Rnordman

Most obviously, the Internet of Things has the power to profoundly change operations — that’s where much of the coverage of this burgeoning network has focused. But companies should also be preparing for profound shifts in their competitive strategies as the IoT takes off. It will change the category you compete in, the products and services you sell, and  how you market them, and even the talent you acquire. These three mini case studies will show you just how profound those shifts will be.

Lowes: Right now, most retail IoT home products — thermostats, security systems, lighting — are singular. The market won’t scale if companies can’t help consumers tie these things together and manage them as a unit easily. Lowe’s, the $53-billion U.S.-based home improvement retailer, has hence developed and is marketing a full home management system, called IRIS. According to Kevin Meagher, vice president and general manager for Smart Home at Lowe’s, “Connected home is the first truly new category that Lowe’s has added in nearly 20 years, because we realize that we can add value by bringing these devices together.”

A new category means new skills: Suddenly, many of Lowe’s 240,000 retail employees must be able to talk software and apps, and know how to connect IRIS to all these other products, so the company is training them. At the same time, with 15 million consumers walking through Lowe’s stores every week, Meagher and his team believe that they can — must — play an important role in educating consumers on smart home technology, ease anxiety around standards and reduce customer confusion while providing that unifying product. If they don’t, Lowe’s can envision a scenario in which customers would buy an IoT device from the retailer, then work directly with manufacturers on future services and products — go right to Google for Nest-related products, say.

Longer-term, Lowe’s needs to reinvent the way it markets and sells to consumers. Lowe’s sees a future in which the company is delivering air filters to customers’ doorsteps because IRIS is providing accurate HVAC usage and customers have enrolled in a filter subscription program. Meagher takes it a step further and imagines that Lowe’s could use energy usage data to inform consumers of programs that would save them money with local energy companies. This will require careful stewardship and permissions around consumer data, and expertise around mining the information for new useful services.

Thermo Fisher Scientific: Medical devices companies suddenly find themselves in the software and subscription services businesses because of the Internet of Things. Thermo Fisher Scientific has developed cloud-based genome-mapping devices that allow scientists to subscribe to the computing power they need at affordable rates. The value for Thermo Fisher Scientific is twofold. First, the company can now identify who the end customers are and how those doctors and researchers are using these devices. Second, this new explosion of analytics on healthcare research has opened a new line of business around aggregating the results and selling access to curated views of large datasets.

Of course, that means that a medical device company that’s used to focusing on procurement groups who bought their devices en masse is now focused on the actual end users of their devices. A company with a strong legacy of device product managers and engineers, Thermo Fisher Scientific had only one software product manager when its new cloud-enabled genome-mapping tools launched. The company is now making considerable investments to bring on additional people in fields and with skill they’d never focused on to expand into the new lines of business. This includes digital product managers and data scientists.

All Traffic Solutions: A traffic sign manufacturer is a natural for Internet of Things adoption. Ten-year old All Traffic Solutions made the strategic shift to put sensors into its products to track traffic flow data. More than 25% of All Traffic Solutions revenue comes from TraffiCloud, a web-based application that uses connected sensors to collect traffic data and transmits that data to a centralized database letting users (often municipalities) generate relevant reports.

Ted Graef, President of All Traffic Solutions, says one of the biggest challenges his company faced was aligning its sales team around the shift from selling hardware to selling hardware bundled with software services. The company conducted a number of experiments with pricing and marketing until they found what made sense to their customers and their sales channels. Ted says, “We learned very quickly that bundling promotional pricing and providing onboarding training sped up adoption of our services.” All Traffic Solutions hired a team to provide introductory training for customers on setting up and using TraffiCloud. The investment in onboarding, a totally new skill for the company, has resulted in 70-80% renewal rates for the service.

Lest you think these companies are just organically building these new skills and entering these new kinds of businesses, that’s not necessarily the case. Huge shifts in strategy and culture like these can be slow, costly, or frankly, too difficult to pull off organically. CEOs and senior executives are looking outside their organizations for help in making the transition. In fact, new businesses are developing to help companies make the leap. They’re turning to startups like Sprosty, which helps companies with market research on consumers’ feelings, business strategy, and product development in IoT technology. Another company, Zuora, has helped companies build and scale subscription businesses, and understand its dynamics like billing, renewal rates, and customer churn.

