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The president and CEO of Cineplex Entertainment has been in the film business for more than 25 years. He held a string of executive roles at Alliance Atlantis before co-founding Galaxy Entertainment in 1999. Four years later, Galaxy merged with Cineplex Odeon, with Ellis taking over as president and CEO. In 2005, he oversaw the purchase of Famous Players from Viacom, which nearly doubled the company’s size from 86 to 166 theatres. Since then, Jacob has continued to grow and diversify Cineplex. In 2013, he led two significant acquisitions: the $78-million purchase of digital signage company EK3 and the $194-million deal for 24 Empire locations in Atlantic Canada. Today, Cineplex controls 79% of the theatre market in this country, seeing a 7.2% boost in revenue in the last quarter compared with 2013, and a 9.3% jump in its concession sales.

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For a theatre operator, Cineplex is becoming a very diverse company. You bought a digital sign company last year, and have a 50% stake in a self-serve frozen yogurt chain. How do you decide what is a natural extension for the business?

It’s about using the expertise we have and expanding in areas where we already have skill. When you look at the yogurt business, we already run food courts in our theatres. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to take that knowledge and move it beyond the theatre. Same thing with media. We are already in the signage business. And we’ve got a phenomenal team of people. My COO and CFO can finish my sentences for me because we’ve worked together for 27 and 26 years respectively.

What’s the secret to keeping a relationship going that long? It’s rare these days.

It’s about creating a family environment for people but also an entrepreneurial environment. My philosophy is that I like people to experiment. I can’t stand people who procrastinate: I’d rather you make a bad decision and learn from it than not make the decision. You’re going to make mistakes. You may as well make them and learn from them. That’s what we did as we grew the organization.

Is there an example of a mistake that taught you something?

When we were operating Galaxy cinemas, we made lots of mistakes. I opened this gorgeous 12-screen theatre in Sault Ste. Marie, and it was way too big for the market. The minute I realized that, we downsized in Waterloo and Peterborough. In a bigger organization it might have been tough to switch plans, but our entrepreneurial culture can make it happen and happen quickly.

You mentioned digital signs. How does the digital sign company you bought—EK3, in London, Ont.—complement your existing business?

We are just planting the seeds. You’re going to see the growth and the trajectory in three to five years. And you may say, “Hey, your U.S. compatriots have all stayed focused just on movies and drinks and popcorn.” Short term, you can see good results doing that. But you gotta look at it and say, “What’s the runway look like five years from now?”

Right. And one challenge of being a theatre owner is that you’re often at the mercy of movie studios’ decisions.

I always say: “We set the table. We don’t serve the steak.” I have a natural paranoia about what the future’s going to be like. You need to be ready for change. There’s nothing wrong with making a change sooner than you need to. This year, we’re having a tough year with some of the movies. Three years from now, our other businesses will be more mature, and that will offset any negative impact from Hollywood.

How do you make these acquisitions part of the Cineplex family?

When we did our biggest deal, the combination of Cineplex and Famous Players in 2005, it was a huge challenge. But we spent an inordinate amount of time communicating. And today, nobody feels like they came from different companies. We got rid of the Famous Players offices about three months after the acquisition. That was critical; if we kept them in different buildings, it would have been much harder to integrate them. Most deals don’t fail because of the financial part—they fail because of the culture part.

So it’s really just about com­mu­­­­­­­­­nicating?

Yeah. We’re going through it again now. We took over some Empire Theatres last year. The first thing we did was visit the theatres. I personally went out with a group of our executives and met with the managers. I remember one said, “God, you came out to see us in the first month. We haven’t seen our previous owners for years!” So it’s all about being part of that group and team. When I ran Galaxy, I used to speak to just about every manager every weekend.

How do you make sure you’re getting an acquisition right?

You look at the opportunities. When we bought Famous Players’ theatres, there were four called Paramount. And the old studio owner said they didn’t want us using the name. I said, “Why? I’m giving you free advertising.” So we sold the naming rights to Scotia­bank, which turned the cost of rebranding into a revenue opportunity.

Why did you approach Scotiabank?

I was visiting Istanbul with my wife. When I travel, I always go to the movie theatres. I went to one where the guy had named his auditoriums after corporate sponsors. I thought it was a really good idea. So when this opportunity came up, I took it to [retired Scotiabank CEO] Rick Waugh, who was CEO at the time. It was a tough sell, but I said, “You want to embrace the younger demographic, because once somebody opens a bank account, they very rarely change.” It’s a great partnership: the naming rights and the Scotia­bank Scene loyalty program.

How is the Scene card working?

I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but we crossed six million members in our Scene program, which now makes us one of the larger programs in Canada. People say to me, “You’ve got such a large market share, what do you need a loyalty program for?” It wasn’t about the program—it was about the data, and understanding the guests and being able to communicate with them. So the program is very, very important to us.

What did you learn that you didn’t know?

We’re learning things all the time, like what people eat at the movies in certain locations? And we’ve got one of the best databases, because it captures the younger demographic. These are the hardest-to-reach people.

You also recently bought into an arcade supplier and have talked about growth potential in that area. Don’t arcades have the same challenges as movie theatres? I can play my Xbox at home.

It’s a social experience. When my kids were younger, I’d ask them, “Hey, what are you doing tonight?” And they’d say, “Nothing.” Their definition of nothing was staying at home watching a movie. Their definition of going out was going to the theatre with their friends. So it’s the social part of it. And you’ve got to keep improving the box where you show the movies. You need to keep that experience beyond what you could do at home.

You guys have tried operating bowling lanes in the past. Why do you think bowling didn’t work but arcades might?

Bowling tends to attract people at a specific time. It became a weekend business, and that’s hard to justify when you’ve got all that square footage. Another thing we tried—and I was disappointed it didn’t work—was child-minding services. I thought it would be awesome: Drop your kid off, get a pager and go watch a movie. But I don’t think parents felt comfortable. The beauty of our business is we can test something in one location. If it works, we can spread it out. If it doesn’t work, we can say, “OK, I learned from that,” and move on.

Can you tell me about something you’ve tested that worked?

Opera has been massively successful. The first year we started, we had 24 locations. We did a million bucks’ worth of business that year. Now we’ve got over 100 locations, and we sell a million dollars’ worth of tickets in one day for the opera.

Does it bring in a different customer?

What’s great about that clientele is they come to the theatre and then say, “Hey, this is a pretty good experience.” They start coming back to see movies. We’ve also done sporting events; we’ve done stuff from the U.K.; we’ve done all kinds of national theatre, Broadway plays and dance. Now we’re doing art exhibitions. We’re taking some of the best art collections from around the world and putting them on film for people to see.

People complain that ticket prices go up, up and up. I gather some prices have actually gone down, but you’re charging a premium for the experience of seeing films in Imax or something similar.

Over the past nine years, our base ticket price has actually lowered. We decided to focus on improving the experience, and for that we will charge you the price. Guests now have so many different choices—UltraAVX, 3D, VIP, Imax, D-Box—if you don’t want to see it one way, you can see it another way.

How do you balance giving customers a better experience against driving the bottom line for shareholders?

It’s important to me that we use efficiency and effectiveness, not pricing, to drive the bottom line. We created a method called “zoning” in our food business, where we made sure customers were served quickly. Nine times out of 10, if I walk into a theatre and see people lined up, I think, I’m not standing in this line. Our concession per person used to be in the $3.80 range—it’s now over $5. When I met up with an analyst recently, she said to me, “Things must really be bad. I went to the theatre and there was nobody lined up at the concessions.” I said, “That’s music to my ears.”

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The post Cineplex CEO Ellis Jacob on secrets of a successful merger appeared first on Canadian Business.

Brooke Beach has a challenge common amongst many: producing a lot of content with limited resources without sacrificing quality.

Sound familiar?

Her marketing team has come up with a system that combines data from website analytics, marketing automation, and live chat to help create the right content for the right audiences. Intrigued as to how live chat contributes to this optimization equation, I talked to Brooke about how they go about it, and the impact it’s had on the business.

Brooke is the Marketing Director at Kevy, an Atlanta-based cloud integration company. Her team is responsible for building and maintaining an inbound engine to educate and engage users, and bring in new leads. They aim to write one eBook and one-two customer success stories each quarter, and two blog posts each week. They also are responsible for writing support articles for 600+ cloud integration combinations Kevy offers.

“Despite our small team, our content goals are lofty so we must be as efficient as possible,” Brooke told me. “All of this writing has to be as targeted as possible or we’re just spinning our wheels. We cannot waste time writing content that people aren’t interested in.”

Brooke decided early on that Kevy would be scrappy with their content creation. Rather than increasing headcount, paying contractors, or writing articles for all 600 integrations, they looked to their existing marketing tools to understand how to prioritize and create content efficiently.

They created a system that combines data from website analytics from Google Analytics and Moz, marketing automation from Pardot, and live chat from Olark to optimize their content marketing workflow.

Combining data from many sources

Kevy uses Moz and GA to understand which keywords lead people to kevy.com and which pages are most popular. Every month, they look at the top 10 keywords people use to find Kevy and the top 3-5 pieces of content that received the most interaction from reads to social posts. They cater their content to use the words people are already using to find them.

Then they use Pardot to gauge engagement through the month-end content newsletter—a dynamic email that compiles the top stories. “The stories with the most clicks/views are what we consider to be the most engaging so we will dive deeper into those topics the following month,” Brooke said.

Their content newsletters receive, on average, a 35%+ open rate—very impressive considering averages are between 20 and 25%.

This data from Moz, GA and Pardot is rolled into a month-end review that highlights the content with the most clicks, views, email opens and social shares.

How live chat works with content marketing

But the evaluation isn’t entirely quantitative. Here’s where live chat comes in. Kevy uses Olark for observational context to understand the content that readers find interesting or confusing.

“Having live chat on our site has been an unexpected but pivotal part of our content strategy,” Brooke said. “We can look at each interaction and see if a particular page is causing a lot of people to speak up. If they are, very often it’s because the content on that page isn’t clear.”

Pages like pricing and the FAQ section sparked the majority of chats—people asking for clarification on some of the explanations. In the beginning, they answered these questions on chat, but soon realized that permanent web content and sales collateral would address the demand for these questions at scale.

