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You've probably heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. 

Even so, 31 million Americans skip breakfast each morning because they aren't hungry, they don't feel like eating, or they are too busy. 

But research shows that eating a meal prior to 11 a.m. provides a number of benefits: a reduced risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and weight gain, as well as increased physical activity and improved cognitive abilities. 

That's why these seven successful business leaders start their days off with a healthy and hearty breakfast. Find out what they eat on the below infographic produced by the small-business consultancy Make It Cheaper.

SEE ALSO: Billionaire Richard Branson's favorite productivity hack is simple

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's Why People Will Love Taco Bell's New Breakfast

NEW YORK, N.Y. – A new kind of crowdfunding will give the average American a chance to invest in small companies and startups. But before you think about jumping in, there are some important things to keep in mind.

Under the new rules from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, small businesses can raise up to $1 million a year by selling stakes in the company. The money raised may be used to grow the business. Early investors can earn money if the business succeeds. But the North American Securities Administrators Association urges caution to those thinking about giving their money to a startup.

Here are some tips:

— WAIT: The rules won’t go into effect until sometime next year, and the exact date is not known yet. So sit tight and be wary of companies seeking cash right away.

— KNOW THE RISK: Buying stock in any company, large or small, carries risk. But small businesses and startups can be even risker, the NASAA said. Some 50 per cent of small businesses fail within their first five years.

— RESEARCH: The SEC is requiring the small companies that are crowdfunding to provide financial statements. Make sure to check how much revenue it earns and if it’s profitable. Information will also be available about its founders and board. Check who they are and their track record with past businesses.

— INVESTMENTS MAY BE LONG-TERM: Know that you may be stuck with an investment for a long time. The NASAA said it may be hard or impossible to sell stakes that you may buy.

— KNOW THE RULES: The SEC put caps on how much money people can invest. Those with annual income or net worth below $100,000 can invest up to 5 per cent of their yearly income or net worth, or $2,000 if that is greater. Those who earn more money can invest up to 10 per cent. But no one can invest more than $100,000 in crowdfunding offerings during a 12-month period.

The post Tips: 5 things you need to know about crowdfunding investing appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

OTTAWA – Fundraising results during Canada’s just-concluded federal election appear to confirm that money can’t buy you love.

The Liberals won the Oct. 19 election but raised the least amount of money of the three main parties during the third quarter — $7.3 million.

That’s a record quarterly haul for the Liberals but well behind the Conservatives, who raised just over $10 million from July 1 to Sept. 30 — an all-time record for any party — even as the Tories were heading for defeat.

And it’s less than the New Democrats pulled in — $9.1 million — even though the NDP went on to lose more than half its seats and sink back to third place.

The third quarter included the first two months of the 11-week marathon campaign, for most of which the Liberals were running third in opinion polls behind the NDP and Conservatives.

Liberals began to pull ahead in the polls at the end of September, just as the third quarter was wrapping up.

The Liberals also had the fewest donors during that period: 50,479 compared to 78,227 who gave to the NDP — a new record for any party — and 63,177 who gave to the Conservatives.

In a bid to demonstrate momentum, the NDP boasted at the end of September that it had set a new quarterly fundraising record. However, the Conservatives ultimately surpassed the NDP’s haul, which turned out to be slightly higher than New Democrats initially reported.

The parties’ third quarter fundraising results were submitted to Elections Canada on Friday.

The post Liberals first at ballot box, but third in fundraising appeared first on Macleans.ca.

By the end of next year, Canada's telecom watchdog will require the country's big incumbent Internet providers to allow wholesale competitors direct access to their fibre networks, including the socalled "last mile" from a neighbourhood's local node to subscribers' homes or businesses.

Metro Vancouver directors have approved a request by TransLink to use $9.35 million from the federal gas tax fund to replace 62 defective diesel community shuttle buses that drivers complained were making them ill.

If you think social media is about selling, think again.

If you think social media is about selling, think again. Advertising is about selling. Social media is about sharing: sharing your expertise by positioning yourself or your business as the expert. After all, you are the expert, right? As the expert, your role is to share your expertise. A little social media 101 for those still trying to sell instead of share.

Substitute your own product or service in the following example and the thoughts still hold water.

You’re on social media to make people happy. Your ongoing presence on social media should be designed to keep them happy.

Just for a moment, imagine your business as one that sells kitchen knives. You’re not on social media to sell those knives. You do that through your advertising. You’re there to speak to the importance of having the right knife for the job. You’re there to teach people about knives and respond to their questions or comments about your company and its knives. You’re making connections and carving out conversations through your knives.

Kitchen knives come in a variety of styles and each is designed to perform different tasks in the kitchen. So, talk. Talk about knife blades, handles, edges and blade materials that work best for various jobs. Talk about the importance of keeping a knife sharp. Talk about the history of knives. Develop interesting associations with other subjects through your knives. The list is virtually endless and there are endless ways to talk about it all. Think creatively. But keep in mind that social media is a forum for conversation, for imparting information that will teach people something or help them in some way. Give people something to think about. Get them talking. You’re on social media to make people happy. Your ongoing (consistent) presence on social media should be designed to keep them happy. Make sure that they want to keep coming back to hear what else you have to say.

Be creative. Be original. Be funny, if you wish. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Allow your social media content to spread its wings. Dream up unique ways to present and share information about your company and its products or services. You’re the expert — you own the valuable ‘insider’ information. You know things about your product or service that nobody outside of your company knows. So, share. Use video. Stream video. Show and tell. Show people having fun with your products — make your content a social event. And don’t forget to have fun while you’re doing this (you probably raised your eyebrows at that comment). But if you enjoyed creating the content, then it’s almost certain that your enjoyment will be reflected in your post. Don’t shy away from ‘funny’. Social media has an incredible sense of humour. Be creative. Be original. Be funny, if you wish. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

You might be saying, “Miriam, not all businesses are fun. Mine’s quite a serious business.” I understand. Some of you are in businesses or organizations that require a great deal of tact and diplomacy. But all businesses have a human connection. To be successful that’s what you must reveal on social media — the heart of your business. Share your heart. That’s what social media is about.

Bottom line: If you believe in your business or organization then you’ll have lots to share.

This post underscores the difference between sharing and selling. Bottom line: If you believe in your business or organization then you’ll have lots to share. The beautiful thing about this very social forum is that it’s accessible to all of us and it’s affordable.

So you’re a small company that lacks the budget to compete with the big guns. In social media that doesn’t matter. You don’t have to compete. You’ve (hopefully) identified your niche; now expand it, solidify it, and secure it. Create a following. Extend your reach. Build brand loyalty. Social media is not governed by borders. Want to stretch your content’s wings internationally? Social media is the passport that allows you to travel anywhere, even on a small budget.

… you’re delivering value. And people everywhere love value.

Through well-written content that is varied, interesting and engaging, you’re delivering value. And people everywhere love value.

What else adds value? Sharing different content, on different platforms, via different formats, while staying true to your brand’s culture across platforms — that’s valuable.

Do it right. Position yourself or your business as the expert. Share. Give. Respond. Reveal the heart of your business and people will seek you out.

We learned it in kindergarten: People don’t like people who don’t share.

If you’re not feeling particularly creative or confident about your social media efforts then reach out to someone who can help you develop a strategy; one that leaves room for your efforts to evolve over time. As the world’s most successful brands will tell you, the long-term payback of sharing over selling is worth the effort. If you’re going to be successful, a presence on social media is no longer a choice and sharing is a necessity. We learned it in kindergarten: People don’t like people who don’t share.

Want a few tips on creating content for social media? Download our content creation ebook, ‘Content Creation Understood.’

 Strap in, friends, bitcoin is back. After spending most of the year in something approaching the doldrums, the cryptocurrency is enjoying a strong price rally, pushing it to its highest value of 2015. Of course, trading for around $320 per coin is still a mere fraction of its former heights. But at the same time, if you picked up some bitcoin when it dipped below $200 earlier this year, the… Read More

Once in a while, Microsoft decides to release the "Work & Play Bundle," a collection of one-year subscriptions to its best services at a steep discount.

As of today, and for a limited time, the Work & Play Bundle is back.

And for $149, you get a lot of good stuff, including subscriptions to Xbox Live and Office 365. Think of it as your gateway drug to the new Microsoft.

Here's the full breakdown of the year-long subscriptions included, per the Microsoft Store listing:

• Office 365 Home, which lets you put Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and the other Office apps on as many as 5 PCs or Macs and 5 tablets, plus a terabyte of OneDrive storage to keep all your documents. 
• Xbox Live Gold, the premium plan for Microsoft's games service on Windows and Xbox 360/Xbox One. 
• Skype Wi-Fi, which lets your Windows device connect to certain Microsoft-sponsored paid wireless Internet hotspots at airports, hotels, and more.
• Unlimited phone calls around the globe with Skype.
• Assure Support Plan, Microsoft's paid customer service plan, which lets you get unlimited support for your Windows PC or tablet on the phone, online, or at the Microsoft Store's excellent answer desk.
• A $60 credit, good at either the Windows Store app market or the Xbox consoles' game store.

Given that Xbox Live Gold is a $60 annual subscription, and Office 365 is $99, that's a $10 savings just between those two. Add in that $60 credit, and it seems like a no-brainer for Xbox gamers.

If you love Microsoft, it's a heck of a deal. And if you have any of these subscriptions already, it just adds a year onto whatever you already have.

It also happens to be the perfect representation of Microsoft's master plan: Pay a subscription fee, and get access to Microsoft's whole entire cross-device ecosystem of services.

For instance, an Office 365 subscription gets you full access to all of Microsoft's apps for the iPhone and Android, including the funky experimental ones. That Skype calling credit works across mobile devices and Macs, too. And Xbox Live is Microsoft's gateway drug into gaming across both Windows and the Xbox.

So it's possible to get a lot of value out of this bundle even if you don't own a single Windows PC. And if you do happen to have one, well, even better. 

But just like this bundle won't always be around, Microsoft is hoping that once you try its services, you'll stick around, and keep pouring money in.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft's newest app makes it easier to use Android

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This Microsoft developer built a voice-controlled smart mirror in 20 hours

If there’s one thing that we at The Brand Builders pride ourselves on it’s transparency. Take a look at any of our blog posts and you’ll see what I mean. We strongly believe in unraveling the mystery of marketing to make it approachable for anyone seeking to understand it. We are more than happy to pull back the curtain to show you the nuts and bolts, the A-Z, the ins and outs of this process.

They say that the very beginning is the very best place to start and the same applies here. What’s the very first step of beginning an inbound marketing campaign? Understanding what you need from that campaign.

