If you ever wanted to play the role of big-time email marketing consultant, now’s your chance. Grab a pencil, a piece of paper and maybe a calculator, and take a whack at helping a brand get its email program back on track.

The brand is Olive Street Toys. No, you haven’t heard of it because it doesn’t exist. However, the numbers in this simulated case study come from actual client work and were used in a recent brainstorming exercise among members of the Only Influencers email community.

Read the case study first. You’ll see that Olive Street Toys faces falling open and click rates, among other issues, and has a high percentage of inactive, or dormant, subscribers. I’ll present my approach to resolving OST’s email issues below, and then I would love to hear how you would advise the brand’s marketing team.

The first battle: Waking up dormant subscribers

In our experience, the leading factor resulting in dormant subscribers is simply that companies are emailing these subscribers at email accounts they no longer read.

From 20% to 30% of an email list churns every year (often more than that). Many marketers turn to reactivation programs, but these usually generate minimal returns if they don’t incorporate an Email Change of Address (ECOA) service.

ECOA ensures that your re-engagement emails reach people at their preferred email addresses, rather than landing in dead, unread email boxes.

OST should take one last stab at reawakening its dormant subscribers with a compelling subject line and an attractive offer. If that doesn’t generate a response, OST should look to update its inactive and bouncing email addresses with an ECOA service before removing them from the list.

This will enable the brand to leverage its marketing spend, reconnect with lost customers, and drive the ROI and revenues it seeks.

Other approaches to reactivation seldom solve the problem

Three schools of thought have emerged concerning the best way to wake up their sleeping subscribers. However, each one has a serious flaw.

1. Stop sending to them altogether.

OST invested heavily to acquire these subscribers/customers. Why throw away this asset when you can reconnect with them at a fraction of the cost of acquiring new subscribers/customers?

2. Continue to send to them but cut back on frequency – only send during the key periods of the year (pre-Easter, pre-Summer, pre-Christmas).

Reducing frequency will waste money on messaging costs without generating much new activity, if any. The low sending frequency will most likely result in these emails being relegated to junk folders, assuming they even get delivered at all.

Finally, a basic marketing adage is that you need to send 5-7 marketing messages before you can get somebody’s attention – minimizing frequency goes against this basic marketing principle.

3. Continue sending at the same frequency.

Given the long-standing dormant history resulting from sending to dead email accounts or whatever, continued sends will not achieve OST’s re-engagement goals.

Further, this will be a waste of money and the lack of engagement could damage OST’s sending reputation, thereby reducing the effectiveness of their overall email marketing program.

My take on 5 tactics Olive Street Toys is considering

OST is weighing five approaches to expanding or

• Add money to the budget to rent third-party lists: Avoid at all costs, for many reasons. Almost all third-party list rentals won’t generate returns to cover the cost.
• Append email addresses to postal address: This is your low-hanging fruit, enabling you to capture guaranteed deliverable addresses for your subscribers or customers at a fraction of the cost of acquiring new ones. However, use a reputable service, and avoid one that promises near-100% matches. Our experience shows results will be closer to 35%.
• Approach retail partners and offer to swap unique email addresses: The email addresses should be better than those available through list rental, assuming your partner provides you with its active house file, not dormant email addresses they’ve abandoned.

However, it’s best to avoid partner share because response will be minimal. Given the volume of emails people get these days, marketing emails that people didn’t sign up for get ignored. Worse yet, they generate spam complaints, which could hurt the rest of your email program.

• Offer website visitors a $5- or $10-off coupon incentive for signing up for email.

If the numbers work, absolutely do this. Don’t forget to analyze the incentive cost across all new subscribers compared to how many subscribers you would have gotten without the incentives.

For example, if you could sign up 10,000 new subscribers without any incentives, and it cost you $60,000 to sign up 12,000 new subscribers ($5 per person in redeemed incentives), then it’s really costing you $60,000 for a net gain of only 2,000 new signups.

• Set up a system to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) and ask children under 14 to sign up for email: Seems fraught with risks. Thumbs down!

Find the golden eggs without killing the goose that laid them

The out-of-pocket costs of continually emailing dormant subscribers is relatively small, but the risks of hitting a spamtrap or exceeding ISPs’ stringent spam complaint thresholds from messaging dead or recycled addresses are real.

Don’t just discard your dormant subscribers. You can still generate significant revenue from them. Rather, try an aggressive offer to see if you can awaken these sleeping bears.

For the ones who snooze on, try something different, like re-engaging them at their current, preferred email addresses through ECOA. As Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Over to you

How would you handle the email issues Olive Street Toys (or maybe even your own email program) is facing? Read the case study, jot down your thoughts, and post them below. I’m looking forward to seeing them!

The post How the Best Tech Companies Run Growth Experiments appeared first on OpenView.

After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft are going public on U.S. markets. Scooter service providers, the transportation trend du jour, raised hundreds of millions of dollars to scatter scooters on city sidewalks (to the chagrin of residents and regulators alike) throughout 2017 and 2018. On the other side of the Pacific, Grab and Go-Jek are raising gobs of cash as they continue to scale upward and outward.

Of all the seed, early and late-stage venture funding raised over the past couple of years, how much of the total went to companies in the ride-hailing, food delivery and last-mile transportation categories (which encompasses bikes and scooters)? Probably not as much as you’d think.

Taken together, companies in these sectors raised less than 10 percent of the total venture dollar volume reported for each of the past five full calendar years.

We’ve charted it out based on yearly totals. Take a peek:

To be sure, we’re still talking about a lot of money here. Companies in these three categories raised more than $22 billion in venture funding rounds (not including private equity) in 2017 and more than $18 billion in 2018.

Ventures in the transportation space loom large in the media, and how could they not? It’s a forbiddingly capital-intensive market to play in, requiring companies to raise massive sums, which make for good headlines.

In its early years, competition between on-demand, point-to-point transportation marketplace companies rewarded brashness and speed with early scale and the long-term structural advantages conferred to first the firms which grew the fastest.

But those advantages may not have been as stiff as first expected. Lyft beat Uber to the public markets, raised its valuation during its IPO roadshow, priced at the top of its extended range and then popped 21 percent when it started trading.

That success means that the red chunks of our above chart weren’t all fool’s bets. Instead, a good chunk of the equity represented is now liquid. Of course, there’s a lot more work to do for literally every other ride-hailing, ridesharing, scooter-renting and other wheels-providing unicorns in the world: They still have to go public.

Advertisements are everywhere. Traditional ads appear on billboards and road signs, where they can reach the largest number of people in an area. You see them in newspapers and magazines, where they can appeal to a large or niche readership. They serve as a way for people selling products to connect with others who may need, or want, to buy.

Targeted ads go further. They go after you specifically in order to deliver ads for products you’re more likely to want, scooping up vast amounts of information about you in the process.

What Are Targeted Ads?

Technically, all ads are targeted ads. Billboards target drivers in a major metropolitan area or potential tourists passing through a more scenic area. Radio ads target people of a certain ethnic background or religious affiliation. But to place these kinds of ads, advertisers don’t have to know anything about you specifically.

If traditional ads are passive, targeted ads are the opposite. Advertisers, or ad networks, actively seek information about customers in order to reach the specific audience they’re after. That means they gather data specific to you, rather than your region or neighborhood.

Targeted ads power much of the web. Their effectiveness has driven advertisers away from many traditional forms of media, such as print newspapers. This means more people are out there collecting and sharing more information about us, typically without our awareness or consent.

It’s for this reason that targeted ads have expanded from being an economic issue to one of security and privacy as well.

Offline Targeted Ads

Before we discuss targeted ads online, let’s take a step back. Have you checked your mailbox lately? There’s a good chance that you will mostly find junk mail. While some of these ads go out to everyone in your area, others are targeted. They’re sent out specifically for people like you.

To send out junk mail, companies or organizations just need your name, address, information about your neighborhood, or basic demographic information such as your age or whether you have kids.

Oftentimes companies get this information from other companies. A magazine may share your address with other companies that sell similar publications or products. Organizations may also tap into public records. Insurance companies access your motor vehicle record, for example.

And when a lawyer sends you a letter advertising their services after you get a speeding ticket, you can bet that offer didn’t go out to everyone on your block.

Online Targeted Ads and Tracking Cookies

Targeted ads use a different playbook online. There, advertisers can track you around the web, learning what sites you like to visit and which products you buy.

To follow you, online ads rely on cookies. Cookies are small files that allow a site to remember information in between visits. This way a site can remember that you’ve signed into an account or added items to a cart. They’re a necessary part of the way the web currently works.

Ad networks use cookies to determine which ads you see. These cookies keep tabs on which sites you visit and develop a profile of you over time, allowing advertisers to send ever more precise ads. Google, which provides the largest online ad network, combines cookie data with the information associated with your Google account.

This can include your web searches, Google Maps trips, YouTube watch history, and your installed Android apps.

Ad networks can gather even more data on mobile devices, especially on Android. Thanks to built-in GPS and other forms of location tracking, apps can track where you go when you’re not sitting in front of a computer.

Targeted Ads and Privacy

Online targeted ads have become increasingly controversial, due in part to what companies do in order to grow these massive networks. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others suck up large amounts of data about us in order to promise their advertisers the ability to deliver hyper-targeted ads that are more likely to hit potential buyers than the competition.

Tech companies design products to encourage you to make bad privacy decisions and give them more information.

These actions have far reaching social impacts. We can now detect and target the most depressed, lonely, or outraged people in society. People are becoming more addicted to various forms of media, and our views have become more extreme or polarized than they may have otherwise been.

So when we discuss privacy concerns regarding social media, search engines, music or video streaming services, and the like, targeted ads are the crux of the issue. Facebook wouldn’t have a Cambridge Analytical scandal if the company weren’t trying to sell more ads and increase profits.

Targeted Ads Are Spreading

Take television. TV ads traditionally aim at a channel’s entire viewership, just like radio. Want to target men, women, sports fans, or children (however unethical this may be)? There are channels where your ad can do just that.

But in the age of hyper-targeted ads, cable and satellite providers are doing more to attract advertisers. They’re now delivering targeted ads of their own. You and your neighbor may watch the same channel at the same time, but you won’t necessarily see the same ads.

Cable and satellite providers start with an approach akin to traditional mail. They have your name, address, and general demographic information such as the number of people living in your household. They can’t target down to the individual level, since they don’t know when you’re watching TV or when it’s your spouse, roommate, or child.

But that doesn’t mean the tracking isn’t as invasive. Cable boxes not only bring shows into your house, they also send out a record of all the shows you watch.

Targeted ads are even starting to encroach more into our physical surroundings. Retailers are using our phone’s built-in Wi-Fi and facial recognition to track us around their stores. Walgreens stores are testing a line of “smart” coolers, fridges equipped with screens and cameras that can advertise products based on your age or gender.

The Future of Targeted Ads

Data collection is a prerequisite to delivering targeted ads, so their use will inherently stir up privacy concerns. Ad companies are incentivized to collect and share as much data as they can, with safeguarding this information only a secondary issue at best. Breaches are a concern largely because of the potential fallout to a company’s brand.

On the flip side, targeted ads make it easier for you to find the kind of product you’re interested in. And quite frankly, they work. People are shifting toward this form of advertising because it’s increasing sales. The degree to which consumer concerns exist hasn’t been enough to substantially reduce profits.

So without economic or regulatory repercussions, don’t expect targeted ads to go away. But with other types of bad ads, there may be some hope.

Read the full article: Why Targeted Ads Are a Serious Threat to Your Privacy

Local SEO is fast becoming a high priority for many businesses. Last year, Google published a study showing a 500% increase in “near me” searches, including variants of “can I buy” or “to buy” from the previous two years. Google also said it had seen a 900%+ increase in mobile searches for “near me today/tonight” over the same period.

A few months later, a separate study revealed that 82% of shoppers using smartphones conduct “near me” searches.

Source

Clearly, “near me” searches are a trend brands can’t afford to ignore in 2019. But they’re only one aspect of local SEO – something that’s becoming increasingly important to a wider range of businesses.

The divide between online and offline interactions along the consumer journey is getting narrower every year. Local SEO is shaping up as one of the most important lead generation strategies for brands that want to turn search queries into customers walking through the door.

What does local SEO look like in 2019?

Local search has been with us for many years now. Google’s 2014 Pigeon update drastically changed the way people find businesses in their area by doing the following:

• Connecting Google’s local algorithm more deeply with its core search algorithm
• Improving Google’s ability to gauge business and user locations
• Reducing the local pack of results to three listings

Of course, it’s important to understand how Google’s algorithm deals with local queries, but the most significant change over the past few years has been user search habits. Mobile has completely changed where and how people interact with search, so understanding your target audience’s search habits is crucial.

“Near me” searches should be a priority for most brands because they generally have a strong purchase intent and suggest users are in a hurry to get what they’re after. Having said that, these aren’t the only local SEO trends you should be paying attention to in 2019.

People also turn to Google to search for flights and hotels in destinations thousands of miles away (hardly “near me” searches). There are plenty of other platforms like Trivago, Skyscanner and Kayak offering this specific location-based service.

To really understand the role mobile plays in modern search though, you have to pinpoint the small issues it solves for users. Someone looking for a car park in London isn’t going to drive around in rush hour until they stumble across somewhere to leave their car; they’re going to pull up and quickly search for car parks closest to their destination.

Likewise, someone with busted pipes on a Sunday morning isn’t going to call every plumber in the area just to ask them if they can come out. They’ll specifically search for 24/7 or emergency plumbers in the area.

Mobile and location-based search have made it possible to pinpoint users in these very specific moments of need. To capitalise on these moments, you need to know why your target audience turns to search in the first place and what specific problem they’re trying to solve.

There are only three listings in local packs now and Google is getting very good at delivering the most relevant results to individual queries. So you really need to pinpoint what people are after (e.g. not just restaurants but restaurants open at specific times) and make sure Google has this information about your business.

And, as voice technology plays a bigger role in local SEO, things are only going to get more competitive.

Turning local SEO into a lead-gen strategy

There are two key things that make location-based searches special:

• High purchase intent: Location-based searches have some of the highest levels of purchase intent of all online activities.
• Immediacy: Local searches also generally indicate users are looking to buy now or in the very near future.

Location-based searches aren’t your typical browsing session, such as those where people are reviewing the best TVs of 2019. Instead, these are sessions where people are looking to find a local tech store with the model they want in stock, so they can see the product with their own eyes.

Of course, there are some exceptions (e.g. hotel bookings) but the vast majority of location-based searches involve people who want to interact with brands, products or services in the real world – to do things they can’t do online.

Generating foot traffic from local SEO

Source

So, in most cases, your goal with location-based SEO is to get people walking through your business’s doors. Google says it saw a 200%+ increase in “near me” searches related to car dealers between 2015-2017 and a 600%+ increase in “near me” searches related to dresses during the same period.

