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When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump announced his candidacy 13 months ago, he proclaimed, "Our country needs a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote 'The Art of the Deal.'"

He was referring to his 1987 memoir, which offers some insight into his personal life but mainly focuses on the philosophy to which he credits his success in the real-estate industry. The business guide sold over 1 million copies and has been one of Trump's talking points over the past year — a symbol representing his deal-making prowess.

But on Monday morning — the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio — the book's coauthor, Tony Schwartz, came out blasting Trump.

In a newly published New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, Schwartz — who is the president and CEO of the Energy Project consulting firm — said that not only did he write the book with practically no help from Trump, he feels ashamed to have contributed to the success of someone he now considers a monster.

"I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization," Schwartz told Mayer.

This is not the first time Schwartz has weighed in on Trump. Last September, after seeing Trump repeatedly refer to "The Art of the Deal" for three months, Schwartz tweeted:

In the publishing world, it's standard practice for ghostwriters to lead writing projects for celebrities — it's how athletes, movie stars, and executives can publish 300-page books with no prior book experience and relentless schedules. These working relationships can range from the ghostwriter doing all of the writing after conducting extensive interviews to serving as editors who liberally work with rough copy.

On the cover of "The Art of the Deal," Schwartz is given credit as coauthor as opposed to being tucked into the acknowledgments section. But he's taking offense at the way Trump is portraying himself as the actual lead writer of the book, a claim he maintained with The New Yorker.

Schwartz spent 18 months shadowing Trump in the late '80s and interviewing his family members and associates in order to capture Trump's voice. It was these experiences, he says, that have made him conclude Trump is unfit to be president.

Schwartz told "Good Morning America" host George Stephanopoulos on Monday that Trump has "an incredibly short attention span" and that he isn't as intelligent as his supporters think he is.

Stephanopoulos mentioned that critics are saying that Schwartz is speaking his mind now because he already made millions of dollars in royalties, and that as a self-proclaimed liberal and Democratic donor, he has an agenda in this election.

"You know, I do have an agenda," Schwartz replied. "And the agenda is about Donald Trump's character. It has nothing to do with his ideology. He has no ideology. He's not a person who has beliefs, except the belief that he himself should prevail in the end."

He added that he never mentioned any of this before because the two enjoyed the results of a successful project and that he never expected Trump to run for president, let alone become a nominee. "I now feel it's my civic duty," he said. "I have nothing to gain from this."

You can read Mayer's article on The New Yorker's website and see the GMA clip below.

SEE ALSO: Donald Trump's core business philosophy from his bestselling 1987 book 'The Art of the Deal'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Trump on Pence voting for the Iraq War: 'I don't care'

One of the most exciting areas of finance now has its own stock market index. 

Nasdaq and KBW launched a new fintech index on July 18, 2016.

The index will track the performance of companies that leverage technology to deliver financial products and services and represents approximately $785 million in total market cap.

The index has 49 fintech companies including major data, exchange, trading and payments companies. Their distribution is nearly exclusively electronic.

Global investment in fintech ventures in the first quarter of 2016 reached $5.3 billion, a 67 percent increase over the same period last year, according to a report issued by Accenture last month. 

Companies represented in the new fintech index (KFTX) include Paypal, MarketAxess, CME Group, and Visa. In addition to the KFTX, there is a total return version of the Index that has simultaneously launched. 

The KBW Nasdaq index family now includes 10 indexes. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 3 Wall Street legends share one investment they find attractive right now

 Résumés are kind of like first dates.

If you seem like a good match, you'll probably get a call back — no long-term guarantees, though.

If you don't come across well (or show a preference for strange and upsetting fonts), you're done.

You'll rarely get a job solely based on your résumé, but it's critical that you sound good on paper — at least, good enough to pique the interest of your hiring manager.

I recently sent my current (but still outdated) résumé to Amy Adler, a certified master résumé writer, management coach, and CEO of Five Strengths, for review.

Here's her feedback: 

Fortunately, she thought it was alright (better than my terrible cover letter, anyhow).

Still, Adler had a few major takeaways to keep in mind anytime you decide to apply for a job:

SEE ALSO: I let an expert tear my horrible cover letter to shreds — here are the mistakes I won't make again

1. Your résumé is not an historical document — it’s a marketing piece

"Showing the slice of your history that is specific and relevant to your future hiring manager’s needs is key," Adler says. "Put another way, your résumé is about you but for them."

In my case, I crammed far too much random experience into my résumé, when I should've provided more elaborate details for a select few jobs.

Yeah, turns out that working as a historical tour guide just isn't relevant experience when you're applying for media jobs (just kidding, being a tour guide is awesome and relates to everything).

2. Make your resumé visually appealing

Your aesthetic is everything, especially when it comes to your résumé.

"Presenting a visually appealing document can 'force' your future hiring manager to read what you want them to read," she says.

She recommends presenting your résumé in a clear, hierarchical format. Put your name, headline, and branding at the top. Next, layer the text of your experience from the most general to the most detailed information.

"This will help your audience digest your message more easily, in the order you want them to read it," Adler says.

3. If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll never get there

A résumé without a concrete goal is résumé that's probably going to get thrown out pretty quickly.

"If you don't have a clear career goal in mind, your audience will not take the time to figure it out for you," Adler says. "The closer you can be to fitting your future hiring manager’s goals in your first presentation the more likely he or she will understand how you fit into their organization."

Opera, the oldest mainstream web browser, is no longer Norwegian. The browser, and the brand, have sold to a Chinese consortium for $600 million. The remaining parts of the company, including Opera TV, have 18 months to find a new name.

The post Opera web browser sold to Chinese consortium for $600 million appeared first on Digital Trends.

As bloggers, we all go through phases. Some weeks feel incredibly productive, while other weeks feel like we’re trudging through mud. If you want to be a consistently productive blogger, then you need to understand how to have more of the former weeks.

Here are some helpful tips for being a productive blogger:

Eat a Solid Breakfast

This may seem like a trivial suggestion, but the importance of breakfast cannot be overstated. Famous writer Victor Hugo was a major proponent for eating a health breakfast. He always started his day off with two raw eggs and a cold cup of coffee…but don’t worry, there are tastier options. The important thing is getting some protein and calories in your body so that you can focus.

A second benefit of eating a healthy breakfast first thing in the morning is that it adds some structure and discipline to your day. When you do the same thing every day, you suddenly become less resistant to your work.

Block Off Uninterrupted Time

As a writer, it’s imperative that you have some time strictly dedicated to getting work done. Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult in the hyperconnected world we live in. If you don’t make uninterrupted time a priority, it won’t happen.

“Figure out the time of day you can naturally get in the zone and block off time to complete tasks that need extended focus,” says Lynda Byrne, content and communications manager at Method. “Or, if you’re really brave, declare one day a week as ‘No Meetings Day’ in your company and see if there is a lift in everyone’s productivity.”

Try unplugging during these uninterrupted time blocks. This means putting your phone on silent (and out of reach), logging out of your email account, and shutting down notifications on all of your devices. This is the only way to totally eliminate noise from the outside world.

Change Up Your Environment

If you work in the same small office for 40 or 50 hours per week, it’s possible that you’re entrenching yourself in a rut. One way to enhance your creativity and become more productive is to switch up your environment. Change rooms in your home, switch up your office layout, go to the coffee shop down the street, or head to the park. A simple change in environment can help you break out of those dangerous ruts we all find ourselves in from time to time.

Listen to Peaceful Music

One helpful tip for instantly increasing productivity is to listen to music. Peaceful background music elevates your mood and allows you to enjoy your work more, thereby increasing output.

“It may be beneficial to listen to music you are familiar with if you need to intensely focus for a project,” marketing expert Gregory Ciotti suggests. “The reason being is that new music is surprising; since you don’t know what to expect, you are inclined to listen closely to see what comes next.”

With a music streaming service like Spotify or Pandora, you can find favorite bands or even listen to predetermined playlists that are specifically designed for focusing. Take advantage of these resources.

Reclaim Your Productivity

One of the keys to being a successful blogger is having the ability to consistently produce quality content over and over again. Unlike book authors who may write for a year and then spend time meeting with publishers, marketing their novels, and going on book tours, bloggers are write nonstop. The only way to be productive is by implementing the right habits and procedures, so start with these hacks and figure out what works best for you.

7 Key Tools That Will Unlock Your Business Productivity

Many SaaS companies like yours struggle to come up with content topics that are valuable to their audience, but they may not even know they’re sitting on a treasure trove of information.

Every time a customer uses your software, it produces valuable data. You can track things like how often a user logs in, which features they use and how frequently, and how long they use your product each time they log in.

Savvy SaaS companies use this data now to understand their customers better, help fuel product design decisions, or look for good opportunities to sell current customers on the value of upgrades or add-ons. Product use data can help you better understand your own product through the eyes of your customers.

But it can serve another, equally useful purpose for your content team. The data you already have on how your customers use your product can likely be mined for insights that help answer questions from your audience.

Why Product Use Data is So Valuable

Companies that produce original research quickly learn it’s one of the best ways to drive traffic, build links and gain shares.

When Moz did an extensive analysis of the kind of content that most consistently earns links, content built on original research was one of the two categories that performed the best (the other category is opinion-forming journalism).

Amanda Subler from the Content Marketing Institute has shared that, while the CMI blog gets a lot of mentions and attention around the web each day, “most of it references our original content marketing research, particularly the B2B research that we publish each fall.”

People love statistics. They provide evidence that feels trustworthy. And they’re the kind of thing bloggers and journalists are quick to link to when the data backs up a point they’re making in a post or article.

The media embraced data journalism a while back; content marketers can and should do the same. And SaaS companies have a head start. In fact, you can skip the work of doing a survey and use the data you already have.

See Product Use Data In Action

If you’ve grown accustomed to looking at your data one way, seeing it in a new light that would be valuable to your customers could be difficult.

It will help to see a few examples of how other SaaS companies have turned their aggregate product use data into content people care about.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks has done an impressive job of building a business with inbound marketing. It targets small businesses and freelancers and has built up a large enough customer base to tap into some valuable insights about how small businesses charge, invoice and get paid.

It’s used its data to produce content on multiple occasions. In 2010, it put together an infographic that shows the average invoice its customers sent ($1,677) and how long it typically takes the company to get paid (22.6 days).

Knowing how long payment usually takes helps anyone who has a small business or is thinking of starting one make their own payroll and pay bills on time. And getting a glimpse into what other small businesses and solopreneurs are charging can help you figure out if your own pricing is reasonable.

More recently, FreshBooks wrote a blog post based on data it had collected on how invoice terms and wording influence the time it takes to get paid. If late payments are a common problem for any of its customers (and for at least the freelancers, they likely are), then knowing that using polite language increases the likelihood of getting paid by 5 percent is an especially useful bit of data.

Buffer

Buffer gets accolades for its content marketing and that reputation is well-earned. Brands have a lot of questions about what works on social media and many feel like they’re just guessing.

If you use Buffer, then your flailing helps create the data that all Buffer readers can use to improve their social media marketing.

Ever wondered what the best time of day is to post on the different social media platforms? Buffer’s aggregate data has some answers for you.

Not sure if you should bother with that hashtag? Buffer’s data shows that tweets with one or two hashtags get 21 percent more engagement.