There are things you should know about your business before you decide to embark on the inbound marketing journey. There are things your marketing team or agency should know about your company before they take you on that journey.

We never take on a new client before walking that prospect through a certain set of questions, whose answers will suggest a strategy that will work for them. These are the questions that will determine if inbound can produce results for them–and how. The more data we have about the efforts you’ve attempted in the past and the results that you’ve been able to generate, the more effective we’ll be in building out a smart, efficient plan for your business.

And these questions go beyond just answering whether or not you’re right for inbound. The information garnered from this exploratory session will dictate much of what is produced and put out for a given client. After all, a huge part of inbound marketing is establishing yourself as an expert in your field. It’s displaying a certain degree of thought leadership that is strong enough to encourage people to seek you out for information and answers. And how can we turn you into experts if we don’t know anything about you? We need to take a deep dive into your business so that we can generate content on a level that will best demonstrate your authority in your space.

So for many reasons, asking yourself these relevant questions is a crucial tool of your inbound marketing strategy and process. It’s certainly how we start with any prospect.

What are these magical questions, you ask?

Well, like I said, we’re all about transparency. So in that vein, I’m going to share our list of questions with you! You may find that you already know the answers to a lot of these questions. As you should–this is your company. But there’s a lot of value on being able to confidently know where your company stands in a lot of these key areas. It will not only help you narrow down what you need to address in your marketing efforts, but how to address them in the most effective way possible.

So without further ado…Key Questions to Developing Your Marketing Strategy

The Company (in the industry)

• Who are your customers?
• Who are your competitors?
• What is your ‘secret sauce’/ unique selling point?
• What is your company mission?
• How do you fit into your industry?
• What is your average sale price?
• What are your company revenue targets?
• What is your elevator pitch? If we met at a cocktail party, how would you describe what your company does in 30 seconds?

The Organization (inside the company)

• What are your department’s goals?
• What is your role?
• How do you fit into the company?
• What are some things you’ve been working on recently?
• What are the other roles in your department?
• What role does your organization play in your company?
• How many employees do you have?

Marketing

• Why do you want to change your approach to marketing now?
• What are your expectations for a marketing program?
• What specific marketing have you tried in the past? What worked? What didn’t?
• How many people do you have in the Marketing department?
• What marketing activities are you engaged in now?
• What marketing activities do you have planned?
• Which ones are most successful?
• Which ones didn’t work?
• Which of your team members is responsible for marketing the company?
• How do you track the results of your marketing?
• Profile the perfect client for your company?
• How many of these perfect clients do you have?
• What problems do you solve for them?
• How many email addresses do you have in your database?
• Do you currently send emails to your database? Yes / No
• What, if anything, do you do to get new email addresses?
• Who currently writes any marketing materials you have? (copywriter, marketing director, CEO, etc.)
• What are you trying to achieve with the web site?

Sales

• Does your sales team cold call, and if so, who?
• What does the sales team think of the leads?
• Are you buying lists?
• How successful have you been with those lists?
• How many sales people are on the sales team?
• What makes a lead ‘Sales ready’ for you?
• How many leads do you need to hit your sales goals?
• How often do you reach that target lead goal?
• How much does it cost to acquire your leads/customers?
• What are doing to reduce your cost per lead?
• How do you measure what’s working?

Goals

• What is your top priority this year?
• Do you have specific company goals?
• What are your top 3 initiatives this year/quarter?
• Do you have published revenue goals for this upcoming quarter/year?
• Are there any other company goals that are important?
• Do you have personal goals that go along with these?

Timing

• When do you need to achieve these results?
• When do you need to hit your given goals?
• What is the time line to achieve your given goals?
• What is the most critical date on your calendar? Why?
• Is hitting this goal a priority right now?
• What else is a priority right now?
• Do you have bandwidth and resources to implement this plan now?
• Is it more likely that you will revise the goals, or revise the time line, if they aren’t realistic?

Challenges

• What obstacles do you think will keep your plan from working?
• What’s going to get in the way of hitting your goal?
• What programs do you already have in place to achieve what we’ve talked about?
• What do you think is your biggest marketing challenge?
• Why do you think you’ll be able to eliminate these challenges now, even though you’ve tried in the past and you’re still dealing with them?
• Do you think you have the internal expertise to deal with these challenges?
• How are you addressing these challenges in your plan?
• If you realize early enough in the year that this plan isn’t fixing this challenge, how will you shift gears?

Guest author Michael O. Cooper is the founder of InnovatorsandInfluencers.com and serves as executive coach, facilitator and trainer for design, software, public relations and communications firms, as well as TED Fellows.

Burning Man may seem like a strange place to glean business lessons. But it's where I've learned invaluable leadership skills, gained a ton of experience around human motivation, and brought these abilities to bear on my professional life. 

I run a large 14-year-old theme camp in the Black Rock Desert at Burning Man, and the camp comes together in this challenging environment to build a temporary city that becomes our home. Then within a few days, we pack it all up and leave without a trace. 

See also: 12 Ways to Get an Industry Rock Star to Join Your Startup 

Though some people think we’re mad, you’d be surprised how many business executives come to this desolate plane, away from the day-to-day grind we call the "default world," to find the inspiration that enables them to become better managers and more inspiring leaders. I’ve managed 150-person all-volunteer teams in a dynamic 24-hour environment, and here are some of the most important lessons businesses can take away from my experience that can be applied to their operations.

What Burning Man Can Teach Business Leaders

At Burning Man there are lots of responsibilities. No one gets paid, though, so conventional incentive systems that businesses use to urge people to do their jobs aren't relevant.

The lack of financial reward onsite has been a huge eye-opener for me as a manager. After years of directing volunteers in the desert, I’ve learned that people are far less motivated by incentives like money or other rewards than most people realize—whether we’re working in a volunteer capacity or a paid position.

According to the article "Why Incentive Plans Can Not Work” in the Harvard Business Review, "rewards typically undermine the very processes they are intended to enhance.... They do not create an enduring commitment to any value or action. Rather, incentives merely—and temporarily—change what we do.”

Every year we have dozens of people from other camps drop by our oasis, asking "How do you do it? You’re always in a great mood and you have tons of volunteers working on everything that you need. In our camp, people are yelling at each other and we can’t get volunteers to do all the work."

There are very few consequences if volunteers don't do their part, except that someone else has to do it. Our secret has nothing to do with traditional incentive-based methods. There are no goal-oriented rewards, financial or otherwise. Instead, we focus on intrinsic motivation, encouraging mutual respect, nurturing, self-determination, creativity, cooperation, having fun and showing love. I’ve come to realize that intrinsic motivators are exceptionally powerful—not just in this desert camp, but out in the professional world as well.

1. Focus on organizational sustainability

Most people focus on the moment they are managing, but you have to play a long game if your organization is to thrive year after year. That means treating people with kindness, acknowledging their contributions, making the work fun, keeping your cool in tense moments, learning from mistakes and allowing for new ideas to emerge.

If you’re in a leadership role, and you’re a control freak, you’re going to have ongoing sustainability issues. In the book "Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior," Edward Deci and Richard Ryan conclude that people who feel controlled, lose interest in what they’re doing. They feel manipulated and it interferes with their sense of self-determination. Based on my experience at Burning Man, I agree wholeheartedly with this view.

2. Come from love

Any cross word, angry comment or bad attitude can send volunteers packing in a heartbeat. The first rule of leading in our camp is to come from love—in other words, if the people you’re managing know that you genuinely care for them, they’re much more willing to interrupt their vacation to help wash dishes, prepare meals, pick up trash or build showers. But they must feel it.

Some people think that means “tough" love, but in my experience scolding people or publicly shaming them only makes them back away. I usually ask “Who's up for washing dishes? Or, who can go pick up ice for us?" Within a few seconds, people raise their hands and tasks are quickly completed, because we ask out of love and we have screened people carefully (see #5 below).

3. Lead by example 

Be prepared for anything at any time. As a leader, it’s your job to embody the mood and tone you want to create. So get enough sleep, stay hydrated, eat well, and take proper care of yourself (especially in the harsh, unforgiving desert). Lead by example when it comes to self-care. This encourages people to take care of themselves.

At Burning Man, a sick individual could require others to care for them, if they become dehydrated or ill. That may require recruiting a few extra helpers, which is a good reminder that floating volunteers are a good idea, since they can help out with anything. If you have a project or other initiative, have some extra hands on deck, if you can, and be sure to schedule them, so there’s help when needed. Many organizations run so lean now, which can spark a crisis when someone's out sick or goes on vacation.

4. Make your work fun

We arrive a week before most event attendees and we build tents, a kitchen, showers with hot and cold water, an electrical grid, sound systems, stages, lighting, venues and art. We work very hard, but we always have great music, and we recruit a kitchen crew to put out snacks frequently. Jokes and laughter often accompany even the smallest accomplishments.

Encouraging fun is another form of engagement. But be careful here—your version of fun may not be the same as your employees. So get them involved, rather than owning this responsibility yourself.

5. Screen your team carefully and distribute work equitably

We screen people in our 150-person camp to make sure they have the right attitude. And every year, we have 2-3 people that we don’t invite back. If you’re not weeding out your non-performers, you will demoralize your team.

We also find out what people naturally like to do, observing what skills they have and what projects they might like to lead or create. In my view, part of our job as leaders is to direct the natural energy and talents people have into projects that benefit the community or the organization.

6. Set and communicate clear expectations early and often

We require people to volunteer for three shifts during the week to help out with preparing meals, cleaning up, etc. We schedule double the number of workers necessary for each task, so that when someone forgets or doesn’t show up, it's still covered. It often makes the work go faster and develops strong relationships among our volunteers.

7. Mother the martyrs

Some of our volunteers work really hard, pushing themselves, but sometimes these martyrs do more damage by burning themselves out (and taking others down with them). That can a ripple effect, since others have to cover their responsibilities when they’ve crashed and burned.

Watch out for martyrs and support them—they often won’t ask for it until it's too late. Once again, this is where floaters can help. They can backfill responsibilities, and step in when workers overextend themselves.

8. Shepherd resources wisely

In a hot, dry, dusty environment, the main resources you have are materials and personal energy. Most people understand the need to conserve water and food, but may not recognize that their personal energy also needs to be protected and directed appropriately.

We provide leads for every project and always have 3-4 projects that can be done at any time. We watch for energy spikes and direct people who are feeling active to those projects. Schedules are great, but they can still burn people out. We try to avoid that by creating a fluid project plan that directs the natural energy of the group appropriately.