Car buyers can’t test drive cars online and clothes shoppers can’t try on dresses with their mobile. For this, they need to find a business in their area that has the products they’re looking for – and this is where local SEO breaks down the online/offline divide.

Once you know which problem users are trying to solve with location-based searches (test driving cars, trying on clothes, taking a look at TVs etc), you can make this a focal point of your marketing messages.

Make it clear people can do these things by visiting your business.

Enhancing the in-store experience

Generating foot traffic from local SEO gets you off to a great start but the most innovative brands are now using mobile to enhance the in-store experience for their customers.

The 2018 Retail Sector Report, entitled The Convergence Continuum, revealed that 74% of millennials still prefer to shop in-store but 51% want to use their phones more to navigate, get information and pay while browsing in shops.

Crucially, 77% of consumers surveyed in the report said they were open to the idea of exchanging data for discounts and special deals.

Google research has highlighted before how much consumers use their smartphones as they shop in-store and it’s vital retailers adapt to this. Meanwhile, separate research from Retail Drive examines how consumers are using their smartphones once they walk through a business’s doors.

Source

The majority of shoppers are looking to find out more about products, more than half are comparing prices and 40% are using their phones to access digital coupons. This gives retailers the chance to direct consumers to their own website or app in-store to find out more about products and gain access to coupons and other deals.

Help these people make better buying decisions and take the opportunity to get them more involved with your brand.

This strategy works incredibly well for retail brands. The leading names in hospitality and food are taking a different approach to turning location-based search into better in-store experiences – and, ultimately, loyal customers.

Turning local SEO into loyal customers

One of the best examples of this in-store mobile experience is the Starbucks app, which allows customers to pay for their coffee, collect points and get free rewards. This app is so popular in the US that it has more users than both Apple Pay and Google Pay – it’s the most widely used mobile payment app in the US and it’s not even a mobile payment app.

More importantly for Starbucks, its app improves the in-store experience for its customers and even gamifies it by rewarding people every time they buy a coffee. More rewards mean more incentive and customers only have more reason to keep coming back to Starbucks.

Starbucks isn’t the only chain company taking this approach either. Greene King has its own mobile app that allows customers to browse menus, book tables, check out deals, order food and pay for their meals. Friends can even split their meal between them by paying through the app and Greene King rewards them for every purchase.

Wherever these customers are around the country, they know they can search for the nearest Greene King pub, book a table and get their food on order.

How to optimise for local SEO

Now that we’ve explained the importance of location-based search, let’s explain how you need to optimise for this strategy in 2019. Things have changed a lot in recent years but most of the fundamentals are the same – so you should have the basics in place already.

1. Optimise your website for local search

Your website is the hub of your entire online presence and this counts for location-based SEO as well. While Google Maps gives users all the essential details about your business (e.g. opening times), it doesn’t provide you any space to get branded messages across or other information people need – for example, checking if you’ve actually got the product they’re after in stock.

The user session may start in Google but your website still plays an important role, so you should pay particular attention to the following:

• Mobile optimisation: The vast majority of local searches take place on smartphones so make sure your site performs well on mobile devices.
• Loading times: You don’t want to kill the experience as soon as users try to click through to your site so keep your loading times in order – especially on mobile.
• Web content: Be sure what kind of messages you want to get across to your target audience and factor local search needs into your content. If people in your local area want to see your products in the flesh, make it clear they can visit you to do so on your homepage.
• NAP details: These need to be consistent across your website and anywhere else they’re listed (Google My Business, directory sites, review sites etc).

2. Use LocalBusiness schema

Schema markup gives Google more information about your business at the code level, helping it deliver your content to the most relevant audience. This applies to location-based search as well – you can use LocalBusiness schema to provide Google with in-depth details about your business and provide users with more info – such as opening times during the holiday season or price ranges for your products.

You can also use this to implement actions on your Google My Business listing, allowing users to book appointments, reserve hotel rooms or book a table. Adding schema to your pages can be a tricky process but it provides users with the kind of info that helps them make buying decisions – so it’s worth the effort.

3. Make sure your Google My Business account is 100% complete

Google wants to make sure it provides the most relevant results to local searchers and gives them all the info they need to decide on a business: location, opening times, reviews etc. Which means you first give this data to the search giant through your Google My Business (GMB) account – this should be 100% complete.

Accuracy is also important, so pay attention to these key areas:

• Make sure your address is 100% correct
• Verify your location in Google Maps
• Specify the city, town etc, that you’re targeting in the title of your GMB landing page
• Choose the GMB categories most relevant to your services
• Define your opening times
• Link to your website (either your homepage or the location page for that branch)

Also, think about what kind of images you want users to see on your local listing. While users can upload their own images of your business for others to see, you can also upload your own pictures in certain categories (e.g. pubs and restaurants), such as menus, food, interiors and other criteria.

4. Be ready to pick up the phone

Aside from linking to your website and providing users with directions to your business location, Google also allows local searchers to call your business up directly. Sometimes, people might want to check you have an item in stock or confirm a pub is showing the football match they want to watch before paying a visit.

Whatever the reason, be ready to pick up the phone and confirm you can deliver what local users are after.

5. Build a strong profile of positive reviews

Reviews are massive when it comes to location-based searches. This is one of the fastest ways for users to differentiate between you and rival businesses. A strong profile of positive feedback on Google Reviews is one of the most important factors when it comes to turning local search into genuine leads – especially if you’re a brand users don’t already know and trust.

6. Get citations and brand mentions

Google takes citations and brand mentions into consideration with its local listing algorithm. A citation is when another website mentions your brand without actually linking to your site. These aren’t as strong as inbound links from reputable local sources but they do give Google confidence that you’re a genuine business people are talking about.

Location-based search as a lead-gen strategy

Location-based search gives businesses with physical locations a concrete channel to generate foot traffic and bridge the online/offline divide. As a lead-gen strategy, you’re looking at prospects with incredibly high purchase intent and a desire to make the purchase now.

Even a fairly basic local SEO strategy can turn online searches into real-world customers, but leading brands are going much further than this. By using mobile to enhance the experience of buying and using products/services, brands are turning local searches into loyal customers that keep coming back to them – and this is proving particularly powerful for brands with business locations across the country.

Today Meredith Kildow, Chief Revenue Officer of Consilio, joins us to discuss strategies that sales leaders can use to navigate their teams through mergers and acquisitions.   Click here for the podcast version of this interview.   Segment 1: People and Structure It’s

The history of telemarketing has given us a lot of information about marketing techniques and insights into consumers preferences. It also created a movement of ‘do not call lists’ and 100’s of free trips going unclaimed. We have also learned the value of a cold call vs a cold email. The creation of spam folders, call blocking and caller ID have shaped the way sales teams reach out.

The following are the top 6 benefits of tracking your calls:

1. It Will Not Change your Current System

You can use your existing campaigns, and optimizing techniques. With call tracking you are just getting more data to see what is and is not effective. Calls are an additional point of engagement and you can monitor your results the same way you would an online campaign. Google Analytics can include your calling information once you set up what you want to monitor and collect.

2. Differentiating Call Sources

Call tracking can help you understand why people are calling into your business. In 2015, Google reported that searches mainly occur on mobile devices. Using call tracking you can see which extensions encouraged the call to your company.

It could be implementation of a call-only add or a Google call button and see which is pushing people towards your business. Tracking a caller’s activity online will show you what they saw right before they called you. This information can help you either streamline your business or update your systems.

3. More Robust Leads Information

Session level call tracking offers a lot of information on who calls into your office. You receive the caller’s phone number, geographic location and what the viewed on your website. Tracking call data can be used to optimize key word bidding in bid management tools, you can compare calls next to clicks and other engagement points to see what is and is not working.

Call tracking can give you a better idea of what the demographic of your customers. Depending on what you decide to track you can get their location and age. You can then use this information to created more targeted advertisements to attract that demographic.

4. Give Credit Where it is due

It is important to track calls so your team can show hard copy results of their daily efforts. Calls are an important part of client business relationship and tracking them will give your account management teams a way to provide their efforts. With inbound calls from mobile sites on the rise having a system to give credit where credit is due is vital to a competitive team atmosphere.

5. The Life of a Consumer

Call tracking is an additional way to see the entire process of how customers start their relationship (no matter how short) with your company. Tracking calls provides the full picture of your customer business relationship. Online sources found that marketers that do not include calls could be missing up to half their conversations. Tracking calls can map out the path of the average customer and provide vital insights for improvements.

6. It Can Help You Refine your SEO

Call tracking can be used to collect information regarding your pay per click marketing to see which keywords are creating calls. This information can help you sift through and focus on the keywords that actually attract customers.

Before the Dial Tone

Getting to know your client base and increasing your client lists requires a lot of time effort and data collection. Make sure that your marketing strategies and team are above their competitors with call tracking!

Hate the thought of doing sales presentations? You’re not alone. But the best reps have sales presentations down pat, even if it’s not their favorite activity.

The best sales reps know that, when done right, sales presentations are a high-earning skill.

So, let’s hone that skill with simple sales presentation techniques that communicate an irresistible narrative and get buyers to close.

As it can sometimes mean the difference between closing a deal or losing a customer, you definitely want to get your sales presentation right. There are strategies and tips you can follow to ensure your sales presentations are effective, memorable, and engaging. Let’s go over them below.

Sales Presentation Methods

1. Structure your presentation. 

Guiding your prospects down a clear path is key to a successful sales presentation. You’ll follow a logical structure, and listeners will understand how each element of your presentation relates to one another, rather than them having to piece together disjointed information on their own. 

There are times when flipping the structure can add unique elements to your presentation, though, and we’ll discuss this further below. 

2. Use data visualizations. 

Using visuals, like charts and graphics, to supplement your message is a valuable way to showcase your content in an easy-to-understand format as they make your words more impactful. 

For example, if you’re selling SaaS that helps users organize their sales process for a shorter cycle, you can create a visual that displays the average length of your clients’ sales cycle vs. those using other tools. 

By doing this, you’re adding extra emphasis to your words with a visual picture, and a bonus is that visuals are more likely to stick with your audience and get them thinking versus just hearing you talk. 

3. Rely on spoken words — not text.

If your presentation slides are text-heavy, prospects may get caught up reading the words you’ve written instead of listening, causing them to miss out on the value you’re sharing. Aim to include less text by calling attention to the most significant elements with short bursts of text that you supplement with your words. 

In addition, when you have less text on your slides, you may be less inclined to just read from them, which can be a bad part of presentations. You’ll have to speak instead of relying on written content. 

Let’s go over some sales presentation techniques that, when paired with the three methods above, will help you nail it every time.

Sales Presentation Techniques

1. Send your buyer the presentation deck before your call.

You might assume that sending a buyer a deck before a call is like revealing whodunnit on the cover of a murder mystery. No one will pay attention to the rest of the book, right? 

When the Gong.io team started sharing our deck before opening sales calls, we learned it was a winning move. 

If your deck is compelling, prospects will want to get into it with you, even if they know the main point. Together, you can dive in, dissect the good bits, and talk through questions. It’s going to be a juicy conversation, and they know it.

Then, you can begin the conversation during your presentation with a statement like, “Based on the information in the deck I sent, where should we start?”

2. Invoke self-discovery.

It’s tempting to stick to a positive linear story during your sales presentation. That usually invokes talking about benefits, outcomes, and desired results. But, that approach isn’t always the best. 

Before discussing solutions and results, you must understand your prospect's problem. More importantly, you have to be sure your prospects understand the problem. 

Self-discovery is the ticket that gets you there. Instead of telling the buyer what the problem is and how you’ll address it, get your buyer to connect with the problem on their own. 

3. Talk about Point A. Don’t skip to point B.

This is 100% linked to the tip above. There’s a problem (point A) and desired outcome (point B). Point A is the status quo. It’s a problem your buyer will continue to face if they don’t make a change. 

You can stand out by focusing on point A, as talking about a pain point is shockingly more effective than talking about positive outcomes. 

Make your buyer feel the pain that results from the status quo. Convince them the pain will only worsen without your solution — because you know that to be true.

You should only talk about benefits once they’re on board with that line of thinking. Urgency is what allows benefits to land. Without urgency, benefits are just happy points that hold no real meaning.

4. Insight is your #1 lead story.

Buyers are experts on their circumstances, but they want insights into their situation from you. 

You’re most likely to impress a buyer by telling them something new about themselves, as your offering is a unique insight into their problems and opportunities.

Check out this TaylorMade video. It’s a bang-on example of how to lead a presentation with insight, and then move on to your product’s strengths:

You learned how to get more distance from your golf swing (an insight into what you’re doing). Then you learned how that’s supported by the product’s particular strength.

Insight comes first. It changes how your buyers think about the problem your product solves. Only then benefits can land effectively.

5. Don’t lead with differentiators, lead to them.

At Gong.io, we’ve taught our sales reps to speak with buyers about a critical problem only we can solve. It’s the delta between top producers and the rest of the team.

After naming that problem, reps offer insight into it and begin to build urgency:

• "The numbers from your top reps are fantastic."
• "The downside is they’re annulled by everyone else who’s missing their quota."
• "Your team goes from outstanding numbers to breaking even or missing quota. Both of those options are unsustainable."

We only introduce our key differentiator once the backstory is clear and the buyer gets it. Then, our reps say something like this:

"Gong is the only platform that can tell you what your top reps do differently from the rest of your team. We can tell you which questions they ask, which topics they discuss, when they talk about each one, and more."

See why we lead to our differentiator, and not with it? It just wouldn’t land the same way if we started with the differentiator. In fact, it might not land at all.

6. Focus on value, not features.

Gong.io research found that focusing on features over value is not impactful. Prospects, especially decision-makers, want value propositions about how you’ll help them solve their problems rather than an overview of the features they’ll get. 

7. Flip your presentation.

he next, eventually achieving a shiny, final outcome. This isn’t always the best strategy. 

Instead of building up to the most significant and impactful part of your demo for your prospect, begin with the most valuable part, which is how you’ll help them, and let the conversation flow from there. 

There’s one other tactic underlying it all: The best product demos start with topics the buyers highlighted on the discovery call. For example, if the buyer spends 4 minutes talking about X and 10 minutes talking about Y, you want to begin with Y, as the buyer has demonstrated that they’re heavily interested in Y. In the opening section of your presentation, address the biggest issue from discovery. Address the second biggest issue second, etc.

It’s called solution mapping, and it’s going to change your sales presentation process forever. Stop saving the big reveal for last. Stop building anticipation. Start with the good stuff. Let it rip right out of the gate.

