Rnordman

My family went to Disneyland over the Christmas holidays. The drive from San Francisco took most of a day. The park was packed to the rafters, with wait times of over an hour on many rides. My next credit card bill will probably give me a heart attack. 

And you know what? We loved it. We'll almost definitely go back.

The reason? Disneyland feels like one of the few affordable splurges left in America. Despite the crowds and wait times, we never felt ripped off or taken advantage of. I never felt like a walking dollar sign or a second-class citizen.

Think of how rare that feeling is in America today. There aren't many other companies that deliver a consistent first-class experience at a price a normal middle class family can afford.

Apple is one of the few I can think of. 

So how does Disney keep packing them in? 

Here's what I found:

The prices are exactly right. One-day tickets to the park are just shy of the psychological $100 mark. That's not cheap, but crummy seats at an NFL game or big-name rock concert easily run that much, and a day at Disneyland lasts a lot longer.

This merchandising genius extends to the food and tchotchkes as well — a decent meal costs $9 to $11, about what you pay for lunch at a food truck in San Francisco. A plastic light saber for my son cost $18 — just on the edge of being too expensive, but shy of the psychological $20 mark. They're geniuses at this stuff.

The parks are spotless. Both parks were wall-to-wall packed with people, and yet we didn't see a single unattended mess the entire time we were there. No overflowing garbage cans — attendants were always emptying them. No paper or popcorn on the streets. Spills of ice cream or soda were quickly and quietly scrubbed clean. Coming from San Francisco, where piles of garbage adorn the parks and litter blows down every street, this was absolutely amazing.

The food is actually good. It would be so easy for Disneyland to take advantage of their captive audience and serve nothing but cheap junk food. But they don't! A lot of the restaurants have special meals you can get only there, like gumbo. Lobster rolls with real lobster. A portobello mushroom sandwich that wasn't like an afterthought like most vegetarian meals. A pasta and pizza buffet. Kids' packs with fresh fruit and crackers. Plus plenty of burgers and fries if you want them.

Lots of rides, artfully done. Both parks combined probably have over 100 rides. The big roller-coaster attractions like Space Mountain are usually packed, but there are plenty of smaller rides that are fun as well — one of our favorites was the Bug's Life ride, a short 3D movie that shows you what it's like to be a bug, with special effects like getting sprayed with acid. (It's actually sugar water, and it's more fun than it sounds.)

Plus, they totally changed a lot of the rides up for Christmas — "It's A Small World" ride replaced the usual theme song with "Jingle Bells," and the Haunted Mansion was entirely rejiggered to Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas." And all the rides are just beautiful, and cleverly done — the lines are long, but often wind through a couple of set pieces that that build anticipation, rather than simply guiding you through acres of concrete.

Disney owns the rights to all the good kids' entertainment. Speaking of "The Nightmare Before Christmas," I didn't even know it was a Disney movie. So is Pixar. So is Star Wars. For that matter, so is ESPN — one adult relative got sick of the crowds and spent a couple hours in the ESPN Zone restaurant watching football. 

They've thought of everything. Need a stroller? Disney will rent you one for $15 (just shy of being too expensive). Want to bring your dog? There's a doggy day care area — all you have to do is come back to walk your pooch every four hours. Drink too much alcohol at the California Adventure side of the park, where they serve wine and beer? A smiling security guard will help you feel better as he escorts you from the park. (We saw this and it could've been an ugly disaster, but was handled perfectly.)

It's just the perfect combination of pricing, marketing, and art-meets-science, all wrapped up with a customer-first bow. Again, a lot like Apple.

Apparently a lot of other people agree. 

According to the Themed Entertainment Association (cited by Forbes), Disney's parks drew more than 132 million customers in 2013. That's nearly twice as many as its nearest competitor, Merlin, which operates Legoland.

You can expect that number to go up in 2014. In the year ended September 28, Disney's parks and resorts earned $2.6 billion in operating profit (up 20%) on $15.1 billion in revenue (up 7%). That's a profit margin of about 18% on a nicely growing business. It's not just theme parks — Disney also operates resorts and cruises and other vacation experiences — but the theme parks are the main driver of that business. 

Apparently there have been calls for Disney to raise prices on its theme parks to keep crowds down. But every person through the gates is another person who will spend money on food, Disney gear, and other extras. Disney knows exactly what it's doing, and the parks seem to be doing great.

Sort of like how people were calling on Apple to lower prices a year ago to meet the Samsung-Android juggernaut. Apple ignored them, and the iPhone 6 is one of its most profitable products yet, while Samsung is struggling.

SEE ALSO: I Can't Think Of One Reason To Buy The Apple Watch —But It Was The Same With The iPhone

Join the conversation about this story »

Stewart Butterfield loves a Gershwin tune. For someone born in the early 1970s, growing up as folk-rock gave way to disco to punk to electronica, this preference for jazz standards is rare enough. But what’s rarer still is that Butterfield, the Canadian head of a tech company recently valued at over a billion dollars, does more than listen to Gershwin. He plays it, during many workdays, on a ukulele. At three o’clock in the afternoon, Butterfield or one of his colleagues bangs a gong, and a group of workers at the San Francisco offices of his company, Slack Technologies, gathers in a conference room to jam.

There is so much that is anomalous about this ukulele-strumming CEO. The burly man of middling height who co-founded and built two of the greatest hits in Silicon Valley’s short history holds a master’s degree, not in business administration but in philosophy, from Cambridge. He’s a guy whose hippie parents christened him Dharma—the son renamed himself Stewart a few years after the family moved off the northern B.C. commune where he was born.

Working out of offices in Vancouver and the San Francisco Bay Area, Butterfield has invested years and millions in other people’s money—mainly other people’s money, with a bit of his own—creating fantastical, immersive online games. Twice he’s failed to draw enough players to make a go of it. But each time, this energetic man, as thoughtful as he is foul-mouthed, has regrouped, salvaging a big win from an apparent loss: The photo-sharing site Flickr (with 92 million monthly users) came out of the first failed game; from the second has emerged Slack, a company promoting a new multi-modal way of communicating within offices.

“Not once, but twice, he’s found something lateral in the making of a game that scores a big success. It’s unheard of.” So says tech investor Rob Solomon, Groupon’s former president and a friend of Butterfield’s from the time they worked together at Yahoo. “In the Valley, there’s a lot of talk of pivoting…but what’s less talked about is how seldom that works. The second thought, the pivot, usually doesn’t take at all—let alone to this extent.”

“Lucky,” Butterfield says, during an interview at his San Francisco office. I’m wondering if he really believes that, when he repeats it. “I’ve been lucky so far.”

Within months of launching the Slack software in February, his company was valued at more than US$1 billion, with more than $180 million in venture capital pouring in. The estimate is based on the software’s early adoption by many influential companies and on tech insiders who say it dramatically improves the way companies work. Certainly, whether through luck or through skill, this has been Butterfield’s year.

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“If someone I worked with emailed me, I’d probably fire them.” This is something Butterfield has said from time to time, only half in jest. Slack’s suite of messaging software aims to consolidate the miscellaneous ways workmates currently communicate. It replaces the electronic cacophony of messages sent through email, text, phone, video- and voice-conferencing, by Dropbox, group calendars, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

“With email, there’s a constant tension between, ‘Please copy me, I want to be in the loop’ and ‘Don’t, because I get too much damn email,’” Butterfield says during our sit-down. Slack’s communications are arranged in “channels,” by groups collaborating on a project or by topics, and they’re all searchable, no matter how the message was originally conveyed.

“If you join a company,” he continues, “and you’re asked to take on a certain task, the whole history of it is there, the institutional expertise, the debate. It’s not lost or dispersed in different places.”

Slack’s billion-dollar valuation depends on it continuing to grow at the high rates it has so far: at least 5% a week. By a recent count, Slack has 340,000 daily active users (including the staff at Canadian Business), and 95,000 have so far made the decision to pay for it. Their clients range from the hip—Gawker Media, Blue Bottle Coffee, Pandora—to the square—Dow Jones, Expedia, the London Times.

“So far, we’ve built all by word of mouth,” Butterfield brags, citing media, tech and creative industries as the main spheres where it’s found takers. Slack is not alone in offering a range of intra-office communication software—competitors include Campfire, Yammer and HipChat—but the tech press has singled out Slack’s design sensibility and ease of use as early competitive advantages. Google’s vice-president of product management, Bradley Horowitz, comments: “It’s a staid, boring space, intra-office communication. But Stewart has somehow made it seem sexy.”

Slack has also amassed considerable cash, none of it from Canadian investors. “It wasn’t as hard to raise funds this time around [as it was with Flickr],” Butterfield says. “Once you have a track record, in this climate…. A few hours of meetings, and we got to choose who we wanted to work with. But one concern we have with raising all this money is making sure we don’t feel we’ve accomplished something already. We’re not valued for our present earnings but for the trajectory we’re on.”

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Butterfield knows something of the upward trajectory—of the prizes and the perils in this ride—from his first time around, with Flickr.

He didn’t go into tech with the aim of building the first major photo-sharing site. Instead, just after the turn of the millennium, he put a team together to make Game Neverending—a team that included his then wife, Caterina Fake. It was innovative, non-violent in a field where the body count was at that time everything, one of the first multi-player fantasy games where users created complicated characters for themselves. And the game, as its name suggests, went ever on with no winners (or losers) declared.

“I came across an early version of it when I lived in London and ran a fan site for the game,” says Slack’s chief technology officer, Cal Henderson. “I was so keen on it that I eventually moved halfway around the world, to Vancouver, to join his team.” Henderson has been with Butterfield professionally ever since—and has become something of a company mascot. (On his birthday, affectionately known as Calmas, staff dress in his signature programmer outfit of Bermuda shorts, flip-flops and a loud shirt.)

As part of the game, the team embedded the ability to share images. In 2004, it became clear the game was failing. The day before a big San Diego tech conference, Butterfield decided to play up the photo-sharing capacity as the basis for an independent web-based service. The team stayed up all night to create a presentation; at five in the morning, Henderson added a way to upload images via email, so that pictures could be shared from a mobile phone.

The demo became the talk of the industry, and Flickr was born. “There was no eureka moment, honestly,” Butterfield says. “It just sort of happened.”

Flickr was social before social became the thing: It helped pioneer the possibility of separating online contacts into friends, family, acquaintances, frenemies and followers. Its open-source programming allowed users to tweak the product to suit their needs. “So many of the established players didn’t believe in that flexibility,” one frequent Flickr user explained to me. “They wanted you only to use their proprietary software in the approved ways. They didn’t understand that you could convert your so-called audience into something more active. Flickr did.” Flickr was also partly responsible for popularizing the concept behind hashtagging, in the ubiquitous way we use it now—and the sign formerly known as the pound sign is the principal part of Slack’s logo. (#ThanksSoMuchForThatReally.)

Because of its speedy growth in an otherwise depressed period, established tech companies soon came calling, and Butterfield and his co-founders made the decision to sell Flickr to Yahoo in 2005, for between US$22 million and US$25 million. Horowitz, then at Yahoo, was one of the executives responsible for the acquisition. “Yahoo had lost its way, and we wanted Stewart to help it find it again. We wanted him to be a thorn in Yahoo’s side…the leader of a rebel force within.”

The purchase price is pocket change now, in what is, arguably, another tech bubble; certainly, the sale allowed Yahoo to reap most of the benefits from Flickr’s subsequent growth. “I don’t regret it,’ Butterfield says. “It was a different time, and no one was investing in anything. But yes, it makes me think about [Slack] differently.”

Canadian-born Silicon Valley venture capitalist Chris Albinson comments: “It’s sadly not so rare for strong Canadian entrepreneurs to sell out early. Many don’t have the backing that enables them to hold out longer.”

“There was so much we wanted to do,” Butterfield recalls, “and joining Yahoo was one way to get it done.” After a time, though, it became clear to Butterfield and the members of the Flickr team who came with him that, while Flickr was growing, they weren’t going to succeed in turning Yahoo’s ship in a new direction. One by one they left: first Fake, then Butterfield in 2008, followed by Henderson.

On his way out the door, Butterfield penned a bizarre exit letter that became something of a legend. It claimed he’d come to the company to make tin, “this most useful of metals,” and had tried to adjust as the firm moved into “real estate, brewing, consumer finance, grain processing, lighting and salty snacks.”

“It doesn’t have a deep metaphorical meaning,” he says now. “I was in love with The Onion at that point.”

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The second time around didn’t go so very differently. The four founders of Tiny Speck, the company that worked on Butterfield’s second multiplayer Internet game, Glitch, lived in different cities. In order to help them communicate better, his team created what would become Slack. This time there was no late-night transformation of a game into something else. Work began on Glitch in 2009; its failure to thrive had become clear to Butterfield by late 2012. He had to lay off most of the team. “That was so hard. Some of these people had moved cities with their families to do this. We tried to do it elegantly, finding other jobs for them. We even set up a site that promoted their talents.”

There was money left in Glitch’s coffers at this point, and Butterfield offered to return it to the investors. But they mainly decided to let their investments ride. “It wasn’t the game they were investing in,” Horowitz says, “but Stewart.”

This time there was a eureka moment of sorts. “We realized none of us would ever work without a system [like Slack] again,” Butterfield says. “That made it seem likely that it’d be valuable for others as well.”

It didn’t take long to retool this internal platform for the market. His former Yahoo colleague Solomon says it was typical of Butterfield to obsess over getting the platform right, even when it had only been meant for internal use. “He couldn’t let it just be OK.”

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For a former philosophy student—at the University of Victoria, then Cambridge—Butterfield talks a pretty good business talk. He gives rapid-fire answers to questions about optimal pricing for Slack (it’s currently US$7 per user a month), strategic acquisitions, and the negotiation of major commercial leases in one of the world’s most competitive real estate markets.

A part of him is engaged by all that hurly-burly, but another part of him is not. “I don’t miss the career of teaching philosophy, but the chance to contemplate something in a sustained way, that would be nice.”

Sui generis is the Latin term lawyers use for entities like him: of its own type. Butterfield tends to dress his moods, often in pastels or all in white—a bit floaty for business attire, even in the über-casual Bay Area. He’ll ask potential hires simple math questions and to name three countries in Africa. “The math—it’s OK if you can’t do it, just don’t panic. But if they can’t name the countries, I don’t really want to work with them.”

Albinson is a founding member of The C100, a non-profit group of top Canadian tech executives in the Valley, and a longtime, plainspoken observer of the expat scene. “Dharma,” he says, with a throaty chuckle. “The time as Dharma, the family background—that’s something I bet is relevant when you talk about Stewart.”

Certainly, Stewart’s reinventions look low-risk compared to those made by his old man. Rather than go to Vietnam, David Butterfield drove all night from the North Carolina army base where he was serving to the Quebec border and beyond. He met a woman, Norma, settled down and married, and the pair joined a commune in the fishing village of Lund, B.C., way up the Pacific coast. David built their first family home, a log cabin—and after their move to Victoria, Butterfield senior started a successful construction business. The couple sent their boy Dharma, by then Stewart, to the private St. Michael’s University School.

