Rnordman

There is little more disheartening than going on holiday and feeling unwelcome in a city or having no one to turn to when you need some directions. 

Every year, Travel + Leisure asks its readers to rank 266 cities from around the globe based on a number of factors ranging from value for money to friendliness, to its food and culture.

This year, they had 199,652 responses, providing a comprehensive and fascinating insight into travellers' experiences and opinions of cities around the world.

Below are the 15 cities that fared worst in the friendliness stakes. Nine US cities featured in the list, alongside several European and Asian destinations. 

Of course, every city has its pros and cons, its friendly locals and its unfriendly locals, so if you're from one of these cities, it doesn't mean you're unfriendly. 

15) Boston, Massachusetts, USA — This isn't the first time that Boston has had a hard time in the friendliness rankings. A study by the University of Michigan in 2011 crowned it the "unfriendliest city in America."

Source: CBS

14) Frankfurt, Germany — A city's airport is the first impression a tourist gets of their destination, and Frankfurt airport, which is plagued with negative reviews of unfriendly staff, has had a knock-on effect on the reputation of Germany's fifth most populous city.

Source: Trip Advisor

13) Washington D.C., USA — D.C. is one of nine US cities that made the list. One Travel + Leisure reader described it as having “Southern efficiency and Northern charm." — make of that what you will.

Digital streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are not the main reason broadband users are ditching pay-TV packages, according to Ericsson ConsumerLab's annual TV & Media report. The report reveals that almost half of broadband household users globally are cutting the cord because they are fed up with shelling out high prices for pay-TV packages. The report highlights what cord cutters value when paying for subscriptions and reaffirms the ways cable companies can draw TV defectors back in.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Viewers find traditional TV packages too expensive. 47% of global respondents got rid of their pay-TV packages because they needed to save money. And 33% of respondents said they did not watch enough TV to justify the cost of a package. 
• Viewers want to choose what they want to watch, when they want to watch. 16% of respondents said that they were frustrated they couldn't customize their pay-TV packages to pay only for programming they actively watch. 
• A surprisingly small number of viewers ditched pay-TV packages because they subscribed to a video streaming service. Only 11% of respondents said they cut the cord because they were already paying for internet streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, suggesting that lower prices or à la carte programming options would likely keep many viewers paying for traditional TV packages. 

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HBR STAFF

The last few weeks have brought news of turmoil in China, including currency devaluations, an economic slowdown, and a stock market plunge. Most economists, including those at the the IMF, think it is premature to talk about an economic crisis. While I agree, I nonetheless believe that the slowdown is due, in part, to an acceleration of “near-shoring,” the practice of producing closer to the customer.

My evidence is a series of separate surveys conducted by different organizations, including the MIT Forum for Supply Chain Innovation.

The MIT Forum launched an online survey in 2012 to understand what U.S. manufacturers were doing about bringing production back to the United States and what factors were driving their decision process. One-hundred fifty-six U.S. manufacturing companies, defined as firms that have their headquarters in the United States, responded. The resulting report, U.S. Re-shoring: A Turning Point, indicated some shift in manufacturing footprint. While 33.6% of respondents stated that they were “considering” bringing manufacturing back to the United States, 15.3% of U.S. companies responded that they were “definitively” planning to do so. The results of the 2014 survey — to which 89 U.S.-based companies and 33 non-U.S.-based companies responded  — were very similar.

The more recent AlixPartners survey of manufacturing and distribution companies serving North America and Western Europe suggests that this process is accelerating: Thirty-two percent of the companies surveyed reported that they have already near-shored or are in the process of doing so to meet end-market demand. Of the company leaders surveyed, 48% said near-shoring activities are likely within the next one to three years.

Another indication that near-shoring is accelerating is the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI). This index, which is compiled monthly, shows changes in manufacturing activity. A value of 50.0 means no change, while a value above it means an increase in activity and below it a decrease in activity. China’s PMI was 49.7 in August and 50 in July, reflecting a real decline in activity. In comparison, the U.S. PMI was 51.1 in August and 52.7 in July, reflecting a decrease in growth but not a decline in activity, and Europe’s PMI slipped slightly to 52.2 in August from 52.3 in July. Altogether, these figures suggest that the decline in manufacturing activity in China is related to both a softening of local market demand and the impact of near-shoring.

Of course, bringing manufacturing to the United States does not necessarily imply more U.S. manufacturing jobs; nor does it necessarily imply that China is changing its position as a manufacturing hub. However, it may suggest that the world is in the middle of a transformation, with companies moving from a global manufacturing strategy, whose focus is on low-cost countries, to a more regional strategy, where China is for China, the United States (or Mexico and Latin America) is for the Americas, and Eastern Europe is for European markets. As the recent surveys suggest, this trend has picked up pace in the last few years not only because of pressure to return manufacturing jobs to the United States but also because the economics that made off-shoring attractive in the first place have changed for the following reasons:

Oil prices. The move to low-cost manufacturing in the 1990s was driven in part by cheap oil prices. However, the price of oil then tripled in the last decade. As a result, logistics costs increased significantly compared to what they were when the decision was made. Yes, the prices of oil have recently fallen. But so have the prices other commodities, and another twist is the increase in U.S. production of cheap natural gas (using new fracking technology). This means that for some industries, the lower cost of manufacturing in the United States may outweigh the lower costs of shipping goods from China.

Labor costs. In the last few years, labor costs in China have increased annually by almost 20% versus 3% in the United States and 5% in Mexico. So if your company made production-sourcing decisions five, seven, or 10 years ago, it may need to revisit those decisions today.

Automation. Cheap sensors, fast computing, and new technologies have led to new user-friendly manufacturing automation that increases productivity. This improvement in productivity changes the economics and reduces the importance of low labor costs. As a result, the focus of manufacturing companies is more on skillful workers than on countries with low labor costs.

Risk. Global companies have realized in the last few years that strategies such as outsourcing and off-shoring have significantly increased risk because their supply chain is geographically more diverse and, as a result, exposed to all sorts of potential problems. A recent example is the explosion at a warehouse in Tianjin that ships hazardous materials, which was most likely caused by a company culture that flouted regulations. This drives companies to reevaluate their supplier and manufacturing base in order to increase flexibility and reduce risk.

The current turmoil in China will most likely accelerate the trend to near-shoring, but the impact will vary by specific industry and company.

For high tech industries (e.g., the manufacture of laptop computers and mobile phones) recreating the infrastructure in China somewhere else would be expensive and difficult to do. In contrast, it will be easier for footwear and apparel companies to move to lower-cost locations. Manufacturers of heavy products such as appliances or cars that are heavily influenced by shipment costs may find it pays to move production closer to market demand.

The bottom line: Companies need to evaluate on an ongoing basis whether the trade-offs for their particular industry have shifted enough to justify a change in their sourcing strategies.

I just read through a "Top 25 [Social/Digital/Marketing Expert/Guru]s to follow" list, and I wondered just how useful these really are in terms of content marketing. They generally have the same folks on them--and they should, frankly. If you were to ask me to name 10 or 20 people to follow in marketing, my list would probably look like a lot of the lists out there. I choose not to write this post, because I don't believe it adds accretive value to the universe.

Yours might, of course. But the more content we make today, the more we have to make tomorrow just to keep up, like the Red Queen of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The list post that worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. I bet you've already seen evidence of that. 

So, on the cusp of a North American Holiday Weekend (in which we Americans celebrate Labor, and our friends up north flaunt their additional "u") I thought I'd challenge myself to write a completely original list post, just to see if it could still be done. So, here is my humble effort:

10 Words You Should Be Using

1. The - This word is incredibly useful as a signal that, as sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti, a noun will surely come. You cannot stop it, so why fight the inevitable? 

2. Be - A personal favorite. You can't Always Be Closing unless you BE. Responsible, along with "do," for a significant part of Sinatra's smoothness.

3. To - It does not matter what your final destination is--when asking directions, if you don't precede your destination with "to," you'll never get there. For example, without the word "to," asking "How do I get to Intercourse, Pennsylvania?" will result in a series of increasingly poor bits of advice.

4. Of - Without this key word, Karen Blixen would have written "Out, Africa!" and Meryl Streep might be homeless.

5. That - An enormously useful word. The universally correct answer to the question "Which?" How many other words can you name that are always the right answer? On the downside, however, in a competition with "this," "that" is not what you should get with, because this is where it's at. 

6. In - Without "in," we'd all be out. It's cold, and frightening out. I'm pretty sure there are bears. Let's stay in.

7. Do - This word used to have limited utility, but its meaning has expanded tremendously in the food and beverage industry as a term employed by restaurant-goers to mean "would like to have" (e.g., "I'll do the chicken," except in Intercourse, Pennsylvania.)

8. Not - It's hard to say what this word actually is, but I can tell you what it isn't.

9. On - Though it's ninth on this list, it is actually incredibly important to the survival of our species. Imagine if generations of humans seduced each other to the dulcet tones of Marvin Gaye singing "Let's Get It." Sure, we would acquire many objects, but would we find love?

10. You - This word is important in content marketing. Without it, I'd just be talking to myself. But I need more clicks than I can possibly generate myself. So, unfortunately, I need you. I'm pretty sure most content marketing doesn't really give you that much thought, but you pay the bills. So, here's to you.

There you have it. Original content using ten of the most common words in the English language. 

The amount of content you have to compete with is only going to grow exponentially over the coming months and years, which means the bar you'll have to hurdle for attention is only going to get higher and higher.

Great content should challenge, entertain, or come from genuine expertise.

Those are the ten words I try to use when I write content. It's a practice, but a worthwhile one.

      

Hiring High Performance Sales Teams
Follow this formula to hire sales superstars

“If you can find good people, they can always change the product/service. Nearly every mistake I’ve made has been in picking the wrong people, not the wrong idea. Most entrepreneurs have no problem coming up with a good strategy, but they usually need all the help they can get in developing and implementing the tactics that will make them successful in the long run.”

—Arthur Rock,
Harvard Business Review, 1987

Selecting sales personnel is one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, challenge of any organization. Failure to achieve revenue targets, manage customer relations and deliver service can be traced directly to hiring people unequipped to carry out their assigned roles. Recruiting is a commitment; it should consume about a fifth of the sales leader’s time, and the process should be as well organized as the company’s sales methodology and forecasting systems. The following information is used in our online video training course for sales managers: . https://app.wagmob.com/ken/

Define the Ideal Profile
The key to building a winning sales organization is understanding whom you want to hire. Why? Because thorough development and analysis of the ideal sales representative profile heightens your chances of recruiting the right person. Here’s how you start:

Make your own list of essential sales person characteristics. As the hiring manager, start by writing down your definition of a great sales representative.

Ask company leaders to make a list. Ask management and members of the sales team to identify desirable sales traits.

Test your top sales representatives. Ask your company’s most successful sales representatives to complete a personality profile or psychological test administered by an outside party. Record the data and look for common denominators among your top sales people.

Reviewing the basic personality types often encountered in sales can provide additional insight into hiring effective sales representatives. “Hunter” (aggressive, accustomed to cold calling and inured to rejection) and “farmer” (stable, oriented to customer care) are common terms used to describe personalities in the sales world.

Understanding an applicant’s most typical behavior style when interacting with others can reveal how that person solves problems and makes decisions. And you may learn how flexible the applicant is in dealing with contrasting personality styles. The types:

Dominant—A dominant individual loves a challenge, and is always ready to take on the competition. Dominant people are direct, positive and straightforward. They continually seek new horizons and like to make decisions quickly. Some consider dominants restless, because they become impatient and dissatisfied with the status quo. They are generally resourceful and adapt readily to new situations.

Cautious—Cautious people are basically humble, loyal and non-aggressive. They are usually conservative, slow to make decisions until they have absorbed all available information, and sticklers for detail. Cautious individuals want to be appreciated, and will go to extreme lengths to avoid stepping on someone’s toes. They strive for a stable, ordered life and tend to be more task- than people-oriented.

Interactive—These individuals are outgoing, persuasive, gregarious and generally optimistic. Interested in people, they’re poised in social situations; at an initial meeting they may greet you warmly by your first name, as if you’ve been friends for life. Interactive’s may act on emotional impulse, making decisions based on a cursory analysis because of their trust and willing acceptance of people.

Steady—Usually amiable, supportive and relaxed, steady individuals appear contented, even laid back. Patience and deliberateness are their defining characteristics. People high in steadiness strive to maintain the status quo and avoid rocking the boat. They value relationships that they have worked hard to establish, and operate well in a team environment.

Matching the salesperson’s personality to the job—or even to the type of client he or she sees—makes sense. But remember that people often display characteristics of two or more personality profiles.

