Rnordman

Many marketers see inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing as a cut and dry choice they need to make. They believe they have to choose one or the other, and stick to it in order to see the best results.

If you’re doing traditional marketing tactics like cold calling and buying email lists, you could revolutionize your efforts (and get better response) by tying in some inbound marketing tactics. One big change that could transform your marketing is offering your target prospects useful content instead of simply product, company or brand advertisements.

Here are a few tips for doing outbound marketing in an inbound way.

Best inbound marketing tactics for e-mails to purchased lists

If you’re not ready to give up sending emails to purchased lists, consider changing the messages you send to those lists. Stop sending these people product promotions and other content they might not be ready for.

The problem with paid lists is that the recipients often don’t know who you are. If your very first interaction with someone is a blatant advertisement, they’re likely going to view your company as annoying or spammy.

Many marketers see inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing as a cut and dry choice – one or the other. Did you know you can combine the two?

On the other hand, you might send an email that will appeal to a recipient that doesn’t know anything about your company. What industry related questions do these people have? Send them an email containing some information that answers these questions. Rather than an overt advertisement, consider linking to a popular blog post that covers a hot topic in your industry, or a landing page for your latest topically-relevant whitepaper.

When you give someone information they can use instead of an advertisement, you set your company up as a resource. You can still have a sales message within the email, but make it a secondary message. Focus first on educating your prospect on how to solve some of their daily struggles.

Best inbound marketing tactics for print or online display advertisements

Consider using your print ad space or online banner ad space as a place to offer useful content to viewers. Many traditional marketers use advertising space as a place to promote their company’s brand message. These ads often contain a website address or link to your homepage. Simply sending prospects directly to your homepage can confuse them because it’s not specific to their needs.

A great way to get more interest from your ad is by advertising your content (like a whitepaper or guide). If you have an ebook that addresses your reader’s daily concerns, use that as the focal point of your advertisement. You can do this by directing people that see your ad to a landing page instead of the homepage of your site.

Promoting your ebook has an added benefit – generating relevant leads! If you send readers from your ad to a landing page for your ebook or premium content, they’ll have the chance to fill out a form to read the information. Now you’re creating a database of people who are interested in specific topics, and could potentially be highly qualified leads.

Best inbound marketing tactics for trade shows

Trade shows are traditionally focused on companies and their offerings. Companies set up their booth, give away branded swag, and promote their latest product or service.

This kind of information is good for someone who knows exactly what they’re looking for, but not everyone at a trade show is ready to buy. Alongside your branded offerings, consider offering some useful information.

Here’s an easy way to do this – choose a blog post that you think would be relevant to your trade show audience. Copy the blog post onto your letterhead and make copies of this content available at your booth.

Another inbound trade show tip is to build your email subscriber list. Make an iPad or even just a sheet of paper available at your booth that invites attendees to sign up for regular, relevant tips from your company. Send them a quick “thank you” email after the trade show, and send them new blog posts as they are posted to your website.

We’ve talked before about how you can get hundreds of ideas for your blog if you write down questions trade show attendees ask. We’ve also talked about some clever ideas for using social media at your next trade show.

Small Steps

The reasons you’d use these inbound marketing tactics in your traditional marketing is to engage the buyer and get new, warm sales leads your sales team can follow up on.

By sending readers to your website, you can position yourself as a resource for your consumers as they read information they can use. An added benefit of a form on a landing page can encourage people to convert, become leads, and potential customers.

What other ideas do you have for transforming traditional advertising to encourage interaction? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

I recently had coffee to catch up with my friend Jill Konrath and we were talking about new opportunities, ideas for the improvement of lead nurturing and I’m currently pondering my next book.

If you’re not familiar with Jill, she’s the best-selling author, sales guru and is a featured keynote speaker at companies like LinkedIn, HubSpot and many others.

Both of us attended Dreamforce 2014 (Jill was a featured speaker) and we stopped by number of trade show booths to see the different vendors and learn what’s new in their companies.

As you might guess, we both experienced lead nurturing follow-up after those visits. It was fast. They all used marketing automation to rapidly follow up with me via email.

But two things were missing: relevancy and trust.

For example, Jill was a guest speaker for one company at Dreamforce, but the marketing messages and phone calls she received after the event didn’t acknowledge they knew her, or that she was featured on their website.

Rather than pitch demos (that were irrelevant or unnecessary) I would have started by addressing what motivated us to stop by their booth. How could they help me right now? What might interest me in their offer?

 

Don’t sell – be relevant

Today’s prospects have a general lack of trust and they simply don’t want to be sold. People are weary of pitches, hype, pushy sales people and irrelevant marketing messages. They are time constrained and too busy to think. So what do they do with most of our sales and marketing messages? They simply ignore them.

There’s an incubation period that needs to happen before sales professionals can even think about taking the relationship to the next level. You don’t ask someone to get married on the first date – the relationship you’re looking to start with customers is built over time with trust.

 

You can’t automate trust 

Marketing automation can help you manage lead follow-up and lead nurturing, but you can’t automate trust.

Building that trust takes time.

Trust is earned by being helpful, relevant and honest with your prospects. Relevance is the foundation of lead nurturing, which is, at its core, a series of conversations.

Like real-time conversations, we can’t bore the recipients of our emails by talking about ourselves all the time – we have to discuss what they care about:

• If all we do is focus on winning the sale, they’re going to tune out or opt out.
• If we focus on how we can help them, we’re going to build trust, and when they trust you, they’ll stick around and likely buy whatever it is you’re selling.

My research shows that executive buyers choose the salesperson who has been a resource and developed a trusted relationship with them regardless of their timing to buy. These people are called trusted advisors.

The foundation of nurturing is relevance, which is knowledge of your potential customer and their world:

• Know the likely problems they’re facing.
• Know what makes their lives easier or harder.
• Know how your value proposition helps them.

For this reason, I think it’s critical to contact and have initial conversations with future customers that are devoid of sales pitches. When we begin a conversation with those prospects, their attitudes and beliefs are being shaped and primed by the information they have already soaked up through various sources.

I think a perfect way to do this is through lead nurturing. A key aspect of lead nurturing is the ability to provide relevant, valuable content and information to prospects.

 

Build trust with lead nurturing

Look up the definition of “nurture.”

Here’s what a quick search of the Web will tell you: foster, help develop or help grow; the act of nourishing or nursing; tender care; education; training; that which nourishes; food; diet; sustenance; the environmental influences that contribute to the development of an individual.

Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful dialog with viable prospects regardless of their timing to buy. It’s about building trusted relationships with the right people. In the end, it’s the act of maintaining mind share and building solid relationships with economic buyers. It’s not about having a salesperson calling up every few months to find out if a prospect is ready to buy yet.

I’ll be sharing more on building trust and what is – and isn’t – lead nurturing in my post next week.

 

You might also like

Marketing Research Chart: Messaging tactics for effective lead nurturing [MarketingSherpa chart]

Email Marketing: The importance of lead nurturing in the complex B2B sale [More from the blogs]

Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content [More from the blogs]

B2B How-To: 5 lead nurturing tactics to get from lead gen to sales-qualified [MarketingSherpa how-to]

As CEO of a company moving to content marketing, are you wondering how to set the right course? These three questions will have the greatest impact.

Let’s say you are the CEO of a company that has seen its sales pipeline flattening out for a couple of years. The effectiveness of cold calling is plummeting. And you have a sense that the traditional marketing that generated leads in the past isn’t working anymore.

You’ve heard about the concept that your marketing needs to pull prospects toward you like a magnet, rather than interrupting them with unwanted, interruptive messages. You’re beginning to think that you’ve got to make the move to this approach to survive, especially before your competitors do.

Your company has marketing people (and a marketing agency) who can mount a content marketing effort to help transform your lead generation efforts. You’ve established a budget, funded largely by re-allocating some marketing funds from other tactics that don’t seem to be working (print advertising, direct mail, trade shows, etc).

This is unfamiliar territory for you and your company. And you know that it won’t be effective without your support and strategic direction.

So how can you, as CEO, make sure the right course is set and followed? Here are three preliminary questions you should ask your marketing folks to make sure that your company’s content marketing will be effective:

1. What is the content’s focus?

Do you want your content to attract more traffic, convert visitors to leads, or nurture those leads toward a sale? All of the above? Something else like changing existing attitudes or repairing your reputation?

Before creating content, make sure you know why you’re creating it. That is determined by researching your ideal customers (also known as buyer personas), and their buyer journey. Those two things are the most important determinants of content marketing success.

Great content is educational: remember that your ultimate goal is to solve your persona’s problems – and the best way to do that iis through education.

Make sure that your content is focused on your buyers at least 80% of the time. And for the remaining 20% when you talk about your company, focus on benefits to the customer rather than your product features.

The people in your C-Suite may be afraid to tell you this, but your customers don’t care about your company and its products. They care about themselves. That’s why when you talk about your products, frame it in terms of the benefit to your customer rather than a recitation of product features. Benefits tie in to emotional desires. Features are devoid of emotion.

Ask how your content is going to remain anchored in the buyer’s head rather than your product catalog. Here are some of the ways your marketing people should be mining for what’s keeping your prospects up at night:

• Keyword research
• Internet forums
• Popular industry news
• Sales/support FAQs
• Your persona’s goals
• Your persona’s challenges

Before creating any content, require your people to answer this question: “Who is this content going to help?” If the answer is not clearly your prospects or your customers, instruct them to stop and readjust.

2. How is the content going to be distributed?

“Build it and they will come” does not work in content marketing. If the content is not delivered to the right people at the right time, it will be largely irrelevant. This is where you should hear about social media strategies (linked to the buyer persona’s habits and usage), marketing automation workflows, email newsletters, guest posting, speaking events, etc.

Consistency is equally important when asking about content distribution. Just like compound interest, consistency pays handsome dividends in the long term. For instance, will the blog posts be going out every day? Once a week? How about premium content like ebooks? One a month? While frequency can get you faster results, consistency is what prevails.

3. What is going to be measured?

Just asking this question at the outset can have an enormous impact. Many marketing and agency people with traditional backgrounds are not used to being held accountable for their activity. Now they can. And you’ll be surprised and pleased at the positive effect this has.

Measurement is not an end in itself. The purpose of measuring and analyzing your content marketing activities is so that you can do more of what’s working and less of what’s not working. Then, give some thought to why things are working or not working. Can that inform future content creation?

Don’t be bamboozled by meaningless vanity metrics such as the number of Facebook likes or Twitter followers (those can be cheaply purchased). Instead inquire about things like:

• Number of visits
• Leads generated
• Social proof, share-ability
• Inbound links
• Content performance by author
• Content performance by topic
• Content performance by format

Many companies are beginning to realize that their marketing has had to change because the way people buy has changed. To ensure that your content marketing is working hard and smart, ask these strategic questions to set the proper course and convey to your organization that you expect successful outcomes.

photo credit: DonkeyHotey via photopin cc

In the political world, there is an axiom that “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” For B2B Internet marketing and websites, the axiom is “content is king.”

Content is what people – and search engines – are looking for. It’s what drives visitors to your site and converts prospects into leads. Without great content, you’ve got a cannon with no cannonballs.

Here are the nine things to keep in mind for killer B2B website content.

1. Messaging – Answer these four questions regarding what happens when someone first hits your site:

• Will they know what you do?
• Will they understand what page they’re on and what it’s about?
• Will they know what to do next?
• Why should they buy from you or subscribe to your newsletter or download your material?

2. Educate and offer value – Sure, your website should have information about your products and services. However, most website visitors are not ready to buy from you. That’s why you should offer e-books, white papers, videos and other forms of content. The more you educate, the more you will sell. Avoid “we are the best” chest-thumping and instead take a “this is how we can help you” approach.

3. Quality – Earlier I mentioned that content is king. More specifically, quality content is king. While a lot of content is a good thing, the search engines are getting smarter and buyers are getting savvier. Make sure your content is unique (search engines love and reward this), educational and helpful, fresh and relevant to your buyer.

4. Avoid gobbledygook – These are jargon terms and phrases that have been overused and abused, rendering them meaningless. I apologize for the torture you’re about to endure – next-generation, cutting-edge, groundbreaking, best-of-breed, mission-critical, etc.

5. Be clear, not clever – There was a time when catchy and creative headlines worked well at capturing attention, especially when advertising was more powerful. Those days are over. People hate being marketed to and they always have. The difference is that now the website visitor, instead of sitting passively through a TV ad, will leave your site if you don’t get to the point and provide the information they seek.

6. Blogging – Think of your blog as an online magazine that provides helpful information about the problems your customers have that your company can solve. Blogging is the most effective online marketing tool – more important than social media or any other part of your website. Blogging creates fresh content and more pages of content, which is great for search engine rankings. It helps establish you as an industry authority and your fresh and frequent blog posts will drive more traffic to your site. Blogging also allows you to communicate with your readers and earn inbound links, which are really important for search rankings.

Need more persuading about the effectiveness of blogs? According to HubSpot, companies that blog have 55 percent more website visitors and get 70 percent more leads than those that don’t blog.