Despite their radically different eras, son and father seem to share a similar mix of savvy and idealism. And a willingness to give a child an unorthodox name: When Fake and Butterfield’s daughter was born in 2007, they named her Sonnet Beatrice. They separated shortly after.

Butterfield splits his weeks between a Vancouver office, where most of the creative and design staff work, and the one in San Francisco, where we meet. “Down here, it’s meetings, meetings, meetings, mainly on the business side. In Vancouver, I get to work more on the product side, the design stuff that interests me.”

He laughs at the difference between the tech scenes in San Francisco and Vancouver. “In San Francisco, there’s a gold-rush mentality. It’s a bit mercenary, but there’s a lot of hustle. I get unsolicited emails from people, saying, ‘I’m going to be your first salesperson.’ But in Vancouver, they don’t give a shit about a lot of that: Is it going to be a rocket ship company? Whatever, as long as I get salary, benefits, health care. They don’t know a bunch of people who’ve made money on equity, and so they don’t negotiate as hard for it. We give it to them anyway, because we’re good employers.”

From the outside, it looks like Butterfield has already made it. There aren’t huge financial incentives for him to work. But from the inside, it clearly doesn’t look that way. He does not want to lose control of the show this time around. He’s just hired a well-known marketing executive, who helped Zendesk as it went public in May. It’s early days, but does he plan an IPO for Slack? “I don’t have any interest, at least at this point, in running a public company,” he says.

Solomon says the real thrill for Butterfield is in finding the product-market fit—he even puts Butterfield in the mix with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Henderson agrees: “He’s good on the product, but he understands what the engineering requirements are too. We both can speak enough of each other’s language to collaborate well.”

With a viable suite of software on offer, the main challenge of the next phase, managing its growth, isn’t as squarely within Butterfield’s comfort zone. “We’re going to be careful about our acquisitions, about our hires. If things go to shit in the market, as they sometimes do, at least we have some money. When it can be effective, we’ll spend that—if acquiring new customers takes $1,000 per, we’ll spend $1 million to get a thousand of them. And we’ll start marketing it more.”

The old adage goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” I’ve been wondering what the motivation is for Butterfield, and so many others, when he’s succeeded pretty well the first time around. “A psychoanalyst could answer that. Maybe it’s a quest for the love they once felt from their mothers?” he suggests. “People like to be useful. I’ve ended up doing things I’m good at—mostly, but not always. There is a lot of ego, and no one wants to feel they were lucky the first time. Everyone wants to feel they were successful because of some innate property.”

We’ve circled back to luck, and I press him a bit. He’s still not comfortable applying to himself his observations about others who feel compelled to make a second charge. “That’s not the way for me. I definitely think I’m lucky.” But then he makes a concession. “Well, 90% of it is luck.”

Should Slack’s run end—either with global domination or something short of that—will he try once more to create a great game? “I don’t think so,” he says. “At least, not as a commercial venture. The kind of thing we wanted to build was too strange and unfamiliar to be a successful business.”

Before I leave, I’m given a pair of Slack socks, woven in Butterfield’s beloved pastels, with a hashtag on its packaging. He looks a bit sour—perhaps at being asked to talk about how big a role luck and skill have played so far, perhaps at being reminded of the failures that ultimately gave birth to his successes. Maybe it’s time for a ukulele break.

The post How Stewart Butterfield built a billion-dollar company in eight months appeared first on Canadian Business.

PPC is already a complicated area for many marketers, especially when advertising on multiple search engines and attempting to keep up with the dynamically shifting landscape of digital marketing. Many companies—particularly agencies or businesses that advertise on many search engines and ad platforms —opt to use bid management tools such as Kenshoo, Marin, DoubleClick, and Acquisio to help handle the day-to-day management of their campaigns. Bid management tools can be helpful to ensure you get the most bang for your PPC budget’s buck, and with these four tips, the bang is even bigger.

Analyze Historical Data

Producing optimal results means not just plowing ahead without considering where you’ve been. Understanding past performance is key when adjusting current programs. Checking daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reports can be very helpful in uncovering some insights that can help boost your future performance.

Don’t Be Afraid To Boost Bids

If there’s a key date approaching—an important trade show, a launch, a big promotion or seasonal event for your businesses (or your competitors), etc.—don’t be afraid to increase bids to meet competition head-to-head. Shying away from raising bids for critical events is setting yourself up for failure.

Don’t Forget The Phone

Thanks to smartphones, search has gone mobile, and is expected to generate more than 70 billion calls to businesses in 2018. What’s more, study after study has confirmed that inbound calls are more lucrative than web conversions, on average converting to revenue 10 to 15 times more frequently. Search marketers can no longer afford to ignore call conversions if they wish to optimize ROI. As you’re considering how to optimize performance, be sure you’re working with a bid management tool that integrates with a call tracking provider so you are able to see the call conversion activity on keywords that generate phone calls alongside keywords that generate clicks. This will give you full transparency into the impact of your PPC programs.

Consider What Happens After The Conversion

Paying careful attention to your call to action can increase your chances of conversion. For CTAs that are encouraging clicks, ensure your copy is seasonal and specific, and be sure that it is reflected in the landing page your send them to upon clicking. In addition (as mentioned above) calls are the new clicks, so encouraging viewers to call a number in an ad or on the corresponding landing page is a good CTA as long as you 1) have the means to track those interactions and 2) have a setup that handles those calls efficiently and effectively. For example, agency Sq1 increased their client’s phone leads from search by 75 percent, but the way they handled those leads didn’t stop with generating the phone call itself. Their use of tools in-call optimization tools like IVR for automated call filtering and geo-location call routing ensured a continual flow of qualified phone leads to their client’s local agents; so when you think about what happens after a conversion, think about context, the action you’re asking that lead to take, and ways to optimize lead conversions to sales.

Want to learn more about how to optimize your PPC campaigns? Download this free on-demand webinar, From Click to Call to Conversion: Using Big Data to Optimize PPC.

How do you personally define a customer-focused company?

I’m not talking about a company that claims to be customer-focused but one that genuinely obsesses over improving their customer experience.

Year after year, we hear of companies of all sizes wanting to focus more on their customer experience. While some actually use the appropriate resources to be more connected to their customers, others continue to give lip-service to it. After all, it’s very easy to say you are customer-focused when, in reality, you’re not.

For nearly a decade, I’ve studied the operations of companies across dozens of industries to make sense of it all. I believe that genuine customer-centric companies exhibit the following five traits.

The CEO Is The Flag Bearer

No customer experience program will be sustainable if your CEO isn’t your greatest flag bearer. I’ve seen it time and time again, an executive claims to be customer-focused but when push comes to shove they allow sales and marketing to reign supreme.

I’m a HUGE fan of Westjet airlines, based in Canada, for several reasons. A key reason why I’m bullish on their success is because of their leader, CEO, Gregg Saretsky. I’m a fan of his because he has humanized the way he leads his team. Perhaps, it’s because he use to be a flight attendant before his climb to being the CEO of the second largest airlines in Canada. I have a friend who works at Westjet’s HQ who speak very admirably of him. I mean, it’s very rare for me to go to a party and have someone talk to me about their CEO for 30 minutes, while I drink my scotch, but this happened to be earlier this year when one of his team members did so. The CEO, entrepreneur or business leader within your company can’t just wake up one day and care about the company’s customers. They must have it within their DNA as a person because caring about strangers isn’t something that comes natural to most of us.

It’s very easy to gain media attention and claim to be customer-focused but does your organization continue these efforts at the end of the quarter when you must hit your numbers? Does your company sacrifice the customer experience to save the numbers?

You Must be Willing To Think Long-Term

An organization must understand that if customer experience is going to be at the core of their company then they must be patient.The ROI of customer experience doesn’t develop overnight and is a long term play.

Your customer experience is a collection of events your customer experiences when doing business with you from beginning to end. For example, if you go to a movie theatre, the experience may begin with you visiting their mobile website to see what movies are playing. When you arrive at the theatre, you will purchase your ticket, visit the bathroom and buy popcorn at the concession stand. Even before you have watched the movie you already have experienced four customer touchpoints that involves marketing, operations and sales departments. To be able to recreate or refine your customer experience you must include all departments. This takes time. For some companies, this won’t ever happen because of silos that exist within the organization.

Now, think about how long it takes to develop a marketing campaign, a part of your business that is given a far larger budget than your customer experience efforts. I believe traditional marketing, such as radio, tv and print, has trained us to be impatient because we can have a marketing campaign up and running in a month or two. If you work with an agency, you can have your radio campaign aired in no time. If you’re a small business, you can have your direct-mail sent out next month.

My argument is this: you will never be customer-focused if you don’t practice patience. Customer experience WILL grow your business, however, you must be in it for the long haul.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, says it best,

“We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

What he means is that he will invest to improve Amazon’s customer experience even if the ROI is 12-24 months away.

Are we going to argue with his success?

Understand Creating Micro Customer Experiences Is Worth The Investment

When I was invited to speak at Tangerine Bank’s executive retreat earlier this year, I introduced them to what I call micro customer experiences. How I define a micro customer experience is a small, subtle, memorable and affordable gesture that will resonate with your customers for years.

Starbucks understands micro customer experiences by writing your name on your cup. A local small business practices micro customer experiences by writing their customers hand written cards that include personalized messages.

When I introduce this concept to my clients or audience, I can always plan on someone asking,

“How do you scale this?”

The answer to this question is quite simple: How much do you care? If you care enough you will find the resources or workflow to scale it.

I’m sure the Starbucks operations team questioned how this would scale as I guess it adds 3-5 seconds to each customer interaction. For the most part, they were able to figure it out.

A small business owner may think,

“I can’t afford to pay someone to write hand written cards to every customer!”

You can afford to pay someone to do this! After all, don’t you spend 5-15 percent of your top-line revenue on marketing? You can allocate a percentage of your marketing spend and reinvest it into becoming memorable, which will bring you organic revenue through repeat business and referrals.

For a company to be successful in 2015, customer experience and marketing teams must work together to improve the customer experience and increase customer acquisition through organic marketing such as word of mouth.

Recognize That Customer Experience Is Marketing

Take a moment to answer this question to yourself before you move forward.

What comes to mind when you see Zappos’ logo?

Do you think of their customer experience or what font they used?

Do you smile because of the call centre employee you spoke to when you ordered your pair of sandals, or do you think of what hue of blue was used to create the footprint in their logo?

Forward-thinking marketing pros understand that customer experience is marketing. You may have heard this before, and agree or disagree, whatever your opinion is, allow me to help you think differently.

The Next Web, one of my favorite tech and business websites, published a post titled, “Why I’d Rather Email than Pay for Ads.” If you have a moment to read it, please do. The columnist explains that as an entrepreneur, she’d rather focus on building a double opt-in email list  to provide value to her community by producing exceptional content; we know this to be content marketing. Before she pushes a ‘buy from me’ email she first provides value through content on several different occasions, and then asks for a sale.

Seth Godin refers to this approach of marketing as “permission marketing.” Gary Vaynerchuk, wrote an entire book on this approach called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.

Providing valuable content to make your customers smarter or more efficient can also be considered customer experience. If you can educate your customers through the content you create, isn’t that providing a better customer experience?

One of my clients, one of Vancouver’s largest auto dealership groups, is doubling down on their content marketing this year to better educate their customers on their industry. The auto industry has a massive opportunity to make their customers smarter. Personally, I don’t know much about my SUV other than that the right pedal is for go, the left pedal is to stop and that my SiriusXM radio has more than one pre-recorded hip hop channel. As a consumer, when I receive an email from them about “5 Things Your Car Needs to Prepare for Winter” I will read it and become a smarter customer. For me, this is a better customer experience than seeing one of their competitors ads on the back of the bus.

Content marketing is powered by producing educational content that enriches your customer’s lives. 

Does your marketing team understand that customer experience is marketing? If not, please share this post with them.

You Must Continuously Invest In Employee Experience

I come from a very traditional family, and I still go to my family home once a week to have dinner with my parents and sister. A few weeks ago, my father admitted that he doesn’t fully understand what I do. He knows my subject but didn’t understand what steps I take when I consult for a company to improve their customer experience.

I began to explain to him that I first audit the company’s employee experience. Where do they recruit their employees? What questions do they ask during the interview process? What’s their on-boarding experience like? How do they motivate and reward their team?

I chose to explain this to him first because it’s what I do with my clients. It’s typical for me to receive an email from an entrepreneur or executive who says,

“Help us increase our customer loyalty.”

I never start with the customer. Ever!

The most successful companies understand to be successful you must: find great people, give them the tools and education they need to succeed and then get out of the way to allow them to navigate the customer experience.

The other day, I read this Business Insider article about Nordstrom’s. The article explains “how Nordstrom’s became the most successful retailer.” The number one reason was because of their dedication to customer service. Within this point, the columnist outlines that they hire “nice, capable people.”

This is exactly why I always start with the employee experience. How on earth are you suppose to deliver a memorable customer experience, one that your customers obsess over, if you don’t have the right team to push your effort forward? Company’s that are customer-focused first become employee-focused.

Does your company focus on your employee experience to improve the customer experience?

We make business complicated.

Business is as hard as we want to make it for ourselves. Many of you are familiar with my story about how I learned my greatest business practices from my grandfather and his fish market in Lima, Peru. If we truly want to be successful, we must be able to take a step back, analyze what is not working in our business or department and trim the fat. After you have done so, review these five traits and ask yourself if you are truly customer-focused.

Now, here’s a tough question. What one trait is the most important to become customer-focused?

When Ilya Semin, the 29-year-old CEO of Datanyze, wanted to first test his product in 2012, he turned to one of the oldest marketing tactics: cold emailing.

He found the email addresses of a few dozen sales executives and sent them an email asking for feedback on his new product.

His product could crawl millions of websites every day and automatically figure out what software — like content management, e-commerce, or data analytics solutions — they were using. It was an early prototype, but definitely something salespeople could use to generate better leads. If they knew what software a web site was using already, they could use that info to sell their own competing products.

Nearly half of the people responded to his emails, sometimes with valuable insight. He would update his software with their suggestions and reach out again for more feedback.

One of the first people to respond to his emails was Ben Sardella, then the VP of sales at KISSMetrics, a web analytics software company. Cleverly, Semin mentioned that his software could show how many people were using Mixpanel, a KISSMetrics competitor:

After a few emails, the two met at a coffee shop in San Francisco to walk through Datanyze’s software. Semin explained how it worked and showed the data it collected: the type of software each website used, when to expect their software contracts to expire, and the size of the companies. Sardella was hooked and became the first customer to use Datanyze. In fact, he was so impressed that he ended up joining Datanyze as cofounder in 2013.

Semin's cold email also caught Mark Cuban's attention. In April 2014, Semin sent Cuban an email with his pitch deck, not really expecting a response back any time soon. But within an hour, Semin’s inbox rang its little bell. It was Cuban: “Definitely interested — Send me more details.” A few months later, Cuban joined IDG Ventures and Google Ventures in a $2 million seed round investment.

