Rnordman

ITU, Brazil – It’s been nearly a month since Diomar Pereira has had running water at his home in Itu, a commuter city outside Sao Paulo that is at the epicenter of the worst drought to hit southeastern Brazil in more than eight decades.

Like others in this city whose indigenous name means “big waterfall,” Pereira must scramble to find water for drinking, bathing and cooking. On a recent day when temperatures hit 32 Celsius, he drove to a community kiosk where people with empty soda bottles and jugs lined up to use a water spigot. Pereira filled several 13-gallon containers, which he loaded into his Volkswagen bug.

“I have a job, and five children to raise and am always in a rush to find water so we can bathe,” said Pereira, a truck driver who makes the trip to get water every couple of days. “It’s very little water for a lot of people.”

Brazil is approaching the December start of its summer rainy season with its water cupboard nearly bare. More than 10 million people across Sao Paulo state, Brazil’s most populous and the nation’s economic engine, have been forced to cut water use over the past six months. A reservoir used by Itu has fallen to 2 per cent capacity and, because its system relies on rain and groundwater rather than rivers, the city is suffering more than others.

In Itu, desperation is taking hold. Police escort water trucks to keep them from being hijacked by armed men. Residents demanding restoration of tap water have staged violent protests.

Restaurants and bars are using disposable cups to avoid washing dishes, and agribusinesses are transporting soybeans and other crops by road rather than by boat in areas where rivers have dried up.

“We are entering unknown territory,” said Renato Tagnin, an expert in water resources at the environmental group Coletivo Curupira. “If this continues, we will run out of water. We have no more mechanisms and no water stored in the closet.”

The Sao Paulo metropolitan area ended its last rainy season in February with just a third of the usual rain total –only 23 centimetres over three months. Showers in October totalled just 25 millimeters, one-fifth of normal.

Only consistent, steady summer rains will bring immediate relief, experts say.

But they also place blame on the government, which they say needs to upgrade a state water distribution network that loses more than 30 per cent of its resources to leaks. Advocates also call for treatment plants to produce more potable water, along with better environmental protections for headwaters and rivers flowing into reservoirs.

Tagnin and others say the government ignored calls to begin rationing water months ago because it didn’t want to take such a step before the October elections and risk losing votes. The government, however, maintains there will be no need for rationing. It says its measures to conserve water are working, such as offering discounted water bills for those who limit usage and reducing water pressure during off-peak hours.

But activists and consumer groups complain the government has done too little too late and failed to keep consumers informed.

The state’s largest utility, which supplies water to more than 16 million people in Sao Paulo’s metropolitan area, for months avoided acknowledging the looming shortage. Only recently did the Sabesp utility release maps showing which neighbourhoods were at risk of water cuts, and was careful to avoid using the hot button term “rationing.”

In Itu, where the taps have been dry for weeks, residents dream of rationing _ at least that would mean some water for their homes.

“I forgot what water looks like coming out of the faucet,” said Rosa Lara Leite, a woman carrying a few gallons of water in each hand at one of the city’s crowded drinking fountains.

Authorities forced the city of 160,000 to cut its daily water consumption from 62 million litres to 8 million litres. Dozens of water trucks are deployed to bring in water from far off towns. Huge 5,000-gallon tanks have been set up around the city.

“We understand that people’s basic need is water. They need it,” said Marco Antonio Augusto, spokesman for a government task force created to manage Itu’s water supply. “We are bringing water from every possible place.”

Baker Franciele Bonfim is storing whatever water she can get her hands on in every possible place. She and a neighbour recently paid $200 to buy water from a private water truck, storing it in two big tanks and about 20 plastic buckets that once held margarine for her cakes.

“It’s an added expense but at least I am good for 15 days,” Bonfim said, as she used a thick hose to pour water into each bucket. “It has taken me a long time to use all this margarine. But water runs out fast.”

The post Sao Paulo desperate for water as drought hits millions in Brazil appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Dynamic pricing, the practice of setting a price for a good or service based on the real-time demand for that good or service and its availability or supply, may be the future of retail. The retail industry, following in the footsteps of travel and hospitality, knows that real-time price shifts online will not only buffer against showrooming—shoppers can't rely on prices online to be cheaper or quantities more abundant—but also maximize revenues.

Yes, it was one of Casey Stengel’s best thoughts. How often do we think we are good enough, or better than our competitors, and yet our market share isn’t growing, or the competitors are gaining on us? We blame the products, the salespeople, and then we blame the salespeople again. But what if the salespeople are right—they don’t get enough qualified leads?

When it’s time for sales leaders to create or grow their teams, I find most take this approach:

• Quickly place an ad
• Spread the word through a network of professional and personal contacts
• Start interviews ASAP

Stop!! There’s something very important missing from this equation: Pre-steps. A few simple yet important ways to ensure the right sellers are hired and that you pave the way for their success.

So before the company even starts advertising, sales leaders should follow these six pre-steps to prepare themselves for hiring a fantastic sales team:

Pre-step 1: Assign leads and clients

Decide what your new sellers will be responsible for ahead of time. This will guarantee they can hit the ground running. If you already have a sales team, make sure you communicate your plans, carve up territories and leads fairly, and in advance. That way, when the new hires assume their designated areas, it doesn’t come as a surprise to your current team. Trust me, you want to do as much as possible to prevent surprises which lead to in-fighting.

Pre-step 2: Prepare to show the rewards

The best candidates will ask about your compensation plan. If you say, “I don’t know, let me check,” or stare at them blankly, they will lose interest. The strongest sellers are driven by the numbers: how they’re going to get paid and their chances for success.

When you prepare a compensation plan, include examples of what a first, second and third-year seller can accomplish. Use metrics from your team to illustrate how goals can be accomplished and what percentage is currently at or above plan. Having this information on hand will keep the best candidates engaged during the interview process and more interested in working for your company.

Pre-step 3: Establish indicators and bonuses

It’s frustrating but true: new hires typically won’t land sales in their first few weeks on the job. However, you as a sales leader can still evaluate their productivity with leading indicators. Determine how many calls the new hire should make or how many opportunities they need to create within a certain timeframe. And reward them when they hit the mark.

For example, a manufacturing client with a very long sales cycle recently fired an unsuccessful seller and now needs a replacement. For this second rep we’ve created a bonus program that rewards them for qualified leads aligned with the company’s sweet spot, as well as for first meetings and proposals, connections with sales managers, and other activities that will eventually lead to sales.

Not only will these indicators and rewards help to motivate my client’s newest hire, they’ll also provide objective and measurable key performance data for gaging future success.

Pre-step 4: Create a seller profile

List the attributes and criteria needed to sell your products before you start booking interviews. Communicate this information to everyone involved in the hiring process. Clarity on these attributes in advance will make it easier to remain objective when evaluating candidates.

For example, your hiring panel might be wowed by someone who interviews well, has a great personality and has found huge success in nurturing long-term clients within one-year sales cycles. However, if you happen to have a 30-day sales cycle, this person is clearly not the best fit. You need someone who can turn around sales quickly.

By creating a list of required qualities for the position in advance, you can stay focused on hiring the sellers who will work best for your particular company. 

Pre-step 5: Prepare for success

I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to sales leaders I’ve worked with: they meet a candidate they love and hire them right away – only to have the new seller arrive on Day 1 and find there’s no desk, computer or phone set aside for them. Instead of getting started on those indicators for success mentioned in Pre-step 3, they sit around awkwardly waiting to be set up by IT and office management.

Before the interviews start make sure you have all the tools and technology in place. You’ll then be prepared for any quick hires, and they’ll feel more welcomed to the sales team knowing you’ve saved a seat for them.  

Pre-step 6: Have an offer letter ready

It’s important to prepare this document before interviews so you can offer the job right away to the strongest sellers. Don’t find an incredible candidate and then make them wait weeks on end for you to create and/or move the offer letter through legal. While they’re waiting for you to act, another opportunity could come along. And let’s face it, the best candidates get snapped up quickly. Have that offer letter ready to go during the interviewing process.

Set yourself up for success! Follow the six interview pre-steps above and you’ll have all the right components in place before the interviews begin. In return, you’ll have a smoother hiring process and even better success at finding great sellers for your team!

Connecting lead generation and sales to content might seem like the Holy Grail of content strategy and content marketing, but that connection is often hard to define. And especially when users perform a variety of complex tasks—discovering your brand for the first time, researching solutions, or actually buying—it’s often difficult to pinpoint if, and when, content nudged the buyer in the right direction.

Ryan Johnston makes a living studying that Holy Grail of connecting lead generation and sales results to content. He’s the Demand Generation Manager at the successful Atlanta-based company Pardot, which is now a salesforce.com company after its 2013 acquisition. The company offers a software-as-a-service marketing automation application that allows marketing and sales departments to create, deploy, and manage online marketing campaigns that increase revenue and maximize efficiency.

Johnston spent some time talking to us about the connections between content and lead generation, how content moves people through the sales funnel, and how to both set content marketing goals and evaluate the tangible success of those goals.

How do you see content’s role in moving people through the sales funnel, from initial discovery of a brand to a closed sale?

It’s all about education. Content educates a lead or contact at a certain point in time to help them know more about your brand, your product, and what value you offer. Ideally, your content meets people’s needs for the top, middle, and bottom stages of the sales funnel. As leads digest your content, it needs to move them to the next stage of the funnel. Calls to action are especially important. Even if a blog post, whitepaper, video, or any other piece of content perfectly resonates with someone, what action does a person take next? If you don’t offer a clear next step, a potential customer may just move on to your competitor, do research on their own, or even just forget and stop considering you. Calls to action help you stay top of mind and help guide people through the funnel.

Content fuels lead generation, so connecting those dots between the different sales funnel stages with content is really important. It’s best to figure out where you’re putting your content and what you’re expecting to get out of it in terms of lead generation. For example, I often recommend putting some content behind forms to help bring new leads into a company’s database. To do that, you have to think hard about the content you’re putting out there. Is it valuable enough that people will exchange information with you? You’re probably not going to put a blog post behind a form, but you might do it with a really well-researched whitepaper. If people signify that they desire your gated content, it’s a good sign in terms of lead generation.

When looking through reams of lead generation data, how do you know if content actually engages users?

Most enterprises look at aggregate level data such as a piece of content downloaded 10 or 50 times in a month. You see users engaging with the content, but you don’t know why or how it’s affecting them. That’s why you need to drill down into the individual lead level to figure out if the first piece of content moved them along down the funnel like you wanted. For example, a blog post might offer a call to action. After that person read the blog post, did they take that action and move to the next stage? You want to see how content influences individual users, how they move through the funnel, and if they take appropriate and desired actions at the right point in time.

What are some common mistakes or misapplications that you see enterprises make when approaching content from a lead generation point of view?

Lead generation tends to get pushed down from the top levels of an organization. Executives want messaging put out and they expect certain results. Many times, they don’t base their demands on a data-driven approach. Then the demand generation and content teams scramble to figure out how to take their messaging, package it into the right asset that resonates on the right channel, and get results from it. But without data, it’s easy to make mistakes. For example, content meant for the bottom of the sales funnel tends not to work on social media channels. Expecting somebody to actually interact and engage with it is unrealistic. And when that unrealistic result doesn’t happen, the teams find themselves trying to tell upper management that they missed the mark. And those stakeholders won’t really understand why those teams didn’t get as many leads from the content as requested.

Instead, enterprises need to look at the buying lifecycle, the phases of the sales funnel, the available channels, and how the organization currently uses content. After some data-driven analysis, you can then ask where video or long-form content makes the most sense. Without data, organizations sometimes use the same content across all channels and expect it to work in every area.

On the flip side, enterprises sometimes make content too complicated. Many kinds of trendy technology platforms exist. As a result, people often spend too much time focused on the tool or technology. They try to build out the right model and figure out exactly how content influences customers, but they forget to experiment. Otherwise, you won’t really learn anything. Put content out there, start getting some basic results, and learn from those experiences. Don’t spend too much time hypothesizing and building out complicated models. An organization should not spend 6-12 months building a model that they have to change one week after launch.

How do you set content goals and then evaluate if those goals are met from a lead generation standpoint?

Ideally, organizations already have some data about how similar pieces of content performed in the past. Then you can benchmark against that past performance. If you lack that historical data, at least identify what stage of the funnel you want your content used and what constitutes an appropriate channel for that content. From there, set appropriate goals for each piece of content. Understand what it’s supposed to do. Generate leads? Help with branding? Is it bringing in new leads through the right channel? Is it for new leads, or existing leads already in your database? Overall, try not to set big lofty content goals for all content. Instead, set goals for each individual piece of content that make sense based on what it is, how you’ve seen that content perform in the past, and what you want it to do now.

