Rnordman

You would think that San Francisco, with its close proximity to tech-centric Silicon Valley, would have some of the fastest internet in the world. 

According to a new report from the Open Technology Institute, that just isn't the case.

Researchers at the institute analyzed internet speeds in 24 cities in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Surprisingly, San Francisco ranked near the bottom in terms of download speed, beating only Mexico City, Berlin, Dublin, and London. 

It seems that San Francisco was a bit of an anomaly in OTI's analysis. As Curbed points out, the fastest internet costs less in San Francisco than in other US cities. A download speed of 200 megabits per second (mbps) can be purchased for $30 per month, while that same speed costs about $300 a month in New York and Los Angeles. 

OTI writes in the connectivity report: "During our regression analysis, every city except San Francisco, CA suggested that as a customer pays more, she receives a higher speed. But in San Francisco, CA, we found the relationship between speed and price is negative, due to some very cheap, fast plans that break from the city’s pricing trend."

Here are the cities with the fastest Internet speeds, compared to average monthly prices. San Franciscans may have some of the slowest Internet connections, but users pay around the same as people living with the fastest connections in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. 

SEE ALSO: I Took An Online Coding Class, And Now I Have A Huge Appreciation For What Programmers Do All Day

Join the conversation about this story »

This time last year, our own Ben Davis reviewed Hyatt’s multichannel web presence taking in everything from its desktop site, social channels and mobile apps.

Ben found its digital presence didn’t really mark the luxury hotel chain out from its competitors, but instead provided reliable, easy-to-use functionality, nothing more and nothing less.

Hyatt has just announced the launch of revamped mobile app and mobile site with many new features, so now seems like the perfect opportunity to revisit the brand’s small screen concerns. 

Concierge

After staying at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo recently during my honeymoon I can say that I’ve never experienced customer service quite so efficient and personal. 

I’m interested to see if this translates to digital channels. 

We miss you, @CosmicLLC! No punishment or ill will from us, promise! ^EV

— Hyatt Concierge (@HyattConcierge) September 29, 2014

@TriciaBanach We are delighted to have you as our guest at Hyatt Regency Orlando! Have a wonderful time.^AA

— Hyatt Concierge (@HyattConcierge) November 4, 2014

Notice the above tweets don't carry direct @mentions. These are clearly loyal customers just generally talking about the company. Hyatt Concierge was monitoring Twitter for mentions and engaged directly with them.

It certainly puts Hyatt foremost in the customer's mind and is a neat little surprise for the follower. There are a huge amount of examples just like the above on Hyatt's Twitter feed.

Complaints are dealt with quickly and are followed up personally by the customer care operator. 

@CheekyTiggerBel I am so sorry for the inconvenience. Kindly DM me your stay info and I will follow up with hotel on your behalf. ^JEK

— Hyatt Concierge (@HyattConcierge) November 3, 2014

There are plenty of examples where a brand on Twitter has merely apologised to the disgruntled customer. Here we can actually see action being taken. I’d be more than happy with this response.

Speed definitely seems to be high on the agenda. This reply came within five minutes. Hopefully it made a difference to the customer.

@NaaMoimeme I'm sorry you have not been assisted yet. I will notify the hotel. ^LM

— Hyatt Concierge (@HyattConcierge) November 3, 2014

Most replies arrive under 10 minutes, which is the optimal time for social customer care. I also love that Hyatt has the grace to engage with customers who don’t get the Twitter handle right...

@lydiabuthello Welcome to @ParkHyattGoa. Hope you all have a great day and enjoy the walk. Tweet if we can be of assistance. ^LM

— Hyatt Concierge (@HyattConcierge) November 1, 2014

‘Tweet if we can be of assistance’ with the customer service agent’s initials is a lovely way to make guests feel welcome.

My only criticism would be that even though the service seems to run 24 hours a day, Hyatt could do with stating that fact in its profile description. 

Mobile app

First of all let’s take a look at how the Hyatt app looked last year...

 

 

It's difficult to read, fairly old fashioned and certainly clunky.

Here's the 2014 version...

The homepage is very attractive with a modern flat design. 

Finding a hotel is a lot easier, with a geolocation tool to find my nearest hotel straight away, and predictive text search.

The calendar for choosing arrival and departure dates is easy to use, clear and classy looking.

Locations are shown with clear pricing and easily navigable detail.

You can also choose to view on a map, which is a very handy touch.

One of my only criticisms is that the text within the respective hotel details page could definitely be larger and easier to read.

Although I am happy to see click-to-call functionality enabled along with Google Maps, a current temperature reading and an impressively comprehensive collection of large images.

When it comes to reserving a room, the speed and efficiency of the task is greatly approved with guest checkout. 

Then filling in your personal information is all done on a single screen, with nice large text fields.

All in all this is a very fluid experience that took very little time to navigate and successfully book a room.  

Mobile site

As for the mobile site itself, this is how it looked last year.

  

A perfectly usable site, where the biggest crime was in looking a little out-dated.

Here’s how the new mobile site looks...

Well, apart from a slightly different homepage, the mobile site is identical to the app.

This provides a consistent experience for all of its users, whichever channel they are using. 

Whatever you think about the value of providing an app, whether there is an actual need for it or not, Hyatt has the done the right thing here and given its customers a choice, rather then forcing them to use the brand’s preferred channel.

Hyatt has also introduced other new features such as Uber integration, the ability to add your reservation details to your Passbook and you can now redeem your Hyatt Gold Passport points via mobile. 

In fact there are even incentives offered for those using mobile to book a room, such is Hyatt’s desire to push its mobile channels. 

For more from the blog on the travel industry check out Ryanair’s new mobile app: reviewed and how the travel industry uses email marketing.

Social marketing is extremely complex, and it’s only growing more convoluted everyday. As social marketers are our customers, we not only have to understand the challenges of their work, we need to truly feel the challenges so we can make products that make their lives better. Of course, I am talking about empathy.

An old movie I watched last week got me thinking deeply about what empathy truly means for our business. I like old movies because at an early age my mom gave me an appreciation for Hollywood’s golden age. It is hardly ever convenient to watch an old flick, but I force myself to anyway, because I always find something awesome in them. Last week I watched Funny Face for the first time. Candidly, not one of my favorites, but a couple hours with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire always makes you appreciate why movies have become so central to our culture.

Audrey’s character is a quiet, aspiring intellectual and philosopher, who ironically gets chosen by photographer Astaire to be the face of the fashion industry. I will spare you the rest of the plot, but the relevant detail is Audrey’s character is obsessed with the (made up?) philosophy “Empathicalism”.

Empathy may be turning into a cliche in the internet marketing world, but it has always been a core value of our company, and the Funny Face character’s obsession rang true through recent experiences we’ve had with our customers. Specifically, that managing all the pieces of social media and doing it really well is getting exponentially more difficult.

Think about all of the moving parts a social marketer has to consider at a large ecommerce brand:

Internal Efforts

• Coordinate efforts with the ecommerce team
• Coordinate efforts with the analytics team
• Coordinate with the broader marketing team to make sure everything is integrated and consistent
• Manage social media accounts across as many as 10 different networks
• Run customer service through social channels
• Manage social advertising, budgets, creative, targeting
• Report on the success of their efforts (in an industry that historically does not use ROI metrics… until now)
• Content and imagery management

External Efforts

• Stay up to date with all the latest products from the platforms
• Keep up with the promising new networks
• Manage and coordinate agency relationships for creative and/or ad buying
• Manage advertising platforms they use for different types of social ads
• Identify, contact and coordinate social influencers
• Cultivate user generated content

And this list is far from exhaustive.

To make matters worse, because social is a relatively young industry, all of these activities tend to be siloed, making manual effort necessary to coordinate everything.

What I am getting at here is that social marketers have it extremely tough. Maybe a few years ago they were small teams of 20-somethings posting fun stuff and reporting on follower growth, but those days are long gone. They have as complex of an ecosystem as anyone and it just gets more complex every day.

As creators of technology for social marketers, we may get frustrated at times with our customers because they have a hard time getting us answers to seemingly simple questions. But if it is frustrating for us, then it is 10x more frustrating for them. If we can realize that and harness that empathy towards creating a better product, everyone wins.

We make their lives easier and they love our products.

Empathy may be a cliche in product creation these days, but it is ubiquitous for a reason, and perhaps we need to take it even farther to living a life of “empathicalism”.

photo credits: theartdesk, amoviescrapbook

It’s that time of year again…business and marketing budgeting time. Whether you are an active officer in a C-suite or are trying to figure out the communication needs of your small and growing business, one of the most important line items is public relations. How much money will you need to convey your message to your target audiences? In less corporate language—how are you going to create and maintain the marketing budget buzz?

Marketing Budget Tips for PR and Communications

Here are a few tips on tackling some of the largest, broadest items in a PR/communications budget:

1. Social Media

There are three main areas to consider in Social Media when developing the marketing budget: content creation, advertising, and tools.

Content and image creation can be time consuming and costly if a company is outsourcing its social media management. Determine the 2015 strategy, including the channels your company will be active in and grow, and any translation that will be needed. Remember to include contests and other social media “events” in the mix.

With over a billion subscribers globally, Facebook remains a marketing budget “must” for businesses. The algorithms are constantly changing to lessen organic growth in favor of paid growth, i.e., advertising. The bottom line is simple: if you want to maintain your 2013/14 engagement levels and grow your company’s Facebook presence, then you need to pay for it. The key to leveraging those ad dollars is to ensure that your communications are integrated.

Keep an eye on Twitter and LinkedIn for algorithm adjustments as advertising gains momentum and set aside budgets accordingly. The broad estimate for budgets is that social media ad spends in 2015 are roughly 2% of a company’s marketing budget.

Now is also the time to review your social media tools—analytics, measurement, scheduling, management, etc. Odds are that your company uses more than one. What tools are you receiving value from and is it time to consolidate where you can and allocate dollars elsewhere?

2. Blog programs and Outreach

Blog promotions can be powerful as well as expensive. Most bloggers that are widely followed receive payment for product/service reviews. Specific campaigns can range from $100 plus product for an individual blogger review to $20,000+ for an organized “blogger blitz” campaign. At the least, we recommend putting aside a budget for product samples to be sent for targeted blogger reviews. Be sure to check if your company charges your department for those samples at wholesale or retail and budget accordingly—and don’t forget the shipping costs.

For additional blogger payment, be sure to have a strategy in place to determine if large cash payments are warranted. For example, we have built an organic blogger following for clients through social media engagement and product samples. While this takes time and might not be appropriate for all companies, it is something to consider for long-term relationship building.

3. Media relations

Media relations still matter—so budgeting for it is prudent. According to Pew Research, people still get a majority of their news from “traditional” news sources, digitally. So plan to engage with the media accordingly through not only press notices and releases but also reputable wire services, social media, and blog postings.

The past few weeks, I have been writing about listening and measuring to learn what matters most to your audience. I’ve taken a look at my own startup CredHive.com as well as served as an active advocate for my clients about listening deeply to the customer conversation in your category. I am wildly passionate about connecting customers to brands and to do this, I think it is really important to know what customers want. To understand what a customer wants means you need to listen to understand and really know your metrics.

The net of both of these posts (and many of my earlier posts) are about advancing the customer relationship and adding value to the audience’s day. The goal of course is to help your brand stand out in the social and digital landscape by really studying what’s working, what’s not and where any existing white space may live. I think measurement and listening are incredibly efficient ways to do all of these things.

But, where I failed in those posts was to call out the fact that it is not about the insight, it’s really about the action you take BASED on the insight. Because insight without action is an epic waste of time. No amount of measurement or active listening matters if we refuse to do anything about it.

Congrats for having a belly button!

Knowing is one thing. Yay! We know what people are talking about in our category. Hooray! I can see where my drop offs are in the product. We must put on our brave pants and take action. Because if we don’t, well, that my friends is the very definition of navel gazing. And we are all occasional victims of admiring our own belly buttons for the sake of having a belly button.

From my vantage point, this is where a lot of innovation goes to die. It dies at the insight. Taking action is actually scarier than measuring and listening. It means you might have to tackle institutional norms. You may have to battle people internally. Your idea may be rejected. So, sometimes, it seems easier (read: safer) to point at the insight and say, “How cool is that?” and let it hang out there in the world being cool an ineffectual.

Go small or go home

But the insight is so easy and pretty. The white space in the conversation is so clear and clean. If we are to capitalize on this insight, we need to “Go Big or Go Home”. #No! This is one of the innovation traps that I like to avoid: Death by Detail (also see Death by Navel Gazing). The action you take does NOT have to be big and audacious. The action could be a tweak in messaging. It could be curating in content that positions your brand in the white space. It might be a small, easy feature on your site or blog. The action does not need to be a fully baked mobile app or a 50-page ebook. You might get there eventually, but remember, you cannot run until you can walk and you cannot walk until you run. Action can be really small. And let’s be honest, little actions are attainable.

Test and learn

Continuous improvement is a continual cycle of learning, measuring and building. We do this every day at SME Digital. It’s being Lean. It is learning, measuring and DOING something about what you are learning and measuring. It is the act of building that makes the cycle powerful. And it is most likely to be forgotten because it is really hard to build something that is small AND meaningful. But without it, it’s a lose-lose. You do not solve the customer’s problem and fail to stand out to them.

As beautiful as the insight is, it cannot benefit your organization if it goes un-acted upon. We are employed to bring value to the organization. As marketers, that means we should be focused on bringing value to our customers. Customers are THE measuring stick of effective marketing. How much they spend? How likely they are to spend again? Are they willing to refer their friends? There are nice measures of success. When we identify solutions to their problems through insights AND act on them, we all can win at a far greater clip.

Disclaimer: This is one of those “inside baseball” posts. It is also devoid of any helpful how-to information (as we’ve become known for at CMI). I wrote this post because I believe it needs to be said. So there.

Update 11/7/2014 - I had a wonderful chat with the writer from the Wall Street Journal this morning regarding clarification on content marketing versus native advertising.  Just wanted to commend her on following through to try to clarify her definition of content marketing. 

Warning … rant alert!

When Amanda Subler, CMI’s media relations lead, notified us that The Wall Street Journal picked up our latest research findings, I was pretty psyched. I mean, it’s the WSJ. Plus, the research is a content marketing initiative that led directly to earned media.

And then I read the following excerpt:

“Investments in content marketing – in which brands create content that is closely integrated with editorial content on publisher sites – have been on the rise for many advertisers looking to reach consumers in a less intrusive way compared to other online ad formats.”

Please go back and read that middle part again. No, wait … read it here:

“… in which brands create content that is closely integrated with editorial content on publisher sites …”

Oh no, she didn’t. Yes, that’s right, the author of this article used a quasi-native advertising definition and called it content marketing. Why is it that so many traditional publishers and journalists think that brands can’t possibly create their own content that … (wait for it) … could possibly live on a platform not owned by a traditional media company?

This is content marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

The purpose of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it.

In content marketing, you own the media. It’s your asset. In native advertising, you are paying someone else to distribute and (ultimately) own your content.

This is native advertising

Note: There are many types of native advertising (you can find them here). For this conversation, I’m talking about the type of native advertising where long-form content is placed on media sites. The Interactive Advertising Bureau created a Native Advertising Playbook that has six categories of consideration. It’s a worthy document, but to simplify its definition, native advertising is:

• A directly paid opportunity. I hate to bring out the obvious, but native advertising is “pay to play.” If a brand or individual did not pay for the spot, it’s not native advertising. Although brands may choose to promote their content by paying for visibility, content marketing is not advertising. You do not pay to create or curate content to your own platform. If you are, you should stop that right now.

• Usually content based. The information is useful, interesting, and highly targeted to the specific readership. So, in all likelihood, it’s not an advertisement promoting the company’s product or service directly. This is where native advertising looks a bit like content marketing. The information is usually highly targeted (hopefully) and positioned as valuable, or similar to the value of the “real” content on the publisher’s site. But again, in native advertising, you are renting someone else’s content asset (just like advertising), except that you aren’t pimping a product or service. 

• Delivered in stream. To truly be a native ad, the user experience is not disrupted. The advertising is delivered in a way that does not impede the normal behavior of the user in that particular channel. The brand that buys the native advertising placement wants its content to look as similar as possible to the site’s content. The media company wants that too (because it’s easier for the salespeople to sell it,) but it also has to put out a multitude of warning labels around the content to make sure there is 100% transparency. The Federal Trade Commission is currently not going to get involved with any native-advertising guidelines in the hope that the industry will self-police.

Again, the goal of native advertising (at least for definition purposes) is to not disrupt the user experience … to offer information that is somewhat helpful and similar to the other information on the site so that users engage with the content at a higher rate than, say, a banner ad (this is good for advertisers, and if the content is truly useful, good for consumers.)

I’m not a native advertising hater. If I was a brand, I’d be jumping into these opportunities to steal audience from publishers. I also believe that for many publishers, native advertising is a short-term offering. Publishers like Buzzfeed can do native advertising all day long, while it’s much harder for brands like The Wall Street Journal.

Can native advertising and content marketing work together?

Actually, the two should work together. As you develop your content marketing program, you’ll get to a portion of the content marketing framework called audience. Simply put, you may not have enough audience to drive your content program. Native advertising is a great way to (legally) steal audience and work to drive it to your owned content marketing platform.

You may also just be using native advertising around traditional advertising goals, like awareness or intent, which is just fine but may not necessarily integrate with your content program.

So, to sum up, native advertising is paid. The content for native advertising occurs on the platform you are paying. We good? WSJ?

If you’d like to learn all about native advertising, see the Ultimate Guide to Native Advertising.

Want to read more insight and helpful information from CMI’s founder? Secure a copy of his book, Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, & Win More Customers by Marketing Less.

Cover image by George Hodan, Publicdomainpictures.net, via pixabay

The post Hey WSJ – Content Marketing Is NOT Native Advertising appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

So why do sales people spend twice the amount of time on forecasting than they should?

