Rnordman

You’ve been reading plenty of “What’s coming in 2015” articles. Pfft, what fun are they? Robin Harris, a.k.a. StorageMojo, peers into his crystal ball to predict what storage will be like in 2025. And, he says, the next 10 years will be the most exciting and explosive in the history of data storage.

Today, storage has assumed the central place in IT infrastructures, just as computer pioneer Alan Turing noted in 1947:

“Speed is necessary if the machine is to work fast enough for the machine to be commercially valuable, but a large storage capacity is necessary if it is to be capable of anything more than rather trivial operations. The storage capacity is therefore the more fundamental requirement.” [Italics added]

I’ve been observing the storage market for over 35 years. In that time, many technologies, products, companies and markets emerged, matured, and – sometimes – disappeared.

Yet some trends have persisted for decades. Ever-decreasing cost per byte. Growing capacity demand. Storage growing as a percentage of data center spend. Storage as the critical management problem.

Storage is the most difficult infrastructure problem because data needs to persist. The ever-present enemy of storage is entropy, the universal process of organized systems – such as your data – becoming less organized over time.

Despite the challenges, though, storage is set for an explosion of new and better choices thanks to a combination of technical, business, and application factors. The next 10 years will be the most exciting and explosive in the history of data storage.

The storage palette

For decades we had RAM, disk, and tape limiting our storage palette. But now: Get ready for Technicolor storage in 3D.

The shadow IT industry – the secretive cloud-scale IaaS suppliers – is a key piece. But so are resistance RAM (RRAM), low-latency architectures, new applications, and the commoditization of most storage. Here’s an overview of some of the most critical changes affecting the next decade in storage.

The shadow IT industry

The shadow IT industry is a couple of dozen Web scale service providers and the dozens of companies that serve them. It will continue to grow in power and influence. This numerically small but economically powerful group is creating products, such as Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disks or terabyte optical discs for cloud vendors, that often will find broader applications in the enterprise.

The larger challenge is that enterprises will no longer have access to the latest and most cost-effective storage technology. Cloud providers will offer services with which few enterprises can compete.

However, this creates opportunities for those inside the cloud companies to leverage specialized technologies for enterprise and consumer consumption by creating new companies. Achieving this goal requires a tricky balancing act, since scaling down is almost as difficult as scaling up.

This is already happening. For instance, the founders of Nutanix, a hyperconverged systems company, included Google alumni who worked on its Web scale GFS storage system.

Non-volatile resistance RAM

NAND flash has revolutionized storage in the last decade. But flash is hardly the ideal storage medium.

Flash writes are very slow – slower than disk. Endurance is limited; 1,000 writes is a common specification. Thanks to Moore’s Law, smaller feature sizes reduce endurance and speed. Power is inefficient, since writes take about 20 volts.

Engineering creativity has worked around most of these issues, but new Resistive RAM (RRAM) technologies are coming that eliminate flash’s problems.

There are several forms of RRAM, but they all store data by changing the resistance of a memory site, instead of placing electrons in a quantum trap, as flash does. RRAM promises better scaling, fast byte-addressable writes, much greater power efficiency, and thousands of times flash’s endurance.

RRAM’s properties should enable significant architectural leverage, even if it is more costly per bit than flash is today. For example, a fast and high endurance RRAM cache would simplify metadata management while reducing write latency.

Latency reduction

Everyone loves the massive Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) of flash storage. But those IOPS have uncovered another bottleneck: storage stack latency.

For decades, our working assumption has been that hard drives are latency’s limiting factor. We ignored the storage software stack’s contribution to latency.

Now the storage stack’s latency has come to the fore. We have to re-architect the rest of the storage stack to optimize it to cope with low latency.

Look at TPC-C benchmarks. You’ll see that even flash-based storage systems may have long tail latencies into the dozens of seconds. That simply shouldn’t be. Application and operating system software stacks shouldn’t have to deal with latencies like this when the underlying storage is capable of much higher responsiveness.

Reduced latency enables servers to do much more work with the same CPU cycles and cache capacity. More important: Long latencies create problems that are difficult to reliably engineer around.

Commoditization

Storage systems and network routers are the two last bastions of vertical integration. In the 1980s, the server world converted from vertically-integrated companies (such as DEC and Data General) to horizontal integration, with CPUs from Intel, operating systems from Microsoft, databases from Oracle, and applications from everywhere.

As a result of this transition, the server industry saw gross margins drop from 60%-70% to 30%. Servers became a box that a business ordered online and received a few days later.

That transition is long overdue for data storage. In fact, it is already happening. Look at what Google and Amazon charge for storage! But if enterprises hope to compete with cloud economics they will demand similar TCO economics as well.

It won’t be an easy transition, especially for legacy applications designed for specific underlying storage. But the sooner enterprises start using scale-out storage – as the big cloud providers already do – the better they will adapt.

Applications

Streaming data analysis is one example of new applications with unique storage requirements. But image analysis, video analysis, and other demanding storage-centric applications will enable new forms of data value. They’ll be made possible by infrastructure-busting performance and capacity demands.

Consider the relatively simple case of police body cam video storage. But to make it useful, a legal chain of custody has to be established, the data has to be searchable, and, of course, the storage has to be extremely cost-effective.

Think of the output of 50,000 high-definition (HD) police body cams. That’s a tremendous amount of data capacity, so it also needs to be readily searchable at high speed. High-performance, exabyte capacity, low-cost, tamper-proof storage – that is a 21st century challenge!

Electronic health records are another opportunity and concern. Once the currently range of EHR incompatibilities are ironed out (I’m thinking 5-10 years), researchers and healthcare professionals will be able to examine outcomes for millions of people in virtual drug trials.

We are just barely scratching the surface of what Big Data means for infrastructure architecture. There will be many surprises.

That’s not all

None of these trends is isolated. They all have spillover effects that, over the decade, will reshape the industry.

Few of today’s storage companies will emerge unscathed by the large drop in gross margins. Enterprises will have to rethink how they architect, justify, and provision infrastructure. The shadow IT industry will struggle with commercializing specialized cloud products.

But the good news is that by 2025 data storage will be much more robust, scalable, performant, and cost-effective than it is today. That’s a future I can live with.

Thinking towards the future of your IT department… perhaps a little more short-term? Consider reading the Gartner report, How to Determine if Cloud Backup is Right for Your Servers.

Ever wonder how you can spend hours, weeks, months — even years — agonizing over your marketing message and the tools you use to deliver that message only to get little response from the audience you  are targeting?

No one seems to really care.

And it’s frustrating.  So we’re going to figure it out together.

Last week, we launched our very first episode of The EDGY Perspective about why winners fail.

WOW. Thousands of you watched, shared, and sent us your comments–and we loved every one of them. (If you missed out, you can watch it here.)

Game on, people.

On Episode 2 we tackle the the hard-hitting topic of why people don’t really care about what you are trying to sell them.

Part of having magical customer service involves having a plan in place and smart tools enabled to help you create a conversation that matters.

I’ve been bothered for a while now that most sales and marketing efforts don’t take into account the “human” side of life. Most marketing strategy doesn’t factor “real life” into the conversation.

That’s not all.

I get a ton of emails asking how I’m able to get so much done in a day. I’ll share the tools I use (and a few I love, but don’t use) so you can too.

Hop in. We’re gonna talk about the madness of throwing a temper tantrum over $4–and how the IRS did customer service right. Ready?

Here you go:

The post Why Your Message Doesn’t Matter. [EPTV] appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

Remember when every businessperson owned a Blackberry? Or when Blockbuster dominated video rentals? (Do you even remember going to a store to rent a video?) Or when Barnes & Noble superstores were putting independent bookstores out of business?

The point is, yesterday’s success story doesn’t necessarily make news today, or promise you’ll even be around tomorrow. The heartbeat of business is repeated sales—if it stalls, the continued health of your business is in jeopardy.

Former CEO and entrepreneur Larry Putterman emphasizes the importance of continuous growth, noting on his blog: “Without increased growth, there is no means to build and sustain your business model.”

Of course, sales often flatten due to seasonal fluctuations or generally weak economic conditions. But if your competition is growing and you aren’t, you can’t blame the weather or the economy. Here are four key areas to consider when trouble strikes.

1. Customer Relations

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software not only automates repetitive, customer-facing tasks such as email marketing campaigns and sales follow-ups, it also helps you manage customer interactions and analyze possible factors contributing to a sales decline.

For example, the majority of a business’s customer complaints express frustration about using the online ordering system, resulting in unfulfilled orders sitting in the shopping basket. That would call for fixing the online ordering process to ensure it is simpler and easier to complete. CRM helps you find these sorts of customer service blips so you can correct them and improve customer relations, and in turn increase the number of completed sales.

2. Market Positioning

Are you focusing on the right markets? Let’s say your sales data shows that while ordering in several market segments are down, one or two sectors show a slight increase. Such analysis might call for shifting marketing efforts to the sectors where there has been growth. At the same time, a survey to the other segments could provide a better picture of why they aren’t buying—is it a general issue, or is it something related to specific market conditions and needs?

Take the market for Apple iPads, for example. Forrester Research shows that only 11% of total tablet purchases came from enterprise-level customers last year. Yet, enterprise purchases are expected to grow to 18% of total tablet sales by 2017.

Analyst Andrew Tonner performed a market positioning analysis on Apple to see how the technology company could boost sales of its slumping (though still market dominant) iPad line. He discovered that three markets were largely untapped for the company: enterprise sales, educational sales, and technological enhancements. Pursuing these markets could spark growth in iPad sales.

3. Pricing Structure

Pricing rarely remains static and can and should change as market conditions evolve. If, for instance, your product is first to market and in high demand, you can usually charge a premium. But if your competitors are coming out with “me-too” products that offer the same value, a more competitive pricing structure not only retains existing customers and encourage long-term loyalty, but also increases your chances of attracting new customers.

How can you compare pricing strategies? Some businesses perform A/B testing online. For example, Price A gets 1000 visitors and 25 buyers at $100 each. Price B gets 900 visitors and 60 buyers at $30 each. Here, Price A is the winner because $2.50 per visitor is more than $2.00 per visitor. A word of caution, though: running A/B testing should compare apples to apples in order for it be meaningful. You don’t want to compare Tuesday’s visitors to a website to Friday’s if your website traffic varies significantly during the week.

4. Product

There comes a time when every product, no matter how successful, no longer resonates with customers the way it first did. Products must continually evolve to meet changing customer needs and expectations. What worked as little as two months ago may no longer be relevant today. Just ask Blackberry, which was the mobile device for email, especially for business—until the iPhone came along.

Blackberry thought its physical keyboard and high security were sufficient to fend off the innovations unleashed by the iPhone. Of course they weren’t, and when Blackberry finally realized that, it was too late.

Watch what your competition is doing, but don’t stop innovating—there’s nothing like introducing new features to make a good product even better to stimulate a declining sales curve. If you maximize your product’s value, you maximize your sales potential.

For many startup CEOs, the company they’re running is their first real business experience. Take Mark Zuckerberg, for example, who dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, or Evan Spiegel, the Stanford dropout behind the wheel at SnapChat. Many young CEOs are guided largely by passion and instinct rather than by experience. In some cases, that works wonderfully; in others, it’s the path to a quick failure.

As a former partner at both Battery Ventures and J.P. Morgan Capital, and now as CEO of Instore, my approach to running a company is a little different. Here’s what my past life as a VC has taught me about leading a company:

1. Keep your investor hat handy when making major business decisions.
As a VC, you spend a lot of time assessing the potential value of early stage companies. As any good investor knows, valuations are driven not just by existing business performance but also by defensible technology and projected performance that creates incremental value when achieved. At my startup, focusing on business value creation helps me determine when to invest in new technologies, marketing, and hiring by asking whether the investment will be accretive to the company’s overall value in the long run.

