Rnordman

Recently, I read a blog post in which the author was criticizing a procurement professional who had written a post about his experience with sales people. While I didn’t get a chance to see the source post, I get the sense the procurement person took a position that he wanted to see sales people when he wanted, talking about the things he wanted to talk about. Beyond that, he had limited/no interest in engaging with sales person.

The author suggested the customer was being irresponsible to themselves and their company by being so selective in seeing sales people. His position was that sales people are a great source of new ideas, failing to listen to them, the procurement professional was potentially cheating himself of chances to improve his company.

Well, yes, I guess…

Accepting this position at face value, that sales people can be a great source of innovation and new ideas and procurement people (or any customer for that matter) should invest time in listening to sales people; I suppose I might also come to some additional conclusions. (Afterall, sales people aren’t the only source of new ideas.)

Our customers should be attending lots of conferences and trade shows, because they are a source of ideas and new ways of doing things.

Our customers should invest time in meeting with analysts and consultants because they are a source of ideas and new ways of doing things.

Our customers should be spending time reading/researching on the web. Perhaps participating in discussion groups, reading blogs, posts, and other social channels.

Our customers should be spending time at Universities, looking at the latest research, understanding some of the best thinking of these researchers.

Our customers should be reading books, consuming all the literature that has anything to do with their profession, the markets their companies participate in.

Finally, our customers should be spending time with their customers and their customers’ customers trying to understand what’s driving them.

By the author’s logic, any customer is being irresponsible to themselves and their companies of they aren’t doing these things. And he’s absolutely right! Every business professional (every human being) needs to be constantly learning and improving–both to keep themselves current and to drive innovation and continuous improvement in their own companies.

But then there’s their day jobs—the stuff they are paid to do. The new realities of everyone’s work lives is that we are time-poor. We simply have too much too accomplish, and too few resources and time in which to accomplish those things.

The very best performers, whether they are sales people, executives, or any other business person viciously protect their time. Hopefully, allocating it to the most important (as opposed to urgent).

Customers, procurement and otherwise, do want to learn and improve, they have to balance that with the realities of their jobs and the competing pressures/commitments they have to themselves and their companies. As a result, they prioritize–hopefully viciously–investing their time in those areas most urgent, where they have the greatest impact. They invest in those things and people that create the greatest value for what they have to achieve.

Now let’s get back to this “irresponsible procurement professional,” the guy being very selective about the sales people he sees.

Let’s look at data about why customers (not just procurement) are reluctant to see sales people: They are poorly prepared, they don’t understand their products, they don’t understand my business/company, they talk about what they want to talk about…

Given the data, is this procurement professional being irresponsible? Is he doing his company and himself a disservice by seeing sales people on his terms and being very selective about who he sees?

Possibly, but more pragmatically, he’s just surviving. He’s probably prioritizing his time to get things done, investing it in those sales people who create the greatest value for him.

It’s not our customers’ jobs (even procurement) to see sales people. They aren’t being irresponsible when they choose not to. They are simply being pragmatic, investing their time where it creates the greatest value to their companies and themselves. Even procurement’s job is to serve their customers–so it makes sense they are highly selective in who and when they see sales people.

We are not owed anything by our customers. We must earn the right to take their time in each and every interaction. We must create value in each and every interaction. If we don’t, we have failed them and ourselves.

If we aren’t creating value, bringing them new ideas, helping them learn, innovate, improve—there is no lack of other sources through which they can learn and improve.

Those sales people who get this right never have challenges in seeing customers.

What if you could be a fly on the wall in a customer’s weekly strategy meeting as she talks through objectives and roadblocks with her team? Or imagine tagging along to happy hour with a group of your prospects and hearing them vent about their pain points and the ways your competitor’s product falls short.

These types of insights would give you an intimate understanding of your market and empower you to speak their language. But instead of planning a covert operation inside your buyers’ walls, look to the social Web, where people are voluntarily and publicly sharing information that can help you get to know them and the problems they need to solve.

Basics of Buyer Personas

Getting to know your buyers is the first step in developing a successful marketing strategy. Marketers take research and buyer insights and distill them into buyer personas, complete with names and photos to make them feel real and relatable. Personas are amalgams of real buyers and the more detailed they are, the better. They can guide all marketing activities, messaging and content creation.

Effective personas include buyers’ demographics, experience, expertise, emotions, values, technology preferences and social and cultural context. Some of these details can be learned only by going directly to the source—your target buyers. And they’re already talking about a lot of this stuff on the social Web. The question is, are you listening?

What is Social Listening?

Social listening or monitoring refers to tracking social streams that follow mentions of your brand and keywords related to your offerings and industry. Active listening makes us better communicators; brands can’t have engaging conversations online if they just push their own messages and disregard what people are saying.

But social listening is also a valuable business intelligence tool. It’s a way to learn about your market’s needs firsthand and hear how they talk about you, your products, your competitors and themselves. Listening lets you tap into a sea of authentic, user-generated information and plug it back into your business so you can market and sell better. “Get as close as possible to what your audience is doing behaviorally and learn from it,” says Julie Fleischer of Kraft Heinz. “The Internet is a gigantic ethnography. It’s our job to pay attention.”

Social listening is not about crossing a line into being a creepy Big Brother or inserting yourself into conversations where you’re not wanted. Not everything you hear warrants a response, and people can be understandably freaked out if you respond to them when they weren’t talking to you. Focus first on learning about your market and how to better serve them. Later this will help you pick and choose your social media interactions so that you’re providing welcome assistance, not unwanted advances.

The volume of communications taking place on social platforms every day can be intimidating, but a listening initiative doesn’t have to be a huge time investment. Once you’ve set up your listening feeds, a single deep dive over a few hours can paint a more complete picture of your buyers than you had before and provide a rich resource of details to incorporate into personas. Continuing to review your streams over time will help you further hone personas to improve their utility, as well as identify opportunities for engagement.

How to Get Started

Some listening tools to explore

• HubSpot: Our partner HubSpot offers a suite of social tools, including Social Monitoring, which lets you listen to mentions of words, phrases and lists of people on Twitter. You can configure your streams to show up directly in your Social Inbox.
• HootSuite: The HootSuite platform offers native listening functionality in the HootSuite Pro dashboard and with the uberVu via HootSuite tool, and it integrates with third-party apps for additional insights.
• Radian6: If you’re on the Salesforce platform, check out Radian6, which integrates seamlessly with your CRM. Salesforce provides several social media marketing tools within Social Studio, including Radian6, which focuses on monitoring and is praised for its user-friendliness.
• Sysomos: If your company is global and multi-language monitoring is a priority, take a look at Sysomos, which can track social activity in more than 180 languages and monitors 25 platforms.

In your listening platform of choice, set up streams to follow industry thought leaders, existing customers, relevant keywords, your brand name, your competitors’ names, and anything else that could help paint a picture of your audience. As you review the streams and notice comments or conversations that seem to represent your target market or industry, pop into individual profiles to get a feel for what these potential buyers are like.

Document what you learn in a spreadsheet, and note characteristics that different buyers have in common. These are the representative details that can add color to individual personas while accurately conveying the persona group as a whole.

Questions to guide your initial listening efforts

• Which platforms and online communities are my audience most active in?
• What are people saying about my industry and product offerings?
• What problems are potential buyers venting about online that my product can help solve?
• What is the current sentiment toward my competitors’ offerings?
• Who are the thought leaders in my industry on the social Web?

Plugging What You Learn Back into Your Personas

Get more specific with demographics and interests

You probably already built age, gender and location information into your personas based on data from Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics. Listening to the content and context of what your audience is saying can provide even greater detail. If you find similarities across your audience on job title, education level or alma mater, political leanings, favorite sports teams or family status, add these details to your personas to make them more informative.

Incorporate social media behaviors and preferred platforms

For each persona you create, list the character’s top social platforms. Add tidbits that reflect larger trends you glean from your research, like “checks Facebook upon waking every morning” or “spends an hour on Pinterest most Saturdays, pinning recipes and home design photos.” People’s behaviors on the social Web can indicate their behaviors within the buyer journey. If you dig into a bunch of target buyers’ social activity and see that many poll their networks before making purchase decisions, include this in personas to remind your team of these behaviors.

Pay attention to the content types your audience is sharing. James Prideaux recommends using Twitter lists or SocialBro to follow influencers or consumers and learn their content preferences so you can create inbound assets they want to consume.

Add quotes from real people for authenticity

As Ginny Redish points out in Letting Go of the Words, “Finding out the words your site visitors use to describe what they want and need is critical. Then you’ll have their vocabulary to use in your content.” Use real language and quotes from your target buyers in your personas to show the way they talk about your product, service or industry. This will help you speak to them with your content and messaging in a way they relate to. Added bonus: This can plug into your SEO efforts, too. As you learn the keywords your customers use, include them in your Web and social content to increase its likelihood of being found.

Enrich basic personas with stories and scenarios

Use more real-world details to take your personas to the next level by creating day-in-the-life stories or scenarios that explore how buyers might engage with your brand. These mock interactions can help you determine what content or tools your buyers might look for when they approach your business to solve a problem.

To learn more about the importance of personas in inbound marketing, download our new eBook, The New Demand Generation: Personas, Personalization & Programmatic Marketing.

It’s become increasingly evident in the modern B2B marketplace that one size most definitely does not fit all. It isn’t enough just to market the perfect products and services to fill specific needs; you must also be prepared to deliver targeted messages to specific segments of the population to generate genuinely warm sales leads. Let’s take a look at how you can use a technique known as personalization to get “up close and personal” with your B2B sales lead generation.

Addressing the Buyer Persona

Before you can create specialized marketing content to attract that ideal individual, obviously you must know what individual you wish to address, what matters most to that individual, and how that individual makes buying decisions. Don’t assume you can just narrow your market segment down to a particular sliver of one industry or demographic; ultimately, there’s one type of PERSON within that sliver tasked with pulling the trigger on that purchase decision. You can glean this person’s identity by using aggregated data to construct a composite virtual personality or buyer persona.

What makes up a buyer persona? Data, of course, but specific categories of data aimed at clarifying that idealized individual’s goals, values, challenges and buying habits. Start by asking yourself questions such as:

• Which specific problems, shortcomings or frustrations compel your clients to buy from your company — and for that matter, which ones do your products or services NOT address?
• What result or improvement level would your ideal buyer characterize as a completely successful outcome?
• Which perceived or real obstacles to the buyer’s ideal outcome might your business pose?
• What are the most attractive benefits (speed, quality, ease of use, etc.) your product or service offers to this buyer, and how much benefit does your buyer want and expect to receive?

Where do you get all these opinions, expressions of need and emotional triggers? The most straightforward approach is just to ask for them. Online polls, contact forms, and even in-person surveys can give you many of the answers you need. By also requesting demographic data such as job title, company name, industry, geographic area, education level and so on, you can narrow your data pool to those individuals most likely to buy from you — and you’ll know what these individuals want to hear in your marketing.

Ask the right question to fill in the pieces of a buyer persona.

Which Metrics Matter Most?

Now that your buyer persona or personas have taken form, how do you make sure each persona gets the right marketing message? First, of course, you have to tailor that message to the specific “hot buttons” you’ve identified in that persona. But you’ll also want to adapt the tone and style of the marketing message to that individual. A nuclear physicist, for instance, may be turned on by terminology that would put a manufacturing plant manager to sleep, and vice versa. At the same time, you need to observe specific marketing metrics that reveal how representatives of this persona typically interact with your B2B inbound marketing efforts. This data may include:

• Incoming website traffic – How are your buyers discovering your website? Are they linking through from your blog posts, from linked references in other companies’ articles, from your AdWords campaign, or from your latest YouTube video? Were they driven to your business by particular keywords? These details will all help you determine what kind of targeted marketing content each buyer should receive.
• Internal website activity – Do specific types of buyers drop off of your site at specific points in their sales journey? If so, you’ll want to create email content and other forms of marketing to reach out to them based on why you think they chose that moment to disappear. Reclaiming these abandoners and overcoming their specific objections is a critical aspect of B2B sales lead generation.

The Power of Predictive Personalization

For every piece of information voluntarily handed over by prospective leads or revealed through online visits, there may be a wealth of other data lurking invisibly on the Web — or even in your databases. A cutting-edge technique known as predictive marketing analytics or lead scoring can help you get at that information and use it in your company’s B2B sales lead generation.

How does this work? Modern marketing automation can make smarter use of big data than ever before by searching for key terms and indications of interest within emails, TCP/IP log files, buying patterns recorded in public databases, you name it. Advanced data science methods can then interpret all this information to predict buyer behavior.

While predictive marketing analytics can produce enormous gains in your marketing effectiveness, the technology in and of itself isn’t a magic wand. You still have to compare the analytics against well-developed buyer personas if you want to understand, not just what the buyers have done and will do, but precisely why they behave in these ways. Only then can you craft the personalized marketing content that sets specific buyers on fire to learn more about your products and services and eventually make a purchase. But the sheer access to all this culled data enables you to build the most detailed buyer personas possible.