This method proved to be highly valuable. Rather than waste weeks by writing content on all 600+ integrations, the team looked at what integrations people were chatting about most and used that insight to write specific content for high-demand integrations.

Results of content optimization: A new website, a user community

This past summer, Kevy used the insights from its optimization tools to launch its new website. Sections such as ‘stories,’ ‘resources,’ and the Kevy blog were all re-vamped, but Kevy’s FAQs and Pricing were altered the most. FAQs were arranged from most asked to least asked so the most frequently asked questions were front and center.

“We’ve had incredible feedback from our new site. We immediately noticed an increase in conversions and have seen an 11% increase in leads since the launch of the new site,” Brooke said.

The new, more targeted site has resulted in fewer questions from customers, so live chat is used more as a sales extension and less for content feedback. The team uses a new platform for content feedback now: a User Community. To aggregate requests and ideas from customers, they built the community as a dedicated channel to engage with customers and build on those ideas.

“Before we were receiving content and product requests from chat, email, and site forms. Now we direct all of these ideas to our User Community,” said Beach. “This community has been a powerful guide for our feature roadmap. We also use it to automatically alert a customer when their idea is voted on or changes status so our customers feel heard.”

Takeaway: Optimization is not just about numbers

Optimization shouldn’t be strictly statistical (say that three times fast). Numbers will tell you a lot, but to get the full picture combine quantitative and qualitative feedback. It might take a little more time to capture and catalog this feedback, but in the long run, it will help you make better-informed content decisions. Adding chat functionality to your site can also help you understand your customers’ needs better, while building trust and engagement. The more proactive you are as a business, the more your customers will trust your dedication to their success.

How you can optimize content like this.

• Do you send out articles via email? Measure which ones drive the most opens and clicks.
• Analyze month over month traffic for your content pages or blog posts.
• Add a live chat widget to your content pages and especially pricing page.
• Compile all of this data into a monthly review.
• Examine which topics were most talked about, what people had the most trouble with.
• Prioritize a list of new articles based on this.

Jay Blandford | Executive Vice President, Sales & Business Development
Parata Systems, LLC.

What are the benefits of Twitter chats for your business? Trying to consider whether you’d join chats in Twitter? Would it only be a waste of time for your business? What I found is that whether your brand is an active participant, or hosts one, it comes with surefire benefits for your business. For sure, it is not a waste of your time.

Here are the benefits of joining Twitter Chats:

Helps Grow Your Twitter followers | One

If increasing the number of followers is one of your goals, then join a twitter chat regularly. You would notice a spike of “new followers” every time you are actively engaged in one. This is a fact that those active in Twitter chats would be able to confirm. Of course, you can look for followers on Twitter, but with chats, they find you. You see, engagement attracts followers.

There’s a plethora of chats going on in the interwebs. Where do you look for relevant chats? Check this list and schedule of Twitter chats.

Builds Your Twitter Community | Two

Through your regular conversations with tweeps in chats, you get to know them; they get to know you.

To build community:

….if you’re the participant: Be there consistently. Make your conversation of value by providing helpful answers. Make your time count. Don’t waste it.
…if you’re the host: Make your topic relevant to your participants. If you don’t know what topics resonate with them, ask! Don’t be a know-it-all!

You Get Free Tips and Information | Three

It is a great source of ideas, tips, information – and inspiration. After each chat, I often walk away with something to try or check out.

Builds Your Brand’s Authority | Four

In twitter chats, you share your knowledge and prove your expertise. That helps build your authority or influence. The more consistently you attend one, the better it is for you. Of course you can fast track that by hosting a chat yourself (check #9), or by being a guest expert of one. You want to build your credibility, do you?

Blog Content Source | Five

Struggling for topic to blog about? Join a chat. It is can be a content strategy. I get sparks of ideas on what to write from twitter chats. This blog is a perfect example.

Opportunity to Chat Online Meaningfully | Six

I used to struggle finding someone to converse with on Twitter despite of its being an open social media platform. Twitter chats take you beyond the weather and coffee conversation. You exchange useful and helpful ideas.

Brand awareness | Seven

It is a very cost-effective way to increase brand awareness. When joining Twitter chats, your brand (i.e. Twitter handle), could potentially get mentioned or retweeted several times during the chat. What they retweet could be seen by their followers. The more people see your brand, the better. Right?

Connect with Leads | Eight

You heard of “out of sight, out of mind,” right? Although a chat is not a sales event and that attendees are not there to buy a product, your engagement in Twitter chats is a tactical strategy to make sure that you are on top of your potential customer’s mind when they need what you’re selling.

Engage with Customers | Nine

Use it as an opportunity to nurture relationship with existing customers. Keep them engaged with your brand through the chat. Get a pulse of what they want. You can, without being sales, even use it as an opportunity to announce product launch or important news and event that would be beneficial to them.

A learning Experience | Ten

Should you want your business to host a chat, join a couple of chats first. Observe how it is done by others. I wrote a list of more than 20 tasks a host may need to do before, during and after a Twitter Chat. Should you want to know more what it takes to host one, check it out.

Should you want to try chats, check out #ConstChat by @YoutooCanBeGuru & #DigiBlogChat by @Carol_Stephen.

Conclusion

Joining twitter chats is very beneficial to your business. In fact, it is a very efficient and effective use of your time, if time is that scarce for you as business owner or executive.

What other benefits of Twitter Chats can you think of beside the above?

During my earliest days as a sales rep, my performance was inconsistent. I quickly learned a lot. I performed better.

As a manager, the same process occurred.

It did again as VP of sales. At one point, during a meeting, one of the VC’s on our board told me to, “stop the self-flagellation and start delivering some numbers.” Ouch.

I learned a lot from that point going forward about selling, targets, pipelines, forecasts, hiring, channels, partners, demand generation, and all the rest.

In some ways a self-employed consultant has it easy.

Targets are self-imposed. No investors breathing down your neck. No CEO, no boss, no having to meet Wall Street’s expectations. On the other hand, if the phone doesn’t ring, you don’t eat. You not only have to sell, but you have to deliver, and market, and service, and stay relevant, always expanding and enhancing your product/service offerings… Lots of plates spinning.

This leads me to my role at ES Research: analyzing and comparing sales training companies and sales trainers. And helping sales training buyers determine their requirements leading to supporting them in selecting the right provider to achieve their objectives.

I learned a lot.

• I learned that salespeople who work for some sales training companies are incompetent.
• I learned that some sales training companies miss their targets as often as they make them.
• I learned that some sales training companies don’t practice what they preach.
• I learned that some sales training companies have no idea how to market, nor respect for marketing.
• I learned that some sales training companies have done nothing to stay relevant to the needs of their clients.

Just food for thought: Don’t you think a sales trainer or sales training company should be able to do for themselves what you need them to do for you: make their numbers?

I thought so.

Graphic source: nacministers.info

When it comes to marketing your business, social media engagement is the best way to go. The question is, which social media would you go for? If you have already created a Facebook page, then you then you have made a great start. Your next step should be pinning with the queen of visual social media networks, Pinterest.

Shareaholic.com reveals that Pinterest has increased its traffic driving capacity up to 7.10% from 4.79% in just three months (from December 2013 to March 2014). This 48% increase has a huge effect for brand exposure through digital marketing in products such as books, magazines, antiques, services, and even IT/computing.

Pinterest is a social media platform based mostly on images. For more than four years, you increase your social network by pins of uploaded, saved, and shared photos which are then organized into pinboards. It can be compared to Facebook as it has an increasing number of fans reaching over 70 million and still continues to grow. If you want your business to be big, here’s why you should go ahead and start pinning and start some Pinterest marketing.

Reasons To Start Pinterest Marketing

Here are some top tips to start Pinterest marketing today!

1. Strengthen Your Brand

With Pinterest, you could personalize your page to your business name and your logo as your profile picture to reach maximum exposure every time you pin an image. You could also add a paragraph describing the nature of your business including your business website, and even link this to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. If your business involves different types of services or products, you could categorize them into different pinboards for easier navigation.

2. Drive Heavy Traffic

To drive traffic for your website, Pinterest provides a hover button which leads directly to your site. This is beneficial for users to pin images directly from your site and check your site as well. You do not even have to worry on how to use Pinterest for your business, Pinterest has a guided editor which helps you navigate through the pages without breaking a sweat.

3. Market Research

Pinterest gives you an overview of the trend in the market and what appeals to customers most. You may think that most Pinterest users are women but these women still have husbands and male friends who they would want to give gifts to or shop for. By the way they build pinboards and pin things, you see what makes them tick as a customer and the other products that are trending.

Photo by Bunches and Bits {Karina} via Flickr

4. Gain New Customers

Once your pin has started to gain popularity in various pinboards, you still get a hefty amount of views even when these are pinned or not. Imagine a billboard along a highway, these are seen by the public and could still win them over as long as it stays there. If pinned and shared by various users, you have a higher chance of gaining new customers in the process.

5. Be An Authority In Your Line Of Business

Since you are able to do market research, you can change and focus your ways on how to be an authority in Pinterest. With the right amount and quality of photos and descriptions, you could easily target these descriptions to what most new Pinterest users would want.

6. Free Marketing From Your Fans

Just like Instagram and Facebook, Pinterest makes use of the followers and images that need to increase their popularity. The more the photo or image is interesting, the higher the chances of being pinned by other users. You don’t have to spend more money on a separate content marketing strategy, all you have to invest on is the right description and the quality image that you could pin.

7. Customer Engagement Through Contests

You could increase customer engagement through contests. With Pinterest, you could try hosting a photo contest of the best photo with your business logo on them. This will definitely initiate a pinning spree all over the world with your logo which is an instant marketing for your product. Your brand is being shared not only to you but to their friends as well which are potential or current customers of your product.

Photo by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

8. Widen Product Exposure

This has been said a number of times above, but the point is Pinterest is often linked to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media websites so expect to have numerous customers with just one pin.

9. Boost The Sales

Scattering photos all over Pinterest increases exposure to different pinners and boosts your product sales. You may create different pinboards for every target audience you have which, with the right board name, entice these potential customers to patronize your business. Also, part of the sales process should also include the company’s target, vision, and mission.

