Rnordman

Apple and Samsung are the McCoys and Hatfields of the tech industry—they seem to hate each other. Besides suing each other over patent rights, each is trying provide the “better user experience” on a mobile device. That’s the nature of competition. However, you should never let intense competition get in the way of mutual interest. Which is why Apple recently awarded a major contract to manufacture chips for its iPhone and iPad product lines to Global Foundries—whose strategic partner is none other than Samsung.

This is also why despite the legendary Mac vs PC ads that posited a Bill Gates look-alike as an unhip, clueless geek, Microsoft continued to supply a Mac version of its Office Suite software. And that the two “enemies” have cooperated in licensing mobile operating system features and patents.

As The Wall Street Journal Small Business Report notes, sometimes a tough competitor can be a good partner. The key is mutual self-interest to create a situation in which both partners win. As noted by the Harvard Business Review, collaboration fails when one stakeholder assumes success can only come at the expense of the other stakeholder. In contrast, co-opetition—a term coined in 1996 in the book of the same name—succeeds when there is a congruence of interests that mutually benefits collaborators, even when they compete in other spheres.

You’ve Got Mail

One example is the co-opetition between the United States Post Office and United Parcel Service. The strength of the Post Office is coverage of “the last mile” to a recipient’s door. UPS has a national distribution system that provides superior logistics. Just as it is more economical for UPS to pick up a package from a warehouse and ship it across its delivery network, it is more economical for the Post Office to deliver that package to its final destination. In addition, customers of participating retailers can conveniently return UPS delivered merchandise by dropping it off at a Post Office mailbox. The two package delivery competitors get to share higher profits by avoiding higher costs of operation they otherwise would have incurred had they operated separately. And packages are shipped faster, providing higher value to both the shipper and the recipient.

Milking It

Brian Wiedemann, owner of George Bowers Grocery in Staunton, Virginia, works with two other local businesses to acquire organic milk for customers. “We work with our local gelato shop and a natural foods grocer to meet the purchase and delivery minimums required for a small-scale dairy farm. Distribution is one of the trickiest parts of small-scale agriculture, so this group purchase allows our respective businesses to grow while also serving our customers.”

Growth of the Amazon Jungle

Rightly or wrongly, Amazon is widely viewed as the Internet juggernaut responsible for the decline if not demise of small businesses that can’t compete with its size and scope. Yet Amazon’s Marketplace provides these very same small competitors with a widely regarded eCommerce portal in return for a small percentage cut of their online sales.

This not only provides a revenue stream for Amazon that has consistently grown over the years, but contributes further profitability by allowing it to amortize software development and other operating expenses over a greater number of items.

These small businesses can’t compete directly with a giant company like Amazon, but by cooperating can improve their profits and long-term sustainability. Moreover, the ultimate winners are consumers who get greater choices and more competitive pricing.

If your business relies on email campaigns and newsletters for lead generation, then you know how important it is that your email recipients actually open your email and see your offer. How else will you turn those leads into new or repeat customers?

That’s why it’s so important to improve your email open rate and click through rates by testing various parts of your email through split testing, also known as A/B testing. The truth is, most businesses should spend a lot more time testing their email marketing campaigns which means you can stand out from the crowd by being one of the companies that does.

You’re probably thinking “A/B testing my email campaigns is hard!” or you might be wondering “What do I even test?”. Let’s take a closer look at the things you can test in your email campaign that will result in more qualified leads.

Email A/B testing, it’s simply a process where you test two versions of an email by sending version A out to a randomly selected part of your audience and version B out to a second randomly selected part of your audience. Once you determine which version performed better, you then send the better performing email to the remaining part of your email list. The goal is to determine what elements of an email need to change in order to generate better results.

First decide what to test in an email split test

Before you even create an A/B split test, you need to first decide what you want to test. Anything goes when it comes to testing email campaigns. If you are just starting out, try to focus your tests around areas you consider important and which are more likely to have a big impact on conversion rate. And remember, each test will have a different effect on different parts of your conversion process.

To give you an idea of what you can test, here are a few things you can experiment with.

** Note: There are certain do’s and don’ts with A/B testing. See best practices at end of this article.

Test Email subject line

Your email subject line is one of the most important parts of your email. It’s the first thing your reader sees in their in box and changing just one word can increase open rates and conversion rates dramatically. Here are but a few examples of things you can test in your email subject line.

· Test personalization (Example: “Hi Joe” vs. “Mr. Jones”)

· Test subject line purely on length (Example; less than 50 characters or more than 50 characters)

· Test different wording

Test the content within the body of your email.

Once you get your subscriber to open your email, you want them to do some desired action like click on your offer or sign up for something, so you should also test different content within the body of the email. There are many things you could test, so start off by testing a few things that you think will resonate with your audience the best. Here are but a few things you can test:
· CTA: Do more people click on a call to action button that says “Buy Now!” vs. an image that shows the Plans & Pricing?

· The specific offer: Which offer gets more click on the buy button?( e.g. “save 15%” vs. “get free shipping”)

· Testimonials: Do testimonials generate more trust and therefore more leads?

· Closing text: what effect does changing this have on converting prospects?

Email Design

Don’t forget to test certain design elements of your email to see if it improves your click through rate or goal of the email. Some design elements you can test include:

· HTML or TEXT: Do text emails get better results than sending an HTML email?

· Layout of your message: What happens if you change the layout from a single column vs. two columns?

· Images: Are subscribers more likely to click a linked image or linked text?

· Bolding: Does bolding certain text affect conversion?

Other things you can test

Don’t limit yourself to just testing which email subject lines to use or which copy converts better. Also consider:
Timing: Sometimes just changing the frequency or the day and time you send your email can have a dramatic effect on click through rates and conversion rates. For example, your audience might consist largely of VP’s and directors with desk jobs who check email early on weekday’s vs checking in the evening or on the weekends.

Frequency: Studies have shown that you can significantly impact the click-through rates and unsubscribe rates by simply increasing or decreasing the amount of email you send.

Test the “From Name”: Are your prospects more likely to open your email if the “from” name is an actual person or simply your company name?

Best Practices for testing email campaigns

When testing, there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel: here are some proven best practices to follow when testing your email campaigns.

· Test simultaneously: Always start and end you’re A/B tests at the same time. This will reduce the chance your results will be skewed by time-based factors.

· Test large samples if possible: You’ll get more statistically significant results using a list of 1,000 subscribers than you will from a list of 100 subscribers.

· Use available tools: For quicker and easier testing, use the testing tools provided by your email marketing service provider rather than trying to cobble everything together yourself.

· Test often: Your audience is dynamic so It’s best to continually test and improve your email campaigns to discover new ways to improve your conversion rates

· Only test one variable at a time: You might be tempted to test more than one element at a time but it is important to TEST ONLY one thing at a time and to maintain a CONTROL GROUP to truly understand if those changes actually affect response rates.

Making time to test

Split testing your email marketing campaigns demands patience and time but higher response rates will make it all worthwhile. Just make sure to keep detailed records about your tests so you can better understand what worked and what did not. Among other things, you should keep track are the following:

· The name and date of the email campaign

· Target list details: the number of recipients, what segment of your list (if any), etc.

· Response rates: who responded to what email.

Keeping track of all this can be done using something as simple as a spreadsheet, or as intricate as an email marketing management tool such as Hubspot.com or Salesforce.com. If you’re a busy executive or manager than consider handing this job off to a personal assistant or making it part of the job of an existing employee or outsourcing the entire process.

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The Internet of Things, or making everyday objects smart and connected, was a huge theme at the 2015 International CES, the big tech trade show that drew 170,000 to Las Vegas last week. Samsung Electronics’ chief said that 100 percent of the company’s products would be connected to the Internet within five years.

It all sounded great to me, and each idea seemed to have merit. If you add some processing brains and networking to any device, you can make it more useful and extract analytics from it. But every time I heard the price for each Internet of Things device, I flinched. It seemed like a way to hike the price of an object by 10 times, and it will lead to price inflation like you wouldn’t believe, if manufacturers stick to the prices that they talked about for their devices at CES. This pricing problem tells you how far the Internet of Things is from really catching on, and how much of it is hype for now.

KeeLight showed off its Wi-Fi enabled multicolor smart light bulbs at CES. You can control them with an app remotely, and turn on sections of your home to create the right atmosphere within seconds. That sounds great, but each smart light bulb costs $100. The average home has 40 sockets for light bulbs. That means it would cost almost $4,000 to outfit your home with smart light bulbs from KeeLight. You can get a deal with $350 for 10 smart lightbulbs. Still, that’s a pretty steep cost for getting a start on the connected home. I have an easier time getting over the psychological hurdle for paying $100 or more for a drone, since I haven’t owned one before, rather than paying that much to retrofit my house with a new version of something that I am already quite pleased with. For me in particular, I would rather pay $60 for a video game than $99 for light bulb.

I also thought that the Petnet Smart Feeder was a great idea. It dispenses precise amounts of dry food to your pet in an automated fashion. The mobile app lets you remotely feed the pet and reorder pet food easily. It keeps your pet happy and healthy, and that’s priceless, right? It sounded great, until I heard the price was $250. But a dumb pet feeder costs anywhere from $5 to $50. I had the same reaction to the Kolibree smart electric toothbrush, which lets you use an app to measure how well you are brushing. It replaces a $2 toothbrush, but costs $99 right now.

“It’s early days,” said Scott McGregor, chief executive of chip giant Broadcom, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’re going to have to decide if pet feeders are an important category. Once we decide, we’ll see brands emerge and the price will go down. Right now, we have to decide what categories will succeed.”

Sometimes it’s clear that the electronics in an object isn’t that sophisticated, and the higher pricing just seems to be aimed at targeting enthusiasts. The Ozobot is a little toy robot that blends the physical and digital worlds. It teaches kids programming because it lets them program the path the Ozobot follows by laying down color tracks on an iPad or a piece of paper. That’s pretty cool, but each tiny little Ozobot costs $50. That’s pretty high for a device that is the size of a jawbreaker.

