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A coach’s job is to facilitate potential change, usually done by asking questions to identify the components of the problem, choosing between solutions to discuss, and offering ways to make, and keep, any changes while maintaining a trusting relationship.

To achieve the excellence that all coaches seek, it’s vital they avoid the ear’s natural, unconscious listening filters that could prejudice an interaction, such as:

Bias. By listening specifically for issues – problems, hopes, missing skills or motivation – a coach will merely hear what s/he recognizes as missing. This causes a problem for a client: if there are unspoken or omitted bits, if there are meta patterns that should be noticed, if there are unstated historic – or subconscious – reasons behind the current situation that aren’t obvious, the coach may not find them in a timely way, causing the coach to begin in the wrong place, with the wrong timing and assumptions, leading to suggestions that may be inappropriate, potentially creating mistrust (best case) or harm (worst case).

Assumptions. If a coach has had somewhat similar discussions with other clients, or historic, unconscious, beliefs are touched that bring to mind specific questions or solutions, coaches too often offer clients flawed or inadequate suggestions.

Habits. If a coach has a client base in one area – say, real estate, or leadership – s/he may unconsciously enter the conversation with many prepared ways of handling similar situations and may miss the unique issues, patterns, and unspoken foundation that may hold the key to success.

And it’s all unconscious. None of us, especially coaches who truly care about their clients, ever mean to harm anyone. As I write in my book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? the problem lie in our brains. Once we listen carefully for ‘something’, consciously or un-, we restrict all else that’s possible to hear as our brains interpret the words spoken according to our bias (led by the electrical/chemical signals sent to our historic neural pathways), often missing the client’s real intent, nuance, patterns, and comprehensive contextual framework and implications.

To have choice as to when, whether, or how to avoid filtering out possibility, we must disassociate – go up on the ceiling and look down – and remove ourselves from any personal biases, assumptions, triggers or habits, enabling us to hear all that is meant (spoken or not).

In What? I explain how to trigger ourselves the moment there is a potential incongruence. For those unfamiliar with disassociation, try this: during a phone chat, put your legs up on the desk and push your body back against the chair, or stand up. For in-person discussions, stand up and/or walk around. [I have walked around rooms during Board meetings while consulting for Fortune 100 companies. They wanted excellence regardless of my physical comportment.] Both of those physical perspectives offer the physiology of choice and the ability to move outside of our instincts. Try it.

For companies wanting a one-day program on listening to ensure teammates hear each other accurately, to help customer-facing staff to hear clients better, let me know. For those individuals seeking to listen without bias, read What? and take the guided learning that leads you through exercises in each chapter, to teach you how to notice, and get rid of, your listening bias.

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Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling With Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy including Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.

More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did you really say what I think I heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at: sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com 512-771-1117 www.didihearyou.com; www.sharondrewmorgen.com

I was talking to a rep the other day, and he was telling me about his approach to structuring his week to help him succeed. He set certain activities to specific days, and filled in the rest of the time with things that were dependent on the buyers’ calendars. He had time set for writing account reviews (Thursday afternoons), this way, if he had to get something from the clients, he still had time in the week. Proposals were done on Wednesdays and Mondays, and all he had to do was set the right expectation from the buyer. And so it went.

But when it came to prospecting, there were no allocations. I asked him about it, and he, like others, told me that he does it when he can, any time he can get around to it. I asked why, since he has clearly allocated time to all other key activities, does he not see prospecting and filling the funnel as a key activity? Of course, he said. Well, then why does it not conform to the way you approach and execute the other key activities? I said, “You have everything else all neatly in place, so what’s the deal with prospecting?”

It was clear that the day he allocated to prospecting was Someday.

Now I don’t like prospecting any more than the next guy, especially cold calling, but it has to be done. This is why I do it first, then it’s out of the way, and I can go on to doing what I like.

I know the beauty of Someday is that it never comes, but the deadline for your quota does come, and in light of the fact that those people who make quota hovers around 50 percent, and the number one reason most sales leaders give for that is a lack of prospects and too much dependence on their base, the day of reckoning will get here before Someday, specifically December 31.

Given the choice between Someday and Today, I would go with today.

Get more sales tips in the RingLead ebook, Sphere of Influence Selling: An Inside Sales Approach to Crushing Your Quota.

A lot of businesses curate content on their website, blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, for many reasons, including increased content output and inclusion of outside perspectives.

While these channels work well for sharing curated content, there’s another option that could be even more valuable: using curated content to support an entirely separate publication or microsite.

Let’s say a company that enables racecars to go faster, called Zippity Technology, launches an online publication as part of its website called Zippity Today. The appeal of this publication may be limited to customers, partners, friends, and family.

Even if Zippity Today offers a lot of content that isn’t about Zippity products and services, many prospects will assume Zippity Today is largely a veiled sales pitch for (you guessed it) Zippity.

Now, what if Zippity created a site that didn’t have “Zippity” in its name, with its own non-Zippity URL to serve as a racing publication (i.e., a microsite)? Of course, a good variety of racing publications already exist. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for one more. The fact that there are many racing publications may simply show there’s a healthy need and interest in this type of information.

But how do Zippity – and other businesses looking to gain a competitive edge – create and launch this stand-alone publication or microsite?

1. Establish a formal strategy for your microsite, including its goals and objectives.

Document a strategy and a clear set of goals for your marketing initiatives. According to new research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, B2B marketers who’ve a documented strategy are more effective with every aspect of content marketing when compared with peers who only have a verbal strategy or no strategy at all.

Every piece of content you create, including the content on this site, should trace back to your overall strategy. If there’s one element of your marketing strategy that’s under-supported (i.e., educating prospects about racecar maintenance), consider creating a publication surrounding this topic.

In addition, ensure there are clear and specific goals for this site, such as driving referrals to your corporate site or generating new sales-ready leads.

2. Study the current landscape

What types of publications are succeeding in your industry? Think about what you could contribute of significant value over and above what’s already out there. One way to differentiate yourself: Choose a unique topic to cover or audience to target. Use Curata’s guide to selecting a content curation topic for more tips.

Alcatel Lucent, a leader in the communications technology space, decided to target its microsite to the CIO or executive-level strategist.

3. Bring customers and prospects into the process.

Use methods, such as a web-based survey, to gather responses from customers or prospects. This could help form a curated piece of content. Jay Acunzo, founder of Boston Content, recently used survey responses to create an infographic about the content marketing industry.

4. Build in the ability to earn serious money or generate leads.

A few ways to make this happen include:

• Banner ads for your products (and ads from other approved businesses). As seen below, Alcatel Lucent uses their microsite, IT Strategist, to advertise their brand.

• Ads or calls-to-action for gated content housed on your site.
• Paid, web-based events.
• Periodic product-specific emails to subscribers who opt-in.

5. Consider complementing curated content with created content.

Best-in-class marketers have found that a good mix of content is 65% created, 25% curated, and 10% syndicated. Employ this mix by placing original, thought leadership pieces on your microsite alongside your curated content.

This will help you generate leads (by including links back to your site, blog, or gated content), and also help establish your credibility in the space.

6. Dedicate enough time to promotion.

Creating an audience for your microsite will be crucial to its success. Since you won’t have the built-in followers from your corporate site, be sure to use several promotion methods, such as:

• A weekly email newsletter highlighting your top posts. Allow readers to subscribe through a form similar to this one seen on Verne Global’s microsite, Green Data Center News:

• Social media and other promotion tools. See Curata’s Ultimate List of Content Promotion Tools to see which work best for your business.
• Customer advocacy. Leverage your existing customers, employees, and friends to send traffic to this new venture.

7. Measure and analyze. (Does this site achieve its goals?)

As I said, you should set clear goals before creating the microsite. It’s important to measure the success of these goals so you can understand the site’s value (e.g., corporate referrals, leads generated, increased site traffic) and make improvements in the future.

Time To Get Started

If you think this seems exciting but you’d have a hard time pulling it off, remember, there are content curation tools available to streamline the process. And of course, you could hire outside experts to handle a good chunk of the publication or run the whole thing, so you focus on your day job.

What I’m describing is unusual, but, in addition to the examples I’ve cited, it does exist in a variety of forms. Here are a few additional examples:

• General Mills’ Tablespooon.com

This site, powered by food manufacturer General Mills, curates and creates recipes based on the latest nutritional facts and the General Mills product repertoire.

• Adobe’s CMO.com

CMO.com aims to be the best source for content on digital marketing trends and how to market in the online world. The site features curated and created content surrounding cutting-edge marketing news.

So, are you ready to begin your microsite?

This is not the way it’s meant to be. It’s far too complicated. Christy Dignam’s plaintiff voice crept out from the Bang and Olufsen surround sound system in Jack Swenson’s new 7 Series. Jack always felt that Dignam, the lead singer of Irish rock band Aslan, was one of the world’s undiscovered singers. “Damn right, it’s far too complicated” Jack mused as he nudged the BMW forward on San Francisco’s Montgomery Street.

As CMO of JKHiggs, Jack was thinking about his conversation with Matt Langton, one of JKHiggs’ star sales performers. Or, perhaps better said, one of the company’s past star performers. Matt’s results had not been great recently, and Matt felt that Jack and his marketing team were to blame. Jack was going to meet his CEO, Kelley O’ Brien at the Starbucks near the Hyatt on Drumm St, just around the corner from JKHiggs’ new offices on California. Matt had told Kelley about the loss of the DeepEarth Oil account to Innopartners and Kelley wanted to discuss it.

Kelley was already sipping her double espresso when Jack arrived at the coffee shop.

“Sorry, traffic on Montgomery was just a nightmare.”

“Sit down Jack. Here’s what I heard.” quipped Kelley, flicking through her iPad. “Matt, one of our top performers, just lost DeepEarth to a new sales person from Innopartners. He’s not happy. Frank, our sales leader is not happy. I’m not happy. They’re the facts.”

“Now the opinion: Matt thinks that Innopartners – or at least this Mandy Adamson person who won the deal – are better equipped to compete than us. I called Joanne over at DeepEarth, and it seems she agrees. She says that Mandy unveiled for her a whole new set of issues to think about in her business. She deflected a little when I asked her if she thought that Innopartners has a better solution than Dynamix14, but I’d say she thinks it is good enough for what she needs. All of the R&D we put into Dynamix14 makes no difference. Joanne thinks that Mandy rocks and knows more about her business. Given that we did not bring any fresh insight, or new perspective, Matt’s credibility, and ours, is now damaged. What’s your plan Jack?”

When Kelley had suggested they meet for coffee, Jack had expected an open discussion. Kelley was the main attraction that brought him to JKHiggs. He enjoyed spending time with her and often sought her advice on big corporate issues. He certainly was not expecting this frontal attack.

“I think you know that I agreed with Frank that what his sales team wanted was a central repository for all marketing collateral. Suzanne and Robert worked their butts off to get that done but the sales guys are just not using it.” Jack shuffled in his seat, waiting for Kelley’s response. She was just looking at him with no reaction, so Jack continued. “Frank committed to me that his team would follow-up all of the leads, but over the last quarter, only 47 percent of what marketing delivered was acted on by sales. What else does Frank want me to do?”

Kelley sighed. “Do you have some paper and a pen?”

Jack rummaged in his bag and handed Kelley one of the expensive JKHiggs branded leather-bound notebooks. He liked the feel of the quality leather and felt that it would give people like Joanne at DeepEarth a sense of the heritage of JKHiggs. He hadn’t really got to meet many customers since he ordered the notebooks, so he had plenty left.

Kelley opened the notebook and drew a big triangle on a blank page. At the left edge of the base of the triangle she wrote the letter ‘S’. At the other end of the triangle’s base she scratched a capital ‘M’, and at the apex of the triangle she put a big question mark.

“Jack, winners take ownership and take action, so let’s fix this. Frank will be joining us soon to give us his perspective as our sales leader – actually, he should be here by now – but, here’s how we have to think about it.”

Kelley turned the notebook to face Jack and ran her finger along the base of the triangle.

“This is where you and Frank are focused. ‘S’ is sales, and you can figure out that ‘M’ is marketing, right? You’ve both invested a lot of time in trying to make sure you are on the same page. You agreed to build the marketing portal and he agreed to follow-up on the leads, right? You both probably think you have nailed this sales and marketing alignment thing. You’re probably on the same page alright, but is it the right page?”

Jack’s emotions tumbled over each other as competing feelings and thoughts fought to come to the surface. Was he going to get fired? Wow, even thinking about that seemed weird. His record throughout his career was stellar, but did he still have his finger on the pulse of the market? Did Frank or Matt Langton throw him under the bus? Was his relationship with Kelley as special as he thought? Where the hell was Frank? Was this incident at DeepEarth as big a deal as Kelley seemed to think? Have things changed that much? He realized that he really wanted to keep working with Kelley. But what did she mean by the big question mark at the apex of the triangle?

“Look Kell’, we know each other well enough. Where are you going with this? Do you want me out of Higgs? I don’t think that would be in the best interest of the company, but if you don’t want me here I don’t want to be here. And where is Frank? I thought you expected him by now. And what’s behind the bloody question mark?”

“Stop Jack, ok? I want you working closely with me to figure this out. I’m surprised you don’t know that. Really. But, I’m CEO of JKHiggs and we have a strategic problem that we need to fix. So let’s move on.

“I sent Frank to meet with Mandy Adamson from Innopartners. I told him to get her to come to work here – money no object. We need to figure out why Joanne at DeepEarth is so enthralled with her. Joanne is no one’s lay-up, if you know what I mean.

And what’s behind the bloody question mark, as you call it, is the most important question we need to answer, if we are to survive.”

Jack leaned forward. He loved that Kelley had sent Frank out to poach Mandy Adamson from the competition. He was relieved that Kelley saw him as part of the solution, not part of the problem. He was beginning to see where Kelley was going. He thought he knew what the question mark signified.

“That’s brilliant, just brilliant. If we can get Mandy Adamson in, I think we can learn a lot. But isn’t that just part of the problem? I know the DeepEarth loss is really painful, but maybe it’s just the wake-up call that we needed. Let’s get to the question mark on your drawing there. I think I see where you’re headed.”

“Jack, before I answer that – and it is the most important question we need to answer – one last thing.” Kelley smiled, put her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. “Do you know why we developed the Dynamix14 product? Do you know, and do you think Matt Langton could tell us?”