Over a few years, it has collected a significant amount of use data that provides specific, actionable insights to customers. More importantly, Buffer has published it for any brand to see, so all the businesses in its target audience can benefit.

Yesware

Yesware’s sales automation software allows salespeople to send emails and track stats on their performance through the platform. As such, Yesware has been able to collect some serious data on what types of emails perform well.

Looking at data from more than 500,000 emails its clients have sent, it was able to pull out which words in a subject line tend to lead to higher and lower open rates. It also analyzed what works best in terms of subject line length—and found it really doesn’t matter.

Getting a lead or customer to open your email is a challenge every email marketer and salesperson faces. Clear data that tells you what to do (and what not to do) is something every business in Yesware’s target audience can use.

How many of these examples included information you were interested in? Probably at least one of them. Data is interesting. Sometimes it gives us insights we suspected, but couldn’t prove. Other times it shows us something we never would have guessed.

Either way, if your software has any data your customers may find useful or interesting, use it. Release a report. Turn it into an infographic. Get it out there in a format that gets people talking. Your traffic and conversions will thank you.

The world’s biggest shipbuilder, Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) – working with Intel, SK Shipping, Microsoft, the Daejeon Center for Creative Economy and Innovation (DCCEI) and the Ulsan Center for Creative Economy and Innovation (UCCEI) – wants to bring smart ships to the world’s oceans.

An agreement signed by the group allows HHI and its partners to team up in an effort to help domestic information and computer technology businesses create software that improves the safety and well-being of crew members, meeting the needs of ship-owners and safe ship operation standards.

See Also: Can the blockchain and Iot solve international freight’s issues?

In 2019, the Ship Service Software should be applied to smart ships, if all goes according to planned.  Once applied, it will allow for remote medical treatment services for crew members, ballast tank inspections, virtual reality training, maintenance of important equipment and automatic voyage information reporting.

“The Korean shipbuilding industry was developed on the back of advanced manufacturing technology but now is the time for us to shift our focus to differentiated ship service technologies,” stated an HHI official. “We see that customized and value-added software will play a role in reviving the industry.”

Ship-owners, crews and customers work together on new tech

SK Shipping and HHI will offer smart ship platforms and technological mentoring services.  Meanwhile, UCCEI and DCCEI will conduct briefing sessions for shipbuilders and shipping lines to encourage the technology companies to participate.

HHI and Accenture, together, unveiled OceanLink this past May.  OceanLink, their version of a smart ship, is geared toward the shipbuilding, shipping, and onshore-logistics sectors. With a grouping of analytics software and sensors, ship-owners can keep track of a ship’s condition and status in real-time.  Along with this, owners are offered a vast range of ship operation data including location, weather, and onboard equipment and cargo status information.

The post Hyundai sailing into a new era of smart ships appeared first on ReadWrite.

Since I am fond of talking about why everyone ignores your email sales pitch, I’m occasionally on the receiving end of examples of awful cold pitches that continue to inhibit sales performance. This example hit my inbox last week:

If this puppy doesn’t convince you to connect with me – I am at my wits’ end.

Woof.

The puppy dog is cute. In 2016, cute doesn’t close sales. Value does. It’s important to understand how the customer is changing and how today’s customer or customer decision team defines value.

How Today’s Sales Dynamic Has Changed

The average B2B deal now requires an average of 5.4 people to formally sign off on each purchase. What is the impact?

The people on buying teams have increasingly diverse priorities, and to win them over, suppliers must bridge those differences. The upshot is longer cycle times, smaller deals, lower margins, and, in the ever more common worst case, customer deadlock that scuttles the deal. — Harvard Business Review

That is a new landscape and navigating it with success is proving to be a tremendous challenge for sales teams. That is why a Forrester study projects that of the 4.5 million B2B sales jobs in existence today, “one million jobs will be net displaced by 2020.”

The first 500,000 out the door will be the salespeople who cannot differentiate themselves as a critical part of the value proposition. On the other hand, the massive shift in customer expectations around the buying decision is providing an unprecedented opportunity for world-class producers to win big.

The best salespeople are finding ways to deliver compelling insight, deep customization and help customers think differently about the future. They’re experts about their products, competition, customers, and are well-positioned to bring customer decision teams together and guide them to arrive at a consensus decision. They win on value and don’t have to compete on price.

While I’ve talked previously about the importance of story, strategy and execution, there isn’t a silver bullet to developing the new skills required to compete and win today. It’s work.

How to Get to Work

I believe part of the work required to help sales teams evolve is sales auditing. In this presentation to 1,000 B2B producers, I unpack the auditing tactics that have proven most effective to me:

There is a shift happening around the way customers make decisions. It begs the question:

Who do I need to become to drive sales growth into the future?

It’s a question I consider regularly and it can be applied to other areas in business and life. I also know a consistent auditing practice will provide insight to help you make forward progress!

In our latest survey, we found that half of marketers cite the lack of personnel as one of the greatest obstacles they face in making personalization a greater priority in their organizations. We predict that as more organizations make personalization a top priority, an increasing number of marketing teams will be looking to hire personalization specialists to help them maximize the impact of their personalization efforts. But this job title isn’t widely used in the industry yet, so it can be challenging to find the right person for the job.

So where do you start? We work with a lot of marketers who are responsible for personalization in their organizations, so we’ve learned a few things about what makes a successful personalization specialist. Use these tips to build your job description and ask the right questions to find your perfect candidate.

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills

To define the personalization specialist’s responsibilities, you need to think about the gaps that exist on your own team. Here’s a job description you can use as a starting point:

Key Responsibilities

• Track, analyze and understand visitor behavior on your website
• Collaborate with team members and execs to conceive personalization campaign ideas
• Plan, implement and monitor personalization campaigns across channels
• Maintain ongoing testing to optimize campaigns
• Measure success and communicate learnings to relevant stakeholders
• Iterate and augment campaigns based on new learnings
• Troubleshoot any problems that may occur within personalization campaigns

What are the personal characteristics required to best manage these responsibilities? This person needs to be deeply inquisitive and always questioning “what would happen if we tried this?” This person is constantly innovating, and will never answer “that’s not how things are done here” to a question about trying something new. This person wants to test new things to keep improving, and will never fall into the complacency trap.

This person needs to be able to think about the entire customer journey, from driving people to the site, engaging them, and encouraging them to return — and how each aspect of this journey can be personalized to the individual.

He or she needs to have relevant experience, and while an ideal candidate would have a background in personalization campaigns already, a background in other digital marketing campaigns (such as conversion optimization or demand generation, depending on your industry) could provide a sufficient foundation as well. Innovative email marketers and marketing analytics specialists can also make great candidates.

With that in mind, here are some necessary traits and skills for you to consider for your job description:

Required Skills

• Curiosity and creativity
• Innovative spirit
• Attention to detail
• Ability to multitask
• Analytical and problem-solving skills
• Digital marketing experience
• Experience with HTML
• Experience with a web analytics tool
• Familiarity with A/B and multivariate testing

Questions to Ask in an Interview

The best person for the job might not have “personalization” anywhere in his or her current job title. Here are some questions to ask to figure out if a candidate is the right person for the job during your regular interview process.

Tell me about an accomplishment you are most proud of.

With this open-ended question, you’re looking to uncover what gets the candidate excited about his work. You want a personalization specialist that thrives on continuously improving and solving complex challenges, so his answer should reflect this. For example, you may know that this person has the mindset you’re looking for if he tells a story about how he was able to improve a critical KPI for his organization, but still believes he could do more.

Would you consider yourself a big-picture person or a detail-oriented person? Please elaborate.

The ideal personalization specialist can see both the forest and the trees. She needs to be able to internalize your company’s cross-channel personalization goals and then identify the best tactics and campaigns to reach them. Use this question to probe for how the candidate thinks, and if she can handle the big picture and the nitty-gritty details.

What would you do differently with the personalization on our site?

This question can be particularly useful if the candidate has digital marketing experience, but no direct experience with personalization. You can assess whether the candidate fully understands what personalization is and can come up with compelling campaign ideas, whether he understands your goals, and whether he has done his research on your website. Use it more as an indicator of how he thinks, rather than trying to catch him unprepared.

What is your favorite website and why?

If you can assess what the candidates thinks of as a successful website, you can get an idea of what she will want to implement for your website. For this question, the answer itself is not important, rather it’s the reasons she gives for her favorite website that are key. Does she like Spotify because she can create her own personalized playlists? Or Amazon because she can always find what she’s looking for quickly? These are good areas for a personalization specialist to value.

Wrap Up

Finding an amazing personalization specialist that you can trust to manage and implement your personalization strategy is a challenge, but it’s worth the effort because a great match will ensure the success of your personalization campaigns. Make sure that you’re looking for the right skills and asking the right questions to find the perfect candidate for you.

When creating a high performance team, it is necessary to answer one question: what is team working?  

I’m fascinated by the workings of agile teams. What creates a high performing team? How does an individual team member affect organizational health and performance?

While updating a white paper recently, I noticed the author casually mentioned how his clients were asking for information on “agile organizations.” Not being an OD or HR expert, I researched the “Agile” framework. Moreover, this research also helped me to learn about SCRUM. SCRUM a teamwork methodology that takes its name from rugby’s scrimmage line.

What is Team Working with SCRUM?

The Agile movement began as a methodology for developing complex software in an iterative process, rather than a start-to-finish project.

The movement is similar to how General Motor’s “Lean” management concepts took on a wider audience and became a well-studied business process. The Agile methodology has been researched, taught and implemented in the mainstream business world as an alternative to “waterfall” project management, which implies only a forward moving process with only one outcome. Key to the Agile framework is an incremental process. Finally, this project moved forward when the outcomes of one iteration inform the start of the next.

SCRUM is a subset, or “flavor” of Agile. Additionally, this process is about how teams work together to quickly process scope change, manage volatility, react to market forces, and restart the “play.” In other words, it describes a team that is flexible, highly communicative, responsive, disciplined, and able to complete complex projects within specialized small teams.

Similar to how some athletic teams have individual players with specialized roles organized around a common goal, SCRUM has key roles to be implemented and the team remains self-organizing. However, the team works together to be effective. As a result, they uses the SCRUM values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage.

What is Team Working: SCRUM Values

Moreover, the value of SCRUM is that it emphasizes individuals and interactions, not processes or tools, to meet team goals. While a definitive definition and implementation of SCRUM is quite complex, it also is organized around values that team benefits from.

What is Team Working: SCRUM #1 – Commitment

The team is governed by realistic goals. Also, an “all in” teamwork approach is mandatory. Goals are realistic and reduced to the smallest, definable denominations possible. Furthermore, this enables clearly defined responsibilities and team members to own their commitments.

What is Team Working: SCRUM #2 – Focus

With the Commitments and Goals realistically defined, team members focus on their own tasks with intensity and clarity. The members can trust knowing that each of the other team members is doing the same. Because the SCRUM process is highly iterative, team members focus on only a few highly specific goals at a time.

What is Team Working: SCRUM #3 – Openness

One of the critical values of SCRUM is openness and transparency. It’s mandatory that each team member’s work is available for observation, scrutiny, and suggestions for improvement. This can be challenging to team members who feel threatened by collaboration. Therefore, it is helpful to think of this not as micromanaging, but as a value based on the Agile tenets of empiricism: transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Finally, empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from what is known, an important counterpoint to secrecy.