Sure, it’s hard to make objects small, and smaller devices often have higher prices. Still, the accelerometers and gyroscopes in some of these objects cost a few dollars. Zepp Labs adds cool Internet of Things sensor to tennis rackets and other sports gear. The app that lets you take a video of yourself and analyze your swing is free, but the Zepp sensor costs $150. There’s a nice try-before-you-buy value in the Zepp app, but the amount of technology in the device itself seems pretty small. The smart tech is in the analytics and other things in the app. But does it justify that price? In that case, it’s probably a smart price, as the target market is smaller, at least for now, and those target individuals may not mind paying that much money to make them better at something that they do over and over again.

We’re also in the stage where many Internet of Things devices aren’t compatible, or use competing standards. Samsung pledged to invest $100 million in making sure that the Internet of Things stays open. So we’re paying $100 for Internet of Things devices that aren’t yet interoperable.

Another problem I have with these small but expenses devices: We’re going to lose a lot of them. Do you want to pay full price again to replace a lost Fitbit health tracker? It’s like the cracked iPhone screen. Somebody is going to make a bundle of money replacing these devices. And the battery life is going to be limited. I have a great electronic key fob that can open my car doors. But I haven’t used it for some time because it has run out of battery power.

Some of the smart manufacturers introduced cool ideas without putting price tags on them. The Panasonic interactive mirror demo takes an ordinary mirror and turns it in to a smart display, enabling you to know what you would look like with sparkles on your eyelashes or a moustache. But that transparent display glass isn’t cheap, and I’m sure it is going to start out at a crazy price. The best thing Panasonic can do now is set our imaginations on fire and get us excited about it, and then tell us how much it will cost later.

I talked to a few analysts about my sticker shock, and they didn’t seem to be too alarmed about the price of the Internet of Things. After all, the laws of supply and demand will normalize the prices. And it’s OK to start out with a high price if you can’t get that many devices built, or if you’re the first to come up with an idea, or if you just don’t think you’ll sell much. If you look at UHD 4K TVs, the successors to high-definition TVs with four times as many pixels as HD, the prices started at $25,000 and have fallen within a few years to under $1,000 for some models. The prices should fall further this year.

“They don’t expect to sell many, they have to recoup development expenses and they know if it actually solves a big problem for a wealthy person or enthusiast they will pay it,” said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an email. “Also, pricing something high provides an aura of ‘premium,’ an attribute attractive to both the wealthy and enthused.”

Brian Blau, analyst at Gartner, said, “Most sophisticated consumer tech companies perform detailed customer analysis and do track price issues relative to customer satisfaction so there is to some degree a methodology to determining prices. There are other factors too. Is there demand? How much? Or they look at competition and how can they use pricing as a strategy to get an advantage. Often times new product categories start out being priced high and that is to help recoup the expenses needed for product research and development and to mitigate risk if the product category does not perform as they expect. Luxury items have a similar pricing trajectory.”

Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies, said he likes the idea of sticking a “beacon” on items. That is, for the cost of about $17, you can add a Bluetooth LE connectivity to anything. It broadcasts to your smartphone and you can interact with it.

“But many of these items risk being a gimmick with a very short shelf life if people don’t want to integration them into their everyday lives,” Kay said. “As it is, only a pro baseball player would really want a swing analyzer, and then, he probably has a $5,000 one with special functions.”

Over time, you see the adoption of devices skyrocket as the prices for those items go down. If you can get a device down to $300, it becomes much more accessible to mainstream households. And if you bring it down under $100, one spouse can buy it without the permission of another spouse. But if you’re asking someone to upgrade, you really want to have price parity between the old product and the new product, in order to get people who are used to the old device to adopt the new device. That’s the situation for the Internet of Things devices, where a smart bulb replaces a dumb bulb.

The problem I have is that the Internet of Things is going to affect every object we own, and the competition is quite fierce. If I can pay $10 for an ordinary light bulb, I’m going to do that. And it may take a long time to hit price parity, when you essentially get the smartness and connectivity for little extra cost.

Shawn Dubravac, chief economist at the Consumer Electronics Association, said that adding connectivity to a device and throwing lots of numbers at consumers has limited value. What really matters, he said, is creating something that is technologically meaningful. I talked to a lot of people who felt like a lot of dumb appliances should stay dumb. Kitchen appliances fall into that category for me. Part of the psychological problem is that, if you do the Internet of Things right, a smart object looks exactly like a dumb object.

 

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem that manufacturers face. They can’t lower the price of these devices until they sell a lot of them and get volume efficiencies. But until they lower the prices, they can’t get a lot of volume.

“Things will sort themselves out,” Kay said. “The ridiculous pricing will fall away, companies will have to bet on higher volumes, and some will die. What will work will be things people really want to use in all seasons, not something that seems fun for a while and then becomes boring, tedious, or too much work compared to the analog solution.”

 

 

 

In the business-to-business world, sales cycles are longer and about 60% to 70% of the journey takes place even before the customer contacts a vendor or service provider. So how do you sell yourself to the prospective client during this attention stage?

In an episode of Landing Page Optimization, SiteTuners CEO Tim Ash and Overdrive Interactive CEO Harry Gold cover what it means to get visitors to pay attention in the B2B space.

Pulling visitors to your nurture funnel

As marketers, ideally, we want anyone who comes in to our environment (i.e. clicks on a keyword, a banner, or a tweet) to fill out a form. Sometimes, however, customers are not ready to do that. So your best bet is to set a cookie on their browser for remarketing – you follow them around with a banner or paid search ads till they click and finally fill out a form to download a collateral. Even then, however, they still might not be ready to talk to you. Not yet.

So, you put those leads into a nurture cycle through a marketing automation system (e.g. Eloqua or Marketo on the high-end, Act-On on the mid-end, and HubSpot on the lower end).

Selling the action, not the product

Needless to say, getting an e-mail address early on in the process is critical, and a popular way to do this is to have visitors give away their e-mail in exchange for collateral.

Harry points out, however, that it’s a mistake to sell your products on landing pages and not the action. For instance, instead of talking about your products, feature your whitepaper by highlighting the cover and listing the benefits of reading it. This way you’re selling the action that you want the visitor to take and not pushing bottom of the funnel things that you want visitors to buy.

Sophisticated tracking

When visitors download a PDF, all pieces of information should be embedded – sort of making a custom PDF for a visitor on the fly – so you know that the user came off of a particular IP, on a specific date, and with specific browser environment variables. This way, when a visitor comes back later, on the inbound link, you can pick all that information up because they’re embedded in the whitepaper.

Harry stresses that appending lead data is critical to serving relevant content on your homepage when a visitor comes back to your site.

Tim observes, though, that cookies seem to be becoming less effective because users either wipe them regularly or use software that does that automatically, and they don’t help in tracking a user across multiple devices.

Harry agrees that only a few companies are closing the loop everywhere or unifying all their tracking. He notes, however, that tracking and cookie-setting is directional. They’re used for data to make fact-based decisions – to see what’s working and what isn’t.

People wipe out their cookies, so you will not be able to track every single conversion. What matters is some quantity of people are getting your drip campaign e-mails or dynamically generated CTAs on your site based on the cookie, and it’s increasing your conversion rate.

Tracking is not an accounting system but a decision making tool. (Am I investing my funds wisely? Is creative convincing people to do what we want them to do?)

Harry stresses that there’s a lot of information you can get off people’s data that you can append to their record, and consequently, there are a lot of binary decisions you can make based on tracking data.

Making the most of your content

It’s not enough to just track a piece of content, either – you need a viable distribution plan across multiple channels. Say you have a piece of content that you already know does well. Once a year, you can update that content and get it distributed again. Then, you can release it in multiple channels – eBooks, a PDF, an infographic, social media mentions, a fragment of the piece on the web site – and you can drip the release on some channels to keep the item active.

The point is to maximize your investment on the content creation side, so that once you have a viable piece of content, you can reuse it in multiple channels. Then you need to track all the traffic you’re getting from the collateral and tie those to actions like form fills and other things further downstream.

Listen online or download the “The ROI of Content and Social Media” podcast from WebmasterRadio.fm

We’ve all heard the phrase “It’s not just about content, it’s about context.”  This has never been truer in the case of inbound marketing.  Providing information to visitors on your website is not just about presenting the content, but about tailoring it to your audience specifically.  By adjust content uniquely to your visitors, you can expect an increase click-through-rate of certain CTA’s, higher conversion rates on key landing pages, and overall increased readership on your website.  Recently, HubSpot launched a new feature in their COS, Anonymous Personalization, which allows marketers to add some context to their content.

Anonymous personalization works hand-in-hand with smart content on the HubSpot COS.  This means that you can make a module (text box, CTA, etc) “smart” so that is renders differently based on a particular rule.  Up until recently, smart content could only be done by lifecycle stage or list membership, which means that the visitors had to already be a known contact.  With anonymous personalization, we can now provide content based on criteria of an anonymous visitor.

The three differentiators are:

• Country
• Device Type
• Referral Source

By setting up rules based on either of the above characteristics, your website can automatically show certain content to a visitor who fits these criteria.  Keep in mind, it’s not just about welcoming visitors to your site from a specific country or letting them know your site works on their device, instead, you want to incorporate this functionality into your inbound campaigns.

3 Ways to Use Anonymous Personalization in Your Inbound Marketing

1. Leverage knowledge of your visitors’ devices: Do your products or services work well with mobile users?  Do you have a new mobile app you’re trying to promote? Does your solution help people on the go?  If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, personalization for mobile devices can yield great value.  Why not setup content on your homepage uniquely for mobile visitors, to promote your new mobile app, or explain how your software helps people with a busy lifestyle.  Appealing to your audience based on their device can certainly help engage with this specific group of visitors.
2. Take Advantage of Localization: Another use case is to tailor content based on a visitor’s country.  This can be helpful on a Contact Us page, where you want to highlight the office closest to them.  It’s possible that you just opened a new office in their area, or you want to show a picture or contact information for their regional salesperson.  Additionally, do you now offer your product or solution in another language?  This can be a great way to promote this new feature to those countries and offer some additional promotion.
3. Increase Value from Referrals: Nowadays, traffic visits your site from a variety of sources.  It’s important to adjust our content based on how you were found.  Visitors from specific referral domains may have common questions that can easily be answered through content on your site, or may be at different stages of your sales process.  By personalizing text or calls-to-action on your pages based on where visitors came from, you’re able to provide this traffic with a great user experience.  A common use would be if you are attending a particular tradeshow and your site is listed as a sponsor or exhibitor.  This usually drives a lot of traffic to one’s site.  It would be great to adjust information on your homepage uniquely to those from the tradeshow’s webpage, alerting visitors of where to find you at the show, along with what you will be promoting.  Imagine the possibilities of adjusting content based on social media source or even organic search.

