By Kim Rees, head of data experience design at Capital One

As a practitioner of data visualization and the design of data systems, I appreciate how the choices we make about data collection, curation, extraction, and transformation impact the outcomes of our analyses and algorithms. The way we choose to frame a question can sometimes yield vastly different results. With these considerations — and their far-reaching implications — in mind, it becomes of critical importance that they are factored into algorithmic development to help set the vision for, and more accurately inform, ultimate intended outcomes.

As we look at the future of AI, machine learning (AI/ML), and autonomous systems — and their increasingly outsized role across businesses, public agencies, educational institutions, and society broadly — we should be aware that models are trained on our past behaviors, not on our values or ideals. For instance, say an airline creates an algorithm to upgrade passengers trained on past upgrades given by gate agents. We could view those agents' choices as an expression of the company values. While the airline doesn't have an explicit value of a certain type of customer, perhaps gate agents' unconscious bias led to more affluent passengers getting this perk.

The “problem” with AI and machine learning.

The problem with AI/ML isn't that it "gets it wrong" or that it's built with malice, it's that the technology has gotten really good. Most of the negative headlines we read about algorithmic outcomes or bias are referring to the fact that the machine actually got really darn good at its job. The machine being a machine, this means that it excelled at executing a very narrowly defined set of tasks based on prior actions and decisions (for example, a more robust set of training data on a certain set of passengers may yield preferential treatment for that group on future algorithmic outputs). The hard part about what I think of as “responsible AI,” is that it forces us to take a hard look at ourselves and recognize that our data is not neutral, because we aren't neutral.

To me, this begs the question of whether we use the word "bias" too liberally. There are many ways algorithms can single out a particular group of people without having biased data. For instance, the mere quantity of data available for a specific person in any given use case may cause an algorithm to rank them higher than someone else. People with a more robust digital presence may enjoy favorable treatment simply because the machine knows more about them.

In order to ask the machine to make the right decision, we can't just give it our data and have it learn from our actions. Just as a mom, I can't let my kids learn from me in a vacuum. Because I'm not perfect, and I let my exasperation come out while driving in rush hour traffic. I need to course correct and tell them I made a poor choice and how it could have been handled better.

Humans are naturally flawed.

Presuming we won't suddenly start making flawless and fair human decisions, so the models can learn our values properly, we need to start by admitting that our past human decisions are flawed. From there, we can perhaps go back to clarify what our values look like when we make certain decisions and start embedding the appropriate levers in the models and algorithms to ensure that those values are reflected throughout the entire system, outputs included.

To help us uncover our flawed past and understand the possible long-term ramifications if proliferated through AI, we need a diverse approach. A diversity of perspectives, whether the perspective stems from socioeconomic, racial, gender, physical ability, professional discipline, or other, is essential to exploring the potential futures created by this technology. And to avoid the possible negative outcomes.

A humanity-centered approach.

It will take a decidedly human-centered approach — or even humanity-centered approach — to ensure confidence in our machine-generated decisions. I fear many of our technological advances will be wasted if we don’t look at human well-being first. If we take a humanity-centered approach, we can start with a crisp view of an ideal outcome and align our algorithms and models to serve that end state. If we simply start with the data at hand, we’ll merely promulgate and intensify the inequalities we already have.

Taking a “slow food” approach with AI, and being mindful of every ingredient, source, and construction, will serve us far better than the “move fast and break things” approach. As machines make more and more of the decisions in the world, we simply can’t accept ill-designed, myopic systems bred in a vacuum of values.

This post is sponsored by Capital One. | Content written and provided by Capital One.

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Managed IT service companies can find an audience on social media. It’s the focus of modern attention – for IT customers as much as for anyone else.

But the reality is that, as the market gets more and more saturated, reaching an audience in the midst of the noise gets harder. That’s especially true as social channels continue to monetize their businesses; on platforms like Facebook, normal organic posts are only reaching 10% of your entire follower base. That’s rough.

Why? It’s because social channels are cashing in on their audience – and that means they’re making you to pay to reach yours.

While that’s a bit of a downer (especially when reaching your entire audience on these channels used to be free), it’s still a huge opportunity, because the cost per impression on social channels is still markedly lower than it is on comparable digital mediums. And, as we’ve mentioned, social media is where people spend their time.

If you’re marketing your managed IT service firm, that means that you can benefit from using it well.

Let’s take a look at how.

Expanded Audience Network

When you think about paid social media advertising, you probably think about showing your ads exclusively on the social media channel of your choice. Running a LinkedIn campaign? You’d expect your ads to reach users when they’re on LinkedIn. Running a paid Facebook campaign? You’d expect your ads to reach users when they’re on Facebook.

Right?

Well – yes. But campaigns have expanded.

In fact, platforms have started to roll out expanded audience networks that allow for off-platform targeting. For example, LinkedIn’s expanded network promotes your sponsored content on a network of publishers beyond just the LinkedIn newsfeed. That means that your ads can show on LinkedIn partner sites, apps, and other digital channels based on where LinkedIn expects your audience to be. LinkedIn partners with these mobile applications and websites to reach more professionals and help your ad get more clicks and conversions.

The same’s true of other channels, too; for example, Facebook and Instagram have rolled out something similar.

The consequences of this are a mixed bag. On the positive side of the coin, you now have the chance to expand your reach even further than before, potentially generating more impressions and clicks. On the more negative side, using an expanded network gives you slightly less control over where users will be seeing your ads.

We tend to advise targeting as narrowly as possible, which sometimes means unchecking expanded network capabilities in order to serve ads to users on the platforms exclusively. But the right call will always be in support of your marketing goals, and the reality is that your managed IT service firm’s customers may be reached through the expanded network.

In support of the right goals, an expanded network can be a powerful tool.

Reach the Right Audience

We’ve already established that paid social advertising helps IT firms to boost reach both on and off of social channels, and that targeting is crucial. Now, let’s dive a little bit more into exactly what targeting can do for you.

Before we get started, let’s review a few key terms that’ll help you to determine how effectively your ads are showing.

• Frequency is the average number of times each person saw your advertisement. You want to keep this low so that people don’t get annoyed by your ad.
• Reach is the total number of people who have seen your ad, not including the number of times each person saw it after the first time.
• Impressions are reach (the number of people who saw it) times the frequency (amount of times each person saw it).

Quick note: the vernacular for these terms differs slightly across different channels, but each channel measures them in some variation. For example, LinkedIn measures impressions, but substitutes the term “unique impressions” for reach.

The goal in any campaign is to show your ads to exactly the type of people who will be most likely to engage with them. Each channel offers a myriad of tools to help you do this – and, honestly, each channel is worth a deep dive on its own terms.

For our purposes here, though, we’ll stick to overviews of how paid social media targeting works.

• LinkedIn: This channel is packed with job-relevant data: job title, company, company size, industry, seniority, group membership, and more.
• Facebook: This channel tends to have less job-related information, but more interest-related data. You’ll be able to target based on interests, behaviors, demographics, and more.
• Instagram: Instagram and Facebook ads are linked, so Instagram tends to offer the same targeting capabilities that Facebook does.
• Twitter: Twitter tends to have similar targeting capabilities to Facebook, often with a bit less control (but that’s okay because, as we all know, Facebook is the creepiest about data).

One more thing to mention in regard to targeting: all platforms allow you to target emails, or to create remarketing lists and target the people who visited your website. They also offer lookalike audiences, meaning you can create a list and then use it to target different people whose characteristics match your known list.

The goal in all of this is to drill down into exactly who will be interested in buying your services. So, if you’re selling managed IT services for 50+ workstations, you might choose to target individuals at businesses of a certain size. If you’re selling ransomware protection, you would probably choose to target people with an interest in cybersecurity.

Reaching the right people with the right message is how you win on any channel – and on social channels, you’ve got pinpoint control.

More Selling Power

Choosing to do paid social can give you more selling power than you’d gain from your average LinkedIn post. You can optimize your ads for specific objectives and customizable goals combined with a CTA that can draw in customers. The result is that paid social advertising for IT firms can help you sell your services, grow your follower base, increase brand recognition, or increase engagement on your page.

No matter what your goal is for your ad, paid social advertising can help you get there. Paid social ads give you all the keys to success, but you need to be able to put them to good use by developing social media skills of your own. Keep your descriptions short but highly-engaging and full of value. Read them from your customer’s point of view.

Are you giving them information that they’ll value?

Native Advertising

Have you ever seen a super obnoxious ad? Trust me – they exist. One thing that makes an ad bad: when it sticks out as different from its surroundings in a way that’s uncomfortably jarring or out of context. Paid social advertising for IT firms allows you to avoid this by capitalizing on a phenomenon known as native advertising. Essentially, it means that when you advertise on a social platform, your advertising is non-disruptive and, if you’ve done it right, not annoying.

Your advertisements need to add value, not take it away. Native advertising on social channels helps you to do that.

Instagram makes your ad blend in with the surrounding feed, identified only by a sponsored mark. You can take advantage of this by using highly captivating visuals in your ad that add value to your audience’s newsfeed.

When you work with paid social advertising, the last thing you want to do is take away from your audience’s enjoyment of the platform.

Make Paid Social Advertising Work For You

Paid social advertising can be a powerful tool for IT service providers. But it needs to be used properly and effectively. If you’re inexperienced when it comes to paid social advertising, it can often be hard to get the ROI that you need.

• The stock market is in the middle of a turbulent patch that's seen proven strategies stop working, while unloved trades have stepped up to take their place.
• Credit Suisse offers four portfolio tweaks investors can make to ensure they keep generating strong returns through next year.

The stock market has been flipped upside down.

Value stocks, which have suffered at the hands of their growth counterparts for the majority of the 10-year bull market, are suddenly the hot ticket for portfolio managers. Meanwhile, stocks that look desirable and safe because of their low volatility are headed for their best quarter in seven years relative to the broader market.

What's resulted is a landscape that looks increasingly foreign to equity investors who have become accustomed to certain circumstances — ones that rewarded growth stocks and the traders who indiscriminately piled into them.

While this has been a tough pill to swallow for some investors, there are still plentiful opportunities available to those willing to make the right adjustments. To that end, Credit Suisse has a handful of ideas how traders can navigate these choppy waters.

But before we get into those specific recommendations, it's important to recognize Credit Suisse's base case for stocks going forward. The firm thinks the market will continue to grind higher through 2019 for two mains reasons.

First, even though earnings and gross domestic product (GDP) expansion are both expected to slow, Credit Suisse says the reduced growth will be "more than sufficient to fuel a market advance." Second, the firm thinks moderate economic growth will take pressure off the Federal Reserve as it hikes rates, leading to a "soft landing" that won't rattle markets.

The chart below shows this second dynamic in action. After spending 2018 above its historical trend, Credit Suisse says GDP will normalize.

With all of that established, it's now time to reveal the four big portfolio adjustments being recommended by Credit Suisse, with full rationale included. All quotes attributable to the firm's chief US equity strategist, Jonathan Golub.

(1) Pile into healthcare — CS has adjusted its sector rating to overweight from marketweight

"This less cyclical sector should deliver strong relative performance in a decelerating economy."

(2) Increase holdings of consumer staples — CS has adjusted its rating to marketweight from underweight

"While less economically sensitive, this sector carries a below-market growth rate and a premium valuation."

(3) Reduce exposure to financials — CS has adjusted its rating to marketweight from overweight

"A decelerating, non-recessionary economy should support solid loan performance but weaker loan growth."

(4) Cut holdings of industrials and materials — CS has adjusted its rating to underweight from marketweight

"These sectors are the most cyclical of any, and should struggle in light of decelerating growth."

SEE ALSO: Bank of America's $2.8 trillion wealth management CIO reveals his biggest market fear, which he warns could trigger the next recession if left unchecked

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Trump once won a lawsuit against the NFL — but the result was an embarrassment

The centrepiece of Canada’s innovation strategy is the $950-million “supercluster” initiative. The goal, according to the federal government, is for companies of all sizes, academia and the non-profit sector to collaborate on new technologies, to spur economic growth and create jobs. As part of the Innovation Nation series, the Financial Post is taking an in-depth look at each of the five regional projects, and provide continuing coverage of their progress. You can find all of our coverage here.

CALGARY – It looks like beef. It tastes like beef. It even bleeds like beef, thanks to the beet juice extract.

If not for the distinctive aroma – fast-food chain A&W’s Beyond Meat burger gives off a scent more like a casserole than a burger patty – the plant-based protein puck would fool even the most red-blooded carnivores.

A&W Beyond Meat Burger

It’s a tasty concoction made from protein isolated from peas, rice and mung beans as well as canola and coconut oils. Importantly, it’s a product that plant-based protein companies across the Prairies, believe consumers around the world will buy in increasing quantities.

Entrepreneurs and the federal government don’t just want Canada’s three Prairie provinces to sell more proteins derived from plants — they want to see total world domination.

“That presents enormous potential for us,” said Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, whose ministry established the Proteins Industry Canada supercluster in Regina this year and is seeding it with $153 million.

To access the funding, companies would need to match the contributions from the federal government on new facilities, said Bains in an interview, adding that funding announcements are coming “in as little as a matter of weeks.”

James Szarko, the president and CEO of Calgary-based Botaneco, which is among a growing number of companies in the West expanding facilities and uses a proprietary method to extract valuable oils, proteins and fibres from canola, safflower, sunflower and hemp.

“We could truly dominate,” said Szarko, adding that there is an abundance of farm land in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as well as plentiful water and suitable crops.

Botaneco CEO James Szarko

But the industry has a classic Canadian problem. We are once again playing the role of drawers of water and hewers of wood, exporting raw produce to other countries who add value and ship it back to us at higher costs. The missing ingredient is innovative processing methods and facilities to turn the crops and seeds from the Prairies into value-added protein products like hemp-based protein powder or canola-based supplements that are set to grow at an impressive rate globally.

The protein supercluster aims to create 4,500 new jobs and contribute $4.5 billion to the country’s GDP in 10 years time.

The cluster’s interim board of directors includes executives from companies across the three provinces, including AGT Food and Ingredients Inc., Emerging Ag Inc., Enns Borthers Ltd., Ag-West Bio Inc. and others.

“It’s bigger than one company and bigger than one province,” Bains said.

While Ottawa has committed funding to five superclusters across the country focused on a range of sectors, Bains says the protein hub on the Prairies is kicking off with some existing momentum.

In Sept. 2017, France-based Roquette broke ground on a $400-million manufacturing facility in Portage la Prairie, Man., that will derive proteins from peas — evidence that investors see an opening in the domestic protein sector.

Even established players in the meat industry such as Maple Leaf Foods Inc. intend to participate in the supercluster and are building a presence in the space. Over the past two years the Mississauga, Ont.-based company purchased Washington-based Field Roast Grain Meat Co. for US$120 million, and US$140 million for Lightlife Foods Inc., which makes plant-based tempeh, hot dogs, breakfast foods and burgers.

“We feel that we’ve entered this space at a very good time. We’ll see how quickly it goes,” said Rory McAlpine, company senior vice-president, government and industry relations.

Other companies such as WA Grains and Pulse Solutions are building or expanding processing their existing facilities to capture growing opportunity in the market.

