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One of the comments I saw recently on Twitter about public relations was that some folks consider PR and its impact to be immeasurable. This is patently false. Virtually everything in marketing, advertising, and PR is measurable. The statement, more accurately worded, is that not everything is worth measuring.

For example, if I get a small mention in the local newspaper about SHIFT Communications that doesn’t have attribution, a clickstream, or a call to action, it would take an extensive research project to find out the true impact of that article. You could, in theory, go door to door and ask of every known subscriber to the newspaper whether they read the article, and if so, what they thought of it.

Doing so would be a project that would take days or weeks and thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars to accomplish, but it is possible. However, the ROI of doing a $25,000 survey for what was effectively a minor mention is almost certainly negative, and deeply so. It’s not worth measuring – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be measured.

When people say that PR can’t be measured, what they’re really saying is that a measurement strategy wasn’t built into the plan. When you’re designing a marketing, advertising, or PR campaign, it’s absolutely vital to plan for both benchmarking on the front end and measurement on the back end to ensure that you’ve actually moved the needle. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working with an agency, using in-house professionals, or even doing it yourself – if you don’t plan to measure, don’t expect to measure the plan!.

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Why don’t more companies and brands measure PR and marketing? Well, as illustrated by the example above, it’s expensive to measure things well. How much should you budget and plan for measurement? That depends entirely on the risk to your business for any given project or campaign. If you’ve doing something that’s low risk, it may not be worth measuring. On the other hand, if your entire Q4 revenue stream is on the line, ask yourself what the price of failure is. What’s the price of not being able to adapt and be agile if the campaign isn’t generating the results you want? What’s the price of not even knowing what condition the campaign is in until it’s over?

Think about what you spend on car insurance or homeowner’s insurance. For the average vehicle, you can spend up to a third of the vehicle’s purchase price on insurance while you own the car. Would you be willing to insure a mission-critical marketing campaign’s value with the same level of investment in measurement, in order to avoid “totaling” your company’s revenues? If so, then build measurement into your plan!

At the end of the day, not everything is worth measuring, so pick and choose carefully. What can’t you afford to have fail? Invest in measurement for that.

Do you have a content marketing strategy in place? Or are you just winging it? It is hard to believe but less than half of all marketers using content marketing have bothered to put written content marketing strategies in place.

Below, we’re sharing an infographic done by QuickSprout. It’s a quick look at the strategies you need to consistently use to get more organic traffic from your content marketing efforts. At a minimum your content must PROVIDE VALUE and then:

• Be optimized for many keywords with lots of searches.
• Have lots of quality backlinks.
• Be evergreen…and stay that way by keeping the post updated.

How to Create Content that Drives Lots of Organic Traffic Infographic

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

Business owners, have you ever found yourself thinking: I should really send out a marketing e-mail to all the people on my e-mail list—but is now the best time?

When it comes to e-mail marketing, timing is certainly an important concern—but we’re here to tell you: The time to get busy with e-mail marketing is now.

The holiday season is fast approaching. People are shopping. They’re working to meet their year-end goals. They’re spending money. Their inboxes are becoming full with special offers, promotions, and ads—and you definitely want to have your brand right there in the mix.

How can small businesses make the most of their e-mail marketing efforts over the holiday season? Read on for some tips from the Grammar Chic, Inc. team.

• Grab your readers with a compelling headline! And keep experimenting with different subject lines right up until the end of the season. Divide your e-mail list into two or three groups, and send each group an e-mail with a different subject line. If one works resoundingly well, it’s worth reusing with the other groups; you might also keep it in mind as a template for future e-mails.
• Remember, though, not to use spammy words in your subject lines! Our thoughts on typical spam words can be found in this post. Note that holiday marketing clichés—Cyber Monday or Black Friday sales, for instance—will also get your messages tossed in with the spam. Avoid using those terms in your subject line.
• Make your e-mails top-heavy. Busy shoppers, receiving your e-mail on their iPhone or Blackberry, aren’t going to have the time or the patience to read 500 words of copy. Include the most significant information right there in the subject line and in the first two or three lines of text. The less scrolling people have to do to get to the point of your e-mail, the better.
• As ever, content is king. The best e-mails will have some eye-catching imagery—perhaps holiday-themed—paired with some brief but value-adding content. Make note of holiday promos and sales, and perhaps link to just a couple of your company blogs, as well.
• Don’t forget your call to action! It’s always essential, and at the holidays more than ever.

E-mail marketing should really be a year-round pursuit, of course, but there’s no time like the present to jump in or to redouble your efforts.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues its run as one of the most popular technology buzzwords of the year, the discussion has turned from what it is, to how to drive value from it, to the tactical: how to make it work. IoT will produce a treasure trove of big data – data that […]

The post IoT Won’t Work Without Artificial Intelligence appeared first on WIRED.

“Success is where preparation and opportunity meet,” said Bobby Unser, who is one of the ten drivers to win the Indianapolis 500 three or more times. His words not only apply to finishing first on a racetrack, but also to sales people who strive for first-place results in cold calling.

So, how do you prepare for success? Start with these cold calling tips.

5 Cold Calling Tips

1. Pinpoint Your Customer Profile 

You need to ensure you understand clearly your targeted customers’ profile—who they are, the markets they participate in and the issues they are likely to be facing. Why?

• First, it enables you to laser-target the people with whom you’re most likely to be successful and, thus, boost win rates and shorten sales cycles.
• Second, by gaining a full understanding of the challenges they are facing, and how your company can help them, you’ll be able to show empathy and develop a more robust message.

                                  2. Research Each Customer 

With company websites and social media, it’s easy to research and discover vital information about a company. For instance:

• How many employees do they have?
• What are the backgrounds of key employees?
• Have any recent changes, such as mergers or acquisitions, affected the organization?
• What is the role of the person you’re calling?

If you know that individual’s role and responsibilities, you can tailor your conversation to points (or specifics) that are relevant to them. For instance, operations managers are concerned about cost reduction while chief security officers tune into messages about risk reduction.

                                3. Crystallize Your Call Objectives 

Don’t get on the phone until you know exactly what you want to accomplish. For instance, what information do you want to gather? What is the ideal outcome of the call?

For example, if you’re trying to set appointments for your salespeople, you need to gather enough information to ensure the customer meets your minimum requirements as a buyer for your product.

Also, consider a minimum objective. In the appointment setting scenario above, you know that you won’t achieve appointments with everyone to whom you speak. However, you can at least test a new value proposition.

4. Polish Your Product Knowledge 

Product success stories that relate to the prospect’s situation need to roll off the tip of your tongue. A memory bank of stories enables you to paint a picture of how your prospect can be successful using your product or service by comparing it to a real-life situation. While it’s fairly simple to put together product stories, doing so will set you apart from the majority of cold callers.

                            5. Build Your Confidence

You have to believe in the value of your offering if you want your prospect to believe as well. So, make sure you have full confidence you’re offering something that can help the person you’re calling.

With over 300 million in-stream active users, Google+ can be a powerful tool for boosting your online presence.

It can help improve SEO ranking, finding, and building relationships with influencers and it can strengthen your industry authority.

A study by Janrain indicates Google+ has continued to grow strong despite its late start (2011), whilst others have forecast Google+ will surpass Facebook by May 2016.

So why is Google+ the place to be?

• 22% online adults use Google+ on a monthly basis
• 42% use Google+ to interact with brands’ content
• 70% of top 100 brands are using Google+

In order to get better engagement rates, more traffic referrals and high numbers of followers, take a look at some of the key hints and tips worth bearing in mind if seeking to become a Google+ pro.

1/ Perfect your profile

Your profile and hovercard is the first impression and entry point for your audience.

Every element of your profile should reflect your brand identity and personality.

2/ Create and manage circles

A great way to get started is by searching for people who share your interests and adding them to your circles: start engaging with them and build on those relationships.

Also, deciding which are your main objectives on Google+ is essential. This can help you organise your circles (eg. create prospects, team members and customer circles for your business page).

3/ Get involved and be active

Go to the “Stream” tab to see what others are sharing and comment on numerous posts a day.

However, quantity isn’t everything. Make sure your comments add value to the discussion and illustrate your understanding and expertise on the subject.

Brief comments such as ‘Great post’ or ‘Thanks for sharing’ do not add much value to the conversation and once you start sending out dozens of these a day, they are going to lose their value.

4/ Join communities

Engaging in industry-related communities it’s a great way to meet new people, learn, and expand your brand’s reach.

Once you’ve identified and joined relevant communities, make it a priority to participate regularly.

Be sure to actively ask and answer questions, as well as share valuable content to fuel engagement.

5/ Share, share, and SHARE

Take a look at the suggestions below aimed to help you optimise your Google+ posts and encourage conversations around them.

The more you share to your Google+ profile or business pages, the more you will get your name out there.

However, it’s highly recommended to avoid being promotional and talking too much about your products and services.

Try to put a premium on your brand only in 20% of posts, whilst the rest of your content should be comprised of industry insights and both educational and entertaining posts.

We may think of Internet of Things (IoT) devices as futuristic looking objects in the home that can lower energy costs and open garage door for you. 

But the IoT is actually much more important to the enterprise sector.

IoT devices and software can offer businesses huge benefits, including better security, more effective monitoring of machinery and equipment, efficiency, energy management, and more.

In a new IoT report from BI Intelligence, we size the enterprise IoT market, noting the breakdown between hardware versus software spending, and determine which industries will upgrade to the IoT first. We examine how businesses are already using IoT systems and what barriers might still stand in the way of IoT enterprise upgrades.