What is Team Working: SCRUM #4 – Respect

A highly valued tenet of SCRUM is respect. This goes beyond the golden rule – be nice to others. This value places the onus on the team to not only be respectful of each other, but demand respect on the part of the team to each other.  The team must work respectfully with the strengths and weaknesses of others on the team. Team goals will not be met if there is even one under-performer, so it is for the benefit of the team to work together cohesively.

What is Team Working: SCRUM #5 -Courage

Now why would “courage” be called out specifically? Fundamentally, SCRUM is about honesty – and that can hurt. It takes courage to stand up to a team member, to hold them accountable, and to overcome the “we have always done it this way” or “it’s not my job” mentality. Finally, SCRUM is about change. Teams need to ask “what can we learn” and asking oneself honestly: Did I do the best job (for my team) that I could have done today?

Ultimately, a team taking on the Agile or SCRUM methodology is a large-scale change management and project management issue. Thus, this is not a simple guideline for your next project. An ‘official’ SCRUM guide I consulted puts it succinctly: Scrum is – Lightweight, simple to understand, and difficult to master. However, adhering to the values above could benefit many teams who have been troubled by under-performance, a bad apple, or scope creep.

Lauren Parkhill, Marketing Director, Sonoma Leadership Systems https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenparkhill

Lauren has a passion for design, marketing, social media, and branding. You will often find her planning and implementing marketing initiatives, maintaining the Sonoma Leadership Systems’ website, developing new content offers and email marketing campaigns, webinars, infographics and curating and creating social media posts. Lauren blogs regularly via “Leadership in the Moment,” Sonoma Leadership Systems’ weekly blog.

Next Steps to learn more on what is team working:

1. Subscribe to the CONNECT2Win Blog RSS feed to read more examples of team effectiveness in this guest blog series.
2. Download this free eBook “What Is Team Effectiveness & How Can We Get Some for Our Team? Stat!”
3. Learn more about the options available to help you enable and ennoble your team. Book a free consultation with Deb. No cost, no obligation.

The blog for everyone who works with anyone

Thank you to Lauren Parkhill for this guest blog post on what is team working. This blog is a product of People First Productivity Solutions where we build organizational strength by putting people first. Our president, Deb Calvert, is a certified executive coach and leadership development specialist, working with teams to bring out the best in everyone.

The post What Is Team Working for High Performance Teams? appeared first on People First.

Google’s recent introduction of AMP and Facebook’s Instant Articles (both of which claim to be able to deliver news articles up to 10x faster than the ordinary mobile web) are a wake-up call to newspapers and other publishers around the world.

Both of these initiatives have been introduced in response to the increasingly sluggish loading speeds of mobile news sites. Put simply, they work by removing all of the excess code, trackers, tags and beacons (plus a bit of caching magic) to foreground text and graphic news content without any of the other bloat found on publisher’s own sites.

In each case, the stripped back page is served directly by Google or by Facebook, posing a worst-case-scenario for news publishers where— if they don’t address the issue of increasingly glacial site performance—it’s conceivable that they could forfeit their right to a platform entirely.

Why are news sites getting slower?

As traditional income sources continue to fall through the floor, newspapers have had to become increasingly creative about how they generate revenue. One of the ways that they are pursuing this is through the use of sophisticated advertising technology: specifically, by using tags, trackers and beacons to harvest behavioural data collected from around the web and using this to display more targeted, more valuable advertising placements.

A wide array of ad-tech startups have sprung up to fill this demand. The downside is that the innumerable platforms and networks —all with their proprietary tags and trackers firing on each and every pageview—has a profound effect on page loading speeds.

Things aren’t getting any better, either.

This survey from July 2015 found that between the homepages of 20 major US and European publishers, some 500 different external snippets of Javascript were loaded. Nine months later, that figure has risen to almost 700.

Do these hundreds of lines of externally loaded Javascript code impact how fast a page loads? By how much? And what impact does this have on user engagement and retention?

This is what my colleagues and I set out to understand.

Quantifying the impact of page loading speed

The Telegraph — a 161-year-old broadsheet British newspaper — is focusing on providing excellent digital products and experiences through A/B testing.

Like many publishers around the world, The Telegraph — a 161-year-old broadsheet British newspaper — is focusing on providing excellent digital products and experiences.

In early 2014 the business established a brand new Product and UX team and, soon after, engaged the services of Easter Island Heads to help set up an in-house A/B testing program with Optimizely.

Site performance was an issue that cropped up continually as we began to define a testing backlog in meetings with stakeholders from across the business.

The way they told it, the advertising team continually asked for new tracking scripts to be added to the site to help raise CPMs in the face of ambitious and unrelenting revenue targets. In response, the engineering team would talk about ‘performance budgeting’ and other measures to try and quell the slowing of pages but found that in reality there wasn’t much they could do.

The main reason for this was metrics, or lack thereof. Beyond the general feeling that slowing the site down wasn’t such a fantastic idea, they didn’t have any tangible metrics to prove it.

The ad team, by contrast, could show that the new trackers were generating revenue; a fairly tough metric to argue with, despite the fact that almost everyone in the business felt that slowing down the site could have a profound long-term impact on user engagement and retention.

With the blessing of the Telegraph’s Head of Product, Alex Watson, developer Stephen Giles and I set out to design an A/B test to simulate the loading of external tags. We would artificially slow the site down in order to measure the impact on overall user engagement and retention to try and model out the relationship between site speed and overall revenue.

Making things worse to make things better

At this stage, The Telegraph was adding somewhere in the realm of one and five new tracking tags to the site every month.

Stephen devised a range of custom Ad Block Pro scripts to selectively remove some of these trackers to help us understand the impact that they were having on page load performance.

We then painstakingly tested page load timings over and over again and we found that average latency was somewhere between 1 and 5 seconds for each tag.

While it would be difficult to remove any existing tags on the site for the purposes of the test, we reasoned that we could try and look into the future to understand what the addition of new trackers could have on user engagement as measured by total pageviews per variant.

How we slowed down the site (on purpose)

Latency was generated for each variant in Optimizely using a Javascript method which delayed the ‘Document Ready’ function and made a call to an Amazon EC2 instance which contained additional code containing this same delay method.

By tweaking and testing these variables, we were able to come up with four consistently proportional delays across four different variants:

• Variant A: ~4 seconds
• Variant B: ~8 seconds
• Variant C: ~16 seconds
• Variant D: ~20 seconds

On slower connections, the delay was greater and on faster connections, it was less but we found that it was more or less proportionately accurate.

What we discovered

We ran the test on just a tiny fraction of traffic, yet still managed to test a few hundred thousand visitors over a two week period.

By integrating Optimizely with Adobe Analytics we were able to measure a wide range of engagement metrics (Number of Repeat Visits, Pages Per Session, etc.) and slice into the results by different user segments (subscribers vs. non-subscribers, for instance) to properly understand the wider picture.

This simple Optimizely goal which measured total pageviews per variant, however, gives a basic overview of what we found:

• Variant A: ~4 seconds delay -11.02% pageviews
• Variant B: ~8 seconds delay -17.52% pageviews
• Variant C: ~16 seconds delay -20.53% pageviews
• Variant D: ~20 seconds delay -44.19% pageviews

Predictably, the more we slowed the site down the less frequently users returned to the site and the fewer pages they viewed.

We were surprised to see that Telegraph readers tended to be fairly loyal and resilient in the face of significant page loading delays. This undoubtedly reflects the nature of the UK press but users on other sites are unlikely to be so patient: a dyed-in-the-wool Telegraph reader won’t suddenly start reading The Guardian, even if they have to wait 16 seconds longer for a page to load.

You won’t believe what happened next! (ok, you might)

Using a metric developed by the Telegraph’s internal strategy team representing the monetary value of a pageview (based on different revenue streams from advertising, affiliate partnerships and sponsored content and so on), we were able to model out the overall revenue impact of each variant.

By doing so, we could paint an accurate picture of the cost to user engagement of any new on-site changes which incur a detrimental impact on page performance.

While there’s still a long way to go, this results of this test provided key data to help frame the debate around site performance and, for now, at least, has armed the UK’s oldest broadsheet newspaper with the data it needs to best serve readers and advertisers alike.

Knowledge management may look like a rather newly-borne approach, since companies still don’t have a unified understanding of how to process and store valuable data and how to transform tacit knowledge into explicit, but the concept has been around since the early 1990s.

A study conducted by Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) in 2015 wasn’t reassuring either: with 12 days spent on average to publish a new item in the knowledge base, some companies needed between 90 and 120 days to make a new publication; only 26% of companies updated their content on a regular basis and 62% of them had no performance goals or incentive structure in place for knowledge management.

As if that’s not enough, the negligence towards knowledge management is coupled with unfriendly technologies. It’s no surprise that one of the most used platforms for knowledge management is SharePoint. Unfortunately, only a few companies decide to go beyond the out-of-the-box features and address their needs to SharePoint developers to get a powerful and interactive solution. Far more often, a SharePoint-focused knowledge base looks unattractive and offers a quite poor user experience.

Such a deplorable situation proves that it’s high time to reconsider the traditional vision of knowledge management and to transform it into an engaging and productive process by improving both the concept and technologies in use. Here we’ve come up with a democratic approach to deal with this challenge.

Make knowledge generation and sharing more open

One of the most widespread mistakes companies make is assigning knowledge management to a very limited group of people well-experienced in a particular domain. This way, the process of knowledge generation automatically transforms into a privileged activity inaccessible for the majority of employees.

Without diminishing the role of experts, it’s still reasonable to make knowledge management more democratic and let employees from different departments participate. It will make a knowledge base more dynamic, increase the volume of information and stimulate the staff’s engagement.

To involve people, it’s also important to think about possible psychological or material rewards. For example, you can create a virtual rating to mark out the most active contributors and organize a special board to place their photos and names or introduce special prizes such as free lunches or cinema tickets.

For those who are ready to taste some advanced SharePoint features, it is a great opportunity to implement gamification features and make knowledge management more interactive and entertaining.

Prioritize and appraise knowledge units

Applying more a democratic approach to publishing content should not lead to a knowledge base pollution with irrelevant or low-quality content. It’s advisable to implement a system of content moderation that will include an obligatory assessment of every new publication made and to assign content moderators who will approve, assess and rate posts before they are published.

The content evaluation not only guarantees high quality of your knowledge base, but it also helps to sort out the needed information. Assigning value and relevance to every publication is what will allow you to provide employees with a Google-like search option so that they can see the most important publications on the top of the list.

Adopt simple and user-friendly solutions

Sounds banal? Maybe. But the reality shows that too complex, scattered and unattractive solutions continue ruining knowledge management initiatives. In the case of SharePoint, the problem of poor user adoption is one of the hardest issues that plagued the platform.

Quite a frequent delusion while adopting the platform for knowledge management is to think that the out-of-the box features will be more than enough for internal use. The problem with this approach is that with no customization, SharePoint can hardly meet your employees’ requirements and will be very soon left aside.

Without resorting to enforcement measures, think of your solution’s tailoring. Take the example of public forums and make knowledge management as engaging and simple as forum discussions. The publication process should be clear and intuitive with all the necessary functions at users’ fingertips. Custom design isn’t a must but it helps to support the corporate culture and contributes to the team spirit formation.

Summary

Knowledge management meets lots of pitfalls on its way to transforming raw ideas into a tangible profit. If your knowledge management just marks time, it’s necessary to come back to the start and analyze if the approach and tools that are currently used can really ensure sustainable knowledge generation and processing, then elaborate on feasible changes.