• Read our full Innovation Nation series
• Innovation declaration: Nine things Canada needs to win in the global ideas economy
• It will take much bigger thinking if Canada is to compete with giants in the ideas economy

“Unlike other superclusters, this one is not aspirational,” Canada West Foundation director, trade and investment policy Carlo Dade said. “Our goal is total world domination,” he said, noting that Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba could collectively corner the global market for plant-based protein.

However, Dade says it’s still unclear whether governments in Ottawa, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are willing to work together — which is necessary to support the nascent industry’s growth.

“I’m not as convinced on the political level,” Dade said. “It’s an indictment of government in general.”

The Saskatchewan agriculture ministry said it’s committed to “a collaborative effort” and is communicating regularly with Alberta and Manitoba on research.

“We need to share our intellectual and physical resources to be successful in this highly competitive global area,” the ministry said in a statement, adding the provinces could better co-operate on developing new technologies and market commercialization.

Similarly, the government of Alberta said it’s willing to share research.

“There’s always been collaboration on research and sharing technology,” Alberta Agriculture Minister Oneil Carlier said. “Alberta is well positioned to be able to supply some research know-how.”

The Manitoba government did not respond to a request for comment.

The cluster effect is already under way as the Prairies’ agriculture industry is tapping into at least 19 crops and research and development in the region — a nexus of universities, government incubators and the private sector.

Combined, the three provinces are already some of the world’s biggest producers of high-protein pulses like peas and lentils, in addition to being major exporters of wheat, canola, barley, beef and other agricultural products.

Saskatchewan, the largest agriculture and agri-foods exporting province, reported $13.6 billion in exports in those categories in 2017, slightly below $14.4 billion in exports a year earlier. Alberta broke its own record with $11 billion in agriculture exports last year, and Manitoba recorded $4.3 billion in ag-based exports, which was roughly flat from the year before.

Those figures could get a boost as global demand for plant-based proteins, valued at US$8 billion in 2017, is projected to grow at an annual rate of 5.9 per cent to US$14.8 billion by 2023, according to a study by the Canada West Foundation. The report found that plant-based proteins will make up a third of the global protein market by 2054.

The surge is largely a function of a growing global middle class driving demand for protein. Data shows 160 million people are expected to join the middle class every year for the next five years.

Still, there was some disappointment in the Prairies as the plant-based proteins supercluster beat out another ‘precision farming’ supercluster proposal, focused on cattle and livestock ranchers.

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association executive vice-president Dennis Laycraft said his group, which represents beef producers, was disappointed that their proposal — aimed at reducing water and chemical usage in meat products — didn’t receive funding, but was pleased for the plant-based proteins supercluster. “It was important that agriculture did achieve one of the clusters,” he said.

But Laycraft rejected the idea that meatless hamburgers were more sustainable than the meat version.

“There are a number of people trying to create the perception that livestock agriculture isn’t good for the environment,” Laycraft said. “Canada is one of the best environmental stories in the world when it comes to livestock production.”

But the budding plant-based industry faces rising competition from the United States and Europe.

CWF’s Dade says businesses in the United States have already established an advantage in the production of protein derived from soy beans, eliminating one potential strain of proteins for Canadian businesses to compete.

Europe, which has less farmland for crops than Canada, has already been investing in processing centres for other forms of plant-based protein, so Canadian companies need to play catch up.

Botaneco’s Szarko acknowledges the competition but notes that Canada has an advantage over its competitors thanks to the recently signed free trade deals with Europe, the United States and the Asia-Pacific countries through the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, which provides domestic agriculture producers low-cost access to a global consumer base.

“I do think Protein Industries (Supercluster) is an incredible catalyst,” Szarko said. “The timing couldn’t be sooner.”

• Email: gmorgan@nationalpost.com | Twitter: geoffreymorgan

Pettycon / Pixabay

Video marketing has become a major force within modern advertising campaigns, social communication, and brand outreach. Recent HubSpot research shows that a majority of consumers prefer videos from favored brands over other types of content, including email newsletters and blog articles.

What video marketers have in common with everyone else in advertising and communications is the need to collaborate effectively on projects. Happily, more tools exist to meet this need than ever before. Read on for a look at which collaboration tools are a great fit for video marketing.

Communicate

Many collaboration solutions place a heavy emphasis on communication capabilities designed to help teams organize how they divide up a project’s work, monitor progress, and seek, receive, and share feedback on the way to the finish line.

Communication tools streamline the process of sharing information with project collaborators, making it possible to stay on track and on the same page while sidestepping time-consuming in-person sessions and bottomless email chains.

One key resource here is video conferencing. HipChat, Skype, Slack, and Google Hangouts are popular platforms that will work well for video marketing teams who want to touch base without breaking stride.

Project managers who want to consolidate online discussions and keep them organized will want to explore collaboration platforms like Trello or Basecamp.

Screen sharing is another best practice for effective communication on video marketing and other detail-oriented content development teams. Camtasia goes beyond the screencasting capabilities of Skype or Google Hangouts to allow users to rapidly narrate and edit video. Web marketers even use the platform to generate original video content. And its annotation tools allow collaborators to draw attention to particular details in video content for which they want help or feedback.

Share & Organize Your Resources

Collaboration is a fancy word for teamwork, and teams can’t succeed or even get going without first pooling their resources. For teams developing video content, this means consolidating lots of data-rich materials across many file types, including images, animations, spreadsheets, schedules, and more.

File sharing and management tools allow teams to optimize their efforts by making needed resources available while documenting drafts and changes. Some platforms that provide great options for teams working on video content development include Nomadesk, Mediafire, Google Drive, Glasscubes, and the now-ubiquitous Dropbox.

According to users on TrustRadius, Dropbox is particularly useful for video marketers due to the large file sizes at stake in their development projects, and the speed and ease with which team members can share and edit them within the platform.

Stay on Track

Project management software are collaboration tools that support the planning, execution, and evaluation of team projects. They add lots of value to video marketing and other types of projects where shared work on large files is divided up into many stages among many collaborators to produce complex deliverables.

With project management solutions in hand, teams can delegate tasks to team members with appropriate skill sets, visibly track progress on a shared timeline, and facilitate real-time communication among team members and project managers about how everything is going.

The Take-Away

Video marketing can’t happen without effective video content development, and this usually calls for a lot of well-coordinated teamwork. Fortunately, there are plenty of collaboration tools designed to help teams plan and execute projects by communicating, organizing materials, delegating tasks, and supporting each other all the way from the drawing board to the finish line.

How would you feel if every person with whom you have a sales conversation was 80% ready to buy? Well guess what? I’m going to share a few of my secrets about your ideal customer that could actually make this happen.

It’s likely that you “know” who your ideal customer is, but I’ll bet you’ve left a few crucial characteristics out. There are some secrets to attracting the people who immediately perceive value in what you have to offer (and who are willing and able to pay for it).

Here are the 3 secrets about your ideal customer that you probably didn’t think about:

These are inherent truths that will make your marketing work so much better.

1. She doesn’t want to be sold. Your ideal customer wants to be allowed to buy. She wants to work with someone who really gets her. She wants to feel understood and not pushed into anything.

Here’s how to engage your ideal customer at a deep level:

• Know her 100% by creating a prototype, an exact replica of your ideal customer. Everything from where she shops to where she vacations, and even what car she drives.
• Give her little bites of your secret sauce in your blogs. Make her feel that if your free help is this great, your paid help must be incredible.
• Create numerous opportunities for her to engage with you long-term, so your brand promise is top of mind when she’s ready to buy.

2. She is desperate for help and is looking for you. Even if your ideal customer doesn’t know you exist yet, she is out there with a pressing problem that you have the solution to. We know your ideal customer turns to Google when she needs help and information.

• Get inside her head and make a list of every phrase she could be searching when she’s trying to solve a problem where you could be instrumental in providing a solution. Remember, the web is not the yellow pages; people mostly search for information, not businesses.
• Create informative, helpful blog posts that are optimized properly for Google. Google won’t display your blog if they don’t know what it’s about. So be clear and use keywords consistently.
• Use your blogs as a backdoor into your business. Give some help and an invitation to get more help through calls to action, such as freebie downloads, free consults, etc.

3. You must catch her attention and FAST. Our attention spans when we’re online are the size of a flea’s. When she first comes across your blog or website, your ideal customer will give you only five seconds to convince her she’s in the right place. And to make matters worse, more and more people are using the Internet on their phones more than ever before.

Here’s what you need to do to capture her attention quickly:

• Create a powerful brand promise and put it on every page of your website.
• Pay attention to the visitor’s experience on your site. If you were your ideal customer, would you call you?
• Be strong and courageous with your brand promise. Speak directly and clearly to your ideal customer about the benefits of your products and services. Don’t force her to think in order to know she’s in the right place.

Your ideal customer is out there and she’s looking for you now. She’s desperate for help and information. She doesn’t want to be sold. Keep these three secrets in mind when you’re composing blogs, email blasts and social media. Then see what happens.

I’m delighted to share some of my ideal customer secrets with you.

Thanks for reading!

Have you identified your ideal customer yet? Download my free workbook…it’s a great start to the process:

Illustration created with culture design firm @GapingVoid

We live in a time of digital Darwinism. As technology evolves so do markets. And as they evolve, behaviors, values and norms also adapt. This sets the stage for the widespread disruption that we are witnessing today. Regrettably, or not, many reigning executives are not experienced to lead growth and innovation strategies as disruptive technologies radically shift everything around them. Yet, no matter how well we study history, it’s always doomed to repeat itself. There’s something about being in charge and surrounding yourself with other executives, boards of directors or investors that project a fallacy of invincibility.

“I know the world is changing, but I don’t see it affecting me. I’m in control. Everything is fine.”

These are the words of someone destined to tempt fate and inevitably repeat history. As I often say, disruption is the result of an all too familiar recipe where ignorance and arrogance result in irrelevance.

Disruption and innovation are not new concepts.

In the 1930s, Joseph Schumpeter introduced “creative destruction” to describe the natural phenomenon of new ideas and models transplanting incumbents that didn’t disrupt themselves.  According to Schumpeter, the “gale of creative destruction” describes the “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

The very nature of organizational design is generations old and it’s not only showing its age, it’s past the age of retirement. Too many executives fancy themselves as leaders. It comes with any hierarchical structure I suppose. Executives have people who report to them and middle managers and managers, and so on, who report upwards. It’s easy to confuse a chain of command or pecking order with leadership since technically, someone is acting as captain, someone is steering the ship and others work to keep the ship running and on course. The only problem is that in a world where agility, creativity and invention are charting new courses, most incumbent ships are navigating against dated charts and operating through aging procedures with legacy experience.

More so, many decision makers today suffer from what I call “out of touchness.” How they see the world and function within it is no longer in sync with the evolution of markets and societies. Without listening, without learning, without recognizing the differences between what we know and what we need to know, out of touchness places organizations directly on a path toward disruption.

Digital Darwinism is pervasive and it’s only accelerating. Everything is changing. How customers shop, how employees work, how we communicate, what we value, our aspirations, etc. are not exempt. Operating against a playbook written for yesterday is no longer sufficient to flourish tomorrow.

To survive digital Darwinism, agility and innovation now rivals scale as the fuel for future success. A new playbook is needed. A new generation of leaders, not operators or managers, are needed. And, in an era where disruption is a constant, creativity, vision and bold moves form a new foundation that separates the extraordinary from the ordinary.

Leadership and change starts when you step outside of your comfort zone.

_____

Brian Solis

Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at Prophet, Brian is world renowned keynote speaker and 7x best-selling author. His latest book, X: Where Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design.

Please, invite him to speak at your event or bring him in to inspire colleagues and fellow executives/boards.

Connect with Brian!

Twitter: @briansolis
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The post The Frozen Middle Separates Management from Leadership (and Innovation) appeared first on Brian Solis.

Impressions count. This statement has never been truer than when you’re tasked with creating an engaging presentation for an audience of your team, peers or potential clients.

When it comes to presentations, there’s little margin for error. Your content needs to be appealing and attention grabbing from the off – failure to appropriately engage your audience can lead to an overall lack of receptiveness to the points you’re trying to make.

While delivery and quality of content make up two large factors in what keeps audiences engaged, the aesthetics of your slides also play a surprisingly large role. In fact, according to Forbes, 70% of American workers believe that giving captivating presentations is a crucial skill for work success.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to take a look at the six best template websites available today – just to give you that little extra boost in planning your next big presentation.

Envato Market

Formally Graphic River, Envato Market makes for an amazing user-sourced range of presentation templates.

The 8,000 templates listed for sale on the marketplace carry various price tags depending on how the designer values their content – but can cost as little as $4.

Most uploaded slides to Envato Market come with an extensive range of details regarding resolution, the number of editable icons and elements, and even support from the designer themselves if needed.

The website offers a subscription package that grants users access to masses of items and themes across the digital marketplace for a competitive $16.50 per month.

TemplateMonster

TemplateMonster is another premium site that specialises in not only PowerPoint presentations but just about any digital content that may need a template – from Shopify layouts to JavaScript editors.

With nearly 1,000 PowerPoint templates available, you’ll have plenty of choice when it comes to finding yourself a theme, and with an impressive collection of categories that range from ‘animals and pets’ to ‘real estate templates’, the chances are you’ll find a great fit for your needs.

Prices typically range from around $14 to $25 for templates, so you’re safe in the knowledge that you’re paying competitive rates for your content.

Powered Template

Powered Template is a stunning premium website that offers users the very best layouts and themes for PowerPoint, Word, Google Slides and print – meaning you can achieve beautiful consistency and coordination across multiple platforms.

At the time of writing there are over 15,000 PowerPoint templates available within, so you’re guaranteed to find what you’re looking for.

If you’re somebody who dabbles in the world of presentations frequently, Powered Template even offers a subscription package that gives users the freedom to download themes for free – with prices starting at $24.95.

Slide Model

With over 20,000 ready-made and fully editable templates, Slide Model has an impressive repertoire when it comes to templates.

Slide Model has a strong speciality in catering for more miscellaneous presentation purposes. The website has a section dedicated purely to embedded maps for just about any country you can think of. There’s also a competent text and tables section that’s designed to find users their ideal forms for showcasing data within their presentations.

Slide Model is a premium service with subscription prices starting at $24.90.

ALL PPT

Finally, we have another site that’s completely free for anybody in need of a presentation template.

The beauty of ALL PPT is that it doesn’t let its templates overawe your work. They typically take the form of simple designs and cover a diverse range of subjects with visual backgrounds and graphically appealing charts.

ALL PPT may not be blessed with the more comprehensive range of templates online, but certainly guarantees value for money – and could save the day if you’re desperate for a quick and easy layout for the last minute presentation.

Some leads are good even though some salespeople and their sales organization perceive them to be bad. Other leads are bad, even when some salespeople believe they are good and their sales organization paid money to acquire the lead.

The worst lead: The worst lead is one who does not buy what you sell and could never benefit from doing so. This is true even if the buyer title matches your ideal customer profile, and even if you paid to acquire the lead.

Compelled and engaged but should be disqualified: These leads feel like good leads. They are compelled to do something different, and they are engaged in the process. All of which points towards their being a good lead. However, if this leads should be disqualified, it is not a good lead. If you are a differentiated, value creating sales organization and happened upon a transactional, lowest-priced buyer, the lead is wrong for you.

