Rnordman

This can sometimes be difficult to remember when payroll time comes around, but your employees aren’t an expense—they’re an investment!

And yet, for some employers, it’s an investment that can seem dicey, at best. This is especially true of younger employees. How often have you heard these words spoken about millennial employees: We hire them and we train them, and then they leave!

It can be frustrating to watch talented millennial workers jump ship just as soon as you get them up to speed—but it’s not necessarily because they are flighty or disloyal. It may be because you haven’t made the right investment in them.

Invest in Them as Individuals

So how can you invest in millennial talents, in a way that boosts retention?

One thing to remember is that today’s employees don’t like to be treated like they’re parts of a machine. They don’t want to feel like they are interchangeable with other employees. They want to feel like you know them—and value them—as individuals.

So I’d simply ask: How often do you stop to talk with your millennial employees one-on-one? How often do you ask them about their career goals? How often do you share with them some of your own passions or pain points? And how often do you show them how their particular role contributes to the big picture?

These are all important ways in which you can invest in millennials as people, not just as parts of your corporate apparatus.

Invest in Professional Development Opportunities

Millennial employees still have a lot of career ahead of them, and they want to be as proficient and as well-rounded as possible.

One way you can invest in them, then, is to provide them with ample experience to learn things on the job—through seminars and training sessions, yes, but also through chances to collaborate across departments and disciplines.

Basically, show your employees that you’ve invested in their future—not just in what they have to offer you right now.

Invest in Personalized Performance Reviews

One more thing I’ll mention is that millennials tend to really like feedback—good or bad, just so long as it’s directly relevant to them.

Avoid cookie-cutter performance evaluations. It’s really worth the extra time to make sure you talk with your millennial employees one-on-one, and give them feedback that’s tailored to their career ambitions.

Metrics are important.  They provide a means of helping us understand whether we are on target to achieving our goals.  They also give us insight into potential changes in the market.

As we “instrument” more of the selling process, whether through CRM, mobile tools, and other means, we have the capability of measuring many more things than we have in the past.

Recently, I was doing some reading on metrics.

One group recommended tracking the following:  Meetings/Opportunity, Time between touches, Opportunity conversion, Untouched opportunities, Contacts per account, Follow up meeting ratio, Opportunity progression, Email engagement rate, Total opportunities engaged, New opportunities, Meetings, Contacts per account, Average opportunity size, Bookings per meeting, Account type, Discounting, Average opportunity age, Follow up meeting ratio, Average time in stage, Stuck opportunities.  Roughly 20 key performance metrics for sales person effectiveness.

Another suggested:  Monthly sales growth, Average profit margin, Monthly sales bookings, Sales opportunities, Sales target, Quote to close ratio, Average purchase value, Monthly calls per person, Monthly emails per person, Sales per rep, Product performance, Sales by contact method, Average new deal size, Average new deal sales cycle, Lead to sale %, Average cost per lead, Retention and churn rates, Customer lifetime value, Average conversion time, New MRR, Expansion MRR, Number of monthly onboarding calls, Number of demo calls.  Roughly 23 metrics, both individual and organizational (which is simply the roll up of individual metrics).

And another suggests:  MRR, CAC, LTV, Churn rate, Burn rate, ARPU, TCV, ACV, Number of active users, Number of registered users, Month on month growth, Total revenue, Gross profit, Gross margin, Produce usage/engagement, Net promoter score, TAM, New vs return customers, Renewals, Number of trial sign ups, Free to paying customers conversion,   Surprisingly, for a SaaS company, they don’t measure Win rates, Sales cycle time, Number of meetings/calls, SQLs, MQLs, etc.

I could go on and on, the point is, the increasing data gives us the ability to analyze that data in any number of ways and to create endless metrics/goals by which we assess performance.  But which of these all these things that we can measure and track do we pay attention to, how do we leverage them most effectively?  Stated differently, just because we can measure a lot of things we have never been able to measure in the past, doesn’t mean we need to measure everything.

For example, for a sales person, while you can track and measure them on any number of the metrics outlined above, doing so on all the metrics can be confusing and misleading.  I’ve seen sales people being measured on as many as 20 metrics.

Sales people will wonder, “Which of these 20 or so metrics should I pay attention to?  Which is most important?”  They can’t manage to all of them, if they try, they end up accomplishing nothing.

In reality, these are all very interrelated.  Positive or negative changes in one area ripple through and impact most of the others.  If we aren’t doing enough prospecting, we won’t have enough qualified opportunities, and we are highly unlikely to make our numbers.  If we have declining win rates or average deal values, or increasing cycle times, then our ability to hit our goals is threatened.

Instead, we have to think about “What are the 3-4 metrics that are most critical to understanding whether the sales people are on the path to achieving their goals?”  For example, it may be as simple as number of weekly prospecting conversations and healthy pipeline metrics.

The fewer metrics enable the sales person to focus on the things most critical to achieving their goals.  If we understand the interrelationships between the metrics, we can see if they are doing the 3-4 things most critical to reaching the goals, all the other metrics are probably going to be in the right range.

Where the other metrics start coming into play is  when we start missing our goals in the 3-4 critical metrics.  We can drill down into the interrelated metrics to try to better understand what’s going on and the potential issues standing in the way of achieving the goals.

Sometimes, the focus on metrics becomes an end in itself.  Focus starts to be on achieving a certain metric, but not understanding the cause-effect or quality relationships between metrics.  For example, we focus on meetings to achieve a meeting goal, forgetting to understand why we need meetings in the first place, whether they are the right meetings, and so forth.

Sometimes our coaching follows the same line, we focus on the metric itself and not what is impacting the ability to achieve the metrics.  For example, the coaching conversation that goes, “You aren’t achieving your meeting goals, you need to up the volume of meetings you have…” is very different than, “Why aren’t you able to achieve your meeting goal, what might you change or do differently to make your meeting goal, how might I help you?”  Or sometimes, we might discover, “The results you are producing with the meetings you are having are far better than we expected in setting a meeting goal.  What you are doing shows you are meeting your overall goals—we probably should adjust the meeting goal….”

Bottom line:

1.  We have an incredible ability to measure lots of stuff in sales.  Just because we can measure lots of things, doesn’t mean we should.
2.  Most of the key metrics are interrelated, as a result, if we choose the right 3-4 “cornerstone” metrics, we can make it easier on the sales people to do the job we expect them to do.  The other metrics may be supporting metrics that help us identify and isolate problems if people are missing some of the key metrics.
3. Metrics don’t solve performance issues, they just help identify potential issues.  We have to get under the numbers, understanding what they mean to identify and address the performance issues.  Metrics and goals are just numbers, they don’t tell us what happened to cause the numbers.
4. While I didn’t discuss this, we tend to obsess on trailing metrics–the problem is, by their very nature, by the time we see problems, it’s too late to do anything about them.  We need to understand the linkages between the trailing metrics, and those that lead them, so we have the opportunity address performance issues early enough to have an impact.

 

 

Growing a business requires investment capital. When companies are scaling, they need money to launch products, hire employees, assist customers, and expand operations. This sentiment is true now more than ever with the collective U.S. business debt to equity ratio amounting to 92.6% (.93) in Q1 of 2021. The trend shows that businesses are growing thanks to a healthy balance of debt and equity.

There are numerous ways to raise capital, and each will have a different impact on your company and the pace at which you grow. The most common way to raise capital is through either equity or debt. But what do each of these entail? And how do they help your business' financial standing? Well, you're in luck, because we'll take a look in this definitive guide to demystifying the debt to equity ratio.

Leverage is the term used to describe a business' use of debt to finance business activities and asset purchases. When debt is the primary way a company finances its business, it's considered highly leveraged. If it's highly leveraged, the debt to equity ratio tends to be higher.

It is important to note the debt to equity ratio will vary across industries. This is because different types of businesses require different levels of debt and capital to operate and scale.

Key Takeaways

• The debt to equity ratio compares an organization's liabilities to its shareholders’ equity and is used to gauge how much debt or leverage the organization is using.
• High ratios indicate to lenders that an organization may be too risky to invest in.
• Investors may choose to focus on an organization’s long-term debt to equity ratio to spot much bigger risks.
• Debt to equity ratios will vary based on industry.

In a LinkedIn poll conducted by Steve McNulty, Partner at Funding Nav, 34% of respondents are currently raising capital through equity, whereas the majority of those who have raised capital in the past did so through debt. Granted, this poll is limited and won’t speak to all businesses, but it does give us a peek behind the financial curtain. The interesting part about McNulty’s findings lies within the comments under his poll. The business owners were not necessarily considering the balance between these two types of funding and what that balance looks like in their industries.

Image Source

For example, an apparel company that requires textiles to create the product, labor to assemble the clothing, warehouses to store their products, and brick-and-mortar stores to sell the product to customers is likely going to carry more debt than a tech company that delivers all of its products online and does not have to worry about storing physical products or maintaining a customer-facing physical space. These considerations will greatly impact the debt to equity ratio of these two companies.

As an entrepreneur or small business owner, this ratio is used when applying for a loan or business line of credit.

For investors, the debt to equity ratio is used to indicate how risky it is to invest in a company. The higher the debt to equity ratio, the riskier the investment.

To further clarify the ratio, let's define debt and equity next.

What is debt?

Debt is an amount owed for funds borrowed from a bank or private lender. The lender agrees to lend funds to the borrower upon a promise by the borrower to pay back the money as well as interest on the debt — the interest is usually paid at regular intervals. A business acquires debt in order to use the funds for operating needs.

A company typically needs hard assets to borrow money from a bank or private lender. A hard asset is a receivable for a product or service delivered that is recognized on the company's balance sheet and shows a lender the business is capable of paying back the loan. If a company is new or doesn't have hard assets it's more difficult to borrow.

What is equity?

Equity is stock or security representing an ownership interest in a company. Put simply, it's your ownership in an asset — such as a company, property, or car — after your debt on that asset is paid.

When a business uses equity financing, it sells shares of the company to investors in return for capital. To learn more about funding options, check out this guide to entrepreneurship.

Debt to Equity Ratio Formula

Now that we've defined the debt to equity ratio, we'll take a look at how to use it. Below is the formula to calculate the debt to equity ratio:

Here are the two elements that make up the formula:

• Total liabilities: Total liabilities represent all of a company's debt, including short-term and long-term debt, and other liabilities (e.g., bond sinking funds and deferred tax liabilities).
• Shareholders' equity: Shareholders' equity is calculated by subtracting total liabilities from total assets. Total liabilities and total assets are found on a company's balance sheet.

Other Debt to Equity Ratio Formulas to Consider

Depending on what metrics you'd like to evaluate, you may need to use a different formula. To compare a company’s short-term liquidity use the cash ratio:

Cash ratio = cash + marketable securities/short-term liabilities

The cash ratio is used to evaluate the ability of an organization to pay its short-term obligations with cash. If the ratio comes out higher than 1, it means the organization has enough cash to cover its debts. If less than 1, the organization has more short-term debts than cash.

Additionally you can opt to use the current ratio:

Current ratio = short-term assets/short term liabilities

The current ratio also evaluates an organization's short-term liquidity, and compares its current assets to its current liabilities. It evaluates an organization's ability to pay its debts and obligations within a year.

Short-term debt can include wages, payments to suppliers,or short-term notes payable. Short-term liabilities are considered less risk because they are typically paid within a year.

Debt to Equity Ratio Example

Let's say a software company is applying for funding and needs to calculate its debt to equity ratio. Its total liabilities are $300,000 and shareholders' equity is $250,000.

Here's what the debt to equity ratio would look like for the company:

Debt to equity ratio = 300,000 / 250,000

Debt to equity ratio = 1.2

With a debt to equity ratio of 1.2, investing is less risky for the lenders because the business is not highly leveraged — meaning it isn’t primarily financed with debt.

How can you tell what your debt to equity ratio should be? We’ll go over that next.

What is a good debt to equity ratio?

A good debt to equity ratio is around 1 to 1.5. However, the ideal debt to equity ratio will vary depending on the industry because some industries use more debt financing than others. Capital-intensive industries like the financial and manufacturing industries often have higher ratios that can be greater than 2.

A high debt to equity ratio indicates a business uses debt to finance its growth. Companies that invest large amounts of money in assets and operations (capital intensive companies) often have a higher debt to equity ratio. For lenders and investors, a high ratio means a riskier investment because the business might not be able to produce enough money to repay its debts.

If a debt to equity ratio is lower — closer to zero — this often means the business hasn't relied on borrowing to finance operations. Investors are unlikely to invest in a company with a very low ratio because the business isn't realizing the potential profit or value it could gain by borrowing and increasing operations.

What should businesses with good debt to equity ratios do next?

Businesses with good debt to equity ratios are those that fall within the standard range for their industries. These companies are likely in a period of positive growth supported by balanced financing from both debt lenders and equity shareholders.

Although a company with a good debt to equity ratio looks good on paper financially, it’s important to understand that this fiscal metric is a snapshot that doesn’t tell the entire story of how a business is using capital as a tool to scale. So, don’t get too comfortable when this number is positive. Instead, turn your attention to your long-term debt to equity ratio as this has an impact on your business’s financial health, too. Consider funding any long-term growth plans with long-term debt rather than short-term financing in order to stabilize your pecuniary picture.

What is a negative debt to equity ratio?

A negative debt to equity ratio occurs when a company has interest rates on its debts that are greater than the return on investment. Negative debt to equity ratio can also be a result of a company that has a negative net worth. Companies that experience a negative debt to equity ratio may be seen as risky to analysts, lenders, and investors because this debt is a sign of financial instability.

A company can experience a negative debt to equity ratio for a number of reasons, including:

• Taking on additional debt to cover losses instead of issuing shareholder equity.
• Expensing intangible assets, such as trademarks, that exceed pre-existing shareholder equity values.
• Making large dividend payments that exceed shareholders' equity.
• Experiencing financial loss in periods following large dividend payments.

When any of these situations occur, they could signal a sign of financial distress to shareholders, investors, and creditors.

What should you do if you have negative debt to equity ratio?

If your business has a negative debt to equity ratio, you might have a hard time finding financing in the future due to the amount of debt you already use to fund your company. The answer to this is not to jump into more equity financing as this can cause issues with the operations of your business. Extending more equity to new shareholders can cause your company to pursue a different direction as a contingency of accepting their financing.

Instead, if you want to lower your debt to equity ratio, you might prioritize repaying the debt you owe before growing your business further. Check CSIMarket for debt to equity ratio standards in your industry to see how yours compares to those of other businesses.

Long-Term Debt to Equity Ratio

The long-term debt to equity ratio shows how much of a business' assets are financed by long-term financial obligations, such as loans. To calculate long-term debt to equity ratio, divide long-term debt by shareholders' equity.