Jack chuckled to himself, thinking that it must be Kelley’s Irish heritage that meant that she often answered a question with a question. Kelley’s grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Ireland in the 1950s and she had often visited. In more recent times, as Ireland had become the technology hub in Europe, JKHiggs had set up their European HQ in Dublin, alongside Google, Facebook, Salesforce and many other leading software companies. There was something about Irish creativity that seemed to make for great innovation. It was on one of Jack’s visits to Dublin that he had first come across Aslan, and the Irish band’s back catalog was a staple on Jack’s iPod.

“Well I know what our esteemed head of engineering would say. Henry is really proud of the world-beating energy efficiencies from Dynamix14. I guess that is what Matt would tell his customers as well, though now that I say it out loud, that doesn’t seem to be working, does it?”

Kelley circled the question mark at the third point of the triangle. “That’s just the problem. We didn’t build it because it delivers world-beating energy efficiencies.” She circled the question mark again. “What’s really critical for everyone to understand, and for our sales team, and your marketing team to communicate, is that our customers need exceptional energy efficiencies to deal with things like the Kyoto Protocol and that’s why we invested heavily in R&D on Dynamix14.“

“Behind this question mark is a customer, and behind every customer is a series of business goals and pressures that they need to solve for. Our job is to help them shape the projects they need to initiate to relieve those pressures, and to identify what’s stopping them being successful today. That’s what Innopartners did for DeepEarth. Mandy helped Joanne get a better understanding of her business and what she might need to consider if she is to get ahead of the Climate Change issues.”

Jack understood that the Kyoto Protocol puts a heavy burden on developed nations, who through 150 years of industrial activity had created a big emissions and climate change problem. He just never connected it to the fact that JKHiggs could help businesses like DeepEarth Oil to respond. He never considered that this might be how the sales team should frame the issues they could solve with Dynamix14.

“You are so right. I can’t believe I didn’t see it this way. “ Jack wrote down four headings: Goals, Pressures, Initiatives and Obstacles. “Our customers can learn everything they need to know about our products from the Internet – so we need to think about this in an entirely new way. We have to be Customer-First in everything that we do and how we sell. We need to focus on their business issues first, before our products, or we are going to be in real trouble.”

As Jack sat back to think, Kelley’s phone pinged with an incoming text message. She glanced at the phone, and then slowly and deliberately put the phone down on the table.

“Jack, it just got much tougher. Frank has just resigned. He is joining Innopartners to lead their West coast sales team. He says Innopartners are more in tune with the customer than Higgs. Damn!”

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The message here of course is that Kelley has recognized this as a strategically important issue for the company. Unless you take a customer-first approach to your sales and marketing efforts you are unlikely to be successful.

One approach might be to use a smart software solution to help you figure this out.

Email marketing is hands-down one of the best methods that you can use when communicating with your existing or prospect clients. That’s a fact.

Unfortunately, with so much spam and unsolicited emails being sent nowadays, the recipients have become wary with the emails that they’re receiving.

In fact, first time emails offering unsolicited direct offers are often frowned upon and are marked as spam or downright deleted. Of course, for businesses who are just starting and aren’t quite familiar with how to use email marketing effectively, this has proven to be detrimental to their business’ success.

However, for seasoned marketers who know the ins and outs of email marketing, they have found an effective way of getting around this hurdle. Because of this one technique that they are using, they end-up thriving with their email marketing campaign despite all the spam emails circulating in the web.

What “one technique” am I talking about, you might ask? Drip marketing.

To get maximum ROI on your email marketing campaigns, you need to have a more structured approach behind your campaigns, that’s where you can leverage on drip marketing.

What is Drip Marketing?

As the name suggests, it is a continuous set of emails being sent to your mailing list, customers, and prospects over a certain time interval. These emails can be either informative articles, offers or just help inquiries.

Drip marketing takes the intended audience from just being prospects, to becoming actual buying customers by establishing a level of trust with them through the emails that you’re sending.

How to use Drip Marketing

While there are a plethora of marketing softwares that you can use to run your drip marketing campaign, I use the software InBoundio by Pushkar Gaikwad since it is the most intuitive one that I’ve come across thus far. And since I’m not as techy as I should be, this software has proven to be perfect for my needs.

Another option that you can use is WordPress since it also has email marketing plugins that you can use. Or, you can also run the campaign manually by using Google apps. Whichever platform you use, it’s critical that you pace your emails accordingly so as not to alienate your recipients.

Benefits of Drip Marketing

Drip Marketing allows you to sell to your prospect customers while building a relationship with them at the same time. Pretty neat huh?

Because of this marketing method, selling becomes relatively easy since you’d have already established a level of trust with them – and as we all know, trust is a key factor when selling.

And since you have them in your email list and your relationship with them grows by the email that you send, you can capitalize on repeat business by continuously selling them products of value to them.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Step by step guide on how to build a Drip Marketing campaign

Creating a drip marketing schedule is rather easy, while there are other resources you can check on the web on how to run on, I’d like to share with you 4 very easy steps to do this.

First, you need to create a plan for your drip marketing campaign (try to bring a new plan each month – this helps a lot as far as establishing relationships with your mailing lists). Once the plan is created, strategize how you’ll execute your plan and decide on your target audience. Lastly, bring your own phrase and slogan into the mix, these are critical for making your promotional drip marketing pieces appealing to your current and potential customers.

There are several types of content that you can use when running a drip marketing campaign. You can use brochures, newsletters, mail newsletters (although in this case you need to make sure that you are seen as a reliable source, otherwise you will need to deal with spam filters).

Things to avoid

Here are a couple of things that you need to avoid when running your drip marketing campaign.

1. Do not approach your sales ready leads with the same message again and again. Instead, try to create something different and more personal. You’ll be amazed at how this can drastically increase your conversion rate.
2. Avoid over dripping. In addition to making sure that you’re providing valuable content to your list, try not to bombard them with too much information. There’s a good chance that they might think you’re spamming when you really aren’t. And it’s all because of the frequency of your drip.
3. Avoid sending the same message to your list. Show diversity, freshness, and uniqueness all while providing immense value to your readers.
4. Do not send generic messages. Instead, appeal to their emotions by relating to them. This makes you look more credible and personal. Or in other words, worthy of their time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, drip marketing is a strategic marketing technique that allows you to establish and strengthen relationships with your prospect or current customers, this then puts you at a good place when you’ll start selling them your products. This marketing method is definitely worth your time and effort if you’re serious about seeing positive results for your company – use it.

If you have questions or suggestions that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post in which I identified 2 critical steps in content-strategy development:

1. Developing buyer personas

2. Understanding how personas move through the sales cycle

In that post, I focused on the former step. Using a fictional company called Potter Paralegal Inc., I demonstrated how marketers can use buyer personas to put a human face on customer information and bring their ideal customers to life.

In the case of Potter Paralegal, which specializes in helping small business owners collect outstanding debts, I identified 3 main target audiences. Then I created a different buyer persona to represent each audience. There was:

• Betty, a book-keeper who freelances for SMEs
• Allan, an accountant at a small manufacturing business
• Sam, a contractor and small business owner

My goal was to provide insight into the benefits of buyer personas and to outline the steps required to create them.

Now that you understand the basics of buyer personas, I intend in the current post to focus on the second critical step: the sales cycle and content creation.

The Sales Funnel

The sales cycle is typically depicted graphically as a funnel, wide at the top (to represent the large number of people who are aware of your business) and narrower at the bottom (to represent the smaller number of people who convert and become your customers).

The sales cycle can also be depicted as a continuum, a graphic illustration I prefer since it more clearly shows how people move from one stage to the next:

The Top of the Funnel

The top of the funnel is the awareness stage. Your leads have an interest in your business because they have a problem they don’t know how to solve.

The buyer personas we created for Potter Paralegal can help demonstrate this point. Imagine that Betty has a client with a customer who is dragging out its payables; Allan’s manufacturing business is having trouble collecting an invoice; and Sam is negotiating with a homeowner who hasn’t made the final payment on a kitchen renovation.

At this time, Betty, Allan and Sam are all wondering what they should do to collect the money owed to them. Consequently, they’re asking questions such as:

• How do I address this problem?
• Should I hire a collection agency . . . or do it myself?
• What’s the best way to get the money I’m owed?
• How do I find the best person to help me?
• Do I keep trying to collect my money or take my customer to small claims court?

Potter Paralegal’s content strategy needs to include pieces that address these questions, create awareness of their company and begin to build trust with prospects.

Top-of-the-funnel content options the company should consider include:

• eBooks—e.g., Top 10 tips to collect outstanding accounts from difficult customers
• Instructional videos—e.g., How paralegals help small businesses collect outstanding accounts
• Blog posts—e.g., Collection agencies versus paralegals: What’s the diff?

The Middle of the Funnel

At the middle of the funnel, prospects have identified a number of possible solutions to their problems.

They’re comparing suppliers and pricing in order to find the best solution for their situation.

Returning to our paralegal example, Potter’s personas are asking:

• How can Potter help me?
• Do I need a paralegal?
• What can I expect if I hire a paralegal?
• How do I know I’m making the right decision?
• What other things do I need to consider?

Relevant middle-of-the-funnel content to answer these questions includes:

• Webinars—e.g., What to expect when you hire a paralegal
• eBooks—e.g., How 5 small businesses collected outstanding accounts from difficult customers
• Blog posts—e.g., How to hire a paralegal: 10 questions every small business should ask

The Bottom of the Funnel

At the bottom of the funnel, the prospects are getting serious about making a purchase decision.

They’ve met face to face with Potter, and senior executives have been brought into the process to decide between Potter Paralegal and a collection agency.

At this stage, Potter needs content to clinch the deal. The questions it should address include:

• What collection option will get the fastest results?
• How much is it going to cost to collect our outstanding accounts?
• What are the steps we need to take once we hire a paralegal versus a collection agency?
• Do we have the internal resources to manage the collection process?

The company’s bottom-of-the funnel content options include:

• Blog posts—e.g., What to expect when you hire a paralegal
• Tip sheets:—e.g., Hiring a paralegal versus a collection agency: A price comparison
• Assessment tools—e.g., How to tell if a paralegal is right to help your business

The “Selling” Never Stops

Of course, the “sales” process doesn’t end once a prospect becomes a new customer.

At the post-purchase phase, every business needs to focus on turning new customers into happy customers. There are endless opportunities to prevent churn, encourage repeat purchases, up sell the relationship to one that is ongoing instead of one-off, and encourage customers to provide a positive review or testimonial.

Great content isn’t the only way to transform customers into evangelists. But it certainly helps to offer educational resources that assist them in running their businesses more efficiently and more profitably.

As a marketer, your mission is to tell stories about your brand. And to make sure those stories have a happy ending. After all, you’re Chief Cheerleader for your brand, and your job is to spur your potential customers to root for it, as well.

Unfortunately, in marketing, as in life, not every story ends the way we’d like.

This is the tale of a brand whose marketing began with the best of intentions and tactics. But whose discord and dysfunction resulted in an ending that was more tragic than fairytale.

I’m telling this story—with the names and pertinent details changed to protect the guilty—because we can all learn as much, perhaps more, from mistakes and missteps than we can when everything sails along according to a well-laid plan.

A Cautionary Tale

I happened upon this tale as I was soliciting people to participate in my blog series on real marketers.

Cassandra (not her real name) had just been laid off from a marketing job at a mid-sized software company after a new marketing executive was brought in to do a marketing reboot.

By this point, the company had undergone several years of chaos and upheaval. Three years ago, the company had completed a merger that looked good on paper but whose execution had been painful and had resulted in numerous layoffs. Before long, the CEO of the company stepped down.

In cases like this, it can be difficult to discern which is the chicken and which is the egg. It may have been that dysfunctional marketing caused the company’s travails. Or it may have been the other way around. Most likely, each one contributed to the other.

Fire-Drill Marketing

By the time we spoke, Cassandra had had plenty of time to mull over what had happened and was anxious to share her thoughts.

“The biggest challenge we faced was the conflict between sales and marketing,” Cassandra explained. “We kept being asked to meet short-term demands from sales for us to fill the pipeline immediately with whatever leads we could find. We never had time to address our long-term needs as marketers to provide education—so we could mentor customers in our space or build trust—so we could ultimately develop customer advocates.”

Among the long-term projects that the group never seemed to get around to completing was the creation of buyer personas. Another deficit was content strategy. They’d created quite a bit of content, but they didn’t know if they were doing the right content. To make matters worse, there was no expiration date for content; it floated around for years. While work had begun work in addressing these issues, it had progressed only in fits and starts.

Rather than completing long-term efforts that would allow the company to pinpoint the right prospects and nurture them through a sales cycle that averaged nine months, the company regularly sent large, “spray-and-pray” email campaigns to thousands of people.

Of course, plenty of companies have success with email campaigns. But they need to be targeted. That’s where the company fell down. The company hadn’t taken the time to break down the list into relevant subsections and create targeted messaging for each audience. As Cassandra pointed out, “It takes time to analyze the database, understand the prospects’ roles, and learn how to tweak the message to address what was most important to each one. And we never took the time to perform these tasks.”

Predictable Results

The results were predictable. “When they’d get 16 attendees to a webinar, people would deem the campaign a success,” said Cassandra. “But no one ever addressed the elephant in the room that this was 16 people out of 5,000 invited to the event.”

Like many more successful companies, the company also spent considerable time and effort creating integrated lead-nurturing campaigns. The team might build a webinar, a case study, and an article, and use the company’s marketing automation tool to send out email touches with links to these assets every week or so for lead nurturing.

Said Cassandra, “We put the cart before the horse. We hadn’t looked at where the person was in the buyer’s journey. Instead, because we were so rushed, we had a daisy chain of content that we hoped made sense to the buyer without our having done the analysis.”

For most marketers, the final step in the demand-generation process is coming up with a sales-ready lead. Here once again, the company’s efforts fell short. This time it was because sales and marketing failed to come to a consensus about what marketing success really meant.

“We hadn’t had discussions of what was a sales-qualified lead versus a marketing-qualified lead,” said Cassandra. “Without that understanding of when we’ve generated a lead, marketing would think something was a great lead and sales wouldn’t agree.”

Lessons Learned

During her experience, Cassandra gave a lot of thought to what her department could have done better. She came to three conclusions:

First, marketing can learn a tremendous amount from defining personas and the buyer’s journey. Those are really the foundation of getting marketing right. Moreover, it’s not something you do once and forget about for the rest of the year. You need to look at them at least twice a year and test your assumptions.