9. Provide shade and encourage rest, recuperation and down time

The desert is harsh. People can’t give their best, if they’re physically not well. We regularly encourage people to relax, provide plenty of water and snacks, and build a large tent specifically for rest. That is the last tent to come down when we leave. We encourage people to take breaks and recharge, and usually after 20-30 minutes, they’re ready and eager to get stuff done.

Treat workers well and allow for breaks, rather than dangle a reward in front of them, and they may surprise you with their energy and commitment. Also make sure to address any actual issues that may prevent them from succeeding.

10. Recognize and support high contributors

We have a lot of people who do the minimum commitment of hours every year, and that’s fine. But I'm always moved by people who go above and beyond. I commit a lot of time to publicly recognizing these stellar individuals. I personally thank them for their commitment at our camp meetings, explore how they’d like to get more involved, or help them design their own personal projects.

What’s unique about high contributors is that they want to give of themselves, and they often need a little help figuring out how to do even more than they already do. They’re not doing the work because of a reward; they do it because they are inspired to innovate. Our group often benefits from these projects as well.

Most high contributors are looking for ways to do more, so be sure to pay attention and guide them if you can.

11. Appreciate all efforts

Every year, we spend a lot of time during and after the event thanking people for their time, energy, resources and commitment. This year, we’re throwing a party to publicly show our appreciation. In the past, we've commissioned an artist to create beautiful gifts for our high contributors, accompanied by handwritten notes from leaders thanking them for specific contributions. This can’t be a generic "good job" comment. If you want people to come back and step up into leadership roles year after year, they have to know they are appreciated and acknowledged.

My experience leading a theme camp at Burning Man has been an amazing study of human motivation. I agree with Alfie Kohn’s argument: "If our goal is excellence, no artificial incentive can ever match the power of intrinsic motivation. People who do exceptional work may be glad to be paid and even more glad to be well paid, but they do not work to collect a paycheck. They work because they love what they do.”

As an executive coach, I study organizational behavior and management in business environments. I observe and coach CEOs in their natural habitat, and most would completely fail in an all-volunteer environment at Burning Man. if they focused on intrinsic, rather than extrinsic motivation, their organizations might thrive. Because their teams would own more, cooperate more, do more—and accomplish more. 

Lead photo by Hawaii Savvy

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Argentina cannot pay some bondholders while refusing to pay $6.1 billion in claims by creditors who refused to swap their bonds for steeply discounted replacements in the South American nation after it defaulted in 2001 on $100 billion in bonds, a judge said Friday.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa’s written ruling means Argentina would owe about $8 billion to creditors who refused the swaps that were accepted by about 93 per cent of Argentina’s bondholders in 2005 and 2010.

Griesa said the republic must pay all bondholders who refused to swap their bonds if it chooses to pay those who did. With the bond swaps, Argentina invited creditors to exchange their old bonds for newly issued bonds worth between 25 per cent and 29 per cent of the original bonds’ value.

The Manhattan judge said Argentina has violated its promise to treat the $6.1 billion in bonds equally with bonds distributed during the discounted swaps.

“The republic has made clear its intention to defy any money judgment issued by this court, and plaintiff has no other means to enforce its rights,” Griesa said.

An Argentina lawyer did not immediately comment.

But in court papers, lawyers for the republic had urged Griesa to reject adding the $6.1 billion in claims to money owed by Argentina, saying it would raise to a “staggering amount” of $8 billion the amount owed to bondholders who refused the swaps and would threaten the nation’s Central Bank reserves.

“Those reserves are vital to maintaining the healthy functioning of the Republic’s economy, and the requested orders would subject the Republic to an unacceptable degree of catastrophic risk,” the lawyers said.

After the 2001 default, U.S. hedge funds including NML Capital scooped up Argentina’s bonds, but refused the swap offers, choosing to sue to enforce the contracts they signed.

In a statement Friday, NML lawyer Robert Cohen said Griesa’s ruling does not change Argentina’s obligations but instead confirms that Argentina must treat its creditors equally.

The post Over Argentina’s objections, judge rules the republic owes $6.1B to foreign bondholders appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

A Sneak Peak at Leadership Research Findings

After interviews and conversations with 100’s of top executives from 26 countries around the globe, it has become clear that business as we know it is on the way out. In its place is a new type of enterprise that looks less like an assembly line and more like a community; a place where care, fun and yes, even love, have a place.

While this new world order of business promises levels of professional freedom and opportunity our parents never imagined, it also redefines the concept of a career and demands new skills for success. Achieving success in the future is what the New Leadership Challenge is all about.

Our research has identified the 11 essentials for becoming an effective leader in this new environment.

The first 4 steps deal with becoming an introspective leader – getting clear about who you are, what you care about and what you want:

1. Personal Inventory: Great leadership comes with reflective honesty and self-appraisal, taking the time to specifically define our strengths and weaknesses AND the courage to validate your findings with others is the first step.
2. Values: It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have that matters and VALUES drive ACTIONS. List the 5 things you value most (in order of importance) and use that list to guide your actions.
3. Unique Ability: We are many things, but each of us possesses unique talents, driven by our passions and what we value. Chicago consultant Dan Sullivan suggests that finding your unique talent is a key to unlocking your leadership potential.
4. What Success Means to You: Success is NOT a destination. Success is an aggregation of effort, time and lots of lesser successes. Take a moment to define what success means to you and make an effort to become successful each day. Then every night ask yourself, was I successful today?

Next week we’ll provide the rest of the list (several of which will likely surprise you) and offer concrete ways to begin taking action to rapidly accelerate your vision of success.

AND… keep those cards and letters coming! Don’t hesitate to share your perspectives by writing me at Jeff@jeffkaplan.com.

Guest author Stephen Moyers is an online marketer, designer, avid tech-savvy blogger. Associated with Los Angeles-based SPINX Digital Agency, he writes about online marketing, web design, development, social media marketing and more.

Many companies have trouble matching fantastic campaign content with their target markets. The result is like a Hollywood flop: bad return on investment (ROI), criticism, and a hit to your brand. Without a deep understanding of your market, you can’t develop a strong marketing campaign. 

See also: How To Evaluate Your Digital Marketing Campaign

Do you know what your average customer looks like? What he does on the weekends? What she reads about on social media? Do you know what they’ll likely order at Starbucks? These are the kinds of questions you should answer about your consumer base. Regardless of what you sell, high ROI starts with an effective audience targeting strategy.

Building Marketing Personas

Without looking at any data, you can likely create an accurate profile for your ideal customer. You have this inherent understanding because you built a product or service created around a need. However, you’ll need to go beyond stereotypes and a basic market understanding to truly hit home with your branding message. You’ll need to visualize your customer’s life outside of the product-need connection.

Start With What You Know

Pick two or three basic stereotypes or associative patterns that make up your core customer base. These are the individuals who your product or service speaks to the most. Give them a name and write down as much about them, generally, as possible.

For instance, you might say a person is likely to be a middle aged to senior career professional who still reads the newspaper in print or on a tablet every morning. He or she prefers black coffee and wears conservative business suits. This person is the perfect fit for our product because…

You might list ages, ideals, family considerations, and other general lifestyle information that could impact a purchaser’s decision. These demographical considerations will largely influence your market’s online behaviors.

Add in Data-Driven Information

Once you have your stereotypical customer, supplement your personas with science. Unless you know what that professional is looking for online, your campaign might still miss the mark. Use data to confirm your approach and better understand what those personas are really interested in.

• Look at website traffic. Use Google Analytics to look at the keywords that most commonly introduce visitors and repeat visitor to your site. Then try to categorize those search terms under the personas you have developed. If there isn’t a strong connection with many searches, rethink your persona outlines.

• Send out a survey. Instead of guessing about your customers’ wants, ask them. Use social media, email interactions, and website exchanges to poll visitors about what’s important to them and what they’d like to see from your company.

• Check out Facebook Insights. If you have a business page on Facebook, your company has access to its analytics tool. Insights provides information regarding the individuals who access and interact with your page. You can see demographical data regarding region, language, age, and more.

• Mix in Twitter Analytics. Some companies are more engaged on Twitter than other social media forums. Twitter Analytics provides metrics similar to Facebook Insights. We’d recommend comparing all sets of analytics to note the differences between platforms. If your company targets many demographics, you may find that certain ages gravitate to certain platforms. The more you know, the more accurate your marketing personas will naturally become.

Scope Out the Competition

Before you start working on a campaign, you must consider one more factor: the competition. If you search for your market’s defining set of search terms, does your company appear in the search results or does your competitor? It’s not enough to be present in the search results. Any campaign for visibility, exposure, information dissemination, or other marketing goals should always incorporate SEO principles.

Your company needs to appear “above the fold” in the search results most commonly clicked. Explore what the competition is doing well, how you can do it better, and what you offer that they don’t. Highlighting these things could give you a boost.

Streamlining a Campaign to Reach the Market

Once you’ve developed your marketing personas, you may want to revisit the data-comparison exercise before creating and executing any campaign. Each time you send content out, you have the opportunity to shift the feedback to match your business goals. Updated information will help you continue to exceed your goals in the future.

You know what your company has to offer the market, and now you know what your market is looking for online. Bring that information to a brainstorming meeting with brand voice documents, design trends, and color considerations.

A Cohesive Campaign Isn’t Necessarily One Approach

A well-developed theme may be the only constant in your campaign. For instance, you may have a design concept, color scheme, and basic tag line that will underline every tactic you undertake. The content you post, on the other hand, may be very different. Approach each platform with the new knowledge you have about your target market.

If your campaign runs on Twitter and LinkedIn, what you say may look very different on each site. You may choose to post an informational article on LinkedIn, whereas Twitter has a catchy statement and a video post. This customized approach will also enhance the overall user experience by giving visitors fast access to the type of content they need, want, and prefer.

Don’t Neglect Your Branding

In any campaign, your branding is a fundamental key to success. Have you ever watched an interesting commercial on television, but never registered which company the clip promoted? If your brand isn’t closely associated with the campaign message, you could have the same problem. Those campaigns are a waste of time and money. Use color, logo placement, and voice to represent your brand and differentiate your content from the competition.

Finding balance between providing value to your customer base through targeted marketing and staying true to your brand is another pitfall of many marketing campaigns. Always take time to understand how your brand fits naturally into your customers’ lives. That connection is where you’ll develop a campaign that hits home and drives revenue.

Analyzing Conversion Rates to Get Ahead

Before, during, and after any campaign, analyze your conversion rates. Use your analytics tools to find out which pages and what content are delivering results. The campaign pieces that aren’t delivering high quality results present an opportunity. Rework content and design to match what’s currently working. With constant vigilance, you can turn a lackluster campaign into a targeted, ROI producing mission for your company. It’s never too late to start reworking tactics to better suit your audience.