8. Turn your presentation into a conversation.

If you sensed we were looking for a two-way dialogue during your pitch, you’re right. That’s a relief to most salespeople, especially the ones who hate delivering traditional presentations.

A two-way dialogue is going to make your pitch feel more natural. To do this, Gong.io says to get buyers to ask questions by giving them just enough info to inspire them to ask more questions and keep the conversation going. In fact, top performers ask fewer questions because they don’t bombard prospects with too much information but instead give buyers just enough information to have them ask questions. 

Long monologues won’t help you have real conversations with your buyers. Instead, aim for a great two-way conversation. 

9. Mind the 9-minute period.

This tip is crisp and clear: Don’t present for more than nine minutes. Gong.io data supports this. 

Presentations for lost deals last an average of 11.4 minutes. Why do they go so poorly? Because it’s hard to retain attention. If you do go longer than nine minutes, switch it up. 

Vary something that re-captures attention and keeps people engaged. Change channels by doing something like switching up who’s speaking in real life or on video. This can rest your clock to zero, and you’ve got nine more minutes for the next portion of the show. 

10. Be strategic with social proof. 

Social proof. Best friend or worst nightmare? It can be either one, so use it carefully. For example, generic social proof (i.e., naming impressive clients for brand power alone) is a disaster. Buyers might not identify with them. Sure, they’re dazzled, but they may not see how they relate to your current client.

An effective strategy is to reference clients similar to your buyer, with the same pain points, challenges and needs that they can relate to. You can tell an accompanying story about the client and their pain points, helping the buyer see themselves in the story you’re telling.

11. Talk price after you establish value.

Would it surprise you to know it matters when you talk about certain topics? It can actually affect whether you win or lose a deal. Pricing is a great example of this principle.

The top salespeople wait to talk about pricing. They know it’s important to demonstrate their product’s value first.

Set an agenda at the start of your call so your buyer knows when to expect a pricing discussion. They’ll be less likely to raise it early, and if they do, you can refer back to the agenda.

Open with something like, "I’d like to talk about A, B, and C on our call today. Then we can go over pricing at the end and -- if it makes sense for you -- talk about next steps. Does that work for you?"

You’re all set.

12. Reference your competitors.

Our data shows that you’re more likely to win a deal if you talk about the competition early in the sales process instead of ignoring them completely.

For best results, practice this during your first sales presentation. Waiting until the end of your sales process puts you into a dangerous red zone. Your buyers will already have formed opinions, and they’ll be harder to change.

In other words, at the end of the day, buyers will justify a decision they made early in the process, which is why it’s critical to set yourself up as the winner early on. Talk about the competition in your presentation. Put the conversation out there. Get your buyer to see you through that lens, and you’re golden.

Over To You

You now have 15 new tips and techniques to throw down this quarter. Many of these data-backed moves come from Gong.io’s own findings and have proven to be effective for us. Implement them, and I know you’ll boost your numbers.

• Lyft went public on Friday, kicking off a parade of high-profile IPOs expected this year, including Uber, Postmates, and perhaps even Airbnb. 
• However, there's still one thing we don't know: Are these gig-economy companies suited to weather a recession?
• They might be so ingrained in consumer habits that they'll be just fine.
• They might also face a supply-side crunch, as people flock to become Uber drivers or Airbnb hosts during economic hard times — which would drive prices down. 
• Or they could get crushed during, say, a downturn in the travel industry.
• It's all unproven, and the fact that everyone's rushing to go public might be a bad omen. 

What do Lyft, Uber, Airbnb and Postmates all have in common?

They all came of age after the last big recession. 

That's an important, and much overlooked, aspect of the young crop of "gig-economy" startups that are set to join the public markets in an IPO parade kicked off by Lyft on Friday. 

The enthusiasm for these new business models — made possible by the advent of smartphones and cloud computing — is based on a very short track record. And it's a track record that's occurred during some of the best possible economic conditions. 

So what happens to their businesses during bad times? 

There are plenty of plausible scenarios to imagine. But the truth is, we just don't know, because, unlike past tech IPOs based on established businesses like advertising or retail, the gig-economy is a completely new animal. 

"That’s one of the wildcards," says Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.

These companies haven’t been "bullet-tested" in a slower growth environment, adds Synovus Trust portfolio manager Dan Morgan.

Lyft's first day of trading saw its stock surge as much as 20%, finishing its first day with a $27 billion valuation, well above the valuation private market investors gave it during its last funding round.  That rich price does not seem to take into account the possibility of an economic downturn, says Ives. Lyft, like some of the other gig-economy firms, is losing a lot of money and the expecations for profitability appear based on a forecast of continued economic good times.

But there are signs of cloudier economic conditions on the horizon, including the inverted yield curve and the downward revision of fourth quarter US GDP.

Ives says he believes we could be in for a "slower demand cycle" over the next 12 to 18 months, though he thinks the economy will likely dodge a full blown recession. 

If we do hit a recession of the magnitude of the 2008 financial crisis, "all bets are off" when it comes to gig-economy companies, he says. 

As a reminder, the so-called Great Recession officially began in December 2007 and lasted until June 2009. 

Lyft was founded in 2012, Uber in 2009, Postmates in 2011 and Airbnb in 2008. 

Although Airbnb and Uber technically were created during the last recession, their businesses were so nascent at the time that they don't really tell us much about how their current, multi-billion dollar businesses would fare in a recession.

Here are a couple of scenarios to consider:

Scenario 1: Gig-economy businesses prove to be 'recession proof'

This scenario views services like Lyft and Uber as essential staples of everyday life. Unlike "discretionary" goods that people decide they can do without during tough economic times, ride-sharing has become a critical means of transportation. 

"It has become so ingrained in people's lives that it’s like a utility," says Goodwater Capital's Eric Kim. "Utilities are recession proof. Regardless of the macro, people need their electricity and their water."

Of course, there's already a utility called public transportation. But the price difference between ride-sharing and public transportation is shrinking. And in some cases, public transportation isn't a viable option, if bus stops are conveninent.

"A bus might be more economic, but if you need to get to work quickly, that 30 minutes might be worth a few more bucks," says Kim.

Scenario 2: Gig-economy businesses experience a vicious supply-side cycle

As people lose their jobs in a recession (more than 8 million jobs were lost during the Great Recession), the gig-economy could provide a sort of safety net for the unemployed to earn cash and try to make ends meet. 

But what happens when the supply of drivers experiences such a massive surge? 

Drivers are already protesting because of the price cuts that Uber and Lyft have rolled out. A flood of new drivers could push prices down to rock-bottom levels. That might help lift the companies' profit margins, but it doesn't sound like the recipe for a sustainable business. Would Lyft and Uber have to cap the number of drivers they allow on their platforms?

Food delivery services like Postmates and the Uber Eats subsidiary could also draw an influx of delivery people. But ordering food may be an easier expense for consumers to cut than ride-hailing, causing a drop in demand which could further push prices down. 

Scenario 3: Gig-economy companies live and die by the industries they're disrupting

It's worth remembering that gig-economy companies are as much "tech" companies as they are companies in the field that they're trying to disrupt, such as transportation, hotels, or restaurants.

"There are certain businesses that can be completely obliterated when there is a downside," says Synovus Trust's Dan Morgan.

Airbnb seems paritcuarly vulnerable, Morgan reckons, since it's so reliant on the travel industry. An Airbnb user "may just cancel their vacation because their spouse lost their job," he says. 

The automotive industry was particularly hard hit in the 2008 recession, with GM filing for bankruptcy and several other major companies on the brink.

If consumers cut back on big budget expenses like buying cars, ride-hailing services will provide a great alternative. On the other hand, Uber and Lyft's drivers still need to purchase and finance cars to do their jobs. That won't be an easy thing for them to do if the prices they charge for rides are falling through the floor.

Be careful what you wish for

Those are just three potential ways things could play out if the economy were to go into a tailspin. 

Morgan worries that the spate of IPOs could itself be a bad omen. 

These companies "were sitting on sidelines for a long time. No one seemed to care," he said. "All of a sudden everyone's rushing to get to the markets.  That brings up my concern that we could be near the end of the cycle."

If that turns out to be the case, we'll know whether gig-economy companies are recession-proof sooner than we'd like.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Wearable and foldable phones are shaking up tech, making 2019 the year of weird phones

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence,  Business Insider's premium research service. Current subscribers can read the report here.

Until now, healthcare was the only remaining industry that had yet to feel the rapid impact of digitization endured by retail, banking, and media. But consumer adoption of digital tech, regulatory overhauls, and a shifting reimbursement model are forcing healthcare players' hands.

Summary List Placement

Digital health innovation offers market incumbents new opportunities to combat constricting margins, labor shortages, and rising costs.

But it also poses a threat to slow movers, as new entrants lean on their digital prowess and lack of legacy infrastructure to cut costs and remain nimble. As such, incumbents are turning to acquisitions, partnerships, and new investments to strengthen their digital health services.

The first Digital Health Ecosystem Report from Business Insider Intelligence explores the current healthcare ecosystem, industry trends that are driving digital transformation, and where the industry is headed.

We outline the role of each of the industry's major players — including payers, providers, and manufacturers — and how they're affected by healthcare's digital disruption. 

 

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Digital health is at the forefront of transformation in the healthcare industry — both as a driver of and an answer to the challenges industry players are grappling with.
• All of the industry's major players — including payers, providers, and manufacturers — are affected by healthcare's digital disruption.
• A confluence of forces induced healthcare's embrace of digital health, including changing consumer expectations, a new and disruptive reimbursement model, and rising healthcare costs
• Tech-focused entrants are also breaking into healthcare, acting as catalysts for change and threatening legacy players' bottom lines.
• Key digital health solutions like EHRs, digital therapeutics, telehealth, AI, wearables, and blockchain are the foundation of the industry's digital awakening.
• Early evidence that digital health can address many of the industry's myriad challenges has fueled a vibrant US digital health funding market in 2018, with overall funding hitting $6.8 billion at the end of Q3. 

 In full, the report:

• Details the US healthcare landscape by the role that payers, providers, manufacturers, and distributors play in the healthcare ecosystem.
• Gives an overview of how digital health is enabling incumbents to overcome industry challenges.
• Outlines how tech-focused healthcare entrants are pressuring incumbents and accelerating healthcare's digital transformation
• Identifies promising digital health funding areas to illustrate what the future of digital health will look like.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >>Purchase & Download Now
2. Subscribe to a Premium pass to Business Insider Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you've given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of the Digital Health.

The companies mentioned in this report are: Aetna, Alphabet, Amazon, American Well, AmerisourceBergen, Anthem, Apple, Arizona Care Network, Arterys, Babylon Health, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Bay Labs, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Blue Mesa Health, Bright Health, Cardinal Health, Cedars-Sinai, Cleveland Clinic, Clover Health, CVS, DePuy Synthes, Devoted Health, Dexcom, Doctor on Demand, Express Scripts, Fitbit, Fresenius Medical Care, GE Healthcare, Geisinger, Glooko, GSK, healthfinch, IBM, IDx, Johnson & Johnson, Mass General, McKesson, Medtronic, Merck & Co., Merck KGaA, Microsoft, NewYork-Presbyterian, Northwell Health, Novartis, Olive, Omada Health, Optum Rx, Oscar Health, Pear Therapeutics, Pfizer, Philips, PillPack, ResMed, Rite Aid, Roche, Samsung, Sanofi, Senseonics, Suki, Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, T-Mobile, UnitedHealth Group, Verily, Viant, Walgreens, Walmart, Wellpepper, Zocdoc

 

 

SEE ALSO: Patients are transforming from passive recipients of healthcare services to active participants in their own health

Join the conversation about this story »

Don’t you just feel stuck?

Sometimes you’re just grinding through the day, doing all these things…

But you feel like you’re not achieving as much as you hoped for.

I mean at the speed everything is moving, you’re probably not going to hit those goals in time.

I know how it feels because it happens to me as well. Which is why I’ve asked some really successful entrepreneurs to share with me their productivity tips. The question I asked them was:

What’s the best productivity tip you would give to entrepreneurs that has personally helped you get more done?

So, let’s just right in…

1. Grant Cardone (Instagram)

My best productivity tip is when asked to do something

1) I decide immediately whether I am in or not… Decide Immediately yes or no and have no maybes.

2) Then complete the task. The definition of work to me is not effort but a completed task.

I used this productivity tip when answering your email.

2. John Rampton (Founder of Calendar.com)

Cut your meetings in half. Whenever someone sends you a meeting request… ask/tell them that you only have half that time. It will help you have more time in every day. The average person wastes 17:34 for every 45 minutes in a meeting. This is unacceptable. Cut those meetings in half and blaze through them.

3. Dave Chesson (GunUniversity.com)

Email sucks the life out of you, so kill it until you’re ready.

I used to lie to myself and think I needed my email box to be open at all times. There I would be, engaged in my writing when all of a sudden and email notification would pop-up. Just like that, I’d divert my attention to it, read it, and usually respond.

Now the worst part is that after that email, I’d have to re-divert my attention to what I was working on, find my place and get back in the zone. But let’s face it, ten minutes later, there’d be another email notification (If I’m lucky).

So, I killed my box. Instead I only open it before I start the day, and right before I close down for the day. That’s it. When I started doing this, there was still the same number of emails, however, I was no longer wasting brain power, or time switching back and forth between it all.

So, save your sanity, and save your time by killing your email program until you’re ready.

4. Chris Makara (Founder of Bulkly)

For me, the best productivity tip is to build out processes that are able to be scaled, replicated or automated. One example of this is to automate and schedule social media posts. Since I am no longer wasting hours each week scheduling content for my various social media profiles, I can now spend that time doing other things. And as an entrepreneur, there’s definitely no end to your “to-do” list…so when you have opportunities to streamline and reduce time spent on various tasks, you end up with more time to work on other things that aren’t as scalable.

5. Nick Loper (Founder of SideHustleNation)

For me, it’s been a couple things. The first is to write down your top 3 priorities for the next day the night before. In the morning, finish at least the first one before doing any other work, or diving into email or social media. The second thing that’s made a big impact is starting to only take meetings and calls one day a week. That’s freed up bigger blocks of “deep work” time the rest of the week to make more meaningful progress without all the constant interruptions.

6. Sam Hurley (Founder of OPTIM-EYEZ)

Block your time.

That means turning all notifications off and NOT responding ‘as and when’ notifications come through; only set one or two times to check and respond, per day. (Including emails, folks.)

Otherwise, your day’s activity isn’t conducive to productivity or growth!

I spent heaps and heaps of time on social media in my earlier stages, so I know the possible implications all too well…

In addition, use automation for everything that can be automated (but always balance automation with human input, where relevant.)