With a deep understanding of the buyer’s persona, marketers may also implement customization of website pages as well to tune the message and provide surgical page optimization right down to the individual. Imagine if you were a CEO and you routinely visited a blog for management advice. Each time you visited, the site offered an ebook or another educational item that were uniquely attractive to CEOs. Then one of your employees in the management ranks also visits the same site but they see offers that are specific to their role or responsibility. Detailed persona mapping and analytics combined with the website “smart content” enables this creative and efficient methodology.

Another attractive benefit of predictive techniques (and any other techniques you employ to narrow your focus) is their ability to help you optimize your marketing budget. The purer and smaller your audience, the more money “per head” you can devote to cultivating each of them. Once you know exactly who they are, where they are and what they respond to, the more emphasis on can place on those avenues, from email campaigns or blog posts to particular industry events.

As you can see, personalization can play a vital role in helping you achieve purer, more efficient B2B sales lead generation for your company. While a lot of thought and effort clearly goes into a successful personalization strategy, there’s no better place to start than developing a better understanding of your buyers personas.

With the widespread capabilities of Google Analytics across websites and pixel tracking through Facebook and
beyond, we’ve nearly become obsessed with finding out as much as possible about our current and potential customers. We advertise and retarget relentlessly, taking advantage of every opportunity to make one more impression on our audience. For most brands, this is an excellent use of budget and productive means of pushing product. It seems that with the ability to discover intimate details about these individuals is invaluable, and the more information we can get, the better. But have you, as a marketer, ever thought about much information is too much?

Reading Adobe’s CMO blog, I was inspired by he article discussing just that: the danger of knowing these nitty-gritty details. Giving memorable examples and actionable tips, the article shares a few ways to manage your advertising efforts effectively without creating negative customer relations that can come as a side effect of this intensive marketing.

Knowing the Downsides

So what are these dangers? Some of them are obvious, like spending too much money on harvesting, organizing, and analyzing data, and not leaving enough money, or time, for actual marketing and advertising efforts.

However, a greater problem lies in creating campaigns that are focused on the greater brand goal and entire user experience. A heavy emphasis on data marketers may create a number of micro campaigns focused on the results of those numbers. However, those may not fit into the greater campaign or brand story. It’s easy to get caught up in the details that we forget to look at the greater picture.

This not only applies to marketing single product lines, but in creating content as well. If we create social, newsletter, or blog content that is focused around keywords and search terms, it can begin to sound robotic and lose the voice and tone that is key to a brand’s personality.

Knowing Where to Draw the Line

While it’s easy to become immersed in data, we must be able to determine where to draw the line. As we’re taught and must remind ourselves over and over, try placing yourself in the potential customer’s shoes. Consider their online experience: do you enjoy being followed around the Internet incessantly through retargeting banners ads and social media posts? Do you prefer that level of personalization, or sometimes feel annoyed by it? Apply those answers to your own campaigns.

A venture capitalist may have pumped enough money into your company’s bank account to push it into the unicorn category, but that doesn’t guarantee success.

Which is good news for people like me who are tasked with putting together a year-end list of the 10 worst unicorns of 2015.

On the one hand, finding the bad unicorns is easy enough because basically, every company is a unicorn as far as I can tell. So, odds are, some are just bound to suck.

Still, the job is difficult in part because there is an abundance of candidates. How does one begin to rank the suckiness of one unicorn against the suckiness of another? But also because “worst” (and “suck” for that matter) is inherently subjective.

Worst by financial performance? Biggest fall in valuation?

One thing is for sure: This job is bound to get easier as time goes by. According to TechCrunch, there are 156 unicorns, led by Uber with a $51 billion valuation. But since 2011, there have been only 21 exits for unicorns, either through IPOs or M&A deals.

The gap between those numbers represents the Valley of Unicorn Death, where we can expect more and more carcasses to pile up in the coming years.

Anyhoo, here are 10 unicorns that probably wished they could hit the Super Zapper Recharge button on 2015.

Fab: The real question with Fab seems to be whether you can count its suckiness in the calendar year of 2015, since it seems to have been falling apart in real-time-slow-motion for a while. But this was the year that the company – which previously raised $336 million in venture capital and was once valued at $1.7 billion — sold for $15 million. So, it goes in my 2015 bucket of unicorn blood.

Evernote: You know it’s been a bad year when people are publishing articles speculating whether your company will be the first dead unicorn. (And are debating whether Fab will beat you to the punch). But that’s what happens when you change CEOs and cut your workforce by 5 percent. Things start to look gloomy and the criticism piles up.

Good Technology: Once upon a time, Good raised $291 million in venture capital and was valued at $1.2 billion. Then it got bought by BlackBerry this year for $425 million. That raises two problems. First, that payday was far below its previous valuation. And second, it got bought by BlackBerry. There is a metaphor about being saved by a drowning man that I’m too lazy to remember here.

LivingSocial: To answer your first question: Yes, it still exists. The company has raised $935 million in VC and was once worth $1.51 billion. This year, the company fired 200 employees after axing 400 in 2014. The layoffs last year were supposed to be part of a strategic realignment. Which doesn’t look like it’s going so hot.

Pure Storage: The company went public this year at a market capitalization of $3.1 billion. Yeah! But the enterprise storage company raised at least $470 million in VC and had reached a value of $3.23 billion. Boo. And its stock price may end the year slightly below the IPO pricing. Lots of people are still bullish on this company longer term. But the IPO clearly didn’t deliver the desired shot of adrenaline or the payout expected by late-stage investors.

Gilt Groupe: First, the company cut 45 jobs in October, hoping to reach the land of profitability. Always a bad sign when a startup claims it’s trying to turn a profit. Then came word in December that the company was in talks to be bought for $250 million. When you were once valued at $1 billion and fall that far, it’s been a bad year for sure.

Dropbox: $600 million raised. $10.35 billion valuation. Coolio. But with the price of storage dropping fast, the company had looked to diversify its product lineup. Then it turned around and shuttered Mailbox, the email app it had bought for $100 million, and its own Carousel picture app. Now there is lots of thumbsucking about what the future holds for Dropbox, which wasn’t helped by rival Box’s lackluster IPO. Oh, speaking of which…

Box: Raised $558 million in VC, and was valued at $2.4 billion at one point. After delaying for a bit, Box finally went public earlier this year at a $1.67 billion valuation. The company had a decent first-day pop, but has since seen its stock fall, treading lately right around the initial $14 offering price. With Google and Microsoft punching harder into enterprise cloud services, it doesn’t seem like 2016 is going to get any easier for Box or Dropbox.

Theranos: Here’s one that’s purely subjective. But after years of riding a fluffy wave of PR and positive press to a $9 billion valuation for its blood-testing system, Theranos ran head-first into a series of investigative stories by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ sought to debunk some of those claims. And the company, while mounting an all-out defense, also decided to stop using the tests in some cases. Meanwhile, federal regulators are sniffing around.

Square: I suspect this will likely get the most flak of any company on this list. Square went public in November at a $3.6 billion valuation. Going public was a victory of sorts. But there was a lot of debate about whether late-round investors got hosed or not. And then Square dropped its IPO price (not good) and had to distribute more stock to some investors (good for investors but bad for the company) but then the stock traded up on the first day (pretty good for everyone.) And the company’s stock has been basically flat since, a victory of sorts considering most tech IPOs tend to trade down quickly. But the fact remains: Square’s IPO is a warning that the public markets are not digging the private-market runaway valuations. And that puts Square on the list for me.

GUEST:

Uber was founded just six years ago. It’s come a long way since. In its latest funding round, Uber was valued at $68 billion, more than Netflix and Twitter combined.

But industries change slowly. With all the hype, Uber still just has 13% market penetration in New York, with traditional taxi companies responding by also going online.

Netflix launched in 1999, but Blockbuster didn’t shut its doors until nearly a decade later, forced out by online streaming platforms. If anything, 10 years was fast. Twenty years after Expedia was founded, only 32% of leisure travel is booked with online travel agents, while airline websites steadily take back market share.

With slow changes it’s not easy to identify the tipping point. But in one sector — freight — it’s starting to become quite apparent.

Yes, freight. Just about everything people eat, wear, and use is manufactured in China, woven in Vietnam, or grown in Brazil. Most products are shipped by ocean or air. And while world trade is massive — $19 trillion dollars worth of goods are shipped cross-border annually — cutting-edge and logistics are not traditional bedfellows.

For example, if you want to import hoverboards from China, you’d find it would take an average of three days to get pricing online (while you can book a flight in seconds). And because of offline processes, you’d probably overpay, even though there is an unprecedented amount of spare space on ships. To make it even more difficult, there will probably be more faxes and phone calls involved in the shipment than the last time you bought a car.

But whether it’s from massive logistics companies, tech giants or startups, that’s changing.

Pitching our Series A to VCs in 2013, I could barely get meetings for a logistics startup. When I did, I got more yawns than checks. That’s changed dramatically for logistics startups around the world.

Over $1 billion dollars have been invested in the sector in the last 18 months, compared to half that in the previous five years. And tech outlets now regularly cover the sector; 300% more freight-related articles were published in the first half of 2015 than than the first half of 2012.

Growing demand for transparent logistics, changing industry mindsets, big data-technology, flexible supply chains, and growing demand for cross-border e-commerce is setting 2016 as the year freight goes online. And it’s coming from the freight companies, it’s coming from huge tech companies, and it’s coming from an exploding number of startups.

The tech heavy hitters

Amazon is getting into freight. Rumors are flying of an Amazon air cargo operation. The company already makes deliveries with thousands of Amazon-branded trucks and operates over 165 fulfillment centers around the world. Not be left out, Uber is getting into the last mile cargo market.

But the tipping point isn’t necessarily coming from technology leaders.

The logistics incumbents

Air, ocean, and trucking leaders are onboard. Delta Cargo launched online air cargo booking this year. Trucking has heated up with CH Robinson snapping up domestic online quoting platform Freightquote for $365 million (January 2015). Other incumbents, like the world’s biggest ocean freight forwarder, Kuehne+Nagel, are revamping technology to enable online booking for less-than-container load (LCL) shipping.

The logistics startups

While market leaders slowly turn their huge ocean liners, nimble startups are popping up. Tech-powered freight forwarders like iContainer ($1.4 million, April 2015) and Transporteca are emerging to compete with industry incumbents, as is Flexport ($20 million, August 2015), a Y-Combinator graduate. Fleet (née Shipstr) is filling a key niche as a Yelp for reviewing forwarders, while at Freightos ($14 million, September 2015) we started automating forwarder pricing in 2013 and released a beta marketplace for freight quote comparisons across multiple forwarders this year.

The “Uber-for-Trucks” business model is taking off too. In early 2015, Cargomatic picked up $8 million in funding to connect companies that need to ship goods with truckers. Jeff Bezos and an Uber cofounder are investors in Convoy, another Uber for trucking. Transfix ($14.5 million, November 2015), Trucker Path ($20 million, June 2015), Cargo Chief ($10 million, September 2015), Quicargo, and others are also in the race. This isn’t limited to the US; a recent Goldman-Sachs logistics report found an influx of Uber-type trucking apps in China.

It’s happening across the industry. Haven raised $3 million in March to provide instant ocean container slot booking. Even the Boston Consulting Group is testing the waters launching xChange, a marketplace for empty shipping containers (November 2015). The same is true with Flexe’s “Airbnb for warehouse space” ($4.4 million, November 2015) and Xeneta’s big-data pricing analytics ($5.3 million, February 2015).

2016 will be a big year

Smart money is on a wave of modernization in the freight industry. The enabling technologies are in place, startups are well-funded, and incumbents are also moving online. The demand is there too, with shippers expecting better, more automated services.

It’s true that it takes a long time for industries to change, but 2016 is the year where freight embarks wholeheartedly on that road.

Zvi Schreiber is the CEO of Freightos, a logistics startup handling international freight. He has founded and led multiple tech companies, some of which have been acquired by companies like IBM, GE, and VerticalNet.

Salesforce's $360 million deal to buy cloud software maker SteelBrick is its biggest acquisition in more than two years.

SteelBrick's quote-automating service is growing fast and could make Salesforce a more robust sales platform.

But some investors believe the deal could also be a sign of much bigger things to come next year: a more active M&A market in the cloud software space.

"This is kind of like a canary in a cold mine deal. I think 2016 will be a very interesting year from an M&A perspective," Jason Green, general partner of the VC firm Emergence Capital, told Business Insider.

And he thinks Google will be one of the companies doing the buying.

A new crop of cloud startups

Green's firm focuses on enterprise and cloud-based companies, and has had a lot of success over the years with early investments in cloud successes like Salesforce, Box, and Veeva

He noted that the market for buying fast-growing cloud software makers has been unusually slow over the past 18 months.

Part of it is because the first wave of red-hot cloud software startups has already been snatched up over the past few years. For example, SAP bought HR cloud service SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in 2012, Microsoft got collaboration service Yammer for $1.2 billion in the same year, and Salesforce paid $2.5 billion to get marketing service ExactTarget two years ago. (SuccessFactors and Yammer were both Emergence investments.)

But that could change with a new crop of cloud software startups emerging quickly, Green said.