In lieu of or in addition to reworking content, you may also decide to focus on what’s presently working. If your conversion rates strongly and positively correlate to one particular tactic, use that to your advantage. The shelf life of online content is fairly short. Recycle content with subtle differences to bring in even more traffic and drives sales.

Remember, it’s never too late to make an okay campaign remarkable by targeting your market.

Lead photo courtesy of Bigstock Photo via Stephen Moyers; chart by em4b2009 on PhotoBucket via Stephen Moyers

The world of online marketing strategy is full of pitfalls and potential content marketing mistakes. Digital marketing personalization is one of them.

While it’s not practical to create a completely personalized marketing campaign or customer experience for every single individual who passes through your sales pipeline, you can certainly take steps to personalize marketing in a manner that boosts conversion and sales rates.

Buyer personas are key to your customization and personalization efforts. When you segment your prospects by persona and set up parallel marketing campaigns for each, you increase the relevance and appeal of each campaign – and make prospects more likely to respond favorably.

What Are Buyer Personas, Anyway?

We’ve discussed buyer personas before, but the concept is important enough to go over again. Basically, a buyer persona is an archetype – an ideal individual with a certain set of demographic characteristics, personal motivations, product preferences and other attributes.

Savvy companies use buyer persona information to segment their target audiences and develop marketing campaigns that speak directly to the needs, wants and goals of each type of consumer.

It’s important to note that buyer personas can be relatively general – for instance, “female head of household aged 25 to 54″ – or quite specific. While it’s possible to customize and personalize marketing materials for an even narrower audience, many of the tips outlined here assume that buyer personas will form the basis of your online marketing personalization efforts.

1. Use Customized Landing Pages for Each Campaign and Traffic Source

Your digital marketing strategy should include customized landing pages for each inbound campaign and traffic source. These pages need to make sense in the context of the visitor’s motivation.

For instance, a landing page that appears when a user clicks an awareness-oriented display ad for a particular product type shouldn’t be tailored to returning customers. Likewise, landing pages tied to lead-nurturing email campaigns shouldn’t ask visitors to re-enter their email addresses.

Ideally, landing pages should be paired with specific products, services or “silos” with the goal of speaking directly to the campaign that led visitors to them.

2. Send Out Lead-Nurturing Emails Based on Visitor Behavior

To the extent possible, track your prospects’ movements around, and engagements with, your website. Send out lead-nurturing emails and other non-intrusive contacts that take these behaviors into account.

For instance, you might schedule a “We miss you!” email for a previous customer who hasn’t visited your website or purchased anything during the past month.

3. Recommend Additional Products and Services Based on Past Purchases

If you have an e-commerce platform, use visitors’ past purchase data to make recommendations or offer deals based on those purchases.

For instance, you might offer a 20 percent discount on the utensil set that accompanies the outdoor grill a particular customer purchased on their last visit.

4. Use – and Learn From – Personalized Surveys

If you really want to get into the minds of your prospects and current customers, it’s hard to do better than a quick, easy online survey.

Ask one or two questions per survey, offering some sort of sweet deal – such as a free piece of content or discount code – for visitors who complete it.

5. Use Location Data to Your Advantage

This is a great way to drive your online marketing personalization efforts beyond the buyer persona. If you have physical stores or pickup locations, it’s particularly useful for marketing to mobile users.

Simply ask your website visitors or app users permission to track their physical locations. Use this data to provide store-specific deals or opportunistic offers, such as beach towels and sunblock in stores located near the beach.

6. Offer Customized Calculators, Games and Other Interactive Features

In some inbound marketing circles, “gamification” is the way to go. If you can figure out a way to turn everyday lead-generating and lead-nurturing processes into fun, engaging activities for your prospects, you’ll be well on your way to content marketing success.

Depending on the nature of your business, such activities might include a customized calculator, a “choose your own adventure” type of game or a wizard that lets you create your own customized product or service.

7. Reach Out the Old-Fashioned Way

Although some buyers really do want to be left alone and allowed to make purchasing decisions on their own timetables, most appreciate regular contact from the companies they do business with.

In addition to your ongoing lead-nurturing efforts via email marketing, don’t be shy about reaching out directly to current customers and potential prospects. If you have the manpower, schedule regular phone calls or Skype chats to check in on each person and determine what they need from you.

Don’t worry about making a hard sell during these conversations. This type of personalized contact is more about building goodwill and laying the groundwork for future sales.

Learn How to Use Buyer Personas from the Pros

Online marketing personalization doesn’t begin and end with a keen understanding of buyer personas. That said, knowing who your buyers are and what they want to see from your company certainly won’t hurt your digital outreach efforts.

If you can personalize your online marketing efforts with lead-nurturing emails, savvy social media use, customized landing pages and other easy-to-implement tactics, you’ll be in a great position to capture new leads, boost sales and lower your per-lead and per-sale marketing costs.

That’s great news for your online visibility – and your bottom line.

B2B marketers, listen up. You’re focused on generating leads. It’s your M.O. It’s what you live and breathe.

But, let me ask—are you utilizing videos to boost your lead generation efforts? Video is a strong lead generation tool—a fact that is becoming more and more apparent to companies across all industries, from tech, to higher education, to healthcare. Through pre-video email gates, end-of video forms, and in-video CTAs, there are numerous ways to capture new contacts.

Let’s explore 3 ways to infuse your marketing activities with lead-generating videos so you can hit your goals, all while getting the biggest bang for your buck.

1. Campaign Landing Pages

Landing pages are meant for conversion. But before you can get anyone to convert, you first have to grab their attention. That’s why the main purpose of videos on landing pages is to be catchy and engaging. Let’s say you’ve just written a snazzy new guide and you really want your audience to read it—but first you need for them to download it. Video can help you do this by luring people in through humor or captivating storytelling. That’s because videos are 12 times more likely to be watched than text is to be read. So, grab that attention and focus on creating something that people will want to watch. There’s no need to use video to go into detail about what your guide offers—that’s what your landing page copy is for. But once they’ve watched your video, they’ll feel more committed to your offering and will be more likely to continue on to the rest of your landing page content.

The best practice for capturing leads when using promotional videos on landing pages is to use a call-to-action (CTA) or auto-redirect. A CTA at the end of your video invites viewers to take the next step (such as downloading the guide), and an auto-redirect sends viewers to the rest of your landing page immediately upon completion, thus giving them the opportunity to further engage with your brand.

In a recent campaign promoting my company Vidyard’s Video Marketing Handbook, we used a catchy video personifying the handbook as a bit of an awkward trainer to get people engaged in our content. At the end of the video, we re-directed viewers to the rest of the page where they could learn more about the details of the handbook and fill out a form for the download.

2. Educational, High-Value Content

When your actual video is a high-value piece of content, like a webinar, you can do the lead capture right in the video itself. This is commonly used for stand-alone pieces of content.

More often than not, these videos will be accompanied by an email gate or full form gate. This means that viewers can’t see your content unless they fill in their contact information. Which is the exact reason that you need to make sure you communicate the value of what they’ll be receiving in the webinar somewhere other than your video (more than likely this will be through your web page copy).

Webinars are a great example of putting this into practice, since they offer a lot of high-value content, typically specific to one topic. Below is one example of including a form right on-page, prior to displaying the video.

You can also use email gates partway through a webinar as a way to first show a teaser amount of content before asking viewers for their information in order to continue with the webinar.

3. Interactive Product and Demo Videos

Product videos are some of the most commonly produced and most frequently viewed videos. If you’re not using them to capture leads, you might be missing a big opportunity! Though, let’s first be clear on the type of product videos I’m referring to in this scenario. I’m not suggesting you add any sort of lead capture to the explainer video that sits on your home page. I’m fairly confident that this would violate like 138 principles of content marketing and demand generation. OK, maybe not quite 138…but this stage is simply too early to ask buyers to provide their information to you. You’ll want to offer some free, un-gated content to them for the first stages of their buying journey. All in all—don’t ask for too much upfront. Instead, look to your lower funnel product videos and “pitchy content” to capture leads and build in video interactivity.

Rather than just capturing the standard information of name, company, email address, and phone number, use these types of videos, instead, as opportunities to learn more about your prospects. For example, you may want to ask them what type of technology they’re using or how many vendors they work with on an annual basis. These questions will differ depending on your target persona’s profile; the ultimate goal is to capture information that will help you to better qualify your leads!

To do this, you can add interactive elements like survey questions or polls into your video to build out prospect profiles. Not only does this allow you to capture more information about your leads, like which technologies they’re using or what their biggest pain point is, but it will also encourage higher engagement on these videos.

While you’re hard at work ensuring all of your campaigns bring in the maximum number of leads, make sure video is pulling its weight, too! It’s a beast of a medium—so, I say, use its power!

How has video worked for your team’s lead generation efforts? Let us know in the comments below!

Earlier this‎ month Canadians went to the polls to select a government and a Prime Minister. It was the first federal election in more than twenty years contested on fiscal policy and conservatives lost. The result ought to prompt a moment of introspection and rediscovery.

The post-election analysis thus far has tended to characterize the election as a referendum on Prime Minister Harper. That is to be partly expected. Mr. Harper governed Canada for nearly a decade and, despite a significant record of accomplishment, was always seen as an imposter by the country’s left-wing commentariat. Justin Trudeau ran a “time for a change” campaign that resonated with Canadian voters and delivered a majority government.

Yet the public clamour for newness needed to be weighed against Prime Minister Harper’s record of accomplishment and the backward-looking ideas proposed by the winning Liberal Party and their dauphin leader. And herein lies the lesson for conservatives as they develop a forward-looking agenda.

Prime Minister Harper’s record is one of competent, effective, and conservative governance. He limited the scope and ambition of the national government consistent with his view of federalism and the role of the state relative to the individual and civil society. ‎ He reoriented federal support programs to give families more choice over their child care decisions and personal savings, resisted calls for “national strategies” and centralized bureaucracy to address every perceived social and economic problem. He cut taxes – including sales taxes and corporate taxes – and brought federal revenues as a share of GDP to their lowest level in fifty years. And he controlled public spending‎. Federal spending grew, on average, by 0.2 percent per year since 2011. The budget is balanced. And Canada’s debt-to-GDP ratio is significantly lower than all other G7 countries. Polls near the end of the campaign indicated broad support for his economic and fiscal record.

When one adds Prime Minister Harper’s principled foreign policy and ambitious free trade agenda, a picture of conservative leadership comes squarely into focus. He admitted his imperfections during the campaign, but, like Isiaah Berlin’s hedgehog, Mr. Harper understood the big issues well, and consistently got them right.