7. Make content shareable and social – According to social media marketing expert Jay Baer, “content is fire. Social media is gasoline.” Once you have great content, make sure to use social media to get it distributed and shared. On your website, add a sharing widget on every page to enable your visitors to share your content via all the major social networks. And when you publish a blog post, set up your site so that it autopublishes content to your company’s social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

8. Using multiple forms of content – Content is more than just the written word. Content also includes images, infographics, video, audio, online utility tools, games, etc. The more you can turn a text-heavy site into something that appeals to multiple audiences, the more effective your site content will be.

9. Customer confirmation – Your potential buyers want to know that you’ve made other customers happy. This is where testimonials, customer reviews and case studies can provide some of the most powerful content for moving prospects closer to a sale.

For most of us, when we become immersed with something we care about, like, or even love, we become completely involved. All of our mental faculties are devoted to a particular experience. As an example, when we travel to a foreign country, we can become immersed completely in a foreign culture. Experiencing for the first time how people in other countries go about their daily lives.

With the tumultuous changes occurring in the new digital economy, markets, consumers, and businesses can seem quite foreign when compared to a decade ago. These hyper changes occurring are rapidly altering behaviors and how people in general go about their daily personal and professional lives. The inability to adjust or adapt to this new behavioral phenomenon can leave many B2C and B2B marketing organizations bewildered. Continuing an exhaustive search on how to understand and connect with consumers and buyers in new ways.

B2C Catches On To Immersive Research And Experience

During the past five plus years, we are beginning to see the adoption of different approaches in B2C in terms of how to understand consumer behaviors and to create new immersive experiences. Digital technologies are not only causing rapid changes but are also offering B2C the means to create new immersive experiences. Yet, the concept of being even-handed with immersive research knowledge is not lost. For example, Disney is well known for using its theme park worlds as a platform for immersive ethnography based research. A few of years ago, Disney found the rise in blended families called for new experiences and services due to a new myriad of reasons why blended families attended theme parks.

In the world of entertainment and games, we are seeing the move to immersive experiences become a bigger part of humanizing offerings as well a how these industries approach marketing. Most importantly, affecting how storytelling can become an essential element of connecting with consumers. Here is a fantastic video on the topic of connected immersion. It is helpful in not only describing the concept of immersion in marketing, but in also seeing and hearing impressive examples:

Strong Connection

What particularly draws me to this video is the notion of creating an immersive environment. These environments are designed to create an experience, a memory, and a strong emotional human connection. While we may see entertainment and games as the forerunners of immersive experience, we are seeing leading consumer packaged brands incorporate this approach into their own marketing. Here is an example of Proctor and Gamble using the platform of the recent Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics to build empathy with Moms as well as create an immersive experience through a storytelling approach:

The Connected Immersion Mandate For B2B

As the world of B2B buyers and operations continues to undergo ground shaking shifts in behaviors, B2B marketing will need to reinvent conventional approaches in both research and experience. We are seeing the crossover of consumer-like experience become a demand of business buyers as well as users who are more influential today.

In B2B, there can be an infatuation with data, analytics, and predicting. A longing for the ease of painting by numbers to have a clear picture of customers and buyers magically appear. Big data has become big business because this chase alone for the ultimate picture is proving elusive. And, it is why B2B must look to embracing immersive research and creating immersive experiences.

What must B2B think about in order to develop a Connected Immersion approach? Here are a few suggestions:

• Commit to qualitative immersion research. With the fabric of B2B business models, operations, and environments transforming, B2B marketing will need to gain deep understanding through immersion–based research efforts. Such as immersive on-site ethnography as well as digital immersion research approaches.
• Recognize buyer persona development as an immersion research approach. Personas are meant to be a communications platform for translating insights resulting from immersive research. Recent surveys showing lack of impact from buyer persona initiatives can be directly related to this failure to see persona development as an immersion research effort.
• Make immersion strategic. When it comes to strategic decision-making, B2B executives can over rely on analytics and lack human connection. Embed immersive insights into strategic understanding and decision-making.
• Focus on drawing buyers into immersive experiences. In general, B2B has operated with an invisible wall between sellers and buyers. Buyers today desire radical openness and transparency. Making it especially important for B2B businesses to offer open immersive experiences as part of the buying experience as well as for a holistic customer experience.
• Create connected immersion experiences. Although there has been an enormous jumping on the bandwagon of content marketing, the mindset of B2B marketing continues to be focused on the “document” – almost exclusively. For B2B marketing organizations, I would be careful about doubling down on transforming marketing into a publishing department. Far more creativity and innovativeness will be needed to meet the call for creating connected immersive experiences in B2B.

The Future Of Connected Immersion In B2B

As more and more connected immersion marketing evolves in the world of consumers, you will see B2B customers and buyers seek the same. As personal and professional lives evolve as well as blend, expectations for immersive experiences will continue to grow. Requiring new creative means for engaging customers and buyers in connected experiences, which give glimpses into what the future will look like.

One of the next big things in B2B marketing will be the concept of connected immersion. B2B organizations, which are slow to embrace this inevitable demand from buyers, will find themselves – disconnected.

Running is one of the easiest ways to get a good cardio workout (and it's an important skill for when the Zombie Apocalypse hits ). Whether you're just getting started running or have already run a marathon, here are some tips and tricks to make the most of your running sessions.

Read more...

Injuries are painful, debilitating, and have the potential to set you back weeks or months from your workout goals. A few injuries make up most of the exercise mishaps out there, and though nobody is truly immune to injury, there are at least some things you can do to reduce your risk.

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They say there are no friends on a powder day. This may be true at most North American ski resorts, where it's every powder hound for himself in the mad morning rush to lay down first tracks after an overnight dump, but not from where I'm standing, perched on a ridgeline overlooking the jagged limestone spires of the Lizard Range in southwestern British Columbia.

ATHENS, Greece – In a tiny, windowless storeroom, elderly women sort through items normally destined for the trash.

It’s an unlikely place to be saving lives.

The women volunteer at a charity clinic that recycles drugs sent by relatives of dead cancer patients, recovering stroke victims, or new mothers who overstocked on baby formula.

The half-filled boxes of medicine are stacked to the ceiling, waiting to be mailed to growing numbers of unemployed Greeks who have been denied hospital treatment since the economic crisis started.

Greece’s recession — the economy shrank every year since 2008 — was declared over on Friday.

“I promise that growth will continue at an even faster pace,” Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said. “No Greek will miss out … Hope is back, Greece is back.”

That’s bold talk, as the recession has left Greek society looking battered: One in every five households has no working member, and a staggering 3 million of Greece’s 10.7 million people have lost state health insurance because the long-term unemployed and their dependents lose benefits.

Cardiologist George Vichas set up the Metropolitan Community Clinic three years ago to continue treating his patients who lost health insurance. Now he oversees a network of 250 volunteers who recycle medicine, provide checkups using donated medical equipment, and set up appointments at hospitals and clinics offering charity slots.

“I had never imagined we’d be working on this scale,” he said. “People who come to us have a sense of shame, anger and deep sadness … Our aim is to replace that with hope.”

The consequences of the recession, including the austerity cuts imposed by successive Greek governments, have been felt far and wide, laying waste to many of the country’s public services and traditions.

“The timeframe of the crisis does not overlap with the social consequences of the crisis,” said Alexander Kentikelenis, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge. “The economic recession may have lasted six years, but the social crisis may end up taking longer.”

Here are some of the social impacts — by no means all — of the recession.

THOUSAND A DAY — As many as a thousand people were losing their jobs every day at the height of the depression, which saw the economy contract by a quarter and a million jobs shredded.

One of them belonged to Yiannis Bouchelis, a 60-year-old graphic artist who hasn’t worked for four years.

“It’s really bad. It’s not just the money but our morale,” he said. “We want to feed our families and live in dignity — that’s the main thing.”

Unemployment rocketed from around 7 per cent in mid-2008 to nearly 28 per cent in late 2013, as more than 250,000 businesses went to the wall. Youth joblessness spiked above 60 per cent. At just a little over 50 per cent now, a whole generation is being denied the skills and experience needed to secure a future. There are indications that the rise in unemployment has led to an increase in alcoholism, drug use, poverty and a fall in the birth rate, among other things.

Those without work receive unemployment benefits only for up to a year — most getting the basic rate of 360 euros ($445) per month. More than 80 per cent of people out of work currently get no financial assistance.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute, a public policy think-tank based near New York City, argued that hope for a recovery based on strong exports was not realistic.

Growth could only be spurred by a major development program funded, at least partly, by the European Union, he said.

Without a major shift in policy — and budgets are likely to remain tight for years — Papadimitriou said it would take over a decade to get employment back to pre-crisis levels. “A jobless recovery is not a recovery at all.”

HOUSEHOLDS WITHOUT HOPE — During the recession, Greek governments enacted wave after wave of austerity in return for the financial bailouts that prevented bankruptcy and a possible exit from the euro currency. The spending and wage cuts, combined with emergency tax hikes, have worsened the recession and strained the finances of Greeks.

According to Unicef, child poverty rates have risen alarmingly. The U.N. body recently found that of 41 developed countries it assessed, Greece had the highest child poverty rate of 40.5 per cent in 2012, up from 23 per cent in 2008.

It found that since 2008 the percentage of households with children that are unable to afford meat, chicken or fish every second day has more than doubled. And in Greece, the share of respondents saying they “experienced stress today” jumped from 49 per cent in 2006 to 74 per cent in 2013.

The repercussions of the recession are likely to last. According to UNICEF, many of the children affected by the recession “will suffer the consequences for life.”

For Oxford University’s Professor David Stuckler, co-author of the book “The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills,” the Greek austerity program “undermined the ultimate source of its strength — its people.”

TIME BOMB — As Greece slashed spending on welfare, public health problems mounted.

In the first years of recession, HIV/Aids infection rates surged, something many attributed to cuts to the budget for a needle-exchange program. Amid international attention to the issue, a joined-up strategy involving many was forged — HIV infections have since fallen back.

Other health issues, however, are likely to prove more difficult to deal with. Ominously, Greece’s mortality rate, adjusted for its aging population, stopped dropping in 2011.

Health clinic founder Vichas offers one explanation — the high cost of treating chronic illnesses, particularly for the unemployed.

Boxes of cancer drugs in his store room cost up to 2,000 euros ($2,500) for a month’s course. In all, Vichas said, a cancer patient would need between 20,000 euros and 30,000 euros to pay for drugs.

He warned that long-term effects of the crisis are just beginning to appear.

“We’ll be seeing the consequences for another 5-10 years: The children who missed their immunizations, and all the consequences of illnesses that were not treated early,” he said.

“And treatment is much more expensive that prevention. It’s a time bomb.”

__

Online:

Metropolitan Community Clinic: http://www.mkiellinikou.org/en/

__

Pylas reported from London. AP Television producer Theodora Tongas in Athens contributed.

__

Follow Pylas at http://twitter.com/PanPylas

and Gatopoulos at http://twitter.com/dgatopoulos

The post Greece finally emerges from recession, leaving a battered society behind appeared first on Canadian Business.

What are the odds that discounting your price is going to lead to a positive customer experience?  It’ll be interesting to see whether your reactions to the following discount scenarios are similar to mine or whether I’m an outlier.

One-time-purchase discounts

I need a tool to effect a home repair.  Since the need for this repair only occurs once every few years the tool isn’t likely to wear out so I’m only going to purchase it once.  I find the tool on sale, what’s my reaction?

I’m happy to have saved money on something I’d rather not have had to buy.  As long as the tool performs as expected, I’m happy.  Will the fact that it’s on sale cause me to buy more tools?  No.  Will the discount bring me back to that store?  No.  I visited the store because it’s convenient to my home.  Besides, I didn’t know the tool was on sale when I went there.

Customer experience: The discount enhanced my experience, but didn’t benefit the seller.

Repeat-purchase discounts

Those of you who are regular readers will recall my roiling about grocery stores discounting oatmeal when the first cold snap hits, but I don’t believe I’ve ever shared my reaction.

I’ll buy a month’s supply of the oatmeal at the sale price anticipating that the discounted price will continue throughout the season, but hedging my bet.  If my expectation is met, I’m happy.  I get what I want at a lower price – even though I’d have paid the higher price.

My joy continues as long as the oatmeal remains on sale.  If the store stops discounting my brand of oatmeal, I buy only a week’s supply and resent having to pay the higher price.  My satisfaction turns to dissatisfaction because I feel that I’m overpaying even though I’d have happily paid the higher price earlier.

Do these price discounts endear me to the store or the brand?  No.  Will I continue to visit the store?  Yes, it’s convenient and the people are friendly.  Will I continue to buy the oatmeal?  Yes, because it’s what I enjoy.  Will I be happy about my purchase?  No.

Will I buy more oatmeal as a result of the discount?  No.  In fact, the discounts makes planning my food budget more difficult.  I purchase more oatmeal when it’s on sale, less when it isn’t, but never more than I’ll eat during the season.

Customer experience: Periodically discounting products or services that are purchased regularly turns customer satisfaction into dissatisfaction.

Dynamic pricing discounts

The airlines were one of the first to employ dynamic pricing – a pricing methodology that is designed to fill seats in less popular flights.  This approach to pricing is also being used to fill seats at sporting events and celebrity tours.

While there are plenty of reasons for despising air travel – delays, missed connections, lost luggage, undisclosed additional fees and security measures – we want to focus our discussion on the impact price discounts have.   