2. Raise money when you have a strategy for using it — not just because you can.
I’ve seen too many startups make the mistake of scaling before they’re ready, when they haven’t yet outlined a clear path to profitability or proven their product economics. While it might be tempting to seek VC funding early to de-risk your startup, don’t make your funding pitch until you know how you plan to scale your business. In the meantime, bootstrap your business and focus on measurable growth to figure out what works and what doesn’t before setting more ambitious goals. In our company, we’ve focused on doing more with less, using our resources efficiently to compete against larger competitors who are burning through money.

3. While it’s easy to get seed funding, that doesn’t mean you’ll make it to a Series C round.
Another reason not to get obsessed with fundraising? To be honest, it’s probably not going to happen. In more than a decade in the industry, I’ve seen that it’s easy to get a small seed round for a good idea. But in order to get investments of $5 million or more, you’ll have a lot more to prove to VCs. You don’t just need to demonstrate a great concept; you’ll also need a solid customer base and limited competition. Making things more difficult, it’s important to jump on an idea very quickly to stay ahead of the game. The time to incubate good ideas has shortened dramatically as competitors pop up quickly, thanks to the reduced cost of starting a web-based business. By the time you think of an idea that seems novel (a laundry mobile app startup, anyone?), you’ll probably see that there are already a half-dozen companies in that field, making it tough to gain a competitive advantage.

4. Admit your mistakes (so you can fix them).
As an investor, I often had to assess when a startup was drifting off course and work with management to get back on the rails. The same goes for Instore: We’ve made some mistakes along the way, but those mistakes hurt a lot less when corrected quickly. For example, we made a bad decision early on to outsource our iPad application to an offshore team. We ended up with a poor-performing initial product that we were only able to fix by insourcing all development. This early mistake cost us probably $250,000, but it could have cost a lot more financially and reputationally if we’d waited longer to correct the error. In our company, we’ve focused on doing more with less, using our resources efficiently to compete against larger competitors who are burning through money.

5. Use data analysis to drive your decision-making.
As a VC, I carefully studied financial forecasts and plans for customer and revenue growth, and I looked at comparable businesses when deciding whether to invest in a startup. At my startup, I look at a variety of business metrics (website visitors, revenue per customer, cost of acquisition, and many others) to determine how successfully we’re meeting our business goals and make decisions in line with past trends to help drive business growth. One recent analysis we did: Customers who request discounted pricing don’t value our product, are more likely to churn, and require more support than the average customer. In short, they aren’t worth the sales effort. Numbers don’t lie; in fact, they provide critical insight into what’s working.

6. Trust your gut.
While data is an important part of the decision-making process, as an investor — and now as a CEO — I also recognize the importance of trusting my instincts. Some decisions go beyond what the numbers can tell you: Choosing to back a startup because you personally believe in the founder’s vision, or, at Instore, hiring an employee who may not have as many qualifications as some others but has passion for the work and will help grow the business. Conversely, if you have an employee, however senior, who instinct tells you is not the right fit, both employee and company are better off if you make a change.

Moving from the role of investor to entrepreneur requires a shift in mindset for sure. Instead of listening to entrepreneurs pitch me, I’m the one doing the selling.

While I miss the stimulation of learning about 15 new businesses a week (great fun for people with mild ADHD), I wake up every day knowing that I’m doing work that makes a difference. My job matters; that’s pretty empowering.

Matt Niehaus is the CEO of Instore, a merchant management platform for restaurants and other retail businesses. He previously was a partner at Battery Ventures and at J.P. Morgan Capital. He offers frequent advice for retail owners on Instore’s blog, and has written about entrepreneurship for VentureBeat, KillerStartups, and other sites.

Monument Valley is one of the most beautiful mobile games around today, and Apple has taken notice, giving the game an Apple Design Award last year and naming it the iPad Game of the Year.

Catching the eye of Apple is something most app developers dream of, but how much is an Apple Design Award or game of the year title really worth?

We now have a general idea thanks to a recent infographic released by Monument Valley's developers, which shows a spike in revenue each time Apple officially recognized the app.

After winning an Apple Design Award in June, Monument Valley saw a jump from ~$15,000 in revenue per day to ~ $25,000, suggesting Apple's award was worth at least $10,000, though the game enjoys a nice bump in revenue in the days following as well, and the full value of the award could extend even further thanks to the increased notoriety.

Interestingly enough, the game saw an even bigger spike in revenue after Apple named Monument Valley as its iPad Game of the Year, spiking from ~ $13,000 to over $30,000 in daily revenue, and increasing further still to well over $40,000 in the following days. This represents a boost of at least $27,000 in revenue, and it would appear that winning Game of the Year leads to a bigger jump in revenue compared to receiving an Apple Design Award.

Of course, Monument Valley is a good example of how games can be honored multiple times by Apple within the same year, and with over 81% of the game's total revenue coming from iOS, it certainly seems like developing for iPhone is still where all the money is at.

You can buy Monument Valley for $3.99 for iOS here, and for Android right here.

SEE ALSO: The 13 Best New Apps You May Have Missed Recently

Join the conversation about this story »

So you’ve just published you new post. Great! Now you need to drive an audience to it and get them to read it.

Social media is your number one port of call here. You post a link on each of your social networks, get a few likes and then even a few shares, including an influencer.

The post gets indexed by Google and when you go check it is on the second page for one of your main keywords. Boo. You keep at it, sharing more on Twitter with different headlines and tactics and next time you check, look, it’s now at number five on page one! Awesome, looks like the social media sharing must have done the trick, right?

There’s a lot of speculation about how social drives SEO. Here we’re going to explain to you exactly how that works and dispel some myths.

Do search engines take social signals into account?

What this means is when people share posts on Facebook, LinkedIn Google+ and Twitter, does it increase a website’s standing on Google? Does getting +1s increase the value of a post?

There have been a lot of studies carried out which certainly suggest that this is the case. The theory goes that if Google sees that a post is getting shared a lot, it considers that post to be more valuable so puts it higher up on the search engine results page.

However, there are some problems with this theory.

1. Google say that it isn’t true. They don’t use social at all for SEO.
2. Social media links are nofollow links, which means that PageRank cannot be passed to the link.
3. Correlation is not causation. For example, eating ice cream and drowning both increase at the same time. Does this mean that one causes the other? No, both activities increase in hot weather separately from each other. They don’t cause one another.

So while good content does get shared a lot on social media, it also gets linked to a lot more, which is one of the real deciders when it comes to SEO.

So does social help SEO at all?

When you look at the bigger picture, social media does help SEO however, although it is less direct than just getting a boost straight from Twitter or Facebook. Instead, social media acts as a PR hub for you, placing your content in front of more people more easily, increasing the chances of it being linked to on websites and blogs.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you are getting a boost directly from social media or indirectly through PR through social media. Either way, it pays to invest some of your time and energy in social media and come up with an effective social media strategy to see a boost in the traffic to your website.

We’re happy to help you with any of your social media and online PR queries, just get in touch today to see how.

The growing demand for greater corporate transparency, especially among Millennials, should not be news to anyone. Trust in business has reached new lows, as reported by the latest 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer (e.g. only 50% of Americans trust financial service companies), and insufficient transparency has been one of the key reasons. Yes, businesses are trying to develop and promote more their “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) initiatives, but these will never win over customers unless the details and results are transparent enough to re-build a trustful relationship. Supporting this, Tove Malmqvist at GlobalScan reported that 79% of experts surveyed in July 2014 believe corporate transparency is essential for a company’s sustainability performance.

Why has “transparency” become such a critical virtue for younger people, yet such a complicated challenge for many global companies? Consumers used to believe most advertising and political propaganda. Not anymore. With ubiquitous accessibility via the internet, younger people can see thru such skewed marketing messages or advertising claims. Today only 6% of Millennials trust advertising (source: Edelman research). In light of the extensive corruption throughout the world, business and government–plus their track record of misinformation–Millennials are demanding more and more transparency in this “openness revolution”. In short, the relationship between transparency and trust for a corporate or product brand is irrefutable.

In addition to building trust, the other value which transparency drives for these Millennials is authenticity. Wally Olins describes in his new book, “Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come”, how consumers today crave authenticity, and his core message to brand managers – “don’t fake it.” Authenticity can be a fuzzy concept for many, however. Julie Napoli, a professor at Curtin University, stated in The Journal of Business Research, that consumers see three important dimensions to brand authenticity: heritage, sincerity and commitment to quality.

As consumers increasingly become less naïve or more knowledgeable about the realities of corporate performance, they are also more sensitive to promises that are unfulfilled. Gallup’s State of the American Consumer Report in June 2014, concluded that the primary problem for business is that consumers don’t really know what a company stands for, or how their brand is special, because its promises are “weak and vague” – a disturbing challenge for managers trying to re-build trust via more transparent, credible communications. Furthermore, consumers don’t believe brand promises are kept or delivered. To address these problems, Gallup experts suggest that companies focus on improving their “brand alignment” (i.e. brand promise and deliverability) to restore trust. According to Gallup, this alignment currently varies by category. For example:

• Retail 90%
• Hospitality 84%
• Financial Services 40%
• Food & Beverages 39%
• Automotive 35%

Gallup offered some useful recommendations for a more balanced brand alignment, all with the underlying assumption that greater transparency and integrity are needed for each suggestion:

• Develop a stronger, more compelling brand promise, AND deliver on each promise
• Emphasize consistency across all touch points – for a consistently great experience
• Use metrics that matter – and even measure the emotional satisfaction
• To use social media more effectively (i.e. to inspire customer engagement):
  • Authentic – want to interact with a human, not a “brand”
  • Responsive – timely, open, available 24/7, admit mistakes
  • Compelling – make content more interesting, original, relevant, personal, but not hard “sales/marketing” pitches

Beyond brand advertising claims or promises, corporations are being forced to open up in other areas such as tax and government contracts, anti-corruption and sustainability programs. Howard Schultz, head of Starbucks, said in 2013 that “the currency of leadership today is transparency.” Three forces are driving this increase in transparency around the world:

1. Many governments (e.g. Britain, Denmark, Norway, etc.) are demanding greater corporate accountability, triggered by the recent recession.
2. The rise and influence of investigative journalists, exposing dubious practices such as sweetheart deals for multinationals.
3. The growing sophistication of NGO’s like Transparency International (TI) and Global Witness.

While the world is still full of murky shell companies, the trend toward greater transparency to combat corporate and government secrecy is clear. Company boards are increasingly accepting the notion that openness should no longer be feared, especially in areas like social responsibility, and even appreciate the reputational benefits. Millennials prefer to work for firms that are leaders in disclosure, and even see it as their civic duty to leak information on shady or secretive deals. Most important, both consumers and progressive business people recognize that transparency is essential for building a trustful, authentic corporate brand image.

There’s a lot your business can achieve in 140 characters. These five quick case studies exemplify social media marketing at its most unique and effective, and demonstrate that B2B businesses can leverage Twitter with stunning success.

1. Constant Contact

It’s easy to treat social media as a one-sided marketing exercise, and a platform for your branded messages. However, as Constant Contact realizes, the real value of SMM lies in its ability to facilitate discussion between a business and its potential customers.

In addition to a constant stream of targeted, valuable content, the brand excels in engaging their audience with Q&As, opinion pieces, and conversation starters—providing a platform for their audience, as well as their brand. Given that Constant Contact helps SMEs to grow meaningful customer relationships, their Twitter feed is an awesome case study in their own expertise and services.

2. General Electric

General Electric isn’t afraid to diverge from tweeting about brand ethos and product lines, and regularly engage their community with quirky competitions and less-than-serious social sharing. 2012’s #IWanttoInvent celebrations saw GE ask their audience for crazy invention ideas, before turning their tweets over to a team of pro designers (my personal favorite: Droid Dog Walker). Their recent EmojiScience campaign continues the trend of fun over function, creating a community that’s genuinely enjoyable to be involved in.