As a sales manager or a sales rep, one of your most important resources is time.  For every minute you spend on non-selling activity, you are spending less time on selling and thus making less money.  One of your biggest time drains every week is the development and reporting of the dreaded weekly sales forecast.  Yet, according to a recent Aberdeen study, accurate sales forecasting provides the following benefits:

• A 12 month increase in organic revenue by 23%
• Decrease the sales cycle by 8.3%
• 9.3% increase in number of sales reps making quota

So why is something so important a time drain?

Nearly 80% of companies use spreadsheets to forecast sales. Reps extract data from their CRM system into a spreadsheet.  They update  the opportunity data in the spreadsheet and send it to their manager.  Their manager also modifies that spreadsheet data, combines it into the team data, and submits it to management.  Management modifies/updates data a third time.  Sales reps are then expected to manually go back into the CRM and update the information – forcing them to do the work twice.  All along the way, human errors are made that corrupt the forecast and make it nearly impossible to explain what and where they went wrong.  Sound familiar?

Here’s what you can do to save sales reps and managers at least two hours a week (ie more selling time) in developing and reporting forecasts.  Once completed, it will only take reps 5 minutes a week to build, update, and report a forecast.

1. You have to get forecasting back into your CRM system. First, start with developing a forecast methodology and process and build that into your CRM.  The methodology is how your sales people select forecastable opportunities.  The process is what they need to do in your CRM system to add or remove deals from a forecast. There are many methodologies out there, but the best practice is not to use a percentage of stage, but to use a scenario methodology.  The reason is that a sales rep does not close a percentage of a deal.  They either close it or don’t close it; binary.  Common scenarios include Worst Case, Likely/Probable, Best Case or Commit, Upside, Strong Upside.
2. Have an automated forecast screen in your CRM where the system can list or even help to predict opportunities that should be in a forecast. Once that list is developed, the sales rep can simply chose the scenario that best fits the opportunity.  This is your process – the steps the rep has to take to build the forecast; it varies by industry, vertical, and product.  Upon completion of the work, the details in your CRM system should roll up to the manager in real time.  No need to submit spreadsheets and manually roll them up.  To over-ride the forecast, the manager should be able to simply access the reps forecast list and remove or add opportunities.  These changes would then immediately update the manger’s forecast view/report.  The manger’s forecast would then immediately roll up to the head of sales via a view or alert/notification/email.
3. Train, monitor, and discipline/reward everyone. If it is not in CRM, then it did not happen.  The methodology and process should be so simple that it only takes 10-15 minutes to train your team.  The more complex you make the methodology and process, the harder it will be to train and the lower your adoption rate.  Your system should also have the ability to monitor the process.  The ability to show sales rep success rates in closing what they forecast, to track value changes from the beginning of the forecast to when a deal is close and trend the information going forward to predict future forecast and pipeline success.  Great behaviors should be rewarded and poor behaviors should be disciplined.

If you are thinking that this sounds challenging or impossible to do, think again.  There is technology out there today that contains the process and serves up the performance analytics. There are resources available to help you build, train and sustain your methodology.  All you have to do is make the decision that you want to change and in this situation, change is good.

 This article originally appeared on Multichannel Merchant.

Few business-to-business marketing and sales professionals say their demand generation and sales training teams are completely coordinated, yet 40.2% believe that alignment leads to better lead conversion and closed deals. The good news? Demand generation is set to see more money in 2015, with search and social grabbing the most dollars.

In the ongoing battle between sales and marketing, leads are often the major casualties. Marketing claims sales doesn’t follow up on its leads and sales claims marketing only sends over garbage not worth any follow up.

Who’s right?

We’re going to dig into some statistics provided by Sirius Decisions and ask the simple question, “Why?” Here is the data:

Twenty percent of leads are followed up by sales.

Eighty percent of leads are never followed up by sales.

Conversely:

Twenty percent of those same leads never purchase anything.

Eighty percent of those same leads buy within 24 months (usually from somebody else) – if they are nurtured.

That’s a big IF!

The finger pointing begins and our ongoing battle rages. Is sales correct? Let’s look at the possibility sales is correct, and assume for a moment our “leads” are really not sales-ready. Identifying the problem is the first step to fixing it. There’s a straightforward fix, and you can implement it in your demand center in a matter of weeks.

Step 1: Get on the same page

You absolutely must work with sales to determine what will be considered a sales-ready lead. You cannot do this on your own because, in order for this process to work, sales must agree on the definition. Marketing cannot define it for sales, so collaboration is essential. However, that agreement must be stated in objective, quantifiable terms, not just the subjective “sniff test” (which actually doesn’t stand up to its own sniff test). What should those objective characteristics look like, given your sales organization is unique?

These objective characteristics should be broken into two categories: Profile and Behavior. For B2B marketers, profile is the combination of demographic and firmagraphic characteristics of the ideal prospect, such as company size, title, and department. For B2C, profile will consist entirely of the demographics of the individual. Behavior is the digital body language expressed in online buying behavior. Has the prospect visited certain web pages, downloaded something or engaged in click-to-chat?

Once sales and marketing have agreed to the profile and behaviors that comprise an ideal lead, you can move on to Step 2.

Step 2: Put a ruler on your lead

Simply stated, how will you measure your objective criteria? Again, Sirius Decisions has created a model you can easily adapt to your criteria. Its co-dynamic model assigns values to both profile and behavior characteristics to create a score you can use to evaluate the sales readiness of a lead.

I also recommend adopting the Sirius Decisions Waterfall terminology for describing “leads.” If everything is a lead, then nothing is a lead. By specifically describing a sales-ready lead by a different name that every other “lead,” you provide clarity in your communications to the sales team. Once you’ve defined your measurement system and labeled your sales-ready leads accordingly, you can move to Step 3.

Step 3: Act on this information

Some data points are actionable and others are not. For example, there isn’t a lot you can do to get your prospect promoted from Manager to Vice President. However, you can create content designed specifically for your manager to pass on to his superiors, thereby creating the potential for additional contacts entering your system. This is called an Audience Acquisition Nurture. There’s that word: Nurture! Well-designed nurture programs have very specific goals, and the tactics and content should be designed to meet those goals.

Nurtures are NOT about sending repetitive sales-oriented content out to large, untargeted groups of prospects. That strategy does not work, and I have a very specific name for them: opt-out campaigns. Because that’s what they do, get more people to unsubscribe from your communications than respond to them.

These three steps will effectively eliminate the “Your Lead Stinks!” argument from sales. How can salespeople complain about leads sent to them exactly as they requested? This is where the objective criteria and measurement comes into play. If they ask for VP and above in IT who have downloaded trial software, and that’s what you send them, the question then becomes why did sales agree to that definition of “sales-ready?”

Notes:

You must identify the problem before you can fix it.

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

Your definition must be in quantifiable, objective terms.

You need to act on the information you have.

So, let’s say your marketing team has agreed to a sales-ready definition, and there is still a problem with passing leads to sales that they still don’t believe are good enough. You have fallen victim to Cause A, the sales argument that they are not receiving enough lead volume. Like any other problem, Cause A can be fixed.

According to recent research from Hubspot, CMOs are planning to increase their budgets for web analytics by 60% in 2015. That may sound like a lot, but it’s money well spent when you consider that web analytics are the key to measuring, understanding and optimizing the effectiveness of your digital marketing programs.

Getting Started

With the vast amount of data available from modern web analytics tools, it’s easy to get lost or focus on the vanity metrics, missing the truly valuable insights that can benefit your business.

For example, it’s tempting and all too common for businesses engaging in Facebook marketing to focus solely on increasing ‘likes’ to their page and content. It’s certainly not a bad idea to track this metric, but on it’s own it doesn’t say much about the real business impact. Tracking and reviewing actions like referral traffic to your website from Facebook, leads generated or social sales will tell you much more about the true business impact of your Facebook marketing initiative.

To make sure your marketing team is leveraging marketing performance analytics effectively, the first step is to identify and clearly define your objectives. Starting here will allow you to tie your business goals to measurable metrics and actionable insights.

Make sure to consider a range of macro and micro objectives, including:

• High level program objectives
• Tactic and team specific objectives
• Campaign level objectives

As an example, let’s say a staffing software company has developed a new platform which they plan to market through digital channels using a variety of tactics and campaigns. A few relevant objectives would be:

• High level: generate platform sales
• Tactic specific: increase site traffic from search engines by drafting and promoting optimized blog content
• Campaign level: capture leads through distribution of a form gated ebook

While it’s normal and completely OK for your goals to evolve over time, don’t make the mistake of waiting until you are in the midst of your digital marketing program to define business goals. That’s like starting a marathon without knowing where the finish line is.

Mapping to the Customer Journey

After defining objectives, the next step is to consider the customer journey, which is the process by which a prospect becomes a customer. As with objectives, there is no one-size-fits-all model and the paths are likely to evolve over time.

That said, there is often enough consistency in sales cycles between businesses and industries that it makes sense to start with a tried and true methodology, then customize to your unique circumstances.

At TopRank Online Marketing, we subscribe to a 3 phase approach to mapping the customer journey or sales cycle:

• Attract
• Engage
• Convert

To effectively measure the success of your digital marketing, your web analytics methodology should map closely to your sales cycle, with metrics that are representative of each stage.

Attract

By definition, Attract level tactics are intended to reach prospects who are early in the sales cycle. Building brand awareness, answering questions, providing value and reaching your customers where they are likely to be spending time online are the primary objectives.

Meaningful attraction web analytics metrics include:

• Organic search rankings
• Social reach
• PPC positions
• Search and social impressions / clicks (organic and paid)
• Inbound traffic to your site

Coming back to our previous example, analysts at the staffing software company could measure the impact of the blog content they are publishing by tracking organic search rankings, impressions / clicks and traffic to the posts.

Engage

Engaged prospects interact with your website and social content, discuss and potentially advocate for your brand and ideally go on to convert and become loyal customers.

Meaningful engagement web analytics metrics include:

• Website bounce rate, time on page / site and pages per visit
• Social shares, likes, favorites, comments and mentions
• Mentions of your brand on external websites
• Links to your site

For example, the staffing software company I mentioned earlier could measure engagement of their blog marketing by tracking the activity of visitors after landing on their posts. Content topics of the pages most viewed could be compared against SEO and social media messages to determine alignment accuracy. Bounce rate and pages per visit will show whether they are leaving right away or sticking around to read more posts or browsing to other pages on the site. Social shares or links indicate whether visitors found the blog posts good enough to share and endorse to their circles.

Convert

If you’ve effectively attracted prospects to your brand content and engaged them through their journey thus far, the final step is to close the deal by providing them with just the right offer, at the right time, optimized to be consumed on the platform and channel of their choice.

Converting informed prospects to buyers will take different tactics and it will be important to both offer and track opportunities for micro and macro conversions. Micro conversions include things like whitepaper downloads, subscriptions to mailing lists and requests for product demos. Those macro conversions provide contact information for nurturing through marketing automation or email campaigns. Examples of macro conversions include specific requests for information, ecommerce sales and appointments with sales reps.

Meaningful conversion metrics include:

• Performance of content offers
• Marketing qualified leads
• Sales qualified leads
• Conversion rate
• Revenue

After plenty of testing, tweaking and elbow grease, our example staffing software company has found a good mix of topics and formats that are bringing in plenty of traffic. Their visitors are going on to read other posts, sharing on their social channels, checking out product pages, reading reviews and case studies and signing up for their staffing tips newsletter. Now the next step is to convert all that traffic into leads and customers.

By tracking calls to action leading to forms to schedule product demos and connect with sales reps in strategic areas throughout the site, the team is able to compare conversion rates to see which offers are performing the best. Integrating web analytics with sales CRM data allows the analysts to attribute revenue to specific channels, campaigns, topics and offers.

This holistic view of analytics across the sales cycle through Attract, Engage, Convert not only quantifies the true ROI of the digital marketing program, it helps to uncover valuable insights into the habits and traits of visitors who tend to convert into customers. Insights captured during a program provide many different opportunities to optimize the performance of the program from persona refinement to more compelling calls to action.

Insights from web analytics about the most effective topics, formats, and channels will help the marketing team optimize where they spend their time and resources. Marketing performance data will also help business and marketing leadership allocate budget where it’s likely to achieve the best return on investment.

Putting it all Together

Web analytics are only valuable when they result in meaningful and actionable insights which drive business decisions.

To make sure you are getting more than just numbers and pretty charts from your web analytics, it is critical to present them in a way that is intuitive and actionable for the intended audience. This is where custom role based dashboards come in.

A great role based dashboard includes all relevant metrics needed by the recipient to understand the current situation, is formatted in a way that is quick and easy to digest and leads to making strategic, data driven decisions.

When deciding which metrics need to be included in each of your role based dashboards, also take a critical eye to what not to include. Everyone has a ‘data threshold’, which is the point at which their eyes glaze over, they stop reviewing the dashboard and probably delete the next ones you send. Every irrelevant metric you include will push them closer to the overload point, so make sure every piece of their custom dashboard is relevant and actionable.

Doing web analytics right isn’t easy, but the rewards of a data driven organization are worth the effort many times over.

If you need help getting started, consider partnering with a digital marketing agency such as TopRank Online Marketing. We’ve been helping businesses large and small to set up, manage and optimize their digital marketing programs for over 10 years.

How are you leveraging web analytics to make better business decisions?

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | Improve Digital Marketing Performance with Attract, Engage, Convert Sales Cycle Analytics | http://www.toprankblog.com

I’m fascinated about a lot of the discussion about marketing and sales alignment. Inevitably, the discussion narrows to MQL’s and SQL’s. The alignment discussion inevitably focuses on gaining agreement on the definition and metrics surrounding these two metrics.

Some of the things discussed are, agreement and alignment around the definition of lead quality and lead volume. Usually marketing is saying “sales isn’t following up on our leads, consequently we’re losing lots of opportunity.” Sales takes the position, “The leads we get are crap, just because someone wants a white paper doesn’t mean I should be wasting my time calling them.”

I still see the same old diagrams, the marketing funnel and the sales funnel, with the marketing funnel feeding the sales funnel.

Essentially, these discussions reduce down to agreeing on the size of the window in the brick wall between sales and marketing.

While this agreement is important, I think we miss opportunities in aligning around how our customers buy.

Our marketing and sales funnels basically identify our workflows in marketing and sales activities. Continuing to look at these sequentially, defines our workflows as sequential–marketing does its thing, leads are passed through the window in the wall, then sales does its thing.

The buying and informational activities our customers undertake aren’t necessarily aligned with our marketing and sales funnels/workflow. To be effective in engaging our customers in buying, we need to look at our marketing and sales workflows differently, integrating marketing, and sales rather than aligning them.

It seems we do better by aligning our marketing and sales workflow around models of the customer buying process and workflow. In doing this, we engage the customer most effectively and impactfully. We deploy the right resources (marketing/sales/other) at the right time and in the right way to help the customer buy.

In designing an integrated marketing and sales workflow, we have must clearly define roles and responsibilities. We must work truly collaboratively. Our metrics are broader and more aligned not just agreement on MQL and SQL. Our organizational structure is more reflective of how our customers buy, rather than the meaningless silos that exist today.

In a truly integrated marketing and sales workflow, sales may initiate the process by engaging customers with insight. Customers may then leverage content or experiences developed by marketing to enrich their understanding of the issues, alternatives and possibilities presented by change. Sales may re-engage at a point where the customer needs that direct interaction. Marketing doesn’t stop, they provide content, materials, and tools to support both sales and the customer later in their buying process, ultimately helping them make a vendor decision.

Today, marketing and sales looks a lot like an Olympic relay. Marketing starts, then hands off the baton to sales to finish. In an integrated marketing and sales design, it looks a lot like a basketball team, with each person on the team knowing their role, with clearly defined plays. But like the basketball team, an integrated marketing and sales function enables us to be adaptable and nimble. This nimble marketing and sales team can change, based on the way the customer changes–“passing the ball” from one to the other to most effectively achieve the goal.

If we want to engage the customer most impactfully and effectively, we need to stop looking at marketing and sales alignment, and start talking more about marketing and sales integration.

Ready. Fire! Aim.

Overview: There’s an old story about Uncle Buster from the backwoods in Arkansas. Legend had it that Buster had a homemade bow he carved from a hickory stump, and Buster could shoot his hickory bow more accurately than an Olympic archer using a custom compound bow. As visitors drove up to Buster’s house, they would pass his big, wooden barn, which was literally covered with hundreds of painted targets. Dead center in each target was firmly planted an arrow, clear evidence of Buster’s incredible marksmanship.

One day, a visitor from up north got lost in the woods and stumbled upon Buster’s barn. He stopped his car on the one-lane dirt road (not like there was any traffic to worry about) and stood there, counting the bull’s eyes on the barn. About the time he had passed 300 targets, Buster pulled up in his rusty pickup truck. “Help ya?” Buster asked.

“I am amazed,” replied the visitor, “as the unbelievable marksmanship here. Do you know who did this?”

“Yup,” Buster responded. “I shot every one of them arrows with a bow I carved myself from a hickory stump over yonder.”

“Absolutely amazing! How did you learn to shoot so well?”

Buster grinned. “Simple, mister. I shot first, then painted on the targets.”

Unfortunately for marketers, Demand Generation isn’t quite so simple. But I often see it executed Uncle Buster’s way: Ready. Fire! Aim. This leads to Demand Generation Fail number 2: insufficient planning.

When it comes to Demand Generation, planning comes in two different flavors: infrastructure and execution. The chief issue with infrastructure is the “new toy” syndrome, in which the rush to stand up and turn on a new Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is so great, the necessary forethought and planning required for proper design is ignored in lieu of getting emails out the door. Lack of execution planning generally results from the lack of process or the discipline to consistently follow established process due to internal or external deadline pressures.