But it was more than just Mr. Harper’s governing record on trial in this campaign. The election was also about a conservative policy consensus to which he had contributed – some may say forged – for over a quarter century.

The Reform Party was established in 1987, and Mr. Harper was the founding policy chief. That party led the charge for fiscal probity at the federal level and elected a significant contingent of Parliamentarians, including Harper, in 1993. Canada’s federal government had run budgetary deficits for more than a quarter century to that point. But fiscal profligacy was not the exclusive domain of the federal government. Several provinces followed a similar course of high taxes and large, protracted deficits. Then the country hit a wall. The federal debt-to-GDP ratio hit nearly 70 percent. Federal debt charges as a share of revenue exceeded 30 percent. The Mexican peso crisis of early 1995 brought things to a head culminating in the Wall Street Journal editorial warning that Canada was becoming “an honourary member of the Third World.”

Out of this crisis came reform. Mr. Harper, as an opposition member of Parliament, was a leading voice for fiscal consolidation. But it would be wrong to characterize this moment as a partisan one. Mainstream politicians across the political spectrum understood the urgency and adopted serious programmes of fiscal reform. There was a pervasive consensus that swept across the country. As one think-tank scholar has put it: “The entire political class decided to stop treating this as a matter of political contention and started treating it as a matter of national interest.”

This consensus helped to put the country’s public finances on a solid footing. Total government spending fell from 53 percent of GDP in 1992 to 39 percent in 2007. The federal debt-to-GDP ratio shrank from 68 percent in 1996 to 28 percent in 2009. And the federal tax burden began to fall as successive governments reduced taxes. The result was period of sustained economic growth, job creation, and wage increases.

The political outcome was a durable consensus in favour of balanced budgets. The federal government ran eleven consecutive fiscal surpluses until the 2008-09 recession. Provincial governments, by and large, did the same.

Fast forward to the 2015 federal campaign. The winning Liberal Party – the party that had delivered a balanced budget at the federal level the last time it held office – broke from this political orthodoxy. The Liberals rejected the balanced budget that Mr. Harper had delivered and campaigned on an explicit promise to return to deficit during a period of economic growth. Mr. Trudeau called deficits “a way of measuring the kind of growth and the kind of success that a government is actually able to create.”

This assertion – backed up by a plan to add $150 billion in new spending to the federal budget over four years and at least three years of deficit spending – signaled a major break from the fiscal policy orthodoxy that dominated national politics in Canada since the mid-1990s. The Liberals were promising, nay campaigning on, a pledge to break the balanced budget consensus. As David Frum has written of the Liberal electoral proposition: “The government he [Mr. Trudeau] leads will repudiate the legacy not only of the incumbent Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, but the neoliberal Liberals of the 1990s.”

Liberals abandoned the consensus and sought to re-litigate a debate that been largely absent from mainstream federal politics for twenty years and conservatives, to be frank, were not ready for it. The conservative intellectual case for balanced budgets had atrophied. We lacked the political vocabulary to make the case for prudent government spending and a balanced budget to the Canadian public. Mr. Trudeau’s calls for “investment” seemed more compelling than our musings about “being in the black.” We were unable to persuasively argue for the concrete, real-life utility of not spending more than the government collects. A return to deficit spending, the anti-consensus, won the day.

Why? Canadians did not become fiscally irresponsible overnight. Nor did they suddenly abandon the prevailing consensus and assume a new ideological poise in favour of deficit spending and bigger government. The result has more to do with conservatives’s inability, or perhaps unreadiness, to communicate the case for balanced budgets and fiscal probity. We took for granted that we won this intellectual conflict. We assumed that Canadians instinctively understood the importance of fiscal plans that reconciled.

It is a powerful reminder that conservatives cannot take for granted the intellectual terrain gained in past battles.

And this is the lesson: While conservatives must put forward concrete, practical, forward-looking ideas to grow the economy and help families make ends meet, we must never lose sight of our rearguard and continue to make arguments in favour of sound public finances and balanced budgets. The conservative consensus was, it turns out, not as durable as we assumed.

Conservatives must continue to demonstrate how a balanced budget is an important means to the ends of lowering taxes and creating the conditions for economic growth and job creation. We must explain how a limited, less activist government promotes individual choice and creates the space for community and civil action. And we must argue that going backwards to failed ideas of the past would undermine the economic and fiscal gains that we have made. In short, it means following Samuel Johnson’s adage about how “men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”

Yet, despite losing this battle, Canadian conservatives are well positioned for the longer struggle. We have plenty of reasons to feel optimistic and have made tremendous progress in the battle of ideas. Mr. Harper will go down as a historic Prime Minister and the most important conservative in Canada’s modern political history. We must follow his example to put forward thoughtful, well-crafted ideas that speak to the goals and aspirations of families. But we must also never take for granted that past battles will not re-emerge as skirmishes that must be refought. We must always keep up rearguard actions to protect what we have won. Conservatives would be wise to heed this lesson.

Sean Speer and Ken Boessenkool have been senior policy advisors to Prime Minister Harper and were members of the Conservative national campaign team.

The post How the deficit gambit stunned Conservatives into silence appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Everybody has those days when they get frustrated at work and question their current role and career path.

It’s perfectly normal. But if it happens everyday, then you should probably listen to those nagging inklings and look into alternative career paths.

As a salesperson, shifting your career path may seem like an overwhelming thought. But if you realize that you don’t want to pursue the typical sales management career path, there are plenty of other options you can consider.

For those who aren’t quite ready to pack their bags and buy a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia, think about transitioning to a role in sales operations, channel sales, or even marketing.

Sales Operations Careers

Sales operations have emerged as an entirely new sales career path with the advent of the CRM (i.e. Salesforce). Roles in this field are very different from traditional sales roles. In sales ops, you don’t need to cold call MQLs, conduct product demos with prospects, or work with champions to push deals over the finish line.

Rather, sales ops is all about empowering and enabling the sales team as a whole. Often, this involves spending a lot of time in your CRM analyzing data and tracking down powerful tools with the ultimate goal of making life easier for your sales team so they can close more — and bigger — deals. Arguably the most attractive aspect of a role in sales ops is that you can have a tremendous impact on the growth of your company.

A career in sales operations might be right for you are:

• Data-driven and excited by analytics
• Constantly searching for ways to increase sales process efficiency
• Interested in sales enablement technologies

Channel Sales Careers

Channels sales is all about building relationships with like-minded, non-competitive companies in your space. This means maintaining existing partnerships, as well as developing entirely new ones. Naturally, channel sales roles involve talking to lots of different people.

The primary objective of channel sales, like traditional sales roles, is to increase revenue. The main difference here is that people working in channel sales aren’t the ones closing the deals. Rather, they facilitate deals by working with partners to reel in qualified prospects who otherwise wouldn’t have heard about your business.

A career in channel sales might be right for you are:

• Always connecting with new people
• Able to quickly establish rapport and make sustainable connections
• On an endless search for new growth opportunities

Marketing Careers

Marketing is more closely tied to sales than most people think, making for a common transition out of a career in sales. As SMarketing continues to catch on, you can expect to see more and more people jump back and forth between positions in sales and marketing.

“Marketing” is a pretty wide field, so let’s break it down even further. What exactly does marketing entail? Here are the some of the more common marketing fields today:

Content Marketing

The goal of content marketing is to generate leads by writing blog posts to drive traffic to your website and gated offers (eBooks, whitepapers, etc.). If you know how to write, content marketing might just be for you.

Demand Generation

This area of marketing often relies heavily on marketing automation and lead nurturing drips to move leads down the funnel until they’re ready to be passed off to your sales team. Demand generation teams often work closely with sales to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding product positioning, sales process, and lead goals.

Branding

No two companies are quite the same. Your brand can be thought of as your company’s identity. When someone thinks of your company, what comes to mind? That depends on how your brand is perceived by the market. Marketers focused on branding play a crucial role in growing word-of-mouth, establishing a strong reputation, and eventually becoming the industry standard.

A career in marketing might be right for you are:

• Excellent at communicating ideas to a wide audience
• Able to garner people’s attention, and maintain it
• Fascinated by the power of the internet

Want to learn more about how to shift your sales career path? Check out our Sales Career Paths Chart to see which roles might be right for you.

Facebook has its eyes set on global domination, and it's quickly executing on its plan to get there. 

Earlier this week, the company rolled out a new kind of ad format meant to bring a video experience to low-bandwidth emerging markets.

Throughout the launch event, the main refrain was how Facebook plans to "connect the next billion."  

Right now, the main Facebook app has nearly 1.5 billion monthly active users. Instagram, its photo sharing app, has 300 million, while Messenger and WhatsApp, its chat apps, have 700 million and 900 million, respectively. 

That's a huge swath of the word's population, but Facebook says that it's just the beginning. 

Right now, about 3 billion people have access to the Internet, but 3 billion more are set to come online in the next five years, primarily from emerging markets like India and Africa.

Facebook wants to rope them all into its apps and keep its $3.8 billion in quarterly ad revenue climbing. 

Here's its three-pronged approach to taking over the world:

1. Make FB work everywhere

Although most people in the US can fire up the Facebook app on their phone and scroll through their News Feed without noticeable lag time, that's not the case in most of the world, where people have slow connections. For example, one third of the next billion people that come online will do so from India, where the majority of mobile connections are only 2G.  

Facebook created this graphic to illustrate the network break-down:

In order to convince people in emerging markets that its app is still valuable for them, Facebook needs to make sure that it works on any kind of phone with any kind of connection, as well as possible. 

The team has sicced its engineering and product teams on solving that problem. The company highlighted its successes earlier this month, like how it has created an open-sourced Network Connection Class system that lets the app figure out a user's connection speed on the fly. With that info, it can adjust what kind of News Feed stories it shows them and how to load them.

For example, with a slow connection, the app will prioritize fully displaying stories that the user is looking at, versus partially loading a dozen pieces of content at once, as well as only initially loading low-res versions of photos. To make sure that people never simply see a loading symbol or gray boxes, it will also show stories loaded on previous connections when a user taps open the app, even when there isn't any connection at all. 

To make sure employees understand the challenge, Facebook recently launched a new initiative called 2G Tuesdays that prompts all of its employees to opt into one hour of a simulated slow connection once a week, to help them identify ways it could make the experience even better.

"What we're really trying to do is build empathy inside of the company and to really appreciate that the people we're building for look less and less like us," Facebook product chief Chris Cox said at this week's event.

2. Making sure all those new users make it money 

Facebook also needs to make money off of all its users in emerging markets.

