GDP came in weaker than expected today, raising concerns about the whole fourth quarter and speculation of another rate cut

The Trudeau government’s proposal to legalize cannabis will no doubt generate heated debate. The question of how to legalize is likely to receive less attention. But it is no less important; the consequences of legalization will depend strongly on details that neither side of the larger debate has given much attention.

The potential benefits of legalization include: increasing personal liberty; gains to consumers in convenience and in product variety and safety (via chemical testing and accurate labelling); and substantially shrinking a multi-billion-dollar illicit market and the associated enforcement efforts and punishments. (Statistics Canada reports more than 20,000 cannabis-related convictions per year; about one-third of those lead to custodial sentences, with a median length of 30 days.)

The primary risk of legalization is increased problematic use (“cannabis use disorder,” in medical terminology) and the resulting damage to consumers, and their families, friends and co-workers. Leakage from the adult market may also increase use among adolescents—especially if prices fall dramatically—creating risks to academic performance and psychological and emotional development.  The growing share of cannabis users who report smoking every day—now about one-quarter of Canadian past-month users—demonstrates the risk of developing problem use.

These can be thought of as the arguments for, and against, any legalization of cannabis. But they can also be thought of as design criteria for a new system of legal availability: how can we provide convenient access for adults who want to use in moderation while minimizing the harms from cannabis use disorder and from use by adolescents?

The commercial model of cannabis legalization adopted in Washington State, Colorado and Oregon performs well in terms of liberty, consumer satisfaction and shrinking the illicit trade, but is likely to be much less satisfactory when it comes to controlling problem use. After all, frequent high-dose users—those most at risk for cannabis use disorder—are the most valuable customers of the cannabis trade, whether licit or illicit.  The marketing (and lobbying) strategies of a cannabis industry will therefore focus on attracting such customers and inducing them to consume more and more of the product, and on converting moderate users into problem users. In this respect cannabis is like alcohol, tobacco and gambling: all of those industries have commercial motives for getting their customers hooked.

Over the past two decades, the cannabis market has shifted increasingly toward material with very high concentrations of THC, the primary intoxicating agent. That raises the risk of acute bad experiences, and may also increase the prevalence of problem use. Since per-gram prices have been steady over that period, the price of getting stoned has been falling.

Even at today’s illicit price, cannabis is a remarkably cheap intoxicant: something like a dollar per hour of intoxication, which makes it cheaper than beer. The price is too low to matter much to most casual users. But very heavy users, for whom cannabis is a significant personal budget item, and younger users, who tend to have less available cash, are likely to use more cannabis as the price falls.

When cannabis growers and dealers are no longer forced to hide their activities and pay their workers premium wages to induce them to accept legal risk, the price of cannabis drops dramatically. This is already evident in falling wholesale prices in Washington and Colorado. Once the market is mature, generic, unbranded legal cannabis may very well sell for one-tenth the current price of the illegal product, making commercialized legalization an unattractive policy from a public-health viewpoint.  Yes, there will be high-end product as well, but what matters is the price per hour of intoxication at the low end of the price spectrum.

A sensible cannabis-legalization plan would prevent the growth of substance use disorder as much as possible by: keeping prices high (through production controls, taxes, or public monopoly); banning persuasive advertising by restricting marketing communications to factual statements about the chemical content of the product; and offering consumers convenient ways of checking their own impulses when those impulses conflict with their judgment about their long-term interests, for example by allowing customers to set monthly purchase quotas for themselves.  Of course any policy that really put a dent in problem use would also put a dent in industry revenues, so we should expect the industry to oppose such policies, as we have already seen in the United States.

That struggle between commercial logic and the public interest will define the new politics of legal cannabis. As the new government proceeds to draft a new system of laws, it should keep in mind the need to prevent the cannabis industry from acquiring excessive political influence.

One approach would be to make the sale of cannabis a state monopoly rather than relying on private-sector retailers; as Premier Kathleen Wynne has proposed for Ontario. The stores could easily administer user-set quotas, and contracts with growers could include a ban on advertising.

It is when the regime is first being designed that the public health interest has the best chance. Later, public attention will shift, but industry lobbying efforts will remain focused on dismantling effective controls.

Cannabis legalization doesn’t have to be bad for the public health. But if we’re not careful, it will be.

Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at New York University’s Marron Institute. Jonathan Caulkins is the Stever Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College. They are two of the authors of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press).

The post The right (and wrong) way to legalize cannabis appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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My agency suit friend, Marc, has very sore feet this week. You see, he’s been making the rounds of the holiday parties. His agency has hosted a few, then there’s the ad club, the marketing association stuff, his clients’ parties and his suppliers’ lunches. Sometimes two or three on the same afternoon or evening. And don’t get him started on the client dinners.

Even as he wipes the wasabi off his sleeve, he knows enough not to complain. This is schmoozing at its finest and, when all the gift bottles are safely tucked into wine fridges across the city, the connections, the gratitude, the networking and the friendships will keep paying Mark’s salary for another year. Hold this festive thought; I promise I’ll come back to it.

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks looking at the disgraceful state of most websites and a few ideas to get them back on track. All well and good, but here’s why we should be looking at an exit strategy for our websites: they are increasingly less important in our conversations with the market.

For a quarter century, these marketing beasts of burden have been the centerpieces of most B2C and B2B marketing tactics, and a good bit of the strategy as well. We loved them because they were all ours. We controlled the content, we controlled the access and all we had to do was drive our prospects and customers into our little worlds and deliver a terrific experience. Plus it didn’t hurt that we could spray a little cash to drive more views on a slow month.

Early on, we figured out websites require a lot of care and feeding. So we pried them out of the Productivity Prevention Department’s purview and hired webmasters, who became web managers, who became digital marketers as the skillsets changed. We dreamed of being “destination sites” “industry portals” and we secretly plotted what we’d do when we no longer needed sales people. You know you thought about it.

But then a funny thing happened: people like Mark Zucherberg and Reid Hoffman came along and built these platforms we don’t own, don’t control, can’t restrict access to and which move a thousand times faster than we do. Let’s call that social media.

At first it was for kids and bored retail workers, and we could sneer. Then it was just for B2C companies who had a few bucks to throw at this meaningless bandwagon, and some of us could sneer. We were content to let other companies profit with games involving chickens. That’s because while we saw media, our customers saw social and thus opened a gate at the marketing rodeo setting loose this crazy, kicking horse of conversations. Marketers, typically, responded by trying to jump on this bucking bronco and turn it into one of those coin-operated supermarket ponies. If you are as exhausted as I am, you are realizing that we are not succeeding.

This exhaustion, for many marketing departments, is exactly why their websites are such a tip. Those digital marketers, who were supposed to be keeping it up-to-date and looking pretty have instead been running around on social media, desperately trying to be relevant. They’re hiring third parties to make sure the trolls and nasty-grams are dealt with and they are, mostly, spraying complete nonsense into the conversation just so they can say they tweeted that day. Just the other day, a law firm I follow on Twitter was asking the universe if it was hoping for a white Christmas. Oddly, nobody responded.

Lords and Ladies of the Spin Cycle, have you noticed your quads are a bit sore? That’s what five years in a defensive crouch feels like. But what if we stop defending ourselves on social media? What if we stop pretending that the social media are just a tool to lure people to our dreadful websites?

What if we accept or even welcome that third parties are going to build and maintain the platform we use for conversations? It’s a lot like Mark going to a bunch of holiday parties all on the same day, and this why it’s a good thing. Someone else is getting the people in the door, mixing the drinks, setting out the canapes and hiring the band. Our job is to show up a little early with a crock pot full of meatballs and work the room for conversations.

Just as Mark has spent his career learning to have meaningful conversations with a mouth full of salmon mousse and a steel drum band in the background, we will need to learn how to behave at this party. We need to be having conversations, not screaming matches. We cannot be walking up to people with a photo of a kitten and asking them what they’re planning to do this weekend to relax. We need to be asking and answering questions. Helping them find resources (yours and other people’s). It’s the delicate, human dance we call conversation and, you will recall, it’s what I think marketing is all about.

Now, back to your website: if Twitter and WordPress and LinkedIn and Instagram are all fabulous cocktail parties in your fabulous condo building, then your website is the storage locker in the basement by the garbage room.

Now and again, you will want to send someone there to gaze upon your wondrous content, pricing lists, shopping carts and references. You may want to send Skippy down on a regular basis to tidy things up and keep the roach motels empty. I think the future, then, looks a lot less like trying to lure people over a shrimp ring and lot more like waiting for them to be interested enough see what you’ve got.

So what does this mean? It means we need to get cracking on our website exit strategies. Our assumptions about lead sources need to be weaning us off driving them through our websites in favour of driving connections to our sales teams. The digital marketing folks need to spend less time stuffing Hootsuite with irrelevant automated stupidity, and more time finding the right cocktail parties on social platforms.

They need to be figuring out what we ought to be taking to those parties. On Instagram and Pinterest, it had better be a platter full of great images. SlideShare and YouTube, not so much. Your digital marketers need to have a very, very granular understanding of these parties, who is there and what is an acceptable sort of conversation to be having.

We need to be looking at getting our sales teams invited to those parties and helping them have conversations that don’t begin and end with a lurid invitation to the storage locker. Because that’s just not festive.

BizMarketer is taking a couple of weeks off to read and drink and recharge the Snark machine. Wishing you and yours a very Happy Christmas.

There are no changes in sales that happen so abruptly that you can predict that they will occur in any specific year. Nothing happens in a single year either.

The major trends in sales take years to develop, and it is easy to believe that the trend line allows you to predict the future easily. But forecasting future events isn’t so simple, and those trend lines can switch direction over time. No one beats the world champion until one day the underdog knocks him (or her) out.

• Inside sales is going to replace outside sales, they say.
• Social selling is going to replace the telephone and other traditional prospecting methods.

What’s more interesting than making guesses about the future is looking at what doesn’t change, what persists over time.

• Trust: In human relationships, trust rules. This has been the case for tens of thousands of years, and it will persist deep into the future. Putting forth the effort to develop character and engender trust is as important now as ever. The value of human relationships based on trust endures.
• Resourcefulness: As soon as we humans solve some problem or overcome some challenge, we discover that we have created another problem, usually one more challenging than the one we just solved. Fortunately, resourcefulness is limitless, and the need for people to solve problems isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
• Fear: Fear has been around a lot longer than Homo sapiens. It lives deep inside of us, doing its very best to ensure our survival. People will always fear making mistakes and hurting themselves. Fear moves us away from pain, and it will still drive human behavior.
• Leadership: Leaders take responsibility for moving groups of people towards a better future. The need for someone to step up and take accountability for delivering that future is unchanged. This is as true for families as it is for businesses and governments. The belief that things can and should be better persists.
• Alchemy: The idea that lead can be turned into gold through some magical process has been with us since forever. It is still with us now. People have a strong desire to believe that they can have what they want without paying the price necessary to have it. Con artists, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen will always prey on people’s desire to believe in alchemy.

In the future, these things–and things like them–will persist, regardless of the trends.

There is no reason not to explore the trends. This year’s fashion might help you produce the results that you want. But the persistent truths persist for a reason. You are better to build your foundation on what has been true for millennia. Character and value beat the “new” new thing over time.

Worry about becoming the best version of yourself. Nothing else provides as sustainable competitive advantage or happiness.

The post Predicting the Future Through What Endures appeared first on The Sales Blog.

When you create your company blog, there is always a clear emphasis on using this channel to educate readers and create an entry point into a relationship with consumers. This is the fundamental principle of thought leadership, where high quality content is used as a way of engaging individuals and delivering invaluable information to them.

While the days of using a company blog to initiate a hard-sell initiative may be long gone, however, it is still an invaluable tool when it comes to informing consumer decisions and driving sales conversions. There are many ways in which this can be achieved, both in terms of optimising online sales and those completed in-store.

3 Successful ways of Driving Sales through your Company Blog

So what are the key measures required to drive sales through your company blog? Here are three of the most impactful: –

Make your Blog the primary stage of the Sales Funnel

There are many stages of the sales process, from first engaging a consumer to converting them either online or in-store. Your company blog should play a prominent role in the first stage of the sales funnel, especially as estimated 59% of U.S consumers alone having confirmed that they have used their mobile devices to research products before making a purchase.

In practical terms, the blog should use engaging and informative content to draw in consumers, targeting relevant topics and creating copy that offers a valuable market insight. From here, you can place cookies on the browsers associated with individual customers in a bid to capture their email address and engage in more personal communication.

This can lead to the sharing of real-time offers and promotions with individual customers, which is more important than ever given the enhanced security of online payment transactions. The proliferation of contactless methods such as Apple Pay (which was first released on the U.S. market in October 2014) has also driven real-time sales in-store, and this is a trend that businesses should not ignore.  By creating relevant content with a sense of immediacy and using your blog to capture a real-time audience, you can drives sales and make the most of branded promotions both online and in-store.

Use Gated Content to collate Data and drive sales Conversions

If you are unfamiliar with gated content, you missing out on a unique opportunity to interact organically with your customers. Gated content is essentially anything that sits behind a form, where visitors to a blog are required to share their email address and non-sensitive data in order to access e-books, downloads and similar material.

This gradually turns your blog into a channel through which potential customers can be initially captured, without forcing you to aggressively target consumers and request their information directly. Instead, you can interact with customers organically and build a sense of loyalty, as you share valuable information in exchange for contact information that offers a portal into a long-term relationship.

Most important, the data accrued can be analysed to determine and target various market segments. It can also be shared throughout the business to improve your marketing ROI and increase sales conversions.

Inform your customers and Influence Sales all year round

Typically, sales volumes endure peaks and troughs throughout the year, depending on the nature of the industry that your business operates in. While Cyber Monday generated sales in excess of $2.68 billion in 2014, for example, this type of expenditure is rare and not something that brands can solely rely on as they look to grow and increase profitability.