Access The Full Report By Signing Up For Risk-Free Trial Today>>

Here are some of the key findings from the BI Intelligence report: 

• The enterprise sector will account for 39% of the roughly 23 billion active IoT devices we expect by the year 2019. We believe it will be the largest of the three main IoT markets including enterprise, home, and government. 
• Spending on enterprise IoT products and services will reach $255 billion globally by 2019, up from $46.2 billion this year, according to our estimates. This represents a 5-year CAGR of 40%. 
• Enterprise IoT software providers will earn far more than those who provide IoT hardware. Enterprise-focused IoT software and services sales will reach $43.9 billion by year-end, while hardware will account for about $2.3 billion in revenue, according to our estimates.
• The manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and information sectors will invest the most in IoT systems and devices in the next five years, we estimate. Manufacturers are currently the leading industry to use IoT devices and we estimate there total IoT investment will reach $140 billion over the next 5 years. 
• The primary barriers to installing the IoT within businesses include the high costs for installation and increasing vulnerability to a cyber attack.

The full report: 

• Examines how many IoT devices the enterprise will use and what those devices will look like
• Forecasts the value that businesses will see from implementing IoT solutions and the amount that will be spent upgrading
• Analyzes executives sentiment towards the IoT and how they are already putting the IoT to work
• Examines which industries are at the forefront of implementing the IoT and how they use the data the IoT generates
• Provides specific case studies of how businesses are using IoT systems in their workplace

For full access to all BI Intelligence reports, briefs, and downloadable charts on the Internet of Things and mobile computing markets, sign up for a trial membership. 

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Earnings season is almost over.

As of Monday morning, about 93% of the S&P 500's combined market cap had reported their third quarter financial results, and on the whole, earnings for the index's members rose 8.5% during the third quarter (or 7.9% ex-legal fees, which for some banks were quite large).  

But are we totally sure that this is how much companies actually earned during the quarter?

Back in October, Matt Levine at Bloomberg View wrote a great column outlining the multitude of problems with Bank of America's earnings report. As Levine wrote, the bank made, more or less, $168 million in the quarter, though given the size of the $186 billion bank it seems that, 1) it would be almost impossible to know this for sure and, 2) this amount really doesn't matter to Bank of America.

(This turned out to be a prophetic piece of analysis: Bank of America later revised their earnings, and they made less than $168 million.)

What Ben Graham Said About Quarterly Earnings

And if we go to what many would call the Bible of investing, Benjamin Graham's "The Intelligent Investor," we find that companies not exactly giving investors a 100% clear picture of what their earnings are is not a new trend.

In "The Intelligent Investor," Graham walks through Alcoa's 1970 earnings statement. Alcoa, which is an aluminum giant and still a major economic bellwether, was an even bigger stalwart in the global economy 44 years ago. And so unlike Bank of America, which is in the business of playing with numbers, you'd imagine that an industrial company might have a more straightforward review of their financial results. 

But this was not the case.

For one, Alcoa presented four different earnings measures for 1970: primary earnings, net income (after special charges), fully diluted (before special charges), and fully diluted (after special charges). 

And after several pages of discussing Alcoa's accounting treatment of special items and after-tax effects, the answer to the question, "What were the true earnings of Alcoa in 1970?" comes out to: we're not sure. 

And if the earnings of a company for a year cannot be known with complete confidence, Graham writes that, "The more seriously investors take the per-share earnings figures as published, the more necessary it is for them to be on their guard against accounting factors of one kind and another that may impair the true comparability of the numbers." 

"An obvious remark here would be that investors should not pay any attention to these accounting variable if the amounts involved are relatively small," Graham writes. "But Wall Street being as it is, even items quite minor in themselves can be taken seriously."

Graham also writes about Dow Chemical's annual earnings report for 1969, in which the company included a $0.21 charge that impacted the company's growth comps — taking them to 4.5% year-over-year from 9% — and Graham writes that it seems "rather absurd" that this exact percentage would matter for an investor looking at the company's future average profits or growth. 

For Many People, It Still Matters

So then what to make of the S&P 500's earnings growth this quarter, or any quarter?

In a note to clients on Monday, RBC Capital Markets' Jonathan Golub wrote that companies in the S&P 500 who reported earnings and sales that beat expectations saw their stocks rise 1.4% following the announcement, while those that missed saw shares tumble 3.1%. 

And so the risk-reward seems pretty clear: don't miss on earnings. 

And while you could argue that a company's earnings are what they are (and though this argument is often more forcefully made for sales, there are creative ways companies can roll forward and backwards revenue recognition, too), lots of people would argue that a company's earnings are what they say, and add that these two statements are not the same thing. 

As Graham writes, "Corporate accounting is often tricky," which seems a little like an understatement (though: see Levine again on the tension between whether or not things journalists and others say are complicated actually are). 

But as Graham concludes his chapter, "stock valuations are really dependable only in exceptional cases," and earnings reports are part of this equation. 

Earlier this week, we highlighted commentary from Julian Emanuel at UBS, who expects the S&P 500 to rise to 2,225 by the end of next year, and as part of this thesis cited, among other things, 7% earnings growth. 

Now, of course if this is the earnings growth the market is expecting, and subsequently what companies deliver (whether as a result of looking to meet expectations or not), than investors can't ignore the market's realities: stocks will probably rise.

And just last week, we highlighted academic research that highlighted the curious relationship between companies that beat on earnings reports and those that employ former stock analysts.  

But as Graham writes, "For most investors it would be be probably best to assure themselves that they are getting good value for the prices they pay, and let it go at that." 

At some point, you've just got to believe the magic. 

SEE ALSO: 30 Years Ago Warren Buffett Gave Away The Secret To Good Investing

Join the conversation about this story »

The mobile channel has been building steam for several years now:

• Mobile traffic has grown nearly 100 percent in just the last year, according to Statcounter.
• There are 156 million smartphones in the U.S., increasing by 24 percent annually, according to comScore.
• 80 percent of the time consumers spending shopping on their devices is through an app, reports comScore.
• Consumers will make $87 billion in purchases from mobile devices this year alone, says Forrester Research.

Mobile has become part of our daily routine — from booking travel, to finding restaurants, or just getting directions to the nearest coffee shop. Basically, we use our smartphones for just about everything.

Maximizing Mobile ROI

So how can online retailers maximize their ROI from their mobile channel?  Since an increase in revenues is directly related to an increase in conversions, one obvious way to see an almost immediate return on investment is to increase those conversions through mobile testing and optimization. For online retailers to win the mobile game, they have to optimize both their mobile websites and their mobile apps.

Testing and optimization simply isn’t just for the web anymore. Testing can determine where mobile web and app users are losing interest as well as what mobile users like and don’t like. Testing can also provide the in-depth data on how much time users spend on your mobile website or app, and where it can be improved. This knowledge helps companies deliver an enhanced mobile experience which in turn drives engagement, resulting in better conversions and revenue.

About Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization using A/B and multivariate testing has been proven to be one of the most effective and immediate experimentation methods to increase sales, enhance visitor engagement, and encourage content consumption.

Common methods for running controlled experiments range from simple A/B testing to sophisticated multivariate testing. In A/B testing, one or more new versions of a page or single element compete against the original (control) version. For example, two new versions of a headline might compete against the original headline. Multivariate testing, on the other hand, is like running many A/B tests concurrently, where there are multiple elements being tested at the same time.

For example, two alternate product images, plus two alternate headlines, plus two alternate product copy versions create a total of 27 possible combinations (including the original control versions).

Think about using multivariate testing in your mobile experiences to learn how to better influence and persuade visitors to:

• Interact with your mobile brand, content, and functionality
• Adopt mobile site features in order to get information on the go
• Click-through to mobile ads and geo-aware offers, such as coupons
• Register for mobile accounts
• Download digital products such as ringtones, wallpapers, and apps
• Increase AOV and revenue from mobile sites and apps

Targeting Your Mobile Audience
Testing a subset of existing, highly-trafficked content on a targeted mobile audience can provide a low-cost and low-risk stepping stone towards building a business case around making a deliberate investment in mobile optimization.

Tests have proven that showing mobile users’ content that is specifically tailored for mobile devices improves the user experience, makes the visit stickier and, ultimately, increases conversion rates.

With mobile targeting, marketers and analysts are able to test, measure and, ultimately, deliver the mobile experience that is most effective for each mobile device category. These can include attributes such as:

• Device type, including tablets and smartphones
• Mobile operating system
• Screen dimensions and rotation support
• Browser capabilities
• Cellular network data speeds
• Preferred markup language
• Keyboard type

Discover what works by testing elements of your mobile experience such as navigation, image size, image choice, specific words or phrases, placement, design, graphical elements, headlines, colors, variations in functionality, or dynamic content.

What is important to understand about mobile optimization is that it not only shows you which combination of elements your visitors prefer, but it reveals which individual elements influence visitor behavior versus those that do not.

For example, did variations in the product image influence visitor behavior more, less, or the same as the copy?

Best Practices

Understanding how each mobile site element influences the visitor experience is the essence of a “test-learn-repeat” process that marketers can use to prove or disprove the effectiveness of new ideas and continually improve their mobile experience to achieve — and exceed — their marketing goals.

Retailers should consider optimizing mobile sites and apps built using traditional, responsive, or adaptive design, or developed as a single page app or native application, in addition to every aspect of their websites (front-end usability as well as back-end functionality).

In doing so, you’ll establish a comprehensive testing and optimization program that addresses all online channels, including web, mobile web, and mobile apps. Clearly defined goals, a strategic optimization plan, and the qualified personnel to execute the plan will ensure that your mobile channel thrives and your optimized apps convert browsers to buyers and keeps them engaged for years to come.

Article originally appeared on RetailTouchPoints

Today, there are two distinct, and seemingly contradictory, paradigms of B2B demand generation. Both paradigms are essentially responses to profound changes in the B2B marketing and sales environment, the most significant of which has been the emergence of empowered buyers. Business buyers now have easy access to a wealth of information, and they are using that information to perform research on their own. As a result, they are much less dependent on sellers than in the past.

