native functionality for Google Drive, Dropbox, and YouTube embeds.

I use BeeCanvas for planning side-project content, and filling boards with relevant content to be later organized when I come to write it up.

Premium pricing starts at: free (premium TBA).

Collaborative tools for developers

Whether it’s pair programming or bug tracking, developers need friction-free environments to collaborate in that allow for enough depth to track the code.

In this section, I’m going to look at Cloud9 and JIRA.

Cloud9

Cloud9 is a collaborative IDE. Think of it like Google Docs for code, where multiple developers can work on the same file and see each other’s edits in real time.

It supports code suggestions, debugging, VIM mode and a fully customizable UI. However you’re used to coding, you can replicate it with Cloud9.

Premium pricing starts at: $29/user/month.

JIRA

JIRA is issue tracking software for development teams. That means anyone can create, prioritize and assign issues to the rest of the team. Issues can be bugs, features, or user stories. Once an issue is created, it can be assigned to a sprint and then allocated to developers, who leave comments and report on their progress.

At Process Street, we use JIRA as our only issue tracking app, and it contains all bugs, features, and user stories.

Premium pricing starts at: $10/10 users/month.

Collaboration tools for team chat

Instead of relying on email (a notoriously irritating time-suck), switch to a chat app designed for business. Some businesses have moved from email to a platform like Skype, but that still isn’t suitable for businesses who need to control group permissions, have public channels, upload files and control notification preferences.

Here are some tools that do that:

Slack

Slack probably doesn’t need much introduction. It’s been taking the enterprise communication world by storm since 2014. For the uninitiated, Slack is a team chat app that features permissions, file uploads, code snippets, notification preferences and integrates with apps like Trello so you can get a direct activity feed into your channels.

At Process Street, we use Slack as our main method of communication. We have it linked up to Process Street, Trello, RSS, Twitter, and even Giphy for a bit of silly fun.

Premium pricing starts at: $8/user/month.

HipChat

HipChat is Slack’s main competitor. It has most of the features I mentioned above, but also the benefit of being natively integrated with the rest of the Atlassian suite which includes Confluence, BitBucket, and JIRA.

Premium pricing starts at: $2/user/month.

Fleep

Unlike Slack or HipChat, Fleep isn’t a dedicated chat app. It’s actually a tool for both external and internal communication. It uses email, but displays it in a chat interface so you can send and track emails to other companys and your team members from the same Slack-like interface.

Premium pricing starts at: $1/user/month.

Cloud storage tools for collaborating over shared files

You won’t get away with saving files locally any more. In fact, that’s been true for almost a decade now! Use cloud storage to centralize your files, keep everyone on the same page, and never lose any important documents again.

Dropbox

Dropbox includes unlimited storage, integrations with over 500 apps, and selective sync from local folders. This means you can create a ‘work’ folder on your computer, and save things locally while automatically syncing them to your Dropbox, retaining the same folder structure.

Premium pricing starts at: $10/user/month.

Google Drive

If your team uses Google Docs, Google Sheets, or other Google products, Drive is an ideal solution. You can use Google’s suite of online document editing and creation apps right inside Drive, negating the need to transfer files between storage.

The marketing team at Process Street uses Google Drive to share spreadsheets, image assets and research documents.

Premium pricing starts at: $1.99/user/month.

Collaborative design tools

Design can be a tough thing to nail down, and often needs a ton of iterations. To avoid problems like endless email chains with files titled ‘finalfinalfinal.psd’ attached, just used a tool that helps you store revisions, comment on designs and get a better idea of what your team’s progress is.

InVision

InVision lets you upload designs, get feedback, then iterate on them. It supports comments, @mentions, and even a live mock-up mode to simulate web designs. It integrates with over 500+ apps via Zapier, and has a native integration with SVG-editing tool Sketch.

It isn’t only prototyping though…

InVision also supports a design project management layer on top, meaning it’s not just for managing single designs, but multiple projects at once. It’s perfect for a design agency working with clients, or a design team getting approval from managers.

Premium pricing starts at: $5/prototype/month.

RedPen

You can think of RedPen as a light version of InVision. It has projects, design annotation and collaborative elements, but no workflow/project management tools included. Also, unlike InVision, it has no integrations.

Premium pricing starts at: $4/project/month.

Collaboration tools to create a social network for your company

Everyone’s used to Facebook, so why not bring that transparency and interactivity to work? With these tools, you can set up an intranet that isn’t just a bulletin board for news from managers, but a platform where everyone can interact.

Yammer

Yammer takes the simplicity of the social media we all know and uses it to help companies create an enterprise social network.

With chat, a news feed, private groups and announcements, it really is like a private, company version of Facebook you can use to store documents, give praise, take polls, and share news about the company without relying on a traditional intranet platform.

Process Street has a direct integration with Yammer, meaning all checklist activity can be displayed in the news feed, and you can use your Yammer organization to create a Process Street account.

Premium pricing starts at: $3/user/month.

Communifire

Communifire is another social network platform like Yammer, with a focus on sharing and aggregating relevant industry content, and feeding content from the company blog into a social space.

It functions like a mix between Yammer and Sharepoint, including document management, company wikis, and a deep search.

Premium pricing starts at: $10/user/month.

Collaborative spreadsheet tools

The ability to quickly share spreadsheets and edit them collaboratively is extremely valuable, especially when the alternative is storing tons of versions on a local machine.

Depending on the size of the data set, your best bets are either Google Sheets or Airtable:

Google Sheets

Fully integrated with Google Drive, spreadsheets made in Sheets are ridiculously easy to share and collaborate over. While it’s missing a few of the important features for Excel power users, you’ll be able to do 95% of what you expect just by using Sheets.

For massive data sets, complex formulas or Microsoft-specific add ons, you’re better off with Excel which now has a cloud-based collaborative version, Excel Online.

Premium pricing starts at: free.

Airtable

Airtable isn’t just a spreadsheet tool (although you can use it exactly like one) — it’s a relational database. That means you can set up multiple ‘spreadsheets’, and link the cells between them.

If, for example, you wanted to create a database of emails, you’d have one spreadsheet that contains the emails, one with the sender’s names, and then link the records to auto-populate other columns and manipulate the data more effectively.

At Process Street, we manage everything in Airtable. All research projects, all content assets, all podcast planning.

Premium pricing starts at: $12/user/month.

Collaborative task list tools

Sometimes project management isn’t enough. You might need to use a task or workflow management tool to break down the action items, assign them to your team, and track progress. The two tools below will help you manage your recurring tasks, but in drastically different ways.

Todoist

Todoist is a task management app that works as well with teams as it does for personal tasks. I have two folders inside the app, one for work that contains projects related to writing, editing, etc (see above), and one for personal lists, such as shopping and ‘to watch’ lists.

When used with teams, it’s possible to assign tasks to individuals, send notifications and set due dates. It also integrates with over 500 apps via Zapier, so it’s easy to push tasks from other apps into Todoist where they can be prioritized and scheduled.

Premium pricing starts at: $3/user/month.

Process Street

Process Street isn’t a straight-up task manager, but it is for managing recurring processes.

1. Create a recurring task list
2. Run a checklist every time the process needs executing
3. Assign the checklist to your team
4. Track the progress from your dashboard

Trigger checklists from over 500 apps with our Zapier integration, and make your team accountable with checklists that explain tasks perfectly.

Premium pricing starts at: $12.50/user/month.

Collaborative tools for video

Whether you just need a quick video call to hash out the details, or to explain something with a screenshare, collaborative video is a must for remote teams.

At Process Street, we’re a fully remote team so have had a lot of experience making working at a distance possible.

Appear.in

The fastest, easiest platform for video calls you’ll ever use.

Appear.in requires no log in, no signup, no actual ‘calling’ is necessary at all. Just claim a URL for your company, and then give the URL to anyone you want to call with. When you’re both on the page, you’re in a video call. That’s that.

Premium pricing starts at: free (premium TBA).

Screenhero

Screenhero is a screensharing tool that lives inside Slack. That means with just one chat command (/hero @username), you can start screensharing with anyone in your Slack channel.

After being acquired by Slack, Screenhero is undergoing an overhaul of its pricing plans and will be accepting new users soon. For existing paid Slack users, though, you’ll get it for free.

Premium pricing starts at: free for paid Slack users (premium TBA).

Collaboration tools for writing teams

Writing teams will consist of writers and editors, and pieces undergo multiple approvals before they’re ready to go. That’s the reason why you’re not going to get away with Word, or writing it up in WordPress directly. You need to be working with a collaborative editor that has versioning, comments, and edit history. Check these out:

Beegit

If your team likes to write in markdown, Beegit is ideal. It’s a document management and creation app for teams that supports comments, edit tracking, projects and permissions. The major difference between this an other apps on the list is that it’s a markdown editor. Markdown is a quick and easy way to format text without HTML.

Premium pricing starts at: $7.90/user/month.

Quip

The range of powerful features aside, Quip is a beautiful writing app that makes typing and formatting articles a joy.

It’s easy for teams to keep up to date with each other’s activity because the main screen of the app is an ‘inbox’ style feed of recent events: document creation, comments, edits, etc.

At Process Street, we always collaborate inside Quip before moving it into WordPress. And, when the time comes, it’s easy to move things over because of Quip’s clean HTML export.

Premium pricing starts at: $6/user/month.

Dropbox Paper

Instead of singing Google Docs’ praises (because everyone already knows), I’m going to highlight a lesser known yet just as capable app — Dropbox Paper. For those who opt to use Dropbox over Google Drive, Paper is ideal. Created documents live next to your stored files, and it allows you to easily embed Dropbox files inside the documents, too.

Teams can collaborate with edits and comments, all of which is tracked by the app.

Premium pricing starts at: free.

Conclusion

The tools you use to collaborate with your team are just as important as the attitude you have. Take a remote first approach to work, and it’ll make it easier to collaborate, centralize data, and scale your business.

Any more recommendations? Let me know in the comments.

Recently, our washing machine stopped working. A month ago, our refrigerator broke. A month before that, our garage door was having problems. And a month before that, our dishwasher door went out of commission too.

Needless to say, more than a few appliance people have walked through my doors lately.

And only this last time did it click … all these repairmen are better salespeople than I am.

Here’s are seven reasons why -- and lessons we can all learn.

1) They get prospects to work on their schedule.

The washing machine won’t drain. The dishwasher door stops latching properly.

Things breaks, and you do what any rational person does: You procrastinate as long as possible. (Or until your significant other gives you the look.)

If, like me, you’re only handy with a credit card, you call some repair shops.

Our washing machine stopped working a day or two before a three-day weekend. The appliance company I reached out to was slammed and wouldn’t be able to get to it until next week sometime. If you've ever had something break before a long weekend, you've probably heard the same thing.

Already, you’re being managed. Before you've even agreed to work with the appliance shop, they’re managing your expectations and forcing you, the customer, to implicitly agree to their available window of time.

Takeaway: Manage Expectations From the Get-Go

Managing expectations is an ongoing battle. But winning the first battle is critical to making sure your prospect goes along with your processes and procedures -- which will cut down on future hassles and speed up your ability to deliver a good finished product.