There is no single path to success with selling and marketing smart, connected devices. This third wave of IT-driven innovation is reshaping industries and redrawing the lines of competitive rivalry. Companies need to identify which skillsets they want to hire, acquire or outsource to partners. The goal is aligning closer to consumers and building ongoing relationships. The distinctions between industries will become less pronounced than the differences between market leaders and laggards within the same categories.

GUEST POST

---

In case you didn’t know, we (Talkroute) declined our acceptance into a well-known accelerator, and a lot of people thought we were stupid. Even after I published a ridiculously long blog post explaining why we said “no thanks,” the skeptics remained, well, skeptical.

But today, right here on VentureBeat, I wanted to share a little secret.

Within six months of declining Techstars, we went from $0 to $75,000+ per month with no outside investment and without hiring a single employee.

My cofounder, Eric Howey (yes, we are related), and I worked heads-down on scaling the bejeezus out of Talkroute and, just like Thomas Edison’s lightbulb extravaganza, found 10,000 things that didn’t work — and three things that worked quite well.

Customer Acquisition: A tactic Google hasn’t blocked yet that got us thousands of customers for $0

As you know, Google loves unique and relevant content. So, when the fate of Google Voice was unknown back in May, we seized the opportunity to write a blog post about Google Voice alternatives.

Fast forward to today, that blog post has been read 180,000+ times over five months, resulting in 17,000+ sign-ups. And it still generates 1,000 – 2,000 sign-ups per month.

Oh, and the cool part is that it cost us $0 (we wrote it ourselves), and it took us under four hours to go from random idea in the shower to a real live article on our blog (side note: we used the Yoast WordPress plugin to quickly markup the meta info and make the post a bit more SEO friendly; this only took a couple minutes).

The slow death of old school black-hat SEO tricks actually presents a surprisingly compelling opportunity: For the first time ever, you can feel confident that investing your time crafting unique content that is relevant to recent events in your industry will be justly rewarded by the Google gods!

So, what are the takeaways?

• A corporate blog can generate a lot of business.
• Monitor the news and voice your opinion on what is going on in your industry.
• Small corporate blogs from new startups can actually rank pretty well on Google.

Customer Service: The trick we use to support 5,000+ paying customers for less than one hour a day

Nothing against Tony Hsieh and Zappos’ customer service, but delivering a big bundle full of happiness can send young startups down the wrong path.

Rather than viewing customer service as an inevitable byproduct of having customers and immediately focusing on hiring someone to “handle that stuff,” we decided to obsess over making our UI and product documentation so awesome that no one needed to ask us anything, ever.

Ok, obviously there are going to be questions from time to time, but the point is, we kept testing and tuning our UI until we reached the lowest number of inquiries possible (side note: had we not bootstrapped our company, I question whether we would have been as incentivized to take this approach).

When we first launched, we only had ~100 beta users, and they were peppering us with 70-80 customer support tickets per day!

Now, with 40,000+ users, we address an average of 40 tickets per day (80% of which are via email), taking an average of 1-2 minutes per ticket to address. And 90% of those tickets are pre-sales questions.

So, what’s the takeaway?

• You don’t need to Zappify your customer service situation just because that’s what all the cool kids are doing.

Pricing Model: How to increase the price of your service without pissing everyone off

We used to have a multi-tiered pricing structure that started at $9.95 for 500 minutes a month and went up to $199.95 for 10,000 minutes a month.

Pretty much every SaaS startup on planet Earth does tiered pricing, and when we launched we followed industry protocol. Why reinvent the proverbial wheel, right?

Wrong.

When we looked at our conversion funnel, we noticed that people were spending a ton of time on the payment page and that an embarrassingly high number of people decided not to buy.

Long story short (you can read the long story version I posted on our blog if you want more of the details), we learned that a lot of people weren’t converting because they didn’t know which tier to pick — a classic paralysis by analysis predicament.

So we talked to customers, did the math, and launched a $19.95 flat-rate, unlimited-minute plan (with a reasonable use policy for protection), and our conversion rate immediately jumped up.

The thing is, the majority of our original customers were paying $9.95 a month, so how did we break the bad news that we had to increase their price?

Simple. We didn’t increase their price.

We spent a considerable amount of time and energy debating strategies on how we were going to break the bad news until we realized that the incremental dollar value of that disruptive change did not exceed the risk of a few vocal angry customers.

So, what’s the takeaway?

• Think of your customers as micro-investors in your startup. There are times when it is okay to cut them a deal in order to keep a good working relationship for the long term.