One approach to dealing with empowered buyers is to expand the role of marketing in lead acquisition and lead nurturing. Proponents of this approach rely on research which indicates that today’s business buyers are educating themselves and delaying conversations with sales reps until later in the buying process. For example, SiriusDecisions says that business buyers are now performing 67% of their buying process online. CEB and Forrester Research go even further and say, respectively, that B2B buyers are 57% or 67% through the buying process before they engage salespeople.

The marketing-centric paradigm accepts that most potential buyers prefer to learn about business issues and possible solutions on their own, especially in the early stages of the buying process. Advocates of the marketing-centric paradigm say that instead of fighting this preference, companies should use content resources and marketing automation technologies to support the “self-directed buyer” as he or she goes through the learning process.

The second paradigm of B2B demand generation focuses on sales methodology and emphasizes the continued importance of sales reps in the demand generation process. CEB is a major advocate of this paradigm, and what CEB and others argue is that salespeople should engage early-stage buyers and use disruptive insights to change how they are thinking about business issues and challenges. These disruptive insights enable sales reps to shape demand rather than simply react to existing demand. More importantly, disruptive insights provide value that buyers can’t easily get anywhere else and thus make it worthwhile for them to interact with sales reps.

Advocates of the sales methodology paradigm argue that the statistics from SiriusDecisions, CEB, and Forrester are averages that mask a wide variation in actual buyer behavior. And there is research to support this argument. For example, in the 2012 How Buyers Consume Information Survey by ITSMA, over 70% of B2B technology buyers said that want to engage with sales reps before they finalize a short list of preferred vendors.

The reality is that B2B demand generation is more varied and complex than it is often portrayed. When you consider all of the available research, it’s clear that a large majority of business buyers (probably 80% or more) are performing independent research before they interact with a sales rep. It’s also clear, however, that a significant percentage of potential buyers will turn to sales reps early in the buying process. Therefore, the two paradigms of B2B demand generation are, in fact, complementary, not contradictory.

What is also undeniable is that early engagement is vital to demand generation success. Forrester says that solution providers who engage prospects early in the buying process win 74% of the deals, while the win rate for those who engage late in the process is only 26%.

The bottom line is, B2B companies must be ready, willing, and able to engage with prospects on their terms. This means that successful lead generation requires both marketing and sales.

The ultimate goal is to sell your products and services. For without sales, you have no business. That doesn't mean you should be a selfish, say-anything-to-get-the-deal salesperson. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

When you consider buyers' and partners' needs, provide value, and help them, you will gain more: buyers' trust, loyalty, and referrals—to name a few things. It's about being helpful and giving.

But it needs to be the right about of help. Too little, and buyers won't see the value you offer. Too much, and you won't get the fees you deserve.

"It's a delicate balance between helping future clients and giving away the farm," writes Vickie K. Sullivan in her article 3 Things to Give Away in Every Sales Conversation. "By focusing on the journey, the crossroads and the decisions, you can help buyers make the right move. You create value without giving the solutions. You can be generous without hurting yourself."

As a marketer, you probably know too well that buying has changed. Today’s self-empowered, self-educating buyer makes major progress down the path to purchase before ever talking to sales, which means that marketing is responsible for more engagement and interaction with buyers than ever before. It also means that marketers need to stay educated about new channels, evaluate their potential, and understand all of the various marketing technologies and solutions available to help them leverage these channels. LUMA Partners’ recent marketing technology landscape, which depicts over 1,000 marketing solutions, illustrates just how difficult this can be. With so many options available to the modern marketer, how do you know where to begin?

One place to start is with Marketo’s technology partner ecosystem on Launchpoint. It’s exclusively focused on educating marketers about innovative solutions that address the challenges modern marketer’s face. Today we are excited to celebrate LaunchPoint’s two-year anniversary – it’s been an incredible journey for our customers and our partners! Read all about it here.

To celebrate this anniversary we have written and published our latest ebook, The Ecosystem Perspective: Building Your Marketing Stack, to help guide the modern marketer through a fragmented marketing technology landscape. We hope it helps you make sense of the various categories of marketing solutions, understand the value they provide, and how they can complement your marketing automation platform.

See how the right Marketing Ecosystem can change your organization – download our new ebook:

  Content Header Target Audiences:  VP of Marketing / CMO VP Sales Product Marketing Sales Enablement  Purpose:  Introduce a new perspective and suggested approach to improve customer conversations and content, as well as the productivity, effectiveness and efficiency of marketing, sales and content development teams. Topics:  Conversations and content creation require common inputs Why make individuals have to figure out universal inputs Design conversations, develop universal inputs, and deploy inventories of support elements to all customer facing and content creating people   Conversation Support Competency for Content Strategy When we talk with people about content strategy, and the preparation required to create effective content, most are familiar with the first competency in our 6 Competencies for Marketing and Sales Content Strategy — Understand Buyers. “Personas! Yeah, we’ve done those!” Well …, ok. But think about what else constrains your ability to create quality content and get it deployed quickly.  Now, think about your sales reps, people in customer service and HR, your sales channel marketing and sales people, and the content they need to create as well as the conversations they conduct. Right … Lack of good inputs, available when needed, has to be high on that list of constraints. Conversations are Content, Content are Conversations We refer to this competency as Conversation Support. Not all conversations are conducted in the traditional, live manner. In today’s online, on-demand world, more conversations you care about take place through content, and through other people, than through your people directly. The “job of content” is […]

The post Conversation Support Competency for Content Strategy appeared first on Avitage.

The marketing industry is growing up fast. And to stay competitive, marketers are relinquishing traditional methods in favor of innovative new tools and strategies, many of which use an unbelievable amount of behavioral data to prioritize the customer experience like never before.

These top 3 digital marketing trends grant a glimpse into the not-so-faraway future of marketing. If you feel like a Jetson at the end of the post (if you even get there, you distractible user, you), don’t be surprised.

1. The “Digital” in “Digital Marketing” Is Becoming Obsolete

The Trend: Buyers are no longer just tech-savvy. They’re tech-dependent. The average adult spends 11 hours a day with digital media. That’s 4,015 minutes per year. And that figure is bound to go up. The term “digital marketing” is now redundant. If you’re marketing strategy isn’t rooted in digital media, you can’t really call it marketing.

What It Means: Marketing is starting to prioritize and organize around the customer experience, rather than around the digital channels (social, email, search, etc.) that the customer uses. But many companies still organize their teams around digital channels or buying stages. We’ll start to see major shifts in organizational structures in the year to come.

2. “Chief Marketing Technologist” Is a Role on the Rise

The Trend: Marketing and technology can no longer be isolated from one another. Since technology is the new customer experience, so too must it be the new marketer’s experience. The Chief Marketing Technologist will be the key role to converge silos and provide a roadmap for delivering a seamless customer experience.

What It Means: Marketing isn’t about advertising anymore. It’s about driving new business models. The industry is more measurable and transparent than ever before thanks to the massive amount of data we can access through new marketing tools and technologies.

But to be successful marketers can’t be led by their tools. They need to be lead by the customer. The marketing technologist will be the person to pull the disparate data and marketing software together, and will provide a roadmap for harnessing our new powers to serve our customers.

3. Responsive Design Matters More Than Ever

The Trend: Responsive design has become less of a trend and more of a requirement. Before the end of this year, mobile users will eclipse web users. 85% of adults think a company’s mobile website should be just as good or better than their desktop website. And, according to a survey by Google, 48% of users said that if a site didn’t look good on their smartphone, they felt like the company didn’t care about their business.

What It Means: Companies that don’t provide seamless experiences for their customers across all devices will lose out on business. Your content needs to be everywhere your customer is. And as customers adopt new devices to browse the web, brands must put practices in place that allow them to adapt to and feed these new devices their content.

Consumer technology is growing at an exponential rate. And the more advanced it gets, the more buyers demand seamless experiences tailored to their specific needs. As these 2014 trends show, marketers are starting to meet those demands through innovative technologies and practices of their own.

What will separate the winners from the rest of the pack is how well brands can adapt to this rapid change, and put internal processes in place that embrace it.

It's usually sinks in after the first board meeting.  

That's when an investor knows he or she has made a grave error and poured millions of dollars into a startup that's going to flop.

Like any aggressive shopper, early stage investors scour the tech scene for the Next. Big. Thing. Sometimes they encounter a great salesman disguised as a Googler-turned entrepreneur, or an MIT coding prodigy. They get swept up in the story, pressured to act quickly before a hot deal ends, and experience FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out — if they think just a second too long and decide to pass.

Inevitably, hot early stage deals force investors to open their checkbooks — sometimes without having done much due diligence. Later, they realize they've made an impulse buy and occasionally they experience buyer's remorse.

"That happened to me last week!" one early investor told Business Insider in Dublin last week. "I spent all day with this founder and I thought he was amazing, so I offered to invest $300,000. A few days later I realized I hadn't done due diligence, and I don't really know the guy at all. Maybe I shouldn't have done that."

Another investor says it can be easy to pull the trigger too quickly, especially if VCs don't think to ask founders the right questions about their businesses.

This person recalled one founder he was in deep talks with, who claimed the average deal size among his enterprise clients was a few hundred thousand dollars. Later, the venture capitalist asked for more details and found that one client was a $1,000,000+ outlier. Most other clients, on average, were spending around $3,000.

Presenting the numbers that way isn't technically fraud, but it's a smoke-and-mirrors tactic some founders use to disguise big issues their startups are facing. And those issues usually become apparent during the first board meeting when an investor's money has already been wired and can't be refunded.

Dave McClure is an angel investor who puts money into dozens of startups each year. He recounted a time he made an impulse purchase on stage at Web Summit. 

"There are moments when we meet someone [and immediately invest]," he stated. "I was in Istanbul one month ago for a conference. We listened to ten companies that were pitching on stage. One of them clearly had traction. It was two guys. I had never met them before. They had a couple million users, they had 20% week over week growth, they were already sort of profitable on a $20,000 per month basis. They seemed really sharp. Before I flew out, that evening they drove me to the airport I made them an offer on the spot." That company is now part of McClure's accelerator program, 500 Startups.

