Effective time management is essential to SDR productivity. 83.4% of SDRs fail to consistently hit quota each month, in large part because they lack this critical skill. The problem is so prevalent that in TOPO’s SDR benchmark research, 33.3% of …
The post Time Management for Sales Development Reps appeared first on TOPO Blog.
I’m excited to be a part of a new book titled, Sales Hack by Chad Burmeister, launching just in time for Dreamforce. I want to share with you an excerpt from Sales Hack which I wrote and encourage you to the read the book.
Salespeople can make it hard by failing to ask the tough questions. The way to be sure the sale is moving forward is to ask questions, listen and respond appropriately. This helps the buyer on the journey rather than forcing the close.
Be sure the sale is moving forward by asking questions, listening & responding appropriately.
Click To Tweet
There are specific questions you should ask. To make sure you do, it’s best to prepare by developing a plan for each sales call.
I know if you ask these questions, you will have most of the information you need to collaborate with the buyers and help them on their journey.
How will our solution meet your needs?
What other solutions have you considered?
Who will be involved in making the decision?
What is the best way to include everyone involved in the decision-making process?
What is your budget?
On what factors will you make your decision?
What is your timeline for implementation?
What is your timeline for making a decision?
Is there anything else we need to discuss?
What are our next steps?
Getting the answers to these questions assures you know where the deal is going. The answers keep you focused on the customer and how they will buy.
You may be thinking, this is easier said than done. It’s easy if you plan and practice. You have to work these questions into the conversation so that they seem natural and not abrupt. In order to get honest answers to any of these questions you need to be talking to someone who trusts you. That means before you can ask tough questions, you have to build the relationship. If you have a relationship with the people involved in making the decisions and they trust you, you can easily ask these questions and get the needed answers.
Use these questions to prepare for every sales call. Figure out which of these questions to ask at each point in the sales process. Before asking for their business make sure you have the answers to the questions above.
How can you make selling easier? There are lots of things you can do and it starts with setting goals and making a plan to attain them. Learning many lead generation methods so that you can fill your sales funnel is imperative. Developing a strategy is a great start.
Does all of this seem overwhelming? Are you prepared to develop your sales strategy? Do you have the skills you need to speed up your sales process and shorten the sales cycle? No?
Join me. Watch this training video to learn what you can do and whether you’d like to join my online training and coaching program. Or call me 775-852-5020 or email alice@aliceheiman.com
The post 10 Tough Questions to Close the Deal appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.
Delivering an effective presentation requires more than just self-confidence. It requires techniques that connect the speaker with the audience on a personal level and transmit a message that leaves them feeling satisfied.
To find out how to give an excellent presentation, we spoke with the 2015 Toastmasters International World Champion of Public Speaking, Mohammed Qahtani. Qahtani is a security engineer in Saudi Arabia who joined a Toastmasters club in 2009 on the recommendation of a friend.
He obsessively took to training to become the best speaker he could, and this year he survived seven rounds of a competition that lasted six months and included 33,000 competitors from around the world.
Qahtani and nine other finalists competed at the Toastmasters annual convention last month in Las Vegas. On August 15, he won for his speech "The Power of Words."
He shared with us the advice that helped take him to the top.
Qahtani grew up with a stutter and still deals with it occasionally, but speaking on a stage empowers him and rids him of the impediment. He said that his confidence grew from advice he received from a speaking coach, which was to tell himself that he's better than the people in the audience.
"I don't mean that in an egotistical way!" he said. Rather, he tells himself that he's "better" in the sense that he's courageously speaking in front of people who are sitting there to listen to what he has to say. It's a mental shift that removes the fear of humiliation. "You don't need to be afraid of them because they're the ones admiring you," Qahtani said.
When you write a speech, it should focus on a message that is as clear and succinct as possible. The message of Qahtani's winning speech is simple: We must be conscious of the power our words can have over other people, for better or worse.
A friend once told Qahtani, "When you're on the stage, the most important thing is the audience. Don't care about how you look, where you are on the stage, how you sound — just care about the audience."
Ideally, you have practiced your speech well enough that you look polished, but once you're on the stage you shouldn't be conscious about anything except speaking to the people in front of you. Speak from your heart, Qahtani said, and play off the energy of the audience.
A fellow Toastmasters member once told Qahtani, "Some people are strong with their words, some people are strong with their voice, some people are strong with their stage presence. Your strength is humor. Use it."
Qahtani dabbled in stand-up comedy as an undergraduate student at Arizona State University and tends to find humor in situations. If people didn't find him funny, he wouldn't use jokes in his speeches. It's all about being authentic.
Qahtani opened his speech with humor to get the audience laughing and relaxed, but he would have fallen into a stand-up act if he didn't transition into moving personal anecdotes. Similarly, if he kept his entire speech heavy, his audience would have felt depressed or even bored rather than satisfied.
However you determine your speech will flow, Qahtani said, it's important that you always leave your audience with a feeling of hope. They need to feel empowered by what you just told them.
The main benefit of joining Toastmasters is that it comes with a group of people who not only support you but who will give you frank feedback on what worked and what didn't in your speech. If you're not part of an organization like Toastmasters, practice your presentation in front of someone, or several people, who you know won't sugarcoat their feedback.
Qahtani said there were elements of earlier drafts of "The Power of Words" that he was convinced were essential to his speech but that he eventually cut because they weren't working with his audiences. It's important that you never dismiss someone's opinion about your work-in-progress. "You write a speech for an audience, not yourself," he said.
If you try memorizing your speech word by word, your performance will suffer, Qahtani said.
He likes to visualize a map of certain points in his speech that he fills in during his performance. It's about becoming comfortable with the material to a degree where you can casually talk about it.
You can watch Qahtani's full speech below:
SEE ALSO: 7 tips for becoming an excellent public speaker
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: 7 rules for making a great first impression
The potential collapse of a Chinese commodity exchange could put more pressure on prices for rare earths and other minor metals in which investors have already suffered tremendous losses over the past several years.
Last week, furious investors kidnapped Shan Jiulang, head of the Fanya Metal Exchange, at a Shanghai hotel and turned him over to police, according to the Financial Times. It capped a debacle in which the Fanya exchange ran into liquidity problems and stopped paying out money on its investment products. Roughly US$6.4 billion of investor funds were frozen, according to estimates.
Now the risk is that Fanya will liquidate its vast holdings of minor metals, a move that could crush the highly illiquid markets for these products and harm Canadian companies in the space.
Of course, that assumes Fanya’s reported holdings are accurate. Investors treat everything this exchange says with skepticism after its rapid flameout.
“Creating a marketplace for illiquid commodities and not doing it properly just doesn’t help the market at all,” said Pierre Neatby, vice-president of sales and marketing at Toronto-based Avalon Rare Metals Inc.
The idea behind Fanya, which emerged out of nowhere over the past few years, was to emulate the success of the London Metals Exchange (LME) and create an exchange dedicated solely to the trading of rare earths and other minor metals. Production of some of these metals is dominated by China, where investors are highly interested in them.
But observers saw troubles with Fanya early on. It offered no hedging, so there was unlimited downside for traders. Metal deposited in the exchange was being used as collateral for loans. Pricing for some of these illiquid commodities is not transparent. And according to Neatby, Fanya appeared to buy metals above the market price in order to build up its inventory and assert itself as a serious exchange.
That worked as long as prices were stable or going up. But when they dropped amid economic turmoil in China, the exchange lost money. Fanya couldn’t pay out the promised returns on its metal-backed products, and it seized up completely in July before Jiulang was captured last week (he was later released).
Not surprisingly, Fanya condemned the kidnapping.
“Violent acts against President Shan and our employees or the disturbance of our work are destructive of our work around solving the crisis. This will only allow forces behind the scenes to profit and will greatly harm interests of all members,” the exchange said on its website.
The concern is that Fanya will have to liquidate its entire inventory. Forced liquidations had a devastating effect on commodities following the 2008 financial crisis, and the impact on these minor metals could be severe given their lack of liquidity. Neatby said it his hard to predict the impact because of the lack of transparency in these markets.
On the other hand, some people question whether Fanya’s inventories of products like indium, selenium and germanium are anywhere near as high as reported. In some cases, Fanya claims to have several years’ worth of global supply.
Prices for rare earth metals soared to incredible highs in 2010 as China took steps to curb global supply. But they crashed in 2011 and 2012 as Japanese firms stopped their aggressive stockpiling and product continued to flow out of China. Molycorp Inc., North America’s flagship rare earth company, filed for bankruptcy protection in June.
GUEST:
To whom it may concern,
I do not consider myself an oracle or a fortune teller, but I like to think that my last 22 years in Silicon Valley has made me more adept at navigating the future of the technology space and uncovering trends. Last year I predicted that companies with scale would control storage pricing and shove the sector into a race to the bottom. Fast forward to the present day; Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have thrown their weight around to do just that — offering unlimited storage as a part of their solution, which essentially renders cloud storage free.
Now, one year later, I am writing this letter to make another prediction: Enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) as a standalone solution will disappear in the next two years.
While Gartner created the EFSS category just two years ago, this space is at an inflection point that will force the vendors to make drastic changes or disappear all together. EFSS was created when implementing file sharing, storage, and sync was a time-, effort-, and resource-intensive effort and hence, moving capital expenditures to operating expenditures was the driving force. This was a time where the cloud was seen as the best possible solution, a panacea for complex file infrastructure if you will. As a result cloud-only, turnkey solutions were developed and rolled out to both consumers and businesses.
This was a good start but had fundamental flaws. While the focus was to make things easier for users, solutions veered toward being too simplistic. However, the reality is that a company’s file infrastructure involves serving variety of use cases that cloud-only solutions simply cannot support — security and privacy issues with data, problems of scale (lots of files), large files, and performance expectations. As time has progressed, vendors have learned that there is a significant amount of customer data that should not be in the cloud, which is now making on-premises storage all the more valuable and relevant. Other than for archival purposes, interacting with terabytes or even petabytes of data in the cloud is simply not viable.
Unlike consumer needs, enterprise needs cannot be satisfied by a one-size-fits-all approach. Providers must be seen either as a platform or as a core piece of infrastructure. The enterprise needs flexibility, security, and control, which are achieved by providing value-added services on top of the simple file sync and share solutions that were initially created. These services include collaboration, data management, and data protection.
Microsoft and Google are already playing this game. Microsoft is capitalizing on the ubiquity of Office to build a three-pronged strategy around making business processes more efficient, incorporating an “intelligent cloud platform” and “creating more personal computing.” Google aims to replace Office products with its own Google Docs, while pitting Google Drive against Dropbox, which itself grew into a main player based on ease of use and widespread adoption.
With all of that being said, the bloom is off the rose for the EFSS category. We are two years since the inception of the EFSS category, and we are now within two years of its demise.
Early entrants to this space like SugarSync and YouSendIt (Hightail) have all but disappeared. Even storage powerhouse EMC decided to sell control of its Syncplicity unit to Skyview Capital.
There is a new realization for enterprise customers, and they are pausing to regroup and rethink their strategy. They are assessing strengths and weaknesses, looking for one solution that can provide a platform to answer all of their needs — functionality, openness, security, and control. This is why I refer to our present time period as “halftime.”
There is still time to find a way to win if you can grow beyond the confines of file sync and share.
Regards,
Vineet Jain
Vineet Jain is cofounder and chief executive of Egnyte.
Powered by VBProfiles
VANCOUVER – A mistake by Air Canada in offering a package of flights at just 10 per cent of the value has triggered a proposed class-action lawsuit by customers who thought they got an amazing deal.
Court documents, filed in both Quebec and British Columbia, stated the flight pass was offered between Aug. 25 and Aug. 28 at just under $800, but customers were told days later the cost of 10 one-way business-class flights in the western U.S. or Canada was actually $8,000.
The documents said Air Canada (TSX:AC.A) refused to live up to its contractual obligations and illegally removed the flight passes.
Garrett Munroe, a lawyer with Munroe and Company, the B.C. firm behind the legal action, said the lawsuit could involve thousands of people, but only Air Canada knows exactly how many people purchased the deal.