Measure the Profile
Once you’ve compiled all your information on the sales position and the applicant’s desired personality profile, boil it all down to five or seven objective, measurable characteristics. Why so few? Because you need to focus on key responsibility areas that drive success. For example:

• Hundred percent quota achievement in four out of five sales jobs, for a minimum of five years
• Bright, articulate
• Experience in opening new territories
• Regional sales experience
• Specific industry expertise

Create a measurement scale for each characteristic, like this:

Ineffective
Effective
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 NA 1 2 3 4 5
and use it to rate each candidate during the interview session.

Don’t be fooled by the profile’s simplicity, or the fact that it measures only five characteristics. This is the distillation of sound input from numerous sources, a benchmark based on the personalities and performance of your top sales representatives. Focusing your work in an easy to understand, simple format places the emphasis on implementation and results. It’s important to make this profile document available to everyone involved in the interviewing process, including recruiting firms.

Critical Reminders
To derive the most benefit from your new recruiting tool, interview a minimum of three candidates for each position, and make sure that every interviewer in the process rates each candidate from -5 to +5. Continue to refine the profile by gathering input from both internal and external sources.

A highly motivated, successful sales organization is critical to generating revenue and margin growth year after year. For a company’s sales leaders, searching for great sales people every day is a top priority and never-ending challenge. Studies show that successful sales managers spend 15 to 20 percent of their time on recruiting. Whether or not there’s an opening in your sales ranks, take the time to meet new candidates or reacquaint yourself with candidates whom you have been courting. When you least expect it, your top candidate may become available.

Striving for Consistency
Now that you have a plan to fill the pipeline with quality candidates, the next step is to systemize the process for choosing and winning the right candidate time after time. Communicating an established process to all involved parties not only saves time, but sends a clear, unified message to candidates that this company has its act together, increasing their desire to join the sales team.
The following model has worked consistently in the past. Consider it as a foundation for your sales recruitment process.

1) Identify and document each stage in the interview process, and who (at least three people) in your company will participate.

2) Perform personality testing on your top sales reps. This provides a benchmark for evaluating candidates in one-on-one interviews.

3) Distribute to all participants:

Outline of interview process
Ideal sales candidate profile
Interviewing scorecard
List of base questions to ask every candidate
The candidate’s resume
It takes effort to build a recruiting process, and even more to ensure that everyone follows the plan. But the result—the creation of a winning sales team—is guaranteed to make life less stressful for any sales leader!

Conversion rate optimization relies on case studies – proof that our hypotheses have merit and are worth testing. After all, if someone else has found success with a strategy or design, why shouldn’t we?

This article showcases five high-performing landing pages, gives you their conversion rates, and breaks down exactly why they’re performing so well.

1. Photographer’s Ebook Landing Page

What I Like:

• This landing page is designed with its target market in mind – photographers. The large, prominent background image might not appeal to all markets but it does to the visual crowd (who may even recognize the camera).
• Colors matter in CRO, and ensuring your copy stands out from your landing page colors is crucial if you want to convince your landing page visitors your offer is valuable.
• The social share toolbar is doing an excellent job of encouraging engagement. People like to have evidence that your offer/service is trustworthy. Social shares give them that endorsement before they convert.
• The CTA copy is written in terms of “giving” the lead something, rather than telling them something to do. Tailor your CTA copy to communicate what your visitors stand to gain, rather than how they need to act (avoid “submit”, for instance).

2. Outdoor Company Online Sweepstakes

What I Like:

• The image of the Olympic Peninsula mountain range is large and at the forefront of this landing page design. This appeals to the outdoorsy prospective leads and provides all the color and energy this landing page would otherwise lack.
• The countdown timer creates a bit of urgency (it’s always important to create urgency on your landing pages and encourages people to engage now (as they could miss out if they don’t)
• The form fields are asking the information this company (an adventure vacation business) needs to know. They could have easily only asked for name and email address, but they’ll be better able to sell/encourage returning business if they know where their leads are located.

3. Real-Estate Ebook Landing Page

What I Like:

• The benefit list, or list of subjects this ebook covers, is intriguing and comprehensive. Though the ad or CTA banner would have already talked about the point of this ebook, it’s always good to include more description and value (just not too much, which is why I like that it’s in bullet-point form, rather than a paragraph).
• It’s all above the fold – This landing page is short and doesn’t require visitors to scroll at all. I like this, as it keeps the message concise and doesn’t ask anything of the visitor: what you see on this landing page is what you get.

4. Spring Sweepstakes Landing Page

What I Like:

• I like that this brand has used the seasons to promote their product. Spring cleaning was on everyone’s brain when this promotion came out. Seasonal, themed contests always out-perform untimely contests.
• I like the massive headline, bright colors, and images. This page does an excellent job of grabbing your attention.
• Including the Facebook comment section (at the bottom) is a good idea, provided you actually have people commenting. Be careful with this, though, as it’s even more powerful than social shares if you get it right, but also more obvious (and detrimental to your conversion rates) if no one engages.

5. Blog Popup for Email-Gated Content

While not actually a landing page, I thought I’d include this case study from one of our most successful exit popups.

What I Like:

• You might not think that a 2.59% conversion rate is all that amazing, but look at it this way: Without this exit popup, that traffic was lost. They were leaving, moving their cursor to the back or new tab button, or that little “x” on the side of their tab.
• I also like that creating a popup like this one takes about 10 minutes from beginning to end. The ebook image is already in the Wishpond image library, the destination URL is already copied, and the headline is ready to go.

I’m happy with 2.59%.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these case studies have given you a better idea of how you can use landing pages. Keep in mind that a few of these examples were so successful because they’re focused on a niche market (and designed for that niche market).

Also, don’t worry about popups. The negative connotation was gone as soon as the majority of respectable marketing websites and blogs started using them constantly. They work. Naysayers are missing out.

Have any questions? Get the conversation started in the comment section below.

Let’s make one point clear: Fee-based rewards are not pet rocks.

Sure, some major merchants have recently launched fee-based loyalty initiatives, but that does not make the concept a fad. Rather, a retailer’s decision on whether to apply a fee to its rewards membership – or not – is very strategic in design.

Consider the recently launched shopping club Jet.com. Or Walmart’s new delivery program, called Shipping Pass. Each charges about $50 a year and is considered a shot across the bow at Amazon Prime, a successful program that charges $99 a year for free two-day shipping as well as video streaming.

With an estimated 44 million members, Prime is not a fad. Nor is iRewards, the fee-based rewards program operated for years by Canadian chain Indigo Books & Music. Rather, they are functions of each brand’s proposition.

In fact, both also offer free programs alongside their fee programs. Amazon recently launched the Amazon Prime Store Card, which instead of points gives its members 5 percent back on purchases. Indigo, meanwhile, in September will change its long-serving rewards program, called plum, a points-based loyalty initiative – more on that soon.

The takeaway is that fee and non-fee programs not only co-exist successfully, but that they also can co-exist under the same brand. The task is ensuring each model services the retailer’s mission, as well as the predetermined needs of loyal customers.

Indigo’s approach, by the book

To appreciate the strategy that goes into the fee/no-fee decision, it helps to review the evolution of Indigo and its programs.

With iRewards, Indigo gave its customers the option to self-select memberships, the net benefit being discounts on books. It also helped segment is customer base: By setting a fee (now $35 a year), Indigo effectively made the program interesting only to its best customers – people who spent upward of $750 per year on books.

The retailer’s strategic planners were clearly applying the Pareto principle or 80-20 rule. They were addressing the interests of those 20 percent of customers who represented a disproportionate amount of sales and profits.

Then in 2011, Indigo introduced plum rewards – a program that charged no fee and rewarded its members points on purchases that they could use toward future discounts. Why? Because Indigo understood the broader value of data and knew the fee required for iRewards limited its ability to understand all of its customers, and, therefore, marginalized its sales potential.

Ultimately, as Indigo pivoted from bookseller to a lifestyle store with a selection of not only books but also toys, jewelry, electronics, fashion accessories and household items, both its free and fee-based programs assumed greater roles. Each now helps the retailer make better-informed decisions that apply not only to novels, but also to assortment, pricing and store optimization.

The changes to plum rewards, to take effect Sept. 3, will usher in features based on such customer feedback. Among them: quarterly bonus events that reward members 10 times the points on their purchases, as well as other bonus point offers. Members also will be able to redeem their points online, in store and via the mobile app.

The rate at which members earn points, however, was reduced, to five points per dollar from 10 points. Indigo said it made the change because members wanted more flexibility in earning and redeeming plum points.

“Members want to be rewarded for their online purchases and they want to see more ways to accelerate their points earnings,” Indigo stated on its FAQ page.

The shift may also be a method of encouraging its dedicated plum members to join its fee-based iRewards program.

Fee or not, emotional loyalty requires relevance

Regardless of Indigo’s strategy, history proves that retail loyalty takes more than providing the customer with an incremental sweetener.

Rather, it requires a commitment to sifting through that customer information – whether it be transactional, from a survey or through social feedback – for the kinds of insights that shape messaging and experiences in ways that are golden, and relevant. Only when the brand experience resonates with the customer on a personal level can the retailer expect to foster an emotional bond.

To achieve that emotional loyalty, a company must engage its customers throughout the experience. This means basing every decision it makes – including those affecting its loyalty program – on what is meaningful to that consumer. Responsible data use is an important part of this task. It will help the retailer understand its best customers’ core interests, assign value to them and then connect with its customers in ways that say, “I know who you are, and I understand your needs.”

Retail loyalty is a combination pack of unit value for the customer and data value for the retailer. Using loyalty as a method for competing on price alone is a limiter. A retailer could fully realize a customer loyalty initiative only when its value extends beyond the program itself and to the ways its data can shape the customer experience – and that includes the decisions implicit in creating that experience.

Fee or no fee – who cares? Unlike Sea-Monkeys and mood rings, retail loyalty programs can evolve with their market. What matters is that the model supports the brand’s purpose, values and ultimately the way it enhances the customer experience.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com, where Bryan serves as a retail contributor. You can view the original story here.

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

______________________________________________________

Dear Dan,

Is it smart to fire someone for failing? We often hear about politicians, generals and executives who blow it and then lose their jobs, but how can anyone gain experience if failure means their dismissal?

—Danny 

This problem is worse than you might think. Organizations that don’t tolerate failure not only stop their employees from learning from their mistakes but also create a risk-averse culture that fears trying anything new. A related problem is that organizations generally reward (and punish) people based on the outcomes of their decisions, not on the quality of their decisions. In general, you’d hope that good decisions would lead to good outcomes, but that causal link rests on probabilities, not certainties—so reward and punishment are often misapplied. Imagine, for example, the manager of a chain of seafood restaurants who invested in five new branches along the Gulf Coast—six months before the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The chain lost money, its share value plummeted, and the manager got sacked. But should he have been? What if the manager had meticulously analyzed the market and made the best decision given the information available at the time? Should the company have punished him—or rewarded him for making a sensible, thorough decision? Obviously, we should reward and retain people who know how to make good decisions, but most of the time, we just reward good outcomes. As long as organizations behave this way, we will be stuck with conservative, risk-avoiding behavior, and we will keep firing some of the wrong people.

______________________________________________________

Dear Dan,

My son wants a Nerf football. I found a real bargain online—just $2.50 on Amazon, but with a $7.50 shipping charge. The combined price of $10 is a really good deal, but paying three times as much for shipping as for the product itself seems like a rip-off. I know that what really matters is the total amount paid, but I somehow feel that the cost of delivery ought to matter too. Am I being irrational?

—Fay 

This is exactly why Amazon introduced Amazon Prime back in 2005. For only $99 a year, you get “free” shipping on your orders.  Of course, the shipping isn’t really free, but it gives you the feeling that you aren’t paying for it. One other clever aspect of Amazon Prime is that once you have paid for it, every additional purchase on Amazon further amortizes your investment, thereby helping you further justify your initial decision.

______________________________________________________

Dear Dan,

A friend of mine and her husband live in an apartment building, and their upstairs neighbors often have noisy sex between 3 and 8 a.m. My friend’s husband has no problem sleeping through the raucous romping, but my friend is being woken up every night. Should she let her neighbors know that their early morning love sessions aren’t as private as they might think (without embarrassing them or herself) so she can get her beauty sleep again?

—Kim

Maybe she could start with a compliment, explain the problem and offer a solution. How about, “I’m very impressed with your level of energy during the early hours of the day. How do you stay so passionate after so much time together? I’m a bit jealous.  And by the way, we got a heavy carpet for the bedroom to help give us more privacy.”

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

Since its inception in 2001, AGILE has become an important and widely used method of managing IT development projects and teams. If the team and the company are small, AGILE development can be a simple, fast and cheap approach. If however the team and the company are large, new challenges will complicate AGILE development. If you follow this methodology here are some fantastic tips to get the best from your teams, meetings and projects, regardless of the size of your operation.