SteelBrick, for example, had its Series A funding in May 2014, and in less than 18 months raised more than $77 million, before Salesforce snapped it up for $360 million yesterday.

On top of that, the market for late-stage financing has been slowing down lately, with some of the private equity and hedge fund investors even marking down their equity value in high-valued startups like Dropbox and Zenefits. The public market hasn't been particularly friendly to cloud startups, either. 

"We’re now starting to see this kind of second wave of companies emerge," Green continued. "And with the IPO markets and some of the late stage financing becoming a little more questionable, I think companies are going to become much more aggressive on the M&A front."

Get ready for Google

This will cause the cash-heavy enterprise companies to find growth through acquisitions.

Green picked the obvious big names like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft to become major buyers next year, but also pointed to Google as a potential sleeper in the enterprise space.

He stressed that Google has become a lot more aggressive in the enterprise, and its cloud solutions are popular among startups. Recently, Google bought a software startup called Bebop, a move that landed them its founder Diane Greene, who's considered one of the most influential people in the enterprise space.

"Google has made some big moves on the enterprise front, and they're going to unleash a lot of potential with that," Green said.

This isn't the first time we heard of this prediction. Tom Roderick, managing director of market research firm Sitfel, echoed the same idea when we spoke to him last month. He said most of the software acquisitions have been focused on private equity buyouts of old tech companies, like Informatica and Tibco, and less on fast-growth startups.

"It’s been too quite for too long for strategic M&A," Roderick told us. "For the next 6 months, you’re going to see some activity in M&A that adjusts the way people think about it."

SEE ALSO: Wall Street still thinks Microsoft could buy $50 billion Salesforce

Join the conversation about this story »

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Excelling at any marketing initiative can be intimidating, and with content marketing representing a significant departure from the “old ways” of connecting with customers, there are bound to be plenty of processes that involve a bit of a learning curve.

This is why the CMI team does what we do: Share insights that can help increase your understanding of the discipline; support your efforts with helpful tips, resources, and guidance; and prepare you to achieve greater levels of success as you move forward.

This past October, I reached my first anniversary as CMI’s content curator. My biggest takeaway so far is that curation is an ongoing journey of discovery – as I am always on the lookout for the best ways to make our tips and insights easier to access, understand, and apply.

Though the tactics and formats I use in my efforts vary widely – from blog posts to social collections, to infographics, checklists, quizzes, and beyond – one format that our audience seems to find the most valuable is our e-books. It’s also one of my favorite formats as it gives me a chance to do a really deep dive into a topic, and learn a lot in the process.

Of course, I’m not the only member of the CMI team who appreciates the benefits of using this format to share information and ideas with our audience. In fact, as a team, we’ve shared over 35 e-books this past year on our SlideShare channel alone on topics that range from essential processes and tactics to collections of examples to ideas from some experts from whom we draw our inspiration. Here are 12 of my favorites from 2015 — in case you missed them.

1. Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Reports for 2016

No list of CMI’s most popular content would be complete without mention of our annual research reports. Covering the B2B, B2C, and nonprofit sectors, as well as the content marketing landscapes in the United Kingdom and Australia, these reports reflect the state of the industry, and identify some of the key opportunities and challenges that content marketers should plan to address in the upcoming year.

For example, this year’s B2B research report found that only 30% of marketers felt their organizations are effective at content marketing – down from 38% last year. When you consider the finding that fewer B2B content marketers have a documented strategy than last year (32% vs. 35%), it seems likely that developing a written content marketing strategy for your organization may result in increased success.

Only 30% of marketers felt their organizations are effective at #contentmarketing via @cmicontent #research
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2. Launch Your Own Content Marketing Program: Who, How, Why

For all those novice content marketers struggling to answer questions like, “How are we going to create all this content?” “What topics will our audience benefit from most?” or “How on earth do we align our content with our business goals?“, this e-book answers your cries.

Through a series of easy-to-complete practical exercises, this workbook provides a step-by-step walk-through of everything you need to set your goals and mission, generate relevant ideas, manage your workflow, and position your program to achieve optimal results.

3. Mastering the Buy-In Conversation on Content Marketing: The Essential Starter Kit

When management doesn’t understand the impact content marketing can have on your company’s audience – and its business goals – getting the support you need for success is probably going to be an uphill battle. It’s critical that content marketers get proactive by answering stakeholder questions, presenting evidence of its value, and setting their expectations right from the beginning. This essential starter kit has done most of the prep work for you, providing key talking points and support statistics you can use as the basis for your own buy-in conversation.

4. Digital Governance: A Primer for Marketers

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by all the content you have and the many processes to create and distribute it, this e-book will help. Digital governance gives you a strategy and process to maintain and update old content so it remains useful for your audience. Discover a step-by-step process for designing how your content marketing team operates so it can scale effectively for years to come.

5. The Essential #BestBooks Reading List for Content Marketers

As much as we all love e-books, there’s something special about the experience of diving into the kind of complete conversation that can only come from a book. Frequent CMI contributor Roger C. Parker creates a semi-annual list of recommended reading, and this e-book compiles the best of those lists. Whether you are looking to immerse yourself in a particular content marketing technique, gain a better understanding of how content can be used to build a business, or learn to master a new technical skill, you’re sure to find something worth curling up with here.

6. These 20 Startups Found A Better Way To Launch And Grow A Business

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the majority of businesses fail in their first five years. In Joe Pulizzi’s latest book Content Inc., he outlines a content-first model for starting and growing a business that can help entrepreneurs beat those odds. But don’t take our word for it: Consider the success stories of how these 20 startups monetized their content audience as proof of principle.

7. 75 Examples to Spark Your Content Marketing Creativity

Few learning tools are as valuable and insightful as experience, and this collection shares it in spades. Get inspired by some of the best content marketing efforts being produced today, from stand-out blogs and magazines to engaging microsites and multichannel experiences to innovative ideas that can help expand your view of what can be achieved through content. Then, take that inspiration, go forth, and conquer your own content marketing challenges with renewed energy and purpose.

8. 13 Content Marketing Mistakes That Are Poisoning Your Progress

Let’s face it: We all make mistakes. The important thing is that you identify your missteps, address the problems, and move forward with renewed confidence. To help you accomplish these goals, we gathered some of our favorite insights from KISSmetrics founder Neil Patel, who reveals common trouble spots to look for and explains the fixes that will get your program back on track.

9. How to Get More From SlideShare: Super-Simple Tips for Content Marketing

Think you know every way to use this popular presentation platform in your content distribution efforts? Chances are that you are missing out on some of the non-conventional features and functionalities SlideShare offers that can help turn your static slideshows into show-stopping storytelling. This e-book shares some of those secrets, along with tips to help you ensure that your SlideShare content communicates in a clear, meaningful, and strategically sound way.

10. Building the Perfect Content Marketing Mix

We built this e-book as a way to examine two separate, yet equally essential facets of the content marketing equation – and provide guidance on how they can be combined and applied for optimal success.

Part 1, Top Priorities for 2015, offers data on which internal processes and strategy tactics your content marketing peers are prioritizing in their marketing mix.

While Part 2, Execution Tactics, outlines the most popular content creation and delivery techniques and offers tips to help companies get the best results from their efforts. Together, the two provide a road map content marketers can use to identify the particular initiatives that will be most beneficial to them – and implement them more efficiently and effectively.

11. Content Marketing Inspiration From John Cleese and Other Creative Innovators

As the legendary John Cleese once said, creativity is not a talent – it’s a way of operating. Anyone can learn to bring more creativity into their content marketing efforts – sometimes all it takes is passion, the right frame of mind, and a few of the tricks we’ve gathered from some of the most innovative minds in the industry.

As John Cleese once said, creativity is not a talent - it's a way of operating via @cmicontent
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12. Become a Content Marketing Productivity Master: 21 Tips from the #CMWorld Community

The struggle is real: We all want to find ways to maintain focus, increase our output, and achieve better results from the work we do. However, short of breaking the laws of time and space, it doesn’t always seem possible to squeeze more into our already hectic workdays. The planning techniques, tactical shortcuts, and time-saving tips included in this e-book won’t keep the clock from ticking; but by minimizing wasted time, they may help you feel less distracted, stressed, or overwhelmed by the tasks you need to complete.

Bonus: Meet the Content Marketing Institute Team 2015: While not necessarily “need-to-know” information, our annual staff “yearbook” gives CMI a chance to share a bit of our own backstory, and provide a glimpse of some of the things our team members are most passionate about – in our industry, as well as in our personal and professional lives. We hope our experiences can inspire you to learn, and share, more about what makes your own organization unique, vital, and worthy of your audience’s attention.

As 2015 draws to a close, the CMI team is already hard at work on new ideas, insights, and advice to help content marketers tackle their challenges – large and small. But we’d love to hear what topics you would like to see us tackle in future e-books. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments or connect with us directly at any time.

Want a reminder to read the latest tips, tools, and more insight from the Content Marketing Institute? Subscribe to our blog posts and never miss a day.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 12 Content Marketing E-Books: A Year’s Worth of Gifts That Keep on Giving appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

GUEST:

If your company has   decided to set up an innovation outpost (see our last post  on how to make that decision), how do you actually do it? How do you staff it? What should the team in the outpost be doing day-to-day? In what order?

Here’s a step-by-step guide that will answer all of those questions.

Successful innovation outposts typically develop over a period of time in three stages. In the first stage, the outpost focuses on networking and partnering in the innovation cluster where it is based (i.e. Silicon Valley, Boston). In the second stage, it moves into investing, inventing, incubating, and acquiring technologies and companies. In the third stage, it focuses on building product(s). Each stage needs a clearly defined set of objectives and the right team to match those objectives.

Stage 1: Networking and Partnering – the Technology Connectors

As the eyes and ears of the parent corporation, a new innovation outpost’s first priority is to “sense” innovations by actively engaging with the innovation cluster. The outpost is on the lookout for innovations that:

1. Could become threats that could lead to the disruption of the corporate parent.
2. Could allow the corporation to be disruptive by entering adjacent markets to the ones it currently serves.
3. Could create and introduce new and disruptive products and/or services for new markets.

To make this happen, the outpost’s first employees must be technology connectors – people who understand the parent corporation’s strategy and can execute it tactically.

The technology connectors need to start with a deep understanding of:

• One or two big strategic problems the corporation wants the outpost to solve. For example, BASF wanted to keep pace with university R&D in inorganic materials and biosciences.
• Innovation areas the corporation is interested in. For example, the Silicon Valley outposts of automakers like Mercedes and BMW and automotive parts suppliers like Delphi are focused on keeping pace with self-driving car technology.

These priorities have been identified by earlier planning work at the senior management level. (see the previous post.)

Next, tactically the outpost needs to engage with the innovation cluster to figure out how connecting the corporation to specific resources can solve the 1 or 2 problems and/or provide data in the areas the corporation needs. This means the outpost needs to identify and connect with:

• Investors
• Academics, consultants, and incubators
• Startups, entrepreneurs, and management teams

It needs to take what it learns and regularly update the corporate engineering, strategy, VC groups, and business unit heads on technology and market shifts.

In addition to getting plugged into the ecosystem’s network, the first role of the outpost is to partner. These partnerships may take the form of Proof of Concept projects with startups, getting to know VC firms and their portfolios, and getting familiar with university groups doing research in the established strategic problems. (The outpost may invest in a few startups in this stage, but that’s not the goal.)

For example, one of the big strategic problems a corporation may want its outpost to solve is to connect the company to the leading PhD and faculty in specific departments at Stanford and Berkeley. A Stage 1 outpost could partner with universities to set up a “Post Doc” center focusing on the strategic problem.

It’s important to establish the ground rules for these partnerships, recognizing that working with startups requires two-way value exchange. Companies and their outposts must be willing to share their knowledge, data, and technology with startups and introduce them to their networks. In exchange, the startups provide companies with their disruptive ideas, technologies, and business models.

(Companies unwilling to empower their outposts with the ability to exchange data with startups have set up the outpost for failure.)

Therefore, the profile of the initial team to staff an innovation outpost should be a technology-savvy business development group. These Technology Connectors will have deep business development (partnering) experience so that they can network broadly within the startup ecosystem with entrepreneurs, startup management teams, venture investors, and other intermediaries.

Companies often initially staff their innovation outpost with a venture investing group. This is not the the optimal way to start. Corporate VC needs to be part of an innovation investment portfolio with a mix of incubate, invest, and acquire. (Time horizons for return on investment from a VC investment may be 7+ years, ROI from the acquisition of an earlier stage company, 4-5 years, and the ROI from acquisition of a mature company, 2-3 years.) Until a company has enough data from its Stage 1 innovation outpost, starting an innovation outpost with corporate VC often results in “ready, fire, aim.”

Finally, it is essential that all of the outpost team members are well-respected and networked within the corporation so that their recommendations can be heard and adopted by the CEO, board, and business unit (BU) executives. There’s nothing more wasteful than having an innovation outpost reporting on disruption heading for the company’s core business (autonomous vehicles, machine learning, virtual reality, cloud, Internet of Things, et al.) when no one at headquarters wants to listen. For all these reasons, the team must consist of a small group of individuals reporting to a single leader, who in turn reports to the CEO.