The following is a list of good leads that are often mistaken for bad ones.

Not ready to buy: Just because a lead is not compelled to change and does not show up to your first meeting prepared to sign a contract, is not an indication that the lead is no good. If the lead buys what you sell or would benefit from doing so, the fact that you are required to initiate the process of change doesn’t mean the lead is not good.

Stalled at discovery: The fact that a lead stalls after a discovery meeting is not evidence that the lead was no good. It is greater evidence that you did not create enough value to command another meeting or lost control of the process.

Leads that don’t buy: A lead that doesn’t buy from you or doesn’t buy in the time you expected them to is not a bad lead. There is a greater possibility you mismanaged it. Even if the engagement ended in a “no decision,” the fact that they engaged in the process just that the lead was good.

It is easy to spend time with bad leads believing they are right when the better choice is to abandon them. The opposite is also true, meaning you can spend too little time with good leads because you perceive them to be bad. In these cases, you are better off asking yourself if another salesperson from another sales organization is going to sell that lead what you intended to sell them.

The fact that a lead is difficult to sell is no indication of the quality of that lead.

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The post Good Leads and Bad Leads appeared first on The Sales Blog.

• A hacker can do everything from hijacking a corporate email account to draining millions of dollars from an online bank account.
• Though many hackers may have malicious intent, some wear white hats and help companies find security holes and protect sensitive content.
• Below we explore some of many jobs a hacker can do for you.

Some parts of the web are the online equivalent of dark alleys where shady characters lurk in the shadows.

Afraid your girlfriend is cheating on you? There's a hacker on the dark web who can get you into her email and social media accounts; that is, if you don't mind sliding past legal or ethical boundaries.

These days you don't have to delve too deeply into the recesses of the dark web to find hackers — they're actually quite easy to find.

For instance, you can easily hire an ethical hacker on Fiverr for as little as $5. These so-called "white hats" help protect your website from malicious attacks by identifying security holes and plugging them.

Other hacking sites openly advertise services of questionable legality, offering illicit access to everything from Skype and Gmail to your college grades. InsideHackers' warns in its Terms of Service that hacking is a "dangerous industry" and "very, very risky business."

In a 2016 report, Dell's SecureWorks found that the underground marketplace is "booming" because hackers are "extending their hours, guaranteeing their work, and expanding their offerings" to lure in customers.

Whether you're in need of a hacker or just curious about the industry, here are seven hacks for sale right now and what they may cost, according to the SecureWorks report and other advertisements on the web.

Note: Prices are listed in US dollars, but some hackers prefer to be paid in Bitcoin.

SEE ALSO: 7 underrated European cities you need to visit

1. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack: $5 - $25 per hour

Kaspersky Labs reports that the average price for a DDoS attack is $25 per hour.

According to Kaspersky, you can pay just $5 for a five-minute attack and $400 to overwhelm a server, blocking legitimate users, for a whole day. The SecureWorks report quotes a slightly lower price of $5 an hour or $30 per day.

2. Online bank heist: $40 and up

According to the SecureWorks report, you'll pay a hacker 1% to 5% of the money you drain from an online bank account in return for their getting you into it.

To hack a US-based account and steal $1,000, for example, you would have to pay a hacker around $40, and accounts with smaller balances actually result in higher fees, according to the report.

3. Rewards points transfer: $10 to $450

To siphon loyalty program credits from someone's account, the price depends on the number of points in the account.

The SecureWorks report lists hacks for hotel rewards points starting at $10 for 50,000 points, up to $200 for 1,000,000 miles.

Frequent flyer miles on US airlines start at $60 for 200,000 miles. $450 will buy you 1,500,000 miles and, most likely, a trip around the world (perhaps to a country without an extradition treaty).

• Amazon announced AWS Ground Station, a new product that will let businesses rent access to data from satellites.
• The company plans to build 12 ground stations throughout the world, with two facilities operational on Tuesday.

LAS VEGAS — After expanding from retail sales to cloud computing, Amazon is now getting into satellites.

At the Amazon Web Services annual re:invent conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, the company unveiled plans to build a dozen satellite transmission facilities throughout the world. The so-called "ground stations" are essentially antenna-equipped facilities that can send and receive data from the thousands of satellites orbiting the earth. 

Amazon will let customers rent access to the satellite ground stations in the same manner that they lease access to its computer datacenters. Companies that have not traditionally had the financial resources to build and operate their own satellite transmission infrastructure will be able to get access to satellite services on-demand, Amazon said. 

That opens the door for a new variety of companies to do things like beam live concerts around the world or create services that leverage weather data and satellite-view photos of different regions. 

"You figure out which ground station you want to interact with. You schedule effectively where you want that satellite interacting with that ground station," said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.

Amazon will be working with defense and aeronautics company Lockheed Martin to integrate AWS's service with Lockheed Martin's new Verge antenna network. Amazon already launched today with two ground stations, and the rest will be in operation by mid-2019.

Station as a service

Dr. Walter Scott, CTO of space technology company Maxar Technologies, said that it plans to use AWS Ground Station to analyze satellite imagery to help address critical issues like fighting ground fires or rescuing people at sea.

"Building that global ground network requires resources," Scott said. "It requires land and hardware, and AWS Ground Station lets us expand that network. It lets us do that in an elastic fashion."

Read more: Amazon and Microsoft are fighting for a $10 billion Pentagon contract — and HQ2 in Virginia could be Jeff Bezos' boss move

Essentially, Amazon is building a network of 12 ground station antennas located all over the world, and AWS will give customers on-demand access to lease these stations and download satellite data on a pay-as-you-go basis. Customers can then download, process, store and analyze satellite data. Once they have the data, they can process it on AWS' services, such as for streaming, processing, analytics, and storage.

Previously, if organizations, especially governments, businesses and universities, wanted to use satellite data for things like weather forecasting, surface imaging, and communications, they needed the infrastructure to do that, making it an expensive endeavor.

Pricing for Amazon Ground Station will be per-minute of downlink time, with an option to pre-pay for blocks of minutes, the company said. Amazon did not provide any details on the cost of building the ground stations.

The announcement comes as Amazon is looking to increase its business in the government sector with its move of HQ2 near Washington, D.C. and its bidding for a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon.

"We have so many customers who are doing so much of this work. We thought maybe we can help here," Jassy said.

SEE ALSO: Trump just threatened to place tariffs on the iPhone and Apple stock is getting crushed

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Trump once won a lawsuit against the NFL — but the result was an embarrassment

Expansion-stage SaaS companies must make many critical decisions in order to survive and thrive. One of the biggest is choosing the right investor. The SaaS/investor relationship isn’t one to enter lightly. In some ways, it’s almost like a marriage—a long-term commitment to working together closely. And just like a marriage, you want to enter into an investor relationship only after you’ve done your due diligence. While gut instinct has its place in the startup world, when it comes to VC firms, you want to make absolutely sure that there’s a good fit and a shared philosophy.

My work helping high-growth, pre-IPO companies navigate their way through the process of scaling their businesses has given me real-world experience identifying and vetting VC partners. Though I touch on many aspects of the journey (from go-to-market strategies and product roadmaps to structural organization and leadership assessment), I maintain a heavy focus on helping startups develop strong partnerships with the right VC firms. Here are just a few high-level insights that I’ve collected over the years.

The VC Partnership—Not Just About the Money

One of the first things to know about VC firms is that the capital is the easy part. What you really want to know is how else a VC partner will provide support.

All across the venture capital landscape, you’ll hear carbon copy pitches that promise insider knowledge and access to a wealth of resources; but nine times out of ten the reality of what’s behind that promise is nothing more revolutionary than basic executive networking. And while executive networking, done right, is valuable, it doesn’t actually take work off your company’s plate.

When you’re a growing SaaS company, you need more than money from your VC partner. You need someone who will actually step up and deliver tangible support in areas like marketing, pricing, hiring, sales enablement, human resources, and so forth. You want a partner who has the ability to get some of these things handled so you can stay focused on product market fit, revenue growth and other mission-critical challenges.

Most of the companies looking to establish initial VC relationships don’t have in-house support teams with deep functional expertise across a wide range of disciplines, and they haven’t reached the size or scale to warrant hiring the operational resources needed to build out company infrastructure. This is why it’s critical to make sure you can get access to this kind of support through your VC partners. Very few VC firms offer this level of dedicated, hands-on support, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t insist on it.

Another non-financial asset that a strong VC partner should bring to the table is a comprehensive network of experts and consultants. You will undoubtedly run into numerous instances where you need the input of an expert on a particular topic, and you can waste a lot of time trying to find the right expert on customer success, lead gen, CRM, or whatever roadblock you’ve encountered. A VC partner with a strong extended network cannot only quickly put you in touch with an expert, they can vouch for the caliber and quality of that expert. This will save you all kinds of legwork, meaning it will save you time and money.

VC Partner Evaluation—5 Steps to Get it Right

Once you’ve identified a VC firm that brings all the right stuff to the table, it’s important to remember that relationships are built between individual people, not corporate entities. Before you say, “I do,” you want to get to know the specific person or team you’ll be working with on a regular basis.

I have five core practices for making sure you’ve covered all the evaluation bases:

Spend time. When you know exactly which partner you’ll be working with, take the time to really talk with them in depth so you can get a sense of their personal values and working style. By learning what makes them tick—both on a philosophical level and a personal level—you’ll get a much better sense of what it will be like to work with this person on day-to-day issues.

Do your research. In addition to talking with the potential partner directly, it’s equally important to do your research with other companies who have worked with the individual. Look at the investor’s past patterns and see what kind of story they tell. Does the strategy align with your own? Does the pattern indicate pursuit of super-fast growth at all costs for a quick exit, or a practice of giving companies the time to grow and mature? Either approach can be right depending on the situation; you just want to be sure there’s no disconnect with your own objectives.

Ask for references. You also want to go ahead and talk with a few of the CEOs who have taken investments from this firm and/or individual. Think about it like vetting a new C-level exec and do a thorough check as a matter of course.

Clarify roles. Just like in any business relationship, one of the keys to success with a VC partner is establishing an upfront understanding of who is responsible for what. When people overlook this step, they can find themselves in awkward situations when assumptions lead to mixed signals. Getting clear on roles will help you avoid any unnecessary friction that can hold up your growth plans.

Review specific scenarios. Finally, instead of relying on generalities, engage in a little role playing. Have a frank, in-person conversation with your potential partner about how they will help you solve certain challenges and conflicts. Do they see their role as giving advice, dictating strategy, bringing in reinforcements, some combination of all those options? Where do they think their jurisdiction starts and ends? It’s easy for people to explain in the abstract what they do and how they partner with a CEO, but when presented with a specific scenario, you’ll often uncover other answers or gain new insight into exactly how things might go down in a real-world situation. And, just to reiterate, have this conversation in person, not over the phone. You can hide a lot of nonverbal cues when you’re only communicating voice-to-voice. Sit down across from each other so you can take in the full reaction.

Simple But Powerful

While this advice might sound like common sense or standard due diligence, I promise you that it’s very powerful when put into action. There is no substitute for doing the actual work when it comes to assessing a potential partner. The key is not to give in to the common temptation to hear what you want to hear and see what you want to see. Don’t gloss over questions or discrepancies. Pay attention to any red flags that pop up. Listen to your instincts, but don’t skip any steps in the process. This isn’t a decision you can make lightly, and it’s not one you want to get wrong.

The post 5 Tips for Evaluating Your Best-fit VC Partner appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Categorize this post as “thinking out loud.”  I’m not sure what I think about this issue, so I’m using the post to help me think through it and to get your input and ideas.

We all know the story—buying has changed profoundly, complex buying is chaotic, we need to be customer focused/driven, we need to create value in every interaction…..

At the same time, customers have many more sources/channels for information to help in their buying decisions, AI/ML technologies will make many transactional sales roles less necessary (tough this isn’t new news).

And we have the convergence of information overwhelm, increased sources of distraction, accelerating change, and skyrocketing complexity–in our customers markets, in their own organizations, with competition/partners, and within our own organization.

In the face of all this, for the most part we are training our sales people in the same skills I learned many decades ago, and my predecessors learned decades before that.

To be fair, the training programs have advanced somewhat in their current implementation, though much of it seems cosmetic.  Many are leveraging technology for delivery or to provide implementation support tools, but when I speak with both vendors and customers, I find them describing the same skills I learned:  prospecting, qualifying, questioning/probing/listening, objection handling, closing, effective demos, competitive selling, territory management, account management, deal strategy development, pipeline management, understanding customer decision-making, understanding buying processes, financial selling, negotiating, developing relationships, trust based selling, and so forth.  Even concepts of insight based selling are repackaging of consultative, solution, customer focused selling programs of the 60s, 70s, 90s.  And, there’s always endless product training (actually most of sales training ends up not being selling skills, but instead product training.)

At the risk of repeating myself, these programs have been upgraded in how they are being presented.  Rather than heavily product selling focused, they leverage more customer focused language, but under the covers, they haven’t changed substantively.  Otherwise, why do customers constantly complain about being pitched, sales people not understanding their problems, and so forth.

At the same time, sales performance continues to stagnate or even decline.  The gap between what customers consider helpful and sales people’s ability to be helpful is increasing.

At the same time, sales execs and sales enablement execs are trying to fill the rapidly increasing gap between what customers want/need and sales’ ability/skills to execute.

Where possible, products/solutions are being repackaged to making buying/selling easier–in essence “transactionalizing” what had been a complex sale.  Rather than making an enterprise sale, we are making individual or departmental sales.  This has a number of advantages, skill levels don’t need to be as high, we can leverage role specialization more effectively (creating sales assembly lines with customer widgets passing through each station), and we can effectively leverage all the traditional selling skills.  Also, these are the easiest applications of AI/ML technologies.  The more “predictable” the process is, the more it can/will be managed by technology, bots, and automated agents.

Where this can be done, it should be–but the more it can be done, the more we and customers will leverage technologies to reduce/eliminate the need for sales people.  Stated differently, I’d hate to be a SDR (the way we currently define the role) in the 2020’s.  Even many AEs will be unnecessary in the transactional environment.

But there are limitations to this.  Many of the original SaaS companies have found they cannot effectively scale this approach  (costs, staffing, and other issues).  Many complex buying/selling processes simply cannot and should not be “transactionalized.”

As we look at the changes that are happening with our customers, their markets, their competition, their growth strategies, the internal complexities they have in getting things done/achieving their goals, and the challenges they face in buying.  The question arises, “Do traditional selling skills help us more effectively and impactfully engage our customers, helping them get things done?”

Of course, there are skills we call “selling skills,” that are critical to everyone in an organization.  The ability to listen, question, probe and communicate effectively is important to every professional, whether they sell, or whether they work on teams internally.  Internal teams don’t think in terms of “objection handling,” but they have skills at resolving differences of opinions, contention/conflict within their own organizations.  But one wonders, “do we need sales specific training,” or might we be more effective if sales people wen through the same skills training as the people they would be working with?