Your blog offers a medium through which you can engage and inform customers all year round, however, as you take an educational approach that seeks to build trust and optimise sales consistently. They key is in adopting a long-term ethos, creating content that offers value to consumers while maintaining a steady and consistent level of interaction. As part of this strategy, you can even adopt an objective approach that highlights similar products and businesses as a way of enhancing the consumer experience, subtly promoting your own goods and aligning yourself with relevant, high-quality brands.

In summary, you can encourage readers to interact with your blog through the publication of regular content and the decision to link to previous posts that offer relevance. This can help to build long-term consumer loyalty and optimise sales conversions throughout the year, rather than relying on periodical promotions and consumer holidays to fuel growth.

9 types of Email Marketing to engage B2B audiences

Email is the go-to form of customer and prospect communication for many businesses today, allowing clear, concise and detailed conversations. In fact, 73% of marketers agree that the email marketing is core to their business and 40x more effective than social media for lead generation.

Is your business capitalising on this B2B marketing opportunity?

The longer life-span of emails in comparison to social posts means there is more time for businesses to leverage on making a sale or closing a deal. With a current estimate of 100 billion business emails being sent every day, this number of business email accounts is expected to rise to 4.9 billion by 2017.

Overall, email marketing continues to be ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment, with 68% of companies rating the channel as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’, and with companies crediting email for bringing in 23% of total sales.

These statistics are impressive, but what about your business?

Have you reached the full potential of email as a B2B marketing channel?

We’ve compiled a quick introduction to B2B email marketing, and have included 9 B2B email marketing examples to set you on the route to success.

1. Curated email content

Your prospective clients will provide their contact details for one reason: they believe you can offer them value. As always, the customer wants to know what’s in it for them and it’s up to you to deliver their expectations and more.

Do this successfully with curated email content based on their industry or area of expertise, ranging from ‘Must-Know Trends’ to ‘The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites as used in the example below by Moz.

2. Activation

As time goes on, you’re likely to build up a list of active and inactive client profiles. This creates a fantastic opportunity to reach out to those customers that may not have logged in to use your site or software for some time. Dropbox keep their activation email simple, focusing on the benefits of why you should install their product.

Use an automated email process to encourage these clients to log in after periods of inactivity and offer them an incentive for doing so. Whether it’s the lure of new functionality or recent industry statistics to back up for your product or services, you can easily entice clients to return to your site.

3. Announcement

Email is a cost-effective and non-disruptive way of making targeted announcements to your database of contacts. Has your business recently won an award? Updated your site? Or released a new product?

Well, these are all perfect opportunities to get in touch with your client base and announce your big news. Announcement emails work well to bring your business back to the attention of current, previous and future clients. When SumAll acquired Flutter, they used an announcement email as an effective way to share the news.

4. White paper

Your clients want content that is of high value. Whether it’s research-led insights, detailed how-to guides or proven ways to conquer specific business challenges – white papers are a fantastic way to share longer-form content that provide value.

Of course, this type of content takes a little longer to produce and may involve a lengthier research process, but the chances are you will receive a much more positive response from it. After putting the legwork in to creating your white paper, increase readership by e-mailing a free download link to your contacts, as shown below in the example from SuperOffice.

5. Campaign

Email is an ideal tool to support any of your campaign-based marketing activities. You have the opportunity to carefully plan and time the delivery of content directly to your audience’s inbox.

This content can help you drive action, traffic and any other key objectives for your campaign in place. Campaign emails can help you get new clients on-board by offering something for free, such as a toolkit (like the Desk example below) to strengthen the relationship with your audience.

6. Events

Are you planning a business event, webinar or Twitter chat?

Email is an ideal tool to inform your client list about an upcoming event and invite them to join. Share information and snippets with your audience about what the event will involve and don’t forget to include a catchy subject line to ensure they read it.

Sales strategist Jill Konrath makes it easy for people to attend an event by including the event time and location, as well as a straightforward RSVP call to action.

7. Webinar

Which business doesn’t want to position themselves as a thought-leader in their industry?

Webinars are a great way to showcase your thought-leadership and enter into dialogue with clients. To grow the number of virtual webinar attendees, email a simple registration form to your client base.

HubSpot’s webinar email clearly states the webinar topic and provides concise benefits to joining, as well as a clear call to action.

8. Case study

If you want to show your clients exactly how they can benefit from your products or services, a case study is the way to go.

After all, the proof is in the pudding. Once you’ve created an in-depth study into the benefits your product or service had for a previous client, email it out to your client list.

Be sure to include details such as revenue growth, like in the example from Perfect Audience, as well as client retention rates and sales figures to back up your claims. To ensure your emails are relevant to recipients, target these case studies by industry or job role.

9. Trial/demo

Who doesn’t want something for free?

Target prospective clients by email with a free product trial or demo, giving them first-hand insight into what your business can offer. For those recipients who do not sign up, use an automated email to follow-up with a limited-time offer.

KISSmetrics makes it easy to sign up to a personalized demo and makes their prospective client feel valued by arranging the demo around his/ her schedule.

Conclusion

The role of email for B2Bs as a measurable, cost-effective marketing channel is clear.

Backed up by both professional opinion and industry statistics, email has an important value for businesses in gaining ROI - enhancing lead generation, up-selling opportunities and client retention.

By delivering engaging snippets of information to a targeted contact list, you can build your client base, establish your business as a thought-leader and positively influence your bottom line. And after all, that’s the ultimate goal of B2B email marketing.

Nuuk (AFP) - As the world struggles to limit climate change, some people in Greenland hope to cash in on rising temperatures with new species to fish, innovative exports and advances in farming. 

While the North Atlantic island remains highly dependent on shrimp as its main export -- it is known locally as "the pink gold" -- warming waters are attracting new types of fish.

"It's very nice to be able to offer freshly caught tuna and mackerel even if we are right here in Greenland," said Bjorn Johansen, a chef at Hotel Hans Egede, the largest hotel in capital Nuuk, which has a population of 22,000.

In summer, fishermen in east Greenland are now catching mackerel and Atlantic bluefin tuna that have swum far from their spawning grounds in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico.

For Johansen they are a break from the monotony of Greenland's traditional staples.

For Nuuk's home rule government, which is seeking more sources of income as the economy has to support an ageing population, they are an export opportunity.

Falling commodity prices have put a damper on hopes that the territory's mineral riches -- buried beneath the ice -- could spark an an imminent mining boom. 

Instead fisheries continue to dominate the economy, accounting for about 90 percent of exports, and mackerel and Atlantic bluefin tuna have ready markets.

That is welcome news for the local government, as the subsidy from former colonial master Denmark that currently accounts for about half of the annual budget is now fixed and its value slowly erodes along with inflation.

- From Nuuk to Nairobi -

"If summer temperatures continue to increase during this century ... it is likely that bluefin tuna could become a regular summer visitor in east Greenland waters," said Brian MacKenzie, a marine ecology professor at the Technical University of Denmark.

Satellite images show the Arctic territory's vast ice sheet, which holds between six and seven percent of the world's fresh water and covers four-fifths of its land, shrinking by nearly 50 cubic miles (208 cubic kilometres) per year.

The ice sheet, a potentially massive contributor to a rise in sea levels, lost mass twice as fast between 2003 and 2010 as during the entire 20th century, researchers said last week in the journal Nature.

For many Greenlanders, climate change is already posing challenges and changing the traditional lifestyle: some hunters and fishermen have had to put down their huskies as thinner winter sea ice makes the use of dog sleds for ice fishing too dangerous.

Tourism, one of the industries the government wants to grow to diversify the economy, is also facing obstacles in the thawing Arctic. 

During some parts of the year the ice floes in the Ilulissat icefjord, Greenland's largest tourism attraction, have been so massive that cruise ships have had problems getting tourists ashore.

They has also made it harder for local fishermen to navigate into open waters. 

But with the melting ice sheet comes rock that has been naturally crushed by the ice. This "rock flour" contains nutrients that can be used in countries with poor farmland.

"It is completely ready for shipping. A man and a shovel and then just off with the nutrient-rich dirt," said Minik Rosing, a geology professor who heads the think tank Greenland Perspective.

- Potato protection -

The substance is a nuisance for Greenlanders when it clogs up the fjords and "may as well do good elsewhere in the world", he added.

The idea is to export the rock flour to places with barren and arid land such as Africa and South America.

The nutrients in the crushed rocks from Greenland can make the farmland arable again, Rosing said.

As the minerals are absorbed by the plants through the soil, more vegetation pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

One tonne can be shipped up to 12,000 kilometres (7,500 miles) before having a negative impact on the climate, meaning the rock flour can be transported from Nuuk to Nairobi.

"We can therefore easily move it to South America or Africa without a negative impact," said Rosing.

Another export idea rooted in microbiology has come from south Greenland's potato crops, which have grown more plentiful as summers have become warmer.

While the cost of farming in the island is high compared to other places, higher temperatures could see it being done on a larger scale in the future.

The warming climate is not the only thing working in farmers' favour: researchers have found that the soil is also providing them with a unique advantage.

While potato growers around the world face the threat of disease-causing microbes such as blight wiping out entire harvests, south Greenland's soil contains microorganisms that inhibit the growth of harmful fungi.

These "have a major biotechnological potential if the molecules can be successfully synthesized into chemical compounds or if the organisms can be used as an organic alternative to pesticides", said microbiologist Peter Stougaard, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Join the conversation about this story »

The value of the female dollar is rising: today, women account for a whopping 85 percent of all consumer purchases, and female income worldwide totals to over $18 trillion. Millennial women — those between the ages of 18 and 35 — represent a significant piece of that spending power. However, many companies struggle to gain attention and buy-in from this generation of women. Marketers spend a vast amount of time and resources creating and distributing creative and messages that are simply not sticking. Why? Because the stories these brands tell portray women in such a uniform way that it fails to attract them as customers.

What brands fail to understand is that millennial women are digital natives: we are exposed to over 5,000 brand messages and advertisements every day, across every marketing channel. We are acutely aware of how brands enhance and distort women to sell us products. In the past, the ideal face of beauty could be enhanced with cosmetics, but today it can be physically created by technology. Amy Poehler said it best: “With all the Photoshop and fake stuff, their [young women’s] world is so different from when I grew up. But that makes them crave authenticity — and they’re really good at sniffing it out.”

Millennial women distrust traditional advertising because we know that marketers are trying to sell us on impossible ideals.

Today, more than ever, women want to be their most authentic selves. Whether it’s embracing our natural bodies, refuting the need to be “likable,” or considering the possibility that maybe no one truly has it all — women are tired of being manipulated to fit a mold that is shaped by brands for them, and not by them.

It’s understandably very hard to sell to a group of people that fundamentally disagree with what you stand for.

Now, brands are expected, not simply encouraged, to reflect the values of their target audience. Many still do not understand this new set of standards. Companies selling to women need to support women and change the unilateral way in which they portray women in owned media. And millennial women believe that marketers have the social responsibility to do that.

Stella McCartney is one of the few names in women’s fashion to understand what this means. “As a designer,” she says, “I have the ability to celebrate my customers, embrace their differences and not just try to create cookie-cutter women. For the next 25 years, I would like fashion design to be more than fashion; for it to encourage people and challenge people to be socially and ethically responsible.”

In their search for authenticity, millennial women have turned to online channels. The prevalence of the Internet and social media has allowed women to represent their own ideals of beauty. They post and share photos of the products they love and create the very authenticity they are not getting from brands. Women upload millions of photos every day that reflect the diverse personalities and individual styles of millennial women.

These millennial-created photos and videos are relevant, authentic and allow us to tell our own stories while upholding our values. Brand engagement rises by 28 percent when consumers are exposed to either professional content or these user-generated inspirational assets, and yet, they remain an untapped marketing resource only a few brands have encouraged or leveraged.

Is it possible that millennial women could be more incentivized to buy from and engage with brands that widen the range of women wearing and styling their products?

Savvy marketers know that supporting and collaborating with women gives them a competitive advantage. This year’s Pirelli calendar selected women based on their merits, not their looks; the Always #LikeAGirl campaign took home a Glass Lion for encouraging social change; acclaim of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty proves that women value a broader spectrum of defining themselves. The brands that do not uphold their social responsibility to advocate for their customers are not going to be as successful as the brands that do.

Millennials are a generation of digital savvy women who know what’s fake and what’s not. If you are looking for your message to resonate with them, celebrate authenticity. Companies develop content that shapes how our society views and treats women, and millennial women expect the brands selling to them to be instruments of change. We are willing to collaborate with you and want to help you shift the way you are marketing your products.

Ultimately, what’s better for women is better for your brand.

This piece was originally posted on the Huffington Post Blog.

When companies want to address fragmented cultures, they do some of the oddest things. For example, we’ve seen at least 15 corporations put “one” in front of their name (as in, “One Acme”), as they launched campaigns to dramatically increase interconnection across the organization.

As if that would work.

Fragmentation is a natural byproduct of scaling. Whether your company has reached $20 million or $20 billion, the routine mitosis of growth will eventually divide your organization into pieces. Designing an organization that remains cohesive even as it grows is hard work, and unfortunately, most leaders take the easy way out. Like new home owners who simply paint over rotted siding, executives take dangerously superficial approaches to unifying organizations, ignoring how splintered theirs really are. They forfeit the organizational magic where everyone feels part of something greater than themselves.

As I’ve worked with companies for 30 years, I’ve observed a recurring management vice I’ve called “faux-hesion”… the institutionalized pretense of unity. Here are the three most lethal “faux-hesion” culprits that do more to undermine unity than create it.

1. Declaring big targets in lieu of having a real strategy. The single most unifying factor of an organization is a widely known, enthusiastically embraced strategy. It’s astounding how many organizations don’t have one. If you go around the room and ask members of the executive team “What’s our strategy?” you’ll likely get many different answers. Sales and product quotas, growth targets, and mission statements are widespread counterfeits. One McKinsey study of 2,135 executives revealed that most corporate strategies “developed idiosyncratically to their organizations, people, and markets,” and don’t pass more than three out of 10 core tests for viable strategy.