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As Johnston points out, a deep understanding of your content’s type, function, and desired action helps you connect the dots between content and lead generation. Remember to:

• Introduce calls to action for each piece of content. Taking a next step signifies further interest, but your audience needs to clearly see that next step.
• Set realistic content goals. Expecting a high level branding video or a niche blog post to generate leads only ends up in frustration. Connect the right content to the right person through the right channel at the right time.
• Evaluate both the “what” and “why” of your content results. It’s not enough to look at aggregate data. Delve deeper into why your content engages people.

 

Have you ever heard the phrase: “You made your own bed, now you have to lie in it?” This is the perfect example. As marketing seeks to become smarter and evaluate leads quantitatively, the initial impact to the lead pipeline is going to be a sudden drop in volume. This will happen virtually every time. And the inevitable reaction from sales is a predictable as the sunrise: “We need more leads!” Let’s examine why giving in to this lie is a terrible idea.

Remember how we got here?

Let’s first recount how we got here. We came to an agreement between marketing and sales on what constituted a “sales-ready lead.” Those attributes were quantitative and measurable. Marketing created a Lead scoring system to evaluate every contact on the basis of those agreed-upon criteria. What is being passed to sales fits those criteria. They have a name and are no longer generic Leads but MQLs or AQLs. Remember?

This is where the rubber meets the road, and demonstrates the importance of previous steps of gaining sales agreement on the criteria for determining the meaning of “sales-ready.” This is also where sales either becomes marketing’s greatest ally or greatest enemy. And it’s your choice. But, before we get to your decision, let’s look at the math. Yes, math.

Look at the math. Because math is indisputable.

Let’s start with the demand before you, “We need more leads.” And, for the sake of clarity, let’s call them by their proper name, Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs. The total number of MQLs is a function of two factors:

1.     Number of contacts in your marketing database.

2.     Conversion rates between funnel stages.

3.     Velocity of those contacts from prospect (or your top-of-funnel designation) to MQL.

How many contacts do you need?

The number of contacts affects your MQL output as a simple multiplier. For example, if your ratio of MQL to prospect is 0.1 (10%), then you simply determine the number of MQLs you require by dividing that number by your ratio. In this case, if you need 1,000 MQLs, your simple ration equation is 1,000/0.1=10,000 contacts in your database.

Calculate your Conversion Rates.

Conversion rates are much more complicated to change, but should always be top-of-mind for demand center managers. Small changes to conversion rates have a big impact on your ratios and, by extension the required size of your marketing database. The 10% MQL-to-prospect ratio above is likely a combination of conversion rates between multiple steps, something like Prospect à Inquiry à MQL. If prospect à inquiry conversion rate is 50% and inquiry à MQL conversion rate is 20%, you net out at an overall conversion rate of 0.5 * .0.2 = 0.1, or 10%. By improving the conversion rate between prospect à inquiry by 20%, we move that ratio to 0.6 or 60%. And, let’s say we move the inquiry à MQL rate by 25%, we move that ratio to .25 or 25%. Now let’s look at the math: 0.6 * 0.25 = .15, or 15%. We actually moved the total ratio by 50%! Our calculation now looks like this: 1,000/0.15=6,667 contacts in your database.

Velocity has impact.

Finally, the velocity calculation can increase your throughput to MQL. However, this calculation is difficult to measure and has the least impact on your ratios. Regardless, you should know it and be able to calculate it for your MAP platform. Velocity is simply time in stage. Velocity impact is time-in-stage*volume-in-stage. By reducing time-in-stage, we successfully improve our pass-though volume by the same percentage. For example, if your average time-in-stage for inquiry is 20 days, this means you have inquiries stacking up behind a 20-day “dam.” This analogy is a great way to visualize the velocity effect. If you can lower the time-in-stage by 25% to 15 days, you are allowing more volume through your dam by lowering its threshold. Imagine lowering a dam on a diver from 20 feet to 25 feet – what would happen? Initially, a flood of backed-up leads would flow through. Remember, you will need to maintain the volume of incoming lead flow to maintain this volume, once the threshold is lowered!

Brass tacks.

We now know what needs to change. The “brass tacks” question is how do we effect those changes. We need to ask these three questions:

1.     How many contacts do we need at top of funnel to meet the required number of MQLs?

2.     What can we do to affect out conversion rates at each stage?

3.     What can we do to affect the time-in-stage to increase velocity?

The WRONG response!

In many cases, the immediate response is to take the easy road to answer question 2. The easy road is to artificially lower the dam by reducing or eliminating the agreed-upon criteria for a “sales ready” Lead. (Bypassing Lead Scoring.) This leads directly to Cause A, and negates one of the key benefits of a Marketing Automation platform. It is quick, easy and completely wrong.

Change the conversation.

Let’s go back to the original demand, “We need more leads.” The conversation usually goes something like this:

Sales: What happened to all our leads? We’re dying over here.

Marketing: Lead scoring has reduced the quantity, but improved the quality of the MQLs.

Sales: What? I don’t care. I need more leads NOW!

Marketing: But we agreed on the criteria for MQLs, and we are sending exactly what you require.

Sales: I don’t care! I have 200 reps sitting around not making phone calls because the pipeline is dry! Do what you have to do to get me more leads today!

Marketing: That’s not so easy, since we set up the system to do what you requested.

Sales: I’m calling the SVP. This is BS. We need people to call. The sky is falling and the world is coming to an end by noon.

Marketing: Okay, okay, I’ll turn off lead scoring!

And, you just wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on Marketing Automation.

Instead, let’s have this conversation. We’ve established and agreed upon the definition of a “sales ready” Lead. We now have the calculations to demonstrate exactly what we need to generate the required number of MQLs. Based on this equation we can know ahead of time what it’s going to take to generate the required number of MQLs. Here are the two options:

1.     Marketing is provided the necessary funding to perform the necessary actions to meet the required number of MQLs, or;

2.     Sales can reduce its staff of sales reps to meet the number of MQLs that will flow through the system at current capacity.

How many times is option number two even contemplated? Is that just because sales screams louder? Data will answer the screaming and help prevent marketing from falling for the “We need more leads” trick at the expense of maintaining the quality of those leads.

Notes:

You must agree with sales on the definition of a “sales-ready” lead.

There are only three components of lead volume marketing can control.

Learn to calculate each of these components and let the math do your talking for you.

When the boss asks you how to fix it, you need to be ready with the answers!

There's a good reason you don't like making cold calls: You've been on the other end of those calls. Americans are united in their dislike of unsolicited sales calls, hence the Do Not Call Registry. So how are you supposed to initiate a conversation with a prospective new client?

Slowly emerging from the Great Recession, I can imagine that clients are more tired than ever of hearing from A/E firms who "just want to introduce" themselves. That's all the more reason not to answer the phone or return calls from strangers. No doubt this adds to the reluctance of many technical professionals to get involved in selling. But you need to be developing new business! So how can you get prospects to return your calls? A few suggestions:

Give the client a good reason to call you back. It's pretty simple, when you think about it. If the client sees a obvious benefit in returning your call, he's most likely going to do it. The reason most of your sales calls aren't returned is you haven't defined the benefit to the client. Do clients really want an introduction to still another A/E firm? You have to do better, and explain why there's value for the client in calling back. Which leads to my next point...

Identify a specific client need before calling. A cold call is driven by the seller's needs. The seller doesn't know what the potential customer needs, but she knows she has to make a sale. So she calls prospects that might have need for her company's product or services. It's a self-serving motive, disconnected from our needs, and that turns us off when we receive such a call. Same for prospective clients.

That means you need to make a preliminary determination of the prospect's needs before calling. "Warming the call" by learning about client needs beforehand enables you to speak directly to a matter pertinent to the prospect, instead of fishing for a possible connection. That gets you closer to getting your voicemail returned, but don't expect it until you get to the next step.

Offer something of value. It's hardly compelling to leave a message simply stating, "I understand you might be needing help in designing a new automated control system for your plant." That only describes a benefit if the client doesn't know any firms that do that kind of work. What are the chances of that? A better message would be: "We recently worked for a client that added an automated control system for a plant very similar to yours. We were able to reduce their costs by 45% by using an innovative design concept. If you'd like to hear more about that, please give me a call."

Yeah, coming up with a good reason for the client to return your call (what I call your "entree") isn't easy. But it works. It requires more work up front. So you can make 20 shotgun calls to prospects and maybe get 3-4 to return your call. Or you can offer an entree to 5 prospects and get 3-4 to return your call. Which seems the better strategy?

By the way, your chances of eventually making the sale are substantially increased when you take a more client-centered approach, starting with that initial contact.

Make it easy to return your call. Think of the things that frustrate you when someone leaves a voice message, and make sure you don't repeat any of the same mistakes. These could include not speaking clearly, making it hard for the prospect to catch your name. Or saying your phone number too quickly to write it down. Or perhaps the prospect can't get through should he call. Here are some suggestions for avoiding such frustrations:

• State your name and phone number at both the start and end of your message. That means the prospect doesn't have to listen to the whole message again to get the number. Give this information slowly and clearly, spelling your name if there's a chance of confusion.

• Tell the prospect how best to reach you. You don't want to play phone tag with someone you don't know well. If you offer your cell phone number and invite a call after hours if this is more convenient for the prospect, then you're hinting that you consider the call important.

• Let the prospect know that the call will be brief. For example: "I can explain in 10 minutes and then you can decide if there's value in our meeting to discuss the matter further."

If you were referred, state up front why the referral was made. I would advise that you still offer your entree and not simply drop a name. The real value of the referral is when the prospect trusts the one who referred you as having the prospect's interest at heart. So don't let the referring party down; explain why he or she thought the prospect would benefit from talking to you.

Always try to schedule the next meeting or communication. One of the simplest ways to minimize this problem of unreturned calls is, when you're meeting or talking with the prospect, to (1) establish the basis for the next conversation and (2) if possible, schedule it. Otherwise, you may find yourself in the same predicament—competing for the prospect's time and attention—when the next contact comes around. 

If the client won't commit to a next time, that probably tells you something about the likelihood of the relationship developing much further. It could be a sign that your next call won't be returned either.

*Editors Note: Live updates from the Sales Hacker Conference San Francisco are brought to you by PipelineDeals. PipelineDeals is sales and CRM software trusted by thousands of companies to increase sales. Follow us @pipelinedeals.

This session is titled What I Learned Scaling From 2 to 80 Salespeople in Under a Year by Sam Blond, VP of Sales at Zenefits.

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There were many things we learned along the way that took us from 2 to 80 Salespeople in under a year, and today I will share some of those with you.

Recruiting

• What to look for in a rep:

Look for synergy between what they have done in the past and what you are doing. Make sure they have seen an early stage startup and can make an impact without having to invest extensive training.

When you bring on new sales reps, remember hitting numbers should be a definition of success. For myself, I always shot to be number one. When I look for candidates I see how they rank against their peers. If they aren’t number one, are they passionate about being number one, or do they show the desire to improve?

Finally, always ask for 5 references. Anyone can find 3 people to speak positively about them. Once you dig into number 4 and 5, you tend to get more accurate and complex information. It helps to position it as, “We are thinking to hire John, what can we do to help make him successful?” This leads the way for their references to surface any weaknesses that may change your hiring decisions.

• When is it time to hire a VP of Sales?

First, get a few sales reps and a million in revenue. You want to find someone who will be a good leader but also have the right amount of talent. The VP should also collaborate well with the existing team.

• When should you use Outside recruiters?

In the beginning, outside recruiters can be very helpful in helping you generate a pool of candidates with the right talent. Use a variety of recruiters for diversification.

• When should you hire an internal recruiter?

If you are hiring 2-3 people a month, it is probably time to hire an internal recruiter.

Quotas and Compensation-

Quotas should be challenging, but attainable. A good goal is to set your quota so 70% of your sales reps can hit it.

Remember, you get what you pay for. Be more aggressive on the variable compensation side and aim for above the market rate. Make people want to work for you, then you can be selective when hiring.

What I Learned Scaling From 2 to 80 Salespeople in Under a Year --> http://ctt.ec/Yzowc+ by @Zenefits via @SalesHackerConf

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Controlling cycle times-

Controlling your cycle time is incredibly important because if a sales rep is taking extensive amounts of time to close an opportunity, they are unable to focus on new opportunity and you are missing out on revenue.

The role of discounting will play largely into this. Be creative with how you position offers. What we did, is every few months we would tell customers we were losing the ability to discount and they needed to take advantage now.  You must be creative in your approach.

Finally, don’t back down. Don’t extend a discount or offer, they will usually end up closing anyways. If you say yes, they will have that expectation in future negotiations.

Specialization and sales development-

Specialization allows reps to be more efficient. For example, if you keep one sales rep for prospecting and one for closing, they become experts in their field. If your margins support specialization, do it.

Hire strategically. You should not be spending time training reps on how to sell. You want to be training them on your product. When you begin hiring more than 2 reps per month, hire them in groups and invest in training classes. Over invest in the beginning, because it will pay huge dividends later on.