GE also excels in nurturing niche micro-communities, like their aviation-focused #AVGeeks follower-base. By sharing super-specific content, with a super-select group of followers, the brand drives truly passionate engagement—and whilst #AVGeeks will never have the same reach as their regular Twitter content, I can guarantee it has a much higher click-through and conversion rate.

3. Buffer

I’ve previously featured Buffer’s epic long-form content, and showcased their unbelievably honest approach to content marketing. Their super actionable content forms the heart of their Twitter presence, with their feed reading like a How-to guide for effective social media marketing.

There’s virtually nothing in the way of brand promotion or self-indulgence—and the only Buffer-specific content you’ll come across are their frequent case studies into Buffer’s own social media wins and losses. Their approach is undeniably popular; despite offering a single product, maintained by a small team, they have 264,000 followers and growing.

4. GoToMeeting

Content creation is the engine that drives social media—but it shouldn’t be the only tool deployed in your brand’s social marketing strategy. The sharing of relevant third-party content (known as content curation) is essential for positioning your brand as a helpful, customer-centric business, and the go-to resource for a particular industry.

GoToMeeting understand this, filling their Twitter feed with awesome actionable content from both parent-company Citrix and other industry-relevant sources. The end result is a Twitter community that puts education above promotion, and in the process, endears almost 50,000 followers to the brand.

5. Maersk

Financial services, hardware manufacturing, and stock transportation are important, sure, but they aren’t sexy. Consumers will never get excited about B2B products in the same way they would a sports car or luxury fashion brand; and I’d wager that exactly 0 people had cloud networking solutions at the top of their holiday wishlists.

Despite this, global shipping company Maersk has a stunning 112,000 Twitter followers. Instead of sharing content in the vein of 5 Best Practices of Stock Handling, they’ve decided to populate their feed with stunning HD images of their fleet traveling to remote and beautiful corners of the world. With incredible sunsets and beautiful seascapes, this bit of lateral thinking has transformed a potentially yawn-inducing Twitter feed into a unique perspective on a surprisingly interesting brand.

At a reception for JetBlue’s most frequent Mosaic flyers, I had the opportunity to listen to the airline’s top management discuss its ambitions to improve operations and enhance customer experience. The discussion was excellent and — on a whim — I asked one of the most senior executives what JetBlue’s customers could do to improve the airline. He paused for a long moment and essentially responded, “The most important way our customers could improve the airline would be by being more polite.” He talked about how stressful and debilitating it was for ticket agents, gate agents, and flight attendants to deal with rude and ill-mannered flyers. Nicer customers, he maintained, would make for a nicer experience for everyone.

Lo and behold, JetBlue recently announced a series of in-craft “jetiquette” videos for its flyers. The hope and expectation, of course, is that these visual “nudges” will preemptively smooth the air travel’s rougher edges. “We wanted to say, ‘We’ve all been there. We get it, and let’s talk about it,’” declared one JetBlue executive about #FlightEtiquette. “It’s a universal truth of flying.”

As big a fan as I am about organizational learning and the need to relentlessly refresh and renew employee human capital, I’m an even bigger fan of investing in how customers and clients create value. Making customers better makes better customers. Improving employees and associates is smart business. But so is improving your customers and clients. What — and how — your customers learn to make your business run better should be every bit as important as what—and how—you want your employees to learn, as well. Customers need to learn from you almost as much as you need to learn from customers. Serious customer experience design debates in organizations should focus almost as much on customer learning as customer delight.

This point was powerfully reinforced when listening to Nadia Shouraboura, former head of Amazon’s Supply Chain and Fulfillment Technologies and founder of Hointer, an innovative “digiphysical” retail startup, at an Intel roundtable on the future of retail experience. Shouraboura mentioned almost in passing that Hointer’s Seattle store makes a point of digitally keeping track of which customers like being approached by salespeople and which ones prefer to be left alone. But she noted that the data indicated that, “customers who liked being left alone ended up asking more questions than those who liked being helped.”

To me, that behavior’s not counterintuitive or unusual at all: most prospects and customers want the power to choose when to seek help and ask questions. The issue isn’t whether or when retailers should physically approach in-store customers, it’s what expectations retailers want to cultivate and inculcate in their customers with regard to assistance. In other words, Hointer is figuratively — if not literally — training its customers to shop on their own terms. Hointer’s salespeople are as much information resources as people who sell.

That distinction’s not subtle. As both a technology and retailer innovator — not unlike Amazon! — Hointer is educating its shoppers to shop in a different way with different norms and different expectations. The product of that education is not just a more sophisticated Hointer shopper, but a shopper who may now become impatient with the delays, inefficiencies, and inferior experiences proffered by other retailers. That’s where value-added differentiation and competitive advantage come from. That’s why helping customers learn can be as strategically important as learning from customers.

This is where a lot of UX design strategies fall short. Yes, Amazon, Apple and Facebook use data and analytics to learn a lot from and about their customers. But does anyone doubt that Steve Jobs, Jonny Ive, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have done a fantastic job of educating and training their best users and customers to — with apologies to TBWA/Chiat/Day — “Behave Different”?

If a smarter, more knowledgeable or more polite customer can measurably reduce the friction of commerce — or measurably increase the ability to get value from an innovation — than that may be a much better investment than boosting the smarts, knowledge or good manners of an employee. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course — but they certainly aren’t the same.

Debate all you want about how best to communicate and sell the virtue of your products and service offerings. But never forget to seriously debate how even tiny investments in improving customers might lead to large-scale insights in improved customer experiences.

How many times have you seen Titanic? Enough to remember the moment Rose tells Jack to “draw me like one of your French girls”? Well, a group of iOS developers from Scranton, PA remember… and they created an app inspired by it.

Meet French Girls, an iOS app that is latching on to a vibrant photography phenomenon: the selfie. The idea for the app is users take selfies and then make illustrations of other people’s selfies. Quality ranges from amateur stick figures to truly impressive and highly interpreted portraits—and more often than not, inspiration from cats. (Bonus at the end of the post: how French Girls got its name.)

Examples of what happens on French Girls.

The app has risen in popularity over the last year, surpassing 1 million downloads in July 2014. With A/B testing, French Girls’ lean team is turning the majority of those downloads into engaged, activated users.

Through testing, French Girls increased activation from 25% to 66.5% and fundamentally changed how they develop features.

Optimizing user onboarding

Activation—turning someone who has downloaded an app into an active user—is a key metric to obsess over because it is deeply connected to retention and indicates the quality of the first-time user experience. A user is usually considered activated after crossing a threshold of activity, like creating an account, filling out a profile or making a purchase.

This is Jeff.

“For us, activation is directly correlated to retention,” says, Jeff Farkas, a developer and backend architect on the team. “Without activation, retention is poor.”

French Girls considers users activated after they complete two tasks: take a selfie and draw a selfie.

Before activation is possible, education is necessary. During the first run experience, people must learn how the app works in order to see the value of opening it again… and again.

“Our first-time user experience required users to complete a drawing of another person’s selfie and take a selfie before proceeding to use the app,” Farkas said. “This was our activation metric, as we saw people that were fairly well retained after this process.”

They knew that non-activated users would come to browse selfie portraits then stop opening the app after a day or two. Activated users would stick around for up to seven days. The problem: their activation success was low—only 25% of people who downloaded the app actually took a selfie and completed a drawing.

The team decided to test their activation experience and learn which new combination of images and messages would activate the most users.

Jeff knew they needed a tutorial to teach people how to use the app but didn’t know what order of actions or messaging would be most effective. So they tested it. The team designed different first-time user experiences and measured the impact each one had on activations.

In Experience 1, users were directed to take a selfie first and then draw a portrait.

In Experience 2, they flip the order: first, draw a selfie, then take a selfie. “It is a high barrier-to-entry method, but makes the user feel invested in the platform,” Farkas said.

They found that Experience 1 (take a selfie then draw a portrait) doubled activation conversion to 50%. From there, they moved on to testing the tutorial messaging. Turns out that slight differences in tone and style had a strong effect on conversion. Here’s what they tried:

1. 

   Original tutorial text.

   Original: Draw a stranger! Now it’s time for you to be an artist. Tap the pencil to draw a stranger!

2. Photo First No Pressure: Draw a stranger! Tap the pencil to draw a stranger. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece! Have fun!
3. Photo First No Pressure 2: Draw a stranger! Now let’s draw somebody. You don’t have to be a great artist, just have fun!
4. Photo First No Pressure 3: Draw a stranger! Tap the pencil to draw a stranger. You don’t have to be a great artist, just have fun!
5. Photo First No Pressure 4: Let’s draw! Tap the pencil to draw a stranger. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece! Have fun!
6. Photo First Ridiculous: Let the art commence. Summon your greatest abilities and draw a stranger. You have the chance to make someone’s day!

Experience #4, (Draw a stranger! Tap the pencil to draw a stranger. You don’t have to be a great artist, just have fun!) led to another 16.5% increase in activation.

Influencing app engagement & team culture

While the app looks a bit different today (unfortunately, their hairy man mascot, Scotch Mornington isn’t guiding folks through the tutorial anymore), this series of tests was pivotal in laying the groundwork for the app’s growth.

• Increasing conversion of the tutorial led to a better ecosystem where users understood the value proposition of the app.
• More people were willing to take and draw selfies, and spend money on in-app purchases.

This test also sparked a major shift in feature development at French Girls.

“Optimization had always taken a back seat over features in terms of priority,” Jeff said. “Since the proven success of Optimizely, optimization is no longer an afterthought, but a necessary part of every feature. It forces us to consider not only how users use a feature, but why they use it and what value it offers to them.”

Today, every product decision the team makes is based on user feedback backed by statistical evidence. They have expanded their toolset to include Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Redshift for business intelligence.

“Optimizely has played a huge part in opening our eyes to how important analytics and optimization is to the success of our app,” Jeff said.

Bonus: Naming French Girls

The idea for French Girls came before the name. At their HQ in Scranton, PA, co-founders Andrew, Adam, and their lean team of seven, organized a weekend Hackathon with one goal: submit a new iOS app to the App Store. Many cans of Mountain Dew later, the team had a prototype for an app that allowed people to take pictures and add them to a pool of all other pictures taken in the app. Then, people could pick a random picture, draw whatever they desired (a message, a picture, etc.) on a white screen with their finger, and send it back to that person.

All it lacked was a name. Ideas like DrawingBash, FaceSmash, FaceDraw covered a whiteboard, but none seemed quite right.

“They were all pretty bad,” Jeff Farkas, the backend architect on the team admitted. “But then Andrew (CTO) walked into the office with such an air of confidence. He walked right up to the board and scrawls, “French Girls” across the other names. Everyone is looking around the room, shooting puzzled looks at each other, trying to figure out why the heck we would call this app French Girls. And then he says, “Draw me like one of your French Girls.” and strikes a pose. It was brilliant.”

Double Bonus: Reasons I love French Girls and opted in to push notifications

• They are fearless and hilarious. Even their app update explainer text made me laugh out loud and show all my friends.
• They suggest a ridiculous username for you in the onboarding flow so you don’t even have to think about it.
• The selfie drawings on it are REALLY good.
• There are hidden Easter eggs all over the app—like this .
• They make subtle references to the Titanic throughout the app.
• They know testing is smart and are doing it.

The future is here and it often seems that science fiction has become our present-day reality. The proliferation of high technology paradigms in alternative intelligence has actually, in some cases, made humans obsolete. The scene of humans pointing weapons at cyborgs that are intent on eradicating our kind seem too far-fetched to consider seriously, but machines have already managed to cause unrest to individuals. Assembly line workers, telephone operators and calculators (back when this used to refer to a humane profession) of yesteryear will surely agree.