10. Longer Post Exposure

According to WebpageFX, the average lifespan of a Pinterest pin is three and a half months, which is 1,600 times longer than a Facebook post. Overtime, as your pin gets to be shared with other users, it still continues to spread like wildfire. You don’t have to repeat the pin over and over again to achieve this exposure. Wisemetrics.com shares that a Tweet achieves the peak of its views and retweets in 24 minutes and then dies, a Facebook post could live 90 minute half-life at best, but a Pinterest pin lives for forever. Pinterest makes it easier to search for your product not only on your page but also on other pages as well.

Photo by Kris Olin via Flickr

11. Excellent SEO Strategy

With the way Pinterest works, keywords are still important. If you google keywords, most of the time a pinterest page comes up with numerous pinboards in it containing the product or the search item.

12. Free Sales Promotion

You don’t need to hire anyone to do the pinning for you. Get a great shot, work on the words, and post it online. Viola! Free marketing! You don’t need to spend a dime on this and this works 24/7.

Why use Pinterest for your business? Pinterest is not just about fashion and other girly stuff. With the rate pinning takes your business, you might just need to start pinning it!

There are few things more delicious than sleeping in, burrowing deeper into a heap of clean sheets and having breakfast brought in on a tray. Reality probably strikes closer to groggy protests and the inevitable panic when you realize you’ve hit the snooze button a few too many times. In either situation­—whether you’re lounging in luxury or running for the dry shampoo in lieu of a shower—people far more successful have already been up for hours. Have early risers caught on to something, or is the relationship between an early start time and success just coincidence? This is what the world’s most successful people—CEOs, self-made millionaires, industry tycoons, and world leaders—are doing while you’re still snoozing.

They’re staying fit

While it’s easy to want to exercise, the follow-through is much more problematic, especially when hectic schedules and innumerable life hiccups get in the way. It makes sense that those most successful get in their workouts in the morning before energy levels and willpower wane. President Obama starts every day with a workout at 6:45 a.m., by which time Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief at Vogue, has already played tennis for an hour. Former Pepsi CEO Steve Reinemund wakes at 5:00 a.m. daily to run four miles, and Condoleezza Rice sets her alarm for 4:30 a.m. to fit in a sweat session. In this Yahoo! Finance study, more than 70 percent of executives exercise in the morning, and as such, benefit from revved up metabolisms, increased energy, better moods, lower stress levels, and higher productivity. A consistent morning exercise plan also brings that sense of control and empowerment so often exhibited by the world’s most powerful.

They’re staying current

According to CNBC, Warren Buffet’s morning reading includes the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Omaha World-Herald, and the American Banker. Bill Gates takes in the national news and various economic and business publications. Others add checking social media feeds to their morning news routines. Whatever the medium, leaders are making sure they are up-to-date on the world before going out into it.

They’re staying sharp

Icons of success use mornings to get a head start on important projects, before the slew of daily distractions, meetings, and interruptions compete for attention. Tim Cook, Apple CEO, is known to send out the day’s important emails at 4:30 a.m. Pre-dawn hours may be the best to tackle difficult projects as not only are you freshly recharged but also evidence in this study suggests that you’re best primed for creative problem-solving directly after REM sleep. The peak energy levels you experience throughout the day are determined by your personal circadian rhythms, but that’s not to say that night owls should write off their mornings as unproductive. According to this article, your creative potential is actually at its best when you aren’t, so if you’re typically alert at night, you’re most likely to experience problem-solving breakthroughs in the early hours of dawn.

Successful people also take time in the early hours to cultivate mental health through meditation. The billionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund said in this interview that he attributes his success to early meditation. Bill Ford of the Ford Motor Company built meditation into his morning routine when he realized he needed a way to bring positivity to the workplace during difficult economic times. If in doubt, ask Oprah; she swears by at least 20 minutes of quiet to set the tone for a successful work day.

They’re staying personal

Demanding family schedules make it more and more difficult to organize evening meals. TV writer Nell Scovell found her career responsibilities often ate into dinner hours, so she changed her family’s main meal to breakfast instead. Sharing your morning time with loved ones also creates a positive mental space to carry throughout the day. Morning family time for successful figures isn’t just about kids; morning sex triggers a boost from happy hormones that keep moods elevated and stress levels down as the day goes on.

The morning routines of the world’s leaders are absolutely achievable. While that snooze button may be tempting, rejecting excuses and adopting a few habits of the successful can only bring greater physical, mental, and spiritual health to your life. Take it from morning lark Benjamin Franklin: “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Set your coffee machine on a timer, unroll the yoga mat, and give up your bed a little earlier for some well-deserved self-improvement.

 

B.C. introduced a new skilled worker immigration stream this week that the provincial jobs minister says will allow employers to bring in people with needed skills faster. It will be almost inaccessible to anyone without a full-time, permanent job offer in the province and the economic means to support themselves. To apply through the new stream, called Express Entry British Columbia, applicants must first apply through the federal Express Entry system, where they complete an assessment to find out if they are eligible for one of the federal economic immigration streams. If they are, they create a profile that indicates their interest in settling in B.C.

Happy new year! Now that you’ve declared your sales targets for 2015, identified three new markets you’re aiming to move into, and signed up for that time-management training course you’ve been avoiding, have you thought about setting some personal fitness goals and sharing them with all your office colleagues?

You would if you worked at Vancouver-based public relations firm Jive Communications. In fact, you’d do that every Friday.
Staff at the 15-member firm declare “healthy lifestyle objectives” for each week at a regular group meeting (where they also discuss more mundane details like the work they do for clients). And as they commit to plans to run 10 kilometres each morning or do a daily three-minute plank, they also own up to whether they met their “fitness accountabilities” for the previous week.

Employees who come up short aren’t publicly shamed—but they do see a summary of the results in a group email, say partners Almira Bardai and Lindsay Nahmiache. The office also has a leaderboard that tracks individual results (two employees used it recently to see who could drink the most water in a week), and each month, staff receive a scorecard—part of a regular assessment of work performance — that assigns them a mark out of five for health accountability.

If it all sounds a little obsessive, the two partners say that the emphasis on sweat-inducing feats is more flexible than it sounds. Staff members who don’t want to pursue physical activity (or don’t want to pursue it in such a public way) can set other personal development goals, like music classes or anything else that helps them de-stress and work toward holistic health.

“But it seems to be fitness that just about everybody wants to focus on,” says Bardai, a trained yoga instructor who committed to doing two running sessions last week—a goal she met—and has upped the ante for this week to three runs and a yoga class. “We really believe in holistic health and personal growth, and these are the values we try to live by. That really appeals to a lot of people—younger workers, especially. That’s what they value.”

Bardai and Nahmiache don’t put a price tag on employee fitness, but a recent study out of the University of Michigan Health Management Research Center does: It showed that even 10 to 20 minutes of daily exercise could produce significant health benefits and lower the cost of employee healthcare. One cohort of workers who exercised five times a week and who had a cluster of risk factors that can lead to diabetes and heart disease had average medical expenses of $2,770 annually, compared with $3,855 for employees with similar conditions who didn’t work out.

MORE:

• Sneaking to the gym during business hours can make you more productive
• How MEC’s new head office encourages employees to stay active
• Five things you need to turn your commute into an easy, efficient workout

Jive isn’t alone in encouraging staff to live healthy lifestyles. Companies that operate in the health and fitness sector often have similar initiatives. Sports drink producer Gatorade, for instance, introduced a program last year that encouraged employees to sign up for one of three health-related streams: endurance, strength training and fitness. The brand also introduced a daily athletic challenge, called the G-Feat:60, a non-mandatory competition that might involve doing jumping jacks or planks.

And then there’s Mountain Equipment Co-op, a company with staff who are already so focused on physical activity, spokesman Andrew Sutherland has a hard time naming everything they do on site at MEC’s new corporate headquarters. There’s a cross-fit gym and a multi-use room where staff do pilates, aerobics and other things, and a rooftop garden where employees can do yoga in warmer weather. “Oh, and I forgot,” he adds. “We have a bouldering room.” Just, you know, another day at the office.

The post “You hit your sales targets. But you’re behind on your yoga” appeared first on Canadian Business.

I strongly recommend that anyone in B2B sales read Andy Paul’s book, Amp Up Your Sales: Powerful Strategies That Move Customers to Make Fast, Favorable Decisions, but you won’t find a traditional review here, the kind in which I summarize the key points in the book.

Instead, I will focus on and develop one of his fundamental principles that I personally found to be a compelling and different angle, one which I plan to pursue in my own sales efforts.

In a nutshell, Paul’s key theme is that how you sell is more important than what you sell, and how is based on three principles:

• Make selling simple
• Be super-responsive
• Maximize selling time

I was especially intrigued by his emphasis on responsiveness; while I certainly won’t do justice to it here I will inject my own interpretation.

Nathan Bedford Forrest once said that the key to military tactics was to get there first with the most, and Andy Paul follows squarely in that tradition. Responsiveness is information + speed, and it’s important because selling is about answering the questions and providing the information the customer needs throughout their buying cycle to make their decision. The salesperson who supports the buying process by helping them make the right decision in the shortest time possible will win. This requires a prompt response to requests for information.

What does prompt mean? I personally would have thought same day would be fine, but Paul suggests within a half hour if possible. The reasoning is that customers need a certain amount of information in a certain order to make the right decision, and they have different needs depending on where they are in their buying cycle, so the best time to add value is when they ask the question or request the information. At the very least, you differentiate yourself from the overwhelming majority who won’t respond as fast as you will, and that sends a powerful message about how you will handle their business if you win it.

There’s a much more powerful yet subtle reason why responsiveness works, which Andy demonstrates through a series of graphs which depict the amount of value being delivered to the customer throughout the sales process. At each point, such as initial contact, discovery and presentation, the buyer has a need for some information which they will then digest prior to the next point in their buying process. For big B2B sales, it’s not realistic that the customer will identify a problem, gather all the information they need to solve it, evaluate alternatives and make the best decision at one time. It’s a process that takes time, and information gathered at each stage is used to shape the next set of questions and necessary information. The real power in responsiveness is that if you are the first to respond, you may have already changed the information they need by the time your competitor responds, so that they are playing catchup. By the time they respond, their response is not as valuable to the customer as it would have been; it may even be irrelevant.