Personally, I resent the work this pricing ‘strategy’ creates for me.  I’d prefer to go online with my favorite airline, find the flight that fits my schedule and feel comfortable knowing that the price isn’t going to suddenly drop.

Besides subjecting me to additional work, I resent discovering that I paid 3 or 4 times what someone else paid for their tickets simply because I chose the wrong time to buy. 

Customer experience: For those getting the lowest-priced fares, they’re happy.  For the majority of us, we feel that we’ve been hoodwinked despite putting forth effort to avoid that result – not happy.

Seasonal discounts

It’s early spring and my favorite carpet cleaning company is offering a discount on its service.  I avail myself of the discount, then discover that:

• They’re running late.
• They’re experiencing equipment problems.
• Their staff is inexperienced and fatigued.

The joy of getting a lower price is rapidly displaced by resentment over having my schedule disrupted and the sloppy workmanship that accompanies workers’ failed attempts to get back on schedule.

Customer experience: Not happy.

As cold weather approached I realized that I needed a new winter coat.  I was at the mall at the time – a perfect time to buy a new coat – except I knew that the stores would be discounting heavily as the season progressed. 

This ‘knowledge’ leaves me with an unpleasant choice.  Do I buy now knowing that I’d be overpaying or do I wait, monitor prices on the coat I want and make a special trip to the mall (I’m not someone who enjoys shopping so I’m not there often) when the price is reasonable?

Customer experience:  I’m not happy with either choice.  If I knew that the price wouldn’t change I would have happily made the purchase when I was already at the mall and enjoyed the purchase I made.    

Rewards discounts

Loyalty or ‘rewards’ programs are really discounts in disguise.  The theory is that the seller is rewarding customers with a gift.  What they’re really doing is lowering the perceived value of their offerings by discounting.

A restaurant that my wife and I frequent often, out of convenience more than the quality of the food, offers a rewards program that originally provided a 10% discount.  Our reaction?  Why don’t they simply lower the price by 10% and save themselves and us the nuisance of tracking all this data?

Since the program’s inception, the restaurant owners decided that a 10% discount was too high and have adjusted the discount to 8.33%.  Apparently we’re not as appreciated as we once were.   

Besides instituting a ‘rewards’ program, they’ve made their portions smaller and raised prices.  They’ve muddied the perception of the value of their menu items so much that most customers with whom we’ve spoken feel that the food is overpriced.

Customer experience: Rewards discounts tend to slow service, complicate the buying decision and, when found not to work as the seller had hoped, require additional adjustments to pricing which further confuse customers and leave them dissatisfied with their purchases.

I’d love to hear your stories.  Please share them in a comment.

How does your audience decide what it wants to click, share, favorite, and purchase?

Understanding a bit of behavioral psychology can go a long ways toward a better understanding of your audience and why they do the things they do on social media and on your website.

There’s tons here for marketers to discover, and the psychology of human interaction can lead to some quick wins in the way you compose your social media updates and communicate online. I’ve collected 15 of my favorite psychological studies and how they might relate to what we all do online. I’d love for you to take a look and let me know what you think!

15 Psychological Studies for Marketers to Know

1. The Endowment Effect

When we own something, we tend to value it more highly. If we have to sell it, we want more than it is really worth.

The research: A study at Duke University found that students who had won basketball tickets valued the tickets at $2,400. Those who had not won tickets would pay $170. Similarly, a study by Daniel Kahneman of Cal-Berkeley found the same effect with study participants and the price of mugs. Value doubled for those owning a mug (perceived worth $10) compared to those looking to purchase (willing to pay $5).

Marketing takeaway:

Your customers attribute a higher value to things they already own. Help increase their ownership in your product or brand by encouraging feedback and suggestions (UserVoice is a great option) or asking for involvement on social media (chats or open office hours).

2. Reciprocity

We feel obliged to give back to people who have given to us.

The research: In 2002, a team of researchers of found that waiters could increase tips with a tiny bit of reciprocity. Tips went up 3 percent when diners were given an after-dinner mint. Tips went up 20 percent if, while delivering the mint, the server paused, looked the customers in the eye, and then gave them a second mint while telling them the mint was specifically for them.

Another fun example: BYU sociologist Phillip Kunz sent Christmas cards to 600 completely random strangers. He received 200 Christmas cards back in response.

Marketing takeaway:

Give something of value to get something in return. In our case at Buffer, we’ve found that acting on the lessons from How to Win Friends and Influence People, at the heart of which is kindness to others, we’ve received many happy returns in terms of opportunities and affinity from others.

3. Consistency Principle

We like to keep consistent what we think, say and do, and will change to ensure this is so.

The research: Princeton researchers asked people if they would volunteer to help with the American Cancer Society. Of those who received a cold call, 4 percent agreed. A second group was called a few days prior and asked if they would hypothetically volunteer for the American Cancer Society. When the actual request came later, 31 percent agreed.

Marketing takeaway:

Help current customers and potential users create an expectation of what they may say or do. For instance, get users to opt-in to a marketing course and offer tools at the end that are used by expert marketers. Subscribers may wish to stay consistent with their stated goal of improving their marketing, and signing up for recommended tools will fall right in line with this expectation.

4. The Foot-in-the-Door Method

When asked to make a small commitment first, we are more likely to agree to a larger request later.

The research: The first study on the foot-in-the-door method was performed in the 1960s by Jonathan Freedman and Scott Faser. Researchers phone a number of homemakers to inquire about the household products they use. Three days later, the researchers called again, this time asking to send a group of workers to the house to manually note the cleaning products in the home. The women who responded to the first phone interview were two times more likely to respond to the second request.

Marketing takeaway:

Ross Simmonds of Clarity.fm has a great take on what this means for marketers: “The more frequently a customer opens your emails, downloads your content or goes along with your request, the more likely they are to comply with a larger request like sharing your content & inviting their friends.”

5. Framing Effect

We react to a situation differently depending on whether we perceive the situation to be a loss or a gain.

The research: Researchers Amos Tverksy and Daniel Kahneman polled two different groups of participants on which of two treatments they would choose for people infected with a deadly disease.

• Treatment A: “200 people will be saved.”
• Treatment B: “a one-third probability of saving all 600 lives, and a two-thirds probability of saving no one.”

The majority of participants picked Treatment A because of the clear and simple gain in saving lives.

In Group 2, participants were told the following:

• Treatment A: “400 people will die.”
• Treatment B: “a one-third probability that no one will die, and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.”

The majority of participants picked Treatment B because of the clear negative effect of Treatment A.

Marketing takeaway:

The words you use and the way you frame your content has a direct impact on how your readers will react. Whenever possible, frame things in a positive light so that readers can see a clear gain.

6. Loss Aversion

We feel the negative effects of loss more strongly than we feel the positive effects of an equal gain.

The research: Chicago Heights teachers received bonus payments as part of a loss aversion research study. One group of teachers stood to receive bonuses based on the performance of their students on standardized testing. Another group received their bonus at the beginning of the year and stood to either keep it or lose it based on the results of their students’ tests. Per the results of the study, the prepaid bonuses—the ones that could have been lost—had a bigger impact on teachers.

Marketing takeaway:

Discover your customer’s challenges and reservations, and alleviate their concerns up front. Risk-free trials and money-back guarantees are one way to deal with loss aversion. Remove the fear of loss from the equation.

7. Conformity and Social Influence

We change how we behave to be more like others.

The research: Would you give a wrong answer if you knew it was wrong, just because everyone else was giving it? Solomon Asch found this to be true for a large percentage of people in a study he performed in the 1950s. He hired a group of actors to participate along with students in answering quiz questions. The actors were told to give the wrong answer. The majority of students followed suit, even though the correct answer was obvious.

Marketing takeaway:

Key influencers and industry leaders can help your product appear more valuable to others. Invite-only networks get the boost of this effect, too.

8. Acquiescence Effect

We give answers based not just on a rational consideration of what is being asked but also in consideration of how we will appear to others.

The psychology website Changing Minds explains three scenarios when we are most likely to acquiesce to the request of others:

1. They seem to be a superior in some way.
2. They have a need whereby we can easily help them.
3. Answering the question fully seems like hard work.

Leading questions are one way that the acquiescence effect impacts the answers that one gives.

Marketing takeaway:

Be aware of the leading questions you may be asking in customer development calls, surveys, or questionnaires. People can be easily swayed to answer in a certain way if the question seems tilted in a certain direction.

9. Mere Exposure Theory

The more we’re exposed to something, the more we like it.

The research: Robert Zajonc showed Chinese characters to non-Chinese-speaking participants. He showed each character 1 to 25 times, asking participants to guess the meaning of the characters. The more often a participant saw a character, the more positive meaning they gave.

This theory has a quick effect, too. Researchers Kunst and Williams showed their study participants a picture of an octagon for only one millisecond. Later on, though the participants could not explicitly remember seeing an octagon, they showed an increased affinity for the shape.

Marketing takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to repeat your message. This can work well for social media sharing, as reposting helpful content can have a direct impact on your audience.

10. Informational Social Influence

When we do not know how to behave, we copy other people.

Alex Lasky of Opower ran an experiment to see which type of messaging would best encourage others to save energy:

1. You can save $54 this month
2. You can save the planet
3. You can be a good citizen
4. Your neighbors are doing better than you

The first three led to no increase in energy saving. The fourth message worked, leading to a 2 percent reduction in household energy usage.

Marketing takeaway:

Use the experience of others to help people see the benefits of your product or company. There’s a close tie here with social proof.

11. The Decoy Effect

Consumers tend to change their preference between two options when a third, less attractive option is presented.

An old subscription page at the Economist stated:

• Web Subscription – $59
• Print Subscription – $125
• Web and Print Subscription – $125

Seems like a super deal for web and print, right? Professor Dan Ariely tested this model with students at MIT, asking them to choose a subscription option among the three choices listed by the Economist. The results:

• Web Subscription – $59 (16 students)
• Print Subscription – $125 (0 students)
• Web and Print Subscription – $125 (84 students)
  Total revenue: $11,444

When the print subscription was removed, the results looked like this:

• Web Subscription – $59 (68 students)
• Web and Print Subscription – $125 (32 students)
  Total revenue: $8,012

That’s a 30 percent difference in sales for the Economist by using a decoy price of a print subscription.

Apple’s pricing method also seems to take advantage of the decoy effect. In the below example, the 32GB option is made to look more appealing in comparison to the other two models.

Marketing takeaway:

You can put the decoy effect to good use with your pricing strategy as well as any time you are comparing different options. The inclusion of an option that is “asymmetrically dominated” (a plan that seems out of whack or a feature list that doesn’t quite add up) will make the other options more appealing.

12. Availability Heuristic

When evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision, we favor options that bring to mind immediate examples.

On a Quora thread about psychology facts, Alex Suchman offers a clear example of the availability heuristic in action. How many times do you think that a seven-letter word with an “n” as the sixth letter would appear in this post? How many times do you think a word ending in “ing” would appear?

Most people, when answering quickly, will say that “ing” words are more common than the other when in fact, seven letter words with “n” as the sixth letter would include all “ing” words as well. Since our mind struggles to come up with easy examples for the first question, we then perceive the second question to be more likely.

Marketing takeaway:

Make your product or service easy to grasp by providing examples of the actions you want users to take.

13. Buffer Effect of Social Support

People who feel supported by others feel less stress. If you know your friends will support you and there is someone with whom you can talk things through, somehow stressful situations are more tolerable.

The research: In a study of pregnant women, researchers found that 91 percent of those with high stress and low social support suffered complications whereas only 33 percent of pregnant women with high stress and high social support suffered complications.

Marketing takeaway:

Be consistent with availability and support for your customers. Constant support—in the form of email communication, blogging, in-app messages etc.—may help others feel more comfortable and less stressed.

14. Ben Franklin Effect

When we do a person a favor, we like them more.

The research: Jim Jecker and David Landy tested the theory by inviting participants to take part in a test in which they could win money. The test was administered in a rigorous way by an actor playing the role of scientist.

At the end of the study, 1/3 of participants were asked by the scientist if they would be willing to return the money to him. Another 1/3 were asked by the secretary of the study if they’d return the money. A third group was not asked to return the money. All participants then filled out a questionnaire, including a spot for how much they liked the scientist. Of the three groups of participants, the group who gave him the money gave him the most likable scores.

Marketing takeaway:

We like to justify our actions—in the case of the Ben Franklin effect, we feel a need to believe we did a favor because we liked the person. Don’t be afraid to ask for favors from your customers, users, and audience. If they’re willing to help out—answering surveys, checkout out content, resharing—their opinion of you will likely go up.

15. Propinquity Effect

The more we meet and interact with people, the more likely we are to become friends with them.

The research: Tenants in a small two-floor apartment had closer friendships with their immediate neighbors. Least likely friendships were between those on separate floors. And tenants who lived near staircases and mailboxes had friendships on both floors.

Marketing takeaway:

Be a constant present on social media and in the inbox of your subscribers.

Further reading

These 15 psychological studies for marketers are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a huge number of additional theories and effects that could help improve your online marketing. For more, I’d recommend checking out the following websites and articles.

• ChangingMinds.org
• The 20 Best Lessons From Social Psychology
• 5 Psychology Studies That Will Help Growth Hackers Achieve Real Results

Which psychological studies piqued your interest? Are you aware of any of these in the marketing you’re doing currently?