First, let’s look at the results of failure to plan you infrastructure. If this were a medical practice, we’d be performing a diagnosis based on your symptoms.

Symptom 1: Reporting atrophy! You are constantly scrambling to piece together reports to indicate the success of your campaign tactics. This symptom presents as patched-together spreadsheets from your MAP, your CRM, and possible other Legacy systems. In extreme cases, you can’t even tell which assets were downloaded as a result of your campaign.

Symptom 2: List mania! You are constantly moving “lists” around manually. Today, you import an acquired list procured by Ted in sales. Tomorrow you export “leads” from an event vendor so you can import them into your MAP the day after tomorrow. In extreme cases, you are managing you lists of lists in another list.

Symptom 3: Leads, leads, everywhere a lead! Every contact in every system is a “lead.” Your conversations about leads with your CMO leave you bewildered. Sales is complaining about lead quality. Field marketing is complaining about lead quantity. EMEA had no idea leads were sitting in their lead queue. APAC isn’t in the habit of following up on leads. LatAm only generates its own leads. In extreme cases, it just occurred to somebody in sales ops that sales was only updating contact records because they don’t know what a lead is.

Symptom 4: An army of one! Your last defined segment produced a single contact in Yuma, Arizona. Your lead scoring map is predominantly D4s. In your last meeting with sales ops, they asked if you could just make everyone an MQL. In extreme cases, your lead scoring is completely turned off.

These results are symptomatic of an infrastructure built without regard to process or not planned to help you manage your processes. Proper process and definition are necessary parts of your infrastructure planning. Part of the planning is a clear and precise definition of your lead flow, Lead stages and process for actions in stage and triggers for both forward and backward movements.

Next, let’s look at the symptoms of execution planning failures.

Symptom 1: Recurring mistakes! Wrong recipients get wrong messages. Links take prospects to the wrong place, or no place (the dreaded 404 error!). Images don’t load. HTML doesn’t render correctly. Since deadlines are critical, we need to skip steps in the process, right? Like QA. In extreme cases, you are unaware the project management discipline exists.

Symptom 2: Low sender scores! Combine high bounceback rates, high opt-out rates and complaints and you get low sender scores. And few responses. Extreme cases result in opt-out rates higher then click-through rates.

Symptom 3: Persona non grata! You can’t point to a specific content map with a persona and buying stage. Your content strategy is “turn up the volume.” In extreme cases, you have no content strategy at all.

Symptom 4: California customs! Everything is a one-off. You have no template library, or nobody uses it. Your internal clients begin every proposal with, “It’s exactly like the Chicago campaign, except…” or “Upper management has their eyes on this…” In extreme cases, you haven’t seen a “standard” campaign in three years.

These execution symptoms are simply the result of insufficient planning, which generally stems from lack of operational process oversight and control. Lack of understanding between departments concerning the level of effort required in each step compounds through the design and development phases of a project until there is little bandwidth left for testing and deployment. The result is systemic execution failure, as exhibited in the symptoms above.

Please remember, you are not alone! Many organizations suffer from these same symptoms. It is not you, it is a disease called FTP, or failure to plan. There is hope, because you can begin to plan today. Ready, Fire, Aim never works.

Notes:

You cannot expect to execute flawlessly on a platform not designed around your process. Take the time to properly document your lead management process before attempting to automate it. You cannot automate an ambiguous process.

Make sure your data is clean, complete and standardized before uploading to an automation platform. Incomplete or incorrect data leads to incomplete and flawed execution.

Whether it is trying to execute too quickly or the repetitive nature of some processes, inattention to detail will kill your campaign every time!

Chrome: Google Drive is adding an "open with" option to the right-click menu. As you can see in the GIF above, this lets you directly open photos in Photoshop, PDFs in your favorite PDF tool , and so on from your web browser.

Read more...

Walter Isaacson has made a career as a thorough biographer of exceptional people, like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. Of course, Walter is quite exceptional himself, in that writing books isn't even his day job.

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We recently bought an ad for a client and the ad rep suggested we make a big deal out of the fact that our client has been in business for 130 years. I politely told her that we definitely were not going to do that.

Instead, we were going to talk about something their readers and our prospects might actually care about.

My conversation with her is what prompted this blog post. We’ve all seen the ads or sales that are somehow tied to a businesses 25th anniversary or the “we’ve been in business for a century” sale announcements.

The reality is – no one cares. While that may be a laudable accomplishment – to have hung in there that long, from your consumer’s point of view – it’s fluff or a gimmick (we’ve been around for 50 years so everything is 50% off!).

Is a business going to offer me a better product after they’ve been around for 100 years? Was the stuff they sold in their ninety-fifth year just junk? Of course not. Is someone who just turned 60 a better advisor than when she was 59? Nope.

You make that the focus of your ad or your sale when you don’t have anything better to say. And if you can’t come up with something more customer-centric than that to say – you’re lucky to still be in business.

It’s actually a symptom of an age-old marketing problem. Businesses talk about themselves rather than talking about what the customer cares about.

Here’s how to fix two of the most common “it’s all about me” types of marketing statements and make them customer centric and customer valued communications instead.

#1 — We’re old and you should care

All about us: We’re 100 years old. Come enjoy some birthday cake and celebrate with us as we cross the century mark.

All about them: Over the many years we’ve been in business, we’ve learned that our customers value three things. They value incredible customer service (click here to speak live with one of our teammates), fair pricing (click here to read about our fair price every time program) and they want quality they can count on (watch a short video about our factory’s 100% right or 100% wrong policy).

You’re saying the same thing – we’ve been in business long enough to be stable, to have earned our customer’s trust and no one has to worry about you being a fly by night operation. But when you push beyond focusing on yourself, you can outline exactly why your longevity is of value to the prospect that is considering doing business with you.

#2 – The difference is our people (perhaps the most trite sentence uttered in marketing today)

All about us: Our people really care. You’re not just a number to us.

All about them: Hi Mr. McLellan – we see that you’re going to be staying at our hotel XYZ in Big City. We’re glad to have you staying with us and want to make sure we do everything in our power to make your stay an awesome one. As the manager of the hotel, I want you to have my direct line (123-456-7890) and email (manager@BigHotel.com) so you can get a hold of me if there’s anything you need.

Don’t tell me that your people care. Show me. It sounds like hype when you brag about it. It feels remarkable when I experience it for myself. The truth is…most businesses say it but few actually deliver on it. Why not just shut up and show it?

If you’re going to expend the effort to talk to your customers and prospects, stop talking about yourself and talk about what they care about — what’s in it for me.

Today I learned that an article I wrote back in November of 2013, Increase in Social Selling Yields No Increase in KPI's, was named Top Sales Article of the Month for October 2014 by Top Sales World.  While I'm always honored to win awards for my Blog, this time around I don't really deserve it. The findings in my November 2013 article were correct based on what I knew in 2013, but based on what I know to be true today, it is no longer accurate.  If you've been reading my Blog, then you are probably aware of OMG's big Sales Force Effectiveness Study that we've been working on for the past three months.  One of the things we studied is the impact of Social Selling. At face value, one might come to the exact same conclusion as we did in 2013, that it's having limited impact on sales.  However, this time we looked wider and deeper and beyond the obvious and we were extremely surprised by what we found.  We discovered that

Ray Dalio has grown his investment firm Bridgewater Associates into the largest hedge fund in the world, with $160 billion in assets. He's worth an estimated $15.2 billion himself.

He's a genius, and an eccentric one at that.

Dalio believes in "radical transparency," which means that everything at Bridgewater is under constant surveillance — all meetings, all interviews, and all interactions are taped. He runs Bridgewater according to 210 principles that he's collected in a manual for his employees.

The Wall Street tabloid blog Dealbreaker leaked this book a few years ago, and the site enjoys poking fun of Dalio's obsessive nature and sometimes flowery philosophizing. The Wall Street Journal's Deal Journal blog dubbed him "Wall Street's Oddest Duck."

But Dalio has responded to critics by saying that Bridgewater's unique approach isn't manipulative or cultish, but based on a powerful unifying culture. And clearly whatever they're doing over there is working.

Today the 2011 edition of the exhaustive manual he gives to employees is available on Bridgewater's website for anyone to read. We've summarized Dalio's 20 core management principles below.

On Culture

1. Place the utmost importance on truth.

"Create an environment in which everyone has the right to understand what makes sense and no one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up about it," Dalio writes.

He believes that even though the truth can be scary (like when your boss points out one of your flaws), it's necessary for optimum performance. Dalio has actually fired employees for talking behind a coworker's back. "If you talk behind people's backs at Bridgewater you are called a slimy weasel," Dalio says.

2. Teach your team that it's okay to fail if it results in learning something.

Dalio believes that managers need to expect mistakes from both their employees and themselves. And analysis of mistakes should be quick and as painless as possible.

"Create an environment in which people understand that remarks such as 'You handled that badly' are meant to be helpful (for the future) rather than punitive (for the past). While people typically feel unhappy about blame and good about credit, that attitude gets everything backwards and can cause major problems. Worrying about 'blame' and 'credit' or 'positive' and 'negative' feedback impedes the iterative process essential to learning," Dalio writes.

3. Get in synch.

Dalio teaches his employees to work at a level where there is a mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished. One way to achieve this is by using conversations about a certain project as a means of reaching conclusions rather than just brainstorming.

He also believes that it is a manager's responsibility to weigh the value of coworkers' opinions. In the same way that you'd value golf advice from Tiger Woods over advice from a friend, Dalio writes, you should value the opinion of a worker with a proven track record over someone without one.

On People

4. Understand that making a hire is the most important decision you can make.

Before you begin a search for an employee, determine not just the job's qualifications, but which specific qualities you want in that hire. And make sure that the person you are hiring naturally shares your values.

5. Recognize everyone's differences.

Bridgewater employees are given personality tests so that managers can determine how they can best be managed. Dalio's test is essentially his version of the Myers-Briggs test.

6. Build your team carefully.

When considering a job candidate, Dalio places the most importance on values ("deep-seated beliefs that motivate behaviors"), then abilities ("ways of thinking and behaving"), and then skills ("learned tools"). He suggests finding a candidate who doesn't just want the job but wants to be part of the company.

"Don't hire people just to fit the first job they will do at Bridgewater; hire people you want to share your life with," Dalio writes, adding that you should "look for people who sparkle, not just 'another one of those.'"

7. Run your team like a machine.

"Micromanaging is telling the people who work for you exactly what tasks to do and/or doing their tasks for them. Not managing is having them do their jobs without your oversight and involvement. Managing means: 1) understanding how well your people and designs are operating to achieve your goals, and 2) constantly improving them. To be successful, you need to manage," Dalio says.

And to manage effectively, everyone needs to know what the team's long-term goals are and what individual employee's tasks are. Dalio says it's necessary to avoid the term "we should," since an objective should be concrete and assigned to a specific party.

8. Be direct and honest with employees, and ask them to do the same.

"The main reason Bridgewater has improved at a much faster rate than most other companies over the past 30 years is that we seek out problems and find systematic ways of eliminating them," Dalio writes.

He thinks that managers and their employees shouldn't pick their battles but fight them all, in the sense that they should never let even small problems float by without being addressed.

9. Be accurate instead of kind with evaluations.

Don't assume that criticizing your employees will harm them. Discuss their performance with them objectively, and do so in a way that results in a plan for improvement.

And don't wait for periodic evaluations to let them know how they're doing. "Child psychologists, dog trainers, and other behavior modification specialists will tell you that constant, no-exception feedback is fundamental to good training," Dalio writes.

10. Guide your employees' evolution.

If you're telling an employee exactly what they need to do to complete a task, then you're either micromanaging or the employee is inept.

"So give people your thoughts on how they might approach their decisions or how and why you would operate in their shoes, but don't dictate to them. Almost all that you will be doing is constantly getting in synch about how they are doing things and exploring why," Dalio says.

11. If someone isn't working in a role, take them out of it.

"People who repeatedly operated in a certain way probably will continue to operate that way because that behavior reflects what they're like," Dalio says. That means that if someone isn't clicking with their role, you're doing neither of you a favor by manipulating the role around their tendencies.

Consider whether they'd be a better fit elsewhere in the company, and if not, then it's probably best to fire them.

On Problems

12. Have criteria for what constitutes a problem and identify them when they arise.

"To perceive problems, compare how the movie is unfolding relative to your script — i.e., compare the actual operating of the machine and the outcomes it is producing to your visualization of how it should operate and the outcomes you expected. As long as you have the visualization of your expectations in mind to compare with the actual results, you will note the deviations so you can deal with them," Dalio writes.

And when you get to the root of a problem, avoid generalizations. Use specific names and the specific ways they deviated from your expectations.

13. Determine the root of problems.

Don't treat problems as if they are one-time occurrences, Dalio says, since they're just the manifestation of a certain behavior or bias. Work with your employee to find these roots so that the expectation of the mistake being repeated is then lowered.

14. Help employees understand their problems and how they were resolved.

Managers and their employees need to do a post-mortem on resolved problems and place them in the context of the past and the future. Place everything in the context of how you want your "machine," your team, to operate at its peak.

15. Build your team around achieving your goals.

"An organization is the opposite of a building — the foundation is at the top," Dalio says. The head of a company should determine their goals and find managers who can help them achieve them by assigning tasks to their direct reports.

These individual managers should also hire employees who share their own goals, which fall in line with the company's vision.

16. Always achieve what you set out to do.

"You can make great things happen, but you must MAKE great things happen. Times will come when the choice will be to plod along normally or to push through to achieve the goal. The choice should be obvious," Dalio writes.

On Decisions

17. Recognize what you don't know.

"Successful people are great at asking the important questions and then finding the answers. When faced with a problem, they first ask themselves if they know all the important questions about it; they are objective in assessing the probability that they have the answers; and they are good at open-mindedly seeking believable people to ask," Dalio says.

18. Minimize risk.

Dalio approaches managing people the same way he manages investments. "Recognize opportunities where there isn't much to lose and a lot to gain, even if the probability of the gain happening is low," he writes.

19. Remember the 80/20 Rule — 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Dalio says that leaders are able to determine the importance of the tasks in front of them and take care of the most important things first.

"Be an effective imperfectionist. Solutions that broadly work well (e.g., how people should contact each other in the event of crises) are generally better than highly specialized solutions (e.g., how each person should contact each other in the event of every conceivable crisis), especially in the early stages of a plan. There generally isn't much gained by lots of detail relative to a good broad solution," Dalio writes.

20. Find outcomes that will keep you improving.

Dalio recommends reflecting on the events of a day and then determining whether they exceeded your expectations, met them, or fell below them. Over a month (or any longer period of time) the frequency of met and exceeded expectations should be on an upward trajectory.

Dalio says that your decisions should be made with this trajectory in mind. "Avoid the temptation to compromise on that which is uncompromisable," and don't try to please everybody with every choice you make for the team.

You can check out all 123 pages of Dalio's principles at Bridgewater's site.

SEE ALSO: Billionaire Ray Dalio Explains Why He Likes To Break Down His Employees' Egos

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Hundreds of consumers standing in line at your local Apple store.  Thousands of protesters rushing to flood the streets of Kiev, Istanbul, or Hong Kong.  Millions of fireflies blinking on and off in complete unison. Even the unconscious beating of your heart. These are all synchronized systems.

So it is curious that the institutions we build—and put so much conscious effort towards—are so rarely able to synchronize.  Despite our best efforts, most organizations operate disjointedly.  Fortunately, research into network science has begun to shed light on how synchronization happens and how we can make our enterprises function more effectively. Three elements are key.

1. Small groups. Most leaders tend to think on a macro level.  That shouldn’t be surprising, because our efforts tend to be focused on our responsibilities.  So if we’re responsible for an entire organization, then we tend to think in those terms and act accordingly.

However, actions are influenced at the grassroots.  As Solomon Asch showed in his famous conformity experiments, we tend to adopt our views our peer group.  In fact, his research showed that we conform to those around us even when their views are demonstrably untrue.

Asch’s research helps explain why it is so hard for enterprises to adapt to new challenges.  It may be possible to create alignment among the leadership team, but that consensus will break down once the individual members return to their working groups.  There, they will find that they are confronted with local majorities opposed to the global leadership view and, in time, even leaders will conform.

That’s what appears to have happened at Blockbuster.  Faced with a competitive challenge from Netflix, CEO John Antioco came up with what seems, even in retrospect, to be a viable plan.  Nevertheless, various groups within the enterprise balked at the plan, Antioco was fired, and Blockbuster went bankrupt.

So leaders need to treat new initiatives not as mere organizational governance, but as a grassroots movement of small, interconnected groups, each with varying thresholds of resistance—some enthusiastic, others hostile and many in between. Moving an idea forward is not just a matter of persuasion, but also of managing the connections between constituencies.

2. Loose connections. Those close to us tend to have the same limited knowledge we do.  They have similar experiences, are confronted with similar challenges and share many of the same personal relationships.  So while our views tend to correspond to our peer group’s, the information most valuable to us usually lies outside of it.

That’s exactly what sociologist Mark Granovetter found he began studying how people landed jobs in communities around Boston.  It wasn’t through close friends that people found employment, but more distant acquaintances—friends of friends.  He called the phenomenon the strength of weak ties.

It is the combination of tight circles and loose connections that drives high performing organizations.  A study of star engineers at Bell Labs found that the most accomplished ones worked in a close-knit group, but also frequently reached out to people outside of it.

Another study of Broadway plays found the same thing.  If no one in the cast and crew had worked together before, then results were poor.  However, if there were too many existing relationships, then performance suffered as well.  You need the right mix of cohesion and diversity in order to achieve both innovation and operational efficiency.

And that’s what makes synchronized organizations top performers—they are not only aligned internally but also able to adapt to new information that arises externally.