Figure 1: Three Stages of Corporate Innovation Outposts

After its initial success in “sensing” the innovation cluster and partnering, the outpost team has to assess how to “respond” to these threats and opportunities. Should the corporation invest, invent, incubate, or acquire? The answer to this question sets up the outpost for Stage 2 of its growth.

Stage 2: Investing/Inventing/Incubating/Acquiring –  Adding VCs and Acquirers

In Stage 1, the innovation outpost was essentially an “early warning” and innovation identification vehicle for the company. For the majority of corporations, having this stage may be sufficient to solve the 1-2 big strategic problems they’ve identified. However, the company may decide to expand the responsibilities of the innovation outpost to invest, invent, incubate, acquire, or partner.

In Stage 2, the corporation adds venture capital and/or mergers-and-acquisition teams to provide these functions. Examples of Stage 2 outposts include BMW’s Silicon Valley development group, working on self-driving vehicle technologies, while their venture group has been making investments in companies like ChargePoint and Nauto. Another example is Qualcomm, which invests around robotics and incubates in collaboration with Techstars.

Before deciding to move to Stage 2, the CEO, exec staff, and operating heads should revisit whether investing, inventing, incubating, or acquiring startups can make an important contribution to the achievement of their corporate innovation goals. If the company needs immediate results, then identifying acquisitions, particularly of more mature companies, should be the priority. If the company has a longer term horizon, then investing or incubating should be considered. At times this means that the company must be willing to share knowledge, data, technology, and processes with these startups.

In Stage 2, the corporation is starting to invest serious time and money into the outpost. Therefore, it’s important to have a permanent executive running the innovation outpost and reporting to the company CEO. Appointing outpost leadership as a temporary assignment leads to weak relations between the innovation ecosystem and the innovation oiutpost and increases the risk of failure.

Stage 3: Productizing the Solution to Corporate Problems

In Stage 3, an innovation outpost creates a product development group to bring to market the solution(s) — a product or service — to the challenge(s) that led to the establishment of the outpost in the first place.

Examples of Stage 3 outposts include Verizon (which has been developing its mobile video player, infrastructure, monetization/advertising, and analytics product(s) in Silicon Valley; Walmart which has acquired, invested, and been implementing its commerce platform in its San Bruno center; and GE, which has created a software development organization around big data, and its Predix platform, which works with GE units that focus on big data.

Before moving to Stage 3 and building products, answering these five questions can save a ton of resources, time, and frustration:

• Do we have corporate buy-in to build a product?
  • This is where the rubber meets the road. Is corporate willing to give both the financial and organizational support for product development in the innovation cluster?
  • Is the outpost product officially part of a corporate innovation portfolio?

• What solution are we productizing?
  • Do we have an initial definition of the solution, have gotten out of the building and validated product/market fit, and have a first pass of a validated business model.

• Where in the company will this new solution fit?
  • Do we have buy-in from existing business units for products that fit existing business models (Horizon 1) or extended business models (Horizon 2).
  • Disruptive solutions with new business models (Horizon 3) require an a priori agreement on the criteria for creating a new business unit (revenue, profits, value-added, etc.)

• Who will lead this new effort?
  • Four excellent examples of this transition include BMW’s brand, Verizon’s online video business unit, Telefonica’s Open Future business unit, and Samsung’s Connected Home business unit. Google’s Car organization is in the process of making this transition. Google just named the organization’s leader.

• Do we have a Lean Startup Methodology in place?
  • Can we deliver minimum viable products?
  • Do we have a go/no process – agreed with corporate – that ensures follow-on funding and deployment?

At the end of Stage 3, the outpost is ready for new challenges, and the innovation cycle repeats.

Lessons Learned

• Does your Stage 1 outpost have Technology Connectors as its key leadership/staff?
• Does your Stage 2 outpost have a permanent executive running the innovation outpost?
  • Do they report to the company CEO?
• Does your Stage 3 outpost have corporate buy-in for productization?

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur-turned-educator who has changed how startups are built and how entrepreneurship is taught. He created the Customer Development methodology that launched the lean startup movement, and wrote about the process in his first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. His second book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, is a step-by-step guide to building a successful company. Blank teaches the Customer Development methodology in his Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, Columbia University, UCSF, NYU, the National Science Foundation and the I-Corps @NIH. He writes regularly about entrepreneurship at www.steveblank.com.

Evangelos Simoudis is founder and managing director of Corporate Innovation Ventures. Evangelos has worked in Silicon Valley as a technologist, entrepreneur, corporate executive, and VC. Today, he advises global corporations on startup-driven innovation and big data strategies, and invests in early-stage startups working on big data applications. He writes and speaks frequently on corporate innovation, big data, cloud computing, and digital marketing platforms. In 2014, he was named a Power Player in Digital Media, and in 2012 as a top investor in online advertising. He writes regularly on these topics at www.corporateinnovation.co.

There's a lot of angst brewing among startup types over Katie Benner's excellent story on Good Technology in the New York Times today.

Good was about 15 years old. In its most recent incarnation, Good specialized in software for managing mobile devices. It had a variety of owners over the years, but in the last few years it raised a lot of venture capital and it filed to go public in 2014.

Then its business segment got commoditized, the IPO fell apart, and BlackBerry bought it for $425 million in September 2015. That price was well below Good's last private valuation of $1.1 billion.

A lot of employees had stock options. Those options were worth a lot less after the sale than they thought they would be. A lot of Good's VC investors, who held preferred shares, did OK in the sale. Some employees reportedly did not. 

Worse, some of those employees exercised their options early and paid taxes on them at an older, higher value. Others bought additional shares on the private market at an older, higher value. Like Matt Levine at Bloomberg writes, Good was almost like a public company in terms of share liquidity, although not as transparent in terms of price and valuation.

Paper wealth

Regardless, what happened at Good is a good reminder for employees working at any venture-funded private company on how to treat those stock options you're getting.

For most employees, for the sake of your own financial planning and salary negotiations, those options should be treated as if they are worth $0. Because until you sell them, that's what they're worth.

But, but, but — founders don't think that way! They just gave up a huge chunk of their last round to hire you, the hotshot engineer or brand new VP of sales. How can you say they gave up nothing? Plus, Black-Scholes and all that.

OK, technically, by some measures, those options are worth more than $0. 

But you have to discount for risk. And startup stock options are an incredibly risky asset.

Most startups fail. A lot of times, the failure is out of any individual's control. Maybe you'll never find product-market fit. Maybe your founders or board are incompetent, or will make one fateful decision that will doom the whole company. Maybe your CEO will get indicted. Maybe the financial markets will collapse just when you were ready to ramp up and go global. Maybe Facebook is going to do your idea better, faster. Or maybe the startup down the street will.

Rules of the game

Venture capitalists and late-stage investors are finance professionals. They understand how to protect themselves against risk. And when they are fronting money to your company so you can grow or stay in business, they are going to exact as many concessions as they can to protect their downside.

If you're a startup employee, you're probably not a financial professional, and you probably don't have the same level of access to your company's financial records or cap tables to know the full extent of those risks, nor the power to negotiate the same kinds of protections.

Even if you're able to get out before a liquidity event, you might not be able to sell your shares for what you thought they were worth. At Uber, for instance, the company apparently forces employees to sell shares back to Uber at a preset price. 

The point of all this?

Don't work at a startup because you want to get rich, as the eponymous VC (we think?) blogger Startup L Jackson so eloquently put it earlier today. If you want to get rich, negotiate the maximum salary at the biggest, fastest-growing public tech company you can find, like Google or Facebook or Apple. Sell your shares as they vest, diversify your portfolio, and enjoy your retirement. 

But if the idea of working for a big bureaucratic company makes you shudder, if you're a rebel or a dreamer with a vision of doing things better, if you want to do a lot of jobs and get a lot of experience really fast, if you want to work incredibly hard so you can look back someday with pride and say "I built that," then maybe a startup's right for you. 

SEE ALSO: How Uber cleverly controls its stock so it won't have to go public anytime soon — unlike Facebook, Twitter, and Google

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The buyer’s journey, the sales funnel, the magical train to revenue land. Whatever you call it, every business knows how important it is to keep customers and prospects on it in order to make sales and keep customer retention high. The first thing you need to know is that you’re never going to hit 100% on either. Not even Ted Williams hit 1.000 in a season. Second, you should always strive for 100%, in the back of your mind. No one baseball player randomly gives up on at-bats, even if he know that he’ll probably end up being successful only a third of the time. The third and most important piece of info is you need to know when to let go. Don’t waste your time and resources chasing prospects that’ll never work out.

Those three things may seem a little contradictory, but in a weird way, they do make a bit of sense together intuitively. If your head’s still spinning though, let me just boil it all down.

Keep your customers and prospects engaged.

That’s it. That’s all you need to do in order to do your best. Keep them engaged and keep optimizing your processes for great engagement. Here are 5 ways to engage your customers and prospects throughout their buyer’s journey.

1) Be Available

People are emotional, and there are certain moments that affect their decisions. Those moments can make or break a sale, and you want to do everything you can to be available in those moments and help influence decisions. One of the best ways to do that is to provide live chat on your website.

If somebody is browsing prices and is trying to figure out whether or not to buy, isn’t it helpful to be there? Or if somebody is having trouble and isn’t sure about the quality of your product, BAM, you’re there to reassure them. Other ways to also be available is to be responsive to emails, even if they’re to your general “info@” or “contact@” email address, always check on your social media accounts for replys/messages, and of course, be available by phone.

2) Provide Value

“You’ve got to spend money to make money.” You may have heard that before, and it is slightly true. The thing is though, you don’t need to spend that much really. For example, a great way to provide value is to produce an eBook and give it out for free on your website. That way, prospects feel like they’re getting value from your company before even becoming a customer, and they might be more amenable to spending their money to derive even more value from your company.

3) Surprise and Delight

It’s around the holidays, but everybody love gifts, any time of year! When somebody receives something unexpected from you, they’ll appreciate it. And don’t forget about your customers, giving surprise gifts shouldn’t be limited to prospects. Even if they’re already a customer, you shouldn’t ignore them. Invest in that goodwill with your customers and who knows, you could get some nice reviews or referrals. At the very least, you’ve boosted your chances at retention.

4) Be a Thought Leader

Establish yourself and your business as a thought leader in your industry. This way, you are a trusted source for people and they’ll go to you when they’re ready to buy. The first way to do this is by publishing. Start a blog on your website and get posting, or you can also start publishing on LinkedIn. The second part of establishing yourself as a thought leader is to share articles and other content to your network. Use your social media to repost other people’s content (and give them credit), and establish yourself as not only an expert, but also a great curator of other experts.

5) Be Engaged

If you’re looking to engage your customers and prospects, it’s got to be a two-way street. You’ve got to be engaged with your customers and prospects in order to engage them. This means not only following the previous four things, but also just putting the effort into making your business more #likeable.

It can sometimes be tough to keep your customers and prospects engaged throughout the entire journey you want to take with them. However, with these tips, you can make your strategies more efficient, and your efforts more worth it!

(Mathieu Belanger/Corbis)

The Kruger family has a diverse portfolio of assets, including lumber, wine and spirits, and wind farms, but its roots are in pulp and paper. KP Tissue recently announced it will spend $250 million—$190 million of which is coming from the Quebec government—to convert part of its newsprint mill in Trois-Rivières into a manufacturing facility for recycled lightweight linerboard, saving 270 jobs at the plant.

Asset Mix:

*Other assets include cash, collections, primary residence and/or proceeds from prior asset sales.

More of Canada’s Richest People:

▲ #56 Muzzo Estate
▼ #58 Stewart Butterfield

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More Lists & Rankings:

The Top 25 Richest Neighbourhoods in Canada

The Power 50: Canada’s Most Powerful Business People 2016

Canada’s Best Brands 2016: The Top 25

The post Canada’s Richest People: The Kruger family appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Oil is going to stay cheap.

OPEC, the 13-member cartel, said that a barrel of oil won't be worth $100 until after 2040, in an in-depth report on long-term energy trends.

But the good news for oil states is that the price will go up, albeit slowly.

OPEC said that oil companies' spending cuts planned for next year will limit supply in the medium term, raising the price slowly even if demand for oil stays low.

The calculations are for a basket of different oil products from OPEC nations (the OPEC reference basket) and adjusted for inflation based on 2014 dollars. In nominal terms oil will hit about $160 a barrel in 2040.

"Reflecting on all of these considerations, the long-term value of the ORB in this Outlook is assumed to rise from more than $70/b in 2020 to $95/b in 2040 (both in 2014 dollars)," the group said in its report.

"Correspondingly, nominal prices reach $80/b in 2020, rising to almost $123/b by 2030 and more than $160/b by 2040," OPEC said.

Here's the chart from OPEC:

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NOW WATCH: JIM CRAMER: This is where you should invest your first $10,000

We recently asked a project team to describe the value proposition for their new product. From the broad range of we received, it was obvious team members differed substantially in their definition of what constitutes a value proposition. This seemed to reflect variations in the term’s common usage, which at one end of the scale might involve a detailed statement of a product’s various benefits to the customer, versus the other, where the value proposition simply refers to some distinctive or ‘standout’ product feature or functionality.