Since Sardella joined, Datanyze has grown 25% every month. It claims to be profitable after reaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue early last year. Despite only having 18 employees, it has already signed up 200 companies, including big customers like Marketo and Hubspot. 

Looking back, Semin says people are generally always willing to help, especially when you’re not asking for money. He always asked for feedback first, and that’s what propelled his business to early success. 

“The biggest lesson I learned was: If you want advice, ask for money. But if you want money, ask for advice,” Semin told Business Insider.

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When it comes to doing business online, inbound marketing is the way to go. People don’t want you to sell them stuff, they want to buy. Inbound marketing takes on the role of informer and adviser. Outbound marketing adopts the role of the town crier and the mass marketer. Inbound marketing is insightful and personal. Outbound marketing is more generic and distant. In the world of Web 2.0 and beyond, the inbound marketing funnel will grow in importance.

Inbound marketing takes strangers and turns them into promoters based on a careful delivery of content, tactics, strategies and insights. It allows you to contact your ideal client directly and personally, with more targeted messages that have clear calls to action. But those calls to action must carefully move your audience from the realm of strangers and spectators to buyers and brand ambassadors.

Content is how you make it happen.

But when content is king and time is money, how in the world do you keep it coming without sacrificing your content’s quality? Here are a few simple suggestions:

1. Create an editorial calendar.

Incorporate each of your content channels, ranging from your email newsletter to social media updates into the calendar you create. When is your content due? How much do you need to generate each day? Each week? Each month? Knowing how much content you need makes it easier to break all of that writing (or hiring of writers) down into much more manageable tasks.

2. Don’t neglect visual content.

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: a picture is worth a thousand words. While cliches are a bit tacky, the reality is that they’re often true. People are in a hurry. Reading takes time and attention – things everyone is short on. Visual messaging in the form of custom photographs, visual memes and infographics allow people to absorb messages quickly and often have a higher impact on engagement.

3. Keep your content timely and newsworthy.

Content marketing isn’t heavy on the sales pitch. Instead it aims to educate and inform. Therefore, you can add greater credibility and a more powerful sense of urgency when you dedicate time to scour the headlines on Yahoo or Google News for headlines and tidbits relevant to your industry or audience.

4. Use your content to engage readers and listen to what they say.

Inbound marketing channels like blogs, social media, surveys, video marketing and other like them allow you to use content and media of all forms to attract new people and generate leads. The best in the business use their content to engage their readers to interact with questions and comments, suggestions and frustrations. Not only do these content creators take these opportunities to solve problems at the individual level, they can also uncover larger conversations and concerns they can not only address and solve, but capitalize on in the process!

5. Use technology to automate your content creation and sharing.

Every day, new apps and software programs emerge that help to put your marketing efforts on autopilot. In the world of business, time is money. Automation allows you to handle redundant tasks like content delivery, newsletter sign-ups, blog and social media postings and handle them automatically, while you sleep. This allows you to focus on the biggest priorities and problems you face while your marketing runs smoothly in the background.

6. Although inbound marketing will require you to invest heavily in content creation, the price tag is significantly lower than with more traditional outbound marketing outlets such as television or radio advertising.

For the average business, inbound marketing has a cost that’s roughly 61% lower than the alternatives. How do those percentages translate into dollars? Well, according to the State of Inbound Report published by HubSpot, the average company saves about $20,000 each year by making the shift from outbound to inbound marketing.

The era of mass marketing is over; we’re now in the age of individual marketing. The consumer, for the most part, now has to power to choose what marketing messages, if any, they want to hear. Inbound’s power comes from that fact that it encourages the consumer to choose to hear what you have to say. And once you have that, it really becomes your ballgame to lose.

Image via Flickr.

Providing really effective customer service doesn’t have to be difficult. Like most things in life it abides by the famous 80/20 rule: 80% of the value can be delivered with 20% of the work.

The problem is that most organisations don’t know which is the right 20% so they can’t deliver it effectively.

Over the past 10 years we have sent and analysed thousands of customer feedback surveys in a variety of industries.

Based on that extensive dataset here are three service attributes that consistently drive 80% (or more) of customer loyalty across a range of businesses.

1. Do What You Say You Will Do.

If you could only instil one service mantra in your staff this is it. Whether you call it “reliability” or “consistency” or simply “do what you say you will do”, this drives more customer loyalty than any other single service element.

The hardest part of delivering this attribute consistently is having staff understand that the key to reliability is setting the right customer expectations.

Most people want to deliver good service but, with the best of intentions, this can lead them over-promise.

“Of course we can deliver a rush order of that widget, in pink with purple spots by Friday!”

The trouble is that overpromising is the enemy of reliability.

Instead of being optimistic, as most customer service and sales staff are, teach your staff to be just slightly pessimistic in their promises.

When they miss an optimistic deadline they have to break the bad news to the customer and that hurts. It hurts the customer’s trust and the person’s ego.

Just beating a slightly pessimistic deadline drives much more customer loyalty. Give them the, slightly, bad news up front and then over deliver.

2. Responsiveness

Responsiveness can be a double edged sword because if you are very responsive it drives up customer loyalty but it also drives up customer expectations. The more responsive you are the more responsive you have to be.

However, the pain is worth it because the value is high; let me show you how high.

The chart below is research from the sales performance industry where outbound calls are made in response to a request by a prospect from a web form.

It shows the number of conversions versus the number of minutes since the customer request.

The seemingly insignificant change between responding in 10 minutes rather than 5, results in an 80% reduction in leads.

Source: The Lead Response Management Study, 2009

The immense impact that responsiveness has on sales, and customer loyalty, is clear.

In practice, staff often don’t want to contact the customer until they have a resolution but this is the wrong approach. Their need is no to **solve** the customer problem in five minutes only to respond to the customer in five minutes.

The difference is important and needs to be clear to staff.

They don’t need to perform the customer service in five minutes but they do need to respond and say “I’ve heard you and here is what is happening”

3. Easy to Do Business With

In practice, your customers will trade off a host of other service attributes if you are easy to do business with. They will forgive a slightly less fancy showroom or better trained service technicians if working with you is easy.

So look for ways that you can make it easy for customers. Here is an example from our own business:

In our consulting business we are often told by customers that our proposals are easy to understand. One of the simplest things we do to make it easy for customers is to provide clear instructions on how to proceed with the proposal.

To accept this proposal

1. Tick applicable Option(s)
2. Sign this page
3. Fax/scan and email entire “Investment” section of proposal to 555 555 555

It sounds simple (and it is) but how often have you gotten to the end of a *War and Peace* proposal, decided to proceed but been none the wiser on just how to do that.

You can see that it’s little things that make the difference her. So, look for ways in your business to make things easier for customers.

In March, after a two-year shut down for an upgrade, the world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will reopen for business.

The rest of the year will see physicists biting their nails — for one way or another 2015 will go down as a famous date in their field.

Either theoreticians will be proved spectacularly right, and experimenters can move confidently on into the verdant pastures of so-called new physics, engaging in a positive safari of hunting for novel particles, or they will find out, to exaggerate only slightly, that they do not understand how the universe really works.

The LHC's main job, now it has found the much-heralded Higgs boson, is to track down an almost equally heralded--and more than equally elusive--phenomenon called Susy. This is the nickname physicists have given to the concept of supersymmetry, which lies at the heart of most models of new physics.

Susy, dreamed up in 1981 to answer tough questions about existing physical models, has been playing hide and seek since then as first the Americans, using the now-closed Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab, near Chicago, and then the Europeans, using the LHC at CERN, a laboratory in Geneva, have sought signs of her existence. Researchers have gradually ramped up the power of their machines, looking for telltale particles, and have now arrived at the point where, if some of these particles do not appear in the latest ramp-up, they will have to scrap the idea and come up with something else.

Susy exists to resolve a conundrum. In the second half of the 20th century physicists painstakingly assembled what has come to be called the Standard Model. This explains all known fundamental particles and forces except for gravity, which has its own private model called general relativity. But, though the Standard Model works, it depends on many arbitrary mathematical assumptions. The conundrum is why these assumptions have the values they do. But the need for a lot of those assumptions would disappear if the known particles had heavier partner particles: their supersymmetric twins.

There are various versions of supersymmetry, but all of the most plausible predict that some of these partner particles, though heavier than the particles of the Standard Model, and thus harder to make in accelerators, are nevertheless sufficiently light that either they should have been found already, or else they should show up pretty quickly when the LHC is turned back on. The machine's upgrade is therefore the last throw of the dice for the theory, at least in its conventional form.

Failing to find supersymmetry would be tricky not only for those who hope to use it to clarify the Standard Model, but also for those others who think Susy will explain the nature of so-called dark matter--which its gravitational effects show is six times as abundant in the universe as the familiar matter of which atoms are made. Many physicists are betting that dark matter is composed of one or more types of supersymmetric partner particles. If those particles turn out to be illusory, these physicists, too, will have to think again.

If Susy does not show up, though, it will not be the end of physics. In science, not finding something can often be more exciting than finding it. In the late 19th century, for example, there was a Susy-like hunt for the luminiferous aether, which almost all physicists then believed pervaded space and propagated light in the way that air propagates sound. But an experiment by two Americans, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, showed that the aether does not exist. Physics had been barking up the wrong tree, and it took Max Planck and Albert Einstein, the conceivers of quantum theory and relativity theory, to give it new trees to bark up.

A century later, a few alternative trees have already been planted, just in case Susy does fail to show up for her date. There are, for instance, more complicated versions of supersymmetry that have the virtue, from the point of view of the current absence of telltale particles, that their own predicted particles are too heavy for even the upgraded LHC to make.

The vice of these theories is that they are indeed more complicated. Invoking them smacks of an ancient astronomer adding an epicycle to a planet's orbit to make that planet's movement fit the data, when what is actually needed is a shift of perspective about where the centre of the solar system is.

Another approach, which has the virtue of requiring such a shift of perspective, is to accept that the Standard Model's arbitrary assumptions are actually arbitrary realities. Physicists are reluctant to do this because even small changes in the numbers would cause the whole thing to break down. The result would be either a radically different universe or no universe at all. It beggars belief, the argument goes, that things could be so finely tuned as to produce this particular universe, the one humans live in, by accident.

The way out of this, for those unwilling to invoke an intelligent creator, is to allow that the observable universe is just one of an indefinite number of universes, each with its own laws of physics. In that case, only universes governed by the Standard Model, or something similar to it, could have the conditions needed for the emergence of physicists capable of observing it.

Such arguments shade into philosophy, for even if multiple universes do exist it may be impossible to observe them. But then, in Isaac Newton's day, physics was known as "natural philosophy". Perhaps it is time to revive the term.

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As you begin to get into the account planning process, be mindful that there are a few areas where enterprise focus can fall short. Here are some of the common pitfalls that can arise and how to avoid them:

Lack of Structure

A lack of centralized account coordination can perpetuate disconnected execution; therefore you want to make sure that you have a strong account structure. Too often the account manager’s role is unclear. While sales should own the account planning process, it doesn’t mean that they won’t need to pull in resources from other departments whether it be marketing or the folks in services and implementation. There should be structure around who is responsible for what.

Poor Selection

Choosing the right accounts for focus is a challenge. Done wrong, it becomes extremely difficult to deliver value. Account planning takes a lot of resources and time, so you want to make sure that you’re betting on the right horses. Utilizing visual tools such as an Account Prioritization Grid can help identify which accounts offer the greatest potential so your teams know where to best focus their time and efforts.

Lack Of Talent

Expecting resources to change focus overnight makes execution unreliable. Don’t simply assume that your team has the skills and knowledge for effective account planning. In addition to giving them training on the overall process, you may want to consider providing your salespeople with some skill development to strengthen their abilities. For example, managing a team…Salespeople are often put into the role of account manager and expected to manage a broad team without being equipped to do so.

Impatience

Expecting full payoff in a short period of time creates unrealistic expectations. Keep in mind that account planning activities may not bear fruit for three years or so. If you’re looking for payoff next quarter, it’s not likely going to happen through account planning.

Unrealistic Expectations

Make sure you are looking at things with a realistic perspective. Just because you have deployed an account planning process does not necessarily mean that you are now “doing” account planning. It requires coaching, technological support, and so on. Like anything in sales, account planning isn’t easy, but the benefits are well worth it.

The way people think about the world will undergo a radical change in 2015, as assumptions that have held steady for years are overturned. In the economy and technology, especially, the year will bring a series of statistical landmarks.

The most remarkable shifts are geo-economic. America will overtake Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest producer of oil, thanks to the shale-gas revolution (chart 1). Many aspects of international relations are built around American access to oil, and these will be viewed in a new light. The International Energy Agency forecasts that America’s oil pre-eminence will last until 2050 and beyond.

Yet Asia is still rising, and some striking numbers will reflect this. The combined wealth of Asian high-net-worth individuals (those holding at least $1m) will exceed those from North America in 2015, according to Capgemini and rbc Wealth Management. Danny Quah of the London School of Economics has calculated the world’s economic centre of gravity and reckons that, thanks to Asia’s rise, over the 70 years from 1980 to 2050 it will move eastwards from the mid-Atlantic all the way to somewhere between India and China. By 2015, the halfway point on this great journey, it will have reached the city of Bandar-e Mahshahr, in Iran, on the north-eastern tip of the Persian Gulf (chart 2).

China will pass two milestones. First, the country’s outward foreign direct investment is likely to exceed its inward flows (chart 3). This powerfully symbolizes the degree to which China has matured as a global economic power. Second, China will for the first time in modern history begin the year as the world’s largest economy, surpassing America, at least in terms of purchasing-power parity (chart 4). Though quibblers will say it is an imperfect measure, it nevertheless suggests that, as Dryden put it, “An old age is out/And time to begin a new.”

After wealth follows power. Defence spending in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding China, will match the European Union’s spending in 2015, according to ihs Jane’s, a research firm (chart 5).

Technology is forever in flux. In 2015, sales of tablets will overtake those of personal computers (chart 6). Revenue from internet advertisements in America will surpass the combined value of ads from newspapers, magazines and billboards (chart 7). And, oddly, mobile-phone subscriptions will exceed the world population (chart 8): some people hold many accounts, especially in countries with spotty connections.

In 2015 there will be more people active on Facebook than living in China (chart 9). If the social network were a country, it would be the world’s most-populous.

One 2015 milestone reflects continuity rather than change. Health and inclination permitting, Queen Elizabeth II will become England’s longest-serving monarch on September 11th (chart 10), when she passes her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria.

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Value Is What Something Is Worth is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Value isn’t what something costs. Value is what that something is worth.

I have Montblanc Le Grand pen that I carry. That pen costs just over $500. Not a lot of people find value in a pen that costs as much as the Le Grand Rollerball. I have carpal tunnel in might right hand from typing so much, and with such poor form, that I almost never write anything. When I do write something by hand, you can take it to any pharmacy and trade it for a prescription for amoxicillin. My handwriting is best with a cheap Pilot G2 (10) gel pen. But the Le Grand was a gift from my mother when I graduated from college. To me, it is priceless.