As we covered above, shareholders' equity is total assets minus total liabilities. However, this is not the same value as total assets minus total debt because the payment terms of the debt should also be taken into account when assessing the overall financial health of a company.

Short-term debt consists of liabilities that will be paid in under a year. Long-term debt consists of liabilities that will take a year or more to mature. Let's walk through an example.

Company A has $2 million in short-term debt and $1 million in long-term debt. Company B has $1 million in short-term debt and $2 million in long-term debt. Both companies have $3 million in debt and $3.1 million in shareholder equity giving them both a debt to equity ratio of 1.03.

However, because short-term debt is renewed more often, having greater short-term debt compared to long-term debt is considered risky, especially with fluctuating interest rates. With this in mind, Company B would be considered less risky because it has more long-term debt, which is considered more stable.

Here's a reference to help you remember the long-term debt to equity ratio formula.

Examples of long-term debt include mortgages, bonds, and bank debt. Just like the standard debt to equity ratio, investing in a business is riskier if it has a high ratio.

Using Debt and Equity to Scale Your Business

Debt can be a four-letter word to small and scaling businesses, but it doesn’t have to be. When used correctly, debt can show investors and lenders that you’re using the resources available to your business in order to realize a positive return on investment.

The debt to equity ratio is a valuable tool for entrepreneurs and investors, and it shows how much a business relies on debt to finance its purchases and business activities in relation to the equity it uses for the same purposes. This ratio is fluid across industries, so check the standards for your company as you begin financing big projects and growth strategies.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

I like to go for walks at lunch as I find that the fresh air helps me separate the actual issues of the day from all the noise in the market. This past Thursday, however, there was no escaping the noise.

It came in the form of a 2,000-plus person, pro-pipeline rally held near the Hyatt Regency Hotel during Prime Minister Trudeau’s visit to downtown Calgary.

Interestingly enough, others have been on this walk before me.

Although I’m too young to remember the 1980s National Energy Program, what is currently happening appears to be another made-in-Canada energy crisis, coincidentally once again under a Trudeau government.

The carnage is everywhere, beginning in the industry itself — where jobs and opportunities are disappearing — and rapidly working its way into capital markets, where energy is in freefall and billions are being lost.

• ‘Build a God damned pipeline’: Oil price crisis has energy investors pondering the falling knife
• The Saudis can send oil prices soaring and Canada has no insurance policy
• Why having real skin in the game matters when it comes to investing

For some perspective, we calculate that Canada’s two largest oil companies have seen their market capitalizations shrink by more than $38 billion from their July highs.

While the crisis is now being felt most severely in Alberta, we do worry about the impact it will have nationally — and don’t kid yourself, it will affect the entire country — despite the head-in-the-sand approach that has been taken by both the Federal Government and the Bank of Canada.

The root of the problem is that pipeline capacity didn’t keep pace with oil sands development during the good old days of $100 oil, something for which both industry and past and present governments share the blame.

Consequently, a situation that was building up for years has hit the industry all at once, with stranded oil and a blowing out of Western Canadian oil prices when compared to global benchmarks such as West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude.

Already it’s been reported that the Canadian economy is losing $80 million a day because of that price gap.

The light at the end of the barrel was supposed to be an improvement in local pricing upon the completion of refinery turnarounds in the U.S., but instead the bottom fell out of global oil prices, with WTI posting its worst one-month drop since 2015. This wasn’t the way the differential was supposed to narrow.

From an investor viewpoint, this is an especially terrible development as Canadians still own a lot of oil and gas in their portfolios.

For example, despite the meltdown, energy remains the second-largest weighting in the S&P TSX 60 at over 19.6 per cent. Two energy stocks, Suncor and Canadian Natural Resources, currently represent 6.9 per cent of the index despite Suncor shares having sold off 21.8 per cent and Canadian Natural 31.4 per cent from their respective July highs. Even worse, there are a plethora of junior and intermediate oil and gas producers that have seen more than half of their values wiped out over the past few months and are testing new all-time lows.

Instead of being caught like a deer in the headlights, investors need to take immediate action when it comes to their energy portfolios. These measures include designing and implementing repair strategies that involve tax-loss selling and high-grading their energy exposure by shifting into better quality, safer names. Suddenly, balance sheets and the calibre of management matter more than ever.

For those lucky enough to have had an underweight position but are thinking of increasing their exposure to the sector, extreme caution is warranted — the same aforementioned rules on what to own apply to new positions, too.

Finally, this is a time when industry, the provincial and federal government need to take drastic action and implement repair strategies of their own. Industry needs to take the lead and finally start working together — and if they are unwilling to take excess barrels temporarily off the market themselves, then the provincial government needs to step in and do it for them.

The federal government also has to step up and acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. Perhaps a good place to start is by putting Bill C69, which would impose a new impact assessment process for energy projects, on hold.

The bottom line is that doing nothing is a terrible strategy and will not only lead to more frustration but also large losses both for the economy and in the portfolios of Canadian investors. And that’s a walk I think most Canadians do not want to go on.

Martin Pelletier, CFA is a Portfolio Manager and OCIO at TriVest Wealth Counsel Ltd, a Calgary-based private client and institutional investment firm specializing in discretionary risk-managed portfolios as well as investment audit and oversight services.

Irrespective of region, industry, and size, there’re some things all businesses have in common. To begin with, they all run hinged on a foundation of contracts. If you concur the same applies to your business, are you presently using a contract management system?

Regardless of the field of your business, you most likely enter into more than a dozen contracts daily. These contracts could create legal bonds or bind suppliers and purchases. The more the number of active contracts you’ve, the more profit you make. But, are you managing these contracts in a system that accomplishes this?

Did you know that businesses lose up to 9.2% of business revenue as a result of lousy contract management? Well, there are quite a few reasons why contracts are tough to manage:

• They can consume a lot of time to copy, file and store
• Approval delays can frustrate your clients and make you less productive
• Incorrect tracking of payments and price can create revenue holes
• Poor management can result in overlooking policy compliance or incorrect info

Before delving further into the topic, let’s first understand what content management is and why it’s so necessary for running a business:

What is Contract Management, Anyway?

Contract management is the organization of contracts from employees, customers, partners or vendors. In simpler layman terms, a contract management system can be described as an electronic version of a filing cabinet.

It supports the whole client and contract lifecycle that covers any process that utilizes, creates or contributes contract data. Effective Contract Management calls for an understanding of every single step in the contract process.

The business world is continuously changing. New ways of driving revenue are forcing many businesses to rethink the way they manage the client lifecycle — making contract management systems indispensable.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at how businesses can benefit from a contract management system:

• Centralized Records

Many small businesses have relatively tight budgets. So, dependent on where the business is situated, lack of additional capital often means a lack of office space given the ridiculous cost of commercial real estate, especially in big towns. Apparently, besides the lack of space, most businesses prefer to have a paperless office. Online contract management solutions are beneficial for small businesses, as they eliminate the need for storage space and make it much easier to store all contracts and related documents in one central location – the cloud.

• Increase in Communication and Collaboration

A contract management system helps increase collaboration and communication in a business. While the sales team hardly ever talk to the Legal team under normal circumstances, with a contract management system, the sales teams understand that they’ve to get every contract approved through the legal team. Simply having the system in place forces both teams to create a contract that is approved by all the necessary parties.

• Careful Organization

Once all business contracts have been uploaded to a central repository, it is easier to organize documents into different folders and subfolders. There will likely never be the need to flip through documents searching for a specific clause. This and automation and centralization will without a doubt save a lot of time, as everything can be quickly searched, retrieved and saved.

• Keeping Track of Important Dates

It is essential for businesses to keep a close watch of important contract dates. Automatic alerts make doing so very easy. Automated contract management systems allow you to schedule notifications as needed so that you never miss important dates of a contract’s lifespan. Using the right tools to monitor and track contracts will positively affect your business. If you are not ready to commit to a contract management software, you can simply use Excel to manage contracts.

• Saves Time

How many times have you found yourself scanning through contract clauses, in search of just some keywords? Also, storing soft-copies of signed agreements, contract management systems allow you to pull out the key contract terms and fields for quick viewing. This means no more perusing through pages of agreements to find your fixed pricing duration, payment terms, termination options, etc.

By having contracted values, termination clauses, documents and contact details only a few clicks away means you get to save the time that was once getting lost in filing cabinets or devoted to fighting with spreadsheets.

• Effortless Data Protection

Data security is now more important than ever regardless of a business’s size or sector. If a business has intellectual property, client data, employee records or any other type of data of value, it’s important that it takes steps to safeguard it properly. The great thing about online contract management is that it allows for effortless data protection. To make sure that data is protected, businesses should invest in a contract management system that has measures like two-factor authentication and encryption.

Conclusion

The contract management system will give you analysis and progress reports. You can use these to check the areas of your business that you need to strengthen and improve. It can actually be your ally in boosting your business. It automatically updates the data on the system, so that you won’t miss out on opportunities, like expiring contracts, customers’ preferences and many more.

You must not feel intimidated by this kind of advanced technology, even if you’re not that proficient with it. It’ll guide you with each step and with continued use, it’ll be easier to integrate and utilize the right tools with the software so that you can maximize its features.

Welcome emails are my absolute favorite, both sending and receiving them.

A welcome email feels nothing less than knocking on a stranger’s door and being greeted with the warmest smile. The email’s subject line is the warm smile inviting me to go further, and if that is followed by a fantastic conversation, I’m definitely coming back for more.

A great start to your email marketing strategy, a welcome email has multiple benefits and functions, but most importantly, it opens a window of communication with your customers.

As a small business owner, your customers are at the center of every goal. It is the customer who inspires us to do what we do, gives feedback to help us get better, and provides support to our businesses. It’s only fair to start this relationship with a welcome message, before setting off on a long and fruitful journey together.

What are welcome messages and emails?

You may have noticed welcome messages show up automatically in your inbox after signing up to a newsletter, or blog, or after downloading an application. This email could include simple text, a verification request, a discount coupon, or simply a callout to other products and resources.

A welcome message can be crafted in different ways, but the intent always remains the same: welcoming a customer into your audience.

Rather than using a single email to welcome your audience to your business, it’s best to use marketing automation to create a series that helps to “onboard” the customer. The welcome email is simply the very first in a customer onboarding series.

Write your welcome email with a single goal

The first rule of effective email marketing is that every email you send must have a specific goal. When looking for welcome email campaign ideas, first you must know your goal.

Here are some possible goals that drive real results:

A simple thank you

The goal of your welcome email could be as simple and as a heartfelt “thank you.” Thank the customer for subscribing, then follow up with a newbie discount or welcome deal, using a direct call-to-action to redeem it.

Show what lies ahead

A welcome email can also serve as a window to what lies ahead. Use this opportunity to let your subscribers know what to expect from future emails and why they’ll want to open them.

Promise something, then deliver

If you said, “Subscribe to receive a 10% welcome discount,” make sure the right customers receive the discount. Every promise you make, keep it. If you promise your subscribers that your emails lead to exclusive deals, great tips, promotions, and surprises, make sure you continue to deliver.

Still wondering how to write a welcome email?

Writing a welcome email isn’t something you should rush into. After all, first impressions matter. Although welcome emails enjoy the highest open rate, you need to delight your customers in order for that behavior to continue in your future emails.

If the welcome email is great, chances are subscribers will look forward to your future emails. The inbox is a busy space, crowded, cramped and pushy, so it takes a great email to stand out. Use the tips below to get your welcome email noticed.

Five tips for crafting a stronger welcome message

1. Write sharper subject lines

Subject lines should be interesting and intriguing, but not vague. Your subject line must be specific, while at the same time include a hint to what the subscriber can expect inside without giving everything away.

For example, a welcome email subject line could read, “Welcome! Claim your new subscriber discount.” You’ve clearly stated the welcome message comes with a discount incentive, but the subscriber needs to open the email to learn how much of a discount is up for grabs and learn how to claim it.

2. Add an incentive

Incentives work, both in life and in email marketing. Your subscribers will continue to be customers and subscribers if the emails have clear merit. Festive deals and discounts, sneak-peeks into new products, or valuable information about your business all add value to their continued relationship with a brand. An example of an incentive could be a welcome discount, first order discount, or referral discount.

3. Hint at what’s coming next

A welcome email must offer immediate value and tease future value in upcoming emails at the same time. Be clear and tell your subscribers what’s in store in future emails. For example, you could tease an upcoming buyers guide to be sent in the next email.

4. Make your call-to-action obvious

With every email you send, you want the subscriber to take an action; that includes your welcome email. Whether it is claiming a discount code, subscribing to your blog, or going to a specific page on your website, the email should tell the customer to do something. The call-to-action button tells customers what step they must take next, and should be direct, easy to locate, and linked to the right page.

5. Include your contact information

Your welcome email should work toward building a bridge of communication between your customers and your business. This can only happen if you give your complete contact details to the subscriber. This includes a legitimate email address to which the subscriber can reply. Sharing contact details helps you build trust and lets your subscriber know you’re always available.

More great tips for writing effective welcome emails:

• Send the welcome email within 48 hours from the time a person subscribes.
• Personalize the welcome message to have a greater impact.
• Check for errors and all the links and buttons in your email before you hit send.
• Encourage social sharing by adding links and buttons to your social media pages. You could also add an incentive for referrals and social sharing.
• A/B test your welcome email to know what works best for your audience.
• Include at least one supporting image.

Examples of well written welcome emails

Like I said before, I love receiving welcome messages. It’s not just because of the amazing deals and discounts, but also because of the trust it helps to build with a brand. It’s a great introduction that makes me want to know more.

Here’s a strong welcome email I received a few days back:

I loved this welcome message, because it’s informative, the joining bonus excites me, and the message makes me look forward to using the product. Notice how it’s clear, simple, and easy to read?

Here’s another one of my favorite email examples that pushes more heavily on the welcome discount:

The bold, red call-to-action makes the welcome discount the center of attention, there’s a direct link to the shop, and there are clickable buttons that take me directly to specific product categories.

A welcome message must be three things, what I call my “Three C’s” for an effective welcome email message: Concise, Compelling, and Catchy.

Build a bridge of communication

With a strong welcome email, you create a bridge of communication; the first step to a long and successful relationship with your valued customers. Your welcome message is the start of a relationship with your customers–make it count.

We all know the importance of great reviews for your business. They show other consumers that your product or service is worth their money. But case studies can take business reviews a step further and provide your potential customers with an engaging and persuasive story of how your business brought success to others. This will make potential customers want to become your customers too.

If you’re still not convinced, keep reading.

Why do you need a case study?