Final words

As cool as it sounds to bootstrap a tech startup from 0 to $75,000+ per month in six months without taking on an investor or hiring a single employee, there were 9,997 mistakes we made in order to end up with those those things we mentioned above that worked out well.

We are proud of our growth, but do you think that being part of an accelerator like YC or Techstars would have allowed us to grow faster?

Let me know in the comments …

Paul Howey is the cofounder of Talkroute, a Chicago-based startup that helps small companies sound like a big companies when customers call.

Being a newcomer in a company often means struggling to familiarize yourself with management and new systems. A new hire is like a lot of the other investments a company makes; the goal is to get value out it as soon as possible. With a new sales rep that means speeding up the “ramp process.” Ramping up a new sales rep is a phrase often associated with gradually increasing your quota to that of your veteran reps, but you also need to help them ramp up socially, to fit in with your culture. After all, having a workplace BFF actually makes you more productive.

Here are some ways in which you can help a new team member assimilate both socially and professionally:

1. A peer-mentoring program

Most new sales reps struggle to fit in within the first few weeks. Set up a few sessions where the new rep can talk one on one with more experienced, long-time members of the team. By providing them with a few different “vets” they can find someone they’re comfortable with to ask about anything from company policies to sales tips.

2. Orientations or “boot camps”

Learning a company’s culture, systems and organizational hierarchy WHILE trying to hit goals is a tall order. Provide new reps with detailed information on the workflow process and any other processes that they may encounter while performing the job. This can save time and effort from the sales rep and from other departments involved. If you are bringing on a few people (including new-hires from different departments) around the same time, a brief, but jam-packed orientation around the aforementioned elements of your organization can prove invaluable. Additionally, it provides an arena for new-hires to meet and bond with people from other departments.

3. Communicate and be clear with roles

Nothing beats open, clear communication on any business day. Constant communication between the sales manager and the new rep can also help clarify expectations and concerns. The more hands-on time a sales manager spends with a new hire, the less time they will have to spend down the road breaking bad habits and having those dreaded “what the hell is going wrong” type meetings.

4. Boost morale and confidence

Anyone new to a company will usually be nervous and cautious with the new environment and management. If a new sales rep is too cautious for too long after hiring, they may end up underperforming and possibly feeling disheartened. Boosting sales reps’ confidence is an essential ingredient in having them perform optimally and close deals. Managers can boost morale by first helping the rep to identify and close on the low-hanging fruit within their pipeline/territory to give the new rep momentum upon starting. This can lead to more confident reps that feel good about themselves and believe they can perform well, attracting more customers and enhancing sales numbers in the long run.

Whether a new-hire sales rep succeeds can depend upon a number of different variables. The old cliché is that sales success depends on the three T’s: Timing, Territory and Talent.

Here are a few of the marketing philosophies I uphold, which will explain the rest of this post on social media and emotional branding:

1. We build relationships with brands like we build relationships with our friends. It takes many positive interactions over a period of time.
2. Loyalty trumps everything. If the world turns upside-down, your loyal customers will be there. So our ultimate goal is to create loyalty.
3. It is impossible to achieve true brand loyalty in the long-term without emotional connection.
4. Emotional connection comes when we feel a brand becomes part of our self-identity.

So let’s start a little examination of how social media can fit into this formula.

1. Content “provocations”

We build relationships with friends by having small interactions with them over time. As these positive experiences accumulate, we grow fonder of the person. Maybe we eventually love the person.

Connecting with a brand works much the same way and content delivered by the social web is a great enabler for this process.

We might not be able to visit with our customers every day but we can provide a “drip, drip, drip” of content to let them know we are there, we are thinking of them, we have something that can help them.

In my view, this is exactly where social media fits in the marketing mix — Providing “provocations” that lead to loyalty.

2. “Wearing our content”

Why do you wear the clothes you wear? Why do you drive the car you drive?

These are outward signs of our self-identity. We have bonded with these brands and have attached ourselves to them.

People also express a self-identity when they share your content. They are making a statement that “I believe in this” or “this content is smart … I am sharing it … therefore I am smart.”

By creating content that aligns with our customer values, interests, and needs we can become part of their identity.

There are a few people who tell me they start every day by reading my blog {grow}. I have become part of their ritual, part of their life. They are wearing my content!

3. Be More Human

I have been giving a speech lately on the future of social media and I end with a quote from Dr. Robert Cialdini. When I asked Dr. Cialdini a few years ago about standing out in an information-dense world, he replied, “Be more human.”