“Our view here is that Air Canada has made an enforceable contract, it delivered the flight packages to consumers and it has improperly taken them away,” he said in an interview.
“Air Canada is duty bound and legally obligated to honour its bargain.”
Nothing has been proven in court.
Air Canada spokeswoman Angela Mah wouldn’t comment on the lawsuit but released a previous statement that said a “computer-loading error” was responsible for the “temporary mispricing.”
“Air Canada has contacted purchasers to apologize and provided a refund,” the statement said.
The airline said any flights already booked with the pass would be honoured.
But Munroe said they want the courts to force Air Canada to live up to its original bargain.
“They say it’s a mistake, but how much recklessness is reasonable in terms of allowing the website to show an offer that they don’t intend to be bound by,” he said.
“It would create a significant amount of confusion and uncertainty in the marketplace if consumers were conducting business with the possibility that the merchant is going to come back and attempt to undo the deal that it made.”
It was an attractive price and people bought the package expecting to be able to use it, he said.
“It shouldn’t be up to the consumer to second-guess the merchant’s motivations in advertising a particular product for sale at a particular price.”
The next step is to ask the courts in both provinces to certify the class-action lawsuit that would represent all those who ask to be part of it.
“Rather than having tens-of-thousands of lawsuits, it can be dealt with as one,” Munroe noted.
Even if Air Canada decided to honour the agreements for the same price now, that doesn’t take care of the legal action because the consumer has lost out on potentially planned trips, he said.
The post Amazing deal or pricing error? Air Canada glitch sets off class-action lawsuit appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.
In the era of Big Data, analytics are becoming a competitive necessity for many managers. And even if it’s not an explicit part of your job description, chances are you need to understand at least something about data and analytics to be successful. So, where should you start? What’s the best way to get a handle on the basics? How should you get to know the quants in your company? And how can you be sure you’re asking them the right questions?
What the Experts Say
Whether you’re in financial services, consumer goods, advertising, hi-tech, or public health, the nature of your day-to-day job is likely changing to include data. For some managers, this is intimidating. “A lot of people want to hide because they weren’t particularly quantitative in school or school was a long time ago, but given the number of executives that want to use data-driven insights to propel their decision-making, you can only hide for so long,” says Thomas H. Davenport, a professor at Babson College and the author of Big Data at Work. Besides, hiding is bad for your business and your career, says Joe Knight, a partner and senior consultant at the Business Literacy Institute, and the coauthor of Financial Intelligence. Your goal, after all, is to be the kind of manager who not only understands formulas and analytic methods, but also knows how to “interpret [results] to make better decisions and improve efficiency.” Here are some strategies to help you.
Get educated
If you remember your statistics classes from college or business school, you may be okay. But for those who don’t or, ahem, are somewhat numerically challenged, a refresher is in order. Fortunately, there are myriad ways to get back up to speed: Enroll in an executive education class; read books and articles on the subject; take an online course. Your goal, according to Knight, is to become data literate. “It’s not hard to get the fundamentals down,” he says. “You need to have a sound baseline understanding of business analysis—including the four families of financial ratios and tools for calculating return on investment.” Davenport highly recommends also getting a solid grasp on the basics of regression analysis. “The vast majority of statistical analysis approaches are based in regression analysis,” he says. If that term makes you want to turn and run, don’t. You don’t have to know how to run a regression analysis but simply what it means and how it is performed.
Form relationships
In some organizations, the quant team and the business executives have an adversarial relationship, says Knight. Managers may feel, “Those numbers guys are always ruining our projects.” While the analysts think, “Those business people don’t understand the analysis.” It’s counterproductive. You will get much better business results if you form deep, trusting ties with the quants in your organization, according to Davenport. Don’t write off your analysts as “geeky” number crunchers. Get to know them and treat them with respect. Perhaps the best way to develop mutual trust is to make clear that you value their skills and want to learn from their expertise. Simply saying, “I have a lot to learn from you” can go a long way toward forming a partnership. And if you have a say in hiring decisions, be on the lookout for people who “want to solve business—not just mathematical—problems,” says Davenport. This will help prevent antagonism in the first place.
Include analysts in decision-making
If you manage a team that includes quants, don’t let them sit on the sidelines. “Make the quant a full-fledged member of your team,” Davenport says. “Expose them to the business problems, so they can see them with their own eyes.” Set up frequent meetings and project-reporting sessions so that they fully understand the business. But don’t just ask them to observe; include them in the decision-making process, especially when you’re using the data they’ve delivered to inform the outcome. “Let them know you’ll be working together to make good decisions,” suggests Knight. Ask for their opinion. Often they might have insight that no one else on your team does.
Establish open communication
Maintaining and nurturing your relationships depends on honest, “open communication,” according to Knight. “The quants must be willing to help you understand the estimates and assumptions in the numbers and help you figure out where the risks lie.” Along the way, you need to ask a lot of questions, he says. “There is a tendency to think of numbers as hard and inflexible but that’s not true. The data are inexact.” Davenport suggests pressing the quants in your organization about their models by asking questions like, What are the assumptions you’re using in this model? Under what conditions might those assumptions become invalid? And, how well do the sample data represent the population? “Don’t be afraid to admit what you don’t know,” he says. Ask for help in understanding anything that’s not clear to you.
Don’t get overwhelmed by the volume of data
Often, sifting through the sheer volume of data available is daunting. Fortunately, “all businesses run on a few key metrics,” Knight says. “You don’t need to be looking at 10 to 20. That’s too many. You need to understand the two or three that drive your organization’s profitability and cash flow.” To figure out which ones are most relevant to your business, he suggests enlisting the help of your quants to, “look at the cause-and-effect of all your metrics, and then weed through the ones that don’t have very much impact.” When you discover which metrics are most important, zero in. “You need to understand those in great detail so you can immediately see when there is a problem,” he says.
Respect the data
Data—not instincts or opinions—should drive decision-making, says Knight. The goal of any analytics team worth its salt is to provide an objective, unbiased perspective. So while “a good operations executive might have an intuitive feel for what could work in the business,” that manager should never pressure an analyst to seek out numbers to support his or her opinion. Not only does that pressure defeat the purpose of rigorous analysis, it also creates an environment where the data team feels it exists merely to please the leader. “Most people who do analytics want to see what the numbers reveal about a truth in the world, not support an executive hunch or prejudice,” says Davenport. Be willing to run experiments and trials to test your ideas and gut feelings. Of course there may be some reasons or “situations where you may want to overrule the data, but if you just cynically ignore what the numbers say, or ask an analyst to prove whatever you think is correct, it can be very damaging for your organization.”
Principles to Remember
Do
Don’t
Case Study #1: Cultivate an environment of curiosity and experimentation
Adam Blake is the co-founder of ThriveHive, which offers low-cost, customized marketing services to small businesses. Adam has a background in mechanical engineering, but he realizes not everyone is as at ease with numbers. One of his top priorities as a manager, therefore, is to help make sure that all his employees are comfortable and confident with data analytics even if they don’t have any specialized expertise.
One way he does this is by fostering an environment of experimentation. Recently, Adam received a tip from his sales team. “There was a thought that maybe some of our customers would be willing to pay to hire freelancers to write their company blogs,” he says.
Rather than present his employees with an edict based on this assumption, Adam asked his product team and engineering team to come up with a data-driven experiment to prove it or disprove it. Communication for this project would be key. “The executives needed to be able to formulate and define the business problem for the team,” says Adam.
After healthy debate on how best to crack the problem, they created a simple experiment. “We placed a button in the product that offers customers a way to connect with someone who could write their blogs,” says Adam, adding that the button was not yet a real product feature but rather a way to test how much interest there was in that service.
Before the experiment kicked off, Adam made sure the product team worked with the analysts to create clear measures of success. “We said our expectation would be that more than X% would click the button; if it didn’t hit that number, then we would have a sense that need [for freelancers] is low.”
The analyst team and the product team are in the process of scrutinizing the data to determine whether or not the company should offer the new service. And since then ThriveHive has undertaken other experiments to try out other ideas. “Our approach is always: ‘If you have a hypothesis, let’s create an experiment and test it out.’”
Case Study #2: Hire the right quant for the job and work on revealing key metrics
Zach Mayo is not particularly numbers-minded. In college, he majored in philosophy. Before business school, he spent two years in the Peace Corps. But today as co-founder of RelishMBA, the online platform that streamlines the MBA employment process for both companies and students, Zach is steeped in numbers and data.
His company, which he started recently with fellow student Sarah Rumbaugh, is focused on eliminating the inefficiencies in the business school recruitment process. “The entire process is driven by decisions that are not informed by data in any significant way,” he says. “From the employer side, decisions on everything from which schools to target to which student groups to recruit [are often made arbitrarily]. Students, meanwhile, have to sift through opportunities and are often at the mercy of circumstances in terms of which recruiters come to their school and which sessions they can attend.” RelishMBA aims “to be the match.com of the MBA job search process,” he says, by providing both employers and prospective hires with more transparency.
Zach and Sarah’s first priority is to hire a quant. They’re looking for someone who can help them figure out the metrics most relevant to their business. “We want someone who has the expertise we lack—someone with a robust understanding of database architecture and data storage strategy management,” he says. “But another big part of the criteria is that we are looking for a person who has curiosity and enthusiasm for what we’re doing. We want someone who’s interested in solving problems from the point of view of the business.”
Their next priority is to sort through all of the data they’ve gathered from their customers. Their goal is to find the best potential hires for companies and the best potential employers for students, so “we are looking for those few key metrics in terms of what creates the best match,” says Zach. They have already identified one: past conversions from internships to full-time hires. They are on the hunt for others. “As we continue, we hope to narrow it down to just a few metrics that reveal the biggest insights,” he says. “Right now our customers, the employers, have a lot of data, but they don’t know what to do with it.”
RelishMBA has already grown to more than 1,000 users—averaging about 50 new sign-ups every day—and is steadily attracting new companies.
Do you struggle with managing time? Let’s be honest, no one is perfectly skilled at making sure they’re working efficiently. It’s hard to prioritize what tasks are most important, and all too often, we end up feeling overwhelmed, and the stress causes us to get even less done! So what can you do? Simply download this free eBook called “Real-World Time Management” and learn the skills you need to be a time management master. By the time you make it through this interesting and in-depth book, you’ll be ready to tackle your workday more efficiently than you ever thought possible....
Read the full article: Free eBook: ‘Real-World Time Management’
Guest author Matt Thomson is the chief product officer at Bitly.
We've heard a lot about deep links so far this year. from Google at I/O and Apple at WWDC. My employer, Bitly, threw its hat in the ring, too. But I feel like the industry is stuck talking about how to implement deep links—and not why.
With 70 percent of mobile commerce taking place inside apps, marketers need to take control of app re-engagement—with deep links. Similarly, deep links make it easier to move users from app to app.
A classic example: Google Maps not only provides driving times but also offers Ubers—redirecting you right into the Uber app. The promise of integration is huge, but this is a one-off example. The question going forward is how we can enable these linked customer experiences all the time?
A majority of initial and current hype around deep linking comes from the investment side. Venture capitalists hope indexing app content will be monumentally different than indexing Web content—and that the unindexed content within mobile apps will somehow be a Trojan Horse they can roll into Google's citadel.
The current problem: Deep links are being used for plumbing—if they've even be implemented. In many cases, they haven't even been installed, making app interactions hard to track. Many app developers and product pros are looking at deep linking as an afterthought. According to URX, only 28 of the top 100 apps even have deep links in place.
While some strides have been made, the deep-link market is still nascent. This poses a threat for startups because big VC money goes toward educating the market and the “capturing value” part of the conversation is either too far out or imminently dominated by a larger player. It’s important for companies to spend time educating customers about what deep linking is and why it’s valuable.
To accomplish this, startups need strong use cases to point to so the industry can move beyond deep linking implementation details and into customer experience.