Big targets intended to “rally” the organization are notorious substitutes for shared direction. “We will be the #1 provider of…”   or “We will be the fastest growing…”   or “We will dominate…”  There’s nothing wrong with ambitions that inspire organizations to stretch. But declaring big targets doesn’t unify organizations to reach them. It may whip them into a brief frenzy of enthusiasm, but once the hype settles, it’s back to business as usual.

Declaring big targets that simply aren’t attainable undermine executive credibility and employee commitment. Big targets can hence backfire, leading to inertia and weakening cohesion. To truly align their organizations, leaders must create substantiated plans that define competitive distinction, differentiated capabilities, core customers, and priority investments.

2. Using values to cover up cultural deficits. Most companies have published values, like integrity, innovation, teamwork, customer service, sustainability, or respect. A toxic culture, pervasive unwanted behavior, or a need for organization change can prompt leaders to ramp up focus on “values.” Underneath the pithy words is often the insidious intention to correct. “Speed” suddenly becomes a value when time to market cycles are industry lagging. “Integrity” becomes a value when there’s been a scandal. When a new value is declared with the unspoken intention of fixing the people asked to embrace it, you can bet embracing it is the last thing that happens. We watched one CEO hire a marketing firm to generate a set of catchy phrases to change a culture, all of which were antithetical to the existing culture. The multi-million dollar effort was crushed by its own weight.

When there is no consequence for violating stated values, the resultant cynicism and duplicity sabotage performance. Worse, values become a weapon used to expose the hypocrisy of leaders whose failure to model them becomes everyone else’s excuse not to, either. True cultural norms drive results, are consistent with strategy, and engender strong communal pride. Values that everyone knows mean nothing weaken cohesion, and with it, confidence and passion. That leaves behind shame and cowardice to shape behavior. The performance consequence can’t be ignored.

One comprehensive study based on more than 1,000 firms in the Great Places to Work database reveals a strong correlation between the corporate financial performance and the extent to which employees believe their company’s espoused values are practiced. A company’s values must reflect what makes it uniquely successful, conveying to employees, This is what it takes to succeed here. From strategy to HR processes, weave them deeply into the organization’s fabric with undeniable consistency between actions and words.

3. Generating lots of meetings and reports instead of implementing clear decision-making processes. I’d love to have a dollar for every time I’ve heard the complaint, “We spend all our time in unproductive meetings and generating useless reports, so we have to do our ‘day jobs’ at night.” Excessive meetings and worthless reports are a sign of poor or non-existent governance. When decision rights are not carefully distributed with the requisite authority and resources, councils and committees proliferate like a bad flu. Piles of presentations and spreadsheets justify the meetings’ value as evidence of productivity. Owners of these groups and reports frantically cling to them as emblems heralding their indispensability.

When people in the organization spend a lot of time together — whether on reports or meetings — of course it feels like you’re cohesive. After all, you’re together for hours and hours of out of every day. (The average person has 62 meetings per month.) But simply breathing the same air does not result in cohesion, and in fact, usually backfires as people eventually resent the useless meetings and the people in them. And the waste of such an approach can’t be overstated. One organizational diagnosis we conducted revealed their top 400 leaders spent more than 57,000 hours per year in meetings. That equates to six and a half years. Leaders should clearly distribute decision rights and authority over resources in a coordinated fashion across the organization. This will speed execution and free capacity because the only needed meetings and reports are those tied to a broadly coordinated set of management processes that link the organization together.

Organizational unity isn’t a mysterious phenomenon – just a tough one to achieve. It doesn’t happen by sprinkling “cohesion pixie dust” over the organization in the forms discussed above. A harmonious, cohesive organization that consistently outperforms competitors happens because you do the hard work to build and maintain it.

Leaders of most internet-based businesses have realized the critical importance of using open application programming interfaces (APIs) to expand the reach of their organizations. If the health care industry followed suit, the impact on the quality and cost of care, the patient’s experience, and innovation could be enormous.

APIs are programming routines or protocols that allow software applications to share data. Organizations such as Amazon, IBM, Salesforce.com, Facebook, and Google, have all engaged in substantial API “releases” that permit developers to access information so they can build new applications or businesses. For many of these organizations, there is massive potential to create new value. Ultimately, this type of innovation serves the end customer — creating better functionality and experience for the user.

The impact of open, standardized APIs in health care would be even more significant. In a health care market where APIs are commonplace, patients could have easy, efficient access to their own data, which would help them understand their own health and make more informed choices. Providers would be empowered by innovative user interfaces and analytics platforms that could support their clinical decision making. Researchers could have easier access to detailed clinical and claims data to create hypotheses and identify trends — and create a better experience for individuals donating their data for science. Finally, the availability of data would lead to the development of an entirely new group of health care innovators: developers who do not have particular expertise in health care but, when given secure access to clinical data from the industry, could create tools of significant value. Together, these benefits could allow the health care system to tap the true potential of its massive data resources.

Insight Center

Efforts to “liberate” health care data for third-party applications have progressed slowly, because the sector lacks the robust APIs and app developer programs common in other industries. This creates major challenges with respect to care quality, safety, and cost. For example, consider the case in which a stroke patient is prescribed a clot-busting medication in the ER, but the record of her dosage does not follow her seamlessly to other units within the same hospital. Even worse, the full record of her ER stay may not follow her back to her primary care provider. Similarly, the parents of a child with diabetes may not be able to get access to their child’s records, impairing their ability to monitor their child’s condition effectively.

In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 introduced the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Program, which is administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This program provided financial incentives to adopt certified EHR technology systems and includes requirements that specific providers “meaningfully use” these systems. As a result of this program, 97% of reported hospitals had certified EHR technology in 2014, up from 72% in 2011.

Their success in meeting meaningful use requirements affects the level of Medicare reimbursement that they receive. Among other objectives, meaningful use includes the requirement that providers enable their patients to (1) view, (2) download, and (3) transmit their health data to a third party (known as the “VDT” requirement). The most-recent meaningful use regulations — the widespread implementation of which is currently due to occur in 2018 — add a fourth requirement that patients be able to access their health information through an API via the application of their choice. This new functionality would not only enable EHR systems to share data with patients but would also help to create system-wide interoperability between different providers and EHR systems.

For patients and their caregivers, the benefits of interoperability and easier access to data via APIs are obvious. Today, patients often have to deal with a different patient portal for each provider they visit. Open APIs will make it easier for both vendors and start-ups to create web and mobile applications that retrieve patients’ clinical data from various EHR portals and aggregate the information in a single location.

For providers, who often report difficulty with using EHR technology, APIs represent an opportunity for internal innovation. Open APIs can allow provider systems to build their own custom user interfaces in-house or shop around for a better solution than the interface that comes standard with their EHR system. EHRs could eventually become a platform on top of which other companies could build more tailored applications and improve usability for clinicians.

For researchers, a less-obvious benefit of open APIs in health care is the potential created for a wide range of individuals or organizations to engage in “citizen science” by performing analysis of trends in utilization, cost, or outcomes using a large population of aggregate, anonymized medical records. The Stanford Children’s Health system in the San Francisco Bay Area has developed an open source, analytics platform for diabetes management, leveraging its EHR’s API and Apple Healthkit, which can be implemented by any physician to improve understanding of patient trends over time. The Stanford team works with the DexCom blood-glucose-monitoring device, which has an app that sends continuous patient data into the EHR, allowing patients and their providers to make shared decisions about treatment.

Other projects like the Personal Genome Project are aggregating individually donated genome, health, and trait data from thousands of participants to help citizen scientists interpret genetic variants. PatientsLikeMe, an online clinical-research platform driven by individual data donation, aims to deliver real-time patient insight into many diseases and conditions. In some cases, it has raised questions about established approaches to treatment. In 2011, a patient-initiated observational study using the PatientsLikeMe platform was published, refuting a 2008 study claiming that lithium carbonate could slow the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). With easier access to clinical data, authorized and mediated by the participant, open databases like this could become powerful tools for fueling precision medicine and data-driven, individualized care.

Given their significant potential to improve value in health care, the immediate question is how we can accelerate progress toward broader use of open APIs within the industry. We see four main needs in this regard:

1. Financial incentives for providers need to encourage the data exchange necessary to deliver better outcomes. The health care industry is in the midst of a massive shift away from fee-for-service models to value-based care that ties reimbursement to better outcomes, lower costs, and higher patient satisfaction. Payments under Medicare’s new merit-based incentive payment system (MIPS) as well as new incentives for professionals participating in alternative payment models will go into effect starting in 2019. Both these programs contain requirements for providers to leverage certified EHR technology to improve care delivery. When providers face an incentive to exchange data to support better outcomes, the business case for implementing APIs becomes much clearer.

2. The concerns of both patients and providers around privacy and security must be addressed. There are legitimate security issues that arise with exchanging data. However, the rest of the consumer and business internet has adopted and extensively deployed standards for the secure exchange of sensitive data like OAuth 2.0 and Open ID Connect to facilitate authentication and authorization using APIs. While the health care industry and health data is certainly subject to unique security and privacy considerations, providers can benefit from leveraging these standards and safeguards to support patient access, while preserving privacy, security, and patient preferences.

3. Vendors should implement open standardized APIs with transparent terms of use, policies, and developer fees. Today, integration with EHR vendors’ varied and proprietary APIs can be costly and resource intensive. No standard has yet been adopted across the market, although promising work is being conducted by Project Argonaut to support emerging standards for health care APIs. Further, there is little transparency into the anticipated costs and policies associated with each unique API. In this environment, small start-ups don’t know what to expect and can be priced out or limited in their partnering options with different EHR vendors.

4. Cultural and workflow issues within health systems must be addressed. Providers often fear being paralyzed by a deluge of data when APIs are implemented that allow patient-generated data to enter the system — or fear that releasing data may cause them to lose patients. When APIs are implemented in practice, however, these fears are rarely realized. To the contrary, modern technology and analytics have the potential to add value to the decision-making process for providers and patients; in other industries we’ve found that making systems interoperable improves both the user experience and retention of customers. At Ochsner Health System, a pilot program to prevent heart failure and hypertension used an API to collect body weight and blood pressure data from over 500 individuals’ connected devices, leading to significant reductions in hospitalizations and improved blood pressure control. Despite initial provider concerns, the results from these and other pilots across the country have shown the potential of APIs to improve care and create a better experience for patients and providers alike.

To truly build a health care system that can evolve at the rapid pace of technology and science, we must tackle these formidable challenges head on. Open APIs provide massive potential for increased patient empowerment and shared decision making between providers and patients that may transform the delivery of health care.

This article is the result of independent research and does not represent the views of the White House, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or any other entity of the U.S. federal government.

VIENNA (AFP) - The OPEC oil cartel sees only a gradual improvement in the global crude market, with prices recovering to above $70 per barrel after four years, according to a report released Wednesday.

With the global benchmark oil price touching an 11-year low of $36.04 on Monday, the cartel which produces a third of the world's crude said that it foresees a "gradual improvement in market conditions as growing demand and slower than previously expected non-OPEC supply growth eliminate the existing oversupply and lead to a more balanced market”.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, in its annual World Oil Outlook report, bases its reference scenario on $70.70 for a barrel of crude in 2020 and $95 in 2040.

Those projections represent a sharp drop in market value compared to last year's report, which predicted a nominal price of $110 for the rest of this decade.

The oil market has been rife with drama over the past year and a half as OPEC abandoned its policy of cutting production to support prices, with the price of a barrel of crude plunging more than 60 percent.

Led by Saudi Arabia, the cartel instead aimed to preserve its market shares and push out growing competition from higher-cost shale rock producers in the United States.

OPEC nations, which are highly dependent on oil for government revenues, may be in for a longer haul than they had bargained for initially.

The report sees shale oil production only starting to "plateau" at 5.6 million barrels per day by 2025 and then decline.

And low oil prices are only leading to short-term boost in demand.

"The impact of the recent oil price decline on demand is most visible in the short term. It then drops away over the medium term,” noted the cartel, which is headquartered in Vienna.

It projected the world's total crude demand to hit 97.4 million barrels per day by the end of the decade, an increase of 500,000 barrels per day compared to its forecast from last year.

And while demand for OPEC oil is also set to increase more than previously forecast over the next five years, it will still remain below current production levels.

The cartel sees demand for its output reaching 30.7 million barrels per day by 2020, an increase of 1.7 million barrels compared to last year's projections. It is currently pumping 32 million barrels per day.

The cartel said it expected its current market share to increase by four points to 37 percent by 2040.

For trends in the global energy market, OPEC sees the developing world accounting for 63 percent of the total fuel consumption, overtaking industrialised countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Natural gas is expected to replace oil and coal as the fuel with the largest share of global energy use by 2040, making up close to 28 percent of world demand. 

Meanwhile, although wind and solar power are set to grow at the fastest rates, their overall market reach will only be around 4 percent in 15 years from now, according to OPEC.

Join the conversation about this story »

Two major trends are driving a transformational shift in B2B marketing. Access to customer data and the ability to mine it for insights has made data-driven marketing possible. Simultaneously, competition among B2B enterprises has placed a premium on marketing results, measurement and accountability.

The current reality of B2B marketing does not align with these expectations. While any observer of modern business can tell you that marketers are on the hook for revenue, it’s also clear that marketers do not always have the full support of their business leaders. How can marketers evolve and succeed in this new business landscape? Much like other business functions that have reached maturity in the modern enterprise, marketing must become a data-driven endeavor.

Predictive intelligence is the tool that is powering this change in 4 key ways:

1. Empowers B2B companies to identify decision-makers.

Today, marketing teams only know with precision that a target prospect is planning to make a purchase when they fill out a demo request form. As a result, marketers waste time and money on untargeted tactics in the hope that broad marketing blasts will spark enough engagement to stimulate demand and help nurture prospects through the sales funnel.