7. Zeb Welborn (Founder of Welborn Media)

#1 – Prioritize your to do list – When I first started my business, I committed myself to doing six things every day to grow my business. Now, my to do list is so much longer that I now prioritize the top 6 things I need to accomplish every day. I put the most important tasks up front so I accomplish those first. It’s important to be proactive in building your business and not reactive by responding to emails or putting out fires.

#2 – Use Google Drive – Google Documents and Google Sheets are a fantastic way to work with others on projects. I set up these documents and try to collaborate with others to help complete things faster and more efficiently. It’s amazing how many people are still sending files back and forth as opposed to working on a document together in Google Drive.

#3 – My last tip on productivity is setting time aside to read and learn. Learning from others will help avoid pitfalls and wasted time, effort, energy and money.

8. Eric Bandholz (Founder of Beardbrand.com)

To answer this question, you actually need to re-think the question. Your goal shouldn’t be how do you get more done, but how do you get less done. By focusing on doing less, this allows you to implement and build systems that bring efficiencies to your business. It also allows you to delegate properly and scale the business; ultimately getting more done through the business and less from you.

So, what are you going to do now?

Will this be just another blog post you read for the day or will you pause for a moment and think of how you’re going to incorporate this in your life.

I mean do you think your life will improve if you just consume more information without taking action.

Because in the end it’s not about acquiring more information but implementation.

For business owners, the dreaded elevator pitch incites great anxiety, and oftentimes, abject fear. Beyond pitch competitions, every day, countless individuals attempt to introduce themselves, share information and engage others for the purpose of building a relationship to sell products and services or themselves.

While it’s highly unlikely you can close a deal at hello with a killer elevator pitch—even a pitch that is flawlessly delivered—it is completely possible that a poorly constructed and delivered elevator pitch can unnecessarily lengthen the sales process, make an extremely poor impression or remove your company from consideration altogether.

Even more daunting are the numerous recommended elevator pitch rules. From those that proclaim an individual should introduce themselves in less than 10 seconds to no more than 60 seconds, making a positive and memorable first impression should be the ultimate goal.

The elevator pitch has an interesting and storied Hollywood history. In Hollywood’s heyday, writers, producers and directors would perfect a pitch for their projects and would share them with studio executives during an elevator ride. This practice graduated into the business world and has become a go-to communication staple at all types of business functions, particularly networking events.

Whether you’ve honed your pitching skills or are still mastering them, there are five important reasons to ditch your elevator pitch and to develop a more strategic approach to introduce yourself, your company and your products and services to prospects, industry peers or influencers.

• Avoid being transactional. Elevator pitches are a transactional activity that limit your ability to successfully connect with others. It is important that you present yourself, your business and your brand in a manner that communicates confidence, competence and interest. The ultimate goal of engaging others is to strategically build a mutually beneficial relationship with prospects, peers and influencers.
• Invite others into the conversation. Generally, when someone delivers an elevator pitch, they are 100 percent focused on the pitch and are oblivious to their audience. This approach serves to disengage people rather than stimulate their interest. It is better to develop a conversational manner that encourages two-way dialogue and engagement.
• Engage authentically. Oftentimes, delivering an elevator pitch can be awkward, painful and downright ugly, leaving a negative impression or, worse, a disastrous presentation of your personal and company brands. When engaging in face-to-face interactions, the majority of the communication occurs through your nonverbal behaviors and your tone of voice. Therefore, authenticity is critically important to making a unique, positive and memorable first impression that supports your brand.
• It’s not about you. Meeting prospective customers, new peers or influencers presents a great opportunity to gather the information necessary to develop a strategic and appropriate follow-up opportunity. Limit your information sharing and encourage others to share more.
• Play the long game. Networking has become passé and extremely ineffective. Savvy business owners and professionals recognize the value of building strategic and mutually beneficial relationships as a mission-critical skill for success. While you can’t win business with an elevator pitch, you can most certainly lengthen the sales process or lose a business opportunity.

A more effective method to introducing yourself, your company and your products or services involves three simple steps.

First, introduce yourself, your company and your products or services. Next, share how you, the company or its products or services adds great value to your customers. In other words, how do you help your customers succeed, and what are the typical results? Finally, engage in conversation by inviting others to introduce themselves or by asking how their organization handles the issues or opportunities that you help your customers excel.

With this approach, you can stand out by making a more positive, engaging and memorable impression. You also can gain invaluable information on prospective customers, shorten the sales process, and help to build a strategic and mutually beneficial relationship.

A version of this post originally appeared here.

• The first few decades of technology innovation have been characterized by rapid growth and quick profits based on low headcounts and low capital outlays.
• The next few decades will require much larger headcounts and massively larger amounts of money.
• If you have doubts, just look at Tesla and Elon Musk.

Tesla is 15 years old, and despite its considerable struggles and internal and external dramas, Elon Musk's electric carmaker remains a Silicon Valley darling and is widely admired in the traditional auto industry.

None of that means the company is getting better at its core function, which is building cars. Tesla has improved drastically on this front, but compared to other automakers, it's gone from what I would say is an "F" to managing a "C."

That's because large-scale manufacturing is difficult. Musk knows this and often points to Tesla's aspirations to reinvent the process as the thing that will ensure the company's legacy.

Read more: Elon Musk just revealed the Tesla Model Y — and he's still the greatest car salesman who ever lived

But what Elon knows is largely ignored by Tesla's most enthusiastic supporters, and it's now broken free and appears to be moving menacingly toward Uber and Lyft as those high-expectation startups IPO.

The basic issue is one of scale combined with speed. I'll give you an example, drawn from a company I know pretty well. Business Insider started out with a few guys in a borrowed loading dock in New York City, hammering out blog posts on tech and the markets in 2009. Ten years later, BI is the biggest business news site in the world, with far-flung global offices. We were acquired by Axel Springer, a German media conglomerate, in 2015, for about $450 million, and since then our growth has been impressive by any measure.

But our central New York operation fits on two office floors in lower Manhattan, and while we employ a large number of journalists relative to many other digital media sites, we're pretty far from Tesla's headcount of around 40,000. A classic example is Instagram, which was bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, when the photo-sharing app had 13 employees.

The problem is getting worse

Uber and Lyft have some structural similarities — the tech side can be run by a relatively small number of high-value software engineers and managers — but the "on the ground" part of the business requires a staggeringly expensive army of human drivers, as well as capital investment in cars, which are a depreciating asset. If I were to transfer this model to BI, we'd all be creating the publication as we do now, writing a number of stories every day — then printing them all and distributing the results by hand. Our business plan would be worse than the one it's replacing, daily newspapers.

I could go on. Apple is having a tough time figuring out what it's next awesome product will be. The Apple Watch has a done OK, but it's no iPhone. The much-discussed Apple Car project has reportedly changed from an actual car into a self-driving software project; meanwhile Alphabet's Waymo has spent a decade on the problem and is just now getting self-driving cars on the road in a commercial application.

You get the point. The low-hanging, scale-fast-and-cheap fruit has been picked. The internet of things is evolving in herky-jerky fashion. So investors have turned to transportation, largely because everybody needs to get around and because the auto industry is worth trillions worldwide but tends to innovate rather slowly.

Tesla's ongoing struggles with the real world

Tesla was ahead of the curve on this trend by a decade, but Silicon Valley is ignoring the carmaker's struggles. The lesson ought to be that the best way to make (or lose) a fortune in the auto industry is to start with one (Elon Musk basically lost the millions he initially invested in Tesla after he and his partners sold PayPal to eBay, but he was able to reverse the death spiral later in 2008, and the company has grown massively since).

The basic math of the car business is that it demands a gigantic amount of capital to generate an immense level of cash flow, out of which you try to achieve profit margins that could run above 10%. Cash balances don't rise to Apple or Google levels, but before the tech economy's economics became the standard, people used to worry about what Ford, for instance, would do when it piled up tens of billions in cash on its balance sheet. Even now, Ford has enough cash to ride out several short, cyclical recessions.

Back to Uber and Lyft. Their balance sheets also enjoy lots of revenue coming in, but the businesses quickly convert a growing topline into a ruinous bottom line because there's an insatiable need for more drivers. That end of the business isn't rightsized for anything but the most robust, densely urban environments; an Uber driver outside a place like New York or San Francisco probably can't get enough rides to think of the job as more than a short-term gig or a stopgap wage.

Driverless cars might remedy this flaw, and that's why General Motors' Cruise and Waymo are pushing in that direction. For Tesla, the solution is automated manufacturing, but that's never going to eliminate 100% of the labor headcount. And thus far, the company's efforts to roboticize its assembly lines have met the same fate as the industry's earlier experiments. In fact, Tesla had to build a quickie assembly line under a tent last year to make its production targets — a line that wouldn't have looked unfamiliar to Henry Ford.

Even Amazon isn't exempt

If I'm feeling especially grumpy, the only tech company that's using the old model (think: Facebook and Google) and looking pretty solid is the brutally competitive Amazon. This is a company that's good at experimenting with innovations that don't reinvent the wheel but gain traction (Echo speakers are no Sonos, but Alexa is winning) and whose buy-everything-from-us strategy has won over consumers in droves. Resistance is futile, as I discovered recently when I needed to buy a tuxedo for an eight-year-old on a few days' notice.

That said, Amazon doesn't have a perfect track record (remember the Fire phone?), and it's starting to get into stuff like airplanes and electric pickup trucks (it invested in startup Rivian not too long ago), so we'll have to see if the great aggregator of online consumption can make it in the world of large, complicated machines.

If Tesla's experience is a guide, the ride is gonna be rough. Another example, from my own life. I'm writing this story at home at 9 a.m. on a Thursday, using a high-speed internet connection and Insider's content-management system. I'll file it, photos and all, entirely digitally, all from the comfort of my home. The story could be good to go in less than half an hour.

In the 1990s, before the web, when I wrote stories at home, I had to save the file to a 3.5-inch disk and take it myself to the publication that would later turn it into a print product. The writing part consumed about the same amount of time as it does now, but the logistics around delivering the end result added hours. And of course there was still a lot of work for other people to do once my job was done. You don't even want to know what it was like when everything was written on typewriters and publications were assembled without digital tools (the appearance of a daily broadsheet, in those days, was something of a miracle). 

Welcome to the Era of Slow Scaling

What Tesla has been trying and failing to do is reverse-engineering some more speed into the production of the automobile — to make the physical car more like virtual software. They have been somewhat successful at this, believe it or not (over-the-air software, updates, for example, that can fix things like braking dynamics). But attempting to crack the code of the moving assembly line has been much more difficult. 

Many of the future opportunities that Silicon Valley wants to attack are like this: the so-called disruption can take hold and gain investment, but it doesn't scale fast enough toward profitability. Tesla is exhibit A: In 15 years, the company grew dramatically, but it's only made money in three quarters since 2010. 

Two-decade timeframes aren't going fly on Sand Hill Road. Even isolated success stories — GM bought Cruise for around $1-billion all-in when Cruise has about 15 staffers, and the company is now valued at $14.5 billion — come with staggering ongoing costs. Cruise's future investment prospects, for example, come in part from GM's possession of a multi-billion-dollar factory in Michigan where it builds the EVs that Cruiser operates. 

How many venture capitalists want to invest in companies that require a few billion in long-term investment right out the gate? 

We're going to find out because this is what's coming: the Era of Slow Scaling. And if anybody wants a comprehensive tutorial on how it will go down, there's no better person to pay attention to than Elon Musk.

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NOW WATCH: Layoffs, SEC battles, and Elon Musk's tweets: 2019 looks like another chaotic year for Tesla

As a business owner, your landing page is the key to unlocking sales, acquiring new customers, and increasing your company’s ROI. When done right, your landing page can astronomically boost conversions and further your reach by grabbing visitors’ attention and showcasing your product value. Without a solid landing page, your business is missing out on potential leads and revenue.

According to WishPond, landing pages have an average conversion rate of 13 percent. Your conversion rate can be higher with enough optimization and research.

A landing page has one purpose, and that’s to convert visitors into loyal, paying customers or capture leads. It should have such an effect on users that they’re compelled to take action after scrolling through and seeing all the wondrous benefits your product has to offer. Its design should be clean and responsive as well as easily navigable.

Creating a successful landing page can be tricky, so if you’re in the midst of creating one for your business, here are a few ways to help you get started.

Craft compelling copy

If users click through to your landing page and aren’t enticed by what they’re reading or seeing, you can bet they’ll hit the exit button pretty quickly. If you want to keep their attention, you need to craft copy for your landing page that compels them and shows them why investing in your products will improve their life and state of mind.

There are normally three main components in landing page copy:

• Headline
• Subtext
• Body copy

Your headline sets the tone for the rest of your content, so it’s important that it grabs readers’ attention. It has a bigger font size than the rest of your copy and usually includes a benefit or solution.

Subtext is optional and doesn’t appear on all landing pages. It’s the text placed directly beneath the header that gives a little more detail about the product or its benefits and convinces visitors they should convert.

The body copy should explain your product’s value — which we will dive into in a second — while proving that value. You can do this through full paragraphs, bullet points, checklists, etc. Keep the text simple, straightforward, easy to understand.

Explain your product’s value

This is a no-brainer when creating a landing page, but it’s absolutely crucial if you want to bring in tons of new conversions. Without properly explaining the value your products and services brings to potential customers, you aren’t selling them. They have no reason to purchase from you or hand you their email address if they don’t feel like they’re getting anything valuable in return.

It’s important to emphasize the benefits of your product right away. Explain how your content will improve the lives of your audience or provide a solution to their problem. It’s better if you can be specific and include a statistic from your analytics.

Simplify forms

It’s simple: if you want to collect more leads, make the process of doing so easier for users. No one wants to spend an entire five minutes filling out personal information when all they want is the offer promised behind it. The more obstacles you put in place, the fewer happy customers you’ll get. That’s why you need to create a simple yet effective contact form on your landing page.

A recent 2019 survey by HubSpot found that the average length of a form is around five form fields. The less complicated you make it for users to sign up, the easier it’ll be to capture leads. Keep it simple by including five fields or less in your contact form.

Display social proof

Social proof marketing is when you use the recommendations and reviews of other customers or clients to prove your credibility as a brand. If a large majority of people endorse a product or service, that means it must have value, and this leads users to believe they need it too.

Some examples of social proof include:

• Client testimonials
• Customer reviews
• Brand logos
• Influencer or celebrity endorsements
• Number of shares, views, engagements
• Certificates or awards

Create a CTA

It’s important that your call to action or CTA serves its purpose, which is to tell your audience what you want them to do next. This could be signing up for your email list, purchasing a product, visiting more blog posts, and more. A CTA can be a hyperlink, button, or image.

The more personalized you can make your CTA copy, the better your results will be. Research by HubSpot proves that personalized CTAs convert 202 percent higher than generalized ones, so optimizing them to fit your target audience is worth the extra time and money.