Many folks recoil in horror at the notion of an aggressive salesperson as pushy techniques simply become amusing conversation fodder to their victims for years to come. But not all aggressive approaches are to blame for the sales stigma, so here are 5 aggressive sales strategies that actually work.

1. Think like a marketer

Because many sales roles rely on high volume activity, think of this as an opportunity to learn from your marketing brethren and use the opportunity to A/B test different catchy subject lines. The content of your email will ultimately matter most, but it is all for naught if your prospect never sees it.

Techniques like direct response copy (writing that motivates action), posing a question, something time sensitive, or a flattering subject line are all good ways to ensure that curiosity is piqued and your note gets clicked. HubSpot even compiled a list of their favorite subjects lines, citing tidbits like using a subject line with “Re:” results in 92% of emails being opened.

2. Level with the gatekeeper

An executive assistant’s job includes screening incoming calls to ensure only the most relevant inquiries get through. If a gatekeeper routinely says, “Ms. Anderson is currently in a meeting,” you are likely being given the runaround so ask for specific availability. If this yields another evasive response you can artfully call out the elusive behavior.

“My hunch is you wouldn’t put me through even if I called back when she was free” will likely put them on their heels, allowing you to knock down some of the professional barriers and just be straight with them. “Apologies for the persistence but I can’t give up that easily when [prospect’s business] has so much in common with some of my most successful [clients / partners / customers].”

This is a chance to earn credibility so be crystal clear about these similarities and request the bare minimum time (5-15 minutes) needed with a decision maker to create interest or convey value. The gatekeeper’s job is to stop sales reps in their tracks, so they need to trust that you will not make them look bad for having done so.

3. Create artificial urgency

Many sales reps create urgency to motivate a purchase sooner, but tying the timeline to business goals like revenue or competitive advantage can take months or years to play out after implementation and ROI can be proven.

The fear of loss is a far more powerful motivator than the opportunity to gain, so creating artificial urgency around short-term factors puts the ball back in your court. Scarcity of a tangible product or a limited timeframe for a configuration of features and cost helps light a fire if there is an (real or perceived) understanding that this offer will be short-lived.

Everyone knows the “I’ll ask my manager” car salesman schtick, so tie timelines to concrete factors beyond your control rather than a higher power gambit. Monthly, quarterly or annual promotions, each more powerful than the last, are ticking clocks that will not feel like a subjective decision made by a third party.

If a prospect demonstrates conceptual buy-in but wavers on cost, try throwing out a great discount tied to an unrealistically short timeframe. If you know vendor approval takes three weeks, mention a sweetheart deal contingent with a purchase prior to that, tied to one of the fixed timeframes above. If they can make it work then great, but if, more likely, they need more time make it known that identical terms will not be available later. It is imperative that the sales rep stick to their guns and not offer the same concessions the second time around and risk conveying that it is okay to delay decisions indefinitely without consequence.

4. Going negative

Eventually we all encounter prospects who are unconvinced that your solution is right for them. If you are confident in the knowledge of their situation that there is no viable alternative, try agreeing with them.

“Based on our discussion, I’d have to agree that you don’t have the time / resources required to invest to see the results we outlined earlier so it’s probably best if we put this on the back burner.” If you have done a proper job exploring the consequences of inaction earlier in the sales process, they should start thinking about what happens if they do not move forward.

If you are correct in assessing their need, the tables will turn and they will begin to explain why they are a good fit, why they do have the time, or the need to take action. When executed correctly, a prospect will attempt to talk their way back into your good graces and regain access to a deal you had taken off the table.

This can be especially important in reputation-based or ongoing services where the post-sale relationship is vital. If you go negative and the customer was indeed not ready or a good fit then you have saved yourselves considerable headaches, and if they are ready then that will be revealed in short order.

5. Follow them around the web

Sales folks tend to view marketing automation as a responsibility for another team, but it can be powerful for reps as well. Remarketing and retargeting efforts to “follow” recent site visitors around the web with advertisements for strong calls to action and purchasing incentives is a great way to get them coming back. Do not inundate them, but using technology to stay top of mind ensures their attention will not wander.

Similarly, some automation tools have the ability to monitor a prospect’s browsing behavior on your site in real time. Everyone wants to strike while the iron is hot, so what sales rep wouldn’t want a notification that a prospect in their territory is viewing the solutions or pricing page?

None of this is to say that it is not important to stick to what works in your sales process, but to the savvy rep, these aggressive tactics are not pushy or particularly bullying, but yet another arrow in the quiver when closing the sale.

A biological Ship-of-Theseus exploration of how quickly your body replaces itself, from your nails to your neurons.

“Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are,” Meghan Daum wrote in her unforgettable meditation on what makes us who we are.

I thought of this recently when I returned to my alma mater to deliver the 2016 commencement address. The evening before the ceremony, I wandered through campus — the alleys I had once walked daily, the library unchanged by the lapse of a decade, the tree under which I gave up reading Ulysses. I found myself puzzling once again over the paradoxical continuity of personal identity — what is it that makes the me of today the same person as the young woman who walked those passageways a decade ago? I look different, I value different things, my life is entirely different and unlike anything she could have possibly imagined, my body has healed. Even my hair has changed color and texture by its own accord.

What, then, makes us ourselves?

That question, or at least the biological aspect of it, is what Lulu Miller, co-host of NPR’s ceaselessly excellent Invisibilia, posed to NPR’s Adam Cole. His fascinating answer presents a kind of bodily Ship of Theseus, exploring the rate at which your body — the amalgamation of organs, tissues, and other structures comprising the physical you — renews itself:

In a fantastic related episode, Invisbilia explores the psychological counterpart to this biological perplexity and examines the myth of fixed personality, reaching the same conclusion that Anaïs Nin did many decades earlier in her magnificent defense of the fluid self.

Complement with Grace Paley on the art of growing older, psychologist Carol Dweck’s pioneering work on fixed vs. growth mindset, and the trailblazing Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner, whose body recently ceased renewing at the age of 100, on how storytelling shapes our sense of personhood.

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Over 900 people took the time to share their thoughts through my 2016 LinkedIn User Survey. Thank you! I've been gathering this type of information for eight years, and it's extremely valuable to everyone who's trying to successfully navigate the site and get real results.

My awesome graphic designer, Kelly Wagner, did an amazing job of displaying the highlights of the survey results in an easy-to-read infographic titled Portrait of a LinkedIn User.

In the next few weeks I'll share more thoughts about how you can capitalize on this information, but I'll start today with my top five take-aways from this year's results.
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#1 feature: Who's Viewed Your Profile

For the fourth straight year, Who's Viewed Your Profile was voted the most helpful LinkedIn feature. Personally, I've benefitted financially from reaching out to people on my list, and many of my clients have done the same.

The Who's Viewed Your Profile information will lead to improved results for you, too, but only if you're proactive and reach out in a professional and helpful way to those people who are in your target audience.

For easy ways to take advantage of this feature, check out Are You Taking Advantage of the Top Rated LinkedIn Feature?
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Usefulness of LinkedIn groups continues to decline

In 2010, groups was the second most helpful feature, with 76% of the survey participants selecting it, and now it doesn't even make the top eight features on the infographic. This year only 28% of the respondents considered it a helpful feature.

LinkedIn did a major overhaul of the Groups feature last fall, and we'll see if that causes a more positive response in next year's survey. But based on my experience with the new Group setup, I'm not expecting an upward trend.

With over 2.1 million LinkedIn groups, there appears to be some untapped potential. 59% of users are in ten or more groups, so they're obviously interested in virtually hanging out and adding value to each other's business lives. However, I just don't see much happening there.

I suggest you seek out groups that include your target audience and where helpful discussions are being appropriately moderated. Spend time in those and leave the others for the spammers of the world.
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The majority of users have more than 500 connections  

55% of the users have 500+ connections. Just three years ago, that number was 28%. I realize that time alone will grow this number, but I'm fairly certain there's a growing trend among the smartest and best users to proactively add people to their network in a very purposeful and strategic way.

If you'd like to learn more about strategically growing your network, be sure to read Is Your LinkedIn Tank Filled with the Right Gas?

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Time spent on LinkedIn has leveled off

In the early years of the survey, the time spent on LinkedIn each week was growing significantly from year to year, but in the last three years the numbers have leveled off. The majority of users (53%) are using LinkedIn for zero to two hours per week, and nearly one-fourth (22%) are spending between three and four hours per week.

If you're having trouble figuring out how to make the most of the time you spend on LinkedIn, check out Not Sure What to Do on LinkedIn to Get Results?

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It's all about research and reconnection

By far, users find LinkedIn most helpful for researching people and companies (77%) and reconnecting with people (71%). I'm disappointed to see only 22% of respondents feel they're generating identifiable business opportunities. And just for reference, these numbers remain virtually unchanged over the last eight years.

I wonder whether this is partly because some people are unable to accurately identify where new business is coming from because of long sales cycles or poor tracking. Perhaps it's because some people look at LinkedIn as just a large database of resumes, and they don't understand how to effectively use the available information to build strong business relationships that lead to increased profits.

I look forward to sharing more insights about this year's LinkedIn survey results in the coming weeks and helping you become more savvy at finding ways to turn your LinkedIn knowledge into real dollars.

The post Are You Curious What Others Are Doing on LinkedIn? appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

By using a dedicated sales assistant to handle admin tasks, your sales team can focus more on selling and closing deals.

Signs of the sales automation movement is all around us. Even historically strong sales organizations are beginning to automate their processes: Oracle confirmed that 30 percent of their phone calls are automated. But even the pro-automation camp admits that it’s challenging to automate the sales process when each sale is “complex and solution-like.”

Though these admin tasks can be onerous, they are necessary. And, paradoxically, while letting them fall by the wayside can be costly, having your rep do them does not help them do their job. So the question remains: how to offload these tasks from them? While there are many apps and platforms to help get your reps more productive, one solution to their problems would be to get help from a sales support team or trained sales assistant. By getting the support they need to complete the myriad administrative tasks, your sales team can focus on what they do best – getting the sale.

That said, many teams are unsure of the value a sales assistant could provide. Here are some ways to leverage a sales admin and create more time for your sales team.

“It’s challenging to automate the sales process when each sale is ‘complex and solution-like.’“

What Can a sales admin do?

Between scheduling meetings, entering data in a customer relationship management solution and pulling reports from said CRM suite, there are a lot of steps a sales staff member has to go through even before they’re ready to talk to a prospect or close a deal. This is where a sales admin can be helpful.

With a sales assistant or support team in place, salespeople gain all of the benefits of these backend systems and processes without having to spend hours on the more menial tasks. So long as the sales assistant is up to speed on the CRM and processes in place, then they are able to handle all of the admin work needed in any sales department. Plus, someone who is dedicated to CRM and calendar tasks is likely better at scheduling meetings, generating reports and inputting data than someone who only uses those tools some of the time.

A well-supported sales team can focus on what they do best – getting the sale.

So after you bring in a great sales admin, what can your salespeople do with their extra time? They can spend more time nurturing prospects and use their expertise to help guide them through the sales funnel, or they can schedule more in-person meetings or attend more conferences or professional development trainings. Freeing up time has opened up another world of opportunity – with the help of a sales assistant.