That's why the company has focused on finding new ways to tailor its ads to feature phones and slower connections since 2013. 

Still, while nearly 60% of its daily active users live outside North America and Europe, those users only account for about a quarter of Facebook's total revenues.

The company has worked to shift those percentages by constantly improving its ad experience in other parts of the world. Today, Facebook's ads work even on slow connections, engineer director of emerging markets Kelly MacLean says.

Here are some other ways Facebook's made a monetization push for users in emerging markets:

• It launched a Creative Accelerator program to help advertisers think of unique ways to connect with regional audiences and work with the local infrastructure. For example, in India Facebook has created a "missed call" ad product where people can avoid using their data plan by having the advertiser pay the data costs of sending them some sort of content, like music or a celebrity message.
• It opened a sales office in Johannesburg to help it expands its reach in Africa. 
• It's constantly adjusting its ad products to make them better, like allowing advertisers to target uses based on their connection, or with this week's introduction of slideshow ads which create a video-like experience for low bandwidth

By paying extremely careful attention to making sure that as it improves its product in emerging markets, it can also find new advertisers with fresh ways of reaching consumers, Facebook is making sure that it can reap revenue from all users.  

3. Spreading internet itself, to keep the new flow of users coming

To get people in emerging countriesd online, Facebook does not only rely on governments or local companies. 

The company has also invested in making sure more people get online as soon as possible, most immediately through the non-profit organization, Internet.org, which it leads. 

It has also partnered with local service providers for a service called Free Basics which lets people use Facebook and other apps without paying.

It even has a solution for areas without the right infrastructure for Free Basics. By next year, it will launch its first solar-powered aircraft capable of beaming internet to areas that don't have the cell towers or fiber optic cables to support 

With these efforts, Facebook ensures a steady stream of new people coming online, who it hopes will join Facebook and start bringing it ad revenue. 

It's not working alone: While Facebook makes its drones, Google is flying internet balloons all over the world, too. 

Everywhere, all at once

Director of emerging markets monetization Nikila Srinvisan summed it up at Facebook's presentation:

"We want to reach everyone, across any level of connectivity, how and when they want to connect."

Whether or not you're a Facebook fan, it's hard to miss how quickly the company is hurtling towards that goal. 

And we'll probably hear even more updates soon. 

Facebook reports its Q3 earnings on November 4, and we bet that its efforts in emerging markets will come up. 

SEE ALSO: Facebook will give employees super slow internet speeds every Tuesday to better understand markets like India

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Every square foot of an Apple store is designed to make you spend more money

According to data from HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing report, “inbound marketing had a 76 percent likelihood of being the marketing approach of choice for B2B companies,” compared to outbound marketing tactics. That’s an overwhelming percentage! However, the same report showed that proving marketing ROI is the single biggest challenge that marketers face today.

This disconnect suggests that it’s time for B2B marketers to take a step back and look to inbound marketing fundamentals. That way marketers are setting themselves up for success (and showing their bosses the fruits of their labors).

In today’s post, we’re going to dive into the key elements that make the B2B inbound marketing machines hum.

What is B2B inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of helping potential customers find your company, often before they are even in the purchasing stage of the buyer’s journey. By creating content that your prospects love, you can build brand awareness and preference. By leveraging content that is relevant to your audience and targeted calls to action, you can pull this traffic through the funnel and ultimately drive new revenue for your business.

One of the biggest impacts of inbound marketing—that is often overlooked—is the increased opportunity for customer engagement. By developing content that your personas love, you are also educating and engaging your existing customer base. Too many marketers forget about their existing customers in their marketing strategy, but in leveraging inbound for engagement, you will grow net-new revenue and also increase expansion revenue from your existing customer base.

Goal setting

Unlike direct tactics such as PPC, inbound is somewhat more complicated to measure, so it’s incredibly important that you have clear goals at the outset of any inbound program. For B2B companies, especially those with an inside sales team, it’s best to work backward from your revenue goals to determine marketing’s responsibilities. If you’re looking for more guidance on how to do this, you can check out this post, where we discuss these steps in detail.

Data from Bizible has shown that the primary metric for B2B marketing success today is the number of opportunities sourced. So even if sourcing opportunities is the end goal, it’s important to realize that content marketing and SEO take time to build. One of my favorite illustrations of this is from SEO Moz, highlighting the “Gap of Disappointment.”

Once you’re through that gap, content can provide lasting and compounding returns on your investment in a way that no other marketing channel or tactic can.

The point being, if you’re investing in inbound, make sure you give yourself enough time to reap the fruits of your labors. It will take time but once it pays off, it pays off big. And if it helps, you can keep these statistics in mind while you push through the gap:

• Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10
• Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5 times more traffic than companies who do not blog
• Companies that have more than 52 blog posts see an increase of leads by 77 percent

Buyer-persona development

Market segmentation and buyer-persona analysis go hand-in-hand. Whether your business is a young startup just getting traction, is looking for a beachhead to cross the chasm, or is an enterprise expanding into new markets, having an in-depth understanding of your audience will be the key to your success. This is especially true when success hinges on consistently producing content that addresses your leads’ problems and keeps them coming back for more.

Once you have your goals, take the time to analyze and understand your target audience. Know who they are, and ask questions like:

• Where they fit in the buying cycle
• What their challenges are
• How they would define success
• Where they spend time online

Content creation

Based on your buyer-persona research, you should have a good idea of the type of content that your buyer personas like to consume. It might be webinars, blog posts, whitepapers, e-books, templates, webinars or videos. The list goes on and on. However, for most B2B marketers, blogging becomes the foundation that attracts potential customers to your site and is the jumping off point to any other content you produce.

Blogging

When it comes to blogging, it all starts with keyword research. This means targetting longer semantic keyword queries rather than highly competitive and specific keywords. These long-tail keywords are perfect for targeting with blog posts, and allow you to target very specific keywords to your niche to drive highly qualified traffic.

Before you start doing this keyword research yourself, I highly recommend reading Neil Patel’s post, on how to uncover hidden gems.

The next question we hear all the time is, “How often do I need to publish blog posts?” First and foremost, prioritize quality over quantity. But when it does come to quantity, HubSpot data shows that B2B companies that published posts more than 11 times/month generate 1.75 times as many leads as those blogging 6–10, and 3.75 times more as those blogging 0–3.

What next?

With this strategy in place, you should be well on your way to creating an inbound marketing machine. In part two, we’ll dive into creating premium content that will help you convert and nurture your audience down the marketing funnel. We will also discuss how you can amplify content results with promotion and align your marketing and sales teams.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on HubSpot's Marketing Blog. For more content like this, subscribe to Marketing.

The alignment of an organization’s sales and marketing efforts is a crucial strategic imperative for companies that desire sustainable growth. Despite the evidence of improved business performance, it’s still a rarity to find an organization that has and maintains full alignment. The good news is that the issue is getting far more attention than ever before, and more organizations are making progress.

A major cause for the overall lack of progress is that while the issue of alignment is getting more strategic attention from executives, it’s still getting very little focus in terms of tactical and structural changes that need to be made within an organization to sustain the goal.

While talk and will power can improve results in the short run, structural change is required to sustain the effort and to gain the benefits of such a pursuit. It is for this reason that the development of a documented service level agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing is so important.

HubSpot’s 2015 State of Inbound Marketing report highlighted three compelling advantages for companies that maintain their SLA:

• Companies with an active SLA are 34% more likely to experience greater year-over-year ROI than those companies that aren’t.
• They’re 21% more likely to get greater budget allocations.
• They’re 31% more likely to be hiring additional salespeople to meet demand.

Why SLAs Are So Important

Having been involved in creating many SLAs (for both my company and with clients) I can attest to the fact that while creating them can be difficult (they require a lot of thinking and working through details), the impact is significant. It is said that great communication is communicating not so that you can be understood, but so that you cannot be misunderstood. SLAs make that possible.

It is also said that Wwhat gets measured gets done, and what gets measured and monitored gets done faster. An SLA formalizes the measurement and monitoring processes that ensure progress and results.

Creating An Effective Sales & Marketing SLA

The process starts by bringing together the leaders of all disciplines into the same room to discuss roles, responsibilities, process, targets and accountability. At a minimum, a marketing and a sales leader need to be involved. As the sales development role continues to mature and grow, the leader of that group should be involved as well.

1) Defining Your Buyer Personas/Ideal Client Profile

As with everything else in your demand generation process, your service level agreement starts by clearly defining and communicating the criteria for who you are trying to attract. The more specific and clear the definition is, the better.

When you shortcut this step (and many organizations do) you leave far too much open to the interpretation of individuals. Let’s face it, salespeople and marketers are naturally opportunistic. Without formalizing, your profile definitions will drift and your demand generation process will get bogged down.

2) Standardize Lead Definitions

I regularly assess sales development and sales processes. One of the first questions I ask is to define what a lead is, and, further, to define each stage of an organization’s funnel. The answers almost always start with, “Well, uhm, well that’s a, uhm, good question. You see it kind of depends…”

At a minimum you must clearly define what qualified, marketing qualified and sales qualified leads are. This will force the participants to get into the minutia, but it’s critical to make your process scalable and sustainable.

3) Set Clear Goals

When setting goals, you should consider the maturity/ramp up of your team members and functional areas, past results and lead generation drivers. This is not the time to pull numbers out of the air and to make them motivating. Your goals must be based on real life situations.

The marketing team (and, if you have one, the sales development team) should be assigned goals around how many leads should be sourced, targets for each phase of the funnel and how many sales qualified leads (SQLs) should be turned over to the sales team.

All teams that are party to the SLA should meet every month to review results and update goals.

4) Define How The Handoff Occurs

Increasing lead velocity is truly a team effort. The handoff is a place where otherwise excellent demand generation processes blow up. You must determine if and how your SDRs will specialize, what determines when a lead is moved to that team and how leads are then handed off to the new sales team.

This is why you must have clear lead definitions. Without them your team will be dealing with too much ambiguity to sustain alignment and growth.

5) Establish Protocols For Managing Leads

The biggest, most common complaint I hear from salespeople and marketers is that the other group doesn’t know how to manage leads. This is the section of the SLA that eliminates that concern.

Clearly lay out how a lead should be treated – when, how often and how many times they should be “touched.” Closing the loop is also important. How should a sales accepted lead be reported as well as a sales rejected lead. Closed loop reporting is crucial to improving your processes.

6) Track, Measure & Assess Performance Metrics

Your SLA should clearly define the key performance indicators everybody will use to assess the progress and effectiveness of your demand generation processes. Tracking should be used to highlight performance issues/opportunities with individual contributors and to highlight and accelerate learning so that everyone is always improving.