Make culture a priority, and include that in training as well.

Org structure and promoting-

Each closing rep manager should have 8-10 direct reports. SDR managers can handle a bit more. Be sure to keep the org chart simple. Additionally, promote from within if it is the best option, but don’t force it.

Be careful not to set unrealistic expectations around promoting. We started a trend where we were promoting people after 3 months, then as we grew and hired more salespeople, they were expecting to be promoted after 3 months when the positions weren’t available. Be sure to communicate and set realistic expectations in the beginning.

The post What I Learned Scaling From 2 to 80 Salespeople in Under a Year appeared first on Sales Hacker.

*Editors Note: Live updates from the Sales Hacker Conference San Francisco are brought to you by PipelineDeals. PipelineDeals is sales and CRM software trusted by thousands of companies to increase sales. Follow us @pipelinedeals.

This session is titled The First Order of Business for a new VP of Sales by Brendan Cassidy, VP of Sales at TalkDesk.

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 Three things to understand when you’re about to enter a start-up:

1. It’s going to be hard.
2. Be flexible.
3. Most cannot do what you are endeavoring to do.

Step 1 – Establish the True Lead Velocity Within the Business

• You don’t know anything until you understand your lead velocity
• Questions to ask
  • Is there someone running marketing?
  • Is there established criteria around what a lead is?
• If someone is running marketing, and you align with their definition of an MQL, the model should be fairly easy to build.
• If there is no one in marketing, then you need to define what an MQL is and then retroactively assign an MQL status to every lead that came in for the last three months. Once you’ve weeded out all the non-MQL’s, you’re at a true north point from which to scale the business.

Step 2 – Once lead velocity is established:

• Structure the sales organization based on the data, not on what you’ve done in the past.
• One common mistake that VPs of Sales do is they try to replicate exactly what they’ve done in the past

Step 3- Put in the playbook. Hint: Keep it Simple

• You are making your customers lives easier. Not harder. Sell accordingly.
• Make the pricing easy to understand and transparent
• Sell to your strengths
• Understand your weaknesses. Make sure your sales people understand your weaknesses. Make your weaknesses a strength
• Understand how your competitors are attacking you

Step 4 – Hire the Best Talent. Period. (That’s on YOU)

• Common mistake with the first time VPs of Sales – hiring good, smart talented people as long as they’re not smarter than you. Get past your own insecurities. If you hire someone smarter than you, that’s a good thing.
• Try to hire your core, early team from within your extended network. Not your first 2 or 3. Your first 10.
• Why? Because you reduce risk if someone is vouched for by people you know? Your best hires are going to come through your network. Period.
• If you don’t have a network. Start now. Today. It will pay off later.

Step 5 – Always seek solutions. Not excuses.

• You weren’t hired to tell the CEO why it can’t be done
• If there are no leads, then you need to build an aggressive outbound sales development organization. Maybe even 1 to 1 SDR to AE. And it’s not going to be cheap.
• If you do have some lead velocity, identify exactly how many leads you need marketing to commit to in order to scale to 10, 20 , 50, 100 sales people. This is easy to model.
• If the product doesn’t work, help your CEO recruit the right engineering.

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Step 6 – Pay your sales people above market rate for performance.

• Hiring great talent is hard
• Retaining great talent is even harder
• If you are cheap, you’re dead. Period.
• You can do all of this and make sales an accretive profit center, not a cost center.

Step 7 – Promote from within

• Build a meritocracy. If you want your top performers to stay with you through multiple stages of growth, give them a path to realize their ambitions.
• Remember – the folks that build your team own the intellectual capital. Bringing in a sales executive might work, but it won’t ultimately help you scale.

Step 8 – Have fun!

• 70 to 75% of your life and time will be spent working. Try to make it as fun and rewarding as possible.

The post The First Order of Business for a new VP of Sales appeared first on Sales Hacker.

*Editors Note: Live updates from the Sales Hacker Conference San Francisco are brought to you by PipelineDeals. PipelineDeals is sales and CRM software trusted by thousands of companies to increase sales. Follow us @pipelinedeals.

This session is titled The 10 Key Revenue Mistakes I Made Getting to $100 Million ARR, by Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, Echosign, and Storm Ventures.

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As you scale your SaaS companies, if you avoid these mistakes you will be much more successful.

Mistake #1: Not Hiring 2 Sales Reps

You will easily learn what you are looking for in your top sales rep if you have someone that’s number 2. 1 rep performing is repeatable, and 2+ Reps Performing is repeating.

You have to sell it yourself first, and then hire 2 reps. Be sure to hire a marketing manager before a sales manager.

Mistake #2: Hiring Early Reps I Wouldn’t Buy From

You will need many types of reps eventually, but in the early days leads are precious. You won’t feel comfortable handing your leads off to someone you don’t trust. If you wouldn’t buy from them personally, don’t hire them. Another good rule to follow when hiring your first sales reps, make sure they have at least 2 years of experience in SaaS.

Mistake #3: Not Seeing the Pattern Early Enough

The pattern is set early, and there is often a natural pattern between customers. You’ll realize that you have an “organic” type of core customer. Once this is repeating, be confident. Don’t be afraid to double down on what seems to be working. While deal sizes, etc will go up, the pattern that has established itself will stay the same. Keep at it, it will keep working.

Mistake #4: Not (intentionally) Going upmarket faster

Nothing is an anomaly. If you can get one enterprise customer, you can get 10. Realize that the outliers aren’t anomalies, they are the future. If you can go up-market, go up-market faster.

Corollary: Go upmarket as soon as you can. You will get more money for the same work.

Mistake #5: Not Seeing the Power of a Mini-brand

Brands are highly defensible. When people in your core industry are starting to notice you, your brand becomes incredibly powerful. It tends to happen when your brand becomes repeatable. Invest in your mini brand, even if you don’t see direct ROI. Do as much as you can to build trust of your product. You also must have some competitive advantage in the marketplace, focus on it and build it up.

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Mistake #6: Ever Allowing Revenue per Lead to Drop

Revenue per lead should never drop. There is something wrong here and you have got to fix it. This may be a time to focus on PR, marketing, upgrading the team or more customer success. Competition should not be a factor here. It is everyone’s fault if you are losing revenue on leads.

How did Brendon double sales in 90 days?

• Immediately upgraded the team to proven closers
• Got the most out of the team he inherited-and got rid of the ones that weren’t working
• He did not attempt to do it alone
• He ended pipeline as a metric

Mistake #7: Too much time on prospects v. Existing

Sales is just the start of a 5-7 year journey. Visit all of your top customers, not just prospects. Pay attention to upsells and upgrades, and try and get more out of existing relationships. If you develop a good relationship with them, they will take you with them wherever they go. We never lost a customer we visited. Get on a plane and visit all your best customers, and all your top 20% customers. ALL of them. Even happy customers will churn if you don’t visit them, and on the flip side, unhappy customers will still stay if you visit them. In typical enterprise relationships, you typically lose a customer in year 3. Year one it is in the budget, year 2 already has the deal legacy built in from a budgeting perspective, year 3 is when they start making changes.

Mistake #8: Not Firing a Bad VPS in 1 Sales Cycle

70% of businesses hire the wrong VPS at first. You should know subjectively in just a few months, just 50% of the way through your average sales cycle if you have hired the wrong person. Numbers should increase in one sales cycle, with keen focus on revenue per lead. This increase does not even need to be significant, but with the stuff in the system, there should be at least SOME improvement in sales. The first few hires your VPS makes should be clear upgrades and made quickly and seemingly effortlessly. If you hire the wrong VPS, they will hire subpar people below them. This can be fatal.

Mistake #9: It gets SO much better at Initial Scale

No matter how bad you are at X, or inexperienced at Y, you will learn in SaaS. Training gets better, script gets better, as well as the process and journey. While it may not get easier, it does get better, and you get better. Find a way to get to $10 million. $1m to $10m tends to be the toughest slog.

Mistake #10: Not Doubling the Plan

Once the team was finally great, we exceed the plan. Every quarter, every year, always. I wish I would have challenged us to do better than 120% of the plan. Imagine a world where capital doesn’t matter, where you can hire whomever you want, and were ROI can be measured in 36 months. The great will never propose something stupid in this scenario. Find out what it would take to get to your goal, then go find a way to make it happen.

The post The 10 Key Revenue Mistakes I Made Getting to $100 Million ARR appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Stop Trying to Make Selling Easy is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

The reason you want the lowest price is because you believe it makes selling easy. If you can take price out of the equation, then you eliminate one of your buyer’s primary considerations. This doesn’t help your buyer get the outcome they need. It’s all about you. It’s all about making your job easier.

The reason you want the very best product is because you want the product to do the work for you. You want an overwhelming list of features and benefits that eliminate any competition so that you don’t have to do the work of building value yourself. This isn’t about what your buyer wants or needs. It’s about what you want or what you need.

The reason you want to work for a big, well-recognized brand is because you believe that the brand will do most of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to selling. It isn’t about the value that you can create; you could create value working for a scrappy start-up. It isn’t about the value your company can create. It’s about making selling easier.

You love lead generation, demand generation, and marketing qualified leads because, in your mind, it eliminates the need for you to build relationships and open new opportunities. You believe that you are better in front of clients once they’ve agreed to discussing their challenges with you. But the most difficult part of selling is helping your clients understand why they need to change.

The reason you want prospective clients to give you an RFP is because it eliminates the process where you build new relationships and create new opportunities. It takes you right to the point where you get to talk about your product or service and where you get to share your price. You believe this makes selling easier because you skip the hard parts of the sales process.

You are better off studying, practicing, and learning to sell than you are trying to make selling easy.

 

In part one of this article I talked about the importance of developing buyer personas to help understand what triggers your buyers to start researching solutions to a problem.

By understanding the steps your buyers take in their decision-making process you can more effectively move your prospects through the sales funnel and turn them into qualified leads.

But that’s just the beginning. There are still a few more things you need to do before publishing your work.

Have the Right Content for Each Stage of the Sales Funnel

Where your potential customers are in their buying cycle will determine the type of content they need. For instance, the content used to make them aware of your products and services tends to be different from the content that will turn them into buying customers.

That’s why you need different types of content for each stage of the buyer’s cycle.

Here’s what a typical buyer’s cycle looks like:

1. Awareness – your potential customer becomes aware that they have a need or issue that needs to be fixed.
2. Research/Education – your potential customer starts researching online to educate themselves on how they can get their problem solved.
3. Comparison/Validation – your potential customer has identified options and solutions that may meet their needs and is reviewing products and companies that may work.
4. Purchase - your potential customer is ready to make a decision to buy (and hopefully they choose you!)

Auditing the Content You Already Have

As you consider all of the new content you may need to develop for each stage of the buyer’s cycle, it can be overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. Think about the arsenal of content that you probably already have available to you that can be reworked and repackaged.

That’s where a content audit comes in –and it’s relatively easy to do.

First, you need to collect all of the content that has already been created for your business such as blog posts, presentations, brochures, proposals, whitepapers, etc. Then, organize and catalog it by content type, topic, buyer persona, the date you created it and the number of leads/customers it generated for you.

From there, start analyzing to see if you have enough content that you can rework and use that will fit your various buyer personas, and if it’s working (or not).

Content audits are great because they encourage you to tap into content resources you might already have and lets you know where to focus your creative content efforts next.

Content Mapping

Remember, all content is not created equal. There are certain types that will be best suited for each stage of the buyer’s cycle.

Research has shown that specific pieces of content come into play depending on where your ideal customer is in their buying cycle.

Here is a typical way to map your content to the buying cycle:

Awareness: Blog posts and social media updates

Research/Education: Ebooks, webinars, industry reports

Comparison/Validation: Case studies, demos, customer testimonials

Purchase: Analyst reports, detailed product information

Time To Get Started

So, you know who your prospective customers are, how they become motivated, what actions they take to get their needs met, and the stages of the buying cycle they go through. Now you can focus on creating (or re-purposing) content that not only speaks to their needs but drives them to your company to get their needs met.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this two part series. You can get even more information on how to implement an Inbound Content Marketing plan in your company in this free whitepaper: “8 Critical Ingredients of a Digital Marketing Plan.” This plan delivers practical inbound marketing advice that you can start applying to your business right away.

 

Revenue runs your business, so it’s critical that you keep your chain of sales revenue unbroken. Every time a link in your revenue chain breaks, your business must make up for it with more time, more effort and more resources – all to sustain the same level of income.

The reality is that for many businesses (including yours), their sales revenue chain is broken and in need of repair. Not only do broken links sap more exertion and energy from your bottom-line growth, but they also open up opportunities for your competitors to steal a sale from a non-converting lead or a non-renewing customer.