Make Scrum Meetings Valuable

Scrum meetings are great, but can easily turn into “one of those” meetings where nothing moves forward, and the entire affair has no value.

To avoid that:

Ask more – In addition to the three statements “yesterday, I completed…”, “today, I will…” and, “the things blocking my progress are…” also ask: “how confident are you that you will get it done today”.

People often complete the third statement saying they have no blocks, only to seconds later admit that they are only 50% sure of that. If team members have been reporting no impediments for a while, but work hasn’t been moving along as fast as it should, this can be a good approach.

Stick to the 15 minute limit: If meetings take over 15 minutes people can get bored and are then likely to feel the meeting adds no any value for them.

Start and end the meeting on time: Don’t delay starting a meeting because someone can’t make it or is running late. Nothing says this meeting is important more than starting on time. The chances are, if team members miss the start of one meeting, they will ensure they are on time in future!

Say thank you: When a colleague has helped you, acknowledge it. This is one of the simplest, most effective methods of building a good rapport with team members.

Stand up! Standing helps people focus for short and high-energy meetings such as the daily scrum.

Don’t Be Afraid to Defer

Whilst the above tips are ways to ensure scrum meetings are valuable, sometimes there are things that need to be addressed that do not fit within the parameters of the scrum. Use a parking lot (a flip chart or section of whiteboard) to note those topics down. Address them right after the daily scrum; allow team members add items. By doing this, you will address everything that needs to be dealt with, but maintain focus within the scrum.

Use Common Vocabulary

Set up a common vocabulary and standard rules to be used by every workgroup. Phrases such as the ‘definition of done’ should be clearly defined: what does this mean, what is expected?

Use Team Metrics

Using team-based metrics (to track team and workgroup performance) will make it clear that people need to work as a team, rather than just show individual productivity. Individual roles and responsibilities need to be clearly outlined; team goals and time frames must allow for no ambiguity, to ensure that every individual fulfils their required role within the structure of the team.

Without a doubt, when used well, AGILE is a fantastic approach, but the key is in the name, sometimes you will need to actually BE agile to get the most from it!

When you see the value of your investments drop before your eyes, your brain sends a funny feeling into your belly that makes you panic and want to "Sell!"

With the global rout we're experiencing right now, that's a feeling that a lot of investors and traders may be getting.

While there's no guarantee that prices won't fall further, history shows that it's moments like this that prove to be the best times to buy.

"Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful," Warren Buffett says.

This is what's called a contrarian strategy.

One of the more popular metrics used by contrarians is Bank of America Merrill Lynch's proprietary "Sell Side Consensus Indicator," which measures bullishness and bearishness among professionals based on how they're recommending clients allocate stocks in their portfolios. When many of them recommend avoiding or staying underweight stocks, this is a reflection of bearishness. And as a contrarian indicator, this is interpreted as a signal to buy.

According to BAML's Savita Subramanian, this indicator isn't screaming extreme bearishness, but it's at the far bearish end of neutral.

"[T]oday’s sentiment levels are still near where they were at the market lows of March 2009 and over 12pts from the level of extreme bullishness that would indicate a contrarian “Sell” signal in our model," Subramanian wrote in  a note to clients on Tuesday. "Strategists are still recommending that investors significantly underweight equities, at 54% vs. a traditional long-term average benchmark weighting of 60-65%."

"With sentiment still near the bearish end of the “Neutral” range of our model, implied 12-month returns are still very robust at +17%," she added.

Citi's Tobias Levkovich was on Bloomberg TV Monday afternoon discussing Citi's proprietary "Panic/Euphoria Model," which is a model that factors in nine metrics like the NYSE short interest ratio, margin debt, Nasdaq daily volume as % of NYSE volume, the put/call ratio, AAII bullishness data, and others.

"Statistically, you’re talking about a 96% probability that markets are up 12 months later," Levkovich told Bloomberg's Alix Steel and Scarlett Fu.

In a note to clients in August, this level of panic has seen an average 12-month return is 17.5%.

Barclays Ian Scott also circulated a note to clients noting the collapse in sentiment as measured by the Investors' Intelligence survey.

"Sentiment towards stocks is now firmly below average, with just 9% more bulls than bears," Scott wrote. "While we would be the first to acknowledge that sentiment does not have a “call” on the market before 2009, in the post Financial Crisis environment, it certainly has. Indeed, whenever the percentage of bulls has dropped below 9.5% the market has consistently been higher 6 months later, with an average gain of 22%."

Ultimately, you'll want to think carefully before making any investing decision. What you see above is just the history.

SEE ALSO: Now might be a great time to be in the stock market

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: RED EVERYWHERE: It’s a global market meltdown

Thousands of posts are written about value propositions and value creation. By now, most people tend to say value is defined by the customer, though most implementations seem to be driven by what we think the customer should value.

There’s also a lot written about differentiation, creating superior value, and exceeding customer expectations.

There also seems to be a “silver bullet” aspect to value propositions and creation. Somehow, I get the sense of people looking for that magic set of sentences, that when spoken to the right people at the right time, they immediately pull out a PO, asking “How much should I order?”

But through much of the discussions, I get a sense of value being “static,” that is, something we define as part of our overall marketing and sales process, but with little change/adaptation through the process.

I think there’s a different approach to value creation, communication, and delivery. For the lack of a better way of expressing it, I’ll call it “Just good enough Value Creation.” Perhaps we can add to the idea by calling it “Just good enough, delivered just in time.”

Here’s what I mean.

Early in our marketing and our sales process—very early in the customer buying process, we are really just trying to be good enough. Differentiation, superiority would be nice, but not critical. Our goal early in the process is not to get our customers to fall over and issue a PO, but simply to get invited to play—to become one of the three alternatives they are looking to consider as a solution.

At this point, value can be relatively generic. Possibly industry, market, or functionally focused. So we might have value propositions focused in CFO’s in investment banking firms, CIO’s in the same firms, or others focused on CFO’s and CIO’s in discrete manufacturing. They have to be interesting, relevant, intriguing. They don’t really need to be personalized (probably because we aren’t addressing an individual, but a persona in a certain function/market/industry). And they don’t have to be really differentiated–they just need to be good enough.

The “just good enough test,” needs to satisfy this criteria: Get the customer to select us as their 1 in 3 they will seriously consider in their buying process.

This doesn’t mean we should be careless or sloppy. The bar for being just good enough is always shifting and getting higher. It’s just that too often we try to be unique and differentiated, when at this point in the buying process it’s both meaningless and virtually impossible.

Once we become 1 in 3, our challenge changes, we have to become unique, differentiated, and superior.

But the way we do this is different. It’s the process of becoming quite specific. It’s where we move from personas to people, individual human beings. It’s not the CIO, but George, the CIO of this division of XYZ company, or moving from the Controller, to Amy, Controller of XYZ, It’s moving from our generic view of the world to the specific situation each individual finds themselves in at a particular moment of time.

So George and Amy are experiencing different problems, challenges, needs, and have different priorities in their roles right now. It’s the job of sales people to understand these differences then to start presenting our value in a way that addresses each person’s specific issues at a moment in time.

This is where, too often, we fall short. We stay to the generic. We may get to CIO’s of discrete manufacturing, but we fail to get to George, the CIO of this division in a discrete manufacturing company, who is facing these problems in keeping his customers happy, or the specific issues his organization is facing. To differentiate ourselves, we must go further, understanding George’s specific situation, needs, challenges, problems, opportunities and goals. We must then be very specific about what we can do about those things. How we eliminate problems, improve a situation, help address an opportunity.

In doing this we start becoming very specific, hopefully becoming unique and differentiated. But we don’t have to be that much different or that unique–just enough.

But there’s one more step–one which virtually 100% of sales people miss, but which becomes the ultimate differentiator in the buying process. It’s understanding George as a human being, and what he is trying to achieve. Most of the time, we can’t express this value in terms of ROI, Payback or a business case, but it’s what drives decision-making.

Ultimately, it’s what we do for George that no one else is paying attention to. It may be simplifying George’s life so he can get home to see his kid’s soccer (football to those who aren’t in the US), baseball, and swimming events. It may be getting his boss off his back, it may be getting that promotion of bonus. Interestingly, all of this probably has little to do with what we sell, but it’s all about connecting with people and how we can impact their lives.

The ultimate value creation and differentiation is not what we do to help CIO’s of discrete manufacturing—that’s table stakes, it gets us to be 1 in 3.

It’s not what we do to help George as CIO of XYZ corporation–that starts stetting us apart, we have to be as good as–probably slightly better than everyone else for the specific circumstances George as CIO of XZY faces.

But the ultimate differentiation, is to discover George as a human being, to understand his frustrations, hopes, dreams, ambitions, goals and what value we can create in helping him achieve those.

We don’t need to do any more—but too few sales people do this, and it’s the value most important and impactful to the customer–George. And we have to do this for each person in the decision-making process.

Value creation isn’t a mystery. It’s dynamic, the value we have to create varies depending on where the customer is in the buying process. It varies based on the specific problems and issues customers face in making their buying decision. It will change as they go through their buying process–as their knowledge, requirements, and priorities shift. Finally, the most important part of value creation, the part that most people fail to do, is the intensely personal and unique part–what do we do for each person, as human beings.

We don’t have to be that much better or different. We just have to be good enough in the parts that mean the most to each person involved in making a decision.

Do you know enough about your customers, their businesses, and them as individuals to be just good enough?

Live Streaming for Business

From HOAs to Blabs and from Periscope to Meerkat, even Facebook Live; how do you grow your audience and influence?

By looking your best, by giving your all, by being prepared, going with the flow, thinking on your feet and with kindness, loads of kindness and willingness to help!

It all boils down to proper etiquette!

Even though live streaming isn’t new, I’ve not been a huge user of HOAs (although I loved being a guest on several shows) and neither Periscope nor Meerkat stroke my fancy! Just. Didn’t. Get. It.

However, Blab came on the scene and I am hooked on the platform.

It’s Easy. Fun. Immediate. Educational. Visual. Visionary.

But…

8 days on Blab and I am just shaking my head.

Shaking my head for the dumb things people are doing, saying and their behavior, too!

I am not holding everyone to my standard, really, I am not. But there are some basic business etiquette rules that doesn’t seem to transcend onto these live streaming apps or even make an appearance on Blab!

Have you seen it? Do you know what I am talking about?

Some of the people I’ve seen and listened too have been rude, arrogant, ill-mannered, domineering, boorish, intolerant, patronizing and pompous.

Say what?!

Interested in hosting a live show?

Do us all a favor and read the following etiquette suggestions.
Especially the suggestions about being prepared and being kind and offering value!

I’ve entered several Blabs to only jump off after 5-10 minutes because no one acknowledged me. The hosts were busy highfiving their buddies and influencer friends and the other participants would just groom and ooh and ah over the guests, too. I have asked questions that went unanswered, said hello with a mention that went unanswered, and added value by answering questions which also went unanswered.

Newsflash – If you are building an audience, you should want recurring visitors and subscribers! Your should aim for a growing audience who will advocate for your show. You should strive to grow your influence online by hosting! Am I right?

Y’all are putting me off!

Remember some of the rules you learned in Kindergarten?

Let me remind you…

listen when someone is speaking!

be kind! (treat others as you want to be treated)

always do your best!

share with friends!

help others!

clean up!

practice makes perfect!

learn from mistakes!

say sorry when you are wrong!

don’t take what’s not yours!

If you remember these when live streaming, you’re good to go in my book!
Just to make sure you get the picture, I’ve made a list with some additional suggestions.
Take them, or leave them.

Just know that if you are a guest on my show, you’ll be treated kindly, and if I am going to join you on to your Blab show, and stay and participate, I’d like some respect in return!

Here is how we do it!

Are you smarter than a Kindergartner?

Preparedness

• pick an interesting topic
• create an agenda
• craft an enticing title
• create an image that lists the time, location, topic and guests
• prepare a list of questions
• create a promotion plan
• set expectations on length of show and what you want to discuss

Without proper preparations for your live streaming broadcast, you are wasting time (yours and that of your audience), breaking trust (you are an influencer and you’re dropping the ball!) and you might be perceived as unprofessional and sloppy.

Equipment

• test your WiFi
• test your webcam (positioning and lighting)
• decide whether you need headphones
• test your sound
• know your record options to add value afterwards
• have a backup plan – expect the unexpected
• download the iOS apps if you can (Blab, Hangout) as a back up system (those who were on my show this Tuesday, know I had to do just that!)

Without proper WiFi, a tested camera and sound system, you’ll look nothing but amateurish!

Appearance/Noise/Surroundings

• remove noisy kids, animals, spouses form the room
• remove visible junk
• reduce noise (close your office door)
• remove or cover up potential offensive signs
• appear groomed
• be dressed

Without grooming (and with bed-head), you are conveying the message that your audience isn’t ‘good enough’ or ‘important enough’ to dress up for! I get it; I work from home as well. But… when I know I am going to be on camera, I clean up a bit and you should, too!