While impulse buying — and occasionally buyer's remorse — is real for venture capitalists, not investing can feel worse. Which is why early stage investors are often eager to take a gamble, even when information is limited. For prolific angel investor Ron Conway, the startup deal passed on and regrets was Salesforce. For McClure, it's Uber.

"Me turning [Uber CEO] Travis Kalanick down in 2010 at a $10 million valuation is my single most painful story and I think about it every f*cking week," McClure said on stage.

David Tisch, an angel investor who's also an entrepreneur, knows the feeling. He passed on Zynga and an app that's currently growing quickly called Yik Yak.

"You [can] screw up either saying yes to the wrong company — and a month or so later you say, 'Oh my God, that was a terrible decision,' or on the flip side, you say no to something and then you see it just take off," Tisch said at Web Summit. "You do think, 'What could I have done differently?' You replay those decisions all the time."

Join the conversation about this story »

If you don’t have a customer relationship management (CRM) system for your small or midsize business, you’re likely wasting time, losing money and stifling your own growth. That may seem a little bold, but your business — whatever its size — needs a reliable way to manage information about your clients and prospects.

That’s something a lot of businesses, especially those with less than 10 staffers, are often overlooking as part of their business toolkit.

According to Salesforce, businesses that implement a CRM can not only increase sales by 29%, they’re more likely to improve sales productivity and forecast accuracy. That could make a big impact on your bottom line.

How can one system make such a difference? A good CRM:

• Ensures your whole team has access to the same client details — including any needed follow-up — so relationships don’t slip through the cracks.
• Improves customer service by managing tasks, making your team more efficient, and saving your clients the hassle of telling their story again and again. And again.
• Keeps even remote workers in the loop, giving you more options for flexible work and building your team.
• Helps you track leads and progress in real time, collating all the information in one spot so you can monitor results and trends.

Before I get into the benefits of a solid CRM, this infographic from Salesforce breaks down how a good system can help boost your sales and service.

Via: salesforce.com

Why You Need a CRM: Today!

Here are the benefits of a CRM and how they could help you dramatically improve not only your lead capture and conversion processes, but also help make your internal processes more efficient and effective.

Shared Information Encourages Shared Responsibility

Having a CRM system in place lets employees capture information and record it instantly. Anyone on your team can chart the progress of any given task and see how everything fits together in the bigger picture.

That said, a CRM is only as good as the information that goes into it, which means that everyone on your team needs to understand what’s needed from them.

As you implement a CRM, be sure you roll out a step-by-step process to ensure that everyone follows the same procedures. This gives each person on your team ownership over his or her own activities, whether they’re focused on lead capture, sales calls, customer feedback, or follow-up.

You Only Need to Ask Once

We all know how frustrating it is to feel like nobody is listening to you — and we’ve all spent ten torturous minutes explaining something to a customer service rep, only to be passed on to one of their colleagues so that you can explain the whole thing all over again.

By embracing a CRM, you can spare your customers this pain, and help ensure that information only has to be shared once. You can create a process to run clients through a sequence of questions: prompt them for contact info, specific needs or requests, mailing preferences, billing information, etc. Then, you can store that information for the future reference of anyone within the company. This will make your customers happy and your customer service team happier!

Make flexible work easier

Your business gets leads from a variety of sources, and chances are they don’t conveniently happen in the office — or even during business hours. There’s nothing more frustrating than following up on a lead only to find that you’ve been beaten to it by someone else.

The cloud is changing how we store and access information and a cloud-based CRM system gives you access to information anytime and anywhere. This can change not just the way you do business but also how you recruit staff.

Traditionally, you had to hire within driving distance of your office. But now, employees and contractors can access your business information from anywhere in the world. This lets you tap into the global talent pool — and if the right person for the job doesn’t live down the street, a CRM can help bridge the distance.

Follow Up on Leads

You can set up a CRM system so it highlights key milestones, processes and timelines, and the technology enables your team to upload new leads using their mobile devices.

With the right processes in place, leads are captured as they happen — on the go, with no data lost between stages. Even better? Any follow-up can start right away. With the tracking tools available in today’s CRM systems, your team can manage their own workloads more freely, and you can chart their status at the click of a button.

Measure Your Success

One of the great things about a CRM is that it can automatically collect data in one place, so it’s easier to collate information for performance reports. There’s nothing worse than frantically entering data into a spreadsheet by hand to meet a deadline or just to check some insights!

CRM systems put an end to all that and help companies track the success of their operations. It’s far too tempting to throw caution to the wind and take a gung-ho approach to measuring results. With a CRM system, the data speaks for itself and allows business owners to see which of their operations are working well and which need adjusting.

Not convinced? Base CRM shared these interesting stats:

• Investing in a CRM has an average return of $5.60 for every $1 you spend.
• When given access to a mobile CRM, sales reps saw a 15% increase in their productivity.
• Working on existing relationships matters: the probability of selling to someone who’s already a customer is 60-70 percent, while the odds of selling to someone new are 5-20 percent.
• Despite that last stat, 78 percent of companies have no process to re-engage or nurture customers after the sale has been made.

Can you see how a CRM system could impact the way your business operates? If you already use a CRM, has it helped you manage new leads? Tell me about your experiences — you know I want to know!

Ask yourself: “If you had $150k to spend, would you add another salesperson or put those dollars into Marketing?” Most entrepreneurs, CEOs and CFOs whom I know of would do the former. Hiring a sales person is a proven, scalable model. More importantly sales is accountable. There are clear metrics and success criteria. On the other hand, marketing folks are known, sometimes unfairly, to spend all day being “creative”, measuring brand metrics and now in the world of social, increasing number of ‘likes and follows’.

The Equation is Changing

The marketing funnel, as we have known it is dead or surely evolving. Gone are the days of the traveling salesman where prospects were dependent upon them as the primary source of information. Today 60-70% of the customer journey is completed even before the prospect interacts with the brand for the first time. The ball clearly has moved to marketing court. It’s now a question if marketing is ready to step up and take control of the situation. It’s an unprecedented opportunity for CMOs to step up to the plate and grab a bigger seat in the boardroom.

Driving Competitive Advantage With Digital Marketing Stack

The advent of digital marketing technologies has helped marketing organizations get an upper hand on the changing customer relationship, if they are able navigate through the maze of solutions in the eco system. According to Venturebeat, there are about 1,400 marketing-tech vendors touting solutions that can drive ROI, increase visitors, and raise revenue; so even the most experienced, up-to-date marketer gets overwhelmed. So taming the stack is a core to the strategy.

Marketing automation is a must, but it is just the start. A recent study found that almost one fifth of companies adopting marketing automation systems boost revenue by 75% or more (source VentureBeat). With those impressive results, it is not surprising to see the phenomenal growth of the marketing automation category (with revenues increasing 40-50% each year). These solutions help organizations nurture leads primarily on email and capture email and web-based interactions. Since I speak to digital marketers and CMOs as part of my job, the one question I always ask them is: “What does your digital marketing stack look like?” I have been surprised by the variance of components of the stack, though I have to say there are a lot of commonalities. Many of our customers have as many as 14 solutions as part of the technology stack; and if you’ve read the post about Marketing Technology Landscape by Scott Brinker, you know that selecting the right components of the stack is a daunting task but once you get your stack right, it lays the foundation for long term competitive advantage.

Opportunities for CMOs to Evolve Or Die

The increased complexity of the customer journey with the right digital stack offers CMOs the opportunity to evolve and adopt new ways of measuring customer attitude, brand performance, and effectiveness of marketing expenditures. As communication shifts from a one way broadcast to two way multi touch communication, CMOs need a better way to manage multi-channel discussions. If organizations fail to act, they are at the risk of losing message control. Social channels in particular will continue to exponentially amplify the silos within the organization and lack of back end integration, systems and processes. Further, organizations fill lose the ability to truly measure the impact of marketing initiatives and forego the opportunity for each of the business functions to influence buying behavior.

The opportunity for CMOs is now to evolve and gain unfair market share within the organization. With the right digital marketing stack and by putting together a repeatable, sustainable and predictable revenue marketing process, CMOs can confidently come to the table with a Revenue Marketing Forecast that aligns tightly with sales (with SLAs in place to ensure revenue goals are met).

The time is now. The question is ‘Are CMOs Ready’?

At Fision, our goal is to make the lives of sales and marketers easier, we also aim to unite the two departments in the process. Every company touts marketing and sales alignment, but few companies are succeeding to make it a reality. Last week HubSpot, a marketing automation leader, entered the sales game with a focus on email simplification.

With our goal of making life easier, we figured we’d share this new find with our sales brethren out there. We hope that this is another tool you can use to make you a better sales person and make your working life more fun.

Most People Think Email is Evil

One of the many problems with email is that after you as a sales person send an email to a prospect you are stuck waiting. If you don’t get a response; you send another email. It’s a waiting game until the prospect takes some action, and as Sweet Brown says, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

In an effort to win over its comrades across the aisle, HubSpot has created Sidekick (formerly called Signals) to “make your email workflow easier, better, and faster.” This easy to use Google Chrome Extension truly makes email a bit more enjoyable.

Informed Sales Reps Send Better Emails

Sidekick pulls available business information about the recipient from their email and social media profiles. This allows you as the sender to see some basic information about the recipient, their company, your past interactions with them and some recent social activity. It gives you some context on whom you are emailing so you can make the email relevant and compelling.

Send Emails at the Ideal Time with the Scheduler

The email scheduling feature is coming soon, but the premise is simple. You can now schedule your emails so they arrive to the person’s inbox at the time you want. This isn’t new technology, but the fact that it is free is very exciting for small businesses or other people who don’t have access to email scheduling software.