Make the offer specific to the user. Write it in the first person so the user can envision themselves taking that action. For example, instead of saying “Download now” or “Sign up,” you could entice them by saying “Give me my ebook” or “Sign me up for my benefits.”

Conclusion

It’s difficult to bring customers to your business if you don’t have a strong landing page that speaks to its audience. Landing pages should compel your viewers and make them feel excited to try your products and services. It should convince them that your brand has the solution they’ve been looking for and the answers to their questions. Your landing page is worth every second and dollar that’s spent on it because of its ability to skyrocket conversions with one webpage. How will you create your next successful landing page?

Want to learn basic coding? Right now, there are too many courses to choose from. You can have your pick of programming languages but you also need to find out if you have the passion for it. Like any other skill, coding requires deliberate practice and patience. That’s why bite-sized coding courses fit the bill.

Dip your toe and find out if you would like to dive deeper into these languages. These apps tap into microlearning that will take up just a few minutes of your time each day.

1. Grasshopper (Android, iOS): Learn JavaScript With Fun Lessons

Area 120 isn’t as mysterious as Area 51. The former is Google’s own skunkworks. And Grasshopper is a fun gamification tool that teaches you JavaScript. The Android and iOS app will take you through a series of entertaining mini-games.

Each level is designed to strengthen your fundamental programming skills with JavaScript. These basics are common to all programming languages. The lessons start with “The Fundamentals” that shows you how to call functions, variables, and strings.

The challenges are made up of bite-sized puzzles and quizzes. You can easily do a couple of them in a few minutes or less. Set your own practice schedule with reminders so you don’t lose the streak.

Download: Grasshopper for Android | iOS (Free)

2. Mimo (Web, Android, iOS): Choose From 23+ Bite-Sized Courses

Mimo has a lot of languages and technologies on its platform. You can start with simple HTML and graduate to more advanced languages like C# and Java. The site and the apps break down all lessons into tiny chunks that a few minutes to complete.

You can pick one language or get on the specialized tracks that take you step by step through one skill. For instance, the Become a Hacker course is eight hours long. So the bite-sized daily lessons will teach you about basic programming, security, hacker culture, and cryptography.

Like other gamified apps, you collect points, badges, and other achievements as you progress through the lessons. Mimo offers a 7-day trial and then opt for a yearly or monthly subscription plan.

Download: Mimo for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchase)

3. SoloLearn (Web, Android, iOS): Learn to Code With a Community

To keep you motivated, SoloLearn relies on the power of community learning. SoloLearn’s Q&A forum is the nerve center of this experience. This follows the bite-sized lessons, interactive quizzes, and fun practice sessions on the site.

You can learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, Ruby, Swift, C, C#, C++, Java, and Python. The lessons are short and you can collaborate with other learners. Also, take part in interactive peer-to-peer challenges to reinforce your coding lessons.

SoloLearn is free. A premium subscription called SoloLearn PRO is the ad-free face of the courses. The subscription allows you to set learning goals and track your activity.

Download: SoloLearn for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases)

4. Encode (Android, iOS): Bite-Sized Lessons on the Go

Encode is an interactive coding editor. That means you get an interface to actually write and practice code. The app presents bite-sized lessons and supports it with interactive challenges to test your new skills.

The Offline Mode removes your dependency on bandwidth.

For now, Encode covers Python, Javascript, and web markup languages like HTML and CSS. The core concepts on Encode are perfect for beginners who are just starting out with coding.

Encode is free but ad-supported. You can buy Encode Plus and remove the ads.

Download: Encode for Android | iOS (Free, $4.99)

5. Edabit (Web): Take on 1300+ Small Coding Challenges

Edabit is a free site that plugs the gap between the basic syntax and the more advanced problem solving. It can be the next step in your programming journey after you have tried the apps above. Edabit doesn’t give you any more lessons; it tests you with interactive challenges.

The challenges are supported by the best tutorials and documentation from the web. Each completed challenge will give you the confidence that you have understood the concepts well. If not, you will learn from solutions to your mistakes.

Edabit is the shortcut to real world programming. Even if you are a beginner, you can use Edabit and its short challenges to get better at JavaScript, C#, C++, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Swift.

Can You Learn to Code in a Few Minutes a Day?

The short answer is no. A book or a full fledged programming course is the best way to start your study. But these bite-sized lessons serve the first appetizer if you are thinking about a computer science skill. If you think that you aren’t cut out to be a programmer, pick up one of these apps and have a go for a month.

These apps will help sensitize you to the rigors of coding and just might give you the clues to what you like or dislike about it. If you like it, then you can teach yourself programming with more thorough resources.

Read the full article: Want to Learn Basic Coding? Try 5 Bite-Sized Coding Apps in Your Spare Time

Medtronic discloses medical device vulnerabilities, while Purdue University scientists propose countermeasure to block attacks

Creating infographics have been one of the most widely used content marketing strategies for the past few years.

They are great for grabbing people’s attention, explaining important concepts, and sharing statistics.

Unfortunately, as more people began to realize the power of infographics, everyone starting creating them for their websites and their quality started to go downhill.

In a world where everyone is trying to increase brand awareness and generate more sales using infographics, it’s more important than ever that you take the time to create high-quality visuals for your readers.

If you’re hoping to increase your web traffic by as much as 12% by adding infographics to your website, check out this quick and simple guide to creating powerful visual content on your site.

So, let’s get started.

1. Choose a Good Topic

It might seem overwhelming at first when you decide you want to create an infographic for your website. In fact, you might not even know what topic to make it about.

Infographics can be used to:

• Display lots of statistics
• Explain hard concepts
• Promote your products, services, or brand
• Give step by step directions

But knowing exactly which topic to make your infographic about is important if you want to use it to drive traffic and get people to convert.

Here are some ideas:

Trending Topics

If there’s a trending topic in your industry that everyone wants to know about, creating an infographic about it gives you time to shine in a way that’s different from everyone else.

To find out what’s trending in your industry, check out Google Trends.

Learn about interest in your topic over time in web and image searches, as shopping searches, and even as news searches.

See which regions in your area are searching about that topic the most. And lastly, take a look at related topics and queries to see if your idea is viable.

You can also scour forums like Quora or Reddit and even highly reputable websites in your niche to see what they’re writing about.

The key is to find a topic that your target audience is going to want to learn about right now.

Repurpose Old Content

Do you have a piece of evergreen content that always seems to have a lot of traffic? If so, that’s the perfect topic to create an infographic about.

List articles, tutorials, and statistic roundups are always great candidates for repurposing into infographics.

And since you already know your topic is popular, you’ll be able to cater to those that are more visual by nature and just want to know the main facts.

In the end, you can create an infographic about anything you’d like.

Just remember, the primary reason to spend time creating a visual piece of content is to add value to your site visitors’ lives.

If you don’t, you’ll see an increase in bounce rates and fewer conversions, which isn’t good for business.

2. Optimize for Keywords

Just like you would any other piece of content on your website, you should optimize your infographic for target keywords.

This way it displays in relevant search results, and the right kind of people come to check it out.

For help with keyword ideas, you can use the free online tool Ubersuggest. Just enter your seed keyword into the tool and receive data such as:

• Search volume
• SEO and paid difficulty
• Average cost per click

You’ll also get keyword alternatives that might be helpful to use and links to websites already ranking for those keywords.

Once you know which keywords to target, adding them to your infographic will be a cinch.

You might also want to consider taking things one step further and buy a domain name for your website that has your target keyword in it.

Your site’s URL is one of the first things people will see whether they find you in a search result, on social media, or in a forum.

Since people want to know whether they’re on a useful site or not, having your target keyword in the domain name itself shows people what you’re all about.

This way they know if they should click and visit, or if they’re already there, continue exploring your site.

3. Make it Shareable

Speaking of social media, making your infographic shareable is one of the most important things you can do to make your infographic work for you and your brand.

In fact, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, infographics are liked and shared on social media 3x more than any other type of content.

Imagine what kind of reach your brand would get if you posted your infographic on your social media account for your followers to like and share.

Add that to the fact that you’ve added social share buttons on the infographic so that site visitors, whether they follow you on social media or not, can share your visual content with others.

Now you have a powerful piece of content.

4. Brand Your Infographic

You should never create an infographic for the sole purpose of promoting your products and services (after all, no one wants to think you’re just after their money).

However, it’s important you add branding elements to your infographics, so people know who created the content and can give you credit when needed.

Add your business logo, which helps improve brand recognition, in a small area on your infographic so that people can see it, but it doesn’t affect the readability of your content.

Need help creating a business logo?

There’s no need to hire an expensive designer to create a simple business logo for your infographic (or your website for that matter).

There are a few really easy to use logo generators available that do all the work for you.

For example, Shopify has a free logo generator that will ask you questions such as:

• Which industry your business is in
• The visual style you prefer (e.g., bold, elegant, innovative, etc.)
• Your business name and slogan
• Where you’ll want to include the logo (e.g., social media, website, large surfaces, etc.)

You’ll then see a variety of pre-made templates you can choose from that meet the criteria you’ve just defined.

From there, click on the one you like and edit it further to customize it to your needs.

Change the font, colors, icons, and even layout so that your logo matches your brand.

Don’t forget, part of branding your infographic includes adding effective call to action buttons both on the infographic itself and outside the visual.

This is to encourage people to engage with your brand and take the desired action, whether that be to subscribe, buy, or even share.

Final Thoughts

In the end, creating an infographic is not that hard to do. In fact, that’s part of the reason there are so many ineffective infographics out there that don’t offer much value to readers.

However, if you put a little thought into what you want people to get out of your visual content, you can make the most of this popular content marketing strategy.

Just be sure to design your infographics so people will recognize your brand and work hard to get it in front of your target audience.

If you do that, you’ll quickly begin to see the positive results such as an increase in traffic, subscribers, and sales.

How many times have you received a business email and scrolled to the email signature to learn a little more about the person, only to see something that looks a little like this:

Yep, that's me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with my signature -- but is there anything really great about it? No.

It doesn’t tell my readers anything they don’t already know from my email alias and introductory first sentence ( "Hi, my name is Meg, and I’m the editor of the HubSpot Sales Blog.").

Other than your subject line, email signatures are often your first impression. Whether you’re conducting outreach or emailing a new customer, your email signature should grab attention, inform, and include a CTA.

So, I’ve gathered nine great email signatures from my inbox, and I’m sharing what they get right along with tips for how you can quickly transform your own signature below.

Professional Email Signature Examples and Tips for 2019

1. Share your latest publications

I love this signature from Avenue Talent Partners CEO Amy Volas. Her email signature is engaging, informative, and action-oriented. It shows her readers exactly where she’s active online, offers the ability to quickly schedule time on her calendar, and links to her most recent blog posts.

Volas’ signature shows that she’s engaged in her work and industry, an active thought leader, and proactive about setting meetings. A playful quote also gives readers a glimpse into her personality and work values.

Source: Amy Volas

2. Include your picture

Humans like to help other humans. Including a headshot in your email signature makes you more than a faceless salesperson on the other end of the internet. Make sure it’s professional and appropriately sized.

Donald Kelly, founder of The Sales Evangelist, includes a sharp photo, a link to his website, and social media icons to guide his peers to other channels of connection. This signature is friendly and invites the reader to connect over more than just email.

Source: Donald C. Kelly

3. Tout your accomplishments

Sales expert Kristin Anderson prominently features her company’s most recent awards in her signature. Whether you’re emailing prospects or longtime customers, these accolades matter to them.

Prospects want to know you’ve been recognized by peers or customers as a top-tier company, and customers like to be reminded they’re with an award-winning company.

When you win an industry accolade, ask the awarding company for badges to include on your website and in your email signature.

Source: Kristin K. Anderson

4. Keep things branded

Include a branded image of your company’s name. It’s professional, memorable, and gives your reader a good impression of your business. My eye was immediately drawn to this SmartAcre logo in Marketing and Sales Technology Director Jenay Sellers' email signature.

Sellers also smartly linked to her company’s inclusion as an Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Company. Because not every accolade will come with a badge, hyperlinking is the next best thing to share news with your contacts.

Source: Jenay Sellers

5. Include customer reviews

Salespeople know peer reviews are one of the most important tools available to sellers today. Include a link to customer reviews right in your signature, like Senior Account Executive Jack Matsen does below. Make it easy for prospects to hear how great your company is -- straight from the mouth of the customer.

Source: Jack Matsen

6. Include a calendar link

Avoid the endless email chains of "Does this date work?" "What about this time?" by including a link to your calendar in your email signature. CMO Eric Quanstrom makes it easy for colleagues, customers, or prospects to grab time on his calendar without the back and forth that can sometimes lead to a loss of interest.

Quanstrom says CIENCE built an email signature template for their employees, creating a clean, cohesive, and well-branded first impression across the company.

Source: Eric Quanstrom

7. Share product announcements

Show prospects there are exciting things happening at your company by linking to your latest blog posts or feature landing pages.

This signature from Canva also includes a link to the company social media pages, which is an alternative for folks who don’t want to advertise their personal pages.

Source: Canva

8. Use a template

Don’t have a design team? No problem. Create an on-brand template to use across your company. This example, from Senior Director Chris Orlob carries Gong’s signature purple color across phone, email, and website icons, and wraps things up with the company’s eye-catching logo.

Source: Chris Orlob

9. Include a slogan or value proposition

"Your 6-figure sales career in 6 weeks " serves as a tantalizing glimpse of how you’ll benefit from CEO Josh Jordan’s company. It’s a quick way to sneak in a pitch without pitching anything at all.

Paired with a headshot and a Top 50 badge from Sales Hacker, this email signature is one to copy.

Source: Josh Jordan

So, what have we learned? Well, for starters, I have a lot of work to do on my email signature. This valuable real estate should be put to good use, so block off 15 minutes this week to refresh your signature -- and don't forget to make sure it renders well on all major browsers and devices.

Hungry for more? Check out these 10 sales email templates with 60% or higher open rates.

Information overload and our ability to become commercial free has changed the old fashioned marketing funnel. Attention getting tactics will no longer sell your products and services. Your brand audience now controls what they want to see whether this be on a smart phone, tablet, computer or television. Old methods simply don’t work anymore — learning what does will help you to navigate the new sales funnel landscape.

Today your company needs to connect with your online community and build relationships in a meaningful way. Simply posting images and information that just “sells” to them no longer generates a response.

The one direction marketing of yesterday is no longer relevant for personal brands. Today’s marketing strategies are all about meeting the needs of your target market, and making adjustments when necessary. Here are several ways to build your personal brand and convert leads online.