7) Standardize the SLA Review Process

Determine the period of time that you will conduct a comprehensive review of the assumptions, processes and targets laid out in your SLA. For most companies a review of the SLA every six months is sufficient. For high-growth companies, we recommend reviewing quarterly.

Creating an SLA is a challenging task but one that is well worth the effort.  Clearly defining and communicating the expectations of your sales and marketing teams will go a long way in helping to meet or exceed the revenue goals you have established. 

Chris Sacca sits in a mostly empty plain white room in his Manhattan Beach, California home, far from the power brokers in San Francisco and New York. The room's lack of color only emphasizes his own abundance of it: Sacca sports his trademark black cowboy dress shirt, lush auburn beard, mussed hair and that biting corporate straight talk that rattles Twitter's board room and stock prices on Wall Street.

He made early investments in today's most buzzed-about billion-dollar businesses, including Twitter, Uber, Instagram and Stripe, which have made him a billionaire

More about Twitter, Chris Sacca, Uber, Business, and Shark Tank

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Cloud Based Education Founded by Gerd Kortemeyer, CSO, Co-Founder and Rob Fulk, CEO, Co-Founder in June 2013. CourseWeaver plans to completely revolutionise education and is well on the way to doing so. Think of CourseWeaver as education in the cloud, how it does that, is by providing education materials and aids such as textbooks, templates […]

The post Cloud Based Education On The Rise And For Good Reason appeared first on CloudTweaks.com.

There is nothing worse than drinking luke warm coffee (but doing it anyway for the sake of avoiding that caffeine headache).

But a company called Ember seems to know that, which is why they've developed a thermos that allows you to manually control the temperature of your coffee. Ember originally raised money for the product through an Indiegogo campaign.

"We put so much effort into making that perfect cup of coffee, so why do we go and pour it into a paper cup or mug?Only to end with coffee that's either scalding hot or luke warm," said Clayton Alexander, founder and CEO of Ember, in a video.

Ember's website notes that the average preferred coffee temperature is around 135 degrees Fahrenheit, but that most coffee is too hot at 160 degrees Fahrenheit. The thermos, which holds 12 fluid ounces, allows you to cool your scalding coffee down to the preferred temperature without letting it get to that nasty luke warm point. Naturally, you can heat up cold coffee as well.

You can adjust the temperature by spinning a dial on the bottom of the thermos or via Ember's corresponding app. The app will also recommend temperatures based on what you're drinking (135 degrees Fahrenheit is their preferred choice for Green Tea).

When fully charged, the thermos will last a full two hours, which is perfect for a commute to work in the morning. But you can also keep the thermos running all day using its charging coaster, which comes with the $129 thermos. The coaster's sleek design lets you easily charge it on the desk without taking up a lot of space.

Join the conversation about this story »

Can social media really function as a force for good? More specifically, can viral campaigns on social networks accomplish real change for the nonprofits that run them? It can be hard for people to take these campaigns seriously. It’s not always clear who exactly will be getting the fundraised money, there’s nowhere for people to see how much has been donated already, and perhaps most importantly, these campaigns get a lot of their participation from younger generations.

Over the years there have been a few notable examples of nonprofit campaigns that “went viral” through social channels. The simple fact that you’ve heard of them proves that these campaigns were at least successful in raising awareness for their causes. But did they help raise money? Did they make people care more?

Let’s take a look at three of the most famous examples.

KONY 2012

When the half-hour film about Joseph Kony, African warlord and recruiter of child soldiers, dropped back in 2012, the term “viral” was completely redefined. The video received over 100 million views in a week –not such an unusual accomplishment nowadays, but back in 2012 it was unheard of. The organization Invisible Children was responsible for creating the video and for the overarching KONY 2012 campaign.

But Invisible Children wanted more than just views to their video. They wanted users to spread the word via social shares, sign a pledge, and, most importantly, donate money. KONY 2012 successfully raised around $20 million dollars during a year of its campaign. Despite criticism over the content of the video, the video’s creator, and Invisible Children’s inner workings, there is no denying that the campaign was successful in making Joseph Kony infamous and in raising funds for the organization trying to bring him to justice. In addition, the issue of child soldiers and human trafficking became a household and national concern. And the effects of the campaign are still in progress. President Obama recently pledged further efforts and funds for the mission to arrest Kony. Not bad for a campaign that was started on YouTube.

Project ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

The internet was taken over by ice buckets during the summer of 2014 in the name of ALS. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurological, degenerative disease that eventually leads to loss of muscle movement and possible paralysis. The ice bucket challenge was started as a way to raise awareness for ALS and funds towards research for a possible cure. Because of the ease of social sharing, the challenge spread rapidly through Facebook. Friends nominated other friends to participate, and the growth was exponential.

This campaign also endured backlash from critics that pointed to the fact that upending a bucket of ice water on your head is not actually helping the cause. They believed that the campaign wouldn’t achieve any real significant fundraising because people were focused on the virality and fun of the campaign, rather than actual donations. This proved to be untrue – the total amount raised specifically from this campaign was $220 million. The large-scale popularity of this challenge was directly responsible for its success. And the social aspect of sharing and nominating friends made the campaign fun for everyone (including the ultra-famous). Check out the 60 Best Celebrity Ice Bucket Challenges laid out by Mashable.

15 Seconds of Shakespeare

Now we get to the latest viral social media campaign. Unlike the other two, this one has largely been active in the United Kingdom instead of the United States. And although anyone is able to chime and participate in this campaign, 15 Seconds of Shakespeare has also been unique in that the majority of meaningful content has come from celebrities. With the campaigns mentioned above, as well as many others, normal people got the ball rolling and celebrities chimed in later when the campaigns were well established. But this latest campaign started when actor David Flynn (who had minor roles in both Game of Thrones and BBC’s Sherlock) posted a 15-second video in which he read lyrics from a pop song in the manner of Shakespearean theater.

Many other celebrated actors have followed suit to create an impressive collection of videos. Warning: If you’re not familiar with British “telly” you may not recognize some of these people (with a few exceptions). Inclusion of the #15SecondShakespeare hashtag constituted a pledge to donate to the British Red Cross’ efforts at aiding refugees in the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe. The campaign is still in progress – check out the hashtag on Twitter to see the latest additions. Because the campaign is still going, there’s very little information on how successful it’s been so far. But if the other viral social media campaigns were any indication, this one will likely raise significant funds as well.

My #15SecondShakespeare thanks @r_jacz and I nominate @imrosemciver and @jenmorrisonlive https://t.co/NjwzCf1FBN

— Karen Gillan (@karengillan) September 23, 2015

@neilhimself @OfficialKat #15SecondShakespeare Donate http://t.co/bFxKwYx4xy Nominating @TerryGilliam @eddieizzard pic.twitter.com/OHtpdV8iAB

— michael sheen (@michaelsheen) September 25, 2015

Based on these three examples, it’s safe to say that viral social media campaigns are a legitimate source of fundraising for certain causes.

They masterfully capture people’s attention and make them want to be a part of it. And the nominations to participate build off the already-made social networks within Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

These examples have become extremely famous, but there are many more examples of lesser-known campaigns that have also been successful. 60% of millennials are donating an average of $481 every year to different causes, so organizations looking for some fundraising should find ways to reach them where they’re already at – on social media. You don’t need celebrity participation to raise money. You just need to target the right audience, and millennials using social media are a pretty good place to start!

Did you know the average employee of a business sends 10,000 emails annually? And that’s just the average! If a sales rep spends 28% of their day reading and responding to emails, then it’s likely they send much more volume than that. In fact, according to Radicati Group’s Email Report, 112 BILLION business emails are sent daily. No, that doesn’t include emails that you subscribe to via a newsletter or mail list.

These are personal, high-touch communications sent from each employee’s email client (think Outlook or Gmail). These are emails sent directly to your most valuable business contacts: customers, prospects, vendors, partners, investors, and so on. And what do each of these emails include? An email signature.

Email Signature Marketing Works

Campaigns in email signatures can play a very important role in helping to brand, educate, and drive awareness to your company’s most important initiatives.Your company likely spends an incredible amount of time and energy creating amazing content: whether ebooks, webinars, events, videos, case studies, or material about your great company culture. Why not let the email signatures work for you?

Feature visual campaigns promoting your most important company initiatives in the hundreds (or thousands) of one-to-one business emails your employees are sending every single day. Let these email signature campaigns be a conversation starter to help your most important company contacts feel further connected to your brand.

Email signature marketing campaigns often have a much higher conversion rate than other types of paid advertising such as rich media (.27%) or overall display ads (.06%) according to Smart Insights. The average click through rate for email signature marketing campaigns is .5%, but some campaigns can reach upwards of 3%.

Imagine if your company had 100 employee, each sending 10,000 emails annually (or 1M emails across your employee base). Just a .5% click through rate would generate 50,000 clicks to your most important content, from your most valuable contacts! What is that worth to your company? Angie’s List uses the power of email signature marketing for over 400 account managers and saw 2M displays in just 6 months. Find out how Angie’s List did it.

Give it a Try

No matter the size of your company, whether a large enterprise with thousands of employees or a startup with 10 people, you can get started with employee email signature marketing today.

For small companies, it may be most economical to create a simple graphic promoting a blog post, ebook, or open positions at your company for your employees to include in their email signatures. Create simple instructions including how to copy and paste the graphic into the email signature area in the Settings section of your email client, and provide them with a link to a landing page or website to hyperlink to the image.

If you’re a larger company or have employees spread across different office locations, it may be difficult to communicate instructions for how to copy and paste the email signature correctly. Let alone swapping out the content on a regular basis and ensuring all employees have up-to-date content (a best practice is to ensure new content is promoted every few weeks – if not more often!).

Try using an email signature marketing platform that allows the admin to create content and automatically add it to all employees’ signatures simultaneously, choose which groups should promote which campaigns, and update to a new campaign in seconds. If you’d like to give it a try or simply want to measure the impact of campaigns by tracking impressions and click through rates, try a provider like Sigstr, which also lets you give the solution a spin for a free 30-day trial before you commit.

Generate Sales Opportunities

What kind of company wouldn’t want to generate more sales opportunities for both existing and prospective customers? Believe it or not, the email signature can be a prime opportunity to educate and promote your brand without any extra effort on behalf of the sales reps or account managers. On average, it takes a sales rep 7 touch points to turn a prospect into a qualified sales opportunity.