In the field of customer service, no catastrophes are on the horizon. On the contrary – automated processes have probably saved more customer representatives than they have harmed. After all, software products do not suffer from the human plague of attention deficit disorders, software products are usually very good listeners, but software products cannot exist without the ingenuity of human service providers, and humans are learning to improve their comprehensive service with the help of these witty machines.

Business Intelligence: The Sky is the Limit

The benefits of direct automation to the customer go far and wide. For instance, the simple fact that conversation logging tools allow for simple referral of existing customer-company correspondence to the agent saves time and frustration. Another direct benefit is the semantic analysis of his question. This tool provides the customer with an answer that’s likely to satisfy him right off the bat. Indirectly, the extraction and collating tools provided with leading automated customer service software enriches the knowledge base of the questions asked and the answers accepted – further enhancing the ability of the company to provide a sophisticated self- service system which grants customer solutions immediately.

On the enterprises, who are, as of yet, predominantly human, naturally benefit from having to employ less first line operational staff and can invest more in hiring the best staff available or in training their current point personnel to reach a higher level of expertise. The most crucial advancement is the insight an automated tool can provide. The best solutions out there have foundations that can be coupled with analysis and reporting tools, allowing the manager to inquire into questions which can assist in both internal employee development as well as the betterment of the customer support service to their consumers.

Permutations of the data that is available to us are only confined by our imagination, bringing us one step closer to a very successful and profitable future. We can definitely incorporate some of the useful ideas from the humanless office into solutions to current problems; however, in the decisions that managers take when shaping up the customer service process, humans are undoubtedly the powerhouses of intelligence.

Accessibility. Engagement. Profit: Step into the future of E-commerce. Find out how with a free nanorep demo now.

The hidden secret is in the merger between these two realities.

The pros and cons of humans versus computers are clear, but the key to success is in the fusion between the two. An automated, online, always-on, multi-language agent contributes to the level of service by providing availability that is comparable to a worldwide-distributed service team that is highly adept in languages; this supports unattended operation – since most businesses cannot afford a human agent around the clock – and reduces costs while increasing the quality of customer experience.

The automated service can provide answers on demand to a huge mass of customers at the same time – for frequently asked, common inquiries. This is not advantageous unless there is a human behind the scenes to:

• Adapt the generic system to the company’s specified industry
• Cater to the escalation of issues that are beyond the scope of this resource pool
• Maintain the system and ensure that it is navigated efficiently to suit the image and mission of the company, as well as the experience of the particular customers

This human can approach the case in a calm, educated, and professional manner after having investigated the documented data from the system, thereby allowing the escalation with the customer to flow smoothly and to reach a proficient resolution. Once this resolution is sealed, this case can be submitted back to improve the FAQ pool, ultimately preventing future problems.

In the end, automation is just a tool in the hands of the support staff and business owner to shape up their service model. The creators of automated systems aim at allowing companies to enhance their business procedures by enriching customer engagement, satisfaction, and general communication. The sustainable ecosystem of computer-man cooperation clearly determines the fact that it is better to make love than war when it comes to the fight of man versus machine.

Optimize your online business with intelligent automated solutions. Learn more through a free nanorep demo.

Within Google Analytics, Goals are designed for you to quantify how well your website is performing in terms of specific objectives. You can set up individual Goals to track an action on your website. These actions are defined as an activity that has a completion. Commonly known as conversions, examples of these activities include the following:

• A customer on an e-commerce website that completes the checkout process resulting in a purchase
• A user signing up to an email newsletter
• A user completing the registration process on the website
• An online contact form that has been submitted

From setting up these Goals within Analytics we can glean invaluable data such as:

• Number of conversion completions over a period of time
• Percentage of successful user conversion rate against abandonment rate
• Visualising the path of customers along a particular goal flow. For example a 4 stage checkout visualisation will allow us to see where along the checkout process there is significant drop off. If stage 3 of the checkout has a significant drop from stage 2 then it is probable that there is something on stage 2 that is causing a customer to abandon this particular stage.
• Creation of two different layouts for the same page with differing page “calls to action” placements that will show which variation of the same page is converting better.

The objective for the website owner, based on these results, is then to evaluate the success or otherwise of website elements and strategise, if needed how the website can be improved. Examples such as:

• removing any obstacles that are impeding conversion completion
• look at incorporating incentives to help with certain conversions (eg discount coupon)
• increasing user interaction and engagement by the type of content that is shown and the frequency that the content is being updated.

Setting up a Goal

To set up a Goal click the ‘Admin’ Tab at the top of the page. Under the ‘View’ Column on the right hand side, click Goals

and then ‘New Goal’

A Goal can now be defined by initially giving it a relevant descriptive name. In this case we are setting up a basic landing page enquiry form conversion

Once a name is given then a goal type needs to be defined from a list of 4 options.

Destination
This option is chosen if the conversion has a goal completion page such as an order success page or an online enquiry success page. For our example this is the choice we would choose.

Duration
A conversion that is measured in duration spent on the website

Pages/Screens per visit
An amount of pages per unique visit

Event
This is defined by a particular event being triggered, such as a click on a particular advertisement banner on the website

Clicking ‘Next Step’ prompts you to give more specifics about the Goal. For our example we have selected Destination as the Goal Type. The first thing to specify is the ultimate destination page for the conversion. For our example it is the form submission completion page.

Funnel
This is not required for our example but if you were tracking the checkout process on your e-commerce website then you would define each individual checkout stage page from start to finish. Goals would then show the flow of the process and if there were abandonment spikes on a certain checkout stage. This can then be acted upon.

Viewing your Goals data

In your Google Analytics data view for your website, the Goal data can be accessed on the left hand side menu under ‘Conversions’ > ‘Goals’

Overview
Metrics for all Goal completions over a particular date range

Goal URLs
A list of all goal completion URLs and their completion number as well as any monetary value associated with those goal completion urls

Reverse Goal Path
Starting with the completion page, this tab gives you the ability to view how a user got to the point of your completion page. The reason that this could be potentially very useful is that users don’t always go from point A to D via B and C. This would show any unexpected path flow that the user took. If there were multiple instances of this certain unexpected path it could highlight a particular sticking point in the process.

Goal Flow
This allows you to see an overview of the traffic from points A to D. This is very useful for immediately seeing any abandonment or if there are unexpected paths that the user takes.

Conclusion
Goals are a very important part of your Analytics armoury to help understand how effective or otherwise key user activity is on your website. From this analysis changes and refinements can be made to help improve conversion rates on your website.

Global currency markets are roiling after Thursday's surprise decision by Switzerland's central bank to end a three-year-old policy that limited the franc from appreciating too much against the euro.

The move sent the franc soaring, triggering hundreds of millions of dollars of losses at banks including Barclays and Deutsche Bank and bankrupting several currency brokers overnight. Many financial observers have lambasted the Swiss central bank for failing to signal the move was coming.

Investor Jim Rogers, however, saw it all coming, and he wrote about it in his 2013 book "Street Smarts."

"I explained carefully and at length that it was coming and why," he said in an email to Business Insider. "I am still astonished they would ever have done something so foolish, but politicians throughout history have always done some amazingly foolish things."

Here's the excerpt from the book:

Some of Switzerland's most prestigious banks were established in the aftermath of the French Revolution, during the turmoil that gripped France under Napoleon. Bank people fled France and took their money over the mountains to Geneva, which was not very far away. You will see that some of the great old Swiss banks, the private banks, were founded in 1795, 1803, years like that. But by then Swiss banking traditions were already well established.

Switzerland has been an international center of finance since the end of the Renaissance. Known since then for its stability, sound economy, sound currency, and privacy in financial matters, it has long provided monetary refuge from the wealthy evading the consequences of political turmoil in Europe, from French nobility fleeing the guillotine to the Jews escaping Germany a century and a half later. It has, for the same reasons, in modern times, attracted the money of numerous despots, criminal organizations, and scoundrels.

Switzerland, traditionally, has been unconditional in its offer of bank secrecy. Of course, all banks are supposed to keep your affairs quiet. If you put your money in a bank in Chicago fifty years ago, you would have done so with the assumption that it was confidential. In America, as we have seen, that is no longer the case. The government can look into your bank account, your bedroom, your mail … anywhere it wants. And in much the way that our privacy has been taken away from us, the Swiss have recently surrendered some of theirs, succumbing to pressure from the United States. Bank secrecy in Switzerland is not as sacrosanct as it once was.

Nonetheless, the first thing people look for when seeking monetary refuge is safety. They want stability. They want the security of knowing they will get their money back, and that they will get back at least as much as they put there in the first place. That depends entirely on a sound currency. And that is something the Swiss franc has always offered. The question, now, is whether that is going to last.

I had opened my first Swiss bank account in 1970 in the face of coming turmoil in the currency markets. By the end of the decade, as the markets grew more volatile, people all over the world were trying to open Swiss accounts. And the same thing is happening today. The dollar is suspect, the euro is suspect, and again people are rushing to the franc. In 2011, the CHF (the Swiss franc) escalated to record highs against both the euro and the dollar, rising 43 percent against the euro in a year and a half as of August 2011.

It was a "massive overvaluation," according to the country's central bank, the Swiss National Bank (SNB). Under pressure from the country's exporters, the SNB announced that "the value of the franc is a threat to the economy" and said it was "prepared to purchase foreign exchange in unlimited quantities" in order to drive the price down.

A threat to the economy? It was the exporters who were doing the screaming, but everybody else in Switzerland was better-off. When the franc rises, everything the Swiss import goes down in price, whether it is cotton shirts, TVs, or cars. The standard of living for everybody goes up. Every citizen of Switzerland benefits from a stronger currency. Our dental technician down in Geneva is not calling up and moaning. She is happy. Everything she buys is cheaper. But the big exporters get on the phone and the government takes their call.

The franc went down 7 or 8 percent the day of the SNB announcement. Nobody, at least in the beginning, wanted to take on the central bank. But the bank's currency manipulation will turn out to be disastrous. One of two things is going to happen.

In the first scenario, the market will continue to buy Swiss francs, which means that the Swiss National Bank will just have to keep printing and printing and printing, and that will of course debase the currency. Now, there are major exporters in Switzerland who might benefit, but the largest industry in Switzerland, the single largest business, is finance. The economy rises or falls on the nation's ability to attract capital. And the reason people put their money there is their trust in the soundness of the currency- they not that their money will be there when they want it, and that it will not be worth significantly less than when they put it there in the first place.

But people will stop rushing to put their money into a country where the value of the currency is deliberately being driven down. After the Second World War and for the next thirty years, people took their money out of the United Kingdom because the currency plummeted. (Politicians blamed it on the gnomes of Zurich.) London ceased to be the world's reserve financial center because Britain's money was no good. Similarly, if you debase the franc, eventually nobody will want it. You will have eroded its value, not simply as a medium of exchange, but also a monetary refuge. The money will move to Singapore or Hong Kong, and the Swiss finance industry will wither up and disappear.

The alternative scenario is what happened in July 2010, the last time the Swiss tried to weaken their currency. They did so by buying up foreign currencies to hold against the franc-selling the franc to keep the price down. But the market just kept buying the francs, and the Swiss central bank, after quadrupling its foreign currency holdings, abandoned the effort. At that point, when the bank stopped selling it, the Swiss franc rose in value, all the currencies the Swiss had bought (and were now holding) declined in value, and the country lost $21 billion. In the end, the market had more money than the bank, and market forces inevitably prevailed.

In the late 1970s when everyone was rushing to the franc, the Swiss National Bank, to stem the tide, imposed negative interest rates on foreign depositors. The government levied a tax on anybody who bought the currency. It was their form of exchange controls back then. If you bought 100 Swiss francs, you wound up with 70 in your pocket. Today, with the rush on again, The Economist has described the Swiss currency as "an innocent bystander in a world where the eurozone's politicians have failed to sort out their sovereign-debt crisis, America's economic policy seems intent on spooking investors and the Japanese have intervened to hold down the value of the yen."