Embracing the New Social Media Marketing Model

Smart social media marketing for your brand begins with a focused strategy. Start these steps today to make lasting connections:

• Brand awareness – Every business has a story to share — this could be an event that is taking place or an important announcement. You don’t want to make the mistake of confusing this with the old style of advertisements. The goal here is to draw people to something that interests them and bringing it to their attention.
• Build relationships first – Create something of value for your fans and followers without demanding something in return. As people are drawn to your knowledge and credibility, they will feel compelled to share your content with others. The more you meet their needs the better your chances are of building a strong community of trust.
• Nurture your new followers – After building a trusted brand that provides valuable information, answers, and meeting the needs of your social community you may not see an immediate return, often referred to as ROI (Return on Investment). This is a normal part of the process as methods such as email marketing and videos are more important than ever when it comes to drawing in an interested audience. Stay persistent and patient in this process, and the sales will follow.
• Know your target market – Pay attention to who your personal brand’s target audience is, especially when it comes to their location. Tap into analytics tools, which are available on the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is good practice to track and monitor your activity and conversations at least twice a month in order to make changes where necessary.

As social media marketing continues to evolve it is important to build authentic and trusted relationships that encourage word of mouth marketing. By staying in communication with your leads and customers you can attract a larger following for lasting and sustained growth.

Driving growth is the only way to continue to scale your business success. But after years of growth and success, sometimes things slow down. The economy or other factors could cause the slowing of an expansion. If you feel that the business you own and manage has been affected by a slowing economy, there are things you can do to continue expanding your operations. You just have to be willing to get a little creative and work a little bit harder. In this post, you will learn how to drive growth through a slow economy to continue your expansion for months and years to come.

Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

As the business owner, you will need to step outside of your comfort zone in order to revive business and drive growth during tough times. You are the reason the company has come this far. But until now, you have probably limited the company to your own personal skills and expertise. In order to grow your business past a tough economy, you need to be willing to build relationships and partnerships in areas in which you are not familiar. Look to expand business operations into new territories. Just be sure to source expert advice or consulting services to make sure you do things right. By stepping out of your comfort zone, you can gain some new skill sets or expand into new areas for increased potential.

Reconsider Your Pricing

Reconsider your business’s pricing model. As your company has grown and changed, it is likely that your pricing has stayed relatively the same through strong and weak economic times. This can be problematic. It can limit business growth and force your sales to slow down. Revisit your current pricing model to see if it still best serves your expansion goals. You may not be able to offer the lowest prices around if you want to continue to grow. On the other hand, you might have to lower prices during economic hardships. In turn, this could lead to greater volume of sales and revenues overall. Reconsider your current pricing policy to help push your business through a rough patch and drive further growth.

Offer A New Product Variation

Next, overcome business stagnation by introducing new products to the market. Rather than going through the entire new product development process, offer new product variations. The product should offer something new and unique to the market. Since it is a variation of your existing product lines, you can implement this strategy quickly while learning and growing as an entrepreneur. With a unique new product, you can set yourself apart from the competition. Your new product will make a strong impact in the market before competitors catch up. This will give your business the edge it needs to overcome an economy that is slowing down.

Consider A Merger

A business merger can be an excellent strategy to drive growth during slow economic times. Mergers and acquisitions can be the single best way to grow and expand rapidly in a market. Of course, you need to find the right partner if you are going to merge with a company and maintain your current culture. You want to be sure that the organizations you are considering will add to and improve your current model. A merger needs to be beneficial for both parties in order to be worthwhile. The same is true if you decide to acquire another company to gain customers or market share. If you find the right partner, consider a merger to grow even when the economy starts to fall.

Rebrand The Business

Rebrand your business to drive growth and expansion after the economy takes a turn. As the years go by, styles evolve and change. Your branding should evolve and change too. Outdated designs and concepts can be the main thing holding your business back from additional opportunities. Look to revamp your branding and imaging to push past a plateau. Customers may meet you with resistance when changing a brand name, logo or identity. However, you should remember who really owns your brand. Through good times, bad times and plateaus, it’s your decision to change the brand as needed. This is one of the best ways to learn how to drive growth through slow economies. That way, your company can experience growth and success for many more years to come.

Improve Your Online Presence

In slow times, build and grow your online presence to handle a business plateau. Growing an online presence generates brand awareness beyond the local confines of your physical location. This is one of the best ways to grow exposure for the company and expand your customer base. With a strong website and social media profiles, you can give your online presence a fresh look to connect with a wider audience. However, consider keeping your original domain name so existing customers will find you easily. Take ownership of all online business listings and create highly relevant social media profiles. Then, focus on expanding your online following. Doing so will help you drive growth to overcome a slow down in sales.

Lower Overhead Operating Costs

Cash flow can cause a business to slow down after periods of growth. During a growth phase, the additional sales provide the necessary funds to expand the day-to-day operations. However, after the sales slow down, your company could be strapped for cash. Even with modest profits, the business could require significant investment in expensive technology to get to the next level. In order to continue to grow consistently, cut back on your overhead costs. This will free up the cash flow needed to invest into people, equipment or inventory. Moreover, it will make your operations leaner which further contributes to overall growth.

If you want to know how to drive growth in a slowing economy, consider the strategies detailed above. These growth strategies will help you promote additional expansion in difficult economic times. It can be challenging to overcome this time. But with the business expansion tactics listed above, you can overcome this slump and revive your rapid expansion for continued success.

Ask the buyers who tells you, “We’re fine here, we don’t need any help,” this question: “If the board gave you a million dollars to invest wherever you thought it would do the most good, what would you do with it? Would you return it?”

Whatever they decide to do with it is where they can use help.

Who likes dealing with a bad car salesman? I think we can all agree that a pushy or unhelpful car salesperson can be one of the worst interactions you can encounter. But a poor B2B website experience can actually be quite comparable.

Instead of a personalized experience presenting the most relevant content for each visitor, many B2B marketers are still using rotating hero carousels to cycle through content for different industries or value propositions, promoting the same generic case study or blog post to all visitors, and consistently recommending the same intro video that repeat visitors have already seen.

Many B2C retailers have an in-store experience to measure against and use as inspiration for designing great digital customer experiences. B2B companies, on the other hand, don’t have such a point of reference, so it can be difficult to understand how to optimize the online experience for their visitors.

My colleague, LB Wales IV, published a blog post a little while back comparing bad B2B website experiences to bad tradeshow experiences. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to further drive home the point by comparing a bad B2B website experience to a bad car buying experience.

A Bad Car Salesperson

Picture this: You approach a car dealership and see a banner that promotes the latest models.

As you enter the lot, a salesman approaches and asks questions about your family size and what type of model you are interested in, and proceeds to show you some vehicles and their features.

After being exposed to those options, the salesman immediately insists on showing you those same options and features again.

Confused by having the same details presented repeatedly, you decide to see if you can gather some additional information — asking for some brochures or other collateral related to vehicles that might be the right fit for your needs. The salesman presents you with a pamphlet related to a flashy sports car, as it has been the most popular/eye-catching option on the lot.

As your frustration grows and you decide to leave, the salesman yells out “Hey, before you go, can I get your email address?”

If you aren’t using digital personalization techniques, your prospects are regularly going through this type of experience each time they visit your static, one-size-fits-all website.

Don’t be the Bad Car Salesman: B2B Website Must-Haves

Visitors that arrive to your site bring important information that you can use to deliver more relevant experiences. You can combine their firmographic and other web attribute information — data you can start collecting the second they arrive on your site — with the behaviors they display in that session and over time to respond with relevant, personalized experiences in the moment.

Firmographic Data: Considering the car they arrive in

When a car shopper arrives on the lot, a good salesperson pays attention to the car he is currently driving and uses that information to infer his needs and preferences. For example, he needs a vehicle that is appropriate for a family, he likes sporty cars, he needs the ability to tow or haul a lot of stuff, etc. You can take the same approach and glean information based on the IP address or referring source of a new website visitor. Depending upon the look-up technology you utilize, you can recognize not just a person’s company and industry, but also more in-depth details like employee count, revenues, technology stack, and even company logo. At the same time, you can identify her geolocation and her referring source (such as a specific email or ad campaign).

When you put this information to use, you can execute personalization from the first moment a new visitor lands on your site. For instance, you could replace a generic hero carousel with targeted messaging specific to the industry of the visitor identified by her IP address or campaign source, update any promoted case studies or blog posts related to that same industry or company size, promote appropriate regional events, etc. — even before you start collecting any behavioral data that will help fine-tune your personalized messaging.

Behavioral Intelligence: Listening to their interests

Firmographic, referring source and geolocation are great places to start, but not factoring in the visitor’s behavior is as flawed as a bad car salesman ignoring a shopper’s requests for a family-friendly SUV to replace his convertible by continuing to show him sports cars.

Monitoring the active time spent on industry-specific pages, for example, can help you confirm the visitor’s focus to inform your messages and experiences across the site. You can also factor in which types of blog posts, eBooks, videos, or other content the visitor explores to help you understand his interests. With that information, you can recommend relevant items to him, and — importantly — you can avoid recommending items you know he has already viewed or downloaded.

Additionally, you can use behavioral data to determine which stage of the funnel a person is in and then provide a more relevant experience to drive him further down the funnel with each visit to your site.

Final Thoughts

Much like an in-person sales experience, like at a car dealership, your website visitors have grown to expect an experience that is personalized for them to help them find information relevant to their needs.

With that in mind, optimize your website using personalization to avoid the bad car salesman-like experience that many B2B sites still exhibit.

A personalization and customer data platform like Evergage can help elevate your marketing efforts by tapping into the rich data available about your visitors and customers and tailoring their digital experiences down to the 1-to-1 level – both on your website and in other channels like email, web applications, and mobile apps.

The number of email users globally has reached a count of 3.8 billion. In fact, by the year 2023, it will reach a whopping 4.4 billion users. These figures are enough to show how email as a marketing channel can work wonders for you as a marketer if you leverage it well. However, what can add up to an email marketing strategy is email automation. This is the reason 27% of email marketers are already leveraging email automation. In fact 49% of marketers are already looking for ways to improve their automated email campaigns.

So, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that email marketing and email automation go hand in hand. To put it in other words, you must incorporate both these strategies simultaneously to have the edge over competitors and be successful in the long run of business. While email marketing can help you reach a large customer base, email automation can enhance the relevancy of that reach.

However, before you go ahead with these two, you must have a deep insight into them. Are these strategies similar or is there any difference? The answer lies in the fact that email marketing can track only those actions that have happened through emails. On the other hand, email automation keeps track of every action that your customer or lead has with your business. So, yes, both these strategies are quite different in their work approach. Here’s a detailed look at the critical differences between the two.

1. Scoring of leads

With email marketing, the information about your leads is limited. The tools of email marketing can only extract the information that you provide to it. To put it in other words, email marketing cannot give you deep insights about your leads. However, the case is different when it comes to email automation. It collects extensive data based on the customer’s behavioral patterns. It doesn’t only help you easily identify the leads with the highest probability to convert but, also assists you in customizing your campaign following the needs and preferences of the customers. All in all, if you have an expanded sales cycle, leading scoring along with marketing automation is worth the efforts you put in.

2. Behavioral and analytical tracking

While the platform for data collection in email marketing is limited just to the email campaign, email automation has a wide variety of data collection. For instance, an email marketing campaign can let you know about the open rate of your email. Also, you can get an insight into the links a customer opened along with the frequency of opening it. In short, it can help you get hold of the percentage of customers that got involved/not involved with your email campaign. On the other hand, email automation goes a step further and help you track a customer’s data through every platform that they interact with. It lets you have a clear insight into a prospect’s journey throughout the sales funnel. This, in turn, plays a great role in designing a more targeted email campaign strategy.

3. Investment of time

Planning a top-notch email campaign requires a lot of time and effort. Right from creating emails and segmentation to keeping track of post analytics, there are a lot of aspects to take care of. Further, after a campaign is built, emails are sent out to every customer on the list. Though segmentation makes the content dynamic and relevant for customers, it lacks the capability of being accurately relevant like email automation. Not that marketing automation doesn’t require any time or effort, but it is worth putting all the hard work and effort. Sure you will have to do everything that you did during your email marketing campaign, i.e. planning the campaign and segmenting the list. However, the difference lies in the fact that automated email programs give you a lot more choices and options to give your best. From drip campaigns that let you schedule emails which are sent automatically to customers to nurture campaigns that send follow up emails based on the customer’s interaction with your messages, an automated email campaign does it all.

4. Revenue calculations

With email marketing, you can’t calculate your revenues. You can only make assumptions about it. For example – when you send an email to a particular customer, you can track if the customer opened the email or clicked on the link provided within the email. However, even if the customer opens an email and makes a purchase, email marketing can’t tell if the purchase was made solely because of the mail. There are chances of them going through other touch points of your website that might have triggered their purchasing urge. To put it in other words, it is difficult calculating ROI through email marketing. But, that’s not the case with email automation. Since it allows you to take a look at the full journey of the customer, it gives you the ability to determine the exact way a customer purchased. This, in turn, works wonders in knowing which strategy drove the conversion and which didn’t.

Final thoughts

The points mentioned above are the basic differences between email marketing and email automation. However, both have their share of advantages and can serve as a great way of creating connections and making conversation. So, the choice is solely yours. Choose the one that best suits your business’s vision and goal. In short, if you have a limited sales cycle where the leads do not require much attention, an email marketing campaign can be apt for you. It will help you send newsletters and promotional emails once in a while and serve your purpose without costing too much. But, if you are looking forward to expanding and are willing to nurture and score your leads according to their brand engagement, email automation is the only strategy that you need. It is worth all the investment you put in it.

Referrals. For years they were the foundation for professional services growth. Yet, working for the research-based branding and marketing firm for professional services, I can tell you that we and our clients are seeing a decline in referral usage. Our research validates the trend. While referrals remain the top search method for buyers in need of a new professional service provider (as shown in Figure 1), the use of referrals as a search method has dropped by 15% over the last five years according to a study from the Hinge Research Institute, Inside the Buyer’s Brain, Second Edition.

Figure 1. Professional service search methods

The research also shows that while clients are more willing to be referral sources, they are making fewer referrals. The rate of actually making a referral is down almost 5% over the last few years. This suggests that prospects are using other methods to find professional services rather than asking a friend or a colleague for a referral. One of these methods is online search. In fact, our research shows that today, online search is used by nearly one in five professional services buyers—and continues to be adopted as a primary search method.

So how can your firm grow if there is less dependency on referrals? I would recommend demand generation programs and activities.

B2B Demand Generation Versus Lead Generation

I am not talking about lead generation—although that effort is very important as well. I see lead generation as those activities that collect information on target audiences and then uses that information to convert those audiences into some volume of leads. For those of you that follow a marketing funnel or waterfall model, lead generation is typically identified as a top of the funnel initiative.