Although he doesn’t call it that, Andy is describing John Boyd’s idea of the OODA loop, which was initially applied to air-to-air combat. OODA stands for Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action. The competitor who gets inside the other’s OODA loop dictates the fight, because by reacting faster the first time he’s in a better position to react even faster the second time, and the cumulative effect can be transformative.

It’s important to keep in mind that responsiveness does not mean simply reacting to customers’ requests for information—at every stage you have the option and ability to ask your own questions or provide different insights in order to reshape their buying vision. If there is a shortcoming to the book, it’s that, although he touched on it at several points, Paul could have emphasized this more.

I also would have liked to see more citations. Andy mentions several articles and studies which add credibility, but it would have been helpful to know how to find those for further reading. This is probably just me, because I study this stuff; if you simply want good solid sales advice you probably can take it at face value and not worry about it.

There’s much more to Amp Up Your Sales than what I’ve covered here, of course, but just that alone would make it worth reading the entire book. I urge you to respond quickly and read it as soon as possible—unless you’re one of my competitors.

 

 

In case you’re looking to make your 2015 New Year’s resolutions a few days after the big day, here are five your buyers want you to consider.

1. I’ll find the time or budget to interview buyers and understand their mindset.
2. I’ll bring the buyer’s perspective to our company’s internal discussions and decisions, replacing “I think” with “we’ve been listening to buyers and they think.”
3. I’ll align with our salespeople by focusing on how we can work together to be helpful to buyers.
4. I’ll ensure that our time and budget is allocated to creating content and resources that provide clear and useful information to buyers.
5. I’ll stop making stuff up.

If this is too many to take on all at once, I highly recommend the final one, and that you’ll start with a plan to stop making up your buyer personas. Too many marketers are treating buyer personas as a creative exercise, with predictably disastrous results.

For example, we recently completed a buyer persona study for a company that had been delivering content to the executive buyer of their technology solution by focusing on its business benefits.

Here’s a verbatim quote from one of the buyers we interviewed:

“I’m looking for a level of detail that would need to be provided by an engineer. I’m not interested in a colorful brochure. I’m not interested in one that has been extensively wordsmithed. I’m just looking for a particular set of capabilities.”

In the next sentence, this executive described the capabilities he wanted in this type of solution. Then he talked about the perceived limitations of each of the solutions he had considered. He said that the business benefits were obvious, available from every vendor, and that marketing materials that focused on those points were useless.

This marketing team is not alone. Countless marketers have made similar mistakes by segmenting their buyer personas by job title and guessing about the content that will be useful to those people. It’s not that these marketers are wrong about the need to focus on business value, but it’s difficult if not impossible to guess about what it will take to persuade that executive that their solution is the best way to achieve a specific goal.

As I look towards the new year, I’m thrilled about the enthusiasm that marketers are showing for buyer personas. But I’m also alarmed about the long term prospect for buyer personas if marketers don’t realize that the purpose of buyer personas is to gain insight into the buyer’s mindset.

I hope that 2015 will be the year that marketers resolve to become buyer experts, and that my upcoming book from Wiley — Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business – will be an easy way for marketers to understand what’s required. The launch is scheduled for March, and the Kindle and hardcover editions are now available for pre-order here.

For many companies considering how digital technologies could or should transform their business models, the questions they face are questions of unprecedented uncertainty, where past experience may be no help.

It’s uncomfortable terrain for many strategists. But it’s familiar territory to innovators, who’ve spent decades wrestling with the problem of how to manage uncertainty when there is little to guide them in getting their new offering to a new audience or market.

But unless your company competes on the basis of continuous innovation, like, say, Apple or Amazon, your innovators probably work separately from your strategic thinkers. That’s a shame, because the discipline of the innovation process is tailor made for addressing the wealth of unknowns that moving to a digital business model entails.

For over a decade now, we’ve been studying how the best innovators manage uncertainty, and in the course of our research we’ve seen three traps strategists fall prey to in fashioning digital business models, which they could avoid if they approached digital business modeling as an exercise in innovation.

Trap 1: Replicating What You Did Before

The greatest temptation is to replicate your current business model digitally. That’s understandable, since making your existing resources do more makes good financial sense and often makes good strategic sense, especially to strategists who have seen the wisdom of moving carefully from core to adjacencies.

But if you think of a digital business model as an innovation, rather than as an extension of your core strengths, it becomes easier to think of the shift as an opportunity to take advantage of new capabilities, rather than leverage old ones.

Innovators lower the risks of moving beyond their comfort zones by breaking down new-product development into a series of small, low-risk, low-cost experiments designed to test the assumptions behind a new offering. This same approach can be used to test out the assumptions behind a new business model  before going full bore over some cliff.

Insight Center

Take the shift from print newspapers to online media portals. In the early days, many publishers assumed they could set advertising rates online the same way they did in print, on the basis of the volume of readers. The prospect of lowering production costs, by not having to print and distribute paper, combined with the ease of (theoretically) reaching a larger audience online, led many to assume that the online versions of their publication would be even more profitable than the print versions. Some further assumed that first movers had the advantage online, and rushed to get big fast.

But those assumptions turned out to be famously flawed, as advertising dollars were spread far more thinly across a proliferation of sites, and publishers found they could not even replicate their print revenue streams, let alone scale up. Incentives for the sales team turned out to be radically different, as well, as large, in-person bulk ad buys gave way to a series of small, semi-automated sales transactions.

Still, the new medium represented new opportunities waiting to be explored, even for incumbents. Salt Lake City-based Deseret Media, for instance, experimented with creating a free online local classified website, in the process building capabilities in web design and user interfaces. In this way, the 165-year-old newspaper succeed in creating a site that most viewers agree is easier to navigate than Craigslist, and as a result, KSL.com is the only local newspaper classified site to beat out Craigslist in one of the 40 largest U.S. markets.

Trap 2: Build It and They Will Come

On the other side of the coin is the temptation to just jump right in and build something awesome and expect everyone to see its obvious merits, just as you do.

But bankruptcy courts are littered with seemingly clever software programs and apps that were written in the mistaken belief that customers would want them.  Successful innovators take a step back, before building, to deeply understand what problem they could really solve with the new digital offering.

Our favorite way to think of this is in terms of what Clay Christensen has famously called the “job-to-be-done.”  Essentially, this is the view that all successful products and services satisfy a functional, emotional, or social job a customer needs to do by either mitigating some pain or creating some gain, and by doing so better than other available alternatives.

It’s the “better than other alternatives” that matters most in digital business models, we’d argue. Take, for example, Instagram’s recent success. Instagram clearly allows for social connection, but so do many other online services. So what job is it doing that other sites do not do as well?  Anyone who has written a blog understands how much time it takes to craft high-quality material. Twitter, arguably reduces the pain of self-expression down to 140 characters, which for many purposes is enough to get the job done.  But with a few clicks on Instagram, users can not only send a picture (possibly worth a thousand words), but through the use of filters and simple effects easily and conveniently multiply their powers of self-expression, as well as get social validation through the feedback function.

Trap 3: Thinking the Sale is the Finish Line

Enlightened strategists have always focused not only on the point of sale but on the entire consumption chain before the sale, mapping out how customers would become aware of, evaluate, and purchase a new offering. But we’ve noticed that even enlightened leaders often miss or ignore what happens after the sale — service, support, and disposal. For digital business models, however, the “virality coefficient” — the rate at existing users recruit new users — may make how you connect to customers after a sale the key to success or failure.

For example, when Dropbox first launched as an innovative file storage, syncing, and sharing service, its executives assumed they could simply acquire customers using Google AdWords. But competitors had bid up the cost of keywords so much that it was costing Dropbox between $300 and $500 to acquire a customer who paid $100 a year in subscription fees. Recognizing that the business model was unsustainable, co-founder Drew Houston proposed another approach, one used by PayPal during the dotcom boom to acquire customers: Dropbox offered 250MB of free storage for referrals (both to the giver and recipient of the referral).  Adoption of Dropbox shot through the roof and customer acquisition costs fell to pennies on the dollar.

Connecting to customers after the sale may mean transforming a one-time sale into a recurring subscription revenue model. Alternatively, it may mean giving away part of the business for free, recognizing that both the additional referrals and data captured (which, with permission, might be resold to advertisers) may have more value in the long run than the short-run sales.

Or not. It might turn out, as the newspapers found, that giving something away for free doesn’t automatically lead to revenues from anyone else. That’s why the only way to resolve these kinds of questions is to test them out on the cheap. Fortunately, if digital business models are risky, they are easy to experiment with.

Some of our students, for example, believed there was a need for an improved collaborative project management tool (akin to Base Camp).  But was that so? To find out, they launched a website that merely described what their software would do and then offered a year’s free access to anyone who sent referrals of five other potential customers who also signed up. In four weeks, 140,000 people signed up for their no-name startup. That number rose to 300,000 soon after, exceeding the growth rate of Base Camp itself. But the important thing here isn’t that experiment worked – it’s that if it hadn’t, the students would have found out that their idea wasn’t the next Base Camp before they’d committed serious resources to it.

Every time you introduce a new value proposition to a new audience (or change some key element of your business model) you introduce uncertainty.  Introducing a digital business model often introduces uncertainties not only of degree but of kind, shifting the effort out of the realms of strategy and into the realms of innovation.  Innovators know they need to manage uncertainty differently than they manage the execution-oriented part of the business. It’s a lesson that strategists might profitably apply, too.

Gerhard Gschwandtner interviews Michael Webb on Selling Power TV: 

 Download the full transcript here: 

Does Your Sales Process Create Value transcript

This was a great opportunity to explain Sales Process Excellence in a nut-shell. Let me know what you think!

And, visit https://www.sellingpower.com/Cloud to subscribe to Selling Power Magazine.

Order your copy of Sales Process Excellence today.