I’d love to hear how psychology impacts your marketing. Please do share in the comments!

Image sources: The Noun Project, Blurgrounds, Franklin Templeton, Quora, Death to the Stock Photo

About every four to five months I notice that my personal Facebook news feed is rather noisy. There are posts from people I don’t really know, few from those I really do and a handful of posts that are connected to my friends, but aren’t really posts they wrote or have anything to do with other than liking them. When that more-noise-than-signal problem arises, I typically cull my friend list.

Now, this is quite hypocritical of me in many ways. I’ve always been rather open with my social connections, even on Facebook. I mean, I have more than one friend on Facebook named after a weather condition, which is technically against my religion. Heh. I reserve Path for close friends and private conversations — we all need a place to bitch about family and co-workers — so I’m far more liberal with connections on the largest social network than others.

But there is great wisdom to be gleaned from weeding the friend garden, too. You can infer how Facebook decides what appears in  your stream. You can check with connections you haven’t heard from before to see if they’re now seeing you more or less — I suspect my friend count affects how they might see my content — and more.

As I sifted through Facebook friends this morning, I decided I would share my approach to culling your friends list. My hope is that you can use it to make  your Facebook news feed more relevant and that you’ll spot the fakes in the list:

Here’s my thought process reviewing my friends:

• If I cannot immediately remember who they are, where we met or how we’re connected, they’re gone.
• If I am unsure, I will see how many mutual friends we share. If it’s more than 75 or so, they can probably stay.
• If it is less than 75 or so, I will click through to their bio page and make sure they’re not a friend from school who has changed their name (marriage or witness protection) and that they do not appear to be a serial killer. If they are then familiar to me, or have killed two or fewer people in their lifetime, they can stay.
• Anyone whose profile picture contains more cleavage than shirt has to go. Nothing good will come of this connection.
• Anyone whose name is “Michael” but is spelled with Ks, Ys or extra Es … gone.
• Anyone whose profile picture is them holding their crotch or pointing directly at the camera — gone. If they’re doing both, that’s talent. They can stay.
• Anyone who has a picture of bourbon, is sipping a cocktail or mentions either in their short bio paragraph stays, but is immediately routed to my AA lead-gen list.
• If the person is from a foreign country and has not interacted with me or my content in the last six months, they can go.
• If I cannot pronounce their name, they probably fall under the first round of omissions, but they’re not likely to stay. Keep in mind this isn’t a racial or national origin thing. I have high school friends whose names I can’t pronounce. Example: Clintanya, who, fortunately for all of us, went by “Skeeter.”
• If they have a blue checkmark icon — meaning they have a “verified” account — they automatically go unless I decide I can tolerate their gratuitous ego. (That one is for Peter Shankman, Brian Carter, Robert Scoble and Jeremiah Owyang, whom I have on a special filtered list called “Douchebaggery Suspects.” And yes, they’ll see this. They have vanity search alerts set for their names. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have verified accounts. Heh.)

Keep in mind that about 1-2 percent of the people you unfriend are also ego-sensitive and have alerts and tools set up to tell them when someone unfriends them. You’ll get a note from them asking what they did to offend you. These people don’t realize your social feeds are for you, not them, and you are allowed to filter them however you like. They can follow your content without friending you. And Facebook friendship status has nothing to do with whether or not you like or value them as a person.

Do not re-friend these people. They are needy and will only constantly look to you for validation of their own lives or work, which you don’t have time to notice. If you do notice it, they won’t be that needy. Politely explain you’re conducting a timeline experiment and it’s only temporary. They’ll likely forget.

Try those filter parameters on for size and see if you don’t get a more satisfying Facebook experience. If you don’t, then go back and add all the ones with gratuitous cleavage or holding their crotches. That should fix it.

  

Related Stories

• An Open Letter to Brands from Your Customer
• How to establish your business blog as an authority in your industry
• Three Ways to Turn Company Secrets into Content

It’s fair to say LinkedIn is still earning its stripes with some small business owners. For many the power of LinkedIn is obvious. You can interact with individuals to expand networks, source new business deals, get introductions, and more.

For those that still need convincing, read on. But before you do, remember: just like any social platform your profile needs a consistent investment, for it to work.

Quality over quantity

Simply Linking In with anyone to get your numbers up is not best practice. Start off by Linking In with people you have networked with in person, colleagues, past and current customers, friends and family. Then use your foundation network to search potential clients or people you want to be connected to get an introduction. And build. And build.

4 powerful reasons to be on LinkedIn

Google loves LinkedIn

When someone searches your name, your LinkedIn profile will be one of the top three search results that come up. If you have a desolate profile, what does that say about you?

Establish your street cred, online

While having a good reputation locally is extremely important, your online reputation is equally as important. Thanks to the Internet customers and clients can come from anywhere and those that don’t know you locally, will research you online. And if your business relies on your personal brand for sales, you can bet your LinkedIn profile is going to help beef up your credibility.

Manage your network

LinkedIn allows you to tag your contacts into groups that you understand and manage communication to these groups.

LinkedIn now becomes your CRM system. If and when your connections change roles or move companies, you immediately will know, which can keep you connected but could also open a valuable sales conversation.

Cement your personal brand and attract business

LinkedIn builds your personal brand. By sharing relevant articles and own content with your network, you establish your positioning as the expert in your field. And when the time comes that your network has a need to buy (or knows someone that does), the only person they will think of is you.

By building your profile over time, you maintain “top of mind” awareness amongst your network, without bombarding them with sales calls or emails. This shortens the sales cycles and can help generate leads over time.

The weather here in Chicago has definitely taken a turn for the worse. But just because it’s getting cold outside doesn’t mean you should let your leads go cold. You know how it is: lead databases often get bogged down by countless leads that have seemingly been there since the beginning of time. These leads get the occasional newsletter or company update, but for the most part do not engage whatsoever with your company. Cold leads may not seem like they are worth the effort to go after, but there are usually a few that can be successfully reengaged and turned into customers.

Contact Leads Before They Go Cold

Before we get into revitalizing cold leads, we should first address prevention. How do you keep leads from going cold in the first place? We have found that the best way to prevent a lead from going cold is by contacting them as quickly as possible. Harvard Business Review found that companies that contacted new web leads within an hour of the lead being created were more than seven times as likely to qualify that lead than firms who waited an hour, and more than 60 times as likely as companies who waited longer than 24 hours. When a prospect browses your website and fills out a form to contact your company, do you know how long it will take for a sales rep to get in touch with to them?

Speeding up the time it takes to contact these leads can prevent them from turning cold. One way to do this is with a tool like MyLeadResponder. When a lead fills out a web form, MyLeadResponder immediately triggers a call to your sales rep and whispers all the information from the lead, including the marketing source that generated the lead. If the rep accepts the call, MyLeadResponder then triggers a second call to the lead to connect them in conversation. This guarantees your reps are talking to these leads before they move on to another provider or lose interest.

Revitalizing Cold Leads Through Email

Many businesses’ preferred method for reengaging leads is with an email campaign. The purpose of these emails is to entice leads to reengage with your company by providing them with new and interesting information. This is the time to brag about new features your company just started providing, offer exclusive deals and promotions, or show them new ways that your product can create value for them.

This type of campaign can be run as either a single email blast, or a longer drip campaign. The single email blast can be used as a last ditch effort before marking a lead as dead. The drip campaign is when you send out a new email to your cold leads about once a week. The goal here is to keep reminding these leads about your company, just not in an overwhelming and annoying way. This type of campaign allows marketing to reengage with cold leads by providing them with new resources such as blog posts, research reports, or white papers. There should be a natural progression with each email providing a resource with a little more information in order to increase their interest.

Tracking the success of these email campaigns is vital. Knowing the results of these campaigns can confirm the effectiveness at reengaging cold leads. For the leads that stay online, marketing automation tools can usually monitor the performance of your emails as well as if leads convert. Call tracking technology can measure the other group of leads who call into your business as a result of the email. Only by combining both tools can you really get the full analytics picture.

Grabbing Their Attention With Voice Broadcasts

Another excellent way to reach out to prospects that have lost interest is by voice. An email always has a chance of being ignored, but a call will almost always get answered. Voice broadcasts can deliver prerecorded messages to thousands of people at once. These calls don’t have to be the same robot voice broadcasts you have seen in the past. With interactive voice broadcasts, you can add the power of interactive voice response as well as personalization of your message. This allows the your outbound message to be interactive and go in the direction that the receiver of the call decides. With IVR, you can allow the respondent to connect back with a live agent right away, during the call, making a sale all the more likely.

Stay At The Top Of Their Mind With Retargeting

Your website may receive a high amount of traffic, but how many of those viewers actually convert? Generally, that number is around two percent. Keeping your product at the top of their mind could help bring back some of the other 98 percent. Retargeting ensures that your online ads can be displayed anywhere the customer goes. With each consecutive ad your brand will become more recognizable. Customers will begin to remember who you are and why they considered purchasing from you in the first place. These ads are a great place to display promotions and coupons to entice these potential customers into consideration. They may not come back right away, but there is a much higher likelihood of them converting in the near future.

Preventing leads from going cold is integral to every company’s success. The faster you reach out to a new lead, the more likely you are going to be to close a deal. But once the cold leads start to build up, it is important to occasionally reach out and remind them you are still there. Email campaigns, voice broadcasts, and retargeting can help you reengage leads that you thought were as cold as it feels outside. To find out more about email campaigns and MyLeadResponder, take a look at our Definitive Guide to Call Tracking for Email Marketing.

You’re ready to get started with inbound marketing. You’ve done your homework, attended workshops, and webinars and now you’re thinking about hiring an inbound marketing agency to get things rolling. Maybe it’s too early to build your own team and you’re not certain how to hire the right people and deploy the best technology. Maybe Senior Management isn’t on board yet and you need to demonstrate ROI for inbound marketing to get full buy-in.

These are great reasons to hire an agency, but which agency? How do you evaluate them to get the best value and a partner you can trust to accomplish your goals? There will be a number of important factors to consider, but the one that may get your attention first is price. How do inbound marketing agencies price their services, and more to the point, how can you compare them to pick the right agency for you?

The Traditional Pricing Model

Most agencies work from some variation of cost-plus-profit model. How many hours will it take to complete the necessary tasks in a statement of work (SOW), and how much does that cost the agency? Summing up those costs and applying a reasonable profit margin, and you have either a fixed price for a standalone project or a monthy services fee for ongoing engagements. Profit margin will depend on the agency’s financial goals, efficiency and competition in their niche. The Devil is in the details of course.

• What service level is needed to achieve your business goals and timeframe?
• What deliverables and pace is needed to support the service level?
• What external costs, such as marketing technology and paid media are needed?
• What is a reasonable price for deliverables such as a blog post, eBook or website?

These specifics are usually included in an agency SOW, and they can provide you with points of reference for comparing costs and fit of the agencies you’re considering. What’s important to remember is the deliverables alone don’t necessarily get you to the promised land. As HubSpot’s Arjun Moorthy put it in a recent post, “Pricing by cost means that you determine how much a job will cost you and add a markup. However, this means that your client pays for your efficiency (or lack thereof).”

Nowadays, content quality and relevance have a lot more to do with attracting and converting qualified sales leads than the number of blog posts or campaigns you publish each month. That’s why some agencies are more expensive than others when it comes to a comparable quantity of deliverables. In general, agencies that invest at least 30-60 days in getting to know you and your customers through buyer persona and buyer journey analysis before launching content marketing campaigns perform better than those that dive in head-first. It’s the attention to detail and focus on strategy that drives reputation and enables agencies to charge more for their services. They deliver value rather than quantity.

By asking the right questions about “how” and “why” an agency prices its services, you can make a more informed decision, but is that everything? You might also consider how well an agency markets their own services, and at some point you want to get to that ROI thing for proof of concept for your Management Team. Be wary of any agency that promises you positive ROI or achievement of specific revenue goals without working with you first. Why? Because they need to understand how your sales process works, how your customers will respond to inbound marketing and what internal and external barriers might be in the way for achieving your goals. Smart agencies will ask you a lot of questions during their sales process and during onboarding, but the real catalysts and barriers usually take a few months to reveal themselves.

Value-Based Pricing

So it can make sense to move to a value-based pricing model in which an agency is rewarded for meeting specific growth objectives rather than performing repeated tasks. The question is when? Usually after 6-12 months you and your agency should be familiar enough with one other to entertain a change in fee structure.

Are they doing what they said they were going to do and how well are you doing with fundamental metrics such as website traffic, new leads and new customers from your inbound marketing program? Your agency should be recommending new strategies and tactics along the way that help to improve results. Your agency should also be giving you feedback about your involvement in the program. If there are significant barriers to success, they should be telling you about them and recommending ways to overcome them. The relationship should be rewarding for both you and the agency. If not, a value-based pricing model may be too risky for both you and your agency.