Anonymous personalization gives marketers the tools to really add context to their website.  Understanding the habits of your audience and tailoring the content to them can significantly increase key metrics such as website conversion, CTA clicks and time spent on page.  By taking advantage of this great new technology, you can expect a much better user experience for your visitors, which can also lead to an increase in leads and customers.

A lot of people would argue that bacon is what makes everything better. And while I do tip my top hat to bacon for being so darned tasty, I must also respectfully disagree. I believe it is beer that makes everything better.

For example, let’s take a look at the iconic lager. On its face, the classic style is a clean, fermented thirst quencher perfect for celebrating and sometimes commiserating each and every football Sunday. But do you know how much planning, precise timing and patience goes into creating the seemingly simple, crowd-pleasing brew? So much.

In fact, a satisfying lager is kind of like inbound marketing in that respect. (You see what I did there?) A thoughtfully executed inbound strategy will come across as an effortless extension of a brand across multiple channels. And just like a lager, a successful inbound marketing strategy requires planning, timing and patience.

Planning

Much like a brewmaster wouldn’t walk up to their mash tun and start throwing random stuff in willy nilly – fingers crossed, just hoping for the best – a good marketer knows you can’t wake up one morning and say, “Hey! I think I will Internet today!”

The most effective way to kick-off your marketing efforts is to take the time to plan your activities around your goals ahead of time. So before you share any link, blog post or premium content offer, here are a few of the things you need to do first:

• Target who you are trying to reach
• Determine what your audience is looking for
• Create mind-blowing content for your audience

Timing

Once you have your inbound marketing ingredients – the right audience paired with the right content – all set and ready to go, the next step is to plot out the timing for your content promotion. This is because timing is everything. From well-paced nurturing email workflows to long-term social media promotion of evergreen content, your goal will be to capture the attention of your desired persona (or personas) at their zero moment of truth and help them through their buyer’s journey with content, going far beyond the lifespan of a single tweet or email newsletter.

So when it comes to the amplification and engagement rates of your content, it’s not only about knowing what to say and who to say it to, but also when to say it and how often.

Patience

What’s funny about the lager is that, even though it seems less complex than a stout or porter, it actually takes longer to ferment and age into the crisp beer with sparkling clarity we have all come to love. That liquid beauty doesn’t just appear overnight. And guess what? The same goes for the results of inbound marketing.

A comprehensive marketing strategy that shows measurable results does so over time, and not because of a single keyword change in your SEO or a viral tweet that happens to give you a momentary bump in traffic. And if you’re looking just at social media promotion, data shows the more time you invest in social media, the more positive returns you’ll see in your sales. In short, content promotion and lead nurturing requires commitment.

Final Thought

Beer and inbound marketing are so easily comparable because both can be awesome (and delicious, in the case of the former) with a bit of forethought. But the creation of each requires time and energy. So while you may be tempted to take a short cut with your marketing, remember the effort you put into inbound will be rewarded with increased traffic and a sustainable pipeline of better, more qualified leads in the long run.

Wall Street's most bullish strategist sees the oil's plunge and the dollar's strength as positives for stocks.

"Of the five 40% declines in oil, the stock market only fell two times—and both were a result of the US being in a recession at the time," Fundstrat's Tom Lee writes of the the history.

"We realize investors are a bit concerned about the negative effects from a surging currency (hurting exports) but consider that strong USD is stimulative for Europe/Asia (trade flows) and also enables US companies to acquire assets cheaply."

Lee identified eight large-cap stocks that he believes should benefit the most in this weak-oil, strong-dollar environment. Each stock has a positive free cash flow yield, and analysts have raised 2015 earnings estimates on them within the last two calendar quarters. All the companies are in the consumer discretionary, consumer staples, healthcare or telecom sectors.

Becton, Dickinson and Co.

Ticker: BDX

Industry: Healthcare 

FCF Yield: 4.2%

2015 Earnings estimate raise: 18.5%

2015 Expected P/E Ratio: 19.7x

Comment: "For fiscal year 2015, we expect currency-neutral revenue growth of 4.5% to 5% based on our current view of the environment," said CEO Vincent Forlenza during the fourth quarter earnings call. "Of course, we have contemplated a number of factors that could bring us above or below that range including pricing, a stronger or weaker flu season than expected, product launches, emerging market growth, macroeconomic conditions and the impact of the Affordable Care Act."

Source: Fundstrat

Illumina Inc.

Ticker: ILMN

Industry: Biotechnology 

FCF Yield: 1.5%

2015 Earnings estimate raise: 18.8%

2015 Expected P/E Ratio: 61.4x

Comment: Illumina signed a 15-year lease with BioMed Realty Trust for a 360,000-square-foot facility in Foster City, California in January.

Source: Fundstrat

Zimmer Holdings Inc.

Ticker: ZMH

Industry: Healthcare 

FCF Yield: 3.4%

2015 Earnings estimate raise: 10.7%

2015 Expected P/E Ratio: 16.3x

Comment: "Zimmer drove solid topline growth across several key product categories and geographies in the third quarter notably, accelerating U.S. knee sales over a strong performance in the prior year," CEO David Dvorak said during the third quarter earnings call.

Source: Fundstrat

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Congrats on making it through the 2014 holiday shopping season. But guess what: we’re already 7 days into 2015 and there is no rest for the small and medium business owner. It’s time to identify your key conversion learnings from 2014 and put them into action for a successful new year.

This post will focus heavily on ecommerce conversion optimization tactics both large and small. To do this, we’ll point you to some great resources that will help you evaluate your online store’s performance for 2014 and note important conversion metrics to monitor in 2015. Plus, we’ll share tips and hacks from some of our expert clients that you can implement right now.

Understanding and Evaluating Past Performance

First, take a step back and examine your store’s current conversion rate, then pinpoint some specific areas for improvement. Along with your ecommerce platform’s analytics, Google Analytics is particularly helpful for doing a deep dive data analysis. Whether you are a beginner or seasoned ecommerce store owner, this Google Analytics Survival Guide from KISSMetrics helps set some healthy expectations for your business in terms of which analytics you should be monitoring, why and how to measure success.

Conversion Metrics that Matter

If you have already been tracking your store’s conversion metrics and metrics that can help to improve your conversion rate, you’ll want to take a step back and assess how you did in 2014. This will help you make educated decisions as to where you should focus your energy to improve your online store’s conversion rate in 2015.

Outside of your ecommerce conversion rate, which will help you to identify the effectiveness of your website’s design and better manage your marketing strategy, among other things, you should also be paying attention to the following:

• Average Order Value: By doing a deep dive on your store’s average order value, you can learn valuable information including whether or not you should re-evaluate your cross-sell campaigns and loyalty programs.
• Purchase-Funnel: You’ll be able to analyze and understand your shopper’s behavior by completing a purchase funnel analysis and identify areas for improvement including product descriptions, pricing or website malfunctions.
• Checkout-Funnel: This type of analysis will let you assess where and when your shoppers abandon ship during the checkout process.

Conversion Tips from Successful Ecommerce Businesses

Every ecommerce site’s goal is to optimize for conversion, and the process itself can be a never ending one. From A/B testing to changing up product copy or bettering product photography, there is a slew of information and techniques out there on how to use data and creative together in order to maximize your revenue. Below, hear from three online store owners who transformed their business with ecommerce optimization, and get a few tips and tricks from those who have turned online best practices into tangible success.

Create a Homepage with Purpose

Most ecommerce beginners focus a great deal on their homepage. However, they forget to ask themselves one defining question: what’s the purpose of my website’s homepage?

There are many different definitions of a conversion online. For example, it can mean someone signing up for an account, downloading a piece of content and/or completing a purchase. Two things to know about your online store’s homepage, however, are that 1) you never get a second chance to make a first impression and 2) in ecommerce, you cannot be passive when it comes to guiding online shoppers to take a desired action on any given webpage. In the video below, online store owners from The Smart Baker break down exactly how to create a homepage with purpose, one that ideally leads your customer down a desired conversion funnel.

How Design Drives Conversion

This next video link has loads of tips from a plethora of online stores including 33-Off, Shop Akira,  Dog for Dog, Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream, Uber Pong, Mason Jars and Protein Co, touching on everything from picking the right colors for your brand and driving conversion, to utilizing the isolation effect to drive your desired goal. These clients will make sure you have the perfect calls to action and website layout for your target audience that will drive your conversion goals throughout not only your product pages, but your entire site.

Transform Digital Window Shoppers into Paying Customers

By optimizing their checkout experience, Orchard Corset boosted their conversion rate from the ecommerce average of 2% to 5%. From setting proper shipping expectations to providing the information their clients seek, Orchard Corset has made a series of small improvements that are specifically tailored to their target customer, resulting in a huge boost to their business’s bottom line.

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GUEST:

For viewing audiences, video is video. Whether watching TV, tablet or desktop, it’s not about the screen. It’s about the content and the convenience.

But for advertisers and media buyers, TV and online video remain vastly different animals. Planning, buying and analyzing are segregated disciplines – each with its own processes, metrics and even culture. As a result, collaboration and joint optimization are rare, messaging inconsistent, and overall marketing performance compromised.

Why the gap? Risk. Buy a spot on TV, and you know exactly when, where and in what context your ad will appear; what content precedes and follows your ad; and, most important, you know your ad will be clearly visible – enabling ad buyers to guarantee brand safety and viewability of any given placement.