When Frederick Taylor published his pioneering principles of scientific management in 1912, the repetitive and mundane nature of most jobs required employees to think as little as possible. Breaking down each task into basic components and standardizing workers’ behaviors to eliminate choice and flexibility could help managers turn employees into productive machines, albeit with alienated spirits.

Fast forward to the present and we see that most jobs today demand the exact opposite from employees: the capacity to keep learning and developing new skills and expertise, even if they are not obviously linked to one’s current job. As academic reviews have pointed out, people’s employability – their ability to gain and maintain a desired job – no longer depends on what they already know, but on what they are likely to learn.

In other words, higher career security is a function of employability, and that in turn depends on learnability. Thus Eric Schmidt notes that a major pillar in Google’s recruitment strategy is to hire “learning animals,” while EY recruiters observe that “to be a standout, candidates need to demonstrate technical knowledge in their discipline, but also a passion for asking the kind of insightful questions that have the power to unlock deeper insights and innovation for our clients.”

Sadly, most organizations have yet to wake up to this reality, so they continue to pay too much attention to academic qualifications and hard skills, as if what entry-level employees had learned during university actually equipped them for today’s job market. Although learnability does boost academic performance, just because someone is job-ready when they obtain their educational credentials does not mean that they are also learning-ready.

For starters, workplace learnability is far less structured and formulaic than college learnability, and employees must juggle the tension between the demand for the short-term efficiencies of productivity with the long-term quest for intellectual growth. For all the talk of lifelong learning – as well as billions of dollars spent on training every year – scientific studies suggest that most organizational training programs have no long-term effects on people’s job performance.

So how can managers do a better job of fostering learnability in the workplace? We suggest starting with three things:

Select for it. Don’t waste training budgets on employees who haven’t demonstrated learnability, even if those employees are otherwise skilled, collaborative, and productive. To maximize the benefit of limited training investments, focus on employees with higher learnability: curious and inquisitive individuals who are genuinely interested in acquiring new knowledge. Just like some people are more likely to benefit from coaching than others – because they are humbler, more open to feedback, and ambitious – certain individuals are more trainable than others because of their hungry mind.

Nurture it. Managers who want their employees to learn new things will encourage that behavior by doing it themselves. We are all time-deprived, but high learnability people make the time to learn new things. What is the last book you read that opened your mind? (Simply reading the articles your Facebook friends share doesn’t count.) When did you last devote time to study another industry? When was the last time you spoke to someone about stuff outside your area of expertise? How hard do you try to break up your default routine at work? How often do you ask “why”?

Paradoxically, instant access to information may suppress our natural curiosity and appetite for knowledge. It is to our learnability what fast food is to our diet: a ubiquitous vice with no nutritional value and the potential to make healthy food tasteless. High learnability enables people to dive deeper to translate information into actual expertise. It is the key intellectual differentiator between those who can go online and those who become smarter in the process.

Reward it. If you want to change people’s behavior, you should show them that you mean it. It is not enough to hire curious people and hope they display as much learnability as you do. You should also reward them for doing so.

One of the best ways to reward high learnability is to provide new and challenging opportunities for those individuals where they can continue to be stimulated to exercise their learnability and be rewarded by broadening their expertise and increasing their value to the company and themselves. Another suggestion is to promote people only if they have acquired sufficient expertise in other jobs in the organization, not just their own.

Or you could give awards for individuals who organize events or activities to promote learnability in the company: e.g., running internal conferences, bringing external speakers, and circulating information that is intellectually stimulating and has the potential to nurture people’s curiosity. Even simpler habits, such as writing a blog, sharing articles on social media, or recommending books and movies, can be rewarded.

Though people differ in their natural curiosity and learning potential, the context will also determine how much learnability people display. Executives and senior leaders should be tasked with enhancing employees’ learnability throughout the organization. Since leaders play a major role in shaping the climate of teams and culture of organizations, they will act as either catalysts or blockers of employees’ learnability. 

When we talk about social analytics, our thoughts often turn to marketing, advertising, and technology. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that agriculture probably isn’t the first thing that pops into your mind.

Recently, I sat down with Dr. Annie Specht, Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural Communication, Education, and Leadership at the Ohio State University, to learn more about how she and a team of graduate students utilize Sysomos MAP to research important agricultural issues. Dr. Specht teaches within OSU’s Agricultural Communication program, focusing on topics such as visual communication, graphic design, and technology. She understands the important intersection of media and agriculture, seeing the value social insights can add to her department’s research.

Dr. Specht shared her experience using MAP to research conversations around a serious water-quality crisis in Ohio. She explained that she and her team often self-reflect on issues incorrectly, so it was very important to confirm or refute their suspicions with concrete social data. They needed to understand how people were talking about the issue, so they could build an informed engagement and education strategy.

Sysomos’ diverse customer base is a constant reminder that social intelligence isn’t confined to specific industries, and that understanding the voice of your audience is always important.

Click here to learn more about how the Ohio State University utilizes social data for agricultural research.

(Photo credit: Flickr user Yair Aronshtam)

The post Case Study: Using Sysomos MAP to Monitor Agricultural Issues appeared first on Sysomos Blog.

No one is waiting for your cold call. No one has ever said to themselves upon awakening, “Man, I hope some salesperson calls me out of the blue today.” The chances of the words being uttered at any time in the future are precisely 0.0%.

Nor is there anyone demanding that you social sell them, either.

Buyers are not hoping that you to send them an invitation on LinkedIn and follow it up by hammering them with an appointment request a half millisecond later. They don’t hope for a completely self-oriented email that creates no value for them. There isn’t anything here that makes this approach inherently better than a phone call.

No buyer is waiting for you to tweet them, nor are they waiting for a direct message. No one is waiting to engage with you on Twitter. No one is begging for you to share links with them, or hoping that you be patient while they come to realize that all of your sharing on social media means that you are someone who can help them with their challenges or opportunities.

If you’re going to be a thought leader, you are going to need compelling content. If you are going to use social tools to build your personal brand and create new opportunities, you are going to have to go deep, creating content that distinguishes you within your space. If you are going to curate or synthesize other people’s content, you are going to have to add something meaningful, some point of view that is valuable, something that makes your thought leadership stand out.

No one is demanding that you social sell them, because no is demanding that you sell them at all.

Because social selling doesn’t actually happen. Customers won’t discover you via your social efforts and sign up. Your social activity can create awareness of you and what you represent, but it doesn’t change what actually must occur for you to sell.

The post Buyers Are Not Demanding You Social Sell Them appeared first on The Sales Blog.

This is the “call to arms” that is transforming selling. Your buyers want you to be their sales hero, their champion who drives profit and is an earnings contributor.

Learn from author and sales trainer Bob Rickert what it means to drive profit as a seller, supplier or service provider. He’ll explain how to modify your sales language, tailor your sales approach and amplify your voice by putting profit at the heart of every customer conversation. Bob’s explanations will make it easy for you to become a sales hero.

Excerpts from Show Host Deb Calvert’s Interview with Bob Rickert on becoming a Sales Hero

Deb: “You mention financial literacy. How much does a seller really need to know about that to be able to connect with customer?”

Bob: “In order for you to sell higher, you have to understand how companies make money, how cash flows in their business. So what are the key elements of their business that really drive their decisions every time they try to grow their profit line.”

Deb: “What does it mean to become commoditized?”

Bob: “To be commoditized is basically to be viewed by the customersas somebody that’s not really different from all your competitors. So they may look at your product and service or your company… and they may say, you know, what you do is probably exactly the same as two or three of your other competitors.”

Deb: “What are the benefits that a seller will be able to take advantage of and enjoy from reading your book and what you are suggesting?”

Bob: “I think that, first of all, you are able to build confidence over time. It’s not something you do overnight, but it’s something you want… Doing these things can help it grow more rapidly.”

Be the Sales Hero Your Customers Want You to be! Tune in to this archived interview for more about how you can do this.

Listen to the rest of this enlightening interview with Bob Rickert to get detailed information about how to become a Profit Hero, a special kind of Sales Hero. There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by listening to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals™. We will help you cut out continuances, put an end to pending and stop stalling out in sales.

The post Don Your Cape and Be the Sales Hero Your Buyers Want You to Be appeared first on People First.

“When writing copy, assume that your product is the last thing on your reader’s mind.” Bob Bly shares that great insight in his Bob Bly’s Secrets of Successful Business-to-Business Direct Marketing special report.

And yet, much B2B content marketing is relatively immature, focusing on the product, features, and benefits. As the research reveals:

• Eccolo Media says “B2B buyers think white papers have too much marketing hype, not enough truly unbiased information, too general of information, and they’re too long”

B2B buyers think white papers have too much marketing hype, biased, too long & general via @eccolomedia
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• Forrester reports that 71% of B2B marketers say “…their content features case studies or customer stories, [but] only 3% admit this is a primary focus.”

What should you do in your content? What actually works?

Questions like these bothered me for a long time. I did some research, thinking, and networking to find out what really works. I checked 100 B2B tech and software company home pages to see how many assume that their product is the last thing on their audience’s mind.

Here’s what I’ve concluded.

Buyers don’t decide the way you think they do

You might think B2B buyers move through a fairly linear process — recognize the problem, find out what they need in a solution, research possible solutions, request and evaluate proposals, make their decision, and evaluate it while in action. Simple and straightforward, right?

Well, that’s not really how buyers’ minds work. They move through stages of awareness in more of a “spider-web” fashion. This graphic from Forrester illustrates what would take me thousands of words to explain:

Image source: Forrester

Your home page most likely is the single most-viewed page of any of your content over the long term. If you aim for perfection in your marketing, that’s the place to do it. I checked out 100 B2B software and tech company home pages to see if they discussed:

• Buyer pain
• Fear of loss
• Business value
• Personal value
• Stakeholder conflicts
• Product features and benefits

During the evaluation, I marked a “yes” or “no” for each of the six features. I gave a company credit for a feature if it addressed it in even the smallest way.

1. Does it address buyer pain?

More than three-fourths of the companies weren’t sophisticated enough to include content that got to their audience’s pain points. And of those that did, most did not make me “feel it.” Pain got just a brief mention (a few words or a sentence or so).

Opportunity missed.

Google, Motista, and CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council surveyed 3,000 purchasers and 36 B2B brands in various industries. They found that “B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers.”

#B2B customers are more emotionally connected to vendors & service providers than consumers via @google
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Why? Think about the stakes B2B buyers face. The purchase could require a six- or seven-figure investment. They have to justify their decision to an average of 5.4 people and sometimes 20 or more. Make a bad decision, and they’ve suddenly lost lots of credibility and respect. They could even get fired.

2. Does it address fear of loss?

Nothing is a more powerful motivator for any human than fear of loss. But, just three of the companies discussed this anywhere on their home page.

While the headline on your home page would be the most powerful place to address fear, none of the reviewed websites did so.

Opportunity missed.

How do you convey how your product or service can alleviate that fear or other pain? Copywriter Dan Kennedy once said:

When you understand that people are more likely to act to avoid pain than to get gain, you’ll understand how powerful this first formula (problem-agitate-solve) is.

A Science study found that when something is framed as a “loss,” people are more likely to take steps to avoid that “loss” even if the net effect is the same.

People are more likely to act to avoid pain than to get gain says @dankennedy_nu #contentmarketing
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3. Does it cover product features and benefits?

Most do. However, how many cover these to the extent prospective buyers want?