Behavior of hosts

• introduce yourself and your guest
• be welcoming, call on people by name
• be responsive when questions gets asked or when answers are given in the comments
• answer questions on air
• don’t ignore visitors to your show (unless you have an audience of 200!)
• listen to your guests when they speak
• be interesting
• smile – do this a lot
• stick to an agenda
• stay on topic
• invite guests – you’re not as interesting as you think you are
• connect with guests on social media afterwards
• mention guests by name and show that you know a bit about them
• make it all about your audience – be a giver

Without setting the right example, your guests might misbehave! When you make these shows all about you and less about your audience, you’ll quickly lose your audience, as they move on to learn something from someone else. You have to give them value beyond the brilliance of you.

Behavior of guests

• if you are a guest, listen to the questions the host asks
• don’t grab a seat if you don’t know anything about the topic
• add value by offering tips and your experience
• be on topic (oh la la – that’s a tough one it seems!)
• don’t hijack the conversation
• don’t outtalk the hosts
• know when to vacate your spot
• be social – share on social
• give links to tools and tips and websites you mention
• don’t sell or spam your own products or services unless you’re asked!
• connect with your audience during the show, too

Behave as a guest! Appreciate your few seconds or minutes on someone’s show and be gracious and professional.

It’s a Wrap!

Those who know me and my writing know that I am not very cynical. I am just a tiny bit hesitant to hit ‘publish’ on this article, but I am going to go for it.

These words are my opinion; it’s my blog and these are my thoughts.

So let me have it!
Is this a Yay or Nay for you?

The Facebook Beacon is a device you put in your local business that sends information to people who are on Facebook near you and have Bluetooth turned on. Gotta love tech!

This week’s #SocialMediaMinute will cover how local businesses can request a Facebook Bluetooth beacon..

This means when people visit your business and open Facebook, they’ll see what’s called Place Tips.

Place tips show people who visit your business things like their friends’ posts and photos about your business, reviews, upcoming events and other relevant info (ex. popular menu items) from your business’ Page.

Learn more by watching the short tutorial video below.

Video Tutorial

How to get a Facebook Bluetooth Beacon

To get a Facebook beacon for your local business, simply navigate to the following URL.

https://www.facebook.com/business/a/facebook-bluetooth-beacons

From here, fill out the form located at the bottom of the page and designate which of your Facebook pages you would like the beacon for. You’ll also be asked to provide your email and prompted to select how many locations your local business has. Facebook will then contact you when additional beacons become available.

Once you’ve received your beacon, visit fb.me/place-setup to customize your visitors’ experience and learn more.

Takeaway

Facebook Bluetooth beacons are a relatively new technology and a development I’ll be following closely. Beacons are the future!

With the possibilities of adding real-time value at the right time (on mobile) a Facebook beacon is a valuable investment for any local business. Investment? Oh wait…it’s completely free!

On the topic of privacy, beacons don’t collect any information from people or their phones or change the kind of location information Facebook receives. They’re designed not to disrupt the operation of your own Wi-Fi or other equipment either so that should help with adoption.

Have any questions about the Facebook beacon? Thinking of ordering one? Let me know in the comments below and make sure to come back next week for more social media tutorials.

According to a recent study conducted by Microsoft, we now have shorter attention spans than the average goldfish. While we were able to concentrate for 12 long seconds at a time in 2000, our ability to focus now clocks in at a mere eight seconds (goldfish have one second on us). 

This is bad news for salespeople, who now have even less time to grab their prospects' attention. Buyers have so much competing for their time: emails, meetings, critical tasks, personal priorities, and a slew of other obligations. How can salespeople convince business leaders to set everything aside for a minute and tune into their message?

The following SlideShare from Wiley reveals five strategies that make people snap to attention and focus on you. Use these tips before, during, and after your next call to snag and hold your prospect's focus. 

We are coming up to the last holiday weekend of a wonderful summer. The countdown for back-to-school has begun. Corporate team leaders can’t wait to get their teams back in full strength. Managers are gearing up for strategy meetings to make the last quarter of the year count. Let’s just say it’s “get serious, get back to work” time for the majority of us.

For B2B marketers, this is a good time to review what has worked in 2015 so far and what needs to change before the year is over. The 2015 State of Marketing* report offers valuable insights from over 5,000 global marketers. Let’s examine the top 10 recommendations to cover 3 key areas of marketing—The Customer Journey, Mobile and Social.

The Customer Journey

86% of senior level marketers surveyed in the report stress the critical importance of tracking and understanding the customer journey in order to implement an effective marketing strategy. How will you achieve this?

Here are 3 useful recommendations:

1. Look beyond buyer personas and lifecycle marketing: In our enthusiasm to plan lead generation campaigns based on proper segmentation, we tend to sometimes get carried away with marketing to buyer personas. In the ideal world, every buyer would perfectly fit at least one persona we have thought of. With the increasing demand for personalization, however, B2B marketers need to focus more on the individual behaviours of different buyers instead of planning for broad patterns across different categories.
2. Trace the customer journey beyond email: Email marketing has stood the test of time as an effective lead generation and nurturing methodology. The limitation of this method when it comes to viewing the customer journey is that email communication is linear and follows a set pattern. You can only trace the customer’s interaction with your brand along that one path of receiving, opening and acting upon email stimulus. In an integrated marketing approach, we need to look beyond email to examine multiple channels, including social, where our customers are spending time. The last thing you want to do is upset a customer by responding officiously to their email while ignoring their much more emotional communication on a social media platform.
3. Make customer journey mapping a team exercise: You can’t possibly sit in the board room and try to map the full customer journey. There are multiple touchpoints and various people within your organization that can offer keen insights into how your customers react and interact at every stage of the customer journey. A regular brainstorm with your team is a great way to stay updated on what your customers are thinking, feeling, doing, and wanting you to do! Discover the gaps in your marketing strategy where customer experience has suffered, and focus on making improvements rather than trying to sweep those instances away under the carpet.

Mobile

2015 is considered the “last call” for joining the mobile marketing train. Experts say it is a ‘now or never’ situation because a majority of the corporate workforce now functions as ‘phablet’ users—or users with smartphones that have tablet-like screens and features. Here are 4 critical steps you need to take with regard to mobile marketing:

4. Define your mobile marketing strategy: You will see from your customer journey mapping exercise recommended above that one of the most important and frequent customer touchpoints is facilitated via mobile. In the absence of a clear strategy to optimize customer experience at every mobile-enabled interaction, you are losing a huge opportunity to make an impact on the dominant majority of your buyer population.
5. Use an integrated approach to manage mobile campaigns: It’s no longer enough to have a mobile campaign once in a while. That is like spike marketing—you may get a sudden peak in lead generation but it won’t last. If your customers are on the go and using their mobile devices 24×7, what choice do you have really? Think about it! Mobile campaigns must become a part of your integrated marketing plan, communicating brand messaging consistent with all other channels and media you are using.
6. Take advantage of location-based mobile content marketing: 67% of global marketers, according to this report are already doing this. If your business is just starting out to test the waters, a location-based mobile marketing campaign is a better way to test and learn before you spread out nationally or globally. Relevant content served up at the right time, in the right place to your mobile buyers will drive traffic to your target location faster, better, easier. It doesn’t necessarily have to be promotion or offer based either. Remember that the customer journey is more than 70% independent research for the vast majority. If your mobile content fits right in and adds value, you will be more successful in helping the buyer complete that last 30% of the decision-making process in your favor.
7. Monitor mobile analytics to devise loyalty programs: This report shows that more than in-store and web-based loyalty programs, mobile loyalty campaigns have an 86% effectiveness rating. That is huge! When planning your loyalty program, take into account the data from your mobile analytics and incentivize loyalty for your mobile buyers.

Social

While social has become an everyday, all the time phenomenon, it is far from easy. With all the automation available, there is still no silver bullet. Here are 8 Techniques that Work for B2B Social Media. You have to work at social relationships steadily and you can’t expect unrealistic returns. Let me remind you of the 5 Laws of Real Social ROI.

8. Explore new and niche social channels: Mainstream social media channels may or may not work for your B2B audience. Consider niche channels where your target buyer spends time. For example, we created this exclusive, invitation-only LinkedIn Group for B2B thought leaders—feel free to join and exchange ideas with B2B thought leaders.
9. Dedicate resources for social marketing: It takes time and effort to do this right. Rather than trying to build volume through more fans, allocate capable and trained resources to run your social campaigns selectively on the channels that work.
10. Focus on engagement and keep testing: Leave the selling to your sales team or even to your website. On social media, your buyers are looking for meaningful content to engage and enlighten. That’s what you need to do consistently. Conversion is always the ultimate goal, but you can’t make that the primary one, especially on social platforms.

How will you refresh and rejuvenate your B2B marketing efforts for the remainder of 2015? Feel free to add to the list of recommendations above. I look forward to hearing from you, so please leave me a comment.

*You can read the full report here: https://www.salesforce.com/ca/form/marketingcloud/2015-state-of-marketing.jsp

image credit: Shutterstock

Smart marketers take a strategic approach to demand generation. Sales may be about getting your leads to choose you over your competition, but demand generation can reposition your product or service to be the only solution to their problem, eliminating the competition pretty quickly. If your goal is to increase pipeline and revenue, focus on your demand generation and sales will follow.

Content Marketing

Your content should build an emotional connection with your buyers. Deliver high-quality content that provides specific guidance and solutions about your buyer’s problems, and you’ll set yourself apart from your competition.

Great content should be infused throughout the entire sales process and used at every marketing touch point. It will establish you as a thought leader and help customers know what to expect from your company. When they understand clearly what your product or service promises to deliver, customers become confident and more likely to convert into buyers.

Your content should be spread across every demand generation channel you have including your website, blog, assets and social-media profiles, it’s time to share your message with your “targeted” world.

Email Marketing

Crazy as it sounds, email marketing continues to be one of the most effective digital marketing tactics. It gives you a direct link to your buyers, and permission to continue to communicate with them to build a relationship over time.

You can create customized email campaigns with special offers and unique content targeted to a specific role or industry, and pertinent information that gets your message in front of potential business customers. Email marketing campaigns have the power to generate leads by directing readers from that email to your site or blog to learn more about your products and services.

Additionally, email marketing campaigns can be created and then scheduled to be automatically released at certain intervals throughout a period of time (once a month for a year for example).

Retargeting

This is one of my personal faves! Use. Ad. Retargeting. This cannot be emphasized enough. Did you know that over 90% of people come to your website and don’t tell you who they are (meaning they don’t complete a form)? Retargeting centers around this specific problem. With retargeting, your message appears on social media, newsfeeds and in search engine results when a buyer has shown interest in your company in the past. You can target this group with specific products or messages. These ads can be strategically placed to boost your visibility during times of day when traffic is high. The ads appear at the right time and under the right circumstances to nurture and build brand loyalty with your buyers.

Remember that watch you’ve been eyeing on the Nordstrom website. Ever wonder how it keeps showing up in ads once you leave their site? B2C companies have mastered the art of retargeting and B2B companies are taking note and incorporating this very powerful tactic into their demand generation strategy.

You’ve paid a lot of money to bring people to your website. It’s important you try and keep that conversation going by delivering to them relevant information after they leave your site to get them to convert.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can streamline and automate your marketing efforts throughout the entire buying lifecycle. You can effectively manage your message to ensure that you remain on the mind of your current or potential buyers. Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) also allow you to set parameters for a planned campaign of social media posts, blog posts, and email marketing.

From buyer personas to content marketing to the buying lifecycle – a MAP is the tool that brings these all together to deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

Personalize Your Message

Make your content relevant. Personalizing and localizing your content means adapting it to the role, industry, local cultural and/or linguistic norms of the buyer. Marketers have recognized the importance of providing buyers with very targeted information and data. If you personalize your website, emails, social media, and blog pages for the areas your company operates, your potential business customers can learn more about what your company does and in the most relevant context possible. This personalized information enhances the buyer’s experience of your message and brand and is a great way to help you gain brand exposure and brand loyalty.

GUEST:

In the string of bad news coming out of Europe lately, it’s easy to miss that the region has become a great opportunity for venture investors.

Lost amid stories of Greek debt and the fate of the Euro are those of startups that are creating leading cyber security, cloud, and mobile technologies; delivering solid returns; and staging strong and successful exists.

All at valuations that are far more reasonable that the United States.

It’s easy to forget that companies like Skype and Spotify got started in Europe. Or that the gross domestic product of the EU is greater than that of the United States.

But the reality is that Europe has become highly entrepreneurial. Most EU countries offer research and development (R&D) tax credits to spur business growth. Many are producing a highly skilled workforce through their sustained investments in education. And almost all of Western Europe has adopted legal frameworks that provide protection for venture capitalists similar to those in Silicon Valley.