Case studies are important pieces of content that help guide prospects through the buyer’s journey. There are three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. When a user lands on your website and starts reading your blog, they’re in the awareness stage. When the user signs up for your newsletter or a free webinar, they’re now in the consideration stage. The next stage is the decision stage, where you’ve got to get users to buy.

So how do you turn users in the consideration stage into buyers? You do it with case studies.

There’s no better selling point to potential customers than to see real, live, social proof of how your product or service has helped another customer or business.

Get ready for more consumers to choose you, let’s dive into how to create a case study for your business.

Pick your case study subject.

The success of your case study partly relies on making sure you pick the right case study subject in the first place. Obviously, you want to showcase your product or service in the best light possible, which is why choosing a case study subject that will allow you to do so is so important.

Most importantly, choose a subject that your ideal audience can relate to. You want your audience to be able to see themselves in the case study — to read it and think “That could be me too!” Choose someone who has also experienced dramatic results from using your product or service. Don’t choose a subject who is still in progress or doesn’t have any results to share.

To find the perfect case study subject ask your sales team and customer support team if they know about any exceptional customers who could be a good fit. You can also take a look through high-praising customer reviews that you’ve recently received.

Don’t forget that you need to ask permission of the case study subject before you start writing a case study about them. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a willing case study participant though because a case study not only benefits you but it benefits the subject as well. They get a bit of free promotion for their company and a link on your post pointing back to their website.

Get the information.

After you’ve picked the perfect case study subject and they’re on board, next you need to get the information you need from them in order to put together the case study. A case study is essentially a story of success, people love to read success stories.

But in order to create an engaging and effective case study, you need to get as many facts and as much information about your subject’s experience as possible. I suggest sending some introductory questions by email to the subject and then getting on a phone call or video chat to get more details.

Some of the questions you should be getting answers to are:

• Who is the case study subject/customer? What do they do?
• What were the subject’s goals? What were their needs?
• What problem did the subject need to be solved?
• What solutions did they try before your product?
• What benefits or results did the subject see over time after using your product?

Your case study needs a beginning, a middle, and an end; what were their problems, how did they use your products, and what awesome results did they get from using your products. Focus on getting detailed information that will help you tell that story.

Write your case study.

After you’ve collected all your information, now is the time to piece all that info together and write your case study. With all the information you’ve collected by speaking to your case study subject, writing your case study shouldn’t take long at all.

The first thing you need for a great case study is a catchy title. Your title should include the name of your subject’s company and show how you helped them reach success. For example, something like “How Company X Boosted Traffic by 660% using Your Product”. This will make your potentials want to click and see how they can get similar results. For the beginning of your case study write a short summary paragraph that describes your subject and their success with your product.

Then write a section about who your case study subject is, what problems they were facing and what their goals were, followed by a longer section on how they used your product to solve their problems and what results they saw. Be sure to use your persuasive writing skills, because remember, you want to convince readers to buy your product too.

Design your case study.

Lastly, before you publish your case study, you need to make it look good. Whether you’re sharing your case study as a blog post on your site, as a downloadable PDF, or in your email campaigns, to be able to catch the eye of your audience your case study needs to be visually appealing. Be sure to break your case study up with headings, subheadings, and bullets and remember that white space is your friend. Include images in your case study and use graphs or charts to display results with important numbers. You can use Canva to easily create stunning visuals for your case study.

If you want to make things even easier for yourself, you can also use case study templates from Xtensio. Their visual and interactive templates allow you to create and customize an awesome case study for your business in minutes that can be shared on a web page, saved as a PDF, or as a digital slideshow.

A great case study will be able to convert readers into customers again and again. Now that you know why you need a case study for your business and how to create one, get out there and show people why you’re worth busting out their wallets for.

This week on the Sales Hacker podcast, we interview Dannie Herzberg, Head of Mid-Market Sales at Slack.

Dannie is one of the top sales leaders in the country having spent time helping Hubspot IPO over 5+ years and then moving on to Slack where she leads all SMB, Mid-Market, and Sales Development efforts for the US and Canada.  

If you missed episode 34, check it out here: PODCAST 34: The Benefit of Finance Background to Help Company Growth w/ Rob Lopez

What You’ll Learn

• Why setting personal goals can transform your career
• How to find and develop mentors
• Redefining sales and the qualities necessary to succeed
• Hiring practices that can help create and reinforce diversity in the workplace

Subscribe to the Sales Hacker Podcast

• We’re on iTunes
• And on Stitcher

Show Agenda and Timestamps

1. Show Introduction [0:09]
2. About Dannie Herzberg: An Introduction [2:54]
3. Goal Setting, With Accountability, is Key To Success [27:52]
4. The Changing Landscape of Female Sales Leaders [36:45]
5. Prioritizing Diversity Within Your Recruiting Funnel [39:57]
6. Dannie’s Life (and Sales) Mantras [45:53]
7. Sam’s Corner [48:07]

Sales Hacker Podcast—Sponsored by Aircall and Outreach

Sam Jacobs: Hey folks, it’s Sam Jacobs. Welcome to the Sales Hacker podcast. We’ve got an amazing show today. We’ve got Dannie Herzberg, who runs SMB, mid-market and sales development for Slack, one of the fastest growing companies in the country that we all use (or at least I do) every day. Dannie has an incredible background and incredible insights on managing her career and how to achieve what you want, which we’ll talk about in the show.

We want to thank, as usual our sponsors. Nothing is possible without the wonderful patronage of two important companies, Aircall and Outreach.

Aircall, it’s a phone system designed for the modern sales team. They seamlessly integrate into your CRM, eliminating data entry for your reps and providing you with greater visibility into your team’s performance through advanced reporting.

Our second sponsor is Outreach.io, a leading sales engagement platform. Outreach triples the productivity of sales teams and empowers them to drive predictable and measurable revenue growth by prioritizing the right activities and scaling customer engagement with intelligent automation. Outreach makes customer facing teams more effective and approves visibility into what really drives results. Without further ado, let’s listen to Dannie.

About Dannie Herzberg: An Introduction

Sam Jacobs: Hey everybody, it’s Sam Jacobs. Welcome to the Sales Hacker podcast today. We’ve got one of the brightest, most promising sales leaders in the country on the show and she’s also representing one of the fastest growing companies that I think many of us use in our day to day lives. We’re incredibly excited to have Dannie Herzberg on the show. Prior to Slack, she spent over five years at HubSpot where she participated in the company’s growth from 80 to over 1,200 employees and through its IPO. At HubSpot, she held roles in enterprise sales, sales management and most recently as director of product. Dannie, we’re so excited to have you on the show.

Dannie Herzberg: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Sam Jacobs: Let’s learn a little bit more about you as a human being before we dive into sort of the work itself and some of your observations on business. You are director of sales at Slack. In your words, what do you think Slack does?

Dannie Herzberg: The general concept is that we’re a collaboration hub but to me, it’s basically one place, virtually, where a company’s culture and knowledge base lives so it’s a way for teams to be able to align in a very productive and fun way around different goals and execute on those really efficiently.

Goal Setting, With Accountability, is Key To Success

Sam Jacobs: When you think about the factors that have propelled your career to date and how you ended up here, what do you attribute your success to? Your track record at this point is amazing. An incredible undergrad school. You were part of an IPO at HubSpot. You then went to best business school in the country and now you’re at one of the fastest growing technology companies again probably on a path to IPO. What do you attribute that success to?

Dannie Herzberg: I think we have an amazing meritocracy in our world that has very little to do with how fancy your test scores are or school you went to. I would say one of the things that helps, at least, accelerate my career, was Pete Caputa introduced this concept to me of writing down and sharing my personal and professional goals. It turns out successful sales people are very goal oriented, which is true.

We have a misnomer of being money oriented or coin operated, which I truly don’t believe, although people enjoy being compensated well. The true motivation comes from setting and achieving goals ambitiously.

I didn’t have any goals laid out. He really pushed me to set a goal so I came back to him a week later and said, okay, I had never considered management but I think I’d love to run a company one day so I should probably learn how to manage people.

I was 24 when I set the goal. By age 25, I moved into the next open management role in his team and that was the biggest game changer in my career. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten there as quickly if I hadn’t written the goal down, shared it, and I’ve now woven that into my own professional development practice and how I encourage my managers to do the same with their directs.

Sam Jacobs: How often do you update your goals?

Dannie Herzberg: The cadence that I aim for is once every six months and we look at short term goals, which is what you’re hoping to achieve in the next 12 months, and it’s really a way to just pause and take yourself out of the day to day and think critically about, ‘What am I building toward? What’s the collection of experiences I want? What are the nights and weekends, projects that I want to take on that not only help the company but help me?’ But don’t be regimented about it or you block yourself off to the beauty of serendipity.

RELATED: Top Goal-Setting Tips for Unbeatable Sales Managers

The Changing Landscape of Female Sales Leaders

Sam Jacobs: There aren’t many female sales leaders and so talking to somebody like yourself, who is a female sales leader and a future CEO, why do you think that is and what should the world do to change that? Should we change it?

Dannie Herzberg: It’s awesome that you’re already thinking about that and being proactive about it and you’re totally right. There aren’t nearly as many female sales leaders as there could be or should be, but luckily, that is already changing and with each one of us that decides to pursue the leadership path, it makes it easier for other people to see an example of what that could look like and do the same.

If you want to meet great female sales leaders or you want to meet other underrepresented minorities in the go-to market world, create the group that you want to be part of, bring us all together and we will absolutely relish that.

It’s changing and as one of my mentors, Anna Raimondi, likes to say, it’s a team sport so all of us women, who are progressing in our careers, are bringing everyone else up with us and that’s part of the fun. I’m feeling very, very optimistic and I’m also very grateful for my male mentors.

Prioritizing Diversity Within Your Recruiting Funnel

Sam Jacobs: You mentioned some of the things that sort of women can do themselves, but is there anything that we should do, I should do, either tactically in the interview process or in the hiring process? Are there specific considerations I should be mindful of as I’m collaborating with partners of all different shapes and sizes and genders in the workforce?

Dannie Herzberg: Absolutely. I would say, at the earliest stage of the recruiting funnel, a tool called Textio is phenomenal. We use it here at Slack and basically what it does is help you uncover bias in the way that even a job description is written. If you want to open up the aperture and increase the pipeline of female candidates or fill-in-the-blank candidates applying to a role, Textio will literally help you do that through NLP and machine learning algorithms.

Being aware of seeking out diversity of thought, amongst other diversity factors, is really important because it’ll help you make better decisions that will help people challenge you when you want to have debates and it will help you from recreating the same playbook over and over or falling into traps.

Being vocal about who you want to hire would be great, so asking someone “Who are some absolute rock star women in your network who I should be talking to whether they’re looking for a job or not?” and sit down, have coffee with them, bring them into your network and that will snowball. I love your question because it means you, as a male, want to bring women into the conversation.

Some of the most impactful conversations I’ve been part of that have yielded important results include not just whatever the minority group is in that role.

Dannie’s Life (and Sales) Mantras

Sam Jacobs: What’s your life mantra? I’m sure you have a few. You mentioned writing down personal goals, but what are some other life mantras that you have?

Dannie Herzberg:

Flex your “helping” muscle – Flexing this muscle will bring you further than flexing your “achievement’ muscle.

Karma is real – The world is small and careers are very, very long so winning at all costs is not worth it.

Cultivate good relationships for the long term – it’s always the right way to operate and it will pay off many, many fold because people remember the way that you interacted with them.

Sam Jacobs: Dannie, thank you so much. Congrats on all your success.

Dannie Herzberg: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it Sam.

Sam’s Corner

Sam Jacobs: Hey, folks. It’s Sam Jacobs. That was a great interview with Dannie Herzberg. She said a number of things that I think are bear repeating and are worthy of remarking on one of them, but the biggest one, I think, is writing down your personal goals. Can you define and articulate what your short and long term professional goals are, and can you be specific? Can you produce the document that has your goals? Dannie talks about doing it every six months.

We’re all somewhat inconsistent when it comes to that, but if you can write down your goals and figure out where you want to be in a year, where you want to be in three years and five years, I think that’s important.

Thing number two is if you’re trying to develop advocacy for a particular group, Dannie and I talked about what can we do as sales professionals to cultivate and promote sales leadership among women and she talked about forming groups and putting yourself at the center of the group that you want to advocate for. I think that’s great advice.

Don’t Miss Episode 36

Lastly, we want to thank our sponsors. That’s Aircall, your advanced call center software, complete business phone and contact center, 100% natively integrated into any CRM. And, Outreach, a customer engagement platform that efficiently and effectively gauges prospects to drive more pipeline and close more deals.

If you wanna find me or check out the show notes, see upcoming guests or play more episodes from our incredible line up of sales leaders, visit www.saleshacker.com/podcast-subscribe. You can also find the Sales Hacker podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Please share it liberally. Please tell all your friends. We appreciate the feedback. We appreciate the patronage and we’ve got a lot more new content coming up, a new types of content as well.

If you want to get in touch with me, find my social handles in my bio below.

Thanks for listening to the Sales Hacker podcast and I’ll see you next time.

The post PODCAST 35: How Goal Setting Can Change Your Career with Dannie Herzberg, Sales Director, Slack appeared first on Sales Hacker.

We’ve been spending a lot of time lately wrestling with what Facebook has been doing with our information from our personal lives—but Facebook isn’t the only place where you’re sharing a lot of information about yourself. LinkedIn, everyone’s favorite professional-networking service, gets a ton of data from you about…

Read more...

Your dream client doesn’t have any way to know whether your company is better than your competitor’s. Nor are they likely to look for objective information to discern the differences. Trying to gain an advantage by starting with your company is ineffective because it doesn’t provide any real, actionable insights your dream client can use to decide.

Level 1 is a Zero

You believe that your product or service or solution is markedly better than your competitors. They believe that theirs is better. Both of you spend time trying to differentiate from your competitors in some meaningful way, including trying to tie what you sell to any preferences your dream client discloses. Remember, your dream client has no objective way to determine which of your solutions would better serve them, having never experienced either. You don’t help by providing them with information they can find on a website or sell sheet.

Proof Providing isn’t Proof

Maybe you provide your prospective client with references, people at companies that will vouch that you are an excellent partner. Your competitor may also provide a similar list, neither of you being so short-sighted as to provide any names and numbers of people who might say something that harm’s your chances of winning their business. What you believe to be proof isn’t strong evidence that your dream client should buy from you.

You Are the Experience

What, then, does your dream client have to go on when deciding whether to buy from you or your competitor?

First, they have the experience of working with you throughout the process. They are getting an idea of who has the best idea about why they need to change, how they need to change, and what’s important to them. They also get a feel for what it is going to be like to work with you and your company, whether you are collaborative, whether you can be trusted, and how you are going to respond to challenges.