The home pages generally fell into two categories:

• Thoroughly discussed major features and benefits (usually three to six of each)
• Casually mentioned without any major highlighting of features and benefits

Opportunity gained (maybe). Since buyers prefer other types of content to features and benefits, their inclusion may not be as valuable as you think.

4. Does it address possible stakeholder conflicts?

Well, this is an easy chart to read. Not a single B2B company addressed stakeholder conflicts.

Opportunity missed.

Group conflicts peak early in most buying journeys, according to CEB Group research. CEB found these strategies work best for creating consensus:

• Focus on common ground among stakeholders through shared learning and content topics preferred by multiple parties.

• Decrease perceived risk and increase perceived rewards of “motivating mobilizers” or those who can wield influence over the decision.

• Equip mobilizers with the tools they need to be effective, such as content on communicating the value of your solution to others in your organization.

The research also revealed that while personalization is important, you have to be careful about how you do it. When you personalize the message too much, the buyer focuses narrowly on their own needs, ignoring those of others involved in the decision. And you can guess what happens to the decision when everyone chooses to go their own way.

5. Does it discuss benefits to the business?

Here, B2B websites did a nice job overall, and some were better than others.

The better websites gave specific and compelling benefits relevant to their products and services. The not-as-good websites offered fairly generic benefits that just about any software could provide.

Opportunity gained (mostly).

6. Does it mention personal benefits?

Personal benefits play such a big role in B2B buying, but prospects rarely think companies help them get those benefits. Kapost said just 31% of B2B buyers think brands provide personal value.

As you can see, my research supports that claim but is a little more extreme — only 2% mentioned personal benefits.

2% of #B2B buyers think brands provide personal benefits via @dansteltercopy #contentmarketing
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Opportunity missed.

Wait, aren’t you supposed to present your product or service so the buyer sees the business value in it? Absolutely. However, buyers consider personal benefits with twice the weight of business ones. Check out that and more reasons in this graphic from Kapost:

Image source: Kapost

Some other stats also raised my eyebrows:

• 68% of buyers who see a personal value will pay a higher price for a service
• 71% of buyers who see personal value will purchase a product

71% of buyers who see personal value will purchase a product via @kapost #contentmarketing
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Clearly, your content needs to emphasize personal value in addition to the benefits to the business.

#Content needs to emphasize personal value in addition to business benefits says @dansteltercopy
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How to do it all

You now have a convincing case to add these ingredients to your content marketing to make it more effective. But, how do you pull it off? Try this simple, five-step formula and start with the content on your home page:

1. Begin with the pain to engage and build interest — your headline could be the best place to do this.
2. Detail the business and personal benefits offered.
3. Address the stakeholder conflicts to build consensus.
4. Introduce your product/service benefits.
5. Show the features that make those benefits possible.

Conclusion

In terms of content about product features and benefits, and business benefits, my research shows that B2B companies address them well on their home pages. However, I also see that big opportunities are still available to better connect with B2B buyers — opportunities to directly address stakeholder conflicts, fear of loss, buyer pain, and personal value.

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Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo, via pixabay.com

The post 4 B2B Content Secrets You Fail to Use appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

The real estate market has entered the Pokémon Go fray, as listings for houses and apartments list nearby gyms, PokéStops, and rare Pokémon to entice buyers and renters. These listings can be found on Zillow, Craigslist, and Airbnb, among others.

The post Home sellers and landlords use Pokémon Go to lure Buyers appeared first on Digital Trends.

Author: Heidi Bullock

Okay, so maybe account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t quite as viral as Pokémon Go, but I would say that ABM is a close second in the B2B marketing world! But what does this mean for you as a marketer? What do you need to know about ABM? Why does it matter? How do you know if it’s right for your business? So many questions, and now’s the time for answers.

Here’s a simple way of looking at how to make sense of ABM. In demand generation, it ultimately boils down to two key strategies:

Traditional B2B marketing is often done through broad-reaching campaigns. Most marketers try to get their word out—as far and as wide as possible—by leveraging different marketing channels: owned, earned, and paid. The objective is to cast a wide net and put out as much content as possible, in order to act as a marketing magnet and draw a large number of leads into your funnel.

On the other hand, account-based marketing (ABM) is in many ways the exact opposite. It’s about getting all your resources— your program dollars AND your people (including your sales and marketing teams)—working together in a coordinated way to pursue and convert very specific accounts.

But is ABM right for you? Both strategies have their benefits, so it depends on your objectives, the market you sell to, and your product/price point. Generally, ABM is the way to go when you have a large target market with hundreds and thousands of prospects, and need to narrow down your focus to high-value accounts. With ABM, you can focus your time and efforts on running campaigns that are personalized to target accounts.

Deciding on whether to do account-based marketing is just the start. Once you’ve decided whether it aligns with your objectives, there are a few considerations to take into account. Here are five simple steps to walk you through the essentials of account-based marketing:

1. Identify Your Target Accounts

While this is fairly obvious, you can’t do full blown account-based marketing if you don’t even know what accounts you’re targeting. To get this right, you need to work in close conjunction with sales. ABM will not work if sales isn’t onboard, since it requires both marketing and sales to focus their resources on the defined set of target accounts. Once you work with sales to build an initial list, you can use lead scoring to help stack rank the accounts to make sure everyone is focused on the ones with the highest propensity to close.

Tip: There are many options for predictive scoring, so take the time to research them. With the right solution, it can add another helpful lens to prioritizing your account list.

2. Develop Personas

Next, you’ll want to map those accounts to marketing personas better understand which divisions are the right ones to target. You need to understand what challenges the account faces as a business, how decisions are made in the organization, and who makes those decisions. This sort of information is critical to an effective ABM initiative. There are different approaches to building out white space, so this should be an ongoing effort.

Tip: Agree on a timeframe to lock in the target account selection. Target account programs, in many cases, take time to work–so you don’t want to switch out the accounts too frequently.

3. Find the Right Content

Targeted customers are more likely to engage with content that is tailored specifically to them. According to MarketingSherpa, 82% of prospects value content made for their specific industries, and 67% say the same of content created for their specific job functions. And because ABM is inherently more personalized, you’ll have a great opportunity to provide prospects from target accounts with content and messaging that resonates with them and is relevant to their business and stage in the buyer journey.

Tip: Try to leverage the content you already have and make small adjustments as needed so that the content or offer really speaks to your audience. For example, if you’re targeting accounts in a specific industry, you can repurpose a more general ebook and add in more examples and case studies from other companies in the same space.

4. Integrate ABM into Your Multi-Channel Strategy

At the end of the day, your target accounts are similar to your other buyers in that they’re on a multitude of different channels every day. To effectively reach and engage them, you will need to execute cross-channel campaigns, targeting the right people in your target accounts on different channels and leveraging the personalized content you pulled together in the previous step. And remember, you’ll need to do this in tight coordination with sales so that they can understand how each target account prospect has engaged with your company.

Tip: Set up an entitlement framework so it’s clear what certain accounts (top tier) receive from a program perspective and others (e.g. tier 1 or tier 2) do not. For example, at Marketo, some of our top tier accounts receive direct mail from us while our tier 2 accounts do not.

5. Measure and Optimize

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again– as with any good marketing initiative, you’ll want to measure and analyze your results over time so that you can continually optimize your campaigns. It’s not about ONE metric either, but which set of metrics matter to your business objectives.

Tip: It is ideal to look at success throughout different time points so you can make adjustments as needed. Some metrics, like pipeline and revenue, take more time to mature, so measuring your campaigns throughout time allows you to get a holistic view of its impact. Measure as you first launch a campaign, while it’s running, when it ends, and three to six months down the line.

Interested in learning more? Check out our webinar tomorrow on The Essentials of Account-Based Marketing as we go through how to get started with ABM and focus on what really matters.

Breaking Down the Fundamentals of Account-Based Marketing was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Breaking Down the Fundamentals of Account-Based Marketing appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Focus on the following big sales drivers this year, and you’ll position your business for massive growth

Whether your business is year ‘round busy or has its ups and downs throughout the year, you’re probably always on the hunt for more sales. Sales and the related revenues are the lifeblood of the business, and even a modest increase in sales can trigger downstream benefits to your bottom line that can support bigger marketing spends, more sales staff, a better online presence, and more. Here are five innovative ideas to boost sales:

1. Get social

Ok, we get it. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years you probably know all about social media and its influence on the buying public. Engage your audience via social media and create compelling interactions between the public and your business. Partner with a reputable online marketing firm to help drive your social media persona; they’ll know the areas in which to invest to net the biggest returns.

For instance, they’ll probably tell you that YouTube delivers the highest levels of engaged website traffic, as most users spend several minutes visiting pages on the site. They may also tell you that 93% of shopper buying decisions are driven or at least influenced by social media. To boost sales this year, invest in a robust social media marketing program to supplement the grassroots marketing activities you’re already doing.

2. Automate your marketing activities

While many business owners focus on the most basic and accessible marketing principles available, those who really want to boost sales will invest in automated marketing systems that can take sales to another level. These automated management steps can integrate direct mail, online marketing, advertising, customer service, email marketing, distribution management, and more, leaving you with less to worry about and more to gain. The idea is to increase marketing productivity, not to spend more money on marketing. If you boost sales while simultaneously reduce your per-customer marketing expense, you’ll see improvements in bottom-line profit and operating efficiency.

3. Create a rewards program

When designing a rewards program, you have to think about your business model and what you’re really looking to achieve. For example, credit card companies offer cash back as a way to entice spending, which can translate into significantly higher levels of interest income down the road for the financial institution. Quick serve restaurants often create punch cards that offer a free meal for every ten bought. The fundamental driver behind a rewards program is to create repeat business and enhanced customer loyalty, so determine what it is you want and design the program around that!

4. Sponsor community events

What better way to boost sales than by creating greater local visibility for your brand? To do so, partner with businesses in your immediate market to create compelling events and marketing opportunities that can spur growth for all partner companies. Sponsor a bowling night, offer promotional giveaways at an upcoming regional sporting event, or support a business mixer that can connect businesses in your local area. Make sure that you deliver a stunning visual presentation to complement your promotional ideas and activities: think tents, tables, banners and the like. Once you have the support of the community, you’ll find that it is much easier to drive sales and earn more money.

5. Become a resource

If you primarily sell a product or service and are looking for ways to increase sales, consider becoming a “go-to resource” for your valued clients. It isn’t enough to simply list a bunch of items for sale and hope that they sell, you must also deliver client support, information and guidance. For instance, if you own a plumbing parts business, consider creating short, web-based instructional videos on ways that homeowners can complete small projects themselves. They’ll appreciate the support and guidance as well as probably come to you for the necessary parts in the future. You’ve become the resource and you’re poised to boost sales.

The five ideas above can help to form the foundation for an amazing sales strategy. Prioritize your activities and your marketing dollars and get ready to reap the rewards this year!

Every sales team needs leads — but the best sales teams know how to make every lead count. Our e-book, Get More From Your Leads, shows you how to jumpstart your lead management strategy.

Whether it’s in an interview with a prospective hire or just chatting with fellow sales managers, the question of “what are the main traits your most successful reps embody?” comes up again and again. After having had ample opportunity to think about this, I’ve arrived at four core characteristics our best SDRs embody.