There are a lot of skills we don’t focus on in selling, but are critical to our customer success and our own internal success.  Critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, project management, curiosity, facilitation, business management/analysis, dealing with risk/uncertainty/ambiguity and so forth.

What if we started training our sales people in the same skills that are critical to our customers and within our own organizations?  Would they be able to engage the customer and our own people much more effectively, enabling both they and sales make more progress?

Maybe there’s a further step, why do we need to make these programs specific to selling?  What if we mixed different disciplines/functions/points of view in the same training programs.  Rather than a sales focused training workshop on problem solving, what if sales people train with finance, engineering, operations, and manufacturing people?

For example, one of the best training programs I’ve been through was a 6 week program on Commercial Banking at Wharton.  It wasn’t “How do you sell to commercial bankers,” rather it was on critical issues in commercial banking, all the participants except for 3 of us were commercial bankers.  In that workshop, I was learning with them, understanding their perspective, how they thought about things.  It paid huge dividends in my ability to have discussions with commercial bankers in how they could leverage the solutions I sold.

Increasingly, we both conduct and observe workshops that aren’t focused on sales people, but bring people from various disciplines together to learn.  How better to learn collaboration than to work with people you need to collaborate with, or curiosity by learning about different functions, or project management with people that will actually be on the projects we will be helping our customers manage?

Undoubtedly, there are training programs that need to be specific to sales people, just as there are for other functions.  But:

• Are the old time, traditional sales training programs even necessary given the challenges our buyers and we face today?
• Do we need to design those programs to be specific to sales, or could we get more value by conducting them for a multifunctional audience?

I could argue both ways–really I’m not sure, but leaning away from the traditional sales skills training.  What do you think?

In a previous blog post, I introduced an updated marketing operations (MO) maturity model defining the five stages of maturity: Unaware, Efficient, Effective, Customer-centric and NextGen.

The last two stages of maturity — Customer-centric and NextGen — are particularly important as marketing takes on the massive responsibility of helping the company pivot to a customer-centric strategy. B2B marketers are really struggling to operationalize customer-centricity.

In 2015 report, McKinsey found that while 44 percent of companies surveyed focused resources primarily on customer experience rather than products, only 13 percent feel they had effectively identified their customers’ decision journeys. Thus, they struggle to know where to focus marketing and have difficulty leading the change and improving business performance in terms of revenue and growth.

On the flip side, other B2B MO teams are ready for this challenge and thrive in this new environment. One indicator of early success is how the MO team is organized. An org chart truly paints a thousand words, as structure follows strategy. How the MO executive organizes resources to deliver the business goals is essential to success.

Last month, we looked at an early customer-centric MO team; this month, we’ll review a NextGen company.

Case study

When I evaluate a MO organization, I begin with their charter, their set of guiding principles or the reason they come to work every day. For the company in this example today, the MO charter and the company charter are well-aligned.

The company charter is to reimagine their industry through innovation. The MO charter is to enable customer-facing employees with the tools they need to be efficient and effective in their day-to-day jobs and to create the “golden thread” between all customer journey decision points and paths.

I am speaking in general terms about this company because, as you can see in the org chart below, there is no MO team. What makes this MO group a NextGen organization is that they have broken down traditional silos by creating a Business Enablement (BE) structure that includes sales ops, marketing ops, and customer success ops.

Additionally, this structure reports into the acting COO. This is a trend that I am seeing. Once sales ops and marketing ops begin to combine and even include other parts of the organization, reporting into the COO starts to make sense.

This org structure was driven by the desire of the CEO to create a single view of the customer and to fully pivot away from a product focus and to a customer focus. Let’s look at each aspect of the org chart.

Note the name of the team is not marketing operations; it is Business Enablement (BE). The purpose of the name is to denote more of an action orientation — toward enabling customer-facing employees with technology, process, and people. The role of the combined team is to create a horizontal view and align all functions for a cohesive customer experience.

The org chart can be viewed as a wheel with a center and a set of spokes. The Business Enablement team is the center spoke, and they work with all areas of the business to deliver the customer experience. A lot of crossover is managed by the BE team as it acts as the main communication vehicle around all things related to the customer journey.

Anything that might touch the customer — either a prospect moving to become a new customer or a current customer — is managed by the BE team. Approvals, help, optimizations, and communications around any customer touch points are driven by the BE group.

Leader of the BE team: Senior director of business enablement

The leader of the BE team is charged with creating an optimal customer experience through the application of technology, process, data, and oversight. In order to most effectively mine and share relevant and objective customer insights, the Analyst role reports directly to the Director.

The Analyst is responsible for reviewing, analyzing and creating actionable insights for sales, for customer success and for marketing. These customer insights are also shared with the executive team with the goal of improving decision-making. Having the Analyst role live outside the vertical functions ensures data analysis objectivity that leads to better decisions for the business.

The verticals

Reporting to the head of BE are three managers, one for each vertical: sales ops, customer success ops, and marketing ops. These managers support sales, customer success, and marketing. Each vertical manager has a similar set of responsibilities: technology, training, messaging and support.

For technology, each manager is responsible for all aspects of the technology required to support the vertical from sourcing, implementing, optimizing, supporting to vendor management. Individual verticals aren’t responsible for data analysis as that function resides in the Analyst role. Analysts are responsible for the state of the data.

Managers do not make technology decisions in a silo. As much as possible, every technology is evaluated for use across all verticals. If marketing ops needs a particular kind of technology, there are considerations to make in the process.

Here are the key questions to be answered:

• First, is there a similar technology in use in the other two verticals?
• Will this technology address pain points in the other two verticals?
• Can it be effectively integrated into the current stack managed by BE?
• Will it help improve the customer experience? Decision-making around the martech stack must support sales, marketing and customer success.

As an interesting aside, BE in this company does not manage the data map; it is managed by marketing. The BE team will step in occasionally to help optimize certain areas, however, the BE team (the Analyst) is responsible for data analysis.

In addition, a key role in the technology and support functions is a dedicated tech support person who provides day-to-day assistance. Half the battle with mastering any technology is getting people to use it; the other half of the battle is to get them to use it effectively.

Having a dedicated person who can express empathy with the users ensures systems are optimally used and ROI is gained. This is a unique role, and one that I have not seen in many companies. As the MO capability continues to grow across functions and the number of technologies continues to grow, having a dedicated training and support person is key. Of course, training is fundamental to this process.

The odd function for each vertical is messaging. While it may seem strange at first, it makes sense in a customer-centric organization. Together, the verticals and marketing work to ensure messaging and content are optimized for the customer experience across all functions. They also work to ensure consistent use of messaging and content. This way, no matter what part of the company a customer interacts with, consistency and thought is given to optimizing each touch point both for the customer and for the company.

Conclusion

I’ve had the opportunity to work with this company over the last 18 months. They began with a desire to focus more on the customer, so their first org chart was a combination of marketing ops and sales ops. This was a great first step, but to become a NextGen MO group, they had to take it a step further.

That step was adding customer support, setting up the BE team as the source of truth around the customer and adding the Analyst role as a direct report — not in a vertical, but to the head of the BE team. For many companies, breaking down traditional silos like this may be almost impossible. Yet, it guarantees a better customer experience and better business results. The B2B customer is looking for the B2C experience in all interactions with your company. Someone has to call the shots to create a cohesive experience. In this company, it’s the BE team.

FirmBee / Pixabay

Have you ever heard someone describe their relationship status with: “It’s complicated”? The same could be said about the relationship between marketing and sales. Ideally, the two teams work together toward shared success. However, when there’s a breakdown in communication, or one team doesn’t make their numbers, it gets infinitely more complicated. Sales blames marketing, and vice versa. This hurts your business.

The solution: a Marketing and Sales Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Let Donna and Greg explain a little:

You can get started on setting up your SLA by downloading our SLA Template. Then, meet with your sales and marketing teams and follow the 5 steps below to get the SLA filled out.

Step 1: Identify and Document your Sales/Marketing Goals.

The path to harmony begins by having both teams working towards the same goals. Make sure the goals are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.

You’ll see on our SLA template that we suggest these 4 metrics for setting your goals:

• The number of visits to the website
• The number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• The number of Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) conversions/submissions on your website
• The number of Sales Qualifies Leads (SQLs)

Step 2: Document a Clearly-Defined MQL Based on Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Both teams need to agree on your Ideal Customer Profile. Understanding your ICP will help you qualify leads.

Some possible criteria your sales and marketing teams can use to identify your ICP is:

• Industry or industries you want to target
• Company size
• Company revenue
• Geography
• Lifecycle stage

Do you need a bit more guidance on building your ICP? We have a template for that too.

Step 2 (But Deeper): Build Your Lead Scoring Criteria.

Now your sales and marketing teams need to work together to build lead scoring criteria.

Use our SLA template and HubSpot’s awesome guide to basic lead scoring to set the rules. Lead scoring is useful when a prospect becomes an MQL and helps you determine that they are ready to be handed over to the sales team for followup.

Step 3: Establish the MQL Goal For the Quarter.

This one goes back to step 1 – determine the number that will help keep your marketing team accountable. Establish a SMART goal that your marketing team can use to build an effective inbound marketing strategy.

This goal should keep the following in mind:

• Sales revenue goals
• Marketing budget
• Past marketing numbers
• Size of the sales team
• Size of the marketing team

Step 4: Establish the Lead Hand-Off Process.

Your sales and marketing teams need to decide how the hand-off will work and BE SPECIFIC. You need to set up an automated workflow in your CRM. We use HubSpot for this.

For example:

When a contact has reached a lead score of X, an email will be sent to the sales team with a task automatically assigned to them to accept the MQL as an SQL or disqualify it.

Step 5: Establish the Sales Engagement Flow and Agreement

This will provide the guidelines that’ll help keep your sales team accountable. Establish reasonable guidelines for your sales team to follow when they are assigned new MQLs.

For example:

• Sales will contact the MQL within 24 hours by phone/email

Once you finish these steps, print it and share it with your sales and marketing team.

But Wait – There’s More

Measure MQL to SQL performance

Make sure your teams are tracking their performance throughout the quarter and following through on their service law agreement. Measure metrics such as:

• How many MQLs converted to SQLs?
• How many MQLs became sales?
• Which campaigns or offers drove the most leads to customers?

Ultimately the goal is to get your sales team and marketing team to stop pointing the finger and start working together. Call it a Snack Level Agreement if you want – anything to get your marketing and sales teams into a room together and on the same page, just make sure you actually have snacks.

We only have 5 weeks left in the year! This means the door is closing on what you will be able to accomplish.  Are you pleased with where you are, or are you coming up short, like the majority of salespeople?   Your results are your responsibility.

If you want to hang your failures on other things or other people, you will never be more than a mediocre salesperson.   If being mediocre is your goal, go ahead and stop reading – go out and just be mediocre.

Next year can and will be your best year if you are willing to let go of the habits that are holding you back, embrace change, and get into action.   Four things you need to do immediately are:

• Assess how you spend your day. Be harsh on yourself. Figure out what you do that’s nothing more than “stuff” and what you do that is truly revenue producing.
• Measure the amount of time you spend each week “customer facing.” I am referring to real interaction with customers or prospects. You’ll be surprised how little time is actually spent customer facing. It’s probably not anywhere near where it should be if you’re a salesperson.
• Who are you accountable to? Who is holding you responsible and is willing to sit down and have that hard talk you need to stay focused?  This person should not be your boss, because your boss is focused on what they need to achieve. He/she will never be the best person to guide you long term.
• What is your process for measuring your performance each day and each week? Top performing salespeople are continually measuring their performance. And they don’t measure it against activities completed, they measure it against progress towards their goals.

December is a rough month for too many salespeople because they have to live with what they didn’t do in the previous 11 months.   I’m going to be totally blunt with what I share next, but hear me out: You must own your results. Nobody will own them for you.

This is why I’m doing a very special master class to set better goals for 2019 and actually achieve them.   It’s called a Master Class because the subject is that important and the people who signup are focused on upping their game.

You’re one of those people, right? I know you have the potential to go far beyond what you’ve done before.  Here’s the link.  I’m looking forward to helping you make next year absolutely awesome.

And don’t forget that a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

geralt / Pixabay

The end of the year is time for introspection and planning. What kind of clients should you focus on in 2019? And how can you find the right opportunities? Read on to find out.

It’s that time of the year again when you dust off the client roster and take stock of your relationships.

Did you deliver on promises made through the year? Did you meet your year-end targets? Or did you miss a few tricks in the afterglow of a long summer?

While you’re busy reviewing relationships, your clients, too, are analyzing their arrangements. They’re revisiting old partnerships, plotting their performance, and charting course for the year ahead.

This makes it the perfect time to map your game plan for the next year. Clients who are unhappy about their existing arrangements will be looking for new partners. And your agency would have fresh resources to commit to new relationships in the coming year.

So what kind of clients should you pursue in 2019? And what should be your game plan to approach them?

I’ll answer these questions and help you plot a path for success in 2019 and beyond.

The 7 Kind of Clients to Target

In an earlier article, we talked about the importance of developing an opportunity timeline. To summarize, your sales efforts should be proactive, not reactive. Instead of jumping from lead to lead, have separate plans for short and long-term opportunities.

This piece of advice is particularly important when you’re planning your new business approach for 2019. Some of your clients will require a high-touch sales approach. Others will need targeted, timely solutions.

Having separate short and long-term pipelines means you can accommodate all these opportunities.

With that out of the way, let’s look at some of the leads you should pursue in 2019:

1. Businesses you’re already connected with

The best kind of leads are the ones that already know you.

You can separate these into four categories:

1. Past clients: At the very top of this hierarchy are clients you’ve worked with in the past. Maybe the relationship didn’t pan out earlier or maybe you separated amicably. In either case, the end of the year is a good time to revisit old clients and see if you can win them back.
2. Cold leads: Next are all once warm leads that have now gone cold. You might not have been able to make that sale six months ago, but the new year is a new time. Reach out to them again and maybe you’ll snag the deal this around.
3. Subscribers and followers: The third kind of leads are people who are already on your email list in some way. Maybe they’re blog subscribers. Or maybe they’ve given up for their emails in exchange for some content. Regardless, these are people who know your brand. Reach out to them and check if they have some need.
4. Website visitors: The last on this list are people that are dropping by your site. Thanks to business intelligence tools, you can get actual names of companies individual visitors are associated with. Since these people have already browsed through your site, they might be interested in doing business with you as well.

Approach these businesses with a focus on solving their needs for the next year. Ask them about their growth targets for 2019 and how they plan to go about accomplishing them.

If any of these pre-warmed leads aren’t happy with their current agency partners, you might just get a toe through the door.

How to spot these opportunities

Except for the last bit (website visitors), spotting these opportunities is easy – they live right in your inbox.

Make a list of:

• Clients you’ve worked with in the past.
• Leads you’ve pursued in the past, segregated by how far you reached in the sales cycle
• Leads you’ve exchanged emails with
• Qualified companies in your list of email subscribers
• Unqualified companies in your list of subscribers

Reach out to them in this order.

For extracting company information from website visitors, use tools like LeadFeeder. This will show you which companies visited your site and what pages they browsed through.

If you see a business spending a lot of time on sales-focused pages such as case studies or pricing, it might be a good idea to send them an email.