Not so much online—brand safety is always a concern and merely serving an ad doesn’t guarantee it will be viewable to audiences. Below-the-fold placements, slow load times, hidden iframes and fraud – any number of factors can render a video ad invisible. Just recently, Google released a study stating that approximately 56% of its inventory isn’t viewable.

Clearly, that’s a waste of budget – especially given the premiums paid for video inventory. Even more important, the viewability issue sustains the unhealthy siloed approach to video advertising strategy. But there’s hope on the horizon.

MRC standards level the field

When the Media Rating Council (MRC) approved a viewability standard for display advertising earlier this year, it allowed a fundamental shift in media buying, enabling advertisers to transact on viewable impressions. The subsequent MRC standard for video may have an even greater impact, although more complicated to address compared to display.

On its surface, the standard sets a low bar, defining a viewable video ad as 50% visible on a user’s screen for at least two consecutive seconds. The real opportunity is for buyers to transact on viewable video impressions, giving advertisers the ability to pay only for ads verified as viewable.

As the assurance of online video viewability approaches that of TV, advertisers can begin to converge their video strategies, share insights and optimize across channels.

Advertisers will likely start shifting budget from the safe ground of TV to online, where the value of TV assets can be enhanced by digital’s expanded reach, interactivity, targetability and granular measurement. When viewability becomes a given, buyers can deliver on the promise of high quality impressions that reach targeted users, at the right time, in the right context – on every screen.

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To find more exclusive insights from tech industry insiders,
explore VentureBeat’s selection of recent guest posts.

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We’ll get there together

Mass adoption of viewability as the defacto standard for video advertising will happen if we together, as an industry, tackle key areas:

1. Address measurement discrepancies. Despite the simplicity of the MRC viewability standard, brand safety and viewability vendors have diverse methodologies – with inconsistency as high as 20% among browsers measuring the same stream. The playing field should begin to level in 2015 as more advertisers require vendors to meet key metrics and uniformity across methodologies. Until then, advertisers should test and learn.
2. Adopt pre-bid solutions. Most vendors offer only post-impression video viewability analysis, allowing the advertiser to tally viewable impressions only after the fact. Pre-bid solutions, on the other hand, can determine prior to serving an ad if the placement is brand-safe and/or whether the video player is iframed or otherwise problematic. Pre-bid solutions can also help advertisers make smarter decisions around issues with quality placement and optimization of digital video investments.
3. Be open about viewability best practices. The Interactive Advertising Bureau with 3MS continues to provide opportunities for the industry to come together to discuss viewability issues. Rather than passively approaching viewability standards, we should all actively participate in these forums and work together to address one of the most important issues in digital advertising today. After all, if an ad is not seen, how can it have impact?

Once metrics and methodologies evolve and the TV-online scale balances, buyers can begin working across the aisle to the benefit of advertisers. In this converged world, new terms of transaction, measurement standards, reporting best practices, ad delivery mechanisms and even ad formats will also emerge.

Video viewability standards and industry-wide adoption will provide the vital first step toward guaranteed impression quality across channels. For media buyers, it offers the ability to deliver a level of confidence once reserved for TV.

Robin Zieme is VP of Video at Amobee. Patrick Rubin is Associate Director of National Video Activation at Carat USA.

Your dream client won’t take your calls or return your emails.

Another prospective customer takes your calls, but won’t commit to giving you time for a meeting.

Still another prospect won’t agree to give you access to the stakeholders within their organization, the ones you need to build the right solution and win a deal.

The more you focus on what they won’t do, the less likely you are to get the response you need. You have a strategy, an approach, and a value proposition. Your dream client has a strategy, too. Your strategy is not working. Their strategy is.

It’s Not Them. It’s You.

But if you want your client, dream client, or customer to respond differently, you have to change the stimulus. You have to change what you are doing–and how you are doing it–before they change how they respond.

No one loves pig-headed stubbornness more than I do. Achieving the outcome you need by persisting is a critical attribute for people who succeed. But doing so without changing your approach isn’t.

You provide a stimulus. You receive a response. That response is feedback. When what you are doing fails, try again. But also try something different.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

They won’t return your call? Change the message. Change the value proposition. Deliver coffee (try it).

Won’t respond to email? Pick up the phone. Call someone else. Find someone to make an introduction. Send a calendar invite with a note asking them to send back times that work better if they are unavailable.

Can’t get the commitment you need? Change the ask. Do a better job explaining how your dream client benefits from saying yes and improve the value proposition.

You produce the results you want when you recognize that the only thing you have any power to change is you. Change your beliefs. Change your actions. Change your results.

The post It’s Not Them. It’s You. appeared first on The Sales Blog.

One of the biggest challenges when developing connected devices is identifying user value and delivering it through successful user experiences. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kuniavsky, Principal Scientist, Innovation Services at PARC, described an IoT-specific approach to user experience design that combines approaches from interaction design, industrial design and service design to create experiences that go beyond simple connected gadgets to create lasting, multi-device experiences grounded in people's real needs and desires.

read more

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.

In this week’s episode, Robert and I discuss and dissect nine marketing and advertising trends reported by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and why Fred Wilson believes the innovation in social media is dead. In addition, we discuss subscriber burn on YouTube, Forbes magazine’s decision to sell a second cover to AT&T, and what authenticity really means. Rants and raves include the clever #MAYHEMSALE from Allstate and an inside look at Marriott’s innovative content marketing strategy. We wrap up the show with a #ThisOldMarketing example from Johnson & Johnson.

This week’s show

(Recorded live on January 5, 2015; Length: 58:31)

Download this week’s PNR This Old Marketing podcast.

If you enjoy our PNR podcasts, we would love if you would rate it, or post a review, on iTunes. 

1. Content Marketing in the News

• 9 Big Questions Hovering Over Marketing and Advertising (8:26): The CMO Today blog at The Wall Street Journal ponders what will happen to broadcast media and online marketing and advertising in the new year. Robert and I share our reaction to the predictions and share our takes on nine trends. The conclusion? We’re going to see another year of disruptions and acquisitions driven in part by evolving consumer information consumption habits.

• Fred Wilson says the Social Media Phase of the Internet is Over (20:45): Fred Wilson, the world’s leading venture capitalist focused on social media, says it’s now a mature product category where very little innovation is taking place. Despite the rapid growth of social media during the last seven to eight years, Robert and I believe marketers are lagging behind. We agree that they must get smarter, faster on strategically employing these technologies to enhance the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives. Continuing with the “social media is dead” theme, check out the video below.

• The Secrets Behind “YouTube Is Broken” (27:00): Matthew Patrick, author of the popular YouTube show Game Theory, explains how the video channel’s evolving algorithm is affecting content creators. Consistent engagement (greater watch time) is rewarded with greater visibility, “MatPat” points out. The reverse is equally true, which means uploading video content more frequently isn’t necessarily better. Robert and I discuss the biggest problem with YouTube’s subscription model, and one approach that could make it much more useful.

• Forbes Sells Its Cover (34:36): The Wall Street Journal’s CMO Today column reports that Forbes is selling a second cover of its print magazine to AT&T, with readers directed to its AT&T Business Circle website. Forbes’ chief product officer, Lewis DVorkin, explains the thinking behind this decision. Is this an innovative move or yet another way Forbes is selling out to advertisers? I think it’s a great move for both parties, and I explain why.

• Quenching Consumers’ Thirst for Authentic Brands via Storytelling (38:45): Consumers love authentic products with stories that speak to handmade quality and timeless values, and reveal a brand’s rich character. Storytelling is an increasingly important element in cultivating a “real” brand that resonates with consumers, reports a recent article in The New York Times. Robert explains why he has a problem with the term “authenticity” and why storytelling is an effective strategy for companies of any size.

2. Sponsor (44:42)

• This Old Marketing is sponsored by Acrolinx. The Acrolinx platform helps the world’s most recognized brands create more engaging, more readable, and more enjoyable content. (Most people don’t even know software like this exists.) Their new eBook called Speak with One Voice answers critical questions about how you can make your content stand out and how to create a unique advantage in the content economy. You can register for it at http://bit.ly/pnr-acrolinx2.

3. Rants and Raves (46:26)

• Joe’s Rave and Rant: During the Sugar Bowl football game on New Year’s Day, Allstate Insurance debuted an episodic series of TV ads that draws attention to the dangers of oversharing on social media. It featured a husband and wife whose home was broken into by the Mayhem Guy; he then sold their items on a website called MayhemSale.com. Kudos to Allstate for a very clever concept, but I think they missed a huge opportunity to get even more value from it.

• Robert’s Rave: In this video from the Skift Global Forum, Marriott’s global marketing officer, Karin Timpone, explains the strategy behind its new content marketing initiative, which features a centralized, omnimedia approach to communications. She also talks about the central role of storytelling in cultivating customer relationships for each of Marriott’s 18 brands. This 17-minute video is required watching for content marketers, Robert advises.

4. This Old Marketing Example of the Week (53:50)

• Johnson & Johnson: It’s been widely reported by many blogs that the oldest known example of content marketing is John Deere’s newsletter, The Furrow. But Derek Halpern, author of the Social Triggers blog, has found one even older from consumer products company Johnson & Johnson. According to the book Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty, the company launched a publication called Modern Methods of Antiseptic Wound Treatment in 1888. It was aimed at the needs of doctors, to whom it sold bandages. The company also launched two publications known as Red Cross Notes and Red Cross Messenger to share helpful articles with the medical community.

For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page.

How do I subscribe?

The post This Week in Content Marketing: Is the Social Media Phase Over? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

It’s that time of the year again… 

Pundits are making their predictions about customer experience, marketing, and more:  what’s the next big thing coming in the new year and what should everyone be focusing on. As you know, these predictions are made every year, late in the year and as the calendar rolls over into the new year.

While I’m a fan of looking ahead, staying on top of the latest trends, being innovative and cutting edge, and getting out in front of things, it’s important to remember this: just because the calendar flips to a new year doesn’t mean everyone has a new-found appreciation or excitement for all things CX.