You would never pay that much for a pen. But you might pay that amount or more to go to a concert or the theatre. The price of the ticket to an event may seem outrageous to some, but you easily trade your money for the value that the event creates for you, namely the experience. The value of the experience is far more valuable the money.

You might pay a lot of money to get the very latest and greatest technology, like a television or a smartphone. There are likely more people that would never pay what you pay for these things, because they don’t value them the same way you do. But the experience of the technology, or the bragging rights that come from being on the bleeding edge, provide a value to you that exceeds the price you pay for these things.

Maybe for you it’s clothes, or fine dining, or your car, or furniture, or rare 1st edition hard cover books. Whatever it is, there is something in your life that you pay more for because the value it creates for you make it worth the money you trade for it.

If your dream client’s challenges are important enough to cause them change, then it’s certain that the value created by changing is worth paying more to obtain. You don’t have to create greater value and also have a lower price point.

There are some people who pay more by being cheap. They perceive greater value by paying less for something, even if it costs them a better experience, better results, and a better outcome. They even have to replace what they buy more frequently. They know what things cost, but they don’t have any idea what they’re really worth.

Your job is to help people make the right investments to obtain the value that they want, to drive up the value created, not to help them focus find a lower price.

If you are on Twitter, Facebook or any other form of social media, then you know how it feels when you post something that gets shared, especially when it gets shared a lot.

It’s a good feeling, isn’t it? Not just for the validation of your message, but also for the increased reach and impact you know you are having.

Now, imagine how you would feel if you could get your message shared more. You can. There is a simple tactic that you could implement today to get your message shared by many more people.

Here it is: create a share page for your blog or website.

Simply put, this is a page that has pre-created messages that people can easily share. It can be a mix of some of your most engaging thoughts, quotes, or posts in the form of embedded tweets, shareable image quotes, and other content. It’s a makeup of messages you feel people will gravitate towards most and want to share with others.

These are not “promotional” messages necessarily; although, they can be, depending on the use. They are primarily messages with content that people find valuable and want to share. As a result, your reach expands and so does your impact (for your core message or whatever it is you are trying to bring attention to).

A share page works well with a launch

You can use a share page specifically around a book or product launch.

See an example here of one bestselling author Jon Gordon used when we launched his book The Carpenter. Not only did it include embedded tweets and images for downloading and/or posting to Pinterest, but it also included sample blog and email copy that fans could use to promote the book.

In Jon’s case, content messages such as this one below were shared a lot:

“You aren’t a true success unless you are helping others be successful.” –@jongordon11 #LoveServeCare www.Carpenter11.com

Since the messages also included the link, the book site received a ton of traffic which then resulted in increased book sales, new email subscribers, and social media followers.

Imagine 50, 100, 1000 or even more of your fans utilizing the messages you provide in the timeframe you suggest. The concentrated impact combined with the reach is phenomenal. And the results can be exponential.

It doesn’t have to be exclusive to a launch

A share page can be a page on your site that you keep as a resource for fans and new visitors. It can be in your site navigation as a link or a link in a thank-you email someone gets after signing up at your site.

It’s a place where people can engage with your best material and share it with others, simply because they find it valuable.

See an example used as a promo page after someone signed up for our recent Author Platform Summit here. The page is very simple, but it asked for people to click links to tweet at their favorite speaker. It worked amazingly well.

If you decide to create a general share page on your site, I’d also suggest adding simple SHARE THIS SITE links at the top of the page to make it easy for someone to click and share your site. Then proceed with the rest of your content-driven shareable messages down the page.

Take a look at a sample share page for Jeff Goins to illustrate how simple it can be. It’s also a great example of how you can utilize the power of pre-created content to encourage increased sharing.

Why does a share page work?

A share page is the easy button. When you have pre-created content with share links, it removes friction by making it easy for people to share. When it’s easy, people take action.

You might start by posting some of your most popular content on your share page because you already know that it resonates. You can also type in other Twitter users’ names to see their top tweets (which could then give you additional content ideas that you might want to utilize because you’ll know the messages resonate with others).

Sounds good, right?

Now, how do you create one of your own?

Here are four steps:

1. Create a SHARE page on your website. Follow the framework of examples cited above.
2. Create embedded tweets using ClickToTweet.com. You can copy and paste your tweet it will create a custom link for your message. You can then just copy that link into your “TWEET THIS NOW” line.
3. Create custom shareable images. It’s best if you get images professional done by a designer or use a service like 99designs.com. I typically make images in 612×612 pixel format so that they work well for most forms of social media (from Instagram to Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter). Or you can create optimized images for each medium. You can also use text overlay apps like Wordswag. Embedding the image and Pinterest button on your SHARE page is a little more advanced, so you may want to get a web designer to help you. Here is the link to create your Pinterest embed button. You can find one to do it quick and affordably from Elance or any number of places.
4. Add any other additional content and you’re set.

Do you now plan to create a share page on your site? Share in the comments.

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The use of 3D printing in the auto industry is set to quintuple over the next five years to a value of $1.25 billion.

The total current value of the car industry’s 3D printing work is about $267 million. But that number is expected to grow to $1.25 billion by 2019, according to data provided to 3D Printing Industry by SmarTech.

Today, according to 3D Printing Industry, companies in the industry spend about $168 million a year on 3D printing hardware and about $99 million on materials.

Lest anyone think that their new car may incorporate 3D-printed parts, we’re not there yet. Today, and for the foreseeable future, the industry is using the technology almost entirely for prototyping. But things are changing fast, SmarTech analyst Scott Dunham told 3D Printing Industry, and we may well soon be seeing working models built into test engines and concept cars. “These kinds of parts not only are higher value parts, but they also go a long way in proving to automotive industry professionals that additive manufacturing can be the ‘real deal,’” Dunham said. “That’s the biggest challenge right now.”

In 2013, I visited Ford’s research and development division in Dearborn, Mich., and got a tour of a 3D printing facility there. The company told me that Ford had first started experimenting with the technology, also known as “additive manufacturing,” in the late 1980s, and even purchased some of the first 3D printers ever made. Today, Ford has three 3D printing facilities in Dearborn and two in Europe.

Like many others throughout various industries, Ford said it makes some of its earliest prototypes on consumer-grade 3D printers like a MakerBot. Then it moves on to much more sophisticated (and expensive) machines. While I was visiting, one machine was busy making a set of cup holders. At a build time of 18 hours, that’s not even close to efficient for production, but it’s perfect for preparing prototype vehicles, I was told.

Similarly, Ford said it had used an additive manufacturing technology known as laser-sintering to make a full front end for a prototype F-150 pickup truck. The company’s R&D team also uses the machines to make sections of door panels as well as intake manifolds, which, if proven to be reliable (meaning no air leaks can be found), can be included in test engines.

Everything I was shown was meant for 2015 or 2016 model vehicles. And all told, Ford’s newest machines, including set up expenses, cost about $25 million. That may sound like a lot, but using the technology is meant to help Ford shorten vehicles’ production cycles. And that can save the company big bucks.

The industry as a whole is clearly aware of that cost/benefit analysis, given SmarTech’s data, and will only become more so over time.

 

 

Nearly as ominous as the economic cloud hovering over Dilma Rousseff is the scandal surrounding Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company. It nearly cost her re-election, and could yet spoil her second term as Brazil's president.

The affair began in March, when federal police arrested Paulo Roberto Costa, Petrobras's chief of refining from 2004 to 2012, in a money-laundering investigation.

Mr Costa, seeking leniency, confessed to far more than that. Construction companies that won contracts from his division diverted 3% of their value into slush funds for political parties, he said. Police identified 10 billion reais ($3.7 billion) of suspicious payments, making the petrolão (the "big oily") Brazil's biggest corruption scandal.

In November police arrested two dozen executives from Brazil's six largest construction firms and another former Petrobras bigwig; 30 people have been indicted. Most of the alleged bribe-takers belong to the Workers' Party, which Ms Rouseff leads, or to her coalition allies.

There is no evidence that Ms Rousseff knew of the mischief, but much of it took place while she was energy minister and chairman of Petrobras during the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, her predecessor. A former manager claims to have alerted Petrobras's current boss, Maria das Graças Foster, and other executives about the irregularities. The company denies that Ms Foster, a friend of the president, had any knowledge of them.

The scandal will produce damning headlines for months to come. Most of the 28 politicians named by Mr Costa enjoy parliamentary privilege; only the Supreme Court may try them. Shares in Petrobras have dropped by more than half since their peak in September (in part because of falling oil prices).

Minority shareholders are furious. On December 24th the city of Providence, Rhode Island, one of several aggrieved investors, filed a case in New York naming Ms Rousseff as a potential witness. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Petrobras violated anti-corruption laws. Expect more storms in 2015.

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SEE ALSO: Petrobras Is Tanking, And It's Dragging Brazil Down With It

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Big Data and data-driven marketing are two of the most prominent business buzzwords.

New technologies are giving businesses access to larger amounts of data and tools that help us analyze data faster, in larger volumes than ever before. It feels empowering in our quest for the answers. We want data to illuminate the way for us.

Data enables us to make the right decisions and to bulletproof our plans – Or does it?

“It is possible to be drowning in data and still none the wiser” – Paul Laughlin

A couple years ago, one of the World’s most innovative companies was about to launch a massive project. They invested in a research project as large as they come, hiring three of the top consulting companies at the time, and spending 8 figures to interview 200,000 people in 54 cities and 22,000 individuals at 3000 corporations. All this research and data should have guided the project and ensured success, right?

The company was Motorola and the project was Iridium, which went down in history as one of the most colossal failures in business and resulted in a $5 billion dollar write-off. What happened? Motorola had access to experts, technology, and reams of data. Nevertheless, they failed to ask the right questions and to interpret the data correctly.

“A great part of information obtained in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the largest part is of doubtful character” – Karl von Clausewitz

We are about to drown in an ocean of data

Back in early 2013, Big Data was already an overhyped term with a questionable path to business value. Unfortunately, the hype continues to grow and companies are focusing on collecting more and more data.

One of the better-known big data technologies helps organizations collect IT systems-information well in excess of 100 GBs of data per day. To put this number into context, consider the entire Encyclopædia Britannica, which uses less than 1 GB of data. How are business people supposed to analyze all this data?

“There is an unlimited amount of data in a digital world. Many times people try to do the most complex way of using the data.” – Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet

A recent survey found that only 6% of marketers have the talent to leverage marketing analytics. Most marketers are not taking advantage of the data we have today, web analytics being a prime example.

Then, a recent ReadWrite article appropriately titled “Gartner on Big Data: Everyone’s Doing It, No One Knows Why”, states “according to a recent Gartner report, 64% of enterprises surveyed indicate that they’re deploying or planning Big Data projects. Yet even more acknowledge that they still don’t know what to do with Big Data. Have the inmates officially taken over the Big Data asylum?”

More data is harder. The value is not really in the quantity of the data, but on knowing what to ask for and deriving the right insights. We are entering an age where organizations will find they are rich in data but poor in customer-insights.

“But of course, the quantity of data is entirely beside the point if the data aren’t of a good quality.” – Phil Rosenzweig, the Halo Effect

The danger is all this data can be creating a Mirage

The mirage is that the answer is in the data, that more data is better, that if we collect enough data and analyze it we will arrive at the right answer.

A couple years back, Mohan Sawhney, one of the most brilliant marketing academics from the Kellogg School of Management, gave us a problem to solve. The case study included a couple data tables and multiple data points: prices, costs, volume, market research, etc. Everyone in the class, myself included, fired up our spreadsheets and came up with a couple conclusions – all wrong. Our mistake was assuming that because we had a lot of data, the answer must be in data analysis. The answer was in front of us the entire time. There was no need to analyze the data to find the answer, because the answer was found in basic marketing strategy. The data was a trap.

“A flood of data should never be allowed to was away your common sense” – Jack Trout

The 7 Hazards That Create a Mirage of Data

1. Data only looks at the past. Despite conventional wisdom, data is limited as a predictor of the future. Otherwise, it would be easy to predict stock prices, sports scores, or even lottery numbers. Einstein knew the act of observation itself alters reality. By the time you collect and analyze data, the environment will have changed, limiting its usefulness.

2. Data does not tell you why and fails to reflect emotion. It is so easy to confuse information with evidence. Modern management practices focus on quantification of all the elements of a business. We are all human. We make emotional decisions and then justify them rationally. From your morning Starbucks, to the car you drive, to billion-dollar decisions in corporations, it is all driven by emotions. You cannot fully understand customers through a numerical lens. Data can show us what customers purchased, how they paid, and how often they visited. It cannot tell us why.

As Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine tell in their book, Outside In, “We recently spoke with the head of consumer insights at a major cosmetics manufacturer who was building a repository of shopper purchasing patterns from retailers PoS systems. Although he insisted that he wanted to create a ‘true 360 degree view’ of his customers, he wouldn’t even consider our suggestion to study how women actually use his company’s products in the bathroom every morning. Women of the world should be outraged that a guy in a suit has the audacity to think he understands them based solely on when and where they shop for makeup.” (P.s. I have lived with my wife for 16 years, and still don’t understand her, or her cosmetics buying process).

HBR notes “Human behavior is nuanced and complex, and no matter how robust it is, data can provide only part of the story. Desire and motivation are influenced by psychological, social, and cultural factors that require context and conversation in order to decode. Data …reveals what people do, but not why they do it.” In other words, trusting data alone assumes the data you have is accurate, complete, and reflects or captures all relevant aspects of consumer behavior.

3. Data is always biased: Every step in data collection and analysis has potential for introducing bias. Your data is most likely biased by the method you use to collect it, the customers you collect it from, the data available to correlate it with, and the way you interpret the data. Psychologists tell us we are all victims of confirmation bias, giving more value to the data that confirms our hypothesis and ignoring the data that contradicts it.

Iridium failed to ask if people would pay for the service at a particular price. That was their bias. Surveys are biased by the subset of data you survey and the subset of those who respond. Your transaction data is biased based on your existing customers, which may not accurately represent the entirety of the market. You are blind as to why non-customers fail to buy. Collection can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy: display the most popular products on your website, make them even more popular, not because they are the best products, but because you chose them as such.

4. We often look at the data we can collect, not at the data we need. Not all data can be useful. Not all data is interesting and most is not insightful. We tend to assume the data we have (or what we can collect or observe) must have the answer to our questions. The weight of a television set has nothing at all to do with the clarity of its picture. Even if you measure to a tenth of a gram, this precise data is useless. The number of Twitter followers a person has is probably not a good indicator of actual influence, even if it easy to measure. It takes guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don’t measure well by conventional means.

An online retailer can focus on conversion rates (percentage of visitors who buy), while being blind to the fact those larger number of buyers have a lower lifetime customer value (LTCV). Conversion is far more easy to measure than measuring and correlating with LTCV.

5. Data makes it easy to confuse correlation with causation. In search for an ROI story, social marketers are quick to point out the higher customer value of those who follow a company on social networks, implying they buy more because they follow them. However, it is more plausible that they follow the retailer on social networks because they are loyal customers. Without understanding the why and the emotions behind people’s decisions, it is hard to properly interpret data. Your data shows a customer purchased a large ticket item and a small ticket item, which one was the original reason why he showed up at the store? Which one was the impulse buy.