 

Michael

Satire has always been celebrated in Western culture, even through the clenched teeth of those being satirized, for the moral outrage that propels it at its finest. In short, for often mythic reasons: the value of, say, South Park, which has been savagely mocking everything for two decades, is debatable for many, who see neither courage, nor beneficial outcomes nor actual moral fervour in it. Even in the case of English literature’s most famous satire, Jonathan Swift’s brilliant A Modest Proposal—which blandly suggests an obvious solution (eat the children) to 18th-century Ireland’s dual problems of starvation and overpopulation—the practical effects then and now are debatable. But as an ideal—the crusading artist, whether writer or illustrator, raging with a brave mockery that entertains and shames and changes hearts—the satirist is honoured. In some places, notably France, the satirist and the satirical vehicle, whether magazine or TV show, are perched on the higher rungs of the cultural ladder, almost sacred cows themselves.

It wasn’t always so. Celebrated or not, until relatively recently satire was a chancy business even in the West, its peril always in direct proportion to the sacredness, power and cruelty of the ox being gored. Criticism of medieval church prelates or Renaissance popes could lead to encounters with the Inquisition, and in pre-revolutionary France, Voltaire often found it prudent to live abroad. It’s also difficult to distinguish from pure mockery or simple political opposition — the mobs that attacked abolitionist newspapers in the antebellum South were not angered by satirical humour. Yet there is something in the real thing, a stinging truth that leaves the powerful naked and ridiculous, without any answer but repression. Satire also lodges in the popular consciousness with an afterlife that continues long after earnest protests are forgotten: there are endless historical accounts about the bureaucratic and deadly stupidity of armies, but none that will survive as long as the satirical novel Catch 22.

Related reading: Charlie Hedbo and the revenge of old religion. 

In the past half-century, though, as ever-wider free expression became a core Western value — as long as libel laws and their modern offspring, hate-speech bans were skirted — satire offered little danger to its practitioners, who could attack virtually anyone in a culture with very little untouchable left in it. There was probably something of that thoughtless assurance in the offices of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which, in 2005, commissioned 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad — even though the paper’s stated object was to test the limits of self-censorship in the wake of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh the year before, as well as what happened to Salman Rushdie in 1989, when Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the British novelist for perceived blasphemies in his Satanic Verses novel.

The reaction — riots worldwide causing more than 200 deaths, continuing threats and attacks on the cartoonists — marked the return, for the first time since the Nazis, of real physical danger for satirists. And it marked too, a resurgence — from those who did not self-censor themselves out of the fray — of the sort of courage and moral defence of free speech that originally brought political satire to the esteem it holds in our culture. It’s the sort of courage the staff of Charlie Hebdo, firebombed only three years ago, displayed in full awareness of the risk to their lives, a risk that caught up with them Jan 7. In a long and uneven tradition, their place of honour is unquestioned.

Related reading: Cartoonists pay tribute to Charlie Hebdo.

The post Satire: Use at own risk appeared first on Macleans.ca.

How many times have you fought hard to get an appointment or a phone call with a great prospect and when you finally do and show up, THEY are the ones who are not prepared?

You did your research, you looked in LinkedIn, you prepared your questions for the discovery call and when you sit down to talk with them, they respond with “I don’t know”, “Let me check on that”, or “Good question, I don’t handle that part of our business directly.”

One suggestion I have that has been pretty successful with our customers is this simple document used to send in advance of your sales call. We named it the “Initial Discovery Questionnaire” and it is simply a list of the discovery based questions you want to know and review with your prospect when you meet them for the very first time.

By sending your questions in advance of your meeting, you make your prospect aware of the information you need to determine whether you have a sales opportunity or not. It keeps you from wasting the prospects time and of course your valuable time. They now know what you want to know when you show up for the appointment.

Start your year off and build an Initial Discovery Questionnaire.

Begin by creating a simple cover page of the information and assumptions you are already aware of. Sort of like an executive overview. You can use this space to Things like contact information for you, your team, the prospect and their team. Include any high level data you already know too. i.e.. Size of organization, number of staff, annual revenues, mostly public information.

Next, create 5 – 8 questions that help you determine their issues, pains, or goals. For example, when we use this technique our questions are:

• “Are you losing profit from excessive discounting?” or
• “Does unexpected downtime affect your bottom line?” or
• “Are your financials taking a hit from the inability to manage inventory?”

Each question should drive the prospect to a potentially costly issue, pain or goal you already know you can resolve better than our competition. Do a Value Inventory to gain this information and confidence.

The next page should be broken out into three sections. The first section is a statement of value. For example at the top of the first section in bold print we type “Increase Revenue with a Reduction in Discounting”. The next section can be a short paragraph explaining how you can help reduce discounting. Finally, in the last section, create questions that capture the current cost of the issue, pain, or goal.

An example might be, Annual Revenue? And Average Discount rate? By knowing these two numbers you are able to use simple math to calculate how much revenue is lost annually from discounting. And drive a conversation on your ability to reduce the losses or improve their revenue.

Each of the 5-8 questions should have a section below with the questions that lead to your value. Title the document “Initial Discovery.” Be sure to put instructions up front explaining these are the questions you want to discuss when you meet or talk, and that they “please take the time to get the answers before you meet.”

Finally, use the answers in your thank you letter too, confirming the information you received and establishing the next steps. This will show you listened to their answers, got the correct information, and have interest is resolving their problems.

The post Prepare your Prospect for a Sales Call appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.

• Your email subject line could determine whether a hiring manager will even consider your résumé.
• This is especially relevant now for thousands of Americans who were recently laid off.
• To make your email stand out, keep your subject line short, specific, and personalized.

Microsoft has become the latest tech giant to announce it's cutting workers. The company's decision follows layoff plans at other industry titans, including Twitter, Meta, and Amazon. 

If you find yourself hit by these layoffs, or are just on the hunt for a new position, it's important to not only dust off your résumé and cover letter, but also to craft the right email subject line if you're contacting a hiring manager.

A bad subject line can land your important note in the trash, while a well-crafted one increases open rates, a 2019 study published in Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal showed. 

Insider spoke with career experts including Amanda Augustine and Dmitri Leonov to learn their secrets on crafting the perfect email subject line. Here are their top tips.

Here’s the third of my “Market Leadership for 2015” videos, this time looking at Marketing Leadership.

You can catch yesterday’s video on Relationship Leadership here. And the first video on Thought Leadership here.

 
Get notification of the next Market Leadership video and my best tips and strategies to help you attract and win more clients. Sign up below.
Get Free Instant Access »
 

Transcript

Hi, Ian here again.

This is the third of my market leadership videos, this one is about market leadership through marketing leadership.

What do I mean by that?

Well if you want to be seen as a leader in your marketplace and get clients seeking you out and get that insulation from price pressure we’ve been talking about then you actually have to be visible to potential clients.

All that brilliant thought leadership, everything you’re doing to build relationships comes to nothing if no one actually sees it. And, of course, that’s where your marketing comes in.

Now in the professions it’s been a truism for a long, long time that the most successful firms are the ones with the most successful rainmakers. People with extensive networks, who can get referrals or go out and do presentations and bring clients in to the business.

And in most firms, those skills are a rarity. The technical skills to do the job are pretty commonplace, but the rainmaking or marketing skills to win clients are pretty rare. That’s why successful rainmakers tend to get paid so much.

Now historically, those rainmaking skills have tended to be interpersonal ones. So business was won by networking, schmoozing, by entertaining, by being a great presenter.

Those are rare skills and they’re also very time consuming activities so it meant that smaller firms – especially sole practitioners were at a disadvantage because they had to deliver the work themselves as well as win it.

Now, of course, the world is changing. Huge amounts of business are still won by networking, schmoozing, entertaining and dazzling people with your presentation skills. But for small and solo businesses the good news is that more and more business is being won or at least initiated online.

And online marketing, once you’ve mastered it, isn’t so time consuming because you set it up and it runs itself; and it’s also more outsource-able than personal marketing.

Now what I’ve particularly witnessed over the last couple of years is that consultants, coaches, trainers, even lawyers and accountants who have mastered some of the emerging marketing techniques quickly have been able to get a real edge and establish themselves as the go to people in their field largely because they were able to reach potential clients that others weren’t or reach the same people in different ways.

So if you’re doing personal marketing – you’re going out to networking events or doing presentations then it’s a relatively small market because it’s bounded by who you can physically reach.

And it’s also a very crowded market. I’m sure you’ve noticed that at every networking event you go to there are dozens of coaches and consultants, three or four law firms, a handful of accountants etc.

So if you want to make an impact with in-person marketing you have to be very, very good at it. Just showing up isn’t enough.

On the other hand, the people who mastered Facebook or Linkedin Advertising early, or who learnt how to do live webinars or automated webinars before their competitors, were pretty much playing in an an empty field where just doing that marketing strategy, even if they weren’t brilliant at it, was enough to stand out.

Now obviously lots more people are doing online advertising, and lots more people are doing webinars these days so it can sometimes feel like you’ve missed the boat.

But the truth is that if you look at your direct competitors you’ll find that pretty much 100% of them are doing traditional marketing and I’m sure they all have websites…

But probably only about 10-20% are doing real online marketing where they’re using pay-per-click or social media effectively, they’re taking people to landing pages, they feed into a marketing funnel with email marketing, they use video and audio and webinars.

If you look at how much of that your competitors are doing you’ll find that most of them are doing very little. Which means you only need to roll in a few of these techniques to get much more visibility with potential clients and to really stand out.

Now of course, eventually your competitors will catch up and that’s what I mean by Marketing Leadership. It’s always being that one step ahead of the game.

So for example, I’ve been doing Facebook Ads seriously for about a year now and I’ve implemented a marketing funnel behind that that very few of my competitors have.

I’m far from the only one doing that but most of my competitors aren’t. And I think it’s going to be at least a year or so before it gets more competitive.

So right now I’m looking at things like Youtube advertising to see if it might be the next thing I roll in when that happens so I stay a step ahead.

Now your market might be more advanced. But usually it’s fields like marketing that I work in that adopt new techniques quickly.

So the truth is that if you can master Facebook or Linkedin advertising or have an automated marketing funnel or get really good at regular webinars or video or podcasts then in most markets you can use that to establish a leadership position for at least a couple of years before it becomes crowded.