Second, because deciding to buy from you is going to be visible to a lot of people on their team, they are gauging whether you are going to be acceptable—or better still, impressive—to the people you are going to interact with inside their company. Not only do you need to help them build consensus around change and the right solution, you are also being vetted to see whether the system is going to reject you.

You are the element of your company that your dream client is going to have the most experience with before they make a decision to buy from you or your competitor. Even if they use a spreadsheet to pretend that they are making an objective decision based on measurable criteria, you are a large part of their decision. This means you have to up your game as it pertains to creating a preference to work with you and your company.

You are, now more than ever, one of the largest components of the value proposition.

The post Why Salesmanship Matters appeared first on The Sales Blog.

• At web app company Basecamp, every time an employee leaves, a "goodbye announcement" is sent to the entire staff.
• The person can write it themselves or have their manager write it.
• If the person doesn't include details about why they quit or were fired, the manager sends a follow-up note.
• The goal is to be open and honest.

Basecamp is known for its unconventional people practices.

Employees at the small web app company work from places all over the world. CEO and cofounder Jason Fried places more value on a candidate's writing skills than on their résumé, and has hired several people who didn't attend college. And everyone who works there gets a $5,000 annual vacation stipend.

Fried and cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson recently published a book titled "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work." The book is essentially a polemic against the modern workplace, broken down into super short essays about Basecamp's unconventional culture.

Read more: A tech CEO explains why he 'throws résumés out the door' — but places huge value on the cover letter

One of those essays is titled "Calm goodbyes."

Fried and Hansson identify the problem with employee departures (whether firings or resignations) at most companies: "When someone's let go, all you get are vague euphemisms. 'Hey, what happened to Bob?' 'Oh, Bob? We don't talk about Bob anymore. It was simply time for him to move on.'"

So people start coming up with crazy stories to explain why the person left.

At Basecamp, whenever someone leaves, a "goodbye announcement" is sent around to the entire company. The person leaving has the option to write the announcement themselves or have their manager write it.

If the person does not mention in their goodbye announcement the details around why they're leaving, Fried and Hansson write that their manager will send a follow-up message filling in the gaps.

In a 2018 Inc. article, Fried writes that he recently had to let go of a "highly skilled" employee who simply didn't fit the role he was hired for. In the staff memo, management explained what had happened, and said that they were going to help the person find another job.

Fried also writes in the Inc. article that if someone is let go for "conduct," management is upfront about that too, although they don't include specific details.

Standard advice is to let your employees know that an employee is leaving and who's going to cover their responsibilities

Basecamp's habit of sending goodbye announcements differs significantly from standard advice on letting your staff know that someone was fired. On the "Ask a Manager" blog, Alison Green recommends saying something like, "Today was Amanda's last day. We wish her the best. Her projects will be temporarily handled by Luis until we hire a replacement, which we hope will happen with six weeks."

If someone quit, Green recommends saying something like, "I'm sad to announce that Julie has decided to move on and her last day with us will be August 30." Green writes that you can mention positive things about her work and that you wish her the best, and include some details about things like who will cover her responsibilities.

As for Fried and Hansson, they write in the book that, in response to most goodbye announcements, employees share photos, memories, and stories. They write, "Saying goodbye is always hard, but it doesn't have to be formal or cold. We all know things change, circumstances shift, and s--t happens."

SEE ALSO: A simple but ruthless exercise reveals who your star employees are — and who should be fired

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Navy SEALs debunk 5 misconceptions about good leaders in the military and the workplace

The ideas aren’t new to me (or to you, if you have read my work for a long time), but the combination into an overall strategy is novel. There are three ideas that make up the heart of the strategy to create a competitive advantage (something I have been writing more about after launching Eat Their Lunch, a book about competitive displacements).

Dominating Time: Your dream client is going to meet with a number of salespeople and sales organizations. The amount of time from client to client will vary, but the combined total of 100% is what is important here. What percentage of the time do you get versus your competitors? If you command more of their time, you give yourself a greater opportunity to create greater value, and you are also likely to engage more stakeholders. You want to dominate the clock, crowding out your competition.

Dominating Presence: This concept builds on Dominating Time. Having a physical presence in a world that is increasingly transactional, automated, and based on clicks makes human presence more rare—and more valuable. We have now reached peak Taylorism in sales, with efficiency overtaking effectiveness, and sales roles being sliced so thinly that the value creation of each role has been made equally thin. When something isn’t as effective as it needs to be, that is not a gain in efficiency. Adding a physical presence while others work to avoid the expense increases the preference to work with you.

Dominating the Narrative: This is one part mind share, one part insight, and one part content, or something along those lines anyway. If you are the one that can teach people why they need to change (how to better understand their world), teach them how to change (including the choices and trade-offs they are going to be faced with making), and inform how they need to pursue that change by controlling the process (see The Lost Art of Closing) you are likely to win their business. You want to own the narrative.

I’ll add one more idea here worth thinking about this week. We sometimes mistake our experience for preparation. We believe because we have done something so many times and so often, that we are prepared. I would argue against this thinking and remind you that one of the ways we squander opportunities is by not preparing and planning our approach. If you want to be able to improvise and think well on your feet, there is nothing more important than preparing.

The post An Overarching Strategy for Winning Deals appeared first on The Sales Blog.

A true apology consists of a sincere acknowledgement of wrong-doing, a show of empathic remorse for why you wronged and the harm it caused, and a promise of restitution by improving ones actions to make things right. Without the follow-through, saying sorry isn’t an apology, it’s a hollow ploy for forgiveness.

That’s the kind of “sorry” we’re getting from tech giants — an attempt to quell bad PR and placate the afflicted, often without the systemic change necessary to prevent repeated problems. Sometimes it’s delivered in a blog post. Sometimes it’s in an executive apology tour of media interviews. But rarely is it in the form of change to the underlying structures of a business that caused the issue.

Intractable Revenue

Unfortunately, tech company business models often conflict with the way we wish they would act. We want more privacy but they thrive on targeting and personalization data. We want control of our attention but they subsist on stealing as much of it as possible with distraction while showing us ads. We want safe, ethically built devices that don’t spy on us but they make their margins by manufacturing them wherever’s cheap with questionable standards of labor and oversight. We want groundbreaking technologies to be responsibly applied, but juicy government contracts and the allure of China’s enormous population compromise their morals. And we want to stick to what we need and what’s best for us, but they monetize our craving for the latest status symbol or content through planned obsolescence and locking us into their platforms.

The result is that even if their leaders earnestly wanted to impart meaningful change to provide restitution for their wrongs, their hands are tied by entrenched business models and the short-term focus of the quarterly earnings cycle. They apologize and go right back to problematic behavior. The Washington Post recently chronicled a dozen times Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized, yet the social network keeps experiencing fiasco after fiasco. Tech giants won’t improve enough on their own.

Addiction To Utility

The threat of us abandoning ship should theoretically hold the captains in line. But tech giants have evolved into fundamental utilities that many have a hard time imagining living without. How would you connect with friends? Find what you needed? Get work done? Spend your time? What hardware or software would you cuddle up with in the moments you feel lonely? We live our lives through tech, have become addicted to its utility, and fear the withdrawal.

If there were principled alternatives to switch to, perhaps we could hold the giants accountable. But the scalability, network effects, and aggregation of supply by distributors has led to near monopolies in these core utilities. The second-place solution is often distant. What’s the next best social network that serves as an identity and login platform that isn’t owned by Facebook? The next best premium mobile and PC maker behind Apple? The next best mobile operating system for the developing world beyond Google’s Android? The next best ecommerce hub that’s not Amazon? The next best search engine? Photo feed? Web hosting service? Global chat app? Spreadsheet?

One of the few tech backlashes that led to real flight was #DeleteUber. Workplace discrimination, shady business protocols, exploitative pricing and more combined to spur the movement to ditch the ridehailing app. But what was different here is that US Uber users did have a principled alternative to switch to without much hassle: Lyft. The result was that “Lyft benefitted tremendously from Uber’s troubles in 2018” eMarketer’s forecasting director Shelleen Shum told the USA Today in May. Uber missed eMarketer’s projections while Lyft exceeded them, narrowing the gap between the car services. And meanwhile, Uber’s CEO stepped down as it tried to overhaul its internal policies.

This is why we need regulation that promotes competition by preventing massive mergers and giving users the right to interoperable data portability so they can easily switch away from companies that treat them poorly

But in the absence of viable alternatives to the giants, leaving these mainstays is inconvenient. After all, they’re the ones that made us practically allergic to friction. Even after massive scandals, data breaches, toxic cultures, and unfair practices, we largely stick with them to avoid the uncertainty of life without them. Even Facebook added 1 million monthly users in the US and Canada last quarter despite seemingly every possible source of unrest. Tech users are not voting with their feet. We’ve proven we can harbor ill will towards the giants while begrudgingly buying and using their products. Our leverage to improve their behavior is vastly weakened by our loyalty.

Inadequate Oversight

Regulators have failed to adequately step up either. This year’s congressional hearings about Facebook and social media often devolved into inane and uninformed questioning like how does Facebook earn money if its doesn’t charge? “Senator, we run ads” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said with a smirk. Other times, politicians were so intent on scoring partisan points by grandstanding or advancing conspiracy theories about bias that they were unable to make any real progress. A recent survey commissioned by Axios found that “In the past year, there has been a 15-point spike in the number of people who fear the federal government won’t do enough to regulate big tech companies — with 55% now sharing this concern.”

When regulators do step in, their attempts can backfire. GDPR was supposed to help tamp down on the dominance of Google and Facebook by limiting how they could collect user data and making them more transparent. But the high cost of compliance simply hindered smaller players or drove them out of the market while the giants had ample cash to spend on jumping through government hoops. Google actually gained ad tech market share and Facebook saw the littlest loss while smaller ad tech firms lost 20 or 30 percent of their business.

Even the Honest Ads act, which was designed to bring political campaign transparency to internet platforms following election interference in 2016, has yet to be passed even despite support from Facebook and Twitter. There’s hasn’t been meaningful discussion of blocking social networks from acquiring their competitors in the future, let alone actually breaking Instagram and WhatsApp off of Facebook. Governments like the U.K. that just forcibly seized documents related to Facebook’s machinations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica debacle provide some indication of willpower. But clumsy regulation could deepen the moats of the incumbents, and prevent disruptors from gaining a foothold. We can’t depend on regulators to sufficiently protect us from tech giants right now.

Our Hope On The Inside

The best bet for change will come from the rank and file of these monolithic companies. With the war for talent raging, rock star employees able to have huge impact on products, and compensation costs to keep them around rising, tech giants are vulnerable to the opinions of their own staff. It’s simply too expensive and disjointing to have to recruit new high-skilled workers to replace those that flee.

Google declined to renew a contract with the government after 4000 employees petitioned and a few resigned over Project Maven’s artificial intelligence being used to target lethal drone strikes. Change can even flow across company lines. Many tech giants including Facebook and Airbnb have removed their forced arbitration rules for harassment disputes after Google did the same in response to 20,000 of its employees walking out in protest.

Facebook is desperately pushing an internal communications campaign to reassure staffers it’s improving in the wake of damning press reports from the New York Times and others. TechCrunch published an internal memo from Facebook’s outgoing VP of communications Elliot Schrage in which he took the blame for recent issues, encouraged employees to avoid finger-pointing, and COO Sheryl Sandberg tried to reassure employees that “I know this has been a distraction at a time when you’re all working hard to close out the year — and I am sorry.” These internal apologizes could come with much more contrition and real change than those paraded for the public.

And so after years of us relying on these tech workers to build the product we use every day, we must now rely that will save us from them. It’s a weighty responsibility to move their talents where the impact is positive, or commit to standing up against the business imperatives of their employers. We as the public and media must in turn celebrate when they do what’s right for society, even when it reduces value for shareholders. If apps abuse us or unduly rob us of our attention, we need to stay off of them.

And we must accept that shaping the future for the collective good may be inconvenient for the individual. There’s an oppprtunity here not just to complain or wish, but to build a social movement that holds tech giants accountable for delivering the change they’ve promised over and over.

For more on this topic:

It’s no secret that SaaS companies like to beat their chest about their performance. Everything from growth rates to conversion tactics get touted across blog posts, press releases, and conference talks. Oh, and let’s not forget the explosion of LinkedIn selfie videos (have you checked out our Weekly Walks?).

You know what doesn’t get bragged about?

Pricing. Nobody is shouting from the rooftops about the recent pricing change they just made and the impact it had on their business.

It’s easy to understand why. Pricing changes typically mean increases in price. SaaS companies want those to go under the radar. They don’t want to spook their existing customers or their prospects.

Nobody wants to relive what Zendesk went through back in 2010 when a pricing announcement promptly led to a customer backlash (TechCrunch actually ran with the headline ‘Zendesk Raises Prices, Pisses Off Customers’). To Zendesk’s credit, they had tried to be “as thoughtful, transparent, and straightforward as possible” about the pricing change. Ultimately the company had to walk back the move, opting to grandfather pricing to all existing customers without a time limit.

This secrecy about pricing does a disservice to the SaaS community as a whole. It gives emerging startups the impression that either (A) pricing is a dark art and should be kept secret or (B) there’s not much incremental revenue to be gained from spending time on pricing.

If you’ve been following OpenView Labs, you know that it’s been our mission to shine a light on SaaS pricing. It should come as no surprise then that we put a special emphasis on pricing in this year’s Expansion SaaS Benchmarks study. OpenView collected data from more than 400 SaaS companies about how they price, whether they changed pricing in 2017, and what impact those pricing changes had on their growth. The results were extremely powerful – even for someone who spends much of their time thinking about pricing.

Of companies that changed their pricing in 2017, only 2% said that pricing changes led to a decrease in their growth rate. Framed differently, for 98% of companies pricing had either a positive or neutral impact on their growth. How many other tests could you run that have a 98% chance of working (or at least doing no lasting harm)?

Frequently these pricing changes had a substantially positive impact on growth. Two-in-five companies that altered pricing reported a 25% or higher increase in ARR as a result.

This is staggering. Consider that the median company in our survey grew 80% year-on-year during the expansion stage ($2.5-10M ARR) and 46% during the growth stage ($10-20M ARR). Pricing changes account for a relatively large percentage of that growth. Growth from pricing is profitable, sustainable growth as well: it doesn’t require huge investments in new sales reps or larger marketing budgets.

There are three main ways that pricing accelerates growth. First, and most common, is higher revenue per customer (price increases, premium packages). But that’s not all. Pricing can also drive better win rates (entry packages, segmented pricing, new pricing models) and net dollar retention (upsell paths, usage-based pricing). The foundation of any successful pricing initiative is executive alignment on which metric(s) you want to impact through pricing and how that translates to overall business growth.