2. Businesses that are under-performing

Do you know a business that can’t get people to share its content or rank in the SERPs no matter how hard it tries?

If yes, this business might be ripe for a new agency partnership.

Poor results, especially in a highly visible area (such as a poorly performing website, limited search visibility, etc.), can indicate that the business’ agency partner is under-performing.

When this business reviews its contracts at the end of the year, it might be willing to listen to overtures from competing agencies.

The key to targeting these clients is to focus on quick fixes that can deliver immediate returns. Remember that marketers are increasingly responsible for P&L. At the end of the year, they’re often desperate for anything that will bump the bottom line.

Marketers are increasingly responsible for revenue growth and P&L, which puts greater pressure on them to show results (Image source: MarketingCharts)

An agency that can promise them a quick increase in their KPIs can at least get a meeting.

How to find these opportunities

Since your goal is to offer quick fixes, start by targeting industries where you already have substantial experience in.

Next, look up companies similar to your existing clients in these industries. Try to spot under-performing businesses, especially in your area of expertise.

An SEO agency with successful SaaS clients, for instance, can look for similar SaaS businesses with poor search engine visibility. A social media agency can look for businesses with poor engagement on their social profiles, etc.

Once you find a few such businesses, reach out to them.

Make sure to:

• Offer quick results, since you’re targeting clients that want a year-end bump
• Use existing case studies from the industries to prove your capabilities

3. Businesses that are launching new products or services

A business with a new product in the market would also have a budget to support its marketing.

For agencies, this is a golden opportunity to get a meeting, especially if the product is in an area you have prior experience in.

The problem, however, is that product launch roadmaps are planned years in advance. The business might have an agency partner in place months before they even have a working prototype. To get a look in, you have to be involved during the early stages of the development cycle.

The exception to this rule is when a business launches a new product on a hyper-accelerated plan. If there is competitive pressure or an urgent market need, the business might rush through the development process.

In such situations, an agency with prior go-to-market expertise can often get a look in before existing agency partners.

How to spot these opportunities

Like under-performing businesses, spotting businesses on an accelerated launch path can be difficult. You have to understand your target industry thoroughly. It’s also helpful to have prior experience in product launches to win over clients.

Here are a few tips that will help you find these target clients:

• Analyze industry players: Make a list of major players in your target industry and their offerings. Is there a business that’s clearly behind others in terms of product selection? Have there been murmurs from the leadership about launching new products?
• Review user forums: Head over to industry forums and social media. Look for complaints from the business’ existing customers about product selection. If a lot of people are demanding it, there is a good chance the business would plan a launch.
• Understand launch cycles: Companies usually plan their launches to coincide with peak market demand. For instance, a sports company would launch its new products in summer. Development of these products might start the year before. Study development timelines in your industry to estimate when a business might launch a new offering.

4. Businesses looking to adopt new technologies or trends

Do you know a business that’s publicly made a commitment to a new technology? Or perhaps everyone in the industry is jumping onto the new technology, leaving your target business behind?

Businesses in this situation should be your prime targets, especially if you have expertise in their target technology. If they’ve already made a commitment to their customers, they’re also likely on the lookout for partners to help them execute.

A well-timed offer can help you close some very lucrative deals this way.

How to spot these opportunities

For a business to adopt new a technology, there has to be sustained pressure – either from the market or internal stakeholders.

While you can’t really get an inside view of what the stakeholders are thinking, you can study the industry and spot trends.

For instance, if 50% of the big players in an industry have adopted AI/ML, the remaining few would likely follow suit too. If nothing else, the pressure to keep up with the Joneses Inc. would force them on an accelerated adoption path.

Another sign of new tech adoption is a small, technologically advanced player eating up a slower competitor’s market share. If you know a business that’s hemorrhaging customers this way, sweep in with a pitch. They’re likely looking for some ideas.

In certain cases (such as web design), tools like BuiltWith can also help you spot outdated technologies. If you see a business with poor performance and outdated tech, swing in with a pitch.

BuiltWith shows you what technologies and tools a website uses – a useful way to find outdated tech practices

Thus, to spot these opportunities, look for:

• Businesses being disrupted by smaller technologically advanced rivals
• Businesses that have been slow to adopt popular tech trends

5. Businesses undergoing a merger or acquisition

There are two crucial pre-conditions for agency new business opportunities:

1. An available budget
2. A compliant decision maker

A business acquiring, or being acquired by another offers both these conditions. When a business sells/buys another, it usually means that they’re going to be cleaning house. Old vendor relationships will be scrutinized and there might be personnel changes.

But that’s not all. Companies that recently acquired/were acquired often feel the need to make a bold move to inspire the troops and keep up morale. New products, hires, and vendor relationships are the usual go-to solutions.

In such cases, a well-timed pitch can get you in.

There are three things to think about when pursuing such clients:

• Practice discretion: Businesses like to keep M&A news on the hush, lest it spook the market or impact morale. If you’re going to chase such deals, make sure that you promise (and practice) absolute discretion.
• Win with big ideas: A merger/acquisition is not the time for small thinking. If you’re going to win them over, offer big, impactful ideas – something the press can tout as a “new CEO” move.
• Focus on costs: Resources are stretched and expenses are scrutinized heavily following an acquisition (especially at the company being acquired). By focusing your solutions on cost savings, you can give stakeholders exactly what they want: lower expenses.

How to spot these opportunities

Spotting M&A rumors before they hit the press is hard. Your best bet is to monitor industry-focused blogs and websites like Crunchbase that track acquisitions.

Another great site is Reuters’ mergers and acquisitions news feed. However, it can get overwhelming quickly since it tracks deals across industries and geographies.

For more insight on individual deals, check out Pitchbook’s M&A database

Once you do find an opportunity, act quickly. Pitch attention-grabbing ideas that solve a key issue in the merger/acquisition. Say, if the business was sold because it had poor media visibility, pitch a PR campaign.

6. Businesses that received new funding

As far as agency new business goes, change is good news.

And there are few changes better than a new round of funding.

Businesses don’t raise money to keep doing things the same way. They raise it to implement new projects and pursue new opportunities.

Recently funded businesses are typically in hyper-growth phase. While they might already have agency partners, not all of them will be experienced in accelerating growth.

Make such businesses your top targets; they’ve got the money and the need to do something substantial with it.

Keep two things in mind while approaching such businesses:

• Focus on big ideas: A business that’s raised substantial funding wants accelerated growth, not to plod along at 10% YoY. Pitch “moonshot” ideas that can get them that vaunted “hockey stick” growth curve.
• Focus on ignored areas: Businesses often ignore growth areas that require substantial, long-term investment (such as SEO). With a new round of funding, however, they might have the money and more crucially, the time to pursue such opportunities.

The last thing you want is to offer middle-of-the-road solutions to a company looking for accelerated growth. Either pitch big ideas or offer to take care of parts of their business they’ve long ignored.

How to spot these opportunities

Plant yourself in front of Crunchbase to catch any major funding news across geographies and industries. Last week, for instance, Crunchbase tracked 359 funding rounds:

Crunchbase doesn’t track every deal, of course. You’ll also want to keep an eye on industry blogs or region-specific news outlets.

7. Businesses that have new decision makers

A change in key personnel is always a good time to pursue new leads. After all, the first order of business for many executives is to review existing partnerships and make a few moves to improve morale.

But a shift in management around the end of the year is particularly good for you. Executives coming in around this time need a big win to end the year on a high. If you can deliver that, you can find a seat alongside other agencies.

Don’t get too greedy pursuing these leads. The business likely already has plenty of other agency partners. Don’t try to supplant them. Instead, complement their competencies, but offer something they can’t accomplish.

Focus on quick wins – anything that makes the new decision maker look good. Your goal should be to leverage these small wins into a juicier contract the next year.

How to spot these opportunities

The best way to spot these opportunities is a strong LinkedIn network.

LinkedIn sends you alerts if any of your connections have started new jobs recently. Keep an eye on these alerts and make a mental note of people who’ve moved to new companies.

LinkedIn new job notifications are a good way to spot opportunities within your network.

If they’re in a leadership role, congratulate them on the move. Then gently ask what challenges they’re facing and if there is anything you can do to help them.

Another tactic is to look at industry blogs. Key personnel changes are often covered in niche blogs. AdAge, for instance, keeps tabs on key hires and departures in the advertising industry.

When you spot these opportunities, focus on helping, not selling. Any new exec has a lot of responsibilities; the last thing he wants to hear is a cold pitch.

Over to You

The end of the year is a great time to pull in new business. Clients review their performance, take stock of budgets, and create plans for the coming year. Targeting the right opportunities and sending the right pitch can help you get a look in.

These 7 client-types I shared above should be your top priorities for the coming few months. Businesses that are changing key personnel, developing new products, or implementing new technologies often need fresh ideas.

If your agency can offer a new perspective, you’ll at least get a meeting, if not a deal.

What if I told you that you should not trust 60% of the doctors practicing medicine? This sounds pretty terrifying, right?

SiriusDecisions reports that nearly 60% of marketers consider the overall health of their data unreliable. Also terrifying.

Clean, accurate and up-to-date data is the lifeblood of every high-performing sales and marketing program. It lets you deliver personal, relevant and timely messages to key accounts. Your Marketing and Sales teams are aligned. You know which accounts to go after in the first place.

The impact of bad data on your business is profound.

• $14.2M – Estimated amount poor data quality is costing organizations per year
• 60% – The number of companies that have an overall data health scale of “unreliable”
• +50 – More than half of all records found in the average B2B contact database are misaligned

But here’s the truth: your data is never going to be perfect. And it should not (and must not) get in the way of executing your marketing programs.

So, what can you do about it?

Sandra Freeman, Head of Strategic Marketing at Engagio, recently shared with me how she is able to execute our ABM programs despite data degradation and discrepancies.

Her #1 piece of advice is “first, focus on data hygiene for your key accounts and top marketing programs to give Sales visibility and confidence in the data shown. Then, implement an ongoing data strategy.”

Starting Small for Quick ABM Wins

Just as your accounts are not all created equal, your data is not all created equal. Start small with your most important data. Here are three things that Sandra recommends starting with.

Execute a Data Clean Up Blitz on Accounts and Contacts

Don’t boil the ocean. Start with cleaning up your top target accounts and contacts. Technology is going to be your best friend here. Lead-to-Account matching (L2A) is an essential first step.

Lead-to-account matching will map your leads and contacts to their respective accounts in your CRM. By using sophisticated L2A technology, you can match on email, company name, and custom fields using fuzzy logic. Smart tiebreakers handle duplicate accounts. Then, you can route leads accurately based on account status. Finally, you can augment lead records with accurate account data (industry, employees, etc.).

Ensure Proper Setup of Your Salesforce Campaigns

Focus on your top priority campaigns to ensure your Account Executives have visibility into engagement in the accounts that will have the most significant impact. For example, start with field events, direct mail, webinars, content syndication, online ads, etc. Quickly deliver visibility into activity on these top campaigns, then clean up the rest over time.

Consider a Select Roll-Out of Engagement Data

Having good engagement data is key in ABM. One of our favorite tools is Engagio’s engagement trend chart.

However, too much data can slow you down. Consider limiting the rollout of important data, such as Engagement Trend charts, so that only the reps that have had the initial data clean up blitz on their accounts can see the trend charts first. Then roll out Salesforce View changes to more reps as the data is cleansed. You can set Salesforce profile permissions to only show Engagio to certain people (for example, your AEs in the ABM Pilot).

With the right people in place on your team, you should be able to accomplish these three things relatively quickly.

With that said, you still must put an ongoing strategy in place.

Your Ongoing Data Strategy

To set you up for long-term success, there are a few key pieces that you’ll need to make part of your strategy.

Run a Data Health Check to Analyze the Status if Your Current Data

To get a handle on the state of your data, a Data Health Check is a good first step. This free report can provide insight into the accuracy and completeness of your contact data and generate a Data Quality Score, enabling marketers to understand where information gaps and trouble spots exist. The Data Quality Score results will be illustrated with an odometer-style rating system along with a report on actions you can take for data cleanliness.

Design a Contact Acquisition Strategy
Keeping a healthy ABM operation means providing a steady source of new contacts for each account across all account tiers. Fill these accounts and buying centers with up-to-date specific contacts based on your ideal buyer profiles. This is the fastest way to grow your account-based strategy.

There are a few options out there. Many of the top organizations use a combination of the following options:

• Manual Lead Generation: This skill is one that all SDRs should learn to develop. Reps can manually find contacts by looking through social networks, a company’s website, meetups or conferences, and blogs, forums or discussions boards to name a few.
• Technology Plays: There are plenty of data firms that have developed their own methodologies for aggregating contact data. It’s a crowded space, to make sure you vet vendors properly before signing a contract.
• Outsource: This is a great way to get quality leads at a fraction of the price. It involves working with freelancers (generally overseas) – which can take some resources to build and manage – but the results are worth the cost when you’re up and running.

For a more detailed description of how you can leverage these options for data acquisition, check out this blog post.

Implement a Continual Data Quality and Discovery Strategy
Quarterly cleanses are a great way to stay on top of data quality. This is a job for your ops team. However, if you’re short on time and/or resources, consider discussing methods of sourcing net new contacts or lock-in an audience definition with Oceanos and source “net-new” contacts monthly or quarterly.

– – –

Since you have a lot riding on your high-profile accounts, the last thing you need is inaccurate, incomplete, or missing data holding you back, or worse, causing you to commit egregious errors.

But don’t let this get in the way of being able to execute on your ABM initiatives now. Start small and clean the data of our top accounts, then implement an ongoing strategy data strategy.

We’re used to thinking of high-tech innovation and startups as generated and clustered predominantly in fertile U.S. ecosystems, such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York. But as with so many aspects of American economic ingenuity, high-tech startups have now truly gone global. The past decade or so has seen the dramatic growth of startup ecosystems around the world, from Shanghai and Beijing, to Mumbai and Bangalore, to London, Berlin, Stockholm, Toronto and Tel Aviv. A number of U.S. cities continue to dominate the global landscape, including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, but the rest of the world is gaining ground rapidly.

That was the main takeaway from our recent report, Rise of the Global Startup City, which documents the global state of startups and venture capital. When we analyzed more than 100,000 venture deals across 300-plus global metro areas spanning 60 countries and covering the years 2005 to 2017, we discovered four transformative shifts in startups and venture capital: a Great Expansion (a large increase in the volume of venture deals and capital invested), Globalization (growth in startups and venture capital across the world, especially outside the U.S.), Urbanization (the concentration of startups and venture capital investment in cities — predominantly large, globally connected ones), and a Winner-Take-All Pattern (with the leading cities pulling away from the rest).

These major transformations pose significant implications for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, workers, and managers, as well as policymakers for nations and cities across the globe. 

The Great Expansion

The first shift is the Great Expansion, as the past decade has witnessed a massive increase in venture capital deployed globally.

The annual number of venture capital deals expanded from 8,500 in 2010 to 14,800 in 2017, for an increase of 73% in just seven years. The amount of capital invested in those deals surged from $52 billion in 2010 to $171 billion in 2017 — a gain of 231%. These figures represent historical records aside from the peak of the dotcom boom in 2000 (and may even exceed it). By all accounts, 2018 will be even bigger.