And while looking ahead is an important part of planning, there’s also a lot of value in taking the opportunity to stop, reflect, and look back on:

• what was on our to-do list for the year
• what we accomplished
• what we did not accomplish
• where we’ve been
• where we are now

Having said that, here are some of my thoughts on customer experience in 2015.

When we make predictions, we need to consider the various customer experience maturity levels. There’s that top 5% – the CX Leaders – that get it, are on it, and know what they need to do today, tomorrow, and next year. When we make predictions, I think we speak to these folks because our predictions tend to be about the “what’s next” or the “what’s going to take the CX/CX strategy to the next level” or the next whiz-bang thing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for someone who hasn’t even started yet, it’s daunting. Or worse yet, they think they need to start there – now – when we all know there are steps we must go through to design and ultimately deliver a great customer experience.

The companies we should be focusing on in 2015 are the ones who haven’t even started yet or who are just getting started. These are the folks who need to know how to get started or how to do best what they are doing today in order to move to the next level, respectively. There are so many companies who still need help getting the basics right – including getting executive buy-in – that thinking about emotions or proactive service or the Internet of Things is only on their wish list – or not even in their vocabularies. They’ll get there, but they need to put one foot in front of the other, first. Baby steps.

The other piece that I think is a must-have for 2015 (as it should be every year) is a focus on the employee experience. There is so much data out there that shows employee engagement levels to be at their lowest ever, and yet there’s also tons of data that supports the fact that employee engagement drives business results. What are companies doing wrong? (I’ve written a post for Intradiem this month that answers this question. Stay tuned for that.) We know that a bad employee experience and employee disengagement lead to churn and a whole host of other problems, not the least of which is a bad customer experience. Let’s resolve to fix this this year!

Shifting gears to what’s in store for customer experience professionals, I think we need to (a) make sure customer experience is clearly defined and (b) lose “customer experience” as the label for everything now, i.e., it’s become watered down. “Customer experience” should not be a catch phrase or a phrase of the day/moment. How do we get companies to stop misusing it, to stop calling every position they are trying to fill a “customer experience role?” It dilutes what we are trying to do, and it doesn’t help our cause.

Perhaps I’ve taken a simplistic viewpoint for moving forward this year, but if we don’t get the basics right and if we don’t look back on how we got to where we are, then I don’t believe we can move forward in an efficient or effective manner.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. -Søren Kierkegaard

As we continue with Invest NB’s series on C-Suite predictions for 2015, we catch up with the ever-dynamic, best-selling author of three books, keynote speaker and sales acceleration specialist, Jill Konrath. Jill’s refreshing honesty and willingness to coach, educate and contribute, are greatly appreciated and we sincerely thank her for taking the time to participate in our series.

MacLean:  Tell us about your latest project that gets you really excited.

Konrath: I’m excited about Agile Selling – which is the topic of my new book. It’s all about the mindset, skills and habits needed to quickly become proficient in a new sales position or when selling new things to new buyers. 

MacLean: What keeps you up at night when you think about business trends/issues that you are seeing right now?

Konrath: The fact that so much is happening, that it’s non-stop and overwhelming. It’s so hard to stay on top of everything that’s going on when you’re already so busy with your normal job. There’s just not enough time to get it all done. That’s why I’m enamoured with rapid learning and learning agility these days. To me, it’s the only way to stay on top of your game. 

MacLean: When it comes to 2015 what do you think will be the biggest challenge for members of the C-Suite?

Konrath: Growth! Because I work with sales organizations, I’m acutely aware of the delta between the knowledge/skills of today’s salespeople compared to what’s really needed for success in the future. If a company is not actively up-skilling their sales team right now, they’re already falling behind.

MacLean: The Conference Board surveyed global leaders and found that the top four challenges for CEOs include:  access to human capital, customer relationships, innovation and operational excellence.  This is very broad.  What do you think will be the top challenges based on the businesses that you have contact with and your experiences?

Konrath: As I said earlier, most sales organizations are in serious trouble because their people are not prepared to deal effectively with the modern buyer.  

So, given those categories, I think the biggest issue is human capital. There are simply not enough “A” players to fill the demand. Companies must invest in developing their employees across the board. With top-notch people, organizations grow. Without them, they wither, slowly and painfully. 

MacLean: What sectors do you envision as the greatest areas for economic expansion?

Konrath: Technology and business services are my sweet spots. I think there are tremendous opportunities in these areas. 

MacLean:  In the work that you do, what are the most important skills and assets that members of the C-Suite must have?

Konrath: Learning agility! Because of my work, I see its importance to salespeople. But according to CEB, Korn Ferry, Google and many other companies, it is the primary differentiator today.

MacLean: What are the skills people think the C-Suite need, but you feel are highly overrated?

Konrath: I have no idea. All I know is that there are too many empty suits out there who look good but are leading their companies slowly off the cliff. And, by the time others figure it out, they’ll be long gone.

MacLean: Based on your experience, what are the stumbling blocks that continue to plague the sales engine of the organization to continue to struggle with sales and connecting with the client?

Konrath: The inane, and very dated belief, that sales is a numbers game.  While a certain level of activity is important, quality is essential. Doing the wrong thing, time and time again is absolute insanity. 

Yet over and over again, I see leaders push activity over quality. How stupid is that? If they were on the receiving end of these calls/emails/meetings, they’d get rid of the salesperson as fast as humanly possible. 

Buyers today only want to deal with knowledgeable resources who continually bring them ideas, insights and information. If your salespeople can’t do that, you’ll lose to price every single time. 

MacLean: Finally, if you could give just one piece of advice to fellow members of the C-Suite, what would that be?

Konrath:  Invest in your revenue engine – the sales organization! I’m talking about your salespeople and sales leaders. You need up-to-date training programs, strong lead generation programs, and a variety of sales tools. Most of all, you need good coaching. Sales is no longer just a numbers game. You need good people, doing the right thing in every client interaction. Your salespeople need to be your primary differentiator. 

2015 promises to be an interesting year and with attention given to agility, human capital and growth opportunities, the C-Suite will see great results.

Note: This post previously appeared on the Invest NB Blog.

With over a billion users spread across all of the major social networks, it would be ridiculous for any legitimate brand or company to not use them for lead generation — especially with Facebook and Twitter!

Of all the social networks out there, Facebook is the most powerful and has been proven to provide the most engagement with audiences. In addition to their platform, they also offer a self serve advertising system for anyone who is daring enough to try it out. Through advanced demographic targeting, you could put your ad campaigns right in the face of your audience and never waste money on non-targeted ad campaigns again!

The Importance of Growing Your Social Following

In addition to using all of the major social networks for generating leads for your own site, running viral contests and promoting third party ad campaigns, you should also be focusing your efforts on growing your own social following as well.

In particular, this is very easy and effective on Twitter and Facebook. One of the best ways to grow your Twitter following is by following other accounts and hoping they follow your account back. However, depending on how you approach this method, it may be more or less effective. This process is explained in detail in this post from Blogging.org, where they actually walk you through the process screenshot by screenshot.

One of the most important things to remember with social media is that it’s all a numbers game. If you can add just 10 new social followers to your account per day, that’s an extra 300 followers per month and over 3,500 per year! Now think about if you were to add 100+ new followers per day!

Using Social Media for Lead Generation

Let’s take a look at some of the great social marketing methods out there, along with some killer stats to blow your mind. If you don’t want to jump into a social media marketing campaign after reading this post, there must not be a marketing bone in your body!

• 77% of B2C marketers say they have acquired a customer through Facebook
• The number of marketers who say Facebook is “critical” or “important” has increased 83% in just two years
• 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter, 20% have closed deals
• LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook or Twitter
• 77% of buyers say they are more likely to buy from a company whos CEO uses social media. 

Infographic provided by Wishpond.

Predictive intelligence and analytics hold tremendous opportunities for B2B organizations; giving Marketers more powerful tools to help focus their efforts around filling the revenue funnel. It’s critical that Marketing and Sales are fully aligned when deploying a predictive solution, especially when that solution incorporates time-sensitive data. Success starts with the advanced groundwork and agreement on definitions, process, testing, analytics, and optimization.

A predictive initiative requires Sales to do their part in order to succeed. Here are my recommendations for ensuring Sales is on board with your predictive program.

Incorporate Predictive Programs into the Overall Demand Generation Strategy

Predictive solutions are a powerful tool to help organizations build their revenue pipeline. Incorporate predictive capabilities into the overall demand generation strategy that includes market identification, audience segmentation, strategy, messaging, tactics, sales enablement and analytics. Integrate all of the Marketing Automation, CRM, and  external predictive data to ensure a global view of all programs and performance.

Include Sales in Process Design, Definitions, and Model Testing

Hopefully you already have agreed on definitions for inquiries, leads, and opportunities as they flow through the lead management process.  A predictive initiative will falter if Marketing runs programs without clear or agreed upon definitions for qualified leads. Predictive leads will likely require unique qualification criteria based on scoring and data attributes, and treatment will be different. Ensure that Sales understands the “why” behind scores, and provide them with campaign briefs, messaging suggestions, and follow-up content for leads sourced from predictive models.

Executive Mandate

A VP executive is needed to support a predictive initiative. This executive should have authority, or at a minimum, influence with Sales. Sales support is difficult, if not impossible without an executive, especially with a new program.

Service Level Agreement

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to predictive success is getting Sales to actually “trust” the leads. This is where the upfront groundwork from including Sales in defining the stages and data attributes pays off.  When predictive intelligence programs are rolled out, Sales should incorporate the leads into their follow up and engagement process and execute that process. Timing is key here as predictive intelligence can pinpoint the right time to deliver the right message. The benefits of a service level agreement ensures Marketing Qualified Leads and Predictive Qualified Leads are seamlessly taken from Marketing and engaged as agreed. Additionally, Sales must track the engagement results in order to help with tracking ROI performance and data model optimization.