Informed Sales Reps Can Make Better Follow Ups

Tracking opens and clicks is nothing new. Software companies have been providing this marketing campaign data for a while now. However, HubSpot is a big believer in giving away awesome stuff for free, and with Sidekick, they’ve done it again.

Once the recipient opens and/or clicks your email you receive a notification. Whether this activity warrants a follow-up is up to you, but at least now you have the tools you need to make an informed decision. If a follow-up is in order, you can glance back look at their timeline to see all the interactions they have had with you. This obviously helps shape your conversation and maximizes your chances of moving them further through the sales funnel.

Once the Google Chrome Extension is installed, all you have to do it click the “track this email with Sidekick” button in your email provider. It currently works with Gmail, Outlook and iMail. You can receive up to 200 notifications per month for free; it’s $10/month for unlimited notifications.

3 Ways It Will Benefit Sales Reps

+ It will help you craft emails that resonate with a particular prospect.
+ It will help your prioritize your follow ups based on who has responded and who hasn’t, ensuring you are reaching out to warm or hot leads first.
+ You will spend less time switching between applications and spend more time selling and schmoozing.
+ *Bonus*: HubSpot CRM (also free) will be coming out early 2015.

In Case You Were Wondering…
Though they are cool company, we are not a HubSpot client or partner. We just like to stay up-to-date on tech industry news and this caught our eye as something that marketers & sales folk might like.

We’d like to hear your thoughts on Sidekick. Would you use this? Does it creep you out that someone knows when you opened their email? Tell us about it in the comments.

At the Festival of Marketing today Econsultancy published the findings from the new Value of Marketing research, which investigates the sometimes difficult relationship between CMOs and CFOs.

It highlights the difficulties in placing a value on marketing activities, with the majority of both marketers and finance professionals still unable to provide a figure for their return on investment. 

In addition, there are significant tensions and differences in opinion between marketers and finance departments which may be impeding both business and marketing success.

Published in partnership with Marketing Week, the report is based on in-depth interviews with nine senior brand-side marketers and nine senior finance officers, as well as an online survey of 171 senior finance executives and 100 brand-side marketers.

Here’s a summary of four key trends identified in the report...

1. A joint failure to understand marketing ROI

A common criticism of marketing is that it fails to deliver a tangible ROI – and it seems digital technology has failed to render those arguments obsolete.

Only around a quarter of finance directors (24%) knew the return on investment from marketing – even approximately. 

Interestingly, the percentage for marketers was even lower at just 17%.

Do you know what your return on investment from your company’s marketing is?

This is a worrying development for those who believe the rise in digital technology and data-driven marketing will give us a more accurate measure of ROI.

2. Differences in measurement cause a disconnect between marketing and finance

The research also reveals that marketers and finance professionals don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to what share of revenue and sales are directly driven by marketing activity.

Around six out of ten (59%) marketers believe that marketing directly drives more than 20% of their company’s revenue. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, only four out of ten finance directors (38%) share that opinion. 

According to Kristof Fahy, CMO of William Hill:

There is still a disconnect where an organisation can have several versions of the truth. I’ll be given different sets of figures from different teams that all paint different pictures. 

But at the end of the day we are a FTSE company where the MD has to be able to stand up and justify it. A single version of the truth is what we need and where we struggle.

3. Marketing and finance differ in both language and personality

An inability to speak the same language is one of the main reasons for the various conflicts that arise between finance and marketing teams.

For marketers, speaking the language of finance is seen as being very important when it comes to building credibility at the highest levels of the organisation.

Similarly, marketers need to be careful of using their own vernacular with senior management. 

Joby Russell, marketing director at Confused.com, described how this leads to difficulties:

A part of the tension is language problems. Often people working in a given channel in a deep way use language that isn’t consistent with how senior management talk to each other. 

The higher up you go, the less technical language is used. FDs don’t have time to learn marketing language. A big part of my job is decoding.

4. Marketers see themselves as more important than finance realises

There was a significant difference in opinion between finance and marketing when it came to the importance of the latter for the business.

While 77% of marketers agree that ‘marketing is a critical function within our business’, just 62% of finance directors feel the same way.

Similarly, only 43% of finance directors believe that ‘the head of marketing has significant strategic influence on the business’, compared to 62% of marketers.

For the full results of this research, download the Value of Marketing Report.

So here’s the deal:

In marketing, you’re trying to get people to do business with you. The ultimate goal.

It’s kind of like a fancy matchmaking service. Your business (person A) wants do business with (date) customers (person B). And the way to make this connection is through marketing.

That’s how you find the peanut butter to your jelly. The cheese to your macaroni. You get the picture.

But throughout this courtship, important distinctions need to be made. You can’t just use the same pickup line on everyone. Your potential customers are in different stages, and they need to be treated accordingly.

So let’s clarify these distinctions. What’s a prospect? What’s a lead? What’s an opportunity?

Prospect

A prospect is part of your target audience. They fit the criteria for the kind of people you’re interested in, and will be interested in your business. This will be different for every company, based on what you’re trying to sell.

Prospects are potential customers that could be interested in you, but don’t yet know enough about you to be sure. They have a need that you might be able to fill, but they’re still looking at options. They’re in that research stage of the sales funnel.

When someone becomes a prospect, you want to give them information about who you are, what you know, and what you do as a company. Let them test the waters and get to know you. Give them informational blog posts and articles that show your expertise in your industry.

During the prospect stage, you (person A) think that person B is pretty groovy. They’re your type. You think that maybe they might like you if they got to know you a little better.

You want to use content (or your best pickup line) that fits this stage. This is your chance to show what you know.

PPC ads, blog posts, and social content can grab prospects’ attention. You want them to take notice of you and see that you have the ability to help them. Use keywords that will draw in potential customers. These tactics draw them in and gauge their interest. If they subscribe to your blog, things are looking good.

Lead

A lead has expressed interest your company. Maybe they filled out a form on a landing page or converted through a CTA. But some way or another, you now know that this person is interested in your company, but not enough to buy yet.

So now, after getting a better look at your personality, person B has given you a thumbs up, maybe even the winking emoji. You’ve got a chance!

You need to follow through on the pickup line with sparkling conversation that will bring them closer to sealing the deal.

Give leads engaging content, like emails, webinars, and advertising that will promote interaction. This content will be a little more product-centric than what you target prospects with. For example, your ad may invite them to set up a demo instead of just viewing information about your service.

You want to present your product or service like it’s the best solution to their problem. You’re their one true fit.

At this point, the customer is in the interest stage of the sales funnel. They like you, they think you’re pretty cool. They see your potential to fill their need. Now make them see that you are what they truly want.

Opportunity

An opportunity is a lead that is ready to do business with you soon. They’re interested and ready to commit.

Person B thinks that you’re pretty awesome, too. You pick a time for dinner and a movie next week. But it’s not a done deal yet! They still have time to change their mind.

Provide opportunities with all of the facts they may need to make an informed decision about their purchase. This means nurturing the opportunity all the way to the sale.

If person B doesn’t hear from you, they may not think it’s worth it anymore, or worse, forget about you.

Opportunities need reinforcement and encouragement to follow through with a sale. They want to do business with you, but have yet to take action. Make sure you have informative web pages that are readily available and easy to find.

Opportunities are much more likely to follow through with a sale when they have all the information they want and need.

Why Are These Distinctions Important?

It’s simple. A pickup line can be amazing, but it can backfire when used at the wrong time.

In other words, great content won’t work unless you use it on your potential customers at the right time.

The exact definitions often vary from company to company, so your team needs to define it for yourselves. You also need to set up qualifications so everyone knows when a potential customer is a prospect, lead, or opportunity. That way, you know what content to use, and when, in order to make a sale.

How do you know if your timeline and marketing campaign is working? Look at your sales. If, for some reason, they aren’t going through, find where they drop out of the funnel and patch up the leak.

You’ll find the milk to your cookies in no time!

The star to your burst, the ketchup to your fries, whichever metaphor you may choose.

Image Credit: VladislavGudovskiy

It’s good to be a customer these days, as tech companies keep devising new ways to keep us happy.

The latest: a real-time customer engagement platform called know’N’act. Today, the company is emerging from beta, officially launching its cloud-based service and announcing it has landed half a million dollars in angel funding.

Know’N’act’s basic angle is to respond quickly in a variety of ways to customer feedback.

If someone hates the room service in a hotel, for instance, management might normally not know about it until a negative comment has been posted on TripAdvisor. Or, if the hotel knows about it, they might not respond quickly enough to prevent a sour posting on a site.

The company’s platform “enables real-time, location-based engagement to let businesses see exactly, when, where, and why a customer is having a good or bad experience and respond instantly,” CEO Srivats Srinivasan told VentureBeat.

To enter their opinions, customers can scan or enter NFC tags, QR codes, or short web addresses on a smartphone or other device, which they are invited to do by customized signage generated by know’N’act.

The code leads to a screen that offers choices or ratings for feedback on the service or product in question. The user might see an immediate response on their screen expressing concern or thanking them, or they might soon receive a programmed email or text message as a follow-up.

Above: A feedback screen in know’N’act

Image Credit: know'N'act

Management can be informed of customer responses through real-time text, email, or push notification alerts that are location-specific. An unhappy customer can be talked down by a personal visit from the staff. For a delighted customer, the plaform can offer a coupon, an opportunity to enter a customized sweepstakes, or membership in a loyalty program.

Intregration with a customer relationship management system or a call center offers more communication channels.

Srinivasan said that know’N’Act’s competitors — including what he described as “the 800-pound gorilla in this space, Medallia” — “are focused on the ‘know’ piece of our platform,” such as providing the “ability to capture real-time customer feedback.”

His company’s platform, he said, is stronger on the “act” side, with a toolset of flexible, fast responses that can be customized by the particular business.

Above: One kind of response screen

Image Credit: know'N'act

“Our rules-based, rich set of response options, [such as] alerts, coupons, sweepstakes, social media invitations, or redirects to other sites,” he told us, “set us apart from other players in this space.”