3. Shared context. In nature, the purpose of a system is hardwired.  Nobody has to tell a pacemaker cell in the heart what it is supposed to do.  However, in organizations it is incumbent on leaders to set direction.

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad called this concept strategic intent. Southwest Airlines has prospered by being “the fun low cost airline” and seeks to be nothing else.  Google strives to “organize the world’s information.”  Apple creates products that are “insanely great.”  It is the mission that drives the strategy, because that’s what defines what winning looks like.

Yet a clear mission, although important, is not enough.  There also must be a shared context of values and beliefs.  Apple, for example, has committed to specific design values and an integrated architecture.  Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has described his company’s values at length in a new book called How Google Works, which emphasizes how Google seeks out “smart creatives” and strives to build a working environment where their ideas can thrive at scale.

Firms with strong value systems seamlessly adapt to new challenges.  Apple and Google, of course, have been successful across a variety of market contexts.  Less familiar examples include the thriving business of McDonalds in India, where it must cater to vegetarian diets, and Cosmopolitan magazine’s success in Islamic countries where public discussions about sex are taboo.

So how do you get your organization more in sync? Most leaders focus on strategies and plans because that is what stakeholders are asking for.  It is easier to formulate a story based on market analysis than it is to promote better organizational health.  Nevertheless, studies have shown that it’s the informal networks within an organization that are crucial to success.

We can no longer rely on hierarchies.  The problem is not that they have suddenly become illegitimate, but that they are slow and the world has become fast.  It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action, today we must inspire and empower movements of belief.

So in addition to their role in formulating strategy and optimizing financial performance, managers must also seek to create synchronized organizations to carry out strategic intent.  That requires a focus on small groups, loosely connected — but united by a shared context.

I still remember when I got an email from LinkedIn with the subject line, “You’re invited to publish on LinkedIn”. Squinting in the early morning hours at my illuminated phone in my dark bedroom, I felt a wave of excitement as I envisioned LinkedIn selecting me as a part of a small, unique group of “Influencers”. That was last winter. Ten posts and 1,450 followers later, my most recent articles have racked up between 2-3,000 views, 40 likes, and 15 comments.

And that’s not including a viral post about phone privacy that reached 77,816 views, 401 likes, and 227 comments in one day.

What, When and How to Blog on LinkedIn

But, LinkedIn never “chose me” to be part of the LinkedIn Influencer program. I was simply one of the first to be invited to publish after LinkedIn opened up its publishing platform to their entire network, over 275 million users. This means you can create a viral post on LinkedIn too, and whether you’re a marketing professional, thought leader, or just someone who has something important to say, LinkedIn provides you with the potential to make incredible waves and probably reach more new people, more easily than you were ever able.

Using SiSense dashboard software, I took the data of over 6,000 LinkedIn articles published from 2012 to 2014, and crunched them all according to the number of views, shares, and comments. I built an interactive dashboard with this data that shows some incredible insights about what, when, and how to blog on LinkedIn in order to reach the most readers and potentially generate leads, followers, and revenue. Here’s exactly how:

The Magic Number for Title Length

A title grabs readers’ attention in a busy landscape of posts. Which is why a clear, powerful headline that promises to deliver value to the reader is known to count for as much as 60% of the overall success of a post on LinkedIn.

Length is one of the biggest factors to consider when choosing a title and for decades authors have been pondering the magic number for a title’s length. Judging from our data, it seems that titles between 26-40 characters are the most widely viewed, shared, and liked–with all 3 of those KPIs aligning perfectly in a sharp rise at that very same number length. A title of that length is eye-catching, easy to comprehend and quick, yet detailed enough to relay a solid idea. Which is why, if you look at the title of this post, it’s only 37 characters.

 

Words in Your Title: The Reason People Read

So, what words resonate most with readers? Our data shows that the top tokens in 2014 according to the number of views are all work and career related words, such as: interview, job, people, work, success, and culture. Also, we see that putting numbers like top 5 or 10 attracts readers as it also appears high on viewed tokens. In 2013, similar words ranked: job, team, company, work, career, and tips.

In line with our findings, we see that the top read article in 2014 so far is: 10 Reasons You Have To Quit Your Job In 2014, with close to 1.5 million views as of now and 25,000 shares. Another career-related article, “The Difference Between Successful People and Unsuccessful People” comes in as the top second viewed and shared article on LinkedIn, followed by: “The 7 Things Successful People Never Say”, “Job Interview: Why Only 3 Questions Really Matter”, and “The No. 1 Time Management Mistake”. Using the SiSense dashboard as a guide is a great way to research topic ideas for your next writing endeavor. Hint: you probably to relate it to jobs.

Feeling Positive on the Weekends, Negative Midweek

Apparently, the day of the week also determines if people are more likely to click and read a positive or negative title to a post. If you examine the outliers in the bubble graph, the middle of the week (Monday and Wednesday), are the best days to share articles with a negative title. On the flipside, during the weekend, most notably on Saturdays, readers are more likely to click and read on positive posts.

We can hypothesize that this is because people have a more positive outlook during the weekend, and experience more downs midweek when the emotional high fades from the previous weekend fades, and the next weekend seems far. Or, maybe lonely readers are trying to stay positive on the weekend by viewing positive posts, while during the busy week, reading a negative post is less detrimental? Either way: if you have something to say that may be a bit bleak, critical or generally more negative, save it for midweek and vice versa for your upbeat posts.

How Your Post Measures Up

Start setting your expectations and refer back to the SiSense dashboard in order to see how your post performed in relation to the median.

Analyzing the data of 2,600 posts in 2014, it appears that if your post exceeds 9,300 views, 735 shares, and 198 likes, you are doing better than 50% of all posts on LinkedIn.

Pretty good. But, do you know what’s more powerful than reaching 275 million people on LinkedIn? Reaching the right 275 people, and getting your message across to each and every one of them.

Have any idea why these insights might be so? Let me know in the comments below.

This article How to Write a Viral LinkedIn Post was originally published at SiSense’s blog and has been republished with permission. 

I’ve got just three words for you: Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. That’s right, the meals you need to eat anyway can be big lead and revenue tools when you invite a few prospects or clients along. They’re easier, cheaper and way more effective than those useless old trade shows and you get to control the whole thing without those pesky competitors, students, people who can’t make decisions and tire-kickers who waste your time.

Breakfast events are a terrific way to engage prospects and clients both. I like to do them in a downtown spot close to where they are all going to go to work. The emphasis for breakfast should be on content. The venue can be anyplace that knows how make watery scrambled eggs, soggy bacon and cut up fruit. What you need to focus on is some great speakers who are interesting enough for people to get up a bit early and arrive at work a bit late. Personally, I don’t think you can beat a panel discussion for breakfast. Pick a topic of some interest in your industry, find five people who know something about it and get one of your senior execs to be the moderator. Your panelists can be clients, consultants, journalists, bloggers, authors and people looking to do a little personal branding on your dime. Have a good list of back-ups in case your speakers fall through at the last minute (in my experience about half of the people who commit will never end up actually making it). Skip the sales pitch, but make sure you have eager Squirrels all over the room and don’t be afraid to force your guests to take some information or nasty little trinket on the way out. I think you need about three months to knock it off a decent breakfast.

Lunch is a bit harder to drag people out for, so you need either a really interesting speaker or a really interesting venue, but probably not both. I’d aim for a central location, and see if you can snag a private room at a top business lunch spot – the type of place everyone says they frequent but really don’t. Even the power lunch spots can put on a decent lunch for a reasonable budget. What you want is a room that works for both eating and talking. I sat recently through a prospecting lunch held at a very popular and expensive steak house. It would have been great except for the unfortunate fact of the very high-backed chairs blocking the view of the poor speaker labouring away at the front of the room. Come to think of it, I don’t actually remember what she said, but I did get a swell nylon bag, a pad of post-it notes and a handy notebook. More on that later. For lunch, you can get away with doing a sales pitch or a product demo as long as there is some up-front value from your speaker. Lunches are great for prospects and I think you can get away with a reasonably competent speaker from your company. Look for a Wind-Up Evangelist or a Demo Dude. Ideally, time it around a content launch, like a new white paper, which is, I hope, timed to support a new product. If that won’t work or you don’t have anyone smart you can chuck in front of prospects, try to find someone who’s recently written a book about something slightly related to whatever it is you sell. They are usually more than happy to talk about their book and you’ll have a nice thing to give away. Nylon bags are not nice things to give away, even if there’s a book inside. If you are going with a single speaker, you can probably put one of these together in about eight weeks.

Dinners are much harder to get people to come out for so you will want to spend some time finding a really great speaker who people want to hear, and then up the ante by holding it someplace they really want to go. The trick with dinners is exclusivity: the crowd needs to be uniformly senior, selectively chosen and well chaperoned by sober Sales Squirrels. Dinners, I think, work best for customer groups with, perhaps, a small number of very senior prospects who can be led to believe that you do these all the time for all your customers. Your location needs to be something special – an exclusive new club, a posh restaurant, an impossibly opulent hotel or it needs to have a killer view. I have rented art galleries, bank vaults and castles with great effect. It should be a place that locals would likely enter only for a wedding. Indeed, it should feel like a wedding only without the taffeta and sobbing. For your speaker, you are going for amazingness. We’re not talking some astronaut flogging a non-stick pan here, people. We’re all about an incredibly smart academic or a senior executive who never gives speeches or a slightly rumpled but still lucid journalist — the kind of person whose TED Talk you share with other people. The presentation should be brief, powerful and absolutely free of PowerPoint. I mean it. No slides. Not one. Throw away your projector. These take months and months of planning and it’s best to start with your speaker: lock them in and work out from there. Keep your list small enough that it doesn’t feel like bingo at the Legion but large enough to give everyone some new people to meet. Keep your subject matter high level and universally interesting: leadership is a good one, service, innovation and looming demographic change also work nicely.

In all cases, the challenge will be bums in seats, and this, friends, does not happen by itself. After the menu is selected, the speaker booked and the invitations designed, your event will succeed only with the help of some diligent follow-up, polite nudging, friendly stalking and, when those don’t work, a little guilt. This is a great activity for all those outbound Squirrels who hate cold calls. Send your invites. Count to ten days and make them work that heck out of that list.

Next time we will talk about what to give people (no nylon bags) and what to do when it’s all over.

“Eight out of 10 participants in the Corporate Service Corps program say it significantly increases the likelihood of them completing their career at IBM,” Stanley Litow, VP of Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, told us.

Recognizing that corporate responsibility can offer a company a competitive advantage today, we became interested in IBM as a pioneer in establishing a skills-based volunteerism initiative that also influences its talent and professional development strategies. Several executives at the company offered to talk with us to figure out why the program has been so successful—not just as a philanthropic gesture, but as a talent development system. As Litow put it, “If participation in these programs increases our retention rate, recruits top talent, and builds skills in our workforce, then it’s addressing the critical issue of competitiveness.”

The IBM Corporate Service Corps, a hybrid of professional development and service, deploys 500 young leaders a year on team assignments in more than 30 countries in the developing world. Employees engage in two months of training while working full time, spend one month on the ground on a 6- to 12-member team tackling a social issue, and then mentor the next group for two months. So far, IBMers have completed over 1,000 projects.

The IBM Corporate Service Corps is an example of how IBM is incorporating service into leadership development as a result of the success of another IBM program, IBM’s On Demand Community, which was launched in 2003 as an online marketplace to connect nonprofits with employees and retirees, as well as a portal offering resources to nonprofits of all kinds. According to Litow, the objective was threefold: to support IBMers in their service engagements, to invest the intellectual capital of IBMers in tackling social issues around the world, and to develop the expertise and leadership of IBMers through volunteer opportunities that leverage their skills and abilities.

Argentinian software developer German Attanasio Ruiz, now part of IBM Watson Research, took advantage of On Demand Community and worked with a team of volunteers to produce a mobile application that helps children with special needs recognize emotions in everyday situations. It has now been translated into five languages. Ruiz volunteered significant hours over a six-month period and added mobile app development to his skill portfolio in the process. The volunteer team has since produced a second app, El Recetario, for more advanced students. They received the Volunteer Excellence Award in 2013 and developed a volunteer tool for On Demand Community called “Mobile Applications for Kids with Special Needs.”

Since the inception of On Demand Community, nearly 260,000 former and current employees from 120 countries have collectively logged more than 17 million hours of service. There’s a clear impact on employee engagement: “When I work for IBM,” says Ruiz, “my hands are bigger in terms of what I can do.”

Diane Statkus, an IBM project manager in Boston, echoes Ruiz’s sentiments. She’s volunteered at Girls Inc., the New England Center for Homeless Veterans, and has used her project management expertise to lead a job-skills assistance event with a team of volunteers each year. She’s startlingly honest in her assessment of how these experiences have affected her: “If I didn’t have the ability to be involved in this volunteer work, I’m not sure I’d still be there.”

So what makes the IBM programs so compelling? We noticed three key differentiators:

A multitude of options, so that everyone can find (or design) something they’re interested in. At the core of the Corporate Service Corps and On Demand Community are projects created by employees, retirees, and not-for-profit organizations. The thousands of IBMers who are engaged in service on a regular basis can select the projects they want to work on from the multitude available.

The On Demand Community portal is more than a marketplace; it’s a library. Volunteers can tap into ready-made presentations, videos, reference links, and software tools. (To expand its breadth of support for volunteerism, IBM made these free resources available to the public in 2011.) This library of tools helps employees get their projects off the ground, and ensures the quality of services that the organizations will receive.

Opportunities are actively pushed to interested employees, and can be used to satisfy professional requirements. Project listings are periodically emailed to employees who’ve filled out profiles with their locations, interests, and skills. Employees also can fulfill their professional development requirements through community service projects.

As a result, not only do IBM employees get to give back while developing their skills, but local communities get a great impression of IBM. One of the organizations that has benefited from IBM’s program is the Girls Scouts of Eastern Oklahoma (GSEOK). Among other efforts, IBMers have volunteered to teach classes and help develop an age-appropriate STEM curriculum. Says CEO Roberta Preston, “The real benefit for us as a not-for-profit is that we have world-class expertise at our fingertips that would otherwise be beyond our reach.”

When employees acquire new skills through volunteering, and enhance the company’s brand by giving back to their communities, there’s a clear benefit to Big Blue’s bottom line. “This is a very important attraction and retention vehicle for our company,” says Diane Melley, VP of IBM Global Citizenship Initiatives. “This brings value to our employees in terms of supporting them as well as acquiring the skills that they need to be successful as IBMers.”

Advertising, wearables, Oculus, Bitcoin, Snapchat, and sponsored content won’t save Journalism with a capital J. But lateral thinking and a little treeplanting might.

I’m not worried about the death of content. The Internet is made of the stuff. Nothing captures the human mind and attention like a great story, and I believe nothing ever will. It’s in our biology.

But the Journalism business is an old man on life support.

That’s what the news tells us, at least. One thing that’s become painfully obvious in my last four years building a media-tech company (Contently) is that the shaded area of the Venn diagram between “Effective Journalist” and “Effective Businessperson” is geometrically tiny. Creative brains are naturally great at providing value without managing to capture it. But I don’t think that means we journalists need to give up—we just need to help the suits find a business model that works.

So what is the business model that will save Journalism?

Two and a half years ago, I argued that this was the wrong question, that the news would not be saved by one magic cure but a by a cocktail of different models. At the time, I predicted four:

• Crowdfunding of stories (pre- and post-publication);
• Crowdsourced and/or roboticized news-gathering for lowering the cost of coverage;
• “Lean” publishing (i.e., low-overhead digital news outfits like Mashable);
• And branded content.

A lot has changed in those 30 months. Nearly every major media outlet has adopted sponsored content in some form. Startups have talked investors out of millions of dollars to serve brands-turned-publishers. Tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, and Pierre Omidyar have bought or talked their way into the news business. Snapchat happened. Oculus Rift occurred. Twitter went public. My company, which drew skepticism early on from investors who said, “Content is a bad business,” started getting courted by those same investors, now with dollar-sign eyes. We raised 9 million dollars to build branded content tools and grew from ten to seventy employees and about half of the journalists in America.

In 2014, the world sees itself through brand new lenses. It’s time that the Journalism business did, too.

In his new book Geeks Bearing Gifts, veteran journalist, entrepreneur, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis argues that the key word for the future of Journalism is “relationships.” I couldn’t agree more. Historically, media companies have been the businesses with the best relationships with their audiences, the most loyalty and attention. That’s primarily because they are in the business of giving information and telling stories, and, as I often say, great stories build relationships and make people care.

In the introduction to Geeks, Jarvis writes, “I hope that every reader of this essay outdoes me … finding more and better routes to explore—and exploring them. I hope to hear the discussion about news shift from its lost past to its future—its many possible futures.”

That’s what I’m hoping to do now as I revisit my and others’ predictions about the future of our industry.

But first, I’d like to discuss the problem with every argument I’ve heard about the future of Journalism:

Journalism vs. content: A vital distinction

Critics of the news business and of the recent flourish in brand publishing[1] tend to conflate two things that are very, very different: Journalism with a capital J that exposes injustice and reports news that’s important for democracy and society, and stuff that we call Journalism but actually isn’t.

The fact is: Most of what we read in magazines or watch on television or browse on the Internet is not journalism. It’s information, education, entertainment. But not Journalism.

When I read my monthly issue of Details magazine, it’s not Journalism. I’m under no illusion that the story about “8 Topcoats Perfect for Beating Fall’s Cold,” or the feature on Rick’s epic beard on The Walking Dead, are making me a better voter or keeping the government accountable. Nor are Details’ editors. They’re giving me entertaining, sometimes uplifting, and nearly always illuminating content. But they’re not giving me Journalism.

And that’s fine.

For the first couple years of Contently, back when people were calling branded content “brand journalism,” I worried about the questions we got regarding how brands could possibly “do Journalism” when one of the core tenets of Journalism is to “act independently.” I felt better after interviewing ethicists and standards editors for our Code of Ethics, but then Bob Steele of DePauw University admonished me, “Accept the fact that it’s not Journalism. It’s a very different animal.”