Second, it’s critical to get sales in the same room and talk about how to achieve the goals of the company. Sales has their numbers. Marketing needs to discuss these quotas, what a qualified lead looks like, and if the lead isn’t qualified, what should happen. “A lot of the information you need for this discussion,” Cassandra noted, “comes from analyzing the buyer’s journey.”

And finally, marketers must use modern technology to measure results. “What’s exciting is the immediate feedback you can get,” said Cassandra. “Before you’d send out a direct mail and wait and hope. Checkbox marketing doesn’t work anymore. Now you can see how an email is performing in real time. That means you can test headlines and calls to action. There’s so much more opportunity to learn what’s working. If you’re given the time and inclination, you can constantly learn and improve.”

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GUEST:

Startups have a multitude of marketing channels available to them: websites, landing pages, email messages, social media, and more.

So what happens if you take all those and add one more marketing channel by launching your own tech conference? That’s what we did at Zula, and I want to tell you why you should do it too.

It all started a few months back and only 30-45 days before we hosted our NYC event, “The Zula Messaging Summit”. We were sitting in our HQ and discussing our product and marketing efforts. We thought to ourselves, “We are doing marketing pretty much by the books, but what can we do to kick it up a notch? What can we do in addition to our various channels that will help establish our name, our brand, as an authority in the team communication space?”

We decided to go a little nuts and host our own event. I will admit that for a second there, we weren’t sure we could pull it off, but we were going to try and give it our best shot. Did it work?

That is a good question. Before I talk about the lessons we learned, it is probably best to address the question of whether it was even a success. So here are some stats:

• As it was our first event, we envisioned a small and intimate event with 160 attendees. Throughout the day, over 500 people showed up.

• There were thousands of tweets with the hashtag #ZulaSummit throughout the month of the event. According to the software we used to measure the reach of the hashtag #ZulaSummit, there were 12,026,143 impressions of that hashtag.

• The event was completely sold out weeks ahead, so we added some more places. They sold out almost instantly as well.

• We saw a tremendous spike in both downloads and in-app engagement during and after the event itself.

• Some of the speakers we were able to bring to the Zula Summit included Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Hull (Head of messaging products at Linkedin), Christina Warren, and Jay Yarow, among others. You can see the agenda for the conference here or watch the actual presentations here.

• The event was intended to give an overview of the messaging landscape and by extension, help get our name out there. The fact that we generated some nice revenue from ticket sales? Well, that sure was a nice perk.

• The day after the event, we discovered that one of our primary competitors was targeting users on Twitter who searched or tweeted the words “Zula Summit”. In other words, that was a keyword our competitor used to advertize. I would call that “mission accomplished”.

So, as far as our goals for the event, they were accomplished and then some. The Zula Summit was a success. Now, here is the thing. Zula is an Israel-based startup and the Zula Summit was in NYC, so not only did we put together this event in less than two months (it was more like one month), but we did it remotely!

Were we confident from day one that it would be this big of a success? Absolutely not. Did we make mistakes along the way? Yes, we did. The following are five of the most important lessons we learned from putting together a full-blown tech conference while trying to build a startup.

1: Do it! 

Here is the thing. I might be giving away our “secret sauce” here if every startup does adopt this strategy of hosting a conference about their space, but I am sure of a few things. First of all, most won’t do it because they will either be lazy, or they will convince themselves that this is too large of a challenge for them in their current stage. Second of all, if startups reading this post decide to take my advice and host a conference, I helped a startup, and I will have to think of some new secret sauce. I am not worried about it.

But yes, if you are a startup looking to build out a brand, a brand people recognize, a tech event, even if it’s a small one, can accomplish wonders. However, and this is key, don’t think for a second that you can make an event about you and your product, and it will succeed. From day one, we were all in agreement that Zula Summit would not be about Zula, but about the space, the market, how far it’s come and where it’s going.

In fact, the day before the event, one of our competitors raised a gigantic round of financing so it was only natural that some of the speakers would talk about that competitor in their presentations. They did, and it was OK. Yes, we gave the stage to our biggest competitor. Remember, this isn’t about you, it’s about providing valuable content about your space, thereby establishing a voice for you.

2: Content First, Tickets Second

Here is the most important thing about hosting a conference. You need great content. I know, seems obvious, but I mean GREAT content. Aim high because if there is one thing I have learned over the years working in tech, it is that people are generally into the whole “helping out another startup” thing. Make yourself a master list of people who are dream speakers for you. I aimed super high and some of the people I approached said no because they couldn’t make it to NY that week or they had a different conflict but none of the people I approached, and I approached some big dogs, laughed at me and told me to stop bothering them with this nonsense.

And so, we booked some pretty amazing speakers, and once we did, we knew the rest would be a whole lot easier. And it was.

Once you get the big names, then and only then establish your ticket price and strategy. My advice? Not too low, not too high. Remember, you are not a huge brand name (yet) that can charge thousands of dollars for a ticket. Charging $25 is also a bad idea because people might not take you seriously. We had an internal debate but ultimately went with $250 for a ticket. But again, only because we had the content to back it up!

So make a list of names, write down the topics you want them to cover, then get to work reaching out to those speakers one by one, which leads me to my next point!

3: Be Personal or Go Home

If you think you are going to tweet to some people to speak at your event or to buy a ticket to your event, and fill up seats that way, you are sorely mistaken. I know, the word “relationships” has become somewhat of a buzzword, but this whole event thing won’t get off the ground if you can’t be personal.

When it comes to the speakers, everyone I brought on was either someone I had built a relationship with for years or someone that was introduced to me via a friend. Nothing here was done on autopilot, and nothing was done without a personal touch.

The same goes for ticket sales. Yes, I tweeted and posted about the event on my social networks, but I tried my best to make it a personal experience. I also made codes for discounted or free tickets, which I distributed personally and privately. The astounding metric we discovered at Zula Summit is that I can count on one hand the number of people who signed up for the event and did not show. Why? Because anyone who got a code for a free ticket got it from me directly. Now, I know that process sounds unscalable. Maybe, but the hours it took me to engage my audience personally was a worthy investment. I didn’t make anyone commit to showing up but anyone who had a free ticket understood from me that the tickets were in high demand so if I am giving them one, it is sort of understood that they will show up.

Build the speaker list personally. Build the participant list personally. Build the agenda personally. Even choose the food personally. Don’t think too big and pay attention to the details!

4: Use Available Resources and Don’t Waste Time

A lot has to go into hosting the conference. Scheduling, tickets, billing, landing pages, websites, social integrations, and on. You don’t want to waste your time on this stuff! You can do it all alone but why would you when there are platforms out there built for this exact use case?

We used Evolero for this and to be honest, we weren’t sure in the beginning. After all, there are others in the event space that are much bigger and more successful than Evolero. Companies like Eventbrite and Meetup. We chose Evolero because we knew them (see point above about being personal) and had been impressed with the company in the past.

We could not have been happier. Using Evolero we set up our landing page for the event, and we instantly had a ticketing system with billing. Evolero gave us the template we could use to add and customize the agenda with little hassle. All the social integrations we needed for sharing the event on the social web were included, as well as seeing who was talking about Zula Summit and what they were saying in real time.

The Evolero team, while offering great customer service in general, quickly realized that this event could help generate great traction for their platform, and were always readily available to help when we needed them. I sat with the team the other day and sure enough, between the blog posts, the tweets, and the general buzz, the Zula Summit created an unprecedented amount of traffic. And they deserve it, because without Evolero, the Zula Summit would never have happened.

Find a platform that meets your needs and leverage it.

5: The Event Itself is Nothing but a Diving Board

Throughout the process of planning and executing this event, don’t forget why you’re doing it and what the goal is. Not to sound too cynical, but you aren’t doing this out of the kindness of your heart. At the end of the day it is a marketing initiative. Does that mean you should use the event to sell your product? That is about the worst thing you can do!

Having said that, every time someone registers for your event reach out personally and say thank you. Monitor what people are saying about your brand and your conference, and be friendly, whether their feedback is negative or positive.

For example, I had one person who had an issue signing up and later asked for a refund. Now we all know it only takes one mistake to ruin a brand’s name when you are in the public domain. I replied to him on Twitter and took care of the issue. All was then good in the universe.

Make sure to engage with your audience before the event, during the event, and, most importantly, after the event. If your product can be used throughout the process, that’s even better. Zula is a messaging app so, for us, it was a no-brainer to use it. Anyone who attended the conference could speak to me, the other Zula team members, or anyone else in the room using Zula. People loved that and the engagement was through the roof!

If the event ends and you don’t continue the conversation with the people who attended your event, you just missed out on a tremendous opportunity. Send a thank you email with all the sessions attached as videos or even the actual PowerPoint presentations. Ask the speakers for their presentations after you thank them by email. (Don’t forget those thank you messages!)

Ask them for feedback, positive or negative. Ask them what they were missing at the event. Ask them about the food! I mean, who doesn’t have a strong opinion about food?

Once you are maxed out on engagement and you begin to get the feeling that you may be annoying some people, then send that one more message letting people know that they should prepare themselves for next year’s event, which will blow this one out of the water (and will of course include all their feedback).

Then go back to your original document with the goals and strategy for this conference and put a little check near the item called “build an engaged audience and establish our name as an authority in our space!”

Kudos on executing a great marketing initiative, now get back to building the company!

Costly hiring decisions that are doomed from the start can easily be avoided if you simply make the choice to do so.

Firing someone is never easy. Even when it’s glaringly apparent that it’s the right choice, I’ve never met a manager who likes letting someone go.

Sales managers often wait until the very last possible moment before coming to that often painful, almost shocking realization that they need to terminate someone’s employment, hoping that they’ve done everything in their power to turn that person around and make them successful in their role. But even after this difficult decision has been made, sales managers still wonder: How did it even get to this point?

Think about the people on your team who just don’t fit your culture or lack the necessary aptitude, attitude, and discipline to be successful. Most of the time, a sales rep doesn’t work out because they were never the right fit to begin with. They’re getting fired mostly because they should have never been hired in the first place!

Whether you hired them or inherited them, are you aware of the gap in your hiring and interviewing process that allowed this person to fly under the radar undetected and land on your team? Maybe the gap has nothing to do with your process, and everything to do with your attitude around hiring.

Make Hiring a Choice, Not a Need

Even if you have all the procedures in place to ensure a successful hire, the biggest mistake employers make is hiring from need rather than choice. In other words, if you are in a position where you desperately need a salesperson and you’re looking for a quick solution, there’s a strong chance that you are going to force the process. Think about how the mis-hires on your team initially made the cut.

In general, finding, assessing, hiring and onboarding top talent is a fairly high-pressure, time consuming activity. During the time that a vacant spot exists on a sales manager’s team, your company could be actively losing money. Leadership often makes it clear that somebody needs to be hired as soon as possible to fill that position to cover a territory where your competition is quickly securing market dominance.

This turns up the heat for the manager. They look at the list of the non-negotiable knowledge base, characteristics, competencies, experiences, relationships and skills needed to ensure a successful hire. Then, they review the potential candidates. They look at the clock. The pressure intensifies.

And in that instant, the deterioration begins. The managers starts to concede on their list of necessary attributes.

The Erosion of Integrity

Whether you are engaging in crisis management tactics because your top salesperson left, you have more leads than you can handle, or you simply feel you can’t take on the added responsibility that comes with hiring a salesperson, taking shortcuts and omitting the necessary steps in the hiring process compromises your staffing objectives as well as your standards of professionalism and excellence.

As time ticks away, the manager’s criteria start to erode. A candidate might not have all the necessary, non-negotiable traits, yet because of the mounting pressure to get the position filled, the justification process ensues. “Well, they have five out of eight critical, non-negotiable competencies needed. That’s not so bad, right?”

In desperation, the sales manager tells herself, “I can definitely train that new rep to develop those skills. I’ll just have to invest a little more time in them, that’s all.” Subsequently, an offer is extended to a person who is not a fit, and will likely never be.

The moment the manager feels pressured to fill the empty position in as little time as possible, the hiring process is doomed. The irony is whatever standard or value you compromise will likely become the reason you fire them or that salesperson quits.

The Cost of Compromising Your Standards

Because sales managers are reluctant to let people go, this ill-suited rep will consume a significant portion of the manager’s time over the coming months (or even years) dealing with problems that could have been avoided if they simply hired the right person to begin with!

It becomes a vicious cycle: the more time a manager gives, the less they want to admit that it isn’t working out. And for some strange reason, there exists a great population of managers who actually believe, “If I have to fire them, then I failed! And I don’t want to fail!”

And while the manager invests their precious and limited time in the wrong person, they’re not doing so with the right people on their team — the ones who actually hit their goals and make the manager look good.

The bottom line is: You can’t make the wrong hire the right fit.

Remember, you’re not serving that person, the company, or yourself keeping someone around who shouldn’t be there in the first place. In fact, you wind up hurting everyone instead.

If you make the wrong hiring decision, own it, learn from it, adjust, adapt, and move on. Otherwise, you’re bound to spend the rest of that person’s career trying to make the wrong person the right fit. And that is a quintessential exercise in futility.

Hire Slow. Fire? No!

In order to hire right, you have to hire slow. Hiring decisions made under time constraints are bound to be bad ones. And if you hire slow, you’ll be in fewer situations where you have to fire.

Take the time to find the right person for the job, and you’ll actually save countless stressful, unproductive hours. Your reward will be a positive ROI, less stress, a happier team, and more productivity.

Photo Credit: Keith Nerdin

My journey into content marketing actually started in 2004 when I left The Nielsen Company after 9 years to work for a local firm.

They hired me as their first VP of Marketing. My team of 1 (me) had absolutely zero budget to start. My first boss there wanted me to cold call to drive leads.

That didn’t work out so well. But then the CEO of the holding company fired him. And they asked me to run marketing like a marketing person would.

How do you execute a marketing strategy for a company with no budget?

The answer is what we now call content marketing.

The company I worked for was a nationally-ranked market research firm that very few people had actually ever heard of.

So I took our greatest asset: survey research. And used it to continuously update our newly revamped website to drive inbound leads for our sales team. I taught myself SEO basics and used a list of target keywords to create and distribute stories on our latest research.

Traffic on our website grew exponentially. Inbound leads started coming in to the company on a consistent basis for the first time. I even spent some time teaching the CEO of our holding company (the guy who saved my job) about digital marketing and how to do paid search.

Growth Hacker Content Marketing

When I initially proposed content marketing at SAP, many people asked, “How much software you gonna sell with blog posts?”