So simply by being better or more accurately learning faster at marketing, you can stand out in your field because you’re reaching different people that your competitors can’t reach, or you’re reaching the same people in different ways.

Now if you combine that with the other market leadership strategies I’ve talked about: so if you’re ahead with your marketing and you’re ahead with your ideas and thought leadership and you’re better at building relationships then you really have a combination that can allow you rapidly grow, become the go-to person in your field, work with the best clients and protect yourself from price competition.

Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be sharing more details on implementing these market leadership strategies.

So if you’re a Momentum Club member you’ll get webinars and detailed training and if you subscribe to my regular emails you’ll get updates and ideas through that.

Now I’ve got one last thing for you, it’s a little bonus market leadership strategy. I wasn’t originally planning to discuss it but as I’ve been doing these videos it struck me that it was a great complement to what I’ve been talking about so far.

It’s the concept of Value Leadership, and if you’re an email subscriber you’ll get an email from me on Tuesday next week with a link to a video on that.

If you’re not an email subscriber, you really should be – you can sign up below.

So that’s it for this week. I’ve really enjoyed doing these videos for you. I hope you’ve found them useful. And I’ll see you again soon.

The post Market Leadership Strategy #3: Marketing Leadership appeared first on Get More Clients: Proven Strategies to Attract and Win Clients.

LAS VEGAS, Nev. – When you’re searching for the hottest gadgets on the floor of this year’s consumer electronics show, be sure to look up. For the first time ever, there’s an International CES section dedicated to drones. More than 20 companies are showing off dozens of different models.

“People have been saying the drones are coming. But I think the fact that we have an unmanned systems area dedicated to them now means they’re not coming. They’re here,” says Andrew Amato, editor-in-chief of Dronelife.

Global revenue for drones will reach $130 million this year, up more than 50 per cent from last year, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. One new feature attracting drone buyers is so-called “follow me” technology, which allows a drone to automatically follow and film the user, who wears a tracking device on his or her wrist. It’s a cool tool for getting aerial footage of extreme sports.

“When you’re ready to surf, just push a button, the air dog will come over, shoot you. When you’re done, press a button and it will go back over to the beach and land and you’re ready for the next wave,” says Edgars Rozentals, founder of AirDog, which is delivering test kits to pilot customers after CES. And that action footage is looking sharper than ever as more drones are taking advantage of today’s 4K resolution cameras and image stabilizers.

But federal regulations haven’t caught up with advancements in drone technology. The Federal Aviation Administration, still concerned about drones getting in the way of commercial aircraft, requires drone users to have prior approval before flying their drones. However, just this week the FAA did issue new permits to allow drones to monitor crops and photograph properties posted for sale.

Drone operators say once other restrictions are lifted, the sky’s the limit.

The post It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a drone! Looking for gadgets at CES? Don’t forget to look up appeared first on Canadian Business.

Among emerging markets, China has long stood apart. Over the past two decades, Chinese GDP has exceeded 10% eleven times, while India’s only cracked that mark once.

Now, though, a new chapter is being written. China’s growth has underwhelmed over the past couple of years; 7.5% GDP growth is the norm today, and it’s trending lower. Two of the other BRIC nations, Brazil and Russia, whose resource-based economies are strongly correlated to Chinese demand for raw materials, have likewise struggled lately. The standout among big emerging economies is India, whose growth rate, while still lower than China’s, is on its way up, says Christine Tan, an emerging markets portfolio manager at Excel Funds Management.

Capital inflows are, for the first time, trending in India’s favour. In 2014, more than US$2.2 billion flowed into India-focused funds, while China saw US$1.8 billion. That’s a big switch from the longer-term pattern: Since 2004, international investors have pumped US$55 billion into China-focused funds versus US$19.5 billion targeted at India.

The changed expectations show up in valuation multiples too. China’s index is trading at 9.5 times earnings—it’s the second-cheapest emerging market country next to Russia—while India is trading at 16 times, making it one of the most expensive developing nations.

A big factor in that role reversal can be summed up in one name: Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister since May. During Modi’s visit to the United States in late September, he was given a rapturous reception by thousands at a packed Madison Square Garden. His fans compare him to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew.

Modi is a reformer who puts a premium on government efficiency and tight budgets, says Louis Lau, Brandes Investment Partners’ director of investments. In the past, India’s potential was perceived to be held back by bureaucracy and a lack of infrastructure. “He’s trying to jump-start a lot of good reforms on infrastructure, tax and other initiatives,” says Lau.

Meanwhile, China has pulled back on the infrastructure spending that got it through the recession. The country is in the midst of moving from an export-led economy to a domestic-led one. That transition typically results in slower growth, at least in the short term.

MORE:

• India’s oil giants plan for growth as government control recedes
• The real opportunities in China today are found farther inland
• In both India and China, the growing middle class is in trouble

Investors should continue to look at both of these countries, advises Tan. The long-term story of growing middle classes that want to buy more goods still holds true, she explains. Right now, though, she is overweight India and market weight China. For the time being, growth investors will want to look at India, while value buyers might find more opportunities in China. In the latter country, look for domestic-focused operations, such as jewelry stores, auto manufacturers and retailers; Lau has found some that trade between 10 and 12 times earnings. In India, infrastructure companies and financial firms could be big beneficiaries of Modi’s reforms.

Now is a good time to get into both countries. Developing-nation stocks were hammered during the autumn volatility, but should rise again as the long-term story plays out. “Emerging markets are always more volatile than domestic ones, but these [two] economies are still growing,” Tan says.

The post For emerging market investors, India is the new China appeared first on Canadian Business.

Today’s sales leaders are fortunate to have a wide array of sales acceleration solutions to choose from. That becomes all the more evident when you take a look at the release of our final Top Sales Tools of 2014 guide where you’ll find the top 50 tools for improving sales performance and results.

What you might not be aware of is the innovation that’s taking place outside of the U.S. In this post, I’d like to shine the spotlight on and give well-deserved recognition to several of those we consider to be the best. A full 10% of our top 50 Sales Tools of 2014 are international.

I encourage you to consider these top tools when evaluating sales acceleration solutions for your organization.

Membrain – Sweden
Membrain is Active Pipeline Management that helps drive successful sales behavior in Complex B2B Sales. It’s a completely customizable sales platform with intuitive tools that streamline and empower your process.

You’ll get visual overviews of your entire pipeline, automated alerts and coaching advice to keep the team focused on all the right opportunities.

Map, coach, visualize and analyze your unique sales process and give your entire sales team a road map to success.

Showell – Finland
Showell is an easy, fast and elegant mobile sales enablement app. It’s an all-in-one solution for sharing & presenting documents, videos, images and interactive content on the iPad.

Focus on what’s important – selling. Showell assures that sales teams have always up-to-date sales & marketing materials and are ready to have more impressive sales presentations anytime, anywhere without having to worry about an internet connection.

With Showell, generating leads, gathering information and monitoring sales is faster and easier than ever. The solution combines an online content management & repository cloud with an iPad presentation app and includes out-of-the-box connectivity with Salesforce.

iSEEit – Austria
iSEEit is a new kind of next-gen CRM solution. It’s an all-in-one sales tool that gives your salespeople a truly natural way to manage their daily sales activities. It will change the way salespeople think about and interact with their CRM – finally!

With iSEEit, it’s easy to focus on what’s most important and have the clarity needed to get the right things done at the right time. CRM should help you drive more sales with less work, not the other way around.

iSEEit will help you Increase efficiency and collaboration across your entire organization. And it also makes the sales process fun again.

Showpad – Belgium (and now, San Francisco as well)
Showpad is an easy to use mobile app that provides up-to-date, context specific, content. Showpad will increase your sales team’s efficiency in every stage: preparation, conversation and follow up.

Salespeople can present all their sales materials on any device and their powerful search functionality and easy navigation means salespeople will spend less time looking for sales collateral and have more time to make that sale.

I love that salespeople can create and send a Personal Catalog—a unique brochure with handpicked content—or a specific file as an attachment or a link.

Marketing can easily upload and manage all sales material in one central and secure place. Any type of popular content is supported (PDF, photo, video, Microsoft Office, HTML5 and more).

Perenso: Australia
Perenso is an application that helps your sales reps automate everyday tasks like ordering, stocktaking, and sales presentations, using an iPad.

Perenso lowers your cost of sales visits, helps you conduct more sales visits, and makes it easier to hit sales targets.

Spending on order pads goes down to $0. No more faxes, paper, or wasted phone calls. No more data entry costs, or order processing errors and credit returns.

Perenso prioritizes key customers to call on and prompts your team to upsell the right goods at the right time. The system lets reps focus on high value selling behaviors all day every day, pushing up sales volume and yield.

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There you have it. Five powerful, proven apps worthy of consideration for your sales team. If you’re looking for a better way to manage your complex B2B sales process, a CRM that salespeople will actually use and enjoy, or mobile selling apps, these five are a great place to start.

At the beginning of each year, my team and I publish a report on significant trends in B2B sales and marketing. This report is based on our experience with our B2B clients as well as relevant industry research. The purpose or the report is to provide information that is timely and actionable. You can read the full report here.

Trend 1: Metrics are a major priority. We see many B2B companies adopting an end-to-end marketing and sales framework that:

• Attributes new revenue to specific lead sources. As Casey Szulc of Inc.com reported, “…89% of businesses who carry out any form of attribution say it had a positive impact on their business.”

• Tracks conversion rates at every step in the process, including response to marketing qualified leads (MQL), MQL to sales accepted leads (SAL), sales accepted leads to opportunities and opportunities to closed deals.

• Combines marketing and sales reporting in a dashboard view.

Trend 2: Social media is getting tougher. It’s getting tougher because it is getting more competitive and the battle for prospects’ eyeballs and ears is fierce. The social sites that used to be mostly promotion-free (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) are now inundated with paid promotion. Just as with past “hot media” like direct mail, email and online banner ads, when advertiser activity goes up, response rates go down. You can see a lot of the Global Web Index research here.