And it all starts with those tiny interactions, those first encounters, like scheduling. Get the prospect in the mindset of working with your process by using a tool like the Meetings app in HubSpot Sales to get your prospect to book time on your calendar.

2) They charge an upfront deposit.

Pay attention, creatives: This point is for you.

Creative services, as a whole, suck at sales. If you're in the field, you probably do free work with the expectation that “ongoing work” or “referrals” will come your way (it almost never does).

Clients, who have about as much skill and experience in design as my pug Rudy, critique your pitch as if they’re Impressionist masters.

Now let’s contrast that initial sales process with an appliance repairman's.

“We’d love to come out on this date and this time,” they tell you. Then, they inform you of an upfront deposit -- just to get them to come out to your house.

And this deposit only covers a diagnosis. If they find and fix the problem, you can apply the full amount to your total payment due at the end.

But still, they won’t even lift a finger until you pay a deposit. Don’t like it? No soup for you!

Takeaway: Say "No" to Spec Work

No other industry does free spec work on the promise of a future, ongoing relationship.

While RFPs are (sometimes, but rarely) tolerable to a certain degree, going overboard on free mockups, wireframes, or ‘test’ campaigns only devalues your future services and further erodes pricing margins in the long run.

3) They always start with a diagnostic.

Asking for someone’s budget is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it helps you come up with different possible solutions to their problem.

On the other, the number you're told is usually completely arbitrary. A department’s share of profit, or what the competition has quoted them, is not a good indicator of value.

Case in point: Development.

A client’s application has bugs. They want to get rid of them. They say they have a budget of $XXX.

Sounds great -- so you invoice and get started. And it is great, until your developers get into the code of the website and recoil in horror.

The back end is a mess. Nothing works the way it's supposed to. And your new client doesn’t understand why it’s taking twice as long (or going to cost twice as much) to fix these issues as you originally predicted.

The only real way to prevent getting yourself and your client into a similar scenario is to diagnose these problems upfront.

But if you don’t charge for this diagnostic work, it’s almost always rushed, haphazard, or skipped in order to hit that arbitrary deadline you’ve been given.

Contrast that behavior with the appliance repairman, who makes no. The only thing they’ll be able to do when they come to your home for that first visit is diagnose the problem. That’s it.

Takeaway: Always Diagnose Before Prescribing

Only after understanding the full extent of the problem can you begin to prescribe the solution.

“How long will this application take to fix?”

The answer’s not “Three weeks.” The answer is, “That depends on what we discover.” Discover, then go from there.

4) They sell convenience.

Only after I adhered to their schedule, paid an upfront deposit, and went through a diagnostic was the appliance repairman ready to make an official ruling.

The motor was worn out. He also just so happened to have said part on hand and could fix it immediately.

“You mean it can be fixed in a few minutes, before my wife gets home, and I’ll look like a hero?" I asked. "Where do I sign?”

Value-based pricing sounds nice in theory. But what holds people back from effectively selling value is a lack of understanding what you’re selling.

Takeaway: Sell Value, Not Commoditized Widgets

How do you go from charging $2,000 for a website (or any other product) to $50,000 or even $100,000?

You sell a solution. Not a feature, a design, or a few lines of code.

You listen intently to what your prospect is struggling with -- using website design as an example, usually something related to business objectives like increasing revenue or cutting costs -- and you deliver a solution that makes or saves the company a lot more than it costs. And this lesson applies whether you're selling a project, a service, or a product.

In the example analysis below, the salesperson has clearly broken out three different scenarios and calculated the monthly revenue increase the customer can expect to see as a result of each.

Source: Brad Smith

5) They are transparent about pricing.

Chances are, your clients have no idea what you’re doing for them.

They kind of get it from a high-level perspective.

But they don’t understand it from an in-the-weeds point of view. Even if they think they know all about SEO for example, they have no idea how challenging and time-consuming it is to tackle canonicalization problems on a large site with international visitors.

During the initial sales process then, you’re selling the invisible. A bunch of intangibles that are hard to grasp and understand.

Google “SEO services” and you’re bound to find someone who’ll guarantee a #1 ranking in one month for only $500.

There's no way a client call tell the difference between that lunatic and you?

One thing jumps out … the price you’re both charging. Which makes it a race to the bottom.

Takeaway: Clearly Show How Price Relates to Value

That several-thousand-dollar proposal you emailed over will sound like it was pulled out of thin air to a client. An appliance repairman gives you a detailed pricing breakdown, with the upfront price (Read: Cash, not NET60) easy to see and understand -- even for a layperson like me.

Source: Brad Smith

6) They build profits into their price.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You’re trying to lock up a new project, so you send a message to a member of your team to give you an hourly estimate for this work so you can apply your rate and send over a quote to the client by end of day.

He tells you, 200 hours. So you multiply that by your project rate of $100/hour, hit "Enter," and throw it on a proposal.

Here’s the problem. This number doesn't take into account project management, time to meet with the client, implementation time, and so forth. It's also not taking into account all of the tools and software it takes to complete a successful implementation.

Takeaway: Charge What You’re Really Worth

Remember that overhead, labor, and profit are supposed to be accounted for in your hourly rate or product price. So don't immediately fold on a discount or reduce your hourly rate just to win the business.

My appliance repairman charged $200 for less than one hour worth of work.

Remember that the next time a client tells you $100 an hour “sounds too high.”

7) They seed their next appointment.

The only thing you can count on with appliances is that they’ll break. Probably sooner rather than later. So what happens the next time?

You start Googling local keyphrases. You read blog posts about the problem. You go to Yelp.

This, my friends, is the purchasing occasion. It’s the moment that motivates someone enough to pick up the phone.

Reverse-engineer the steps people take to find you to determine where you should start promoting, marketing, and prospecting for more customers. Then coordinate your own sales efforts to match up with those activities.

Take appliances as an example. Those companies place a sticker in the upper right-hand corner of your appliance that reminds you who to call each and every time you use the thing.

Source: Brad Smith

Takeaway: Perform Simple Actions to Generate Repeat Purchases

A timely notification or update like the one below is an example of an in-product reminder that prospects should upgrade or buy something new.

Source: Brad Smith

Keep yourself top-of-mind with reminders, check-ins, and continuing pieces of information that add value to your prospect's life.

Smart people tend to over-intellectualize things. We memorize all the closing techniques. We study all the tips, tactics, tools, and hacks we can find.

But at the end of the day, some of the best sales lessons are sitting right in front of us in plain sight.

They’re being practiced and delivered by professionals: People who have been in the game and around the block more times than we can count.

When you watch what they’re doing, notice that it’s not overly complex or sophisticated. It’s basic. The simpler, the better. They’re executing a well-worn process with confidence.

If you are like many companies, you want to employ the right people for the job. However, there are many titles and positions out there, making it harder to figure out which one you need and which skill set will best serve your sales organization. Therefore, you should consider the differences between a chief sales officer (CSO), Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or a Chief Customer Officer (CCO). Each of these titles is different and will provide you with a different set of skills.

CSO

A CSO or a sales director is one of the highest managers in the organization. They are responsible for marketing and sales. They deal with marketing, sales of products/services, customer relationship management and decide how to best align the company’s objectives with customer needs. Their primary responsibility is to sell services and goods and also plan how to best sell those goods/services. They work together with the CEO to set product portfolios and strategies and work to balance the organization’s needs with the customer’s. They may also determine the best channels to use and how to maintain strategic relationships with clients.

CRO

The CRO is an executive officer responsible for the processes relating to revenue generation in the organization. They are tasked with integration and alignment of all revenue-related tasks, which can include customer support, pricing, sales, marketing and revenue management.

They will work with your company’s executive team to communicate and create the company vision and then use that vision as part of their long-term strategy for creating new opportunities and markets.

CCO

The CCO is a newer title that has recently gained popularity over the past decade. They usually focus on customer retention, acquisitions, service, and relationships. They must figure out how to keep current customers, as well as how to get new ones and implement activities that will keep them happy. They can then help salespeople and others in the company understand what to do and how to do it.

In many cases, the Chief Customer Officer will also be a CRO or a CSO, especially in smaller companies. If you’re wondering which one you need, you likely need all three. If you want sales to grow, you’ll need someone to understand customers, someone who knows how to generate revenue and someone who knows how to get more sales.

A recent study conducted by ATD Research, evaluating the state of sales around the world, highlighted scheduling conflicts and time restraints as one of the top barriers to effective sales training. The study quoted similar findings from a 2014 Brainshark survey, which cited distractions in the classroom and a lack of post-training reinforcement as challenges that organizations investing in sales training should address.

By 2020, nearly half of the U.S. workforce will be made up of digital native millennials, who switch their attention across media types an average of 27 times per hour. While millennials in the workplace are often cited as being majorly impacted by tech behaviors, the reality is that we all now interact with devices we didn’t have ten years ago. We all belong to the digital tribe — we are all busier, more distracted, and harder to pin down.

Role of Technology in Sales Training

Traditionally, sales organizations have focused their training budget on high-value learning interactions for core sellers, such as role playing, coaching, and problem solving. But in this new, integrated world, the key is to accommodate all learning styles and deliver a consistent and effective experience that fits seamlessly into a workday.

Technology plays a significant role in making this real by creating highly personalized learning experiences. For instance, mobile, on-the-go content puts users in control of when and where they engage with lessons; gamification maintains engagement and creates accountability; and video-based scenarios create relatable moments that can be tried out in the classroom.

Practical Solutions for Exceptional Training Outcomes

At the end of the day, effective learning means practical learning. More often than not, a blended approach is the best solution for sales organizations because it combines the best of online and in-class learning. At Richardson, we believe that blended learning is about focus. We’ve developed a truly blended learning platform that adapts to users.

Accelerate uses online videos, games, and activities to teach learners essential models and concepts before they step into the classroom. Learners can do this at their own pace, on their own time, and on their own devices. Online learning opens the door for highly personalized instruction and higher-order learning activities in the classroom. This is a learner-centered approach, where class time is used to explore and practice behaviors in greater depth, creating more meaningful learning outcomes.

Sales Training Technology Improves Measurement

When it comes to training, technology is often viewed as a driver of engagement, but one of its most powerful contributions to development is its ability to benchmark, measure, and adapt to a learner’s progress. For example, we designed Accelerate to empower managers and coaches with learner-level analytics that tell an objective story and promote learning interventions where and when they are needed. Baseline assessments benchmark starting points and prepare sellers for learning. After each lesson, learners are reassessed to show exactly how far they have come and where they may need to put in more time.

Given the ubiquity of accessible technology, learner-focused platforms that deliver “anytime, anywhere” content are poised to become the norm to help sales organizations take on the biggest challenges facing their training programs. Early adopters of platforms like Accelerate will have an edge when it comes to driving consistency across their organizations, even as sales environments continue to shift in complexity.

Click here to download more information about Richardson’s online sales training solution, Richardson Accelerate^TM or contact us at info@richardson.com or 1-800-526-1650 to learn more!