Predictive intelligence uses sophisticated modeling to accurately identify accounts and prospects as they’re entering the buying journey, allowing marketing teams to reach the right decision-makers with relevant messaging and calls-to-action.

2. Improves scoring models and sends better prospects to sales.

As marketing teams adjust their priorities from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales accepted or sales qualified leads (SQLs), predictive models will help tackle the challenge of improving conversion rates and accelerating sales cycles.

Predictive intelligence accurately determines the buying stage of accounts and prospects by monitoring buying signals gathered by your marketing technology stack and third-party data sources. This data arms marketing teams with the necessary insights to implement data-centric scoring models to surface and prioritize accounts and prospects for sales that are truly in market.

3. Allows companies to enter conversations first.

Predictive intelligence provides visibility into prospects’ research patterns, allowing marketing and sales teams to discover accounts the moment they enter the buying process and better understand the business challenges they’re trying to solve. Being the first vendor to connect with a prospect puts your company in a position of strength. You earn the opportunity to educate the buyer, shape their thinking and help define the scope of the project.

Knowing what challenges your prospects are trying to solve helps capture their interest and develop a trusted advisor relationship. It will also avoid the costly situation where your company enters the sales cycle late and has to fight against pre-existing assumptions and approaches defined by your competitors.

4. Helps companies break into new markets.

Entering a new market or establishing a product category requires a significant level of market research. Predictive helps identify accounts researching products and engaging with content relevant to your company’s offering, allowing your team to build targeted account lists and develop a go-to-market strategy.

Having visibility into how your target prospects are thinking of the business challenges your solution and services address, allows a marketing team to develop and test messaging and positioning in the new market. Data-driven insights will enable you to engage new buyers and have the greatest impact on purchasing decisions.

Reframe Your Company’s Thinking

In the end, it’s important to understand how data can drive results. The best predictive intelligence tools help you:

• Identify prospects early in the buying process, before the competition gets to them;
• Determine the buying stage of all the accounts you could sell to — both existing and net-new;
• Shed light on the most important contacts at those accounts — the true decision makers in the buying committee;
• Decide which prospects to pursue, when to pursue them, and how to get the best engagement to establish a relationship.

As a result, revenues goes up. Win rates go up. Customer satisfaction go up. Your business is booming.

Predictive intelligence is designed to predict your prospects future behavior and decisions. As we all know, what’s true today is not necessarily going to be true six months from now. Prospects’ priorities change. Their business challenges shift. The right predictive vendor will give you complete visibility into your dynamic buyer universe even as the landscape continuously evolves.

Looking to learn more about predictive intelligence? Download our report “The Business Case for Predictive: 4 Talking Points.”

As any small business owner or marketer knows, conference attendance is a big investment which can yield great returns. Achieving those returns is about smart attendance, from scheduling to pre-planning, to what you make of your leads when you are back in the office. Here are some tips for making the most of your investment to secure sales, partnerships, and other opportunities from your hard earned leads.

Choosing the right conference

Attend the right conference and do a poor job and you may still come away with a hundred business cards for leads well-suited to your solution; but do a great job at the wrong conference and any leads earned are unlikely to convert. The certainty that you are attending the right conference comes from a bit of independent research.

A useful tool for quickly qualifying conferences is Demographics Pro, which allows users to compare Twitter audiences. This can be used to make sure that the target audience for your product is the same as likely conference attendees.

As an example, after running an analysis of the @SMExaminer Twitter handle, it is clear that most attendees to the Social Media Marketing World Summit will be social media professionals themselves. For social media managers who are interested in learning from the best, as opposed to securing sales leads, the conference is a great fit.

At the same time, for those selling marketing automation software, this conference is be a perfect target for earning leads. Interest in technology by followers of @SMExaminer is 2.8x higher than the Twitter average, and 27.3% of followers are in sales and marketing.

Planning

Demonstrating your product? Make sure you purchase the right sized booth, and make all of the necessary purchases well ahead of time (carpeting, electricity, etc). Usually none of these “accessories” come free, and forgetting to order them does not make for a good time, especially if you are depending on demonstrating your technology to walk-ins. You can easily figure out what dimensions of booth is right for you using a tool as simple as paint for mapping out a floor plan.

Next, finding out who will be there before attending, and setting up meetings in advance, will make you much more efficient during the conference. Don’t be afraid to reach out to those you want to speak with before the conference even starts. Just be mindful of your approach.

An easy way to succeed in minding your approach is by using the web-tool Crystal. The tool allows you to search almost anyone with an online presence, then uses an artificial intelligence engine to give advice as to how to approach the person you searched. While some specific recommendations may be off, usually the overall theme about a person is impressively accurate.

Lastly, make sure to have enough business cards on-hand, and make sure that there is some blank space on your business cards, as contacts often like to take notes on a card they received.

Gametime

What you do at a conference and how you interact with potential clients matters. Whether you have a booth or are just there for networking, a high level of emotional awareness and good salesmanship will go a long way in securing leads. I have witnessed company executives talking to few people, talking only about their product/solution, and even arguing with others. This is not the way to make a good impression at a conference.

Instead, start a conversation, but let your partner in conversation lead the talking for a bit, and find a good place to introduce your service. The person you are talking to is likely not there looking for a solution; let him or her feel good by being open to their pitch first, then work in your product organically.

As I mentioned before, many conference attendees like to take notes on business cards, and you should too. Have a good reason to call this person? Jot that down. Would an email introduction to your service be better received? Make note of it. Talk about something particularly interesting which can be used as a gateway to a sale? Be sure to remember it. Cold-contacting is not the way to go, especially after you have physically introduced with the lead.

If you aren’t a fan of keeping business cards around, but are a LinkedIn power user (which you should be!) check out Evernote’s business card scanner, which can be used to scan a business card, save the information into Evernote, and then pull up the person’s LinkedIn profile. It makes it easy to secure a long-term connection with those you meet.

And if you are active on Twitter, be sure to use social and join the conversation with relevant hashtags – online introductions can knock down barriers to entry for talking with larger players in your industry, allowing you to demonstrate your insights in a way which might not be as easily accomplished in person.

The post-game show

So, you’ve received a hundred business cards, packed up, and are back at the office. What’s next? I suggest waiting about a week to reach back out to leads to make sure they are also back and on their normal schedule. But if you don’t follow up, you at best have only severely and not completely diminished the ROI of attendance. When following up, be sure to call rather than email as many people as is appropriate – it will better help establish your relationships.

Also, take a couple of hours to note what went well and what didn’t go as well as you would have hoped, and what you can do to improve next time. Then tuck those notes away and review them when planning your next conference. Practice makes perfect!

The Proper Way to Handle a Call in Lead

By Mike Brooks, www.MrInsideSales.com

 

Call in leads can be tricky.  Because reps often equate the implied interest of a call in to being “qualified,” they often skip some important steps.  This can happen to all sales reps and even happened to me recently…

A CEO called me the other day and wanted to know more about the kind of training I offered.  Before I gave him my menu of services, I did what I teach and asked him how he found me, what motivated him to reach out to me, what he was looking for, etc. 

I listened carefully as he revealed, in a candid way, what was happening with his inside sales team and what he as hoping to accomplish. 

After he was done, I went over how I could help him and carefully matched up my customized solutions to each of the points he brought up.  After a pause, he told me he would think about it and reach back out to me.

Now, this is usually the time that I would qualify and close, but I was on vacation when this call took place and was more interested in getting back to the museum tour I was on than I was on closing the deal (I know, shame on me).  But…

When I was back in the office the following Monday, I reached out to this prospect and picked right up where I left off. 

 

Here are two ways of handling a call in lead (the first being what I should have done on the first call, and the second what I did on the next call the following Monday):

 

The proper way to handle the first call:

After first hearing your prospect out and then matching up your product or services to them, you should then begin qualifying and even closing using the following questions and statements:

“What is your timeline for getting this process started?”

[If “As soon as possible”] 

“O.K. – Let me check my schedule: (or your delivery/install schedule, etc.), I see that I could have you on the calendar this coming Wednesday – does that work for you?”

AND

“How does what I’ve described sound to you?”

[If “Sounds good”]

“Great – are you ready to put me to work for you today?”

AND

“Who else have you looked at for this so far?”

[If “You’re the first” or “A couple of people”]

“How does our solution sound to you?”

[If “Sounds good”]

“Great – then let’s look at our calendars and pick a date to get started…

AND

“If this sounds good to you, are you in a position to get started today?”

[If “I’ll have to run this by (whomever)”]

“I understand.  Does what we’ve just gone over sound good to you so far?”

[If “Yes”]

“O.K.  Then let’s go ahead and schedule a time to speak with (whomever they mentioned) and that way I’ll be able to answer their questions as well…”

 

Do you see how I’m moving the call to either a close or setting up the next step?  At each phase I’m taking their pulse and directing and keeping control of the call.

 

If you missed asking these questions on the first call, then here’s how you handle the call back: 

“Hi this is ________ and I just wanted to get back with you regarding our last call.  Now I know you were interested in (your service or product), and I don’t know if you’ve spoken to other companies or where you are in the process….” 

[Now hit mute and listen…]

AND

“Hi this is ________ and I wanted to get back with you regarding our last call.  Now I know you were interested in (your service or product), and I wanted to know what your timeline for getting started with this is…”

[Now hit mute and listen…] 

And

“Hi this is ________ and I wanted to get back with you regarding our last call.  Now I know you were interested in (your service or product), and I wanted to know what other questions you might have are…”

[Now hit mute and listen…]

 

Based on what their answers are to the above questions, you can pick up where you left off last time and resume asking the questions from the first set listed above (direct and control the call towards the close). 

 

Either way, just remember that when you receive a call in lead, you need to still qualify and close.  And if you forget or get rushed off the phone, the key is to call back within a day or two.  And when you do, take the call as far as you can using the scripts above.

 

If you found this article helpful, then you'll love Mike's Completely Updated and Revised eBook, “The Complete Book of Phone Scripts.” Now over 130 pages of powerful and effective scripts to help you easily get past the gatekeeper, set appointments, overcome objections and close more money!

Visit: http://mrinsidesales.com/completescripts.htm and find out why Jeffrey Gitomer, Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins and many others recommend Mike’s ebook of Phone Scripts!

Do you have an underperforming inside sales team?  Talk to Mike to see how he can help you and your team reach your revenue goals.  To learn more about Mike, visit his website: http://www.MrInsideSales.com

 

I don’t think I’ve ever called or emailed a salesperson back. Normally, when I hear from someone trying to sell something to me, I’ll just ignore the message, and move on without really thinking about it. The immediate reaction in my head is just delete.

After thinking about my behavior, I’ve identified eight main reasons why I tend not to answer salespeople. And while I can’t speak for the entire public, I’m betting that B2B buyers share most of my beliefs.

So before you send out another email, consider the following reasons you might not hear back.

1) I don’t know who you are.

According to a poll from CBS News and The New York Times, just 30% of Americans say people are trustworthy. The odds that someone is going to feel comfortable responding to an email from a person they don’t know are low.

In order to change this perception, start by becoming familiar to your prospects. Build a rapport through mutual connections or by interacting with them online, and then send your initial email.

2) Unclear or uninteresting subject line.

Convince and Convert found that 33% of emails are opened on subject line alone. That means one-third of your emails aren’t getting opened simply because you went with, “let’s talk about [enter product name].”

To make an impact, according to the statistics, your subject lines should be less than 30 characters, include the person’s name, and create a sense of urgency or exclusivity. Bad email subject lines can cut out one-third of your audience before they even read your email.

3) I don’t need your product (or I don't know that I need it).

Sometimes a rep will email a prospect in hopes of convincing them to buy a product they don’t need. In other instances, the prospect could benefit from the product, but the rep does a poor job of selling it as a solution to the prospect’s pain point. Both of these mistakes can result in a prospect not getting back to the sales rep.

The moment that a customer decides that they don’t need your service to solve a pain point, they will move on. To avoid the first mistake, focus on attracting good fit customers and reaching out to buyers who have already demonstrated interest instead of spamming any and all leads you can find. To avoid the second, make the connection between your prospect’s pain point and your offering crystal clear and compelling.

4) I’m not sure why you’re reaching out.

Unclear messaging is the Achilles heel of sales emails and calls. If you’re unable to clearly explain who you are and what you want in one sentence, odds are you’ll lose listeners and prospects, says Patricia Fripp.

Before you reach out to a prospect, identify your mission and the one thing you want to get across. This makes your value clear and gives them a concrete reason to respond to your message.

5) I don’t know the next step.

What’s the step you’d like me to take as a result of this email? Without including clear instructions, the email is pointless.

The call to action in any email is what drives curiosity and moves a prospect into the next phase of the buyer’s journey. Next steps to include could be a calendar invite, a question to answer, or simply seeking feedback on what they’ve read so far.

6) I’ve already spoken to you … several times.

More than one-fourth of buyers say their biggest sales pet peeve is dealing with a rep who doesn’t respect their buying process, according to HBR. Reps who email too frequently and try to persuade are learning that buyers shy away from these types of high-pressure messages.

Each buyer goes through their own individual journey in order to become a customer. Instead of trying to get prospects to buy on your timeline, respect their process and only reach out when you have something of value to provide.

7) I don’t need information from you.

While sales reps used to boast information that their prospects didn’t have, the modern rep no longer has that advantage. Today, prospects are going through nearly 60% of the buyer’s journey before they talk to a rep. A quick Google search can help this person gather all the information they need without talking to a sales rep.  

If all your email offers is information easily found on your company’s website, you probably won’t hear back.

8) I’m not ready to make a decision yet.

The final and most important part of the sales process is the decision. While some folks can quickly go through the funnel, others take their time and move slowly.

Reps who send emails that try to force the decision will likely end up scaring away the buyer. Instead, offer guidance and assistance as the buyer goes through their journey and honor the fact that they’ll make a decision when they’re ready.