Accepting this fact made it easier for me to swallow the idea of our journalists finding and telling stories on behalf of brands. When a photographer shoots a wedding on the weekend, or a commercial for Mountain Dew in her spare time, she’s not yelled at by her photo editor at The Wall Street Journal when she comes in on Monday to photograph a campaign speech. The key is in transparency about where you’ve worked, where your loyalties lie, what your intentions are as a creative person or a publisher, and not fronting like what you’re doing is Journalism when it’s not.

This is why it’s troubling when you see a company like Verizon attempt to cover news and politics while scrubbing information on topics that affect its business and only disclosing that it’s the sponsor in a footnote at the bottom of its website. But when GE writes about a DJ making music from industrial machines, or about the Nobel-winning former GE scientists who invented the LED on GEReports.com, GE makes it clear who it is as a brand. They make it clear that it wants the reader to like its company, to advocate for the brand and perhaps eventually buy GE products. They’re making it clear that they’re providing information and entertainment, not Journalism—just like Details and 90 percent of the rest of the magazines and blogs we read.

The problem is that people generally don’t differentiate these two types of information when they talk about content. That’s likely our own fault as the press. Reporters seem to be bad at articulating the difference and good at conflating the two, often in the service of the hand-wringing concern that “lines are blurring” and “the sacred cows are being murdered.” And the distinction is made blurrier when a brand publishes not on its own turf, but on a journalistic media property as “sponsored content.” More on that later.

This distinction between Journalism and content is crucial to the discussion of business models because the former has never been independently profitable. By ignoring this fact, and the difference between what-to-wear entertainment and keep-the-government-honest Journalism, we distract ourselves from the actual challenge at hand.

“Pure” Journalism has always been subsidized

We need to admit to ourselves that high-minded Journalism was never a good business by itself. In the newspaper, the ads in the sports section have historically paid for the war reporting on page one. Commercials keep the power on at the radio station. The glossy photo of James Bond wearing an Omega watch lets Tom Junod report on mercenary assassins. Bloomberg’s terminals subsidize Bloomberg News. The content that we are generally willing to pay for online—music, television shows, books—by and large aren’t Journalism; the movies and music and books that a journalistic outlet might have once sold on the side as an e-commerce play are now available on demand and lower cost from Apple and Amazon. And, of course, rich families have kept less-than-profitable news orgs afloat as long as any of us have been alive.

The “great unbundling” of the news business that’s been talked about is about exactly that: the disentanglement of things that aren’t Journalism—but pay for Journalism—from the Journalism that was never that profitable. Sports and watch advertisers creating their own publications to compete with their former ad outlets is just the next evolution of the Internet’s magnetic pull, which has already shifted ad money from Esquire to Google.

Publishing became a lucrative enterprise because media companies—whether news or not—had audience. As much as it pains me as a creative person to say it, it was that attention that the advertisers paid for, not the content itself (though the content attracted the attention). But even the advertisers steered toward the information and entertainment and education kind of content, because that’s where their business was.

As media entrepreneur Brian Alvey once told me, nobody wants to advertise next to the story about the orphanage fire.[2]

What won’t “save” journalism

So. Media’s economics are strongest for content that’s not Journalism. And bundling is largely done for. Additionally, with the rise of the web, advertisers want their ads to be closer to the purchase than ever before. We’re not going to go back to a model based on exposure—how many people drove past the billboard. So advertisers pay based on clicks (and, increasingly, attention time). Publishers, meanwhile, cram ads into every crevice imaginable, from the related links to the comment sections to the story feeds.

That’s not going to save Journalism.

We’ve finally gotten past the point where news orgs are trying to stuff last century’s tape back into the cassette. However, I contend that most of the technologies that critics and entrepreneurs get excited about with respect to the future of media are at best wishful thinking with no economics to support them—and at worst just dumb.

Case in point: When I was writing about the rise of geo-location social apps like Foursquare and Loopt and Gowalla in 2009, “bleeding-edge” media critics hailed geo-social as the beacon of hope for the news business. “We’ll get news alerts beamed to us based on our locations!” we cried. “And that will… somehow… make money…”

In reality, all those applications did was give reporters tools to do their jobs a little better, while siphoning more ad money away from their parent companies. In fact, media companies like New York and Bravo were some of Foursquare’s earliest paying customers.

Likewise, when I see posts about how virtual reality or wearables or “ephemeral content” (e.g., Snapchat) will save news, all I see is a desperate industry grasping for hope. In reality, little of the money made from computer watches will find its way to news orgs. Optimistic media bloggers tend to stop typing right before the part where math is required.

This includes Marc Andreessen’s prediction that “Bitcoin for micropayments” will save the news. A new currency, even one that divides into tiny, tiny increments, does nothing to address the fundamental problem of funding journalism. It’s a cool technology, but not a business model.

Finally, though of all people in the content industry I should be bullish about brand publishers’ potentially positive effect on Journalism (because building relationships through storytelling is more effective than advertising, and so much nicer, too!), I’m skeptical that sponsored content will be the economic savior of the news business in the long run. For two reasons:

1. It’s hard to mix the Journalism and Advertising worlds without diluting the value of the Journalism Brand. Studies show that people don’t trust sponsored content as much as both publisher and advertiser would like. This is often due to labeling and editorial design—people don’t know whether “sponsored post” means the post was written by the advertiser, or if the advertiser simply underwrote the post but didn’t influence the content. But even when we get the labeling right, there will be a natural limit to the amount of sponsored content that a reputable publication can shove in front of people before it alienates its audience and loses the asset that it’s able to charge a premium for in the first place: its own brand.

2. Sponsored content works best for the kind of content that advertisers have always wanted to be associated with: The not-Journalism content. This is precisely the kind of content that brands can publish under their own banners, on their own websites and in their own magazines—at lower cost and higher ROI because the brand can own the experience from content to shopping cart (or brand advocacy). I predict that in the next two-to-five years brands will shift from sponsoring information and entertainment to producing their own rival publications. Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review last week, Michael Meyer seemed to agree, writing: “One day soon, native advertising may be recalled as a quaint evolutionary step, as brands are increasingly comfortable simply reaching an audience themselves.”

This will push the premiums for sponsored real estate down to the point that news organizations need to find yet other ways to subsidize their non-advertiser coverage.

I do believe that sponsored content will be a profitable business for a little while. It just won’t be the panacea for the news. And I think by nature it will be much more profitable per unit for Details magazine than it will for The Washington Post.

What Can “Save” Journalism

In my book, I write about how “lateral thinking”—or the questioning of our most basic assumptions—has helped innovators and revolutionaries throughout history make breakthrough change. One of the problems with the news business is that we don’t use much lateral thinking; the models we construct are built on centuries of assumptions. Like when we defined automobiles by the past paradigm, calling them horseless carriages. When we strip away those assumptions and analogs and “best practices,” what we’re left with are the principles that I believe can lead to real ways forward. And you find at the crudest level two models for funding Journalism: subsidizing it, or getting people to directly pay for it.

I think we can still find profits in both categories:

Direct

Two and a half years ago, I predicted that crowds could directly pay for Journalism. Sites like Beacon do this now in the Kickstarter method: People pitch in to fund a story idea, then a reporter makes the story. Conversely, companies like Atavist act much like book publishers, funding stories out of their own pocket with the hopes that consumers will essentially crowdfund back the advance in $1.99 increments. We’re seeing a little, but not much, traction in this field. Paywalls like the one employed by The New York Times essentially do this: They pool readers’ money for content.

In the future, the paywall/crowdfunding/subscription model will only work, I believe, in the presence of two if not all three of the following variables:

1. Premium content, of a high caliber

2. A niche audience

3. A top, respected news brand

Again, the math is tricky. It might take something like a half million subscribers at $10 a month to pay for a 500-person newspaper staff’s salaries. That’s more than the 1,300-staffed NYT‘s current subscriber count. So subscriptions alone are not enough to keep Big Journalism’s nose above water.

Subsidized

I think one of the most important ideas for the future of the business of Journalism is this: Instead of chasing new technologies and shoehorning them into old business models, we should step back and ask, Can the fundamental assets that news orgs accrue be used to generate subsidies for Journalism? If they can, this is good news. If news orgs can maintain market leadership with products that can also subsidize Journalism, those subsidies will be hard to siphon away.[3]

Here are the core assets that effective journalistic organizations accrue over time:

• Audience relationships
• Expertise in publishing and distributing content
• Deep institutional knowledge of an industry
• Sometimes: proprietary publishing tools

I think the “business model that saves Journalism” is a cocktail of subsidies generated by the smart monetization of the above assets. Here’s my current thinking on each:

Audience relationships:

Access to audience is what media companies typically sell advertisers. Now that we have Google and Twitter and Facebook and every other website to compete with, selling online reach to a targeted audience is a tough business to win. But one advantage media companies do have with their audiences is immense trust built on telling stories. These relationships can be monetized through events where the audience can meet each other in person and pay for live access to content, speakers, and talent (e.g., anchors and writers). Audiences are willing to pay for this kind of access with media brands to which they’re loyal, and we’ve seen many smart media companies start to take advantage of this in earnest. Events are not necessarily an interesting business for Google (which likes revenue opportunities with a couple more zeroes attached to the them), but for media brands, it’s effective.

Second point on this front: Contently Editor-in-Chief Joe Lazauskas often talks about media companies’ ability to leverage their audiences’ enthusiasm to contribute content by creating “minor leagues” wherein lots of user-generated content happens, and the good stuff bubbles up to the main brand. Examples include Gawker’s Kinja, BuzzFeed’s blogs, Forbes’ contributor network, and Medium. A lot of low-class content gets created by the audience itself at these secondary tiers, and exceptional stuff periodically gets brought to the main brands. This is a way to lower the cost of creating quality content (through a spray approach, essentially). This doesn’t solve the model question, but it does help with one of the inputs of the model. It also carries the advantage of infusing news organizations with new blood and points of view.

Finally, though the world is full of content, good publishers are in a position to engage audiences with better content than alternative sources of entertainment on the web. As more of advertising turns to the attention-based model that Upworthy and Chartbeat and others (including Contently) advocate, the incentive for those who make money from advertising is to engage people longer. News organizations, with their expertise in building and maintaining relationships with audiences, can win at this game.

I do harbor skepticism that attention-based advertising will work in the long run, simply because an advertisement next to the thing that you want as a consumer is not a good experience. (And I’m further skeptical that the longer you read an article necessarily means that you’re paying more real attention to the ad on the side of the article, though research shows there’s some correlation here.) I think the rates for attention-based banner advertising will eventually fall, but the so-called silver tuna in this model is when you apply it to sponsored content. If readers pay lots of attention to a sponsored article, that’s valuable to a brand, and brands will pay a nice premium for that.

Publishing expertise:

Many (and I think soon most) commercial brands now aim to become publishers and build audiences of their own; they’re turning to agencies for content strategy and solution providers (like Contently) for the tools, talent, and expertise to execute. Every variety of agency, in fact, from PR to creative to media to digital, is now pitching “content marketing services.” News brands are in a unique position, given their expertise in publishing, to compete against them for seven-figure contracts as consultants and agencies for this growing line of business.

If I were Ogilvy, I would be nervous that Fast Company or Vogue could step in and steal clients, helping them build big publications with legitimate audiences. This practice will pose questions about church-and-state separation within a media brand, and those ethical issues are going to be important future discussions. But I’m convinced that news organizations with deep publishing expertise are in a unique position to gobble market share as service providers for brands-turned-publishers, whether the brand is doing sponsored content or building its own publication.

Deep industry knowledge:

There’s a scadzillion “publishers” out there dumping content into the Internet’s maw every day. But journalistic organizations with good reputations and top talent are in a position to provide deeper information for businesses and researchers—as B2B publishers.

The product: premium educational (not Journalistic) content. On subscription or demand. Think academic studies, books, industry reports, and market research. This is the model that the Harvard Business Review pulls off well with its books and case studies and research. 99u, the publishing arm of Adobe’s Behance, makes a bit of money publishing books and other products based on its reputation and expertise, as do magazines like Men’s Health with its house-made books.

The B2B research and educational publishing markets are massive and growing, and journalistic publishers have an opportunity to win share in these areas.

Proprietary publishing tools:

Many of the fast-growing new media companies of the last decade have developed their own technologies for better publishing. The Huffington Post used its headline-testing tech to grow its business. Vox and BuzzFeed tout their content management systems as competitive advantages. Circa attributes its mobile content atomization tech to its success so far. And Medium’s clean publishing experience is both the envy of the publishing world and a big reason for the company’s growth.

Regular ol’ software companies like Adobe and Sitecore and Automattic make billions of dollars off of technologies like these. Any tool that a publisher develops to make publishing better could possibly be licensed as SaaS (Software as a Service) on a four- to five-figure monthly subscription per client. This would require resources to support and maintain, but it’s a great business with high margins. Basically: Media companies can become software companies, publishers-turned-brands instead of brands-turned-publishers.

This is essentially what we realized that Contently did not long ago. We built a marketplace for hiring freelance journalists, and in the natural course of business developed project management and publishing technology to help companies—and ourselves—manage this talent and content more effectively. We used this platform to grow our own industry publication, The Content Strategist, to hundreds of thousands of readers. That publication pulls in customers for our publishing tools, which we charge for on a monthly subscription. The content attracts the audience, which proves the value of the publishing platform that creates the content, which pulls in clients and profits for the business, which fund more content.

And that brings me to the Journalism business model that I’m perhaps most excited for:

A new model: Corporate responsibility

We started Contently with a vision of what we call “a better media world,” where content is awesome and interruptive advertising doesn’t exist, where storytellers get paid what they’re worth to do what they love, and consumers get content they want without feeling betrayed. As our business grew, we kept asking the question, What happens to the kind of Journalism that newspapers can’t afford? We were helping brands publish information and entertainment, and therefore journalists make a living, but we weren’t doing Journalism.

Until we realized that our brand revenues could subsidize Journalism just like brands always had. In this case, as a form of corporate responsibility.

Most corporations have initiatives for giving back to their communities—planting trees or cleaning up highways. As a company that cares about Journalism, we decided to put some of our profits toward funding investigative reporting in the public interest. So we formed a nonprofit called The Contently Foundation and started commissioning stories about gun trafficking and illegal surveillance and sex slavery—real Journalism that gives voice to the voiceless and has nothing to do with our brand marketing goals.

If we think about real Journalism as a public service, we ought to be able to ask corporations to do the same: to donate to nonprofit Journalism as part of their responsibility to their communities. I think Starbucks and Zappos and Whole Foods and other brands that like to show that they care about community ought to put some of their profits toward funding public-interest Journalism—and do it without expectation of influence on the coverage that ensues. There are plenty of ethical guidelines to be created and enforced around the model, but essentially, we’d be asking corporations to fund a slew of ProPublicas.

The exciting part about this is that Fortune 500 companies spend $15 billion dollars a year on corporate responsibility. A small percentage of that could fund a lot of Journalism for a long time.

When I was a kid, I was terrified of the part in All Dogs Go to Heaven when Annabelle tells Charlie, over and over, ”You can never come back.” We in journalism can never go back to a pre-Craigslist, pre-WordPress, pre-Oculus world. But we can stop being so scared about what comes next.

“We still have more imagining to do,” Jarvis writes in Geeks. I’m imagining a terrific new life after old media’s death.

It’s just going to be different than we pictured.

Android is underappreciated as a commercial platform — as a revenue driver for the e-commerce, advertising, and software industries. 

Consider: 

• Android is crushing it as a driver of ad revenue. In this year's second quarter, Android's share of mobile ad traffic passed the share controlled by Apple's iPhone and iPad devices. Android at 39% still lags iOS in ad revenue share, but it is gaining share twice as fast.
• Android is exploding as an e-commerce driver. Android's share of mobile commerce orders is up 26% year-over-year. Android devices now account for just over one-fifth of all mobile e-commerce orders in the US. 
• It's also the fastest-growing major app ecosystem. Global revenue on Google Play more than doubled year-over-year in the first quarter of 2014. That's faster growth than iOS, according to App Annie. Some analysts believe Google Play will overtake the Apple App Store in revenue within five years. 

In a new BI Intelligence report, we show how Android has translated its massive audience — an estimated 1.2 billion active users globally by the end of this year — into a solid platform for mobile-based businesses. 

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

Consider: 

• Mobile business models that neglect or ignore Android risk severely limiting their market potential. Android is roughly twice the size of iOS in terms of its user base and is comparable in size to the world’s two other major platforms: Facebook and Windows.
• The fragmentation problem is extremely overblown, from all perspectives: screen size, operating system version, and device proliferation. Globally, 80% of Android devices are running the two latest available versions of the platform. In the U.S, it's over 90%. Android Lollipop will roll out beginning this month.
• Android's Achilles Heel remains the feature-creep and bloatware perpetrated on the platform by partner carriers and manufacturers. But Google is exerting more and more control over Android and pushing partners to adopt its preferred version of Android, which has a full suite of Google apps, including  Search and Google Play. 
• Google has made progress in "recapturing" Android. In the second quarter of 2014, 65% of global smartphone shipments were running Google's preferred version of Android, rather than variants. That was a 3-percentage-point improvement over the previous quarter.  
• Too many analysts remain attached to an outdated idea of Google's mobile operating system as fragmented, malware-ridden, and low-end. They believe Android users don’t spend money on mobile and lack lifetime value. This is no longer true.

The report is full of charts and data that can be easily downloaded and put to use. 