Luckily I had a direct manager who saw the declining effectiveness of traditional advertising. She knew that the digital age demanded more engaging and continuous content marketing.

At the time, we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising landing pages. These destinations had 99% bounce rates, no organic search traffic and zero social engagement. I asked for a fraction of that cost to build our thought leadership content hub.

So for a third of the cost of a throwaway landing page, I built a branded content marketing hub to serve as the landing destination for advertising, and to reach new people with great content marketing.

Once we started publishing, we saw a 20% lower bounce rate, almost immediate organic search traffic and a growing level of social engagement.

That is growth hacker content marketing. The site basically funded itself – it had a return on investment from day one! And we were continuously testing, iterating and improving our results.

Guerilla Content: How To Growth Hack Your Way To Content Marketing Success On A Limited Budget

OK, so now you have a site built. But how do you produce enough and a consistent volume of content, at an acceptable level of quality, to stay relevant to your audience?

This is where you can turn to what I call Guerilla Content:

Guerilla Content: content created with almost no budget, simply be re-purposing things your organization already produces.

For example, people ask me all the time how do you find to time to create and share content? The answer: I re-purpose stuff I already create. I look at my email outbox. Each one is an answer to a question!

In many cases, it is a few paragraphs and detailed enough to turn into a blog post. I turn my powerpoints into slideshares.

Why keep content created for a few dozen people from reaching hundreds or thousands?

The first 24 blog posts I wrote on SAP’s Business Innovation were all white paper summaries I wrote from content that was sitting in a campaign library.

So if you are looking for your own Guerilla Content, here are some ideas I’ve used along with some examples:

30 Growth Hacks To Content Marketing Success

1. Gather Executive or Customer insights on top issues, or
2. Top challenges, or
3. Biggest mistakes via simple email questions. And turn them into blog posts.
4. Profile your executives and customers by asking Who are you? Greatest challenge? How you solved? + Profile photo and turn it into a blog post.
5. Ask multiple experts “what is the future of, biggest challenge,” or
6. “worst mistakes,” or
7. “Best examples of [your topic]?” And turn them into blog posts.
8. Answer the simplest questions about your solution category: What is [your topic]? Such as “What is content marketing?“
9. Use Klout, Buzzsumo, Topsy, YouTube, Slideshare to identify “best of” lists.
10. Highlight content you love from others (OPC = other people’s content): Infographics,
11. People to follow,
12. Blogs to read,
13. Slideshares,
14. Linkedin Pulse articles,
15. Videos,
16. Conferences,
17. Books,
18. Quotes,
19. Facts, etc.
20. Define the terms You Need To Know on [your topic]
21. 8 Steps To Success In [your topic]
22. Best Practices For [Topic]
23. What [Hot Topic] Means for [Your Issue]. My Example: What Google’s New Algorithm Means For You
24. Re-purpose content from your own campaign material, or
25. Cover research reports, or
26. Highlight analyst reports
27. Turn executive Slideshares + Speaker notes into articles
28. Customer service people are a great resource. Ask them to identify your customers’ biggest questions or FAQs
29. Turn customer testimonials (talking head videos) into “customer profile videos by just taking out the promotional parts.
30. Ask your employees who attend events to provide you with their notes.

I also suggest teams sit in a room once a quarter and bang out lists of content ideas. Here are a few resources to help you with brainstorming your own list of Guerilla content marketing ideas:

• Neil Patel on How To Come Up With 50 Topic Ideas In 30 Minutes
• 101+ Blog Post Ideas

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Do you want to generate more leads on your website? Without landing pages, you’re like the single guy who doesn’t ask Miss Right for her phone number.

One day back when I was single in the City of New York and living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I met the girl of my dreams. It’s true – it was like a thunderbolt struck me. We hit it off immediately.

Among the things we talked about, we discovered we were both runners and members of the New York Road Runners Club. We talked about how it would be fun to run a race together.

We parted ways that day, and later I realized that in all my excitement of meeting her I’d forgotten to ask for her phone number. D’oh!

It’s said that you don’t regret the things you do in life, you regret the things you don’t do. And boy did I regret not asking for her phone number.

Her number wasn’t in the Manhattan phone book. But I remembered she mentioned that she often went on morning runs at the Central Park Resevoir. So, for several weeks before work I went running there hoping to bump in to her again. I never ran so much in my life. Not even in the army.

And then one day, I saw her again!

This time I got her number. We went on our first date. Long story short: we dated, got married, and have two great kids.

If I’d just asked for her number when I first met her I could have avoided the risk that I’d never see her again. And we could have started the relationship sooner.

Sadly, many companies who want to generate leads on their websites are making the same mistake I did when I forgot to ask for Miss Right’s phone number when I first met her.

Many companies are doing content marketing to attract more of the right kind of traffic to their sites. But some are dropping the ball in the conversion stage by not using landing pages to generate leads.

What Are Landing Pages?

A landing page is a website page specifically designed to convert visitors to leads. It collects and processes information on website visitors who identify themselves in return for valuable content.

Here’s how landing pages work: When someone visits your site, goes to a landing page and fills in a form, landing page software automatically adds that information to a leads database.

Based on the landing page and the information provided, that lead is then segmented into a group of similar leads. And with landing page software, you can see which pages the lead visits, what they’re searching for and even how they got to your site in the first place.

Why Landing Pages Are So Important

Landing pages are like your digital sales reps, gathering information for marketing and sales about your prospects that help move them through the process of purchasing a product or service.

Capturing their contact information is crucial, because 98 percent of all website visitors will never come back to your website. Using landing pages to capture the prospect’s email address, your chances of getting them to return to your site improves dramatically.

Weak Offer = Weak Landing Page

Since all leads are not created equal, it’s important to synch up landing pages with buying cycle steps and timing, which vary by industry.

Studies show that 75-98 percent of B2B website visitors are performing research. They are looking for content or information to solve a problem or fulfill a need, but they are not ready to buy.

To convert those types of visitors into leads, content that appeals to researchers is offered behind a landing page. Examples of effective lead conversion content for the research stage include white papers, guides, tip sheets, eBooks, checklists, videos, and kits.

Leads Are Not Generated By Landing Pages Alone

Of course, landing pages are not the only part of the conversion process. There are important before and afters in the form of call-to-actions and thank you pages.

A Call to Action (CTA) is a website button, image, or text link that encourages a visitor to take an action by typically clicking on the button, visiting a landing page and filling out the form in return for some kind of valuable content.

After the visitor submits the form they are then redirected to a thank you page which has the content download link or pre-recorded webinar.

Do Landing Pages Work?

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing and landing pages generate 2X more leads than non-inbound marketers.

Want more leads? Add more landing pages. Marketers see a 55 percent increase in leads when increasing landing pages from 10 to 15.

Why Are Landing Pages So Important?

Sure, landing pages play a big role in the lead conversion process. But most importantly, they are the first step in generating a potentially long-lasting, mutually-beneficial relationship between prospect and customer.

[Photo Credit: Wendy Longo photography via photopin cc]

No matter how you slice it, being a sales rep is not easy. And even the best, most seasoned pros will feel the pressure from time to time. This leads to excuses -- excuses to draw attention away from the sales reps' performance (or lack thereof).

The truth is, these people are rejected, challenged, and often given unreal expectations each day. This leads to great days and some not so great days. The important piece for an employer is to build a company culture where excuses are not accepted, even when the times are tough.

I’m sure you have heard this: Excuses are like armpits, they stink and everyone has them. Before you can build a culture of positive thinking, it is important to identify excuses and defuse them. Without further ado, here are the six excuses you should never hear from your sales reps:

“I Don’t Have Enough Leads”

Leads are the pipeline that keep your sales moving, yet only about 70 percent of the leads marketers send to sales reps are ever contacted. Shocking? Not really.

No matter the organization, this is an extremely common problem. Sales reps often feel as though they do not have enough leads, despite actually having an abundance. I have seen that this problem often starts with a lack of accountability in the CRM. Sales reps don’t log appointments, nor pick them up, leading to snowball effect.

When This Excuse Might Be Valid: It’s a story as old as time, the miscommunication of Sales and Marketing. The definition of quantity and quality of leads can differ. In these cases, it not an excuse for Sales. Rather, identification that the leads won’t allow Sales to reach their goals.

“The Leads Aren’t Any Good” 

Not all leads are qualified the moment they come in the pipeline, which is why marketing should classify them as “SQL,” Sales Qualified Leads, before handing them off to Sales. If the logic for a “SQL” is solid, then there should be no quality-related excuses.

As a sales rep, it is their job to get in front of the lead and sell -- not cherry pick for their definition of low hanging fruit. For example, if a lead indicates they want to buy in the next three months and have the money to purchase, it should be a case of simply closing.

When This Excuse Might Be Valid: When there are issues with Marketing and Sales alignment, lead quality can come into question. What marketing considers a “sales qualified lead” might be completely different from what Sales would consider ready to work. 

“I’m Too Busy Taking Care of the Floor Traffic”

In a B2C environment, sales floor traffic is important. These potential customers have come to your location and deserve the time. But only serving these customers and ignoring your future customers is an excuse which simply shows a lack of time management skills. 

When This Excuse Might Be Valid: When budgets are tight, so are hours allotted to sales staff. If there aren’t enough salespeople to service the floor traffic, then it shouldn’t be surprising when a majority of their time is monopolized speaking to these customers.

“Marketing Doesn’t Do Anything”

Hearing that, “marketing doesn’t do anything,” or “they just print shiny brochures” is enough to send any manager through the roof.

This excuse is frustrating for two reasons. One, this means your sales reps aren’t aware of the promotions going on within the store. And two, they aren’t taking accountability for their own actions. The truth is, Sales cannot function without Marketing and vice versa. If a sales rep is complaining, it is probably time to look in the mirror.

When This Excuse Might Be Valid: It’s a blanket statement to say that all marketing departments do nothing. But it’s also a blanket statement to say that all marketing departments are working optimally to promote the company and deliver leads. In the worst of cases, this excuse can be completely valid.

“Our Goals Are Unachievable”

Sometimes managers like to set lofty goals, but often they're still entirely achievable. Sales reps might just unable to devise a strategy to hit said goals. Encourage your staff to work toward achieving these goals, and teach them how to make it happen.

When This Excuse Might Be Valid: If goals are set without a basis in analytics or past performance, chances are they’ll unachievable. Anyone can say we’ll sell a million gazillion widgets, but if we only sold five last month, it might too lofty. 

“It’s Not Me, It’s the Product” 

Nothing smells of denial more than blaming the product. In sales, you must believe in what you're selling. Luckily, unless your company is still selling VHS tapes, this shouldn’t be a problem. There is a demand, and the sales rep needs to close.

When This Excuse Might Be Valid: If the product changes, or quality diminishes, there’s nothing you can do as a salesperson. Just imagine if you sold Coca-Cola, and suddenly you’re forced to sell the “New Coke.” It’s impossible to sell something everyone hates.  

Hopefully these “excuses you should never hear from your sales reps” will help you build a positive environment that fosters a killer sales team. For further help, download our Lead Generations Lessons from 4,000 Businesses ebook to see insight into supporting your sales reps. Good luck!

Most companies fall short of their revenue potential, not because of bad revenue strategies, but because of a failure to successfully implement good ones.

High growth companies demonstrate better “alignment” than most companies. However, simply locking your VP Marketing and VP Sales in a conference room until they figure out how to better align the Marketing and Sales groups may not be the best answer.

The Real Barrier To Becoming A High Growth Company

If you want to become a high growth company, focusing on internal organizational alignment may be a red herring. It is a symptom, not the root cause, of your revenue growth problem.

The root cause for lackluster growth is insufficient external alignment with your target market.

Most company executives will claim that they are already aligned with their target markets. However, while your target market may be the same as it was five or ten years ago, if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll discover that the buyers within those markets have dramatically changed their purchasing process.

Thanks to rapid changes in internet, social and mobile, the buyer’s team has access to all the information they need to determine their short list of possible vendors to evaluate, without ever calling any Sales organization.

Each of your revenue functions have responded to it by different degrees, causing alignment issues between functions as a result. However, none of the functions have fundamentally changed their go-to-market plans in response to the target buyer changes, resulting in company alignment issues with your customer.

Aligning Your Company To Its Target Market Customers

Regardless of company size, you cannot have a high performance revenue team if each of the team members are executing outdated or different strategies.

You need to give your strategy implementation a “tune up”, not a complete overhaul. Your goal should be to identify 2 or 3 major roadblocks that need to be tweaked to get the company revenue growth going in the right direction. You want to start by ensuring there is sufficient alignment within the company on strategy.

1/ Aligning The Functions To Company Revenue Strategy

Each of the functional revenue-generation strategies must dovetail into the company revenue strategy.

• Company Revenue Strategy. All revenue generating functions maintain cross-functional alignment to corporate target markets. Do the functional strategies reflect that most of the buyers’ purchasing process has moved online?

Here is a brief example of how a CEO of a high-growth company might confirm that the revenue functions are aligned with their company’s revenue strategy.

• Sales Strategy demonstrates an increased focus on online selling skills and leverage of lower-cost sales channels such as inside sales (plus, an increased reliance on more high quality Marketing- generated leads and more compelling products from Product Management).
• Marketing Strategy demonstrates a substantially increased focus on digital lead generation and Sales enablement (plus, an increased reliance on responsive lead management support by Sales and more compelling products from Product Management).
• Product Strategy demonstrates an increased focus on delivering compelling business value to the target market buyers (plus, an increased reliance on cost-effective product leads from Marketing and proactive product launch Sales focus).

When you are comfortable that all the strategies are sufficiently aligned to the target market buyer and the company revenue strategy, then the next step is to review the revenue generation processes.

2/ Aligning The Functions To Company Revenue Process

Each of the functional revenue-generation processes must dovetail into the company revenue process.

• Company Revenue Process: The revenue functions will apply the most cost effective sales, marketing, and product launch techniques in an integrated process that increases revenue and profitability. Have the functions developed the processes needed to effectively implement their new strategies?