In the past, salespeople relied on persuasion and persistence to move prospects through the funnel. With modern buyers, these tactics simply don’t work.

Hard sales tactics are losing their effectiveness. And while you can continue to try these methods, I’m here to tell you: You probably won’t hear back.

At the end of 2014, I put together a blog post on my predictions for 2015 and talked about how marketing automation was going to continue to move upstream and take over more and more of the value sales reps provide in the sales process. I went into more detail with a follow-up post titled Death of the Average Sales rep. For 2016, I don’t see this trend slowing down in any way. As a matter of fact, I see it accelerating even faster.

Consolidation of Sales Tools

It seems like there is a new sales enablement / automation tool coming out every day at this point. It’s almost impossible to keep them all straight or understand which one fits at which stage of the sales process and how they work together without overlapping and getting in each other’s way. My prediction (and hope) is that in 2016 we’re going to start to see some consolidation of these tools and more holistic solutions instead of point solutions. I’m not sure if this will be accomplished more through acquisition or by some of these companies evolving their solutions themselves. My gut tells me it’s going to be more of the latter and by the end of 2016 there will be a few players who have evolved to the point of having a more complete solution. Then in 2017 I think we’ll start to see the acquisition and IPO market heat up for some of the larger ones.

Further Automation of Sales Processes

With this evolution of these sales tools along with the continued evolution of the marketing automation tools we’re going to see even more and more automation of the sales process. I read an article posted by Salesforlife where they talked about how a large portion of the sales process will be automated by 2020. A lot of people are probably going to hate me for this prediction but I think the SDR role (the one that only deals with inbound leads) is going to turn into a salaried position by 2020 and will be considered more of a customer service role than a sales role. The reason I say this is because Marketing automation is just going to get better and more targeted which is going to lead to higher quality inbound leads from people who know more about what they want than ever. As a former VP of Sales I don’t understand why I would spend so much money investing in one of those tools, hire someone or a team of people to manage it, optimize the hell out of it to drive high quality leads and then pay commission to a rep who probably knows less about the product than the client does and is just there to ask “how many would you like?” It doesn’t make much sense to me.

AI, Predictive Analytics & Profiling Impact Sales

The last prediction I’ll throw out is how we’re going to start to see Artificial Intelligence, Predictive Analytics and profiling have a significant impact on our lives and on Sales. There is some cool albeit scary stuff going on in these areas right now. When you have people like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates warning us about Artificial Intelligence we might want to start paying attention. Are you seeing those IBM/Watson commercials? Yup, that thing is getting scary smart. Did anyone read the article about Tesla drivers and how all of a sudden drivers woke up one day with an automated driving feature installed? I guarantee within 2 years you’re next Uber ride will be from a driverless car. With Predictive Analytics I’m starting to see tools that are looking at your pipeline and proactively identify deals that are in danger and providing recommendations on what to do. Profiling is going to a whole new level with tools like Crystal where you don’t even need someone to answer questions any more to help figure out how they like to be communicate with. All this stuff is just going to get more and more integrated into our daily lives and impact everything we do, including sales.

The question we need to continue to ask ourselves is “what can we do that a computer can’t?” It’s getting harder and harder to answer that question but more and more important. For those of you who are still blasting out template e-mails, making generic cold calls, trying to hit 50+ dials a day, asking basic BANT questions, pressing play on demos and simply going through the motions with Sales….good luck.

Evolve or die. Make it happen!

This post originally appeared on jbarrows.com, a resource center and online portal all aimed at helping sales reps stay more relevant.

The post Sales Predictions to Make 2016 Your Most Successful Year Ever appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The year 2015 was a pivotal time when humanity turned more decisively toward building a thriving and sustainable world. On our largest shared challenge, climate change, most of the major hurdles to action — both imagined and real – started to crumble. And an unlikely group of new voices joined the fight. From the Pope to global CEOs to almost all the world’s political leaders, the most powerful people got on board.

It was a year of amazing progress — mostly. Here are eight cross-cutting themes and stories from 2015 that are driving us toward a sustainable world (and two that are doing the opposite):

1. The Pope reminds us that we’re all connected. The Pope’s encyclical, Laudito Si, is a manifesto asking that we reconsider how we treat each other in a threatened and divided world. He challenged the current form of capitalism and made a powerful case for tackling climate change and inequality on moral and economic grounds (I’ve summarized his paper here and here).

The Pope is, at least nominally, the moral leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics around the world. His voice carries enormous heft with all leaders. By adding a weighty moral dimension to the discussions of climate and equity, and for linking them effectively, I believe his manifesto and continued vocal support for the issues make this the top story of the year.

Ideas can affect the world more deeply than even historic treaties or agreements. Consider that other power brokers, such as Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank, echoed themes similar to those the Pope raised. Kim said in September, “we have no hope of ending extreme poverty unless we tackle climate change.”

2. In Paris, all countries say with one voice, “We will tackle climate change.” The deal reached on December 12 might be one of the first times in history that representatives of every human being on earth agreed on, well, anything. It’s big news and a very good start, but the deal has a major flaw: the commitments will not keep the world from warming 1.5 degrees Celsius, or even 2 degrees (the stated long-term goals). That said, with 187 countries pledging collective action to cut carbon emissions, the deal will have vast repercussions for business, particularly as governments put into place policies to remake our energy, transportation, and building systems.

The lead-up to Paris gave us a taste of what’s to come. For example, China committed to implement a carbon cap and trade system, Britain said it would phase out coal plants by 2025, and President Obama vetoed the Keystone pipeline. Besides possibly saving humanity, the deal has another big upside — it signals to financial markets and businesses that the low carbon economy is worth investing in. Multi-trillion-dollar markets are in play and there will be many more winners than losers.

3. Companies line up like never before for climate action. One of the reasons the Paris talks succeeded was the clear support of the business community. CEOs from some of the world’s largest companies put out public statements backing a strong climate deal. Sectors calling for action included banking (Bank of America, Citi, Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo), the apparel industry (including Levi, Gap, Adidas, VF), and the World Economic Forum, which brought 79 CEOs together to urge action. Even oil giants from Europe (including BP, Eni, Shell, Statoil, Total) advocated for a price on carbon.

Some big names went even further than this nudging and took direct action to lower their carbon emissions and costs by buying large amounts of renewable energy. The giants contracting for hundreds of megawatts of wind and solar included Apple, HP, Kaiser Permanente, Google, Dow, Amazon, and Owens Corning. Many of these companies are also shooting to use only renewables.

4. Companies and global governing bodies set visionary global goals. Goals matter. Big, aggressive targets drive organizations (like the ones above) and countries forward. And we’ve seen a lot of them this year.

To start, the UN, in a parallel with the climate negotiations, released in September the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals. Also called the Global Goals, these 17 statements (and 169 targets) create a vision and destination for building a thriving world — no poverty, zero hunger, health and well-being, equity and equality, and action on climate change, just to name a few.

Many companies also set visionary goals this year, often based on science — and some achieved big targets like Coca-Cola’s 100% water replenishment goal. A few examples:

• Dow put forth 2025 targets “to help redefine the role of business in society,” which aim to deliver breakthrough innovations and help build the circular economy.
• More than 50 large companies have joined RE100, a group committing to use 100% renewable power (disclosure: I’m on the RE100 steering committee).
• Unilever said it would go even further and generate more energy than it needs by 2030 (and exit coal by 2020).
• Google will buy two gigawatts of renewable power (that’s a lot).
• More than 100 big companies signed on to follow science-based targets for reducing emissions.
• The White House has gathered 154 companies (and growing) to make hundreds of specific commitments to reduce carbon and buy renewable power.

This all leads to a huge breakthrough:

5. The vision of an all-renewable energy system comes into focus. In November, two professors from Stanford and the University of California at Davis mapped out how 139 countries could rely entirely on renewable energy by 2050. As the progress countries and companies are making shows, this isn’t just science mixed with wishful thinking. The world has already begun the shift — and the numbers bear it out.

Of all the new power generation built globally over the past two years, renewable sources accounted for over half. In the U.S., in the first six months of 2015, 70% was renewable. This is in part because every clean energy technology is rapidly getting cheaper. As Bloomberg reported in August, for example, “fossil fuels [are] losing cost advantage over solar, wind.” This means that solar will reach the point where it costs the same as traditional options — what’s called “grid parity” — in 80% of the world by 2017. To keep the renewable sector humming along toward that economic watershed mark here in the U.S., the congress passed tax credits for solar and wind at the last minute this year.

6. Wall Street wakes up. For years, asset owners with longer-term horizons, like pension or sovereign wealth funds, have pressed companies to better manage environmental and social issues. This year, the shorter-term investors (shorthand: “Wall Street”) started to join in.

Blackrock, with $4.7 trillion in assets, has been pushing the investment community to get serious on climate. Larry Fink, Blackrock’s CEO, also sent a letter in April to S&P 500 CEOs suggesting that they invest more for the long-term and stop putting so much money into stock buybacks and dividends (a $1 trillion boondoggle for investors this year). And at Morgan Stanley (in what I believe was a first), an analyst raised the stock price target for companies — in this case three apparel giants (Nike, Hanesbrands, and VF) — based on how well they manage environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues.

In other investor news, the fossil fuel divestment movement grew quickly, gathering together universities, cities, and other institutions that have more than $3 trillion in assets. And Bill Gates gathered some friends to create the largest clean energy fund in history to invest in R&D. So-called “impact investing” is moving out of the niche world and into the mainstream. Blackrock, again, created a new ESG-friendly mutual fund.

7. Consumers (finally) show interest in sustainable products. Blackrock’s new fund was specifically aimed at Millennials, the group of workers and consumers that are demanding more environmental and socially sound products. A Morgan Stanley report found that Millennials are twice as likely to buy from brands with good management of environmental and social issues, and twice as likely to check product packaging for sustainability performance. For packaged goods and food in particular, it’s the era of what many call the “clean label.” It’s a sweeping change in expectations, as people want to know how everything is sourced, made, and delivered.

There’s real money here for the good actors. Mega-retailer Target, for example, assesses thousands of products it sells and scores them on sustainability performance. For a segment of the highest-ranked products, sold under the “Made to Matter” banner, sales at Target are growing much faster than regular products (and will total $1 billion this year). And Walmart took a fascinating step, trying to help choosy customers by labeling thousands of more sustainable products online as “Made by a Sustainability Leader.”

8. Companies challenged, and were challenged by, their supply chains. For many sectors, supply chains are becoming both a major source of risk and also an opportunity for positive change. The food business is an important case study. At a UN event I moderated in Paris, the CEO of Kellogg’s talked about the risk to the company’s supply chain from climate change. It’s one reason that the food giant set a new carbon reduction goal for its whole value chain – as did competitor General Mills.

Why? The previously mentioned clean label movement is a key part of what the New York Times called “a seismic shift in how people eat.” This shift in consumer demand is rippling up through supply chains as food giants race to change the food system. This year McDonalds experimented with organic beef, Subway committed to buying antibiotic-free meat (following many others in the sector as well as Perdue and Tyson), General Mills said it will drop artificial flavors and colors from cereals, as will Kraft with its mac and cheese. The list goes on, and the trend won’t stop at food and personal care products.

In addition to these steps forward, 2015, like all years, included some steps back.

9. Commodities continue their relentless plunge in price. During the 20th century, the price of nearly everything that goes into making our society – energy, metals, food, and so on – dropped steadily. Then from 2000 to 2014, everything got wildly more expensive, doubling and tripling at least. But since the end of last year, the prices of most commodities have plummeted. Oil is nearing a 14 year low.

This massive shift has many fathers, from overproduction and over-investment in capacity to a general slowdown in China’s economy. And it’s worth noting that lower costs are good for most businesses (except commodity producers) in the short-term. But the rising cost of doing business was a core driver of the move to a more circular, sustainable economy. The logic of tight resources has not vanished, and investments in renewables have not slowed as much as lower fossil fuel energy prices would’ve suggested. But making investments in dematerializing value chains, or in designing products for end-of-life, is harder to justify right now. That’s unfortunate in the long run.

10. VW cheats and Exxon’s true colors. Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” VW quickly learned this this harsh truth when it came out that the company had cheated on emissions tests to make its diesel cars seem cleaner burning. Credit Suisse says VW’s actions could cost the company $86 billion, and sales in November in the U.S. dropped 25%.

But this story does not call into question every sustainable product claim out there. No, this was about fraud. But it does perhaps make diesel less compelling as a clean transportation technology. VW found it was difficult to achieve high fuel efficiency, power/torque, and low emissions … but not impossible. It turns out, by the way, you can get all three: just look at Tesla.

And as for Exxon, it was the least surprising “scandal” of the year that the company knew about climate change for decades and spent millions of dollars calling the science into question. At least the exposure of VW’s and Exxon’s misdeeds demonstrates that transparency is a powerful tool coming for everyone.

Looking Back — and Forward

This year will likely go down as the time we began, in earnest, to make some important and deep changes in “business as usual.” Climate change is becoming an accepted reality to address; renewable energy is starting to outcompete fossil fuels; the private sector is taking the lead in building more sustainable products and pleasing ever-more demanding customers and workers; and investors are following the money toward a cleaner economy.

The coming year will be filled with more companies facing global challenges and considering tough questions about their purpose and role in society. I look forward to a fascinating and more sustainable year to come.

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2015 was the year “political correctness,” formerly a leftover catchphrase from the 1990s, came back into the mainstream. From Jonathan Chait’s widely shared New York magazine article “Not a very PC thing to say,” to Amanda Taub’s Vox magazine rebuttal, “The truth about political correctness is that it doesn’t actually exist,” everyone was arguing about the explosion of identity politics and whether it’s a good or bad thing. But the argument has only begun, and 2016 may be the year it starts to take over everything, all the time. “The attitude that we have outgrown the need for rights and agreeing to disagree is now moving beyond the campus,” says William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books.