Let’s address another myth about SaaS pricing: that it’s only something to optimize when new customer acquisition starts to stall. This would imply that while pricing changes might accelerate growth in the short term, companies that change their pricing on the whole don’t grow as quickly as their peers.

That turns out to be false.

First off, more than 60% of the companies we surveyed changed their pricing in 2017. There was a high rate of pricing changes regardless of company size or funding round. Secondly, companies that changed pricing consistently grew faster than their peers who didn’t. The median growth rate of those who changed pricing was 65% versus 50% among those who kept pricing as-is.

Need more proof? Here are just a handful of examples of successful pricing changes:

• • • HubSpot: Introduction of contact-based pricing helped improve net dollar retention from 75% to almost 100% according to Chief Strategy Officer Brad Coffey.
    • Logikcull: Launch of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing model helped increase customer count by 500% in under a year according to CEO and Co-Founder Andy Wilson.
    • StatusPage: Charging for their free plan and raising prices allowed them to increase ARPU by 2.4x without hurting conversion according to Co-Founder Steve Klein.
    • Netflix: 2017 pricing changes increased growth by 10%, corresponded with higher than expected subscriber growth, and caused Netflix’s stock price to soar.

If companies won’t brag about their pricing changes, I’ll do it for them. Pricing is an extremely powerful, overlooked growth lever. It’s high time we build knowledge, experience, and confidence about the art and science of pricing. (PS, this book is a good starting point!).

The post The Unspoken Impact of Pricing Changes appeared first on OpenView Labs.

• Wall Street analysts expect a "beat and raise" from Salesforce in its Q3 2019 earnings, which the company is set to report on Tuesday after markets close.
• Analysts noted that the company had strong traction in its sales department across verticals, with particular success in financial services and with its newly acquired MuleSoft products.
• Still, Salesforce stock has been hit hard by the ongoing market correction and currently trades at lower multiples than its peers in the software space.

Salesforce stock is down nearly $38, or 24%, from its high of $160 per share at the end of September, but analysts on Wall Street remain optimistic about the software giant's prospects in its Q3 2019 earnings, which it will report on Tuesday.

In notes published last week, analysts were unanimous that Salesforce is well positioned for another "beat and raise" quarter, even if its stock price reflects investor trepidation over more macro concerns, such as whether Salesforce is trading at a reasonable revenue multiple during a market correction.

Analysts noted that as of late last week, Salesforce was trading at a revenue multiple of 5.9 times and 4.9 times to 2019 and 2020 revenue estimates, while its peers in the software-as-a-service space were trading at a median multiple of 6.5 times and 5.4 times, respectively. If looking at free cash flow estimates, Salesforce was trading at a 22 times multiple while its peers had a multiple of 28 times.

"We expect the macro debate (risk on/off, growth>value, etc.) to overshadow fundamentals for software stocks for the remainder of the calendar," Kirk Materne, an analyst with Evercore ISI, wrote.

---

Read more: AI and voice will completely change the job of salespeople in the future — Salesforce's in-house expert explains what you can expect

---

When it comes to sales, Salesforce is finally starting to see some of the benefits of its $6.5 billion MuleSoft acquisition, and its financial-service cloud could prove to be a "meaningful driver of outperformance," according to Alex Zukin at Piper Jaffray.

"We believe there may have been one particularly large deal coming from financial services cloud at a major domestic financial institution," Zukin wrote, without naming who that deal is with.

Pat Walravens, an analyst with JMP Securities, wrote that industry insiders have indicated to him that Salesforce has strong traction across verticals. Walravens said he's "seen evidence of sales representatives that have far exceeded their annual quotas through the first three quarters," though noted that some buyers in the space showed hesitation when it comes to information-technology spending.

Here's what analysts are looking for from Salesforce in Q3 2019:

• Revenue for the quarter (GAAP): Analysts expect $3.37 billion.
• Earnings per share for the quarter (adjusted): Analysts expect $0.50.
• Revenue guidance for Q4 (GAAP): Analysts expect $3.53 billion.
• Earnings per share guidance for Q4 (adjusted): Analysts expect $0.57.

SEE ALSO: Salesforce owns $1.2 billion worth of other companies — here are its 5 biggest investments in public companies

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The first woman in space almost didn't make it back to Earth and she had to keep it a secret for 30 years

By Tibor Shanto

Truer words were never said, right, but that does not stop the tears for those who live it every day and struggle to engage with enough opportunities to drive their pipeline and results.  But whether you are struggling to connect with your targets or you are acing your way to President’s Club, you have to accept that Buyers Do Not Have To Take Your Call, before you leave your house in the morning.  Doesn’t matter how great your product is, how much shit your manager fills your head with, if this is not the rock-solid foundation of your prospecting reality, you’re beat before you “get in the car.”

This is not a negative, think of it as the most solid starting point, you cannot go any lower, it is not the end as many think, it is the beginning.  Yes, it is all uphill, I am no fool, but I cannot go any lower with this prospect, and let’s assume that they are the one, the DM.  If I never connect, I will be no further behind.   Which means I can focus on the road ahead, and any gain, big or small, is in my favour.

I was with a client last week, they had exhausted all their routes into the opportunity, and while the buyers were impressed, they decided not to decide, and did not buy anything from anyone in the process.  It turned out that the president at my client had a previous interaction with prospect’s president some ten years ago, but nothing since.  When he was reluctant to make the call, I pointed out that he had Nothing now; if he doesn’t make the call he has Nothing; if he makes the call and is rebuffed he has Nothing, but if he is not rebuffed – Opportunity.  Faced with those odds, making the call all of a sudden seemed all too obvious.  And guess what, it led to a scheduling of a further meeting with the key executives’ direct involvement, direction, and blessing.

So not having your call taken is bad, but it allows you to begin planning your next step away from the square you are in.

There is always more you can do than we have room or time for here, so here is one thing you can add to your current tool-kit.

Go beyond

I use the expression “take your call” as a catch phrase for all the activities we have to undertake to achieve success.  But salespeople are selective in mediums, modes, or channels of communications they are willing to utilize in “getting” to a prospect.

What surprises me is how hard I have to work many to just use the basic tools of the 21^st century.  I assume that the at the minimum, minimum, you are packing phone – email – LinkedIn; you would be surprised how often that is not a safe assumption.  People let their personal feelings get in the way of success.  These salespeople fail to remember or realize that no one cares about them, least of all the buyer.  And for many these days, as in all previous days really, what they want to avoid is the phone.  But whether you like the phone or not, though shit, pick it up.  Stats continue to show that a combination of all three: phone – email – LinkedIn, when one is absent, the numbers decline, yet many sellers avoid the phone.

But I am talking about going beyond those three standards.  It is clear that the more modes of communication you add to your pursuit, the greater the likelihood that you will better communicate with more prospect.

One opportunity to go beyond is snail mail.  And I don’t mean direct mail pieces or obvious campaigns where your signature, and that of all the team, is your name in fancy font.  But say a hand-written note, or a greeting card, both the card and the envelope.  Personal greeting cards rarely get “intercepted” by executive assistants; and if your buyer opens their own mail, a hand-written note is always a curiosity, when was the last time you got one?

There are other sites and services where you can initiate something that will lead to a physical delivery of something, and when they get it, they touch it, it is real.  And it works in combination with other things.

There are loads of other unique and personal ways to touch someone in ways that speak to them directly and get them to “take the call”.  I am still struggling to understand why more sellers don’t text as an example.

Even the way some approach one of the troikas, LinkedIn.  There are numerous ways to touch someone, and if you weave those into a well thought out narrative, they can be quite effective.  I like to go to someone’s LI profile mostly to see what they look like when I call them.  Most people are usually smiling, looking smart and pleasant, they look much less intimidating.   But I also know that they will see that I visited, and that coupled with the voicemail, the one they could be listening to as they surf their updates.  They also get a notice when you follow them.  Yes, you can invite them to connect, but there are many other ways to be noticed, paired with other prospecting activities, these serve as reinforcing echoes.

As mentioned, this is just one example, of how you can up your odds.  Voicemail is another, crafting a story you can tell over many touchpoints across various mediums is also key to master, and more.  But start with one.

The post Buyers Don’t Have To Take Your Call appeared first on TiborShanto.com.

It’s a no-brainer: If your sales reps over-achieve their quotas, you’ll have more prospects.

That’s why the best sales managers spend time and money motivating their teams and sending them to training seminars to perfect the craft of cold calling. But even with their sales reps calling prospects and leads every day, many businesses still don’t see the revenue growth they aim for.

Why?

Because a whole lot of their sales reps’ time is wasted leaving voicemails or waiting for people to respond to their calls. The sales data is staggering: An average sales rep makes 52 calls each day, and 15 percent of their time is spent leaving voicemails.

That’s 36 hours of wasted time each month—per rep!

The end result?

Only 60 percent of sales reps meet their quotas.

You might be thinking: This is madness!

You’re right—it is. And there is a better way. But you have to embrace the right sales toolkit and arm your sales teams with the technology they need to be more efficient.

And that’s where sales dialers come in.

What are sales dialers?

In simple terms, a sales dialer is an electronic device that simplifies the manual dialing while calling prospects.

Sales dialers aren’t new. But now they’re a must-have tool in every sales professional’s toolkit.

Why?

Sales dialers have become smarter thanks to technology.

The cost of sales dialers has also decreased significantly over the years, making them an easy buy for companies. There’s a variety of options, and each type has some unique features.

These are the three main types of sales dialers that businesses can choose from:

Preview dialers: Preview dialers make calls one at a time. In simple terms, these dialers allow sales reps to preview a lead before deciding whether to call. Basically, you could say that Close.io's 1-click-calling that's been built into our CRM since day one is a preview dialer.

Progressive or power dialers:  Like preview dialer, power dialers also call one by one, but in this case, sales reps can’t select which lead they want to dial, a power dialer basically automatically calls through a list of leads. As soon as one call is finished, it automatically dials the next lead from the list. For that reason, progressive dialers are better suited for teams with a set script for reaching out to leads.

Predictive and automated dialers: Predictive dialers are extremely efficient and therefore used primarily by structured teams, enterprises, and call centers. With these dialers, sales reps can call several numbers at one go and spend less time waiting to get connected with prospects. We’ll discuss all the benefits of predictive and automated dialers in depth in the next section.

How do modern sales dialers work?

The latest generation of sales dialers, also known as predictive dialers, integrate with your preferred CRM (or are already built-in, like it's the case with our inside sales CRM), provide deep insights and save your busy sales reps a ton of time. Not only that—predictive dialers automatically limit the number of abandoned calls and are designed to comply with local regulations regarding cold-calling.

By using Close.io’s predictive dialers, MakeSpace has been able to significantly improve their team’s efficiency and reach rate.

Obviously, sales dialers can make your sales reps more efficient and productive. But let’s see exactly how a sales dialer can help you improve your overall outbound sales strategy.

Why a sales dialer should be part of your sales strategy

• Integrates with CRM

CRM software is a boon for sales teams because it provides a complete overview of all their sales activities. Most sales dialers either integrate with popular CRM platforms or come pre-packaged as a CRM feature. With the latter, as in the case of Close.io, sales reps can call directly from the CRM.

A natively built-in sales dialer has the advantage that it often creates a more streamlined sales workflow, and removes friction you'd typically encounter with a 3rd-party add-on to your CRM.

What's more, data is more accurately captured in your CRM, leading to better data, more meaningful insights, and faster organizational learning for your sales team.

Your sales reps will be able to make more calls. The bottom line: Used in tandem with your CRM, a sales dialer will accelerate your sales process.

• Helps increase the conversion rate

Calls from unknown area codes are often rejected or ignored due to the growing fear of spam. Smart sales dialers usually match the outgoing call with a local number, thereby increasing the chances of a conversation. According to a test by Engine Ready, conversion rates more than doubled and the volume of phone leads increased by 112.5 percent when a local area code was used to make calls instead of an 800 number.

Source

• Minimize human error

It’s normal for human error to occur while you’re making a call—punching in the wrong number from a spreadsheet, calling the same person twice... Sales dialers automate the whole process to prevent those miscues.

• Free up time for other tasks

Because sales dialers can call multiple numbers at once, your sales rep can make more calls in less time. Predictive dialers can cut the gap between calls to just 3 seconds, saving your sales reps an average of 45 minutes per day.

Imagine what they could do with all that time!

For starters, they could follow up with more warm leads, thereby boosting your conversion rate.

Conclusion

Everything in sales is driven by numbers.

The more leads you reach, the more prospects you’ll have in your pipeline. By sticking to a manual dialing process, you’re just adding to the misery of your already exhausted sales reps. Investing in a sales dialer will not only improve your broken sales process but also skyrocket your team’s productivity. Try out Close.io today if you’d like to learn more about how we can arm you with the sales technology your team needs to succeed.

While marketers are finding themselves overwhelmed by the pace of technology innovation and disruption, it’s quite surprising to see martech adoption surging!

Gartner’s latest Marketing Technology Survey revealed that “Marketing leaders are aggressively adding to their marketing technology stack as they seek to deliver more relevant customer experiences and gain control over their digital advertising activities.”

Ambitious marketing goals and growth initiatives are driving CMOs and marketing leaders to use new technologies that will help them adapt their operations to the energetic and ever-changing digital space.

But it can sometimes feel like guesswork to find the marketing strategy and technology that works for your business and helps you attract, convert and serve your customers better.

We decided to look at the game-changing technologies that will shape marketing and e-commerce in 2019 and have the potential for a significant and rapid increase in return on investment.

1) Intelligence-Driven Engagement

In a 2010 interview, Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, shared the following remarks, addressing how companies can stay in touch with their customers and succeed in the digital space:

“People no longer want to be sold to; they want companies to help them find an informed way to buy the right product or service at the right price […]”

This statement is just as accurate today as it was then. The only thing that has changed is that sophisticated technology now allows marketers to understand a customer’s context and intent so that they can engage and guide them to the right products and services.

In 2019, intelligence-driven, personalized engagement and contextually relevant recommendations will further separate top-performers from the rest.

So how are brands responding?

Let’s have a look at Nespresso.

They know how important intelligent engagement is, which is why they used AI to drive their very own highly visual product recommendation solution, taking them a step ahead in providing an exceptional experience for their customers.

To determine which system is right for the shopper, the solution selects and asks the right questions in the right moment, such as “How much coffee do you drink per day?”

In the end, it analyzes interaction behavior and other data points so that it can recommend the type of machine that would suit the customer the best, such as “Vertuo.”

The benefit of this dialogue-based engagement is that Nespresso can show customers that they are their “trusted advisor” who gets them and is interested in helping them find an informed way to buy the right product.