Deep-linking adoption got a boost when Google and Apple made it more enticing for all apps to name, expose, and index deep links. At its I/O developer conference, Google announced Now on Tap and recently unveiled ways for locations inside of apps to surface in search results via App Indexing. At its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced Spotlight for iOS, and it’s expected that 70% of all iOS devices will have the new deep-linking capabilities within five months from rollout—which could happen as soon as this month.
Apple and Google are giving developers more incentive to create deep-link locations in their apps, while simultaneously educating the market.
Beyond search, there are many other ways for the industry to locate hidden content within apps—for example, mobile-Web-to-app or app-to-app. The latter is particularly interesting, with users spending 84% of mobile time in apps.
The app-to-app experience is the market many power startups are pursuing. URX, Button, and Quixey are attempting to enable app discovery and engagement from within other apps. Like Google and Apple, they’ve built robust search and ad-serving technologies by scouring deep links to understand what inside an app is worth surfacing to users. These companies will have long lives, but the company who combines its technology with an ad form factor that feels more native will prosper.
Additionally, a huge opportunity exists for marketers to leverage other digital channels to drive app engagement. As many as 52% of consumers discover apps via social media—so deep linking within posts and tweets is imperative to capitalize on that massive opportunity, both organically (word-of-mouth) and inorganically.
When it comes to customer experience, it ultimately falls on the marketer to give customers the best ways to move in and out of a product, including enticing users into apps. Yet direct marketing such as email, SMS, and even paid media are still stepchildren when it comes to deep linking. These channels are key to reengaging customers over long periods of time on the Web.
Given the increasing need to trace the customer journey in and out of apps and solving problems such as sustaining app engagement, locking in high-lifetime-value users and making the app’s value clear to them, there’s a huge opportunity for the deep-linking industry. First, though, we have to move the conversation past the plumbing and into where the money flows.
Photo courtesy of Picbasement.com
Change is a hard to accept, let alone enact. This is especially true when you have to change an industrial mindset that has established and maintained its rigid structure for centuries. It requires painful introspection, grueling self-reflection, and salesmanship to convince others of your discovery. But most of all, it requires a leader to step forward. Between 2003-2008, General Stanley McChrystal served as the commander the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an organization encompassing the US military’s most elite units. Facing an unorganized, chaotic enemy the traditional military wasn’t trained to engage, McChrystal was forced to be this leader.
On August 20, McChrystal and his co-author, former Navy SEAL Team 6 member Chris Fussell, joined LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman to discuss this process of adapting to a new environment as expressed in their new book, Team of Teams. The beauty of McChrystal’s experience in Iraq lies in his applicable ideals. His thought-process in Iraq mirrors the same ingenuity, preparedness, and readiness to adapt as the most innovative and successful companies in our industry. As Reid stated, “You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.” Such is true about tech, and such is true about fighting a war.
Although hard to imagine, McChrystal and Fussell conveyed important values that transcend industry, company, and function. The following three lessons from the LinkedIn Speaker Series resonated with me profoundly:
Understand what “success” really means
McChrystal could only describe the US military as “excellent.” Yet, he realized being excellent at one’s job and even winning every battle doesn’t necessarily result in winning the war. As McChrystal recounts, the most elite units in the world were winning, but the team was losing. “Each of our teams was excellent…but I see we are losing.”
McChrystal reflected, “[The teams] are working, but cumulatively they are not.” He and Fussell understood that success required a conceptual understanding of the bigger picture, and even if intermediary steps were proving to be successful, the larger, strategic goal is all that matters.
Connectivity is pivotal to foster teamwork
McChrystal realized he had to change the communicative interaction between the seemingly siloed teams spread across the globe. He enacted a mandatory daily video conference between all the teams so they could understand the bigger picture during the war.
In essence, this is the same technique technology companies employ. Company “All-Hands” meetings unite employees all over the globe to alert them of the company’s goals, strategic plans, and a project’s progress. Just as our CEO Jeff Weiner conveys his vision in LinkedIn’s meetings, McChrystal established an outlet for each deployed team to understand the chaotic atmosphere in Iraq. It also allowed each team to understand the role they played on the global stage and learn from the entrepreneurial thinking and insights of others. This network connectivity proved to be an invaluable tool in the war as it proves to be invaluable in our industry.
Good leadership is ultimately the essential seed that breeds success
An understanding of the need for change is important, but it ultimately requires leadership to enact it. Technology and network connections are merely ingredients to achieve success, but leadership is the driving force that uses those tools. As McChrystal advises, “You have to use the digital tools you have to inspire and to instruct.” Sometimes, the biggest leadership step to undertake is simply committing the idea that you need to change. McChrystal freely admits, “I didn’t know what we had to change to, I simply knew that the status quo was failing.” Essentially, when you’re failing, any decision to change is a good decision.
McChrystal and Fussell’s remarkable insights demonstrate that value can be derived from even the most chaotic and seemingly unrelated scenarios. Through thorough analysis, self-questioning, and action-oriented leadership, McChrystal rearranged the traditional structure of the US military’s Special Ops units to make them more efficient. Ultimately, we must ask ourselves in everything we do, “Are we succeeding in our mission?” And if not, we mustn’t be afraid to change even the most well-established norms.
In case you’ve missed them or are in serious need of sales motivation quotes, here are all 31 videos we published this month.
Theoretically, since each video is less than a minute long, you could watch them in half an hour. Although we can’t guarantee what will happen to you if you do!
If you’re not getting them delivered every morning to your inbox, sign up for a free daily dose of sales motivation!
Warning: Binge-watching these videos could have a serious effect on your life, business, and finances. Side effects include but are not limited to: more sales, better attitude, business growth, personal growth, less bullshit. These videos may also act as a gateway to other business knowledge such as blogs, podcasts or books.
Please watch responsibly.
Here are the quotes. Click on the image to watch the video with the related action item.
"I don't have dreams, I have goals." - Harvey Specter [tweet this]
Don’t try to be a man of success, try to be a man of value. - Albert Einstein [tweet this]
Consistency is king [tweet this]
You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them. ~Michael Jordan [tweet this]
You can't turn a no to a yes without a maybe in between - Francis Underwood [tweet this]
The most important promises you make are the promises you make to yourself. [tweet this]
You can't sell others if you aren't sold yourself first. [tweet this]
Don't sell the stage, sell the act! [tweet this]
Don’t wish for things to be easier, wish for you to be better. [tweet this]
You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. - Aristotle [tweet this]
Feedback is the breakfast of champions. [tweet this]
Nothing happens until a sale is made. [tweet this]
You just can't beat the person who never gives up. - Babe Ruth [tweet this]
Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action. - Walter Anderson [tweet this]
Most people aim... aim… aim… [tweet this]
Success is never owned; it is only rented – and the rent is due every day. [tweet this]
Coffee is for closers. [tweet this]
Stay the course! [tweet this]
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. - Bruce Lee [tweet this]
If you can't do great things, do small things in a great way. - Napoleon Hill [tweet this]
Done is better than perfect. [tweet this]
The universe will always test your resolve. [tweet this]
Kill your goals. Create habits instead. [tweet this]
You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want. - Zig Ziglar [tweet this]
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself. [tweet this]
What you call a marathon, I call a sprint. [tweet this]
If you can't, you must. [tweet this]
Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. [tweet this]
Emails that never get sent close no deals. [tweet this]
Fear is your road sign to growth and success. [tweet this]
Closed mouths don't get fed. [tweet this]
Of course the best way to get your sale motivation is to take one a day. Because the thing that really makes great sales people is consistency: showing up every single day and performing at your best. Which is why you should sign up to get your free daily sales motivation video delivered right to your inbox every morning.
For many years, companies only focused on switching off paper and moving customers to electronic versions of important documents, which were primarily bills and statements. However, these documents never evolved from their original presentation and format. So, what value are customers getting out of them today? How are they making your customers’ lives easier? It’s time to start adding value…
Bills and statements are well and truly entrenched in the electronic world, but for many companies, the value that can be derived from sending these documents electronically hasn’t been realized. This includes adding functionality to the document and giving the customer the choice of electronic destination for that document (portal, email, mobile, social sites…)
An enhanced customer experience is crucial in today’s world, where customers switch between devices and make payments on the go. Gone are the days of the once a month sit down at the kitchen table, trawling through bills and preparing checks. Customers want convenience and it’s time you start providing it in their documents and in the way you send them.
If you’re sending your customers their bills and/or statements electronically, consider adding value to these documents in the following ways:
Adding a payment form to the distributed PDF or HTML bill is a no-brainer, as customers are using an electronic medium to view their bill. Giving them the means to pay from within the document will result in faster payments.
50% of customers using this functionality pay within 2 days and we’ve seen Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) reduced by 9 days on average for companies who have included this functionality.
For added convenience, consider allowing your customers to request a payment reminder directly from their bill. 
Bills and statements are prime real estate when it comes to marketing, however, by going electronic, these documents have lost this crucial up/ cross-selling opportunity. Adding customized and personalized offers to an electronic document or the email to which it is attached, is essential.
These emails see an incredibly high open rate (70% to 90%) because customers are expecting them, so if you’re not including marketing, it’s a lost opportunity.
Dynamic functionality like this adds a great amount of value to the end customer, with minimal effort:
There’s no time like the present to start making changes to the electronic documents customers receive. They make the world of difference to the customer, resulting in a more positive experience and ultimately, loyalty to your brand.
Since the economic downturn in 2008, corporate America has been managing to squeeze profits by reducing budgets, stretching staff thin and adding technology at every turn to reduce human interactions. Now the wake-up call! Virtually, everything has been turned into a commodity.
According to Mike Berman, founder of Berman Means Business and a leading turnaround consultant, “differentiation will not come through low cost advantages, but by creating superb customer experiences able to offer unrivaled value to the marketplace. Because cost management has dominated the landscape for several consecutive years, companies have generally lost their intellectual as well as physical way for executing on the customer-oriented growth strategies.”
Companies must consider the impact of loyalty and repeat business when new technology is considered or “reminding” customers of self-service technology that already exists. ATM’s are a good example. They were first introduced in the early 1970’s. Data has shown that customers were comfortable using them to withdraw cash, but not so eager to deposit money or checks. They wanted the human-to-human interaction to confirm their funds were safe.
Fast forward to today. Most people know how to use an ATM and do so, but sometimes want to speak and interact with a person, the teller. If a customer is standing on line at the bank, there is a reason. My friend went into Chase the other day in Manhattan and told me that managers approached customers waiting on line to walk them to the ATM machine. In effect, Chase is ‘chasing’ customers away. People were angry, frustrated and probably thinking they would rather take their business elsewhere. There is competition on every block eager for new customers.
I called American Express and the recording announced the wait time will be long and “suggests” to use the web. I push “O” and get an agent immediately. It’s obvious they are trying to reduce costs, not build my loyalty or continue the customer journey.
I love technology; my mobile devices, our really cool Echo (Alexa) from Amazon, but don’t push me to self-serve when I know I need or want to speak to a person. That’s not good customer service. It doesn’t make feel good or warm and fuzzy towards the company.
Once my loyalty to a company has been compromised, it is difficult to repair. Verizon Wireless has a major media campaign to get customers to return. They obviously have lost customers. The other day I received a letter from Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. It said, “ I used to be a customer, and would I consider coming back?” Too little, too late! It was two years ago. I’m happy with my new insurance provider. I deal with Larry and Ken at a State Farm office in my neighborhood. Even if they were on the other side of the telephone or computer, I could still feel a connection if the interaction was personalized.
Competition is fierce. Customers yearn for the human touch and want to connect. Customers cannot become a commodity. If a company wants to grow, become more profitable and survive, technology must enhance the customer relationship, not detract. Departments need staff who know how to create and build relationships.
Human bonding is the differentiator and the glue. Replacing staff with machines doesn’t make sense if the primary reason is to cut costs. Customize the customer journey; don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
What do you think?
I was recently in the market for a new car and while I was fairly certain I knew the car I wanted, I was intent on doing my research. Like most people in today’s digital age, I went to GoogleTM and typed in “best all wheel drive vehicles” and scanned through the results. Several more searches on key terms led me to a manufacturers website as well as some good consumer blogs. As a result, I had narrowed my search to three cars specifically and it was a pretty quick and efficient way to research.