6. The delusion of a single explanation. It is common to look for the (singular) root-cause for a problem – to try to find the one thing that drives customer buying decisions. The reality is that the way people make decisions is far more complex. Dozens of factors have some influence on a single decision. It is like proposing for marriage: would you be able to tell why she said ‘yes’? Was it your looks, your money, your smile, or your sense of humor? As much as we would like a simple answer that clearly points to a single explanation, chances are events and decisions are results of much more complex, interdependent factors.

7. More data (or big data) is not better data. You can survey thousands of people and ask them who invented the light bulb, which will result in a false sense of security in perfectly inaccurate data. We tend to believe that more data will give us more precision, when it usually has the opposite effect. It is easy to draw a chart with two axis and it is possible to compare data using three dimensions. Adding a fourth, fifth, or sixth dimension makes data visualization an impossible problem in itself. With more information and more data points to correlate, we are forced to ignore or minimize large sets of data, increasing the chances of arriving at the wrong conclusion. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink makes a pretty good case for the accuracy of gut-based, split-second decisions over those made after more careful and pseudo-scientific evaluation.

What to do, if data can create reality distortion?

The best insights come from customers, not spreadsheets or analytics

Sometimes we look for technology, sophisticated data models, complex analytics and expert advice to tell us more about customer behavior, when it would be easier to simply get out of the office and listen to them.

The best insights come from observing and listening to customers. If you make it a habit to speak with a customer or three, every day, you will gain insights that no computer technology can give you.

Bernadette Jiwa captured it beautifully: “We assume that the most valuable data is static and lives on graphs and spreadsheets….The truth of what we need to know and some of the most valuable data live in plain sight. The wrinkled nose of the diner. The sigh of the shopper waiting in line. The posture of the customer as she walks out the door. What she packed in her bag before she left home this morning. Noticing what people do is often more valuable to us than listening to what they say they think”

I am a believer in the power of Big Data technology and the business value of insights. I have seen the success stories first hand. What I am pointing to is Gartner Research calls (link) ‘a peak of inflated expectations‘ that is almost always followed by a ‘trough of disillusionment’, that there is a danger of following buzzwords and trends blindly, and the danger in relying purely in metrics and analysis for decision making.

Understanding the limits of what data can tell us, identifying the challenges in interpreting data, and being deliberate at capturing simple but very useful data can lead to insights and then to action. Taking advantage of data, along with non-data derived insights, results in better decision making. If he had relied purely on data, Steve Jobs would have never considered building the iPhone (click on the link for the story).

It would be a misunderstanding to conclude I am suggesting marketers ignore data. To the contrary, data is fundamental for every businessperson. Data can be especially useful for marketers. The point is to be aware of the limitations and traps of data, to better comprehend its usefulness and to extract real value from the data we have.

Wondering if you should allocate marketing dollars in 2015 for virtual trade shows? Trade shows are an effective way of getting your brand out there and have become a necessary part of doing business. However, for some businesses, limitations with traditional trade shows are that they require a substantial budget and a significant amount of time.

For small and medium size companies traditional trade shows can be difficult due to a small event-marketing budget. Large companies have a leg up at trade shows because they have the means and resources to make a much larger impact. They can afford premium booth spaces, event badge lanyards, and gold sponsorship packages that gain maximum exposure. But for smaller B2B companies that’s not always the case. Virtual trade shows are an opportunity for companies of any size to gain brand exposure and increase lead generation on a small budget.

Benefits Of Participating In A Virtual Event

Virtual events offer a certain appeal that traditional trade shows don’t. They range in price from $3,000 to $8,000 per event, which is substantially cheaper than traditional events that can run you upwards of $100,000. As soon as the event begins, audiences can view content and live chat from the convenience of their laptop or mobile device. With the click of a button you can connect with booth visitors via a chat room, share collateral, and exchange contact information with people all over the world. After the event you have access to a full list of attendees and your own booth visitors who you can later engage with in a more in-depth conversation.

Close The Loop On Lead Generation From Events

Are you getting the full picture from the leads you generated during a virtual event? You already get a substantial amount of leads from the event attendee and booth visitors lists, yet you can only partially measure the success of a virtual trade show based on these leads. To understand the full scope of success, you also need to track and measure the number of phone calls that are generated from the event and which leads converted to revenue. How is that possible? Call tracking software can tell you how inbound phone calls were generated from the online trade show – whether from collateral, booth video, or post show email.

You can track all phone calls generated from the virtual event by placing a unique trackable phone number on the collateral distributed or within your booth. If someone calls using one of the phone numbers placed on the collateral, you then have the ability to know where that lead originated. Call tracking is another way to help you accurately measure the ROI of an event and determine if it is worth sponsoring again.

Sharing a unique trackable phone number with attendees who you determine are ready to talk with a sales agent is another way to generate leads during the event. If an attendee calls that phone number, you can then immediately route them to the appropriate person using intelligent call routing technology. And using an IVR (interactive voice response) enables you to survey a caller before transferring them, which allows you to score the caller and ensure they are being transferred to the appropriate person. Implementing these solutions at your next virtual event will help you to create a more personalized conversation – similar to being face-to-face at a physical trade show. Implementing these techniques will drive more qualified leads and help you to understand the ROI associated with virtual shows.

To learn about how call tracking can help improve the ROI of your next event, read: “Tracking Phone Leads: The Missing Piece of Marketing Automation.”

Lead scoring is a tool used to help marketing communicate to sales which MQLs are most likely hot, and which leads can be given a bit more time. It is extremely useful when done correctly. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot help marketers integrate this system with their CRM, offering custom lead scoring capabilities so that you and your sales team set the parameters that make the most sense for your company. Below we will discuss how lead scoring works and what steps you need to take to get started.

How Lead Scoring Works

Leading scoring systems in the simplest terms rank leads according the behavior, action or characteristics logged in contacts’ properties within the leads database. Those who have the most qualified attributes get the highest score.

Sales and marketing teams work together to decide how much an action, characteristic, or piece of content are worth. The lead scoring system adds up those values for each lead, based on what is recorded in the database, and calculates the overall lead scores based on the findings. The calculation can also include negative actions such as unsubscribing from email. The sales and marketing teams also decide together if any additional weighting is necessary for particular attributes such as stage of the buying cycle. The weighting adds an additional fine-tuning to the lead score but isn’t necessary all of the time.

 Attributes commonly scored are:

•     Content downloaded (individual and total)
•      Number of pages viewed on website
•      Job Title
•      Role at Company
•      Frequency of visits
•      Key pages visited (such a Pricing)
•      Unsubscribes
•      Comments on blog
•      Timeline to purchase
•      Persona (can be positive or negative)

Taking the First Steps Toward Scoring Leads

Step 1: Meet with the Sales Team

Similar to your sales process discovery meeting, you should setup a meeting with sales to figure out what key attributes should be scored to help them qualify leads better. Remember to ask how personas play into their scoring. Who does the sales team like to work with best?

Step 2: Develop a Lead Scoring Matrix or Scorecard

A scoring matrix should be a table that plots out what you’re scoring, the value of the each criteria, and the number of points it takes to end up in a stage of the buyer’s journey or sales funnel. For example is a lead with 200 points marketing qualified? 300 points? What actions do they have to take to make sure they fit the qualification specifics given by the sales team. This process will take you the longest to complete.

Step 3: Double Check Your Logic

The key to great lead scoring is ensuring your logic works. Is the “demo” scored too high making everyone ultra-qualified? If it is, refine, refine, refine. The key, again, isn’t to make every demo request the most qualified. It is to help sales decide which demo request they should call first.

Step 4: Add to Your Marketing Tool and Test

In HubSpot, setting up lead scoring is easy. You should take your logic, setup the lead scoring tool and then run it for a couple of weeks. Is it working? Does it sync to your CRM system? Is the sales team actually using it? If the answers to any of the questions above is “No” you should reevaluate why it’s not working and in some cases if lead scoring is actually that useful to your team.

Step 5: Refine Your Efforts

Setup a meeting every quarter to discuss any refinement that needs to happen in the lead scoring process. Is it working? Is it not? Why or why not? Is there anything new that needs to be scored? You get the idea. Take what you learn from this meeting, set it up again in the tool and test to make sure it works. Continue this process each quarter.

By implementing lead scoring into strategy you can ensure that your sales team gets the hottest marketing qualified leads. This not only keeps both teams happy; it also allows you to show proof that your inbound marketing efforts are worthwhile.

Editor's note: The five steps are listed at the bottom of the post.

I had an opportunity to ask Robin Dreeke a few questions. Robin is in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s elite Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program and the author of "It’s Not All About Me."

Robin combines science and years of work in the field to offer practical tips to build rapport and establish trust. In this brief interview he discusses building relationships, how to approach someone you don’t know and ask for a favor, and the keys to establishing trust.

A lot of people are interested in strengthening and furthering relationships. How can people do this?

This is the most important aspect of everything we do in life. I’m going to give some light science behind each of my answers but to me it just explains the subjective simple explanations behind naturally great trusting relationships.

Both anecdotal (evidence) as well as science supports the fact that the greatest happiness is found in positive social interactions and relationships. The simplest answer to this is to “make it all about them.” Our brain rewards us chemically when we are able to talk and share our own views, priorities, and goals with others… long term, short term, etc. Our brain also rewards us when we are unconditionally accepted for who we are as a human being without judgement.

Both of these concepts are genetically coded in each of us (to varying degrees) because of our ancient survival instincts (ego-centrism) as well as our need to belong to groups or a tribe (tribal mentality for survival and resources). When you put these simple concepts together the answer is simple to understand, but oftentimes difficult to execute…. Speak in terms of the other person’s interests and priorities and then validate them, their choices, and who they are non-judgmentally. Some people do this naturally, for the rest of us you can build this skill and it eventually becomes second nature.

Trust is a foundation to most situations in life. How can we develop trust? What are the keys?

I can only answer from my own background and experience because trust is a very difficult thing to measure and define and each individual’s definition can vary and our brain takes in much more than verbal information when determining trust. For me and what I teach I start with what I said in question one. Trust first starts with a relationship where the other person’s brain is rewarding them for the engagement with you by doing what I outlined above.

Part two of my trust process is to understand the other person’s goals and keeping their goals and priorities on the top of my list of goals and priorities. By making the other person’s goals and priorities yours, trust will develop. Over time (some people faster than others) a need to reciprocate the kindness and relationship will build. In other words, trust is built faster and stronger when there is no personal agenda.

What’s the best way to approach someone you don’t know and ask them for a favor?

Using sympathy and seeking help is always the best. If you can wrap the help / favor you are looking for around a priority and interest of the individual you are engaging, the odds of success increase. Add social proof (i.e., others around you helping already or signed a petition etc.) and you increase it even more. Again, focus on how you can ask a favor while getting their brain to reward them for doing so.

What are some strategies to build rapport while giving a talk, presentation, or interview?

Ego Suspension / self-deprecating humor… Make it all about them! How is the information you are chatting about going to benefit them? Talk about the great strengths and skills they each have already and that all you hope to do is to have them understand their strengths even better and be able to pass them on to others more effectively if they want to. Validate every question and opinion non-judgmentally. If you don’t happen to agree, simply ask “that’s a fascinating / insightful/ thoughtful opinion… would you mind helping me understand how you came up with it?” Again, their brain will reward them on multiple levels for this.

I suspect you spend a lot of time trying to figure out if people are manipulating you or the situation? Can you talk about this? How can you tell when people are attempting to manipulate you?

I’ll start by saying I don’t like the word manipulate. The word tends to objectify people and removes the human being from the equation. When people feel they are objects, trust will not be built. I tend to not think of anyone trying to manipulate me but at times a very self-serving agenda becomes evident. This is what manipulation generally is…. a self-serving agenda where the other person feels used with no reciprocity.

When I notice that there may be an overabundance of a self-serving agenda (manipulation) I don’t judge the person negatively. I try to explore two areas in order to understand them better. (go back to my first answers here… this process begins to build a relationship and trust :)) I try to understand what their objective is and why that is their objective.

What are they trying to achieve, etc. I will also attempt to understand why they felt a certain way of communicating with me would be effective for them in the situation. I tend to ask questions to help them think about how they might be more successful in their objectives using other methods… such as I outlined above.

In other words, help them achieve whatever objective with me they had…. because wasn’t that their goal after all? :) See… keep it always coming back to them.

If you had to give a crash course in building a relationship with someone, what are the top 5 things people need to do? What carries the bulk of the freight so-to-speak?

1) Learn… about their priorities, goals, and objectives.
2) Place… theirs ahead of yours
3) Allow them to talk…. suspend your own need to talk.
4) Seek their thoughts and opinions.
5) Ego suspension!!! Validate them unconditionally and non-judgmentally for who they are as a human being.

If you haven’t already, check out Robin’s Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport With Anyone.

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SEE ALSO: 3 Brilliant Negotiating Tips I Learned From Steve Jobs

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Mobile apps can be great fun, but they can also cumulatively take up a lot of your time and distract you from work. You'll need more than just willpower to properly control your appetite for apps—you need to understand how they work, and why they're extremely addictive.

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FEATURE:

Tech entrepreneurs were busy in 2014, building startups and raising money for products that could make it big in 2015.

While no one can predict the future, there are a handful of startups we are especially excited to watch in the coming year.

This unscientific list, compiled by VentureBeat’s staff from their own reporting, is an eclectic list of startups that we think are especially promising. We did the same thing last year, picking 26 amazing startups to watch in 2014. How did we do? Check out our analysis of our 2014 picks. (And we’ll do the same thing with this list next year.)

We’ve divided this year’s list into three sections: consumer-focused startups, enterprise startups, and companies focused on the increasingly hot sector of marketing technology.

So read on to find out what companies we’ll be watching in 2015.

Consumer and social media companies

8tracks

The current climate for streaming music services is healthy among consumers, but not so much with artists. That said, 8tracks managed to build a business that is much less hindered by music licensing costs than the majority of similar services. Like Pandora, 8tracks doesn’t provide on-demand access to a library of songs. Instead, the service relies on people who are awesome at building playlists. Recently the company took on new funding, and added a ton of recommendation features to help people discover better playlists. When you combine this with the company’s highly impressive ability to attract the 18-32 demographic (made up of lots of college students) coveted by advertisers, it’s very likely that we’ll see lots of sparks flying from 8tracks in 2015.

Atlas Wearables

Austin-based Atlas Wearables doesn’t just log the number of steps you take, it records exactly what exercise you’re doing, whether you’re performing it properly, and what you need to do to push your body to get a complete workout. Meanwhile it is also slowly building what it calls a Motion Genome Project for the purpose of identifying every conceivable physical activity using only the data collected from these wearable trackers. The startup’s tech could prove crazy useful for a variety of scenarios, like tracking a police officer’s activity down to identifying when they shoot a gun. Atlas, which saw one of its early founders get poached by Apple, has raised $1.5 million to date.