Here are two major ways to repair your sales revenue chain and get your business back to performing its best:

Your Lead Universe

The first critical link of your sales revenue chain is the quality of your overall lead universe. Without leads, your business doesn’t close sales, so it’s important to keep a constant watch on the lead generation aspect of your revenue chain. After all, without revenue, you’re out of business.

Having Enough Leads:
Before you ramp up your demand generation program, it’s important to know and understand your company’s lead consumption rate. Every business has a different rate according to industry and sales cycle, but most B2B companies fall between using 300 to 600 leads per month, per rep. Once you identify your lead consumption rate, strengthen this link in your revenue chain by building a demand generation program that meets or exceeds your given rate.

Cleanliness Of Your Data:
When it comes to leads for your business, quality always outperforms quantity. Investing time and resources in a low-quality lead that doesn’t convert into a sale is a waste, whereas your time would have been better spent on a high-quality lead more likely to generate revenue. The quality/quantity factor is why a clean lead database with only accurate and precise sales leads is critical to repairing and strengthening this link in your sales revenue chain.

When you remove bad data from lead databases, expect to see your conversion rates increase. One Invenio client increased conversion rates by 33% – imagine the boost those results could have on your revenue.

Your Sales Team

The second essential link in your sales revenue chain is personnel-driven: Without hiring and training the right sales team for your business, your revenue chain breaks down due to high turnover, lack of expertise or a poor bonus and compensation structure.

Fielding The Best Team:
Hiring the right salespeople for your business is not a task to be taken lightly. After all, your sales team is responsible for the most important aspect of your business: creating revenue. When companies experience high turnover and attrition rates in their sales force, it has a major impact on their bottom line due to missed revenue opportunities.

Instead of continuing this pattern of attrition, look for these three critical characteristics when hiring your next salesperson:

• Mental aptitude – Does he or she have a firm grasp on your business goals and capabilities? Does the candidate think light on his or her feet?
• Aggression – Does the candidate go after a lead aggressively? Is he or she driven to meet challenging sales quotas? Does he or she persist after a lead even while handling objections and concerns?
• Logic orientation – Is he or she a critical thinker? Does the candidate create logic-based arguments and sales pitches? Does he or she make metrics-driven sales decisions?

For one Invenio client, hiring according to these three characteristics (among other variables) reduced the company’s sales personnel attrition rate by 49%. Not only did this reduced attrition rate save the company on administrative and hiring costs, but it also meant smoother sales cycles and increased long-term revenue.

Training Your Team Of Sales Experts:
Appropriately training and developing your sales team is just as important as making a more selective hire. Not only do training activities help your team accomplish more, but they also increase employee retention.

However, you can’t just implement a sales training program and expect it to continue producing solid results for years to come – you need to continuously improve and innovate your sales training. Keeping your development program sharp requires a Measure-Analyze-Improve approach.

You need to consistently measure each aspect of your training program, analyze how well each facet of the program is performing and finally improve under-performing aspects of training. The Measure-Analyze-Improve approach also helps you identify which salespeople need to ramp up their training faster. For example, one Invenio client that used the Measure-Analyze-Improve approach reduced its time-to-sale by 14% while simultaneously increasing its retention rate.

Strengthening your sales revenue chain isn’t just a matter of reinforcing a single link or a few short-term tactics. Rather, you need to maintain every link from top to bottom to ensure that revenue generation flows consistently.

The words “inbound” and “outbound” are distinctively different; thus, it should come as no surprise that inbound and outbound leads are very different. While they can be similar in multiple ways, there are major differences that marketers need to consider when planning campaigns. Here are some major differences between the two:

1. Outbound Leads Are Dying

Not literally, but you get the point. As companies rely more on inbound marketing for lead sources, there are less outbound leads to come by. In addition, the buying process is changing significantly as a result of our high tech world. With millions of ads to be encountered everyday, consumers are much better at tuning out your outbound campaigns. Conversely, when they do need something, they are surely to look for a solution on the Internet making inbound marketing an ideal choice of strategy.

2. Inbound Leads Know More About Your Company

With outbound leads, you have to assume that the lead knows little to nothing about your company at the first touchpoint, which means your sales team has to spend a significant amount of time educating the lead. On the other hand, inbound leads found you because they want to learn more about solving their problems. They’ve likely already downloaded your content, read your blog and have a taste of who your company is. With inbound leads, salespeople have to do a lot less convincing because inbound marketing campaigns have already done a great job of convincing them your company is worthy in content.

3. Salespeople Like Inbound Leads More than Outbound Leads

Leads generated by outbound marketing campaigns like telemarketing, direct mail, and trade shows are thought to be less valuable by sales, according to HubSpot’s 2014 State of Inbound. This makes sense considering they have to spend more time educating outbound leads about your company. Inbound marketing helps shorten and simplify the sales process, which makes for a happier sales team at the end of the day.

4. Outbound Leads Are More Expensive

Outbound leads cost 61% more on average than leads generated by inbound marketing campaigns. This is probably one of the most important differences between outbound and inbound leads because, not only are inbound leads higher quality, they also help you get the most out of your budget.

Final Takeaway

You may be thinking, “Wow, it really sounds like she is rooting for inbound leads”, and you are right. What else do you think an inbound marketer would recommend? However, outbound leads shouldn’t be completely ruled out. Actually, integrating outbound marketing campaigns with inbound marketing campaigns can reap many benefits. At the end of the day though, inbound marketing will produce better ROI for your company.

Outbound vs inbound leads – what differences do you notice within your company? Does one generate more ROI than other? Share your comments!

Using Social Media to Generate Sales Leads written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest post is from Dawn Ellis – Enjoy!

If you’re looking to generate sale leads successfully, you need to go where the people are. And currently, everybody seems to be on social media. At first glance, social media looks like a place for friends and family members to share pictures of their daily outings – which is true to some degree – as social media is about connecting people digitally through conversation.

With the average Facebook user spending 6.35 hours a month on the social platform, and 260 million active users on Twitter, you cannot afford to avoid social media. Businesses are investing a lot of money and time into their social media strategy. On the other hand, smaller businesses cannot afford to budget marketing and finding leads through social media is overwhelming.

If this sounds like your business, stop putting your head in the sand and find those sale leads through social media by following these four simple steps:

Know your audience

People join social networking websites to socialise. They don’t want to be bombarded with advertisements. Advertisements belong in magazines and not on social media. You should treat your social media accounts like you would your mailing list. Be personal, be engaging and be human. Always remember to reply to customer comments.

Give them what they want

You know who your prospective customers are but they don’t know about you. Why should they come to you? Be interesting, be entertaining and be informative with your content. Be reliable, be dependable and don’t ask for anything in return. Soon your prospective customers will find you.

Become the go-to person

You should have an integrated blog on your website. You should be addressing current issues that your customers are facing, updates on your business and daily ramblings. You should be sharing these posts on social media. People are quick to dismiss the brands that they believe will not deliver the services they require. By becoming the go-to person in your industry, you will attract more customers and strengthen existing relationships.

Utilise multiple channels

It is worth knowing that the most popular networking websites are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. Each social media channel boasts their own community. You should adapt your long-term plan to each community accordingly. Have a clear focus, be consistent and prove your expertise. Utilise multiple channels and cross promote. Nonetheless it is better to be actively involved with one or two social channels, than to be spread thinly with no given direction on them all.

Measure your success

There are many free tools to monitor your social media engagement but they do not tell you if people clicked through to your website. Google Analytics is a great tool for learning about your customers. You can see how many people have visited your website through social media. Learn what works for your audience and what doesn’t. By consuming this data you can work to making your social media a triumph.

Finally

Studies show that 70% of businesses generate leads on social media. Productively use social media and your business will see an increase of brand awareness, website traffic and conversation. Follow the above steps and advance your business by attracting more customers and strengthening existing business relationships.

Dawn Ellis is Content Outreach Executive of AlldayPA, offering businesses a bespoke call handling service, answering calls personally and professionally 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Dawn is interested in marketing, search engines, social media and all things digital..

 

I may not be in touch with all my emotions, but there is one I know all too well — jealousy. I have worked my entire career in great health systems with fabulous people. And yet, when I go “outside,” I constantly see health care providers working brilliantly together in innovative ways that I had not even imagined. It makes my chest ache with envy. This type of jealousy is the deepest and most sincere expression of respect of which I am capable.

Here are just five examples of the dozens of innovations out there that make my head and my heart hurt. I hope they make you feel envious, too — and that you will send us your own examples so that we might  learn from them as well.

1. Transparency at University of Utah Health Care

In December, 2012, the University of Utah health care system started posting on its “Find-a-Doctor” sites all patient comments received after office visits. It wasn’t easy for Utah to reach this decision – its physicians had plenty of misgivings, but they were also irritated by the negative comments made by small numbers of patients on existing social media sites.

The logic was that trying to get data from all patients would lead to a much higher volume of comments, and they would paint a more accurate picture of the quality of care that the University of Utah offered. So, after a period of “internal transparency” during which only Utah personnel could see the data, Utah went public with all the ratings and comments – good, bad, and ugly.

As it turns out, the vast majority of comments have been extremely positive, the kind of praise that would make one’s mother blush. And the relatively few negative comments have had a profound impact on the physicians themselves. Physicians suddenly understand that every patient visit is a high stakes interaction, after which patients might write positive or negative comments.

The result has been so much more than a marketing ploy – it has changed the care being delivered. The Utah physicians with whom I have spoken all agree (some grudgingly) that the transparency has made them better and more compassionate caregivers.

2. Culture of shared responsibility at Mayo Clinic

When I visited the Mayo Clinic this spring I was amazed by how well everyone worked together to give patients first-rate, coordinated care. For example, if a patient is referred to a heart failure specialist because of shortness of breath, but the real problem turns out to be lung disease, the patient will be sent to a pulmonologist – but that initial heart failure specialist continues to play to role of doctor to the patient, making sure all the loose ends are tied up during and after the consultation. It’s wonderful for the patients, but not the way most specialists in U.S. health care work.

I asked some Mayo physicians why they were willing to do this “extra work” beyond their specialty expertise. One said, “Look, we think we are pretty good, but we know that these patients did not come here for us as individuals. They came because we’re the Mayo Clinic. So we all know that they are not really ‘my’ patients – they are ‘our’ patients.”

I thought of how most organizations attract patients using the “star” system – they market the superstar cardiologist or neurosurgeon, for example. But the schedules of those superstars are often booked for months in advance. Guess which model is more likely to accommodate growth? The “star” system or the group culture?

3. Teamwork at Northwestern’s Integrated Pelvic Health Program

At Chicago’s Northwestern Medicine, the Integrated Pelvic Health Program provides care for patients with problems like incontinence, uterine and vaginal prolapse, anal fissures and fistulas. The specialists with the expertise needed to address these difficult issues are all concentrated in one place – gynecology, urogynecology, and colorectal surgery. And in the middle are the physical therapists, who teach the patients exercises that strengthen the muscles to get their problems under control.

When I walked around this center and saw physical therapists talking with surgeons about shared patients, it suddenly dawned on me that I could not remember the last time I had actually talked to a physical therapist taking care of one of my patients. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I had ever talked to a physical therapist taking care of one of my primary care patients. There was no question that the care delivered by physicians and physical therapists who were really working like teammates was better than what I had been doing.

This is just one of dozens of examples I’ve seen of co-location leading to better teamwork. Hennepin County Medical Center moved dental next to the emergency department. University of Utah put case management right in the intensive care units. Teamwork is not just easy – it’s natural. These organizations understand how critical co-location is to real teamwork, and how important real teamwork is to patients.

4. Addressing socioeconomic issues at Contra Costa

At Contra Costa Health, a Bay Area safety-net provider, patients in waiting rooms were asked about their most important health concerns. The number one issue, named by 62% of patients, was having enough food. That was followed by housing (58%), then jobs and utilities. Not long after, Contra Costa began working with HeathLeads, which trains college-aged “advocates” to address socioeconomic issues like the ones named by Contra Costa’s patients, and places the advocates in emergency departments and practices. HealthLeads helps address problems that fall outside of what traditional health care can do, such as access to food subsidies.

Within weeks of the launch, Contra Costa physicians could see that some of their patients had better control of their chronic conditions because they had access to healthier food. In discussing one patient who had lost four pounds in eight weeks, one physician said, “I felt like I had finally been a good doctor to him and it wasn’t due to anything I learned in medical school.” Another doctor said, “This is the help I have needed for the past two decades to care for my patients. I now have something to offer my patients when I tell them to eat healthier and they can barely afford groceries.”

Contra Costa’s CEO told me that they know their job is producing health, not health care. They understand that to do so, they need to figure out who outside of traditional health care can help them make a real dent in their patients’ health problems. And that required developing a collaboration focused upon their patients’ socioeconomic issues — the core competency of HealthLeads.