Demand generation is a longer commitment and focuses on creating a want or need for your services. The activities, campaigns, and programs are designed to drive sales engagement and opportunities, not just leads, for net new or up-sell/cross-sell deals. With demand generation, your efforts cover the entire funnel or waterfall but there is more focus on the middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel stages.

I see lead generation as an important subcomponent of demand generation. Both approaches may use similar tactics, but they use them differently. For example, content used in a lead generation program will typically collect contact information somewhere along the process. With demand generation, the content is used to increase engagement, create conversations, or enhance the reputation of the firm or an internal subject matter expert—we call this person a “Visible Expert.”

Most marketers focus on lead generation activities first to show activity. But it is demand generation that will nurture the majority of leads that are not ready and move them on as sales opportunities at the appropriate time. Demand generation requires more strategy, time, and commitment.

Hopefully these few paragraphs have provided some clarity around lead generation and demand generation.

Technology to Support a Demand Generation Strategy

As I mentioned earlier, demand generation takes time. It is not implemented overnight nor do you see the results overnight. You should really prepare for demand generation with an on-going, phased mindsight. Depending on what your overall growth and revenue goals are, you may need some tools and technology to help you scale your efforts. In our 2019 High Growth Study for Professional Services, we found that high-growth firms are investing more in marketing and technology as shown in Figure 2. Some of your early martech stack considerations may be a social media management tool, an email or marketing automation platform (MAP), and a customer relationship management system (CRM). There are a lot of good ones on the market these days so be sure you not only look at price but also the features that you will grow into over the next few years. Typically, firms evaluate their large-scale technology purchase decisions every three years or so. As you become more sophisticated, you may want to consider a content management system, a business intelligence platform, data solutions, and more.

Figure 2. Median Marketing Budget by Growth Category

If you are considering a technology platform to help you with your firm’s growth, plan for the future. Some questions that you will need to answer early on include:

• Do we want an all-in-one platform that claims it has a number of the features we are looking for (CRM, email/MAP, social media, etc.) on one platform?
• Do we want to integrate best-in-class point solutions to create our tech stack?
• Should we leverage an open architecture that allows us to plug in various applications via APIs?

Also, please plan and budget for a worst-case scenario. Implementations always take longer than projected. You may not have the right skill sets in-house. You may not have dedicated resources. Processes may be few and far between. Content may be scarce. Reporting may not be consolidated on one platform and may require manual data collection. Be sure that you account for all of these types of variables and leverage outside expertise to get your firm up-and-running.

“Social media management is the most popular stack option at 83%, search management is at 80% and email marketing automation sits at 73%.”

SmartInsights

Six Key Demand Generation Activities

Many of these activities overlap but they should be designed independently to be implemented collaboratively.

1 . Strengthen your brand identity and differentiate yourself

Before you can expect significant results from your demand generation efforts, you have to make sure you have a brand that stands out from your competition. Every market is crowded. What makes your firm different? Truly think about it. I have spoken to two cybersecurity firms over the last month and when I asked them that question, they both gave me almost the same answer!

I believe that truly impactful differentiators must possess three qualities. They must be:

• True—Your differentiators have to be grounded in reality.
• Relevant—If it does not matter to your clients, it does not matter.
• Provable—Anyone can claim a quality. You have to be able to prove it.

2 . Raise the awareness of your subject matter experts

Chances are, your firm has staff with experience and expertise that others do not have. Your Visible Experts can be game-changers at your firm. Do your prospective clients know about your visible experts? Making this expertise known will get your firm into more sales conversations and on more short lists for vendor evaluations. Other practitioners and media will seek them out for their perspective and subject matter expertise. Let your expertise shine! Learn more in our blog entitled, The Visible Expert: How Ordinary Professionals Become Thought Leaders.

3 . Segment your audiences

Either because of a lack of time or data, too few marketers segment their audiences. This oversight has a definite negative impact on email open rates and client engagement. Gone are the days of sending one email message to your entire contact database. Today’s client is more sophisticated and is expecting a higher level of customized and personalized messaging. You need to take the time to create some groupings of buyer personas and be able to speak to each of them differently. What are the challenges, goals, needs, and journeys of these personas? Investing the time to segment now will pay off later.

“Recipients are about 14% more likely to open an email if it’s a part of a segmented campaign vs. traditional email.”

Mailchimp

4 . Map out your content and conversion pathways

You have segmented your audiences, built buyer personas and identified buyer’s journeys. You are now ready to develop a content strategy that takes all of this hard work into consideration. Write your content in different formats to meet the challenges, goals, and needs of your personas. Also, if you use a sales and marketing funnel, map the content back to the various stages of the funnel. Take the time to run through various buyer scenarios and see if the content that you are offering is compelling and engaging—and prompts the potential buyer to move further down the pipeline. Be honest with yourself.

You may want to experiment with display advertising, paid search, guest blogging, and third-party blog contributions to see if you can reach a wider or a harder-to-reach audience. When possible, be sure that your content contains or is associated with calls-to-action (CTAs) that will drive your readers or listeners to your website for more information and engagement. Learn more in our video blog, Communicating With Clients During the 4 Stages of the Buyer Journey.

5 . Measure demand generation campaign performance

This is an area where many marketers drop the ball. They are so concerned with getting the campaign out the door that they do not set up campaign metrics to follow. How can you correct or optimize your campaigns if you are not measuring how well they are doing in the first place? This is actually a consideration for the technology you evaluate and choose as well. Make sure that the platform or system you buy provides you with reporting that you will use and appreciate. It is really just data or information until you can turn into insights and make it actionable.

Spend time truly considering the metrics that you want to monitor on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Start out with six or seven of them that you can analyze and study. You may not be able to get all the metrics you want from one platform. You may need to do some manual compilation on a regular basis to ensure that you have a reporting dashboard that all key decision makers understand. As you become more sophisticated your metrics will change from number of followers or amount of website traffic to behavioral or engagement metrics that show more impact on sales opportunities and revenue.

If you are using a sales and marketing funnel model, keep track of lead volume and velocity at every stage of the funnel. By creating a baseline of conversion rates, you can later adjust demand generation programs to improve your funnel volume and velocity numbers to increase and accelerate revenue.

6 . Listen to your clients, not yourself

Original research—this should actually be your FIRST demand generation activity. It is the foundation or compass for all of your other activities. How can you differentiate your firm until you know what your clients and others think of it? I have had on more than one occasion a client tell me, “I have been in this business a long time. I know my clients. This is what they think of us.” Yet, after the research is done, it is always these folks who are surprised by the results and are most grateful that the research was done. Do you really know who your competitors are? Do you know who your perceived competitors are? Do you know why people are not buying from you? There are so many questions that need to be answered to ensure that your future marketing efforts are as successful as possible. Don’t leave it to chance or your gut feel.

Four Proven Demand Generation Program Tactics

1 . High-Impact, High-Performance Website

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, nearly one in five people is using online search to find professional services firms. That usually means that they are going to check out your website if your firm does well in the Google search rankings. In fact, our research shows that 82% of buyers of professional services check out a firm’s website. This can be a “Make it or Break it” moment. Your website visuals, text, navigation, tone etc. all play a role in whether a prospective buyer remains engaged long enough to fill out a form, send an email, make a phone call. We live an “immediate” society. We do not want to wait. If your website pages take too long to load, we are gone. If you are using too much text and not enough video, we are yawning. If your web pages do not have prompts to guide us to some sort of action, we are not moving forward. Today’s website must satisfy so many senses and categories—and do it quickly.

Chances are if you have not updated your firm’s website in the last year or two, this is probably where you want to start with demand generation—after you have done your original research. Even if you have recently updated your website, I would do a quick audit and compare it to some competitive websites—and other websites you like in general. Again, be honest with yourself. Does your website make you feel like you want to engage further? For most, a website is the first impression of a firm. What is your website saying about you?

While your firm is making a first impression, your website visitors are leaving impressions as well around preferences, pain points, interests, and more. Are they responding to online offers? Which blogs did they read and comment on? Which content was valuable enough for them to fill out a small form to download it? Answers to these questions and others will affect your future demand generation programs.

2 . Content Strategy

Content is still king. It is the main influencer in the world of professional services. There are so many content formats available to marketers today. The key is to research and study your prospective and current clients to see how they like to consume content. Find out how they make their buying decisions. Where is their pain? Are you listening to their objections? The more relevant you can make the content, the better. While email should be a core piece of your content delivery strategy, you may want to expand this year to include a few others. For example, if your target audience includes commuters who live near San Francisco; Chicago; New York City; or Washington, DC, you may want to add podcasts to your content mix as these cities—and others—have workers who commute an hour a day each way and often use that time to listen to content. For others, an infographic on social media goes a long way. Continue adjusting your content strategy until you come up with an approach that gives you the return you want. Do not give up. You will see the payoff.

3 . Lead Scoring and Lead Nurturing

For those of you who have made the investment in a marketing automation platform, now is the time to take advantage of lead scoring and nurturing. Most professional services firms who have a marketing automation platform use it to “batch and blast” out emails. This is really a lead generation function. To make your marketing automation platform more of a demand generation tool, start setting up some basic lead scoring rules to monitor lead behavior. The beauty of lead scoring is that you can quickly change the rules depending on whether you need more lead volume or more lead quality. Lead scoring is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your content as well.

Lead nurturing is the perfect way to work with the 75% of the leads generated that are not ready to move forward as a sale. Lead nurturing allows you to apply what you have learned about segmentation, buyer personas, and more and push out personalized content that creates service demand and compels readers to take action. Too many marketers buy a marketing automation platform with the best of intentions but never leverage features such as lead scoring and nurturing. They then become frustrated when they cannot show ROI over a reasonable period of time.

When implemented correctly, marketing automation can be a powerful tool in your demand generation arsenal. But, as I mentioned early, there are factors beyond the technology cost and purchase that have to be considered such as skills or lack of skills, processes or lack of processes, content or lack of content, and more.

Learn more on how to leverage marketing automation in our three-part video blog series, Top 10 Marketing Automation Strategies.

“Organizations that use lead scoring see a 77 percent increase lift in their lead generation ROI.”

Marketing Sherpa

4 . Social Media

Platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter are great vehicles to make introductions, showcase content and opinions, and build relationships and loyalty. According to Forrester, fully 100% of business decision makers use social media for work purposes. Most marketers assume that social media is only used for brand awareness or top-of the-funnel activities. However; I have seen social media be used for lead generation campaigns, vendor selections, and even buying decisions. When leveraged properly, social media can be part of a demand generation strategy that impacts all the stages of a sales and marketing funnel.

Just be careful on how you use it. I use it to stay in touch with prospective and current client needs. If you listen, you can hear a lot. I also use it to educate. When I say educate, I do not mean pushing out sales and marketing materials. I mean reposting or retweeting articles or infographics—produced by others—that are informative and relevant. I read everything before I post it. If I am interested in a topic or article, I am hoping that my followers are as well. My social media followers have come to expect a certain level of quality from me. They get tips, techniques, and actionable information that they can use immediately. In fact, I have had followers ask me more than a dozen times, “How do you select or write your content?” I always tell them that they are topics that interest me. I am always learning. Once you have been posting for a while, you will earn the trust of your followers. Never take that for granted or abuse it by posting opinions that you should keep to yourself, etc.

I hope that this discussion around B2B demand generation strategies, programs, and activities at least got you thinking about the technology, skills, and processes needed to build out framework that will generate more sales opportunities and revenue for your firm. Remember, roll out your demand generation in a phased approach. Do not get overwhelmed. It is worth the investment of time, resources, and budget. The payoff is there.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed these days. Selecting a Netflix show can consume a whole weekend and lead to a breakup. Combing through the comments on Trivago to pick a hotel can cause an outbreak of hives. Even grabbing a coffee can induce a nosebleed – a dizzying array of roasts, sizes (often in different languages), milk from different animals and a variety of nuts. We are at once blessed with unimaginable choices and burdened by them. What’s more, it’s not getting any easier — the unprecedented pace of technology is so rapid, so relentless, so all-encompassing, that it can be hard to catch our breath. It is any surprise that neo-luddism is on the rise?

One source of comfort is that at least in our personal lives we can embrace technology at our own pace. In business, we seldom have such luck. Pour one out for enterprise leaders in these wild and volatile times, for tech adoption is predominantly driven by the demanding and unpredictable needs of employees, customers, and the competition. Regardless of whether you want to be, we’re all in a digital rat race to be more intelligent with our use of tech and data to gain that all-important inch on our competitors.

With tech-driven change bursting forth inexorably, it can be hard for business leaders to find their feet in this world of software-driven disruption. Every new initiative, every new piece of tech, every glitzy new methodology is a “must have.” You can’t blame the C-level suite for thinking: “Hey, things are complicated enough, won’t adding more new stuff add even more fuel to the bonfire, not to mention cost even more money?” And that’s not even taking into consideration the endless mergers and acquisitions, the organizational restructuring and so on. How do you see the woods for the trees?

When it comes to the enigmatic and mercurial world of software delivery, a blend of visibility and flexibility can destress and even embolden leaders. A modular toolchain infrastructure, underpinned by Value Stream Integration, enables business and IT leaders to steady themselves in this vertiginous economy. Even better, they can see how business value is flowing across the IT organization and can confidently experiment with new tools and processes without interrupting existing workflows and product value streams (also known as a “win-win”).

Crucially, by making this complex process visible, leaders can see what is working (and, significantly, what is not), and can introduce solutions with minimal blowback to end users; no more wild punts and gambles. Rather, an informed investment strategy that is focused on the realities of large-scale software delivery and how to measure them to business outcomes.

After all, that’s what digital transformation is all about. It’s not a fad; it’s the difference between survival and prosperity — ask Nokia, which lost the mobile market it helped create, or General Electric, the last original member to drop out the Dow due to its failure to transform, about the perils of ill-designed digital strategies and investments.

With the right understanding of how their businesses are delivering value through software, business and IT leaders can collaborate to find their calm in the chaos. And the only thing customers will ever see is their great product working or getting better. Or if there is a problem, these enterprises can fix it quickly while communicating with their customers. Continuous delivery as it should be: uninterrupted, evolving, impactful, delighting.

To obtain this holistic control and innovative environment, we need to consider what constitutes a software delivery value stream. How does value-adding work flow across the process? What are the impediments to acceleration?