Different Types Of Value-Based Pricing Models

The simplest would be a base fee for agency labor plus a bonus structure for meeting revenue goals. This approach is feasible if the revenues directly associated with inbound marketing can be tracked through a CRM integrated with an inbound marketing platform like HubSpot or Marketo. Another approach might be to set goals and track sales-related metrics like sales qualified leads (SQLs) or opportunities generated by inbound marketing. This requires some analysis, planning and negotiation to set reasonable benchmarks and goals. A more sophisticated approach, say for a SaaS company, would be to track free trials, trial-to-customer conversions, customer LTV and CAC, and monthly recurring revenues. The immediate benefits of this kind of value-based compensation include:

• ROI can be easily measured
• Increased alignment between Sales and Marketing
• The agency is incentivized to maximize performance
• Inbound marketing budgets can be justified
• Your company can achieve financial goals and measure progress

When you’re considering hiring an inbound marketing agency, it pays to be thorough and to find out what’s behind the different pricing models your candidates present to you. Think about the relationship you will have with your agency and how you can see it develop into something more like a partnership through value-based pricing. Starting with that style of relationship is risky, however, so take your time and get to know each other first. In the end, you will build a stronger bond and ensure inbound marketing delivers on its promises.

One of the vivid memories I have from being a startup CEO is the feeling that most people in your company have a look in their eyes that like they can do your job as well as you. How hard could it be? You just assign out tasks to all of us.

In the early days the CEO is the jack-of-all-trades, doer-of-all, famously the “chief janitor” or coffee maker. But if you level up, raise capital and grow customers, revenue and staff – life changes. Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. Most companies that are scaling have CFOs, heads of HR or talent. The “span of control” for a growing tech startup is probably 6-9 people. The “doers” in your organization.

This is when your job function truly starts to match the definition of “leader” because that’s exactly what your role is. You set direction. You hire great people. You help them prioritize their objectives and review the results. You course correct. You motivate, cajole, reassign tasks, hire, fire and push the organization forward. CEOs who try to do everything themselves rather than lead are usually pretty ineffective – they can’t scale.

Leadership is actually quite difficult. You have this tension between on the one side being a micro-manager (by which great people won’t want to work with you) or being hands off (and having quality lapses or team alignment issues). Neither end of the spectrum is particularly effective. The best leaders are great at hiring in large part because they are inspirational.

If you hire truly talented people you end up definitionally with a lot of competitive peers who will inevitably jockey for resources and control. Extremely talented people are ultra competitive. So building a great team often means assembling a team of rivals. You end up with a great VP of Sales wanting to massively grow top-line revenue but complaining that his sales pipeline isn’t wide enough or qualified enough or marketing isn’t giving him good enough collateral, segmentation data, product specs or competitive intel. Of if your VP Sales isn’t complaining about marketing she’s trying to get the function reporting to her. Power. Control.

Marketing of course often feels the opposite. They are irritated because they generated a ton of leads at their trade shows, their webinars and through online acquisition and they’re tired of getting blamed for the Patel leads. They’re pissed off that sales can’t learn the product, doesn’t have high enough close rates, won’t use the corporate sales decks they worked so hard on.

And then there’s product management. They talk to customers, operations, sales, marketing and engineering to determine the company product roadmap. They review competitors offerings and analyst reports. They want to help the organization determine what must be built and when. But the guys in engineering have set up skunk-work projects that aren’t “on plan” and product is angry that engineering won’t listen. As CEO, do you step in? Whose side are you on?

Engineering? They worked yet another fucking weekend to ship product on time for that VP sales who said we can’t win deals unless we ship these 17 customer features. But then why is that guy getting huge bonus checks schmoozing clients at Knicks games while I’m working yet another Saturday? I’ll bet he’s nursing a hang over while at had pizza at my desk again last night.

Ahhh. Startup life. The nuance and neuroses of these living organisms. Trust me – the infighting doesn’t disappear just because you work at a successful company. In some senses it can be worse because the financial & career stakes for success or failure are much greater. Your most talented developer quits because he thinks his boss is a fuckwit and he can’t work with her any more. What do you do?

It’s why I often tell startup founders that the that job of a successful startup CEO is “chief psychologist” because as you grow your job becomes more about motivating people, making sure people are getting along, adjudicating disputes, assigning resources (financial & talent), remunerating great performance – and often it is just stopping your teams from letting normal conflict spill over into war.

The job of a CEO is both “strategy” (what should we collectively as a group be working on) and  “alignment” (making sure there is no white space between departments – that everybody is pulling in the same direction).

This is where it becomes hard to be loved. I often worry about founders who have a deep-seated need to be loved because it can lead to bad decisions. Adjudication is about resolving intractable disputes. Resource allocation is hard at a startup precisely because you have limited resources. Do you hire more sales people? More developers? A larger marketing team? In each case somebody wanted more.

I have found that the best CEOs are respected, not loved. They listen to everybody’s requests, they weigh the situation, they talk with many staff members and get inputs and then they make tough decisions. Great leaders explain their logic but make it clear that decisions are subjective and that the decision has been made. Great leaders promote people who achieve great things and allocate more resources their way. Great leaders are willing to fire people who can’t get along with teams because they know that bad apples are what create white space between teams in the first place.

Now I know all of this sounds rather Pollyannaish and obvious. But in practice it is much more complicated. I find that more leaders fudge decisions than make hard choices. I find that most leaders make too many compromises to keep people happy. In my experience many leaders hate conflict so they avoid it and let inter-departmental issues fester. It’s easier not to decide. It’s easier to avoid the disappointment of having to weigh in somebody’s favor.  It’s easier to create strange job titles so that nobody feels slighted than to agree clear reporting lines, roles & responsibilities.

But none of these things are what great leaders do. I believe Facebook is the company it is today because of the decisiveness of Mark Zuckerberg – his willingness to turn the company on a dime. Contrast that with years of decay at Yahoo! where many of the leaders avoided the hard internal debates that led to the peanut-butter manifesto.

I’m not saying that great leaders need to be assholes. That’s certainly not true. But I do believe it is much more important to be respected than loved. To make hard choices that will sometimes be right, sometimes by wrong. But a directionally correct decision made quickly in a startup and that can be fixed later is better than protracted contemplation. A hard choice the frustrates some a great deal is better than a compromise that frustrates all a little bit. People who want to be loved hedge.

In my experience entrepreneurs too worried about being loved make poor decisions and thus poor leaders.  Entrepreneurs should care more about respect.

 

When marketers talk about the power of Twitter, what they’re really talking about is the power of people. One of the key lessons of Twitter training for business is that you need to use this platform to target the right people. Although you can drive a lot of traffic without the right targeting, the majority of that traffic isn’t going to be people who are likely to become customers.

While having a large number of followers may look impressive, if you want your Twitter for business efforts to have an impact on your bottom line, you need to focus on quality over quantity. Now that you know why it’s so important to target the right Twitter users, let’s take a look at several different ways to connect with the right people:

The 3 Groups That Matter

Individuals who fall into your customer demographic are the first group you want to target. If you haven’t taken the time to define the traits that one of your potential customers may possess, put that task at the top of your to-do list.

One commonly overlooked aspect of Twitter training for business is there are actually two other groups worth targeting. The first are industry influencers. Not only can the tastemakers of your industry send you qualified traffic, but having their endorsement can help close sales.

Amplifiers are the other group worth your time. Although there may be some overlap between influencers and amplifiers, not every influencer is active enough to be considered an amplifier. Since these users can be a little tricky to identify, the easiest way to pinpoint them is to visit Topsy. You can paste the URL of a popular post within your industry into this tool, and then you can see which Twitter users were most active in sharing it.

A Twitter Marketing Strategy That Works

Since a big part of Twitter training for business is identifying a strategy that works, we’re going to give you an actionable plan that you can start putting into practice today. Followerwonk and Buffer are the two free tools you’ll need in order to execute this strategy. Followerwonk provides lot of insights into into Twitter users and data, while Buffer is a Twitter management tool designed specifically for content.

Twitter profile optimization is the first step towards making beneficial connections. Adding a profile and including relevant keywords in your bio will maximize your profile’s visibility. Next, use Twitter hashtags and @ mentions to get on users’ radars.

As you start using Twitter more, you’ll want to share a mix of content from your own blog, as well as others. In addition to sharing content, be sure to actively engage with other users. Finally, as you get more comfortable with Twitter and all of the features this platform has to offer, you can utilize advanced tactics like creating Twitter lists.

While this strategy will provide you with a solid start, if you want to fully optimize your Twitter efforts, be sure to take a look at our social media management services for your business.

Do you need a Twitter Marketing campaign that will drive more leads to your business? Before you can find a solution, you need to identify the problem. Web Strategy Plus offers a free web strategy score, consultation and live website review to help you identify the areas of your marketing plan that need improvement. Learn More.

The process of qualifying leads requires you to be really understanding of who your prospects are and what they want. Then again, you read about that in just every blog, article, and case study on the subject.

What are other specifics can you get into? Well one of them could be the aligning your strategy with your prospect’s own style.

For some people, some things are just their style.

“Oh man, that is sooo him… Only guy I know who does things that way.”

“I’m sorry but that’s just not my style… You sure you got the right guy?”

Lines like these are best remembered in movie and TV scripts. But you know, that doesn’t mean real professionals have no sense of style or distinct traits that set them apart. A good lead generation strategy factors in the existence of these signifying traits and aligns itself accordingly.

Consider the following reasons:

• Leadership alone comes in different style – If you can’t process someone having too many styles at once, at least look at the most relevant: Their leadership style. As with most B2B prospects, their authority has always been one indicator of lead quality. But of course, it wouldn’t be reasonable to reject a lead simply because a certain leadership style is incompatible with your service/product. (At least, not immediately.)

• It’s another facet of business culture – As you should know by now, information about a business’ particular culture is still very important information for sales reps. Knowledge of budget, authority, and needs isn’t as clear as when you understand them through the lens of a prospect’s business culture. And wherever there’s culture, there’s bound to be style.

• Yes, it is personal – And like it or not, there’s a lot of personality involved when it comes to style. For example, when dealing with highly mobile prospects and professionals, would you try and get them to settle down? You can already tell that’s a very bad move. If you don’t like a potential client to make things too personal, you have to (ironically perhaps) understand what makes certain decisions personal to begin with.

In fact, you could actually do better by encouraging prospects to take pride in their own style (whether it’s management, purchasing, or even just dress). Like regular consumers, B2B buyers are more open to those who understand them (even in ways that are not strictly business).

For gaining and keeping the attention of potential customers, for persuading leads to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I’m interested”, and for building your brand, few marketing techniques come close to the power of storytelling.

More and more marketers are harnessing the power of storytelling as a business-building tool. With the explosive growth in popularity of content marketing, it’s easy to think of storytelling as a new marketing tool, but it’s not. Marketers have been successfully using the power of stories for generations.

Indeed, storytelling is an ancient art form that humans universally respond to. Done right, it can drive your marketing results forward like few things can. Done wrong, your audience can quickly become bored and lose faith in your brand. Avoid the following two approaches to make sure your storytelling efforts are effective.

Two Ways You May Be Getting Storytelling Wrong

1. Is your story about you or about your reader?

Some marketers think their stories, and their marketing messages in general, need to focus on them, their products and the company they represent. They think the way to impress consumers is to babble on and on about the great products they carry and the incredible company that they are, without ever mentioning the reader and his or her needs and wants.

This is the wrong approach. The way to influence your readers is to empathetically talk about them, their problems and how you can solve them. Great storytelling does this in a subtle, indirect fashion.

The most effective marketing stories don’t place their primary focus on the company or its product; instead, they talk about a customer success the reader can relate to and mentally picture himself enjoying. In this kind of storytelling, the main character (a.k.a. the “hero”) finds a solution to his vexing problem; this resonates with, and persuades, readers in a big way.

2. Is your story driven by logic or emotion?

People are emotional creatures. Our emotions influence the decisions we make, including our buying decisions. If you ignore the power of emotional appeal in your advertising, your campaigns will likely end in frustration.

When you craft your brand stories, don’t make them dry, logical lists of product features and technical product specifications. Rather, use powerful emotions to capture your readers’ hearts. Try using a means end chain analysis to “ladder up” to your audience’s values and then use storytelling to appeal to those values.

You might even start your story off with a bleak and dreary tone. To quote Seth Godin, “sell the problem”. As you begin your story, drive home to the reader how painful the hero’s dilemma was (and by extension, how painful it is for the reader). As the story progresses – as you talk more and more about how you solved the hero’s problem – give the reader hope that you can do the same for him.

Taking the reader on an emotional roller coaster with a happy ending is a powerful way to bond him to your brand and make him want to find out more about becoming your customer.

Can You “Sell Without Selling”?

Understand this about effective storytelling: It “sells without selling”. As your reader becomes emotionally involved in your story, he often starts to convince himself of your product and company efficacy.

Consistently offer compelling stories and your audience will bond with you emotionally. This attachment will lead to more first time sales, more repeat sales and a higher lifetime customer value.

And here’s a bonus: customers bonded to you through emotional, compelling stories will be much more likely to become brand ambassadors, otherwise known as your “unpaid sales force.”

A Matter Of Trust

Remember that no matter how effective your marketing messages are, your potential customers trust your current customers much more than they trust you. If your happy customer/brand ambassador tells them how wonderful your product is, you just might gain new customers as a result.

Likewise, if you can connect with your audience through poignant stories that are relevant to their own desires, they’ll be much more receptive to more direct marketing communications further down the funnel.