2) AI Chatbots

In 2019, artificial intelligence will really take precedence. Not only to sell more effectively but also to help businesses finally implement the customer service strategy customers expect.

The truth is that a great product means very little if your customer service is lacking. Your e-commerce business hinges on the quality of your customer support.

As consumers are starting to feel more comfortable with conversational interactions with digital assistants and chatbots, brands, big and small, will be implementing this technology to have intelligent conversations and create an open dialogue, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

However, it will be more important than ever to blend the human element as part of AI.

Nike’s StyleBot is an interesting example of an AI e-commerce bot that was created so that Nike could pursue a conversational marketing strategy for retail.

Customers were able to access the bot via the Messenger app to style their own shoes, mix-and-match, or browse for inspiration by genre and style. It supported natural queries and responded with interactive buttons, pictures, and gifs to create a more personal experience.

By the end of the campaign, Nike could toast to some impressive results: the average CTR was 12.5X higher than Nike’s other campaigns. And conversions, too, received a huge boost. They were 4X higher than the brand average.

3) Predictive Analytics: Sales and Marketing

Why does your e-commerce store need predictive sales? According to studies, businesses with accurate sales forecasts are 10X more likely to grow their year-on-year revenue.

This is essential in 2019 as competition steadily increases.

Predictive analytics uses big data and algorithms to discover patterns and trends that allow you to make a better forecast of future activities and predict probabilities with greater accuracy, such as the best time to:

• Launch new products
• Offer product discounts
• Discontinue legacy products

Angoss is a predictive analytics platform that helps you to reduce risk while boosting your marketing and sales performance. It predicts your best leads and opportunities and informs you on how to attract new customers while also increasing their loyalty.

Exacaster is a predictive sales tool worth checking out. It uses machine-learning algorithms to address important sales and marketing challenges, and it helps you to target the right customers with your up-sells. It also helps you to maximize your profits by optimizing your prices.

4) AI-Powered CRM

In 2019, customers will be more vocal than ever. Their voices can already be heard across multiple channels, including social media.

The key to establishing a great relationship with your customers in 2019 is using a powerful CRM tool.

If you already have a customer relationship management (CRM) system, your customer’s data is neatly stored in one place. This includes their previous interactions and transactions with your business, as well as their social media, email and phone details.

The issue is that traditional CRMs aren’t able to process the massive amounts of data from multiple sources that are being created every day. Collecting customer intelligence is necessary to create a 360° view of your customers in order to deliver better experiences.

Salesforce Einstein “is the first comprehensive AI for CRM” that allows you to collect a mountain of automated data and run machine learning, predictive analytics algorithms, and NLP so that you and your team can understand your customers better. It anticipates opportunities, tells you when a customer is a lead or not and can help you personalize the customer journey.

5) Intelligent Retargeting

Retargeting is a concept that almost everyone who uses the internet has experienced; People who have visited a website and then left will see tailored ads of the previous site when they open other websites. This is a highly cost-effective practice to bring visitors back into the game, which has proven to be immensely successful.

In 2019, however, intelligent retargeting takes this process a step further.

With the added advantage of machine learning to learn user preference and access expert insights into consumer behavior, marketers can generate better results.

Crucially, AI helps you retarget your customers at the time and place when they are most likely to engage. This increases the possibility of a visitor turning into a customer by making a purchase.

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Audience Network earlier this year. It uses LinkedIn and Bing Search AI to power AI driven marketing solutions, helping marketers reach their ideal customers across various online properties including MSN.com, Outlook.com, Microsoft’s Edge browser, and select high-quality partner sites. It is said to optimize ad relevancy, ad selection and improve conversion predictions.

Rik van der Kooi, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Advertising, explains, “It also offers the convenience and power of a unified platform with Bing Ads, building on our search intelligence with a familiar experience, all to help deliver a great ROI.”

These were some of the technologies you should consider adding to your marketing stack in 2019.

Emerging technologies have always played an integral role in the growth of marketing. They offer exciting new ways for brands to communicate with customers and grow relationships, helping you transform the challenges in this rapidly changing world into opportunities. Marketers that push boundaries, innovate, and leverage the marketing solutions of today and tomorrow, are the ones that are going to win.

This article has been originally published at Guided-selling.org.

Selling software shouldn’t really be much of a trouble, especially if you happen to be an experienced vendor who knows his market all too well. Still, there is a need for tech companies to up their marketing game, and getting decision-makers to consider purchasing your product involves more than just reading up on Marketing “How-To’s.”

Be it as it may, lead generation and appointment setting remain the most crucial aspects in selling software and IT products. On the B2B side, more has to be done for companies to maximize their revenues, lessen costs and losses, and remain competitive in the battlefield.

With software startups sprouting here and there like mushrooms, it can be difficult even for veteran brands to remain consistent in selling their software. Apparently, there is still a lot for them to understand when it comes to attract high quality IT and software leads, and meet sales targets in the long run.

For our part, we offer you some of the best tips to consider to stay ahead, starting with:

#1. Informational content.

You guessed it right. We are crazy for content, and so are your prospects. And if you want to increase your brand’s appeal, you might want to start creating effective content that touches on your prospect’s expectations.

There is a whole plethora of things you can do to put your products front and center. In your case, you might want to add infographics and other nifty visual stuff to your creative arsenal.

#2. Tap influencers.

In your industry, there are a lot of personalities who you call influencers. Basically, they are the who’s who in the software industry. Their clout speaks a lot about their influence, and to invite them post something on your blog will eventually win over some potential customers to your side. Here’s how to reach influencers and grow your audience.

#3. Offer discounts and coupons.

Okay, so we are delving into traditional territory right now. But you will realize how important it is really for companies to offer discounts on products on sale. If it works in the past, it may as well work in the present. So, whenever someone signs up for your newsletter, give them product codes and limited one-time offers. These will basically lure decision-makers towards a purchase, satisfaction guaranteed!

In connection with this, we created our Marketing eBooks, not solely to lure prospects but also help and share them with their marketing campaigns. It’s one way of establishing your name in the industry, give more than you take. This even applies in growing your email list.

#4. SEO, SEO, SEO!

Search Engine Optimization remains as your best bet to get software sales through the roof. After all, most prospects consider search engines as their prime source for knowing about the right software solutions for them. It is only a matter of using content that uses the right amount of keywords to give your brand a good boost in terms of sales.

Did we miss out on other important tips for selling software products? Share them in the comments below. You can also check on other important stuff in our blog.

Article originally published at Callbox — The Savvy Marketer.

Coal, the most polluting of energy sources, shows no sign of disappearing three years after the Paris agreement, when world leaders promised decisive action against global warming.

There’s a reason why “the pirate” has proven to be an enduring romantic figure for centuries now. It’s hard not to regard the swashbuckling, rebellious, go-where-the-wind-takes-you approach to life without some sense of envy, particularly if you’re stuck in an office. However, the good news is that there are a few attributes of the privateer persona that can and should be emulated to enhance your innovation leadership skills (and we should emphasize that this doesn’t involve getting anyone to walk the plank).

When we think of great innovators in history, people like Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison typically spring to mind first. But why not pirates? During the golden age of piracy (1650-1720), notorious buccaneers like Henry Morgan and Blackbeard (of Pirates of the Caribbean fame) had to employ a variety of decidedly innovative strategies to reach their goals and remain several leagues ahead of the competition. What’s more, pirates were ambitious and driven individuals who believed in a vision and did all they could to achieve it. Surely these are the traits that any innovation leader should possess.

The following are just a few of the admirable (and legal) corsair qualities that will foster greater innovation leadership and drive real value to your enterprise. Let’s dive in!

1. Boldness

Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, once remarked that “life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” This approach is just as applicable to an innovation leader trying to lead his company to a treasure trove of value while making optimal use of the resources at hand.

Because grappling with budgetary restrictions, internal bureaucracy, and external competition is inevitable, good innovation leadership means making the best possible use of limited resources under pressure. Just like a pirate, the innovation leader needs to be able to take advantage of every opportunity that comes their way (while also keeping mutinies at bay). This means anticipating opportunities before they arise by constantly being aware of changing consumer demands, emergent trends, and the capabilities of the enterprise.

2. Optimism

The pirate is the eternal optimist, never letting the loss of a map, ship, or leg, discourage them from reaching their prize. Maintaining an air of optimism is also crucial for innovation leadership, as it’s essential for envisioning how far new creative endeavours could take the company within a given time frame.

Innovation leaders should be spending their time looking to the horizon (i.e the coming months and even years) in addition to the here and now. Consider the development of the airplane. Although initial development entailed grueling trial and error focusing on short-term goals – such as overcoming weight and aerodynamic limitations – efforts were motivated by a grand vision in which distance could be conquered by flight. Today, this long-term goal has become an everyday reality.

Good innovation leadership means remaining focused on three distinct horizons. These include analyzing the present and what is in the most immediate future and its pragmatic concerns can be addressed with existing capabilities, a future where there is ample visibility to make reasonably accurate innovation forecasts for growth, as well as a more distant horizon where – although there is less predictability – grander visions can be accommodated.

3. Decisiveness

Should we attack that galleon or not? Should we anchor here or risk the reefs and doldrums for fairer shores? The pirate’s life demanded decisive and often rapid decision making. In the same way, an innovation leader needs to be able to examine any given situation and make tough decisions. This often involves choosing where the budget should be best invested, who or what needs to be cut, and most importantly, what course should be charted for the overall innovation venture to be most successful. . This often involves choosing where the budget should be best invested, who or what needs to be cut, and most importantly, what course should be charted for the overall innovation venture to be most successful. Having an efficient means to communicate with other departments and gather key metrics from them, can help produce a clearer picture so that the most impactful decisions can be made.

Of course, decisiveness also means knowing when to cut your losses and move on. The most successful pirates knew that when the odds were stacked against them, there was nothing wrong with quitting while they were still ahead. An innovation leader must be the same way, learning when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. Sticking to your guns is admirable, but only to a point. Facing reality and regrouping or pursuing a new direction is always preferable to going down with a sinking ship. Of course, having a means of actively measuring the KPI of innovative ventures , as well as reporting this information to various departments, can reduce the need to continuously “change tack” when it comes to innovation.

4. Independency

Despite being members of often tightly-managed crews, pirates were known for their fierce independence. After all, it took a lot of courage to shun the conventions of 17^th century society and choose buccaneering over a safe but inglorious life. Likewise, it’s important for innovation leaders to embrace a free-thinking spirit, unencumbered by the “can’ts” and “won’ts” so prevalent in enterprise corporations. Truly great innovation leadership will result in employees being encouraged to think outside of the box and inspire them to contribute bold ideas that could yield major returns.

Aside from being a key virtue of a good swashbuckler, independence is also a critical component of disruptive innovation. It’s important to venture into uncharted waters with bold and original ideas if blue ocean markets are to be secured. Although adhering to an established model to maintain sustained incremental innovation affords a degree of security – as well as a variety of other benefits- playing it too safe could result in being blown out of the water by other more independently minded competitors. It’s far better to strike while the iron is hot.

This graphic by Joseph Babaian draws a comparison between the attributes of sustained and disruptive innovation. Although the former makes use of established resources and data to make conservative improvements, the latter has the potential to yield game-changing results even though greater risk is involved. An effective innovation leadership strategy will balance and accommodate both approaches.

Harnessing the Swashbuckler Spirit to Master Innovation Leadership

At this point, it’s important for us to emphasize again the point that we’d hope would go without saying. Innovation leaders shouldn’t actually be pirating anything. Instead, they should be embracing the tenacity, resourcefulness, and courage that epitomizes the pirates of legend to uncover and implement lucrative ideas.

Though pillaging and plundering is strictly off limits, there’s nothing wrong with innovators adapting existing ideas and molding them into something new. Afterall, phones and touchscreens were both existing technologies before Steve Jobs put them together to create the iPhone. Likewise, electric and gasoline motors were both in use well before Toyota created the hybrid Prius. Innovators must keep their focus ever on the horizon to discern how existing ideas can be amalgamated and improved to reach broader customer bases.

So how can you channel your inner pirate to augment your innovation leadership skills? Turning up to the office wearing an eye-patch and calling everyone “matey” won’t cut it. We recommend combining the qualities outlined above with the use of idea management software – your map and compass as it were. Hunches are good, but data-backed insights are even better. An idea management system will allow you to define a clear innovation focus or challenge, gather ideas from your stakeholders, and develop these ideas through collaboration. However, using an idea management platform which can be configured to the unique strategic requirements of your organization – such as Qmarkets’ Q-ideate – helps you to ensure that these ideas are transformed into results. Whichever solution or methodology you choose, it has to be said that the applying the mindset of a pirate will help you to promote smooth sailing towards company growth.

Influencers can smell a leech a mile away. If you launch into influencer marketing with the wrong tactics, you won’t get a second chance.

Many B2B marketers use a templated style of outreach through email or LinkedIn message which sounds something like this.

“Hi, I love your article on ___. Would you be interested in ____?”

In your industry, the leading influencers are familiar with this approach. They may even receive over a dozen of these impersonal “influencer marketing tactic” emails each day.

Don’t rush relationships to get a quick return.

At Integrate, we’ve done B2B influencer marketing successfully for several years. We know it’s ultimately about relationships. The following guidelines are designed to help marketing organizations create real relationships and leave templated emails behind.

B2B Influencer Marketing: How To Do It Right

Molly Clarke, Senior Marketing Manager at ZoomInfo, says,

“Influencers are not marketing campaigns. They are human beings and should be treated as such.

If you aren’t careful with your outreach efforts or partnerships, you can burn the wrong people – quickly.”

Focus on creating original introductions and authentic engagement during early influencer outreach. Don’t make it about yourself. Instead, focus on delivering value to the influencer.

To learn more, we recommend The Beginner’s Guide to Influencer Marketing.

1 Create Authentic and Engaging Outreach

Many B2B brands initiate influencer outreach by writing a blog post that mentions someone else’s work. Once the article goes live, they’ll send a Tweet or an email with a link to the post. While sending an influencer a link to a blog is a step above template-based outreach, it’s still not authentic or engaging.

The key is to build genuine relationships. Show B2B influencers that you value their opinion and thought leadership. Reach out and ask for their input as a subject matter expert in your niche.

• Introduce yourself and explain that you’re writing an article on a topic within their area of expertise.
• Mention that you’ve read several of their blogs on related topics.
• Ask 1-2 unique and engaging questions on your topic.

Not only will you get new information, but you’ve also created an authentic and unique introduction. You’ve built rapport by demonstrating familiarity with the influencer’s work. Before you propose partnerships with industry influencers, you want to create a baseline for future conversations.

2. Add Disproportionate Value

Influencer marketing must be a partnership. Early discussions with influencers should never be about your brand or your needs.