The post Technology in Sales Training: Breaking Down Barriers appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

Throughout the last decade, the explosion of the freemium model – a combination of “free” and “premium” – for cloud-based software has had a profound impact on the way B2B companies identify and convert customers.

In the freemium model, users gain access to basic product features with the ability to upgrade to a paid subscription after exceeding a quota or requiring additional functionality. This ‘try before you buy’ strategy has given birth to some of the most successful SaaS companies on the market today – think Slack, Mailchimp, Wistia, and Box. Yet, where some built an empire, others collapsed under the pressure – attempting to grow a user base as quickly as possible to prove product-market-fit while losing sight of who they’re building for and why.

Despite the moaning and wailing, proclaiming the death of the freemium model, we’re here to tell you that it’s not going anywhere. Instead it’s evolving, and we have data to thank for that. The companies that prove the value of freemium are harnessing their vast data-sets to pioneer a new piece of the sales funnel that reduces waste, boosts efficiency and converts leads at around 50 percent – the Product Qualified Lead (PQL).

Step One: Flipping the Antiquated Lead Funnel

If you’ve ever worked in sales or marketing at a B2B company, you’re probably familiar with lead qualification terminologies such as Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). As new leads enter the system, they travel through the funnel by matching defined marketing engagement criteria until the visitor eventually becomes a customer or is identified as unqualified.

Glancing at this funnel, it looks simple and makes seamless, right? Prospects hear about you through a source or campaign, find your website and complete and lead form, eventually becoming a happy, loyal customer. The problem is that the reality of today’s customer journey often directly contradicts this beloved and strictly adhered to funnel.

According to Gartner Group, “80 percent of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers.” This means that while your team may be focused on driving leads in the top – what they really should be focused on is opportunities at the bottom.

There are crucial touch points that occur throughout the buying journey that are missed in the traditional funnel. But, the engagement that occurs after a user has started to test your product is even more crucial. Here’s an example of a buyer’s journey taking place every day here at Woopra that challenges this antiquated model:

Following the traditional lead flow, the sales team might get notified if a new user creates an account or completes a form. But, with freemium models bringing in thousands of new accounts a day, where do you focus your efforts?

By monitoring Jane’s in-app engagement data, we know that she deserves a phone call or placement in a targeted drip campaign. We can see her path from the moment she became aware of Woopra and know that she’s been actively using our product. Jane is a product qualified lead. She’s already immersed in our tool and has a high likelihood of becoming a paying customer.

Tom Wentworth, CMO at RapidMiner explains that in a PQL, “users qualify themselves by using the product and inside sales exists to support them through the journey and set the stage for a long-term relationship with the customer.” In that light, here’s a more accurate representation of a lead funnel that integrates a PQL engine:

The traditional funnel is flipped 180 degrees – starting instead with product adoption. Time and energy is invested in those leads that have raised their hands, are happily engaging with the product and qualify for a more robust offering. Here, the buying process is no longer linear with prospects coming in at the top and moving out the bottom. Instead, they go through an ongoing set of touchpoints before, during and after purchase.

Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, said it best in this piece by the Harvard Business Review, “the pivot is the experience, not the purchase.” And, for a company operating on a ‘try before you buy’ model, this experience is what will determine the success or failure of your company.

Step Two: Defining the Composition of Your PQL

Each company will define PQL differently because of the unique engagement metrics that make up your product. For example, at Woopra we look at the number of events a user is tracking – combined with proprietary lead scoring technology that measures corporate fit, demographic data and more to enhance qualification.

“The best definitions of PQL are informed by conversion correlation data, eg the behaviors trigger customers to convert paid,” writes Tomasz Tunguz, Venture Capitalist at Redpoint.

Whatever your definition, it should be clearly spelled out within the entire organization, remembering, that this definition should mature with time – just as your product evolves and changes. It’s no longer the sales or marketing teams that decide how to qualify a lead – now the product and engineering departments are heavily engrossed in this process and invested in the outcome.

Depending on the flavor of your freemium model, this defined set of criteria can be complemented by a lead scoring system. This accelerates the sales segmentation process by integrating user behavior that suggests upsell-readiness. According to MarketingSherpa, organizations that use lead scoring see a 77 percent lift in their lead generation ROI!

The caveat to this PQL recipe is that the majority of today’s leading lead scoring technologies don’t take into account the right combination of data points within a single platform. For example, Marketo can calculate a lead score based on activity such as web page visits, downloads, email opens and offer responses. Once a user identifies demographic information in a lead form (such as revenue, job title, industry), this information is combined to deliver a score that indicates a user’s propensity to purchase and is qualified as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).

If you try to map these data points to the freemium lead funnel we outlined above, you’ll quickly realize that these “lead score” indicators are lacking the vital data points used in a PQL model. The most imperative of these being – product engagement. To get this recipe right, the PQL must be enriched by a combination of engagement, behavioral and demographic data.

Distinctly identifying the composition of your PQL, how it will be measured and the corresponding data points will catapult your ability to develop a seamless and self-funding PQL engine.

Step Three: PQL + Revenue= Team Alignment

Tying PQL to a revenue target will reveal an unparalleled level of team alignment. With cross-selling, up-selling and messaging being dependent upon feature engagement – all teams are equally vested in the success of the product. This is the next evolution of lead qualification. Integrating marketing, sales and product data to enable data-driven decisions and goals based on company revenue targets.

“Typically, the product and engineering teams don’t have goals tied to revenue which bisects a team into revenue generating components (sales and marketing) and cost centers (eng and product),” writes Tomasz Tunguz. “PQLs pull product and engineering into the fray. Everyone in the company has the same goal.”

After identifying what a PQL looks like in your organization and how it will be measured, you’ll realize a heightened collaboration between departments to drive PQLs further into the adoption cycle. According to Forrester, “74 percent of businesses say they want to be data-driven, but only 29 percent say they’re good at connecting analytics to actions.”

The PQL model enables teams to monitor engagement with new features or changes and instantly tie those actions to realized ROI across the entire organization. Taking these fundamental steps will set you on a trajectory for joining the ranks of organizations that are thriving on a booming freemium model, fueled by the PQL.

When someone lands on your blog and signs up for your email list, they’re said to have converted from your owned media.

But what about that funny piece you wrote on BuzzFeed, or that awesome Facebook post that came from a spontaneous idea?

How will you nurture leads from discovery to conversion when the content lies beyond the realm of your control?

The puzzle becomes especially difficult to crack when you are dealing with pricey B2B or SaaS products such as CRM, ERP, or subscription services, which frequently take months to consider and try out, let alone buy.

So how do you take control of content that lives outside your blog or website and present it at the right moment to customers who are at the appropriate points along your marketing funnel?

Where is the lag?

In an attempt to find widespread inefficiencies and insufficiencies in current web-based conversion practices by SaaS providers, I poked around the websites of a few ERP/CRM products and landed on Maximizer (disclaimer: random choice, no professional relationship).

Maximizer is an Enterprise CRM Software that’s apparently been using the most tried and tested methods of content marketing. From press releases to reviews, to webinars and case studies, they have been there and done that.

However, they need to take their conversion attempts a step further to leave a better imprint on people’s minds and convert leads to customers.

• For starters, they are missing out on retargeting. I spent considerable time on their website, read a few blog posts. I even went through some of their press releases and reviews on third party sites. Despite that, I failed to see their ads after leaving their website.
• A few minutes into their website, I started wondering why there’s no ubiquitous “Wanna chat?” pop-up or why they’ve managed a paltry 2 reviews on their Facebook page despite claiming to have over 120,000 customers. Whether the visitor is on your site or on your social media page, one on one conversations are extremely important to help them take the final leap to become customers.

Obviously, if you want your leads to convert after reading and interacting with your content, you need to do much more than Maximizer is doing.

There are dozens of tools, tactics and techniques out there that help you gain and keep the attention of your readers that bit longer. When each second is precious and when you are investing a significant amount of resources into producing content, there’s no way you can ignore these tools.

Here are 4 uncommon ways to nurture your leads with personalization and improve your “discovery to conversion” equation:

1. Personalize your content recommendations

Personalized and timely content recommendations are one of the most powerful ways to make your leads stay longer on your website and recall your brand at crucial times. Bloggers and large content publishers vouch by predictive recommendations for awareness, reach and engagement (as opposed to ads).

See how content recommendations work on Inc. They (and many other media publishers) show recent/popular articles on the right-hand side.

In addition, a small pop-up with a link to another article that piques your interest appears on the bottom right, as you scroll down and reach the bottom of the post. This pop-up works nicely to re-attract the reader’s attention, just as it is running out.

I’ve no doubt you’ve seen this in action somewhere – and fallen prey to it too!

Image Source: Inc

While these pop-ups work wonders to keep readers on your site, don’t forget that much of your content lives outside your own website or blog. And that may often include your best pieces.

If you are a regular contributor to a third party media site or blog, your only hope for leading readers from there to your own site is through a link within the article or from your byline, which is hoping against hope. Links aren’t as attention-grabbing as – and take up much less screen space than – a pop-up.

What you normally do to circumvent this problem is share your articles and posts on social media, which again are high on the “hope” factor that someone will re-share (and associate you with the content, in case they happen to remember you by the time you consume it).

The middle way out, which helps you associate your content as well as brand with content either created by others and shared by you, or created by you on platforms you don’t own, is to use a recommendation tool like Start A Fire, which helps you draw leads to your website from all the content you share or curate.

You can add up to 5 other links, which show up along with your face/logo, in the familiar pop-up box at the bottom right, when someone clicks through to the main link that you’ve shared.

This way, there is less chance they’ll forget you’re the one who shared the link in the first place and more chance they’ll click on the other links you’ve shared once they finish reading that particular post.

Here’s an old-fashioned before-after picture of how pop-up content recommendation work:

Whoever thought you could milk more out of links shared on social media, or pop-up boxes for that matter?

2. Amp up your retargeting on social media

It’s annoying.

It’s expensive.

It works.

Retargeting works on the principle of effective frequency, i.e. the exposure of your audience to your message must range between inadequate and wasteful. Thomas Smith, author of Successful Advertising, got it right way back in 1885.

If you want to create a leak-proof sales funnel, make sure your customers see your ads on all relevant sites, if they ever happen to leave your site without buying (or subscribing, or downloading).

Baremetrics used retargeting to acquire customers for as little as $6 on Facebook and $21 with banner ads. Nothing exceptional, you might think, until you realize that a single customer is worth $650 to them. That isn’t exceptional, that is phenomenal!

Baremetrics caters to startups and ecommerce companies, so it was natural for them to advertise on websites that offered startup advice, marketing tips, etc. That is a highly targeted approach considering Baremetrics is a SaaS-based analytics tool that focuses on revenue and customer growth metrics.

Crazy Egg has been doing something similar for a long time, but their approach is a bit different. What makes their retargeting campaign equally effective is that they follow you almost everywhere for a few days, and then for months on certain websites, until you are forced to consider their tool.

Image Source: Psychology Today

Now, both of the above examples apply to people who visit your website. What about targeting those folks who see your content but have never been to your website?