Data Capture, Reporting, & Visibility

Data turns into information and accurate information leads to better decisions. Without accurately captured data, there is no way a predictive program will be accurately measured. Marketing and Sales should report on the same data sets to show Opportunity Contribution, Sales Won, and Pipeline Velocity. Sales MUST record the disposition of all leads in the CRM system and that information must flow to and from the Marketing Automation Platform. Data capture and analysis eliminates emotional and subjective arguments about lead quality, follow up and results. Predictive leads should have a lead rating, similar to lead scores for all other marketing leads. All of the information that Sales captures can help identify what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly, reveal results.

Continual Optimization

When data is properly captured, tested, and analyzed, the predictive models are easier to improve and modify based on the target customer audience. Customer behaviors change. Predictive intelligence can help determine when and where these behaviors change to reveal prospects in market to buy right now.

Promote success early and often

Early results should emerge within 6 to 8 weeks with opportunity contribution. Promote every single successful predictive lead that turns into an opportunity.  Take special time to review the first closed sales to help with continual improvement and analysis. Tap into the natural competitive behavior among sales reps and develop a contest for closing the first leads from a predictive program.

 

Sales must do their part with a predictive program. But as with any marketing program, the degree of success depends on the quality of the preparation and execution with Sales. What are your thoughts on these suggestions?

This post originally appeared on the  6sense Predictive Intelligence Blog. 

Your business thrives off people searching and finding your business online. You know it, we know it, and our customers know it because they’re the ones perpetuating this behavior in an increasingly digital age. Our customers now have constant access to information: 91% of people have their mobile devices within arm’s reach 24/7 (Nielsen).

More and more businesses are recognizing the need to incorporate a mobile strategy in their marketing efforts in order to stay relevant in the minds of their customers. Take the growing investment U.S. businesses are making in mobile search alone: in 2015, ad spending on mobile search is set to surpass that spent on desktop search. But now it’s not enough to just include mobile – we need to think mobile from the get-go. Let’s run down five best practices for infusing your business with a mobile-first mentality.

1. Mobile Can’t Be An Afterthought

When planning any future marketing strategy, a mobile-first mentality does two things for your business: create efficiency and reduce costs. Businesses that keep mobile in mind from the beginning don’t have to go back through content that has already been developed and reconfigure it for mobile. They instead reduce double work and boost efficiency. Along the same lines, no business wants to have to pay more money just to reimagine the same content for a different device. It’s simple: making mobile your first thought saves you time and money.

2. You Need to Be Accessible

As hinted above, people require constant access to information. This includes information pertaining to your business accessible via their smartphones. By focusing your marketing strategy to include mobile from the beginning, it ensures your business will always be at the forefront when your customers are searching on their smartphones.

Being accessible also means having a good call to action – even more so with a call to action that is driving inbound calls. When 66% of sales managers say that phone calls are excellent leads, your business needs to efficiently serve those customers (BIA/Kelsey). Luckily there are tools such as IVR (interactive voice response) and intelligent call routing to help you better manage your accessibility to these customers.

3. You Need a Mobile-Friendly Website

This has meant a number of things over the past few years as companies have begun to optimize their websites for a smooth mobile experience. People using mobile Internet might see a few different types of website designs: desktop versions of websites rendering on a mobile screen, separate mobile websites, or responsive websites that automatically adapt to the device a person uses.

With the number of mobile searchers set to grow 58% by 2018, it will be critical for businesses to ensure they have a mobile website that is friendly for all visitors. And when the largest and most tech-savvy generation – Millennials – say there are still a lot of websites that’s don’t offer good mobile functionality, that means something (eMarketer).

4. You Need to Make People’s Lives Easier

People turn to the convenience of their mobile devices first for nearly every piece of information these days. So for your business, that means not only making the visual experience easier for them, but also making it easier for them to get to the information they need. Structuring your mobile site for the way smartphone users engage with small screens (such as emphasizing click-to-call) will bring the information that makes their lives easier to the forefront. A smooth and painless experience with your mobile site will drive them back to your business time and time again.

5. You Need to Measure Effectiveness

So you’ve instilled a mobile-first mentality by thinking of how your customers use mobile to search for and engage with your business, and you’ve created a beautiful mobile website. That’s all well and good, but unless you measure how well the mobile experience you’ve created is driving conversions you won’t be able to properly optimize for what is working, and fix what might not be working.

Most businesses can easily measure the effectiveness of their online marketing through tracking clicks and conversions. Conversions take other forms as well, and as we learned above, phone calls are a valuable lead source for sales managers. Call tracking technology is another way to help close the loop on your ability to measure your mobile marketing efforts.

Bonus: Mobile-First Helps Build a Culture of Innovation

At this point, with digital and mobile technology so prevalent, it still feels shocking sometimes to say that keeping technology like smartphones top of mind is progressive – but you’ve seen the stats now, and many businesses have yet to create an adequate mobile experience for their customers. So, by making a mobile-first mentality a priority in your business, it inherently fosters an overall culture of innovation.

Check out our free white paper to learn how to manage (and drive more of) the valuable calls that mobile-first innovation can bring to your business: “Marketing to Smartphone Users: New Mobile Strategies for Driving Sales Calls.”

As any eighth grader studying Charles Darwin will tell you, adaptation is not a choice—it’s a prerequisite for survival.

And, as today’s marketers know, this rule firmly applies to business environments, too.

Adapt to Survive

The marketing landscape is shifting rapidly in response to the independent consumer, who expects a consistent and valuable experience across all of their devices and channels. Yet marketers are struggling to adapt to this expectation.

While 78% of CMOs believe customer content is the future of marketing, 68% of marketers say they’re not creating enough content, and 73% say their not tracking leads effectively.

Marketers cite many reasons for their struggle to create consumer-centric content at scale, including lack of time, lack of budget, inability to measure ROI, lack of coordination, and scarce resources.

But these challenges are merely symptoms of a bigger problem: marketers today are chasing after the newest trends and creating multiple channel “strategies” in an adhoc fashion, rather than operationalizing their content and teams around the value their customers seek.

While 78% of CMOs believe customer content is the future of marketing, 68% of marketers say they’re not creating enough.

Organize around the Customer, Not the Channel

Building an adaptable content marketing operation is the secret to thriving in the new marketing landscape. Marketers who have taken the time to do so reap big benefits, including:

Core Principles of a Content Marketing Operation

Let’s take a look at some of the core principles of a content marketing operation, and the resources you need to start building one.

1. Customer Value

Content operations prioritize customer value above anything else. They do so by cultivating content their buyer actually needs, serving their buyer at every stage of their purchase journey, sparking engagement with customers, researching buyers wherever they go, and producing fresh, relevant messages consistently.

With an operation focused on providing value—above all else—you can adapt to any change in marketing technologies or channels.

2. Alignment

Content operations align the production and distribution of each company asset around key business initiatives and specific buyer personas and content themes. By mapping content in this way, marketers can ensure they’re producing relevant materials that help their company drive real business results. They know who their content is for, why it’s being created, and how it will be used and reused to serve the company.

3. Visibility

In a content operation, everyone can see the content marketing process, from ideation through promotion, and understands the roles they play. They are held accountable by clearly defined workflows, can find any asset they need in an easily accessible content library, and can see which content assets has been distributed through inbound and outbound channels.

By breaking content out of a silo, it becomes a cross-functional and cross-channel resource for every member of the team from product to sales.

4. Insight

Marketing performance is measured beyond vanity metrics like unique visits and social shares. The content operation provides insight into the entire content process—revealing bottlenecks in production, thematic gaps, clarity of performance across inbound and outbound channels, and an in-depth analysis of what moves people through the pipeline.

Content facilitates the buyer’s journey from interest through purchase. Figure out what assets and campaigns enhance that journey and how.

Ready to start building your content operation? Learn how in the American Marketing Association’s upcoming webinar “The Rise of Content Marketing Operations: How to Survive and Thrive in the new Marketing Landscape” on January 13th at 1PM ET.

Jesse Noyes, Senior Director of Content Marketing at Kapost, will walk through the content operation in more depth, and reveal the steps you need to take to build one.

Soon after Mongolia’s Soviet-supported regime was toppled by a bloodless democratic revolution in 1990, financial giants like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank swooped in to take advantage of the new free market economy. Since then, investors and venture capitalists from around the world struck gold—literally—with the discovery of mines rich with gold, copper, coal and other minerals, garnering the nickname “Minegolia” among locals. While the boom has cooled off slightly, Mongolia is still one of the fastest-growing economies, which has given birth to a vibrant new middle class.

In the capital, Ulan Bator, the changes are palpable. The first thing Belgian photographer Marika Dee noticed when she arrived in Ulan Bator (or “UB,” as it’s referred to there) is the sea of construction cranes dominating the skyline. “Many people have an image of Mongolia as a country of nomads, but in the capital the reality is quite different,” she said.

What fascinates her most is the way the next generation of Mongolians (almost half of the population is under 30) attempts to balance this new world of technology and consumerism with their traditional heritage —much of which was repressed under the nearly 70 years of communist rule. Lenin and Marx, icons of their parents’ era, have been replaced by Genghis Khan, and Buddhism and shamanism, religions long forbidden, have been embraced once again. “They really want to be proud of their national identity,” said Dee. “This is something that is not unique to Mongolia, but is universal.”

The post Mongolia chases the new and the old appeared first on Macleans.ca.

From giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to challengers such as Ello or about.me: social networks have engaged in an incredible race to popularity. This article gives an overview of the present situation in a nutshell and shares visions on the future of platforms that could win… or lose this race in the coming years.

The evolution of practices on social networks depends strongly on mind-set, cultural habits and user lifestyles. These changes involve increased reactivity expected from software companies in the development of their product, and high responsiveness from their communication strategy.

The largest platforms in the world: Facebook, and… QQ and Qzone

According to figures collected by French social media news site le Blog du Modérateur, Facebook remains unsurprisingly the largest network with 1.32 billion registered users worldwide. Not far behind, yet far less known in the western world, QQ is the most used messaging platform in China with 798 million users. Third place on the podium is Chinese Qzone, which allows users to customize their blog, send photos and listen to music. With 623 million users, Qzone is nearly triple the size of Twitter!