Well, I’m not usually such a stickler with definitions, but I believe the concept is of such fundamental importance in product development that its use deserves greater care and specificity than it typically receives.

“The value proposition describes the values or benefits the customer will accrue from your product, including the point of differentiation from your competitors. The customer should perceive the importance of those benefits, and enable your product to stand out in their mind—to the extent that they will be willing to pay for those benefits.”

The value proposition is not the same as a competitive strategy. The value proposition is a perception of the customer. Competitive strategy, on the other hand, is perceived from the company’s point of view—it is what the company does differently that ultimately results in the value proposition.

The value proposition may vary by customer segment. The company should therefore focus on one segment at a time and determine the segment specific activities and resources needed to deliver to the customer.

The Seven Key Value Proposition Questions

Here are seven questions to consider when developing your value proposition:

1. How will you determine if there is a customer problem to solve (If there is a problem, can you solve it?)?
2. How is the product need being met right now?
3. Why is the customer seeking a new solution (Are they willing/can they afford to pay for it?)?
4. How can your company provide new solutions to address the need? What capabilities and other assets can the company leverage? What can the product do differently and better than the competition?
5. Why and how does the customer evaluate a potential purchase?
6. How does the customer view your company/product/brand versus other options (direct competitors or substitute products)?
7. Can your existing business model deliver? Do you have the right infrastructure in place, and the appropriate resources for delivering the value proposition?

The value proposition is one of the most important product development terms because it expresses the value from the customer’s point of view. It is not about what you do differently, it’s about how that difference provides valuable new benefits to customers.

Want to learn more? Read our ebook describing the Strategy 2 Market strategic framework. Great read.

SEE ALSO: Startup employees: Here is the proper way to value your stock options

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NOW WATCH: JIM CRAMER: This is where you should invest your first $10,000

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, most retail advertisers are focused on how they can get their products in front of the most potential buyers and maximize sales. If trends from last year’s holiday shopping season are any indication of this year’s, most consumers will look online to research and purchase products.

According to a US Retail eCommerce study by eMarketer, 90% of consumers browsed, researched, or compared products online last year, and an impressive 83% of US digital shoppers made a purchase online.[1] As consumers continue to shift towards digital media as their holiday shopping channel of choice, the opportunity for retail advertisers to reach more potential customers during this critical time period will continue to grow.

With these retail advertising trends and opportunities in mind and to help retailers showcase their products to more customers, we’ve released support for Bing Shopping Campaigns. Marin Search advertisers can now drive sales on Bing using an engaging and impactful ad format that contains images, pricing, and physical store information. They can holistically manage, measure, and optimize their Bing Shopping campaigns and product groups alongside Google, allowing them to budget more intelligently across publishers and drive better overall shopping campaign performance.

There are several great reasons retail advertisers should get started with Bing Shopping Campaigns now. In this post, we highlight expanding reach and enhancing the user experience.

Bing Shopping Campaigns can help you expand your reach and engage more potential buyers

Leading search engines, like Bing, have long been a top channel that consumers use not only to purchase products online, but also to influence purchasing decisions from “showrooming” in a retailer’s physical store. In fact, according to a Search Engine Land study, 73% of consumers use search engines to find where products are sold, 72% use them to make price comparisons, and 63% use them to find promotional offers.

Product ads, managed through Bing Shopping campaigns, can help retail advertisers surface the top information consumers are looking for while they’re showrooming, putting the shopper closer to an online purchase. With more than 540 million retail researches occurring in Bing every month, the potential reach and exposure that Bing Shopping Campaigns offers to retail advertisers is massive.

Bing Shopping Campaigns can help get your brand get in front of more potential customers, and supplement the traffic that you’re probably already getting from Google Shopping Campaigns.

Bing Shopping Campaigns offers advertisers an improved experience over legacy Bing Product Ads

Many retailers are already advertising with Bing Product ads, and will need to convert their legacy campaigns to the recently released version of Bing Shopping Campaigns. Others may have held off testing Product Ads in the past because of limited features.

Either way, Bing Shopping Campaigns offers significant workflow and reporting enhancements over the legacy Product Ads offering. These improvements create a compelling case to try the new offering now.

Some of the incremental benefits of Bing Shopping Campaigns enhancements relative to Product Ads campaigns include:

• Better control over your product ads when targeting for certain products. Now, with Bing Shopping Campaigns, retail advertisers can target the products in their feeds with a high degree of granularity within the UI. Bing’s new product hierarchy view for Shopping Campaigns gives you more control over what products you’re showing and how much you’re paying. It’s a simple way to organize, manage, bid, and report on ads. In addition, advertisers can now easily prioritize which campaign to run when running multiple advertising campaigns for the same product.
• A more streamlined workflow and easier campaign management. Bing Shopping Campaigns offers advertisers new, intuitive ways to view all the published offers from their data feeds in a hierarchical tree within the Bing Ads UI. In addition, they’ve made it much easier to view your inventory by assigning attributes like brand or product type, selecting inventory you want to promote (or exclude), and setting appropriate bids.
• Enhanced product insights and advanced reporting. Bing Shopping Campaigns now offer Share of Voice reporting and provide insight into impressions, clicks, average click-through rate, and average cost-per-click, relative to your product targets. This is a significant improvement from legacy Product Ads reporting. In addition, Bing Shopping Campaigns reporting now offers deep insight into your campaign performance and allows you to see performance data at an item ID level right within the Bing Ads UI.

In our next post, we discuss optimizing and scaling your Bing Shopping Campaigns program, and the streamlined setup process. To keep up with all the latest posts, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

[1] Source: US Retail Ecommerce: 2014 Trends and Forecast, eMarketer, April 2014

Show an A/B test case study to a group of 12 people and ask them why they thought the variation won. It’s possible you could get 12 different answers.

This is called storytelling, and it’s common in the optimization space.

Why Did This Test Win?

I used to train new consultants on advanced optimization techniques as part of my larger role in a consulting organization.

One of the first things I had new consultants do was to take any test that they have not seen the results for, and to explain to me why every version in that test was the best option and why it would clearly win.

Every time we started this game the consultant would say it was impossible and complain how hard it would be, but by the time we were on our 4th or 5th test they would start to see how incredibly easy it was to come up with these explanations:

• “This version helps resonate with people because it improve the value proposition and because it removes clutter.”
• “This version helps add more to the buyers path by reinforcing all the key selling points prior to them being forced to take an action.”
• “This versions use of colors helps drive more product awareness and adds to the brand.”

Keep in mind they have not seen the results and had no real reason what works or what doesn’t, these stories were just narratives they were creating for the sake of creating narratives.

The second part of this exercise was then to have them talk with the people who worked on the test and to see the results, and see how often those exact same stories were told by them. How they always used the same structure to explain something no matter how often. Grabbing a random sentence off of a jargon generator has as much relevance (and often is more coherent) yet people so desperately want to believe their narrative.

You yourself can do this – just go check out the comments on just about “case study” and you will inevitably see the same tired explanations played out.

Grasping at Straws to Explain A/B/n Test Results

If you want true humor go look fake intelligentsia sites like WhichTestWon and Leadpages which actually encourage this behavior.

This behavior is a real plague in our industry. They ask people to reason why and then show results. Even worse they present extremely limited data set with biased metrics and then expect anyone to get anything from their “case studies.”

A big red flag that someone is using testing to make themselves look good instead of using testing to actually accomplish something – and make no mistake, those are often opposing goals – is how much they want to create a story around their actions. These people are using the data to choose which story they prefer, but without fail the story itself is decided on well before the data is available.

I used this exercise to help people see just how often and how easy it was for people to create a story. In reality the data in no way supported any story because it couldn’t. One of the greatest mistakes that people make is confusing the “why” that they generate in their head with the actual experience that they test.

You can arrive at an experience in any number of ways and story you tell yourself is just the mental model you used to create it. The experience is independent of that model yet people constantly are unable to dissociate them.

Science Doesn’t Care Whether or Not You Believe In It

When you reach the conclusion of any test, no matter how many experiences you have in the test, the only data available is simply positive or negative relative to a change, independent of why you thought you made a change. To use one of my favorite quotes, this one from Neil deGrasse Tyson, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

No matter how much you believe in your mental model, the data doesn’t care and has nothing to do with it.

There is no mathematical way from a test to even describe correlation, let alone causation. The best we can hope for is mathematical influence of factors, and even that requires a massive data set and hard core discipline (as anyone who has gone past cursory ANOVA analysis can attest). It is just a single data point, positive or negative, and yet people hold onto these stories, no matter what.

The Narrative Fallacy

What is actually being presented is what is known as narrative fallacy – the need people have to weave facts into a story so that they can pretend to have a deeper understanding of the world. Humans – and animals – are wired to need to feel like they control their world and their environment, to mitigate the perception of randomness, and to try and make order of chaos.

It is impossible to discuss the narrative fallacy without talking about the work of Nassim Taleb and modern economic theory. While he ascribes macro-level impact to the need to create post-hoc rationalizations, I especially love his own story of how he first was taught the narrative fallacy.

“When I was about seven, my schoolteacher showed us a painting of an assembly of impecunious Frenchmen in the Middle Ages at a banquet held by one of their benefactors, some benevolent king, as I recall. They were holding the soup bowls to their lips.

The schoolteacher asked me why they had their noses in the bowls and I answered, “Because they were not taught manners.” She replied, “Wrong. The reason is that they are hungry.”

I felt stupid at not having thought of this, but I could not understand what made one explanation more likely than the other, or why we weren’t both wrong (there was no, or little, silverware at the time, which seems the most likely explanation).”

Our stories about what we see says far more about us then it does the facts.

Just as Taleb had a form of manners pounded in his head, he described the narration of the lack of manners to the people in the picture. In all cases, the rationalization of the information presented is coming after the fact and is not based on the data but the observer. It in no way changes the actual action. His view of the lack of manners does not change the painting, but it does change his view of it, and yet there was no real additional information added.

Other Forms of Post Hoc Rationalizations

Post hoc rationalizations can cause havoc in a large number of ways, from changing future actions to ignoring actual data that we do not want to see.

Even worse is the fact that people are hard-wired to group the data points after the fact to suit their story, which is known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Not only do people create these false stories, but they do it by grouping data together after the fact to meet their expectations. We are now shaping our view and the data, leaving no part of reality left to actually use in the decision model.

One of Sherlock Holmes most famous quotes best explains this:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Now keep in mind, I am describing a known scientific psychological bias. I am not saying why people are wired that way, nor do I care.

What matters is the existence of the behavior itself. Just like a test, in the end it DOES NOT MATTER why something won, what matters is…

• can you act on the results?
• can you move on to the next test? and
• was the original set-up created in a way to maximize efficiency?

None of those are about story telling. They are about the mathematical realities of the act of optimization.

This is why I make a requirement for my testing programs to have no storytelling. Storytelling is just a brain trying to rationalize the facts to meet some preconceived notion. By forcing people to stop that act, we can have rational discussion about the actions that can be taken and efficiency.

‘Hypothesis’ is Just Another Name for Storytelling

Now keep in mind another fact: storytelling happens after a test, but it also happens before the test for many groups in the form of a “hypothesis” (note that I am using quotes because most people think in terms of hypothesis as what they learned in 6th grade science and not its actual scientific meaning, unless you are holding yourself accountable for amongst many other things disproving all alternative hypothesis).

People’s confusion of prediction and hypothesis leads them to assume that they have played out the hypothesis in a meaningful way, when in fact they have only looked at a localized prediction.

They say X is true, therefore Y will happen, but they fail to see how often and where X is true, not just held to that local outcome. To actually use a hypothesis and not just pretend to, the onus is on you to correctly prove the concept is correct ALL the time and is also the best explanation of the phenomenon observed, not just construct an action to help your prediction look good (which makes the 10-12% average success rate in industry even funnier).

The hard part of scientific method is design your experiment(s) to prove your hypothesis as well as disprove other alternative hypotheses. Even worse, they fail the basic tenets of experiment design by not evaluating alternative hypotheses, and by creating a bias in the initial experiment to suite their prediction. Even if they’re so adept at grouping data points that they subconsciously create a positive conclusion to their story, they fail to reach step B in a journey that should take them from A to Z.

Essentially we have created a negative feedback loop.

You have invested a story in the front, which is fed by your own ego, which is then built up by the experiment design and then the data afterwards is manipulated to continue the fraud.

You feel that you are had used data and experience to decide what and where to test. Even worse, it is done subconsciously and done in such a way that feels good. We have a practice which feels good, feels like it helps, but ultimately is left without any ability to add value and with numerous ways to consistently limit value.

How to Combat Storytelling

By creating these stories all you are doing is creating a bias in what you test and allowing yourself to fall for the mental models that you already have.

You are limiting the learning opportunity and most likely reducing efficiency in your program as you are caught up the mental model you created and not looking at all feasible alternatives.

Your belief that a red button will work better than a blue one has no bearing on whether the red does work better. Nor does it answer the question of what is the best color, which would require testing Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, Purple, Etc.