A few days later, I went to Edmunds.com to further my research, as I wanted an independent review. In addition to my online research, I talked to a few friends (some in person, others online) who had the makes and models of the cars that were on my short list to ask about their experiences. During this process, I also received a direct mail piece from one of the manufacturers that aided in my decision making process.
The later stage of research (speaking to friends and scanning the web) was done over the course of several weeks. In addition, I emailed various dealers in town with questions and specifications of what I was looking for and simultaneously researched my best financing options.
All in all, I used multiple channels during my purchase process (web, social medial, word-of-mouth/peer referral and email) and it took about two months. I used four channels just to end up buying a car, but this is the digital age and as the buyer,I have access to all of these channels easily via my phone. Why not use it to my advantage as the thought of walking onto a car lot and dealing with a car salesman was not an option.
I am no different than other consumers in this scenario. We conduct our own research, we ask questions directly, we collect information, and we read independent reviews. This applies to buying a car or picking a place to eat…we use multiple channels to consume information that may or may not lead to a purchase. If this is how we operate in our personal lives, why is it that B2B vendors lose this concept when marketing to their buyers?
According to recent articles and blogs the best approach to a B2B demand generation program is mono-channel. Advice like how to have “The Best Email Campaign”, “Tips to Accelerate Your Social Media Strategy,” “How to Implement a Webinar Program” and the list goes on focus on mono-channel solutions. However, today’s buying process is more multi-channel than ever with buyers consuming content across an array of mediums and sharing across the buying committee. If this is true, then the idea of a one-channel program or a strategy designed for one specific content channel is a waste of time, effort and money.
There are a few key changes that B2B organizations can make to address this issue and better align with their buyers and their purchase process:
The multi-channel approach we take in our consumer lives is not all that different than how we participate in buying in our B2B lives. Organizations need to adapt to this approach and understand it is a multi-channel (and not always digital) world.
Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidalgo CEO/Principal, ANNUITAS
The American writer Margaret J. Wheatley once said “Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences and failing to achieve anything useful.” This is good advice in general but can have specific relevance for business practices, which need to be updated and assessed as time goes by. Marketing has changed a lot over the past few decades. With 91% of B2B marketers now relying on online content marketing, it’s important to take the time to step back and really look at the strategies your business uses to capture its customers. This infographic, featured on OpenView and designed by Rachel Worthman, lays out 25 must-read stats about the current state of B2B content marketing.
Measuring success is an important part of any marketing strategy.
B2B marketers have a few different ways to gauge how well their content marketing is working, including web traffic (63%) and sales lead quality (54%), though only 21% admitted to being successful at tracking the ROI. Timing and content also matter. The biggest chunk of marketers published a few times per week (26%), and the rest of the group was pretty much evenly divided between posting a few times per month (19%), weekly (17%), and daily (16%). 73% of them pulled traffic by uploading or linking to video content, and 63% of them rated this tactic as effective. 70% praised the use of interactive content, including quizzes, apps, calculators, conversion generators, or assessments. The top five content marketing practices cited were social media content (92%), e-newsletters (83%), website articles (81%), blogs (80%), and in-person events (77%).
So marketers clearly believe in the power of content marketing, and the evidence shows that they are right to do so. What do their customers think about it? Vendor content was cited by 65% of B2B buyers as having had a significant impact on their choice. 68% recommended that B2B organizations keep their online content free of constant sales messages, and 80% of them would rather learn about a company through a series of articles rather than an advertisement. How are these customers being reached? While 87% of B2B marketers use social media, there are obviously a number of different choices available, and the channel matters. While LinkedIn is a better choice for B2B companies when it comes to lead generation, only 47% of B2B marketers are actively using it, while 90% rely on Facebook. Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and SlideShare are also used for B2B content marketing.
A final piece of content marketing strategy is the creation of a dedicated role (or team.) 73% of the organizations surveyed had someone responsible for overseeing their online marketing strategy, and 47% had a dedicated content marketing group. These roles are on the rise; 78% of the B2B marketers said that they would be adding 1-3 people to their content marketing teams over the next 12 months.
After having read these stats, will you be reflecting on or tweaking your organization’s content marketing strategy? Which points did you find most surprising or helpful? Join the discussion below.
In 2013, I questioned whether businesses should continue a traditional trade show strategy and shared the need I saw to integrate other marketing activities with trade show and conference strategies in my article Trade Shows: A Necessary Evil?
Two years later, I am still asking the same question. I still believe trade shows are a necessary evil and should be integrated with other marketing activities. But now I’m going to add another requirement to a successful show strategy. The need to engage your audience online prior to the show or conference is a must.
Next week, several members of the Quintain team are going to attend HubSpot’s INBOUND15 conference in Boston. This is a large and growing conference that attracts thousands of attendees every year. Below are several examples of how different groups and businesses are engaging INBOUND15 attendees online and positioning themselves for success before the start of this year’s conference.
Does the event you are planning to attend or sponsor have a hashtag? Monitoring the event #hashtag is a great way of listening to conversations to get a feel for hot topics and trends going into the event. If your event sponsor hasn’t created a #hashtag, why not do it yourself?
Some of the trade shows and conferences we attend have thousands of attendees. This can be overwhelming for many. Marcus Sheridan and George Thomas of the HubCast understand this. That’s why they have invited their podcast listeners to a “fireside chat” each night of the INBOUND15 conference. This is a great way of fostering connections within their podcast community and demonstrating their selflessness and desire to connect on a personal level with other inbound marketers.
More and more business (9 out of 10, to be exact) are using content or inbound Marketing to get found online. It’s no secret that we are big believers in the power of this strategy and tools like HubSpot (disclaimer alert – Quintain is a Platinum Level HubSpot partner). A common challenge faced by businesses using inbound marketing is how and what content to create. Offering a ready-made content strategy for an upcoming event is a great way of helping attendees get the most of their show investment, and your connections will thank you for making their life that much easier going into the show!
Not all of your information has to be written. Given that 65% of the population are visual learners, sharing images and videos on Instagram, Twitter or other platforms is a great way to connect with attendees.
Everyone likes likes having the “inside scoop.” You know – getting the down low from a local. If your upcoming event is in your hometown, share what you know with out of towners. For example, I make a point of eating breakfast at local diners when I attend conferences. I love a good mom and pop, greasy spoon (and if you have a recommendation for Boston, Tweet me @Marketing_Hack) and regularly share tips on great breakfast joints near trade shows and conferences.
I know Brooklyn is a hot spot these days, and man are the folks in the Brooklyn HubSpot User Group brilliant! If I was with any business targeting inbound marketers in the New York City metro area, I would be all over this. Think about it – the group is made up of your local prospects and they’re all coming together in one place during this conference.
The six examples I’ve listed above are all potential differentiators for you and your business. Look at it like this, if you’re an exhibitor and could choose between engaging someone walking past your booth when they were the only one in your aisle or when they are one of thousands, which would you choose? If it were me, I would choose when they are alone because there would be more time to talk and I’d be able to give them my full attention. Striking up a conversation before the show online is a great way to connect with your trade show audience without the distraction of others around.
My takeaways are these:
As the marketing landscape continues to evolve and new ways to connect with potent buyers emerge, marketing and sales professionals need to examine how best to reach their desired audience. This examination will challenge the status quo and the “business as usual” marketing mentality within many compaines. Traditional marketing strategies should not be abandoned just for the sake of adopting something new simply because it is new. When it comes to attending or exhibiting at a trade show, all businesses must plan, evaluate, measure the results, and integrate their trade show strategies with their overall marketing strategy to achieve the greatest return possible on their marketing spend.
Market research is an effective way to segment and understand your target market.
It is the first step in strategic alignment. And as our 2016 research report details, the first step to accelerated revenue growth.
But effective market research is much more than just gathering customer data. It’s a deep understanding of market, accounts, buyers and users.
Effective market research enables you to:
So how does market research contribute to successful strategic alignment in 2016?
The highly competitive digital arena can make engaging with and even being found by your audience extremely challenging. Inbound marketing is a comprehensive solution that helps many businesses further expand and connect with their customer base. Here’s how inbound marketing can help you to reach more of your audience.
Your audience most likely varies across certain aspects. Maybe they live in different areas throughout the country, vary in age, or behave differently when it comes to the buying cycle. But even the most diverse persona groupings share a common factor: the unique problem that your product or service solves.
Content that doesn’t educate won’t help you help your customers. Inbound marketing’s approach to presenting your audience with content that teaches and inspires allows you to explore the everyday complications that face your potential customers in a unique and engaging way. By regularly providing your audience with informative, relevant content, your business gains trust from readers and develops a status as their preferred source for what’s new in the industry.
The one-two punch inbound marketing brings when it comes to valuable content? Relevance in the mind of your digital searchers that leads to shares, a higher positioning on the search engine results page, and content that travels to new corners of your customer sphere.
It may seem difficult to speak directly to all of the buyer personas that make up your audience through one specific method or channel. As an integrated approach, inbound marketing allows you to reach your audience over numerous platforms, whether that’s on their social media feeds, in their inboxes, or at your company’s blog and website. Going where your audience goes can be a challenge, but inbound marketing allows you to be active on the platforms that your buyers use most.
In addition to helping you connect with customers across the web, inbound marketing allows you to deliver content in new formats that may be more attractive to the individuals in your audience. For example, a 10-second video clip, a colorful infographic, an engaging blog post, and a downloadable ebook work to establish your brand presence in multiple places and give you a better chance of engaging your audience in their preferred learning style.
Another way inbound marketing helps you to engage with more of your audience is by helping you zero in on a specific group of customers you’d like to reach out to. Through inbound marketing you can develop a strategy that caters to a customer set’s individual wants and needs through a dedicated incentive or content collection. Promoting a special offer or free ebook that provides a solution to a problem faced by this segment in exchange for their email contact info allows you to reel in and engage with parts of your audience that may fall outside the norm.
Inbound marketing’s dynamic approach puts you out in front of more of your audience through compelling and helpful content, an established multi-channel presence, and many ways to cater to the needs of specific customer groups.
Imagine yourself as an inside sales rep, you pound the phones day in and day out trying to qualify leads. You navigate accounts, build pipeline, and then finally your efforts pay off and someone answers. You pass them…score! You feel a great sense of accomplishment as you get the calendar invite scheduled connecting your field sales rep and the prospect. Cut to a week or two later when the call is set to happen and you get the dreaded email from your sales rep…
“I sat on the conference bridge for 10 minutes and no one showed up”
Crap. Now what do you do? A wave of anxiety overcomes you as you think “it was hard enough getting this prospect on the phone in the first place!” So you spend a week or two calling them, chasing them, offering them your first born child in order to get them to reschedule.
No shows are the worst and it’s a situation no rep likes to get themselves into. It’s a time suck, it distracts you from finding new prospects to qualify, and worst of all it can affect your compensation should the appointment never actually take place.
When ramping new clients I like to walk them through this exact scenario to demonstrate how following our best practices can decrease the number of no shows.
The first is probably the hardest for some clients/field reps to buy into as it requires them to relinquish a little bit of control, but stick with me here. The best practice here is to leave the initial scheduling (and potential rescheduling) to the ADR/SDR/ISR. I know some reps don’t like sharing their calendar and I know they sometimes want to be the one who is in control of the meeting. But when you think about it, this prospect has no idea who you are. If an ISR has an established rapport with a prospect, isn’t it better that the initial invite come from a familiar name? Good, I’m glad you can agree with me on that. Additionally, we have found that an invite is most likely to get accepted if it is sent to a prospect within 15-20 minutes of the initial call with an ISR. Field sales reps are busy, they could be traveling or at an onsite with an existing customer. They may not have the time to be able to get an invite out as quickly as necessary.