In other words, Europe is a good place to do business.

Does that mean investing in the region is an easy ride? No – but who says the ride to a great return is supposed to be easy?

At the end of the day, Europe offers access to leading-edge technologies, the potential for solid returns, and far more reasonable valuations than those in the United States. There are even a few hidden gems in unexpected places. You just have to know where to look.

Changed Entrepreneurial Aspirations

At the turn of the century, the average European entrepreneur thought small. The goal was often to be the biggest company in a country – or maybe in a small region. Those aspirations have changed drastically and for the better.

Today, most European companies want to be full-scale, worldwide enterprises and operate using standard global business practices. This change in mindset is luring ex-pats back to lead companies, bringing with them the experience to grow the business further.

It’s also driving a lot of deals.

Consider two of our portfolio companies. We took a stake in the Belgian cloud storage firm Amplidata in 2011; in May, industry leader Western Digital acquired the company. In 2013 we invested in FeedHenry, an Ireland-based provider of mobile application-development tools; the open-source giant Red Hat acquired it last fall.

In both of these cases, we made solid returns based on strong fundamentals – all while helping to build the next generation in cloud and mobile technologies.

Sustained Government Investment

Like most investors, we don’t get too exited about government intervention. But in Europe we make an exception for two specific forms of investment.

The first is R&D tax credits. One of the five priorities the European Commission laid out for growth, these credits help support startups and large-scale operations and have played an important role creating technology clusters such as those in France, Germany, and the UK.

The second form of government investment we applaud is in education. Many European countries have a long history of funding engineering and science programs. Companies in those areas reap the indirect, but substantial, benefit of a steady supply of young, high-tech talent that can help them grow rapidly.

These government investments have spawned a surge of high-growth potential companies, many of which we’ve backed.

For example, Sweden is home to the leading eye-tracking software company (Tobii) and Europe’s largest mobile payment processor (Izettle). And Apple recently acquired the German augmented-reality firm Metaio.

As more investors are exposed to the breadth of available opportunities – especially in a region where there is such little venture capital competition compared to the United States – we expect to see more of these companies emerge in the years to come.

Hidden Gems

When I tell people there are hidden investment gems in Europe, they always want to know where to look. The answer I give often surprises them: France.

Perhaps more than any other country, France has a reputation for being unfriendly to doing business globally. Its frustrating labor regulations and legal structures are legend among investors and entrepreneurs.

The truth about France, however, is that it has fundamentally changed. Its labor rules are less complicated and costly than other countries, especially for technology startups. It’s also made revisions to its legal system to make it easier for companies to do business on an international scale.

Are there are still legal complexities to working in France? Yes. But if you go in understanding things will be different, and that you’ll need to seek local professional advice, the payoff can be significant.

That’s because the country has one of the most aggressive and generous grant-making programs for R&D in all of Europe. And its engineering schools, including Ecole Politechnique and Ecole Central are first rate and well funded.

The result is a clutch of companies poised for high worldwide growth and solid returns.

Consider Sigfox, a company in our portfolio based in Toulouse. It builds low-energy, low-cost wireless networks that are critical for Internet of Things devices. With deployments that cover most EU countries, it has secured two rounds in funding from more than a dozen firms. The latest round will let it expand into the United States, Latin America, Japan, and South Korea.

These kinds of companies and their successes give us the confidence that France is much more open for business than people might think.

Investor Ready

Venture funding has always been a two-way street: We make capital available, but only if a company, or in this case a region, is ready.

Traditionally, U.S. buyers worried about integration concerns when investing in or acquiring a European company, including culture, time zone, and compliance issues.

That’s changing radically. Today the integration is easier, the returns are good, and, absent the intense competition of other markets such as the U.S., the valuations remain reasonable.

As an investor, you can’t ask for much more.

Marcos Battisti is the Managing Director for Intel Capital in Western Europe and Israel. He leads the investment activity of Intel Capital in his region and is one of the voting members of Intel Capital’s investment committee.

In the last year, all of the "Big Five" publishers — HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Penguin, and Hachette — all signed new agreements with Amazon that allows them to set their own e-book prices. 

For Hachette in particular, there was a long, brutal negotiation period as Amazon tried to persuade the publisher to price all its e-books at $9.99. 

But even though Hachette and the others technically won the battle to set their own prices, it could be hurting them now, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Trachtenberg. 

People might not be willing to pay as much for e-books as the publishers want to charge. 

HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette all reported declining e-book revenue in their last quarter (Macmillan doesn't report its earnings, and Penguin's deal with Amazon just went into effect in September). The industry on the whole saw a decline in sales too. 

Although part of the problem could be a dearth of particularly hot titles recently, experts also point to the fact that e-books from the Big Five cost double, on average, of all the other e-books in the Kindle store. 

"Unfortunately, it may be that consumers aren’t happy with the higher prices," Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of publishing consulting firm Idea Logical Co, told Trachtenberg. 

The CEO of industry research group Codex agrees. 

"Since book buyers expect the price of a Kindle e-book to be well under $9, once you get to over $10 consumers start to say, 'Let me think about that,'" Peter Hildick-Smith says (the average Big Five book costs $10.81, with new titles sometimes only cents cheaper at $14.99 than hardcover options sold on Amazon). 

Ultimately, publishers told The Wall Street Journal that the pricing model they agreed to with Amazon "involves some sacrifice" but was necessary, and seems to correlate with an increase in sales of physical books.

SEE ALSO: Amazon Prime Video now offers something Netflix says it will 'never' allow

Join the conversation about this story »

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The responsibility for the customer journey has largely shifted from sales to marketing. As marketers, it is now crucial to optimize the customer journey and evolve it to better align with our online, mobile world. It is not always easy to locate weak points in the customer journey, but these 15 statistics will likely help you locate some areas in need of improvement.

1. 86% of senior-level marketers say that it’s absolutely critical or very important to create a cohesive customer journey (Salesforce). Senior-level marketers understand the importance of the customer journey. This journey needs to be consistent and make the process as painless as possible for the customer. This means being available on every device and through every channel.
2. 43% of survey respondents said there were more team members involved in a B2B purchase than in the previous year’s survey (DemandBase). As the customer journey becomes longer and more complex, this means more parties are going to be involved on the buyer side. This requires a strong CRM instance to keep track of every contacts details as well as personalized content to keep everyone personally invested in the journey.
3. 91% of consumers check their email at least once a day on their smartphone (ExactTarget). Email is a superb way to attract the attention of consumers in the early stages of the journey. Having a presence in their inbox is a sure way to remind them of your brand and show them what you have to offer.
4. 66% of smartphone users turn to their phones to look up something they saw in a TV commercial (Google). The world has gone mobile and this has had a drastic impact on the customer journey. This isn’t just true for TV commercials either. A huge number of marketing channels are now designed to drive consumers online. This largely happens on smartphones due to their convenience of always being at your side.
5. 72% of buyers will turn to Google while in the research stage (Pardot). Google is an incredibly important research tool for those in the early stages of the customer journey. Having a great SEO presence and effective PPC ads go a long way in moving that buyer from a Google search to your website.
6. 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally (SiriusDecisions). This means that your online marketing is more important than ever. Buyers are relying less on sales reps to provide them with information and more on your content.
7. 90% of consumers say their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews (Ciceron). Before consumers make a purchase, they want to know what other consumers think. Having positive online reviews will help transition buyers to the later stages of the journey.
8. 53% of B2B buyers turn to social media in their assessment of various tools and technologies (DemandBase). Your social media presence is incredibly important during the early and middle stages of the journey. Buyers may not discover you through these channels, but they are certainly evaluating you based on your social media.
9. In general, display impressions tend to influence customers at the beginning of the purchase path 33% of the time and in the middle 45%. They play a role at the end of the journey about 23% of the time (Google). Display advertising can be effective at the beginning of the journey, but it really shines in the middle. This is because these types of ads are great for keeping your brand in front of consumers and at the top of their minds.
10. 83% of consumers require some degree of customer support while making an online purchase (eConsultancy). Consumers don’t want to spend their money online without first hearing from you. Providing a positive customer experience at this point in the journey is crucial to winning sales.
11. Customers are increasingly frustrated with the level of service they experience: 91% because they have to contact a company multiple times for the same reason, 90% by being put on hold for a long time, and 89% by having to repeat their issue to multiple representatives (Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Survey). Customers are not happy with the service they are getting. Improving your CX in these three key areas will only get more important.
12. By 2016, 89% of companies expect to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, versus 36% four years ago (Gartner). Companies know that CX is growing in importance. As the online marketplace continues to produce more vendor options, truly successful companies will differentiate themselves by providing superb customer experiences.
13. 4 out of 5 local searches on mobile devices end in a purchase and 73% of these purchases are in brick-and-mortar stores (Search Engine Watch). Local searches are one of the quickest paths to purchase. Optimizing your search results to connect people with your business and give them a clear path to your stores is a sure way to drive revenue.
14. 62% of customers find it extremely/very important to be able to call your business at the purchase stage (Google). Moving customers through the purchase stage often requires having a conversation with them over the phone. Having a readily available phone number and getting callers on the phone with sales or support reps quickly is a great way to boost revenue.
15. 67% of online shoppers call a business directly for any purchase greater than $100 (OECD). Considered purchases are driving a higher number of calls into businesses. If your company sells a product or service that has a longer and more complex buying process, optimizing for inbound calls is necessary for success.

Improving the customer journey can drive extraordinary benefits for your bottom line. As more and more of this journey shifts to online channels, especially through mobile, marketing must take responsibility for each and every one of the stages. To discover even more ways to optimize the customer journey, watch our on-demand webinar: How to Create a Mobile Friendly Customer Journey.

A detailed tutorial on how to research your AdWords target keyword list to improve your ROI from PPC

Keywords trigger your ads. Building and maintaining the right list of keywords is vital to getting the best return on your paid search spend.

Keywords are organised into ad groups. You assign ad creatives (ad text) to these ad groups, which appear when triggered by these keywords. Therefore, knowing which keywords will perform best is important.

Keyword research is the process of building keyword lists, based on the frequency at which consumers search for these words and phrases.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

Keywords are the nuts and bolts of your AdWords campaigns. They let you control your visibility in search results, as well as affecting the amount you spend.

If you’re setting up an account for the first time, it’s essential to build a robust keyword list as soon as you can. The quality of this list will determine the frequency at which your ads appear, and the relevancy of your ads to users’ search queries.

Even if you’ve been running AdWords campaigns for some time – or you’ve recently inherited an account – it’s still important to regularly review your keyword lists to discover missed opportunities.

Keyword Research Tools and Techniques

While there are many third-party, non-Google Keyword research tools,  your starting point should be the tools made available by Google.

• Google Keyword Planner: The Keyword Planner, Google’s own keyword research tool is invaluable, as it provides solid data on the popularity of keywords from Google itself. The tool also provides keyword suggestions, lets you organise keywords into ad groups, and forecast visibility based on varying bids. Google Trends is an alternative with a higher-level view of the data.
• On-site search: Search data from your own website such as the Google Analytics Search queries report can provide plenty of insights to help you start your keyword research process. The terms your browsers use to find products and services using your on-site search box will very likely be reflected in the terms they use to search on Google.
• Search terms reports: The Search terms report from AdWords provides a list of search queries that triggered your ads within a specified time frame. This is useful if you’re looking to optimise your existing keyword lists further, or discover new keyword opportunities.

For example, search terms data may bring to light a new synonym for your products you hadn’t previously considered. Using this synonym as a starting point, you could use Keyword Planner to discover further keywords, and create a new Ad Group to categorise them.

Best-Practice Tips

• Think ‘quality over quantity’. Creating a ‘quality’ keyword list doesn’t necessary mean creating a lengthy list. Strong, relevant keywords should take precedence over generic keywords with high search volumes.

• Think about budget. Consider search volume and CPCs when finalising your keywords, so you can be sure you can afford to bid on all the keywords you’ve chosen.

• Keep an eye on competitors. You can use competitor review tools to analyse how rival businesses are bidding on keywords – and uncover new keyword opportunities.

• Think like a consumer. Don’t assume the terminology you use reflects the way your customers search for your products.

Deciding on Match Types

Match types (or keyword matching options) let you choose who sees your ads, based on the similarity of users’ search queries to your chosen keywords. They are the most widely used targeting options for search ads in AdWords.

AdWords lets you choose from five main match types:

Exact match

Set your keywords to exact match, and their ads will show only when a user’s search query matches the keyword exactly.

The only exception to this rule is when a user searches for a very close variant to your exact match keywords. In these cases, your ad may appear.

Phrase match

Like exact match, phrase match triggers ads when a user’s search query matches the keyword exactly (or is a very close variant).