Discovery of what is the best option does not require a “hypothesis.” It requires discipline. Any storytelling, no matter where and when in the process, has no way of being answered by the data but adds the opportunity to reduce the value of your actions. Be it what you test now or in the future, or what you ignore based on your feelings on a subject, the only outcome is lost value over time.

Discipline in Place of Stories

The great thing is that you don’t need stories to be successful in optimization. Being able to act with discipline is actually the opposite of storytelling. There are many tactics to dealing with this, but I want to reiterate the key ones:

• Never Focus on Test Ideas (All ideas are Fungible)
• Focus on the beta of multiple options
• Attack an issue, don’t tell a story
• No stories at the start or at the beginning
• Hold yourself far more accountable for biases than you hold anyone else

When you drop the stories at the start, you are then only discussing what is possible to do.

When you focus on the beta of options, you are expanding the likelihood of scale and outcome. When you attack an issue, you are optimizing towards a single success metric and not just to see who was right.

When you stop the stories at the end, you are asking people to choose the best performing option and to look for descriptive patterns only.

When you focus on your own biases, and note that you can’t eliminate them, you create a system that is focused on efficiency and not self aggrandizing.

By having the discipline to only do these things, and only these things, you are allowing the data to take you down the natural course. The more you make excuses, or let discomfort and negative learned behavior dictate your course, the more you are focusing on yourself and not the problem.

If you were “right,” then you will arrive at that same point because the data will take you there. But if you are wrong then you will arrive at a much better performing place. Even better, you just might actually learn something new and unexpected instead of just creating a feedback loop to fulfill your own ego.

The Natural Pushback

Without fail when I implement this rule, or when I present it to an audience, I get responses along the refrain, “But understanding ‘why’ helps us not make the same mistake and/or helps us with future tests and future hypotheses.”

Nice in theory, but again, it is impossible for the data to validate or invalidate a theory, which means that the only thing that is going to happen is you create a narrative to make you feel like you know something.

You may actually be right, but the data, the test, and the actions you take have no bearing on that and in no way can validate you. Even worse, you stop looking for conflicting or additional information and keep moving down the predefined path, further grouping data as you want to keep pushing forward a story.

The instant that something is “obviously” wrong or that something is going to work “because…” is the moment that your own brain shuts down. It is the moment that our own good intentions change from doing the right thing and to doing what feels best.

Cognitive dissonance is a really powerful force, and yet we are incapable of knowing when it is impacting us. Comfort comes in the known, not the unknown. It comes from making sense of what we see or in feeling we know why people do whatever it is that they do. It can be scary and painful to really look out at the world and realize that we have very little power and even less real understanding of the actions of others or most importantly ourselves.

Conclusion

The power in stories and the power in “why” is that it helps us place ourselves in the narrative.

It helps us feel we have power and insight into the world. When we deal with the reality of our own lack of understanding it is often very humbling and always mentally painful thanks to cognitive dissonance.

We love to think of ourselves as the unsung hero in a world of Dunning-Kruger lead sheep, not realizing that our own wool is just as thick and just as blinding. We seek to shelter, we seek to weave that wool into a cover and blanket ourselves from the harsh realities of the business world.

The irony of course is that nothing should invigorate you more than the knowledge that there is still so much to discover.

Knowing so little and understanding how few hard and fast rules there are means that there is so much to discover and so much that is yet to figure out. Optimization gives us the opportunity to seek out more and more information and to prove what little understanding of the world we have wrong. It gives us the means and the tools to go so much farther than other disciplines because it allows us to get past ourselves.

Exploration is equally scary and exciting. It is hard, it is dangerous, and it is often lonely. It is always easier to stay close to comforting shores and to beware of those fables and tales of legendary adventurers. Of course, are those tails true? Do you discover anything but staying in close shores? How much of the world do we really see versus how much is left to discover. There is only one real way to figure that out, and it all starts why a simple decision:

Do you want results or do you want to stick to “why”?

Feature image source

When you start a business you get it that your marketing has to be spot on and give you a healthy ROI. And, no business will build with no customers and will lead to failure.

So putting in the time and effort to craft a high-performance selling machine is a good idea and the time is now and the best way to do it is with a branded sales funnel.

Let’s see what I’m talking about….

What is a sales funnel?

Let’s go over the basics of what a sales funnel is and how you can use it in your marketing game plan to make a pile of cash. There are 3 types of people you connect with in a sales funnel marketing process.

1. Lead
2. Pre-Qualified lead
3. A buying customer

A lead is someone who becomes aware of your company or someone who you decide to pursue a sale, even if they don’t know about your company yet. A lead is someone is your list of interested customers but don’t know much about your company and what problem you can solve for them.

Once you convert a lead into a pre-qualified lead is someone who has had some kind of contact with your company and they are still interested. All  are leads, but not all leads pre-qualified leads.

After that, you have your first buying customer, and we all know what buying customers can do for your business, grow it. Once this process is down pat then repeat, add more traffic, and rinse. I added in more traffic, because that’s part of the sales cycle, and keeps the sales funnel well oiled and churning out leads in no time.

Now, here are the five steps to follow to construct your own simple online sales funnel.

1. The Landing Page

A great landing page says it all about you and gives your lead a first impression to “Opt-In” your sales funnel. This has to look good, nice bio’s, good pictures and looks great if you want them to engage and signup. Your offering value to get value in exchange for their contact information, once you have that then you can begin to craft a relationship with your lead.

2. Front-End Offer

Next step is creating a front-end offer to your leads that will guide them to purchase or buy your other services or products. This help creates more desire for the next [backend] offer [you’re] going to present them with. In other words, you are Pre-Selling your leads with your own course (like mine) I created. This front-end offer is also branded to me, giving you the creditability.

3. Backend Offer

Any successful sales funnel has the ability to upgrade your front-end customers to “Upsize” them with a back-end product that would interest them. This kind of offer will benefit them.

This an upsell strategy and works like a charm to the right prospect. You see this all the time when you buy a car, for example, you have the option to upgrade to a more expensive add-on’s, like heated leather seats, 20″ custom rims for example.

4. Keep Customers in the Loop

Not all customers will want to upgrade, some will want to downgrade instead, and that’s fine. It’s not a sign of failure or a loss of a potential sale, instead, your customer might have financial difficulties. Be considerate, offer a lower priced product for these prospects and maintain the relationship with them.

These types of customers may also come back at a later point, so keep them in the loop.

5. Build Momentum

Sales are all about building momentum. Always follow up with your new leads or customers and make sure they are happy with what you are offering. What I did for my funnel is made it an affiliate program on JVzoo.

This keeps you in contact with your customers and then you can offer other services and deals down the road. This is the last step to your sale funnel and I feel every business in every niche can benefit from using a sales funnel.

One thing to remember you might have a lot of leads to start with but once you narrow down the list, and your customers represent the smallest group of people.

In my business 10 paying customers is my target every month, and 10 customers times 20K each is quite a bit out of 1000 leads. This meets my initial sales goals and can add more traffic and scale up to get 20,30 or 50+ paying customers a month.

6. Brand Your Sales Funnel

The last thing to add to this post about sales funnels is the branding element. All top earners use a branded funnel, not just an affiliate link. Why? So you stand-out amongst the crowd, and to increase your conversions and click through rates.

Which do you think will get more clicks? The branded one right. Creating your own personal bio in your funnel helps a lot as well, with a nice picture, and testimonials.

7. Add in an Influencer

The last point I’m going to cover is using a power influencer preferably by video into your sales funnel. Once you set the association tone into your leads and customers minds, building a relationship with them and creating sales got much easier. I’ve tested it and an influencer does make a BIG difference in opt-in’s and overall sales.

Referral Features that give your sales team superstar status

Let me guess. You’ve been trying to ramp up your selling power? Naturally, you’ve already checked out the advocacy sphere and have decided that referrals are for you. Well, I have to say, you’re one smart cookie. However, while you now have discovered what advocates and prospects want from your referral program and the features you need to fulfill those wants in part 1 and part 2, you may not yet have considered what your salespeople want from your referral program to optimize their nurturing efforts.

But there’s no need to fret. At a recent tradeshow, Sarah the salesperson and I had a frank discussion and she let me in on what salespeople really want from a referral program.

“We want to be able to have our CRM integrate easily to quickly see referral leads and follow up with them,” said Sarah.

Of course, empowering your sales team to nurture referral and advocate opportunities is a top priority when trying ensure your referral programs success. After all, your referral program won’t just succeed on its own, it requires sales enablement to have the ability to nurture referrals into profitable customers and advocates into repeat referrers.

With the important part sales plays in your referral program, 5 sales referral desires were identified and 5 features were developed to spark you salespeople’s selling power.

5 sales referral desires fulfilled to turn referrals into customers

1. Easily see and prioritize referral leads – Sales teams need to be able to attribute high-quality leads in Salesforce or other CRMs to a specific referral program in order to nurture and build their advocacy base.

A feature that fulfills this want: Salesforce Easy Integration

2. Own your customer’s referrals – As the saying goes, rules are meant to be broken, and lead assignment rules are no exception. Salespeople want more lead, especially from relationships they’ve already established. Give your salespeople the power to break you lead assignment rules and watch you referrals flourish.

A feature that fulfills this want: Lead ownership

3. Empower sales to recruit advocates – The more advocates sales can recruit, the more successful a referral program has the potential to be. Your salespeople want a referral program that enables their recruitment of advocates and facilitation of advocates through the referral process, including registering an advocate and following up on a verbal referral.

A referral feature that fulfills this want: Advocate Recruitment Tools

4. Visible referral data – The full visibility of a referral’s data essential to nurture and guide the advocates to encourage continued referral action.

A feature that fulfills this want: Advocate Activity Dashboard

5. Motivation – Salespeople always want to do their best. But sometimes your sales team needs a visual motivator to keep pushing the boundaries of success for your referral program. Leader boards that assign scores to a salesperson owned advocate activity taps into the competitive nature of your sales team to push them to reach their full potential.

A feature that fulfills this want: Advocate Scoring

By adding these 5 empowering sales enablement features to your referral program, you don’t only give your salespeople’s the ability to make their job easier, but deliver increased numbers of profitable referral customers and nurture advocates to keep referring.

With the addition of the salespeople’s user experience, 75% of the referral experience is covered, resulting in a drastic increase in your referral program’s performance. However, if even one user is left out of your referral program your referral results will be lacking.

In the final part of this 4 part blog, the wants and needs of the last user experience, the marketer, will be delved into and explored, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, discover how powerful obtaining all the right referral features can be by checking out these amazing referral statistics.

More and more businesses are employing sales development representatives, or SDRs, to act as the glue between Sales and Marketing. As your company grows in size and your number of inbound leads increases, your quota-carrying reps will find it increasingly difficult to balance prospecting, qualifying, and closing.

A sales development team takes some of the prospecting and qualifying burden off your quota-carrying reps’ shoulders. But its grander purpose is to become a training ground for your sales organization. It’s a place for your SDRs to prove they can become quota-carrying reps and should feed new reps into your organization every year.

SDRs qualify and disqualify leads, source new prospects, and tee up meetings for sales reps. As director of global sales development at HubSpot, I’ve learned a few lessons about how to build out a top-notch SDR team. Here are four essential steps to take to get started.

4 Steps to Build a World-Class Sales Development Team

1) Build the perfect candidate profile.

When hiring SDRs, you’ll probably be reviewing many resumes from candidates who’ve just graduated or have only been in the job market for one or two years. Talent is more important than experience (see #2), so define the personality traits you’re looking for.

Look for traits that will make someone good at sales. You can coach SDRs on their specific job functions; you can’t teach a natural aptitude for sales. The characteristics I look for are:

• Desire to pursue sales as a career
• A track record of achievement
• Goal-oriented
• Naturally curious
• Strong aptitude
• “Get stuff done” factor
• Competitive nature

You have to craft interview questions that can quantify the presence of these attributes. Many interviewers get distracted by what I call the “woo” factor -- a candidate who says impressive-sounding things about their work ethic or talent, but can’t prove it. A grading rubric removes some of this bias.

One of my favorite questions to ask is “What’s the one thing you’re most proud of in your lifetime?”

A good answer demonstrates that the candidate can tell a succinct story and describes a real accomplishment, such as starting a sales club in college and bringing in outside speakers. A bad answer would be something like, “I really enjoyed the semester I spent studying abroad” -- that’s not an achievement.

2) Prioritize talent over experience.

When hiring young professionals, experience shouldn’t be the only thing you screen for. It’s far more important to source people who can become A players, groom them in your company, and prepare them for future career success. If you hire the right SDRs and train them well, you’ll be able to maintain a consistent hiring plan for your organization in the long run while training talented reps for the future.

When evaluating talent, I look for two things: aptitude and character.

When testing aptitude, I look at a candidate’s academic record and their business aptitude. For example, one question I’ll ask is: “Given that a company sells X product, who should they target?” We also use roleplays to test situational skills and provide on-the-spot criticism to evaluate candidate coachability and ability to incorporate feedback.