Characteristic #1: Organized

With hundreds, sometimes thousands, of leads in play, it’s almost too easy for a rep to become disorganized. If they forget to disposition (CRM maintenance) a lead who they set a meeting with, they may end up calling them a dozen more times and lose the opportunity. If their calendar isn’t up-to-date, they’re likely to miss meetings. The list goes on and on in terms of the potential pitfalls of lack of organization. The best SDRs know that it’s tough enough to connect with and then qualify prospects, and that a messy prospect relationship management platform or calendar is counter-intuitive. A handful of my best reps block off specific times on their calendars to organize their leads in our platform, their emails, and also their calendars. Some reps do it every morning before they start the day and every evening as they’re ending the day. Some take an hour each Sunday in order to get ahead of the week. The point is, A-player reps understand that spending an extra 1-2 hours a week to get organized will save them a ton of time (and headaches) in the future.

Characteristic #2: Focused

High-performance sales organizations often feature cultures that work hard and play hard. It takes a certain type of person to be able to get their work done in an environment like this – especially when, a lot of times, they’re just out of college. What does this mean for SDRs? This means that from your first interaction with them (the interview), you need to let them know that while they’re joining a fun workplace, the keyword is “work” and they’re there to contribute to your organization in an impactful way. The best SDRs know this and place an emphasis on doing absolutely everything in their power to not just achieve their goals, but go above them.

Characteristic #3: Resilient

Regardless of if your sales team is heavily-focused on making 100+ calls per day, sending out hundreds of emails, or doing research on contacts to then employ a hyper-personalized approach, the job of an SDR is tough. So tough, in fact, that according to TOPO, the average tenure of an SDR in a rapidly-growing organization is under 12 months. Yes, one year. This is because many organizations adopt an “up or out” mentality and reps grind as hard as they can to get promoted ASAP.

With that in mind, reps are also facing rejection upwards of 90-95% each day. On many days, it’s 100%. Think of this. How many times have one of your reps made 100 calls or sent out 100 in a day and not connected with a single person? Or, if they connected with 10 people, never set a meeting? The rejection in and of itself is emotionally draining. But, the best reps don’t take it to heart. They quickly understand that it’s part of the game and that the best thing they can do is remain positive and find new and better ways of working. The best reps get knocked down again and again, but keep going because they understand that what they’re doing isn’t easy. Hopefully, your company is as ambitious as your reps are and they see that, too.

Characteristic #4: Responsible

Have you ever heard a rep say, “But, (Head of Sales Development), we’re not getting enough leads to achieve our goals,” or “I missed my quota because it was too high, can we lower it?”

If you did, you probably already know that this isn’t a top rep. Top reps take responsibility and ownership for both their successes and their failures. They don’t blame external factors when things go wrong and they certainly don’t look to cut corners to achieve their goals. Instead, they ask for feedback. They look inwards and ask themselves what they could do better as opposed to blaming their misfortune on “luck.” They’re proactive instead of reactive and are always looking to fine-tune their own strategies, even if they’re working because they know that the success they’re experiencing in the world of today can quickly change in the world of tomorrow.

For example, one of my best reps today was once put on a performance improvement plan (PiP) a few months into starting her job with us. Instead of blaming her leads, her manager, or anything else in the world, she put a plan together to get off of the PiP and worked day in and day out to achieve her goal, which she did. A lesser rep who was averse to taking ownership would have given up from the get-go.

As I think more on the question of, “what are the main traits your most successful reps embody?” I’m slowly arriving at another conclusion: “It depends.” Some of your most successful reps may be humorous, “hard-working,” or entrepreneurial, etc. The list could go on and on. Regardless of which attributes you decide to place the most emphasis on, it’s key to identify these characteristics in reps from the initial interview, be completely transparent with them regarding what you expect of them, and work very hard to instill these traits when all is well and especially when the going gets tough.

The following is an excerpt from a brand-new eBook from Ambition, PersistIQ and LeadGenius: Bridging the Gap: The Basics of Account Based Marketing and Selling.

Account based strategies work because they incorporate everything B2B marketing and sales teams do to target, close, and grow the best possible accounts. Account based strategies are not only personalized, they leverage basic human emotions and group dynamics for more effective selling.

Account-based marketing has boomed in the last two years, in large part because technology now automates the process of decision maker identification. With an account-based approach, every buyer can feel that the sales process is customized specifically for them.

B2B sales reps should be willing to walk a mile in their customers’ shoes. Successful account based strategies are grounded with emotion. Empathy is key to building out your buyer personas and understanding your audience’s motivations and pain points.

Engage.io’s John Miller has a great distillation on why Account Based Marketing works. “First and foremost: Reach the right people with a targeted strategy. That’s ABM. Rather than waiting around for the right people from the right companies to come swimming to your net, ABM allows you to reach out the right people with a targeted strategy.”

Add in the fact that B2B purchases always close faster with organizational buy-in, and you have quite a compelling case for account based marketing and sales.

Account Based Strategy: Familiar Principles & Key Concepts

Well-orchestrated account based strategies share a few fundamental characteristics. To quote Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures, “an Account Based Strategy is built on the idea of creating many advocates within a company in order to close a sale. Sales and marketing teams use ABS to concentrate their efforts on a discrete list of target accounts.”

Account Based Strategies are not a departure from what many would recognize “regular” or “traditional” marketing and sales. Rather, Account Based Strategies are a combination of familiar principles applied and concentrated toward a B2B audience.

PREDICTABLE LEAD GENERATION

One of the hallmarks of a solid SDR program is that lead generation (and the cost of securing those leads) is predictable from month to month and quarter to quarter.

If your lead projection numbers fall consistently off target (either positively or negatively), it’s time to pinpoint why. Even if your efforts generate significantly more leads than expected for a given time period, it can be concerning. While it’s usually good to have more leads (in most cases—see a caveat to this rule later in the list), you want to ensure you understand what is driving the increase in leads. Fine-tuning the measurement of your outbound marketing campaigns so that you understand what the levers are for each tactic and what effect it has on the outcome is key to accurately projecting lead volume. And a more accurate projection of lead volume not only demonstrates the value of marketing to the rest of the business, it shows that you are in firm command of what works, why, and what the business can expect as a result.

GROUP DYNAMICS

An account based marketing strategy is similar to what is traditionally called enterprise sales. The primary difference is that an account based strategy can be used to target a company of any size. Instead of messaging only to decision makers within a company, sales and marketing work together to simultaneously target multiple decision makers, with different roles and responsibilities. The concept involves leveraging dynamics of group psychology to close an account.

Rather than waiting for a decision maker to inbound companies using an account based strategy aim to speed up their sales cycle by targeting additional influencers directly.

By the time the decision maker at the company requests a demo, there will be a panel of people at the company who are knowledgeable about what you offer. When they go into their next meeting, your company’s name is on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

PERSONALIZATION

Today’s sales teams are challenged with sending tens of thousands of emails while maintaining a high standard of customization in each message. The more specific, accurate merge fields available, the greater the capacity for personalization. The more personalized an email, the greater the likelihood of a positive response. Even with a proven process, personalization at scale is hard, however, and not everyone knows how to do this effectively, so it’s important to hire and train well across your sales and marketing teams.

In order for these principles to be effective, Account Based Strategies must be applied all the way through the marketing and sales process. The gap between sales and marketing is an age-old chasm. Now more than ever, the Sales Development Representative (SDR) plays a key role in bridging the gap.

The Rise of SDRs

Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Inside Sales at Cloudera and who coined the term Account Based Sales Development states: “I called it ABSD because it is very much the SDR whom has the focus and control of both the technology and the multi-step processes that have to come together in order to execute a flawless outbound campaign. The SDR is in essence the quarterback for ABSD and can allow for scale across your target accounts.”

The largest and easiest cost to overlook for any SDR program always comes down to one thing: time.

And what is the most important activity that reps spend their time doing? Generating leads! With the recent role specification and birth of the SDR, sales teams have gone from buying leads to bringing the task in-house. Provide your SDRs with all the training and technology to succeed, the true cost of even a small team of 6 reps can cost upward of $30K per month. That covers salary, coaching and training, technology, and everything else for a fully operational sales team. That’s a lot of money to protect someone’s time.

So, what do we do to protect the reps’ time? We invest in tools and technologies that will help automate pieces of their job, making them better, fast and stronger.

Demand Gen Report recently released new data on the current state of lead scoring, which spotlighted some important insights marketers need to know. From the overall effectiveness of lead scoring to the importance of team collaboration, the data point to a few key areas for improvements that can make this aspect of lead generation much more worthwhile.

In this post, we’ll look at three of the major takeaways from this report, their implications for content marketing, and some tips for improving your lead scoring efforts overall.

3 Key Takeaways from the 2016 Lead Scoring Survey Report

While lead scoring tools are often bundled into martech stack tools, an overwhelming amount of marketers are putting these resources to good use.

86% of marketers are currently using lead scoring as part of their demand generation strategy, and the remaining 11% plan to implement a lead scoring system in the coming 12 months. With almost 100% participation in this marketing activity, here are some key takeaways you need to know:

Effective Lead Scoring Takes Time

The report found that most lead scoring programs have room for improvement: Only two in 10 rated lead scoring activities as highly effective – and that only 15% said it produced highly qualified leads. However, it appears that those with more experience using lead scoring tools had significantly higher levels of success.

Companies who had been using lead scoring for more than two years saw better results than those who were only one year in, which indicates that it does take some time to make lead scoring an effective demand generation tool.

Lead Scoring is an Essential Function in Demand Generation

Overall, lead scoring does appear to have some serious benefits for marketing and sales teams. 74% reported better-prioritized leads, more than half of survey participants reported seeing improved marketing and sales alignment, and 40% saw improved conversion rates from leads.

So what does that tell us?

There’s clearly a connection between lead scoring and better-prioritized leads – but that’s only the first step. From there, it’s up to the sales team to follow through on those bottom of the funnel leads.

Sales and Marketing Teams Have to Work Together

Last but not least, in order for lead scoring to be an effective business tool, the data clearly indicates a need for sales and marketing teams to work together. While sales teams may be impatient for success, it’s important to take the time to ensure both marketing and sales departments are properly trained with lead scoring resources, and that complementary objectives are aligned for both teams.

Implications for Content Marketing

After reading through these takeaways, maybe you’re wondering, “How does this impact my content campaign?”

We’re glad you asked.

What we can glean from the data in this report is this: Your content marketing efforts (like blog posts, landing pages, and interactive quizzes) need to collect some important pieces of customer information.

In order to effectively leverage your lead scoring system, you need to know not only who your audience is, but where they’re at in the sales funnel, what their concerns are, and what they’re looking for in a solution to their problem. This way, you can present more personalized, relevant follow-up materials that help nudge them closer and closer to conversion.

The next question, then, is: How can you craft content that does that?

Tips for Improving Your Lead Scoring Efforts

Your content needs to complement your lead scoring efforts by gathering essential data from leads as they move down the sales funnel. Here are a few ways to do that.

1. Create content for different sections of funnel

Creating content for users at different parts of the sales funnel means that you’re constantly sharing new, increasingly relevant information to the lead. For example, sharing case studies with bottom of the funnel leads allows them to study how other similar companies have achieved success with a specific product or service offering.

2. Use multiple content formats

Content doesn’t only have to come in the form of blog posts. Leveraging email marketing, social media, and eBooks or guides in tandem with your blog content gives your leads more opportunities to interact, a way to share content, and more formats to choose from.