The Bellevue, Washington-based company said current customers include McDonald’s, Best Western, and the Seattle Art Museum. The new funds will be used for product sales and initiatives in sales and business development, Srinivasan told us.

The angel investors included RoundGlass Partners, Founders’ Co-op general partner Rudy Gadre, private investor Gary Rubens, TiE Seattle founding president and chairman Vijay Vashee, and Wright Ventures’ managing director Andrew Wright.

Not that long ago you were enchanted with your inbound marketing strategies.

Perhaps it seems like only yesterday when the future was wide open and every chance of a charmed marketing plan was yours for the taking. Starry-eyed and optimistic, you believed what you were told about the right way to market your service based business, and you were flying high with expectations that were sure to become realities.

But alas…like all impossible romantic dreams, other things start to take precedence. And when your marketing visions become all too real by failing to produce any noticeable return, the rose-colored glasses fall away and you find that you’re left with nothing but empty promises.

It doesn’t have to be that way though. Your passion for inbound marketing doesn’t have to die.

Re-kindling the spark of affection for your inbound marketing strategies is easy when you know the right moves. And what’s even better, when you take the time to do it right, you’ll learn that you never stopped loving the idea of inbound marketing success, you just need to remember how to keep the passion alive for the long-haul.

But by defining inbound marketing success and understanding where marketing strategies go wrong, you can know the right moves to make… ones that will ensure that your marketing plans work. And naturally, change the disenchantment you feel now into confident reliance on your long-term marketing plan that produces captivating, profitable results.

Defining Inbound Marketing Success

Defining inbound marketing success is a little like preparing for that first date. Every factor must be considered with cool, intelligent deliberation such as where to go (targeted customers), your personality and that of your significant other (current inbound practices and those of others in your industry), and previous bad dates measured with pros and cons detected and enhanced or removed (things that have worked in the past) for your date to go smoothly. When translating that to an inbound marketing strategy, what you come up with are 3 key areas:

1. Patience
2. Identification
3. Measurements.

Patience is a virtue.

Like all true achievement, marketing success requires a reasonable processing time to demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy.

Have you ever been in a relationship where the other person drops the L-bomb (love) way too soon? It makes things awkward and almost sabotages the relationship, the same concept can be applied to the inbound marketing relationship. Many CEOs and business owners unknowingly sabotage their marketing strategies through impatience. They think that new directions are needed….new advertisements, new mass mailings, new whatever…because they feel that their outreach is stagnant and things aren’t happening fast enough.

But you know that it took hard work and determination to get your business where it is today, and that same patient, deliberate consistency is needed for any marketing strategy to work.

Identifying Your Goals, Challenges, And Timelines

There’s an old saying that carpenters use, “plan your work, work your plan.” It’s obvious, granted, but undeniably true. Any relationship takes time to build trust and an understanding of what the other person needs. This can be true in both personal and work relationships. Jumping into any marketing plan without planning is reckless and extravagant. Success comes from identifying your goals, constructing timelines for completion, and preparing to overcome anticipated challenges to the plan’s effectiveness.

To determine these points for your business, ask yourself:

1. What do I want to achieve from my marketing plan? Possibly your goal is to establish a strong pool of possible leads that have high conversion indicators, or maybe you want to see significant increases in new contacts. Whatever your specific goal is, identify it first before you initiate any marketing plan.
2. How long should I wait to see improvement? The answer to this question will depend on the type of methods used in your inbound marketing plan and your specific business model. But again, identifying these factors helps to prevent the impatience that can be so detrimental to an effective strategy.
3. What challenges do I face? Perhaps you need to educate your targeted consumer about the service you offer. Many B2B businesses have fantastic solutions that could transform industry procedures overnight, IF other companies knew about them. Identifying the challenges to an effective inbound campaign for your business can help you develop the strategies to overcome them.

Measure Everything

With inbound marketing strategies, the ever evolving technology and changing SEO indicators requires consistent monitoring. Each activity must be carefully analyzed to determine which techniques work best with your particular target audience, and the reasons for failure ascertained and suitably adjusted to create positive returns.

But a word of caution, CEO’s shouldn’t get bogged down by the myriad of statistical comparisons…those type of measurements should be monitored by your marketing team. For instance, when it comes to watching television with your significant other you wouldn’t ask your wife to watch Ice Road Truckers just as much as she wouldn’t make you watch Say Yes to the Dress. Different people can focus on different things based on what’s important to them and their role. Business owners and CEOs should focus on the big picture measurements that indicate investment returns and other broad stroke actions.

Are your reps guilty of this costly mistake?

A rep from one of the world’s largest technology companies that sells enterprise (i.e. large corporate) solutions rang me up yesterday. I’m not looking to call the firm out publicly so I’ll refer to the 3-lettered company as SPG. The rep didn’t reach me live so she left a message.

Paraphrasing her message, she wanted to thank me for stopping by their booth at Dreamforce and asked whether I would have some time so she could learn about our current processes and see if there is a way they could help me. It wasn’t so much the content of her message—though there is much to criticize there — it was the fact that she called me at all. I have no use for high-end enterprise solutions. My company has less than 10 people. For her to call me was a complete waste of her time and mine. So why did she call and do your reps make the same mistake?

I suspect that reps were handed a list of people from Dreamforce and told to follow-up. I didn’t stop at SPG’s booth. My guess is that they scanned me as I was walking by. Booth tenders see you passing and stop you to ask if they can scan your badge. I always say yes. This isn’t a bad trade-show practice. Much like panning for gold, you need to scoop up a pan-full of minerals before you can sift through it for the good stuff. The operative word here is “sift.” You don’t take a pan-full of minerals to the assayer. You sift first.

Sift through your leads before you start calling

One of the simple rules of selling is this: “don’t call prospects that will never buy your product.” You don’t need to know whether they will buy you just need to know that they might buy. This is what I refer to as suitability. Small companies are not suitable fit for large solutions and will therefore never buy them. Don’t call them.

Ideally, her marketing department would have pre-qualified the leads for suitability and this company is certainly big enough to have the resources (i.e. tools and technology) to do that. Had marketing pre-qualified the leads, I would not have been on the call list. Since that obviously didn’t happen, it is the rep’s responsibility to pre-qualify before calling. In this example, it would have taken approximately 15 seconds for the rep to go to my website. There, she would have seen that Smart Selling Tools is not a large enough company to be a suitable prospect.

You might ask, “Wouldn’t it take more time to qualify than to just pick up the phone and leave a message?” The call itself is only part of the equation. This is the string of events her message likely put into play:

1. Left a voicemail
2. Put me on a call/email contact attempt sequence
3. Send me an email re: the voicemail
4. Leave me another voicemail
5. Continue until I either reply to tell her that I’m not a suitable prospect or until the pre-determined contact attempts have been exhausted.

What a waste of resources!

I don’t believe in the call first—ask questions later approach. If you ask your reps to call each lead without first knowing its suitability, you are hampering productivity and revenue growth. You have two choices. You can either run your list through a database service to check for company size or other relevant criteria. Or you can have a qualification team sift through the list manually by visiting websites or conducting other relevant searches. If you don’t have either option available to you, then make sure your reps know that they are to pre-qualify leads and that you don’t expect nor do you want them to call leads that are not suitable for your products or services. It’s too costly of a mistake any way you look at it.

SPONSORED POST

This sponsored post is produced by Microsoft.

Ask a CMO about their priorities these days and you’ll hear stuff like better targeting and analytics, an agile social strategy, reaching consumers across multiple screen and channels, mobile and digitally-enhanced customer experiences.

Underlying it all is data. You can’t be good at marketing these days without being good at data.

And that leads to the biting anxiety that even the most savvy and sophisticated marketing departments might not know enough – and their IT teams can’t act fast enough – to keep up with the pace of change. After all, they’re marketing professionals, not data geeks at some edgy startup.

So where can marketing departments get their data geek on? Well, an edgy startup might be a good place to start. And here are some reasons why that partnership might make a lot of sense.

Agility for hire. Startups present great opportunities for marketers looking for instant agility and low-impact ways to harness big trends without making big bets. Innovation can be difficult within large organizations, especially in an area like digital marketing that requires collaboration between marketing and IT groups at the highest levels. Engaging with startups allows enterprises to outsource rapid and risky innovation, piloting a bunch of initiatives and moving forward with the projects and partners that show the most promise.

Tactical advantage. The breakneck pace and pressure of digital marketing makes it tough for marketing business leaders to spend time and resources on an experimental initiative, even if it has transformative potential. By contrast, many of today’s most interesting tech startups are focused on delivering a single service, optimizing one key process, or solving one big problem. Bringing them into the fold gives brands the best of both worlds: a partner that views the brand’s tactical problem as a strategic imperative.

Culture clash. Working with an outside partner gives internal teams experience looking at problems through the eyes of an entrepreneur, as well as exposure to classes of solutions that could be tailored more specifically to the company’s internal processes or industry-specific needs.

There are plenty of cases of large companies that work closely enough with startup partners that the end result is a long-term business relationship or acquisition. For example, CoreMotives, a startup that developed an automated email-based targeting solution integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, was acquired by SilverPop, a more established market leader in direct email, as a way to create a unified SaaS-based alternative to Salesforce.com’s offerings.

Brands and startups: a speed dating guide.