That advice seems so simple and yet I think that is the “killer app” for emotional branding through content. Ultimately, people buy from those they know and trust and we have a historically important opportunity to do that through our honest content and human engagement through the social web.

4. Connecting P2P

One of the core ideas from The Tao of Twitter book is the social media “path” I believe exists that leads to business benefits.

Since the first edition came out in 2011, I have watched with awe and admiration as more and more companies pick up on this idea of connecting their people to customers. And I mean real people.

This is an idea that is seemingly hard to scale. Or is it?

A 30-second ad on the Super Bowl costs $4 million. What if a large company took that amount — or half that amount — and built a social media employee advocacy program? Which of these stands a better chance of establishing loyalty over time? A 30-second ad, or a meaningful connection with a real employee?

My point is that many companies are missing the point. They are oblivious to the opportunity to create real emotional connection … lasting emotional branding … by using technology to focus on relationships instead of advertising to the masses.

Those are a few ideas and opportunities about using social media for emotional branding. In fact, it is probably PRIMARILY about emotional branding.

Agree?

The post Four ways social media impacts emotional branding appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Mobile payments are just starting to gain traction in the consumer world, but they’re already behind the curve. Toronto tech firm Bionym today announced a pilot project in association with MasterCard and the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) that will turn its Nymi wearable into a payment device.

Canadians already use cash for only 10% of their transactions. The vast majority of that non-cash activity is composed of credit and debit cards, and tap-to-pay cards and point of sale (POS) terminals are already in widespread use in Canada. That makes Toronto the perfect test case for Bionym’s undertaking, because the Nymi will use the same near-field communications (NFC) technology in currently-available contactless payment options.

MasterCard’s involvement in a recent $14 million funding round was an early indicator that Bionym was considering the payment space. The pilot will be limited to existing MasterCard account holders, and unlike the much-hyped Apple Pay-enabled Apple Watch, will not require users to have a paired mobile device on hand.

MORE: Vancouver’s Elastic Path raises $5.35 million to invest in e-commerce’s wearable future »

Bionym CEO Karl Martin hopes the project will change the way consumers think about wearable payments. “Success is people saying they want to pay this way,” he says. “Given all the options, they should want to be wearing something for this purpose because they have a higher level of trust and find it convenient.”

Martin believes the Nymi adds the missing security piece to the virtual payments puzzle. The Nymi establishes identity using a wearer’s pulse, making it harder to fool or forge than a PIN or password. “When you make payments in physical locations using your credit card, all you’re doing is providing credentials that tie you to the account you’re making a payment from,” he notes. “We provide a connection of trust, because the person is wearing a biometric authentication device.”

Martin discussed the company’s pilot project.

---

Canadian Business: How big do you think the market for wearable payment is? 

Karl Martin: Payments itself is massive. We’re doing this pilot in Toronto, where people have already gotten comfortable with contactless payments and what we’re hearing is that they love it. The market is huge, and our goal is to ensure that contactless payments are not a peripheral idea for low-value transactions, that you could use it for every transaction in a physical location because we provide a higher level of trust, even more secure than the chip-and-pin.

Does getting involved with transactions change anything for Bionym from a financial liability-perspective?

We’re already doing lots of things that I would consider very high-value, even though they might not be directly connected to payments and dollars. By managing a person’s access to their devices and their accounts—including perhaps bank accounts—we’re already in a space where there has to be high-level security and trust. So we don’t see this as a huge leap from the things we’re doing around device access.

We also look at it in comparison to what’s already out there. What’s out there already is the tap-and-pay, which has no authentication. So in the case of contactless payments where somebody else uses your card, the onus is on you to notice that your card is gone, and then deactivate it. What we’re trying to do is build a higher level of trust, so that in the long term you can reduce fees and make contactless payment a more trusted transaction. Compared to what’s out there today, we’re certainly offering a higher level of security or trust.

MORE: Enterprise uses for wearables expanding as SalesForce grows app stable »

Convenience is a consistent reason cited for wearable payments, but they also seems to remove some of the convenience of cash. I can give someone money to buy me coffee…

There’s no question that by changing the way we do things so significantly, you could possibly lose some of the features of other forms of payment. But at the end of the day, you do have to look at this in terms of cost-benefits. What are the kinds of things you do most often with your money? Most often you’re using it at a store. Personally I’ve started to go cashless over the last six months or so because I realized that despite whatever added benefit cash has, in terms of being able to use it anywhere, I just couldn’t be bothered to carry cash everywhere.