Globalization

The second shift is the accelerating Globalization of venture deals. For decades, the United States held a near monopoly on venture capital, where as late as the mid-1990s, the U.S. captured more than 95% of all venture capital investments globally.

That share has declined since then — gradually for the first two decades (falling to about three-quarters of the global total by 2012), and rapidly in the last five years (dropping to a little more than half by 2017).

Urbanization

The third shift is the Great Urbanization of startup activity and venture capital activity in the largest global cities in the world. For decades, startups and venture capital activity was located in the quaint suburban office parks and low-rise office buildings of “nerdistans” like Silicon Valley, the Route 128 Beltway outside Boston, and the suburbs of Seattle, Austin, or the North Carolina Research Triangle. But our research shows that the startup activity and venture capital investment are now concentrated in some of the world’s largest mega-cities.

The table below shows the 10 leading cities for venture capital investment in the world. These 10 cities accounted for more than $100 billion in venture capital investment on average each year between 2015 and 2017, or more than 60% of the total. Three of the 10 leading global metros have populations in excess of 20 million people and three more have populations of between 10 and 15 million. Three more cities have between 4 and 10 million people, while one has less than 2 million (San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley).

A separate study by one of us and a colleague that looked at the factors associated with venture capital investment across U.S. metros found population size and density to be key. The only other factor that was slightly more important was high-tech industry concentration, which is what entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are aiming to create over the long run.

Winner-Take-All Geography

Startups and venture capital increasingly take on a winner-take-all pattern geographically. Venture capital investments are highly concentrated geographically. Just the top five cities account for nearly half of the global total, and the top 25 for more than three quarters of global venture capital investment. And, previous research one of us has done for the United States and globally, shows that even within cities, venture capital activity tends to be highly concentrated among just a few postal codes.

The geographic concentration of venture capital has also increased over the last decade. This is particularly the case at the very top, where the top 10 cities account for 61% of venture activity worldwide in the latest three-year period, but just 56% a decade ago. Given the large amount of underlying activity going on each year, even small percentage point changes represent meaningful shifts in concentration.

Forces Behind the Shifts

We can point to three major factors driving these trends, though there are others. The first is technological, as the confluence of high-speed internet, mobile devices, and cloud computing has made it possible to start and scale digitally-enabled businesses at a fraction of the cost. As these technologies have fallen in cost, they are within reach in more markets, meaning that it’s easier to create and grow these high-growth, high-tech businesses in more cities.

The second factor is economic. The world has just gone through the largest global reduction in poverty and concomitant expansion of the global middle class in history, and multi-national corporate giants are emanating from more countries, particularly in emerging markets. This has increased demand for many digital goods and services in more places, giving technologically-enabled entrepreneurs in more places a robust market to sell into.

The third factor is political. Many nations around the world are doing more than ever to compete on a global stage by improving their education systems and universities, investing more in research and development, and bending over backwards to welcome high-skilled foreigners and company founders. The United States, on the other hand, is sliding backwards on all of these fronts — and in our view, has become complacent with its long-held dominance as a monopoly for high-tech entrepreneurship.

What It Means for Leaders

These trends have important implications for entrepreneurs, investors, managers, and workers, as well as national and local policymakers across the world. For entrepreneurs, it’s fairly straightforward. The San Francisco Bay Area remains by far the leading location for venture activity and the most robust ecosystem for growing a high-tech startup by a long shot. However, many of the key resources found in The Valley are increasingly available in other places. Whether non-American founders can’t obtain a U.S. visa or choose to stay at home for other reasons, it will only get easier for them to do so while building their companies.

For investors and corporations, the big takeaway is this: You can no longer look only in your own backyard for startups, innovation, and the talent that power them. Venture capitalists, used to looking close to home, need to broaden their horizons and think, look, and act globally.  Corporate managers, especially those in the United States, are used to strong local sources of innovation, but they too must increase their awareness of global innovation and startups as they look to as address competitive threats and capture new sources of innovation. Large established corporates may see opportunities in building globally disturbed teams. Techies and entrepreneurs around the world can count on greater opportunities in their home markets.

For global policymakers, the lesson is that globalization of high-tech entrepreneurship and venture capital mean greater competition across the board. For U.S. policymakers, they can no longer take its long-established lead in innovation and startups for granted. China is nipping at its heels and other nations are also gaining ground quickly. Sure, the US remains the dominant place by far, but it is time to stop doing counterproductive things like imposing immigration restrictions on highly-skilled individuals and founders with validated business ideas. Such actions chill the climate for global talent. For countries that are emerging on the global stage, it means continuing and even expanding on recent improvements in education, innovation, and immigration. For the world as a whole, having entrepreneurs and techies build companies where they are may eventually help to address the growing spatial inequality and winner-take-all dynamics that currently define the global geography high-tech startups.

Of course, innovation and entrepreneurship are local, not national, games. That means mayors and city leaders must take the lead. And it means nations should consider devolving responsibility for innovation and economic policy functions to the local level, especially as most countries will only have one or a few cities that can compete on a global stage. But it does not mean throwing government money at venture capital, which too many national and local governments tend to do. Instead it means investing in local universities and innovation, creating greater local density, and generating the kind of quality of local talent. And it also means working with the private sector not just to improve the preconditions required for innovation and startups, but to address the growing economic inequality and housing unaffordability that is causing a growing backlash against big tech in cities across the globe.

Tumisu / Pixabay

Despite the fact that the recruitment industry is so small on LinkedIn, it is still a fabulous place to recruit staff, but you don’t necessarily have to pay to do so.

The techniques to recruit on LinkedIn are similar to how you would use it to find any good person but, in this context, you just want to employ them as opposed to influence or sell to them.

There are a number of ways you can use LinkedIn to recruit and we’ve highlighted the free options and paid options below:

Look at your own direct connections (Free)
Might it be that someone in your own network fits the description of the person you seek? Perhaps it’s time to use the search on LinkedIn to look for that job title, keyword or expertise at level one of your own network and then message or call them.

Status message from you and your team (Free)
Most businesses operate in a market, domain or niche and hence people know people, so an ideal way to get the message out about the sort of person you are looking for is by using your status update (instructions here).

This is the easiest way to communicate with all of your connections in one go (and those of your team if they engage or post their own), and you can either talk about it or just attach a link to your own recruitment page (or advert) in the conversational narrative on your update.

Company status update (Free)
The company can play its part too and you could use the company profile update to get the message out to all the followers of the company page about the sort of person you’re looking for or to share a link to your own recruitment page (or advert).

LinkedIn job advert (cost varies)
Job adverts on LinkedIn let those overtly looking for a role find yours within the job section, but also advertise your role to others if you think it may be relevant to.

The cost of these are not fixed as popularity, time frame, number of views etcetera will define the budget so watch your projected spend or criteria carefully as we regularly get people contacting us where they have overspent through a lack of criteria or management.

Group question (Free)
One often overlooked aspect is to simply ask a relevant question within a group as this, as a minimum, might get you insights into how that industry/space hires and it also flags to the group recipients that you are looking for good staff.

Asking the member audience of a group is a good way to get from them how they might look for a role or the factors that influence their choices in where they look, whom they engage with or how they might shape a job role. A great and useful source of insight, perspective and also exposure – depending on which groups you ask the question within of course!

Search through your level 2 network (Free)
As long as your connections are solid and real you can always use them to find your next potential employee. Jump into the search on LinkedIn and look for those titles, traits or skills you’re trying to find in the second level of your network i.e. the people your connections know.

This has some huge advantages to you in terms of cost, but more so in terms of validation (as you can ask your level one connection about the people), credibility (you can check out their full LinkedIn profile, activity, recommendations, endorsements and more). You might find this blog on how to find good people on LinkedIn a real help.

You can also get a good feel for cultural fit, openness to move and longevity in role simply by talking to your level one connection before you even approach them or get introduced to them via your connection at level one.

Find a recruiter (Find them for free but …)
If you don’t want to get involved with this you could always search through using the same techniques as above to find a good recruiter to do the work for you.

So there are five free ways (and two that will cost you) to use LinkedIn to find that next employee for your growing business.

Google Sheets is a popular Microsoft Excel alternative. As with other Google tools, the Sheets is a core part of Google Drive. In this article, we have taken the liberty to dive deep and unearth a handful of super useful Google Sheets tricks that you may have never heard before.

These Google Spreadsheet tricks are simple enough to learn and remember.

1. Using International Currencies on Your Spreadsheet

We have all come across situations where we need third-party calculators for exchange conversions. While there is no harm in doing so, it is a tedious way of getting stuff done. Google Sheets offers built-in currency conversion features that will help you convert from one currency to another in a jiffy. Let us see how to use this feature.

Use the following syntax:

=<CellAddress>*GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:<FromCurrencySymbol><ToCurrencySymbol>")

Let’s break it down. The “from currency symbol” is the base currency that you want to convert. The “to currency symbol” is the currency that you want to convert the initial value to.

As an example let us convert the Indian price (in INR) for the latest iPhones into USD. So the syntax shapes up as follows:

=B2*GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:INRUSD")

Ensure that you don’t use the actual currency symbol and instead stick to the three lettered conventions.

2. Use Spell Checks in Google Sheets

Spell Check is an everyday feature that helps you keep the spreadsheet free of spell-errors and typos. It is tiresome to spellcheck manually. In such cases, it is always better to rely on Google’s inbuilt spell-check feature and manually correct any discrepancy.

Here is how you can enable the Spell Check on Google Sheet,

1. Select the cell range/columns that you want to check
2. Select the Tools tab and click on Spelling
3. Google’s Spell Check will automatically identify mis-spellings and typos
4. You can choose whether to Change, Ignore or Add the word to the Dictionary

A word of caution, it is not wise to completely depend on the Spell Check feature. So, make sure you give it a second look before the change.

3. Translate Cells in Google Spreadsheet

Thanks to the Internet the international boundaries have shrunk. Just imagine this, you have just received a quotation in a foreign language. Translating every cell will involve a lot of donkey work. Google Sheets has got you covered with the Translate function.

The Google Translate function is capable of translating the content across hundreds of cells into multiple languages. Furthermore, this function will also help you detect which language is currently being used in the Google Sheets. This is how you can translate the individual cells in a spreadsheet from one language to another.

Use the following syntax:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(<CellAddress>, "source_language", "target_language")

Example:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A9, "en", "ar")

In the above example, we have translated text (“Hey are you free for lunch”) from English to Arabic. If you don’t mention the “target_language”, Google will automatically convert the cell to the default language.

4. Autodetect Language and Translate

Google offers a nifty trick if you don’t know the source language. In the syntax above replace “source_language” with “DETECTLANGUAGE” and Sheets will automatically detect the source language and translate the cell into a language of your choice.

Use the following syntax:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A14, DETECTLANGUAGE(A14), "en")

As part of this Syntax, the language in cell “A14” is automatically detected and translated to the “Target Language”(English in this case.) Since the GOOGLETRANSLATE function on Google Sheets is not an array function you can simply drag the result and translate other cells as well.

5. Convert Your Google Sheet Data Into a Heat Map

Heat Map involves representing data in the form of a map where the data values are represented as colors. The Heat Maps are particularly popular in scientific studies when a large amount of data is collected and the scientists create a heat map to identify trends and patterns.

Thanks to the power of conditional formatting, you can easily create a heat map on Google Sheets. Follow the steps below to create a heat map out of your data

1. Select the data on the Google Spreadsheet
2. Head over to Format>Conditional Formatting
3. Choose the colors for Minpoint, Midpoint, and Maxpoint in the Conditional format rules panel
4. Map your Midpoint to a Percentile

Note: The Google Sheets conditional formatting panel will also allow you to set the minimum or maximum values. Once this is done the heat map will extend to the values that exceed the minimum while the ones that are below the minimum will share the same shade of color.

6. Import HTML From Web Pages to Google Sheets

Copy pasting web data to your Google Sheets is not exactly intuitive and effortless. There’s a high chance that this might end up being a messy affair, especially if the data set is large. Thankfully, Google Sheets allows you to scrape websites and thus import the data automatically. The best part is that you don’t have to be a coder to do this.

Let us see how the Google Sheets web scraper works with a live example.

For the sake of demonstration let us consider a Wikipedia page. This particular page is titled “List of original films distributed by Netflix” and features multiple tables across different categories. I am interested in the Documentaries section. Use the ImportHTML syntax for scrapping the web page.

Use the following syntax:

=IMPORTHTML(URL, query, index)

The URL in this Syntax corresponds to this webpage address:

“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_films_distributed_by_Netflix” in our case.

The Query is the part where you mention the item you intend to import, in our case the import element in the table. As you might have already noticed the Wikipedia page features multiple tables. The argument called index is a way of specifying which table you want to import.

In this case, it is Table 4. Finally, the syntax reads as follows:

=IMPORTHTML("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_films_distributed_by_Netflix","table",4)

Lo and behold! The Google Sheets will automatically fetch the table from the Wikipedia page and the formatting is not botched up either.

Work With Google Sheets Every Day

The Google Sheets is a universe of its own. The online web tools offer a plethora of functions that can be leveraged to make your life easier. It isn’t only about productivity, as the quality of your data will also improve.

And for all of this to happen you don’t need to be a computer geek. I personally prep up Google Sheets with the help of different templates. Try Google Sheets for automatically sending an invoice every month or just automating repetitive tasks. The possibilities are endless.

Read the full article: 6 Google Spreadsheet Tricks That Are Easy to Learn and Remember

Promoting your business on Facebook can be complex, and you need to do a lot of things well in order to see sustainable results from your efforts on-platform. When it comes to Facebook marketing, though, there’s one mistake I see over and over again: brands create a stream of self-promotional posts, sharing their own blog posts and product updates and that’s it.

In reality, about 80% of what you’re posting shouldn’t be directly promotional. You should be focusing on brand building, relationship building, and community building, and the posts you share will set the stage for all three.

While coming up with near-daily posts can be overwhelming, the secret is diversity. By using different types of relationship-focused posts, you’ll always have a full calendar that will work well for you.

Not sure where to start? In this post, we’re going to take a look at 10 types of Facebook post ideas that you can use to keep your content calendar full and diverse.

1. User-Generated Content

When new clients come to me and we start working on social media campaigns, user-generated content (UGC) is one of the first things I focus in on. People love seeing UGC on a brand’s profile. It builds trust, which makes it easier to establish communities and relationships, and people love seeing that you value what your customers say. Even better: it means that other customers cared about your business enough to create it in the first place.

Share user-generated content as often as you can, even if it shows up on Instagram or Twitter instead of Facebook. Include CTAs asking for UGC alongside them, and be specific. “Show us how you style our scarves!” or “Share what you’ve made with our tools” will increase the likelihood that people share.

2. Videos Featuring Brand Story

Using social media to create bonds with your target audience is a good strategy, and videos that focus on brand storytelling can help you do so. Use videos that somehow focus on your brand mission and create an emotional connection your customers will respond to.

Go behind the scenes to show how a product is made, talk to the CEO about why the brand mission means so much to them, and show employee or customer appreciation whenever possible.