Each of these touch points is a critical window of opportunity for a sales rep to not only educate the prospect on the value proposition of their product or service, but also build the credibility of the company they represent. Similarly with account managers, education on new products or services can be challenging. Email signatures, which are included in every single business email sent, are an ideal space to capitalize on this opportunity and turn prospects into revenue through education, rather than hard selling. There are three key ways to take advantage of this space, as well as manage it effectively.

1. Control the Marketing Message

By injecting marketing calls-to-action into each employee email signature, marketers are ensuring that their hard work is displayed in every email touch point – automatically.

The power of email signature marketing lies in the ability of the marketer to update these campaigns for all employees in real time in just a few seconds. This puts the control back in the marketers’ hands and removes the possibility of sales reps not updating their signature content.

2. Measure What Works – and What Doesn’t

Analytics are an important facet in any sales process to understand which marketing campaigns are converting prospects into opportunities or customers into upsells.

Email signature marketing platforms, such as Sigstr, provide this data in real time, allowing marketers to understand which content resonates with the end audience. This information is critical in knowing how to change messaging or where to allocate resources in the future.

3. Maintain Brand Consistency

Each of the thousands of emails sent to a prospect is an impression of your company. Consistency throughout employee email signatures is a key way of protecting the company’s brand. A professional email signature is not a place to reflect an individual’s personality. The way to prevent this inherent risk is to have insight into all employee signatures and standardizing them to represent a unified, consistent brand.

Employee email signatures are an ideal space to inject marketing content, know how the content is being received, and protect the company brand. By capitalizing on this opportunity, your company has the power to marry personal one-to-one email communications and your company’s most important initiatives or content to produce qualified sales opportunities without any additional effort.  

 

The post How To Drive Opportunities Through Email Signatures appeared first on Sales Hacker.

It used to exist – that clear and definite line between the marketing material creators and the people that closed the deal. Marketing and sales professionals knew exactly what they had to do, did it, and to paraphrase the immortalized words of Kipling, never the twain did meet. Even when recruiting for positions in these two departments, the personality type and skills required differed vastly.

With the digitization of our personal lives, the business landscape in which we operate has changed dramatically. As technology controls our personal lives more and more, the way in which we communicate (and with it our personal boundaries, and expectations) has shifted. The line between sales and marketing has blurred, and this “grey, blurry area” we call content.

Content is where sales and marketing connect and even overlap. In our content driven society the main aim of anyone (sales, marketing, support, finance) is to provide the right content to the right people at the right time. While marketers have known and accepted this for some time now (and this used to be the exclusive space of the marketer), it is becoming increasingly obvious that sales professionals who can’t, or won’t get with the content program will be left behind in their numbers game. But what does content marketing mean for sales, and why is it such a vital part of the social selling phase we have entered into, as B2B businesses?

Social selling by definition is about nurturing potential customers by monitoring what they’re doing on social media (social media tracking if you will). It adds a more personal touch to the relationship – real people providing real services and solutions to answer the real challenges and needs these real people face. The simple act of sharing a link can add value to a conversation and be seen as providing an insight. A person who contributes value to a conversation is someone who can be trusted. Content supports the tweaked individual message sales send out, bringing with it an element of trust and faith in not only the seller but the company as well. It almost removes some of the mysterious, even scary idea of online communication/selling.

While there are strong arguments for and against the POSITION of content marketing in a sales professional’s social selling strategy, there is little argument about its need in the strategy. For sales people who employ a social selling strategy as a main part of their sales strategy, content marketing IS key. Why? Content is great at attracting the right kind of leads – those who are driven by and to your content. Secondly, content can be used to nurture the lead while they’re right in your line of sight (or in the actual sales funnel). Here is where is gets important – relevant content nurtures the lead and drives them to the sale, while building trust in you and your organisation. But (there is always a but) the wrong content becomes annoying, spammy and works against a company trying to build a brand, an awareness, and a reputation. By minimizing the importance of content marketing in the strategy, you run the risk of not only creating or using the wrong content, but sending it to the wrong people and alienating them. Worse yet, by sidelining content, you run the real risk of becoming irrelevant and out-of-touch with your sales target.

Next week we will give you simple 5-step process to jumpstart your social selling strategy to start adding value to the marketing-sales funnel, and remain relevant in front of your leads.

Let’s take a look at customer retention. When it comes to your existing customers, there are two related metrics to watch. But as always, you have to take the time to listen to the stories they tell you.

We’re a subscription-based business, similar in some ways to a mobile phone service or a magazine. When we get a customer, they sign up and pay us a certain amount of money each month in exchange for our services.

In any given month, there are three things that can happen with an existing customer.

• Nothing changes: They continue with their service as before. This is revenue-neutral.
• They upgrade, for example by subscribing to additional features, thereby bringing us more revenue.
• They leave, and thereby cut our revenue.

If we want to grow, we have to make sure the number of customers we bring in and retain is greater than the number of customers cancelling the service. No surprise there, but as you grow this simple math can unravel an otherwise solid company. From that perspective, keeping existing customers is as important as getting new ones.

Companies that really grow are those whose customers not only stay, but also expand or upgrade their service so the same number of customers is generating more revenue. And if you keep adding new customers as well, you’ve got a chance to really take off.

So that means there are two ways to look at customer ‘churn’ (the number of customers who cancel): You can look at the number of accounts on the one hand, and their dollar value on the other: Are you losing lots of small customers, individuals who were paying you only $20 a month? Or are you losing a few big accounts, the ones that represent a bigger chunk of your monthly income?

It’s worthwhile to look at both figures — both the individual number of accounts that are canceled each month as a percentage of the customer base (that’s the first calculation to make), and the total dollar value of the accounts canceled, as a percentage of monthly recurring revenue (that’s your second calculation).

When you collect the numbers over time, you start seeing trends.

We noticed, for example, that the accounts most likely to be canceled were the ones associated with a single user. In other words, there might be one person in a firm who found our product useful. And when that person moves on, the account gets canceled. In our case, these single-user accounts canceling pushed our account retention lower than we wanted, but from a dollar point of view, they were less significant than the numbers suggested.

From what I’ve read, if more than one per cent of your customers leave you each month, there’s something wrong.

Customers can leave for a variety of reasons:

• Maybe the product is not valuable to them anymore.
• Maybe it costs too much.
• Maybe it’s too difficult to learn or use.
• Maybe they’re getting poor service.
• Maybe they’re not the ‘right’ person in their organization, the person who would get the most out of the service.
• Maybe the primary – or only – user left the company.

When we started looking at our own numbers, we found our churn rate — the percentage of customers leaving each month — was above one per cent. That was an indication there was a problem.

So we have to ask ourselves: Can we improve our product? Can we make it easier to use? After all, nothing is ever perfect, and we believe we should strive for something exceptional. And while Klipfolio’s product works for a great number of people, we are working to make it even better, so that it will appeal to a greater number of people.

The lesson from all this is that a company can’t put all its energy for growth into sales. It’s got to continue to devote time and effort to the products and services it sells. Truly think about customer success, and your retention and expansion rates will climb.

Look at your numbers and do the calculations. Make sure you hear loud and clear the stories those numbers are telling you. And act quickly to fix anything that isn’t quite right.

The post Why Do Customers Leave? Listen to Your Numbers & Act Quickly appeared first on OpenView Labs.

In Germany, McDonald’s is experimenting with selling a burger made with organic beef. Subway just joined a growing list of companies (including, again, McDonald’s) committing to buy mainly antibiotic-free meat. Why are big, mainstream food companies moving toward more natural ingredients? Clearly, there’s a broad trend toward health and wellness, but that’s not the big news here.

The real story is the relentless shift to transparency and what many call the “clean label” movement. In the food world, a clean label focuses on having fewer ingredients that are very clear about their origins, and recognizable (e.g., “cream” versus “microparticulated whey protein concentrate,” which the fast-growing chain Panera has placed on its long “No No List”). But “clean” is a catchall for a much broader and growing list of demands about the human and planetary impacts of all products and services (and the companies behind them).

Two major forces are driving this clean label world: (1) technology-driven transparency about products and their supply chains, and (2) Millennials, who are regularly demanding good behavior from the companies they buy from and work for. This movement, while hitting a fever pitch around products we put in or on our bodies, is not just affecting the food and personal care worlds.

The financial community, too, has noticed the new demands from Millennials — and the money that can be made by appealing to their larger aspirations. At the recent Sustainable Brands Metrics conference, Audrey Choi from Morgan Stanley presented some fascinating research on investor attitudes, with particular focus on Millennials. Choi explained the simple reason banks care about this generation: 10,000 people are turning 30 every day, and that’s roughly the age they start amassing assets (and having kids to spend money on).

This latest generation of workers and parents are, according to Morgan Stanley’s research, three times as likely to “seek employment with a company because of its stance on social and/or environmental issues.” And they’re twice as likely to “check product packaging to ensure sustainability” (in the search, I presume, for a clean label), purchase from a brand because of its sustainability credentials, or put their money in investment funds that target sustainability outcomes. Blackrock, the world’s largest money manager with $4-trillion-in-assets, launched a new “impact investing” fund this month specifically to please these demanding Millennials. The fund will “seek stocks that advance health, the environment, and treatment of workers.”

This is clean-label investing.

But Millennial consumers aren’t the only ones driving the transparency train. All generations have access to more technology and businesses are raising the bar on what they expect from their supply chains. How ready are you to answer these kinds of tough questions from your employees and customers?

• What is every ingredient in your product, why is it there, and what does it do, exactly?
• How much of your energy comes from clean, renewable sources?
• Who are your suppliers and what are their workers’ lives like? And how about your suppliers’ suppliers?
• How much do all your executives make and what multiple of the average salary is that?
• How much do you know about the dangers of your product and when did you know it (see recent news on Exxon and climate change)?
• What goals do you have and how do they tie to global challenges (like reducing carbon emissions or dealing with inequity in your communities and value chain)?
• Which organizations, political causes, or candidates are you donating to, how much is it, and why?
• Why does your company exist? What’s its purpose? What’s yours?

Answering these questions, and dozens more like it, will not always be easy. But companies are developing the systems – data/IT, organizational, financial – they need. The bigger shift, to answer these honestly or admit what you don’t know, may be a cultural one. We Gen X-ers, or Boomers, may not have the level of comfort with transparency that Millennials expect. But even if these types of questions do make you uncomfortable, tough luck. There’s not much choice anymore.

Neglecting the clean-label movement will cost you customers and workers; avoiding it as a purposeful strategy could destroy the company or a few careers. Just think about Volkswagen, the poster child for creating the anti–clean label. By flat-out lying on its labels, VW damaged its brand, possibly irrevocably. So get proactive about really understanding your products and supply chains deeply, and get ready to share what you learn with the world.