Trend 3: The buyer’s funnel is becoming more important than the sales funnel. There are many variations of sales funnels, but they all have one thing in common – they are focused on the methodology sellers use to find prospects, engage with them, and close business. And while having a systematized process for achieving revenue is important, it will fail unless you incorporate something more important than just the way you prefer to do business.

Prospects want to buy the way they want to buy and are not prone to being directed by a sales team. For instance, they may do their own competitive product research, read reviews and appear much deeper in the funnel, ready for a quote. Yet, the prospect is confronted with a sales rep that frustrates them because of the insistence of following a rigid process that may have little to do with the way they prefer to conduct business. Industry experts have referred to this trend in different ways, calling the new model a “blurry buyers funnel” or a “fuzzy sales funnel.”

Trend 4: Tighter alignment of the sales and marketing functions. We are seeing a greater emphasis on sales and marketing alignment, not only in industry buzz, but also among our clients and prospects. As a specific example of why this is important, you can read my June 2014 article, where I talked about two very different sales models, and how they were created to effectively support the sales function. When you include hybrids, there are dozens of possible sales models and each needs to be tightly aligned between marketing and sales.

Trend 5: Failure to follow-up remains a big revenue killer. My company, Fusion Marketing Partners, has conducted extensive research on short- and long-term B2B buying patterns. One of the most striking conclusions is that the number of qualified prospects that will buy short-term is matched by an equal number who will buy, either from you or a competitor, downstream. This is why nurturing your prospect database is such a valuable activity. This means that you must follow-up not only when the lead first comes in (even though our research shows that 51.4% of inbound inquiries are not contacted), but also on a regular basis until that individual/company is ready to engage with you and buy something.

I feel confident that taking advantage of one or more of these sales and marketing trends can have a large impact for your company. I hope you enjoy and benefit from reading about these trends. We strongly feel that 2015 can be a great year for B2B companies and trust that you will achieve your share of revenues and profits.

Like most marketing initiatives, content marketing isn’t a one-and-done deal. And when you take an integrated approach—collaborating with other departments and teams to plan and distribute content across channels—this long-term strategy can set your marketing foundation for the next few years.

But taking the leap too quickly could cause your company to overlook existing assets and do more work for only a fraction of the benefit.

Before you rush into an integrated content marketing strategy, here are five critical mistakes many companies make (and how you can avoid them):

1. They Don’t Get the Necessary Buy-In

Before you invest in resources for your integrated content strategy, you need to get internal buy-in, or it won’t be successful for the long term. An integrated content strategy involves more than just the marketing department; educate upper levels on what an integrated content approach means and why it’s crucial to the company.

“An integrated content strategy involves more than just the marketing department.”

2. They Don’t Devise a Distribution Strategy First

Many companies create content and place it on a blog or in an external publication. But they don’t think through other potential distribution channels they can capitalize on to attract new customers and build better relationships with existing ones.

Companies should think about content distribution up front. Instead of putting all your focus on creating an engaging piece of content, start the process with distribution in mind—it will help you craft more compelling and engaging content.

“Think about content distribution up front.”

3. Measurements Aren’t Consistent

It’s common for large companies to be extremely compartmentalized, having multiple managers measuring a variety of verticals and key performance indicators. But when these departments fail to communicate, it’s impossible to determine your content’s success.

Standardizing measurement among departments is key to perfecting your content creation and distribution plan. But don’t get caught up in page views or leads just yet. See whether readers share your articles, and hone in on what they really want. When it comes down to it, you need to determine whether your company can effectively execute this type of strategy and properly distribute your content.

“Standardizing measurement is key to perfecting your content creation and distribution plan.”

4. There’s a Wide Skills Gap

Just because you want to create an integrated content marketing plan doesn’t mean you have the resources to achieve it. Some companies develop this strategy without the necessary writers, copy editors, and publication connections to execute a strategic plan.

Bring in outside experts to guide your integrated content marketing strategy. Use their advice to build the right processes and team structure. Then set up a cross-functional team, and pull in the right people, including writers proficient in social media, digital media, and traditional PR. This cross-functional team can inform your content creation and guide its distribution.

“Bring in outside experts to guide your integrated content marketing strategy.”

5. They Try to Sell

Integrated content marketing is about developing a trusting relationship with prospects and customers. You want to educate them on your industry so they can make more informed decisions. But far too often, companies view this as an opportunity to tout their own services. If you take this approach, you’ll end up creating clickbait that prospects write off as spam.

Shift from constantly trying to sell to actually educating your audience. Don’t sacrifice long-term relationships for short-term measurement gains.

“Don’t sacrifice long-term relationships for short-term measurement gains.”

6. Each Department Is Compartmentalized

Larger companies often don’t involve employees on the front lines of customer support and sales in the content creation process. But team members working in the trenches have their own unique perspectives that you should be harnessing.

Your social media team goes back and forth with customers on a real-time basis. Have them report on what content your audience wants to see. Customer service knows what clients call and complain about. Sales teams know what problems are keeping them from getting clients in the door or closing deals. Use this information to craft articles that put these pain points to rest.

At Influence & Co., we develop personas. Most companies have some sort of persona they’ve looked to for years. But involving other departments in persona development will help you pinpoint your target customers, so you can use personas as a guide instead of playing an endless guessing game.

“Involving other departments in persona development will help you pinpoint your target customers.”

If you approach your content strategy with integration in mind, you can capitalize on all the resources and channels you’ve already invested in. Developing a long-term strategy comes with risks, but if you have the right processes and team in place, the reward is well worth it.

It used to be called the January sales, but it seems like most retailers have had sales since at least the beginning of December. And they're still going... 

This is apparent in the sheer number of emails I receive from retailers. However, rather than delete them, I've decided to study them in more detail to see which brands are doing this well.

Read more...

Finding the right mix of material for your content marketing efforts can be an exhilarating or exasperating operation. For instance, you might enjoy posting those quirky short posts with employee activities, but are they doing anything for your Google juice? Take for instance the Q and A format or an expert interview. These are content formats that take time to set up, prepare for and execute properly. But guess what brings in more site traffic, qualified leads and interested eyeballs?

Knowing what to keep and what to drop in your content marketing strategy can make a big difference in your efforts this year. Maybe you’ve spent all of 2014 trying everything on for size, by testing all sorts of content marketing formats, like these below:

• Content/Articles
• Blog Posts
• Infographics
• Gifographics
• Animated GIFs
• Social Media Posts
• Photographic Images
• Social Graphs
• References/Resources
• Motion Graphics
• Free Guides/White Papers
• Slideshows
• Case Studies
• User-Generated Content
• Interviews
• How to’s/FAQs
• E-mail Content
• Videos

But when you look at the KPIs of your efforts, what have you found? What’s worth keeping around in 2015? What formats and strategies should be relegated to the dustbin of eternity? A key focus for content marketing professionals in 2015 is recognizing what works and what doesn’t – in other words, what’s hot and what’s not. You have to know what to keep and what to drop in 2015.

Effective Content Marketing

High-performing, effective content for many B2B and B2C marketers should have the following characteristics:

• Center on audience needs (i.e. educate, answer, or inspire)
• Connect to the audience’s self-identity
• Generate an emotional connection
• Be distributed through relevant and visible mediums
• B designed to fit a strategic place in the sales funnel

Your content needs to focus on the 3 Cs – consistency, concept, and corroboration. It must answer your customer’s questions, go beyond just the blog format, and reflect well on your organization as a thought leader. And more importantly, you need to stay up on what’s happening with winning content marketing around the Web.

Because many people have figured these few characteristics out, they have seen positive results after consistent effort. This is what makes content marketing the fastest-growing marketing strategy in business circles for the New Year. Need reasons? May we suggest a few reasons why content marketing works:

• Content marketing generates more leads and follow-up opportunities all at a lower cost.
• Content marketing can help drive SEO
• Content marketing can increase quality traffic to your site
• Content marketing matches consumer expectations for information delivery

What To Keep And What To Drop

We know what we need to do with our content marketing – but what can we leave behind? In our new webinar, The 2020 Content Marketing Strategy, you’ll learn from Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute exactly what should be in your strategy plan moving forward.

Here are a few areas to keep or consider dropping from your 2015 content marketing strategy.

Keep:
– Mindful Content Strategy
– Authoritative Content
– Link Earning
– More Robust content
– Quality Information
– Mobile Strategies
– SEO Audits
– Informative infographics
– Short, Crisp Videos

Drop:
– SEO Manipulations
– Author Rank
– Link Building
– Consistent short content
– Sponsored Advertising
– Duplicate Content
– Generic Titles and Copy
– Stock Photos
– Talking head clips

These statistics from How to Convince Your Boss also help to show the need of what to keep and what to drop in your content marketing practices:

• Brands that create 15 blog posts per month average 1,200 new leads per month (State of Inbound Marketing Report)
• 61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post (The Blog Economy)
• Content marketing produces 3 times more leads per dollar (Eloqua)

We’ve referred to this earlier in 2014, but we think it’s important to share this overall definition of content marketing again to set you up for an even better 2015:

• Content marketing is the art of providing relevant, useful content to your customers without selling or interrupting them.
• Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your customers more informed before they buy.
• If you deliver consistent, ongoing, valuable information to your customers, they ultimately reward you with their business and loyalty.

How about you? What content marketing tools will you keep, and which ones will you drop in 2015? Leave a note in the comments and share with the community!

If you’re interested in the state of content marketing in 2015 and beyond, register for our upcoming webinar with Chief Content Strategist, Robert Rose, on January 8.

What are your social goals this year?

No, not who are you taking to the dance on Saturday night. What are your intentions to create more online social involvement that leads to attraction, engagement and sales. Social sales. Oh, that.

UPDATE: Social sales and social selling is the new black.

SET YOUR SALES COMPASS ON “SOCIAL” AND THINK ABOUT THIS:

• What are your social value offerings?
• What are your social product offerings?
• What is attractive about your social offerings?
• Where is the perceived value in your social outreach?
• Where is the perceived value in your social offerings?

These are painful questions – but I’m just getting started.

My good friend, and IBM’s social evangelist, Sandy Carter, asked me to comment on what’s next in the world of social selling for 2015.