In today’s crowded marketing environment, your potential audience is drowning in a vast ocean of content. You need clear advantages over your competitors to win their attention. When your brand develops a reputation for producing compelling, entertaining, emotional stories , your content will stand out and get noticed in a big, bold way.

It’s no secret that technological innovation is explosive.

The exponential development and refinement of first desktops and laptops and notebooks, then tablets and smart phones, has now finally evolved into a next generation gadget—wearable technology. Today, this revolutionary concept is a fast-growing trend that is reinventing the meaning of internet-based connectivity.

The future is here

Leading-edge technology companies are smart when it comes to deciding where to invest millions of research and development dollars. They envision wearable devices as an opportunity to create next-generation innovation and introduce advanced technology products for consumer’s insatiable demand for cool gadgets.

According to an April 10th press release from International Data Corporation (IDC), a research company that analyses future trends, “wearables took a huge step forward over the past year and shipment volumes will exceed 19 million units in 2014, more than tripling last year’s sales. From there, the global market will swell to 111.9 million units in 2018.”

Big names pushing innovation

It’s not hard to guess who the big names pushing the industry might be.

Google, Samsung, and Apple are pushing the envelope when it comes to wearable devices. After Google launched Google Glass, the new tech has proved popular with geeks and gadget aficionados. Samsung was not far behind with its smart watch. Now Apple is planning to release the iWatch, and will make its debut in the wearable technology marketplace.

Health and fitness aficionados

It isn’t surprising that the health, wellness, and fitness industry would be early adopters of wearable technology. Currently, at least fifty-five wearable devices allow users to keep track of bio-metrics like sleep patterns, heart-rate, blood pressure, and calorie counting.

Health-conscious users no longer need a visit to an expensively-equipped lab or clinic to keep tabs on their health because they can now access their vital statistics anywhere, at any time.

New security threats

Technology has never been free of the dualistic nature of reality—good or bad, right or wrong. Wearable devices are no different. While they do make life easier, they also pose a new security threat to personal privacy.

When users log in key personal health data about their lives on websites, they actually have no idea about the developers behind the app or the companies selling them. Even if these are innocent providers, with no malicious intent, users still do not know if their personal data is stored on servers that have sufficient network security to ward off a hacker attack.

If personal information falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to a wide spectrum of cyber-abuse like employment or housing discrimination, higher insurance rates, identity theft, or targeted advertising.

Since wearable smart devices can store and transmit information in seconds, users need to be mindful of how this information can be a goldmine for hackers and online criminals who intend to spring a cyber-based attack.

Vague privacy policies

Few people read privacy policies because they are often written in ‘legalese’ and can be difficult to comprehend.

Consequently, they are often unaware of how their wearable devices store, manage, or protect personal information. This ignorance leads to insufficient knowledge about the security controls in place to safeguard information from unauthorized access. For example, users may not be aware if their information is being sold to third-party purveyors or to online and mobile advertising agencies.

Simple self-defense

Ignorance about privacy policy can hurt a user. For example a wearable device may have privacy settings default to publicly share information.

This makes entering usernames and passwords and social networking behavior visible to anyone surreptitiously tracking the user’s online movements. One simple precaution is to simply switch the default setting to private or turn off the wearable device when not in active use.

Accidental spyware

If precautions are not taken when using wearable devices, hackers can peer into user’s personal lives. For instance, hackers accessing someone’s Google Glasses can see and record everything the user does. Similarly, hacking into a user’s Samsung smart watch could allow a hacker to record information with a microphone.

Although manufacturers are not oblivious to these security threats and have created effective counter-measures, these safety features benefit from mindful and alert users.

Precautions in the workplace

The biggest threat with wearable devices comes when users work in a company that endorses bring your own device (BYOD) policies. These liberal policies did not anticipate the potentially invasive features of wearable device. Because they were designed for older technologies, they did not anticipate how wearable devices could pose a security threat in the workplace.

Usually, corporations that encourage BOYD are in the technology or financial sector, which means that innocent users can accidentally share their employer’s information with hackers who are monitoring their devices.

For instance, unless the network security of a technology corporation has invested in cloud security solutions, it may be impossible for network administrators to detect any malicious activity. They will not even be aware that an unknown device is monitoring their network. Consequently, they are not prepared to block information that is being transferred to a wearable device.

If, for instance, the wearable device is Bluetooth-enabled, it may pair with other unprotected Bluetooth emitting devices and transmit sensitive information.

Final thoughts

This review of the potential dark side of wearable devices, is not a condemnation, but a warning of possible abuse.

All things considered, wearable devices are a positive technological breakthrough, and hacker activities can be blocked by alert manufacturers and informed users. The news is that it is entirely possible to enjoy wearable devices without compromising security.

Corporate growth, good and bad, can be traced to sales lead follow-upⁱ. 

Marketers keep thinking it is common sense for sales representatives to follow up all inquiries given to them. After all, what is the alternative? Cold calling? But alas, as Voltaire said, “Common sense is not so common.”

So we are left with motivating them to do the obvious and not give up. Yes, follow-up is difficult today. Prospects are always available when they want something, but disappear when they have what they need. Follow-up is variously reported from 10%-25% in most companies. When you think about it, some marketers feel that giving some salespeople sales leads is like throwing money in the trash. Here are some thoughts on motivating salespeople to do the obvious:

I remember when I first adopted social media marketing as a way to promote my business. It was January 2009—just over 5 years ago so the memory is fairly clear. At the time, I knew intuitively that social media would be useful, but I didn’t have a good handle on my goals.

So I recruited a social media pro to help. Not surprisingly, one of the first questions she asked me is what did I want to accomplish?

“I don’t know,” I responded with more than a hint of frustration. “What can social media marketing actually DO?”

It wasn’t until I immersed myself in social, and the content creation that goes along with it, that I truly began to understand its potential. The experience of connecting to people online, learning from them, helping them and even developing offline relationships is something no blog post or book can fully convey.

If you’re still finding your way in social media marketing, trying to understand how it can—and cannot—help your business, read on. I’ve been thinking for some time about sharing the insights I’ve gained through working on my own business and for clients.

Build relationships with key influencers

The first social media platform I experimented on was Twitter. I began using it to build relationships with other professionals in marketing and public relations. This approach quickly proved to be an effective way for me to learn how my peers were using social media and to compare notes with them on common challenges.

For any business, social media can serve a similar purpose.

For starters, it’s a powerful tool for getting to know the important influencers in your niche. Once you identify them, you can follow them, engage with them and, ultimately, implement strategies to build deeper relationships with them.

While the percentage of the population on Twitter is relatively small, the active users frequently wield significant influence elsewhere.

For example, many thought-leading journalists and bloggers use Twitter (and other social platforms) to promote their latest published writing. To forge relationships with them, follow their social media activity and make thoughtful, relevant contributions to the discussions they participate in or initiate.

Social media is a way to establish and build new business relationships, but it’s not a substitute for actually getting together with people. You still need to meet people one on one, participate in networking events and attend industry conferences.

Early warning signs of an issue

You may already know what people are saying about your business. Perhaps your call center is responding to negative inquiries. Or maybe your sales force is having a problem closing deals.

Monitoring social media can help you understand the source of the problem. Google Alerts will track mentions of your product on the web and on blogs. Social media dashboards, including HootSuite, allow you to track mentions of your brand on Twitter.

More sophisticated monitoring tools, such as Sysomos, cost more but are often worthwhile if your business is prone to customer complaints that surface in forums and other online spaces.

If your monitoring efforts reveal a social media discussion that’s negative towards your brand, you have an opportunity to do damage control and even turn the discussion positive.

However, keep in mind you can’t control the conversation. You can only participate.

Start by listening because, as in real life, listening on social media is even more important than talking. Then present your point of view in a thoughtful and respectful way. This simple approach can go a long way to resolving problems before they escalate into serious issues.

Drive awareness of your product or service

Social media marketing sometimes contributes directly to sales. However, unless you’re using marketing software that tracks the source of your online leads, it’s extremely difficult to draw a direct line between a social media post and a sale.

For consumer marketers that sell products through traditional retail channels, drawing the connection with the bottom line is even more difficult.

For this reason, it can be more useful to employ social media marketing as a top-of-the-funnel tool for building brand awareness. Don’t panic when your newly launched social media campaign doesn’t generate an immediate bump in sales.

Instead, develop metrics that measure other things that matter to your business and that social readily delivers, such as customer engagement and satisfaction levels.

There are plenty of ways social media marketing can help your business. You just need to get started, learn everything you can from your experiences and apply a little imagination. The real issue is can you afford not to participate in social media? That’s a question only you can answer.

If you’re interested in finding out how social media can help your business, get in touch to learn more.

Need some web content for a landing page? No problem, hire a copywriter. But when you’ve invested heavily in your website and need compelling copy that effectively generates sales, leads, and conversions, what you need is an epic copywriter. Yes, there are many good writers out there, but not all of them can produce the type of copy that prompts action. Even those who can may not always be suitable. As Karri Stover points out in her post, there are factors that distinguish great copywriters. Epic copywriters get you results – ROI. They are skilled wordsmiths versed in the art (or science) of linguistic persuasion. They are also reliable professionals who take a genuine interest in your business. Here’s how you spot the pros…

Image source

How to Spot an Epic Copywriter

1. They have a website

Every serious copy writer has a website. Not just a website, but one that is active (check out the blog), was obviously professionally developed, and makes you feel confident about procuring their services. Is the copy on the site effective? Did it engage you and make you want to hire this person? If the writer can’t sell his own product, he won’t sell yours.

2. They have a portfolio

Does that snazzy-looking website have a portfolio? If it does, and it contains a long list of real clients (that you can contact) and testimonials, that’s a good sign. An epic copywriter understands the value of making this information available. If they have live samples up of their works, even better. Note that some writers only provide a portfolio upon request.

3. They have high-profile clients

Are there any big brands or companies on that list of clients? If your potential copywriter is working with well-known businesses, particularly those known for their high-quality web content, she may be worth hiring. Of course, this requires some due diligence on your part, but major companies don’t normally outsource to second-rate providers.

4. They have other skills

An epic copywriter has skills beyond writing persuasive copy. The great ones understand the web and websites. They are well acquainted with SEO best practices and know how to effectively optimize the content they create. One way to identify these skills is to check how past works have fared in search. Do those pages rank? Are their own sites visible?

5. They have an online presence

A freelance copywriter relies on his online reputation to land sales and clients. If you run a search on their name, you might come across guest posts, blog comments, forum discussions, etc. Copywriters are usually active on social media, too. This info can help you gauge their authority among peers. It’s also another opportunity to evaluate their writing.

6. They aren’t charging pennies

An epic copywriter knows the value of his time and efforts and charges accordingly. Whether he or she charges flat rates or by the hour, prices toward the upper end of the copywriting scale indicate that the writer is confident in their ability to produce measurable results; it suggests that she is prepared to put in 100% to ensure the success of your project.

7. They communicate

Not every great copywriter has a silver tongue, but the professional ones do take communication seriously. Usually, there are multiple ways to contact them. They respond promptly when you do. They follow up. They conduct interviews efficiently. They explain their working processes clearly and candidly. Top copy writers may be booked way in advance, though.

Tips for Hiring Copywriters

• Hire the right specialist. There are different types of copywriters. Some specialize in technical writing and sales brochures, while others excel at creating search engine optimized content for websites. Once you identify the skills needed to complete your job, seek out writers with the relevant expertise.
• Start small. As a first time client, you may want to test the skills and work ethic of who you hope will be an epic copywriter, so start small. For example, if you need content for every page on your site, have the new writer start with just one. If he or she delivers in line with your expectations, award the rest of the job.
• Fixed rates are better. While website copywriting is not an area of your business where you should skimp or cut corners, nobody wants to pay more than they have to. That is often the case when you are paying by the hour. If possible, negotiate a fixed rate per project when you hire a copywriter.

Got a few of hiring tips of your own? How do you spot epic website copywriters? Please share in the comments.

Do you ever wonder how you can write better, or better yet, how to hate writing less?

How do you create engaging content that is truly going to drive business for your organization?

I recently saw Ann Handley, renowned author and content marketing thought-leader, in the flesh at #MeshCon (I’m a huge fan of MarketingProfs). As the day’s keynote speaker, she opened up the Meshmarketing conference with a topic that really gets to the content marketing matter and that is to create ridiculously good content.

Here’s what Ann has observed over the past couple of years:

There is so much stuff being created. Producing engaging content has consistently been the #1 challenge for the past 5 years and we are competing for attention in a way that we have never before. So how do we create content with more meaning and sense of purpose?

Below are 7 ways Ann Handley creates better content.

7 ways to create better content

1. Be strategic and find your content marketing mission

As Ann comes from a journalism background, she brings up an industry best practice, maybe some of you know it? It’s called the 5 Ws. They are as follows:

Who – Hone in on who you’re trying to reach.

What – What are your goals?

When and Where – What value can you deliver at any given stage of the buying cycle or journey?

Why – Why does it matter?

Answer these questions and one last important question: what do you want them (your customers, your prospects, etc.) to do next?

2. Think Thanksgiving not Spanish tapas

Ann borrows an example from Jason Miller of LinkedIn to depict how he thinks of content as a big Thanksgiving turkey. This helps us imagine our content strategy as a big hunk of meat that can be sliced and diced into different content types. Basically, your content is not just a one-off. Think of it as a whole.