Blurb

Publishing startup Blurb is hoping to disrupt the book publishing business by giving authors more control — and more profits. The company invites authors tmake all the business decisions surrounding a published book (paper quality, colors, number of units, etc.), and even cut a deal to distribute those books to retail stores as well as digital copies in Amazon’s Kindle store. Blurb only makes money when a book is sold, which seems to be working out pretty well considering that the startup is profitable. Blurb founder and CEO Eileen Gittins told VentureBeat the company has some big plans for the next year that should make Blurb more attractive to Hollywood (among others), and we can’t wait to see what they are.

Imgur

Imgur is the world’s preferred choice for image hosting services, and over the last year has seen its own community grow leaps and bounds, not to mention that it sees 60 billion page views every month. This past year Imgur — the startup that didn’t need funding — raised a $40 million round to transform itself into a powerful business that doesn’t rely solely on programmatic advertising to make money. More recently, the San Francisco-based startup hired former Pinterest marketing and ad head Steve Patrizi to launch a new native advertising platform expected to launch in mid 2015. Point being, Imgur is worth keeping an eye on.

Nuzzel

If you can’t keep up with everything your digitally-enhanced social circle shares on social networks every day, you are not alone. Nuzzel’s purpose is to fix that by aggregating links to news articles that have been shared most often by people you follow on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Founded by Jonathan Abrams (the founder of Friendster), Nuzzel is working on adding more integration with other social networks in the near future. It’s a ridiculously useful service, as we’ve written about many times in the past, and we’d be surprised if it doesn’t make a huge splash in 2015.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt, in simple terms, is a “Hacker News for products,” a community-generated leaderboard of new, hot, or little-known products, tools, and services. The community, which founder Ryan Hoover and his tiny team vet, is made up almost entirely of players from within the startup community: developers, product managers, designers, investors, tech product enthusiasts. It picked up two rounds of funding in 2014: A $1 million seed round in August, and a $6.1 million series A in October. We expect big things from this increasingly vibrant community of technologists.

Spring

David Tisch, an angel investor at Box Group and former TechStars NY managing director, set out to create Spring, a mobile marketplace that gives brands a simple way to let consumers shop with them. It is a pseudo-social network that allows you to follow fashion brands and easily buy products directly from them. It’s not serving as an intermediary like flash shopping sites — Spring holds no inventory; it just connects you with a brand’s existing e-commerce infrastructure. Any products you purchase are shipped directly from their brand (which also means you’ll have to deal with them for a return). Spring launched in August, and we hear that it’s picking up a lot of users, so keep an eye on this one in 2015.

Yik Yak

Gossip is always gold! After Secret raised $8.6 million in March, and Whisper raised a massive $36 million in May, anonymous messaging app Yik Yak announced in June that it had raised $10 million for its own slice of the anonymous messaging pie. Then Yik Yak picked up another hefty $62 million in November. There are just a couple of problems: In December, experts discovered a really gaping security flaw in the Yik Yak app. And the app is a favorite tool of high-school pranksters who use it to call in fake bomb threats, gaining them a day off of school. If Yik Yak can quash these problems without becoming so uncool that its users abandon it (as they seem to have done with Secret), well, it could be a real threat in 2015. No wonder we hear rumors that Facebook wants to acquire Yik Yak — or maybe take it out, with its secret sharing app called Rooms.

Business infrastructure companies

BetterWorks

We were impressed by BetterWorks, which spent a year in stealth, crafting a web-based service big companies can use to store employees’ goals and measure their progress. In September, BetterWorks finally released the app to the world, and announced a $15 million round of funding from big-name investors that it took on last year but never talked about. John Doerr and Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers led the round. Joe Lonsdale from Formation 8 also participated. With top-tier investors like that, we’re looking for big things from BetterWorks in 2015.

Cartonomy

A New York City startup, Cartonomy raised $1 million in December, with plans to launch next year. It offers an online version of a shared shopping cart, letting a group of people toss their product choices into the cart and then bundling up their purchases for lower prices and more efficient shipping. The inspiration came when founder Jack Lowinger tried to find something in a university’s supply closet, and realized that the institution’s purchasing processes were completely out of whack. The platform already has a catalog of over 11 million products, thanks to partnerships with Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Sears, Office Depot, Staples, and Drugstore.com. The company plans a public launch in early February.

Cratejoy

Cratejoy thinks the future of most business lies in monthly subscriptions, and as such, has built a “subscription as a service” platform that makes it easy for new and existing companies to launch one. Cratejoy helps business owners of subscription services manage shipping and packaging information, product inventory, communication with subscribers, and more. The Austin, Texas-based startup has raised $6.2 million, and has about 1,000 clients, with hundreds more signing up each week, Cratejoy founder Amir Elaguizy told VentureBeat recently.

Docker

Docker created a way of packaging up application code into containers, making it easy to transport applications from one server environment to another. That helped the company pick up $40 million in funding in 2014. And since it became freely available in March, startups have been assembling products based on it, sometimes under the phrase “Docker-as-a-Service,” including Orchard and Copper.io’s StackDock. Big companies have leapt to embrace Docker containers, too. We wrote about why Docker was so hot in December 2013, and it shows no sign of cooling down yet.

Slack

Corporate messaging tool Slack announced in October that it had closed a $120 million round led by Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. The round valued the company at $1.12 billion, post funding — a massive valuation for an eight-month-old company with fewer than 300,000 users. Slack was quick to point this out in its press release: “Having just launched in February, this milestone marks Slack as the fastest growing SaaS company ever.” If Slack doesn’t do some amazing things in the coming year, Google Ventures and KP are going to look pretty foolish.

MetaMind

A type of artificial intelligence, deep learning involves training systems on lots of information derived from audio, images, and other inputs, and then presenting the systems with new information and receiving inferences about it in response. Technology companies like Google and Facebook have been making technical advances and acquisitions in the field, and a few deep-learning startups have appeared.

But MetaMind’s technology may have some advantages, drawing as it does on New York University professor and Facebook employee Yann LeCun’s breakthrough convolutional neural networks for mining pictures as well as founder Richard Socher’s own recursive neural networks, which have achieved breakthroughs in text processing. Our December story on MetaMind tells you everything you need to know about this rising star.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel, a company providing A/B testing tools for apps and websites, raised an impressive $65 million in December, entirely from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz. With an $865 million post-money valuation, the company is getting close to the “unicorn club” of companies worth $1 billion or more.

When we last spoke with cofounder and chief executive Suhail Doshi, the company that made its name helping startups optimize their websites based on how visitors interacted with them was shifting full-force towards mobile with the launch of its first A/B testing tools for mobile apps. A16Z’s investment is a recognition of what we’re hearing: Entrepreneurs are taking a shine to Mixpanel’s tools — enough so that the company has been profitable since 2012.

Marketing technology companies

Grow

Grow launched its platform in early December, offering business intelligence (BI) dashboards that surface the key data from a variety of tools used by small and medium-sized businesses.

Grow’s service, which ranges from $39 to $1000 monthly depending on number of users and dashboards, allows companies to readily access the data in more than two dozen common tools, including Salesforce.com, Zendesk, QuickBooks, and others. Grow says a dashboard can be up and running in half an hour or less. The target company, Nelson said, has annual revenue of $1 million to $50 million, and between 10 and 30 employees. If Grow can succeed in reaching SMBs with its lower-cost and simpler approach to BI, it will have a huge market at its disposal.

InPowered

You might think that native advertising is all about clickbait: Getting people to click on something by teasing them with a headline that promises more than the article actually delivers. But InPowered begs to differ. It recently launched version 2.0 of its platform, which premiered in April, with a pricing model that charges advertisers based on readers’ engagement with their content, not just clicks. In other words, content that is the opposite of clickbait. With native advertising being a hot topic for marketers today, we expect InPowered’s model will attract a lot of interest in 2015. Read more about InPowered on VentureBeat.

Pecabu

“Digital outdoor advertising is mostly really stupid,” Pecabu CEO and founder Rob Smith recently told VentureBeat. “There’s no feedback, no results, no targeting, no metrics.” Pecabu aims to change that, with digital billboards and signage that can detect whether people are actually in front of them — then combine that information with demographic data to give advertisers some idea of who they’re actually reaching.

Swrve

Mobile marketing platform Swrve recently decided to open up its platform for real-time data sharing with other marketing tools, such as marketing platform Marketo and data visualizer Tableau. The interconnection goes in both directions: For instance, Marketo can trigger Swrve to perform in-app messaging, giving Marketo a capability it didn’t have previously. By contrast, competitors such as Kahuna, AppBoy, and LeanPlum are relatively closed. Swrve’s move to openness — combined with a $10 million round it picked up in September — position it well in the increasingly complex world of mobile marketing.

Barry Levine, Harrison Weber, and Jordan Novet also contributed to this story.

Introduction

Your book is rolling along and you think your sell sheet is working hard for you. But is it? Is your sell sheet driving the results you need? If not, it might be time for a makeover. The solution may be to rebrand, adjust your value proposition, or simply modify your existing strategy before these danger signs turn into unavoidable headaches. If you can identify with any of these problems, then it’s probably time to rethink your book’s sell sheet. But don’t stress too much. They can all be fixed.

Sign #1. Your Sell Sheet’s Message Is Inconsistent
For example, is your sell sheet reflecting the content and information of the book, and your blog, and your brand? Is the book’s cover, and title, and subtitle, and back-cover information, all relevant to the book and projecting the correct message to your book’s audience? Is your sell sheet projecting the same message all of your other marketing material is projecting? Is the content on your blog relevant to the same audience that you wrote your book for? A consistent message across all of your marketing material will make each piece more believable and make them more powerful – and increase your chance of making a sale.

Sign #2. You Don’t Really Understand Your Audience

While you were writing your book, you had a very particular audience in mind. And of course, that is the best way to write a book. But now that your book has been selling for several months, and your blog has been up and running for much longer, you start to realize that there are other groups that are buying your book that you didn’t know would be interested in your topic. For example, you might be getting questions from your blog readers that might relate to an audience, or demographic, that you had not thought about before. You might also be getting questions on your YouTube page altogether from another demographic. All of this new data that you did not have before can help you redesign your sell sheet to better reflect the needs of these new audiences. This will also enable you to add blog content that will better serves the needs of these new audiences. You must always be willing to change gears in order to better serve your audience. The more you serve their needs, the more books you will sell.

Sign #3. Your Sell Sheet Hasn’t Connected With Any Libraries

Your goal should be to send your book’s sell sheet to every library in the country. And you should be getting some feedback from them in the form of books sales, or at the very least some email questions from them. If you are not getting any feedback at all, then you probably need to be rethinking what content should be added or changed on your sell sheet. Start by re-evaluating who your book’s audience really is, and what marketing message you are using to connect with them. Show your sell sheet to a local librarian and ask for their comments and suggestions about it.

Sign #4. Your Sell Sheet Doesn’t Look Professional Enough

If your sell sheet does not look like it was professionally designed and printed, you should not have sent it out in the first place. You only get one chance to make a first impression, so don’t waste that opportunity. Look online at other sell sheets and catalogs of other publishers for design inspiration. It is also very easy to find an affordable professional graphic designer on the internet. And, for a fee, some printing companies have a graphics/design department and will do the design for you. Pay the money and get it done right. But even if you hire someone to help with the design, you will still need to know what information needs to be included. If you haven’t done so already, compare your sell sheet to others selling a similar type of book. Anything that I write or design I show to my kids – both in their 20’s. They are a lot smarter than I am, and they can be brutally honest.

Sign #5. Your Sell Sheet Isn’t Making An Emotional Connection

For any marketing efforts to be successful, they must make an emotional connection with the buyer. The better and bigger the connection, the more book sales you will have. Even if you don’t understand anything else about marketing, understand this one thing, and you will be a successful marketer and sell more books. The content, or message, that is in your sell sheet must make some kind of connection with the reader. The reader must believe that you understand their needs. And that you will share that information with them so that they can fix their problem. They must believe that you have the answers for them.

Conclusion

You may not even realize your sell sheet is out of date or not working to its fullest potential. Make a point of reviewing it every quarter, or at regular intervals, so that you have plenty of time to keep it updated to ensure it accurately reflects the book you offer, as well as your contact information. Sell sheets are often the first impression people have of your brand. Take the time to make sure the sell sheet on your website is always up to date, professional looking, and error free.

If you think this is yet another article on using passive voice, writing concisely and crafting eye-catching headlines, you’re correct – but not in the way you expect it.

The basic elements linger, but I expand on key points, include a few less-known ones and make sure the whole article teems with tips applicable from the get-go.

That’s what makes this article different from the score of articles elsewhere.

Trust the words of someone who scours the internet for writing advices and techniques on a daily basis, and devours books by the dozens.

1. Mental Images

The fundamental rule of writing is ensuring that people understand what you write. That requires clarity in your words. My university professor taught me this method, which I’d like to share with you: Creating a mental image of the meanings behind the sentences.

If you’re able to swiftly conjure an image in your mind, your sentences are polished. The images don’t have to make sense or flow like a story; they just have to form in your mind, no matter how absurd or bizarre they may be.

The rationale is simple. It tests how crisp and well the words are in conveying the intended meanings by forcing you to visually re-examine the sentences. While creating a visual representation of each sentence can be a chore, it’s really effective at sieving out needlessly complex and/or structurally confusing sentences.

It’s also a good tool to gauge if your sentence is too lengthy. Too hard to visualise, even with simple words written in the active voice, suggests the need to cut the sentence short.

As my professor said time and again, “Clarity in words comes from the clarity of mind.”

2. Right Verbs

Copywriting or content marketing seeks actions from readers. Nothing does that better than powerful action verbs. Look at your copy and see what verbs are weak.

Not sure? Okay.

Static verbs are verbs that describe a state instead of an action. Some examples are appear, sound and believe. Too many of them weaken your copy. Common words like make and go are weak verbs too.

Go for impact. Use verbs that empower and engage. Overwhelm, insist and depict are some words that came to my head.

Take these before-and-after examples:

I ran from the door (before)
I bolted from the door (after)

Tom thinks about the restaurant offer (before)
The restaurant offer dominates Tom’s thought (after)

See how the stronger action verbs enliven the sentences? You can almost feel their vitalities. Used right, they breathe life to your writing and paint a visual image, clear as day, to the readers.

The second example presents another situation: Is it “Tom” or “the restaurant offer” that you want to emphasise on? The tip on passive construction will clarify this.

Tying to action verbs, Beth Hill, who manages The Editor’s Blog, talks about using career verbs, which is a powerful technique to apply to your writing. Career verbs, in her definition, are verbs that relate to a particular profession.

In Beth’s words: “A carpenter may note that others pound or hammer away or smooth rough edges. A trial lawyer may think that other characters redirect or obfuscate or judge.”

Using career verbs creates the right feel and context for your content, humanising it for your readers.

To achieve that, think about the audience to whom you are writing. Are you writing to lawyers, doctors or engineers? Use career verbs specific to the target audience’s profession.

Career verbs play less a role when your target audience cuts across several professions, but they have their moments to shine.

Don’t overdo, though. Keep them subtle and interspersed throughout the copy.

Everything has its shadowy counterpart.