Here is a brief example of how a CEO of a high-growth company might look at their revenue process alignment:

• Sales Process includes a more accurate forecasting process that is better aligned to the buyer team members and their purchasing stages, etc. etc. (plus, a well-managed process to manage the service level agreements (SLAs) with Marketing regarding lead generation and with Product Management regarding new product launch.)
• Marketing Process includes a cost effective lead generation process that attracts new customers, moves them through their purchasing process, and delivers a high volume of quality leads for Sales to close, etc., etc. (plus, a well-managed process to manage the SLAs with Sales regarding lead generation and with Product Management regarding new product launch).
• Product Management Process includes a target market requirements process that identifies the compelling business need and decision criteria of the target market buying team members, etc. etc.(plus, a well-managed process to manage the product launch SLAs with Sales regarding product sales and Marketing regarding product leads).

However, functional managers and their staff will always prioritize their functional goals ahead of any cross-functional objectives, unless and until, the CEO directly ties their cross-functional performance to their compensation.

A shared executive goal of “Revenue” might reward individuals collectively when the company is successful, but since all boats rise with the tide, it does not necessarily drive the right individual behavior that’s needed to achieve important team goals.

This is the area where the CEO, as cross-functional leader, must get personally involved if the company is going to get on the right track for accelerated revenue growth.

Incentive compensation, if done “right”, can turn individuals from various functions and silos into high performance revenue teams. Getting incentive compensation “right”, however, is part art and part science.  More on leveraging incentive compensation for revenue growth will be discussed in a separate post.

3/ Aligning The Functions To Company Revenue System

In most cases, there is no company revenue system!

Sales has a CRM system that they constantly complain about, Marketing has their shiny new Marketing Automation system, and Product Management is just starting to use some product management specific applications.

The company needs to move towards a cross-functional revenue system that allows you to effectively manage the performance of your cross-functional revenue strategy implementation.

This is another key area where the CEO must get personally involved to achieve a balance between the corporate desire to have an “all in one” system (that can’t keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions) and the functional desire to have tactical point products (that don’t fit into any corporate technology system strategy).  More on aligning revenue generation technology for revenue growth will discussed in a separate post.

Achieve Accelerated Revenue Growth

You cannot become a high-growth company without achieving and maintaining company alignment with your target customers.   Sales can no longer carry the company’s revenue burden alone. Nor can you continue to rely on Sales forecasts to be the primary measure of your company’s revenue strategy health.  A more detailed discussion and CEO Action Plan for successfully turning your revenue strategy in accelerated revenue growth with profitability can be found here.

As CEO, you must lead this cross-functional effort, particularly if you want to see accelerated revenue growth within the next year.  You may need to bring in a “change agent” (employee or revenue growth consultant) who can be your lieutenant to give the current revenue strategy implementation a quick tune-up.

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50% of sales go the first salesperson to contact a prospect (source: InsidesSales.com).

Social Selling is the use of social media to interact directly with prospects, answer questions, and offer thoughtful content until the prospect is ready to buy. Social selling is not hard selling. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Cold Calling is the solicitation of business from potential customers who have had no prior contact with the salesperson conducting the call.

You might say one is yesterday’s way of selling and the other is today’s.

• Where is it going in the future?
• Why has it changed?
• Which way is most likely to get to the prospect first?

Here are 37 facts on the future of social selling vs. cold calling.

SOCIAL SELLING

1. 98% of sales reps with 5000+ LinkedIn connections achieve quota (source: Sales Benchmark Index)
2. 89% of customers begin their buying process with a search engine (source: Fleishman-Hillard)
3. 80% of introductions generate a sale (source: DSWA)
4. 75% of customers say they use social media as part of the buying process (source: IBM)
5. 74% of B2B marketing companies use Twitter to distribute content (source: Content Marketing Institute)
6. 72.6% of salespeople using social media outperformed their sales peers (source: Social Media and Sales Quota Survey)
7. 61% of US marketers use social media for lead generation (source: IBM)
8. 55% of B2B buyers search for information on social media (source: MediaBistro)
9. 54% who used social media tracked their social media usage back to at least one closed deal. (source: Social Media and Sales Quota Survey)
10. 50.1% of sales people who report using social media state that they spend less than 10% of their selling time using social media (source: Social Media and Sales Quota Survey)
11. 50% of identified sales leads are not ready to buy (source: Gleanster)
12. 47% larger purchases result from nurtured leads than non-nurtured leads (source: The Annuitas Group)
13. 42% Follow or Like a friend or brand; 79% are motivated to do this in order to learn more about the brand (source: Fleishman-Hillard)
14. Over 40% of salespeople say they’ve closed between two and five deals as a result of social media. (source: Social Media and Sales Quota Survey)
15. Social media users were 23% more successful than their non-social media peers. (source: Social Media and Sales Quota Survey)
16. Today’s sales process takes 22% longer than 5 years ago (source: SiriusDecisions)
17. You are almost 5X more likely to schedule a first meeting if you have a personal LinkedIn connection (source: Sales Benchmark Series)
18. Marketers spend an average of 4-6 hours a week on social media (source: Social Media Examiner)
19. 2X higher ROI from email marketing than cold calling, networking or trade shows (source: MarketingSherpa)
20. B2B marketers who use Twitter generate 2X as many leads as those that do not (source: Inside View)

COLD CALLING

1. 91% of the time, cold calling doesn’t work (source: Harvard Business Review)
2. 91% of customer say they’d give referrals; only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals (source: Dale Carnegie)
3. 90% of C-suite executive say they never respond to cold calls or email blasts (source: Harvard Business Review)
4. 82% of B2B decision makers think sales reps are unprepared (source: SiriusDecisions)
5. Customers don’t want to deal with salespeople until they are 70% down the path of the buying process (source: HubSpot)
6. 61% of marketers send leads directly to sales, despite the fact that only 27% of those leads are qualified (source: SalesForcce.com)
7. 60% more expensive per lead than other methods (source: HubSpot)
8. 57% of the buying process is done before sales contact (source: Corporate Executive Board)
9. 8 attempts to reach a prospect today with a cold call vs. 3.68 in 2007 (source: TeleNet and Ovation Sales Group)
10. 8% of salespeople get 80% of sales (source: The Marketing Donut)
11. 7 people in the average firm of 100-500 people are involved in a buying decision (source: Gartner)
12. Only 5% of business lead phone calls lead to a sale (source: DSWA)
13. Only 2% of cold calls result in an appointment (source: Leap Job)
14. Only 2% of sales occur at a first meeting (source: The Marketing Donut)
15. Only 2 attempts are made by the average salesperson do reach a prospect (source: Sirius Decisions)
16. 1 out of 250 salespeople exceed their targets (source: Harvard Business Review)
17. Less than 1% of cold calls lead to a sale (source: DSWA)

These facts say we spend more time on search engines and social networks seeking out, researching, and connecting with products we’re going to buy and the people who we want do to do business than we do on our phones. As a result, more of us believe we don’t need to speak to a salesperson until we are further along in the buying process.

When that time comes to speak to someone, the person who is most relevant and top of mind is more likely to be the contact that gets the business. It’s more likely that that person is going to be found through an association established on the internet and social media than it is through a cold call.

And that’s now. So the trend is only going to move more in that direction for the future.

Do these give you facts for the future on social selling vs. cold calling? Could your business use help doing social selling better?

In a relatively short time, social media has become a core pillar for any brand marketing strategy. A full 88 percent of brands said that they were planning to use social media for marketing in 2014, but according to Towers Watson, just over half of retailers use it as a part of their internal communications strategy. How is it that strategies so vastly important to how a brand presents itself externally are so widely overlooked when it comes to how they are represented internally?

Let’s not just think about specific technologies here. Rather, let’s inspect the underlying mentality and identify steps that brands can take to ensure they are utilizing everything in their digital toolkit to empower and motivate employees.

1. Understand your target audience – your employees  

The same rules that you implement on any social media campaign also apply to internal communications: understand your audience. What your employees look for on LinkedIn differs from what they might read or like on Facebook. If you haven’t already, take the time to get to know who your employees are. What social media channels do they spend most of their time on? Do they want internal company news, or insight from top management? Do they prefer email communications, or text message? Identifying the needs of your employees can be achieved through internally-organized surveys, focus groups or meetings between senior management and sales employees.

2. Equip your employees with the right tools

In today’s BYOD environment, it’s not hard to find a multitude of different types of devices within any professional setting. Mobile technology serves as a valuable asset that can equip sales employees by giving them the ability to retrieve product and pricing information, log complaints or queries, check stock, update timesheets and swap shifts from the shop floor.

When mobile devices are used to foster teamwork and collaboration on the go, it works particularly well in retail stores, where employees are in constant communications with those managing the stock room, registers and customers. Apple is an example of such a company who has transitioned from traditional cash registers to iPads equipped with mobile payment offerings. Investing in well-equipped employees pays off when each individual’s organization and product knowledge better serves customers.

3. Go beyond the traditional showroom

To facilitate the in-store experience for employees, employers should not only provide them with mobile devices, but also personalized apps or programs that cater to their needs. For example, Neiman Marcus launched a new shopping app called the NM app for shoppers to not only shop and purchase items, but also to text, email, call or FaceTime with sales associates.

New digital services are also helping customers virtually test products, making it easier for retail employees to be available in other ways. Macy’s and Sephora have experimented with “magic mirror” technologies, which allow shoppers to select items on a tablet, try them on virtually and share photos of themselves on social media.

4. Implement smarter scheduling technologies

Work-life balance has become one of the key factors by which employees measure satisfaction at work. For Millennial employees, an ideal work-life balance means choosing where they work, but also having the freedom to choose when they work. However, to retailers who depend on in-store employees to drive sales, it may seem difficult to offer this type of flexibility.

One solution is to incorporate technology that offers digital crowdsourced shift scheduling.  These new tools allow employees to access their schedules online, bid for shifts that suit them best, and swap shifts with colleagues via their mobile devices. For example, DW Sports, a UK-based sports specialty store with nearly 50 retail and fitness locations, has reduced the time it takes to create weekly schedules from 3 hours to 10 minutes by transitioning to Workplace’s smart scheduling technology, thus freeing up managers’ time from focusing on tedious tasks such as this.

Needless to say, technology is rapidly changing the way we live, work and communicate. Employers can no longer afford to think only about how the latest technologies benefit the customer, but also how they keep the organization. By leveraging more traditional, customer-facing social and mobile technologies along with next-generation scheduling systems, retailers designate employees as stakeholders and boost organizational efficiency while driving a better in-store experience.

Did you know that increasing sales effectiveness was the second highest objective voiced by top sales professionals in 2014, yet only 27% of companies had a dedicated sales enablement/effectiveness staff?

When alignment fails, sales enablement fails. But, with the right motivation and processes, sales enablement can be a big asset to your company.

One of the first steps to improving your sales and marketing alignment is getting both teams to adopt the same technologies.

Smart investments in marketing and sales technologies—and the adoption of those technologies—empower cross-departmental visibility and communication.

This is important because both marketers and salespeople benefit from insight and visibility into what each function is doing. Marketing teams need to know about key prospects in a company’s CRM system in order to produce content that is specific to them. Similarly, sales teams need access to digital asset libraries to pull relevant content during sales conversations.

Which Technologies Do You Need?

There are at least 947 marketing technologies out there. But top-performing companies know there are only a few systems you really need to be cost effective and impactful at the same time.

1. Content marketing software
2. Marketing automation (like Pardot, Marketo, or Eloqua)
3. CRM (like Salesforce, or LeadMaster)

Content marketing software is where modern marketing starts. It provides marketers with applications for content planning, ideation, production, distribution, collaboration, and analytics. With these platforms you can pump out digital materials that make up the bulk of your marketing efforts.

Content marketing software is the factory where content assets are made, stored, analyzed, and optimized.

Marketing automation software is the conduit through which content is distributed. Email is by far the most popular way to get and share information. In fact, 69% of people in a 2014 study said that they prefer to receive content via email, and 77% said they prefer to share content via email.

Marketing automation is the tool that ensures your message reaches the right people at the right time.

CRM systems house a bulk of the data, closed-won cycles, and touchpoints a prospect experiences on their buyer’s journey. This information can be used to assess the results of your content marketing, and provide the most relevant information about which marketing-created assets influenced with successful buyers during their sales cycle.

CRM systems are powerful tools for tracking the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts.

With these core technologies in place, you marketing and sales teams can not only produce quality messages for the core prospect list, but can see which of those developed pieces authentically connect with buyers.

Aberdeen Group found that top-performing companies for sales enablement have a significantly higher adoption rate of these three technologies than average companies.

With the right technologies in place—marketing automation, content marketing software, and CRM system—your marketing and sales departments have a much better chance of being aligned. Give your business the opportunity to have sales enablement success.

The classic novel A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens begins with these most famous words and phrases:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness……… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

These famous words and phrases may very well describe how many B2B organizations as well as marketers and sellers felt in 2014. The year 2014 displayed unabated rapid changes in buying behaviors and in how B2B marketed and sold to B2B buyers. Undoubtedly, causing many B2B businesses to feel like they have become a chapter in A Tale Of Two Cities. Throughout the year, it was the best of times and it was the worst of time.

Here then are 4 B2B Marketing trends, based on working directly with several B2B organizations this year and qualitatively interviewing over 100 B2B buyers this year, which may lead to the best of times in 2015:

1. The Content Marketing Slow Leak

As opposed to calling this a bubble burst, what is more appropriate is the slow leak. There are two major reasons why content marketing will be under the microscope. One, the silent majority of B2B buyers turned off by the inundation of content is growing. In over 100 qualitative buyer interviews, I can tell you the complaints are getting louder. Two, content marketing has struggled now for more than three plus years to reach mass effectiveness.

As a former senior executive, I can empathize with marketing leaders who are going to face harsh questions on why an organization should continue to allocate more cash flow to content marketing when effectiveness has not kept paced. This means B2B Marketing leaders will have to get a whole lot smarter about content. Improving their Content Intelligence immensely from a focus on what to do and how to do – to that of why content is appropriate.

2. Shift From Prediction-Based Marketing To Customer Intelligence

In 2014, we saw the touting of predictive analytics, predictive marketing, predictive data, predictive scoring, data-driven prediction, and anything, which can be preceded by the word prediction. Predicting buying and human behaviors via data alone will prove to be elusive at best. An apt quote by Steven Davidson, author of the Crystal Ball is:

“Forecasting future events is often like searching for a black cat in an unlit room, that may not even be there.”

In 2015, forward thinking marketing leaders will begin to seek more in-depth and rounded customer knowledge and thus, customer intelligence. Whereby data supports knowledge, understanding, and intelligence about customers and potential buyers. Here is an important perspective offered by renowned Stanford University Psychologist, Phillip Zimbardo:

“Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so than we recognize or acknowledge.”