5. Consolidating care with the London Stroke Initiative

In 2010, the city of London decided to consolidate the care of patients with strokes at just eight of its 34 hospitals. This meant that 26 hospitals, including some quite famous ones, had to close their stroke services, so that there was sufficient volume at the eight Hyperacute Stroke Centers to support care by special teams of physicians, nurses, and therapists who were completely focused upon stroke patients. As described in the HBR-NEJM insight center last year, the result was a decrease in mortality for stroke by 25%, and a reduction in total spending for stroke patients by about 6%, despite the greater number of stroke patients who survived.

Concentrating volume led to better care, better outcomes, and saved money. Most London hospitals (some kicking and screaming) gave up their ability to care for acute stroke patients in the interest of patients and society.

When I presented this case to a class at Harvard Business School last year, one student from the U.S. said, “This is phenomenal. We could never do it here.”

What makes these five examples so painful for me is that none of them required much in the way of capital investment. But all of them required (and continue to demand) expenditure of social capital, changing in the way people work together. The results are impressive.

There are going to be more examples of things that make me jealous during this eight week HBR/NEJM Insight Center. As those roll out, we would like to invite you to send your own — perhaps from your own organization, or from somewhere else. Maybe even from a competitor.

The more it hurts, the better.

Having a strong presence on social media is vital for a modern business to thrive. Social media is a place to refine your brand representation and engage with both current and potential customers. Through social media platforms, you can establish your credibility and reach out to people who want to hear about your business; but it’s not enough to simply claim your social media pages. With these 13 tips, you can build your social media presence and build an engaged audience.

1. Have a plan for your social media.

Before you begin creating your social media profiles, it is important to think about what you want to gain from being active online. Having a clear idea of what you hope to get out of your experience on social media will help drive how you build and use your social media presence. First and foremost, outline and document your goals. Do you want to inform customers about upcoming deals? Do you want to build an engaged community online? Do you want to generate leads by driving social traffic to your website or landing pages? Starting with clearly defined goals will let you keep these guidelines in mind and keep yourself from floating in social media limbo.

2. Establish your brand identity on social platforms.

Defining your brand’s identity on your social media platforms is an important way to tie your social media into your marketing and brand strategy. For example, your logos, photos, descriptions, and business information should be consistent across your entire web presence, including your website, social sites, local listings, and more. Plus, this can give customers a stronger sense of your business’s message and goals, making it easier for them see how your business aligns with their needs.

3. Give yourself a social media makeover.

If you’ve already taken the dive into social media by claiming profiles in the past, it’s a good idea to take stock every few months to make sure that you’re presenting the latest information and details on your profiles. This is a good time to update visual content, such as changing your cover photo on Facebook or Twitter “cover photo” to align with current promotions or offers.. Make sure to replace low-resolution photos with higher quality versions. Make sure that you have brand consistency across all social media platforms.

4. Tailor your social media presence to what you can manage.

Having a presence on a variety of social media platforms is great, but it is important to be strategic when deciding what platforms are right for your business. Ask yourself: what can you realistically manage with regularly updated information and regular content posts? What platforms are right for your business? Consider your audience and your content to help you decide where to focus your efforts. For example, visually-based platforms like Instagram may not be the top choice for a plumber; but for a makeup artist or a photographer, Instagram is a perfect social media platform for regular engagements.

5. Publish timely, relevant content.

There are several types of content you can post on social media sites, but essentially, it breaks into two big groups – content such as blog posts, videos, and testimonials, that your business creates, and content that you share which has been created by others. It’s a good idea to balance both types of content to build relevance and provide value to your fanbase. For example, you can sharenews stories of timely events relevant to your business industry to engage your fanbase. Be mindful, sensitive, and tasteful when sharing content from other sources. And, make sure what you post is relevant. For example, a great time for a roofing company to advertise a special on social media would be right after a big storm that created some damage.

6. Cultivate a community.

Social media offers a unique way to create a community around your brand or business. In marketing theory and anthropology, consumer tribes are groups of people that experience camaraderie over shared loyalty to a brand, product, or business. Nurturing that loyalty by rewarding steadfast community members and being an active member of your own business’s community is an important way to get consumers to engage with you. Invite customers to share experiences, offer unique access and special moments for your social media fans and followers. Think about the brands you enjoy following on social media platforms and think about how to apply these to your own social media presence. Creating a sense of identity for customers or followers of your business will make them feel invested and proud to be supporting you.

7. Maintain consistency.

Posting consistency, message consistency, consistency of your brand’s voice: consistency is important on social media. This is especially important to keep in mind if more than one person is posting on behalf of your business or company. Everyone who contributes to your business’s social media presence needs to take the time to understand what sort of voice should be used when posting for your business. Plus, it’s important to establish a regular cadence for your posts – at least once a week is recommended, but daily posts will build more engagements and help better grow your presence.

8. Engage with other businesses, brands, and social media users.

While posting links to content is a good way to keep your social channels full of interesting things, it’s also important to be a part of ongoing conversations relevant to your business or industry online. For example, you can respond to or re-share social posts from users and businesses that you value. In the case of Twitter, this can mean re-tweeting posts from some of your favorite relevant businesses or blogs, or tagging other individuals or businesses that you admire through replies. On Facebook, you can tag collaborators or friends of your business when you post, or re-share posts from important influencers with your own audience. When you share other people’s content, it helps you build influence, credibility, and digital relationships.. It also means that people will notice and value your engagement with other members of the online business community.

9. Take part online.

It is so important to not only provide content, but to also engage as a member of your business’s community. On your own social media pages, this means asking questions and listening! Ask your audience what kind of content or services they would like to see from your business. Ask them what kind of specials they think would best benefit their budget or lifestyles. It is also important to, when appropriate, engage in online communities. Forums like Reddit can be great for businesses to interact with potential clients through participating in threads or hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything). You can participate in Twitter chats on relevant topics, which allow people to follow a similar thread of conversation using a common hashtag at a specific time. Industry or location-based LinkedIn groups are a great way to engage with consumers who are interested in your business industry or topics.

By being an active member of these communities, you can build your business’s visibility online, grow your fanbase, and establish your credibility as a thought leader and contributor. These platforms are essentially a way for you to share your expertise and personality with a wide audience, many of whom will be local to you and will be more likely to use your services simply for having seen you taking part in their online community.

10. Ask your audience to engage.

An easy way to get people to engage on social media is by simply asking them to. Let your social media community know you want their feedback on the types of content you posts, offers you provide, or community programs you offer. Ask your audience to share an important post with their friends, or to leave a comment. This can help drive more engagement on your posts. It seems simple because it is. People like to share their opinion and take actions that will help your business when they already feel invested in your business.

11. Make content visually appealing.

Today, social media posts that are image-driven and brief tend to perform well. A relevant image that is humorous, moving, or informative will catch people’s attention when they’re scrolling through their feeds. Find a balance between posting images and text-only content. Also, think about what your audience will want to share and let that help drive you. Check out these tips for creating images to fuel your business web presence online.

12. Take advantage of analytics.

Once you get going with building your social media presence, you don’t have to play the guessing game forever. What really works to drive engagement? Pay attention to on-site analytics that most major social media platforms offer today, and consider using a universal monitoring program to help you keep track of results, mentions, and other important metrics.

You can also figure out which of your posts are most successful with some good old-fashioned experimenting. Try posting at different times of day, on different days, and take note of which posts are more or less successful. Consider any other variables that may have affected the success of these posts, such as the popularity of the content. Take notes so that you can measure change over time so you can refine what times of day your audience is best receiving your posts and what kinds of content they are most receptive to.

13. Recognize your clients and audience.

Don’t let the technology factor of social media let you forget that in its simplest form, social media is a way to communicate with your customers and prospects. Keep basic business practices in place, like thanking your customers, clients, and followers for their business. Share your online promotions and events with your social media fanbase as well. Showcase client success stories and photos of your work (with permission, of course)! On special dates such as anniversaries or holidays, offer specials to clients who perform an action such as sharing your page or calling with a special code. Make sure your active clients and social media audience feel appreciated and they will pay you back with new followers and lead referrals.

Building your social media presence is an important part of online marketing for today’s local businesses. How does your social presence stack up? What else would you add to this list? Share your thoughts with a comment!

Yes, it was one of Casey Stengel’s best thoughts. How often do we think we are good enough, or better than our competitors, and yet our market share isn’t growing, or the competitors are gaining on us? We blame the products, the salespeople, and then we blame the salespeople again. But what if the salespeople are right—they don’t get enough qualified leads?

Maclean’s ranks universities in six broad areas based on 12 performance indicators, allocating a weight to each indicator. Universities are placed in one of three categories, recognizing the differences in types of institutions, levels of research funding, diversity of offerings, and breadth and depth of graduate and professional programs. Comprehensive universities have a significant degree of research activity and a wide range of programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including professional degrees.

To see more from our 2015 university rankings issue, visit www.macleans.ca/rankings. For a full description of the ranking methodology, click here. 

The post University Rankings 2015: Comprehensive appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Is Jian Ghomeshi, as of this moment, the most comprehensively humiliated person in the history of Canada? It is hard to imagine another candidate. As the star of CBC’s Q—let’s just review the chain of events here—Ghomeshi started to get nervous about his reputation for behaving disrespectfully to women. He demanded a pre-emptive court-martial from his employer, hoping to establish that he didn’t have a problem.

He got fired when his dossier of visual materials somehow failed to demonstrate the groovy consensuality of his sadistic bedroom activities. He decided that losing his rag publicly on Facebook was an appropriate follow-up to this. And then he disappeared altogether, as nearly a dozen women, appalled by his protestations of innocence, came forward with converging stories of not-so-groovy never-signed-up-for assault.

Ghomeshi’s suicide bombing of his own reputation led some writers to praise him, in an odd combination of handwashing and valediction, as a great host and interviewer despite his sins. I am afraid this goes to show that the defensive instincts of the Torontonian legacy-media claque operate even in a time of shame and soul-searching. If Ghomeshi really had any talent, it is hard to explain why the only moment in his career that anybody seems to remember with any vividness is his awkward 2009 collision with a truculent, peeved Billy Bob Thornton.

Certainly that is the highlight, the shred of Jian Ghomeshi that will survive: one short segment of legendarily awful radio. Ghomeshi’s downfall gave the Thornton clip a second life in the U.S., where it popped up often. It was about the only reason any American, aside from public-radio trainspotters and a few unfortunate FCC regulators, might have heard of Jian Ghomeshi

Q is, in theory, an “arts magazine” show. It has made Ghomeshi a sort of national compère, juxtaposing CanLit grannies and media blowhards with grade-A pop-star guests and amassing visibility from being at the centre of it all. He hosted the Giller prize gala for years, and was involved in the Polaris Music Prize, despite a near-total lack of militant taste, visible passion or discernible learning. No one seems to have thought it odd, much less brain-scaldingly inappropriate, that the Cute One Out of Moxy Früvous had come to be sitting in judgment on the music of Feist and Ron Sexsmith and Joel Plaskett.

Q, being the big weekday arts show on Radio One, can never just be an arts show: It inevitably tends to become a party establishment, a Transport House or a Reform Club for the country’s tight-knit Anglo creatives. Who could deny this? For, after all, did Ghomeshi’s Q carry on feuds? Did it disapprove, ever, of anything certified by the prize-lavish Canadian establishment? Did Jian Ghomeshi ever admit that some book or record, or even some writer or performer, bored him? Surely he was no more capable of it than Typhoid Mary was of getting typhoid.

It is not the purpose of Q to express individuality, but to express power, the harmonious, sweetly liberal, eternally-in-opposition power of the arts community. The show is not just coincidentally redolent of self-satisfaction: It is designed to communicate self-satisfaction, in the medical sense of “communicate.” The fans of Q are those who venerate the spiritual power of the traditional arts, and they rushed, unwisely and shamefully, to defend Ghomeshi, suggesting at first that he had been the victim of a Conservative party conspiracy. This cannot be accounted for, except on the premise that Ghomeshi was the leader-guru of a cult. Don’t we all know how cult leaders generally end up treating women?

The Toronto Star’s Kevin Donovan reports that when he confronted Ghomeshi about abuse allegations in a recent chance meeting, Ghomeshi told him, “You need to watch yourself . . . People in this city need to understand that I have a long memory.” Any normal person—let’s say, someone who earned his living making or fixing something—would surely react to this threat by saying, “Uh, you’re some douche with a radio show. What are you gonna do, sing a crappy comedy folk song about me?”

Imagine a world so crowded, unhealthy, and inbred that Ghomeshi could feel confident in making such a threat. Imagine that he could, in fact, create a regime of sexual terror that famous, experienced women hesitated to defy. Imagine that, even now, people are lined up in the hundreds, hoping to enter that world, praying for a chance to cling to its fringes. If you can.