Tech startups aren’t exactly a traditional part of the marketing vendor ecosystem, but there are a bunch of ways both sides can move quickly into relationships ranging from a “one night stand” to a committed partnership:

• Open APIs: As brands integrate their internal data stores, some are publishing open APIs (application protocol interfaces) that allow external developers to build apps and visualization tools using non-sensitive data like store locations, product catalogs and visual assets.
• Hack-a-thons: Hack-a-thons gather whole communities of developers and startups in fast-paced open competitions to create new apps using data and assets made available by brands, governments and other entities. These often result in prototypes for imaginative new products and services that might not have been discovered through normal innovation processes.
• Innovation and business plan contests: The number of innovation and business plan contests has mushroomed in recent years as the entrepreneurial vision has captured the imagination of the world’s rising young generation. Sponsoring these events can bring brands into contact with promising young talent, new ideas and new firms looking for partners.
• Accelerators and innovation labs: Silicon Valley and other global startup hubs are dotted with new Accelerators sponsored by big tech companies and, increasingly, consumer brands looking to tap into the energy of startup culture. Microsoft Ventures operates seven startup accelerators in Beijing, Bangalore, Berlin, London, Paris, Tel-Aviv and Seattle. These accelerators also serves as partnering hubs for marketing companies and branding agencies.
• Equity and acquisition: For the truly committed, one way to secure the ideas and energy of a startup with clear strategic value is to take a stake.

The start of a dialogue. At Microsoft, we take an active role in promoting startups through programs like BizSpark and Microsoft Ventures. The breakthroughs that these companies are working on can affect many aspects of business. However, we feel the implications and benefits for marketing are especially intriguing, considering how strongly the interests of both sides converge around the issue of data.

Over the next year, we will be sharing stories about startups that marketers need to know: businesses whose ideas can help brands realize the potential of their data more quickly, as well as ones whose disruptions could create massive challenges for unwary incumbents. Please join us in this journey to the frontiers of innovation. We look forward to a great dialogue.

Tzahi (Zack) Weisfeld is Head of Microsoft Ventures Europe and Global Accelerators Program. Business Insider (May 2014) named Zack as one of the 10 top Most Influential Israelis in Tech Worldwide.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

The customer experience is a hot topic in business circles these days. I find that interesting because understanding, orchestrating, and naming that experience has always been smart marketing.

Once again, what’s old is new again.

In many ways your process for delivering exceptional customer experiences is your business brand. The challenge is packaging it in such a way that makes it tangible, and therefore, memorable.

Let’s take a look at three important considerations for doing this, along with examples that show how it works in practice.

#1 – Take Buyers On A Journey

Think of the purchase of your product or service as a destination. It’s clearly where the buyer and the business both want to go, but that transaction can be very unsatisfying if the journey for getting there is challenging.

This is why buyers are reluctant to approach many businesses. Intuitively, they sense something is not quite right. This means marketing has failed.

Your business needs to understand the typical obstacles for engaging with companies like yours. Then use your marketing to address them.

Hint #1: There is probably more than one obstacle.
Hint #2: These are chronic obstacles that relate to trust.

To get started, consider how a buyer would want to buy if they had full access to your experience and expertise. What are the questions they should be asking? What questions should your business be asking to learn how to help them?

Hint #3: Why are they not asking the most important questions?

#2 – Describe The Experience In Two Words

When selecting a title for my podcast episodes, I choose the two best words that describe it because that is all that will be visible on iTunes.

This is an important exercise that instantly communicates what the episode is about, both for listeners and for SEO.

What is it about your business in a couple of words that differentiates it from every other? Is it smarter, faster, or friendlier?

Here’s the test: If I ask someone in your community or industry to name who is known for X, will they name you or your business? What is X in two words?

To give you an example, when I operated my landscape business we named our process The Intelligent Landscape System™. The word intelligent obviously suggests a smarter way that has been carefully orchestrated into a repeatable system.

That’s what we wanted to be known for – being smart and intelligent, just like the affluent customers we served.

In a world where most people do not trust companies, a process, or way, or system that promises to take buyers on an enjoyable journey that leads to a desired result is everything. The challenge is often simply branding (naming) and promoting it.

#3 – Put Your Customer Experience On A Pedestal

Have you ever walked into a business that has a framed photo or portrait of the founder proudly displayed in the lobby? The story of how that founder cared for his or her first customers is revered.

The same should be true of your process for delivering exceptional customer experiences. That’s why you give it a name, create a graphic representation of it, and prominently display it in your marketing. In my landscaping days before digital, it was on the walls of our conference room where we met with customers.

Especially these social media days, promoting a business can turn buyers off. Whereas, promoting stories that capture the essence of what the business is all about is interesting, engaging, and memorable. That essence is your branded customer experience.

Name it and own it.

People don’t care about what you do until they learn why. Legendary sales trainer Zig Ziglar put it like this, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Your carefully orchestrated process is evidence that you care.

It represents your customer experience. Brand and promote that and you will sell more.

The true story of the big, old, outbound marketing empire getting overthrown by the nimbler, humbler, and more helpful army of inbound marketers is the thing great Hollywood movies are made of. Okay fine, great books.

The inbound marketing movement revolutionized how brands behave online. We moved away from yelling at consumers with a megaphone to attracting them to us like a magnet with remarkable content, search engine optimization, and a plethora of other inbound concepts.

And it’s high time we bring these techniques to mobile apps as well.

Yes, “Inboundy” App Marketing Is Possible

Think inbound is just for the web? Think again!

The people that deeply understand and embrace the inbound movement know that it goes above and beyond just digital marketing. Product development, customer service, and even outbound can be “inboundy.” So, why should your mobile app be left out in the cold?

4 Inbound Marketing Techniques And How They Fit Into Your Mobile App

Inbound marketing principles can help your app get found, nurture and convert users, and grow your social reach. But it’s not a one-to-one translation of techniques because websites are information-oriented while apps are more task-oriented. For example, no blogging happens inside your mobile apps, but there is a content strategy. Intriguing right?

Let’s take what you love about inbound marketing and make it work for mobile. The fun, relationship-building soul is there – the implementation tactics are just a tad bit different.

1. App Store Optimization (ASO) is mobile’s version of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Inbound Principle: Get found organically

How do people find apps? Here’s an interesting graph of the answer via Moz (based on research done by Forrester).

As you can see, the natural process of search and discovery is alive and kicking on mobile too. But instead of vying for rankings on web engines, you need to gain visibility in app stores so your app is easily noticeable – not buried on page 30-something of Google Play or Apple’s App Store listing chart.

The SEO wizardry you learned will come in handy because app store optimization borrows more than a few things from search engine optimization. Below, we’ve highlighted key SEO concepts and their ASO equivalents (with tips to get you started). One thing to note: ASO isn’t as sophisticated as SEO (yet), but just like the web, there are “on-page” and “off-page” components.

On-page elements are things you can completely control (like what goes on your app’s product page) and off-page elements are things you can only somewhat control (like reviews and ratings).

Page Title vs. App Title

Similar to a website’s title, your app’s name is one of the most important on-page factors that determine how you rank. It should contain both branding and keywords to help app stores figure out what your app does and where to list it. To identify which keywords to use, think about what terms your app users are searching for (but don’t keyword stuff or make your app title abnormally long!).

Above the Fold Content vs. App Description

Google’s algorithm grades websites based on what content appears at the top of the page (before you have to scroll down). The ASO version of “above the fold” is your app’s description. This is where you outline what your app is all about. Be explicit, clear, and highlight user benefits.

Meta Description vs. App Icon

While not directly imperative for SEO, meta descriptions play an extremely vital role in getting click-throughs from SERPs (search engine result pages). A meta description is the short paragraph (usually one-two sentences) that you see underneath a link. It helps searchers understand what the webpage is about. Unsurprisingly, a concise and compelling description leads to more clicks and traffic.

In the land of apps, your icon takes the place of a meta description because it appears in app store search results. Your app’s icon should be striking, well branded, and convey usefulness to entice people to click on it. The number of visits to your app’s product page also affects your rank so make your icon unique, make it stand out, and make sure it visually explains your app’s purpose.

Promotional Screenshots & Languages

Aside from the three ASO elements highlighted above, other things like promotional screenshots/videos of your app and the number of languages it is available in, further influence how you appear in search results. Take high-quality screen grabs of your app in action and overlay it with text or graphics to tell a story. And if you can offer your app in more than one language, do it!

Ratings & Reviews

The better rated your app, the more visible it will be. The more positively reviewed your app, the more likely it will appear in top charts. Although ratings and reviews are somewhat out of app marketers’ control (that’s why we classify these as off-page components of ASO), brainstorm ways to motivate your happy users to publicly rate your app and obsessively resolve negative complaints.

Link Building for Websites vs. Link Building for Apps

Link building for apps is actually not that different from getting inbound links for your site. On the web, online marketers publish blogs with calls-to-action to a landing page, which collects leads.

On smartphones, there is no room to maintain a blog within an app. Instead, mobile marketers should build a microsite for their app and showcase what it can do. This microsite should also contain a micro-blog to drive links and traffic to your app’s product page in app stores (which collects users).

Key Takeaways & Additional Reading:

• SEO and ASO algorithms share similar methodologies
• Key differences are mostly nomenclature (i.e. above the fold content = an app’s description)
• For a more comprehensive and technical overview of ASO, read Singular and Plural Keywords Put to the Test in the iOS App Store

2. Social sharing buttons can amplify in-app actions (vs. just content)

Inbound Principle: Use social media marketing and grow your reach  

Did you know that Facebook has more than one billion active monthly users? Of that number, more than 94% of people access Facebook from their mobile device. Similarly, Twitter has 271 million active monthly users and 78% of them are mobile.

Safe to say, social media networks are here to stay. Are you effectively using them in your app marketing strategy?

Online, we use social media to grow our brand’s presence (“click here to like our Facebook page”) and get people to amplify our content (“click here to tweet this article”). In apps, social media marketing is able to elicit a deeper level of engagement because you have the power to share actions and accomplishments too.

A lot of our content consumption happens while we are on the go and therefore, don’t forget to make conventional “follow us” or “share this” social buttons a prominent feature (especially in news or magazine apps).

Beyond that, mobile marketers can embed social calls-to-action that encourage users to invite their friends to an app or brag about how close they are to achieving a goal. And you can also build-in a social feed of peer activities so users feel inspired and motivated to keep interacting with your app.