To give you an idea of the average time spent on social networks, the global average is 2 hours per day. China is slightly below with 1 hour 30 minutes per day while the French average is one minute less, with 1 hour 29 minutes on social networks daily. Note that this is already a decrease compared to 2011!

The progressive death of Facebook?

Gone are the days of Facebook’s hegemony in terms of messaging and image sharing. The time of diversification has come, and users now spend their time between several social networks on multiple devices simultaneously.

Facebook has lost attractiveness, which can be seen both in terms of new registrations and in terms of volume of content shared: public discussions are struggling in favour of discrete likes. Typically, we notice that Facebook is struggling to attract the 13-24 age group who are not part of the original “Facebook generation”, as shown by the figures in the table below (figures for the United States).

Number of Facebook users in the US, in 2011 and 2014, by gender and age group. Source : iStrategy Labs

Who to blame?

First, given the business potential of social networks, it makes sense that new social networks would appear on the market. This boost of competitiveness is therefore a logical consequence dictated by market forces. But other reasons could explain Facebook’s drop in popularity, such as the many doubts expressed in terms of data privacy and unwanted advertising. That’s enough reasons for some users to deactivate their account, leave it inactive, and eventually turn to other social networks.

The privilege of private messaging and picture-based networks

Looking at the numbers in the illustration below, there is no denying that Instagram has experienced strong growth. Content based on images allows for a different kind of creativity, a new way of expression, and a greater incentive for interaction. Text requires (relative) effort in reading while showing an image is more obvious. Proof of the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”…

Growth of social networks in terms of active users (2013). Source : Softonic

Another trend concerns the strong growth of private messaging: 760 million snaps are exchanged daily on Snapchat and over 70% of WhatsApp users are active every day. This would also explain why Facebook has decided to create two separate mobile apps, one being an app version of the classic platform and the other being solely the private messaging system (Messenger).

Mobile is king

In order: mobiles are the most used devices to access social networks, followed by tablets, and finally fixed computers. The device influences in a major way the design of platforms, their structure, and UX.

According to figures from Laurent Giret, it turns out that some mobile applications are actually experiencing strong growth because they are dedicated to mobile support.

Compared to 2013:

• Vine: + 403%
• Instagram: + 130%
• WhatsApp: + 123%

From a social network to a business network

Any good solution offers features that can meet the needs of masses of users and create a loyal consumer base for businesses. From social to commercial, , companies try to master the psychology of social networks and implement that while creating their own platforms. Professional and targeted platforms are now highly acclaimed, and emphasize the feeling of spontaneity, fun and proximity. This is the case of Sephora with “The Beauty Board.” Users share their “looks,” find inspiration and test Sephora products online. And of course, they can buy their favorite products in a few clicks. I say, way to go!

From one year to the next, the multitude of platforms and apps appearing on the social networking market are changing existing solutions and creating trends that may affect tens of millions of users at a time. The challenge for software companies is to please an extremely varied age range and retain their loyalty because users will ultimately and endlessly be curious to test new platforms and look for new ways to connect. What will the year 2015 hold for us? Even more innovative and creative concepts, or on the contrary, a tendency to return to basics and reject virtual interaction via social networks? Read these great insights collected from social media influencers about 5 social media trends for the year!

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Facebook has long been the social login of choice for many websites and apps. But it seems that Google is starting to climb the ranks, according to new data from Janrain.

You know when you use Facebook or Google to register or log onto another site? That’s called a social login. The reason they’re important is because they allow the companies that use them to track you in more places, collect your data in more places, and ultimately better target you with marketing campaigns. Social media companies provide them, because it puts their brand in more places.

Currently Facebook captures 43 percent of social logins, only three percent more than Google. Meanwhile Google’s social login use has grown 6 percent since last quarter.

Retail

Facebook’s social logins for retail outlets are building, while Google’s seem to be dipping.

 Gaming and Entertainment

Facebook is big on games. Considering that a third of our time on our phones is spent playing games, according to data from Flurry, it’s no wonder Facebook is expanding its reach into mobile and online gaming social logins.

Consumer Brands

By contrast, Google seems to be picking up speed where consumer brands are concerned.

Music

Another area where Google is picking up is in music applications like Spotify (though Spotify actually leverages Facebook for its registration process). Notice also in this particular graph the way that Google and Facebook’s path mirror one another. When Facebook is ahead, Google is down and vice versa. For now, it seems Google is on an upward trajectory for music.

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When it comes to social logins, Facebook is still dominating in retail, gaming & entertainment, and media. But it’s worth noting that Google may be starting to claim a larger share of this space because of the prevalence of Android phones. More time spent with Google applications, means consumers have more of reason to prefer this type of social login. This matters as consumers increasingly move to mobile.

Ultimately companies will choose a social login that’s most convenient for its customers and one that allows consumers to share their activity more easily with friends. For a long time that has been Facebook, but Google is making strides in that space.

To that end, perhaps, Google is simplifying its login protocol. Rather than signing in with Google, the company is pushing its Google+ sign-in. Developers and consumers will need to switch over to using Google+ for their social sign-in by April 20, when sign-in with Google sunsets.

If your Google search just isn't returning the quality content you want, this little URL trick might find more in-depth articles on the subject you're searching for.

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Got an HDMI port handy? Sure, you could plug in a Chromecast , Fire TV Stick or Roku Streaming Stick to get your Netflix fix. Or you could pay $150 to get a full Windows 8.1 PC in the same form factor.

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A solid business strategy starts with a Mission Statement, Vision Statement and Positioning Statement. These three documents set out what’s important to a business and to its prospective customers. Combined, these documents help to define a business, provide a road map for where that business wants to go and plans for how it will get there. They are parts of a company’s brand.

To some businesses, a Value Statement is also a brand component and is just as, well, valuable. A Value Statement sets out the core beliefs of a company — its goals and priorities. You’ll see action words like: strive, pursue, recognize, encourage and promote and desired achievements like: sustainability, diversity, loyalty, accountability and transparency.

One target of a Value Statement is Customers: the hope is that, by defining the company’s beliefs, those beliefs will align with those of their potential customers and provide another reason for customers to patronize the business. The second audience for the Vision Statement is employees who have, at the ready, an understanding of their employer’s priorities and goals and what the expectations are of them while on the job.

Practice What You Preach

“Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.”

― Thomas Carlyle

Of course, a business must “walk the talk,” and in all its dealings, reinforce the statement of core values. At each “touch” a customer has with a brand; every experience, message or interaction with the brand, the implementation of the beliefs set forth in the Value Statement must be upheld by the company espousing those values.

A Typical Value Statement:

• Is a series of short statements

• Incorporates action words and priorities

• Defines how those words and priorities will be demonstrated by the company’s dealings with customers and employees

• Is a public document (available online or in printed materials)

Samples Excerpts From Core Value Statements:

Innovation: Infuse and energize the organization, enhancing the lives of those we serve, through the creative ideas and unique talents of each employee. (The Mayo Clinic)

We believe our strength is rooted in our core values: putting people first, pursuing excellence, embracing change, acting with integrity and serving our world. These values are our legacy and our future. (Marriott)

Diversity: Commitment to diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making. (Cornell University)

Taking the time to create your brand’s Value Statement can pay off in terms of refining the essence of your brand and garnering increased business by those who want to do business…with a business like yours.

The best Sales Incentive Compensation Plan helps execute the corporate strategy, motivate the “right” Sales behaviors, and deliver the “right” customer experience. It aligns the corporate strategy and field sales activities to the target market buyer.

Better organizational alignment delivers better results.

Companies that are better aligned with their customers have 50% more sales reps achieving quota, close 38% more proposals, retain 36% more existing customers, consistently achieve their sales budget, and grow sales 10-30% more than their peers, according to studies by Aberdeen Group, MathMarketing and Sales Management Association.

If you’re waiting until the end of the fiscal year to figure out whether your company’s incentive plan can actually deliver this level of results, you’re probably waiting at least 11 months too long!

Let’s look at what the “best” plan looks like and then determine if you’re on the right track for a successful year.

The Best Plan Improves Organizational Alignment

The best Sales Incentive Plan achieves the goals of three different stake holders: the Sales representatives, Sales Management and Executive management. When all the primary stake holders are aligned to the company strategy and the target market buyers, then it’s a lot easier to get everyone excited and on board with the details of the plan

In the end, it’s all about making the number!  The company’s revenue and profit number.  The function’s sales and expense number.  The sales rep’s quota number.

Within 30 days of a new fiscal year, you should have a good sense of whether you’re off to a good start.

If the roll-out of the plan does not effectively motivate, instill trust, and empower the Sales representatives, you’re off to another rough year.

The Best Incentive Plan Motivates the “Right” Behavior

Hopefully, a lot of the feedback you hear from Sales representatives immediately after the launch of your company’s incentive plan sounds something like this:

• I know how to maximize my income and my contribution to the company. The CEO briefly shared components of the company’s revenue strategy, the VP Sales shared components of the company’s Sales strategy and a detailed overview of the Sales Incentive Compensation Plan, and the head of Sales Operations clearly explained what to focus on (and what not to focus on) to maximize our income. Wow, great meeting!
• I know that I will be fully supported in successfully executing the plan. From the CEO down, everyone demonstrated that they wanted us to succeed and they committed on-going active support. It was clear that management wanted to minimize channel conflict, align the sales teams to the customer’s buyer process, and keep us externally focused on the customer purchasing journey. My direct manager immediately convened workshops to help us develop work plans that would allow us to over-achieve our goals. The more money I make, the more money the company makes. A win/win situation, finally!
• My goals are challenging, but achievable. My goals represent outcomes that I can directly deliver. It’s clear they want me to sell more Product A and less Product B, and, focus more in developing large new logo business and less focus in supporting customer renewals. The quarterly MBOs and bonuses are designed to help me stay focused, motivated and on track throughout the year. The fiscal year just started and I know exactly what I need to focus on!
• I have confidence in the plan. Management helped me understand everything I needed to know to maximize my performance and my income. By the second week of the fiscal year I already was executing my work plan for Q1 success. The plan document was clear, transparent, and consistent with the information management presented at the rollout. The rules are fair and make sense. There isn’t a lot of fine print to scrutinize, potential situations that need arbitration, or negative surprises.   The administration is straight-forward. I will not have to waste time ensuring that commissions and SPIFs are accurately paid on time.  This is refreshing and exciting!
• I feel motivated, empowered, fully supported and confident that I will over-achieve my Quota this year! I’m looking forward to the planned quarterly management updates, sales performance training, work plan workshops, new product launches, etc.