That’s where social network-specific retargeting comes to the rescue. For instance, Facebook remarketing ads allow you to define an audience based on their interaction with your content. So, if someone liked a page, post or video that you promoted, you can start serving them targeted ads the next time they get on Facebook.

Of course, you can target customers or visitors to your site or app by including them in a “Custom Audience” on Facebook. What’s more, even if someone hasn’t visited your page or website or seen your content, but share similar interests and characteristics, you can reach them on Facebook with the “Lookalike Audience” feature.

“Retargeting” can be taken to mean not only users who’ve engaged with your content, but any content in your industry. A friend started getting a tea company’s ads in her feed five minutes after she looked up a competitor:

While you can’t directly target all of your competitors’ fans on Facebook, you can target people who have “expressed an interest in or Liked a page related to” a specific business using the “Interests” field.

With a little bit of testing and tweaking, you can create an ideal retargeting campaign for any of your owned digital properties. You just need to understand your audience’s content taste and consumption habits to make your campaign a success. Repeated exposure will ensure your leads start converting.

Pro Tip: While you’re at it, also include social proof in the form of details of your current customers in your retargeting campaigns. Smiling faces of happy customers might just tilt the balance in your favor.

Grammarly’s remarketing campaign on Facebook shows you all your friends who like Grammarly on top of the ad, which itself has has over 1600 likes and 130 shares. Not bad at all for a subscription service provider!

3. Have more one-to-one conversations

When Facebook introduced page messaging for businesses, it opened many doors for one-to-one conversations. You can not only respond quickly to customers’ queries, but also earn badges like “Very responsive to messages” that speak volumes about your prompt services.

One-to-one conversations can be the fastest way to close deals, even better than emails.

Here’s another example from a friend’s conversation with a club and the transaction was finalized within 30 minutes. Needless to say, the chat below is not typical of a B2B conversations, but the idea is to show how being prompt on social media can work in your favor:

Don’t waste any time striking up a conversation with newly-discovered leads or those who’ve engaged with your brand on social media. Make it a point to introduce yourself and your company to new followers of your brand (even if it means using those annoying DMs):

If you’re a B2B enterprise or large organization aiming to personalize the experience for your leads and be everywhere (multiple digital platforms) at the same time, without having a sales team tuned in and listening with flashing beacons on their heads, you need to rely on a bit of automation.

And just like Start A Fire, there’s another “solution to a solution” tool that comes to the rescue, LiveAgent. This multichannel helpdesk and live chat tool allows you to connect with visitors in real time and get a head start in converting them to customers. It doubles up as a customer service agent by automatically scanning multiple email accounts and sorting emails into pre-defined departments.

LiveAgent not only works with your website and email provider, but also social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It can monitor Facebook Messenger chats and convert wall messages into tickets, which can then be dealt with by your support team in the same way as email, chat or tweets.

Finally, LiveAgent integrates with popular CMS, CRM, ecommerce, collaboration and billing platforms. Crucial, considering your customers are already more than half-way through their purchase process before their first commercial interaction with a vendor, and over a quarter of your competition is getting back to them within five minutes.

The automation part? Your customer care team has help from chatbots that are able to answer common questions, pull up order details, and so on.

4. Give your influencers leeway

If you are using Fiverr or Famebit for your influencer campaigns, you can stop reading here; they’re going to do what they want anyway.

Businesses that aim to develop a long-term relationship with their influencers need to get them not just interested, but deeply involved in your product, so that they engage with your leads using any means they might have in their content marketing arsenal.

First, build trust with the influencers that you work with. Trusting them with your brand’s messaging, voice and personality is the best way to show that you respect them.

Treat them as creative partners and give them the liberty to take the campaign in the direction they want. You may give your final inputs in order to make sure your core offering isn’t misinterpreted, but make sure you don’t control the flow of the campaign too tightly.

A lot of influencers try different methods to keep their followers interested, and most of the time, intuitively know what’s best for their audience.

For instance, Emma from WhispersRed uses the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Median Response) technique to unbox an online order of cosmetics. The video has heavy tapping, crinkles, lid tapping, glass tapping, and lots of whispering.

It might sound like mumbo jumbo to a typical audience, but has over 65,000 views and 120 comments to its credit. As a brand, you might not want to throw valuable marketing dollars at associating unproven therapies with your product, but believe it or not, just like your spouse, you never really know your customers.

In another example, Swanson Health Products, who sell vitamins and supplements, got “Chocolate Covered Katie” to share a chocolate cake recipe on their blog.

Image Source: Chocolate Covered Katie

Chocolate cake and health supplements make for an unlikely combination, but Swanson gets a lot of leverage by inviting guest bloggers to create content for them on linearly related topics.

So trust your influencers. They are experts in their field and have a lot of experience in what will work with their audience. Just give them the background on your brand and the context of the campaign along with some guidelines, and let them unleash their creative genius to create a post or video of their choice.

Crowdtap’s “State of Influencer Marketing” report found that 77 percent of influencers think creative freedom is the most important factor that encourages them to build up a long-term relationship with brands.

Image Source: Crowdtap

The trick is to keep the interaction going with your influencers on a regular basis, and keep increasing the value they get out of your product. SEMrush has been doing just that – with a broader audience as well as affiliates – for some time now. They proactively reach out to industry experts, bloggers, and the like, and give out free trials to their communities and readers too. I am one such lucky recipient of their Guru account.

What sort of results are they getting? Rishi Lakhani wrote an Ultimate Guide that’s probably more comprehensive than their own documentation. Affiliate Anil Agrawal not only wrote a long, “unbiased” review but also went ahead and convinced his readers to try SEMrush by comparing it favorably with competing offerings.

Image Source: Bloggers Passion

Pro tip: Allow your influencers to be fully transparent. For example, if a reviewer or affiliate is allowed to be forthcoming about special prices or offers, they have that extra “authority” needed to convince undecided customers.

Over to you

That’s it folks! I seriously hope you can figure out how variations of the best practices, methods and tools we discussed here work for you.

While we started with a lackluster example that showed us what isn’t enough to drive visitors towards conversions, there’s no doubt that retargeting, content recommendations, timely personal conversations, and win-win influencer partnerships are all really good ways to nurture those leads.

There are 450 million active users on LinkedIn. And I swear half of them want to take me out for coffee. I get these requests on a regular basis and I always find it strange. Mostly because I do not know most of the senders. It is akin to a stranger on the street asking, "Hey, how about a quick latte?"

I do not want to be rude. But no, I am not interested in getting a latte to "get to know each other." And I am not interested in meeting just for the sake of meeting. I am sure that you are a terrific person, but I just do not have time. And neither do you actually.

This type of "empty networking" might feel productive at the moment you hit send. But it will ultimately leave you right where you started — no closer to making a connection or your real goals.

Anyone doing important work does not have time for endless glad-handing. That is because it rarely adds value. It is more about trying to find something to do than knowing exactly what you should be doing.

Of course, there is value in building a meaningful network of trusted colleagues and advisors. But when I am struggling with a particular issue, I rarely find the solution with someone who is more or less a stranger. I am more likely to turn to my established network — mentors, former colleagues, and the team at Aha! And if I need some expert advice that no one I know has, I look to these individuals to recommend people in their network to me. I then ask for a warm introduction.

Building a meaningful network is not about attending unstructured industry mixers or wracking up the most LinkedIn connections. It requires relationships — and those take hard work, dedication, and time.

These types of relationships are typically developed with people that have proven to be dependable. And it often takes years to forge those lasting bonds and fortify mutual trust. However, if you put in the effort to go deep — past random connections — you will find valuable people you already know who are anxious to help when you ask.

Here is how:

Be purpose-filled

When you need to ask for help, put some thought behind the ask. Requests should be clear, meaningful, and directed at the right person whom you know or a trusted connection knows. Sending a random request to a random person will likely get you ignored or marked as spam.

Abandon ego

You may think that you need to embellish achievements, couch requests, or act bullishly to build your network. How is that helping anyone? At Aha!, one of our key values is open, honest communication. We develop meaningful relationships as a result. Take this approach and you will naturally develop close connections.

Invest in colleagues

Too often we look outside our organization for growth when our greatest assets are the people we work with daily. Get to know your colleagues. Swap ideas, resources, and weekend stories. Prove to them that you are a hard worker. Over time, you will develop lasting bonds. So when you do need a favor some day, it will be an easy ask.

Act quickly

If you reach out to someone for help and they respond, get back to them right away. Do not schedule a lunch or coffee later — that only delays deepening the relationship. Or, if you are on the receiving end of a request that you cannot help with, quickly let the asker know so they can go elsewhere. Either way, they will appreciate your responsiveness and think of you in the future.

Reciprocate

Look for useful ways to help the people you work with or who have helped you in the past. Could they benefit from an introduction or some transparent feedback? Maybe there is a new opportunity you can share? Remember that building a strong network goes both ways — you have to invest to get back.

I am sure I would enjoy meeting with you. You probably have a lot to bring to the conversation. But I can bet that we both have more productive things to do.

Do you think networking is still important for business?

SEE ALSO: A master networker shares his top 20 networking tips

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The story of Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter Steve Jobs claimed wasn't his

Have you been using emails to reach your prospects? If so, what sort of response have you seen? Chances are, many of your emails go unanswered. Business owners and CEOs are busy people with a steady stream of incoming emails. If you can’t engage them quickly, they’ll delete your before they even read what you have to say.

The majority of salespeople make the same prospecting email mistakes, so they never even reach their target customers. But don’t give up on prospecting emails just yet! When done right, email prospecting can actually be a successful way to reach high-level prospects. Next time you write a prospecting email, remember the following six keys to prospecting emails that get a response:

1. Make it personal.

If prospects think your email is a boilerplate message that’s been copied and pasted to dozens of recipients, it will be deleted in a matter of seconds. In order to engage prospects, make your message hyper-specific to their world. Show them you’ve done your homework. Demonstrate your expertise about them, their organization, and even some of the challenges they’re facing.

Watch this video to learn more about personalized sales emails:

2. Avoid promotional subject lines.

Most people today check their email on their smartphones—which means they’ll decide whether to open your message or delete it based on just your name, the subject line, and the first few words of your sales email. Sales-y subject lines are a surefire way get your emails deleted. Instead, try using a short line that mentions the prospect’s company name.

3. Keep it short.

What’s your actual goal in sending a prospecting email? It shouldn’t be to educate the recipient or to make a sale. Rather, you’re just looking to get a response and start a conversation. While long emails will be quickly deleted—no matter how engaging the content—an email of five sentences or fewer is likely to engage your prospect and elicit a response.

4. Offer value.

Most prospects believe salespeople are always looking to take from them—so stand out by being someone who gives value instead. Offer to send them something they’ll find useful, or provide helpful feedback on their company. Free assessments, relevant articles, e-books, and special reports are just a few examples of value-adding gifts you can offer to a prospect.

5. End with a hook.

Closing an email by saying, “Let me know if I can ever be helpful,” simply isn’t going to elicit a response. Never end your prospecting emails with a statement. Instead, close with an open-ended question that’s easy to answer. Try asking, “Did any of these challenges ring true to you?” or even “Where should I send my free assessment?” A simple question that quickly gets to the point is a great way to engage your prospect in a conversation.