Key Takeaways & Additional Reading:

• Encourage people to share how they’re using your app on social media (give them something worth talking about)
• Consider using social calls-to-action placed within in-app messages and read The Anatomy of Highly Successful In-App Messaging Campaigns

3. Push and in-app messaging are the new email marketing

Inbound Principle: Earn subscribers, engage leads, and nurture users

Bestselling author and online marketing pioneer, Bryan Eisenberg, notably said, “Never forget social media is for reach, but email is for revenue.” In other words, social amplification can increase the number of eyeballs on your product, but a structured email-nurturing strategy is what ultimately drives sales.

Push and in-app messaging for apps are like email marketing.

First, earn a healthy number of subscribers by persuading users to opt-in to push notifications. Be creative and specify exactly what users will gain from turning push notifications on. You want to highlight the types of push notifications your app will send, how they will benefit the user, and what scenarios will trigger the alerts.

Second, employ a systematic nurturing strategy and deliver well-written push alerts and well-designed in-app messages with compelling calls-to-action. Carefully time these to re-engage users. Push notifications will help you stay top-of-mind while in-app messages will move people through key funnels once they’re back in your app.

Key Takeaway:

• Push and in-app messaging are the new email nurturing because they drive app usage and conversions

4.  Remarkable content changes into remarkable context, which powers irresistible offers

Inbound Principle: Provide personalized value to customers  

Unlike your website, your app is not supposed to be an information hub. There’s no blog inside your app, no eBooks, no whitepapers, no webinars – nada. But there is a content strategy and it’s more digestible in size.

Content marketing translates into context marketing when applied to apps. It means sending push and in-app messages that are highly targeted, relevant, and personalized. Think about how you write an article for a certain audience and channel this skill into creating irresistible offers for different segments of your app users.

Mobile apps are uniquely positioned to deliver exceptionally customized app content because of Profiles (which allows you combine information from outside and inside your app). This is how inbound app marketing is becoming smarter and more robust than its online counterpart.

Key Takeaways:

• Match up people with the right offers (built just for them) at the right time
• Tailor your push and in-app messages so they take both profile information and in-app behavior into account

Attracting, Engaging, and Delighting People Online In Apps

Aren’t you happy that the number of cold calls you get during dinner has dropped significantly? Us too. Interruptive marketing is no longer as effective as it used to be. Consumers want less noise, more value.

The inbound revolution has ushered in a new, brighter era for brands. And it’s coming to mobile too.

To attract, engage, and delight people using your app you need to be interesting, entertaining, and helpful. You need to pay attention to your ASO, incorporate social media tactics, nurture users with push and in-app messaging, and adopt an individualized approach to app marketing.

That’s how you excite people and make them flock to your metaphoric mobile doorstep.

We all know how quickly B2B inside sales reps can get discouraged when the first few people they call on an inbound prospecting list end up being grad students doing research, people no longer working with the company, or contacts that don’t exist at all. Although they may have worked through a small fraction of the list at that point, as many sales reps do, they’ve determined that the leads you’ve given them are complete junk.

I’ve received a wide range of sales prospecting lists of varying quality for each and every campaign we run for our clients. Over the last 10 years, I would like to assume that I’ve seen it all, but inevitably unique scenarios tend to pop up over and over. Point is, nothing surprises me anymore.

One thing I can say is that there have been consistent themes when managing the inbound or warm data that we’re feeding to our reps. Now, some of these tips could seem obvious to many of you, but from what I’ve seen many of us are still guilty of continuing to make these mistakes. Here are 3 quick list development tips to keep in mind before getting that golden list queued up for your team:

1) Scrub your damn list.

There. I said it. It starts here. It always starts here. Bad B2B data kills campaigns. The amount of crap that can exist in unscrubbed “warm” lists can far outweigh what I typically see in a cold list, assuming you’re buying from a reputable source. Have you ever measured how much more efficient your team would be when dealing with clean data? Sure, you can use solid tools like Marketo, Eloqua, or Act-On to help in the cleansing process, but I recommend that you do some manual cleaning before you put the list in front of your reps to call.

2) Don’t give the warm lists to your new hires.

The best way to accelerate a new hire’s learning curve is to put them in front of the coldest list you have. Not because you want to set them up for failure, but because, from what I’ve found, this is really the best way to teach them how to prospect any lead. Exposing brand new reps to hot leads (assuming they’ve been scrubbed) out of the gates can be a dangerous game. When you eventually put a cold list in front of them, they don’t know what to do with themselves. At that point, they’ve been spoiled on the warm stuff and it can be tough to bring them back to reality. My suggestion would be closely monitor how well they do with the cold list, so when you deem them ready to call the warmer stuff, they’ll be that much better prepared for mostly any scenario thrown at them.

3) Don’t assume your prospect remembers reaching out to you.

Just because they stopped by your booth, registered for a webinar or downloaded a whitepaper doesn’t mean they’ll always remember that. That would be crazy, right? Seriously though, I guess they have the excuse that they’re in research mode and may not remember your company from the 15 others they’re considering. There is no worse way to kick off a call with a prospect when you say something to the effect that “you stopped by our booth recently” and they say “no I didn’t.” That can be tough to recover from. If you want to set the appropriate tone, I would suggest treating it like a cold call. Unless you’re following up on a lead within a couple of hours, I would suggest leaving it open them to bring up the reason behind why they reached out.

The goal for me is remove any excuses that my team can bring to the table when they’re not converting inbound leads. It’s critically important for any of us tasked with managing a team to make sure that we remove any potential obstacle that allow for those excuses to rear their ugly head.

What are you doing with your inbound lists to help your sales reps prospect better?

We all know that sales and marketing struggle to live in a connected universe. It’s a hot topic these days, usually focused on leads (their quantity, quality, follow-through). But Sales isn’t only looking to marketing for more leads! They need help finding and converting opportunities through later stages of buying. The disconnect has now moved from the question of leads to, “How can marketing work better with Sales in account planning?” Here’s a good place to start:

CAMPAIGNS

It all starts here. Marketing can do a lot to open doors for Sales with the right campaigns, but marketers aren’t mind readers; therefore, COLLABORATION is key. Without it, Marketing is left to their own devices and their campaigns are merely a shot in the dark, doing little to support sales productivity or to build trust amongst the teams.

Around November/December, sales starts looking at their long list of named accounts to figure out how to make their number next year, where they should focus and invest, and where they need to build and nurture relationships. It usually begins with accounts that have in-flight opportunity – the ones that need to be closed this year and into the first/second quarter of next year – and moves on from there. Guess what? Marketing can help sales accelerate and win these opportunities (and build relationships!) by developing campaigns tailored to those specific accounts…but only if they are included in the account planning process!

Sounds simple enough, right? Not so fast! Marketing needs a high level of visibility into these accounts in order to craft their messaging and campaigns in a way that will generate interest. So, the collaboration must be more than sales simply saying, “Hey marketing, here’s a list of my target accounts.” There is much more information needed.

PENETRATION

Together, marketing and sales need to figure out where in a given territory they should be focusing their efforts, and on which product(s) they should be focusing. Do you want marketing to create collateral promoting product “ABC” when your primary targets are potential candidates for product “XYZ?” Probably not.

A white space map can help both teams visually identify the current penetration levels of a product/service in each account. In this diagram, the white boxes indicate zero penetration and the black boxes indicate full penetration of a product or service for that particular customer. Gaining visibility into these white spaces is the first step needed for marketing to design highly targeted campaigns that will help sales penetrate these customers.

It’s a good place to start, but there’s still more information from sales that marketing can leverage…

POTENTIAL/PROPENSITY TO BUY

Your customers aren’t going to buy a product just because they don’t have it. It’s wishful thinking. After identifying the white spaces, Sales and Marketing need to determine which accounts are most likely to spend more money on your products. Which have the highest potential? Using segmentation scorecards, the teams can develop a list of attributes that will help identify which customers have the highest potential/propensity to buy. These attributes will include: how much the customer has spent, how much of that spend are you getting, how closely do they match the ideal customer profile, their satisfaction level, if they are growing or in decline…

This type of exercise where marketing and sales examine the accounts together, then leverage that information in the account plan, is a great process for truly recognizing where BOTH TEAMS should be focusing their efforts. Again, it doesn’t stop here.

PRIORITIZATION

What do these attributes really tell you? The most effective way to utilize the information from a segmentation scorecards is to visually map it out using an account prioritization grid. This type of grid visually plots the accounts into four quadrants/categories, clearly identifying the accounts with the greatest potential so both teams know where to focus their time and effort. For marketing, this means creating campaigns based on three of the quadrants:

• High Potential Value/High Current Revenue – Campaigns focused on expanding into new buying centers and new products
• High Potential Value/ Low Current Revenue – Campaigns focused on getting current products more robustly into these particular customers
• Low Potential Value/ High Current Revenue – Nurture campaigns that provide content and best practices to drive satisfaction and promoter scores

The customers with low potential value and low current value simply need to be “managed,” at least at this time. Without this type of insight and involvement in the account planning process, Marketing’s efforts might otherwise be geared towards capturing the attention of this less-desirable segment of customers.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that sales and marketing have thoroughly examined and prioritized accounts, it’s time for both teams to execute. Marketing is now fully equipped with the information needed to fine tune their own account plans – ones that go after the accounts and opportunities mutually decided upon with the sales team. Good ones will focus on things like goals, personas, the buyer’s journey, customer lifecycle stages, etc. But again, this isn’t possible without sales first inviting them into the account planning process.

Long story short: the goal is for sales and marketing to create a connected universe where both can agree on what they’re going to do, with whom, and when. That way, marketing can apply its resources to the types of accounts that sales has in its go-to-market strategy, so that their portfolio of accounts has proper support from both teams. Otherwise, the marketing and sales divide will continue.

Seeking a killer price on new high definition television sets, two women in California will end up spending just over three weeks camped out in front of a Best Buy before Black Friday deals kick off.

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