3. Tell a different story

We hear this all the time: “We don’t have a story to tell”, especially from B2B companies. Ann challenges us to look at other parts of our life, think outside the box and be inspired by our lives, to bring the inspiration back into our content marketing development efforts.

4. Be useful!

Ann absolutely believes that utility is the cornerstone of effective marketing. Make the story about the customer, be ridiculously useful. Here’s some food for thought: if your content was gone, would people miss you?

5. Mind like water: content moments everywhere.

Keep your mind open and follow this “mind like water” approach where water will always find its place in a crevice. So stay open to the idea. There’s always a story to write.

6. Hone your own skills, build your dream team.

We need a broader tool set at our own disposal. As marketers, we need to be more in social. People who are active in social tend to be proficient in social and understands how it can work with content. Also, we need to get great at conent and writing, and have a basic grasp of SEO. We need to be good at analytics so that we are able to communicate back to team, especially with the C-suite.

7. Be a better writer: tell better stories.

Becoming a better writer is becoming a better marketer. It’s all about better stories, and that starts with better writing. A lot of times, people think writing is an art where only a select few can do it well. Ann believes that writing is actually a habit, not an art. Writing is the heart of content marketing.

And lastly, Ann leaves us with these wise words: “Words are your ambassador, don’t squandor them.”

For more amazing tips on how to create ridiculously good content, check out Ann’s new book. You can get a sneak peek of ‘Everybody Writes’ here: bit.ly/everybodywritespreview

For small businesses, a healthy pipeline of new potential customers can be the difference between success and failure. Try these tips to keep business prospects coming year-round.

Evaluate Your Own Business

Start by taking stock of your business. Finding and keeping steady work requires strategic planning, a step busy business owners tend to skip.

“A full SWOT [Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats] analysis will help you build your job pipeline and keep it full,” says business performance consultant Terry Corbell, founder of The Biz Coach.

Start by writing down your strengths and weaknesses – things you have control over, such as your skills, contacts, and credentials. Next, list the opportunities and threats to your business from external forces, such as the current market, your location, and competition.

Finally, look into whether you’re leveraging your strengths to secure new jobs and addressing your weaknesses so you don’t lose business to competitors. “Many business owners don’t know what advantages their skills afford them or how quickly a weakness can be turned around once it’s identified,” Corbell says.

Develop A Job Prospect List

Subscribe to area business journals and join your city and state business associations.

“Attending these groups’ meetings allows me to network with other business owners and find out about new commercial construction jobs,” says Andrew Colas, president of Colas Construction in Portland, Oregon.

Get to know people in related businesses as a way to generate leads. For example, if residential construction is your forte, stay abreast of area property sales. “Develop relationships with local real estate agents,” says Jamie Strotmeyer, owner of Henry Street Building + Design in Burlington, Vermont. “The jobs may be small, but they can help to fill in the gaps.”

Keep Up With Past Clients

A lead doesn’t necessarily need to be a brand new client; it can be a new project for an existing customer or cross-selling a new product or service.

When a client expresses satisfaction with your work, that’s the time to ask if he or she knows anyone who needs similar work done. Then, follow up on those leads right away. “Happy customers are the best source of referrals,” Corbell says.

Boosting customer satisfaction will build your reputation for being thorough and detail-oriented, and will help you land future jobs. “Doing quality work on every job is the best way to ensure a steady workflow,” Colas says.

Generate Good Word Of Mouth

While you are talking to those happy customers, asking them to write a good review about you on Yelp can help establish your business as a reputable place to go for service.

Eighty-five percent of consumers say that they read online reviews for local businesses, and these are consumers who have already identified a need that they have and now want to select a business to use. Make sure your business is there when they start looking.

Of course, to get good reviews, you need to provide good service. In the social media era, every part of your company is in customer service, meaning that you need to make sure that any interaction a customer has with any part of your company needs to be positive. The average Facebook user has 190 friends. That’s 190 people who could have heard great or terrible things about your company. The true return on investment of social media is not in ad response, nor in clickthroughs to your website, but in affinity for your brand built on an organic person-to-person basis.

Becoming A Thought Leader

Always take time for marketing your business, even when you are busy. If you neglect marketing while you’re busy, there will not be any jobs in the pipeline when business quiets down. At this point, it’s too late to start getting the word out.

Content marketing – creating useful, non-advertorial content on your topics of expertise – is an excellent tool for drawing leads into a sales pipeline is because it helps educate and interest sales leads before you are even aware of them.

In his article The New Rules of Sales Pipeline Management, Al Davidson notes, “If prospects are reading articles and viewing informative content from your company on your website and on social media, they are getting better educated about your solution (and are getting more likely to buy from you) before they even get a phone call from a sales rep. Content marketing gives you an opportunity to publish your company’s own original thought leadership to talk about industry trends, offer informed commentary on the issues that your prospects are facing, and build credibility.”

Searching out online and social media discussions that you can lend some knowledge to is another sound strategy for establishing yourself as a thought leader. This shows that you are passionate about your business and take an authentic interest in helping people, even if it doesn’t lead to an immediate sale for you. It also helps keep you in people’s minds when they do require a service.

A Long View Will Pay Off

There is a lot of pressure to meet daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly targets. However, successful businesses will not focus exclusively on the back end of the pipeline. Taking these steps to bring new leads into and through the pipeline are just as important. Keeping both your pipeline and your funnel healthy with a long-term focus will help you and your sales in the long run.

Plenty of opportunity in emerging city for entrepreneurs willing to take on fluid, changing roles.

Somehow, in the last 10 days, Vancouver’s election has gone from a boring, done deal to one of the tightest and ugliest civic fights in years. With money, visibility, the incumbent’s edge, plus a volunteer army capable of delivering warm bodies to polling booths on E-Day, Gregor Robertson, Vancouver’s centre-left mayor, should be a shoo-in for a third term. Instead, the 50-year-old juice magnate is fighting for his political life in tomorrow’s election. If polls can be trusted, ex-journalist Kirk LaPointe has narrowed Robertson’s lead to just five per cent. Hard as it is to believe, Gregor, come tomorrow, could be a goner. The race is still Robertson’s to lose. But here are 10 reasons the mayor might actually fail:

For starters, there was the puzzling blanket apology he offered voters in the campaign’s final debate two days ago: “I am sorry,” Robertson told voters, “I can do better.” The Hail Mary move was calculated to humble a mayor widely seen as arrogant. But, just two days before the vote, with polling showing the cratering of support for Robertson and Vision, his political party, the play reeked of desperation. Right, so you finally got the message . . . 48 hours before polls close?

Even Vision supporters acknowledge the party has been remarkably tone-deaf: Their aggressive push for bike lanes and towers has come at laser speed, with little consultation or concern for affected citizens. In a telling off-camera incident, the mayor was once caught complaining about the “f–king hacks” concerned about property values and quality of life, cementing a widely held view of the mayor as imperious and uncaring.

Vision has been seen to toady to the city’s elite. By closing car traffic to Point Grey Road, Vision transformed a waterfront thoroughfare in the city’s toniest enclave to something akin to a gated laneway. The move, of course, caused property values in the surrounding neighbourhood to spike. The city’s affluent West Side has also managed to avoid the towers and homeless shelters thrust into the city’s central neighbourhoods.

Robertson has been haunted by the Vision-led Vancouver School Board’s refusal of a $500,000 donation from Chevron to implement needed math and science programs. It was dirty money from Big Oil, the school board declared—to parents’ outrage. Chevron’s “Fuel Your School” program has been a smashing success in the region’s other school districts, which were all too happy to snap up the money Vancouver left on the table.

Last week, Vision, in a curious move, chose to sue LaPointe for defamation rather than direct funds and attention to a last-minute ad buy. The long-shot suit, filed in the campaign’s final stretch, has instead cast LaPointe as a kind of free-speech martyr. (Robertson and his top political ally, Geoff Meggs, contend LaPointe depicted them as “dishonest,” and painted their attempts to solicit support from organized labour as “corrupt.” LaPointe, who denies the charge, characterizes the suit as an attempt to “silence” him.)

LaPointe, though he stumbled early, has mounted a strong campaign, proving himself particularly deft at the art of retail politics. As a journalist, LaPointe knows the crucial importance of crafting a narrative. His platform may be paper-thin. (Does he support Vancouver’s Green City initiatives? How about densification?) But he’s connecting with voters in a way Robertson never has. In pledging to increase funding for a school breakfast program, for example, LaPointe pointed to his own childhood: He was raised by a single mom, never knew who his father was, was forced to resort to butter-and-sugar sandwiches, and went to school hungry every single day. Compelling stuff, for a run-of-the-mill policy pledge; it earned the underdog another round of flattering headlines.

Two weeks ago, the Georgia Strait, the city’s free weekly, ran a column entertaining the conspiracy theory that Robertson is actually trying to throw the election. It’s the wackiest of theories (Robertson, the thinking goes, is torching his municipal career to run for the Liberals in the next federal election); but the fact that the left-leaning Strait actually deigned to note it says a lot about the strength of Robertson’s campaign.

Although Robertson has repeatedly pledged to make Vancouver “Canada’s most open government,” his administration has become known for muzzling city workers. The mayor’s elected opposition have dubbed city hall a “sealed fortress”; the councillors complain that even they must file freedom-of-information requests to get routine budget information.

COPE, Vision’s rivals on the far left, have defied all expectations and mounted a credible campaign, connecting with voters on issues such as the city’s affordability crisis. Robertson’s pleas for left-leaning electors to vote “strategically” tomorrow appear to be falling on deaf ears: Support for COPE, a Vision splinter party, has hit nine per cent. The party could hive off a significant chunk of progressive votes from the mayor’s party.

Sure, signage may be the most unscientific measure of voter intent; but Vancouver, in the earliest indication of mayoral frustration, was blanketed with a shocking number of LaPointe signs, even in traditionally leftish neighbourhoods such as Mount Pleasant—never a good sign.

The post Vancouver election: Could Gregor be a goner? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Few observers are more astute on the markets, modern life, and human nature than investor Jim Rogers. An early internationalist, Rogers has made a fortune over many decades, seeing what others don't. I recently spoke to him about a range of topics, from the latest market turns (and some missed timing calls) to his life growing up.  

Still wary of the US stock and bond markets, Rogers says he's not short now, but nor is he a buyer. He believes that sometime in the next year or two, US stocks will fall as interest rates rise, and that will be a turning point. The following has been edited for clarity and length:

Jim Rogers: If the stock market goes down — say, you pick the number, 13%, 23%, who knows — everyone will be screaming, and Mrs. Yellen and her friends will say, 'Oh, we're sorry, we didn't mean to hurt you,' and they will loosen up again. One way or the other, the markets will heave a sigh of relief, have a big rally, maybe even turn into a bubble, at which point I hope I'm smart enough to try to short stocks in the US.

Henry Blodget: We seemed to have a preview of that a few weeks ago where we had a pretty sickening plunge for a few days, and then James Bullard came out and said, 'Hey, we'll do what we need to do.' And suddenly stocks took off again. So you're expecting a bigger version of that?

JR: That's exactly right. Wait until it gets worse and it will, somewhere along the line. At which point, the Fed will panic. It's all they know how to do, Henry, so they will pump huge amounts of money in. It's going to go into shares, and that will cause the top. I have no idea when that will be. That's when I would sell short. By the way, if it happens that way, one should be long, and long big time. I doubt if I will. Either I'm too smart or not smart enough. What we need is a 26-year-old. The 26-year-old will think this is wonderful. She will think she is very smart. She will make a lot of money for a while, and then it will collapse. 

HB: You said recently we're going to pay a 'terrible price' for what the Fed doing is doing. What do you mean?

JR: We're going to have economic hard times again. Next time it will be worse because the debt is so much higher and because for the first time in recorded history, all major central banks are printing huge amounts of money. So there's this gigantic artificial ocean of liquidity that's going to dry up some day, and when it does, we're all going to pay a terrible price.  

HB: Could the recent move in oil prices indicate a fundamental positive for the economy? 

JR: It's a fundamental positive for anybody who uses oil, who uses energy. It's not a positive for places like Canada, Russia, or Australia. It seems to me that this is a bit of an artificial move. The Saudis, from what I can gather, are dumping oil because the US has told them to in order to put pressure on Russia and Iran. And it's probably not a real move. I read about shale oil like you do. But at the same time, North Sea production is declining. Russian production will start declining next year. All the major oil fields that we know about — all the production is static or declining. So it doesn't quite add up on any kind of medium-term basis I can see.

HB: You've been bullish in the last year or two on Russia, which is now going through something of a crisis. Has your view changed?

JR: No, no. I've been traveling a lot lately. I should probably try to sit down and figure out what to buy in Russia again. It has had a collapse, as you know, but I suspect if you look at things like Russian ETFs, they are down at previous lows, but not making new lows. And a lot of that is because of the ruble. To Russia's credit, Russia has not been sitting around supporting the ruble in any big way. My view of markets is you let them clean themselves out, let the system find a clearing price. To my astonishment, the Russians are being more capitalist than the Western capitalists. They are letting the currency find its own bottom. That will change soon. It will find its own bottom, and then Russia will be a good place to invest. 