6. Stop using formal language.

This is a personalized email—not a college essay. Omit buzzwords, fancy language, and “sirs” or “madams.” Instead, write the same way you talk. This will convey that you’re a real human being with something of value you’d like to share.

Which of these six keys did you find most helpful for writing prospecting emails that actually get a response? Share your thoughts in the comments below. For more useful tips on engaging prospects, check out this special report on three closing questions you must ask to close the sale.

When it comes to marketing and leveraging the influence of social media, businesses are often inhibited by preconceptions and narrow thinking. One example is the notion that social media marketing is the sole preserve of B2C sectors, for example, which often deters inexperienced firms in B2B markets from embracing this unique and accessible channel.

In fact, social media marketing is something that can also serve as an impactful tool for businesses across a range of B2B sectors. This is particularly true in the manufacturing industry, where an estimated 85% of marketers cited content and social marketing drives as key drivers of sales in 2015.

Social platforms including LinkedIn and YouTube were also referenced as increasingly influential resources, particularly in relation to the effective sharing and distribution of content.

3 Ways in Which Manufacturers and Product Managers Can Harness Social Media

This is an encouraging trend, and one which suggests that the manufacturers and product managers that have leveraged social media have achieved positive and measurable results. This is something that less knowledgeable or experienced brands within the manufacturing sector can learn from, as they harness the reach and influence of social channels to drive sales and brand awareness.

With this in mind, here are three effective ways in which you can successfully leverage social media for the good of your brand: –

Make Facebook and LinkedIn the Focal Points of your Social Marketing Strategy

While all businesses should look to develop an integrated and tailored social profile (in order to effectively target customer segments), this is particularly important in the manufacturing sector. Whether you produce your own products and sell directly to consumers or are hoping to engage B2B clients, you will need to choose a viable range of channels that provides a showcase for your ranges and markets them appropriately.

In terms of core elements, you need to integrate Facebook and LinkedIn at the heart of your social marketing strategy. Facebook offers you instant access to a user base in excess of one billion, so creating a company profile and using this to highlight products and innovations provides tremendous reach. This can be also be used to integrate alternative marketing tactics, primarily by sharing blog posts, details of product launches and any innovative promotional campaigns aimed at optimising sales conversions.

While Facebook offers you access to a huge, global audience, however, you will need to ensure that you deliver the most relevant and appealing content to engage individuals. This requires a core understanding of your client and consumer base and the reasons that they use the platform, with an estimated 49% of individuals claiming that they ‘like’ a Facebook page in order to support a particular brand.

For B2B manufacturers, LinkedIn is another powerful and effective platform. This site is far more stream-lined and professional in its nature than Facebook, which in turn offers access to potential partners and an entry point into long-term, client relationships. By registering a company page here, you can leverage LinkedIn’s blogging facility to share informative and insightful content that establishes your service as a thought leader.

This will improve your chances of forging mutually beneficial contacts and securing lucrative B2B orders in the future.

Embrace Video and Broadcast on YouTube

Of course, rich media plays a central role in any successful social and content marketing campaign, as diverse publications are far more likely to engage customers and clients alike. When targeting B2B clients, however, it is also important to note that video is far more impactful than still imagery and capable of driving 62% more engagement on average.

So while your B2B manufacturing outlet can still use imagery to drive social conversations (particularly when targeting female-orientated clients or markets through Pinterest), you should undoubtedly focus the majority of your attention on video marketing.

One of the best ways for manufacturers to capitalise on this trend is to broadcast on YouTube, as this platform currently boasts over one billion unique users and enables brands to establish their own, independent channels. This can then be used to share varied by impactful content, from product training videos and behind-the-scenes the scenes footage of the manufacturing process. This offers value and information to B2B clients, while helping to humanise your operation and cultivate a deeper relationship.

Both B2B and B2C manufacturers can also leverage video to share brand and product narratives, while also capturing compelling testimonials from former customers and clients.

Platforms such as YouTube are also powerful as they allow you to host content directly on the website and embed it on your own website, enhancing your own landing page loading times and the quality of the videos in question.

Empower Followers, Customers and Clients as Social Contributors

One of the biggest concerns that manufacturers about social media marketing is their ability to consistently produce engaging content. While this can be a particularly significant challenge for B2B brands, however, the conversational and interactive nature of social media actively enables manufacturers to empower their follows as key contributors of insight and content.

One of the best examples of this was in evidence recently, as food manufacturing brand Hampton Creek connected with followers through Twitter and encouraged them to share tricks for recycling and reusing empty jars. This is a direct and fun way of engaging followers, while subtly advertising products, sustainable manufacturing techniques and an overarching brand.

Twitter is central to this process, whether you are interacting with followers, gathering real-time insight or attempting to drive efficient, after-sales service. In fact, Twitter helped brands to re-imagine the nature of customer services, which went from being a costly and unyielding business element to a key marketing channel and ‘a scalable way’ to delight consumers.

Regardless of how you engage your customer or client base through social media and the Twitter platform, however, the key is to create real-time interaction and an organic channel through which to market your products. This will help to both generate fresh and exciting content for your social profile and optimise the ROI on your total marketing spend.

As 2016 winds down, sales and marketing teams around the world start to plan for their 2017 calendar year. It’s going to be an exciting year because buyers are firmly in charge of how they do business with your company and once you understand the ramifications for this fundamental shift, you can reach them with a sales strategy that will drive success. Be fearless in 2017 and align your sales effort to influence them throughout the process.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

The Android platform captured a record 88% of the 375 million new smartphones shipped worldwide in Q3 2016, according to a new report from Strategy Analytics.

Android’s growth in new smartphones was largely driven by greater smartphone adoption in India, Africa, and the Middle East, where Apple’s competing iOS platform has little market penetration.

Android’s market share growth will continue in the near term thanks to the device manufacturers that produce low-cost Android phones for these markets, Strategy Analytics predicted. Apple has yet to manufacture an iPhone at a price point that can draw mass appeal in these markets, and emerging platforms like Tizen don’t have enough support from device manufacturers and app developers to put a dent in Android’s share, the report explained.

However, the report noted that very few of the hundreds of smartphone manufacturers that leverage Android make any money, and Google’s new Pixel smartphone is set to compete with Android devices from other high-end manufacturers. In the long term, these factors could drive device manufacturers to give more serious consideration to some of the emerging platforms. As consumers in emerging markets gain more disposable income though, it could create more opportunities for low-cost manufacturers to sell more profitable Android devices in these markets, which would help cement Android’s dominance in these markets.

The global smartphone market is expected to slow considerably over the next few years. Despite a record-setting holiday quarter, 2015 was likely the last year of double-digit growth for smartphone shipments.

Mature markets were at the heart of this year’s deceleration. Adoption has reached new highs in key markets in the United States, Europe, and China. The pool of first-time buyers in these countries is shrinking rapidly, and sales are now primarily coming from phone upgrades.

Meanwhile, emerging markets will continue to see robust shipment growth. India and Indonesia, in particular, will help fuel a large share of the shipments growth within the global smartphone market over the next few years.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on smartphones by country that forecasts the market through 2021 to reflect slower, stabilizing growth in the long term.

Here are some key points from the report:

• The global smartphone market is still growing at a steady pace due to more widespread adoption in emerging markets. We estimate the global market will hit about 2.1 billion units shipped in 2021.
• Shipments growth over the past few years has been driven by the falling price of smartphones, which has made handsets more accessible in emerging markets. The average selling price of a smartphone in India nearly halved between 2010 and 2015.
• With relatively low smartphone penetration, we forecast Indian smartphone shipments to grow rapidly over the next five years. Nevertheless, India has a long way to go before it surpasses China as the world’s leading market for smart handsets. India is estimated to account for roughly 10% of the global smartphone market in 2016, considerably less than China’s 30% share.
• The global platform wars are over, even as smartphone adoption continues to rise across various markets worldwide. Android and iOS are estimated to account for 97.3% of global platform market share in 2015, compared to 96.3% last year.
• Apple closed the year with another strong quarter on the back of its iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus launches. Still, the vendor saw a slight decline in YoY growth of its share of the market in the face of stiff competition from Samsung and Chinese vendors such as Huawei.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts global smartphone shipments through 2021.
• Explores why India is the next high-growth smartphone market.
• Breaks down the global smartphone platform wars.
• Discusses smartphone vendor performance market share.

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

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the smartphone market.

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Conversion optimization is a little different if you’re in B2B.

Some of the same underlying principles apply, but because of the inherent differences in buying decisions and sales cycles, pulling B2C optimization practices straight from the book might be a bad idea.

You’ll still need to do the same types of conversion research, persona building, and experimentation that is common across conversion optimization, but let’s talk a bit about how and why B2B is different.

Note: this article is heavily based on our great course with Bill Leake, CEO of Apogee Results. It’s called Optimizing for B2B. Check it out at ConversionXL Institute.

Why is Optimizing for B2B Different?

There are a few things that make optimizing for B2B a different beast:

• The sales cycle is usually longer
• More people tend to be involved in buying decisions
• It’s often a higher purchase price (or at least a more complex sale)

The above points are unique but all tie back to the fact that, in B2B, you’re more closely working with a sales team.

Sales teams cost money, and of course, they also deliver another layer of organizational complexity. So instead of simply increasing the volume of leads on a landing page, you’re suddenly also supposed to factor in quality of leads, lifetime value, sales productivity, etc.

So while many usability heuristics remain the same in B2B website design and functionality, much of what goes into lead gen, sales, and analysis is different.

Think about it this way: in B2B, sometimes optimizing means aiming for less leads. When would you ever try to produce less sales in B2C eCommerce? But because of the human costs of a sales team, it makes sense to optimize for quality in B2B.

Longer Sales Cycles and Micro-Conversions

In our ConversionXL Institute course, Bill Leake explained the differences between B2B and B2C sales cycles:

Bill Leake:
“The conversion that occurs on the website may be a very early conversion and may still be many, many months and sometimes years ahead of the sale. So, you have to approach it in a different way. It’s almost like, in some ways, the first date of something that’s leading into a relationship.

So, be thinking about the conversion experience, more as a process, rather than a one and done.

In B2B, it’s often far more complex in terms of the content marketing for conversion than B2C. In B2C, you might have thousands, if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of SKUs. So, you have lots and lots of products and that brings complexity.

But in B2B, you’re often dealing with fewer products, but you not only need to take into account the persona of the person coming to your website, but where they are in the customer journey.”

So while we talk about not optimizing for micro-conversions, in B2B it becomes more important, at least to account for them. In other words, you’ll answer questions like:

• Where in the buyer journey is the person that downloads [X] whitepaper?
• Do we get a higher lead value from those who fill out a form or those who contact sales?
• What types of micro-conversions produce the highest lead values? To what points in the customer journey do they correspond?

What Are Your Goals, and What Are Your Metrics?

Since the sales process is more complex, there tend to be more people in the room for a purchasing decision. There are more conversations around buying.