Overall the benefits are much greater, and whatever costs there might be, like for example the flexibility of transferring cash to other people, those just cause new innovation. My belief is that ultimately we will go towards a cashless society, and then there will just be more and more transactions to enable all possible kinds of transactions, including peer-to-peer. You’re already seeing some of this liberation with Square, which enables anybody to collect credit card payments. I think that’s the direction we’re going to go.

JOIN: Sign up for the Nymi contactless payment pilot project »

The post The future of payments is wearable, and it’s already here appeared first on Canadian Business.

How True Authority Is Actually Gained written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

The idea of authority has gotten a great deal of attention in business circles the last few years. People who have amassed lots of fans and follows in social networks are seen to have authority. People who have lots of blog readers or who have carved out some niche of expertise are seen to have authority. Authors and speakers are deemed authoritative.

But the idea of assigning authority based on position has rarely led to long-term positive impact. Think about those who command authority based on an elected role. We may respect the role, but resent the authority.

In this online social world we live in some individuals, by virtue of somewhat arbitrary measurements, have been able to assign and command authority, but I offer that authority, in the end, is earned through a much different path.

Ultimately, over time, authority is gained by how you relate to communities. How you serve and add value – and I sense a significant shift in what and whom we view as actually authoritative.

It’s not about being expert in a world that has no more subjects left to master. It’s about signal, signal that’s clear and true and consistent.

In a time where our reality is increasingly dictated by screens instead of people and experiences, I believe you command authority not by assigning it to yourself, but by practicing the following five habits.

Share an opinion that matters

Instead of picking up on the latest trend or finding a niche that seems wanting, you command authority by having and sharing a point of view that you believe is true and worth holding on to.

This can be your view on work or life or simply your advice to a client. It’s okay to say to the world – this is the one thing everyone must do – if you believe it, practice it and perfect it.

Surround yourself with teachers

This one is a little counterintuitive because people who want to command authority often strive to be seen as the teacher.

I’m here to tell you that growth and your ability to relate to and add to a community comes from spending a great deal of time as the most inexperienced person in the room.

When you become so big that your ego competes with this notion, you’re on your way down.

Stop seeking reinforcement

People who gain some little measure of authority often try to cling to it by surrounding themselves with people and information that supports what they already believe.

When we do things in an effort to please or prove how right we are, we lose the ability to expand and make choices that are evolutionary for us.

You command authority by exploring new ideas and intentionally stretching your level of comfort.

Expect a response

If you share and hold on to opinions that matter and you do so without trying to please others, you should expect people to respond and you should be prepared to nurture and grow that response into a community.

In fact, if you are to command authority you have a responsibility of sorts to deal with the positive and negative responses that come from how you relate to communities.

Be vulnerable

Vulnerability is another one of those terms that’s getting a lot of play and words these days.

One of the ways you command authority is to show the world you don’t need it. Show your community that you can be as silly, frightened, confused and happy as they are and they will trust your intentions even more.

This is a scary one for most leaders, but know that you don’t have to always have the answer – if you are to command authority people simply need to know they can trust you.

Storytelling in marketing terms isn’t just about producing an advert with a narrative, it’s about telling the story of the ‘brand’ across multiple channels and using various tools and methods.

Storytelling techniques can give credibility and personality to brands both large and small.

You can build more meaningful relationships with customers by either highlighting the people behind the brand, creating a distinct tone of voice across all channels or by using the history of the brand to broaden the richness and authenticity of your story.

Join us at our Festival of Marketing, a two-day celebration of the modern marketing industry held in November, where we have an entire stage devoted to Brand & Creative.

Here speakers will help you find the right story for your brand and teach you to how to grow your business while maintaining culture and brand authenticity.

In the meantime, let's take a look at some other useful case studies.

Visa

Despite being one of the most used credit cards in the world, Visa had identified an emotional distance between its brand and its customers.

Industry research suggested that brands have people’s attention for just 6.5 seconds, so Visa created the GoInSix campaign where the brand would generate interactive content designed to motivate people to dine, shop and travel, using either six-second videos, six-image vignettes or six words.

The campaign ran across all of its social channels and Visa urged influencers to upload their own GoInSix stories.

Visa’s Facebook engagement score ranking went from seventh to first in ‘finance’ and climbed to second in all lifestyle brands. The campaign delivered 284m earned impressions, five times more than a previous Visa campaign, which had 18 times more media spend.