The second best practice has more the do with the rep who is scheduling. We’ve established no shows are the worst and you would hate to see all your hard prospecting work go to waste. So, make sure you have a process designed to prevent no shows from happening. Ideally when scheduling calls we try to make sure calls are scheduled for 1-2 weeks out, at most. Even in that amount of time the memory of your initial call can fade for a prospect. Therefore, you want to make sure you remind them about any scheduled appointments and required follow up. Use your CRM to set a task to follow up with the prospect the day before the appointment is scheduled to occur. Be sure to try to reach them live on the phone first, and then follow up with an email to make sure the date/time still works for them. It’s much more proactive to do that than risk a no show because there was a last minute conflict.
Another way reps can prevent sales no shows is to sit on the calls themselves. This is valuable for a variety of reasons. The ISR gets a chance to hear the pitch of a more seasoned rep and subsequently adopt some of those strategies into their own. They will also get real-time feedback regarding how promising of an opportunity it was AND if the prospect flakes they can quickly reach out within the scheduled time frame and see what the deal is.
Following these best practices can help to minimize the amount of no shows that occur within the beginning stages of the sales cycle. As the prospective customer moves down the funnel the addition of increased interest, mutual understanding, and deeper engagement should help solve against future no shows further in the process. What do you do to make sure the first sales appointment between the field rep and a prospect has the best chance of happening?
Excel: the software that literally everyone totally knows how to use … according to their resumes.
Excel is, first and foremost, a business software. But, it’s hard to pin down what that actually means. How is Excel used in business? Is there a definitive, specific list of tasks and processes it’s used for?
The variety of the software’s potential applications is so wide that there may only be a handful of companies that use it the exact same way. Still, there are some popular uses of Excel that can suit the needs of most companies in need of the platform.
In this article, I’ll discuss some of those applications and give a high-level overview of how to create a business model in Excel.
Virtually every accounting professional uses Excel in some capacity. In a lot of ways, accounting could be considered the main function of the entire application. Excel supports processes like creating balance sheets, preparing financial statements, and setting budgets. It can also be used for expense tracking, forecasting, and loan calculation.
Inventory tracking is central to the success of any business selling a physical product. Though there are systems and applications specifically designed for and better equipped to handle inventory management, Excel is still a reliable, affordable option to facilitate the process.
Inventory management in Excel requires a lot of manual oversight and is, in turn, more prone to human error than its pricier alternatives. So, using Excel for inventory management is usually a better option for startups or smaller businesses still in the process of getting off the ground.
The range of Excel’s applications extends well beyond number crunching; it’s also a great way to store and maintain records of prospects’ and customers’ contact information. It has resources to manage and sort massive quantities of that kind of data for different kinds of projects, promotions, or outreach efforts.
If you’re interested in conducting a personalized mass email campaign, you can use an Excel feature called a Mail Merge to tailor mass emails to address specific contacts you’ve listed in a spreadsheet.
Data visualizations allow you to convey the results of any data analysis you’ve conducted succinctly, accessibly, and compellingly. Potential investors, management, or coworkers will have an easier time understanding your data by taking a look at a dot plot or bar graph than they would by wading through a massive sheet of numbers.
Excel sports several different visualization options to make borderline incomprehensible pages of raw data visually appealing and easy to make sense of.
Excel is an incredibly useful resource for HR managers. HR is a wide-reaching field that covers a broad, eclectic range of responsibilities. The people behind a human resources department have a lot to stay on top of. Their day-to-day could include everything from talent acquisition to conducting training to coordinating company benefit programs.
With so much to keep track of, it’s essential that HR managers remain organized. Excel can do a lot to help that process. It can provide a reliable means for HR professionals to arrange employee work schedules, keep tabs on vacation time, and more.
These might be the simplest, most straightforward applications of Excel, but that doesn’t mean they’re not useful or worth mentioning. Excel can be used to track different projects’ progress, list and detail specific deals, and keep tabs on individual tasks that need to be covered day-to-day.
Tracking employees’ hours is central to maintaining accountability at a company — for both management and employees alike. Excel can be an inexpensive, reliable way to ensure that process is carried out consistently and properly. It’s an excellent way to maintain timesheets. Microsoft even offers downloadable templates specifically dedicated to that purpose.
A CRM can produce valuable data in spreadsheet form. Several CRMs can be integrated with Excel, helping salespeople handle processes like tracking contacts, creating calendar tasks, and planning enterprise events with spreadsheets.
The automation capabilities many CRMs offer also take pressure off of sales professionals by replacing traditionally manual Excel tasks. For instance, HubSpot’s CRM can automatically transfer any information from static contact lists to Excel spreadsheets and vice versa. The same goes for information about new, current, or previous deals.
Excel is a great resource for building out a rough model of your business. It’s a solid way to help you track and understand the nitty-gritty, technical aspects of your company, including your business’s legal structure, competitive strengths and weaknesses, and revenue plan.
Creating a business model presents a lot to unpack and make sense of. Luckily, Microsoft provides some helpful templates to make that process a bit easier.
You can find templates for shaping your business structure.
Constructing detailed revenue plans.
Understanding your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
And more.
Excel has a presence in virtually every industry — and for good reason. It’s one of the most universally applicable, dynamic business applications available. No matter what your business does, how many people it employs, and how far along in its development it may be, it still probably has something to gain from some savvy use of the application.
B2B marketers are always on the lookout for the best way to support their marketing goals and make their sales teams successful. Typically that means leveraging a range of owned, earned, and paid marketing channels to amplify a product message and build as much awareness as possible across a wide swath of a target market in order to maximize the number of leads brought into the funnel and deliver the most sales possible out of the funnel. As a result, B2B marketers are intimately familiar with broad-reaching marketing tactics like online and offline advertising, PR, SEO/SEM, event marketing, social marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing and more, all designed to cast a very wide net and feed a sales team with a high volume of inbound leads. This broad-reaching approach to marketing can be an effective way to generate leads and sales BUT it’s not the only way to organize your sales and marketing efforts. In fact, based on the nature of your market, there may be a much more effective approach to achieve your goals—account-based marketing (ABM).
Account-based marketing is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the inbound marketing tactics I mentioned above. Instead of leveraging a set of broad-reaching programs designed to touch the largest possible number of prospective customers, an ABM strategy focuses marketing and sales resources on a defined set of targeted accounts and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each individual account. With ABM, your marketing message is based on the attributes and needs of the account you’re targeting, hence the name account-based marketing.
So why would you consider focusing your marketing resources on a select group of customers with an ABM strategy? Sales and marketing teams typically select target accounts because they are “high-value”—they have the potential to generate more revenue and are strategically significant or influential in a market. You might sell products that are only relevant to a small set of target accounts (let’s say, for example, computers designed to run nuclear power plants). In this case your buyer is so specific that your target account list is obvious. But ABM often makes sense even when you can potentially sell your products to a much larger group of companies. You might have a large total addressable market that includes hundreds or even thousands of potential customers, but some customers are certainly more valuable to your business than others. And there is no doubt that optimizing your campaigns with individualized messages for each account will result in better campaign performance than a generalized approach. If you have a high-value prospect you’re trying to turn into a customer (or a high-value customer you are trying to sell more to) and you think that a personalized approach to marketing will be effective in achieving your goals, then ABM is right for you.
Benefit 1: Clear ROI
Effective ABM drives clear business results. In fact, compared to other marketing initiatives, the 2014 ITSMA Account-Based Marketing Survey found that “ABM delivers the highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic.”
Benefit 2: Reduced Resource Waste
Because ABM is so targeted, it allows marketer to focus their resources efficiently and run marketing programs that are specifically optimized for target accounts.
With ABM, you decide which accounts are qualified and then go after them. This can profoundly impact the way you think about sales and marketing and the types of programs you execute.
Benefit 3: It’s Personal and Optimized
ABM not only targets your sales and marketing efforts with laser precision to a specific audience, but ABM also entails personalizing your messaging and communications to specific accounts so that your campaigns resonate with these target audiences. In fact, according to Aberdeen, 75% of customers say they prefer personalized offers, which makes sense. Targeted customers are more likely to engage with content that is geared specifically to them, and is relevant to their business and stage in the buyer journey. And because ABM is inherently personal, your campaigns are automatically optimized for the right audience.
Benefit 4: Tracking Goals & Measurement Is Clear
When you’re analyzing the effectiveness of campaigns, whether email, ads, web, or events, it’s easier to draw clear conclusions, because you look at a smaller set of targeted accounts instead of a vast set of metrics and analytics that span your database.
Benefit 5: Sales Alignment Is Easier
ABM is perhaps one of the most efficient ways to align sales and marketing. This is primarily due to the fact that the marketer running an ABM program operates with a mindset very similar to sales—thinking in terms of accounts and how to target them, bringing them to the table, and generating revenue from them. Accounts are what sales people use to measure success, be it accounts in the pipeline or accounts won—for sales it’s all about accounts. The ABM marketer not only speaks the same language, but also works closely with sales to identify accounts and pursue them throughout the sales process.
If the above benefits resonate with you and ABM seems like a good strategy for your business, here are some key steps you need to take:
Step 1: Discover & Define Your High-Value Accounts
Use all the firmographic data and business intelligence you can find to help you prioritize your accounts. But remember, deal size potential is only one factor. You might select accounts based on other strategic factors like their influence in the market, likelihood to purchase repeatedly from you, or potential for higher than average profit margins.
Step 2: Map Accounts & Identify Key Internal Players
Now that you know your target accounts, you need to understand the way the account is structured and identify the critical players within the organization (e.g. decision makers and influencers). You might have this data already in-house or subscribe to services that can provide it. If not, consider having your sales team conduct the research or purchase this data from outside vendors.
Step 3: Define Content & Personalized Messaging
It’s important to put real thought into this step. Some define effective ABM as a web banner personalized with the prospect’s business name, which everyone loves but isn’t necessarily effective. Instead, an effective ABM strategy delivers deep and valuable content that addresses clear and significant business challenges the target account faces. Think about how your content, and ultimately your products and services, can address the target account’s specific business challenges in their industry.
Step 4: Determine Optimal Channels
We live in a multi-channel world and you will undoubtedly want to connect with your audience on many different channels (e.g. web, email, mobile, print…etc) in a coordinated way. But put some thought into your channel strategy because some channels are more effective for certain roles or certain industries (e.g. email is tough in the healthcare industry). You’ll also want to consider things such as opt-in rules in your region or other potential restrictions in your channel strategy.
Step 5: Execute Targeted & Coordinated Campaigns
Now that your content and messaging is ready to go, you need to make sure the influencers and decision makers in your target accounts see it. You can do this manually of course but technology is enabling marketers to coordinate and execute ABM campaigns at much greater scale and more efficiently than ever before. At Marketo we use our own marketing platform to support our ABM initiative. For example, we use our real-time personalization solution to serve content on our website designed specifically to resonate with key customers while we serve different content to our top prospect accounts. We employ a similar strategy with paid ads, leveraging personalized ad banners on Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook, using our Ad Bridge solution to serve ads specific to target accounts. Whatever your solution, make sure to coordinate campaigns across your channels to ensure a consistent voice and message. And work closely with your sales team so they can follow up on campaigns in a timely manner and with a consistent message.
Step 6: Measure, Learn and Optimize
As with any marketing initiative, it’s critical to test, measure, and optimize your ABM marketing campaigns to ensure they are effective and you’re always improving your results over time. Of course you’ll want to look at the results of individual campaigns (e.g. email open rates, click-thru rates, first-touch and multi-touch attribution…etc). But ABM isn’t about one campaign; it’s about pushing into a high-value account with a series of campaigns over time. Be sure to look at trend data to see how things are really going. Are you growing your list of known individuals (remember step 2?) within your target accounts over time? Are you generating web visits, campaign responses, meetings, sales opportunities, and, of course, deals and revenue at your target accounts? These are the metrics and signs of account engagement you’ll need to understand to assess the health of your ABM program over time.
For more detail, check out the ebook we recently published, “A Recipe for Lean Account-Based Marketing,” for a deeper dive into account-based marketing and for information on how to get started quickly with ABM in your company.