However, it will also trigger ads when the search query includes additional words before or after the keyword.

Broad match

Broad match keywords will show ads for a wide range of queries that may be closely or broadly related to the keywords themselves.

Users can see ads with broad match keywords if:

• They search for synonyms
• They search for words in a different order
• They search using long-tail queries that broadly relate to the subject matter
• They use incorrect spellings

Broad match modifier

Broad match modifier is a cross between broad and phrase match. It offers a greater level of targeting control than broad match, because it won’t display ads when users search for synonyms or related searches. And unlike phrase match, it will show ads when users search for words in a different order.

Negative match

Negative match lets you define queries that will stop ads triggering. The obvious candidates are potentially offensive keywords, but there may be other obvious negatives that are specific to your industry or brand.

At a later stage, you should build this list out at campaign level – but only when you have a better understanding of which keywords convert, and which don’t.

Optimising your Match Types

Make sure you audit and optimise your match types regularly. Without control of your keyword targeting, you won’t have control of your budget. If you have clicks from irrelevant, non-targeted search queries they are less likely to convert and cost you money.

Each different match type affords a greater degree of control over targeting (and therefore budget). Exact match offers the most control, followed by phrase match, modified broad match and broad match.

Broad match should be avoided most of the time, as broad match ads are likely to appear for low-value and irrelevant queries.

In an ideal world, your account would have all keywords set to exact match, with all possible keyword variations covered. This would allow the maximum level of control over targeting and budget.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. So we have to use phrase match and modified broad match to help us reach our customers without spending too much time optimising our campaigns.

Brand Keywords – Dos and Don’ts

It is also important to look at branded keywords. This is important to ensure brand protection.

Until 2008, Google didn’t allow advertisers to bid on competitor brand names. Then the floodgates opened.

So now you can bid on competitors’ branded terms, but you may not be able to include them in your ad text if they are trademarked. Nonetheless, this means that no search query is safe – even customers searching specifically for your businesses website could end up being enticed by a rival company’s ad.

For this reason, you should take reasonable steps to protect your brand in search.

Does this mean bidding on your brand name as a keyword? For some businesses, yes – but for others, it’s just not worth it.

A small business in an uncompetitive market, for example, may find that no competitors are bidding on its brand name.

For this business, bidding on its brand name simply to secure a top position in Google search may be a waste of money, as it will likely already appear as the #1 organic result, with no paid search competition.

However, a big retailer in an aggressively competitive marketplace will likely have to bid on its own brand name, or risk competitors pushing their search results below the fold.

This retailer will also have to ensure that its bids are set high enough to ensure customers go straight to its site. Whenever possible, you should aim to appear in position #1 for your own brand terms – you can’t rely on organic results to bring in clicks!

Best-Practice Tips

• Consider match types. Depending on your brand name, broad match may or may not be a viable choice. Certain brands, like AstraZeneca or Microsoft, could get away with setting brand-name keywords to broad match, as their brand names are either unique, or inexorably tied to the products and services they provide.

However, brands like Apple should avoid broad match at all costs, as brand names based on common words are most likely to bring in unwanted traffic. Apple, for example, may appear on searches for ‘apple baskets’, ‘apple pie’ and countless other irrelevant terms.

• Consider targets. Brand keywords are often more profitable than generic keywords, for a simple reason – people who search for your brand have likely already made up their mind about the retailer they want to purchase from. For this reason, you may wish to set different targets for brand versus non-brand keywords.

• Consider reputation. Reputation management is an important consideration in PPC, especially when it comes to brand keywords. As well as thinking about the keywords you want to bid on, you should consider the queries that you don’t want associated with your brand. For example, keyword constructions like [brand + ‘scam’] or [brand + ‘sucks’] are unlikely to bring in traffic that converts. As part of your audit, you should identify terms like this and add them to your negatives list.

Building an effective keyword list takes time, and maintaining it is an ongoing process. However, if you want your ad campaigns to succeed then getting the building blocks right at the beginning will give you a sturdy base on which to build.

For more on how to use keywords and match types to maximise on your campaigns read ClickThrough’s latest e-Book – The Best-Practice Guide to AdWords Audits: Part One. Download your copy now to find out more about keeping up and moving with the industry.

Thanks to Phil Robinson for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Phil Robinson is the Founder of ClickThrough Marketing, a leading UK digital and search marketing agency specialising in helping companies increase leads and ecommerce sales. You can follow ClickThrough on Twitter or connect with Phil on LinkedIn.

Sales and marketing teams have become more and more aligned in recent years, especially in B2B organizations. History may show a past of battles, resulting in scars and wounds between the two departments, but it’s imperative that they now work together.

Marketing must support sales, and sales must support marketing. Sales is the delivery vehicle for marketing’s message, and the main intention of marketing is to guide a prospect through to a sale.

Traditionally, marketing teams have done a great job raising awareness of products and nurturing the coldest of leads until a salesperson gets a prospect on the phone. But increasingly, the thing that will close a deal is more marketing. Selling situations are getting more complex. More stakeholders are involved in deals. More is on the line for all parties involved.

Supporting the Champion

Here’s a common scenario: A sales team has won over a champion inside a target company. This champion is a person who will regularly use the team’s product and understands how valuable it will be. But the champion lacks the authority to make a buying decision. Instead, this person needs to build the case internally that a) a need exists and b) this product meets that need. The champion asks the sales team for some material to convince stakeholders and shares some new objections that have come up in internal meetings.

In many cases, all that’s needed here is a case study and a few customer testimonials. Ideally it directly relates to their situation and addresses the objections that are being raised. Even better yet, the marketing team has a library of documents — blog posts, slide decks, one-pagers, case studies and testimonials — a salesperson can select from and quickly deliver to their prospect to move the deal forward.

How can you make sure you’re getting the right assets from your marketing team?

First, let’s take a step back and guarantee they’re playing on the same team. To ensure sales isn’t yelling at marketing for sending them unqualified leads, and to attest that marketing isn’t hounding sales to close more leads they’ve been sent, Mark Roberge of Hubspot recommends a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is designed to establish similarly quantified agreements between the two teams. Instead of focusing on raw numbers, your teams should be focusing on implied value of leads generated. This puts sales and marketing on a similar revenue quota.

Second, after this is established, in order to get the right assets from your marketing team, tell them what you need. It’s as easy as that.

The more specific you can get, the better. At a growing company, sales should effectively guide a large portion of marketing activity. But that can’t happen without a consistent flow of information from sales to marketing.

“I take all my cues from sales,” Jeremy Boudinet, Ambition’s Marketing Director told me. “I write about what they tell me. I listen to their conversations. I look at our current customers and see who’s succeeding and how they’re succeeding.”

The Daily Growth Standup

It sounds simple because… well, it is. At PersistIQ, we just implemented a daily growth startup between our marketing and sales teams. We start every meeting at the top of the funnel and work our way down.  Each member reports on their one metric that matters most and the activity related to that metric. This way, each member of the sales team knows what I’m doing on the marketing side, and I know the objections everyone is encountering in the field when they’re out talking to prospects and customers.

I get to hear in near real time the roadblocks our Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and Account Executives (AEs) are running into. This helps me plan my pipeline so I stay focused on projects that will be as helpful as possible to closing deals.

When an AE tells me in that meeting, “This deal didn’t close because of this reason,” or “These are the words the customers are saying now,” I can get out in front and address these issues before the next customer thinks to ask it.

Growth is a Team Effort

Gone are the days where each department sits in isolation from all the rest. The scope of roles are broadening as each team member needs to understand roles of members in other departments in order to support growth. No more heated exchanges at the water cooler or criticizing behind the other department’s back.  After all, let’s not forget we’re all working towards the same goal: growth!

In the words of the most successful basketball coach in NBA history, Phil Jackson, “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.“

Sales and setting goals for salespeople go hand in hand. Like ice cream and sugary toppings. Miley Cyrus and controversy. Or airlines and headaches.

Something else that goes hand-in-hand is quotes from famous people and articles like this one. When it comes to business-related quotes and quotable people, there are few people better to draw from than Tony Robbins. I especially like one of his quotes on this article’s topic of goal setting:

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
~ Tony Robbins

I think this is especially true in Social Selling, an area that sales and business professionals may not “get” when they first hear of it. Once they do start to learn about it, though, they’ll likely feel overwhelmed and wonder where to start with it.

This is where goals come in, and why setting them before you take the Social Selling “plunge” is necessary.

While I’d love to be able to teach you everything I can about Social Selling goal setting in this article, there’s no way I could do the subject justice in this format. For example, I have a whole chapter on it in my workbook, and I could spend a half full day teaching it in a seminar. In other words, it ain’t gonna happen in under 500 600 700 words (It’s tough to keep an article like this short).

Instead, I’m going to start you on turning the invisible into the visible with these tips:

Begin with the end in mind. While this is taken directly from general sales goal setting, it applies with Social Selling as well. Here’s the big question: In a year from now, if you said, “this was an amazing social media year for me (and/or our company),” what happened that made it so good for you? When you can answer this question, you can then build out your plan.

Measure a few specific items. As you may know by now, the Social Selling process can involve numerous moving parts. My advice: don’t try to do everything at once. Select a few of these elements with which to begin, and then measure the activity around them:

• Brand awareness/PR
• SEO/Website Traffic
• Customer interaction/Visitor Loyalty
• Lead Generation/Conversion rate
• Conversations/engagement
• E-commerce
• Education
• Market Research
• Advocacy
• Entertainment
• Growing a mailing list

If you find you’ve done a good job at integrating two or three items from the above, toss in another one or two. Keep yourself busy with it, but don’t overdo it. After selecting your items, build out some realistic goals that deal with where you would like to see results in three, six, nine and 12 months.

Determine activities that will help to achieve those goals. This is the proverbial “to-do” list. Determine what it is you need to do, decide how often you need to do them (daily, weekly or monthly), and then… do them! Here’s a few examples of what you can do (all are from LinkedIn-related activities):

• Request to connect with the people who view your Profile (the “Caller ID” strategy… very powerful)
• Request to connect with current clients
• Connect with current prospects
• Meet with/call your first-degree connections to exchange introductions
• Make introductions for others
• Post status updates
• Write and post your own (or company-supplied) Published stories
• Join new LinkedIn Groups

These are just a few of the many goals you can set for yourself.

Schedule your “to-do” items in your calendar as recurring events.Pretty simple here. Put specific times around each of your to-do items (or combine them into a “Social Selling Power Hour/Half-Hour). Then enter them into whatever calendar you use (Outlook, Google Calendar, etc.) as recurring events for whatever time period you’ve chosen. Just make sure you make the commitment to actually tick these items off of your list, even if you have to move around some time blocks on your calendar to get them done.

Also keep in mind that you can use Social Selling throughout the sales process. Here’s how.

I’ll end this article with another quote from Tony:

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
~ Tony Robbins

In other words, if you haven’t set any goals, you’ll never reach them. If you’re not getting any sales leads and closing business using whatever ways you’ve been using before, those methods won’t get you what you need now or in the future; in this case, closed deals. Social Selling definitely helps with the latter; goal setting is the way to go with the former.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

B2B tends to be pretty old school when it comes to marketing. For a long time, companies in this realm have built their empires from scratch to the behemoths they are now with only a good product, a great sales team and solid connections. But with the advent of today’s digital age, where everything is a click away and the market is inundated with options, even big name B2B companies have to rely on well-strategized, customer-centric marketing pursuits to beat the next best option (who is most likely just a click away).

One of the biggest mistakes a B2B company can make is to think that whatever their competition is doing, is the industry “standard”, and because that is the standard, they should limit themselves to it. Innovation is the key to success. If you’re on this boat and a bit apprehensive on making the stride from cold calling towards inbound marketing, here are five reasons you should reconsider.

1. Your competition is not doing it right 

If your competition is still relying on rolodexes and cold-calling, they are not doing it right. They are probably spending quite a bit of money on traditional marketing strategies that yield little results and are hard to measure or just plain untrackable.

They may implement one or two strategies, but few have not taken the time to think through a lead generation funnel and allocated the budget to make it a success. This is a huge opportunity for the companies that make the leap to inbound marketing a priority, and will allow them to dominate their market organically. Let the leads come to you and capture them at the right moment.

2. Your website makes the first and sometimes the last impression.

A big part of your inbound marketing strategy includes an search engine optimized website focused on UX and supported by lead nurturing and conversion tools and activities. With today’s mobile technology, we all have immediate access to the internet and that is how we search for solutions to our problems. When your target market need your type of service, they will pull out their phone, do a quick search and analyzes their options.

Your website is your first impression, and first impressions don’t just last, but they can determine your target market’s choice between you and your competition. Think through their decision-making process and plan your website to be search engine optimized, visually appealing, mobile responsive, easy for a prospect to identify the services you offer, have testimonials or reviews that prove your quality and lastly conversion points that will convert them into a lead. The last thing you want is your site to fall short of a prospect’s expectations and they move on to the next company.