In full, the report: 

• Explains how Android has essentially solved the fragmentation problem 
• Delivers all the key stats in a dozen charts for Android-based e-commerce, advertising, and app sales
• Shows how Android is growing much faster across most key mobile business categories than rival platforms
• Lists all the milestones Android has achieved in 2014, including surpassing iOS in web traffic share
• Delves into why Android still has significant vulnerabilities, and how Google is addressing them

For full access to the report on Android As A Mobile Business Platform and all our downloadable charts and data on mobile computing strategy and trends sign up for a trial subscription today.

 

 

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I used to market chemistry journals to scientists. I know it sounds dull, but it actually taught me a lot. Yes, about chemistry (you’d be amazed at what you can make with shaving cream and food coloring), but also about relationship marketing.

Thanks to how science programs are structured, it’s easy to track the evolution of a scientist’s research needs and interests. Starting in undergrad, these individuals gradually become more focused on a specific area of interest. They start with a general field, like Chemistry, and narrow that expertise as they progress through to PhD.

From a marketing perspective, then, it was pretty easy to know some key, yet basic, information about my audience. Add to that face-to-face interactions at conferences and workshops, website searching behavior, and content consumption, and I was getting a well-rounded view of my customer.

Doesn’t that sound like segmentation? Taking a big group and making it smaller around common elements? I thought so, too.

But let’s just call that a simpler time, where my intel was good, my customers were happy, and I embarked on targeted multi-channel programs to drive success. What I was missing—and what remains a potential blind spot for marketers—is that simply making a group smaller doesn’t mean you’re creating segments.

But enough about chemists, let’s apply this lesson to ecommerce.

What is a segment?

First, let’s be clear on what a segment is. A segment is a subset of people who you can identify within your audience, that you can describe via their attributes and behaviors, and that you can reach with precision across channels.

Personalization platforms come with many “out-of-the-box” segments and, while it’s great to be able to distinguish your new visitors from your returning visitors (and you definitely should be doing this), these targets only address part of the interactions you’re having with a customer. As a marketer, you need a way to reconcile their behavior across channels, which is where segmentation becomes more powerful.

To create better ecommerce customer segments, you need to use three categories of information:

• Context. This is real-time data—like location, weather, and device type—and demographic data—like age and gender. All of these data points impact the mindset of your customer, and how they interact with your brand.
• Behavior. This is observed data—what your customer is doing on your site, what products, brands, categories they express interest in, and what actions they take, like adding items to carts, wishlists, or proceeding 90% through checkout only to abandon cart. All of this information gets you closer to understanding a customer’s buying intent.
• Relationship. This is the historical and cross-channel data that makes it possible for you to recognize and relate to your customer. Taking a backward look at the customer will also help you determine stability of your segment. Are they tied to a particular purchase cycle? Do they only shop with you during a particular season or time of day? Do they only make a purchase when presented with a promotional offer?

These categories, you might recognize, progress in the same way a scientist progresses from Chemistry undergrad to PhD: they start broad, then narrow in scope. And it’s not until you make your way through all three criteria that you can create better ecommerce customer segments.

Of course, not all of your customers are going to fall into a segment. That’s why there are natural breaking points.

Context provides you with the break points to form groups—a common thread of rain, female, college educated, midwestern, etc.— while behavior will show you how people differ within the group. This is also where you start to form better segments. Examine what types of behavior are taking place within the group, how often, and when—and you’ll start to zero in on your most valuable customers.

The next step is to analyze the relationship, which will bring forward the attributes, behavioral patterns, and even changes in context over time that help you understand when, and with what urgency a customer is ready to convert.

When it’s all said, done, and hopefully purchased, you’ll have a defined set of information on that previous group of customers, and a strong customer segment. And don’t worry if not all of your customers map to a segment, just give them time to evolve.

What is a group?

Before you can get to a customer segment, you need to start with something larger. That’s a group.

A group is a collection of visitors that I can tie together with a single characteristic, like chemists, visitors, and humans. But don’t let the simplicity fool you, even if you refine the details, you still wind up with a group, for example:

• Biochemists, Organic Chemists, Physical Chemists
• First time, returning, frequent visitor
• Men, women

So far, you’ve gathered some data about who they are, and how you can classify your customers. And if you were to apply these broad categories within campaigns, you’d wind up with some traction, but these groups will still be quick to point out how, and why, they are different.

When should a group become a segment?

A lot of that decision will come down to how homogeneous your group is.

Within the larger classification—for example, female—are behavior and decisions largely the same? If so, it’s probably safe to stick with groups for the time being, but keep an eye out for significant differences in behavior.

An example:

When a woman visits your site, and you direct her to dresses, you’re anticipating some basic category needs. While the characteristics (and stereotypes) may be right, the behavior and intent could be wrong.

I, for one, can’t remember the last time my fiance bought his own clothes. And as a result, in the scenario above, I am a woman who logically should be presented with dresses, but I am also a woman who purchases men’s jeans, shirts, sweaters, and, sometimes, shoes. (I highly doubt I am the only woman in the world who does this, by the way.)

This type of behavior, appearing in a subset of your group, may point you toward forming a segment. Let’s break it down into each data source:

• Context. You’ve formed some preliminary groups based on gender. In this case we’re focusing on female shoppers. There may be other elements to break it down further, like mobile, or located in New England, that are common threads within the group.
• Behavior. Behavior will start to poke holes in your original hypothesis. I know my recent session on a certain retailer’s website looks like this: Recently Browsed: Women’s Shoes, Recent Category: Petites, Recently Purchased: Men’s Sweaters, Abandon Cart: PID12334 (Women’s Boots). What I’ve done, by simply shopping as I normally would, is provide four different ways to break down the group in favor of segments.
• Relationship. This drives patterns, affinity, and loyalty. All of which influence online habits. Looking into historical data can uncover this information. I tend to purchase when there is a promotion for free shipping or a minimum of a 20% discount. It’s also been one year since I last purchased women’s jeans, which I’ve bought around this time for the past 4 years, and I have built an affinity for the petites category and men’s sweaters and t-shirts.

Thanks to this mish-mash of context, behavior, and relationship, we can start to look at my biggest motivators when shopping and which behavior is translating into repeat purchases for your brand. What emerges will be the attributes of a new segment, like “Relationship Shoppers.” Based on any one class of information above, context, behavior, and relationship, I would have been entered into campaigns that weren’t very relevant. But by combining them, you’ve determined that I tend to purchase more items for my finance on your site, and just browse for the occasional purchase for myself. I can now be targeted by appropriate campaigns.

But the most important thing about a segment is that they should prove value to your brand. Scientists would say publish or perish (a fancy way of saying “Innovate or die”) and I think it applies here, too.

Do the research to form meaningful segments. Look for the patterns, form a hypothesis (or, in this case, a segment), and validate through experimentation. And if all else fails, use the hard facts to form a new hypothesis and start the process again.

Science beakers image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. — You might not think investors with huge piles of money would have much to worry about, but that’s increasingly the case in the competitive world of tech venture capital.

There is so much money chasing so few good deals that VCs need to work hard to get the choicest opportunities.

One way is by offering ridiculously huge valuations, such as the $1.12 billion that Slack is now worth — even though it has only 268,000 daily active users. (It’s important to note that, thanks to Slack’s freemium business model, these are not all paying customers.) That means Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the lead investors, are valuing each Slack user at about $4,180. If Facebook got a similar valuation for its billion-plus users, it would have a market capitalization over $4 trillion.

For Slack’s founders, that’s a great deal — they got $120 million in operating capital and only had to give up about 10 percent of the company. For other VCs, it’s probably causing sticker shock and making them wonder how they can ever compete.

So if you’re a VC and you don’t want to pay top dollar just to get in on a promising new startup, you need to get creative.

“The venture model is evolving to a value-add [proposition],” Intel Capital president Arvind Sodhani told me this week at his company’s annual conference for portfolio companies and partners.

Intel Capital — the venture arm of the semiconductor giant — has pockets just as deep as Google’s or Kleiner’s. It has invested $300 million to $400 million every year for the past decade, making it one of the largest funders of startups in the tech world. In 2014 so far, Intel Capital has made 55 investments totaling $344 million. It has also seen three IPOs and 19 acquisitions among its portfolio companies.

But it’s not just cash that Intel Capital offers: For the past decade or more, Intel has offered a powerful “ecosystem” in addition to its capital. Taking an investment from this fund means gaining access to a powerful network of potential customers, partners, advisors, and peers. This week’s Intel Capital Global Summit, here in sunny Southern California, is the capstone.

About 1,000 people attend the event, roughly half of them the CEOs and executives of “I-Cap companies,” as the portfolio companies call themselves. The rest are Intel employees or representatives of Intel partners — plus a smattering of journalists. A lot of dealmaking gets done in the hallways.

(Intel even brought Beastie Boy DJ Mix Master Mike to put on a private show in the evening — another amazing perk that, curiously, most attendees seemed not to appreciate.)

In short, an investment from Intel means admission to an elite club of companies, with access to many other companies that can purchase your products, invest in you, or help you in other ways. It really is an ecosystem, with Intel at the heart of it.

“Here I can meet lots of CEOs from completely different fields — but they have the same problems,” Idan Tendler, the CEO and founder of security analytics startup FortScale told me. (FortScale took $10 million from Intel Capital and Blumberg Capital in June 2014.) “It’s great networking. If I want to reach a customer or a partner, I can do it here.”

Other funds are taking a different tack. Eden Shochat is the founder of Aleph, an Israeli VC firm that has raised its first fund, with $150 million committed. In other words, Aleph’s entire fund is about half of what Intel invests in a single year — and the network of Israeli entrepreneurs and investors, while powerful, is much smaller than Intel’s ecosystem.

So Aleph is differentiating through software. It has built an app, which it calls Karma, to help connect Israeli entrepreneurs with one another. It’s an open network, so it’s not just for Aleph portfolio companies. Using the app, people can ask questions, receive or give advice, and make referrals to other people in their network.

Karma now has 2,100 entrepreneurs using it, Shochat says, which is a substantial fraction of the Israeli tech startup world. Shochat says that this app provides real value to entrepreneurs — but it also gives Aleph unprecedented visibility into where the talent lies. For instance, it’s easy for him to see which users are continually receiving referrals, which provide the best answers to startup questions, and which have the best reputations as engineers, designers, or what have you.

It also provides a way to funnel deals into Aleph’s pipeline.

“You will always have too few partners — so you need software to get the right deals to the right partners as quickly as possible,” Shochat told me.

But for startups, that software is an added value that, he believes, will make his firm more attractive than others. And, Shochat believes, VC firms have moved too slowly to embrace the power of the software that they ostensibly believe in.

“It’s interesting to see that the industry tasked with identifying innovation is still working with IT systems from the Stone Age,” Shochat said.

That might be a bit harsh. But one thing is clear: As long as valuations are this high, and the market remains this optimistic, most VCs are going to have to work quite a bit harder to keep (or win) their places at the table.

Intel Capital has a number of dedicated funds that drive innovations in specific geographies and technology areas. Country-specific funds include the India Technology Fund, China Technology Fund II, Brazil Technology Fund and Middle Ea... read more »

The challenging world of enterprise security demands challenging solutions. Fortscale is an innovator in Cyber Security Analytics. We deliver a powerful, user-friendly and affordable platform, that translates advanced security know... read more »

Sometimes I accept a connect request on LinkedIn with people I don’t know but others in my network do.  When this request happens, I look to see who has connected, then I go to view this person’s profile to see if it is someone I may be able to refer or if they just seem interesting enough to connect with. Unlike some on LinkedIn, I don’t connect to just anyone, and know most of the people I’m connected to or have talked with them since we connected.

Within ONE day of connecting with someone I’m not sure of,  I can learn if I made a mistake in having made that connection.

What happens within 24 hours is that this person I connected to immediately sends me a LinkedIn message – now that we are connected. Often it begins, “Thanks SO much for connecting!” Next they proceed to go on and on about their products and services and how much they’d love to talk with me about them.

This strategy is called, “Showing up and throwing up.” It is one of the worst things you can do as a seller. I’m posting this because I just got another one today, so my plan now is to simply reply to the seller-focused note with a link to this post, in hopes that they will “get” a better idea of how to build relationships on LinkedIn.

There are at least two types of prospective customers on LinkedIn –

Industry / Niche Specific

Those who are very similar to companies you have worked with already. If I’m an oil and gas company and you have cornered that market with your expertise and specific solutions for my industry – you can approach me as an expert in that market niche. You are a professional contacting a professional – with industry insight – not just products and services.

Anyone Else

Those with a pulse and a heartbeat on LinkedIn and your desire to make anyone a customer because you are such an amazing awesome company.

Think About It

Busy professionals only want to speak with other professionals, not sales reps. If you feel like a peddler or sales guy / gal with a “pitch” – you won’t get far connecting to the professionals on LinkedIn.

Learn about ME first before you dump your product information on the table. Your prospective buyers are getting dozens and dozens of contacts from bad sales reps every day. Ever since I returned from Dreamforce I’ve received bad emails and InMails.

One More Tip

When you go to connect with someone you DON’T know on LinkedIn, connect from your laptop, not a mobile device. For some strange reason,  you cannot customize a connection request on the mobile LinkedIn app.  Say something PERSONAL to that connection – why it is that you are reaching out to connect.

Because You Are A Person I Trust

Using LinkedIn’s tired phrase of “because you are a person I trust” has NOTHING to do with me, and everything to do with YOU. You trust me? You don’t even know me. I certainly don’t know you. Give me some insight about why it would make sense for both of us to connect with each other – not just why it would be great for you. Don’t assume you know that it would be great for me. Another bad thing is when you copy and paste the same message – it is generic enough to cut and paste. That makes me also feel like you are being lazy and a personalized connection to me is not worth your time.

Real sales pro’s are making connections to build relationships, and over time are introducing potential ideas that could benefit those around them.

If you get this one thing right – you will go far in utilizing LinkedIn as an amazing prospecting tool.

Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Social Sales Influencers” worldwide. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | My LinkedIn Profile | twitter | Visit us on google+

The post How Salespeople Goof Up on LinkedIn Part 1 appeared first on Score More Sales.

Alibaba announced its first quarterly earnings report since the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in September. The company announced better-than-expected revenue, topping $2.74 billion in the third quarter of 2013 — a 53.7% jump from the same period a year ago — but perhaps what’s most promising is the growth of Alibaba’s mobile business. 

Based on company data charted for us by BI Intelligence, 35.8% of Alibaba’s gross merchandise volume of $90.53 billion — or $32.4 billion — in the quarter. That’s an increase of 14.7% from the same year-ago period, and up 32.8% from the last quarter. That’s coming from 307 million annual active buyers across all of Alibaba’s platforms; comparatively, eBay only reported 152 million annual active buyers last quarter.

SEE ALSO: 16 Beautiful Variations Of Jawbone's New High-End Wristband

SEE ALSO: The Steve Jobs Guide To Manipulating People And Getting What You Want

Join the conversation about this story »

Here's the recording of a startup sales bootcamp we did for Y Combinator alumni on August 14, 2014. This was my 45 minute startup sales crashcourse intro, followed by a Q&A (which we didn't record because founders shared some confidential numbers).

Here are the slides:

Prefer to listen? Here's the audio:

Transcription:

(Or get the transcript as .pdf, .mobi or .epub)

All right. So let me give you, let me do this the legal microphone thing. Oh, and the founder, let's shame him. He's late. No, I'm just joking. All right. So let's get started.

Let me give you a little bit of background, just a tiny, tiny bit why sales is important to me, why do I care, how I have learned the things that I know, partially at least. So we started a company called "ElasticSales". Originally, it was a totally different business called "Swipegood". That's how we sneaked into YC and then we turned the charitable micro giving project into a sales machine. So kind of like behind the, you know, the back through the chest into the nose.

So ElasticSales, what we did with that company is the idea was to do like AWS for sales. So we wanted to offer a sales team on demand for startups and technology companies. We ended up working with over 200 venture backed startups in Silicon Valley alone basically doing two things:

1. working with startups in the sales exploration phase, right, you have some customers, you have a product, some things work, but you don't quite yet have a predictable repeatable sales model;
2. and then the companies that were in the sales execution face so companies like Eventbrite, for instance, that is clearly on the path to IPO and they're like, "We have these seven verticals we'll never get around to get to. Here's the leads, here's the script, here's the process, you guys just throw people at this problem, manage it for us."

So we did both these things.

And from day one, we actually developed a piece of software called "Close.io" that was kind of an internal secret sauce. We never intended to actually launch that software. But we were recruiting people with it. We were making our own lives better. It's an inside sales tool. And eventually, it got so popular that we decided to release it last year in January.

And you know, as a founder, you almost always wrong, but once in a while, you're actually glad you're wrong. This is one of these cases. This was not me being a visionary founder and saying, "We should release Close.io immediately." I love the software, and I knew that eventually this would be a bit business. But I also was trying to handling this other business, ElasticSales. I was like, "I don't want to get distracted. This is going to be complicated." So I was resisting this.

But we were getting more and more signals from the outside world - come on in - that people would actually really, people really wanted the software, not just the services.

The other thing that happened is that a little group led by the guy in the orange polo, Phil Freo, he led the resistance internally at Elastic, lobbying it every opportunity, hustling me like, "We need to release the software. We need to release the software. The software must be free." It's just like pushing and pushing and pushing until because of a variety of factors, we decided, "All right, whatever. Let's launch the software." And Close.io has been a lot more successful than we thought. Today, that's all we do, is Close.io.

So we have done sales for other companies, for over 200 companies ourselves. And now we have software that's being used by thousands and thousands of inside sales, you know, people around the world. So we've seen kind of all different perspectives on this.

Sales Basics

All right, let's talk sales basics. All right, so first of all, let me give you my formula for the hustle. And when you think about hiring sales people for a startup, you're not looking for traditional sales people. You're not going to go to your car dealership or your insurance company and try to hire those people to come and work for you because it's a completely different beast when you actually do sales for a startup, right?

It needs a lot more hustle and not just somebody that's like, "Give me a script, give me a commission structure and give me people to talk to."