3. Live Content

If you’re looking to switch things up and get a ton of engagement all at once, you can’t go wrong with live videos. Facebook live has the opportunity to be hugely engaging, especially when you’re able to create a conversation between viewers and the live host in real time.

If you’re wondering what you want to discuss on your live videos, there are plenty of great options. These include:

• Q&As with your audience
• Interviewing an influencer or industry expert
• Discussing industry news and sharing tips with your followers
• Discussing news about your business and answering questions
• Showing users how to use your product, or other tutorial content

You can learn more about going live on Facebook here.

4. Behind-The-Scenes Looks

When I go to a brand’s Facebook, I actually look for behind-the-scenes looks into who they are and what they do. What matters to them? How do things work behind the scenes? I’m coming in to this from a marketer’s perspective, but from a customer’s perspective, these things matter, too.

Behind-the-scenes and video content often goes hand in hand. Show people what your business looks like day to day. Give “exclusive” access to new information, making your followers feel like they’re part of an exclusive club. This will be an important part of community building that will keep them around.

5. Event Coverage

Are you hosting an event, or participating in one? Whether you’re hosting a conference or participating with a small booth in a local event, share pictures and videos of your time there.

Whether you want to promote an event or just fill up your Facebook post calendar, showing what you’re doing and how you’re interacting with the community is a good way to get results. If you post early enough ahead of time, you can even use it as a signal boost to attract people to you.

6. Product & Business Information

We said that 80% of your content shouldn’t be about selling. That means 20% can be.

This is that 20%.

If you’re posting daily, this means that only about one post a week should be directly promotional. This will help to keep users engaged, because you’ll only be posting relevant content that’s likely to be important since you’re sharing it more infrequently, and they will want some of this info.

Posts that fall under this category include sales announcements, product features (including product videos), and links to your blog posts.

7. Engagement-Oriented Questions

Sometimes the best posts on Facebook are those that completely center your followers. Asking them questions outright can generate conversations, getting you plenty of engagement (and thus momentum in the algorithm). It gives you a chance to talk to your audience one-on-one. Again, relationship building, relationship building, relationship building.

You can go for the easy “what’s your favorite product” or “how do you use this?” Instead, it’s almost always a good bet to go for the emotional.

A camping tools store, for example, could say “what’s the one thing you wouldn’t leave home without?” They may get more responses by asking “what’s your craziest camping story,” or “what do you love most about camping?” Emotion-based questions can yield incredible engagement and make a stronger emotional connection with your audience, which is exactly what you want to do.

8. Curated & Shared Content

Coming up with thirty posts a month is exhausting, so go ahead and fill in the gaps with other people’s content. Not only will this help you fill up your calendar and give your audience information or content they find helpful, it will also help you build relationships with other brands in your industry.

Share local events, even if you aren’t attending, or boost up other (non-competing) businesses in the industry. It will establish a lot of good will, and users like seeing valuable content that isn’t just all about you. It can help them to trust you more, and they’ll keep checking in for great info.

9. Insider Info

Insider information is another way to give your followers that exclusivity feel that can be intoxicating. In the video below, Barnes and Noble got an interview with one of their authors sharing her experience and answering some questions to provide incredible information not available anywhere else.

Other options include sharing statistics or data from research you’ve conducted, or sharing insider tips that will benefit your audience. A dental practice, for example, could even just share a snippet of information about why a certain toothbrush is preferred and how it’s important for health. It’s quick, it demonstrates expertise while offering valuable information for your followers.

10. Seasonal Content

Posting seasonal content is always a great option. It’s sure to get plenty of engagement, and posting fun, timely content without it being promotional will be seen as a positive from customers.

You can create new original content or share a relevant image or gif that you find that you know your audience will love. Humor, excitement, and feel-good nostalgia are all good feelings to target when creating these posts.

There’s no need to stick to the main holidays, either. Pounce on every opportunity possible that’s relevant to your business, including National Secretary Day and National Hot Dog Day. You can see a big breakdown here.

Conclusion

Keeping your Facebook posts diverse in subject will help to keep your audience engaged. No one wants to be sold to 24/7; that’s already what your email list likely does, and social media needs to focus on relationship building instead of selling. Think marathon not sprint, with a long-term goal of creating communities that are valuable alongside your product.

What do you think? What types of Facebook posts do you use? Which get you the most results? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

This is a subject I’ve referred to before, but an excellent article by Don Mulhern has prompted me to promote a concept that deserves far more attention - and which is driving impressive success in the growing number of sales organisations that have embraced the idea.

Most CRM systems - and most sales methodologies - are based on the idea of the pipeline reflecting a series of sales stages which are assumed to be progressively completed over time. It is also assumed that the further we have progressed through these sales stages, the more likely an opportunity is to close.

Many systems go even further: applying the same default probability to every deal that has reached a certain stage. Even worse, many CRM implementations take the “out of the box” default percentages without ever giving any thought to their accuracy or relevance.

But complex B2B sales are - unsurprisingly - far more complicated than that, and it’s yet another example of how simplistic, statistically derived assumptions that can be made to work in straightforward transactional sales environments don’t apply anything like as effectively to complex buying decisions.

I’ve seen ludicrous examples in which the delivery of a proposal is automatically associated with a 50% probability - despite the fact that at least three vendors are bidding (probably making similar unrealistic assumptions about probability), and without regard to the very real possibility that the customer will decide to stay with their current situation or defer the decision.

Why your sums don't add up

Even a child can see that the math doesn’t work - and that’s without taking into account the inevitable fact that the vendors and their associated bids are invariably not equal in the eyes of the prospect. It’s a recipe for catastrophically inaccurate sales forecasting.

So - what can we do about this? Well, at minimum, we need to break the link between sales stage and probability and replace it with a mechanism that reflects the specific characteristics of every individual opportunity. For example, we might choose to:

• Down-weight opportunities where we only discovered the project after we received an unexpected RFP - and up-weight opportunities where it is clear that we have engaged early and positively influenced the prospect’s requirements
• Down-weight opportunities where we are dependent on a single point of contact - and up-weight opportunities where we have identified and engaged every member of the decision group
• Down-weight opportunities where we have not completed a formal value assessment - and upweight opportunities where we have completed a formal value workshop with the active participation of key stakeholders
• Down-weight opportunities where projected close date is merely based on when the prospect hopes to act and up-weight opportunities where the prospect has a truly compelling event that will force their hand

Even if some of these specific examples do not have predictive value in your sales environment, it would be astonishing if there were not other factors that had a significant impact on your chances of winning.

But even that approach - relating deal probability to the completion of critical success factors rather than only to sales stage is still something of a kludge. And that’s why I claim that your pipeline doesn’t need (and shouldn’t use) sales stages.

A discredited metaphor

Sales stage thinking is a discredited metaphor. It assumes linearity, and it fails to recognise the complex and essentially unpredictable nature of our prospective customer’s buying process. Like Monty Python's parrot, if its feet had not been nailed to the perch by the CRM vendors we would have recognised that it was dead long ago.

Our customer's buying process is almost inevitably non-linear (and often not very well understood by our potential champion). At any point, our prospect can decide to move forwards, to revert to a previous phase, to say as they are, or to abandon the decision journey altogether and stick with the status quo.

It is critically important that we are aware of where they are in their decision-making journey, and that we use this information to guide our actions and assess our chances of winning.

Whilst the process is often non-linear, at any particular point in time the centre of gravity of their decision process is almost always in one of the following phases:

• STATUS QUO: whilst staying aware of what is going on in and around their company, they currently see no need to change what they are currently doing
• EXPLORING: something has changed - either internally or externally (often related to a TRIGGER EVENT) - that causes them to recognise that perpetuating the status quo may no longer be the right strategy, and they start to both explore the issue and their potential options
• DEFINING: having concluded that they probably need to take action, their attention now turns to defining what they may need to change to, who needs to be involved, what decision criteria and process they should adopt and which options they should shortlist
• SELECTING: the decision group now assesses their various options, receives proposals from qualified vendors, and attempts to achieve a consensus about their preferred option or options
• VERIFYING: the decision group seeks to eliminate any remaining concerns or reservations, to negotiate the best possible deal, to finally discard any other options, and to emerge with mutually agreed terms
• CONFIRMING: but even then, we cannot rely on their order - because if it is regarded as a significant purchase, the project still needs final formal approval (and often ends up competing for resource with other potential investments)

It is normally possible to make an informed assessment of where our customer is in their journey. And instead of thinking only about our sales actions, we can usually identify a handful of things that we need to know or do at each stage to assess the likelihood they will act, to facilitate their buying decision, to positively position our approach against their other options, or to qualify them out because they are unlikely to do business with us.

A simple combination of an accurate assessment of their current buying stage plus a handful of key success factors along the lines outlined above can help us to make a much better informed judgement about whether they are likely to buy, whether we are likely to win, how much the deal could be worth, when a formal order can be expected, and whether all the effort required is likely to be worth it.

All of the available research - from CSO Insights and others - suggests that sales pipeline management and sales forecast accuracy remain at acceptably inaccurate levels. There are some obvious remedies - including the ones I have highlighted above. So - you have to wonder - why do so many sales organisations still base their pipeline around sales stages?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales, an award-winning blogger, a confident and entertaining event speaker and workshop leader, a regular contributor to the International Journal of Sales Transformation and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, the B2B value-selling experts.

Following a varied and successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates Bob now works as an adviser to some of today’s most ambitious B2B-focused sales organisations, equipping and enabling them to accelerate revenue growth and transform sales effectiveness by implementing the proven principles of value-based selling.

Resistance is futile. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here, now.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the software equivalent of the semiconductor —ubiquitous, unseen, and capable of changing the shape of society and business. And it is embedded into increasing numbers of systems and applications in a manner that is both transparent and transformational.

It’s here now, and its presence is only growing. Expect AI to be embedded in systems that deal with customers, suppliers, employees, machines, transport, and every other aspect of business activity.

We are not talking futures here. Most medium-sized and large businesses are already using AI-enhanced sales and marketing systems—whether they are aware of it or not. AI allows applications to process massive amounts of data in minutes or seconds and make decisions superior to those of people with decades of experience.

Everywhere you look, AI is assisting and displacing human effort. Legal research is being carried out by AI robots; MRI scans are analyzed with AI-supported systems for higher speed and accuracy; and investors are using AI robots to create investment analysis.

It should be evident that if AI can perform these sorts of tasks, then it might also help business managers in their decision-making and analysis processes. Traditional tools for analysis will soon become too burdensome due to their complex interfaces, their arcane methods, and the sluggishness of their workflows.

AI is revolutionizing analysis tools by making them more user-friendly, faster, more accurate, and cheaper to use. It’s an undeniable revolution and the emerging opportunities that AI presents are numerous and significant.

Business managers don’t have to understand AI technology, but it has become essential for them to understand what it can do and how it impacts business. As with all new technologies the winners are those who see the opportunities and utilize a technology before it becomes the norm. Everyone else can only hope to catch up.

How do we measure intelligence?

With all of its power, if we are going to use AI in our businesses, we’d be wise to have some measure of its intelligence. But how do we do that? We do so by taking steps to define a goal for every AI-embedded effort we deploy. Only by observing outcomes and comparing them with well-defined goals can we determine whether an AI application is truly intelligent. For example, if we use AI to place advertisements on various social media channels and tell the application to optimize clicks, if we find that fewer people click and engage as a result, it would be fair to say that the AI we’ve deployed is not so intelligent.

Setting goals in an AI application turns out to be more complicated than it first might appear because the goals themselves are complex. In the example above, our goal might be to achieve clicks, increase business, and lower costs, all at once. With that understood, we can use the combination of the three to provide us with the measure of intelligence we are looking for.

Since it’s not all that simple to determine how intelligent an AI application is, it’s a good idea to take the time to ensure its value. When dealing with suppliers who claim a whole host of benefits for their AI-embedded solution, for example, it is worth taking the time to take a step back, look at the broader picture, and consider whether the measures being promoted are the ones that are most valuable to your business.

The Four Types of Intelligence

Several components within AI help make it the powerful tool it is to address a broad range of business problems, beginning with machine learning (ML), but also including knowledge representation, search capabilities, and more.

Machine Learning

Most of the attention that AI gets these days has to do with machine learning—a data-centric approach to building intelligence. ML uses algorithms that scan historical data and look for patterns of behavior that might be useful in the future. For example, it might discover that people within a certain age range, income bracket, and educational background are much more likely to buy a particular product than the population as a whole. Businesses can use information of this nature in a variety of ways, such as targeting market segments, reducing the cost of sales, and increasing revenue. The key word in the name of this aspect of AI is “learning”—machine learning makes it possible for systems to modify their behavior as conditions change.

There is currently tremendous interest in the machine learning component of AI. ML allows businesses to exploit the vast stores of data that they collect as part of their everyday activities to help them improve both their operational and their tactical decision-making. Building predictive models using ML is still a very labor-intensive activity. The variables involved are numerous, and the combinations can mean data scientists spend months searching for meaningful models. AI automates much of this work. Predictive models have a limited window in which they are valuable, making it critical to be able to refresh them frequently. In some cases, the refresh is measured in minutes, such as in algorithmic trading, and in other cases, it might be measured in several months. Either way, intelligent tools using machine learning can drastically minimize the workload.

ML isn’t without its drawbacks. But with skilled use, it can boost productivity and decision-making accuracy. Wherever there is a plentiful supply of historical data, ML can be used to sharpen decision-making.

Knowledgebases

Not everything can be learned from historical data. The ability to represent knowledge, store it in a knowledge base, and use it to automate tasks plays a significant role in how AI benefits business. For businesses of all sizes, AI-supported applications can automatically schedule a wide range of activities. Airlines use AI to reschedule flights based on weather conditions, flight crew availability, the cost of refueling in various locations, and more. Only through the creation of an extensive knowledgebase can AI identify the optimal deployment of resources in real time, on demand. Knowledgebases are also used extensively in medicine, law, and other businesses where knowledge needs to be extracted, processed, and delivered immediately. It is used extensively in planning and reasoning.

Search

Imagine a salesperson who, over the coming month, needs to visit 20 locations that are spread wide apart. A valuable question might be: what schedule would incur the lowest cost? While the problem might sound simple at first, its solution is actually quite complex. Ultimately, a search is needed to evaluate all the alternatives until the best one is found. Many problems in business are of this nature, where problems remain unsolved without the use of search algorithms. For example, the airline mentioned above needs to employ complex search algorithms while accessing their knowledgebase to find the optimal solution.

Communication with humans

For AI to be most useful to us humans, it needs to be able to communicate with us. A great deal of effort is now being directed at getting AI to interact effortlessly with its environment. In practical terms, it means that voice and image inputs and voice and text narrative outputs need to be part of the picture. To this end, natural language processing (NLP) also plays a significant role in AI development; it becomes especially important when people need to communicate with the apps and systems they use. Effortless communication between human and AI will determine how widely it is used in settings where human input is essential.