Remember your competition is only one click away. Taking the time and allocating your marketing budget to build a meaningful site where you can stage your inbound marketing strategy will secure the impact you want. You will also be able to measure what works and analyze every step of the way what strategies you can and should adjust.

3. Your clients want to business with companies that have a track record of success.

I think we can all relate to this. We want to hire someone that is going to come out and get the job done correctly. A part of inbound marketing is getting your customers to become loyal evangelizers of your product or service. If your competitor is stuck in the olden ways, you can beat them head-on by fostering an active social presence online where you can communicate with your customers, find out how they really feel about your company and gather reviews from delighted customers.

Success in this area starts with providing great service to your customers. Next create a system that prompts your clients to leave your reviews.  This can be a printed piece you leave behind, or even better — an email workflow that is sent out after the work is done.  Dedicating the time or budget to build a positive online reputation will pay a continuous long-lasting ROI. Tracking and automating these activities can be achieved through marketing platforms like HubSpot.

4. Lead with value

The most searched phrases in Google start with “How To”. This is a huge opportunity for your company to be found and become the trusted thought leader in your industry by providing your target market with valuable information regarding their questions and interests relevant to your expertise. This will position your company as a true resource, and one that wants to help people in their time of need. This will build trust and lead them to hiring you when they really need your services. This can be in the form of how-to videos, blogs, ebooks, webinars, or even infographics.

5. Know what you don’t know

Inbound marketing enables you to back every piece of your marketing strategy with analysis. From knowing your buyer personas very well — their behavior, their likes and dislikes — to tracking what campaigns are working, just how much is the impact of your strategy and what components you can adjust, inbound marketing allows you to be informed way ahead of your competitors. Use this to your advantage.

So why are you still tailing the old, inefficient, and ineffective marketing strategies of your industry? Why not set the standard?

A company that sells highly technical products and services, such as IT business solutions, typically has a long, in-depth sales process. While you might not be able to overhaul the entire process, there are plenty of ways to improve efficiency in your sales cycle, giving your sales team more time to generate leads and close deals.

Use these eight quick tips to keep your sales process moving and achieve top-line revenue:

1. Target The Right Prospects
To reach your ideal buyers, you need a narrow, well-defined target list that includes company size and position title. This narrowly defined target list helps your sales team avoid calling the wrong people and the wrong companies, which gives them more time to talk to solid sales leads.

Company size is an important consideration in prospect targeting, as well. For example, if you’re selling expensive business software and SaaS solutions, it makes sense to only target those businesses with the necessary budget to support your software price. As you close more deals, analyze your sales data to further define the ideal company size for your products and services.

2. Understand The Decision-Making Process
Make sure you’re pursuing the actual decision-maker for a purchase and understand that person’s thought process. The better you comprehend their decision-making process, the better you’re able to gauge the strength of your sales pipeline – and avoid mistakes. For instance, if your company’s products or services would eliminate a person’s job, make sure not to target that person as your potential buyer, since they would probably see the purchase as counter to their own self-interest.

3. Increase Your Rate Of Contact
Increasing your rate of contact with leads provides a steady influx of sales opportunities for your sales pipeline. To maximize potential revenue, contact your entire sales database 1.8 to 2 times per year. Calling your database on this type of predetermined schedule allows you to eliminate out-of-date contact information and helps you unearth latent leads, which could become your next finalized sales.

4. Evaluate Opportunities In Your Sales Pipeline
Sales reps should evaluate each of their leads on a regular basis to determine whether a lead is a schedule opportunity or a nurture opportunity. Note that schedule opportunities include any previously contacted lead or prospect that requires a future contact. Determining the number of schedule and nurture opportunities allows reps to better gauge their sales pipeline and forecast expected sales. This evaluation also helps your team know when it’s time to ramp up additional lead generation.

5. Map Out Your Buyer’s Journey
To map out your buyer’s journey, start by defining what success looks like for your sales team. This definition should be concrete, with specifics for sales metrics, timing and dollar amounts. Next, map out the milestones your prospects pass as they move to finalized sales. Using these milestones, create a list of essential steps and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to apply when contacting each prospect.

6. Clearly Communicate Your KPIs And Process
Once you’ve established your definition of success and mapped out your buyer’s journey, make sure to clearly communicate your sales process and KPIs to your salespeople. Knowing how many leads have passed particular milestones helps your sales team forecast sales and close rates more accurately. It also helps the team make better decisions about which opportunities to pursue.

You may want to eliminate any old metrics that don’t measure actual sales success. For example, many sales managers urge frequent dialing, but this approach doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales (or higher quality sales). The best salespeople often make fewer calls, because their understanding of lead quality and prospect milestones allows them to be more efficient.

7. Track Your Sales Data
Managing data is key to an effective, scientific sales process and achieving your top-line revenue goals. The first step is to track all of your transaction data in detail. For example, tracking your sales data by industry vertical helps you see how results vary across different customer segments. If your sales are strong in a particular vertical, you have an opportunity to drill down until you understand the factors contributing to your success.

Sales data should also be tracked in relation to individual sales reps. Should you decide to give your salespeople room to experiment and test new theories, this data allows you to later assess those efforts and capitalize on any promising methods.

8. Use Analysis To Optimize Your Sales Process
The more data you track and analyze, the easier it becomes to make sound decisions that optimize your sales process. Analyzing your sales data is a great way to determine which decision-maker is the best person to contact, which lists are worth purchasing, and which tactics are most effective.

Data analysis could also reveal how many times you need to contact a prospect in order to close a sale. Then, use these insights to optimize your sales process. For example, if you notice nearly all of your sales leads convert on the twelfth call, for example, don’t let your salespeople give up after the fifth call.

These eight tips offer ways to make your sales cycle more efficient, helping your team fill your sales pipeline with strong opportunities and bring new revenue to your business.

Is your sales pipeline running dry? Download this industry guide from Invenio Solutions® and discover how to start boosting your IT sales today.

GUEST:

How do you introduce agile marketing into an organization? I’ve watched many organizations struggle with this, with varying degrees of success. While there is no magic formula, I have a few suggestions based on experience.

My thoughts are highly influenced by the best book I’ve ever read on change management, Point B by Peter Bregman. If you haven’t read it, get it immediately. Everyone has to manage change, whether it be introducing agile marketing to an organization or introducing a new technology or service to a customer.

1. Make the Case

Why is the change being made? What’s in it for the participants in the change? You have to answer these questions first, and I try to do so by appealing to the heart, not the brain. I do this by telling stories, and weaving those stories into a narrative. If you’re unsure about the difference between a story and a narrative, see this post about story and narrative. The narrative, or the promise, of agile marketing is to increase the predictability, transparency, velocity, and adaptability of the marketing function. It leads to marketing that is done in a rapid, iterative, experimental, don’t-be-afraid-to-fail fashion that complements agile development.

Involve the participants in making the case for agile marketing. Someone told me a long time ago, “People support what they help create.” I think that’s true. If the participants in the change are making the case, and they’re involved early on, their level of engagement will be much higher. No one likes change foisted upon them. But change where they have some control, and that meets their needs . . . that’s much more likely to succeed.

I involve people by asking questions. Here are a few of mine, but make sure that you add your own:

• What do you love about marketing? What do you find frustrating?
• What’s working here (at this organization)? What’s not working?
• Does management understand what marketing does? Why or why not? Does sales understand marketing? Again, why or why not?
• What’s your experience with the pace of change of marketing? Is it pretty much the same as it was 10 years ago, or has it changed? How has it changed? What about the next 10 years? Do you think the pace of change will slow down or speed up? What are you doing to prepare for it?
• Do you have enough resources (everyone in marketing always answers no)? Would something that helped you get more done with the same resources be helpful here?

The answers to these questions lead to the reasons for change. Write them down. Refer back to them.

2. Sponsorship

Introducing “agile” into a marketing organization requires sponsorship, not just from the most senior levels of marketing, but from sales and general management, too. If they’re not committed to it, don’t do it. I once taught a class on Agile Marketing to a group, and the VP of Marketing sat in the back of the room, working on email, occasionally stepping out to attend meetings or perhaps do something else. She never participated in any of the exercises, and the only questions she asked were skeptical. Not surprisingly, agile marketing failed at that organization. I never understood why she spent the money in the first place to bring me in.

The sponsorship has to be the right kind. It can’t simply be a top-down dictum. It has to be the kind of sponsorship that is going to allow the team to make some of the critical decisions and find their own way. It has to hold them accountable, but also realize that there are going to be bumps along the way, and even some failures. If you’re not experiencing a few failures, you’re not taking enough risks. Good managers know this.

3. Build Competency

Learn the language of agile marketing. Understand the difference between a sprint and a scrum. Learn how to write user stories. Assign story points, and start measuring your velocity. By all means, take a class or read a book, but the best way to build competency is by doing. Realize that you won’t get it all right during that first Sprint. That’s OK. If you get it half right and improve from there, you’ll be fine.

Don’t practice “Scrumbut.” This is where you say, “We practice Scrum, but . . .” and you list most of the things that are at the heart of Scrum, and you really aren’t practicing it at all. Give the process a chance before you start modifying it for your own needs. Then, if you really have something that works better for you, by all means implement it. But build some competency first.

4. Persistence and Grit

Teams that succeed in agile marketing, just like teams that succeed in anything, have persistence and grit. It can easily take six months to a year before you start seeing all the benefits of agile marketing. The desire to change may be strong at first, but it will eventually get lost in the daily grind. People who persist due so by making small daily changes (like the daily scrum) and by showing perseverance. If you make a commitment and follow through on it, you are much more likely to succeed in making a change.

What’s your experience? For those of you who have successfully or unsuccessfully introduced agile marketing to your organization, what worked and what didn’t? I’d love to hear your stories.

Jim Ewel is an entrepreneur and a turnaround CEO. He has been blogging about agile marketing since 2011, and along with John Cass, organized SprintZero, which put together the Agile Marketing Manifesto. Jim spent 12 years at Microsoft in sales and marketing and the last 14 years as the CEO of three companies: GoAhead Software (sold to Oracle), Adometry (sold to Google), and InDemand Interpreting. You can learn more about Agile Marketing at his blog, www.agilemarketing.net.

“Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder,” Mason Cooley, an American writer.

It’s September. We’re almost into the fourth quarter (Q4) and John, the Vice President of Sales, is in a mild panic. It’s not surprising. After all, time’s running out to meet his quota and sales are soft.

How did he get into this position?

When he arrived at work at the beginning of January, he was full of optimism for the New Year and ready to tackle the sales challenges. Ahead of him stretched twelve long months to make it all happen. Plenty of time to fill the pipeline, nurture leads and convert them into sales. Or so he thought.

It seems like this missing link is made of gold. What are these sales lead management teams doing that is multiplying the number of ready-to-buy prospects while cutting marketing costs?

But things didn’t work out that way.

Each month sales fell just a little short. And John thought he could tweak a few things to catch up. It didn’t work. Now, he’s about 5% down year to date. Making up those lost sales in the last quarter will require some heroics.

Does this sound familiar?

Too often glass-half-full leaders fail to take strong actions to get sales back on track until they’re up against the wall. Time, their friend at the beginning of the year, zips along and turns into their enemy. And, as Cooley noted so wisely, procrastination makes hard things become harder.

How to Improve Sales

If you’re suffering the same predicament as John, you need to take action. Now. What should you do? Well, it depends on where you are today. So, first identify your exact problem, and then the solution.

• Problem 1: You Have Leads, They’re Not Qualified

At least you have something in your pipeline. Now you need to transform unqualified leads into sales. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, it may be possible.

First, whip your leads into shape. If you’re missing phone numbers or demographic information, such as industry type and company size, append the list. The demographic data will help you to segment the leads and prioritize who to call first. That’s essential because there’s no time to lose.

Now, add the human touch. Get a team of professional telemarketers or inside sales people on the phone to qualify the leads as soon as possible.

The team will gather the names and titles of everyone who’s involved in the buying decision and determine whether the lead is hot to buy or just researching. Also, they’ll dig into the potential client’s problem, gathering the information your sales people need to prepare a persuasive sale presentation.

And, of course, they’ll make sure the lead can afford your product, service or solution. Your sales people can’t afford to call on people who can’t afford to buy.

Your team has a lot of questions, but it’s not a one-way street. If it’s available, they also need to provide information to help the potential client move through the buying process.

If the lead passes all your qualifying criteria, your business development representative can set up the appointment while they have the lead on the phone. This enables them to pass qualified appointments to your sales people, empowering them to make the best use of their time and close more sales.

If you don’t have an internal team to take care of lead qualification, you can outsource the project to a team of professional B2B business development specialists.