The post The other problem with ‘Q’ appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Problem:  Tim, a software sales rep, had been having a rough day.  He’d been bombarded with questions from several customers and had gotten behind on a proposal that he needed to finish before the end of the day.  Then he got a call from Gene, a prospect who introduced himself by saying, “I’ve heard great things about your accounting software package.  I saw a demo about a year ago, and was not in a position to purchase it at the time, but since then it’s become very apparent that I need to integrate it immediately into my system.”

“Wow,” thought Tim.  “This will be easy.  It’s about time something went right today.”

Then Gene said, “I need to know about pricing and availability.  And tech support is important, too.  Tell me how that works.”

Tim went into his pitch.  He discussed tech support in detail, covered availability and other options, and explained that the price was $8,000 with 30-day terms.

Gene’s response was unexpected.  He said that $8000 was quite a hefty price tag and he needed a couple of days to consider the purchase more carefully.  He’d call Tim back next week.

Tim did a double take.  “What just happened?” he thought.  “This sale was in the bag, a sure thing, and now he’s thinking it over?  He said he needed the software right away.”  And that was the end of the call.

Analysis:  Tim got lazy, plain and simple.  He thought Gene was sold.  All he had to do was give Gene the info he needed, then write it up.  He got conned into doing a presentation without getting Gene to demonstrate why he was so excited about buying the software.  The entire transaction was conducted at the intellectual level.

Solution:  Confusing interest with commitment will lure you into taking shortcuts.  Take the time to qualify the prospect and make sure he’s real before you make your presentation.  In Tim’s case, a couple of quick questions would have made a world of difference.  He might have said, “Before we discuss pricing, help me understand why this software is so important.  I want to make sure the application is correct for you.  Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”  Of course, you’re probing for compelling reasons they are interested now, one year later.  “What’s changed?” in this case is a good question to ask.  Also, one of the most important things to find out is the financial impact of not implementing a solution.  Having discovered the financial impact and, assuming it was significant, you will find that the cost of the solution disappears as an objection.

Don’t take shortcuts!  Don’t assume anything.  Get the prospect involved at an emotional, not an intellectual, level.  Use the system, qualify completely, and get the sale.

Good Selling!!

Social media managers are required to have skills that any circus juggler would be proud of. There are so many aspects of the job, you need to be super-organized to manage social media marketing for SMBs let alone global enterprises. Hats off to all you social media managers out there, anyone who thinks it’s an easy job should have a go themselves.

Different sized businesses have different requirements, there is no one-app-fits-all solution. There are apps for social media out there to accommodate all business models and all budgets. Let’s take a look at some of the requirements of the role and some social media marketing apps to help you manage them, whether you have a small business or a large enterprise.

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Marketing

Social sharing and social listening are a huge part of any modern-day online marketing campaign. Coping with multiple social networks can be difficult and mind-blowingly stressful if you aren’t organized about the whole thing.

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Infusionsoft: Online Marketing for Small Business

Infusionsoft is marketing automation, a CRM, social sharing, eCommerce and landing page creator all designed specifically for small businesses to manage their social media and marketing. It lets you do all of those things in one simple platform, its pricing starts at $199 per month.

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ExactTarget: Online Marketing for Large Enterprises

ExactTarget is powerful online marketing cloud software for larger enterprises (although it still works for small business too). It has a CRM, sophisticated automation tools and the power of Salesforce behind it. The ExactTarget pricing structure is done on an individual basis.

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Email

While email marketing isn’t technically social media, it is often part of the role of a social media manager to create and manage email marketing campaigns, as another avenue for sharing your business content to targeted customers.

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Zoho Campaigns: Email Marketing for Small Business

Zoho Campaigns is email marketing for small to mid-sized businesses to help you to create and automate your stunning email campaigns. It integrates with Zoho CRM for an easy way to access your customer information. There is a freemium option and paid packages start at $5 per month.

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SendinBlue: Email Marketing for Large Enterprises

SendinBlue is a powerful-but-simple email marketing software which works well for businesses of any size as you can upgrade as many times as you like with their pay-as-you-go business model. Take advantage of their free plan or check out their paid options from $7.47 per month.

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eCommerce

eCommerce is another role that has been lumped in to the social media manager’s job description. Setting up and managing online stores and promoting them through social media can take up a huge part of your day if you aren’t using the right eCommerce software for the job.

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Brightpearl: eCommerce software for Small Business

Brightpearl is order management, inventory management, shipping management, accounting, invoicing and a CRM specifically for small businesses. It means you can collaborate with your team to know who has done what action (or not). Prices start from $99 per month.

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NetSuite SuiteCommerce: eCommerce for Large Enterprises

NetSuite SuiteCommerce is web store and eCommerce software for businesses of any size but particularly for larger enterprises. It is a multi-currency, multi-language, multi-country system. Pricing for NetSuite is on a case-by-case basis.

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Invoicing

Another role of social media managers can be to invoice customers and suppliers. Keeping track of those invoices and making sure that payments are made on time, or chased up if late is a full time job in itself without the right invoicing software to back you up.

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QuickBooks Online: Accounting and Invoicing software for Small Business

QuickBooks Online is a full service accounting, billing and invoicing system for small businesses. With QuickBooks you can keep track of all your financial in-comings and out-goings with an easy-to-use dashboard. After the 30 day free trial, pricing starts at $26.95 per month.

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FinancialForce Accounting: Salesforce Accounting App for Large Enterprises

FinancialForce Accounting has the clout of Salesforce which makes it an ideal accounting and invoicing app for large enterprises, as well as smaller businesses. Its systems are easy to learn and easy to implement, saving time and effort. There is a 14 day free trial and monthly pricing is on request.

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Time-tracking

Even SMBs need to manage their time-tracking. It is all too easy to while away your day on social media so a little organization will make sure that all staff members are paid for the time they have spent being productive.

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Timesheets.com: Time-Tracking Software for Small Business

Timesheets.com is web-based time-tracking for payroll and project purposes. It is efficient and accurate software which can be accessed from anywhere. There is free training available and optional mobile access. There is a freemium option and monthly prices start from $9 per month.

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When I Work Scheduling: Time-Tracking Software for Large Enterprises

When I Work Scheduling is an ideal software solution for time-tracking in large enterprises. It allows you to communicate easily with larger numbers of staff and keep track of everyone’s schedules. For those with five employees or less it is free and monthly subscriptions can be as low as $0.25 per employee.

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Any of the above apps will assist you with your daily tasks and make life a little simpler and less stressful. I have made suggestions for SMBs and for large enterprises but for those in the middle there are lots of solutions out there for you too. It’s time to get organized and make your job look as easy as most folks think it is already! There is a software solution for every business type, of every size and to cater to every budget, I hope we have helped you to come to a decision about the right software for YOU.

Take a look at more apps and software for social media, marketing, finance and accounting and time-tracking in our GetApp marketplace. Don’t forget you can compare apps side-by-side with our GetApp comparisons.

When it comes to online marketing, the sky is the limit. We’re talking:

• SEO / SEM
• PPC / Ad management
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• In-bound marketing
• Influencers
• Brand penetration
• Integrated marketing
• …[insert tomorrow's marketing buzzword here!]

At the end of the day, however, online marketing efforts boil down to a few key business goals, and it is these business goals that we focus on at the start of any project. In fact, we start our online marketing projects with a fairly extensive set of questions that we discuss with our clients. As of this rambling, we are up to 43 questions in our questionnaire (yikes – need to whittle that down!), but here are the most important questions that we really try and force, er… encourage, our clients to answer. Without these answers, we cannot provide the best service!

So here goes. Ready to start your online marketing? Make sure you can answer the following:

1. What are the primary business goals for your online presence (E.g. branding/identity reinforcement, improved access to information, audience communications, sales, etc.)?
2. Who are your competitors and what makes you different?
3. Who are we talking to? Is there a specific target audience associated with your organization? Please be as specific as possible – demographics, location, behavior, tech savviness, etc.
4. Why would this audience want to talk to you?
5. What is the value of these visitors? (Not sure what that means? This might help! )
6. What is the most important action you want these visitors to your site to complete? This must be specific, measurable and realistic (E.g. download a white paper, join, buy something, search a database, etc.) These are your conversion goals!
7. What OFFLINE marketing tactics are you currently using or considering?
8. What are your internal resources for your marketing efforts? Specifically, who generates content for your website and marketing efforts now?
9. What is your marketing budget – both online and offline?
10. And finally, and most importantly, what outcome will make this project successful? How will you measure success?

Serious questions, right?? We never said this would be easy! But it really is important to answer these questions before starting an SEO program, social media outreach, email communications, or any other online marketing tactics.

When I am invited to “teach leadership” to managers in corporations, I use the first few minutes to address the issue of where and how one learns to lead—and what gets in the way. I usually begin with a confession and a question.

My confession is always the same. That I am hoping to learn something from our encounter, brief as it may be, that I will remember and use. This is what I believe good leaders and good teachers have in common—the commitment to keep learning as they practice.

I have never met a manager who disagrees. Good leaders, they tell me, like good teachers, raise tough questions and make others feel stretched, empowered, inspired. Mediocre ones issue commands and make others feel overlooked, bored, underutilized.

My question is different every time. It usually has to do with some aspect of leading that people in the room will have divergent views about. Is honesty necessary to lead, or just desirable? Or: What makes a responsible follower?

Raising a controversial question is not an unusual way to begin a presentation. It energizes the audience. But keep the debate going for more than a few minutes, and regardless of how informative it is, restlessness begins to set in. There’s inevitably a challenge like, “We are spending precious time here, you are getting paid for yours, and we are no closer to a clear answer.”

I have come to wait, if with some trepidation, for such remarks.

I am a professor. Learning is, broadly speaking, my job. And yet no matter how enthusiastically we agree that good teachers and good leaders are perpetual learners, and that being offered a difficult question is empowering, it does not take long before I am reminded that I am not supposed to keep questioning and learning—not so publicly at least—on the company’s dime.

I am supposed to deliver.

The reminder is hardly surprising but how quickly it comes is revealing. It is a great illustration of a contradiction that affects most managers every day: learning is the most celebrated neglected activity in the workplace.

Everyone says that learning is essential for companies’ success—and for your own. And yet, on a daily basis, who cares for your learning? No one. People care about what you have learned. They care about your results. Learning is great as long as you do it quietly, in your own time.

This is only fair, you may say. In business, after all, delivering is what counts. Learning matters to the extent that it helps one deliver and does not get in the way.

But learning does get in the way of delivering. Especially learning of the transformational kind—that makes us tentative, confused, and ineffective for a while. And we do not neglect it just because we lack time.

Consider the popular 70:20:10 “formula” stating that 70% of learning happens on the job, 20% through coaching and mentoring, and 10% takes place in classrooms.

While little empirical evidence supports it—the scholar to whom the formula is often attributed recently described it as “folklore”—plenty of organizations invoke it as a cornerstone of their learning strategies.

The reason we have turned folklore into a formula, I believe, is because it resonates with the safest, most efficient kind of learning—the incremental kind. We acquire an idea and we practice it with some feedback on the way. That eventually results in mastery. That kind of learning is additive—and addictive.

Transformational learning rarely builds up so smoothly. It does not just make us more knowledgeable. It reveals what mastery prevents us from knowing. It does not just refine our skills. It changes our perspective. And it is not just a matter of time.

A class, a reading, a difficult conversation with a colleague, may take 1% of our time. And yet they may radically alter how we approach the other 99%, raising questions that jolt us into learning new things from everyday experiences. A challenging assignment, conversely, may take most of our time and yield little new insights.

Take your job’s design. Does it leave space for you to process your experiences and draw a few conclusions or imagine alternatives? Do you have access to people who see the world from another perspective—or just to good old feedback? How often does your team have open conversations about your work together?

And outside of work, are you getting enough sleep, time off your smartphone, idle breaks, walks, exercise, and all those other things known to make you more productive and imaginative—let alone live a more decent existence?

The question then is not whether we have time for learning, at work or elsewhere. It is what kind of learning we are encouraged, and have the courage, to pursue.

We seldom visit the periphery of our knowledge and competence—the region where transformational learning happens—without feeling threatened, exposed, or ashamed. (That is why when we meet a friendly, forgiving face out there—which makes learning easier—we cherish it. We call that a mentor.) People like failure only in inspirational speeches. In real life we endure it, at best, and come to value it only if and when its lessons become clear. Workplace pressures and norms just turn our instinct to steer clear of failure into a habit.

Look past the rhetoric and you will find signs of the neglect of transformational learning everywhere. In the workplace as well as in many business school courses, with their emphasis on tools that can be taught in a weekend and applied on Monday morning. The learning that we privilege is the safer, incremental kind. Learning that makes us better at what we do but hardly frees us up to revisit why we do it that way or what, say, we may want to do next.

No wonder innovation lags, personal change eludes us despite our best intentions, and we hesitate to make the moves that would most help us lead.

This is most true for those managers whose work is so fast and visible that the pressure to keep up and prove oneself all but overwhelms the aspiration to step back and reflect. Their stifling predicament, however, is hardly a misfortune.