When it comes to buying and human behaviors, situational variables are the most powerful influences exerted on buying decisions. A trend is emerging whereby savvy marketing leaders are grasping this important concept. A concept of understanding contextual as well as situational variables will guide them to the in-depth customer understanding they need for smarter decisions. This type of understanding comes qualitatively versus by quantitative data means only.

3. Humanizing Will Move From Concept To Discipline

Many B2B Marketing leaders have been exposed to content in 2014 from various circles calling for more personalization and humanizing of their marketing. A hallmark of 2014 has been the discovery of a transformation underway in B2B. Spurred on by the influence of digital consumerism bleeding into B2B. Which is, B2B decision-makers are putting more emphasis on emotions-based factors versus logic-based. A recent Fortune Knowledge Group study shows 55% of 720 executives surveyed are relying on subjective, hence emotional influence, as opposed to logic-based objectives or factors when making decisions.

What this means is B2B marketing leaders will have to be more disciplined in learning how to conduct Human-Centered Marketing. When it comes to humanizing branding and marketing efforts, leaders will need to do so through a disciplined process of Hearing, Understanding, and Modeling. A framework I recently referred to as H.U.M. in an article in May of 2014. Such a disciplined approach will help marketing leaders evolve from viewing humanizing in terms of a feel-good concept to a repeatable human-centered process. Putting the human, the customer, at the center of their marketing.

4. Collaboration As A Strategy

One of the most striking aspects of a recent IBM CEO Study for 2014 is how much active collaboration directly affects a corporation’s ability to outperform its’ competitors. To make collaboration a driving force in customer strategy means organizations will need to embrace radical openness and transparency. Displaying overt willingness to share information and allow access to multiple networks in order to arrive at workable solutions.

Collaboration as a strategy also means B2B organization will need to immerse themselves in the business of their customers. What we will see as a trend is more immersive-oriented research taking place to deeply understand customers. It is through this process companies will then be able to offer true collaborative immersive experiences for its’ customers.

What Will 2015 Be?

Will 2015 be the best of time or the worst of times? Only time will tell. B2B Marketing leaders can give themselves a good shot at 2015 being the best of times by embracing these trends. Customer-centricity in B2B will continue to grow as a powerful force and differentiator. It very well may mean the difference between having everything before you and having nothing before you in 2015.

I leave you with a thirty-years look at predictions given by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Labs. He has made a habit out of providing predictions for the past thirty years and here he takes us on a journey of those predictions as well as makes future predictions. Enjoy:

Sales training companies are in the unique position of selling their services to salespeople. Selling to sellers -- very meta. 

And as any salesperson worth their salt knows, buyers today are more informed than ever. So when sellers become the buyers, they're fully prepared to do their research. Thoroughly. 

Sales leaders hire external sales training companies for a variety of reasons. But whether you're looking for a quick two-day seminar to shake up the team, or a more significant reskilling exercise, this checklist can help you research all the relevant aspects of a sales training company to ensure you make the right choice. And salespeople understand more than anyone the cost of choosing the wrong provider -- tread lightly. 

1) Know your team's needs from the start.

To avoid getting sold on bells and whistles that your sales organization doesn't need, take time to evaluate and diagnose the problems within your team before you start looking for a sales training provider. That way, you can keep a laser-focus on your goal and select the trainer that's truly the best fit.

2) Determine what area you'd like to focus on.

Do you want to get your reps on the social selling train? Or are they stumbling when it comes to connect calls? Different sales training companies have different specialties. Short-list trainers whose experience lines up with your goals.

3) Determine the length of time you want to devote to training.

Maybe a day-long seminar is all you need, with the intention of firing up the troops. On the other end of the spectrum, you might want to totally overhaul your current sales process, and need to invest in a months-long training engagement. Either way, make sure your sales training providers offer programs that correspond to the desired level of detail and duration.

4) Evaluate the follow up plan.

According to Training Industry, 50% of sales training content is forgotten within five weeks without ongoing reinforcement. Don't spend money on sales training only to have it go in one ear and out the other. Inquire after the training provider's follow up and reinforcement processes, and make sure they meet your expectations.

5) Peruse the client list.

Much of selling today hinges on buyer- and industry-specific knowledge. So it's worthwhile to check out a sales training company's customer list to see if they've worked with organizations within your industry or that sell to a similar target customer. Requesting a reference call never hurts.

5) Think about location.

Most sales training programs feature a mix of in-person and elearning. But if you'd like to skew to more in-person sessions, seeking a local sales trainer might be wise.

6) Inquire about selling philosophy/methodology.

No matter how much a sales trainer customizes their program to your team, their core philosophy won't change. And if you flat-out disagree with it, it's probably not a good fit. Dig into the company's selling values and beliefs make sure they line up with your idea of how sales should be done.

Additionally, some sales training providers teach within the context of a patented methodology. If this is the case, think: Does this methodology gel with your current sales process? If not, are you willing to do a major process overhaul? Ask if and how much the provider is willing to customize their curriculum to your team's sales process.

7) Evaluate the sales management component.

A sales training initiative requires the support of sales management. Without the managers on board, there's no hope of reps taking the content to heart. With this in mind, make sure the training company offers a suitable management program to complement the rep component. 

8) Consider an assessment. 

Some sales training companies offer assessments as part of their curriculum, to diagnose reps' issues and measure their progress against specific goals. This might be a desirable feature for some sales teams. But if your organization already uses an internal skills diagnostic, subjecting reps to another might be overkill.

9) Ask about ROI.

Many sales training initiatives fall down in the assessment stage. Did the team get smarter and more effective? How can you tell? Ask the provider to explain how they measure results, and make sure this method fits your expectations.

10) Assess the content.

Request a sample curriculum or piece of training content to evaluate the direction and quality. 

11) Check that all desired formats are included.

Does your team learn best with videos? Audio? Physical worksheets? Online resources? Make sure that content is delivered in all the channels you'd like.

12) Investigate the showing/doing split. 

It's common wisdom that people learn best by doing. Yet, many sales training companies slant their efforts towards showing, and allot only a small portion of time to interactive roleplays and exercises. Look into the division between formal training and interactive learning and make sure the skew is where your team needs it to be.

When Don Tapscott’s The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of the Networked Economy was published in 1994, travel website Expedia was just a skunkworks project within Microsoft. Twenty years later, the company is the perfect example of a phenomenon that Tapscott detailed in his book: the disappearance of the “agent” class.

Disintermediation cut out the middle man in industries where the Internet could allow service providers and consumers to deal with each other directly. Tapscott reflected on how this dynamic has played out over the last 20 years in a talk earlier this week titled “The Digital Economy—A 20 Year Retrospective and Perspectives for the Future” as part of the Big Ideas Speaker Series at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“You have the word ‘agent’ in your job title? You’re going to have to create new value, or you go away,” says Tapscott, who is an adjunct professor of management at Rotman. “And we saw that, of course—all the travel companies that we deal with today, none of them existed back then.”

MORE: Why dot-com business are big buyers of traditional TV ads »

The companies that booked tours and flights, arranged hotel rooms, and issued travellers’ cheques are now gone, or relegated to being niche players in the travel business. Industry giants like Thomson sold their travel holdings or pivoted into the guided tour space. Websites that aggregate quotes from multiple airlines and providers now dominate the travel business.

One sector that has seen old middlemen rendered obsolete only to have a new class arise is the private investments industry. Tapscott points to funds with low fees that track stocks algorithmically rather than trying to beat the market using human investment managers’ wiles as a case of the first. At the same time, “there are all kinds of other institutions that have been very successful creating these wealth management services, where they help you figure out not just your investments but also all the other financial services that you have.”

The Internet presents challenges for companies around issues like trust and identity—determining that a person with whom you are transacting is indeed who they say they are requires some kind of independent verification. “So we have trusted third-parties—banks, PayPal, Apple now is getting into that whole thing,” observes Tapscott,  speaking at an event marking the launch of the 20th anniversary edition of his book, held at the Rotman School earlier this month. Developments like Bitcoin, however, could fix this problem of trust by enabling true peer-to-peer transactions that are verified by the technology itself rather than an independent entity.

But there is still room in the digital economy for intermediaries. “The opportunities to create new value in the middle can be as big as the old middle,” Tapscott says. “I’m not convinced that everybody is going to be wiped out. If you can create new value you can succeed.”

WATCH: Don Tapscott in conversation at the Rotman Big Ideas series:

The post No middleman is safe in the digital economy appeared first on Canadian Business.

Optimism is on the rise in the A/E business as 2015 holds promise of continued improvement in economic conditions. Some seem to think that a return to normalcy is just around the corner. But count me among the skeptics. The growth in new business opportunities is certainly welcome, but the competition for work isn't easing up.

One thing the Great Recession should have taught us is that most firms could stand an overhaul in how they do business development. When times were good, they got by with a loosely coordinated, ad hoc approach. The economic downturn exposed their shortcomings, although many continue to blame external circumstances rather than acknowledge their weaknesses.

For those of you who still see the need to rethink how you pursue new work, let me suggest a new year's resolution—get your sales effort better organized. Where to start? The specific strategy will vary by firm, but I've found that most will benefit substantially by taking the following steps:

Anoint your "sales force." In many firms, people's sales responsibilities are more implied than explicit. If this is true at your firm, the first step is to formally identify your sales force and define their respective duties (see below). Assigning responsibilities is not the only reason for doing this. Sales is often perceived as a lonely activity, which is particularly a problem with technical professionals who are already uncomfortable with the role. You want to make them feel part of an active team where there is sharing, support, and mutual accountability.

Fit people to the appropriate roles. There's a tendency to view sales as a monolithic activity requiring a specific skill set (which many technical professionals conveniently claim to lack). But in fact there is a role for almost everyone. Activities include:

• Conducting market or client research
• Building and maintaining a network of contacts
• Participating in professional and trade associations
• Making "warm calls" to prospective clients
• Calling on existing clients for information and leads
• Participating in conferences and trade shows
• Helping develop your firm's intellectual capital
• Developing tools and resources for clients
• Public speaking
• Writing (or supporting writing) for publication
• Providing webinars and seminars
• Developing and making sales presentations
• Writing proposals
• Negotiating fees and contract terms
• Serving as a "client advocate" after the sale  

The key is assigning these and other responsibilities to the right people. In fact, given the diversity of sales-related tasks, your sales force will likely include junior professionals and administrative staff. You might want to refer to the Sales Funnel as a way to think about organizing your sales force. In particular, make sure you have enough "above-the-funnel" activity to generate the appropriate number of sales leads.

Budget a specific allocation of time for their assigned responsibilities. Most firms do business development with leftover time, which is a formula for mediocrity. Sales time must be treated like project time, where there are certain tasks that need to be done regardless of interruptions or changes in schedules. Budgeting time also mutes the common complaint that selling detracts from utilization. The goal is to specifically devote a portion of people's nonbillable time to business development, not steal billable hours (although individual utilization goals may well change to accommodate their new sales assignments). Once you've made allocations, track "sales utilization" to make sure that adequate time is being expended.

Provide training and coaching. Although most professionals are turned off by the stereotypical sales persona, they typically default to many of the same behaviors—talking too much, listening too little, focusing on themselves—because that's all they know. Training is typically necessary to help seller-doers employ a client-centered approach that is both more palatable (to the professional and buyer alike) and more effective. But since improved sales performance ultimately depends on behavior change, classroom training alone won't suffice. You need ongoing coaching to reinforce application of the new strategies over time.

Manage your best sales opportunities. Research indicates that as many as 80% of sales leads are neglected or mishandled. You certainly can't afford that kind of inefficiency with your most critical sales opportunities. The leading A/E firms typically have some form of capture planning process to guide their efforts in closing on their best leads. This earlier post outlines a proven approach to maximizing your success on your top sales opportunities.

Hold regular sales team meetings. These meetings are designed to build the team, define assignments, review progress, and encourage accountability. Keep them short and to the point (usually no more than 30 minutes). Focus on sales activities, not proposals (you want to avoid mistaking proposal volume for productive sales efforts). I recommend weekly meetings at the start. Once increased activity and accountability appears sustainable, then it may be appropriate to go to biweekly meetings. Make sure that someone is in charge of the meetings so they don't drift off course.

Conference attendance yields the obvious benefits of learning, lead generation, and sales, but a lot of companies miss the excellent opportunities for content creation and amplification. Similar to breaking news, conferences are current, are mentioned in numerous articles and other types of online content, and tend to generate popular search trends.

Creating content centered on the time leading up to the event, the actual days of the event itself, and even the wind-down period can lead to increased recognition, sharing, and many other sought-after benefits.

Here are five ideas to help you turn the next event you attend into an engaging content marketing series.

1. Expose your YouTube channel to the world

Studies show the average lead costs $22 less and conversion rates are 1.7% higher for video users than non video-users. For your video marketing to be effective, you need more views and subscribers for your YouTube channel. Popular events like conferences and trade shows can help you boost your YouTube numbers because they allow you to easily target an audience with which you have something in common.

Create a series of videos that focus on your team’s conference trips. Right now, you are probably having a minor panic attack thinking about your limited marketing budget and the need to buy video equipment, hire professional videographers, and recruit top-level on-screen talent.

Stop worrying. YouTube viewers are more likely to engage with content that’s authentic and doesn’t look like polished marketing or PR material. The only camera you need is the one on your smartphone, and the only on-screen talent you need is you as the narrator and attendees as the extras. Here’s an example of something simple:

I know what you are thinking: I missed my calling. I’ll start writing my Oscar™ acceptance speech later this week. In the meantime, I won’t quit my day job in case no one else catches my clearly superior acting abilities. All joking aside, I think you get my point. You don’t have to have an experienced video production staff to create engaging video content. Just be yourself and start filming.

These videos:

• Introduce conference attendees and others to your brand
• Show that your team is actively engaged in your industry
• Direct more users to your YouTube channel so they learn more about you and seek your more sales-oriented content
• Help in recruiting talent by showcasing fun travel opportunities available at your company
• Brand your team members by highlighting their personalities and experiences

So before your 2015 conference tour schedule begins, get your team together and develop a video strategy. Get creative. Think about your goals and objectives, and plan accordingly. And make sure you keep your non-YouTube social media channels in mind when creating your video strategy.