Even those who think PC is overstated as a problem think it will get even more overstated next year. “I do think that the narrative of ‘political correctness run amok’ will become increasingly prevalent in the next few years,” says Nancy Leong, a law professor at the University of Denver. Here’s how we may see these arguments play out in every walk of life.

PC will be an electoral issue

Political correctness has only started to become an issue in electoral politics, but it’s bound to take off when the U.S. presidential election becomes the focus of world news next year. Two political outsiders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, have already done well by setting themselves up as scourges of PC. Carson has built his entire campaign around denouncing political correctness, the idea that there are conservative truths being suppressed by liberal taboos: Carson even answered a question about increased drug abuse by blaming it on the fact that we’re “throwing away all our values and principles for the sake of political correctness.”

Even if Trump or Carson don’t get nominated, the eventual Republican nominee will notice that there is electoral gold in the fear that some opinions will become unacceptable. Around the world, leaders are trying to appeal to voters by portraying themselves as politically incorrect truth-tellers.

Sometimes it doesn’t work: Stephen Harper tried to get some of the anti-PC vote when he came out against the niqab, and wound up losing to Justin Trudeau and his proud cultural liberalism. But sometimes it works: just ask Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned the electorate that “Arab voters are heading to the polls in droves”—and coasted to re-election. There may be a significant share of the electorate who will vote for the man or woman who says the things you’re not supposed to say.

More campus drama than ever

People spent 2015 complaining about college students’ use of medicalized terms to refer to their offended reactions: safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions became popular topics, and led to a popular essay in The Atlantic, “The coddling of the American mind”—a riff on the 1980s conservative classic The Closing of the American Mind—arguing that there’s something wrong with the kids today.

But in 2016, this language is likely to get even more prevalent—not because students are hypersensitive, but because it works on hypersensitive college administrators. If students express concern about a hostile atmosphere on campus, the school is likely to ignore them. If they say they were triggered or felt an implied threat, that leaves the school open to charges of negligence and possible government intervention. We may see students use this type of phrasing not because they’re getting coddled, but because they’re getting more clever.

Identity-based cultural criticism

The PC wars are, if anything, even stronger in the world of cultural coverage. Arts websites have discovered their readership is interested in issues like lack of diversity in the works they cover; it became common this year to see headlines like Jezebel’s “The Coen brothers’ new movie Hail Caesar! looks very funny, and very white,” chiding the filmmakers’ 2016 movie for being about a white-dominated Hollywood studio in the 1940s.

Those who disagree with this approach have created a sort of counterestablishment in the form of conservative journals that push back against “social justice warriors” in arts journalism. One very conservative website, Breitbart, just launched an entire vertical, Breitbart Tech, devoted to attacking what its readers see as political correctness in gaming and tech coverage. Meanwhile, The Dissolve, a website devoted to mostly aesthetic movie criticism, went belly up in 2015. In a creaky publishing economy, the PC wars may be the only thing that can reliably bring in readers and advertisers. And when something makes money, we get more of it.

It will dominate art

Artists will also notice that this topic provides something most art has lacked in recent years: a galvanizing issue they can use to stay relevant. South Park, a show that had spent the last few seasons stumbling around without much of a satiric purpose, returned to form in 2015 by making the new political correctness the theme of an entire 10-episode run. They parodied all the catchphrases like “safe spaces,” and even occasionally dared to hint that the forces of PC might have a point about the show being a relic of another era.

Other shows have recently addressed the subject from less conservative perspectives. The comedy Black-ish was rapturously reviewed for an episode where the characters argued over when it is acceptable to use a certain radioactive word. And comedian Jerrod Carmichael had unexpected critical success with his eponymous sitcom, about the divisions within a black family over issues of race and gender. These shows don’t preach too much—okay, South Park does, but it always has—but by taking on identity politics and language issues from different perspectives, they feel at one with our time in a way that most entertainment doesn’t. Expect writers and producers to notice that they can get a lot more attention taking on race than doing jokes about iPhones.

We will question everything

Near the end of the year, the Metropolitan Opera unveiled a new production of Verdi’s operatic version of Shakespeare’s Othello, and for the first time, it didn’t use dark makeup for the Caucasian singer playing the lead. Not long afterward, playwright Roy Ellis cancelled the Halifax production of his play Black Dragon Mountain because of objections to Caucasian actors playing Chinese characters. These and many other incidents reflect a growing trend: people are noticing and rooting out implicit biases in everything, even things that have gone on mostly unchallenged for a long time.

Leong points out that many countries have seen “an increase in the number of people from historically underrepresented groups such as women and people of colour in positions of power.” Which means that complaints about stereotyping are no longer as likely to be ignored, no matter where they are, and something that seemed acceptable yesterday may turn out to be unacceptable today. “There’s no rule book,” Ellis told Global News, “that you can look at and say, ‘What is culturally appropriate?’ ” In 2016, the grandfather clause—the idea that some things should be accepted because they’ve gone on for so long—will, for better or for worse, be over. (And it probably shouldn’t be called a “grandfather” clause anymore.)

Academic language will be in

One of the most talked-about books of 2015 was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, a personal view of race in America, where he frequently made reference to “the black body” and referred to white people as “people who think they are white.” It wasn’t an academic book at all, but it used these academic-sounding concepts casually, as part of normal language, and readers had no problem understanding. It was one of many signs that what used to be dismissed as college jargon is now part of regular English. The webzine Vox circulated a code of conduct urging its employees to refrain from “mansplaining,” a word that went from feminist meme to everyday conversation almost instantly.

Terms that used to be just for the classroom or chat groups are going to enter the common language, and this may cause more friction: some of these terms have often been useful in describing systemic problems, but individuals can’t help but take it personally when they’re told they’re part of a “rape culture.” But social media is breaking down the barriers between college and the so-called real world. In 2016, the way we talk may resemble the way college professors write.

Everyone will be angrier

People often fight harder when they’re frustrated, and the PC wars may be a case where both sides believe the status quo is rigged against them. William Voegeli thinks the left has been “embittered and radicalized” by the disappointments of the Obama years, and that they have “the feeling that playing the game by the rules of liberal democracy has yielded unsatisfactory results.” But Leong points out that the anti-PC backlash we’re seeing now is a product of “a lot of anxiety by members of historically powerful groups—namely, white men—about losing power and status.” Both sides, in other words, may be arguing from a position of insecurity. That’s when arguments get hottest.

The post Why the new PC wars will change the way we speak appeared first on Macleans.ca.

4 Steps to Increase Your Sales Pitch’s ROI

By Mark Scrivner

 

No matter how diverse your recruiting efforts, every sales team struggles with three chronic close-stopping challenges: confidence in the pitch, self-assurance, and readiness.

The simple fact is that audiences buy from salespeople who portray confidence, in both their personal presentations and in the consistency of the documents and proposals they present. Sales teams who hit the road lacking confidence — whether they appear intimidated by the customer or shuffle nervously to find the right documents — send a clear message: “Don’t buy from me because even I don’t know what I’m saying.”

 

Hundreds of resources exist for learning how to become a better salesperson. However, figuring out how to help each member of your sales team increase his effectiveness is a little more difficult. These four tactics will help your sales team gain confidence, prepare quickly, and boost the return on investment for every sales pitch:

 

1. Develop a consistent sales enablement process. Take a look at the big picture of how you prepare your sales team. Do you have a consistent process? Do your salespeople understand the basic steps for preparing and delivering a branded sales pitch?

The most effective sales enablement initiative will simplify the process for the sales team and provide clear objectives in line with your brand message. Create a clear procedure for your team, directly communicate it, and provide the best tools to set team members up for success by asking what would be most useful to them.

 

2. Provide professional and accessible cloud-based sales materials. Do your salespeople know where to find all the proper documents, materials, and data they need to create and prepare for a pitch? And is all that material up-to-date and in line with the company’s branding?

Preparation and readiness directly contribute to a salesperson’s sense of confidence, including her ability to maintain a positive attitude in the face of fear. Professional materials and deep preparation can also turn the conversation in your team’s favor before anyone speaks. In fact, as we’ve gone through the sales process, our clients have told us, “Your proposals look so buttoned-up that we knew the work we were going to receive would be buttoned-up, too.”

Empower your team with cloud-based access to professionally designed sales materials. Attending the meeting prepared will allow your sales team to spend more time checking in with the buyer, asking questions, and building relationships — three important steps in high-ROI sales conversations. 

 

3. Deploy analytics to inform your sales practices. Research is an important step in the sales cycle that often gets overlooked. After all, doing your homework makes you more likely to close the deal. And the more you know about the client, the more likely your sales team will be to address their unique concerns and questions.

Enter: sales analytics, which will help you zero in on a client’s unique needs and interests and compile information about how that client interacts with your sales material.

For example, when a salesperson sends a presentation embedded with this kind of technology, he knows when clients open it and which slides they click on. These analytical data tell salesperson when the client clicks on the pricing page. The salesperson can then follow up with a targeted message such as, “Hey, a lot of people question some of the pricing models we have behind this. I just wanted to see if I could take a second to elaborate on how we’ve laid it all out.”

 

4. Combine your efforts into one effective sales enablement tool. A sales enablement tool by itself won’t transform your sales team. However, a tool that helps you solve your client’s problems more efficiently is worth its weight in gold. So wrap up all your ideas into one tool that will boost the confidence and preparedness of your team.

The right sales enablement tool for your team will empower your salespeople with confidence and streamline the overall sales process, saving your team time and money and improving its overall effectiveness.  

A great sales analytics tool can boost the ROI of a sales team in just one project, and it can decrease the time it could take to build a PowerPoint presentation. The time savings then leads to savings in resources, money, and preparation, increasing the overall ROI at no expense to your sales teams’ sense of preparation or readiness.

 

Confidence and preparation are simple concepts that can have a great impact on the results your sales team can deliver. Arm your team with soft skills and sales enablement tools that will boost both readiness and confidence for every sales engagement. With the right tools, your team will always be ready for the pitch, leading to a renewed sense of confidence to close the deal.

 

Mark Scrivner is the founder and CEO of ECOS, a cloud-based, digital presentation platform that helping bridge the gap between sales and marketing. Mark is also the founder and COO of SnapShot Interactive, a Nashville-based, full-service digital agency that provides high-quality video production, award-winning web design and development, and creative online marketing strategies. 

So, you’re getting visitors to your site? Great!

But not enough are turning into leads? Not so great..

There’s no getting away from it, lead generation is a tricky business and it takes a lot of work to perfect and get right.

The thing is, approx. 96% of visitors to your site are not ready to buy, which immediately starts you off on the back foot. Not what you want to hear when you’re already struggling for leads. What you need are some steps to take to help you turn those visitors into leads.

Below are five steps to lead generation success…

Step One: Keep things Simple

Once people are on your website you want to encourage them to do something, not just read and leave. That’s why you need well designed and positioned calls to action. Don’t confuse your visitors, make sure you keep things simple; to help you with this take a look at this blog I wrote for Publi.sh on the “4 ingredients of all great calls to action“.

Once you have a well designed CTA, make sure you position it clearly for your visitors to see. Once they click your CTA then it needs to then take them to a well designed landing page. The landing page should include a form for entering their details, in order for them to access whatever led them to this landing page.

Step Two: Make them an offer they can’t refuse

This is the bit that actually gets them clicking on that CTA because even if your CTA button is beautifully designed, they’ll be less likely to click it if you’re offering something irrelevant or of no use to them.

Also, whatever you’re offering needs to be worth them giving up their details for. It needs to be more than the content you used to get them to your site i.e. blogs, infographics, or video content. Instead it should be more valuable content like ebooks, white papers, or instructional videos.

But just creating valuable content alone isn’t always enough. As with anything in life, if there’s an option to come back to it at a later date, we will. Include some urgency and we may be encouraged to carry out the action now. The same applies with your content, offer it for a limited time or with added quantity for a limited time, and see your leads soar.

Step Three: Ensure content is relevant to your industry

The best way to ensure your content is relevant is by using SEO tactics. Look at what is topical when creating your content and carry out keyword checks.

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable and high return activities you can carry out, as ranking for the right keywords can make it much easier for you to get the right audience to your website.

The following tools will be useful in helping you to achieve this:

• Google AdWords: Keyword Planner
• Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool
• Google Trends
• Buzzsumo

Step Four: Use social

77% of B2B marketers say they have acquired a customer through Facebook, which is pretty huge. But what’s even more impressive is that Linkedin is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook, or Twitter put together.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t use Facebook or Twitter as part of your overall content marketing plan, but you should judge which social channels will be most appropriate for your choice of audience.

It could be a mix of the social media channels that works best for you, but the key is to promote your content in a way that is entertaining and best suited to each platform. The other thing is to not only share your own content, but to get the balance just right and post links to entertaining content that relates to your audiences interests.

For more information on getting the balance in social sharing check out this blog we did, “How to use the 5:3:2 Rule for Social Sharing“.

Step Five: Prepare for how you will nurture the leads you get

It’s all well and good collecting these leads, but if you don’t have a plan in place for how you intend to nurture them into customers then you’ll have wasted your time. This is all a part of the marketing methodology and one part is no good without the other.

With this in mind, here is a quick run down of what to have in place for when you need to nurture your leads as it’s not a one size fits all process.

• Email marketing is key for lead nurturing and there are some great email marketing companies out there that help you target and personalise your emails. Check out this blog to give you the lo-down on “7 of the best email marketing apps“.
• Blog management is something you can do with your email marketing by creating blog content that is more suited to those leads who are closer to a purchase.
• Social Media works at every step of your marketing funnel and you can use it to share the blogs directed at converting leads into customers.

For more information on the marketing methodology check out this blog, “How to site visitors into paying customers“.

Closing Thoughts

Getting your sales funnel filled with leads is great for validating your marketing efforts, and when it’s done with the above tactics, everyone benefits.

However, as marketers we don’t feel the pressure to always deliver qualified leads – so hopefully following these steps will make it that bit easier to ensuring that we do.