You have to figure out a lot more things. There are a lot more moving parts. Today you're this business. Tomorrow you're a completely new business. It needs, it requires a completely different level of flexibility and hustle and somebody that's comfortable with the messiness of a startup. And it's not like, "Well, where's my sales material? Why isn't the commission structure already perfect? You know, why isn't this already a proven model that I can just follow instructions and I'm going to make 200k here?"

All right, you need hustlers. Here's the simple formula when you're looking for hustlers. You look for people that know how to do three things really well and it's in their DNA, in their nature. They know how to show up, they know how to follow up and they know how to close. Right?

Showing up is all about opening doors, going to events, calling people, like sending an email. All that is showing up even getting an opportunity to get attention, even getting an opportunity to build a relationship or even to sell anything, right? Once you showed up, that's already, like you're already at the top of the pyramid in terms of like competing in the market because most people don't want to show up. Most people want the customers to show up at their doorstep, you know, ready to buy. So when you actually have to show up everyday, go out there and hustle, it needs, it requires a certain type of personality that likes that, that wants that, wants to show up, wants to go and send that email, make that call and has that in them.

The next thing, once you showed up, that's just like 20% of winning and 20% of like the sales hustle. The other 80% are actually happening in the follow up. So follow up, and I'm going to talk about that, follow up is where winning really actually happens. It's when everybody else stops racing and you're the only person running in the race. It doesn't matter how slow you run, you are going to win because everybody else stopped running, right?

So I'm going to talk about my follow-up philosophy, but the core idea here is that when you make a connection with a human being, when you show up somewhere and there's a connection, somebody liked something, somebody got know you, you got to know somebody, make sure that you never stop following up until you actually get to a result. And it doesn't matter what the result is, yes or no. Both work. We're going to talk a little bit more about that later on.

And then the last but not the least is closing. And closing starts with actually asking for the close. This is something most people don't want to do. The simplest secret in sales is - here's how you all are going to become sales ninjas: Just ask the question a lot and ask it early. "Hey, do you want to buy? Hey, are you ready to buy? What do we need to do to get you to become a customer?" Ask the question at a time when you're sure they're going to say no. How about that? Ask when you are completely certain they're going to say no. Embrace the no.

What about being comfortable with him saying no and saying, "Of course, you're not ready yet, but I was just curious? I was just testing, you know. Don't blame me. I was just playing. So you're not ready yet and it's cool. What do we need to do to get you ready? What are all the steps? Can you guide me through this?"

Asking for the close. I see this all the time. Founders present something and then they go silent and since the customer doesn't close themselves, they go, "Well, this was a really productive meeting and I really liked it and it seems that this was really good. So hopefully, yeah, just let us know." What's this all about? Just ask, "Do you want to be a customer?" It's an uncomfortable question because rejection is a pretty high likelihood, and you get comfortable with the uncomfortable if you want to actually succeed in sales. You need to look for people you're hiring that are comfortable with that. And that goes into the next thing.

What you are looking for is for people with a high tolerance level for pain and rejection because in sales, if you're not getting rejected, it means you're not trying hard enough. You're not going for big enough deals. You're not doing things that are valuable enough for the business. You're only going for the safe area that you've already mastered. You've created a safe comfort zone in which you operate successfully. These are the types of customers we're closing easily. And now, you know, you got comfortable in it that's all you do all day long. That means that you're missing opportunity, opportunities outside your comfort zone not inside.

You look for people, you need to look for people and in yourself you need to cultivate the ability to deal with rejection and to embrace it to say, "If we want to make sales a priority, if I don't hear no multiple times a day, we're not doing our job." Okay?

Consistency

So and here's the next thing why sales is actually really fucking hard. So some people like Phil, I'm going to call you out. Phil is actually an engineer. He's an awesome product person. But Phil is also somebody who has a naturally high sales IQ or high IQ in general. So like working with us, he picked up all the sales strategies, all the negotiation hacks, and he is actually fucking dangerous when it comes to customers. When you hear Phil talking to somebody on the support call, all of a sudden he closed them on a one-year contract or something, you're like, "Wow."

And he's really great at critiquing sales people, critiquing somebody like, "Why did we give this amount of discount? Why did we manage this? Why not that?" And he has really great insight.

So actually learning the basics of sales is simple. If you're smart, if you're a hustler like Phil, you'll learn everything you need to know about like how sales works. And you will get people come and interview for you that seem to be really good at sales, really charismatic, talk a lot, like whatever, in a nice suit, present themselves in a way that makes you go, "Salesperson, right?"

What makes great salespeople great is not that they're good a talking or even good at like being charismatic. What makes great people great is consistency.

Sales is very much like a, you know, high-performance sport. So if you're Michael Jordan at your prime and there's a game and you get on the field, the scoreboard doesn't read 20 points for Michael Jordan being awesome. It's zero, dude. You have to perform. It doesn't matter, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. You have to perform in this game today. It doesn't matter what you did last week or the last five years.

Sales is very much the same thing. That's why sales is really fucking hard because no matter how amazing you are in sales, if today's a new day, you have to do calls, you have to do emails, you have to negotiate, you have to close. It can't be like, "Oh, but today I don't feel like it. Oh, but today, you know, I wasn't in a great mood." No, what makes great salespeople great is consistency.

So when you're looking to hire people, for instance, you cannot judge salespeople on a single event or even two or three interviews. You'll have to actually work with them for a month and then a month or two and actually then see, "Does this person, is this person immensely consistent? Do they show up every day and bring it?"

If they do even if they're a little bit less charismatic or less impactful than somebody else, hire these people and not the people that are amazing one day, not that great the other day. Right? You need consistency.

Ask questions

All right, the other quick myth about sales or a basic truth about sales that you need to know is that sales is not about talking. Sales is not about you being like amazing and speaking for 60 minutes and talking people into decisions.

Sales is all about asking questions. It really is. She who asks leads the conversation, right, leads the focus of the conversation.

Sales is all about what I call - horrible salespeople do this, they throw darts in the dark. A dart is a value proposition or feature, and they go, "Well, you know, great to meet you. You know, let me tell you about our software. Our software is so amazing. Our software is going to increase your revenue and your sales. It's going to decrease your cost. It's really easy to use so your entire team's actually going to use it. Our support is amazing. We've been around for a long time so you can trust us."

They're going to be like throwing value propositions in the dark thinking something will surely stick. It's the worst thing you can do. The more value propositions, just like the website with 100 calls to action, the less your conversion. People tune out.

What you need to do instead is ask a bunch of questions and really understand somebody, not just on the surface level but really deeply. "Hey, why are you checking us out? Why are you interested in this software? What's important in your business right now? What do you struggle with?"

And when people give you answers, you can't just go, "Oh, we're struggling with revenue. We need more revenue." - "Oh, cool. Our software does revenue - " No, no, no, no. You don't know anything yet! They just said a word.

Calm down. Ask follow up questions like these to deepen your understanding.

• What does that mean, revenue?
• How much revenue?
• How much are you making today?
• How much do you want to make next quarter?
• Why are you struggling with it?
• What have you tried before?
• What are all your options in trying to increase revenue?
• Why would you go with the option of choosing our software instead of some of the other options?
• What is the - who is involved in revenue in the team?
• Is it the entire company?
• How do you guys decide if you are on the right path?

You really want to dig deep and understand the person. Once you truly understand them you throw in one dart and it hits.

If they're a good fit, once you truly understand what they're situation is, you're like, "Okay, here's why our software is going to increase your revenue by 5%. I have four case studies to show you they did the same thing in the exact same market. And they also had to choose between this and that, just in the same situation as you and here's how they went about it."

Now you can close them easily. You just give them a solution to what they describe to you they need.

Sell value

I'm going to go through this really quickly. Don't sell features. Don't sell features. Don't talk about features.

Don't.

Talk.

About.

Features.

Nobody gives a fuck. People might ask you about features and yes, you can tell them. "Yes, we have, you know, whatever, we have bulk email. Yes, we have the analytics dashboard that does X, Y, Z." But that's not the sale.

"Why does that matter? Why do you need this feature? What's the value you try to create? What is the exact work flow you're trying to use it in?"

People go, "Oh, we need an email software that allows us to send emails to a lot of people at once."

"Cool, we have that software, blah, blah, blah. This is it." Wait a second, is it a newsletter? Is it drip email? There's a million cases where you do one-to-many email. You need to go really deep and really understand them. And then you sell them on the value that your features are creating, not on the list of functionalities and features that you have.

Friendly strength

This is as tiny as I could make it so guys would have to lean forward. No, this is the size of the graphic.

So somebody asked me recently, "Hey, if I'm doing startup sales, what is the kind of aggressiveness I need? Do I need to be like Wolf of Wall Street, like pushing people into decisions, be like hard hitting like baller? Or, do I need to be like a lamb, more like a teacher that offers information, it's like responds passively to whatever people want and make sure that I'm not offending anyone or doing anything wrong?"

Here's the model that I want you guys to think about when it comes to the salesperson that you'll hire and the way that you do sales. The way that you need to do sales is what I call in "friendly strength," right?

So hostile strength is when you're in it for yourself and you think everybody's preying. And you kill everyone. You're a wolf. You're out there to kill people to benefit yourself, right? That doesn't work for us.

But, you know, friendly weakness is when you're like, "I don't know anything. You know, the world's a complex place. I don't want to offend anyone. You know, the most important thing is -" and these people also get killed out in the market, right? And customers actually treat these people horrible.

You would think like these people will be loved. No. When somebody's actually friendly and weak, it makes you a little bit aggressive. It makes you a little bit unreasonable. The dynamic between the two people is not healthy.

The thing you want to go for is actual friendly strength.

The best was to describe it - because I'm a dad now and I describe almost anything in family terms - is great parent. A great parent is somebody that if they're interacting with their child, interacting from a place of friendly strength. What do I mean by that?

I know better than my child in most cases except when it comes to having fun. I know better than my child certain times what decision to make, when to go to bed, when to eat, when to not stick a knife in his head, things like that. So when I give my child information and my child acts all crazy because he's like tired. You know, it's been too late. It's 8 pm, he goes all nuts, I'm not affected by that.

He screams, he does this, he says I should leave the room. I'm not like, "Oh, my God! My son hates me. You know, why do you? I've done everything for you."

I'm not getting involved emotionally. I'm not fighting with my son. I'm not taking him that seriously either because recognize, "All right, this is a special state. You know, he's tired. What he's saying, what he's doing is not really what he means."

But I still have to be firm.

So I go in there. When he goes nuts, I'm going to go, "All right, my man, I understand that you're upset, but this the way that this is going to go down. I'm going to put you in your pajamas, we're going to get this book, we're going to read it together, you're going to enjoy it, and then we're going to hit the bed. And that's how it's going to go down."

You know what? He's like rebelling a little bit, but this is not optional. I pick him up, change the clothes. And by the time we hit the book, he forgot about everything. It's like, "Oh, he seems pretty certain that dude knows what he's doing so I'm going to just submit to that."

That's the way you need to sell you customers. That's the way your salespeople need to sell your customers.

You usually should know better about your product and market than most customers do.

If you actually only want to sell to people that qualify for your product and where your product is the best fit, then it's your responsibility to close them.

And when they say, "No, I'm not interested, blah, blah, blah, you guys are ridiculous," you're not going to get involved.

You're going to be like, "All right. That's fine. I'm going to put you in our pajamas, we're going to, you know, read a book together, and then you're going to buy." You're going to say, "You know what? This is exactly the same thing that the last 10 customers said that I closed. Those people are my best customers. I totally get where you're coming from. Let me tell you how it's going to go down. What we're going to do next is we're going to through this, this."

And that kind of energy creates real trust. People are comfortable, want to buy from people that have strength that come from a friendly place.

Follow up

All right, and then I said a little bit about follow up, but I don't want to preach about this too much. I've written about it a lot. You sir, Nathan. You've commented. I've posted a talk that I gave on the Facebook group of Y Combinator and then you sir said something about the kind of results that you got through follow up. And we didn't talk about this beforehand so I'm sorry. So you want to share some of that.

The basic philosophy that I have is you never stop following up ever until you get a yes or no. The result doesn't even matter. A no is good. A no is fine. It's a result. What you're looking for is creating results, outcomes.

Yes and no are both great. Maybe or I don't know are killing your business. Killing your business. Occupying mind space, occupying time, not doing anything. Yes or no are both great.

When you have a connection with somebody, you have a meeting or a call or something and they say they are slightly interested, you think it's a good fit, what you have to do, what you absolutely have to do is you have to follow up indefinitely until they actually tell you to fuck off or say, which happened to us... I followed up with one of my investors in the early days of YC. We got an intro from an investor to a guy. All of your are using his product. And the guy responded and said, "Yes, I want to meet." And then I sent an email and said, "Hey, next Tuesday or Thursday," didn't reply. Followed up again, didn't reply. Followed up again, didn't reply. 48 follow ups later he replies and he says, "Fuck. Thank you so much, Steli. I was traveling. We had this big crisis. Can you show up tomorrow at 1 pm." Ended up investing.

You want to share your use case real quick?

Nathan:[0:18:10 - 0:18:48]

Steli: Awesome. Yeah, because you don't want to inconvenience people, you don't want rejection, you don't want to be that insecure person that's been like a nuisance and like annoying.

But this is business. Like grow up. Like this is business. When we talk and you're interested and I send you an email saying, "When should we talk again," and you don't reply. I'm not going to make up stories. "Oh, he doesn't like me. He didn't like my shirt. He thinks I'm ugly." No! Dude, I'm not going to make any assumption. I'm going to just assume you're busy.

At any time you can send me a reply and say, "Fuck off, dude. No, I'm not interested." It's not that hard. As long as you don't reply, I'm not going to make up stories why.

Keep it clean, keep it professional. Don't refer back, "I've already sent you 10 emails. Why haven't you replied? It's really rude of you." Like don't do that kind of stuff. Just clean cut, "Hey, another beautiful day in paradise. Here's the three things that we've done last week. Can we talk this Thursday?"

Next email, "Hey, look, we're in this press. We got this product launch. What about this Monday?" Just keep it clean cut, professional and see what happens.

Speaker 3:[0:19:48 - 0:20:02]

Steli: All right, awesome. So he has a little task, a little takeaway right away. I want all of you to think about three people, three people, investors, press, employees, potential co-founders, customers, whoever you've wanted to continue the relationship or move forward in the conversation you haven't heard from them in a while, write down three names and follow up today.

And don't stop until you hear from them either yes or no. And then we'll compare results. I can create a little email group with everybody that was here today, and we can share like, "This shit didn't work. We got sued because of too many emails. Steli, you suck."

Or like some people can share more stories of like, "Fuck, we closed this deal. Fuck, we hired this person." And we can all encourage each other to be a little like better in our follow up hustle and with that more successful with our company.

So just take a moment. Think of three people, three people, whoever three people that you should be following up. See some people are like, "I don't want to follow up with anybody." Just everybody, write down three people. I can't control it anyway so if you don't follow up with them I can't do anything about it.

Speaker 4:[0:21:06 - 0:21:08]

No. So it depends, right? It's a philosophy thing, but I think if you adopt the philosophy, "I'm going to follow up indefinitely if it's valuable to me until somebody says no," you're already at the, you know, top, top, top of your game.

Now there's people that are more aggressive than that and say, "A no today doesn't mean a no in a year." So if it's just valuable enough I'll just keep that relationship open. And some of these people have had amazing successes with that.

But I want the baby steps. One step at a time. One simple rule. When people tell you, "I don't want to hear from you anymore," just leave them alone, right? But they don't talk to you, when they don't reply to your email, never stop following up if it's worth it. It's a $10 a month deal, obviously, you can afford it. But if it's a big investment, big, something that's crucial, never ever stop following up.

Most of the things that are happening in our business today are results of things that started six months ago.

Outbound sales pros and cons

So outbound sales. Let's talk about that real quick. Lead generation, you know, so that's the first part. So let me go really quickly through all the ways that you can do lead gen when you're going up or even, you know, let me backtrack real quick.

Let me actually just highlight a little bit the difference between outbound and inbound sales and what is good about outbound and what isn't before I even go into lead generation. So here's what's awesome about outbound sales, all right?

The thing that's awesome about outbound sales is that it empowers your business to be proactive. You can decide who the hell you want to talk to, who would be your most amazing customer, and then you don't have to wait around for them to click on your ad somewhere.

Like how would you say, "We want to close the VP of marketing of Coca Cola." All right, cool. Now do inbound marketing and get that guy, right? There's no way to do that.

So outbound sales is great because you can define that. Say, "I want to close that dude or that gal," and then you pick up the phone or you send an email. You proactively go forward. That's the awesome part of outbound sales. You can decide who should buy your product, and then you go after them proactively.

The other thing that's awesome about outbound sales is if you can make it work, it can scale pretty dramatically.

And the third thing that's awesome about it is that if you compete with other technology companies, other startups, most of them will want to shy away from it. So if you can embrace it and make it work, you're going to crush them independently from who has the better solution.

If one startup does only online, you know, ad spend marketing or SEM/SEO and you do some of that too but you have an outbound machine that works, you're going to kill them. We all know these products that are shittier than their competition that are killing it. You know, outbound sales can make a huge difference.

Now what sucks about outbound sales is that you're interrupting people with a message they didn't ask you for, right? So you're now in my inbox. I didn't ask you to be there. I don't want you to be there. I have too many things in there. And now you need attention from me. You need computational power from my brain. You have an ask. I need to do something for you.

All of a sudden, you created to-dos for me. It's very inconvenient. I don't like it.

Same thing with a call. I don't want to pick up my phone. There's a random phone number that's popped up. I don't want to pick up. When I pick up, I'm like, "Oh, shit. I don't know this guy. He wants to hire, you know, people, give me recruiting services or sell me some software." We hate it, right? We all don't want to be sold to especially when we don't ask for it. That's the bad thing about outbound sales.