All of which is true, but I think the problem runs deeper than that. The Swiss for decades had a semi monopoly on finance. And as a result they have become less and less competent. The entire economy has been overprotected. The reason Swiss Air went bankrupt is because it never really had to compete. Any monopoly eventually destroys itself, and Switzerland, in predictable fashion, is corroding from within. As a result, other financial centers have been rising: London, Lichtenstein, Vienna, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong.

I still have those original Swiss francs that I bought in 1970, and since then the franc is up about 400 percent. Granted, it has been over forty years, but 400 percent is nothing to sneeze at. Plus I have been collecting interest. Had I kept the money in an American savings account, it would have gone down 80 percent against the franc.

Reprinted from "Street Smarts" Copyright © 2013 by Jim Rogers. Published by Crown Business, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.

NOW WATCH: We Did The Math: Should You Buy Or Rent In These Major Cities?

SEE ALSO: Jim Rogers Reveals The Key To Being A Successful Investor

Join the conversation about this story »

Personal branding and the future of talent

Tom Peters, an influential business management writer, called it back in 1997 when he introduced the term “personal branding” into the workforce lexicon: “The main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents, looking to have the best season you can imagine in your field, looking to do your best work and chalk up a remarkable track record, and looking to establish your own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh.”

In his groundbreaking and much lauded article “The Brand Called You,” Peters saw the future of talent and business clearly. Branding was everything, and it rose to even greater prominence in the late 1990s as the Internet allowed any business a competitive, visible, online presence. And Peters saw that with these advances, talent would also need to adopt personal branding efforts to make themselves recognizable across the countless communication platforms that would inevitably sprout.

Personal branding, as Peters conceived it, described an increasingly freelance workforce where talent not only began thinking of themselves in terms of marketable brands, they relied on the same business assets, resources, tools and tactics as large corporations to keep themselves relevant and identifiable to prospective buyers — in this case, employers.

What if staffing curators became personal brand consultants?

If Peters’ idea was considered transformative and novel when he envisioned it 17 years ago, the business conditions of the 21st century have made personal branding an imperative. That said, it’s still not easy for people to think of themselves as microcosmic companies that need to promote a brand in order to transact business. And with the changes in the nature of employment, and how talent is procured, the philosophies and structures of staffing are becoming equally as transformative. As we discuss in our eBook “The Future of Talent in the Contingent Workforce,” staffing professionals are taking more consultative approaches to engaging and facilitating talent. They are more actively curating processes, as experts in the field, to match talent to hiring managers — not just place them.

There are all sorts of books and columns these days that offer advice on how to achieve personal branding goals, however we believe there are tremendous opportunities for staffing curators to step up and help candidates develop their own promotional campaigns and personal brands, bridging the chasm that still exists between the buyers of freelance labor and the freelancers themselves.

Think of it: staffing curators know the needs of HR and hiring managers, they understand the technology and online marketplace platforms, they have become social media gurus, they know how to polish resumes and pitch candidates, and they are highly proficient employment brand ambassadors for the companies they support. Why couldn’t they elevate their sourcing and recruiting efforts by translating their expertise into a sort of public relations/image consulting role? In large part, it’s what many already do.

How staffing curators can help talent cultivate and market their personal brands

Love it or hate it, social networks aren’t going away in the foreseeable future. Business leaders know this, too. Companies fighting to stave off their competition and stay one step ahead are aggressively developing social media strategies that include training their workers to become brand evangelists across their own audiences. According to a study performed by the Altimeter Group, business leaders state that training for social media awareness and usage ranks among their top three priorities. And yet, only 38 percent of those companies are doing it. This coming year, most experts predict, a robust social media presence will separate the victors from the laggards.

Staffing professionals have understood this for a long time. To remain competitive in today’s evolving labor market, forward-thinking staffing companies have already invested in social media as sourcing tools and techniques to recruit the emerging generation of Millennial workers. Many organizations have found that traditional recruitment methods take too long, cost too much and produce too few qualified candidates.

Each day, sourcers and recruiters enter a digital space in which passive and active job seekers have already shared or collected massive amounts of information on a daily basis. In order to make candidates take note, staffing curators have become adept at making a company’s message stand out above the unrelenting traffic. They present job openings in creative ways to showcase the personality of the organizations they support, which in turn helps job seekers get a feel for whether a business culture will be a good fit.

They can do the same for talent. Staffing curators have the wisdom and experience to help candidates market themselves to companies just as effectively through social media. Not only can staffing professionals help talent develop personal brands, they know the types of employers who would find those brands most attractive. They also know how to educate talent on the best usage of social media, as well as the optimal networks to use for specific employers, industries and markets, based on traffic.

The rise of the freelance economy

One of the predominant themes in our eBook “The Future of Talent in the Contingent Workforce” is the undeniable rise of the freelance economy, along with the momentum it continues to gain. Today, contingent talent choose their freelance lifestyles. Temporary or contract-based work is not a matter of circumstance or situation, it’s a choice — a preferable career arrangement for highly skilled, tenured and credentialed supertemps. And the most recent industry statistics point to even greater numbers of freelancers and contractors penetrating the workforce of the near future.

The contingent workforce is not only a new permanent reality, it’s going to keep growing and maturing. With the entrance of Generations X, Y and Z into the workforce, we are seeing a renaissance of values that emphasize freedom and entrepreneurialism. Learn more about the novelty of full-time employment.

As skilled professionals turn to the freedoms of contingent work, throwing off the shackles of domineering corporate schedules and impositions, organizations are making tremendous efforts to find ways of working with them. These freelancers are in the driver’s seat now. If businesses want to succeed, they need to follow the talent. According to Elance, one of the world’s largest online marketplaces for freelancers, 1.2 new jobs are posted every 60 seconds.

In this evolution, staffing professionals can play a pivotal role in curating the relationship between freelancers and their clients. The contingent labor industry isn’t just creating new jobs — it’s creating opportunities. With the growing reliance on freelancers and the online marketplaces they use, elite staffing professionals will be needed to curate the process, ensuring compliance and connecting businesses to this exceptional contingent talent. And that, of course, means branding.

Staffing curators, with their intimate knowledge of companies, industries and skilled talent, are ideally positioned to help candidates brand themselves to buyers on sites like Elance. They have a mature perspective on how companies can discern the characteristics that make up inherent aspects of their overall employment brand. This insight can be translated into helping talent evolve their own brands through blogging, social media posts, personal websites, online presentations and more.

Putting a face to a brand

It’s no secret that the staffing industry buzz about video interviewing continues. Every day, new articles are written about it. RFPs sent to staffing providers by MSPs or hiring managers now include questions about it. YouTube channels keep cropping up, dedicated to this kind of personal branding. Now, the industry is witnessing the introduction of technology firms that specialize in recruiting videos.

According to the company videoBIO, their “biggest growth application is videoBIO Recruiter being used by hiring teams for recruiting, interviewing and screening new talent.”

As ERE noted: “Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting. Used together they create a better candidate experience and raise the likelihood of a better hire. They also enrich recruiters by giving them a much deeper perspective on a candidate, in less time, than has ever been possible.”

A video interview allows employers a rich, genuine and credible experience with a prospective candidate. For talent, video interviewing demonstrates that a company is modern, progressive and tech-savvy.

Staffing professionals know all the ins and outs of acing interviews. They have a prime opportunity to coach and prepare talent for presenting their personal brands in the most compelling ways when video recruiting comes into play. The fact is, video is a way of life now with smartphones, YouTube and even Twitter’s Vine. However, as blogging becomes micro-blogging and videos give way to six-second Vines, candidates must be able to convey the key points of their brands as quickly and effectively as possible. Recruitment experts at staffing firms know what their clients are looking for and how to help top talent parse down their brands to the essentials.

More importantly, video recruiting platforms are rapidly being integrated into major ATS and online marketplace systems. As superusers of these technologies, who better to educate talent on the systems than staffing curators?

Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark

Perhaps Tom Peters had not imagined the extent to which advances in technology and certain economic conditions would have shaped the need for personal branding, yet he clearly grasped the core necessity of it — one that’s undeniable today.

“The good news — and it is largely good news — is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills,” Peters wrote. “Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.”

And as staffing professionals expand their roles to curators in the hiring process, they could very well set the stage for how those brands will be developed and made remarkable to employers.

In a drive to commoditize everything, we live in a world where big data is all about the numbers and we’re all fighting for attention. Maybe it’s time to take a step back and consider a different approach.

What if we have it all wrong? What if it’s about smaller groups of people revelling in your brand, product or service and having that community drive the agenda? Scary sentiment right?

Not really. Huge brands (including iconic ones) have set that standard and not just in business but in entertainment, sports and virtually every walk of life with that notion in mind. Ask Apple, The Grateful Dead, The Toronto Maple Leafs and hundreds of others.

You know the brands. They all started off as smaller community based brands that turned into global iconic ones.

We’re in a new age where demographic lines are blurring and access to content is abundant but cutting through is more and more difficult.

When media buyers sit down to do their work, they hover over charts grouping people into different buckets. They, on behalf of their clients, buy various media (digital, print, broadcast etc.) based on who has the largest of something in each of those buckets depending on the needs of their clients. Media creators do the same.

These days, one of the least relevant buckets is this notion of ‘age’. There is no such thing as an “adult 25-54”. We’ve yet to meet a person called “25-54”. There is such a huge disparity in the interests between a 54 year-olds versus a 25 year-olds.

Their life experience is too different. You could use any sort of traditional demographic bucket and you’ll quickly surmise why it’s so crazy that we ever considered people in this way. It’s just lazy, and the fact that it hasn’t changed in decades is worrisome.

However, what might be true is that people relate to a specific theme or topic in a similar way based on their experience or knowledge around it.

For example, an eleven year-old who is a rabid baseball fan may know every story, transaction and statistic about his or her favourite ball club. Their knowledge is consistent with someone in a completely different demographic bucket. It’s actually that knowledge that is way more relevant than people based on age.

Blurring the lines even further these days is our technology and specifically the access and prowess we’ve gained around that technology. In the past the gate keepers of technology and communication platforms held the control and access to knowledge.

Since the Internet and the kinds of tools we use (smartphones, tablets) and platforms we hang out on (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat) that access is fairly ubiquitous. Grandparents can chat with their favourite grandchild and share all kinds of content now, and be really comfortable with the technology that enables that sharing.

So again, the kinds of content we’re all sharing has less to do with our age, but more to do with our interests and knowledge.

Because the Internet has become so democratized we have access to content at various levels of knowledge, expertise and language. You could get a tweet from a renowned astronomer Tyson Degrasse, a photo from your favourite baseball player like Jose Reyes on Instagram or video on YouTube from Phish’s Mike Gordon goofin’ around backstage.

You could too, decide to read blog posts at Scientific American and know that the content you are reading is appropriate for you. That’s ultimately how all of these people and brands connect with their audience. By providing content that is independent of demographics, but geared to their expertise, knowledge, or emotional state.

By creating quality content, not a whole bunch of content geared to large masses is going to help you connect in a more impactful way. When that content is emotional, is genuine, and relatable you enhance the chance that your audience will enjoy it and share it. The goal is to create content your audience enjoys and shares it with others.

That’s the key piece of advice for people who consider big data. Sometimes it is less about sheer tonnage and more about the impact your message has on your audience. If you figure out the magic ratio of quality content vs. quantity content you are likely fit to do really well.

The final piece is in this puzzle of understanding your audience is around search engine optimization. When you sit down to write a piece of content, you bring a great deal of thought, knowledge, and expertise to the project. Perhaps, you have a creative flare, or a specific way of using language. Whatever the case, you are probably writing for other people. Ultimately that’s who you want to connect with.

Next time you sit down to write some content understand your audience are real people, who are looking to connect with content that engages them on a visceral level. Content that evokes an emotion but matches their knowledge level around your theme or topic and that’s how you’ll cut through.