Getty Images
The waters off Isla Mujeres, near Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, are an unlikely place to find the latest potential threat to Canada’s resource-based economy, one that wears a dry suit and snorkel. And yet, when Sumitra Rajagopalan recently tumbled off a boat in search of cuttlefish—shape-shifting sea creatures that the former biomechanics professor at McGill University credits as a muse for her lab work—she indirectly played a role in contributing to the oil glut that’s pushed prices to lows not seen since the Great Recession. That’s because her Montreal-based medical devices company, Bioastra Technologies, recently discovered an unlikely market for its “smart” materials: cost-conscious oil and gas firms.
“I saw this brief from an oil company that wanted a particle that could swell to 10 times its volume, but could resist huge compressive stresses up to 15,000 psi,” she says of an oil major that was looking for a way to prevent sand from infiltrating its offshore wells. “I remember telling my colleague: ‘Gosh, it looks like somebody else wants artificial cartilage over here.’ ” The contract quickly led to several others, and now she’s working on a smart particle that could potentially replace the billions of tons of sand used annually by U.S. oil drillers in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” applications, potentially saving the industry a small fortune. When it comes to the oil and gas industry’s hunger for new, cost-saving technologies, literally everything is on the table—particularly now, with oil having plunged to a recent low of just US$38 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate, the North American benchmark for light, sweet crude.
Yet while such investments make perfect sense for oil executives charged with keeping their operations afloat, the trend is collectively threatening to perpetuate the very oversupply problem that caused prices to falter in the first place: the more they can drive costs down, the less incentive there is to cut back on production. It’s also one of the reasons so many forecasters failed to predict how deep oil’s slide would ultimately become. Case in point: while the number of U.S. drill rigs has been cut in half over the past year, production has barely budged at 9.4 million barrels per day.
The result, when coupled with Saudi Arabia’s determination to “sweat out” its higher-cost North American rivals, is a planet that’s suddenly gone from worrying about US$250 barrels of oil to speculating about oil priced at just US$10. While oil traders sparked a rally in crude prices to US$49 a barrel this past week, based on forecasts that U.S. oil production may have peaked and that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, might be willing to pull back on production, many observers dismissed the gains as wishful thinking as opposed to a meaningful change in the supply-demand equation.
That’s bad news for Canada because, while cheap energy is generally seen as an economic tailwind, the country has become reliant on expensive-to-extract oil sands in northern Alberta to fuel GDP growth and create jobs in recent years. And, as any Calgary oilman will tell you, it now makes a lot less financial sense to scrape, boil and steam gooey bitumen from the ground, which is why billions worth of investments have been deferred and thousands of workers laid off, even as existing oil sands projects have little choice but to maintain production given their decades-long lifespans and steep upfront costs.
How long will the oil bust last? Many initially predicted a snappy rebound in prices, but it’s since become clear that the world of cheap energy could be around for years—possibly even a decade or more. Unlike previous slumps, OPEC no longer exercises enough control over the market to manipulate prices, even if Saudi Arabia was on board. Meanwhile, U.S. drillers continue to adapt and North America’s storage tanks continue to fill up, raising questions about what happens if “tank top” is reached this fall, when seasonal inventories typically hit their peak. More troubling, China’s rapidly slowing economy is punching holes in a widely held assumption—that the country of 1.3 billion can be counted on to sop up as much oil as the world is able to produce.
In other words, those who hope oil prices are poised to rebound to triple digits may find themselves over a barrel.
The U.S. shale revolution set the stage for oil’s collapse by reversing a decades-long decline in U.S. production. But it was Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter, that sparked the current crisis by refusing to turn off the taps. Tired of watching a new crop of high-cost, unconventional producers in North America steal market share when oil prices were at above US$100 a barrel, the Saudis pushed OPEC back in November to maintain existing production levels in the face of falling prices to see who would tap out first. “It is not the role of Saudi Arabia, or certain other OPEC nations, to subsidize higher-cost producers by ceding market share,” Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi told an audience in Berlin last March, according to Reuters. But the strategy didn’t quite work as planned. Total global oil production grew by 2.9 million barrels per day through July of this year, while supply inventories have hit their highest level since 1998, according the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, the bulk of that extra production, or about two million barrels per day, continues to come from non-OPEC countries, including the U.S., suggesting North Americans aren’t yet ready to cry uncle.
Indeed, one of the biggest surprises of the oil crash has been the resiliency of U.S. shale producers. Where once fracking operations in North Dakota’s Bakken region were thought to have a break-even cost at around US$70 a barrel, only slightly below oil sands operators, some producers are now reportedly able to make money with oil at just US$30 a barrel. Hess Corp., for example, has managed to scrounge half a billion dollars in cost savings from its supply chain and corporate operations. Others like Continental Resources and Whiting Petroleum are focusing their efforts on more productive areas of shale while also improving their well-completion techniques—the process of using explosives to fracture deep, L-shaped horizontal wells, allowing the hydrocarbons to seep out. Still others are using tracked rigs to make it possible to drill and complete wells simultaneously. As one oil analyst put it to financial website MarketWatch recently: “It seems every month somebody has a new and better way to frack a well.”
Nor is there any evidence shale producers are anywhere close to realizing maximum efficiency. Some are experimenting with electromagnetic sensors and spectroscopy to better track underground fluid movements and optimize well-spacing. Others are hoping to replace the 43 billion kg of sand that U.S. shale drillers pumped into fracked wells last year with man-made proppants, which prop open the tiny fissures in the rock during extraction. Rajagopalan’s Bioastra, for example, proposes the use of a water-filled particle that swells to 10 times its size once injected into a well, but resists being crushed under high pressures. In addition to a tenfold reduction in the amount of proppant material that must be hauled around the country in tractor trailers, the environmentally friendly polymer also promises to allow more oil and gas to be extracted from fracked wells because the tiny particles are nearly spherical in shape, maximizing their porosity. “Talk about efficiency,” Rajagopalan says. “We’re getting more by using less.”
It’s not only shale drillers seeking the benefits of new technology. In Alberta, some oil sands producers are working with General Electric to fine-tune steam-assisted gravity drainage and cyclical steam stimulation projects, potentially yielding production improvements of as much as five per cent. Christina Waters, the Canadian software leader for GE’s oil and gas business, says GE’s technology can help producers create picture-perfect underground steam chambers, shaped like a guitar pick, by sifting through terabytes of data gleaned from sensors deployed in wells. But don’t expect oil sands producers to suddenly become profitable at $30 a barrel or even $40 a barrel. “The difference between a shale oil play and a heavy oil play is they’re scaled differently,” Waters says, referring to the lifespan and capital intensity of the projects. “The complexity is also a lot higher.”
One surefire antidote to falling oil prices would be soaring global demand. But while cheap gas has indeed sparked a renewed interest in pickup trucks, SUVs and even lumbering recreational vehicles among car-crazed Americans, statistics show that global consumption averaged 92.4 million barrels per day last year, and another 1.2 million barrels per day through July. But production was still greater, and looks set to balloon further this year, especially if Iran, with the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves, makes good on a promise to boost output in the wake of a nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers.
China is another wildcard. The last time oil prices collapsed, in 2008, alongside the global financial crisis, Beijing rode to the rescue with a massive, US$635-billion stimulus program that involved building everything from high-speed rail networks to entire cities, sparking a worldwide commodities boom. But the country of 1.3 billion is unlikely to reprise the performance, given that policy-makers are scrambling to deflate a debt bubble and put a floor underneath a stock market crash, all while orchestrating an orderly transition to a more modern, consumer-driven economy.
In a recent note, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco argued that, while China has made great strides since the 1980s, it’s nevertheless at risk of falling into a “middle-income” trap where workers’ wages rise so high that the country’s comparative cost advantage is eroded. If China follows a similar path as Japan and Korea, the report said, its GDP growth could slow to as little as three per cent by the 2020s, compared to seven per cent today and double-digits over the past decade. That, in turn, would have a knock-on effect on the economies of other countries that have come to depend on China for their own growth, reducing the overall global demand for energy. “The [Chinese] prime minister says it’s no longer high growth, it’s medium-to-high growth,” Daniel Yergin, oil analyst and vice-chairman of U.S. consulting firm IHS, said recently. “But if it’s medium or low-to-medium growth, that’s a big hit for the oil market.”
In Canada, the impact of falling crude prices has already taken a steep toll. The national economy fell into a mild recession during the first half of the year with two back-to-back quarters of negative GDP growth, Statistics Canada confirmed this week. The loonie, meanwhile, has fallen to 75 cents against the U.S. dollar after several years near parity with the greenback. While that’s potentially a boon for export-oriented manufacturers in Quebec and Ontario, it threatens to put a serious crimp in the balance sheets of households right across the country as the price of imports—everything from granola bars to passenger cars—will rise.
By far the biggest wallop landed on Alberta, where the country’s oil and gas industry is centred. Premier Rachel Notley’s new NDP government painted a bleak picture this week with an economic update that suggested the province was sliding into recession and faced a $6.5-billion deficit, thanks largely to falling crude prices. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, or CAPP, added to the misery by estimating 35,000 jobs had so far been lost in the oil patch as companies cut back on exploration and shelved projects, which other estimates have valued at US$60 billion.
While it’s impossible to predict exactly how the province, and by extension the country as a whole, will be impacted if cheap oil prices persist—CAPP says production, now 3.7 million barrels per day, will grow to just 5.3 million barrels by 2030 instead of a previously forecast 6.4 million barrels—it’s clear Alberta’s meteoric rise over the past decade gives it ample room to fall further. Over the past 10 years, for example, Alberta saw a massive net increase in interprovincial migration—the province saw 253,000 more people move there than away, as Canadians from Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes followed the money westward. (B.C. was the only other province to see a net gain over that period, at just 66,500.) Meanwhile, in June 2014, the same month oil prices peaked, the province was credited with generating 75 per cent of Canada’s net new jobs over the previous 12-month period. Now, by contrast, Alberta leads the country in Employment Insurance applications. Not surprisingly, the once-hot housing markets of Calgary and Fort McMurray are also cooling rapidly with double-digit declines in home sales this summer. If prices follow suit, that could create a fresh round of pain for many local families.
The question, of course, is why so few seemed to see the crash coming, and whether predictions of a return to US$80 oil (assumed to be the average cost of production worldwide) within a few years are to be trusted. This week’s gyrating oil prices show the market deeply wants to believe the oil rout is over—as was the case in the spring when prices briefly climbed back to US$60 a barrel—but lacks conviction in the face of weak evidence. David Jacks, for one, isn’t holding his breath. The professor of economics at B.C.’s Simon Fraser University published a paper two years ago that looked at 160 years of commodity prices and predicted, accurately as it turned out, the end of the decade-long, China-driven commodities “super cycle.” Now, he says, the world is facing a classic oversupply situation that could take a long time to unwind. “My gut feeling on this is we’ll spend the next few years trying to establish a bottom for petroleum and other major industrial commodities,” he says. “After that, there will be a few more years of sideways movement while we’re waiting for that next big demand shock.” Others, like U.S. financial analyst and author Gary Shilling, have predicted oil prices could still drift much lower before finding a floor, noting in a recent Bloomberg column that the marginal cost for some Middle East and U.S. producers to ramp up production to make up for lost revenue are as little as US$20 or even US$10 a barrel.
Meanwhile, the drive continues to find ways to produce more oil, more cheaply. Back in Mexico, Rajagopalan has just wrapped up a series of three dives as she searches for inspiration for the next generation of smart fracking materials. She saw parrotfish, eels, giant sea turtles and, in a “heart-stopping moment,” several whale sharks. There were no cuttlefish this time around—or at least none that wanted to be spotted—but Rajagopalan is unfazed: “It’s only a matter of time before they give up their secrets.”
It’s certainly the first time in history oil companies, energy traders, rig hands and Canadian politicians have had reason to care so much about a lowly cephalopod.
The post Awash in oil: Why the glut isn’t going anywhere appeared first on Macleans.ca.