2. Piggyback on the conference’s social media frenzy

Recruit followers who attend the same conferences. To make this happen, you’ll need to learn to piggyback on the social media efforts that will likely be orchestrated by the conference organizers. Determine:

• What are your goals and objectives?
• Who will maintain your social media efforts focused on the conference?
• Will the team members in attendance post or will they send content to someone at the office, or both?
• Are your team members aware of the conference’s hashtags?
• How are you monitoring conference mentions?
• What is your plan for joining the conversation?

Make sure your team is aware of the speakers, location, topics, and more, so they are ready to engage in conversations and connect with potential followers, as well as conference organizers.

Find out who is influencing the conversation by listening to all the conference-related chatter. Follow their accounts. Encourage them to follow you by talking directly to them, sharing their content, or crediting them in your posts. As long as you don’t come across as desperate or ignorant, your following will likely grow.

Make sure you include the conference hashtag in your posts or you’ll miss a lot of views and potential engagement. In addition, use the hashtag to search for others’ posts.

3. Showcase your blogging skills

Make sure you leave room on your content calendar for conference-related blog posts (and add your posts to your social media calendar). Lots of people will search on topics related to the events, and you can gain a share of the impressions and clicks.

Schedule a few posts before, one or two during, and a short series after the conference. You will have full coverage and create targeted content with relevant keywords that attract visitors to your site during the period when conference hype is at its highest point.

Here are a few topic suggestions during each period of the conference conversation:

Before:

• Highlight your company’s attendance.
• Have a speaker from your company write an article that teases the content being presented.
• Highlight a few speakers whom you are excited to see.

During:

• Write a short recap of each day of the conference.
• Interview conference attendees about their experience.
• Showcase some things that stand out about the host city.

After:

• Share takeaways from the conference as a whole and about specific presentations.
• Make predictions for the next year based on what you learned at the conference.

Use these ideas as a starting point to develop your own ideas tailored to your goals and the conference’s purpose.

4. Summarize keynote presentations visually

This one requires excellent note-taking skills combined with a talented graphic designer. After the note-taker returns and meets with the graphic designer, the two can break down the main points of a presentation into visually friendly chunks to create an infographic or slide show with minimal text.

Once the visual content is ready to go, share it on your social media channels, and don’t forget to mention the conference to encourage sharing. In addition, upload it to SlideShare.

5. Create a webinar interview series

Review the list of speakers and sessions on the conference’s website. Choose three or four topics that stand out and track down the presenters connected with those topics. If you can’t locate an email address for them, LinkedIn is a great way to connect. Just make sure you clearly state your intentions so that they don’t ignore your request to connect.

Although it may not be feasible for you to get a response from a keynote presenter like Kevin Spacey, many speakers are willing to take advantage of more opportunities to share their voice.

Set the dates for your pre-conference web series. Schedule one webinar per week, and try to schedule each session on the same day of the week to stay consistent.

Notify the conference organizers. Since you are actively promoting the speakers at their event, they likely will help promote your series.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Don’t just rely on the conference organizers to promote the series. Send emails to your database and include in your newsletters.
• Require an email address to register. Follow up with everyone afterward. Add the contact information to your CRM to maximize the value of the series by keeping in touch and turning some attendees into leads.
• Create a hashtag for the series. Since it will happen over a few weeks, a dedicated hashtag could have time to gain popularity and become a trend, allowing your series to be found by more people.
• Give viewers something to show your appreciation for their attendance. Offer a related white-paper download or another valuable piece of content.

Bang for your buck

Conferences typically come with a hefty price tag, so it’s important that you look beyond the surface value ROI. Content creation is the way to dig deep for more, long-term value from the conference and to enhance your existing content marketing strategy.

If you focus only on lead generation and learning, you’ll miss out on a lot. It’s hard enough to get approval for high-cost marketing expenditures like these, so why not add a few more ROI points?

Have you tried any of these content creation ideas, or have you tried others that worked? I’d love to read your opinions and ideas in the comments section.

Readying your conference content creation plan for 2015? Don’t forget to register for Content Marketing World here.

Cover image by tpsdave via pixabay

The post 5 Ways to Get More ROI From Your Next Conference appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

*Editors Note: Guest post by Daniel Barber, Director of Sales Development & Operations at ToutApp* In Part One, we established how taking a marketing automation approach to […]

The post Sales 3.0: Personalization at Scale appeared first on Sales Hacker.

The only major personality trait that consistently leads to success is conscientiousness. 

"It's emerging as one of the primary dimensions of successful functioning across the lifespan," Paul Tough writes in "How Children Succeed." "It really goes cradle to grave in terms of how people do." 

Tough says that people who test high in conscientiousness get better grades in school and college, commit fewer crimes, and stay married longer.

They live longer, too, he says. And not just because they smoke and drink less. They have fewer strokes, lower blood pressure, and a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease.

There's a staggering amount of research linking conscientiousness with success. An Italian study found that conscientiousness predicts academic achievement. A National Institute of Mental Health study found that conscientious men earn higher salaries. The National Institute on Aging also found that conscientiousness is linked to income and job satisfaction. Other studies show that conscientiousness is the most important factor for finding and retaining employment. 

Taken together, the research suggests that conscientiousness is the personality trait most often correlated with job performance. 

How do you know if you're conscientious? Conscientious people tend to be super organized, responsible, and plan ahead. They work hard in the face of challenges and can control their impulses. 

Psychologists classify conscientiousness as one of the "Big 5" personality traits, with the others being agreeableness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The other traits can predict certain workplace outcomes — extroversion is a great fit for highly social gigs like sales and openness to experience often leads to creativity — but conscientiousness is remarkable for the way it cuts across roles.

Research shows that arriving on time, doing thorough work, and being thoughtful toward your colleagues helps people across job functions. "Being on top of deadlines is almost universally a good thing," one industrial psychologist told us.

Moreover, within conscientiousness are the narrower traits of self control and "grit," which University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth has found to be more integral to children's scholarly success than IQ. 

Why conscientiousness people are so successful

"Highly conscientious employees do a series of things better than the rest of us," says University of Illinois psychologist Brent Roberts, who studies conscientiousness.

To start, they're better at goals: setting them, working toward them, and persisting amid setbacks. If a super ambitious goal can't be realized, they'll switch to a more attainable one rather than getting discouraged and giving up. As a result, they tend to achieve goals that are consistent with what employers want. 

Roberts also owes their success to "hygiene" factors. Conscientious people have a tendency to organize their lives well. A disorganized, un-conscientious person might lose 20 or 30 minutes rooting through their files to find the right document, an inefficient experience conscientious folks tend to avoid. Basically, by being conscientious, people sidestep stress they'd otherwise create for themselves. 

Being conscientious "is like brushing your teeth," Roberts says. "It prevents problems from arising." 

Conscientious people also like to follow rules and norms. You can spot the conscientious kids in the classroom. They sit in their chairs, don't complain, and don't act out — which also, of course, contributes to earning good grades from teachers. While conscientiousness doesn't correlate with high SAT scores, it does predict high GPAs. 

However, that impulse toward convention doesn't lend itself to every job type. Work that requires innovation, creativity, and spontaneity doesn't fit well to a highly conscientious personality; a highly conscientious painter would stick to the norms of a genre rather than expanding it, and a highly conscientious chef would be less likely to tinker with tried-and-true recipes. If you're looking for creativity, select for openness to experience. 

To spot conscientious people at work, Roberts says to look for punctuality. If someone shows up on time, that's a great clue toward conscientiousness, since a punctual person has to be organized enough — and care enough — to arrive on time. 

The bigger, and less visible, indicator is how people deal with setbacks. Do they give up or redouble their efforts? 

"The conscientious person is going to have a plan," Roberts says. "Even if there is a failure, they're going to have a plan to deal with that failure."

SEE ALSO: 3 Ways Steve Jobs Made Meetings Insanely Productive — And Often Terrifying

Join the conversation about this story »

Social media managers and clients alike usually have one issue: where do they find the best content to tweet? What do they tweet about, and how do they move from lurking online to becoming a powerhouse? The secret lies in giving people what they want. This series of small steps can help you become a power tweeter, as well as make you masterful at content creation.

Retweet. A Lot.

In the beginning of your Twitter career, retweeting others’ content can create a lot of engagement. In fact, if more people retweeted all the time, Twitter would be a much friendlier place. Those who are starting out on Twitter are often the best at sharing others’ content. Just make sure the content is aligned–for the most part–with what your brand stands for. So for instance, an automotive account could also retweet tweets about tools, windows, after-market parts, hot cars, etc.

Create Compelling Tweets From Your Blog

With one blog post, you can create quite a few tweets. Each paragraph head, for instance, can become a tweet. Or, you can take the title of the post, include one paragraph header and then create a tweet from that. For instance: “The Secret to Golden Tweets: (shortened link) One Secret? Use “Discover” Within Twitter!” And, as Krista Bunskoek explains, keep your tweets short and compelling. And the subject matter of your blog answers the questions that your audience has.

Add An Image

Twitter, like other platforms, has become more image-centric. So adding a beautiful image to a tweet will make that tweet golden, especially if you use Twitter’s native image uploading system, according to Dan Zarrella. Again, this is part of giving people what they want.

Use Discover Within Twitter

“Discover” within Twitter (on desktop) is a terrific place to find fresh content. Often, the Discover section includes accounts you already interact with anyway. If you see a tweet you like, you can add an image to get extra traffic.

Employ Lists To Track Great Content Creators

Start creating lists of people whose content you really love. Note that you don’t have to follow people to list them. So if you like to retweet news stories, put all the news agencies on a list and then check your list. Or create a list of compelling content creators. For more information about lists, see my previous post about Twitter lists for the power user.

Pick Pinterest’s Guided Search

In my humble opinion, Pinterest’s guided search is better than Google’s search. Use Pinterest to discover the best content by typing a word or two and then seeing what Pinterest suggestions appear. You could be very surprised. For instance, I have a board about social media failure. After a search on Pinterest, you can create a tweet or two from any article. In addition, you could pin the article, of course, and then use it on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Mine LinkedIn

See what people in your industry are talking about, and create tweets from those posts. You don’t have to limit yourself to the title of the post, either. And of course tag them on Twitter–a great way to start a conversation.

Use Trending Topics

Twitter’s own trending topics are often an interesting source of material to tweet.

Tweet Your Instagram Photos

Since tweets do better with photos, you could attach an Instagram photo (like mine above) to your tweet. Twitter loves photos! Your tweet could explain the photo. Or not!

Thanks to its famously easygoing culture and fabulous perks, Facebook is one of the most in-demand places to work — and getting a job there is no easy feat.

To get a better sense of what it takes to land a highly coveted position with the social media giant, we recently spoke to one employee who walked us through his interview process and shared what it's really like to work for the company.

Nicolas Spiegelberg earned a Masters in Computer Engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2006. 

After graduating with a 4.0 GPA, he worked for a telecommunications company in Alabama for a few years — but had a serious interest in the "greatly unrealized potential of online social networking."

Spiegelberg, 32, tells Business Insider he was "hooked on the idea of working for Facebook from the start."

In 2009, "Facebook had fun programming puzzles that you could solve and get your performance evaluated online," he says. "I solved a variant of the Stable Marriage Problem and submitted the answer. Turns out Facebook recruiting saw the results, and I got an interview request from a recruiter as a result."

The first step was a 45-minute phone screening. "Most of the interview was spent on a coding problem but there was a decent chunk of time at the end where I could ask the engineer questions about their job and what motivates them to work at Facebook." 

Spiegelberg was invited to California to meet with hiring managers in person. He went through a total of four interviews with a quick break in the middle. 

"It was refreshing from some of the other 10-plus hour interview slogs that I've been through in the past," he says. "I feel like they got a good assessment of my skills while not spending so much time that I was too drained to perform well at the end." 

Spiegelberg says if you're flying a long distance, Facebook normally gives you an extra day to rest before your interview. "I strongly recommend taking it so you can relax, freshen up, and give it your 100% the next day."

He says two of his in-person interviews focused on coding and algorithms. "They give you problems that require you to take the common programming structures (lists, graphs, caches) and combine them together to solve a single problem," he explains. "The problems are a little contrived, but definitely mirror the sort of problems you encounter on a day-to-day basis here." 

Another interview focused on work philosophy. "The interviewer had me walk through tough problems I had solved in the past and various lessons I learned from it," says Spiegelberg. "Facebook wants to make sure that you want to constantly improve and can use lessons from the past to apply to current challenges."

And the final interview focused on system design. "I believe my particular question was to design a traffic light system," he recalls. "Facebook doesn't ask this anymore — but the basic gist was to see if I could take a complicated problem and break it into parts. Nowadays, we focus more on designing some of the basic products that comprise Facebook."

Spiegelberg says he wasn't a shoo-in after that round.

"It turned out, my packet created a big argument during candidate review. One person really didn't want me hired. However, a couple different interviewers thought that Facebook would be making a mistake by letting me go. The people who fought for me were able to convince management to reassess me on the criticisms of the negative interviewer and I had two follow-up phone screens."

Spiegelberg has seen candidates demoralized because they didn't do well in their interview, and they just give up. "What they don't realize is that Facebook values somebody who will go to bat for you. That's why you need to give it 100%. You actually have multiple chances to convince Facebook hiring managers that they are making a huge mistake if they let you go."

Spiegelberg did just that and eventually won over the skeptics.

In November 2009, he landed a job as a software engineer in Facebook's California headquarters, and in January 2012, he relocated to Facebook's New York office, where he was promoted two years later to Engineering Manager.   

"I love it here," he says. "There is so much opportunity for personal and professional growth. I started by joining a brand new team that created Facebook Messenger, scaled their storage system to billions of users, open sourced my work, and traveled all over the world to share my experience at conferences." 

"Then, I moved to New York to help start an office," he continues. "A year ago, I moved to Mobile Infrastructure and am learning how to scale out a completely new set of challenges. There are always new, unexplored growth opportunities for engineers here."

Facebook is always at the top of workplace rankings, including Glassdoor's list of the best companies to work for. Spiegelberg says Facebook's mission, culture, and values are what make it such a great place to work. "Making the world more open and connected for billions of users is a high impact and personally rewarding mission. Friends and family are constantly sharing how Facebook helped them connect with people they care about."

Internally, he explains, the Facebook culture is also very open and connected. "You can learn about any area of Facebook, even it's not immediately related to what you do." If you don't fully understand how Facebook's News Feed works, for instance, you can go watch an internal presentation. "If you're wondering what Zuck thinks about Occulus, ask him this Friday at the company Q&A." 