If there’s anything you think we’ve missed or that we could elaborate on leave us a comment!

By Téa Silvestre Godfrey, {grow} Community Member

It’s been a little over two years since Mark Schaefer coined the term “Content Shock” and about 9 months since he wrote the book that outlined a slew of great ideas to help us survive this mega-trend of overwhelming content density.

But he left out one seriously crucial point.

In fact it is a point Mark often practices himself, but he hasn’t articulated it.

And (besides his practice of keeping it real and staying human) it’s at the heart of how he stands out in a saturated content marketplace.

So why didn’t he include it in his book? Why doesn’t he tell you about it in his blog posts?

Mark does it so naturally that I bet he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Because, hey, when you’re that close to it, it’s easy to miss.

How leaders rise above the noise

He did it when he named the elephant in the content marketing room (Content Shock).

He did it when he took an unemotional and academic pro-Klout stance in Return on Influence.

And he does it every time he shares his thoughts on why things are the way they are — and what we might do differently, if we want better results.

The “it” in question is his ability to think differently — creatively — about any given situation, but most important, have the courage to actually say it.

In the past, we might have called it something cliché like “thought leadership,” but it involves so much more than being an influencer (or someone who does a lot of public speaking or writing).

For now, let’s call it “thinking around corners.”

The Proof is in the Pudding

The Content Shock post was the shot heard ‘round the internet, right?

People showed up in droves to comment (1,300+ comments on his post), share (3,000+ shares), and respond by writing their own blog posts on the topic (more than 1,000 to date).

In short, Mark expressed and opinion that got noticed. Big time.

He didn’t decide to pick an unsaturated niche and start there. He just looked closely at what was going on around him, poked the box (as Seth Godin would say), and then shared his thoughts with us.

Was it controversial? Not really. It was a topic that seemed to be on almost everybody’s mind. He just … poked it.

How do you poke the box in your corner of the world?

In the past, our marketing experts implored us to use content marketing as a way to establish our “authority.” The idea was to gain trust by showing off our expertise.

“Write fabulously helpful how-to content,” they said.

That, too, was great advice. At the time.

But today, we need something more than 20 best practices for amplifying your message.

What’s missing is an emphasis on crafting a creative message in the first place.

And usually that’s because creativity isn’t something you can learn via a simple blog post (although I’ll attempt to teach you some of that in a minute).

The difference is … your difference

Success means something more than zagging when everyone else is zigging.

Being different is simple, but not easy. The trick is you must set aside regular time and energy to BE CURIOUS.

Here are seven practices to help you break out of the dreaded echo-chamber and approach your content marketing from a deeper and more impactful place:

1. Question everything (and be willing to dig for answers).

Look at your industry with a beginner’s mind and take note of what your colleagues are saying. Is everyone beating the same drum? Are those best practices still useful? Is the world really flat? How do you know? Where’s the proof? Make a list of all those tactics and ideas and write about them. Take them one at a time and examine every detail. Ask a lot of “Why?” questions. Why do we do that way? Why is this important? Why aren’t we challenging the status quo? See if you can pinpoint something that needs changing. Or something that’s no longer appropriate.

2. Study industries outside your own.

How do other types of professionals approach issues? How do they market themselves? Pick an industry you’re not at all comfortable with and study it. Notice what limits they work within; or conversely, what boundaries they choose to ignore. Allow their perspectives to become yours — just for a day. How could you approach your own goals (or your clients’) differently?

3. Look for patterns and echoes.

Connect the dots. This takes a bit of time, so be willing and patient enough to spend the necessary hours thinking.

Pretend you’re Sherlock Holmes or Carrie from Homeland attempting to solve a mystery of great import. What’s the story beneath the story? Or the story that all those pieces — together — are trying to tell you? For example, when you write your first draft of a blog post, there’s a point you’re trying to make.

The most effective way to do that is to use a story as a way to show what you mean. You might even weave two or three mini-stories together. On their surface, these stories help you make that main point, but there might be a deeper, more meaningful lesson that emerges. As you write, ask yourself, “Why is this important?” And keep asking until you can go no further.

4. Say what others are only thinking.

As soon as you notice yourself become fearful of saying a thing out loud — because it might ruffle someone’s influence feathers or be received as bad news — you know you’re on to something big! Don’t be afraid to point out the elephant in the room or the naked emperor. Be childlike in your willingness to shine a light on something, and be an adult in your willingness to own the consequences.

5. Propose solutions.

It’s not enough to rant and complain. You’ve also got to bring options. What else can we do? What other paths might we take? This is where you’ll outshine the others who merely point fingers. This is where you become a Business Luminary.

6. Release your grasp on an expected outcome.

As soon as you decide that your end-goal (for example, writing something that goes viral) is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing, you kill your ability to think creatively. Innovation emerges from a place that doesn’t hold onto an expected outcome, but rather allows for play and experimentation. It needs a place where you’re free to ask questions and are willing to be vulnerable.

7. Listen to feedback.

Great ideas aren’t born in a vacuum or clarified on your own. You need the give-and-take of a conversation (sometimes many!) to help you refine your thoughts and test them. Listen to your customers, colleagues, masterminds, and mentors. Be willing to be wrong. And be brave enough to take a stand, when you’re right.

Don’t rest on your laurels.

Things change so quickly these days that once you’ve led everyone in a new direction, it won’t be the new direction for long. At best you’ll have one, maybe two years of being the industry leader on a topic before someone else comes along with a different way of looking at the situation. This is exactly how echo-chambers are born. Continue to assess and ask questions.

If good content marketing and brand storytelling has taught us anything it’s that we can always do better. And if you want to stand out, you’ve got to step away from the herd, step up on that soapbox, and show us what needs to change — in your own voice.

Poke that box. This is how you arrive to give a TED talk, write a book, or lead a movement. This is how you move beyond content shock. This is how you help make your industry (and our world in general) that much brighter.

What’s your experience with thinking around corners? Do you have an approach that’s worked for you?

Téa SIlvestre Godfrey is the founder of Story Bistro and the author of “Attract and Feed a Hungry Crowd: How Thinking Like a Chef Can Help You Build a Stronger Business.” She teaches workshops in brand storytelling and mentors creative solopreneurs, coaches, and authors on the art of building a heart-centered, luminary business. Learn more at StoryBistro.com.

Illustration courtesy Flickr CC and Hairbear

The post Thinking around the corners. 7 ideas to re-charge your content appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

LinkedIn has over 400 million users based in 200 countries across the world. Due to its global reach it has become increasingly important as a way for businesses to gain clients and for individuals to find new employment.

In recent months there has been growing concern about fake accounts being set up on the site. These bogus profiles allow hackers to gain the trust of those they interact with, which can lead to sensitive personal data being disclosed. This is something that any user of the site should remain vigilant about, particularly as these fake accounts seem usually to represent themselves as recruitment companies. However, these concerns don’t mean that LinkedIn isn’t still an excellent way to reach out to your target audience, whether that’s new clients or a new employer.

Let’s look at ways you can develop your LinkedIn profile so you have the best chance possible to gain your objective.

Individuals Seeking Employment

If your aim with LinkedIn is to put yourself in the market for a new job, it’s imperative you fill out your LinkedIn profile as fully as possible. Add detailed descriptions of your previous roles and make sure you include the skills you will bring to a role, don’t just write a bland list of responsibilities you held. Also, complete your educational background, including whether you have any higher education qualifications such as a degree or vocational training of value to your career. To make your profile appear more fully rounded, you can also complete the sections on hobbies, voluntary work and membership of any societies.

Endorsements for key job skills and personal recommendations can also make your profile far more appealing to prospective employers. Therefore networking is essential if you want to make the most of the platform. Reach out to past and present colleagues and write recommendations for those you would genuinely endorse, you will find your goodwill is often swiftly reciprocated.

LinkedIn for Business

If you are using LinkedIn to promote your own business or to widen your audience to gain new clients, you will need to approach the platform in a slightly different way.

While your individual profile is still of value and should be completed as fully as possible, it is also important to set up a company page for your business. This allows you to share more about what your company offers and it can even feature individual services and products. If you have employees a LinkedIn page is also a central place for colleagues to connect and you may well find that your staff have people in their network who can be seen as potential new business.

If businesses want to build their credibility within the industry and engender trust in their audience, one way to do this is to share expertise via the LinkedIn Pulse posts. Pulse offers a platform for anyone to write an article about something within their niche and then to share this to a larger audience than just their own network for even wider exposure. If the article is frequently commented on and liked it can garner a great deal of interest and this can help build your brand awareness. In addition, Pulse also allows you to embed links, images and even videos so you can easily drive people back to your own online real estate, such as your website or blog, and encourage people to sign up to your mailing list.

As you can see LinkedIn offers benefits to both individuals and companies using its platform. As with anything online you should always be careful who you pass your details to, but this shouldn’t deter you from reaching out to make new contacts who will be valuable to you as a job seeker or who may wish to become your client. One of the key advantages of LinkedIn is that it comprises people who genuinely know and who have worked with each other in real life and little is as powerful in business as this face-to-face knowledge.

Some months ago I reviewed Mike Weinberg’s book: New Sales. Simplified. I thought at that time, as I do now, that it was the best book on sales available. So when Mike asked me if I would be interested in reading and possibly reviewing his new book, Sales Management. Simplified., I jumped at the chance.

The foreword to Sales Management. Simplified., written by author and consultant Jeb Blount, states “how desperate businesses are for a solution to the #1 problem plaguing twenty-first century companies: underperforming salespeople in dysfunctional and sub-optimized sales organizations.”

In the introduction to his book, Mike makes the same observation: “Everywhere I turn, sales managers are overwhelmed and often confused, and executives are frustrated.” The book is broken into two parts. Part One is filled with “true stories about real sales managers and real executives in real companies, big and small.” Part Two presents “a very simple, practical sales management framework that any company or leader can implement.”

After reading the book I thought readers would really benefit from an interview with Mike. He agreed and I’m happy to share Part 1 with you today:

Dan McDade (DM): Mike, in Chapter 1 of your book you quote a mentor as saying: “As goes the leader, so goes the organization.” You followed this with “The level of the team rarely, if ever, exceeds the level of its leader.” In New Sales. Simplified. you write: “Where I’m from, it’s the chief executive’s job to determine and articulate the company’s strategy. It’s essential to be able to inform the sales team about: our reason for existence, the direction of the company and why it’s the correct course, what we sell and why we sell it, which markets to pursue, the competitive landscape and the pricing model.”

Some years ago I worked with a company that blew through $100,000,000 in venture capital because marketing was promoting point solutions and sales was selling an enterprise solution. I once told the SVP of Sales (still a friend) that he had more sales reps than there were $1,000,000 plus deals for his company’s solution. They ran out of cash and were sold in a fire sale. The CEO never was able to get sales and marketing on the same page.

It is said that CEO’s care about revenue but they don’t care about leads and databases. In my opinion CEO’s should care about revenue, leads and databases. Are companies failing because the CEO does not know what to do, or are companies failing because the CEO can’t conquer the dysfunctional nature of their organization?

Mike Weinberg (MW): Dan, I’d love the chance to blow through $100 million! I think most senior executives are frustrated with their sales teams because results are inconsistent and not what they should be. Then the executive looks at the sales managers and realizes how little “leading” of the sales team is actually taking place. The odd part, however, is that it’s often the frustrated CEO who is burying the sales leader in all kinds of crap and dragging him/her to meetings that have zero to do with leading the sales team or driving new revenue. It’s madness.

You also allude to the CEO’s responsibility to set strategy. That’s a huge issue. Very often I see companies with “sales” problems that have nothing to do with sales. If the strategy isn’t crystal clear and we can’t point the sales team toward the right target accounts to attack, that’s a company leadership problem and a strategy problem, not a sales problem. The sales manager’s job is to lead his team into battle and to execute the strategy that’s been set at the top; it is not to make up the strategy on the fly hoping the team is going the right direction.

 

DM: In Chapter 2 you write about sales culture. You contend, and I agree, that we have become too politically correct to publish sales results. Tell us what you would measure and publish and why.

MW: It’s absolute madness that companies have gotten away from the public posting and distribution of sales reports. Sales is still about results last time I looked. We should be looking at specific sales and possibly margin goals for the sales team and for each individual producer. I also like to measure progress against specific goals like the number of new accounts acquired, and total dollars sold to new accounts. I also like to compare an individual salesperson against his/her peers. Where do they rank for sales versus goal for the month or YTD? There is nothing politically incorrect about publishing a sales ranking. The goal is not to embarrass anyone; it’s to keep our eyes laser focused on results. If an underperformer is made uncomfortable seeing their name at the bottom of the ranking–good! They should change their behavior or consider deselecting themselves.

 

DM: In New Sales. Simplified. you write about aiming high in organizations when selling to them AND  “You know what you typically find in the executive suite? Nicer people. Smarter people. More professional people. Bigger-thinking people. People more interested in achieving the goals than beating up a vendor over a nickel.” You state that “most executives are more concerned with solving business issues and achieving better results than they are with protecting their jobs or the status quo.” What kind of job are sales managers doing on this today and what could they do better?

MW: That’s exactly what I wrote and that’s even more true today! In general, I am not seeing managers invest anywhere near enough time pointing their team toward strategic target accounts or coaching salespeople how to pursue higher-level contacts at those prospects. Honestly, aside from accountability, what could be more powerful for driving improved results than ensuring the team is pursuing the right people at the right accounts and that team members are armed with great weapons to succeed on their sales mission. Managers could do a much better job modeling good sales behaviors (like conducting consultative sales calls that bring value to executives) for their people.

 

DM: Tell us about multipliers and diminishers and the difference between being the hero and making heroes.