Just embrace the suckiness of it because what's not going to work no matter how amazing your outbound sales machine is, what's not going to happen is everybody loving you, everybody being appreciative of every email and call you make. That's not how it's going to go down, right?

All right, let me actually, this camera remembers me that somebody has to document that people are actually here. We did this. All right.

So this is the bad thing. Outbound sales is going to be painful. It's going to be painful. It's like saying, "I want to lose like 200 pounds or whatever." Awesome, go to the gym and eat healthy.

This is not going to be a pleasant exercise until you actually made it a habit and a part of your life. It's not. It's not going to be easy. It's not going to be painless. It's going to suck for a while. You can't deal with that level of pain, you're never going to succeed with outbound sales. Period. Right?

Lead generation

So let's talk about all the ways you can do lead generation. And the cool thing is it's very limited. There aren't that many things you can do to do lead generation.

You can either buy a list. You go to Data.com, you go to Hoovers. It's like 10 places on the web that you can go and depending on who you want to sell to, you may or may not be able to download a massive list of names.

Good thing about it is that every idiot can do it. Bad thing about it is every idiot can do it.

The quality of those contacts usually are usually really bad so you have 30 or 40% typically of these contacts they're not going to be accurate anymore. These people have left Coca Cola and now working at Pepsi. That email, that title, the phone number, nothing of that works. So a lot of these names will not be accurate so you have to account for that.

And these people, these lists, the people that have lists they optimize to sell them as many times as possible. So awesome, right? You're not the only person who's calling them. These people are going to get tons of calls, right? So but sometimes it works, right, if you sell to doctors or to lawyers, any kind of profession, this might work really well.

The next thing is to scrape list. So this is where you say I cannot buy or don't want to buy a list, but I'm selling to restaurants so let's just go to Yelp and scrape it, right? Or let's go and find a way to write a script, to do the same thing essentially, just go to different websites and take the content information out of them.

This can work really well and it can be a huge producer of bullshit, right? More often than not, these like high quantity things are low quality things. Right?

And you need to account for that.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try it, but you need to account for it.

I have people that tell me, "Oh, well, we've just bought 10,000 contacts of leads. So if we contact all of them in the next two months, we think that we can get a 30%."

Whoa, whoa, whoa, what 30% conversion of what? Well, 10,000? You're not going to. Out of those 10,000, there's 6,000 that are actually accurate. Of these 6,000, if you send them an email or if you call them, they're actually just going to reach like 2,000 of them. Right? So and now apply your conversion rate to those 2,000 and not to 10, right, just to manage your expectations.

So buying lists, scraping lists.

The third option is researching, doing the manual work of basically saying, you know, buying it or scraping it en masse doesn't have the human judgment of deciding what's good or not.

So what you do is go into LinkedIn or go into Twitter or go into wherever your audience is, wherever your core customers are hanging out, wherever that is and having actual human beings, either yourself or people that work for your company, look at things manually one by one and choosing who's good, who's bad, who's good, who's bad, building a list. Right?

Then last but not the least, you take that job and you just work with a company that has mastered that and has a bunch of people doing that and you outsource it.

These are all your options. When you do lead gen for outbound, you either buy lists, scrape them, you do the work yourself manually or you outsource it. That's it. It's not rocket science. Right?

Here's a thought that in in outbound sales the way this works is that you have some level of numbers and then it drops quite dramatically in the next two, three steps. A lot of them will not be accurate. And most of them you're not going to be able to reach. And then take the ones that you can reach and now we'll see if we can work with that.

All right, so let's dive - oh, one last thing that I want you to think about, in general about this.

Here's a good way to think of lead generation. You should take - who has a business that has customers right now that are paying? Shit, a ton of you guys.

All right, so take your top five customers today, the customers that pay you the most money, the customers that get the most value out of it, that are the most vocal, that love you the most, your five, 10 best customers. Create a DNA, like create a spreadsheet where you try to figure out and create as many data points about them as possible.

• How many employees?
• What's the industry they're in?
• What other software tools do they use?
• Are they on social?
• Where on social are they?
• What other titles of all the employees, the title of the employee that bought?
• Anything, everything you can find out about them.

And then see once you've done that for five or 10 of your best customers, see of you can find the common denominators like the things that all of them have in common and create a customer DNA. And then use that to do your lead gen. Use that to find their competitors next to pitch to if you want to do outbound. Use that to find companies that are as closely related to your best customers as possible and reach out to them first.

This is the best - here's another thing that sucks about outbound sales, if you go really broad, which most people do, you're going to get very inconsistent, unpredictable results.

So I have people that tell me, "Well, we sell, let's say, to restaurants or lawyers." Let's say restaurants, whatever, right? "We sell to restaurants. So we made a list of 100,000 restaurants in the US and we're sending, you know, 5,000 emails every single month and we make X amount of calls."

The first thing that I would ask is how predictable and consistent are your results? Because I know they aren't.

Yeah, you know, it sucks because one, we do the same activity one month and get this result and the next month we get a totally different result.

And that's the worst situation you can be in. You guys know that. If something clearly doesn't work, that's cool. You learn something. Move on. If something clearly works, sweet. Those are the best situations. Do more of that.

But when things are kind of you don't know, how are you going to make decisions? Should you continue or not? Do the employees suck, your process suck, the market suck, your product suck? You have no clue. How are you going to make decisions to continue or not? That's the thing that really suck.

So the problem with when you go really broad in your lead gen and in your sales approaches is that all restaurants aren't created equal, right? There's such a variety of restaurants.
Who are you best customers? Are those restaurant chains with like five or 10 locations? Are those like Mom and Pop shops? Is it the specific restaurant like Asian food, Mexican food that's better? Do they have to delivery? Do they have to have a Yelp account?

Like try to figure out something that's more narrow because if you go really, really narrow, you can like scale immediately.

But once you can actually reproduce the same results again and again and again, now you have something that clearly, that works or doesn't. So you can either continue or not. And that's what you're going for when you're doing outbound. So better go narrow than go really broad at the beginning.

Sales calls: Reach people

All right, let's go into the meat of sales calls, outbound sales calls, right? It's not rocket science people. No offense to you. It's really not rocket science. The very first thing you need to do is you actually need to reach people, right?

And this is, again, the most obvious thing but the thing people don't think about this. We all, we don't think about this.

We think I've 1,000 leads, I call 1,000 people and 20% of them are interested then I'm talking to 200 people. No! You're not reaching 1,000 people just because you have 1,000 people.

You're going to reach voice mails. You're going to reach dial tones. You're going to reach assistants. You're going to reach whoever. You're not just going to reach every decision maker every single time. You have to have...  that's where your outbound model will either work or not. It starts with your reach rate.

Some simple benchmarks. If you're doing cold calling and you're reaching less than 15% of the people that you call, chances are more likely than not that you're already dead in the water when it comes to outbound sales. There's exception to the rules, but more often than not you're fucked. So look at that number and see if you actually improve it. The higher it is the better obviously, right?

If you can have like 20. Like best of market are usually in companies that are around 30%, 20 or 30. Sometimes there's anomalies, 40%. But if you're in like 5% or 10%, it's going to be really, really, really hard to make it work. Right?

Reach rate is really crucial. That's where the top of the funnel is. If you're like really, really low there, it's going to be hard to make this work. If you only reach five out of 100 people and you call 100 a day, and out of the five you have a conversion rate of 10%, right, 0.5 people, like half a person a day. It's going to be really hard to make this work. So pay attention to your reach rates.

Sales calls: Sound good

Next thing, once you actually reach somebody, you need to sound good. Your salespeople need to sound good. You need to sound good.

Here's the other thing like this is really hard to swallow for technical founders or for entrepreneurs in general, we think it's all about the product, it's all about the technology, it's about the logic, the content of what we're saying. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In human communication - this is not like a big surprise or like a super, you know, secret insight - in human communication, the content of what you're saying is making up a very, very, very small part of the way that communication is perceived. In person, your body language makes up the majority, whatever the percentage is, 60, 70%. Your tonality makes up another big chunk of it. And the slimmest like 10% of the entire way that you actually impact people is what you're actually saying.

If I call and I'm like, "Hey, um, I'm Steli from Close.io. I'm really excited to talk to you." Does it fucking matter what I'm saying? No.

You're like, you're already like, "Oh, my God. How can I get off this call?" You don't paying attention. You don't care what I'm saying, right, because I sound horrible.

And on the phone if you're doing inside sales, if don't go knock on doors, like you're tonality is going to make a massive impact on how you affect people.

And this is not rocket science. We don't all have to become - bless you - like Anthony Robbins and whatever motivational speakers and like amazing tonality. Just be a little excited. How about that?

Be a bit excited. If you're not excited to talk to me about your business, why should I give a fuck about your business?

If you sound like you are like suffering right now, how is this going to be a good call for me?

There's no winning if the person's trying to pitch me is like in a horrible condition and hates his life. Now way that I'm going to listen because the information is so interesting. No, I'm not listening to you, right, because your voice is going to actually create images, and those images are going to influence me.

So you need to create images of somebody that's excited, somebody that's energetic, or of somebody that's authentic that I can believe. But your tonality is really important.

The simplest thing to do is make sure that when you call people, you're happy. Listen to a cool song, Eye of the Tiger, if you need motivation, whatever it is, whatever works for you.

Make sure that when you talk to people in meetings, you have some level of joy and excitement. It's going to make a bigger impact than with your sales pitch is.

Sales calls: Asking questions

The next thing is asking questions. We talked about the magic of sales being all about actually asking questions versus talking, right? This is not about you talking for 30, 40 minutes.

This is about you asking questions, finding more out about them to actually be able to qualify them and decide should they buy your product? And if so, why? And once you really, truly know that, you can close them. It's going to be easy.

Sales calls: Manage objections

You need to be able to manage objections. Don't be surprised by that. I'm always surprised that people are surprised by that. "Every single time people tell us the same thing. They don't have the budget."

"Okay, what do you tell them?"

"I don't know. I mean every call is totally different, super inconsistent," because you've never taken the time to actually sit down and think through what are the top 10 or 15 objections people have? What are the top 10 objections people have that you hear again and again?

You know what? How about writing down an answer to those?

Keep it at two sentences max. You know what?

It doesn't matter what the answers are. They don't have to be perfect.

Obviously, when you write them down you have to actually have some thoughtfulness behind it. Other people can see it and critique it, so it has a lot of benefits to it, but at the end of the day, the more important part is to actually be able to answer something with precision and some level of clarity in one or two sentences.

That alone will make the other person feel like this guy knows what he's doing or this gal knows what they're doing versus when you compute the answer on the fly, you're always going to tend to talk too much. All right, "Uh, well, uh." You're just going to go on and on and on and you don't know when to stop because you've never thought about, you know, what you actually want to say. All right?

Sales calls: Ask for the close

And then last but not the least - we talked about this - you need to close. Ask for it. Ask early. Ask often. Just because somebody says no at the beginning doesn't mean that they're going to keep saying no.

But actually, like in the hierarchy of things, you need to be aware of being in the trap where people tell you they like what you do.

Listen, especially when you call enterprise clients, restaurants, people that are not in the startup innovation technology world, these people, you're the most interesting person they've talked to in a while, right? And most of these people are actually like they're getting paid. Like if you're like a large corporation and you have a meeting with me for 60 minutes, I don't give a fuck what's going to happen to those 60 minutes. I'm being paid right now. And now I hear about this new technology and how is it to be a Y Combinator startup like I can, "Oh, my God. I love what you guys are doing."

And then you guys are all like we're all confused like, "Oh, my God. They love what we did." Well, loving what you did and buying is a very different thing, right?

• So at the bottom is like, "I really like you."
• One level above is them actually saying, "Yes, I'm going to buy this." Or, "I really want to buy it."
• And at the top is them actually giving you a credit card, singing the check, actually purchasing something.

You always want to go for the top.

The original Elastic script

All right, so I don't think we're going to get through this. I'm just going to do the beginning to give you one quick example. So this was the exact script we developed the first day we had the idea for ElasticSales.

This is what got us seven customers or seven potential customers in the first two weeks and two actual paying customers.

We were cold calling startups that had raised a series A and B2B that we didn't know. We used fake names, I was, Steve, Steve Eli, we were doing a different startup. We didn't want the world to know. We were just like getting press on how amazing everything is we're doing, and we knew we failed with that business and want to do a different one, right?

So no websites, no powerpoint, no logo, no nothing. We started, we wrote this up in a day. We started cold calling the next day. Here's what I was saying, and the beginning is really important. That's what I want to go into a little bit in detail.

So I would call startups and would say, "Hey, my name is Steve. I'm calling startups in the area to figure out if they're a good fit for a better program that we're running."

Why is this important?

The first thing people do when they pick up the phone is like, "I don't recognize this person. Who the fuck is this person? Can I hang up? Should I hang up? How can I hang up?" Like that's, we've all been there. Like you're trying to see, "Who's this?" And once you figure it out, "This is somebody I don't know. How can I get off this call," right, "as quickly as humanly possible?"

So you need to address these questions. Who the fuck are you?

And I use a lot of lingo here, right?

I say, "We're calling startups in the area," suggesting you're probably a local too. I'm using lingo like,

"We're looking for a good fit for a better program," not closing you on our product but looking if there's a good fit for a better program. We're calling startups. They probably had a better program themselves.

So this all tells people, "I'm like you. I'm in your area. I understand you," right? "Maybe you should give me one more sentence."

Every sentence in a cold email or cold call selling people on listening to you for another sentence.

You can't be talking for 10 minutes then figure, well, the bottom they're going to figure out why this is interesting. They're never going to get there, right?

So once I said that, I said, "What we do in a sentence" - and this is so they can calm down and not think, "Oh, my God. This guy's going to pitch me for 100 hours" - "what we do in a sentence is we offer startups a sales team on demand.

Does that in general sound interesting to you?"

And here it didn't really fucking matter what they said.

They said, "No." And I said, "Oh, interesting. What's your sales process?"

They said, "Maybe." I said, "Oh, interesting. What's your sales process?"

They said, "Yes." I said, "Awesome. What's your sales process?"

I didn't take their answers serious here because they didn't know anything. I didn't know anything about them. They didn't know enough about us. So it was not the right time to make that decision, but I knew that they had a thought. They already made up their mind after I said what we do. "What we do in a sentence is sales team on demand."

Somebody says, "Oh, my God. I want this." I cannot continue with a pitch.

I have to address the elephant in the room and allow them to verbalize it, allow them just to say no so it's out of their mind out of their system. And now we can continue, and they can actually pay attention to what I'm saying. If they think no and I continue talking, they're not listening to me, right?

So once they did that, I would actually go into the qualifying stage and actually try to discover if this would be a fit.

"Hey, what's your sales process like? What is this? What is that?"

The power of questions is really, really amazing. We've all been taught as kids that you should answer when asked. It's impolite to not answer. So when somebody asks you a question, there's a very strong, unconscious urge to answer. You don't go, "Well, who are you?" And this group maybe more because you are really highly intelligent. But most human beings would just answer impulsively.

They're not like, I had an employee of mine 15 years ago who was a really junior guy. And every time he called me it was like, "Hey, where are you?"

And we're like, "Well, I'm at a client."

And then next time, he would call, "Hey, where are you?"

"Oh, well, I'm on my way to this meeting."

And one day when he's like, "Where are you?"

I'm like, "Wait a second. Why the fuck do I have to tell?" Like, "Where are you?"

And he's like, "I'm on my way to the office."

The urge to answer questions is really, really powerful.

Cold emailing

All right, next one, cold email. Same structure. This is really simple, guys. First they have to open it. Then they have to read it. Then they have to respond, and you should have a plan in mind to follow up. It sounds simple, right?

You know how many founders send me emails to give them feedback in outbound email, and it doesn't have the subject line in it.

You know what my replies, "Where the fuck is the subject line?" It's the first thing I want to look at. I'm not going to read your email. I don't know what your subject line is.

Startups spend like 80% of their time with the text of the email body and like 10% of the time with the subject line because it's less texts so it's clearly less important.

No. If your email wasn't open, it didn't exist. So it doesn't matter what it says.

First thing you have to do is you have to make sure that people open your email, right?

Now if it's an outbound email, you want to strive again for like 20 or 30% open rates. If you're below that, if you're like at 15 to 20, may or may not work. If you're below 10, you're fucked. Again, you're fucked. You need to figure out a way to make them open your email. (Btw. our sales CRM with integrated emailing not only tracks individual and overall email opens, but also response rates).

One thing, even open it, you have to make them read it. And again, you have to actually have the philosophy in mind that every sentence in this email needs to be selling, sell the reader why he or she should read one more sentence. If your sentences don't do that, people will not get to your content. They're not going to read.

Then you need to have a call to action. One, not five. One thing. "Reply here. Let's find a time."

If you ask them for a time, give them options so they don't have to make decisions.

All the simple things that you would do with your website, do with your email as well.

And then when it's truly important, have a follow-up strategy in mind. I said follow up indefinitely when you had a good meeting. When you didn't, if this is a cold email, still follow up.

Follow up two or three times at least.

I have companies that have been following up with me for months now like probably 20 times.

I've never replied, but I'm getting really familiar with the guy, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, this is John again in my inbox. And wow, that subject line is good."

You know, I didn't see it coming when I opened it. I was like, "Oh, that's John. I didn't realize that."

So I personally respected, but even if I didn't - and there might be just in a weak moment I'm going to reply to him - but even if I don't, it doesn't really matter.

I could at any time reply and say, "Stop." Or put him on a spam folder. I haven't.

But have some kind of a follow up game even if it's just three follow ups, but follow up.

Don't just send me one cold email and never again follow up. Then don't email me at all.

All right, let's do Q&A. What's the question?

- END OF TRANSCRIPT -

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