Spiegelberg says Facebook values building products that people love by moving fast and being bold. "As an engineer, this means that you're empowered to fix problems instead of resign yourself to them. Engineers are constantly trying to move faster and make a better experience."

Another important thing to know, especially if you're interested in working for Facebook: it's imperative that you study up before you apply for a job.

"Facebook attracts people that want to make an impact," he says. "Our interview process might be tough, but you know that your coworkers are individuals with the same perseverance that you demonstrate," he explains.

"One of my favorite quotes, echoed by multiple Facebook engineers, is an ancient Latin proverb: 'Fortune favors the bold.' Maybe you're a great fit for Facebook; maybe it's something else. You'll never know if you don't try," he says. "The act of being bold and putting your all into preparing for your dream job can only end well." 

To read another detailed overview of the mechanics of interviewing at Facebook, check out Carlos Bueno's post here.

SEE ALSO: Facebook Engineers Start Re-Writing The Site On Their First Day Of Work

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The good news is that divorce rates in America are going down. 

The bad news is that Americans tend to work insane, relationship-damaging hours. 

According to a Gallup poll released earlier this year, the average American worker logs 46.7 hours a week.

A full 39% of people report working over 50 hours a week, enough to qualify them as "workaholics" — who, by the way, have double the divorce rate of the rest of the population. 

Which presents the bind that hard-charging careerists are in: Is it possible to put in the hours to make it to the top professionally while also nurturing a mutually life-affirming relationship? 

Can we, in other words, have it all? 

Some people do. Consider the case of Jessica Jackley and Reza Aslan, parents of twin 3-year-old boys and a new baby due in January. You may recognize their names. Jackley cofounded the microfinance site Kiva and the crowdfunding platform Profounder and has her first book coming out next year. Aslan teaches religious studies at the University of Southern California and authored "Zealot," a book about the historical Jesus that set off a storm of internet outrage on its way to the bestseller list. 

They work a lot. Aslan works 70 hours a week; Jackley is working 30 to 40 hours a week less than a month away from giving birth. Yet for all their productivity, they spend lots of time together — thanks to how they've structured their professional lives. 

"Both of us have incredible flexibility," Jackley tells Business Insider. "We get to be together a lot, not just with each other, but with our kids. Even if we're tucked into the office for a quick call and someone falls and needs mama or dada, we're right there." 

This is made possible by a few things. First, they can afford to have help. Beatriz, a nanny, spends about 30 hours a week with the family, including travel. They also eat breakfast with the twins every day, providing family time first-thing in the morning. 

Jackley and Aslan both do lots of speaking and have the same speaking agency, so they book talks strategically. For example, last year they each had lectures in Las Vegas and Miami within 24 hours of each other, so they made the trips as a family.

The couple also has a shared calendar, and they're not afraid of moving one another's appointments. And, perhaps most importantly, the two of them escape for a retreat at the end of each year, where they can dream about their individual and shared goals. 

It seems as if the family is run like a startup, which the experts say may be the best way to approach a relationship. 

As we've noted before, businesses and marriages often fail for the same reasons: not learning from experience, not adapting to disruptive change, and not planning for the future. 

"Most couples stop thinking critically about their relationships after the honeymoon stage," couples therapist Peter Pearson tells Business Insider. "After they get married, they just assume that things will work out."

He sees it all the time in his practice at The Couples Institute in Menlo Park, California, the heart of Silicon Valley.

"But [getting married] is no different than two people beginning a startup company," he explains. "No two people would ever begin a startup company thinking, 'Well, now that we started it, we don't need to talk about it anymore.'"  

Quality communication is the core of any relationship. But it doesn't happen by accident; like a successful business, you need to have systems. 

Research shows that it's important to have a structure in place to deal with the menace of household chores. A UCLA study that tracked the lives of 32 dual-earning families from 2001 to 2004 found that "couples who don't have a system for household tasks can get really resentful, really quickly," according to the Atlantic. 

Similarly, Northwestern psychologist Lesley Seeger says that couples should take time every week — say, Sunday night — to make sure that their schedules are aligned. Seeger suggests asking questions like: What's on my spouse's schedule? What's on my schedule? What do we feel about our respective duties together? 

Just like an organization might have weekly meetings to get on the same page, couples need to give themselves the space and time to imagine their future. 

Jackley and Aslan's annual retreat is a great example of this in practice. Ever since they met five years ago, they've been taking this week-long vacation. The kids go to hang with the grandparents, and the two of them find a quiet corner of the world, either near their Los Angeles home or as far away as Argentina, to forecast the coming year. 

"It's not one [New Year's] resolution," Jackley explains. "We map out all the areas of our lives: individually, together, family, professional, everything, and talk about our hopes and dreams." 

They then pin those aspirations to the wall of their shared office to guide them throughout the next year.

Far from fanciful, plotting out your shared destinies is essential to nurturing a long-term relationship. And Pearson, the couples therapist, says "date night" can't possibly be enough. 

"You're going to need something more exciting to pull you through those low spots," says Pearson. He encourages couples to think about goals that "excite their imagination."

He and his wife, Ellyn, decided to start building schools in Africa. Other families take a road trip across America or backpack around the world. 

Pearson's advice: "Look for a joint endeavor." Then, you can have the adventure together. 

SEE ALSO: Marriages And Businesses Fail For The Same 3 Reasons, Says A Silicon Valley Couples Therapist

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If you were to send me an email right now, a number of things would happen. My wrist would vibrate. My pocket would vibrate, light up, and make a sound. A pop-up would appear in the corner of my laptop screen. A counter next to a small icon of an envelope would increase in my Google Chrome window. I'll twitch and squirm and swear in frustration but I need all these things to happen, I swear. Still, I probably won't answer your email.

Read more...

Frank Pokiak remembers long days on the land, camped at traditional hunting grounds under June’s 24-hour sun, secure in the knowledge that sea ice would provide a safe highway back to his Tuktoyaktuk home.

Those days are gone.

“We used to stay out quite a while, eh,” recalls Pokiak, a longtime Inuvialuit hunter. “We go hunting geese and ducks along the coast and after the snow melts on the ground we still have access via the ocean.

“We don’t really do that any more. You can’t stay out on the land as long. The ice is melting quicker.”

Last month, Arctic sea ice covered 630,000 square kilometres less ocean than the 30-year average. Sea ice extent is shrinking about five per cent a decade.

And the frozen ocean is not only smaller, it’s thinner. David Barber, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Arctic System Science at the University of Manitoba, says sea ice has lost, on average, about 40 per cent of its total volume.

“We discovered this rotten ice in the summer of 2009,” said Barber, who made the finding while on an icebreaker in the Beaufort Sea. “It was multi-year sea ice that had deteriorated so much that the meltponds had gone through and connected with the oceans.

“The ice had broken up into tiny pieces about the size of a Volkswagen and these bits and pieces had congealed with new ice that was forming, only a couple centimetres thick. The satellites thought they were looking at multi-year sea ice, but when we were driving a ship through it, it was this heavily rotted stuff that didn’t slow us down at all.”

What’s coming? Hard to say.

Sea ice has always been highly variable. Barber said that variability is growing and makes predictions difficult. Dates for an Arctic free of summer ice vary from 2020 to 2080 and scientists can’t really say how that’s going to play out in different regions.

“When you look at what’s happening over the whole Northern Hemisphere, the models are pretty good at that. What they’re not good at is the small-scale stuff, particularly storms and the role that storms play in how the ice behaves.

“Most of the contemporary research is looking at these small-scale phenomena to try and understand them so we can encapsulate the physics of them better in the models.”

But the effects are already distorting fragile Arctic food webs.

Almost all Arctic life, from birds to bowheads, begins with algae that starts blooming beneath the ice every March, said University of Manitoba biologist CJ Mundy.

“When you take an ice core, the bottom of the ice core is brown,” he said. “That’s all algae.”

The bloom is the first in a series of pulses that run from algae, to plankton, to tiny animals called copepods, to fish, to seals and on up.

“That bloom really kickstarts the whole system,” Mundy said.

Arctic plants and organisms have evolved to take advantage of resources exactly when they become available.

“It’s the timing,” said Mundy. “The whole idea behind the Arctic is that they have certain pulses of primary production and then organisms have to survive the rest of the season without having access to that food any more.

“If you melt the sea ice, you’re going to decrease the length of the ice algae bloom.”

Life will adapt, he said. It just won’t be the kind of unique and beautiful life evolved for the Arctic.

“If we start changing the timing, we’re going to allow the more southerly ecosystems to march northward. It might produce more energy, it might open new fisheries, but it would likely be a different ecosystem that is there right now.”

Weather systems may be changing, too — and not just in the North. Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University caused a stir last year with her paper suggesting that disappearing sea ice exerts an indirect but powerful influence on what kind of day southerners experience when they walk out the door.

“It’s really kind of set off a whole new line of research,” said Francis.

The average temperature difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes is shrinking because the North is warming faster than anywhere in the planet, partly because melting sea ice allows oceans to absorb more heat.

That difference is what drives the jet stream. The narrower the difference, the slower and more erratic it is.

Francis said the stream is about 14 per cent slower than it was in the ’90s. That allows the current to “wobble” north-south instead of flowing evenly east-west. That blocks weather patterns in place that would normally move along.

Scientists have suggested the phenomenon is at least partly behind events such as Alberta’s disastrous 2013 flooding and droughts in California. Not all agree. Francis said the skeptics just don’t think the effect is pronounced enough yet to be detectable.

“There’s been a lot of evidence supporting that it actually is occurring, but the atmosphere is so chaotic that it’s difficult to detect these signals with a lot of confidence,” she said. “The controversy isn’t from people saying, ‘No, this is wrong;’ it’s more they’re saying, ‘No, we can’t see it yet.’”

Much has been made of a potential economic boom from Arctic resources made accessible by opening seas. Not so fast, said Tom Paddon, CEO of Baffinland Iron Mines Corp. and chairman of the Arctic Economic Council, recently created by the group of eight nations that ring the North Pole.

“The changes in sea coverage affords some development advantages and some other disadvantages,” he said.

Cruise ship tourism has increased. And although exploratory fisheries have failed to find commercial resources and the government has since banned such attempts pending more research, studies have found more than 800 commercial fish species are moving poleward at up to 26 kilometres a year.

Two commercial transits of the Northwest Passage have already occurred and Paddon said the route is likely to be a handy way to get Arctic minerals to market. Scandinavia has a long history of northern industry and Russia is busy building Arctic ports.

“But this is not the resource development bonanza that to some degree it’s been portrayed,” he said. “The facts are much different.”

Canada has little to none of the infrastructure that makes development possible. New construction will have to confront issues such as melting permafrost, which destabilizes the ground that airports, mines and ports are built on.

There are major doubts around energy development — over the impact of activities such as seismic testing on marine animals and the ability of industry to clean up spills in ice-choked, stormy waters.

“The Arctic remains an expensive business that requires significant investment. It’s going to take time and it’s going to take the appropriate level of oversight,” said Paddon.

Meanwhile, vanishing sea ice is already changing the lives of those who live alongside it, said Chris Furgal of Trent University.

“The ice is not only forming later, it’s also taking longer to form,” he said. “The period during which you can get out onto the water freely in a boat, or the period during which you can get out with confidence on a stable ice pack, is changing.”

It’s the same in spring.

“It’s not as though, ‘Hey, we can get out in our boats earlier.’ It’s that we’ve got these mushy, bad ice conditions for a longer period of time earlier in the year.”

That’s already causing food security problems for some Labrador communities, said Furgal.

He’s hearing reports that communities are having to organize more rescues as travel becomes less predictable. It’s also causing financial woes, because bad ice forces longer trips and takes a higher toll on gear.

There are social losses, too.

“A lot of people still go out on to the ice during the winter for what we would think of in the south as a picnic. Along the Labrador coast, people talk about going out for a ‘boil-up.’”

People fish, drink tea and eat traditional foods. Grandparents tell stories. Families and communities bond. People break free from the confines of tiny Arctic hamlets into the vast wilderness that is their true home.

“A lot of people talked about the importance of that, of going out on the ice, as being really important from a social, cultural and mental perspective,” said Furgal.

Still, northerners learned long ago to roll with the punches, said Pokiak.

“We live with these changes. Inuvialuit people have been living with changes all their lives. People adapt.”

Less caribou around? Eat more moose. Can’t get to the goose-hunting ground? Fish the Mackenzie River instead.

One thing, however, is unlikely to change.

“I don’t think we’re going to disappear. We’ll always be here.”

The post Vanishing sea ice creates whole new Arctic for both people and places appeared first on Canadian Business.

When done well, inbound marketing can help you attract new customers – and keep them for a long, long time. Inbound marketing truly can deliver a terrific return on your investment.

But as with most things when you’re first starting out, mistakes will be made. And that’s a good thing (we learn from our mistakes).

Yet when time and money are involved, you understandably want to keep those mistakes at a minimum.

Read below for five common inbound marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Writing content about anything that pops into your head. This might be good. After all, you know your business and your perfect prospect better than anyone, right? Right? In fact, that’s key when it comes to inbound marketing: knowing your perfect prospect extremely well. That’s why it’s best to sit down and create a perfect prospect buyer persona (really, write it down) and the life cycle of your buyers. Doing so allows you to create content you know your perfect prospects/clients want.
2. Deciding that keywords don’t matter anymore. While Google’s search algorithms have put the kibosh on keyword stuffing, keywords still matter. You need to do some keyword research to determine what keywords your prospects are using when they search for your products/services.
3. Deciding that a blog takes too much time and too much effort. Blogging actually is the best type of inbound marketing strategy. A blog provides you great bang for your time and your money. Each time you add a new post to your website’s blog, the search engines index it. Which means that you have yet another chance to show up in search engine results. Google and other search engines love the new and as they see that you’re regularly adding new content to your site, they’ll crawl your site more frequently, just to see what new content they can rank.
4. Not having any call-to-actions on your blog posts. Your posts can help you generate leads. That’s why you need to add a banner to the top or bottom of each post with a call to action. Or you could provide links in your post to landing pages for specific services or products, even other posts on our blog.
5. Deciding that there’s too much to do, you can’t possibly do it all, so you decide to do nothing. Trust us on this: it’s really best to take inbound marketing step by step, and growing your efforts. There’s not need to feel you have to “do it all and all at once.” Instead, prioritize your efforts. We recommend that you start by blogging. Then focus on engaging with your followers on social media. Follow this by creating more great content for your website. Then start on e-mail marketing.