• Problem 2: The Sales Pipeline Has Dried Up

If there are no leads in the pipeline, your problem is more serious. You need to generate leads quickly. It’s too late for inbound marketing driven with content, which is a good strategy when you have time and can be patient.

But does cold calling still work in 2015? Absolutely, with one caveat: you have to do it right. That takes a little more time upfront for planning, but it pays off.

First, get a list based on your profile of your ideal customer’s demographics. Then, research each lead. Check out the company’s website and social media profiles. Find out the background of the person you’re calling, the business’ product offering, recent organizational changes and more.

This information is food for your business development specialist’s conversation with the lead. It personalizes the conversation. Also, depending on what you find, it may help you eliminate some names for a more laser-targeted list.

Now set the call objective. In your current situation, you likely want to go for the appointment. But make sure you qualify the leads before you set one up. Also, since you won’t be successful in setting an appointment with everyone you contact, have a secondary objective. That might simply be lead qualification and gathering more data.

There’s just one more thing you need your reps to do before they pick up the phone. Make sure they can relate your value proposition and have a memory bank filled with success stories. To persuade people to take action as soon as possible, these must roll off their tongues.

Preventing Future Q4 Sales Troubles

Once you’ve surmounted today’s troubles and have sales back on track for this year, you’ll need to put a plan in place to avoid future Q4 sales sprints.

Create a strategic lead management process that you can monitor throughout the year. Define how you’re going to work with your leads from acquisition to qualification to close. Set up qualification criteria, and how you plan to filter and score leads, ensuring sales people focus their time on the golden nuggets.

Of course, it’s not all about the leads you send to sales. Many of your leads won’t be ready to buy day one, but most of those will want to buy down the road. If you don’t want them running off to the competition, you need to set up a plan for nurturing these leads until they’re ready to buy.

Also, determine how to track, measure and report on your lead pipeline. If you have clear visibility on where your leads stand in the pipeline and typical conversion rates, you can forecast future sales. If your sales forecast falls below your quota, you’ll know exactly where you need to turn up the volume, improve sales and achieve your goals.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, the ability to be alert and flexible is a necessity for any company looking to stay a step ahead of the competition. Organizations cannot afford to have agility be an afterthought; an agile company culture needs to be developed through an intentional, disciplined approach. This post will discuss what an agile company culture looks like, as well as some best practices for achieving agility within your organization.

What It Means To Be Agile

Although the term is used for a variety of purposes, agility in business typically refers to agile methodology in project management (specifically software development), according to Officevibe Director of Customer Happiness Jacob Shriar. However, agility can be interpreted as more of a mindset than a methodology, and its principles can be applied across all levels of an organization. Agile culture does not rely on sequential processes, but rather, allows for constant adjustments and improvements. Shriar notes that with an agile company culture in place, projects can be completed faster and employees will be more engaged. In VersionOne’s 8th Annual State of Agile Survey, researchers found the top three business areas that improved after implementing agility were the ability to manage changing priorities, productivity, and project visibility.

In agile environments, employees communicate with each other frequently for the sake of improving as a team. With constant communication comes constant learning. To that point, companies with agile cultures do not place emphasis on fear of failure. Instead, failure is acceptable because it leads to learning and improvement. With this type of mentality in place throughout an organization, employees are empowered to work more innovatively because they aren’t afraid of making mistakes. In Shriar’s words, “Agile is more about how your team approaches problems, not the tools used to solve them.”

Agile environments keep the momentum in a project moving quickly, which is exciting for employees. This type of culture is more engaging than one that focuses on long, drawn-out projects, and thus boosts employee motivation. Additionally, being agile lets organizations move faster than their competitors who are busy with planning and perfecting rather than executing. Agile organizations can also outperform their competitors because they are constantly making adjustments to tailor their product or service to their customers’ specific demands.

How To Make Agility Part of Your Organizational Culture

Implementing an agile company culture starts at the management level. In fact, in VersionOne’s survey, 61% of respondents indicated that the first champions of agility in their organizations were managers. The survey findings also reveal that the most common reason that organizational agility fails is because of internal resistance to change. Those survey respondents who were successful at achieving agility within their organizations shared some common strategies for implementation. They are: clear processes and training about the basics of agility, strong leadership, inter-team communication, collaborative workflow, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

Shriar shares five ways that organizations can become more agile, some of which overlap with VersionOne’s survey results. His first piece of advice is to give employees more autonomy with how they do their work. If organizations employ a mobile software solution that has an instant messaging function, managers will be much less worried about giving up some control to employees. Instant messaging lets managers coach employees remotely when they run into problems on the job without stepping on their toes. Shriar also advises managers to lead by example. In order to to do this, he explains, managers must communicate with employees often, be transparent with them, and embrace the principles of agility. Without guidance from management, how can employees be expected to adopt agility on their own? To that point, Shriar recommends that managers expand their knowledge of agile principles in order to better understand the value agility has for their organization.

Shriar suggests that organizations can become more agile if employees are working towards a common goal. Doing so will create focus within a team, instead of having people work on numerous different projects independently. Finally, it is crucial to adopt a culture where fear is acknowledged and even welcomed. Employees shouldn’t be scared off when things don’t go as planned. Instead, they should approach challenges as opportunities for finding creative solutions to problems. For this to be accomplished, employees need to be aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. If employees are equipped with this knowledge, they will be better able to handle any problem that is thrown their way.

In summary, organizational agility is about being able to rapidly adapt to change and not being afraid to fail. With an agile culture in place, employees will be empowered to find more creative solutions to problems because their actions will not be dictated by fear. Furthermore, agile organizations are able to outdo competitors because of their ability to constantly make alterations that align with their customers’ needs. With a strong commitment from management, transparency, and continuing education, organizations will be well on their way to becoming agile.

Content marketing has gone mainstream. In 2014, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs revealed that 86 percent of B2B companies and 77 percent of B2C companies now produce some form of content marketing.

The most successful content marketing programs attract a large audience by offering valuable and relevant information. They build brand authority—and generate leads—by creating content that provides solutions to the specific problems facing their audience.

But with so much content flooding social media and the web, the challenge now facing marketers is how to stand out from the content crowd: how to differentiate their content from the endless stream of blog posts, infographics, ebooks and videos.

One solution, often overlooked, is to turn to your customers. Because current customers already chose to buy your products or services, they can provide valuable feedback on whether your content is effectively tailored and targeted to their specific needs and challenges. More importantly, they themselves can become content creators on your behalf.

Here are some simple ways customer engagement can help elevate your content marketing efforts.

1. Build customer knowledge.

The first step in this process is to develop a deeper understanding of your customers. Who are they and what motivates them? The most successful content marketing programs put the needs of their audience first and their company’s second. They provide value to their target audience by offering meaningful insight into a key business problem facing the companies they are trying to reach.

Before diving in and creating a comprehensive content marketing program, it’s critical to step back and think about the challenges that your customers face. Don’t assume you know the issues plaguing your prospects. Talk to your current customers and ask them to help define the challenges that are prominent in their industries. Engaging customers directly will remove the guesswork in your content strategy.

2. Optimize content marketing distribution.

The success of your content hinges not just on your ability to create compelling content but in how well you distribute it.

Is it really worth your time maintaining a presence on Twitter? Is your target audience more likely to be on Facebook or on LinkedIn? Should your company be on Vine? Answering questions like these will help optimize your distribution plan and maximize your reach. To succeed in content marketing, you need to know the type of media your customers consume and where they naturally find content. Getting that information requires a two-way conversation with your customers.

3. Elevate content quality.

The 2014 Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study revealed that 54 percent of B2B marketers and 50 percent of B2C marketers identify “producing engaging content” as a top challenge. Creating content that resonates with a target audience is a real challenge for many marketing organizations.

Your customers can help. Talk to your customers and regularly ask for feedback on your content. Then tweak and improve based on their insight.

Even better, utilize your customers as a source of content themselves. Providing the opportunity for your customers to generate content for your campaigns—or co-create content with you—lets you put your customer community to work for your business. Collaboration with customers helps ensure that your content really resonates once it’s released to the wider world.

4. Offer original data and insight.

Finding ways to make your content stand out can be tough. From our experience at Vision Critical, sharing original customer data for content marketing is an effective way of getting the attention of your target audience. Some of our most well-received reports and webinars offered data not found anywhere else. By sharing hard data on the collaborative economy and on social media analytics, we’ve learned that data-driven content marketing gets the attention of prospects and of the general public.

The key to using data for content marketing isn’t to be seen simply as a data company. You can attract the right people in your target audience by offering provocative insight and outlining the unique benefits of your solution.

Conclusion

By increasing brand awareness, attracting prospects and engaging customers, effective content marketing can help your business acquire new customers and retain existing ones. It can help align marketing and sales towards the same goals.

More importantly, content can humanize your company, helping you build authentic relationship with potential customers by offering something valuable in return.

By collaborating closely with their community of customers, marketers can ensure the effort and investment they place in content marketing yields tangible business results.

By now, you’ve probably heard about smarketing – a term made popular by HubSpot, defined as “alignment between your sales and marketing teams created through frequent and direct communication between the two.”

When sales and marketing teams align their goals and create a service level agreement (SLA) to follow up with each other, everyone is held accountable and more gets done. And with the help of sales ops, this relationship can be even more rewarding.

But how exactly can your marketing team increase sales efficiency?

It all starts all starts with content. Due to the growing popularity of content marketing, sales efficiency now depends heavily on marketing efforts. That’s why smarketing should be a priority at every organization, especially B2B SaaS companies.

Let’s take a look at how sales ops can facilitate sales efficiency through content and unite marketing and sales teams.

(To learn all about how marketing can increase sales efficiency, check out our FREE eBook on Sales Enablement.)

1. Content Creation

In order to generate leads, you need to collect information from your audience. This is typically done by enticing people to download original content that your marketing team has created. So if you want to generate more – and higher quality – leads, it’s up to your marketing team to create compelling content that your audience can’t resist.

Your content should be genuinely insightful and informative so that your audience values your expertise. If people read your content, they want to get something out of it. Include actionable tips so people have clear takeaways that can help them do their job better. You don’t want anyone to feel like they wasted their time reading your content.

In order to attract the right audience, make sure you’re doing these 5 things:

• Follow the Buyer’s Journey
  • Create content that addresses all three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.
• Audit Current Content
  • Gauge the ROI of each asset and pinpoint your strongest and weakest assets.
• Develop a Content Creation Plan
  • Sales and marketing leaders should collaborate to create a strategy to fill in gaps in your content library and target specific customer personas.
• Create Mobile-Friendly Content
  • With the rise of smartphones, your content needs to be accessible – and readable – on mobile to maximize your reach.
• Optimize for Conversions
  • Lead your audience down the marketing funnel by having CTAs for relevant offers in your blog posts to increase your conversion rates.

The better your marketing content, the more luck your sales team will have in their initial conversations with prospects. Discussing the eBook that a prospect just downloaded can help sales reps build rapport and make connections more efficiently. This makes breaking the ice a little bit easier, kickstarts productive dialogue about relevant topics, and increases the sales efficiency of your team.

2. Lead Nurturing and Scoring

You don’t want your sales team to waste their time working low-quality leads – that’s why it’s critical to nurture leads until they’re ready to be passed along to sales.

You wouldn’t ask that person you just met last night if they’re ready to marry you, so don’t ask that person who downloaded your eBook yesterday if they’re ready to buy your software. You need to develop a deeper relationship with someone before having a conversation about your future together.

But how do you know when a lead is ready to handed off to your sales team? That’s where lead scoring comes in.

Once you have clearly defined what constitutes marketing qualified leads and sales accepted leads, you should implement a lead scoring system to quantify the sales readiness of each lead. Leads are typically scored based on algorithms that consider factors such as company size, location, job title, etc. Leads that share traits with your typical buyer and interact with more of your content receive higher scores, as you’d expect.

3. Lead Behavior

It’s important to consider how each person interacts with your marketing content in order to gauge their interest level. A person who reads one top of the funnel blog post and subscribes to your newsletter is very different from someone who reads 20 bottom of the funnel blog posts and downloads 5 assets, and must be treated as such.

When a sales rep receives a lead from marketing, they should be able to answer the following questions:

• How did they first hear about our company?
• What content have they downloaded?
• Which pages on our website have they visited?
• Did they engage with anyone on our marketing team?

Your sales team should have a list of your top-performing assets to share with leads. This is an effective way to provide value to prospects and spark deeper conversations about your product, ultimately increasing sales efficiency.

In sales ops, connecting your marketing and sales teams through sales enablement is a large part of what you do. Make sure you encourage your marketing team to work with your sales team to create awesome content and thoroughly analyze lead behavior. Bridging the gap is worth your time.

To learn more about how to increase your sales efficiency with content marketing and sales enablement, check out our FREE eBook on Sales Enablement.