Here are the Social Media and Social Selling Trends for 2015:

• Social media and social selling are entering the next phase. It’s the “comfortable with” phase – big companies and previous naysayers in general are branching out and digging in. Everyone is realizing the unlimited power, and has some experience with the process and applications. Comfortable enough to BUY.

Social Selling Challenge: Are your customers and prospects buying from your online offerings?

•  Will your social selling offers only bring sales? The discount offerings bring customers. The value offerings bring customers and PROFIT! Social Selling Challenge: How much profit are your online sales bringing in?

• Every social media site is trying to do and be everything to everyone. Photos are now everywhere. Videos are now everywhere. The “likers” are now everywhere.

Social Selling Challenge: How current is your social presence? Are you gaining a following?

• Kids will continue to abandon Facebook for Instagram – 300,000 million Instagram users – and don’t be misled by the word “kid” – in 5 years they’re your new customer – and will probably be more social savvy than you are. Social Selling Challenge: What are your kids doing? What are they buying?

• Smartphones will continue to be the social involvement device of choice. And the app will continue to dominate Internet use. Social Selling Challenge: Do you have a social selling app? What’s your plan to get one or improve the one you have?

• “Social” involvement is no longer an option – it’s an imperative.

You no longer have a choice – it’s all in or be left out. Social Selling Challenge: Who is in charge of social sales and social selling in your company?

• Social selling is becoming more prevalent and more sophisticated.

Analytics is the new black. Data-driven selling is the new norm. Social Selling Challenge: do you know who your online customers are?

• App developers are thriving to capacity. That should tell you the story all by itself. Social Selling Challenge: Partner with an app developer and make something happen.

• Purchases are the final frontier. The more people buy online, the more social interaction becomes and stays relevant. Ratings by customers will outweigh all other forms of advertisements. Social Selling Challenge: What is your social selling volume? And what’s your plan to double it?

My business plan for 2015 has a heavy concentration on social selling. So much so that I am writing (like this), investing in infrastructure (website and apps), and intensifying my social presence with more value messages.

Oh, I am also learning. Social selling is more fluid than mercury. Changes occur by the hour. And game-changers appear daily. I study the marketplace and especially MY marketplace, daily.

Where is the attraction coming from and what’s happening once the attracted actually land someplace? Are they buying or are they flying (okay, clicking) away?

Social selling is on the rapid rise. And unless you’re Amazon or Apple, you’re way behind the eight ball in development and execution.

Hopefully your competition sucks worse than you do. And hopefully you’re doing something about it sooner than they do.

As we start 2015, the one thing that B2B marketers can be assured of is that our market and the approach our buyers take to purchase will continue to change and become all the more sophisticated. Marketers will again be challenged to keep pace with these advancements and will need to do more in order to connect with their buyers and show demonstrable ROI as a result of their Demand Generation and Content Marketing Strategies.

As we kick-off 2015, here are some key areas that B2B marketing leaders should focus on in order to ensure they have maximum results from their Demand Generation and better align with their buyers:

Move From Campaigns To Programs

In the ANNUITAS B2B Enterprise Demand Generation study, more than 60 percent of respondents stated that they ran over 15+ campaigns on an annual basis. Typically these campaigns promote a singular asset or event like a white paper, webinar, or an eBook. The real question however, is what is next? Generally it is another campaign that is focused on an asset or event and lacks continuity to the action the buyer took before. This campaign approach leads to a very convoluted buying experience for the buyers.

When an organization moves to a program-based approach, there is a buyer-centric approach to how content is delivered. Additionally, programs are perpetual (always on and ready for the buyer’s next step).This means that every interaction from the buyer is met with a response from the vendor, digitally or a via live interaction. This program-based approach can only be accomplished when vendors understand the buying patterns of their buyer(s) and can then align content accordingly giving buyers continuity through every stage of their buying process. The best news? This approach leads to higher conversion rates.

Don’t Treat All Content The Same

Not all Demand Generation content is created as equal. When a buyer first engages with your brand, they are not necessarily looking to find the latest enhancements to a vendor’s product. They may be looking to simply solve a problem and finding a vendor who can write about that issue and address it in a way that speaks to the buyer and a “day-in-their life” will go a long way to build trust.

When developing content for Demand Generation programs, think about the kind of content that will engage buyers and build that trust while educating. As a buyer engages, the “next step” is to nurture. This is also a different kind of content that begins to map problems to overall solutions and enables the buyer to learn more about how vendors can and will address their problems.

Lastly is conversion content that can be used by sales. This necessitates that marketing educate sales on all of the various content that has been developed as part of the Demand Generation program again, with the aim of providing a seamless experience for the buyers.

Ensuring that specific content is created to Engage, Nurture, and Convert along the buyers purchase path (currently only 28.3% of organizations do this consistently) not only allows for a better conversation with the buyer, but when mapped to the buying process, enables the buyer to self-select the content they want and signifies where they are in the buying process.

Don’t Start With Technology-
I read an article over the holiday break that spoke about how marketing automation is advancing with features, the ability to integrate and how these vendors are improving training. The author of the article made the connection between these improvements to a forecast of better Demand Generation results in 2015. Oh how I wish it was as simple as this.

According to the ANNUITAS study, less than 30% of B2B enterprise organizations are experiencing effectiveness with their marketing automation solution. One of the biggest reasons is that the technology is the starting point for many organizations when it should all start with the buyer.

While marketing technologies, like automation are important, they cannot be the focal point for companies that want to succeed with sophisticated, contemporary Demand Generation. These are tools to enable strategy and without a solid strategy, there will be very little improvement no matter what tool is selected and implemented.

Invest In Skills Development

In Forrester’s 2013 report B2B CMOs Must Evolve or Move On, 97% of CMOs either strongly agreed or agreed “Marketing must do things it hasn’t done before in order to be successful.” Yet so few marketing budgets include training for these skills that are needed.

The ANNUITAS Demand Generation study asked participants to rate the skill set of those who are responsible for Demand Generation and only 7.5% rated themselves as highly skilled. Buyer-centric Demand Generation is surely one of the areas that “marketing must do,” yet the vast majority lack the skills to do it effectively. The education and enablement of personnel is key to any success organizations want to have in Demand Generation.

Commit To Change

Adopting the advice that is listed above will necessitate change within the marketing organization. However, if B2B marketing departments are going to deliver on the promise of Demand Generation, this is not something that can be done half heartedly, it requires a commitment to change within the organization. This change, while at times uncomfortable, will lead to marketing being a strategic role in the organization and ensure the dollars that are invested in Demand Generation in 2015 deliver revenue and maximize Customer Lifetime Value, something that any B2B marketer should aspire to.

This may sound as though we’ve got our facts backward, but your company can significantly increase its knowledge output by cutting R&D spending.

It’s all a matter of when you cut your spending, and why.

Take Cisco, for example. The company’s R&D expenditures dropped by about $1.5 billion from 2002 through 2004. Drawing on data from the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, we found that during this period, the company’s patented knowledge output increased significantly.

The chart may appear to show merely that Cisco’s patent filings lagged its R&D spending by three years, but in fact the decline in spending and the rise in patents were part and parcel of a deliberate strategic shift by the company in 2001.

So what was going on? How could a decline in research spending stimulate an outpouring of patents?

What Cisco was doing was shifting its R&D approach from exploration to exploitation. Exploratory R&D, in which researchers cast about for radical new ideas, is expensive and iffy, typically resulting in patents that are relatively few in number but packed with valuable knowledge. Exploitative R&D, in which companies focus on making use of the best ideas they’ve discovered, is less costly and more of a sure thing, often resulting in a vast quantity of incremental and defensive patents built on the foundation of prior exploration. Cisco followed this pattern: In 2001, its patent activity narrowed dramatically from a broad array of technological areas to relatively few.

Over time, many of the best tech companies cycle between exploration and exploitation. Sometimes exploration means creating inventions; sometimes it means acquiring small, inventive companies. But whatever form it takes, exploration in these companies is typically followed by exploitation (a few companies do both simultaneously, but we’ve found that the sequential approach is much more common, probably because trying to do both at once is really difficult).

Exploitation allows companies to monetize their exciting new ideas and thereby relieve some of the stakeholder pressure for short-term earnings. It gives the CEO a breather until the company has to return to exploration to restock its supply of radical ideas.

We’ve found that, in general, companies that move between exploratory and exploitative R&D exhibit superior performance, in comparison with companies that budget R&D expenditure as a fixed percentage of sales, committing neither to exploratory nor exploitative R&D.

Our research shows that Cisco is unusually adept at this sequential ambidexterity, shifting between the two approaches at opportune moments. In fact, we think Cisco is one of the all-time best at this corporate skill.

During exploratory periods, when new opportunities are opening up, Cisco spends generously in search of radical innovations for competitive advantage; once it has identified a good number of them, it shifts to exploitation, which allows the company to cut its R&D budget while producing large numbers of valuable patents, although with narrower scope than during the exploration phase.

Having gone through a period of intense exploration and discovery at the beginning of the 2000s, when the internet was still fairly new, the company changed tack, focusing mainly on exploiting inventions related to the internet’s backbone. It issued numerous upgrades that increased the speed and throughput of its routers and improved the accompanying software platform. Although it expanded into new markets, these moves were based on the company’s existing knowledge: Cisco’s storage-area network products were modified versions of its routers, and even its move into consumer wireless internet relied on mature Cisco technologies.

As of late, Cisco is back into exploratory territory as it leads a push into multimedia conferencing, in large part by acquiring smaller companies. Where will this period of discovery take the company? If the past is prelude, before long we’ll see the company amass a number of valuable ideas related to conferencing, then shift to a lucrative period of exploiting its best ideas.

Cisco’s example demonstrates that corporate vision comes in many flavors. It’s not always just about hiring great minds and giving them the freedom to look for the next big thing. It’s also about knowing when to shift from one mode to another. That requires an understanding of when a set of radical ideas is ripe for monetization and, later, when the returns to incremental R&D are falling, necessitating a return to search mode. Visionary leadership is also about helping the company overcome inertia so that it can shift effectively from one frame of mind to another when the time comes. Few companies pivot easily, but those that do position themselves to ride wave after lucrative wave of exploratory, then exploitative, R&D.