• Offer to help with projects.
• Ask to feature influencer content on your website.
• Position yourself and your brand as a willing resource.

Gary Vaynerchuk emphasizes that “the person that brings the most value wins.” While this concept isn’t a specific reference to B2B influencer marketing, it’s directly relevant:

Vaynerchuk gets right to the heart of why 80% of the marketers reading this article won’t take a value-driven approach to influencer outreach and will stick with the “templated influencer marketing” tactics everyone else is using. It’s easier. Not adding value is the more accessible route.

It’s simple to regurgitate email templates hoping to eventually get a response than it is to add value to an influencer. But, that means there’s a lot more opportunity for the B2B marketing organizations that are willing to bring some serious value to the conversation.

3. Pace Yourself

B2B marketing organizations are eager to move from influencer acquaintances to formal relationships. According to McKinsey, customers converted by influencer campaigns achieve, on average, a 37% increase in retention. While your organization may be to create a formal partnership, don’t rush relationships before they’re ready.

Continue to provide value to influencers. Let the relationship form naturally. Avoid rushing to propose anything until you’ve built genuine rapport and familiarity.

Don’t overuse someone or an organization. It’s not valuable for your audience and it’s likely to bother influencers. It can also diminish your brand’s own efforts to build thought leadership.

Succeeding at B2B Influencer Outreach

There’s definite value in effective influencer partnerships. According to the Content Marketing Institute, marketing campaigns that include influencers show a 10x increase in conversion rates. However, most B2B marketing organizations fail to capture this enormous value by falling flat with influencer outreach.

You only have one chance to make a positive introduction to influencers. The key to success is to ditch the templates and lazy mentions on Twitter. Start adding value and doing the serious legwork necessary to build authentic relationships.

To see an example of influencer marketing in action, check out the B2B Game Changers Spotlight – Integrate’s annual recognition program that honors top B2B marketers who are paving the way for others to follow. You can find a compilation of advice and strategies from the 2018 B2B Game Changers in this eBook: Real Revenue Marketing Strategies to Advance Your Game.

 

• A new report analyzes the impacts climate change is having in the US now, and what the country could look like by 2100.
• The findings are dire, predicting severe sea-level rise, more insect-borne disease, and big increases in precipitation.
• The report is mandated by a 1990 law, and some experts believe the Trump administration's decision to release it on Black Friday was an attempt to hide these stark realities.

On Black Friday, as many Americans were shopping or spending time with family, the Trump administration published a major report on climate change.

The study, called the National Climate Assessment, is the fourth in an ongoing series mandated by a 1990 law. It looks at how climate change is affecting the US now and what the country might look like by the end of the century.

The findings are dire.

The researchers found that the average temperature in the US rose 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951-2010, and an additional 2 degrees more is inevitable by 2050. But if we continue business-as-usual (and don't change our energy or agriculture systems to emit less heat-trapping greenhouse gases), the average temperature could go up by as much as 11 degrees by the end of this century. 

Sea levels on US coasts have already risen about 9 inches, but we could see as much as 6 feet by 2100. About $1 trillion of wealth in coastal real estate could be threatened.

Deaths from heat-related causes are projected to increase, as are the frequency and severity of allergic illnesses like asthma. Changing temperatures will also expand the geographic range of disease-carrying insects like ticks and mosquitoes, leaving more people at risk of getting Lyme disease, Zika, West Nile, and dengue. 

All of these changes, and the many others projected — including more severe storms, changes in growing seasons, and impacts on infrastructure — could majorly hurt the economy.

"Annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many US states," the report says.

What the data shows

Over 300 scientists and other experts from academia, government, non-profits, and the private sector helped write the assessment. 

Andrew Light, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, worked on the chapter focusing on mitigation. What's different about this report from the last one, he told Business Insider, is how much clearer and more precise scientists are able to get about the US-specific consequences of climate change.

"We can now say with more accuracy that by the end of the century, the difference between the United States in a world where we have achieved something like the goals that we undertook for temperature stabilization in the Paris agreement and one where we don't is tens of thousands of lives lost annually and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars lost annually," he said.

For example, the report predicts that in the years from 2070–2099, the US will see 20% more precipitation in winter and spring for the north central US, and a 20% decrease in the southwest in spring. And the area burned by lightning-ignited wildfires each year is expected to increase by at least 30% by 2060.

But the report doesn't just make projections about changes that may occur decades from now; it attributes trends and disasters that we're already seeing today to climate change as well. 

"With climate science now, we can tell you today how climate change is impacting the world and the United States in particular regions. We are better able to say that yes, particular extreme weather events, the wildfires that are going on in California — there is a climate change component to all of these things," Light said.

For example, the heaviest rainfall from intense storms, including hurricanes, is 6% to 7% higher than it would have been a century ago.

Why publish this on Black Friday?

The report was originally slated to be published in December, but the Trump administration decided to publish it on Black Friday instead — a day when many Americans are off work and spending time with family, and therefore paying less attention to news and politics. 

Light said it's impossible not to conclude that the timing is intended to hide the report from public view.

"Making an announcement on Friday is called taking out the trash. This is not just taking out the trash, it's trying to burn it, bury it, scatter it to the four winds," he said. "This administration does not want anyone to understand that this report is coming out. They don't want people to come to the absolutely reasonable conclusion that it contravenes everything that this administration is doing on climate change. And that's a shame, because this should not be a partisan issue. This is a public health crisis."

With regard to human health, in fact, the report found that the annual health impacts and costs would be approximately 50% lower in a scenario in which we reduce emissions and limit global warming than they would in a business-as-usual scenario.

'There is a growing and increasing market for getting on the right side' of climate change

But despite these ominous predictions, Light said the report gives us reasons for hope as well. 

"There is abundant evidence that this is not a negative-cost proposition, that you can make tons of money, that there is a growing and increasing market for getting on the right side of pricing the pollution and then selling the alternatives to high-carbon energy sources," he said. 

That evidence includes the fact that, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two fastest growing professions in the US are in the renewable energy sector: solar photovoltaic installers and wind turbine service technicians.

There is also growing interest in the tech community around ways to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Y Combinator, the largest startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, put out a request in October for companies working on such technologies.

"This is where markets are going. This is the new set of technologies that people are starting to pay attention to," Kate Gordon, a fellow at Columbia's Center on Global Energy Policy, told Business Insider last month. "Otherwise we'll be buying it from somebody else, because someone's going to do it."

Join the conversation about this story »

• Healthcare startup Forward is opening two locations on the east coast, with plans to become the de facto healthcare program of the future.
• Forward is a doctor's office that works like a gym membership, and focuses on preventative healthcare — and promises to use advanced AI to help patients manage their health. 
• Founder Adrian Aoun, a former Google exec who foudned Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs subsidiary, believes that Forward could be the model for American healthcare going forward.

Of all the issues afflicting America's current medical system, there's one that Adrian Aoun, founder of healthcare company Forward, sees as the most troubling:

As a whole, the current healthcare system doesn't focus on preventative care. There's often little reason to visit your doctor beyond an annual check-up, unless you're dealing with a pressing medical issue. 

To that end, Aoun launched Forward in 2017, as a sleek, futuristic doctor's office with a business model that has more in common with your local gym than that of a typical healthcare facility. The company recently opened its first east coast location in New York City, to complement the three it operates in Los Angeles, and its one location in San Francisco. A second New York City location will be opening soon, says Forward. 

Aoun, a former Google executive who oversaw the launch of Alphabet's urban innovation program Sidewalk Labs, hopes to give Forward members a hands-on approach to their health, using the company's AI-equipped technology and a health-focused app.

The new approach begins with the pricing model. Forward offers memberships starting at $150 a month, which means that you can drop in to visit your doctor as often as you please. Rather than focusing on treating you while you're already sick, Forward is primarily concerned with helping its members proactively manage their health over time. 

"Why would you want the healthcare system to work like a gym?" asked Aoun. "You go to the gym with the goal of changing your body. It's about continual engagement. We're here to work on things that will effect you in 10 or 20 years. It's not about just visiting the doctor's office to address an issue and then coming in and being done. The health issues that affect us in 10 or 20 years from now are what's ultimately killing us."

The future of Forward

Along with two new locations in New York opening this winter, the company recently debuted a series of new medical devices, like a cardiac ultrasound and DNA sequencing tools, that it's already put to use to help monitor its patients' health. 

This, says Aoun, is only the beginning of what Forward plans to offer. For now, if you're addressing a healthcare issue that needs a specialist's attention, Forward will help you set up an appointment with an out-of-house physician. But, in general, you should expect to see more of those kinds of specialists in-house at Forward in the upcoming year, said Aoun.

"We want to build the world's biggest health care system," said Aoun. "We're planning on launching more and more services until one day we're able to perform open heart surgery."

Aoun says that even with an ever-expanding roster of services at Forward, he plans to maintain the same price for its monthly membership program.

"The plan is to make healthcare more accessible and efficient," said Aoun. "We want to rebuild every part of the healthcare system."

Designing the future of healthcare

To do so, Forward is building out tech-heavy doctor's offices outfitted with lustrous wall-to-wall flat screens and blonde wood paneling — all without a clipboard in sight. Technology, says Aoun, is the cornerstone of healthcare's future, as a way to treat more patients with lower overhead from human capital. 

"You have to ask yourself what went wrong with today's healthcare system," said Aoun. "The problem is that our current healthcare system is based on labor. Paying doctors $200,000 a year is a system that doesn't scale well. If you build a healthcare system on the foundation of technology, you can scale it to billions of people."

Aoun has no intention of Forward remaining a boutique healthcare provider; instead, the company plans to rebuild nearly every conceivable field of medicine with technology as its core backbone. And while Forward employs its own doctors, much of the company's healthcare programming takes place over its mobile app.

"It's like having a doctor in your pocket that's in your phone at all times," said Aoun. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Review: Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL are the best smartphones you can buy right now

Here at Buffer, we think a lot about visual content.

We’ve shared our own study on the importance of images in Twitter posts for more social sharing. We’ve explored tools that help anyone create visual content. Our social media management tool incorporates image posting because we know how important that element is to engage your followers and fans.

But there’s one question we get asked quite often: Where can you find free images that are high quality and cleared to use for your blog posts or social media content?

It’s a question with a lot of different answers and caveats. Nearly every image created in the last 30 years is still protected by copyright—a protection that gives virtually every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. But you can find a public domain photo, use a Creative Commons image that might need attribution, or even create your own image from scratch.

In this post, we’ll share more than 20 different sources and tools for free images, covering searchable image sites, create-your-own-image tools, and more.

Understand these terms before using any free images

A few things to know before we get started. The following terms will come up often as we discuss free image sources. Read over the terms and conditions of each site you try so you know exactly when and what type of attribution is required.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. There are various types of Creative Commons licenses that range from allowing any type of use with no attribution to allowing only certain uses and no changes.

What is public domain?

Works in the public domain are those whose copyrights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. Finding something on the internet does not mean it is in the public domain.

What is royalty free?

Royalty-free images aren’t necessarily free. In most cases, you’ll have to pay a one-time fee to obtain the rights to use the image. Then you can use it as many times as you like. The “free” in “royalty-free” only means that you do not have to pay royalties to the owner of the image every time you use it. For a comprehensive read on royalty-free images, check out this guide by Amos Struck.

24+ websites to find free images for your marketing

To better help you evaluate these sites, I performed the same search, if possible, on each using the term “happy people.”

1. Unsplash

Unsplash has its own license, which essentially lets you use the images for free, in any way you like, except for using them to create a competing website. (We are huge fans of Unsplash here at Buffer!)

2. Burst (by Shopify)

Burst is a free stock photo platform for entrepreneurs by Shopify. The images are both free and royalty-free. (Burst has a cool section of business ideas, with tips and high-resolution images for getting your business started.)

3. Pexels

Pexels also has its own license, which states what you can and cannot do with the images. You can use and modify the images for free for both commercial and personal use without attribution.

4. Pixabay

Images on Pixabay are licensed under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means you can use the images without asking for permission or giving credit to the artist (though it’s always appreciated). Pixabay provides a gentle reminder to check that the content depicted in the images doesn’t infringe any rights.

5. Free Images

Free Images provides over 300,000 free stock images under its own license. The license allows a very broad range of uses, though it does list several restricted use cases (which are quite common for most free images sites).

6. Kaboompics

Kaboompics uses its own license, which is similar to Creative Commons Zero except that you cannot redistribute its photos. There are two things that I love about Kaboompics: one, it allows me to search by color, and two, it provides a complementary palette of colors in the photo.

7. Stocksnap.io

Stocksnap uses the Creative Commons CC0 license so its photos are free to download, edit, and use for both commercial and non-commercial projects.

8. Canva

Canva is an online graphic design tool that also offers free stock photos. One advantage of using Canva is that you can quickly turn an image into a custom graphic to use on social media or your blog.

9. Life of Pix

Life of Pix lists free high-resolution photographs and partners with Adobe Stock for more (paid) stock photographs.

10. Gratisography

Gratisography also has its own free photo license, which lets you do “almost anything you can think of”. While they have a rather limited number of images now, many are high-quality images that I would use.

11. Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting platform where you can find images that can be used and modified for commercial purposes. Select “Commercial use & mods allowed” under the “Any license” filter to find those images, and remember to check the license for each image as they vary.

12. The Jopwell Collection (by Jopwell)

The Jopwell Collection contains several albums with hundreds of images featuring people in the Jopwell community. The images are free to be downloaded and used as long as you visibly attribute Jopwell. (You can read the story behind this collection here.)

13. WOCinTech

This is an album of photos of women of color in tech, started by Christina and Stephanie, the founders of #WOCinTech Chat. The images can be used as long as you attribute #WOCinTech Chat or wocintechchat.com. (While the team isn’t updating the album anymore, there are over 500 images to choose from!)

14. CreateHER Stock

CreateHER Stock’s team has manually curated more than 200 high-quality images of women of color, which might be used for personal use only. (Do check out their license here.) You can also receive new free images every month when you sign up to their newsletter.

15. Death to Stock

Unlike most websites mentioned in this post, Death to Stock doesn’t have a gallery of images. It sends you 20 new photos every month when you sign up for its newsletter.

16. Getty Images

This might come as a surprise to you (as it was to me). You can use images from Getty Images on your non-commercial websites for free by embedding them. Downloading an image and uploading it to your website is still a no-no—you’ve got to embed it. An embed is slightly more intrusive than simply adding a photo into your post – the embed keeps its own frame, share buttons, and branding. Still, for many blogs, it’s an option worth looking into.

17. PicJumbo

PicJumbo offers a variety of free images for any kind of use—free of charge with no registration required. You can also get new free images by subscribing to their newsletter. (If you have the budget to spare, do check out their premium photo collections such as this, which looks amazing to me! It even has vertical images for Stories content.)