HB: And you say that even given Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aggressiveness?

JR: It sounds like you have been reading American propaganda too much. This all started with America, with that diplomat in Washington [Victoria Nuland, the Asst. Secretary of State]; they have her on tape. We were the ones who were very aggressive. We're the ones who said, 'We're going to overthrow this government, we don't like this government, even though it was elected. They are fools and we don't like them, so we're going to get rid of them.' We were the aggressive ones. Crimea has been part of Russia for centuries. If it weren't for [Nikita] Khrushchev getting drunk one night, it would still have been part of Russia. That election was in process, anyway. Everybody would rather be part of Russia than Ukraine. Ukraine is one of the worst-managed countries I've ever seen. Of course people want to get out of Ukraine. You would, too. It's a disaster. And Russia has been much more prosperous.

Maybe Putin has been overly aggressive, but he has been subject to horrible stress in the West. The State Department says he's a bad guy, so the American press says he's a bad guy. They stop looking at the facts. It happened in previous wars, including Vietnam.

The other effect it's having is driving the Russians and the Asians together. That will hurt us — the US — in the end because the Asians have more money than the West. America's the largest debtor nation in the history of the world. China has huge assets, as do other Asian countries. So unfortunately, it's causing Russia to turn more toward Asia. That too will be good for Russia in the long term. There are 3 billion people in Asia. You see the Russians have made this huge gas deal with the Chinese. The Chinese and the Asians have recently started an Asian bank to compete with The World Bank. This whole thing, which we started, is only accelerating bad movements.

These sanctions are not hurting everybody, but they're certainly hurting Europe, which is driving more and more people to look for competitors to the US dollar and the US banking system. In the end it's good for Russia. I don't like saying it. I'm an American like you are. But I have to deal with facts, not with propaganda and not with hope. 

HB: What would make you lose faith in Russia?

JR: If Putin suddenly invaded Germany, I would certainly lose faith. If it turns out that Putin is deranged, or other people in the Kremlin are deranged. I was bearish on Russia for 46 years. I went to Russia in 1966 and came away with the idea that this will not work; this cannot work. And only in the last couple of years have I realized that something was going on and changing at the Kremlin. If I suddenly find this is wrong, that this is the same old KGB and the same old Kremlin, then of course I would change my view.

HB: You made a great call on commodities more than a decade ago. We're in a downturn now. What is your view going forward?

JR: Great question. I certainly missed this correction. The correction has been worse than I thought. Some of it I knew — I've been quite vocal that gold would go down and stay down for a while during this bull market, maybe even under $1,000 dollars per ounce. But still the overall correction I got wrong. My view, rightly or wrongly, is that this is a correction in a bull market. You will remember in the bull market in stocks between 1980 and the end of the century, we had some very serious corrections. And every time people said the bull market was over, it wasn't. It ended in a bubble. My view is that's what's going to happen with commodities. We're in a correction, a serious one, but that it will turn around. Back to what we said about oil, most major oil fields are in decline. In agriculture, we're running out of farmers. So we're facing a serious problem worldwide. I don't see enough new supply to say the bear market has started again, that the bull market is over. I think there will be one more big leg.  

HB: So is this a buying opportunity?

JR: For sugar maybe. Rice maybe. I do own gold, I do own silver. I haven't bought any of significance in a few years. I haven't sold any. Gold went up for 12 years in a row without a down year, which is extremely unusual in markets. So in my view the correction will be unusual as well. Gold has not had a 50% correction in years, which too is unusual. That would be $960 per ounce. I'm not predicting it's going to go there. I'm just pointing out to you there's going to be another chance to buy gold and silver in another year or two or three, I have no idea why. If America goes to war with Iran, I'll probably buy gold at $1,600, begging to get more.

HB: When you look back at your career, are there specific experiences, either mistakes or successes, that you feel have shaped you as an investor?

JR: I, like many people, didn't know much when I was young. I thought I knew everything. At one point, I decided the market was going to collapse. I went and put all my money, which wasn't much, into puts. And lo and behold, the market collapsed, the worst drop since 1938. I tripled my money when everybody else was going broke. And I thought, 'Boy am I smart.' I sold my puts the day the market hit bottom, waited for the market to rally. This time I sold short, didn't want to pay the premium, and two months later, I was wiped out completely. I didn't have anything left. I couldn't meet the margin call. One thing you better learn is about the margin clerk. He doesn't care. He's going to give you a margin call. The six stocks I shorted eventually went bankrupt in the next two to three years. But in the meantime, they had gigantic rallies. It never occurred to me that a company on the way to bankruptcy could go up, could double.

I learned a lot about myself. I learned about margin. I learned that markets do really strange things. I assumed that everybody knew what I knew. I now know they don't but that I have to wait. My timing is useless and hopeless. I now realize if I want to do something, I usually wait a year or two, and even then I am wrong in my timing. When I speak at schools and universities, I explain to them that there's nothing wrong with failing, nothing wrong with losing everything, but please do it when you're young, when you don't have that much money. Learn your lessons that way rather than when you're 50 and it could be $50 or $100 million dollars. That was a great experience.

Once in 1980, when oil had been booming for a decade, I came to the conclusion the bull market was over, and I shorted oil. And that weekend Iran and Iraq went to war. Needless to say, I had to scramble in panic, and I covered like every other amateur. One could say that was bad luck. But no, no. Somebody knew that was coming. You don't move a lot of armies and start a war without some preparation. I just hadn't done enough homework. Nearly all the mistakes I've made have been from not doing enough homework. Whenever I get sloppy I nearly always lose.

HB: How do you know when to actually stop doing homework and start making a trade?

JR: Well, I do try to discipline myself and realize I better wait, because my timing is hopeless. Eventually I get enough confidence. But even then, Henry, you can't just act. You gotta keep at it. Because something can change, and things do change. As we were discussing, I decided to start buying Russia and, lo and behold, came the Ukraine. It didn't occur to me that America was going to try to throw its weight around and try to overthrow the Ukrainian government. I should have done more homework and been more aware. When things change you need to change with it, you need to reexamine and see if you were wrong in the first place. The market constantly makes me reexamine.

HB: You have said you were poor in the beginning of your life. How has that shaped your career and the decisions you've made?

JR: When I went to Wall Street I was stunned by what I would hear. How trees can grow up to the sky. Stocks cannot go down. I grew up knowing it wasn't easy to get money and it wasn't easy to make money.

When I went to Wall Street I was stunned by what I would hear. How trees can grow up to the sky. Stocks cannot go down. I grew up knowing it was wasn't easy to get money and it wasn't easy to make money.

That gave me some grounding or reality or skepticism or something, which at times has stood me in good stead, because in the backwoods of Alabama if you came in and said some of the things I was told on Wall Street, they would run you out of town. They would know you were nuts. So that's helped me.

On the other hand, it's made me miss some bubbles. Because if you can invest in bubbles, you will make staggering amounts of money, Henry. And that's why you need 26-year-olds, Henry, because they don't know any better. Unfortunately since I did grow up having a sense of reality and grounding, I've missed some bubbles because I knew too much, if you will. I was too smart for my own good. There's nothing more exciting than finding a bubble or two if you can if you can invest in it artfully. I cannot. I am not any good at it. 

HB: You're very humble about your timing ability. Have you met anybody who can time it well in a regular enough fashion that they don't blow themselves up?

JB: There are great traders. I try to differentiate between traders and investors. Roy Neuberger, whom I once worked for, was astonishing. I just could not conceive of how good he was at short-term timing and trading. Mike Steinhardt was an awfully good trader and timer of making investments. Mike might disagree, but I always viewed him as more of a trader than investor because he did have such a good sense of market timing. There must be plenty of guys, good market timers, short-term traders. They won't survive if they're not. But as far as someone who can time markets — go from a bull market to a bear market — I just don't know that person. I am sure she exists. I just don't know her.

HB: You've referred to the 26-year-old investor who thinks they know everything, thinks they are incredibly smart, and many of them are incredibly smart. What's your best advice for young, smart professionals who clearly have a lot left to learn?

JR: Two things. One, they have to understand the numbers and the accounting. They have to read the 10ks and the notes to the 10ks. That's true no matter how wonderful the story is, and it might be wonderful. But they had better understand the numbers or they won't last too long as investors. And secondly, understand history. Go back and read about previous markets, bull and bear, read about the '20s and the '30s. Read about the Panic of 1907. Read about all this stuff because it's exactly the same!

One reason, other than the fact that I grew up in the backwoods of Alabama, that I could recognize bubbles is because I had read about them. I realized, 'Oh my God, they said the same thing in the '20s!' They said the same thing in previous bull markets, no matter where it was. 'This time it's different.' They're always talking about this new technology, or new genius or new methods. Just go back and read market history, economic history — history. I tell kids all the time that they should study history if they want to be successful at just about anything, because it has all happened before.

Mark Twain said it rhymes, well, it does, if you understand history, all the big forces. I don't mean when the First World War started, but if you understand why the First World War started, the real reasons, not because somebody was assassinated. If you can understand the real workings of previous times, you're going to be much better able to understand our time because it's the same stuff. We're all the same people! We haven't changed. We still put our trousers on one leg at a time.

HB: Talk a bit about living in Singapore. What drew you to it? What do you like, and what's toughest about it?

JR: I am keen on Singapore. I moved here because I had been lecturing for many years that everybody should teach their children Mandarin because it would be the most important language in the 21st century, eventually. And then suddenly I had a child and I said, 'What do I do now?' We had a Chinese governess, and it became clear it wouldn't work long-term. There comes a time when every 9-year-old refuses to speak the language because their friends say it's not cool. So I realized we had to move to a Chinese-speaking city where our daughter wouldn't have any choice but to speak Mandarin.

We looked at all the Chinese cities. They were too polluted. Singapore seemed perfect. They speak two languages: Mandarin and English. Everything worked. There's fantastic healthcare and education. My kids like it here very much. My wife, Paige, and I both feel it's a great place. New York City — I loved it and still do, even though every time I go, I see it deteriorating. As for complaints about Singapore, they're minimal. It's not as bicycle friendly as I'd like. And when I travel, my Singapore mobile phone gives me trouble. Even AT&T phones don't give me trouble.

HB: Do you get homesick?

JR: My wife says I'm a gypsy, a wanderer. I don't think I've ever gotten homesick in my life. I remember as a teenager I said I wanted to see the world, I want to taste it all.  

HB: Given the contrast in the way you grew up, how do you talk to your kids about money? What do you tell them?

JR: Oh, boy. I'll tell you, Henry, somebody is spoiling my kids. I hope it's not me. It's hard, living in Singapore, since everything is so prosperous. People do expect good times or nice lives, even people who are not very well off. It's a problem that I grapple with all the time. I have never been a parent. Certainly my kids are growing up different than me. They see the cars we have. Friends tell them, 'that's an expensive car, or, 'that's an expensive house,' no matter how much I tell them we're not well off.

You and I both went to Yale. There were certainly kids when I was there who had grown up quite spoiled, from a life different than anything I had ever conceived of. And some of them didn't do well in life, partly because of that. I don't know how to solve this problem. I tell my daughters all the time that money is hard to get. I try to show them that. I try not to buy them everything in sight, which they want and they expect.

When they were born I got each of them six piggy banks for 6 currencies. I am not trying to teach them to be currency traders. But I am trying to teach them you have to save, and these are different kinds of money. I do try to give them money when they do something, when they do a chore or when they do something terrific. But I don't have an answer. I wish I did.

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Every day, many salespeople get up in the morning, have their morning cup of coffee, and set out to find somebody with pain.

I used to work with a consultant who proudly told me that he saw his job in sales as finding the soft underbelly of the beast, stabbing it, and then being there to offer up the cure.

I’m going to argue, like a lot of others have argued in sales, that if a prospect has a need, they probably would come to you. If you have a viable product, then you have prospects actively looking because they do have a pain.

On average, here’s a look at the breakout of prospects in any given market.

10%: have pain and are actively looking for a solution.

20%: passively looking so they’re not yet feeling the pain.

70%: they have no pain and are satisfied.

Most salespeople tend to spend their time within the 10%, hoping to cure that pain.  What that creates is a situation where 90% of the market is untouched. You have salespeople chasing a very small part of the market.

That 10% is also a dangerous part of the market. We all know that 60% of buyers are through their buying journey before they reach out to the salesperson. This 10% falls into that camp. They’re looking for two things: 1) an order taker, and 2) someone to talk to about price.

Still, given all those odds, most salespeople still tend to concentrate on that part of the market. But consider this: 75% of customers who leave or switch from one vendor to another were either satisfied or completely satisfied with the vendor at the time that they switched. What was the reason behind that?  If the old perception is that the 70% are satisfied, I’m going to argue that 100% of your target market is focused on objectives.

Objectives can vary. Sometimes it’s about getting rid of the pain. Sometimes it’s about getting ahead of a regulatory event. No matter what, they all have objectives for their business, and they all have objectives around growth. Therefore, just because they don’t have pain, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be interested in you or your product.

If you focus on objectives rather than pain, you’ll be dealing with a much bigger part of the market in a much more positive way. You’ll be able to expand your market and your opportunities.  If you work from an actionable definition of value, you’re going to be a lot more effective.