Applications

Any application that makes decisions either wholly or partially autonomously can be said to employ AI. When a search engine displays a list of suitable links, it has made a decision: its best guess at what will be relevant. Voice recognition is a process of matching waveforms to words and deciding which words are correct. And there are many applications in sales and marketing that use AI in general and machine learning in particular. Sales apps can interrogate vast amounts of historical data to suggest which prospects are worth pursuing and which are likely to be a waste of time. Marketing apps can learn which words and images are likely to be most effective in a marketing campaign. In both cases, the learning is ongoing, and the AI modifies the decisions that are being made on an ongoing basis. No human being could match the speed and volume of this kind of analysis.

The Need for Better Analysis Tools

As with ML, the workload associated with analysis using BI tools is often ponderous, with unworkable latency. Businesses are real-time and require real-time analysis. Data preparation—which typically comprises more than two-thirds of the analysis task— is just one candidate for AI. Others include exploration of variables and relationships, programming, arcane user interfaces, and the ongoing need to translate between business activity and technical tools.

Fortunately for us, the problems associated with existing BI tools and platforms are well understood. The fact that only one in four people use a BI tool even though they have access to one indicates that people find them unwieldy and impractical for their everyday needs. The incorporation of AI into BI has already started. Within five years, AI will be executing many of the tedious and time-consuming tasks associated with the use of BI, and the interfaces will understand the language of business.

Ultimately, we want to ask meaningful questions of our BI tools and receive useful answers quickly and accurately. AI will facilitate this.

The same disinformation campaigns that epitomize the divisions in US society -- beliefs in voter fraud, vaccine conspiracies, and racist conspiracies about migrants, George Soros and Black Lives Matter, to name a few -- are a source of strength for autocracies like Russia, where the lack of a consensus on which groups and views are real and which are manufactured by the state strengthens the hand of Putin and his clutch of oligarchs.

In a new Harvard Berkman Center paper, Common -Knowledge Attacks on Democracy, political scientist Henry Farrell (previously and security expert Bruce Schneier (previously) team up to explore this subject by using information security techniques, and come to a very plausible-seeming explanation and a set of policy recommendations to address the issue.

Farrell and Schneier start by exploring the failures of both national security and information security paradigms to come to grips with the issue: Cold War-style national security is oriented around Cold War ideas like "offense–defense balance, conventional deterrence theory, and deterrence by denial," none of which are very useful for thinking about disinformation attacks; meanwhile, information security limits itself to thinking about "servers and individual networks" and not "the consequences of attacks for the broader fabric of democratic societies."

Despite these limits, the authors say that there is a way to use the tools of information security to unpick these kinds of "information attacks" on democracies: treat "the entire polity as an information system with associated attack surfaces and threat models" -- that is, to think about the democracy itself as the thing to be defended, rather than networks or computers.

From there, they revisit the different disinformation styles of various autocracies and autocratic movements, particularly the Russian style of sowing doubt about what truth is and where it can be found (infamously, Russia's leading political strategist admits that he secretly funds some opposition groups, but won't say which ones, leaving everyone to wonder whether a given group is genuine or manufactured -- there's some excellent scholarship contrasting this with the style used by the Chinese state and also with techniques used by authoritarian insurgents inside of democracies, like Milo Yiannopoulos).

In the paper's framework, the stability of autocrats' power requires that the public not know how other people feel -- for there to be constant confusion about which institutions, groups and views are genuine and which ones are conspiracies, frauds, or power-grabs. Once members of the public discover how many of their neighbors agree that the ruling autocracy is garbage, they are emboldened to rise up against it. Tunisia's dictatorship was stable so long as the law banning dissent could be enforced, but the lack of enforcement on Facebook allowed Tunisians to gain insight into their neighbors' discontent, leading to the collapse of the regime.

By contrast, democracies rely on good knowledge about the views of other people, most notably embodied by things like free and fair elections, where citizens get a sense of their neighbors' views, and are thus motivated to find solutions that they know will be widely viewed as legitimate and will therefore be sustainable.

So when information attacks against democracies sow doubt about the genuineness of movements and views -- when Soros is accused of funding left-wing movements, when Koch Industries' name is all over the funding sources of right-wing think-tanks, when politicians depend on big money, and when Facebook ads and its engagement algorithm pushes people to hoaxes and conspiracies -- it weakens democracy in exactly the same way that it strengthens autocracy. Without a sense of which political views are genuine and which are disinformation, all debate degenerates into people calling each other shills or bots, and never arriving at compromises with the stamp of broad legitimacy.

It's not a coincidence that the right's political playbook is so intertwined with this kind of disinformation and weakening of democracy. A widely held belief on the political right is that the most important "freedom" is private property rights, and since rich people are always outnumbered by poor people, subscribers to this ideology hold that "freedom is incompatible with democracy," because in a fair vote, the majority 99% will vote to redistribute the fortunes of the minority 1%. In this conception, the rich are the only "oppressed minority" who can't be defended by democracy.

This gives rise to the right's belief in natural hierarchies, which are sorted out by markets, with the best people rising to the top (Boris Johnson: "As many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.").

The right's position, fundamentally, is that the "best" people should boss everyone else around for their own good: kings should boss around commoners (monarchists); slavers should boss around enslaved people (white nationalists); husbands should boss around wives and kids (Dominionists); America should boss around the world (imperialists); and rich people should boss around workers (capitalists).

So when Reagan started cracking wise about "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help,'" he was kicking off a long project to discredit the US and its institutions in favor of autocrats, the mythological heroes of Ayn Rand novels whose singular vision was so true and right that it didn't need peer review, checks and balances, or anyone who might speak truth to power. He was initiating the process that led the Trump administration's army of think-tankies to dismantle the US government's multibillion-dollar institutions charged with defending us from food poisoning, plutonium spills, unsafe workplaces, tornadoes and starvation: in the autocrat's view of the world, these institutions' word cannot be taken at face value, because every institution is just a pawn for its bosses' and workers' personal ambitions, featherbedding and pocket-lining.

Unsurprisingly then, Farrell and Schneier's recommended countermeasures for disinformation campaigns cut directly against the right's most cherished policies: get rid of Citizens United and the idea that secret money can fund US political campaigns; limit financial secrecy and make it harder for anyone to claim that US political movements are the inauthentic expression of manipulative foreign disinformation campaigns.

Alongside financial transparency, the authors suggest that vigorous antitrust enforcement, possibly with reclassification of online services as public utilities, would help curb the deployment of ranking algorithms that elevate "engagement" over all else, leading to spirals that drive users to ever-more-extreme and unfounded views and communities (weirdly, this is the one highly selective instance in which the right is calling for a return to pre-Reagan antitrust fundamentals).

For example, before the first stirrings of the Arab Spring, the Tunisian government had extensive control over common knowledge. It required everyone to publicly support the regime, making it hard for citizens to know how many other people hated it, and it prevented potential anti-regime coalitions from organizing. However, it didn’t pay attention in time to Facebook, which allowed citizens to talk more easily about how much they detested their rulers, and, when an initial incident sparked a protest, to rapidly organize mass demonstrations against the regime. The Arab Spring faltered in many countries, but it is no surprise that countries like Russia see the Internet openness agenda as a knife at their throats.

Democracies, in contrast, are vulnerable to information attacks that turn common political knowledge into contested political knowledge. If people disagree on the results of an election, or whether a census process is accurate, then democracy suffers. Similarly, if people lose any sense of what the other perspectives in society are, who is real and who is not real, then the debate and argument that democracy thrives on will be degraded. This is what seems to be Russia’s aims in their information campaigns against the US: to weaken our collective trust in the institutions and systems that hold our country together. This is also the situation that writers like Adrien Chen and Peter Pomerantsevdescribe in today’s Russia, where no one knows which parties or voices are genuine, and which are puppets of the regime, creating general paranoia and despair.

This difference explains how the same policy measure can increase the stability of one form of regime and decrease the stability of the other. We have already seen that open information flows have benefited democracies while at the same time threatening autocracies. In our language, they transform regime-supporting contested political knowledge into regime-undermining common political knowledge. And much more recently, we have seen other uses of the same information flows undermining democracies by turning regime-supported common political knowledge into regime-undermining contested political knowledge.

In other words, the same fake news techniques that benefit autocracies by making everyone unsure about political alternatives undermine democracies by making people question the common political systems that bind their society.

Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy [Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier/ Berkman Klein Center Research Publication No. 2018-7]

Democracy as an information system [Henry Farrell/Crooked Timber]

It’s time for another rant. Every day I get messages from salespeople who are struggling being salespeople.  The notes range from a couple sentences to novels that would rival War & Peace.

Let me blunt. If you’re behaving like a loser, then you will be a loser.  You’re never going to be successful until you are willing to put on your big boy pants or your big girl pants and go make it happen.

Your issue starts with trying to justify why things aren’t going right by blaming everything from sun spots to a lack of iron in your diet. When you send me a note and claim you can’t prospect because nobody answers their telephone and how you don’t even respond to phone calls, I have to make an observation about why I believe you sent me the note.

You sent me the note because you personally don’t like talking on the phone, and you want somebody to validate for you that the phone is outdated.

Check out what this person wrote in a note to me:

I read your article and am perplexed. You say that cold calling works. I am trying to understand how since statistics and my own experience shows that maybe 2-5% of people will answer an unknown number. I haven’t in 3 years, leave a vm and if I know you I’ll call you back. If it’s general business you’re getting an email or text. 

I don’t know anyone under 40 who answers their phone. I would turn off the voice part if not for family.

I don’t even buy cars using voice or in person, all on email and text. If they call me I take em off the list after one warning. Negotiate on email then tell them to have it ready when I come to pick it up.

I am looking for stats that support your position. If you have any I would be greatly appreciative.

This person — or I should be more blunt and say “idiot” — is asking me for information to validate his belief about the telephone.  This person says in the note how nobody answers the phone and how he himself won’t even talk to anyone when buying a car. It all leaves me wondering. If you don’t believe in a process, then it’s time to exit and exit now!  This guy will never be successful in sales as long as he himself can’t embrace the phone.

You’re wondering if I responded to him?  Yes, I did. I called him, as he did leave his phone number, and as I expected, he didn’t answer.  I also sent him a very nice email with some ideas and invited him to respond via email or phone.  What’s your prediction as to whether or not he responded?  The correct answer is no! I never heard from him again.  Go ahead… let’s all call this guy a loser!

If you are losing and want to validate why you’re losing by having others support you as a form of therapy, then you’re destined to keep losing.  Act like a loser and you will be a loser!  Act like a winner and you will be a winner. Winners associate with winners, winners push themselves, winners do not pass blame but rather accept blame, and winners take control of their actions.

There are people who I used to associate with but will have nothing to do with today, because they’re losers and they love being a loser. The people I associate with are winners. Those are the people with whom I want to spend my time.

Every day I work to improve myself. I’m never satisfied with my current position.  I know I have come nowhere near the level of potential I’m capable of and I won’t reach it unless I keep improving.  This means I never spend time validating why something didn’t work. I use it to learn and to help me find the next idea — the next solution.

Success does not begin with others. Success begins with you and what you believe. It’s one reason why I will encourage you to join me and other winners, my friends Anthony Iannarino, Jeb Blount and Mike Weinberg at OutBound next April in Atlanta.  I want you there and on our team, because I’m 100% confident you will improve yourself.   Here’s a code to save $100 at check out: Mark100

You can register at this link.

If you’re saying to yourself, “I knew it! Mark wrote this article just to hustle me to buy a ticket to his event,”  then you’re a loser, because with that thought, you’re trying to validate your thinking as to how you have your act together already.  You see, those who are winners see this as another opportunity worth considering. Winners are always looking with their mind open. Losers think with a closed mind.

Rant over. Thank you for your patience.

Are you ready to have me speak at your next sales kick-off meeting?   I sure hope you are! The calendar for 2019 is filling up and we need to talk ASAP to make sure I’m part of your sales meeting.  Call me at 402-445-2110 or email me at Mark@TheSalesHunter.com.

And don’t forget that a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Clearly, big data is not a fad. It’s a competitive advantage most marketers recognize as a potent solution to some of their most pressing problems:

• Marketing budgets that outpace sales numbers in growth
• Ineffective and time-consuming lead scoring
• Lack of impactful personalisation
• The notorious inability to accurately measure and predict the ROI of certain marketing activities

You know that data science is your strongest bet for remaining competitive. But where do you begin when that data of yours is well… big?

Our team is here with some answers. We have developed a three-part series explaining exactly how to get from ground zero – loads of data, little sense – to the marketing foresight moon – automatic determination of the best actions and their impact on your business. But before we dive deep, let’s recap the core basics.

The difference between data science and data analytics

The goal of data science is to move your company from the ‘hindsight’ to the ‘insight’ stage. It helps identify repeating patterns and establishes how seemingly random data points are connected to what we have not previously known.

Our data science process: The initial goal is to move your company from the hindsight to the insight stage

For instance, you can apply data science to social media and determine that 42% of your customers discuss fuel efficiency of your latest car model; 29% tweet about their dealership distress and others actively talk about the overall efficiency.

In this case, data science alone concentrates mainly on registering some initial observations, trends and potential insights that can be important. Here, you should clearly talk more about fuel efficiency in your marketing.

Data science directs you towards questions you might have been unaware of before. You can query your customer micro-niches, identify the most promising leads or discover that your ads generate a lot of impressions in areas your brand is not yet present. As a result, you are raising some important questions; what has happened, why, and how can we benefit from this?

Big data analytics, on the contrary, helps you match those questions to the best answers based on existing data.

Instead of simply knowing that your customers worry about fuel efficiency, you can now develop a multi-channel marketing campaign addressing just that. What’s more, you can even predict that targeted email blasts to customer segment A will convert at least 5% and increase your revenue by 3.5%.

Data science helps you extract new knowledge worth exploring further. Big data analytics helps you turn those new insights into direct action and, with further optimisation, even predict what will happen, when it will happen and how you can benefit from these predictions.

How to get prepared for big data analytics

Big data analytics is multi-step. Before you even get to asking the big questions, you will need to prepare your data for departure.

Whether you plan to adopt a proprietary marketing analytics platform or sign up with a consulting firm, without a sound data preparation strategy, your transition towards data-driven marketing can take months, if not a year. Inadequate or insufficient data, even when analysed by the best human or AI minds, leads to biased and useless insights. So before you commit, consider your transition plan:

1. Start with an endgame in mind

What do you want to achieve post-adoption? Better search marketing visibility? The ability to set dynamic prices? Optimisation of your PPC spending? Knowing what you want to accomplish will help you identify all the primary data sources to use and define the type of data cleansing you will need to do.

2. Consider additional data sets

You may require more data than you have to support your decision making. For instance, fresh competitor data or better information about your email marketing performance can be game-changing for analytics. You may also want to explore additional analytics tools to adopt and or/enquire about the options from a data science partner.

3. Ensure a continuous flow of data

Most data sets are dynamic and evolving. Your data preparation strategy should account for the newly available insights and ensure that those will be readily available to use.

4. Data consolidation

This is the final and most challenging step. You will have to assess your IT infrastructure for limitations before you deploy any algorithms – something 42% of companies name as their main roadblock to data analytics adoption. Data consolidation involves collecting and integrating all your data sources into a single destination – a data lake. This way you avoid storing multiple copies of your data, obtain faster access to it and ultimately receive better insights.

In the second part of this series, we will move on to the next key adoption steps – extracting context from your data and making sense of what it’s actually telling you.