When you want to buy a pair of jeans from Bonobos, you often don’t need much of a nudge. Sure, you still need to be reached with the right message at the right time, but the buyer journey is much less complicated than a complex B2B purchase.

It’s something that people deliberate upon. They ask and negotiate budgets for technology or corporate development.

But when they come to your site, they could be at any given stage:

• They might be looking to buy.
• They may have been a customer before.
• They may be coming to research and see if it’s something they need.
• They may have just stumbled across it accidentally.

In order to maximize the value of your website, you need to define goals for each of these stages and how you can track them across the purchasing journey.

Typically, the big goal is leads (can mean many things). But a lot goes into a good quality lead, and there are different stages of measurement. Generally, as a marketer, you’re focusing on compiling MQLs (marketing qualified leads). What this means depends on the company, but it can take into account different metrics like pathing, time on site, video engagement, company size, role, etc. So the process in B2B looks a bit like this (simplified):

Visitor → MQL → SQL → customer

For further reading on B2B goals and measurement, check out this article on better measuring lead generation.

Account-Based Marketing

Something else unique in B2B is what’s known as Account-Based Marketing. As Bill Leake explained:

Bill Leake:

“The other thing that you typically want to look at as well in many B2B cases, some goals for account-based marketing. Because you might have four different folks of the company who hit your website at different places.

So if a sale is worth six figures to you or more and you see that somebody from IBM is on your website, you’ll probably spend a lot more time or you should spend more time trying to figure out who they are and what they were doing, than if you’re running a large retail website and some random person from Hotmail.com or AOL.com hits your site.

There you want to look at things in clumps and aggregates. But in an account-based marketing thing, you might even want to throw up some things like Demandbase on the high end to LeadLander on the low end that do help you resolve IP addresses into companies, so you know which companies hit your website.

If they spent a certain amount of time, figure out from list purchases or your house list, “Who else do we know at that place?” Then, actually have some outbound that cascades into that company based on the inbound.”

In any case, B2B optimization starts with building and understanding personas. Who is your ideal customer profile? How do they buy? What content and information do they like?

Building Personas

A big part of B2B mastery is understanding and building buyer personas.

Because of the complexity of decision making that is often involved, and the fact that many people are in the discussion of whether or not to buy, it’s tough to map out which personas you should be targeting.

It’s just as hard, if not more so, to map out where these personas are in the customer journey and what type of content to serve them depending on the stage.

Personas should be nothing new to our audience, but if you want to brush up, here’s an article (and if you want extra credit, take our Rigorous User Personas course in the Institute).

Image Source

Cross reference the personas you’ve created with your historical customers as well as who you want to be your customers. Try to analyze the top 10% of clients you’d like, and figure out what they have in common.

Also, look into those that evangelize your company, your top referrers. What do they have in common?

In addition, there may be multiple personas you need to address with different campaigns and pages. For instance, ConversionXL Institute has a variety of personas, both in-house and agencies. Employees and managers. We approach each sale with a different messaging strategy.

From there, you must optimize your content.

Optimizing Your Content

Most B2B sites are multi-purpose vehicles.

Historically, lots of B2B sites have acted as big brochures. People’s attention spans tend to be getting shorter though, and they want content that’s easier to consume.

Image Source

Depending on your personas and sales process, your content could be a few different things:

• Long form content has plenty of benefits, like thought leadership, SEO traffic, and authority building pieces.
• Short form can be good too, especially for top of funnel content and concise product-based content.
• Webinars perform particularly well in a B2B context. You can also tease out more information from these and better qualify leads for your sales team.
• Whitepapers are a classic. There are even new ways of optimizing and testing whitepaper content.
• Videos are great, and often underplayed in the B2B context.

You get the point – there are lots of different approaches to content in B2B.

The main thing is to align your content with your customer personas as well as where they are in the customer journey – how ready are they to purchase? Then you create your content with that in mind, and optimize the call to action based on the presumed and desired intent at that stage…

Optimizing CTAs

What are you trying to sell? How many touch points do you need? Web-based sale or phone call?

Some sites, like Optimizely, prioritize the demo:

Others, like Oracle, want you to call their sales team right away:

And still more sites (usually lower purchase prices), let you jump in with a free trial, or simply let you purchase on the site. VWO here:

The CTA on a B2B site is where the money is to be made; it’s what the sale is predicated on. Bill Leake explains very well the different strategies you can use:

Bill Leake:

“Our client had a really, really strong tech team, and when they got somebody signed up for their demo, the thing sold itself. They converted like 60% of demos into customers once the demo was activated.

So for us, in that case, the right answer was get them into the demo. Make it as easy as possible to the demo and the demo sells itself. There are lots of pieces of software out there where you don’t want them to go anywhere near the demo, because it’s fugly, it doesn’t work, or it breaks, or it doesn’t showcase, or there are a bunch of other questions people are going to have.

So it’s really understanding what do we have to work with today, what are we gonna have to work with next quarter. One of the things you have to be thinking through all the time is are we still working with the best call to action. Sometimes it’s a phone call.

Amazingly enough, most people in conversion have historically focused on getting the web form. If you’re in B2B or any high dollar sale, you know what, when you have a human talking to a human, if you’ve got the right team, close rates go up, and attachment and upsell rates go up. So you typically walk people into a more lucrative higher margin sale.

Dell computers knew that for years.

Dell computer would have teaser items that were cheap to get someone called in, and the stuff that got added to their shopping cart wasn’t so cheap. And then a lot of margin got added to the order. Online it’s fairly easy to people to cost compare and kind of strip all the margin out of orders.

Sometimes you’re optimizing for a phone call, and sometimes make it clear that this offer is only available if you call.”

In addition, Bill explained, people tend to over optimize for email list subscribers without qualifying the leads. If you have a super compelling offer for your email list, and you don’t require qualifying fields, you’ll tend to get a lot of leads but a low ratio of qualified leads.

This doesn’t sound like a problem until your analyst goes in and tries to segment leads and quantify your marketing efforts. It’s hard work at that point.

Using Dynamic Content

Your landing pages need to be hyper-specific to your customer persona. If not, people don’t take leaps of faith – the landing page needs to talk to their specific problems.

This isn’t specific to B2B – you should always align your pages with your customers’ expectations. But B2B customers tend to exhibit more heterogeneity because of the problem of multiple buyers and roles. As Scott Brinker said in Search Engine Land:

Scott Brinker:

“In B2B, where respondents are more risk aware, they’re even less comfortable making leaps of assumption. If your landing page doesn’t specifically call out the issue they were searching for—or fulfill a promise you dangled in the ad copy—they’re more likely to abandon you and go in search of a stronger “information scent” elsewhere.”

Don’t Forget Emotions

Remember that whether you’re selling to businesses or consumers, the end buyer is always human, and humans are never totally rational. In fact, B2B buyers tend to be specifically risk averse, as Scott Brinker outlined in Search Engine Land:

Scott Brinker:

“See, if I buy a new TV and then realize a couple of months later that I made a bad choice, the consequences are limited. I’m disappointed, and my wife might make a few wise remarks, but we move on. However, if I’m a key decision-maker for a new enterprise HR system—and then several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars later it becomes clear that we made a disastrous decision—I can suffer real damage to my career.”

Lead Types: How Much Info Should You Collect?

There’s a saying in software development that applies to B2B lead gen: do you want it fast, good, or cheap?

Cheaper leads tend not to be as qualified, and if it’s more expensive, it’s probably that there are either more (easier to sift through for cheaper price points) or they’re higher quality.

Anyway, this is a sales and operations decision based your product and market. Outside the scope of this article.

What is inside the scope of this article, though, is how you collect and vet inbound leads based on what your company decides.

If you have a multi-tier sales engine where, if you have any contact info, they can be contacted, you can have more leads. Usually, though, you want to have as much information as possible on your leads without sacrificing too much on the quantity side of things.

One possible way of bridging the gap between poor lead quality and high-friction forms is progressive profiling. Each time your prospect fills out a new form, you collect additional information, piece-by-piece – instead of a daunting form asking for everything all at once.

Image Source

Lead Scoring and Prioritization

In B2B, it’s not simply “they converted; we’re done.”

After someone fills out a form, or attends a webinar, or whatever, how do you determine whether this person is an MQL to be passed onto the sales team? How do you score them and prioritize them?

Lead scoring is complicated. Like any model, it’s probably not going to completely align with what is capital T True. But a good model will definitely help you waste less time on the sales front and optimize your approach on the marketing front.

Lead scoring also tends to be quite unique to your business, though there do tend to be common correlative indicators of lead quality.

Conclusion

This article is only a short outline of B2B optimization and the ways it differs from more transactional B2C optimization. Of course, the devil is in the details and it’s all about execution; you can read about long term sales cycles, building personas, and lead scoring, but there’s a lot of work that goes into each of those that is specific to your own business.

The one takeaway here is probably that B2B sales cycles are different. The higher the cost of the item, the more inherent friction there is as well as complexity. Your website strategy has to reflect that, as well as take into account the costs and efficiency of a human sales force. It’s not easy.

You can’t be a trusted advisor and a consultative salesperson and also be a marshmallow. You can’t be your dream client’s peer and be fearful of them at the same time.

For all the talk about the stereotypical salesperson being a self-oriented brute, the reality is that pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. The odds are greater that you are too soft.

The American Salesperson has been wussified. The evidence is in the standard excuses:

• I Hate Cold Calling: I know. You are never supposed to interrupt your prospective client. You are supposed to connect with them on social and try to move the relationship offline without actually making an ask of any kind. You’re supposed to generate enough trust online that your prospective clients ask you to meet. This soft, passive approach works sometimes… just not often enough or fast enough. If you can’t pick up the phone and schedule an appointment, you are no one’s peer. You’re simply afraid of your prospective clients.
• Marketing Generates Opportunities: Marketing is supposed to generate your leads for you. You are supposed to be getting everything you need to make your number through inbound. You are a value creator, with talents too valuable to be wasted on prospecting. If you can’t get your hands dirty prospecting, you are surely no hunter. You are simply an order-taker.
• Someone Else Should Do My Prospecting: You need an SDR to schedule your appointments for you. Or a BDR. Or some other role that has been sliced out of the role of salesperson. Sales is about opportunity creation as much as it is opportunity capture. If you don’t like prospecting, you don’t like sales. How can you be a rainmaker if you can’t make it rain?
• Never Be Closing: Wait for your buyer to ask you to take the next step when they are ready. You are only there to serve them on their buying journey, even if that means they take way too long to make that journey, and even if they are hurting themselves by not acting with the urgency they should. The thing is, a trusted advisor doesn’t allow their client to be harmed because they can’t ask them to make the commitments they need to make. If you can’t ask, you aren’t selling, and you aren’t serving your prospective client.
• Don’t Pitch: Never pitch your prospects. They aren’t interested in you, your company, or your solution. No matter how much your prospective client needs what you sell, don’t show them how you can help until they decide they’re ready. If you are going to be a peer, you better have ideas you believe in so strongly that you propose them before your prospective client suggests they have a need. If you don’t have the next idea, you are irrelevant. And how, pray tell, is your dream client supposed to know you have the next idea? Pitch them.
• Don’t Be Salesy. In fact, change your title to anything that doesn’t have the word “sales” in it. You want to be a consultant, a much more respectable title and role (even though no one sells or has to sell like a consultant does). Don’t believe so deeply in yourself as a value creator, your company as a great partner, or you solution as the best on Earth. All great advice, if you lack confidence and a strong belief in yourself. If you don’t believe strongly in yourself, your company, and your solution, why should your dream client?
• Buyers Have All the Power: Buyers have all the power now. You have to wait for them to tell you what they want, normally when they are 57 percent through their decision-making process. Even then, you better be able to compete on price, because you will never have a relationship that is anything more than transactional. The only reason you and your buyer have information parity is because you have allowed it. The only reason they would ever be deep into a decision without you is because you haven’t taken consistent action to gain a meeting earlier. If you believe all that is left to do is transact, no one needs you as their trusted advisor.