Business jargons or corporate buzzwords, some of which are action verbs, should be omitted from your writing…for they carry little meaning and come across as too business-like.

Yet the hackneyed tune plays from Linkedin descriptions to corporate profiles; professionals and executives are too fond of them.

Optimise workflow; value-added services; game changers; and streamline business processes, are unsubstantiated claims at best and fluff phrases and sentences at worst.

At the day’s end, what do you learn from reading them?

Their popularity, however, doesn’t surprise me – such jargon-filled phrases can bewitch the guileless hearts. Ultimately even the most artless will pierce through the veil of pretentiousness and see them for what they truly are – meaningless words.

3. Passive Construction

If the law applies to language, passive constructions should sue for unjust discrimination. It’s singled out for blame, but it has its fortes into which not many writers have tapped.

The most obvious portrayal of its strengths is its ability to front-load your copy by putting the most important information at the start: in the headline and lead paragraph, for example.

Take the headline for a serial murderer who was on the loose for weeks.

Active voice: Police caught the serial murderer
Passive voice: Serial murderer caught

As the example of Tom or the restaurant’s offer foreshadows, passive construction can direct your readers’ attentions.

For content looking to capture eyeballs, it needs to start off with striking words. Passive constructions allow you to craft more eye-catching headlines and compelling lead paragraphs.

Indeed clarity may be compromised when sentences are written in the passive voice, but they make for good starters in selected situations.

The second benefit is more subtle and used selectively. Think about a writer’s duty. To grab readers by the eyeballs and set passions ablaze with words, no?

To do that, words must strike emotional chords. One way is to communicate what the readers feel, and you can do that through sentence constructions themselves.

A little story may make things clearer. Your target audience is employees in dead-end jobs looking for an outlet. Sustaining their livelihood forces them to stay in their respective jobs.

Passive constructions convey, well, passivity. And nothing is more passive than being ensnared in something you don’t like. Using the passive voice, you can create sentences along this line:

You are chained to your work desk…by the need to make a living.

In this case, the passive construction expresses the target readers’ feelings perfectly.

A caveat: A couple of passive sentences enhance, but an excess of it kills even under the right light; be careful when treading the line. Otherwise, continue to learn the finer nuances of language and realise that everything exists for a reason.

4. Shorten the sentences

Weasel words. Weak beginning. Bloated sentences. Redundancy. The list can go on.

Be emphatic and direct when you write copies or create content – and that means filtering the aforementioned issues.

Take weasel words.

It is believed that consumers can smell bullshit from a mile away

Cut off the weasel words.

Consumers can smell bullshit from a mile away.

Such ambiguous claims are loose fats that await trimming.

Other fats include weak beginning, which goes along this line: There’s a storm raging in Singapore.

A storm is raging in Singapore sounds better.

Applying the advice on action verb, I can morph an even better sentence: A storm rages in Singapore.

While they seem bolder, that’s how they’re supposed to be. Slow wind-ups kill a copy faster than you think.

Bloated sentences are harder to spot and can elude even the best of writers. That’s why copy-editors are writers’ best friends.

Consider this sentence: He will make a decision later.

Not so shabby. Everything’s in the right place but it can be better, and leaner.

He will decide later.

Wickedly simple.

Here’re a few common constructions that could be shortened:

I have a lot of work to do (before)
I have much work to do (after)

I seek fund in order to conduct my research (before)
I seek fund to conduct my research (after)

The event is held over a period of eight days (before)
The event is held over eight days (after)

Sometimes, the possessive form offers an alluring substitute. A client’s call may replace a call from a client. While at the end of the day is commonly used, at the day’s end works well too.

A few sentences above, I had the option to write copy-editors are the best friends of writers. Does it sound better?

But if the possessive form grates your ears, discard it. Your content should be at its mellifluous best.

The uphill battle to trim sentences into clear, concise ones is most efficacious against redundancies. Yet a few stubborn ones, unique to different writers, remain pervasive. To pick a few would be pointless, so look at this list to find those you made and eliminate them.

5. Ugly First Draft

A commonly-espoused advice but is one so important it deserves a place here.

Take a step back and imagine staring at a blank copy as white as pristine mountain snow and being expected to conceive powerful content – it’s daunting, isn’t it?

The brightest of us in our field advise us to write, to type something down, even if you feel uninspired and intimidated. Let the words flow. Let conflicted thoughts and directions be given life.

As you write, you explore, discovering details and knowledge gaps. You research and fill up those gaps; rewrite sentences; shuffle the paragraphs; rein in hyperbolic claims; and slay unkind remarks.

Every writer goes through this stage.

Elegant first draft, with polished sentences, is a tall order, a scenario that stays a fantasy. Most, if not all, start off with a lousy first draft; the best and famous writers are no exceptions.

Just so you know the article you see here is the third copy whose history contains one thorough revision, several shuffling of paragraphs and upright elimination of rows of sentences.

So don’t be dismayed if the draft doesn’t turn out well. Given enough time and fine-tuning, a masterpiece will stare back at you.

6. Bad Habits

Anything that’s done often enough becomes a habit. Some habits in writing can hurt it if you’re not careful enough. The danger of habits manifests in many, albeit subtle, ways.

For example, you can succumb to the same grammatical mistake over and over again. A friend I know misuses the semicolons. An adorable mistake, but one you can’t afford to make in professional writing.

Some other habits are more innocuous, but calling them benign wouldn’t be right too Many writers, including myself, tend to draw words from a limited pool, no matter how vast, and reuse certain phrases. I also made the mistake of using too much and and but in some of my recent writings.

A copywriter to whose e-newsletter I subscribe has a tendency to use the long dash in his articles and copies. After a while, it cuts at my attention and forces it to the dashes. His writing is phenomenal, but it proves even accomplished writers form unconscious habits that can hurt copies.

A Parting Message

Practice is what separates a great writer from a mediocre one. I started off unable to differentiate a noun from a verb, but now I monetises writing.

I don’t rest on my laurels nor see my past achievements as anything more than what they are – past events. I seek continual improvements and learn from writers whose skills are leagues ahead of mine.

A word summarises this: attitude. With the right one, you can spellbind people with your words. If you can take home from here only a single message, this is the one.

  We all want to think we can raise our prices or minimally not have to discount our prices. Easiest way to do this is by narrowing your value proposition. You might say the way to get more is by offering less.  You read that correct — offer the customer less and you will get […]

During the first weeks of their education, masses of freshman marketing students still get confronted with Jerome McCarthy’s 4P model. A tool created more than 50 years ago, in an age where customers were labeled “buyer” or “consumer”. And though the 4 P’s still may provide a fair means for defining a traditional marketing mix, I dispute that “putting the right product in the right place, at the right price, at the right time” is the most important course that 21st century students should get on the menu.

In the era of content, communication, conversation and customer experience (coincidently all starting with a C,) a marketer’s capability to create a decent message house, translate it into a captivating story, and use it to engage with a specific audience is probably more essential than mastering the 4 P’s.

So it was no surprise to me that the French ManpowerGroup identified the storyteller as one of the emerging job profiles for the future: “a craftsman of engagement, the storyteller gives meaning to the company’s engagement and communicates with internal and external stakeholders through dialog and social media.”

Being able to create and deliver a compelling business presentation is certainly one of the basic competencies a storyteller needs. As Richard Branson once said in an Entrepreneur magazine Q&A:

“Good speakers aren’t just talented or lucky – they work hard.”

This is why I am dedicating this post to mastering the 3 P’s of presenting: Pitch,Preparation and Presentation.

The setting is simple: when you want to deliver specific content to a specificaudience via a specific medium, you will need to connect the corner points of the triangle in the picture above.

1. First of all you will need to define your Pitch. The message(s) you want your audience to remember. How you will grab their attention and capture their interest. The story you want to tell them. This is where techniques like power mapping, message house building and storyboarding will come in.
2. Take ample time for your Preparation. Choose the most effective medium (e.g.PowerPoint show, Prezi, naked speech, video testimonials, …) for getting your story across and adapt your content to it. This is where your right brain hemisphere comes to the fore. When creativity, design and empathy turn out to be your most valuable attributes.
3. And finally, the moment will come when you are scheduled to face your audience and deliver your Presentation. Be prepared. Use all possible means of visual, verbal and non-verbal communication to persuade your listeners with your value proposition and to call them to action.

The attentive reader may have noticed that there’s something more in the center of the picture: YOU. Because, as KPCB’s Bing Gordon rightly observes,

“The first and most important element of your presentation is not a slide: it’s you.”

In the next 3 chapters, I will further elaborate on the 3 P’s and give some tips, tricks and tools for better pitching, preparing and presenting your content.

The first P: your Pitch

“Great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of large or important audiences.” ― Seth Godin

Some readers may know pitching as what advertising agencies do to promote their ideas to a potential customer. And that’s indeed what it’s all about: defining your value proposition, translating it into a few clear messages, and deciding on how you’re going to communicate them to your customers (or any other audience.)

• Finding the right pitch often boils down to pinpointing a sticky story to tell. With the right mix of ethos, pathos and logos you can appeal to the hearts and the minds of those listening to you.
• In my blog post of January 10, 2013 I have written about the 7 C’s of a good story: compelling, credible, concrete, clear, consistent, customized andconversational. If you remember these seven adjectives, you’re already one step closer to a great pitch.
• When defining your value proposition, never forget that value is in the perception
  of the beholder. Adapt your pitch to address the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) concern(s) of your audience. And give them something in return for listening to you.
• As mentioned in the previous bullet, it’s extremely important that you have a good understanding of who will be in the room. Doing some upfront research and power mapping will help you to tailor your pitch and (later) customize your presentation to their specific knowledge, needs and expectations.
• Building a message house is a great and simple means for defining, simplifying and structuring your messages, and to make sure your audience will remember them.
• You could also consider creating a mind map and/or drawing a story board. These tools will help you to sort out your thoughts and put your ideas in a sequence that easily translates into a presentation.
• A good way to validate your pitch is putting it to the elevator test. Can you ‘sell’ your message(s) in 30 seconds? Can you summarize your story on the back of a napkin? Can it be understood by your mother in law?

Once your pitch is completed, you’re all set to start preparing your presentation. Don’t forget that HOW you tell things may be as important as (or sometimes even more important than) WHAT you actually tell.

The second P: your Preparation

“World class presentations require time and focus” ― Nancy Duarte

Rome wasn’t built in one day. Neither will you be able to create a good presentation in a few hours. Crafting a presentation ― yes, even a business or technical one ― is a creative process. A process that takes more than a PC with PowerPoint (or Keynote, or Prezi, or …) installed on it.

As I wrote in my previous post, it all starts with finding your pitch: thinking about the story you want to tell, the messages you want to convey, and the results you want to obtain. So, don’t start creating a single slide before you have figured out WHAT you want to tell to WHOM, and HOW you’re are actually going to deliver it. Only then comes the ‘packaging’ of your content.

• Always start with the end in mind. Take a blank sheet of paper and write down (no more than) three results you want to obtain from your presentation. What impressions do you want the people in the room to take home? What do you want them to remember about your product or service? What action do you want them to take after the meeting?
• Then inventorize your assets: what facts and figures, anecdotes, trivia, case studies, experience, demos or prototypes, etc. do you have on hand that may help you achieve these objectives?
• Based upon the outcome of the questions above, you may select the most suitable medium for delivering your content, e.g. a traditional slide presentation, a naked speech, maybe supported by video testimonials or — why not — a live demonstration. Note that your choice may also be influenced by the size and composition of your audience, the layout of the room, or the technical facilities you have on hand.
• Make sure your talk has a begin, a middle and an end. Structure it the AIDA way. As the first seconds of your performance are crucial for grabbing your audience’s attention, choose a catchy title and a powerful opening slide.
• Think visual. Use images to communicate, not decorate. Translate concepts to visual metaphors. Look for compelling ways to conceptualize facts, processes and data. You won’t need artistic drawing skills; a bit of analytical sense and a good portion of creativity will certainly do.
• Analyze. Surprise. Focus. Simplify. Cut the crap and don’t feed the chameleons. Keep your presentation short and sweet. And when you prepare slides, keep them clear, clean and consistent.
• Practice makes perfect. Rehearse your presentation as often as needed. In front of your mirror, your family or your colleagues. Or use a video recorder to tape your performance.
• But most of all, reserve ample time for your preparation. The time you invest in realizing, refining and rehearsing your presentation should be proportional to the importance of your talk, and reverse proportional to the time you will be given to present.

The third P: your Presentation

“There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.” ― Dale Carnegie

I am aware that many of you may suffer from glossophobia, or fear of public speaking. But honestly, if you have invested enough time in defining your pitch andpreparing your presentation there’s really not that much left to worry about.

• Make sure to avoid unpleasant surprises. Arrive at the venue well in time, get familiar with the room in which you will present, and check the A/V equipment before your start. And when you’re planning a demo, dry-run it a few minutes ― not a few hours! ― in advance.
• Go on stage with a positive attitude. Don’t get paralyzed by stage fright. You know that you can do it! Take a deep breath before you start and give the audience what they came for.
• Start with a short silence. Then grab your audience’s attention from the first second onward. Surprise, intrigue or provoke them with an opening statement or poll.
• As I have explained in many of my older blog posts, when you give a presentation, you need to get your audience engaged. Appeal to their emotions, by telling a personal story. A good practice is to try to make eye contact with a few individuals in the audience and monitor their body language.
• But, watch your own body language and nonverbal communication too. Your tone of voice, volume of speech, as well as your facial expression, stance and gestures should add to or complement your verbal message.
• Speak in short sentences and pause often. Pause right before a key point to create a sense of anticipation. Pause right after a key point to allow it to sink in. And, most importantly, don’t forget to breathe.
• Take care of your speaking time. Ask a time keeper in the audience to give you a five or ten minute warning. If you feel you’re going to run over time, adapt your story and/or your pace, or consider skipping details and less meaningful slides.
• Concentrate on the message — not the medium. Only present your own pitch and show the slides you prepared yourself. Don’t let the visuals dominate your talk. Never read your slides aloud: most people in the room already know how to read!
• Be aware where you stand, don’t obscure the screen, and don’t turn your back to the audience. When you like to move around on stage, make sure you use a remote control device (that’s why I always carry a clicker on me, along with a spare battery ― prevention is better than cure.)
• End your presentation in a powerful way. Your closing is your chance to leave a final impression on the audience. Don’t lose energy. Don’t change style. Don’t stop cold. Summarize your main ideas and key points. And call the people in the room to action.

The 3 P’s. Do you still know what they stand for? If you want to be a professional public presenter, then take control of your pitch, yourpreparation and your presentation.

(originally published on my B2B Storytelling blog on 27 November, 4 December, 11 December and 18 December 2014)

You sales reps are overwhelmed: Portals are teeming with content, and reps are overloaded with the number of data repositories in which to search for it. With so much content and numerous ‘haystacks’ in which to look, no one should be shocked when sales is not able to find what they need when they need it. And yet, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of marketers plan to grow their content output next year. How, with this flood of content, can marketers provide a systematic way to organize and deliver content to the sales team in a way that helps impact sales effectiveness?