There are lots of actions that your Sales VP can take to make the number, however, getting the incentive compensation plan “right” is probably the most important.  A more detailed discussion of a CSO/ VP Sales action plan to achieve quota can be found here.

It’s never too late for your company to make its incentive program more effective. The sooner they start making the needed course corrections, the more likely everyone will make their number.

What are you personally doing today to motivate your company to make its plan more effective?

 

Was this helpful? Then please share it with your colleagues.

Now that the 2015 is underway, there’s no better time to focus on your sales goals for this year. Use these ten tips to crush your sales number.

1. Remember the Connected Buyer

The connected buyer is savvy, educated, and has done more research than buyers of any previous generation. They’ve done their homework and will be able to quickly tell if you haven’t. Know how to speak to the connected buyer, and remember them in every interaction.

2. Be Social

Social media helps your sales organization drive pipeline by giving you the ability to engage with buyers early in the sales cycle, maintain relationships with current customers, and demonstrate valuable market insight. Don’t make the mistake of forgetting to integrate social media into your sales process.

3. Prepare

Before your sellers dive head first into their sales calls, it’s important that they first earn the right to ask the tough questions that lie ahead. Being prepared for the sales discovery call is the key to unlocking a powerful discovery process.

4. Execute Effective Discovery

In order to effectively map your organization’s value to their business problems, you need a method for uncovering their business needs. Knowing which discovery questions to ask, and when to ask them is a vital part of the sales conversation.

5. Highlight Value In Your Sales Conversations

So you’ve done all the work to get on the phone with a decision-maker and have uncovered their business needs. Now what? You have to be able to articulate the value you bring to the table. Without an effective process for highlighting your value, you’ll quickly lose these big opportunities.

6. Be Ready For Multiple Buyers

As time goes on, more and more B2B sales require the sign-off of more than one person. The process for speaking to multiple decision makers is quite different than speaking to only one. Knowing how to properly engage with multiple decision makers is a powerful tool for increasing your wins.

7. Differentiate Against “Do Nothing” And “Do It Internally”

Two of a sales organization’s greatest competitors are the buyer’s option to simply “do nothing,” or “do it internally.” There are ways to effectively differentiate yourself from these silent competitors, but in order to do so, you must know the right questions to ask and how to respond to a buyer’s reservations.

8. Use Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials are often the nudge that a buyer needs to move forward in the sales process. They provide proof and reassurance that you can deliver what you say you can. By including testimonials into your sales process, you put the buyer’s reservations to rest and increase your chance of making the sale.

9. Give Better Feedback

Your salespeople are on the front lines every day working to deliver the results you look for. As their leader, they expect you to set them up for success by providing resources, guidance, and knowledge. Build trust by setting up a system to provide important feedback.

10. Remember The “Big Rocks”

The “big rocks” are the critical activities that need to be executed in your sales organization each day. It’s easy, however, to let the smaller, less critical, activities eat away at your time. Help your team avoid misdirected focus by improving their sales planning discipline.

There are three common myths about tech founders: they are extremely young, they are technically trained, and they’ve often graduated from a prominent local university. The logic then follows that to accelerate the growth of a local tech sector, cities need to actively cultivate people who fit this profile and encourage them to start a business. But on all three counts, the data tell a different story.

Two of the most successful tech entrepreneurs in history—Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—follow this model. Both were college dropouts who studied computer science by day, programmed by night, and built large public companies without ever having worked at one. Anecdotes from popular media have only added to the cult of youth. Last year, articles in The New Republic and The New York Times explored the role young entrepreneurs have played in shaping Silicon Valley. The verdict in both follows a familiar line: for better or worse, successful tech sectors are products of young entrepreneurs, who disrupt whole industries without ever having worked in them.

These founders, in turn, are invariably portrayed technical experts. HBO’s Silicon Valley is emblematic of this stereotype: its protagonists are nerds. What they lack in business and social skills, they make up for in technical brilliance. The show is satire, but not pure hyperbole, either. Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education is now at the center of entrepreneurship policy, and cultivating technical talent has become an important goal of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

Where better to get that technical education than at a great local university? Stanford is the classic example, with hundreds of future Silicon Valley entrepreneurs passing through its Palo Alto campus. A university of this caliber not only creates great talent, the theory goes, but also helps a region to retain it. It makes sense, then, to assume that without a world-class university nearby, a city’s tech sector cannot thrive.

Over the last year, we at Endeavor Insight began studying the New York City tech sector, one of the largest in the world, to understand just how closely these myths align with reality. We started with publicly available data from Crunchbase, AngelList, and LinkedIn, and layered on top of it interviews with nearly 700 local tech founders. We found that none of these three stereotypes hold up.

We looked at the university start year for over 1,600 New York City tech founders, and found that college dropouts are the exception, not the rule. While the bulk of founders were in their twenties, the average founder in our analysis was 31 years old at company founding, and a full 25% were older than 35 when their companies got their start.

We also found that youth does not predict success. We took recent research by the Harvard Business Review a step further, by comparing founders’ age to traditional measures of success—investment amount, employee count, exit value—and found no relationship between age and company success.

The most successful entrepreneurs are not like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, and instead tend to be mid-career specialists with substantial industry experience. Take Alexandra Wilkis Wilson. She earned an MBA and worked for several years at retailers like Bulgari and Louis Vuitton before founding Gilt Groupe, a leading e-commerce business that has raised over $200 million. The same is true for Neil Blumenthal, who spent five years as Director of VisionSpring, honing his industry knowledge before founding online eyeglass company Warby Parker.

Tech founders are also much less technical than conventional wisdom leads us to believe. We divided New York City tech founders’ college majors into two categories: STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and non-STEM, and found that just 35% studied STEM fields, while 65% majored in something else. In fact, these founders were more likely to study political science than electrical engineering or math.

When computer chips were made by hand, tech entrepreneurship was the domain of engineers and computer scientists. But today the barriers to starting a tech company have never been lower. With just a few clicks, a would-be entrepreneur can build a website, acquire new customers, and begin making sales. Scientists will continue to develop new technologies, but most entrepreneurs will succeed by applying existing solutions to new markets, creating a thriving local tech sector in the process.

Local universities certainly develop new research and talent, but their role in attracting and retaining entrepreneurial talent is less certain. In truth, talent flows to wherever opportunity is greatest. New York City is no exception, with over 90% graduating from college outside of the city. (The University of Pennsylvania, 100 miles to the south, is the school with the most alumni in our sample of New York City tech founders.)

Despite its world-class universities, New York City’s tech scene succeeds because people want to live there, not because they studied there. The average future entrepreneur initially comes to the city to work for one of its existing companies, taking the plunge to found a company almost a decade after graduating. Ultimately, it is not the cities that educate entrepreneurs, but rather the ones that attract and retain them that are building top-performing tech sectors.

Our research shows that entrepreneurs don’t fit the stereotypes. Policymakers looking to further local tech sectors need to base their decisions on numbers, not anecdotes. In reality, the entrepreneurs they are seeking to support are older, less technically trained, and more likely to have attended college elsewhere. Whatever their age, experience, or background, the best policies use data to help local entrepreneurs scale their businesses and reinvest as mentors, angel investors, and serial entrepreneurs in the city where they got their start.

Before Contactually, I was running a software consulting firm. As we were starting to grow, a mentor gave me the sage advice that a great business is made by the clients you choose not to work with.

We designed Contactually from the ground up to be a user-centric company — it’s our very first core value. Most debates are usually capped off with deciding what is best for the user.

But that doesn’t mean everyone should be a user of Contactually and this covers some of the basic criteria we look for in finding the right customers.

Examples of Criteria for Customers of Contactually

Need For Relationship Management

While everyone gives lip service to relationships being important, there’s a subset of people that actually are at the top of their game or ambitious enough to practice good relationship management. There’s a level of commitment necessary.

Habitual Commitment

Beyond desire, Contactually is a product that relies on habit. We regularly research how we can make our product easier to use, and have implemented numerous mechanisms to keep users engaged (the grade was not a “just for fun” invention!). That can only go so far — the user has to be willing to invest the time repeatedly. Your gym may be fine with you paying and never showing up, but we aren’t!

Time Investment

There’s a level of time investment necessary. Contactually isn’t a straightforward productivity tool that promises to shave hours off of your day. While we do that, our main focus is taking the time you’d be spending otherwise and making you more productive.

Basic Tech Savviness

As easy as our product is, there’s a base level of tech savvy necessary. If you don’t know how to turn on your computer, we may have a problem!

What happens if we have a customer that doesn’t meet this criteria?

1. Our sales team, if a user engages with them, will spend precious time on the phone trying to help coach on best practices, when they could be spending time focusing on users that would actually benefit from the advice.

2. The customer may leave soon after upgrading — that’s churn. Too much churn makes a software business like ours look bad from the outside, which affects our ability to raise capital.

3. Our rockstar support team may spend hours answering their issues, again, all for naught after a customer cancels.

Now you understand why some software business call these customers barnacles, and barnacles need to be scraped off the side of your beautiful ship!

Does that sound terrible? One of the basic tenets of sales is that not all leads are equal, and lead qualification is one of the core activities. Just as bad leads can sink a company, bad users could sink a company. Even though having a high quantity of customers sounds promising, finding the right customers is more important.

Think in your business — be it a software, real estate brokerage, or DJ business — who is your ideal customer, and who isn’t?