OTTAWA – New figures from Statistics Canada show the economy contracted for two consecutive quarters in the first six months of 2015, which meets the technical definition of a recession. Here are five things to know about the numbers:
Rebound simmering: Even even though the economy declined at an annual pace of 0.5 per cent over the second quarter as a whole, it grew 0.5 per cent in June, the final month of the quarter. The June increase was the first one-month spurt in real gross domestic product to hit 0.5 per cent since it rose 0.63 per cent in July 2013.
Households fuel growth: The data shows that household consumption climbed 0.6 per cent at a time when interest rates remained low. As a result, household savings dipped to 4.0 per cent from 5.2 per cent in the first quarter. Transport purchases — with help from 2.9 per cent growth in vehicle purchases — were the biggest component with a 1.5 per cent increase.
Oil slump blues: Natural resources, including mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction, contracted by 4.5 per cent in the second quarter — for the second straight quarter. The decline was mostly tied to a 5.7 per cent drop in the non-conventional oil extraction sector.
Exports creep up: The numbers reveal that exports edged upwards in the second quarter by 0.1 per cent following two quarters of contraction. Goods exports gained by 0.2 per cent, reversing a 0.5 per cent decline in the first quarter. The export of motor vehicles and parts rose by 4.7 per cent, while crude oil and crude bitumen climbed by 3.3 per cent.
Business investment drop: Business investment in machinery and equipment fell 4.6 per cent in the second quarter, while non-residential structures tumbled 2.3 per cent for a third consecutive quarterly decline. The drop was fuelled by lower investment in non-residential buildings, which was down 1.8 per cent, as well as the 2.4-per-cent decline in engineering structures.
Follow @AndyBlatchford on Twitter
The post Five things to know about StatsCan’s latest numbers on economic growth appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.
WASHINGTON – Airlines should clearly disclose the cost of change and cancellation fees, as well as the size of the plane’s seats, before a passenger buys a ticket, a federal panel said Tuesday.
Hotels should also be required to include any mandatory fees in their room rates, the Transportation Department’s Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections recommended.
Some hotels have begun adding mandatory resort and other fees to bills even though customers say they weren’t informed of them when they booked their rooms. The panel’s recommendation on hotels was directed to the Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating such so called drip pricing.
Likewise, the four-member panel heard testimony that passengers must search to find the cost of change or cancellation fees that airlines hide in a ticket’s fine print. The fees can run hundreds of dollars, especially on international flights. The Transportation Department should require the fees be spelled out clearly so that passengers are informed before a ticket purchase, the panel said.
The panel also recommended that the Transportation Department permit airlines to choose whether to allow passengers to make wireless voice calls from planes during flights.
Airlines have also shrunk the distance between a seat and the one in front by as much as 6 inches in recent years. It used to be that 34 inches between the seats was standard for economy class seats. But now 31 inches is typical and some airlines have wedged in so many seats that there is as little as 28 inches of room.
The width of seats is typically 18 inches but has been reduced in some cases to 17 inches, and there are indications some airlines may shrink them even more, said Charlie Leocha, head of Travelers United, the consumer advocate on the panel.
Seat shrinkage has raised concern that passengers may get blood clots if they sit for a long time without the ability to move around, and that passengers may not be able to quickly evacuate a plane in an emergency.
The Federal Aviation Administration requires that aircraft makers demonstrate that all passengers on an airliner can be evacuated within 90 seconds with half the emergency exits blocked in order for the plane to be certified. There have been no evacuation tests of airliners with seats 28 inches apart, Leocha said.
The panel recommended the FAA conduct more realistic evacuation tests, including of planes with seats as close as 28 inches apart.
Leocha said he was disappointed the panel didn’t recommend the FAA issue regulations establishing a minimum amount of personal space that must be allotted per passenger. There are already regulations that set a minimum amount of space that pets on planes must be allotted, he noted.
Panel member Dave Berg, an attorney with Airlines for America, a trade group for major airlines, said he objected to the notion that the government should establish a minimum amount of space per passenger. Difference between seat sizes “goes to the heart and soul” of airline competition, and it would be inappropriate for the government to interfere in such competition by a deregulated industry, he said.
The FAA is not required to act on the recommendations. The airline passengers advocacy group FlyersRights has filed a petition asking the FAA to establish a minimum amount of personal space per passenger.
___
Online:
Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections http://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/ACACP
___
Follow Joan Lowy on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Joan_Lowy
The post Airlines should disclose ticket change and cancellation fees, seat sizes, consumer panel says appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.
Price activates our loss-avoidance mechanism – all our brains work that way.
Fear of loss motivates us twice as much as the potential for gains. So for purchases to go smoothly, you have to work with the part of the brain that handles pain, and soothe away the hurt.
Thankfully, that’s a fairly well-understood science. You can optimize the way you present price points. What you need to remember is simple: you are dealing with irrational brains.
Brains anchor against the first thing they “see.” They get affected by options that add nothing to the conversation. They are affected by the format of the presentation, on top of the meaning of the content – so they will like one thing over another even if those options are essentially the same thing.
Let’s dive in.
When you shop for men’s clothing, notice that they offer the suit first; the shoes, belt, tie, and cufflinks come later. Selling a $50 tie before the $1000 suit wouldn’t work because people anchor on first thing they see.
That’s completely irrational – you should be comparing suits to suits, and ties to ties – but you will think of it the next time you shop, even if you know it’s irrational.
So what does that mean for you as a marketer? It means you need to pay attention to what people see first. You need to optimize for that irrationality.
Putting plans or packages in a logical manner can cost you a lot of money.
For instance, if you look at Yahoo Small Business Website Hosting plans, you’ll see the $3.75 plan first, the $5.99 plan second, and the one for $8.99 last (from left to right because that’s how people generally read). Experienced this way, you probably won’t be inclined to sign up for the most expensive plan because it has to be about 2.4 times better than the cheapest one.
By contrast, the Attention Wizard, a piece of software from SiteTuners that predicts where visual attention goes on a landing page, lists its three packages in decreasing price order. The first one is $197/month, the second is $97/month, so by the time you get to the last one, you’ll probably consider it a bargain at $27/month.
If you look closely, though, you’ll realize that the cheapest plan does not offer the best bang for your buck. You get 200 heat maps for $197 (that’s essentially a $1/piece), the silver’s $2/piece, and the bronze costs about $3/piece.
That’s not how most will look at it, however. Your brain will be too focused on how the total price of the third plan is so much lower than the other two, for you to realize that you’re getting less for your money.
Dan Ariely, a psychologist focused on behavioral economics, ran a test on subscription packages that The Economist was offering which were as follows:
He asked 100 MIT students to choose one option, and the market share was:
Since nobody chose the print-only plan, Dan removed it and presented only two choices to another set of 100 MIT students. That resulted to this:
By removing what seemed to be a useless option, revenue decreased by 30% as more people chose the cheaper plan. The $125 print-only plan, which did not make sense, actually biased people towards the $125 print and online plan – the $125 print-only plan made the print and online plan at the same price look like a steal.
Price is mapped to the same area in the brain as physical pain. When we see currency symbols, we experience it as pain as we automatically associate that with price. To lessen that pain, you can remove the symbol if it’s obvious the number represents a price. Otherwise, make the symbol as small as you possibly can.
This is what some smart restaurants are doing right with their menu. They …
Context and the specific set of choices you present to people have an impact on what they end up choosing.
So be deliberate in what you include as choices (put irrational anchors to increase the sales of the reasonable compromise), in how you arrange the offers, and how you present prices.
eCommerce is constantly evolving but one thing remains the same: online shoppers are bombarded with hundreds of marketing emails everyday. While the medium for communication hasn’t changed, the depth and diversity of email capabilities has grown exponentially over the last decade. In this week’s article we’re going to look at some ideas that can get your email marketing up to speed and help your messages stand out in an overflowing inbox.
There are three primary components to an email subject line: Contents, characters, and strategy. We’re going to go through each of these elements and outline the best practices that will get your emails opened.
In 1996, Bill Gates published an article titled ‘Content is King.’ This prophetic piece covered everything from online news to games and this mantra has since become the battle cry for every internet marketer. This need for personal involvement in anything internet even applies to, you guessed it, email subject lines. Following the tips below, you’ll learn how to inject relevant content into your subject lines and get your marketing emails opened and read.
If you’re able to tailor your subject lines to the consumer’s characteristics, preferences or interests your emails will stand out and get clicked. Depending on the limitations of your current email service provider (ESP), personalization can range from dynamic insertion to segmented strategies. Dynamic insertion allows marketers to customize each individual subject line, while segmented strategies group customers into messaging segments.
Including your customer’s name in the subject line will draw attention. People are hard-wired to recognize their own name in a page of text in the same way they can quickly identify the make model of their car on the highway.
Dynamically inserting your customer’s name also suggests a pre-existing relationship. If you have their name, then it is likely they have interacted with your brand before and are interested in what you have to say.
Catch your customers’ attention by aligning your email subject line with their location. Whether it’s regional-specific products or simply a reference to their locale, personalizing subject lines based on geo-location is an effective method of inducing email opens.
As seasons change, so should your subject lines. Stay relevant. Take advantage of seasonal details that can creatively convey your message. Assist shoppers as they gear up for certain weather. Remind them of holidays relevant to their country. These seasonal messages will make your emails stand out in a stagnant inbox.
Align your email subject lines with the shopper’s level of intent. As shoppers progress through the conversion funnel, the common reasons for site abandonment evolve. Open rates will increase if you address the reasons for abandonment in your subject lines.
Include products previously viewed or products that were put into their online cart. This type of personalization reminds the shopper exactly where they left off, making it easier for them to complete their purchase.
Also, don’t forget about keeping previous customers engaged. Previous customers are ones you already know, which are the best kind. If they have previously purchased an item, sending a follow-up email not only keeps in touch with your customer, but also collects data (product reviews) that is significant.
A subject line may be short, but it should be embedded with a strategy aimed to get the email opened. With only so much information displayed to the user, make sure what is visible is enticing.
Use the subject line to tell the customer what you want from them. Clearly state the goal in the subject line. Are you offering a discount? Are you reminding them of their abandoned cart? The more direct you are, the easier it will be for the shopper to navigate back to your site. Engage the user with a clear call to action. The email body should deliver the goal you stated, whether it is a link to their discount or back to your page.
Ask a question. The best questions elicit a need to open the email in order to answer. By sparking curiosity in the customer, you keep your brand top of mind. They will be more motivated to open the email and claim their discount and follow through to your site.
The email subject line should excite the customer. Create a sense of urgency that compels the user to open the email. Urgency can be conveyed without a demanding tone. You can include an offer’s actual expiration date or instead utilize time-sensitive language in your email subject line. Time-sensitive language would be letting the customer know their cart is expiring soon or that the discount is a limited time offer. “Don’t miss out” is a great example of creating urgency, while also invoking FOMO (fear of missing out) in the shopper- a perfect mix for a successful conversion.
Appeal to your customer’s emotions by suggesting exclusivity. People love exclusivity. Exclusivity elicits desire. Basic economics tells us that as supply decreases, demand increases. With that small supply, the value is very high. There is power in a limited offer and what feels like VIP access. A “Just for you” subject line can be sent out to thousands of people, but can make those people feel individually rewarded by your company.
With content in mind and strategy in place, there is only one thing left: characters. There is such thing as “netiquette” and offenders will be sent to the spam folder.
Your subject line length should be short. Keep in mind that users are not only checking their email from desktops but from mobile devices, as well. As of May 2015, 75% of Gmail users access their email through a mobile device. Keep your subject line short and accessible by every user.
An email subject line should be easy on the eyes. Special characters are generally advised against, so avoid using symbols to replace actual letters. Also, avoid white space between letters. You want your subject line to be easily read.
If you use all capital letters in an email subject line, expect backlash. When reading text in all caps, most people read it as shouting. However, while objection to the caps lock key exists, for some companies, like NastyGal, the implementation of this approach in their email campaigns has been successful.
Alternatively, the anti-caps lock approach, the “all lowercase” campaign has been used by Kate Spade. In this post by Fulcrum Tech, Kate Spade’s all lowercase email subject line is dissected with the verdict that the all lowercase choice aligns with the brand.