The answer is to extend to the sales team the same marketing principles we apply to reaching and converting prospects: By extending the target marketing framework to sellers.

Personalization

Companies of every nature and stripe strive toward the tantalizingly just out of reach 1:1 marketing ideal, and an overwhelming number of surveys and studies conducted over the past year indicate that personalization is the name of the game. Yet, as marketing moves toward a hyper individualized form of targeting for prospects and customers, a blanket, mass approach to communicating is still applied to the sales team.

Instead of personalizing sales interactions and the assets marketing provides, making it relevant to the individual seller’s role and goals, everything from training to assets for use in the sales process are delivered in fire hose fashion. Inundating reps with huge amounts of information about the entire sales process is not only ineffective, but counterproductive with sales reps often finding it easier to simply wing it then dredge through mountains of content. As it is, the average salesperson spends more than half of their day engrossed in some form of administration or research, and less than half in sales.

Know your Audience & Make it Relevant

Working with sales like this is the equivalent to sending out a mass email to every single prospect and customer, regardless of their relationship to the brand. Turn this approach on its head and boost sales productivity and efficacy in sales situations by improving marketing support by:

• Sales people are just-in-time learners. They learn what they need to know when they need to know it. In fact, without follow-up, salespeople will be unable to recall 80-90 percent of what they learned in training within just one month. As a result, it’s best to give sales the specific information they need, when they need it.
• Moreover, short, modular pieces of content are proven to be most effective in keeping seller’s attention and being retained for future use. Adding interactive training aids like videos or quizzes, further boost retention and a sales rep’s ability to apply the content in live sales situations.
• Make sure your content is device agnostic so that sales reps can access it on any hardware – whether that is their mobile phone, tablet, or something else.

Make it Relevant

A study conducted by the American Society for Training and Development shows that continuous investments in training and reinforcement result in over 50% higher net sales per employee, nearly 40% higher gross profits per employee and a 20% higher ratio in market-to-book value. To provide sellers with reinforcing assets that are relevant to their position and current sales situation:

• Make sales assets relevant to where the seller is in the organization. Ask yourself questions such as, ‘what products/services they are responsible for selling?’, ‘Are they new to the organization or a senior staff member?’ and ‘Do they sell to specific buyer personas and/or vertical markets?
• Sales assets should also be relevant to the buyer’s journey and sales cycle. Sales aids should, for example, be pushed out at the specific points in the sales cycle where they are most relevant. If these aids are tailored for the prospect type AND point in the sales cycle, that is even better yet.
• More and more organizations are finding a way to automatically recommend content so that reps don’t have to search through hundreds of docs (or across portals and management systems) for what they need. Best practices include pushing this content through the seller’s system of choice – often the CRM where they already spend the majority of their time.

Experian Research recently published a Millennials’ “Omni-channel Consumer Bill of Rights,” that is very closely aligned with this approach. The tenets of this Millennial Bill of Rights are: recognize me, treat me as an individual, make it easy for me, anticipate my needs, and give me a voice. And while these tenets may sounds obnoxiously self-centered, they’re actually incredibly applicable.

Just as the Millennial hates to search for long for the information they need, reps are more likely to be effective, knowledgeable sellers if they’re given relevant content when they need it. Aberdeen reports that companies that were superior in aligning Marketing and Sales experienced an average of 32% growth in annual revenue, compared to a 7% decline in organizations lacking this alignment. Given this direct impact marketing can make to alignment – and in turn corporate sales – it’s clear that it’s time we begin applying the lessons of personalization and target marketing within our own organizations.

Many CMOs in charge of affiliate management aren’t entirely sure what they need to run a successful program. In the best-case scenario, their programs don’t reach their full potential. But in the worst-case scenario, they become a branding liability and an actual cost center if margins and fraud aren’t properly managed.

Affiliate management means different things to different people, which can prove problematic. When CMOs perceive it as a reactive service dealing with the nuts and bolts of a program and inbound affiliate customer service requests, they’re overlooking the big-picture goals of their affiliate programs.

To effectively manage your affiliate program, you have to take a 360-degree approach to ensure you’re covering your bases. Affiliate management should entail three specific things: program strategy, program recruiting and activation, and program operations. Unfortunately, many managers fail to incorporate these key aspects, resulting in goal misalignment, wasted resources, and ineffective programs.

A retail client recently hired us to manage its pre-existing affiliate program. It had a strategy of never couponing, but after digging in, we found that coupon sites drove 100 percent of the program’s performance. The checkout page didn’t even have a coupon code box. The program was so contrary to the client’s strategy that it didn’t provide value, negatively represented the client’s brand, and drove up costs. The previous “management” firm had failed to notice this.

The Dangerous Misconceptions Of Affiliate Management

It’s difficult to determine where your management is lacking without a well-defined strategy, recruitment efforts, and operations plans in place. But if you’ve fallen into any of these traps, you need to rethink your approach:

1. You unknowingly receive basic operations. While some marketers might think they’re receiving 360-degree program management, they’re often only paying for or receiving basic program operations, which can’t fuel a successful program.

Basic program operations include inbound customer service functions with affiliates, reporting, applications, etc. It’s more ops-oriented than creative or strategic, and there’s very little marketing in this basic form of affiliate program management—and not enough compliance and fraud management.

2. You allow networks to manage your program strategy and checkbook. Many firms have turned over their entire programs to a network for “management,” which presents a serious potential conflict of interest. The network is in charge of making key decisions on the company’s behalf, but part of your strategy includes choosing which networks you should work with in the first place, tracking how they’re doing and determining what you should be paying them. Additionally, since the networks earn a fee from affiliate sales, they have financial interests that can drive self-serving decisions.

3. You’ve hired one person to handle every aspect of affiliate management. Superior affiliate management is complex and requires elements of creative strategy, business development, operations, and financial planning. It’s difficult to find those specialties in one person. Someone who’s creative and loves campaign development probably hates applications, reporting, ROI analysis, and fraud detection.

It’s also not cost-efficient for one person to do everything. You have to play to each employee’s strengths to oversee the three aspects of effective affiliate management. Assign the number crunchers to fraud and reporting, the outgoing people and those with a deep industry Rolodex to recruiting, and the creatives to ideation. Wrap all that with a high-level strategist and superior client service, and you’ll have a formula for success. By doing this, our company created a full-time equivalent comprised of people who possess the skill sets required for effective management.

4. You underestimate program recruiting and activation efforts. The recruiting and activation phase is the lifeblood of your program, but it takes time and specialized talent, relationships, and tools. If you’re paying someone who has 10 or more accounts at a time, you could actually be overpaying for insufficient management. A program can’t grow if you’re not reaching out to new, high-quality people and dedicating time and resources on a regular basis to help them gain traction.

Revive Your Affiliate Programs With A 360 Approach

If your affiliate programs aren’t meeting your goals, your management approach might be the problem. To adopt a 360 approach, start with these four steps:

1. Educate yourself on affiliate management. The first step in sufficiently managing every aspect of your affiliate program is to stay educated on the practice. FeedFront is the official blog of the Affiliate Summit and a great resource for cutting-edge ideas and opinions on affiliate marketing. ClickZ also offers news and expert commentary for interactive marketers, and the Performance Marketing Association is a trusted resource for best practices and standards in affiliate marketing.

2. Hire a reputable agency with expertise in affiliate marketing. In a constantly evolving field, your program is much more likely to produce the results you want if a team of experts is working on it. You don’t want to delegate this to an overextended in-house marketing manager with three other channels on her plate or an agency that’s similarly stretched too thin.

3. Make sure your affiliate manager has extensive experience. If your company doesn’t have the budget to hire an agency, be sure that your in-house affiliate manager has extensive experience in affiliate marketing. Require her to attend conferences and keep up with changes in the industry.

4. Keep the program controlled to start. Limit your program to a select number of partners to increase transparency, reduce management strain, and mitigate fraud risks. Don’t expect the affiliate program to become a huge contributor to volume as it’s a much better contributor in terms of ROI.

If you’re not receiving 360 management, your affiliate program could actually cost you money. Programs generally lack strategy and planning more than anything. Without this vital step, the channel isn’t integrated into your marketing plan. Don’t let your affiliate marketing programs go to waste. Tackle every aspect of affiliate management with a comprehensive approach, and you can start reaping the true benefits of affiliate marketing.

In the past, sales pitches started and ended with a product. There might be a slight reference to the prospect's problem in the middle, but the product was front and center. Salespeople hoped buyers would be so dazzled by snazzy features that they'd whip out their checkbooks before the meeting was over -- and sometimes, they did.

But today, this playbook doesn't work. Prospects are inundated with product-focused pitches when what they really care about is their businesses. So instead of being more aggressive with messaging, salespeople need to scrap their old presentations in favor of an entirely new approach.

However, starting from scratch can be intimidating. How can you reinvent your story to appeal to the empowered buyer? This SlideShare from Blue Lobster outlines 9 steps of a customer-focused B2B sales pitch. Learn how to sell your clients hook, line, and CTA. 

A major client performed a Green Belt study and found that their sales reps were only using 5% of the material produced by marketing. This was a major warning sign and call to arms for management.

Because when marketing content lies idle and unused, it means reps are underprepared (lacking the proper collateral for meetings and presentations), overcompensating (wasting time and resources creating rough-and-ready sales materials) and underperforming (missing out on critical opportunities to communicate, convert, engage, differentiate and win revenue).

Reps who use marketing content effectively are reps who communicate clearer, convert higher, engage deeper, differentiate easier and win more for both personal quotas and company revenue growth.

So why don’t all reps hop on the content train to stronger sales execution, higher win rates, revenue growth, and rewarding performance?

There are three main barriers standing in the way of sales reps and their effective use of marketing content.

1. ACCESS: There’s no centrally located, single-source library.

There’s that age-old content management problem: Reps have to search through multiple repositories and storage sites – usually inconsistent in the way things are tagged and catalogued, searched for, and filtered – every time they want a piece of content.

2. VISIBILITY: Reps don’t know what’s there for them to use.

There’s a serious visibility issue, and it’s not just in terms of organization and retrieval: Reps literally aren’t aware of what content is in the system and at their disposal.

3. CONTROL: It’s a pain personalize and cater to specifics.

There’s no easy way to customize sales materials­­: Reps are hard-pressed to put their own personal spin on approved marketing content, to target each prospect’s unique needs and to deliver materials in a way that drives home that unique buyer experience.

These are the symptoms of poor content management, and every rep out there has dealt with his or her fair share of their frustrations and inefficiencies.

Let the software do the work.

A  constant content connection.

Tap into the science of sales enablement with a content management platform that keeps your reps in the know and on their toes.

• STORAGE: Access & Search
  • Reps access marketing content – wherever, whenever – through one cloud-based library.
  • Recommendation wizards and full-text or filtered searches help them find the most relevant materials according to sales region, business unit, sales situation, etc.
  • The platform makes it easy for sales to both request content from marketing and provide feedback on that content – promoting continuous improvement and sales and marketing alignment.
• VISIBILITY: Awareness & Insight
  • Reps are made aware when materials are added, removed and updated.
  • Live notifications alert reps when buyers open, download, share and engage with the content they send.
  • Analytics, ratings and comments show reps which content is working and which pieces may need some work.
  • Simple visuals and graphics promote constant content awareness, as well as quick-and-painless content discovery.
• CONTROL: Customization & Delivery
  • Whether tweaking current content for a unique situation, adding a personal touch or building materials from scratch, reps create exactly what they need with drag-and-drop ease.
  • If reps get stuck, or simply want an algorithmic opinion, question-based recommendation engines highlight relevant pieces to include in their next sales play.
  • Content delivery gets a serious upgrade with private buyer portals that promote interactive conversations, intimate connections, differentiation, and dedicated buyer experience.

The platform that talks the talk, and walks it too.    

Remember that client we mentioned earlier – who was tipped off, thanks to a Green Belt Study, to their reps’ dismal use of marketing content? Well, they closed that sales-content gap with a centralized sales resource library.

Here are the quantifiable (and impressive) results:

• Sales usage of existing content increased from 5% to 65% – that’s 1,300% in just 12 months.
• Impactful, well-crafted marketing messages are now used 60% more often with prospects.
• The number of repositories reps need to visit was streamlined from 50 to one – saving several million dollars in repository-management costs.

Give your sales force that constant content connection.

Centralized storage, easy visibility, and control over customization and delivery.

Accent Technologies provides cloud-based content management and scientific sales enablement with three powerful platforms: Presentation Librarian, Accent Librarian, and Accent Accelerator.

Ready to transform underprepared, overcompensating and underperforming sales reps into a content-savvy, revenue-driving sales force?

Click the button below to schedule a demo and discover which solution works best to connect your sales reps to sales-enabling marketing content.

» Request Your Demo Now

Upon hearing the question, how quickly will someone make money after experiencing your programs I was stunned. How could that possibly be quantifiable regardless of whose service it might be?

Numerous possibilities play into the final answer. The following insights are worthy of serious consideration for anyone wanting to make their mark in business world.

Motivation
Remarks heard indicate the difficulty in answering that question: “The difference between us is, you are motivated”; “The learning curve is to steep, why begin?” and, “It’s not worth setting goals because everyone gives up”.

You can teach yourself to be motivated. The other option is to sit back and feel sorry for yourself. So the next question becomes, which scenario do you prefer?

Using a few sales techniques, you can quickly become motivated too:
* Each evening create a list of 10 things you will complete the next day
* On your list, include one person to call for a friendly conversation
* As you complete tasks during the day, cross them off of your list
* On your list, include one fun activity for the week
* Use the fun activity as celebration for having achieved your goals

This process allows you to quickly see items checked off as completed. Sticking to the plan, you will begin to feel motivation kick in to turn some of these tasks into long held ideas for projects. Using the same running task list strategy will see completion your projects in a more timely fashion. Celebration is a requirement to keep the motivation moving forward.

Program Type
Another factor comprising the answer is the complexity of the program. Was the reference being made to purchase of a digital book, a yearlong one-on-one coaching program, or something in-between?

The person asking the question was assured that all content provided applies to entrepreneurial work as well as selling to Fortune 100 corporations. Business development, building relationships, and sales strategies apply to all programs, but need to be modified for one’s own clientele.

Embracing Programs as Your Own
It is impossible to predict how quickly someone will benefit from a product or service. A person may take all the training imaginable, but unless it is comprehended well, and adapted to one’s unique style and own program, the information will not be helpful.

The final answer to the question of how quickly someone may make money from your program is in fact, one cannot predict. The outcome is dependent upon self-motivation and a dedication to trial and error. And it will only work if the information is adapted to one’s own unique style for their intended clientele.

Sales Success
Your sales success is dependent upon getting to the heart of the matter of what each of your clients truly needs, wants and deeply desires. This is true for any dollar amount involved.

Last word of advice, decline to answer such questions, as you have no control over the outcome. Making false claims will hurt you and your business. You can only speak to how the information has served you well and that you do your best to teach others. This maintains an authentic personal brand.

Doing your best, in every regard, is what leads to the Smooth Sale!