3. Leverage interactive content to better qualify and enable sales

Interactive content allows you to collect important data about where the lead is at in the sales funnel. For example, if you used an interactive quiz (like this example from HotSchedules) to assess the major obstacles your lead is facing, you can more effectively address those hurdles keeping them from conversion (while educating them at the same time.)

Lead Scoring: A Powerful Tool for Demand Generation

With the data from this report and the tips we’ve outlined for more effective lead scoring, you can improve your sales funnel and the hand off between your marketing and sales teams.

The bottom line: If you continually score your leads and provide relevant, personalized follow-up materials (with the help of interactive content that collects user data), the impact on conversions has proven to be worth its weight in gold.

I love a warm lead as much as the next guy. And we can all certainly understand why most salespeople start at the bottom of their sales funnels and work their way up. That is the default mode of most sellers, right? They start their sales day by obsessing over the hottest deals in the pipeline and then progress to using whatever time and energy may be left over to chase opportunities that they’ve already identified.

I promise, if you observe most typical (reactive) sellers, this is the modus operandi:

1. Do everything conceivable to drag/push hot deals over the finish line, then…
2. Work warmer active opportunities attempting to advance them to the hot stage, then…
3. Look around for a lead or a new opportunity to chase

As I write this, I can almost audibly hear many of you asking, “What’s wrong with that? It sounds perfectly logical to me.”

My retort is simple:  Ideally, nothing is wrong with that approach – assuming, that is, you’re exceeding your sales and margin goals and your pipeline is healthy and full of both cooler and warmer active opportunities fed by your company’s highly effective marketing machine. And further assuming that you’re not showing up late to all of these opportunities  (well after your more proactive competitors are there), getting you relegated to “vendor” status and commoditized. And, of course, assuming even further that you are not missing out on business with your company’s ideal profile prospects because you or your sales team are living completely in reactive mode – staking your sales results solely on your ability to chase and close opportunities/projects/bids you find or that find you.

Unfortunately, however, we don’t live in an ideal world, and for many individual sellers and sales teams operating completely in reactive/opportunity-chasing mode, this is their reality:

• New business sales results are not what they should be
• Salespeople live as prisoners of hope (credit to Tom Reilly for that phrase) devoting way too much time and focus to the precious few hot deals in their funnel at the expense of creating new opportunities and a balanced pipeline
• They are arriving late to opportunities…finding prospective customers who are already shopping and often talking with their competitors who are acting as consultants and value-creators helping to shape the buying criteria and process
• So they’re not only forced to compete on price (because they’re late), but they end up becoming victims – victims of a reactive approach that traps them into only working deals they’ve found but didn’t create

The past few weeks while leading new business development-focused workshops and consulting with senior executives, I have observed several sales organizations struggle with the concept of each salesperson having a dedicated, strategic, finite, focused list of target prospects to proactively attack. Many of these salespeople have been living in reactive mode, settling to “hunt” merely for opportunities that they can chase, but unwilling to pursue strategic accounts prior to identifying an opportunity.

Friends, the best, most strategic, most valuable and most successful sales hunters proactively target strategic accounts and relationships.

These top producers work their way in to see key contacts at ideal profile prospects. That’s where that scary word prospecting comes from, and why the the subtitle to New Sales. Simplified. is “the essential handbook for prospecting and new business development.”

Because these true hunters are strategically targeting accounts instead of simply chasing known opportunities, everything changes. These proactive sales hunters have more fun, do great discovery work, earn a seat at the table, are viewed as experts and value-creators, make friends and build consensus within prospect organizations by delivering value – early, help shape buying criteria, and position themselves to win. And they not only sell more and bigger deals at higher margins, they live free, energized lives because they’re much more responsible for their own destiny and sales results! Instead of living as victims of whatever leads are fed to them or just chasing the same opportunities everyone else is, they’re out creating new opportunities through their own excellent prospecting and discovery efforts.

What might happen if you or your sales team made the effort the craft a strategic list of ideal profile prospects and then truly dedicated significant portions of the calendar to proactively pursue those accounts? I think we both know the answer.

“Is my business development team spending too much time outside of activities directly related to interacting with prospective customers?” It is an age old question for Sales Leaders. What is the correct relationship between the amount of time a rep should spend performing tasks such as list building, planning, pre-call research, template building, self-education on your products and market Versus actually reaching out to prospects? How can I determine which teams and individuals are spending too much time on one versus the other?

These are not new questions, but they are important ones. According to the Bridge Group, sales productivity is the number one challenge for 65% of B2B organizations. A productive sales team maximizes results while minimizing the resources expended, such as cost, effort, and time. Whether your Business Development team is measured on opportunity creation, appointments set, or both, understanding the relationship between a rep’s volume and efficiency can have a huge impact on results.

Volume is the total number of ‘touches’ (calls, emails, InMails, voicemails, Skype messages, hand written letters etc.) that reps are using to communicate to leads and prospects in a given time period. Efficiency is the rate at which they are converting these touches into desired outcomes such as appointments set, demos booked, or opportunities created.

The below formulas are a simple, yet effective tool that every Sales Leader should hold their BDR manager accountable for using to achieve the correct balance between volume and efficiency in order to drive results. It can be used by a BDR Manager to diagnose where an underperforming rep might need to course correct behavior, hone in on where to focus coaching efforts, and as a tracking tool to measure progress.

If you track touches, appointments, and opportunities use this formula:

Number of touches = (Opp Target /Opp Conversion Rate) / (Appointment Conversion Rate)

If you track touches and opportunities use this formula:

Number of touches = Opp Target / Opp Conversion Rate

Definition of Terms

• Opp Target: The rep’s goal for the number of opportunities that they aim to create in a given time period (Year, quarter, month, or week).
• Number of Touches: Outreach attempts (calls, emails, Inmails, voicemails, Skype messages, hand written letters etc.) Also known as total activity.
• Opp Conversion Rate: The rate at which Appointments convert to Opportunities
• Appointment Conversion Rate: The rate at which Touches convert to Appointments. Appointment may also be a Discovery call, Demo or whatever your company uses to label an initial scheduled meeting with a prospect, BDR, and Account Executive.

To use the formulas, fill it out for your total team numbers and for each of your team members. Three months of your most recent data should do. You now have a data driven snapshot showing how historic volume, efficiency, and results are related. Now it’s time to use this tool to drive improvements in productivity. Here are a few ways it can be applied:

Diagnostic Tool

If your team has underperformed, you can use the formula to drill into where the issue is. According to Vorsight, top performers make 120.8 dials per day. Manipulate the formula to solve for how many touches your team would need to produce in order to exceed quota given their actual historic conversion rates. If this number exceeds 120.8 per day, you have an efficiency problem, and need to focus your coaching on how to improve this (feel free to replace the 120.8 dials with whatever you feel the maximum number of touches a rep could realistically make in a day). If not, your team simply needs to increase it’s number of touches.

On the other hand, manipulate the formula to understand what conversion rates will be required in order for your team to hit their Opp Target given their historic number of touches. According to the same Vorsight study, top sales reps are converting about 10% of these touches into meetings. If the conversion rate required to hit the Opp Target given actual historical number of touches exceeds 10% (or your top performer’s conversion rate), you have a volume problem. If not, your team simply needs to focus on improving its efficiency.

Coaching Tool

Once you’ve identified whether a struggling rep or team is having a volume or efficiency issue, the formula can be used to help them focus in on corrective behaviors.

You can also use the formula as an educational tool by tweaking each number to show your reps how, by improving in their volume or efficiency, they can dramatically improve their results. Use this to create a quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goal for their volume and efficiency, and be sure to track, measure, and hold them accountable to it.

“If you make 200 more touches this quarter, and your conversion rates stay the same, you can source two more opps!”

“If you improve your Touch → Appointment conversion rate by 10% this quarter, with the same number of touches, you could source 3 more opps!”

Now that they understand what their target volume and efficiency should be, it’s time to work on the improvements. If a rep or the entire team is clearly struggling in one area or both, put a specific coaching program in place to help them increase their volume and/or efficiency. It will also be important for you to understand what exact skills and activities lead to higher volume and more efficient prospecting for your particular sales playbook so you can train new hires accordingly.

Tracking Tool

So far you’ve:

• Diagnosed where an individual or team is struggling
• Identified what the ideal Volume and Efficiency is
• Conveyed to your team members how improving in certain areas can lead to higher quota attainment
• And put a goal and coaching plan in place to drive improvements in weak areas

Now it’s time to track progress. Each week, perform a weekly retrospective on how the team and individuals performed versus their target volume and efficiency. This will allow you to intervene with new training or reinforce old training in specific areas if you notice any trends as well as to have a heightened sense on the productivity of your team.

Happy Hunting!

George

The post A Simple Formula for Improving your BDR Team’s Results appeared first on OpenView Labs.

It’s safe to say that sales operations leaders are the true masters of the sales universe in the modern age. So, the tech-savvy sales development organizations may be sales operations’ biggest and baddest allies: eager to use new tools, refine their own process and become more efficient through sales operations data.

SDRs, being the truly data-driven individuals that they are, have compensation goals tied to critical metrics drive leads through the funnel by way of demos, appointments, intro calls and sales accepted leads generated, which essentially makes sales operations data the glue that holds sales teams together.

But there’s a popular saying in the sales operations world, and it goes a little something like this:

If it isn’t in the CRM, it never happened.”

Unlucky for them, sales operations leaders are usually tasked with chasing down sales reps to comply with using the company CRM. But they don’t just do it for fun — they do it to ensure a high level of sales operations data integrity.

What is data integrity? It’s the accuracy and completeness of any data stored in a database, application or otherwise within a system. And it’s important because sales operations data is the foundation of modern sales analytics.

CRMs, from one perspective, are simply data entry systems. Sales operations designs and customizes this data entry system to match up to the sales process they’ve designed. Without data integrity, any analysis is flawed. Without analysis, there’s no point in collecting data.

Clearly you should be collecting sales operations data because… science.

In all seriousness, when a sales operations leader asks reps to comply and correctly fill out fields within the CRM (probability of close, recording task activity, etc.) understand that all of this data goes into the decision making and strategy of the sales organization. Data integrity affects everyone in the revenue function of a business, including:

• Marketing: Sales data is critical for collaborating with marketing to develop a go-to-market process. Example data points include the velocity at which leads travel through the funnel, characteristics of leads that are most likely to be accepted by sales, and which marketing methods are truly driving revenue.

• Sales Executive Management: Ever wonder how those territories, duties and responsibilities are assigned? It’s all in the data. Data can inform which territories are most active, which tasks push leads through the funnel and the roles in the organizations that are really pushing the needle forward.

• Individual Reps: Data points such as deal size, composition, and customer retention help inform how much sales reps get paid. (Do we have your attention to sales operations data now, SDRs?) It’s also used to predict pipeline and revenue, which means that it’s also the foundation of quotas and goal-setting for individual reps.

That’s a lot of weight on just one role, but sales operations leaders are the masters of the process, ensuring team-wide success and growth.

They’re responsible for creating and socializing the sales process that drives revenue for the business. They’re responsible for the rhythm and cadence of the entire team’s process. And ultimately, a team with solid sales operations data crushes numbers, while teams that just wing it barely hit quota.

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The post Sales Operations Data: CRM or It Didn’t Happen appeared first on SalesLoft.