A typical software delivery process starts and ends with the customer and involves a complex and implicit network of specialist teams (sales, product, project managers, business analysts, developers, testers, operations, etc.), domain-specific tools and methods (SAFe, Agile, DevOps) that help plan, build and deliver software. They are bound by the work they collaborate on. A knowledge-sharing network of communication centered around four essential units of value:

• Features (business value)
• Defects (quality)
• Risk (security, governance, compliance)
• Technical debt (removal of impediments to future delivery)

By connecting these domain-specific tools, disconnected by design, organizations can automate the flow of work across their product value streams and make it visible, traceable and measurable. Once this network is connected, the modular infrastructure reveals the intricacies of the process and removes the headache of working out when and where to invest resources. Everything is lit up by a click of a button. No more stumbling around in the dark.

For example, perhaps IT management is being pushed for the latest Agile planning tool by development teams. However, with a visible value stream, one can see that the work isn’t actually waiting in development, where teams are churning out code like it’s going out of fashion. Instead, the bottleneck is revealed to be further upstream in the business analyst’s tool, where there’s a wait state of five weeks.

Five weeks! That’s precious time that a customer isn’t receiving its product. It’s probably best to start lifting the constraint there before throwing more tech, people, and money at the development teams. Moreover, this visibility leads into the flexibility benefits, into the experimental world opined by the three ways of DevOps of flow, feedback and continual learning. There are myriad benefits to a visible, modular infrastructure that build a strong case for integrating before speculating, two of which will instantly change the way an organization approaches and manages the technical tides of change:

New tools, upgrades, version/API changes

Software tool vendors such as Atlassian can amend their APIs at any moment for multiple reasons. As business needs change rapidly and unexpectedly, developers must integrate new application components into existing architecture to ensure the software is as innovative, functional and responsive as possible for their customers. Robust and reliable enterprise-grade integration between tools supported by 24/7 automated testing ensures that any tool changes are automatically incorporated to eliminate disruption to product value streams.

Accommodating organizational change

Organizations are mutable, living, breathing entities that reflect the people that they employ and the work they deliver. As ever, change is constant, especially in a time where larger companies are absorbing other businesses to protect and grow their market share at an incredible rate. In the first nine months of 2018 alone, M&As all over the world reached $3.3 trillion in value, a record high. Every M&A brings its own set of headaches, such as new teams, tools, workflows, and processes to software delivery. Through a modular infrastructure, IT leaders can easily plug in these elements into existing and new product value streams. This capability mitigates the negative impact of the transition on things like product downtime and employee happiness.

The combination of being able to see how software delivery is creating business value with the ability to minimize the vibration of inevitable change is a potent mix. Suddenly disruption doesn’t seem so scary. In fact, this modular, connected infrastructure makes the unknown seem exciting.

To paraphrase Jeffrey Snover of Microsoft, “During periods of disruptions, there are periods of opportunity.” With this in mind, the question is no longer about how to handle the Catherine wheel of disruption posed by tech. Instead, it’s about how you can artfully take advantage of it.

Lead scoring – as a fundamental part of a company’s lead management strategy – has officially fallen out of fashion. I say this based, anecdotally, on the number of B2B marketers I talk to who either 1) don’t use lead scoring at all, or 2) have a lead scoring system that clearly doesn’t work (or is completely ignored by the sales team) and have no apparent motivation to fix it.

How did we get here? Two reasons I can think of:

One is that lead scoring is routinely set up as part of an initial implementation of a marketing automation platform. That initial set-up is typically basic at best, usually as part of an overall “rush to value” and an impatience to get the system live. The result, inevitably, is a lead scoring model that fails to take into account the complexity of the company’s selling process. When salespeople see inaccurate lead scores, they rapidly lose trust in the system, and ignore the data from that point forward. Marketing, in turn, sees no reason to fix the system because “sales doesn’t use lead scoring.”

The second reason has to do with the trend towards Account-Based Marketing (ABM). The classic business case for lead scoring has been a function of inbound marketing and the traditional lead funnel. Companies generate a mix of qualified and unqualified leads, the argument goes, and lead scoring is one tool for helping to sort the good from the bad. The move to a more account-based model shifts the emphasis from individual leads to accounts, and also lessens the need to score leads because (in theory, if not in practice) leads are more qualified in general due to the company only marketing to accounts that fit their target profile.

So, is lead scoring a dying art? Something that simply isn’t worth the investment in today’s account-based marketing world? I would argue: no. An effective, accurate, trusted lead scoring model is a vital cog in a company’s overall lead management process. And as long as most companies adopt a hybrid model that combines traditional, funnel-based demand generation with ABM (a scenario that industry experts indicate is the case), spending the time to make lead scoring work is an investment very much worth making.

Here are 3 key reasons why lead scoring is still relevant:

Increased Sales Productivity – effective lead scoring helps sales (and especially BDR teams) focus their time and energy on leads that merit attention, avoiding leads that aren’t worth the effort. By applying objective standards, and optimizing those standards over time, lead scoring helps eliminate “missed” leads that would otherwise be ignored by sales, and capturing revenue that might otherwise fall through the cracks.

Faster Lead Velocity – if reps know more about the leads assigned to them, they’re able to have more meaningful conversations and make their outreach more relevant, and effective. More effective outreach means higher rates of engagement. Higher engagement means more leads move through the funnel, more quickly. Faster lead velocity means shorter sales cycles.

More Insightful Reporting – many companies in enterprise markets have sales cycles that are too long to make ROI (or even pipeline attribution) a practical way to measure demand generation effectiveness, at least not in a manner that allows for rapid optimization. Lead scoring enables a more detailed view of the lead lifecycle, and, in turn, better visibility into the types of activities and programs that are generating qualified leads.

Photo by Nick Hillier on Unsplash

“While consumers have always had the ability to vote with their feet, or with their wallets, they have more power to influence not only what they buy, but also what others buy.” —Nigel Wixcey, Lead Partner, Consumer Business at Deloitte

Selling to a customer has changed dramatically over the years. It’s simply not the same straightforward process that it used to be. Today, growth-oriented companies aren’t just selling to a single customer—they are also geared to tap that customer’s extended network.

That’s why getting the customer’s attention quickly and building a strong relationship are both critical for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Not only do you want the customer’s attention—you want their loyalty too.

If you are looking to scale faster, you need two things in order to succeed. First, your sales team needs to be great at identifying good prospects; second, they need some serious Jedi skills when it comes to closing the deal.

In this post, you are going to learn some ways that technology is giving sales pros superpowers, allowing them to work more efficiently, close more leads and achieve better results. Read along…and the force will likely soon be with you.

1) The Ability To Reach More Sales Leads At Scale

Ask any sales team about their biggest challenge when it comes to scaling, and chances are reaching more sales leads will dominate the conversation. Data supports this: A recent report says that generating traffic and leads remains the primary challenge for companies.

So what can you do to ensure that your sales team has enough leads and the pipelines aren’t dry? The answer is: equip your team with sales-oriented tools. Having these tools is like having superpowers—your team will be able to reach more prospects than ever before, faster than ever before.

Tools such as power-dialers and customer relationship management (CRM) software can significantly simplify your team’s outreach process.

Sales dialers have become smarter thanks to technology. Now they give sales reps the ability to call several numbers at one go, meaning teams spend less time waiting to get connected with prospects. Teams with sales dialers have reported a significant increase in their productivity and outreach.

Don’t just take our word for it—Sarah Haselkorn, director of sales operations at MakeSpace, has this to say about the company’s adoption of Close predictive dialers:

“The early results are indicating that we're leveling up to a new level of efficiency. It has driven up our reach rate [which means] we drive up our end-to-end conversion rate.”

CRM software is another tool that’s a boon for sales teams aiming to scale faster. CRMs store lots of relevant information about your customers so that your team can access it at any time. Having a CRM as part of your sales process simplifies communication, enables automation, facilitates effective team management, and makes other tasks more efficient.

What does this mean? It means that your team has all the data to provide a better experience to your customers. Not only that, your sales reps are more productive and can focus on closing leads rather than worrying about other things that clog their schedules and slow their progress.

Apart from the benefits mentioned above, the best CRMs can integrate with other software, and they make it easier for sales reps to send highly personalized emails at scale, reach more leads by phone with less effort, and increase reach rate when texting customers.

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2) Better Insight Into What Your Buyers Want

The biggest mistake that sales teams make is focusing on what they think is right for their buyers rather than on what their buyers really want. When sales professionals adopt the former approach they miss in three critical ways: They don’t have data to back up their decisions, they can’t visualize the performance of their outreach, and they fail to find and take advantage of valuable insights about their buyers.

Not long ago, the process of collecting and analyzing customer data was extremely time-consuming—sales teams had to spend hours navigating between multiple tools and documenting everything in spreadsheets.

Thankfully, technology has transformed this process. The best inside sales tools provide extensive reporting and analytics that allow sales professionals to quickly and efficiently do a deep dive into their prospects.

Take emails for example. Using Close, a sales rep can easily download a report about what their users prefer when it comes to email—what they clicked, what time they opened the email, whether the content resonated with them, and so on…

You can use technology to see how often sales reps say certain words when they’re pitching over the phone. You can use technology to see which elements of a proposal your client looked at the longest. You can use technology to see who at a company viewed a document that was sent to just one lead.

If this kind of intelligence isn’t a superpower, then what is?

3) Video Messages That Engage Leads & Prospects

The beauty of inside sales is that reps can sell to anyone, anywhere; however, the sales process often lacks facetime between the buyer and the seller. Now, I know a lot of us modern folks will say that facetime is not important anymore, but you can’t deny that people connect with people. (And it’s harder to ignore someone when you have to look into their eyes.)

People prefer personalization, they want human contact—and being able to put a face to your name only adds to the experience! Which is why sales videos are an emerging superpower that sales teams can use to build stronger connections and increase their close rate.

While a tool like Close helps sales teams send highly customized and personalized emails, by adding videos to your outreach you can take it up a notch.

How is that, exactly?

Through video, salespeople can better handle prospects’ objections, improve negotiations and build a more meaningful conversation—all of which increase the likelihood of closing a deal.

For example, Soapbox by Wistia is a great tool for sales reps looking to nurture relationships with existing prospects or initial leads. With Soapbox, sales teams can demonstrate the real value of their product or service through a medium that’s the next best thing to face-to-face. Video doesn’t just work for leads and prospects but also for existing customers, helping sales teams build stronger relationships and sell more products or features.

Here are a few ways that sales teams can take advantage of video:

• Use it for cold outreach to inform potential users about the value of your product
• Use it to create a customized demo that matches your buyer’s use case
• Use it recap a call and close the loop on a conversation

Video as a superpower? You better believe it.

4) One-On-One Relationships Via Text Message

It’s easy to believe that SMS is dead when the sales conversation focuses on chatbots and AI. If you think the same, I don’t blame you.

However recent reports confirm that good ol’ texting is here to stay. Mobile messages are read in under three minutes and the global average open rate for SMS is 94 percent. That’s crazy high—and even better than email.

Not only is SMS effective; it’s a channel preferred by customers—77 percent of consumers ages 18–34 with texting capabilities are likely to have a positive perception of a company that offers texting.

So if your company can scale the process of texting prospects and customers, it is nothing short of having a superpower!

This might sound simple, but it isn’t—SMS marketing comes with its own challenges, like having to switch devices in order to send messages. That’s where Close's SMS tool comes in handy; it allows sales teams to increase their reach rates with less effort.

Wrapping It Up

There you have it: four ways that technology is giving sales pros superpowers.

1. The ability to reach more sales leads at scale
2. Better sales insight into what your buyers want
3. Video messages that engage leads & prospects
4. One-on-one relationships via text message

Scaling isn’t easy, but by incorporating these insights into your sales strategy, you can not only boost your sales but also win brownie points from your customers and prospects. We hope that you are able to use these superpowers to scale faster in 2019.

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Customer journey maps are on many marketers’ to-do lists and a lucky few manage to find the time and the budget to get them done. I think they are well worth the investment, particularly when you add in the dose of reality known as the customer experience map. They’re not the same thing and here is why.

Your journey map focuses on the ideal path from initial awareness until your customer tells you to get lost. It looks at each touch point with your brand, including advertising, website, sales rep, service and so on.

They are, by necessity, pretty idealized, though you need to ground them in actual user research, and you may find you have different journeys for different buyer personas.

For example, one B2B mapping exercise I did showed that enterprise buyers waited far longer in the buying cycle to contact the client’s sales department. Small business owners, on the other hand, often went straight to a sales conversation after just one website visit.

Understanding this dynamic, including how long decisions take, the reference networks customers check with as they make decisions, and the number of alternatives they consider is incredibly helpful in designing an efficient process to separate buyers and their money.

Once on board as a customer, there are multiple other touchpoints around payment, shipping, installation, support, billing and so on. The more we understand how our customers prefer to do this stuff, the better we can design an awesome experience for them.

But there’s the other half of this, which is the real experience. As much as we may imagine a flawless, frictionless love affair between our brand and our customers, the truth is rarely as pretty. Websites are slow, invoicing is clunky, products are not quite as advertised and so on. So we need to take our journey map and spend some time comparing it to reality. This allows us to fix poor processes and get the imagined experience as close to the real one as we possibly can.

But wait, there’s more

Sounds great, doesn’t it? You should totally invest in journey and experience maps for your customers. But if you really want the lived experience to map closely to the process chart on the whiteboard, you need to consider the journeys and experiences of your employees.

The best customer value propositions go quickly down the drain when the people charged with delivering on them don’t know or don’t care what’s expected.

We see it pretty much daily. Low trust, low morale employers deliver low risk, low effort services. Go visit the food court in your local mall if you’re looking for evidence.

Customer experience runs in parallel to employee experience. Top employers have 21% more productivity, 41% fewer quality defects and 86% lower first year employee turnover. These, among a great many other things, bode well for the customer’s experience. Yet very few organizations bother doing the work of mapping what the experience should be and then comparing it to what it is.

It’s far easier to make cat puke values posters and inflict net promoter surveys on employees than it is to invest in a low-friction workplace. Given that employee engagement has been basically flat for a generation, I think we can agree that it’s time to try the latter.

If you’re looking at your “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” mug and thinking smug thoughts about your organization, think again. Even a terrific culture in one or more parts of the business can’t outshine irritating issues, such as poor tools, a lack of training or terrible processes.

A friend of mine has run multiple “engagement” initiatives in her company’s large call centres. They plant trees, play soccer, have pizza, do mentoring and bring in emotional support kittens. It’s lovely. The place looks like a daycare centre. Problem is, the staff still have to open three or four ancient applications to assist most clients, their antique call handling software cuts people off, overtime is calculated manually (and usually incorrectly) and the key metric by which the agents are judged is average handle time for each call.

Despite the outward appearance of a fun youth centre, this place has more in common with a Dickensian workhouse without all the lovely singing about porridge.

So go ahead and get that budget in place to map your customer journey and analyze the experience, but do yourself a favour and call up HR to see if they can kick in a few bucks to manage the parallel work of ensuring your employee experience is up to the task of meeting customer expectations.