You will never be a trusted advisor if you don’t perceive yourself as your dream client’s peer. You will never be consultative if you are unwilling to have uncomfortable conversations. You will never be an agent of change if you passively wait for others to decide to change on their own schedule.

You don’t have to be a brute. Nothing here requires that you demonstrate a self-orientation or employ horrible sales tactics that are decades old and now worthless. You do have to step up and decide whether you are a going to be a peer, someone worth doing business with, or if you are going to be something much less than that.

The post The Wussification of the American Salesperson appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In the traditional demand gen model, there’s a clear distinction between where marketing ends and sales begin. And traditionally, there’s a lot of confusion, miscommunication, and even conflict during this crucial period when marketing is handing off the lead to the sales team. If you’re not careful here, you risk fumbling the ball and watching your competition pick it up and run away with the deal.

However, in Account Based Sales Development (ABSD), things are a little different. When you’re selling to large accounts, it becomes a team sport. And just like in the pros, if your team has the best player but you don’t work together, you could lose every game. On the other hand, a team full of good players becomes great once they’re dialed in and on the same page, running the same Plays. Call it “team chemistry,” call it “getting in the zone,” call it whatever you want. That’s what it means to be a team.

Here’s why the standard handoff isn’t as relevant in ABSD. If you’re already on an account based model, then (hopefully) you’ve aligned your marketing, sales development, and sales teams. Marketing isn’t worried about a monthly lead commit. Sales Development isn’t the little brother. Sales isn’t worried about the quality of the leads marketing is passing their way. Customer success (did you forget about them?) isn’t worried about trying to fulfill the promises that sales makes. If you’ve taken the right first steps of aligning your team, they’re all striving for the same goal: giving the customer an exceptional experience, and ultimately winning the deal.

Easier said than done.

Let’s take a look at the essential elements of aligning your team for success. Then we’ll finish off with looking at one and only handoff in Account Based Sales, and how to do it so seamlessly, the target account won’t even notice.

The New Objectives and Metrics for Account Based Sales Development

Sales and marketing fought like cats and dogs for good reason in traditional demand gen and lead-based sales. Marketing was held to and compensated on metrics like website visits, form submissions, marketing qualified leads, etc. Sales was held to dials per day, overall activity, conversions, etc. When your sales and marketing teams are not speaking the same language, how can you expect them to understand each other?

Breaking down the silos and aligning your team starts with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is designed to establish agreement across the entire team and, more importantly, align and compensate on comparable revenue quotas and business results.

An SLA is designed to do a few key things:

• Set agreed upon definitions and criteria for key definitions, such as Marketing Qualified Account, Sales Qualified Account, close/lost opportunity, etc.
• Set agreed upon KPIs, metrics, and benchmarks.
• Establish dashboard and reporting that key members can easily access.

Although your team is now on the same page and striving for the same business results, you still have to hold them accountable for the activities they do every day. This is going to be different for each team. These activity metrics are going to be slightly different, but they’re not unfamiliar. Decide what is going to be important to your team, and use good judgment.

For example, measuring on MQL’s is no longer valid, but inbound response time is still important for marketing. Measuring on daily dials is no longer valid, but positive conversations is still important for business development.

Learn to Say No: Managing Your Time and Resources

Sales hunters are known for their tenacity and never-quit attitude. Grit in sales is usually synonymous with success. However, it can get you in trouble and cause you to miss your numbers. Not all deals are going to close, and since time and energy are your most valuable resources, you have to know when it’s time to disposition out an account and move on to the next target.

It’s particularly hard to say no because of the sunk cost fallacy, which is the misconception that we make rational decisions based on the future value. However, the research time and again proves that our decisions are often tainted by the emotional investment and time accumulated — the more time and energy you put into something, the harder it becomes to give it up.

To get this right, you must develop guidelines to keep you from chasing deals that never were. There’s no hard and fast rule across the board that every org should follow. You need to figure out what makes the most sense for you and your team.

When coming up with your guidelines, first, take a look at the tier of the account. Tier 1, 2 and 3 accounts require different resources and attention levels. When determining tiers for your accounts, factor in other elements of a deal specific to your business, like the average contract value, the size of your total addressable market, the length of your sales cycle, etc. Next, consider the account based metrics above — how much coverage, awareness, engagement, reach, and impact do you have at each account for each tier?

It’s No Longer About the Handoff

“There is no longer a clear hand-off of a lead between Sales and Marketing. Marketing increasingly is nurturing and advancing prospects through the entire sales process. That’s why there’s an increased focus on conversion rates rather than simple lead numbers. It also means that Sales and Marketing have to collaborate more than ever.”

-Peter Mollins, VP Marketing, KnowledgeTree

According to research by SiriusDecisions, buyers want Marketing and Sales involved equally at every stage of the buying process.

When you’re selling to multinational or global accounts, and you’re at the far end of the Account Based Sales Development spectrum, there is no handoff. Everyone is working together from the beginning, and throughout the entire revenue cycle. At that level, you’re only selling to Tier 1 accounts and you’re engaged fully in team selling.

• Executive management provides the vision.
• Marketing finds and nurtures the accounts and creates tailored content for the account
• Sales development sets the stage
• Pre-sales and sales enablement gives a great demo
• Account executives negotiate and close the business
• Company executives provide executive alignment and support
• Customer success onboards and trains
• Product and engineering teams make something to sell
• Support fixes problems along the way
• Accounts receivable gets the money

In her book Whale Hunting with Global Accounts, Barbara Weaver Smith explains that today’s buyer wants to meet the subject matter experts and everyone else on your team. This begs the question: if people want to buy from the whole team, why do we only expose them to certain members during certain times?

This is where global teams often have project managers who act as the fulcrum between the different teams and departments within your organization. The project manager, often the “farmer” salesperson, is like a quarterback and acts as the lead. The quarterback is responsible for being the go-to key contact for these accounts.

There are still key players on your team who will be leading at different stages of the sales process, and having this structure means less confusion and a better experience for the customer. There’s no handoff, but rather a shuffling around of players.

For Tier 3 accounts, you can’t afford this much time, attention and resources on one account, therefore mastering the handoff is more important. For this, I’d like to turn to Richard Harris, a top sales trainer and leader, for some wisdom. He outlines a great process and email for when you have to orchestrate a handoff. Immediately after you send an event invite for the call/meeting, send an email to make the transition smooth. Here’s an example:

You can (and should) even launch a Play (or series a series of follow-up emails) if the prospect doesn’t respond or doesn’t show up to the meeting. The same process should be in place when an AE closes a deal – a Play should be launched to introduce the Customer Success Manager to start the onboarding process.

For Tier 2 accounts, each player should be slightly more involved, but can’t be as involved as your Tier 1 accounts. To execute this play properly, have the rep handing the account off set the meeting, send the email, and join the call. This is how the call should go down:

1. Open – Pleasantries and re-establish rapport
2. Introduce your teammate – Give a formal introduction to the next point of contact for the account.
3. Summarize – Give the two or three main points from the previous call. This further emphasized you understand the customer while giving the new POC more context. Don’t take more than 30-45 seconds.
4. Establish an agenda – State the goal of the call and the desired outcomes
5. Hand off the call – Let the new POC take over.

This process can be used when Account Development Reps are handing the account off to the AE, when the AE is handing the account off to customer success, when there’s a new account owner due to movement in your org, or any other reason.

Andy Paul, author of Amp Up Your Sales and host of the Accelerate! podcast, firmly believes that how you sell is as important as what you sell. By providing a superior sales experience to the customer, you are differentiating yourself from other organizations.

There’s more to Account Based Sales Development than the handoff. In fact, it’s one tiny piece of the puzzle. That’s why we’ve put together The Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Sales Development. You can download the full guide for free today.

CRM platforms were created to help businesses manage the complete customer lifecycle, from marketing, through sales to support. Unfortunately, while marketing and support workflows have evolved into stand alone platforms like Marketo and Zendesk, not much has changed for sales. Reps are still trying to work directly out of legacy CRMs that were not built around the core needs of salespeople.

Your reps deserve a dedicated sales solution designed to meet their specific needs and make their everyday tasks easier, more productive and increasingly successful. However, we all know sales doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and a sales platform that isolates sales from the rest of the business is just as troublesome as a CRM that lumps everyone’s needs together.

At the end of the day, your sales platform shouldn’t try to be something that it’s not, but it also needs to effectively connect your sales team with additional tools and information that can make them better at their jobs. We’re taking a look at three key sales platform integrations that ensure sales reps are getting what they need without overloading them with unnecessary features and functionality.

Marketing Automation

If you’ve been a part of any sales or marketing organization, you know how many arguments can erupt between these two camps simply around what happened to a particular lead. Your sales team doesn’t need the ability to send marketing emails or create landing pages, but insight into information like lead source or which campaigns prospects belong to is key to strategic and contextual selling.

Your sales platform should have an integration with one or more of the top marketing automation platforms, like HubSpot or Marketo. And if this integration happens to be a full two-way sync, that’s even better. This kind of integration ensures consistency between sales and marketing data for better prospect and customer experiences across the board. Here are just a few ways that integrating your sales solution and marketing automation platform can help drive sales productivity and performance:

• Most marketing automation platforms give each lead an engagement score, or rank them based on the level of interaction they have with emails, landing pages, etc. Knowing this score is a major indicator of how hot a lead is.
• Did your prospect open that newsletter that was sent out this morning? Did she click one of the links 5 minutes ago? This level of near real-time insight enables reps to reach out and strike up a conversation when you’re top of mind.
• Marketers are able to customize the fields that are required when prospects fill out marketing forms. Upfront access to information like whether a lead has a current project or if she is currently using a competitive solution is pure sales gold.

For more tips on how to achieve better sales and marketing alignment, check out this blog post.

Support Platforms

Have you ever called to upsell a customer only to be greeted by an angry voice on the other end of the line? Your contact currently has an open ticket with support and has been trying to get her issue resolved for a week. How dare you try to upsell her when the solution she’s already paying for doesn’t even work! Ouch.

Unfortunately, these are the types of situations that occur when sales and support teams have limited visibility into customer conversations – it’s nearly impossible to provide award-winning experiences. What’s more, putting your sales team in a position where it must constantly ping support for information and updates about its customers zaps productivity for both teams.