There’s no question that automated marketing systems are delivering results for brands. Implemented well, prospects receive persona-specific content dripped to them in reasonable intervals. If the content mix is right, prospects will be exposed to a host of messages, a few of which might stick, turning interest into demand.

This approach to demand-gen is also extremely measurable, and as such, it poses challenges for marketers who advocate a holistic approach to marketing, incorporating top-of-funnel tactics that are not as easily measured, such as social media and PR. It can be tempting to deploy more and more resource to the conversion engines the brand is building, and at the outset, improved results may affirm that decision.

Inbound lead flow is the fuel for those engines, however, and dialing back upper funnel activities will soon reduce the number of qualified leads, causing conversion numbers and revenues to dip.

The challenge is this: the higher up the funnel you go, the more difficult measurement is, leading some to lose sight of the importance of awareness building social media and public relations programs. For marketers who build social media and public relations strategies designed to support buyers journeys and fuel inbound attention, content marketing to capture and hold interest, and automation on the back end to nurture and convert leads, developing measures that justify upper funnel programs can be a bear.

• Early stage and persona-level qualification: Upper funnel, awareness-building activities have a profound impact on the generation of qualified leads and ultimately, the efficiency of the marketing engine. Over time, as your social teams build and refine audiences and brand traction grows, lead scores from the upper funnel should improve.
• Audience building: Contrary to popular belief, social media isn’t a wild and wooly universe. There is an inherent degree of organization, in which people and topics are woven together by relationships, keywords and hashtags. Brands that take the time to build persona-driven audiences deliberately can quickly find themselves seated at the table, amongst their core constituents. In addition to developing direct connections with key groups that have the potential to drive qualified leads, this audience also carries another powerful benefit: amplification.
• Amplification: When you’ve built a relevant audience for your brand messages, you’ve established an amplification network that will generate additional power for the brand. When you share content the audience values, you’ll see immediate benefits in terms of follow-on social sharing by your audience. However, these benefits are not ephemeral – they continue to accrue as your message ripples across the connected peer network owned by your audience. This amplification delivers two important outcomes to the brand:

1. Relevant traffic to and exposure for the message that was shared
2. New audience acquisition, via a credible introduction to the brand.

The strategic upper funnel is a crucial driver of success for a number of marketing initiatives, including demand gen, search and content marketing. Success in this quarter is predicated upon the brand building authentic and credible social presences and then fueling those presences with rich and useful content.

From a measurement standpoint, things become much clearer when the upper funnel is aligned with the brand’s larger goals. While the web analytics will never be perfect, marketers can measure the effectiveness and efficiency of their upper funnels by correlating outputs and audience growth with traffic (especially to target URLs), search rank, lead quality and on-page conversion rates. A heads-up organization will assess campaign success by looking up the funnel and reverse-engineering the results, and then applying that learning to future campaigns.

It’s become common knowledge that segmenting your contact base increases open rates and click-through rates. Both of those factors are high drivers of email’s overall ROI, which can directly be pointed to revenue. Taking a glance at your contact base, there is a high chance that you aren’t coming across two individual contacts that have the exact same qualities with each other. And more times than not, they’d probably receive different messages from you too. So why would you segment them into the same group?

A common question that we get from users at Contactually is how to segment your own contact base. What Buckets should you set up? How should you group your own lists? What factors should you consider when you are segmenting?

I wish I could tell you the perfect formula for this; unfortunately not every contact base is created equal and this “formula” is every changing.

Out of all of the marketing channels, email remains one the top channels with the highest ROI and marketers are forever trying to optimize this channel in order to get the most out of it. In 2015 segmentation is one of the top priorities in order to improve this ROI. Ultimately, to keep all of the things running, segmenting your contact base allows you be proactive with your relationships and then let’s you send the right messages at the right time. So, what are the best ways to set up this segmentation?

10 Fool-Proof Ways To Segment Your Contacts

1. Relationship

Who is this person? How did you meet? What is their relationship to you? Relationship based segmentation can come in handy for personal to small-midsize lists.

For example my buckets in Contactually are set up with Family/Friends, Digital Marketing DC, and Team Contactually. Or for relators maybe the segmentation is based on buyers, sellers, and other relators? The relationship segmentation is up to you and what your relationship is with that contact.

2. Company

Do most of your contacts work at a few different companies? Then this is probably the segmentation for you.

One example that comes to mind for this segmentation can be for consultants or agencies. If you have different companies you work with, you can then group the individual clients by their respective companies.

3. Region

Image via Litmus

Did you know that Thursdays at 8-9 a.m. is most optimal time to send emails? However, if your contacts are based all over the US or globally…that’s not the time they’ll receive your emails. Granted, there are many studies out their that have differing views and at the end of the day it’s based on what’s best for your audience. And organizing according to your contacts’ timezone is a good place to start.

Segmenting based on region can be extremely beneficial in ensuring your email arrives at the optimal time to guarantee higher open rates and click-through rates. Litmus tested this segmentation strategy when they were promoting their conference and saw a 68 percent open rate for the emails they sent out.

When obtaining your contact’s information ask what state/region/country/city they reside in or ask for their zip code for easy segmentation after.

4. Job Titles

What are each of the contact’s job titles? Are there similar ones that can be grouped together?

This segmentation might be more beneficial for marketers, business development folks, or people in sales, as knowing the titles of key stakeholders can help outline decisions for better messaging. For example a CEO, VP, Director, and Manager all have some type of influence or decision marking in if a deal closes or not. By segmenting these contacts with the dedicated message in how they will be affected can help progress the sale positively in your favor.

Tip: Seeing commonalities in these job titles with your segments can help with marketing practices. Are you noticing that your product is mainly attracting C-suite level individuals or just managers? If you are using some social paid ads try adding that segment with those job titles.

5. Social Media Networks

The content that is shared on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, is just as different as all of your contacts are. Everyone treats each of these platforms different areas and most likely chooses to share differing things on each.

If you notice that some of your contacts are very active on Facebook and others are active on Twitter, this is a creative case for segmentation. Would you tell the Facebook active group to follow you on Twitter? Or would you message the Twitter active group to like you on Facebook? Probably not, because that’s not where either hangs out.

A marketing best practice is to create individualized pieces of content dedicated to each of the social media platforms’ needs and you can repurpose some of that content depending on the social media segments you set up with your contact base.

6. Value

Segmenting by how much the contact or deal that this contact plays an effort in is worth is important to organize each within. The contacts that have a higher value will amount to more in your business, so they may have a higher priority and a different set of messages. This is not to say your other contacts who aren’t worth as much monetarily are less important, but maybe they require less touch points.

Warning: I read an article about how CVS segments their customer base and it’s very advanced for their large customer base. The article made an argument that value-based segmentation may be beneficial to you, but it may not fulfill your customer’s wishes in terms of messaging. This is just a small warning though because if you are providing a message of high quality and segmenting properly, you won’t need to worry about this. (Now, I just wish CVS would work on the length of their receipts… )

7. Deal Stage

Where is this contact in terms of your sales cycle? Is it just a first introduction or are they on the verge of closing?

Deal stage is an incredibly important segmentation for sales and tailoring the right messaging for each stage and each contact within can make or break the deal. You wouldn’t want to send the introductory message to a contact who is about to close. Or contacts at the middle of the funnel may need more content or guidance in order to move onto the next stage.

8. Timeframes

Time based segmentations can be anything from the date you met this contact, the time he/she came into your system, and/or the schedule in which these contacts will receive messages from you. According a MailChimp study, segmenting contacts by when they signed up for the list last improves the open rates by over 11 percent.

Let’s say you have a group of people who don’t require as many touch points, maybe they go into your “Once A Quarter” segmentation? And then you have another group that needs more contact and they’ll fall into your “Once A Week” category? This type of segmentation will allow you to stay on top of your appropriate follow ups and will make crossing off your to-dos easier since these messages are scheduled according to your groups.

9. Activity

Are these contacts “hot”? When was the last time that you spoke? Are they now “cold”?

This segmentation is similar to time frames, but it’s dependent on how much you’ve spoken to them. I have a couple buckets with old and cold contacts. These contacts are people who I haven’t spoken to in over a year (and I don’t plan on having contact with them unless the conversation is relevant), and/or we’ve had conversations recently, but our relationship is cold.

Segmenting contacts by activity can be efficient and is a simple grouping. Cold, warm, old, and/or new can be used to organize these individual to then send the corresponding follow ups to in order to keep your network up-to-date.

10. Interests

Marketers are usually charged with building personas out identifying who potential buyers would be. These personas not only encompass what the person does professionally, but also what his/her hobbies or interests are.

Maybe some of your contacts are into football? And some are into basketball? You then have the opportunity to provide them with a timely and sincere message that shows you are paying attention.

As I mentioned earlier, the way you segment your contact base is really up to you and what your contact data looks like. But, these segmentations are not set in stone. If you segment your contacts one way and it doesn’t work well in a month…it’s ok. Recognize that these segmentations are living breathing things that can morph into other groupings in order to best optimize for your business and for your audience.

One of the biggest issues we see in the brands who are struggling with content marketing, no – in the brands who are struggling with marketing overall – is culture.

Marketing at many B2B brands emerged out of the sales team’s need for more leads. Marketing generally started in the field, hosting events, hanging logos and grabbing business cards.

In B2C, marketers started in the traditional advertising side of the house where the game was all about reach and frequency. But again, the goal was about getting the brand message out to the target audience – with the logo attached.

The biggest mistake marketers make: they make the message all about themselves. When I started my own content marketing journey, I remember hearing the challenge almost every single day, “but how much more stuff will this help us sell.”

The simple fact is that the best way to sell more stuff is to help your target audience better than anyone else. And the worst way to try and reach your target audience in today’s digital, consumer-led world is to try and sell yourself directly. Ads are what we try to avoid.

But answer the buyers’ questions, and you may earn the right to tell her more about yourself (your brand, products, and services.) Creating a company that focuses on helping over selling? Now that is a question of marketing culture! I have covered company culture before, but here we are going to talk about the main job of the CMO: building a customer-focused culture of content.

What Is A Culture of Content?

And so effective marketing simply becomes the art of providing the best answers to your buyers questions. And that is a content problem.

The most misunderstood aspect of how to use content to drive real business value is what I call a culture of content. Now, apparently there’s a book being written about it. But Rebecca Lieb and the folks at Altimeter have been talking about this for quite some time. In their Content Marketing Maturity Model, from 2012, they talk about content as the new marketing equation.

Almost 3 years ago, their content marketing maturity model listed 5 phases of content marketing maturity. While the 5th: monetizing content (RedBull) may be out of reach for some brands, they identified culture of content as a more attainable stage for most brands.

Late last year, Altimeter published an updated report on how to foster a culture of content, which I was honored to contribute to. IN the report, Rebecca points to education, executive buy-in and employee advocacy as some of the key components of a culture of content.

Shifting Away From A Culture of Selling

Most businesses think that the best way to drive new sales is to talk about themselves. They think that if they are not outright asking for new business that they won’t get it.

This is a business-centric view. In today’s world, we tune out promotional messages. We can see in an instant which content is trying to sell us vs. help us or entertain us. Businesses need to (get) the brand out of their content and make the customer the hero of the stories they tell. They need to exhibit empathy in a real and human and emotional way.

One of the most effective ways to use content to drive traffic that many businesses forget is to simply answer your customers’ most basic questions. If you sell widgets, the first question you should answer with your content is “what are widgets?” Then go on to answer “How can widgets help a business like mine?” Once you’ve done that regularly, you can go on to answer why your widgets are best.

There is no magic pill for effective content to drive traffic. The best businesses have a documented strategy for publishing high quality content that helps their audience. They put someone in charge to drive that strategy. And they publish on a consistent basis. Businesses that publish audience-focused content more than once per day are many times more effective than those that publish less frequently. This requires a culture of content.