MW: I give Liz Wiseman 100% credit for this brilliant concept. I heard Liz speak at a conference five years ago and her book “Multipliers” is a must read. Multipliers are the kind of leaders everyone wants to work for. They challenge their people and bring out the best as they multiply themselves by raising the game of team members. Diminishers are the opposite. They shut down their people with pontificating to make sure everyone knows they are the smartest person in the room. Instead of pointing to the big goal, they not only tell their people what to but also how to do it. I take Wiseman’s theory and apply it to sales managers. She says that great leaders (multipliers) are more concerned with making geniuses than being seen as the genius. In sales, the manager’s job is to make the salesperson a hero, not to be the hero. Unfortunately, there are a lot of high-ego, insecure sales managers who do the opposite. They steal the limelight and the credit from their people. And nothing disengages the heart of a salesperson faster than when a manager takes the credit for their success. Yuck!

 

DM: You quote Neil Rackham in your book. He suggests that to determine if sales people are doing a “good job” in front of the customer, we should ask this question: “Are your people making the kind of sales calls where the customer would write a check for the sales call … because the sales call did something so useful for the customer that the customer values it?” I perceive that CBE’s The Challenger Customer and the account-based marketing approach would target the same type of companies that would apply to Neil’s quote. Agree?

MW: Yes, completely. In fact, I believe Rackham was making that statement in support of CEB’s work. Whatever your feelings about The Challenger Sale, Rackham makes a great point and truly raises the bar for how salespeople should view sales calls. I regularly quote Rackham and ask salespeople what would have to take place on sales calls to bring so much value to the customer that they’d be happy to pay you for the time spent with them. That’s a really high bar that forces some truly big thinking. I love it because salespeople are immediately challenged to rethink the sales call and see it through the lens of the customer.

 

DM: In both books you take issue with the inbound marketing crowd who chant the “Don’t call them; they’ll call you when they’re ready …” mantra. We agree that’s nonsense. In the book you go on to write: “I take issue with the many loud voices preaching these deadly lies. These theories are not only wrong, they’re dangerous. They’re particularly dangerous because today’s under-mentored and under-coached sales people are gullible. The sole reason prospects get that far along in their buying journey without having engaged with a sales person is that reactive sales people are sitting on their collective butts waiting for the prospect to raise their hand and call them in.” It seems the market is shifting away from the “inbounditis” of the past. However, there are still a lot of sales reps sitting around waiting for the telephone to ring. What can sales managers do to fix this?

MW: Dan, I agree. The tide is turning as the Kool-Aid being served by the Inbound and Social Selling extremists proved not to be the secret sauce it was promised to be. So it’s a good thing that those hysterical voices preaching that everything has changed and that prospecting is dead are starting to get drowned out. The time is right for sales managers to ensure that every salesperson has a strategic, finite, workable list of target accounts to work, AND that some percentage of each rep’s calendar has time blocked for proactively pursuing prospecting customers. We need to snap salespeople’s expectations back into reality. Leads are not free and they don’t grow on trees. Most of the top producers at my clients take full responsibility for creating their own leads. And they also understand that when you create a lead from scratch, it’s easier to “own” your sales process because the prospect didn’t come to you and is less likely to try to dictate your approach.

 

DM: You write that “social media is a wonderful supplement to, but not a replacement for, traditional prospecting and new business development efforts.” How is social media misused and how should it be used?

MW: Social media is misused in a myriad of ways by salespeople. Some reps spend hours lurking around in LinkedIn groups looking for opportunities to comment or hijack a conversation. Others have been duped into writing blog posts because goofballs in my business who get business by putting out content and IP preach that salespeople should do the same. I am not sure there is a dumber idea than telling all salespeople they need to write blog posts. Have you seen how much trouble some salespeople have even writing a brief email? Do we really think for a minute that a top sales hunter should spend hours writing content and promoting it on social platforms?

However, social media offers great tools to help us learn much more about prospects than we ever imagined just a few years ago. It also provides opportunities to connect much earlier with prospects in non-threatening and non-intrusive ways. I’m a huge fan of social selling. My problem is with the charlatans who tell salespeople that it’s the replacement for that old school stuff like the telephone that doesn’t work anymore.

 

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This sponsored post is produced in association with GumGum.

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When the film Minority Report was released in 2002, image recognition still seemed like science fiction. Fast-forward to the present, and the impressive image recognition technology displayed in that film and others is no longer a fantasy. Instead, it’s advanced to new levels this year that cover medical, military, science, and business applications.

GumGum — an image recognition-based digital marketing platform for the web — just released its 2015 Image Recognition Year in Review report, which highlights the significant achievements made in the computer vision field during the last 12 months.

As you can see in GumGum’s interactive infographic below, image recognition has come a long way since Google popularized the tech in 2010 with Google Goggles. We’re creating artificial intelligence for self-driving cars; saving farmers time and money by identifying plants within seconds; and instantly buying products we heart on Pinterest. Most notably, these advancements are taking place through mobile, bringing more value to our handheld devices.

Medical developments like the Dulight device — a small wearable camera that uses image recognition to identify objects like food, money, and traffic signs– are empowering the visually-impaired in ways we never thought were possible. We’re also seeing other health benefits come from image recognition, such as Panasonic developing a refrigerator that identifies foods that have gone bad.

Additionally, image recognition is being used by the U.S. military and law enforcement by taking poor-quality 2D images from phones and converting them into 3D models for more accurate identity verification.

The retail realm is a particularly interesting area for image recognition, as mobile often struggles in delivering a quick and painless shopping experience. More than 90 percent of smartphone users abandon their virtual shopping carts when trying to buy online, compared to the 68 percent of shopping done via desktop or tablet.

However, we’re seeing brands combat the issue by using image recognition to make smartphone shopping hassle free. For example, PowaTag is developing a platform that allows users to buy a product by simply waving over it with their phone. We’re also seeing online shopping become more tailored to the consumer, like the eBay Motors app identifying a specific car auction based on a photo of a vehicle’s back end. And, as previously mentioned, Pinterest optimizing its visual search engine to find related products — and showing users where to buy them — is a big win for consumers and brands.

Image recognition isn’t limiting itself to big business as numerous startups are rising to the occasion. Apps like Voconow integrate digital media with print media, allowing users to view a product from different angles, send an inquiry to the manufacture, schedule a visit in person, and more. Wazzat Fashion is another fascinating app that lets users search for similar apparel based on a snapshot, but its social media plugins expand the search to sites like Instagram and Pinterest, setting it apart from other like it.

Of course, there will always be room for improvement. Google search chief Amit Singhal recently acknowledged the limitations of image recognition in its current state.

“When we started working on speech recognition, many years back, we used to get one in four words wrong,” Singhal said. “And if you get one in four words wrong, you can’t build a viable product out of it. Computer vision is at that stage today. Today we can tell this is a chair — but we can’t tell what brand of chair, what model of chair.”

He then linked the failure of the Amazon Fire phone to the company’s push of Firefly, a feature that scanned real-life objects to find more information about them, saying it wasn’t enough to create a billion-user product out of it.

Nonetheless, 2015 has further opened the road for image recognition technology and based on Microsoft’s impressive win over Google in the sixth annual ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, the Redmond, Washington company may lead the charge. Microsoft’s win is attributed to successfully reducing the amount of wrong photo IDs to 3.5 percent, which is significantly less than “one in four words” Singhal referred to with speech recognition.

With the industry estimated to grow to $25.65 billion by 2019, we’re destined to see more investment and development in image recognition – especially since giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other of their ilk have demonstrated their commitment by open-sourcing their tech and hardware in the past year. The results of their hard labor are guaranteed to rival anything we may have imagined in 2002.

Have a look at this year’s different impressive milestones:

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It’s not often that a piece of marketing content prompts me to talk about it aside from the occasional tweet or share…however, the new Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing from Jon Miller and Engagio is really impressive. If you have the least bit of interest in adopting or learning more about this growing B2B marketing trend, you should definitely go and get this 124 page eBook, available (free) for a limited time by clicking here. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading this as it is the most complete exploration of the topic I have come across. I took the liberty of pulling a few interesting quotes, hoping to comment and expand on what has rapidly become the hottest topic in B2B.

ABM focuses time and resources on accounts most likely to drive revenue. It’s a ‘zero waste’ strategy that targets 100% of time, budget and effort on the named accounts your company decides as having the greatest potential.

How often are “qualified” leads sent to sales that they reject, or simply do not follow up on? It can be frustrating when a lead that passes all engagement and scoring requirements is rejected, with little insight from the sales team as to why. Odds are, it is from a company they don’t feel like they have a chance of selling to. By focusing more diligently on accounts that are likely to buy, leads from your ABM target list are more likely to get the attention that they deserve, and are more likely to drive revenue. That is why, as the eBook states, the “…core of any ABM initiative is an aligned marketing and sales team that’s dedicated to large accounts.” I would suggest, however, that your target account list should not simply be comprised of large accounts but rather the accounts that are most likely to both make the purchase and become a good and profitable customer.

Wasting effort on a poor fit … Put the wrong accounts on your list and you’ll spend time, money and effort on low-potential opportunities while under-resourcing your best shots.

Building your target account list is a vitally important first step, and the eBook outlines a few tactics to employ to build the right list. Firmographic (industry, revenue, employee count, etc.) and technographic (i.e., which technologies do they already use) details are important as you strive to understand the common characteristics of your best customers. But even before that, you need to understand who your best customers are … as your biggest customers (from a revenue perspective) are not necessarily your best ones. Think about things like acquisition costs, support costs, willingness to participate in co-marketing and time to close along with the simple question of how much money they have spent with your company.

A well-run sales development or prospecting team has always coordinated a mix of touchpoints – email, phone, social media, etc. – to create and develop account-based opportunities. The new ingredient in ABM is the alignment and integration of a dedicated marketing function to mirror and support that effort.

Do you want true sales and marketing alignment? There is little that will get your sales team more engaged than a marketing strategy that is focused on the companies they think they have the best chance to sell to. These are the companies they are scanning for whenever they receive a batch of leads from marketing, and the ones that they call first. Odds are, they already have their own mini-campaigns that target specific companies, and leveraging their efforts to both build your list and then market to it can create a synergy that will get the salespeople on board and actively engaged.

You also need to track the aggregate level of engagement across the account and know when that engagement level changes. Because, in B2B, you’re never just selling to an individual.

You can’t throw a rock without coming across research that discusses how B2B buying is conducted by committees, and that there are often teams of individuals within an account that are involved in the decision to purchase your products or services. If one person from a target account is on your website, or downloading your content it might be indicative of a selling opportunity. If multiple individuals from the same account are engaging with you, there is definitely an opportunity there. You need to take the steps to measure account-wide engagement with your brand, and to proactively drive it with an account-based targeting effort across multiple members of the buying committee. You also need to create content that addresses the needs and motivations of all of these buyers, because the pain points of decision-maker one are not necessarily the same as those of influencer two. Do your research into the committee, as well as into the accounts.

ABM efforts take time. Once you’ve chosen your list of target accounts, stick with it for longer than you may feel is right.

Definite words of wisdom, because B2B buying is usually not a quick transaction. Buying cycles often take months. Don’t give up hope if the returns are not immediate, and spend the time discussing your goals and how they might be achieved in stages – such as:

• Increased target account engagement over time
• Pipeline growth from accounts on your target list
• Lower turnback rates of qualified leads from sales
• Net new lead volume from target accounts

For a limited time, you can download your free copy of the Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing by clicking here.

Author: Jason Stewart @jstewart_1 is VP, Strategy, ANNUITAS

 

Content marketing — or the use of written content such as blogs, white papers, e-mail newsletters, and more — helps draw customers to your company website and convert new leads in an inbound, organic way.

Instead of using salesy ads, content marketing allows you to create and release valuable content that people can discover and consume voluntarily, ultimately branding yourself as an expert and trusted authority in your field.

One form of content that can be highly effective at generating leads is “gated content,” which you create and put behind a form (or “gate”). To download the content, people must provide basic contact information. Popular types of gated content include eBooks, online courses, and white papers.

I know what you’re thinking. Why would you hide great information behind a form? Will B2B buyers really fill out forms to get information? 68% of B2B companies use landing pages to gain new sales leads.

So how does gated content help you generate better leads?

1. It Confirms a Buyer’s Interest

People who share contact information on your website in order to access content have confirmed they are at least somewhat interested in the what you have to share.

This means you can spend your sales time and effort following up these “warm” leads. The more warm leads your company has, the fewer cold leads they need to make sales numbers.

Another perk of gated content is that the people that fill out lead forms volunteer their contact information and are more likely to take a phone call than a cold lead.

2. It Implies Content Has More Value

When you gate content, you imply that it is more valuable than a standard blog post or article. Just like you’d expect more from subscription content in a magazine, newspaper or website, gated content can help boost your company’s identity as an authority or expert.

If a potential customer visits your website and finds “premium” content that’s more than just descriptions of your products or services, it differentiates your company from those that don’t provide this information.

3. It Makes Content More Secure

If you gate content behind a lead form on your company website, you protect it from being scraped, shared by bots and copied.

Bots can take the information you publish and disseminate it for free on other websites. You want your company website to be the exclusive source of this information, and you want people to find it on your website alongside other helpful marketing information that furthers the sale.

In short, gating content ensures that the people who are seeing it are the people that you wrote it for in the first place.

4. It Makes Personalized Lead Nurturing Easier

When a potential customer accesses specific gated content, you have a good idea of what topic resonates with them. You can then personalize your follow-up, whether it’s by email or phone.

Using marketing software or analytics, you can look at what individual leads looked at before filling out the form, and can also see their subsequent visits to your website. Because you have this intelligence in your sales arsenal, you can easily tailor your follow-up to move things along.

5. It Automates Entry Into Your CRM

If you’re using a CRM to keep up with the status of your prospects, gated content can make your sales rep(s) more efficient. When website visitors submit lead forms, this information can flow right into Salesforce or other CRM so sales reps don’t have to type it in manually.

Ultimately, gating some content on your website can bring in better sales leads, making it easier to convert people to paying customers.