Like a professor reminded to deliver rather too quickly, they are in a position that requires them to keep learning and makes it harder at the same time.

Contradictory as they may be, those are the very circumstances that, throughout history, have forged many a leader. Few may be able to keep learning despite the pull not to. But those who do become the kind of leaders who, because they care for learning, don’t just attract dependent followers. They develop other leaders.

In that predicament lies, in short, the most valuable learning opportunity of all: the opportunity to recognize that transformational learning always involves defiance—of complacency, conformity, and norms. As such, it takes courage, not just time. And courage, in turn, is easier to muster and sustain with some support. Surely organizations could make it a bit easier. But it will never feel entirely safe.

In the end, good leaders are seldom spoon-fed. They are usually tempered. They pursue causes and questions that matter—even when it feels risky and no one else seems to care. When learning is too easy, it doesn’t teach us to lead.

The credit card industry processes a massive volume of transactions — about $4 trillion this year in the U.S., according to BI Intelligence estimates. With so much money in play, it's no wonder that a host of startups are trying to carve out a niche for themselves and offer services to merchants and consumers that will rewrite the value they get from every credit card payment.

But the credit card processing industry isn't going to change over night. These startups are entering into an extremely complex and entrenched space. 

In a recent report from BI Intelligence, we look at the complicated series of interactions among different legacy players that powers each credit card payment, outlining the six essential links in the credit credit payment chain. We explain what each of these players do, and how much value they add, and explain why two parts of this chain — the hardware providers and merchant service providers (MSPs) — are particularly vulnerable to disruption.

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Trial Today >>

Here are some of our key findings:

• The credit card companies themselves aren't going anywhere for now. Visa and MasterCard in particular will remain an indispensable part of the chain because they don't actually process payments. They simply provide the rails that the credit card system runs on. Credit card processors like First Data that actually do the work of processing merchants' credit card transactions on the back-end are also in a strong position.
• Two pieces in the chain are particularly vulnerable to disruption: the makers of the actual hardware — basically card readers and registers — that are used to physically accept card payments at stores, and the hundreds of vendors known as merchant service providers, or MSPs, which set businesses up to accept credit cards.
• Point-of-sale hardware faces an immediate threat from mobile devices. These devices are cheap and easy to implement, they do not require consumers to adopt new behaviors, and they free up retailer space previously devoted to bulky hardware.
• In addition, the new payments companies — including PayPal, Leaf, Revel Systems, Square, and others — could shove traditional MSPs aside as they bridge the offline and online worlds. They pair their mobile registers with consumer-side smartphone apps, and often also provide additional merchant services, like software for loyalty programs or for parsing online consumer data. These new companies want to replace the old players that focused mainly on logistics, i.e., helping merchants take credit card payments.
• But it's not all doom and gloom yet for legacy MSPs: they have existing relationships with the majority of merchants who accept credit cards and with banks. They also have established marketing channels and large sales forces. Large MSPs will move to acquire new payments technologies to squelch the disruption threat.

In full, the report: 

• Sizes the U.S. credit and debit card industry, taking stock of offline vs. online volume and growth
• Gives a detailed breakdown of the entire credit card transaction process
• Defines what role each of the players occupies within that chain
• Underscores which players in the credit card transaction process are most ripe for disruption from new payments companies, and which ones remain in the strongest positions
• Explains what services these new payments companies will most likely offer to merchants and consumers
• Examines how legacy players are responding to the threats from these new payments entrants

Join the conversation about this story »

Listening is often considered the softest of the soft skills. So the idea of being a powerful listener can seem like an oxymoron. And yet, my work with executives has taught me that when they really listen to discover what is essential, the impact can be astonishing. It’s one of the most important ways to engage employees.

We know that engagement is a challenge. A recent Gallup survey found that 63% of the global workforce is not engaged. That adds up to waste in the range of half a trillion dollars globally. Putting it more positively, Jim Harter, the Chief Scientist for Gallup, has found that “publicly traded organizations that achieve top decile in our employee engagement database outperform their competition on earnings per share by 147%.”

With both the waste and opportunity implied in these findings, it begs the question, “How can we improve engagement scores quickly and inexpensively?” Among the short list of items that really move the engagement needle is that people believe that “at work, my opinions seem to count.” Listening — really listening — matters.

Many companies fall into the trap of trying to engage their employees by doing more – which is, in essence, just creating more noise. I have seen this firsthand in Silicon Valley, where managers sometimes go to extreme measures with perks like 24/7 food; show-stopping offsite events with concerts; sports competitions; clubs on every subject from hula dancing to American Idol and many other bizarre and bombastic activities. I believe in the power of play, but at their worst, such activities can completely miss the mark. They sometimes remind me of Pleasure Island in the movie Pinocchio, where the puppet almost becomes a donkey.

Such panem et circenses (“bread and circuses”) may appease some employees, but I am not convinced that these types of “perks” engage people’s hearts and minds in a way that enables them to give their highest and best contribution — in the end, they still treat employees like wooden puppets, and they mirror the problem described by Guy Kawaski as a “bozo explosion,” a downward slide that seems inevitable after a company achieves success. Moreover, such gimmicks don’t make the cut in Gallup’s top twelve engagement measurements.

Deep engagement does not begin with getting people to listen to you; it begins when you really listen to them. Powerful listening is one of the rarest executive practices today, not because of a lack of skill – although that is often the case – but because it’s a skill that’s under attack from social media, smart phones and the ubiquitous expectation of instant reactions. Have you ever been in the middle of a conversation when the other person just started checking his phone? Of course you have. We have a listening famine going on and it’s a shame, because in a knowledge age, so much value creation lies in the ability to figure out what’s important—by listening.

The Quakers practice a particularly powerful way to listen. They conduct what’s called a “Clearness Committee,” which is founded on the belief that, as author Parker Palmer has written, “each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems.” Here is how it works:

First, a member of the Quaker community defines a key decision, personal problem or question that represents a dilemma for a member of their community, who is the “focus person.” Then, they form a committee to meet with the focus person, inviting only select people (the “members”). These members must first commit to the highest levels of confidentiality: nobody can speak of the meeting afterwards, unless the focus person specifically asks to discuss it. Members can take notes, but they must be given to the focus person at the end of the committee meeting.

The committee then meets in an offsite location, where the focus person spends 10 minutes presenting a concise statement of the problem, including any relevant background information. The committee creates a safe space for the focus person to speak, prioritizing that space over the social comfort of the members. For example, there should be no talking between committee members, no loud laughter, no side conversations, no phones or computers, and no rapid-fire questions that could overwhelm the focus person.

Then, there are two hours of interaction, during which members of the committee may only speak to the focus person by asking honest questions – which are not the same as manipulative questions. Manipulative questions have answers embedded in them, such as: “Have you ever thought that this is really happening because you did X?” Honest questions are defined as questions that members couldn’t possibly know the answer to, such as “Did you ever feel this way before?” Honest questions are, simply, all inquiry and no advocacy.

Before the meeting is over, the focus person can allow people to reflect back what they have heard. Again, there should be no opinions offered, just reflections. Five minutes before the end of the meeting, the members are allowed to affirm the focus person for showing strength and courage in sharing vulnerably deep insights. Even at this point there is no advice given and there are no suggestions made. The idea is that the focus person goes away and listens to his or her own inner voice for continued guidance.

The clearness committee is a fascinating listening innovation. If it seems too intense or involved for regular use, you can still apply many of its aspects in your interactions with your team. For example, you can have a rule that you and your team will only ask honest questions: in this way you can avoid the manipulative questions that complicate communication. When one of your team members comes to you with a particular challenge, you can ask her questions to define what the real dilemma is, instead of jumping in with premature, well-intended solutions that actually miss the mark. Finally, you can increase the ratio of listening to speaking by asking questions and spending at least 50% of any conversation actively listening to the other person speak.

The bottom line is this: if you want to engage your employees at a whole new level, if you want to become a person of greater influence, and if you want to discover a new kind of power—listen.

Most email marketers are fully aware of the benefits – and the challenges – of an e-newsletter. These regularly scheduled email messages go on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. (I don’t know anyone who has a yearly email newsletter, but I guess it’s possible.) They’re usually filled with feature stories (or short blurbs that lead to longer articles online) and generally don’t have a “hard sell” call to action, although selling or customer retention is usually the ultimate goal.

There are many reasons these newsletters keep showing up in your inbox:

• They can be fantastic vehicles for engagement, putting your brand in front of your customers and prospects on a regular basis.
• They set your organization up as a leader in your field or industry. It’s your chance to showcase your resident experts, whether they’re technical geniuses or trend gurus.
• And of course, they give you a chance to regularly promote your products and services.

However plentiful the benefits may be, some email marketers find themselves sending out the latest issue of a newsletter just because it’s on the calendar (or because the boss expects it to go out), not because they’ve got something relevant or interesting to say.

Other marketers are reluctant to even launch a regular newsletter because they’re daunted by the amount of work involved. And that’s too bad, because 68% of marketers agree that e-newsletters are the best type of email messages to help to achieve their business goals – at least, according to the 2013 DMA National Client Email Report.

During my years as the editor and publisher of an email newsletter, I’ve found that there are several factors working against the regular delivery of relevant email newsletters.

• Too little time. Making sure a regular newsletter goes out regularly, on deadline, every time, is a challenge. Plus, when there’s no room to stop and catch your breath, there’s no time to test, redesign, and optimize your message.
• Lack of content: How do you find something new to say every time you have a newsletter to put together? Sure, you can count on seasonal features, depending on your industry, but fresh articles and new insights can sometimes be hard to get.
• No focus: Once you’ve got an email newsletter in place, stakeholders start coming out of the woodwork. Can you promote this discount program? Will you include an article from the CEO about a charity? It’s hard to say no – especially when you’re running low on content (and time).

So what does it take to start and maintain a compelling email newsletter program, and how can you make sure you’re getting the most value from the work you put into it? Here are five tips for making the most of a newsletter program.

1. Create an Editorial Calendar

Knowing what’s going out when is a great way to spot gaps in your content strategy. You can make sure you’re hitting all the top focus areas while still making room for stakeholder content. When a piece of content doesn’t fit into the strategy, you’ll have a good reason for turning it down. An editorial calendar should include an outline of the content and images you’ll be running in each edition, along with who is responsible for delivering it, as well as reviewers, deadlines, and so on.

2. Develop an Executive Editorial Board

Getting stakeholders together in in a room, real or virtual, is a great way to get some alignment into the strategy. At least, in a perfect world, that’s the way it works. In the real world, it’s more likely you’ll get a bunch of people who never show up for meetings and who end up sending you content at the last minute, demanding that you run it in tomorrow’s issue. Avoid this problem with an editorial board, and make sure they have the power to veto last-minute additions – and call out people who miss their deadlines.

3. Design for Your Readers

Pay attention to how your recipients read your messages. Optimize your design for mobile using responsive templates that adapt to the device being used. Use a service like Litmus (which is integrated with Act-On’s email composer) to see exactly how your message will look across different devices and email clients. In addition, you may want to keep the content short and drive readers online to read the whole article. It frees up your email for more topics, allows some breathing room (especially on mobile devices), and sends more traffic to your site.

4. Make it Relevant

Everyone is busy these days, and the best way to make sure your newsletter gets read is to make it as relevant as possible. I’ve worked on newsletters that had thousands of different versions – all generated using dynamic content. It included this kind of customized content:

• Tech support and troubleshooting for recently purchased products
• Lifestyle features focused on the products owned. For a mobile phone, the recipient would get an article about extending battery life. The owner of an eBook reader would receive an article about new bestsellers available for download.
• A targeted upsell and cross-sell promotion. For example, “Here’s why your smart phone needs a protective case,” and, “Your universal remote control should really have a rechargeable battery.”
• Finally, there would be a geographically relevant feature. Readers in colder regions got an article about space heater safety tips. Readers in sunny climates saw information about portable air conditioners.

Of course, you might not have the time or the resources to find, create, or curate the many pieces of content it takes to support this level of customization. But even a single piece of content that’s personalized to the interests of your readers can go a long way to making them feel like your message is worth their time.

5. Test and Optimize

Remember when I said that the relentless pace of newsletter publishing can often leave you no time to test, redesign, and optimize your message? Well, you can always do what I did – take some time off. Identify your slowest periods, if you have them, and use the time to go on hiatus for a week or a month, and test during this time.

Take advantage of the insights you’ve gained from testing to revise or completely redesign the newsletter – and be sure to test it again once you do. During the rest of the year, continually test small things, one at a time. Are text links better than buttons? Do pictures of people resonate more than photos of things? A simple A/B test can tell you a lot about your reader preferences and help you optimize results.