How can brands establish a “Culture of content?”

The best way to build a “culture of content” is to help your employees across the entire business understand your brand’s higher purpose.

Companies that do this well make sure their ecosystem understands the larger world they operate in and how they fit into that world. Then they activate their employees to tell authentic and personal stories about how they contribute.

As a content marketer, I found myself more often in the role of teacher and coach. Teaching others how to write, how to share on social media, and how to build their personal brands.

It takes executives who embody this spirit – living and breathing the notion that your brand is more than what you sell.

The job of creating and defining a culture of content starts with the CMO. But you can’t wait around for her. It is also your job, each and every day. What content have you produced today that helps a potential customer? Have you coached any executives on how to turn their presentations into slideshares and blog posts? Have you encouraged any of your thought leaders to start contributing more often?

It’s time to get started . . .

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

“In digital marketing, if you stop learning you die. Period.” Jay Baer, Convince & Convert.

Jay’s observation is…dead true. In an industry that evolves so fast, it’s easy to get left behind. By regularly reading and learning from the best blogs in the business, you’ll quickly find new ways to develop both professionally and personally – putting yourself on the next step in the career ladder.

This is by no means an extensive list, but take a look at some of our top blogging picks for 2015 (and let us know what you think).

Shutterstock Blog

Feel like getting your creative juices flowing in 2015? Visual content will be a growing medium in any B2B Marketers toolkit in 2015, just look at how fast Instagram moved in 2014 – over 300 MILLION active users, overtaking Twitter by a long run.

Take inspiration from Shutterstock’s blog where they uniquely combine photography, design and marketing in these eye-pleasing entries of high-quality articles.

Bryan Kramer Blog

If your goals for the year revolve around making your work and your brand more human (or even becoming a little more ‘human’ yourself…) then this is the blog to bookmark.

70% of buyers rate ‘how’ you engage with them as having more impact than the product sold, as a result, #H2H (Human to Human) is a marketing movement that is ringing true with B2B Marketers today. Keep an eye on the CEO of Purematter’s blog in 2015 – Bryan is leading the way with transformative marketing, and is a great inspiration challenging the status quo for B2B Marketers everywhere.

Wistia Blog

If your goals in 2015 are to get more creative with media, take a look at Wistia’s blog. They’ll show you how to create and edit high-quality videos on a budget and using a smart phone. And when 52% of marketers name video as the content type with the best ROI, it’ll put you in your managers ‘good books’ too!

MOZ

If your career and development goals for 2015 are SEO based, then MOZ will help you get there! Take a look at their extensive beginners guide or dive even deeper with Whiteboard Friday, a weekly video series covering the latest SEO news and discussions with Rand and the team.

99U

Looking to develop your leadership and marketing skills this year? Perhaps you’re ready to take the step up in your career?

Imagine if TED talks dealt just with marketing, design and leadership – awesome right? Behance brings together a whole mixture of podcasts, music playlists, blogs and quizzes. Take a look at their extensive mix of media that will keep you engaged and learning for hours.

This Advertising Life

For when you need that little pick me up, take a peek at This Advertising Life and revel in the GIF’s of life as a modern marketer.

Ready to become the Ultimate B2B Marketer this year? Download Your Go-To Guide and make 2015 your best year yet.

What blogs are you getting stuck into in 2015? Tweet us @leadforensics #TakeTheLead

According to Bain & Company, B2B sales executives have seen a tremendous disruption in recent years – and there’s every reason to believe the trend will continue.

In most B2B markets the buying process has changed dramatically. At the center of change is the fact that buyers have access to more and better information about you and your competitors then ever before.

As the Bain points out: “Many buyers will have researched a supplier, queried some of its customers and screened the supplier out of consideration before the supplier’s rep has an opportunity to contact the prospective buyer.

They go on to point out – “The traditional role of the sales rep identifying needs and communicating product features is waning, and the ranks of quota-carrying reps without relevant expertise in an industry, function or offering will disappear.” Companies want sales reps that can function as trusted advisors who can provide fresh insights and new ideas for solving business problems. There is a decreasing need for sales reps that function strictly as product facilitators.

So how ready are most companies to respond to this new state-of-affairs? Well, unfortunately this is where the bad news starts to unfold. According to Bain, few companies are prepared for the structural changes taking place. They surveyed 550 B2B sales executives – here are the results:

• 60% said their companies do not consistently do a good job of aligning offers to target customer segments.
• Only 40% said their sales reps have a strong understanding of their company’s differentiation.
• Only 35% said their marketing and sales organizations have strong operational alignment.
• Almost one-third said the majority of their reps do not have the requisite skills.
• Three-quarters have made significant investments in technology—but less than a third have realized marked improvements in sales effectiveness from those investments.

Bain argues that companies must take a fundamentally new approach to Sales – and quickly.

From our perspective Bain’s sense of urgency is well taken. In addition, for many companies the change is not about a little tweak here and a little fine-tuning there. The change will more than simply doing a better job doing what you are doing; it will be about doing something different. So what are some things a company can do right now to do a better job getting ready for 2015?

• Selection. A first step would be to take a fresh look at the selection profile for hiring new sales reps. If customers want trusted advisors rather than product facilitators, then hire sales reps with a different skill profile that would include skills related to executing a consultative sale including industry, customer segment, and technical knowledge. A correlated thought is to remember that bigger and better onboard training is a great next step.

• New product launches. A second area of focus for getting starting would be to up your game when it comes to the sales training associated with new product launches. This is an excellent case in point for trying out ideas for better alignment between Marketing and Sales.

• Technical personnel. Many companies have a cadre of engineers and technical staff who have extensive expertise for providing the insights and ideas the customs are asking for. The challenge is to provide these people with the sales skills required to get actively and effectively engaged in the sales process. In many cases the knowledge customers are demanding is simply not going to be acquired by the sales people; it is just an unreasonable demand. So leverage the power of a team sale versus staying with the lone-wolf model.

In any period of disruption new winners and losers emerge. The trap is changing too little – too late.

Tell us a little bit about your business?

We make Countfire, an app that automates the counting of symbols from PDF construction drawings / blueprints.

In order to cost / quote projects, construction companies need to quantify or “take off” symbols from drawings and this process is often still done by hand. Countfire reduces the time spent on this task from weeks to days and in some cases hours, while also increasing accuracy.

What did you use before Close.io? Why did you decide to switch?

Pipedrive. Their solution was good for us in the early days because it was inexpensive and gave us some organisation to our leads and sales tasks. We found however that as a web only based product, it could be a little slow for us to use sometimes.

We also saw a lot of duplicated contact information when BCC’ing outgoing sales emails into Pipedrive which was a major catalyst for us looking for different solution.  

What were some of the sales challenges before Close.io?

Honestly? Learning how to actually do sales. I’m a geek that has a construction industry background and my co-founder Aidan comes from 15 years of coding & development so neither of us really had the first clue about how to approach sales.

Beyond actually getting to grips with the process, we found dealing with the number of leads we had and their associated contact information problematic. We also did a lot of tasks, like sending cold emails, on a very individual basis and our approach to sales was slow and not very repeatable as a result.

How did Close.io help you guys overcome them?

There are two parts to this. The first is that we set ourselves up as a sponge of information for anything close.io related. We read your book, watched videos, participated in webinars and sought out guest posts. You guys obviously use all this content as a sales machine for your own product but the content you produce has been a fantastic starting point for understanding sales and has really helped us.

The second part is the close.io product itself. It deals with contact information in a much cleaner way than our previous solution and we spend almost no time on data entry. Close.io has a number of killer features that have helped us build a repeatable sales process, while also not being bloated with tons of features that distract and detract from the goal we actually care about—making sales!

What are the top 5 Close.io features for you and how do you use them?

1. IMAP email integration
   This one is the “major win” feature over our previous solution. Any emails related to a contact are automatically imported into close.io and the integration works flawlessly.
   

2. Email templates
   Another big feature for us. We spent some time upfront and created a number of template emails for the different requirements our sales process had. Now, instead of writing an email from scratch or searching through previous sent emails in the hope of finding something copy and paste worthy, we have a basic structure for each email at our fingertips that we can easily customise if required.
   

3. Smart views
   We use smart views to slice leads into different batches that need attention. Views like “Never contacted”, “Follow up today” and “Needs demo” allow us to segment leads with a single click.
   

4. Bulk emailing
   Whereas previously we would write and send individual emails, we now put close.io’s bulk emailing functionality to good use. We use it conjunction with smart views and email templates meaning we can simply click on a smart view and then bulk email a pre-defined template to that whole segment. It really allows us to ramp up our process.
   

5. Custom fields
   Close.io gives us a ton of flexibility with custom fields. We can add all sorts of metadata to leads that is relevant to our business and then use smart views to slice those leads at a later date.
   

6. Bonus feature!—being able to track the value of an opportunity on a monthly, annual or one-time basis. This wasn’t something we could do with our previous solution and as we do monthly, annual and one-time sales, having the flexibility to properly track the potential revenue from our opportunities is great.
   

What’s the ROI that you have seen using Close.io?

Rain. After spending the time to get our templates, smart views and custom fields set up right, our sales process is an order of magnitude more focused and productive—the result has been more qualified leads, more opportunities and ultimately more happy customers using Countfire.

Company website: http://www.rapidtender.com

App website: http://www.countfire.com

Will Jennings, Managing Director

Research has shown that 20% of salespeople generate 60% of sales revenues.

As we start a New Year, what can be done to change that? How can sales organizations increase that number to help the other 80% close more deals?

To find out, we went straight to some of the biggest names in the sales industry.

Partnering with Top Sales World, we asked them to share their top tips to gain competitive advantage – and close more deals – in 2015. Here’s a snapshot of what they said:

“Your ability to respond quicker than your competitors and to answer the questions that move the buying decision to close are how deals are won!”

Barb Giamanco, Social Centered Selling, @barbaragiamanco

“Strive for maximum impact. Make sure that every single interaction with your prospects and clients yields the best possible outcome.”

Jill Konrath, Sales Acceleration Strategist, @JillKonrath

“Make sure that you communicate the value that has been delivered to all the initial and current stakeholders. Doing this creates the entry point for new business.”

Tamara Schenk, Research Director, MHI Research Institute, @tamaraschenk

 “My experience is that you cannot have everything you want, but you can have anything you really want – you just have to know what it is, and then be prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to bring about its happening.”

Jonathan Farrington, CEO, Top Sales World, @TopSalesWorld

“Make sure your opportunities are completely qualified before you quote, propose or demo.”

Dave Kurlan, Objective Management Group, @KurlanAssoc

“Sales coaching is the #1 competency for increasing the performance of the sales force.”

Linda Richardson, Founder, Richardson, @LindaR2015

“The biggest mistake employers make is hiring from need rather than choice.”

Keith Rosen, CEO, Profit Builders, @KeithRosen

“Our relationships are actually what seal deals—and keep our sales pipelines full of hot leads.”

Joanne Black, Referral Sales, @ReferralSales

 “The success plan for the salesperson is a prerequisite for success.”

Joe Galvin, Chief Research Officer, MHI Research Institute, @JoeGalvin

 “The sales team needs to know that big deals are special. Don’t over resource them at the end. Do it at the start and throughout the process.”

Matt Sharrers, Partner, Sales Benchmark Index (SBI), @mattsharrers

To read more, you can download the complete eBook: 10 Ways to Gain Competitive Edge in 2015.

This blog post originally appeared here.

Maximize sales results by starting with the right B2B marketing strategies

We have written about the importance of a b2b marketing strategies that aligns with your target prospect’s triggers and goals while leveraging that content with marketing automation that implements your best sales representative’s sales process to create a lead generation engine for your business. This proven approach combines the best of Inbound Marketing and adapts to the changing buyer behavior. Prospects are using the web to perform the majority of their product research online, so naturally your website is one of your most important marketing investments.