Ultimately, it is up to the client. The usage of capitalization must align with the brand’s identity. For some companies, it might be very successful. Before you press that caps lock key, just remember: tread cautiously.
Emoji’s can be a great way to stand out in a flooded inbox. Including emoji’s in an email subject line can be extremely beneficial as long as they are relevant. Relevant emoji’s correspond with the subject line text.
Emoji placement is important. Don’t overwhelm the user; delicately place emoji’s in the subject line. Also, emoji placement can be creatively chosen. Start the subject line off with an emoji, or choose to place it at the end of the subject line. Keep in mind subject length, so don’t use multiple emoji’s when 1 would be effective. Also, keep in mind character count when choosing where to place the emoji, as ones placed on the tail end might not be visible.
Get creative, but definitely test emoji’s success. Emoji’s are playful by nature, so don’t be afraid to get creative with them. Understand who the email is being sent to. Know when to adapt your tone for the recipient: humor is great, but not always appropriate. With emoji’s, knowing your audience is key. A/B test subject lines so you can measure the subject line’s success.
With these primary components in mind, your email subject lines have a formula for success. Test different variables of each component and see what works for your brand identity.
Email subject lines have to be compelling. You don’t want the user to shy away from your message simply because you didn’t grab their attention with the subject line. You want to be creative, but focused. Don’t get lost in your experimental touch and forego the most important element of a great subject line:
relevance.
Social media selling is dismissed far too often as fluffy or impossible to measure in terms of ROI.
Jill Rowley wants to change that attitude on sales teams everywhere. Rowley is the Founder and Chief Evangelist of #SocialSelling, and helps sales organizations better use social to drive revenue. She warns that sales organizations everywhere can no longer ignore the opportunities available to them using social.
“When I talk about the ROI of social selling, I talk about the Return on Investment, but also the Risk of Ignoring,” she explained. “We are at the stage of maturity within social selling that we’re able to start measuring that return.”
In the latest episode of Million Dollar Insights, Rowley shares measurable methods for sourcing sales opportunities, connecting with buyers, and moving opportunities down the funnel faster.
Listen now:
Rowley warns salespeople that 90% of cold calls go unanswered, executives don’t respond to unsolicited emails, and 92% of B2B buyers start their search on the web. To fight these unfavorable odds, reps need to be engaging with buyers in new ways online, specifically through social media. However, far too many sales reps miss out on huge opportunities by making the same mistakes on their social media profiles.
“Think about your presence in social through the eyes of your customer, your buyer,” Rowley said. “Would a buyer rather engage with a quota crusher or with a subject matter expert in the buyer’s world?”
In this exclusive 31 minute interview, Rowley shares:
Get practical social selling advice from Rowley and start seeing real ROI from LinkedIn, Twitter and more with the newest episode of the Million Dollar Insights podcast.
We all want more business for our firms. Often, attracting more business involves a discussion of increasing brand visibility. So, let’s explore how to do that the right way.
You might also want to check out our Brand Building Guide for a more in-depth roadmap to improving your firm’s reputation and increase your visibility among your target audiences.
A professional services brand is the combination of your firm’s reputation and visibility. By that measure, brand visibility is very critical.
Our recent research on professional services buyers shows that most firms’ brand visibility is weaker than their reputation.
Professional services firms tend to have very good reputations. About 57% of buyers in our research rated their sellers as having a very strong reputation while only about 23% of those buyers felt that sellers had very good visibility.
And we found that this was true across industries as well. Brand visibility was consistently rated lower than reputation. This is a problem worth solving.
But this also creates a challenge. If you simply increase visibility without attending to reputation, you will end up with a hollow brand. Folks who recognize you may not know much about what you do or who you serve.
For that reason, you should focus on strategies that increase both brand visibility and reputation. Here are five of our favorite ways to do this.
We all face the dilemma of deciding where to spend our marketing dollars. If you are currently spending a significant amount of money on advertising — which, according to our research, is usually an inefficient use of your budget — try investing instead in promoting your thought leadership materials to clients or business partners. In this way, you build brand visibility and reputation at the same time.
High-profile content is content that people feel compelled to share with others and discuss. Examples include research that covers a topic of interest to your target clients, a new book that takes on a noteworthy topic, or an article in a major publication, such as the Harvard Business Review.
Once you have some high-profile content, you must devote a sufficient amount of your marketing budget to making it widely visible in your target market. Once again, this will have the dual impact of elevating your firm’s reputation and increasing your brand’s visibility.
This may not strike you as intuitive at first. We tend to think of brand visibility as advertising or PR, something that happens “out there.” But in reality, one of the best ways to increase your firm’s visibility is to help people find your firm when they are searching for educational content or services similiar to those you provide.
Among other tactics, this is accomplished through search engine optimization (SEO). If the valuable content that you produce is available on your website and is properly optimized for search engines, you increase the likelihood that potential clients or referral sources will find you through online search. In short, you raise your effective brand visibility. And when people do find you, they can explore your website to get a full picture of your firm. (You do have a credible and up-to-date website, right?)
You are known by the company you keep. Conducting a research project or educational event in conjunction with a very visible and credible partner can be a real win for both parties. High-profile partners improve your brand visibility in a couple of ways. First, because of the partner’s reach and resources, the relationship will expand the pool of people who hear of your firm. Second, you benefit from the reputation and credibility of your partner.
Let’s face it, most firms just dabble in social media. At this superficial level, it will do you little good. But there is an alternative. Invest in social media to enhance your brand visibility.
It will require that you have multiple people in your firm who are both willing and able to engage people (prospective clients, influencers and referral sources) online over time. Find out where your prospects are hanging out online and engage them there. As the pool of people who know you from your online presence expands, so too will your brand visibility.
VB WEBINAR:
Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, September 10 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free.
The face-to-face B2B sales process of the past — the many phone calls, the gratuitous lunches, the exhausting trade shows, followed by more phone calls — has been transformed by the digital landscape. The number of touchpoints and opportunities that now exist to intercept prospects and turn them into viable leads is unprecedented.
That doesn’t mean lead generation has become easy. It takes a healthy mix of art and science to succeed in a hyper-competitive, crowded space. And it takes a well-honed knowledge of all the available channels and how they can compliment one another.
That’s because there’s no one silver bullet for lead generation. If you think email alone is going to give you the results you’re looking for, or an aggressive adword campaign, you’ll be overlooking many of the tactics that successful B2B marketers bring together to turn the top of the funnel into leads that convert.
Email, search marketing, display ads, webinars, social campaigns, content marketing and syndication, on-demand events, blogs — not to mention strategic use of your own website — are all elements that need to be considered.
Of course, that list, which is not exhaustive, can be exhausting. In this webinar, we’ll look at the kinds of tools marketers need to ease the process, and ways to test and scale that make it all manageable — and ultimately get you the ideal mix of lead gen tactics for your business.
Join our panel of expert B2B marketers who will share insights and best practices that can heat up your lead gen game.
Don’t miss out!
Nick Bhutani, Senior Digital & Acquisition Marketing Manager, Booker
Rochelle Sanchirico, VP of Marketing, mHelpDesk
Jamaal Saunders, Senior Marketing Analyst, Salesforce
This webinar is sponsored by Capterra
Powered by VBProfiles
Does your company have trouble hanging on to customers?
There are many reasons a client might disengage with your company, many of which may be out of your control.
Competition may be stiff, the economy can cause clients to tighten their belts, and sometimes customers simply outgrow your services.
Some customers are even worth ditching if it costs more to keep them happy than they pay in billings.
But before you dismiss customer losses as typical, take a look at your company’s methods.
Ambitious sales goals can be great for motivating your sales team, but unnaturally fast growth can set your company up for excessive client losses, which will negatively impact the accuracy of sales planning and hurt the entire company in the long run.
Did you know that it is six to seven times more expensive to bring on a new customer than it is to keep one that you already have?
It is also much more economically efficient to keep a customer than it is to try to win back customers after they have left.
Think about how much time and money your company spends each month finding leads, qualifying leads, presenting to potential clients and closing deals versus maintaining current accounts.
Most sales teams are built to focus on upfront growth, which makes sense on the surface, but disregarding longevity when closing deals will make your company more susceptible to fluctuations in the market and the whims of clients, which ultimately puts more pressure back on your sales team.
Sales is known to be a high-pressure field, and sales planning should always be ambitious, but financial instability stresses everyone out in a way that is more likely to hinder productivity than help it.
According to Dan McDade, author of The Truth About Leads, in order for healthy and stable growth, your company needs quality deals with long-term customers even more than it needs new customers.
Does your company track its sales? If not, you should start.
The knowledge you can gain just from keeping track of which contacts turn into leads, which leads turn into sales and which sales turn into lasting relationships is invaluable.
When you have collected data on closed deals and the length of average customer relationships over a period of time, start paying attention to which relationships seem to end more quickly than usual.
Do you notice any similarities in how those deals were made or where those customers were found?
With good data you can pinpoint problems accurately and use that knowledge to make efficient adjustments to your sales process.
Do your salespeople know the difference between assertive sales and aggressive sales?
Aggressive sales tactics tend to turn clients off early, but if your sales team uses them to pressure a client into a sale he is not really comfortable with, you can bet that customer’s chances of sticking around for the long haul are low. Assertive sales also put pressure on clients, but with much more tact and sensitivity to the client’s actual needs.
The key difference between aggressive sales tactics and assertive sales tactics is listening. Teach your salespeople to listen to the customer and respond to objections with questions rather than ultimatums.
Asking questions builds trust between salespeople and customers and will give your company more insight into the long-term potential of a deal.
Where are your leads coming from? What criteria do you use to determine whether or not a lead should be pursued?
If you are losing customers often, you are probably not finding them through the right channels and you are likely not spending enough time vetting them.
Think: who specifically is your ideal client, what problem does your product solve for him and how can you position yourself to meet him when he is ready to buy?
If you have gathered data on previous sales and current client relationships, you should use that knowledge to modify your qualification process.
In his article How to Recognize Which Customers Are Bad for Business, Joe Worth explains that not all leads are equally valuable, so try being a little bit pickier about which ones you decide to spend your company’s money and time chasing.
If your salespeople are qualifying their own leads, they need to be taught to see the difference between a promising lead and one that is not a great fit for your company, even if that client could possibly be persuaded to buy.
Salespeople are motivated by structure, competition and clear goals. Upfront growth happens because salespeople measure and earn commissions on new sales.
It goes against the nature of a rookie salesperson to pass up on a less than “ideal” lead (and the accompanying commission) for any reason, so he may need to be helped to see the value of skipping mediocre leads for the sake of the company’s long-term stability.
It is in everyone’s best interest to acquire quality clients, but the acquisition of those clients is in the hands of a salesperson who is motivated by numbers.
To better align the interests of the sales team with the company as a whole, consider building rewards into your compensation plan for when deals last past the six month mark, the two year mark, or whatever length of time makes the most sense for your product.
If restructuring your sales team’s compensation is not an option, consider using other motivational tools like competitions or quarterly awards to get your team to care about quality leads more than just quantity.
If you have done the work as a manager to understand your customer, qualify your leads, and train your sales team but your company still struggles to keep customers, you might have a problem that needs to be addressed higher up the ladder.
The information you collect when you track your sales and teach your team to qualify leads can help your company figure out why it might be losing clients, refine its product and stay competitive.
Training, data tracking, and strategic incentives can help you find quality clients, but all these things will have little to no effect on the quality of your customers if your sales team does not have the Drive required to successfully implement changes. Need for Achievement, Competitiveness and Optimism are the elements of Drive that make great salespeople, and these elements are difficult to spot in the typical hiring interview.
The best way to determine if a potential sales hire has what it takes to help your company succeed long-term is to utilize an accurate sales aptitude test during the hiring process. Hires with Drive, when managed well, will have no trouble helping you shift your company’s focus from quantity of sales to quality customers and sustainable growth.
The post Are Your Sales Sustainable? appeared first on SalesDrive LLC.