Don’t Do It Just to Do It

One more piece of advice: Figure out whether or not you really need a newsletter, because sometimes they aren’t the best way to achieve your business objectives. Track clickthrough rates, conversions, and revenue generated. See if unsubscribes jump after the latest issue goes out. You might be better served by (and your audience might be more receptive to) sending out bulletins as events warrant. Only when you look at the numbers can you know for sure. After all, email may be cheap, but it’s not free – especially when it has a negative impact on results.

Why did Jean Tirole win the Nobel Prize in Economics? Not for the highly-regarded work on competition between small numbers of firms with which his career began more than thirty years ago but for more recent work on how carefully structured regulation can improve performance relative to unbridled market forces. This is a reminder that serious students of market performance take market failures seriously.

But what many economists generally gloss over is a notion that I will argue is highly complementary to market failures: management failures. For policy-making purposes economists assume that all businesses act rationally in the pursuit of profits. The possibility that that might not be the case is generally ignored, or even when mentioned, quickly finessed.

Even Tirole betrays this bias. The section on the profit maximization hypothesis at the end of the introductory chapter of his classic 1988 textbook on industrial organization concludes by saying that even if a firm doesn’t maximize profits, it can be treated, for the purposes of many of its interactions with the outside world, as if it does. Partly because profit maximization is a bedrock assumption and partly because maximization is a basic mathematical tool, economists have trouble dealing with firms that are not maximizing profits.

In this worldview, disasters only happen because the rules of the game in which the businesses operate must be flawed. Economists disagree about the actual incidence of these market failures and the cost-effectiveness of governmental efforts to tackle them, but they broadly agree that the only factors that prejudice performance are external to businesses.

Businesses and management experts, in contrast, tend take the opposite position. Thus, Dominic Barton, among many others, traces capitalism’s current problems to capitalists who work with time horizons that are shorter than they ought to be. And Michael Porter and Mark Kramer point to a big pot of gold for businesses that properly internalize the social consequences of their decisions instead of incorrectly externalizing them. In this view, poor performance is (mostly) caused by management failures — specifically, miscalculations of various sorts — rather than inherent flaws in the workings of the marketplace. And specific prescriptions for practitioners are served up that are supposed to improve both private profits and public welfare.

Neither school of thought, though, has it quite right. In their efforts to characterize important failures as being (for one group) always market failures and (for the other group) management failures, the two groups end up missing out on each other’s insights.

For an example, reconsider the financial crisis. Some, arguably including the Fed Chairman who presided over its eruption, Alan Greenspan, were utopians who thought nothing could go wrong on either front: the rules of the game or managerial responses to them. But the financial sector was clearly subject to a number of the market failures that were well known to most economists.

To begin with, quite a few parts of it are heavily concentrated at a global level (the credit ratings business, for example, or global investment banking), and many more at the national level (just six financial institutions account for 46% of all U.S. banking assets and as such are “too big to fail”). This small-numbers problem invalidates Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” mechanism in which good performance is supposed to be ensured by large numbers of competitors, none controlling more than a sliver of the market and none, therefore, with the power to jack up prices.

Other aspects of the financial sector highlight some of the problems with markets that economists have added to their list since the time of Adam Smith. Because of informational imperfections (think subprime mortgages), segments within financial services have a history of provoking manias, panics, and crashes — volatility exacerbated by recent innovations such as exotic derivatives and high frequency trading. Since capital is like air to other markets, problems with the financial sector can have important effects on the rest of the economy, a version of the market failure referred to under the rubric of externalities.

But having run through those economic problems with financial market attributes, the meltdown probably shouldn’t be chalked up just to them: missteps on the part of key managers also contributed. Consider Lehman Brothers, whose collapse was the trigger for broader sectorial travails. In the aftermath of Dick Fuld’s refusal to agree with the terms proposed by the government to help bail it out, his net worth was estimated to have collapsed from close to $1 billion to about $100 million. Similar points could be made about Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns and many others.

Nor was the government — beyond Greenspan and the Fed — blameless in the run-up to the crisis. The push to expand home ownership swelled the subprime mortgages that ended up sinking large chunks of the financial sector. Bailouts — not just the ones after the crisis but also prior ones, such as that of Long Term Capital in 1998 — aggravated the problem of “moral hazard” that informational imperfections can engender. And the complexity of some of the post-crisis regulations seems, in a world of human rather than superhuman managers, to have slowed down recovery from it.

Given such realities — which could also be illustrated with other key sectors such as health care and education — the right response is to pay attention to both market and management failures. Doing so expands one’s sense of both the room to improve performance and the levers that might be pulled to do so. It also helps enhance credibility — another important consideration since recent surveys suggest that Americans, at least, are similarly dissatisfied with their government and with large corporations.

Finally and most importantly, considering both management failures and market failures helps spotlight the most serious problems because of an interaction effect: market failures expand the scope for management failures to matter a lot. For instance, poor decisions by managers at a company will be of more concern if the company is one of a few or, even worse, a monopoly. Choices about how high to set investment hurdles are more likely to be an issue in highly volatile market conditions. And managers are likely to be more confused about what they should internalize and what they should ignore when there are some externalities.

But to see these complementarities you have to take both market failures and management failures seriously — and not enough people are doing that as yet.

 

This post is part of a series leading up to the 2014 Global Drucker Forum, taking place November 13-14 in Vienna, Austria. See the rest of the series here.

Though it's unpleasant to admit it, there's a lot more that goes into being successful at work than merely being good at the tasks you're assigned.

It's also about giving people the perception that you're competent, getting the right people to like you, and — in some hostile workplaces — preventing your rivals from tearing you down.

Users on Quora recently discussed the question: "How do you win at office politics?"

Their answers shed some light on what you can do to get ahead:

1. Never let your guard down.

One of the trickiest parts of working in an office is conducting yourself professionally during work-related social events. While the company holiday party might be presented as a chance for you to put back a few beers and enjoy yourself, it's important to remember that one wrong comment in a relaxed setting could tarnish the reputation you've spent all year building.

"'Informal' environments are a lie," writes Quora user Michael O. Church. "Complainers (even justified ones) and blowhards still get shot in the head, in these 'informal' environments. It's just not publicized."

2. Be useful to your peers.

Quora user James Liu shares this piece of advice given to him by his father: "If you share your knowledge with others and do this well, you will never be redundant."

While it might seem counterintuitive to help others learn the skills and information that could otherwise distinguish you from everyone else, doing so builds trust with your coworkers that could lead to them being your ally down the road.

Additionally, these people may be willing to pass along information to you, whether it's a tip on how to do your job better or a heads up about a coming organizational shift at your company.

"When you expose yourself, you are bartering knowledge for trust," Liu writes.

3. Don't be a gossip.

It's tempting to trash someone you're competing for a promotion against while they're not around, but speaking negatively about your coworkers can do more harm than good.

Quora user Nick Baily explains that people are smart enough to figure out that if you're giving them the dirt about another one of your coworkers, you're likely to do the same thing to them.

"When someone instigates a conversation where you would be inclined to b*** about another coworker and you don't take the bait, you send a very strong message that you can be trusted in the other direction too," he writes.

And when it comes to speaking negatively about those in power, it's best to be very, very careful.

"Assume everything you say at work will be heard by the boss," writes Alan Cagle.

4. Always be doing something — or at least try to look like you are.

At work, you're essentially managing two different things — your actual productivity, and how that productivity is perceived by your bosses and peers.

Michael O. Church says you should avoid being seen doing useless activities at work like chit-chatting with your friends. This gives people the impression that your time is not particularly valuable and sends the message that the only thing you're adding to the company is a likable personality.

If you don't have anything to do, he recommends finding a skill you'd like to learn and working to get better at it.

"You'll probably never get fired for reading machine learning papers on your computer (you'll stay out of trouble, with your head down)," Church writes. "But you will get pushed out or demoted (eventually) if you project low status, and putting a visible low value on your time has that effect."

5. Tactfully promote your accomplishments.

It's hard to impress your bosses if they don't know what a good job you're doing. You can do this by taking a moment out of a one-on-one meeting with your manager to bring up the specific things you have done — winning a new client, updating the company's employee handbook, etc.

Career coach Lea McLeod recommends in an article on The Muse that you put your personal achievements in the context of how they help the company meet its longterm goals, this way there's no doubt about what you're adding to the team.

To avoid sounding arrogant, make sure to spread praise to the coworkers who helped you succeed.

6. Know your purpose.

There's no use trying to climb the corporate ladder if you don't know why you're doing it. Are you trying to make money to support your family? Do you have a desire to create products people love? Or is there some social goal you hope to achieve through business?

It's important to keep what you're trying to accomplish in mind at all times, otherwise you'll lose focus of why want you wanted to excel at your company in the first place. And in some sense, that's just as frustrating as not succeeding at all.

"Without purpose, you're just playing a game and can't expect anything to come of it," writes Quora user Nick Yandell.

NOW WATCH: Here's Exactly What A Hiring Manager Scans For When Reviewing Resumes

 

SEE ALSO: 7 Hard Truths About Life That People Don't Like To Admit

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I recently wrote about Teaching Our Customers To Buy. In the article I mentioned the importance of customers selling within their own organizations. To many, that’s an unnatural, detestable act. After all, if they wanted to sell, they’d be sales people, wouldn’t they?

“Selling,” internally, is critical to people getting things done and moving their initiatives, strategies, programs forward. Within organizations, there’s always selling going between people and groups, but people don’t tend to think of it that way.

Too often, also, people are relatively naïve about how to get what they want within their organizations. They think, “I put together a good argument….. I put together a good business case…… My boss is my buddy, she and I have a great relationship, she’ll approve….. They have to do this, I really need it….” (Starting to sound a lot like what goes through the minds of sales people.)

But internally, there is always competition. Other points of view, other approaches to solving the same thing. The inevitable political jockeying. Other ideas or projects that are addressing completely different issues—They want a new cafeteria and I’m trying to get funding for a new marketing automation system.

In every organization, there are always competing ideas for resources, funds, and management/executive attention. Management can’t and won’t do everything. Part of the job of management is to drive the projects, programs and initiatives that have the most impact on the execution of the organization’s strategies and priorities.

And then there is always the alternative of doing nothing.

Getting things done within organizations requires strong sales skills–but most people don’t think of it that way. Consequently, people don’t use many of the tools, strategies, processes that come natural to high performing sales people. As a result, they struggle in moving things forward and getting approval.

It’s not limited to lower or mid level people, I recently met an executive running a multi-billion part of a larger corporation. He was trying to drive some very big changes, but struggling to get alignment and support with his own management team (selling downward). Additionally, he wasn’t getting the approvals/investment from the CEO and Board. Too often, execs in non sales roles (even some in sales roles) don’t think of “selling” as a method of getting things done.

We can help our customers move their buying initiatives forward, for our mutual success, buy helping them both recognize they have to sell internally, and to help give them the skills to “sell.”

Some of the simplest things we do every day in selling are the things our customers need to do to buy and to sell internally:

Qualifying: We look at, “is the customer committed to do something.” Internally, customers need to do the same thing. “Is our management committed to this change? Are they prepared to invest the time and resources necessary to support the change? Do they have a high sense of urgency for this initiative, or are there higher priorities?” Our customers need to qualify both their management and organizations before they even start an initiative.

Often, and approach to getting senior management and the organization qualified is through providing Insight. They need to bring new ideas to their management and organizations, “There are opportunities we are missing, we can improve the way we do things, we can better serve our customers, we can outperform our competition…..” Our ability to engage customers in Insight based conversations helps them sell internally.

Discovery: This is the most important part of selling–it’s also the most important part of buying. We work with customers to understand their needs, requirements, priorities. We want to understand who’s involved in the decision, alternatives they may be considering. Our customers go through similar things in their buying process. They have to align their buying team around solving a particular problem. There may be other groups (competitors) looking at different solutions, or other groups (competitors) who will be competing for the same funding in entirely different areas. They need to understand what they need to do to get approval–who are the decision makers, what are their hot buttons,,,,,

Proposing: They need to create a plan and a proposal. It has to address the issues executive management cares about, it has to provide a business justification and value proposition that is meaningful and relevant to executive management. They have to be prepared to handle objections, disagreement, concerns.

Closing: Both of us have to get the order. Lots of times it’s a lot of detailed stuff–getting scheduled to present and get approvals/signatures from management, the review with the CAPEX committee, and so forth.

Call Planning: Just as we plan our meetings/calls to be purposeful and accomplish our goals, our customers need to plan their meetings with the team, execs, and others in the organization. They have to set agendas, objectives, understand/anticipate potential objections, challenges. Make sure the right people are attending, close on next steps and actions.

I’ll stop here, the point is that a lot of the things that come naturally to us as sales people are not natural ways for our customers to think. They aren’t things they do to get what they want, to get approval to go forward, to have the ability to spend money and invest resources.

If our customers want to get what they want, they have to sell internally. We can create huge value in helping them recognize the need to sell and how they might be most effective in selling.