Businesses continually struggle with where to invest their marketing funds. It is always hard to understand which marketing activities generate the best results for your business. This infographic shows the best and the worst marketing channels for B2B businesses. I found it very interesting that the channels that generate the most leads, seldom result in the best conversion rates into deals.

The conclusion of the B2B Sales Benchmark study is to invest in your website, employee and customer referrals and social media for the best conversion rates from the opportunities generated by these activities into deals.

Marketing automation with closed loop analytics from sales enabled this analysis. When Bristol Strategy develops an Inbound Marketing strategy and plan for a client, we always work with them to establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Visitors to Leads, Leads to Opportunities and Opportunities to Deals (and in some cases, one or more additional levels or granularity). With these goals in place, we can measure how we are doing as we execute their Inbound Marketing strategy.

This report claims a Lead to Opportunity conversion rate of 31.3% and an Opportunity to Deal conversion rate of 5% from B2B business websites. This statistic underscores the importance of a website, and the content the site delivers. The worst performance from lead to opportunity conversion rates is from Events, Lead Lists and Email Campaigns with conversion rates in the single digits. Another surprise was that even though Webinars had a 17.8% Lead to Opportunity conversion rate, a much lower percentage converted into deals (2.5%).

Another surprise was the ratio of Closed-Won versus Closed-Lost from each channel. The worst performers are Events (7.6%) and Lead List (15.5%). The best rates come from Employee & Customer Referrals (68.7%), Facebook, Twitter and other Social (68.6%) and Website (61.4%). The higher the percentage ratio, the more of the opportunities are won by the business.

This report demonstrates the importance of a company’s website and social strategy to the overall effectiveness of their marketing and sales efforts.

If you are interested in learning how to create a content strategy for your website that will increase your conversion rates from visitors to leads to deals, please download the content strategy data sheet.

Whether you like it or not, today’s buyer has evolved. At the center of their evolution is the Internet, and all the information that is now freely available out there about you and your company. The next trend that helped shape how people buy today is social media, where buyers build relationships, glean information about their industry and listen carefully to what the experts and thought leaders have to say.

What better way to understand the impact of these trends on Sales and Marketing professionals than to chat with social selling evangelist and expert Jill Rowley?

After 6 years in management consulting and 13 years in software sales, her passion for elevating the Sales profession led her to work on enabling companies to sell in the social media age.

I asked her a few questions and here is what she had to say:

How can sales people adapt to the modern buyer?

“Sales has been and always will be about relationships. It’s important in sales to be where your buyer is. If your buyer is at a conference – be there. If your buyer is at a networking dinner – be there. If your buyer is on the phone or on email – be there.

Your buyers are on social, which means that your should be too in order to be relevant and build a good relationship. Social is a channel you can leverage, not only to learn more about your buyers but to engage with them.”

What is the role of content in social selling?

“The role of content in social selling is twofold. First, as a sales rep the content that the marketing department creates helps educate me so I can better understand the buyer’s world, so I can speak their language. For example, if I’m selling to developers, but don’t know the difference between Ruby and Python, I’m not relevant or credible to them.

Second, sharing content helps you cut through the clutter. It helps you be noticed, be relevant, be helpful, and add value. As a sales rep, sharing the content that helps a buyer makes me more visible and more relevant.”

What is the most important metric in social selling?

“The rubber meets the road with revenue. We’re not doing social for social’s sake. The goal is to build pipeline and drive revenue.”

This was just the start of our conversation with Jill, and there is plenty more that we want to chat with her about. We will resume the discussion where we left off in our upcoming webinar: How Social Selling and Content Work Together.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How to brand your Salespeople as industry experts.
• How to connect with content to warm up to your coldest leads.
• How to measure the ROI of your social selling efforts.

Register today to save your spot!

Originally published on Uberflip’s Hub.

I must say that we as marketers have improved over the past several years in the analytics arena. Four or five years ago, it wasn’t surprising to talk to marketers who literally weren’t tracking anything. Today, all of us are tracking results in some form or fashion. In fact, we have more tools for tracking results than we know what to do with. There are web analytics, predictive analytics, business analytics, business intelligence (BI) tools….just to name a few. I dare say that many of us have gone from one extreme to the other, from too few metrics to too many.

How can you have too many metrics, you might ask? The question shouldn’t really be about the quantity but about the quality of our metrics. Many of us use the acronym KPIs today, standing for Key Performance Indicators, and that’s exactly what your analytics should reflect:

• Key – Metrics should add value to the business
• Performance – Metrics should tell you if your program is running above, below or on par with current or past benchmarks
• Indicators – Metrics should provide a lens as to the condition or direction or your marketing efforts

Is what you’re measuring today truly accomplishing these things? Do opens and clicks of email messages really add any value and reflect how effective your marketing efforts are? While at a very detailed level those metrics are still important, what you really want to measure is how well your marketing efforts are Engaging your prospect universe, Nurturing those who have engaged, and Converting your prospects into actual buyers.

Engagement-
For engagement metrics you’ll want to look at KPIs that show the volume and quality of prospect names you have collected as a result of your marketing efforts. Here are a few examples to consider:

• Net new names by lead source (PPC, outbound email, organic web)
• Cost by source vs. net new names by source
• Net new names by offer

Nurture-
Nurture metrics should be focused on how well your efforts are pushing prospects through the buying process. For example:

• Conversion rates from one lead stage to another
• Number of days it takes to move prospects from initial engagement to a sales opportunity

The results of these KPIs will tell you if your leads are getting stalled somewhere.

Conversion-
And finally, your conversion metrics should reflect your Return on Investment (ROI) as well as the health of your sales pipeline. Some examples:

• ROI of each content offer
• ROI of each engagement channel
• Value of all current sales opportunities

To summarize, analytics that matter are much more than numbers. Simply pulling numbers into a dashboard doesn’t constitute tracking or understanding results. Are those numbers useful? Yes. However, are they meaningful to the business? That is what matters.

Long live the king! While it may be a tired and rundown analogy, content is still the key influencer of what drives authority online. By developing strong, valuable content you are providing something that users, and subsequently search engines, have a need for and will naturally gravitate towards.

The problem for most brands is creating relevant content that gets exposure. Digital content is a competitive space with many brands now devoting substantial resources to marketing strategy in an effort to increase visibility. One of the most effective ways to improve your brand’s exposure and influence through content is to provide value through education. The best brands in the space will be those that capitalize on optimizing and amplifying great content users are searching for.

Why Education Drives Authority

Sharing knowledge across your digital channels is an excellent way to establish your brand as a thought leader. Asking for nothing in return may seen like a waste of resources and a bad business strategy, but in the long run it can help develop strong relationships, build brand advocacy, and drive sales.

Giving content away for free creates leadership by removing barriers to entry and increasing exposure. By increasing accessibility, more users will read your content and share within their personal networks. This circular pattern can help drive the right audience to your site and recruit returning visitors by continuing to offer relevant and valuable information. Nurture these relationships into leads by strategically endorsing your business offerings as a compliment and solution to the problems your content identifies. The key to generating sales from content is to be unobtrusive and keep branded and sales-focused content to a minimum, around 20 percent.

Creating Valuable Content

Driving authority and sales through content starts by generating strong content that offers value and engages users. When specific pain points. Isolate your audience segments then create a plan to reach each group and identify segments with higher engagement and conversion rates.

Maintain a regular schedule for producing content as users will develop expectations for your timing and will abandon their relationship with your brand if consistency in not delivered. Attract visitors to your content by developing a strategy that keeps the needs and interests of your audience top of mind. Niche focused content can create more relevant and compelling interactions from readers by targeting relevant, cutting edge, and occasionally disruptive to be seen as a resource and thought leader within your industry. Always include links to sources referenced within your content to increase credibility. Readers want to be able to validate your claims and search engines will reward your brand in search rankings for including sources. To further increase visibility in search, optimize all content for the keywords and phrases your audience segments are searching for.

Leveraging Content Mediums

As you identify the behaviors and interests of your audience segments you will find that different groups engage with different types of content. Diversify how you deliver education by leveraging a variety of content mediums. Test and measure which content platforms results in the highest engagement and conversions within individual audience segments. Balance how you deliver content by utilizing some of the different content mediums listed below.

• Blogs/Website Content
• Case Studies/Original Data
• White Papers/Industry Reports
• Slideshare/Presentations
• Video
• Images
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Social Conversations
• User-Generated

Sharing Content

Increase the reach and engagement of your content by sharing it across the web. Promote your own content in social media and amplify through all you brand’s channels. Track what content performs best across different platforms and adjust to attract more visitors. Encourage users to share your content and embed social share icons within your content to remove additional barriers to entry. The more your content is organically shared through social and across the web, the more exposure and authority your brand will generate online.

Syndicating content to publications with influence in your industry can help compliment your owned content and draw more users to your site. By publishing your content through external sources, you can establish your brand as a thought leader and improve visibility in search through link building.

Paid media is another effective way to position your content in front of the right audience. Promoting your content allows you to specify targeting and measure data to determine the success generated by individual campaigns.

Conclusion

Digital authority can only be earned through quality content, constant exposure, and access to the proper resources. Marketers will get out what they put in when trying to drive leads through content development. Strategize to stay consistent and relevant to the needs of individual audience segments, and focus on creating content that is worth talking about.

Headlines change lives. Think I’m being dramatic? Get this. You could be sitting on top of the most interesting news in the world and the world will pass it by if your press release has a boring headline.

Check out the difference between these two headlines:

#1 A Magnificent New Treatment is Being Used in Medicine for some Awesome Things!

#2 Mayo Clinic Doctors Pioneer First Cancer Cure

Whoa! Curing cancer is a big deal, but if you hide it behind headline number one, journalists may not even realize what they’re reading. The cancer cure will stay hidden and millions of people could suffer!

Okay, maybe the results of your press releases aren’t quite that dramatic, but you get my point. A headline should succinctly tell a journalist what they’re about to read. Further, it should pique his or her interest and make them want to read more. Here are some tips for writing headlines for real journalists:

1.) Keep it Short – Headlines should convey your central message within 60-80 characters. If you find you can’t do that, then you haven’t refined your hook enough yet. Tip: Try using strong verbs, like the word “pioneer” in example #2 above.

2.) Be Specific – “2015 Best Year Yet” is insanely general. The best year for what? Why was it the best year? Sure, this title may catch a journalist’s eye simply because they wonder what they heck you’re talking about, but it isn’t a great press release title.

3.) Avoid Braggadocio – Words like “Awesome” and “Magnificent” in example #1 above add nothing to the press release. In fact, they make it look more like a sales pitch. Stick to the facts, ma’am. (Or sir.)

4.) Be Interesting – “Rex Corp Hires New CEO” isn’t very interesting. “Rex Corp promotes Janitor to CEO” is extremely interesting. Pinpoint the most interesting aspect of your news item and highlight it in your press release headline.

5.) Use Interesting Data – Think of “Medford Humane Society Leads Region in Cat Rescue” vs. “Medford Humane Society Rescued a Record 5,423 Cats This Year.” Data, numbers, records, and percentages catch a journalist’s eye. Include data in your press releases when you can.

6.) Avoid Jargon – What does “10 KPWs Decimate Local Podapoda Crop #1,089.” even mean? Remember, you’re writing for a layperson who may have no knowledge of your industry, so keep it accessible. Try: “Mutant Insects Destroy 50% of Local Organic Food Supply.”

7.) Send it to the Right Journalist – But if your news is intended for a specific industry, right your headline with an eye to the right journalist. “New Upgrade Makes Kronobots 50% Faster” may be earth-shattering news in your tiny niche Kronobot industry. But the editor of your local newspaper will likely have no clue what you’re talking about and trash your press release. Make sure you send niche news to niche journalists.

Follow these tips and your big news won’t end up at the bottom of the pile!