To spot character, look for involvement. A candidate who was an athlete or has worked in a team environment is promising. Success in those environments requires coachability, time management, and a competitive nature -- all characteristics which serve SDRs well.

As a test of personality fit, I level with candidates about what the day-to-day of their jobs will be like. I give them the good, the bad, and the ugly about HubSpot and watch their reaction. The best candidates perk up and view it as a challenge, while others might seem intimidated -- a bad sign.

I also look for involvement in extracurriculars and academic achievements. Did they do more than they had to? Did they commit to activities and stick with them? Consistent commitments demonstrate that a candidate is good at picking activities they enjoy and will step up to get things done.

3) Recruit talent from colleges and universities.

There are a few reasons why I think hiring managers should be eager to recruit new graduates.

1. They come in without any bad habits. Many sales organizations have a prescriptive methodology that will differ from yours -- you should be spending time training and shaping your SDR’s routines, not prying them out of entrenched practices.
2. They’re in learning mode. New graduates are fresh out of school, and are used to absorbing and applying new information. Their professional careers are just starting, and you won’t have a better opportunity to shape the way they think about business and sales.
3. The cost basis is lower. Hiring someone with 10 years of experience is going to cost you far more than hiring a 22-year-old -- there’s no way around it. Hiring the wrong experienced candidate will cost you even more.

The biggest fear hiring managers have about recruiting millennials as SDRs is that they’ll discover that sales isn’t for them. But this is something you can suss out in the interview stage, using the following questions:

• What are your career goals? If you hear anything other than “sales manager” or “sales rep,” this is a dealbreaker.
• Why do you want to be a sales professional? Of course, some candidates will say they want to be in sales despite being unsure of their future goals. The answer to this question should confirm their commitment to sales and provide a coherent explanation. Not being able to tell their story is a huge red flag.
• Why do you feel you’ll enjoy sales? If your candidate will like connecting with prospects, you won’t have to crack the whip. You can’t outsmart a lack of motivation, so make sure your candidates will truly enjoy doing their jobs.
• Where else are you interviewing? Listen for organizations that are similar to yours or at least have similar sales positions. A candidate interviewing to be a recruiter at Company X, a copywriter at Company Y, and an SDR at your company is a candidate who doesn’t have a real commitment to sales. Pass on them.

To establish a presence on college campuses, you’ll have to demystify sales, demonstrating to students that sales in your industry is a viable and lucrative career option. Start local, and create strong relationships with career services professionals on campuses -- they need to be your new best friends. Hold events on campus to build your company’s brand -- it won’t happen by itself. Take advantage of career fairs and campus job boards as well.

4) Always be interviewing.

Whether you’re in charge of building an SDR organization from the ground up or scaling an existing program, your number one priority should be to create a hiring plan. What headcount will you need to start, six months from now? How much attrition do you expect in your SDR team? How many will be promoted to sales and need to be replaced?

Stay in constant communication with other sales managers so you know when they’re planning on promoting people or will have spots open on their teams, and hire ahead. If you know that Joe Sales Rep is going to switch teams or become a manager in October, have someone trained to take his seat by then so you won’t be stuck with a one or two-month productivity gap.

A common pitfall of interviewing is that managers can start hiring for themselves. While chemistry is certainly important, hiring for culture fit within your organization is a higher priority than having one manager and one SDR hit it off.

It’s also crucial to view interviewing as an investment. You need to set aside budget specifically for recruiting, whether it’s hiring a recruiter or money for recruiting visits -- just make sure you have the resources to keep your candidate pipeline full.

Once your company reaches a certain size, an SDR team is invaluable to keeping your larger sales organization running smoothly. Hire and train the right people and your SDR group will pay dividends for you for years to come.

Sales reps need to know more and their knowledge must be at a higher level of proficiency today than ever before. To be among the emerging winners, sales reps must not only be able to sell a competitive advantage; they must be a competitive advantage. They must bring value to the customer by the way they “sell” as well as by what they sell.

All this means that sales training has moved closer to center stage and the spotlight is a little bit brighter than in yesteryear.

Given these trends, we sat down the other day to analyze the sales training we have conducted over the last 25 years. We asked ourselves: What has been common among those sales training engagements that produced significant and lasting performance improvement? What is that necessary ingredient that is required for superior success?

First a couple of givens. The instructional designs must be engaging and the content must be solid. In that regard, sales simulations work better than lecture-based PowerPoint driven programs and tips and tricks need to be replaced with best practices. These requirements are foundational. However, they are not sufficient.

The additional ingredient is “co-ownership.” Sales Training departments cannot produce superior results if they alone are viewed as owners of the training effort. The Sales business unit must come to the party. Sales leadership must be engaged in helping to define the “why’s” and “what’s” of the training effort. They must co-own the sales training initative.

McKinsey & Co conducted a survey of 1,400 executives worldwide to answer the question: Do your training efforts drive performance?

McKinsey reported the more cooperation that exists between the training function and the business unit, the more likely the sales training will have an impact on business results. Bottom line lesson – “Co-ownership” leads to success.

As reported, “co-ownership improves a program’s credibility and effectiveness thereby encouraging additional investment. When senior leaders become more confident about a program’s contribution to business performance, they start thinking about potential capability gaps and become better able to estimate the potential value of filling them.”

If you are a VP of Sales and if believe your sales team needs to improve their sales performance and sales training is a part of the answer, don’t just send your Training Department an e-mail to “do some sales training.” Get engaged – co-own the initiative – the impact on performance change and revenue gain will be strikingly different. As an additional note, it would be great to get the folks in Marketing to be engaged in the training effort, too.

Marketers use different combinations of tech, different techniques for demand generation and different checklists for what counts as a qualified lead, but to be a pipeline marketer there are three requirements that are at the core of business: alignment with sales, a multi-touch attribution model, and a revenue-as-a-goal focus.

Want to learn how to implement each of the three, develop a marketing mix that’s “juuuust right” and turn yourself into a pipeline marketing hero? Read on.

Pipeline marketing is the next evolution of marketing. It focuses on decision making based on revenue, rather than leads or opportunities, and therefore turns the marketing department into a profit center instead of a cost center.

Pipeline marketing will prove to be the greatest shift in marketing mindset since the tracking pixel.”- A.J. Wilcox

Alignment

True pipeline marketers are aligned within the marketing department and with the sales team. This does not mean simply grabbing lunch with a sales rep, although that’s nice too. It means working every day and establishing a routine that proactively enables the sales team.

Good starting points can include:

• Weekly meetings with sales
• A sales enablement folder in Google Docs
• Encouraging sales reps to contribute blog post ideas
• Listening to sales calls

The sales team speaks directly with prospects and customers and therefore is a great resource to utilize for marketing. Do they notice a trend in questions they receive from prospects? If prospects are all asking the same question, maybe the content team should write a blog post about it. This will help the community educate themselves, and provide great talking points for your sales team when they are presented with the question in the future.

This is only a small example in the myriad of ways sales and marketing teams can benefit one another.

A recent ToutApp survey found that 70 percent of B2B marketers want to meet with the sales team more often and almost 90 percent say that intra-team meetings improve marketing outcomes.

Not only is alignment with sales a priority, marketers must be aligned within the marketing department as well. If the CMO is focused on a revenue metric, while the rest of the team is optimizing for leads or page views, then it will be difficult to hit any of the marketing goals. Communication is key. Each team member should know exactly what is expected of them so that the team as a whole is on the same page.

Further supporting an alignment with sales, the 2015 State of Pipeline Marketing report found that marketing teams that were tightly aligned with sales primarily focused on total revenue and total opportunities as metrics for success. While the seldomly aligned teams were optimizing for metrics all over the board.

Instead of disjointed priorities and operating strategies, aligned teams work together toward common goals, and the more aligned marketing is with sales, the better the company will operate as a whole.

Revenue

This brings us to step number two, a revenue-as-a-goal focus. With sales and marketing aligned, the most important goal for all teams should be revenue generation. Although they are an important part of any business, leads as a goal are dead. Optimizing marketing channels that bring in leads means nothing unless those leads are turning into customers.

Marketers are often looked at like the teenager who just graduated and is taking some time to figure out what it wants, travel, hang out with friends; it’s a fun part of life but at a certain point you wonder how you’re going to pay the bills. Holding itself responsible for a revenue goal legitimizes marketing spend and proves the value of the work that marketers put in on a daily basis.

To drive business, the marketing department must work to optimize the full funnel. Each transitional step should be met with the question, “how do we convert this lead to the next stage?”. There is no handoff to sales, it is a joint effort with a single-funnel view.

Even after a lead becomes a customer, revenue should be the focus. How do you keep the customer happy, how do you get them to renew once their contract ends? A marketer’s job is never done.

Attribution

Now that you’ve aligned with sales and have revenue as the biggest metric of success, your pipeline marketing strategy is pretty good. But how do you get it juuuust right? Add in an attribution solution, of course!

Attribution allows marketers to track all of their channels back to revenue. In turn, it provides a clear picture as to what strategies are working and which are not. Weed out the channels that don’t work great for your business and use that saved money to invest in the channels that do.

There are many options and it’s important to do research to choose the right attribution model for your company. Are you marketing with paid media, across multiple platforms? What about at events or with outbound calls? Multi-touch attribution can track all of this, from anonymous first touch to all of the channels that drove the lead through the funnel and eventually converted it into a customer.

Alignment with sales is good, add in a revenue goal and you’re better, take both of those two and implement attribution software and your pipeline marketing strategy will be just right.

Paris (AFP) - Colombia on Tuesday became the latest in a growing number of nations around the world to legalise the use of cannabis for medical reasons.

However the rules vary widely across continents, with some countries permitting cannabis cultivation and others only allowing pharmaceuticals extracted from the drug.

A state of play:

- LATIN AMERICA -

- COLOMBIA: President Juan Manuel Santos signed a decree Tuesday making it fully legal to grow, process, import and export cannabis and its derivatives for medical and scientific use.

- CHILE: Chile said in October it plans to allow the sale of marijuana-derived medication in pharmacies. The measure requires strict oversight, including authorisation by a specialist and inventory checks.

- MEXICO: An eight-year-old girl who endures 400 daily epileptic seizures became in September Mexico's first authorised consumer of imported medical cannabis after the government granted her an exemption to its marijuana ban.

- URUGUAY: Uruguay in December 2013 became the first country in the world to fully legalise marijuana all the way from the cannabis field to the joint, setting up a regulated market for cultivation, sales and use.

- NORTH AMERICA -

- THE UNITED STATES: Federal law bans the cultivation, sale and use of marijuana. However, twenty-three US states allow medical marijuana use while four states -- Oregon, Colorado, Alaska and Washington -- plus the US capital city have legalised its recreational use.

- CANADA: Cannabis consumption for medical reasons has been legal since 2001. In June 2015, the Supreme Court expanded the definition of medical marijuana to allow authorised users to bake it into cookies and brew marijuana leaves for tea, in addition to smoking it.

- EUROPE -

- CROATIA: In October Croatia became the 13th European Union country to allow the medical use of cannabis. Medicines containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant's main psychoactive ingredient, can now be prescribed by doctors to ease health problems associated with cancer, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and AIDS.

- Austria, Britain, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain already authorised cannabis-derived products to help treat certain illnesses.

Join the conversation about this story »

I recently had an opportunity to interview Mike Weinberg about his new book, “Sales Management. Simplified.” In part one of my follow-up blog post, I focused on the real stories about real sales managers and real executives we discussed in our conversation about real companies, big and small. In the second part of my post below, our discussion reveals a simple, practical sales management framework that any company can truly benefit from. Read on …

DM: The second half of the book is all about what you call a “very simple grid that helps sort out a myriad of potential sales issues into three main buckets: sales leadership and culture, talent management, and sales process.” You talk a lot about culture in the book and the importance of two kinds of meetings. First, there are one-on-one meetings that follow a well-thought out agenda with sales executives. Second, you stress the importance of the sales department meeting, which also follows a structured agenda. You write that, “Sales team meetings are critical to building a winning culture. They foster competition, cast vision, share best practices, challenge the team, facilitate sales or product training, build relationships between team members, and allow salespeople to see that they are part of something bigger than just themselves and their own territory. My old boss used to say that sales people do what you pay them to do, not what you want them to do. What do you think?

MW: I think this last question is a great summary of Part Two of the book! And I think your old boss was partially correct. Compensation matters–a lot. Compensation and complacency start with the same four letters and I’d argue that is not a coincidence. So if you see complacent sellers it’s not a bad idea to start by looking at the compensation plan. Having said that, comp is only one piece of the puzzle, and all the other pieces you touched on in your question are VERY powerful. When a salesperson’s heart is engaged, when she feels like she’s part of a winning team, when she knows she will face the music about her results every month, and when she gets to attend great sales team meetings that align, equip and energize the sales team, and she has a manager who masters the art of balancing encouraging her heart and kicking her ass—then we’ve got something special—and sustainable. Let’s be honest: doesn’t every executive crave a healthy, high-performance sales team that consistently hits its goals? I sure hope that’s the case, and it takes more than a rich compensation plan to create that kind of culture.

DM: I love the line from the book “none of us is smarter than all of us”. Tie that quote into the book for us.