18. Crello

Similar to Canva, Crello is a free graphic design tool by Depositphotos, which has many free images for you to use.

19. Depositphotos

Depositphoto offers a sample of free images, vectors, editorial content, and footages, which is updated every week. You can also sign up for an account to get the free stock files every week.

20. iStock

iStock releases a new batch of free stock files every week when you sign up for a free membership.

21. New Old Stock

New Old Stock is a collection of vintage photos from the public archives, free of known copyright restrictions.

22. Superfamous

Superfamous houses the work of Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter, whose photography is available under the conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This means that you can use the work for your own purposes — including commercial use — as long as credit is provided.

23. Google Advanced Image Search

Google Advanced Image Search is a method of finding free-to-use images through Google’s own search tools. Here’s a quick guide.

24+. Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, and more

It’s also worth noting that you can embed Facebook posts, Instagram posts, tweets, YouTube videos and even Slideshare decks to your blog post.

Pinterest boards are a little trickier to embed, but it can be done by using its widget builder and copying and pasting the code into your blog post. (For WordPress users, I noticed that I have to publish the blog post while in the “Text” editor mode after pasting the code for this to work.)

 

Often, readers can engage with embedded posts more deeply than static content by following users, liking, or commenting on the posts.

Consider replacing screenshots with embedded posts so that readers can engage with your examples.

Schedule your images with Buffer

Thanks so much for reading all the way to the end of the blog post. As a thank you, I would love to share a nifty feature that we have built into Buffer to help you share your images as quickly as possible.

Whenever you share your blog posts or marketing websites with Buffer (either through your dashboard or the browser extension), we will automatically pick up images from those websites and suggest them to you for your social media posts. You just have to click on your favorite image to add it to your social media post.

(Note: When sharing images from others’ websites, it’s always advisable to check with the owner of the website or image first.)

Over to you

What free image sites did I miss? What tools do you like the most to find or create images? I’d love to keep the list growing in the comments!

P.s. If you are looking for background music for your videos, you might like our collection here.

If your startup were a Netflix series, the cap table would be the credits rolling at the end of each episode. For any up-and-coming founder, it's crucial to have a detailed understanding of who owns what at each stage of the business.

The capitalization table, or cap table, provides the information you need to get a clear understanding of your company's ownership structure. In this post, we'll discuss:

• What is a cap table?
• How to Make a Capitalization Table
• Cap Table Template
• How to Use a Cap Table
• How to Maintain a Capitalization Table
• Capitalization Table Examples

A cap table is the place of record for the equity-based transactions of a company. It includes ownership stakes, types of shares, and option pools.

Why is a cap table important?

Whether you're a business owner or an investor, having a capitalization table is important because:

• It provides an easy-to-understand visual of a business’ ownership structure of who owns what, who has invested, and individuals' levels of investment in the business.
• It helps you track the value of equity and debt investments so that you can stay up-to-date on the financial status of your business.
• It helps you manage company stock options and how much employees can be granted from the stock pool.

Overall, a cap table is a single source of truth that gives a full picture of financial investments for any business, making it much easier to picture business cash flow and make informed decisions.

How To Make a Capitalization Table

Most capitalization tables are created at the inception of a business in the form of a spreadsheet carefully structured around a few variables we’ll outline below.

Ownership stake is a crucial element of any cap table. It refers to who (founders, investors, or employees) owns what percentage of a business and who has the majority stake. Most startups need a voting agreement among common and preferred shareholders, so this element shows who needs to sign off on major company decisions (like a company sale or reorganization). The ownership stakes section can sometimes list shareholder names and the number of shares they hold.

The type of shares section indicates who has common shares with no special treatment vs. who has preferred stock. Preferred stock can often be converted to a 1x payout of money invested.

Debt that can convert into equity is another transaction often found on a cap table. This convertible debt is factored into all ownership calculations on a fully diluted basis, which is a way of looking at ownership where all outstanding warrants, options, and convertible notes are exercised.

Every business has different needs, so some other variables that might be in a cap table are:

• Valuation: Total cost of your business shares.
• Total of authorized shares: The number of shares your company is authorized to sell.
• Total number of outstanding shares: The total number of shares held by all stakeholders in the company.
• Reserved shares: also called restricted shares, the total number of shares available for employees.

Let’s look at a cap table template you can use as inspiration.

Cap Table Template

Here's a sample cap table:

Image Source

As the columns move from left to right, additional dilution items are applied to get an understanding of a person's actual ownership percentage of the company.

You'll notice the cap table lays out the essential pieces of a transaction:

1. Shareholder name as it appears on the security,
2. Date of issuance,
3. Number of shares or units issued.

How To Use a Cap Table

1. Understanding your equity.

One of the primary uses of the cap table is to show how decisions impact the equity structure of a company. Do you want to expand the employee option pool? Are you raising another funding round?

Either way, you can see exactly what impact actions will have on your shareholder groups. When raising funding for the first time, you need to know exactly what you're giving up. The cap table will do just that and show you the proposed new structure of the company.

2. To discuss initial equity distributions.

When you create a company, a cap table has your company breakdown in writing. Having a cap table will make your job easier from the start, though, as it can help you facilitate important conversations like discussing initial equity distributions with the founding team.

3. For managing employee options.

When hiring new employees, you want to align their incentives with your company's objectives. Stock options are a great way to do just that, as you can match employee contributions with the appropriate amount of stock.

Your cap table will show exactly how many options are authorized and available to be issued to employees and the number of options used to date. When creating your table, ensure you have enough options to cover a 12-month rolling period.

4. Term sheet negotiation.

A clear snapshot of your company’s ownership structure also helps you run a what-if analysis on a financing round. You can look at what happens to your ownership stake and company control at different valuation levels and consider other factors, like the impact of issuing new options at different stages.

You’ll get insight into the situations you’re happy with and where you’ll need to draw your line in the sand.

How To Maintain a Capitalization Table

Maintaining your cap table is essential as businesses are constantly changing. For example, increased investments, more funding rounds, and more employees will all impact the totals in your chart, and staying up-to-date ensures you always have the most relevant information.

Here are some common elements to keep track of and update when necessary on your cap table:

• Valuation: Whenever your stock price changes, update it.
• Investors: When you get new investors, add them to your table.
• Reserve/restricted Stock: If you offer stock to employees, update the number of shares when you hire.
• Debt that has converted to equity.
• Total outstanding shares.
• Remaining authorized shares.

Assigning specific people or teams to manage your cap table is also important. Multiple people having access can confuse if people make their own edits, so having a designated person make all updates ensures a streamlined process.

Capitalization Table Examples

The capitalization table you create can vary depending on the stage your business is in and the metrics you're hoping to track. Let’s review some examples that will help you understand what to include in your table.

Basic Cap Table

This cap table has the essential elements to include if you’re hoping for a simple overview of shares and stock.

Image Source

Pre-Investment Cap Table

For businesses that have yet to go through funding rounds or obtain investments.

Image Source

 

Post-Money Comparison Cap Table

For businesses that have gone through funding or investment rounds and want to compare new capital to pre-funding rounds.

Image Source

A Cap Table Is A Guiding Source of Truth

A cap table is a guiding source of truth for your business, giving you a snapshot of ownership stake, stock options, and who should be involved in critical business decisions. The information in this piece will help you create your own high-quality cap table that can make your next big fundraising decision or employee hire a bit easier.

So, whatever type of episode your startup turns out to be, don’t forget to write down the credits.

There’s an unwritten rule that women need to support other women at work. Countless articles are detailing how we are supposed to be each other’s champion, encourager, and referrer. Some have even gone so far as to say that achieving equal rights starts with treating one another as equals. The ideas of how to receive equal pay, equal treatment, and equal status to our male counterparts have been on the minds of millions of women for decades and remain hot topics even today.

There is no doubt that when women support each other, magnificent things happen.  Women who uplift, support, and celebrate other women instead of trying to bring them down create a healthier workplace for men and women alike.

If this is the case and the evidence supports this position, why are so many women in sales struggling to do what they know is right?

For starters, it’s a culture issue. The typical “Every man for himself” sales culture would have you believe that you should only look out for yourself and make sure that everything you do centers around achieving YOUR quota. After all, your commission check is likely based upon your performance and not the teams. You know the saying, “There’s no I in TEAM, but there is in COMMISSION.”

The spirit of competition in sales is as old as the profession itself. Companies count on this competitive environment to motivate their sales teams to achieve and exceed their goals. While there’s nothing wrong with competing against your teammates, many women sales professionals wonder, “How am I supposed to compete against my fellow saleswoman and have her back at the same time?

As individual contributors, the typical sales culture encourages us to be laser-focused on our own goals; however, that’s not the cultural message women receive Society pens men as providers, protectors, and fixers. Men are supposed to take care of themselves so that they can take care of their families. On the other hand, society views women as nurturers and caretakers of others. People tend to label competitive women sales professionals as “aggressive,” “salesy,” bossy, and (heaven forbid), a “fierce “b*tch.”  To encourage women to thrive in a highly competitive environment goes against everything history has taught us and how society wants to see us.

You may be familiar with Madeline Albright’s famous quote from 2006 – “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Some try to guilt women into helping other women despite a culture that does its best to pit us against each other.  This disconnect is troubling, exhausting, and confusing. Have you ever heard of men being pressured to help other men the way women are urged to help other women? Has anyone ever heard it said that “There is a special place in hell for men that don’t help other men?”

So…what’s the answer? How can women in sales support each other despite a culture that promotes something drastically different? Here are six ways YOU can make a difference:

How to Support Your Fellow Women in Sales

#1 – No hazing allowed. Too often, veteran female sales reps put newbies through frivolous initiation rituals because they were subjected to the same behavior. As a result, some women adopt an “I had to figure it out, so they can too.” or “I was the only woman on the team when I started, and no one helped me…” attitude. Whatever the reason, taking this approach in an attempt to “school” a new rep only serves to increase hatred and anxiety. Let’s stop the hazing and try adding some kindness.

#2 – A closed fist cannot receive. When you hold onto your knowledge, time, and resources, you block the Universe from giving you more. No one is asking you to give away the secrets to your success, however, try to think of ways that you can share a little bit of yourself to help a woman who needs guidance. For example, riding along on her sales calls and helping her identify opportunities for improvement can dramatically improve her learning curve.

#3 – Shining a light on someone else makes your light shine brighter. The natural tendency is to believe that if we praise another, somehow others will fail to see our brightness. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you are free and gracious with your praise and compliments, others see you in a positive light and as someone who is confident within herself. After all, only insecure people are afraid of having the spotlight shine away from them for fear that others won’t see their value.

#4 – They print new money every day. In a highly competitive sales environment, it is to adopt a scarcity mentality. When we come from a place of scarcity — or an “I have to get mine before anyone else does” type of behavior — we operate out of fear, and that fear leads to desperation and a feeling of lack. The reality is that unless your company has 100% market share, there are enough prospects and customers (and plenty of money) to go around. Successful women in sales know this, so remind yourself of this anytime you are tempted to feel otherwise.

#5  – The best measure of your success is by the number of people you help achieve theirs. Anyone can accomplish great feats but those who take the time to help others accomplish their dreams and stand head and shoulders above the rest. As you progress in your sales career, be willing to take a new female rep under your wing and mentor her. It won’t hurt you at all. Both of you will benefit from the relationship. She will gain valuable guidance, and you will feel fantastic knowing that you’re giving back what you have been fortunate enough to receive.

RELATED: Check out Sales Hacker’s 35 Saleswomen Helping Other Saleswomen

#6 – Be true to yourself. Sales may be a cutthroat profession, but it doesn’t have to be cutthroat for women. You can decide how you want to succeed – you have the right to be a champion, encourager, and referrer. What mark do you want to leave on the world? What legacy do you want to leave behind? What do you want others to say about you long after you have moved on from your current role? The answers to these questions will reveal your authentic voice and allow you to live authentically and on purpose.

Yes, sales is a highly competitive profession and can be cutthroat. As emotionally mature women in sales, we have the power to change this reality for ourselves, our companies, and other aspiring women sales professionals. It is up to us to be the change we wish to see in the world.

The post How to Have Your Fellow Woman’s Back in the Cutthroat Sales World appeared first on Sales Hacker.

It’s that time of year. We’re all making predictions and tracking trends in customer experience. What will happen in 2019? Which trends will matter? Which will fade away? One thing we predict will not change for a long time is the need to reduce customer effort.

CCW’s latest report, 2019 Trends, highlighted many great trends, but one of them really caught my eye:

“Reducing customer effort is the #1 CX Priority in 2018, and organizations believe customer feedback, agent training and digital engagement are the keys to achieving that objective. Reducing efforts will only begin when organizations understand customer journeys and personas.”

Customer Contact Week’s report is filled with great tips and facts to help you create better experiences. Get your copy here!

We’ve been talking about ways to reduce customer effort for a while now. And yet it continues to be an elusive and difficult to achieve goal. Understanding the customer journey is a key part of it. With the rise in journey mapping popularity, it’s easy to think we’re doing that! But there are serious limitations to our understanding today, and I think I have a few ideas why.

1. Journey Maps are not a one-and-done project.

In fact, they aren’t really a project at all. Viewing a journey map as a static and once-in-a-while tool leads to complacency around really understanding the rapid changes happening in today’s marketplace.

Customers are expecting more, even if the experience you provide is not changing. Using the journey map to help identify the hot spots on a constant basis is how the best organizations stay one step ahead.

Listen here for great tips on human-centric service design.

2. Leaders need to talk the talk and walk the walk around customer-centricity.

If employees are only asked to think about the customer in times of crisis or quarterly results discussions, they will stop thinking about the customer!

Leaders need to reinforce a focus on the customer through constant communication and tying the results back to that focus. Employees should feel compelled to include the customer impact in each decision. They need to understand how their daily work connects back to the customer journey. Leaders need to make sure the focus on the customer comes from the top.

3. However you reduce customer effort, it should never be measured on the “good enough” scale.

Reducing customer effort should never be about just becoming better than the not-so-great way of doing things. Instead of asking, “how can we reduce hold time at our contact centers,” ask “how can a customer contact someone directly on the first attempt?”

Think differently about what effort really means to customers.

That five-minute wait time might be an improvement over the 25-minute wait time of last year, but the real goal should be eliminating a wait altogether. Get specific about why. It’s not just the time, it’s the fact that our customer had to call in because he or she had a problem. That’s unnecessary effort for the customer. In fact, calling in at all is effort we should aim to eliminate!

Do you really know your customer’s journey well enough to reduce customer effort and eliminate some of the steps it takes to do business with your organization? It’s a big question with lots of questions underneath that one.