Ensuring that key information like open and closed tickets is made visible to your reps in your sales platform enhances team agility as well as helps reps enter conversations with greater context. Spot an open ticket? Now probably isn’t the time for an upsell. Did an issue just get resolved in an efficient and timely manner? Grow your relationship by giving the customer a quick call just to check in. Smooth sailing? Time to pitch that new add-on!

Email & Calendar

Think about the process that the average rep must go through just to set a single meeting:

• Send email requesting prospect availability
• Track whether email is opened and clicked
• Book meeting on prospect and rep calendar
• Mark meeting as set within CRM

That’s four – four! – different tools that a rep must use just to book one meeting: email service, email tracking software, calendar application and CRM. Your reps probably have a goal as to how many meetings they must set every day or week; think of how much time is wasted switching back and forth and connecting the dots between these solutions. No wonder 59% of sales reps believe that they’re required to use too many sales tools.

Imagine if your reps could send emails, track clicks and opens and book meetings all within a single platform. When your sales platform integrates with your email and calendar provider, like Gmail or Microsoft, you can. The best part? When communication happens inside your sales platform, all messages are automatically logged in the context of your contact, so you never have to spend time reconciling CRM notes with your inbox ever again.

What’s Next

Marketing automation, support platforms and email and calendar – your sales platform shouldn’t try to BE these things, but it should integrate with them in a way that leads to enhanced sales productivity and performance. For more tips on what you should be looking for when it comes to choosing the right sales solution for your business, download the free white paper: 7 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Sales Software.

Running a small business can be tough, given the countless tasks to manage every day. And when you're worrying about everything from paying your vendors to sweeping the floor at night, tracking success can fall to the bottom of a business owner's list of priorities.

According to a Staples survey, 51% of small business leaders admit that they don’t measure business metrics as often as they should. This can put a business at risk and blindside a team when crises arise.

That's why Staples launched Quick Wins, a new tool designed to help small businesses keep tabs on their growth.

How it works

Quick Wins gathers social media engagement, site traffic, and sales numbers seamlessly in a single dashboard. Users can sync relevant data from Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Shopify or Quickbooks, and view their metrics on their desktop or mobile device.

"With 50% of businesses failing within the first five years, we created this app to help provide the guidance and support small businesses need to succeed," says Christine Mallon, vice president of marketing at Staples.

Quick Wins also makes suggestions small business owners can use to improve their metrics. For example, if your bounce rate rises too high — that is, people are leaving your website too quickly or too often — the tool will notify you in the dashboard, and might also advise creating more blog posts to increase user engagement. 

Theresa and Haley Hanna are the owners of Bell Cottage, a mom-and-pop gift shop in Burbank, California. With Quick Wins, they were able to reach more people on Facebook because the app offers suggestions on the best times to schedule posts. Once the Hannas implemented the advice, they saw improvements on their page.

Building a network

The Staples survey also reports that three in five small business leaders would like access to a network of their peers. That's why Quick Wins features a community board where users can interact with other business owners and managers who can offer advice and support. 

Monitoring growth is crucial to building a successful business, but it’s just one step along the way. Equally as important is the ability to seek — and get — advice from other small business owners.

Whether someone is stumped on social media strategy, struggling with location options, or just in need of general feedback, they can log into the app and get helpful answers. There is also a community manager who moderates discussion threads to help break the ice and start a dialogue. 

"It's kind of like having a marketing department ... just on your phone," says Taylor Calmus, co-founder of Taybles, a company that sells unique coffee tables.

Signing up for a Quick Wins account only takes a few minutes. The process is even faster when done through an existing Staples or Google account.

"It's so much more than just a tracking tool," Mallon says. "It's a business companion."

For more information on Quick Wins, watch the video below.

To start tracking your metrics and growing your business with Quick Wins, click here.

This post is sponsored by Staples.

Join the conversation about this story »

Salesforce is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform of record for sales teams around the world. And with the emergence of so many powerful functionality integrations, products that work hand-in-hand with the CRM make Salesforce for Sales Development Reps that much easier.

In sales development, much of your success is dependent on activity – how much high quality correspondence you can complete, and how fast you can complete it. That being said, sales enablement tools are your lifeblood for efficient sales activity. They grant you the option to craft personalized cadences at scale, recording all of your activities as you go. Without having to live in CRM, having the peace of mind that everything is recorded gives you more time to perfect your process and increase your activity.

Here are four of the ways you can use Sales Enablement and Salesforce for Sales Development Reps in tandem to improve your numbers:

Want to learn more about the in’s and out’s of Salesforce and Sales Enablement? Here’s your chance! Download a free copy of the ebook today, “Salesforce for Sales Engagement: For Sales Development Reps,” and watch your productivity multiply.

The post 4 Keys To Using Salesforce for Sales Development Reps appeared first on SalesLoft.

Marketers of today, like you and me, are of a mindset that Inbound Marketing is all we need to conquer the Search Ranking game. The more the merrier.

Mostly overlooking maybe the most important factor that adds up to the overall experience of your user — Your site’s loading speed.

While there were a lot of influencers and biggies focusing on it a few years back, it seems as they have moved on to much better things.

Which is a shame because while it may seem irrelevant to a Marketer because all we care about is bringing in more traffic, your site’s loading time is still the first phase of contact between you and your potential customers. And it may be the only reason you are in the number 2 spot of your search rankings or maybe lower even after hitting every aspect of SEO spot-on.

Your site’s speed effects the user experience even before he gets to see your site’s strategically amazing layout, design and content filled with high authority backlinks.

Which is one of the main reason that optimizing your site’s speed must be on top of your priority list, even as a hardcore Marketing specialist.

Google backs this as well. Google has always been fond of speed, in 2010 it was desktop, now it is mobile. Google has to crawl every page on the web and slow sites have slow crawling speed as well. Which hurts Google. So, the crawlers can sometime ultimately abandon your site if it’s too slow which seriously effects your SERP rankings.

And obviously you need to avoid that from happening at all costs. So, here are the top 3 free tools that will help you measure and improve your site’s loading time without any external help of a Dev —

CloudFlare

In-depth performance improvements including your site’s speed

The easiest and most in-depth way to speed up your site and add a little security bonus on top. Cloudflare speeds up your site by routing your content through their servers all over the world. It is a bit complex to understand but provides the best-detailed options to optimize your site’s loading speed when you get used to all that it offers.

It does indeed offer a free plan when you create your account on CloudFlare but it takes them 24 hours to completely index your site through their servers when you embed the given nameservers.

Google Page Speed Insights

Google offers their own webmasters tool to aid marketers in identifying page speed problems on their sites. You just have to enter your URL, and Google analyzes your site. It will then give you a score between 0 and 100. Your goal is to get this score as close to 100 as possible, following the suggestions that the tool gives you.

Since, Google started favouring mobile over desktops a while ago, Google page speed insights optimizes your mobile site’s speed as well.

GTMetrix

If Google Page Speed Insights isn’t enough, you can use GTMetrix. It follows along the same lines by loading up your site on their servers and analyzing it using 2 different tools: PageSpeed and YSlow. You are then presented with both scores (again between 0 and 100) and suggestions on what to do to optimize your overall site performance.

Here the average YSlow score is 68% and The average PageSpeed score is 71%

Your Turn Now

Google still puts providing a seamless User Experience amongst one its top priorities while deciding the rank of a site in it’s SERP.

And a seamless user experience starts when your site loads quickly without wasting the viewer’s precious time. Time is money.

Try these 3 tools to improve your site’s loading speed and tell us if they were fruitful with increasing your conversions.

And don’t forget to share if you liked this piece :)
Also, share with us any other awesome tool that you have in your mind which could add to the value of this post in the comments.

Salesforce is a trailblazer in their space.

If you need proof, just look at the great legacy they’re building for themselves, particularly in promoting the cloud and democratizing access to software. We also saw their ever increasing breadth of solutions at this year’s Dreamforce event.

As always, Dreamforce 2016 left attendees buzzing on a variety of new products, perhaps none more notable than Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Predictive Analytics. But even bigger than those topics has been the major underlying theme around B2B data.

The growth of the Martech stack and explosion in data has led to most marketers sitting on a wealth of information in the cloud across their CRM and Marketing Automation (MAT). But the focus now is on understanding the latent potential inside customer data.

Today, marketers are tasked with driving revenue and pipeline more than ever before. And the conversation increasingly needs to move away from the new tech you want to adopt to asking more fundamental customer data questions like:

• What is the quality of my customer data?
• How actionable is my data?
• How quickly and efficiently can I monetize customer data?
• How can I better understand past successes from my installed customer base?
• What learnings can I apply from existing data to find new customers?

This overarching trend around pipeline growth primarily falls into two categories: driving net-new pipeline and increasing pipeline from existing customers. Chances are you have some new technologies and initiatives in mind that you would like to test out to meet your goals, but here’s what you need to be on the lookout for when considering them:

Predictive for the sake of predictive is not a viable approach

We’ve seen an increase in adoption of predictive over the past few years, but marketers need to be wary of the “smoke and mirrors” that many vendors are using to position their offerings.

Traditionally, “predictive 1.0” solutions have largely focused on their algorithms and models, even putting the impetus on ‘bake-offs’ rather than proof-of-concepts that factor in long-term goals. But while you can have amazing algorithms, your predictive solution of choice is only as good as the data driving those predictions.

So my suggestion is: Find a solution that has incredible data powering an amazing predictive engine.

Integrate your tech stack the right way

It’s no secret that the growing number of Martech solutions is throwing everyone’s tech stack for a loop. So if you’re in the process of integrating platforms across your tech stack, make sure you do it the right way.

Bringing together a tech stack is a ‘one-time-only’ event.

Make sure to build out workflows and processes that are reputable and well thought-out. Also, check if your tech stack can integrate your solutions on an ongoing basis.

Data is great, but you need insights

According to a recent Demand Metric report, more than 80% of companies without effective demand gen blame data quality for ineffective marketing campaigns and sales flops. Yet, only 42% of companies with rich data are happy with their demand gen.

Data quality is a critical issue for marketers today, but it’s not enough to just have high-quality data. Marketers still need insights into their prospects, customers, and market to create more targeted campaigns that yield better results.

Get better insights with network effects

A great source of insights for your business can come from partners in adjacent industries or competitors. It’s important to be part of a network that real businesses contribute information to on what campaigns, offers, and pricing drives favorable marketing and sales outcomes.

Leverage multi-channel marketing at every stage of the funnel

Buyers interact across various digital touch points nowadays, so make sure you’re building an integrated, multi-channel marketing strategy to address their needs. You need to know your best leads and the most impactful channels you can interact with them on.

Wrapping It Up

There’s a major shift in B2B marketing, and data is leading the charge.

It’s imperative for marketers to understand the latent potential of their customer data, draw insights across the buyer’s journey, and act on them with personalized, relevant campaigns.

If you want to learn more about upcoming transformative sales and marketing technologies, join executives from Salesloft, Revana and myself, for an executive roundtable on How to Transform Data into Dollars in 2017.