MW: I took that quote from my mentor Donnie Williams (who I’m sure borrowed it from some leadership book). We would use that as it pertained to sales team meetings. Too often, sales meetings are boring and lame because the manager carries too much of the burden for planning and facilitating the meeting. Great things happen when the manager shares the load and gives away responsibility for leading parts of the meeting to reps. The other way that expression applies is when we do group brainstorming and strategy sessions on potential deals. If a salesperson has an opportunity stuck in the pipeline, bring that deal to the sales meeting and let your teammates go to town asking hard questions and offering ideas. None of us is as smart as all us. That is for sure.

DM: From your book: “I’m convinced that your three highest-value, highest-payoff activities as the sales leader are meeting 1:1 with your people, leading productive sales team meetings, and working in the field alongside members of your team.” Summarize your advice about these three activities for our readers:

MW: What could be higher-value than the benefits that accrue from those three activities? There is so much in those three specific chapters, instead of summarizing the content, which won’t do it justice, let me simply beg sales leaders to reevaluate their calendars and time commitments. So often I hear excuses that managers don’t have time to meet 1:1 with their people or that they can’t afford to spend time out in the field (on the phone with the inside sales team) with their people. Are you kidding me? That IS your job! These aren’t “nice to be able to” activities. These are the essentials. If you think you can lead your team by sending out strongly worded emails or sitting in corporate meetings, or worse, at your desk with your head buried in CRM screens, you’ve lost total sight of your roles as a leader and driver of revenue. I’m so passionate about this that I’ll send a signed copy of Sales Management. Simplified. to the first five people who read this article and write to me, mentioning my answer to this question.

DM: Finally, tell us about the “zookeeper” analogy as it relates to the points you make in the book about talent management.

MW: Too many companies deploy a one-size-fits-all approach to sales roles. Sure, some give lip service to the common hunter vs. farmer conundrum, but most aren’t willing to do the hard work to further define roles so their hunters can hunt while their zookeepers care for the animals. I use “zookeepers” intentionally because it’s a more stark contrast. Why does management think they can take someone who loves caretaking, feeding, nursing, cleaning, protecting the animals under their care and think for a minute that this same person is going to pick up a weapon and go out on the hunt? It’s crazy. Why even bother? Let people serve in their area of giftedness. We need great farmers and zookeepers caring for what’s been entrusted to them. And what would happen if we freed up the precious few sales hunters so they could maximize the amount of time they spent hunting? Why in the world would we task the hunter with preparing meals, serving guests and cleaning up the kitchen when there are other people who’d love to do that? Let the hunters hunt and the zookeepers zoo-keep. Imagine how much more fun everyone would have, how much more we’d sell, and how happy companies, clients, and salespeople would be.

Water daily, direct sunlight, and lots of love. Okay, just kidding, but I really do LOVE to code and design email templates, and there’s lots you can do to care for your email template to make sure you’re getting the most out of it!

Emails thrive better in some environments than others. As an email designer, I do my best to code templates that will work well across all email clients, browsers, and apps. If you’ve ever tested your emails to different combinations of browsers, email clients, and apps, you may have noticed your emails display differently depending on where it’s being rendered. You may have also noticed that some email clients are more difficult to work with than others.

So what can you do to take proper care of your email template?

Copy and paste with caution

Copying and pasting content is a common practice, but it can introduce some pests into your email code. It’s best to type directly into the editor, or to only copy and paste from plain text sources which will strip out any extra code picked up in the copy process.

For example, when I copy some text from one of our blog posts into the editor, extra tags are being added into the code. Note

below. While these are common HTML tags, different email clients may handle these tags differently than the browser where you’re creating the message.

5 Essential Design Tips for the Non-Designer

As a writer, I can’t believe I’m saying this: Visuals are the foundation of your business. Consistend, empowering branding helps to draw in prospects and keep customers coming back for more. It’s your first opportunity to make an impression.

It’s your brand identity.

Here’s another example of the code when I copy it from our blog, then paste it into a plain text editor. I’m using TextEdit with Plain Text formatting selected, as opposed to Rich Text formatting:

5 Essential Design Tips for the Non-Designer
As a writer, I can’t believe I’m saying this: Visuals are the foundation of your business. Consistend, empowering branding helps to draw in prospects and keep customers coming back for more. It’s your first opportunity to make an impression.
It’s your brand identity.

The extra code is not being embedded into the editor and will yield better results across a wider variety of email clients and browsers.

Keep it simple

Overdoing your message can cause your engagement to wilt. Keeping things simple will allow for you to have a clear, concise message.

Avoid overemphasis – don’t confuse or distract your reader by adding too many font sizes and styles, like underlines and bold text, throughout your message.

Use a simple color palette – try to keep the font colors to a minimum to avoid distraction. Pick a headline color, font color, and link color and stick with those colors throughout your message.

Limit the number of images you use.In some cases image-heavy emails work, but too many images may not only be distracting, they may also impact load times. If your message doesn’t load within a couple seconds you risk losing the attention of your readers. Another thing to remember is that some email clients will block images by default, so relying on images to convey your message isn’t recommended.

Make sure your images aren’t too wide – most of our templates are 600 pixels wide. If you upload an image that’s wider than 600 pixels, consider using the Optimized or Thumbnail option for the best results. If you have columns in your email, make sure the width of the image isn’t “breaking” the width of the column.

Avoid using too many links.In many cases you will want a clear call to action within your message. Offering too many links can actually prevent your subscribers from taking action.

Test your messages

Test your email in a variety of different environments. Create test accounts with free email services, and check to see how your email renders in those clients and different browsers. There’s also services, like Litmus, which will run dozens of tests at once to save you some time.

These are some of the most popular email clients, and I suggest trying to test to these if possible:

Desktop Email Clients

Remember, not everyone will be using the same version and rendering may vary from version to version

• Outlook
• Apple Mail

Webmail

The browser being used may also affect rendering – always test a variety of browsers like Chrome and Firefox

• Gmail
• Outlook.com
• Yahoo!

Mobile Apps

While all of our email templates are designed to be responsive, some email apps will display a mobile friendly version

• Mail App for iPhone
• Gmail App for iPhone
• Gmail App for Android

Need help cultivating your email template?

Did you know we have a team of email design experts who can help you troubleshoot rendering issues, and even design custom templates to match your brand? Let us help you grow your brand!

OTTAWA – When star NDP candidate Linda McQuaig mused during the opening days of the federal election campaign that some of Alberta’s oil wealth would have to “stay in the ground” in order to meet Canada’s climate change targets, the remark was treated as a scandalous revelation by her political opponents.

Yet McQuaig, known for her sometimes polarizing and provocative views, arguably was simply stating 2015’s middle-of-the-road orthodoxy.

From the governor of the Bank of England, to the U.S. president and the investment arms of the planet’s biggest banks, 2015 was the year that “stranded assets” stopped being some mythical bedtime story told by tree huggers to spook oil workers and landed in the mainstream.

Mark Carney, the Canadian head of the Bank of England, attracted international attention with a Sept. 29 speech at venerable Lloyd’s of London cautioning against the grave risks to the financial system posed by a changing climate.

Carney cited estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that only between a fifth and a third of proven oil reserves can be burned if humanity is to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.

“If that estimate is even approximately correct it would render the vast majority of reserves ‘stranded’ — oil, gas and coal that will be literally unburnable without expensive carbon capture technology, which itself alters fossil fuel economics,” said the central bank governor.

President Barack Obama, making the case for his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline barely a month later, made much the same point.

“Ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky,” he said.

Investment houses are also issuing cautions.

Last April, HSBC Global Research reported that: “Fossil fuel companies, or some of their assets, may become non-viable or ‘unburnable,'” under conditions of increased climate regulation and depressed prices.

And following this month’s UN COP21 climate agreement in Paris, Citigroup Research Equities Australia was warning investors that, “whatever the fine print, high emissions industries will face substantial change in coming decades.”

It remains, however, a highly sensitive subject for Canadians who spent the past decade being told the country was on the path to becoming a global energy super power.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press, sounded the requisite progressive notes when asked about the impact of the Paris climate agreement on Canada’s resource sector.

“We know, and with Paris it’s very clear, where the world is going,” said Trudeau, whose Liberals won power in October promising to make Canada a responsible player on the international climate front after 10 years of Conservative ambivalence.

“We’re going towards a zero carbon economy. The question is, does Canada want to drag its feet on it or do we want to be part of it?”

But Trudeau also maintains new oil pipelines to spur oil sands development are compatible with this low-carbon future. He argues the transition requires investment and innovation, which is dependent on a robust economy.

It sounds a bit like having your cake and eating it too; not so different from the Conservative government’s mantra of balancing the environment and the economy. Trudeau pushed back hard at the analogy.

“You square that by making sure that Albertans, who have been innovative in the energy sector for decades, are part of that disruption, are part of moving beyond the fossil fuel resources we have,” he said. “Leverage the fossil fuel resources we have now — and are needed now — into solutions for tomorrow.”

For Canadian policy makers, that’s a very tricky needle to thread.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper agreed last April to a G7 goal to decarbonize the economy by the end of the century, a timeline long enough to delay hard choices in the short term.

But under the new Liberal government, Canada was among those at COP21 who helped push for a goal of limiting global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, an ambitious target that demands swift policy action.

Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose says Canada needs policies to deal with the fall-out of stranded assets.

“All you have to do is talk to CEOs of major corporations and they’ll tell you, billions and billions of dollars have left Alberta and will never come back,” Ambrose said in an interview.

“So if the Liberal government is talking about going even farther than the targets that we had already proposed to go to Paris with as a Conservative government, they need to look very closely at what the implementation of that looks like.”

Dave Sawyer, an economist with EnviroEconomics, says there are two tracks for ongoing oil sands production even in a low-carbon economy.

Companies with large investments already sunk in production will continue to make money off oil, but they’ll be less profitable.

“It’s like a sunsetting sector in the economy where you just don’t invest capital in the operation,” he said.

Future increases in production, meanwhile, must be driven by technology that reduces costs and carbon emissions.

“The longer term question is: Is there room for oil in a significantly de-carbonized world? There are a bunch of end uses we’re looking at now — even with transformative technologies — that you can’t really do much with,” said Sawyer, pointing to long haul trucking and jet travel as examples.

David McLaughlin, the former head of the defunct National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, said the concept of stranded oil resources is now an accepted part of the climate debate — a development that poses profound policy implications for an energy dependent economy like Canada’s.

McLaughlin posited that this fall’s Alberta NDP climate plan, which includes a hard cap on oilsands emissions by about 2030, serves as “validation” of the stranded asset argument and thus has significance far beyond the specific greenhouse gas levels it legislates.

“This is the new normal, we’re into it,” he said in an interview.

“So Canada’s economy, being based on an energy bet, becomes really risky. Canada’s economy, based on an environment bet tomorrow, is even riskier.”

Managing the transition will be the policy challenge of a generation, he said.

The International Energy Agency released a report on the global energy investment outlook in June 2014 that clearly laid out the looming stranded asset debate and the perilous path ahead for fossil fuel investors and public policy makers.

The report’s summary of conflicting public sentiments is cautionary reading for Canadian governments: “a demand for stronger action on climate change but a backlash against the cost of subsidies; opposition to fracking; protests against nuclear and coal-fired plants; suspicion about CCS (carbon capture and storage).

“Against this backdrop, the risk of policy incoherence and even policy reversals is high.”

— With files from Stephanie Levitz

— Follow @BCheadle on Twitter

The post Trudeau faces looming ‘stranded assets’ debate in confronting climate policy appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The price-value ratio is more of a moving target than ever, reports Jack Nicas in The Wall Street Journal (12/13/15). The concept of dynamic pricing is nothing new; airlines, in particular, have adjusted prices based on demand as far back as the 1980s, with hotels and rental-car companies later following their lead. In 1999, Coca-Cola experimented with “raising its vending-machine prices on hot days … but retreated after customer backlash.” Of course, dynamic pricing quickly spread to e-commerce with the rise of the Internet.

Today, you can’t go to a zoo without paying a premium during prime time, and in Dallas, Texas, highway tolls change “every five minutes depending on traffic. Kohl’s Corp. uses electronic price tags in 1,200 stores to change prices for busy and slow times.” Dynamic pricing is a major feature of ride-sharing, be it Uber or Lyft: “On busy nights like New Year’s Eve, fares can soar to $500.” Lyft changes prices as a way “to lure more drivers onto the road.” A car dealership “in North Carolina is testing electronic tags that alter prices based on competition online.”

This usually works out better for sellers than buyers. Economists say that “consumers pay more as a result” of dynamic pricing, on average. Although consumers sometimes try to resist dynamic pricing — as Major League Baseball fans did five years ago when certain teams introduced it — they tend to get used to paying more “based on factors such as date, opponent, weather forecasts and seats remaining.” Peter Fader of Wharton says fans now expect this. “Now pretty much every one of them is doing it routinely, with a remarkable lack of backlash,” he says.

The post Dynamic Profits appeared first on The Hub.

       

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Buyers today realize they have more power and options to negotiate terms heavily in their favor than ever before.