WaterAid

‘The Big Dig’ by WaterAid was an integrated campaign which brought fundraising, communications and country programme teams together to raise over £2.5m for WaterAid’s work in Malawi through digital storytelling.  

Mobile blogging direct from Malawi meant supporters and donators could see their support in action and meet the people they were supporting.

It was a first for the sector, using social platforms and mobile tools so that supporters could meet people whose children were dying from lack of clean water, come together with them to change it and watch as a truck drilled the borehole bringing the village clean water.

The Big Dig was WaterAid’s most successful fundraising and awareness campaign, raising £2.6m (including government matching) against a target of £1.2m and bringing clean, safe water and sanitation to 134,000 people in Malawi.

Digital channels including the Big Dig blog raised £75,000 directly, but also drove engagement and reach to increase the overall result. 7% of new supporters signed up for email updates or left a comment. 

ITV

ITV wanted to create a new multi-screen synchronised ad format that made the most of the growing audience using their smartphone and tablet to use play-along games.

While the percentage of the broadcast audience on these games is still small, it is proving to be a useful tool as it combines the storytelling potential of broadcast TV advertising with the intimacy of tablets and smartphones.

The new ad format was integrated into ITV’s play-along games so as to complement the broadcast advertising, reaching consumers on second screen devices with interactive messages synchronised with on-air spots.

The ad format was launched during The X Factor final last year, and it resulted in 252,865 impacts and 1,327,657 page views, with an average CTR of 8.75%. 

Active engagement was 38% (the percentage of page views that were actively viewed by the user swiping rather than shown automatically after 10 seconds). 

Microsoft

Microsoft needed to prove to an audience lured away from IE9 by Google Chrome, that its browser was just as exciting, fast and easy to use.

Microsoft teamed up with director Edgar Wright and illustrator Tommy Lee Edwards to create an animated story, The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator.

After each film, the viewer was able to contribute ideas, messages, prose and drawings through an interactive hub, all using the capabilities of IE9.

The crowdsourced, immersive story led to:  

• 600,000 unique visitors to the Brandon Generator site
• 10,000 crowd-sourced entries to create subsequent chapters
• 308,342 organic YouTube views
• 12.2m media-driven YouTube views
• IE market share finished ahead of target (target: 51.8%, actual: 53.9%)
• 1.7m IE9 downloads

IKEA

In 2011 the IKEA catalogue had more competition from other print and online publications than ever. The catalogue needed reinvention, however it needed more than a digital-only solution.

Ikea created an augmented reality application to enable smart-phone users to unlock extended content. This enhanced the experience of reading the catalogue, thereby breathing new life into its pages and giving consumers a continuous brand experience.

The design, technology and storytelling overhaul turned the catalogue experience into an evolving innovation platform, which generated real time insight around consumer preference. 

Globally, the app was the No.1 downloaded marketing app for a brand in 2012 and the catalogue received three times the attention of the 2011 catalogue.

The new print and app experience led to an increase in engagement with a six minute time spent in app vs. the average 3 min with just the catalogue. The 42 scannable pages saw a 35 % increase in scanning. The app was downloaded 6.2m times.

Manchester United

Manchester United has a massive global following, with more than 300m fans in Asia alone. Connecting with this fanbase is a key part of the club’s strategy.

It identified that social media platforms are one of the primary methods by which it engages and transacts with its global following, and can be used to create new revenue streams. 

Man United launched an official Facebook page in 2010 and posts an average of ten times a day, often running competitions to capture data and using content to support sponsors’ requirements, as well as running polls and asking fans’ opinions. Its timeline also displays the history of the club.

In July 2013 the club launched a presence on both Twitter and Chinese site Sina Weibo.

On Twitter, it taps into its players’ individual followings, with Q&As as well as news, with an average of ten tweets a day. It also tweets lots of photos as well as sharing fixture updates and infographics. A similar approach is taken on Seina Weibo, with the majority of posts hitting over 100 shares within a few hours.

With over 34.5m Facebook 'likes', MUFC is one of the most popular brands on Facebook. Both Twitter and Sina Weibo accounts attracted over 700,000 followers within just over a month of launching, with the majority of Twitter posts averaging over 700 retweets. Its Google+ page also acquired more than 40,000 followers within less than a month.

Join us at our Festival of Marketing event in November, a two-day celebration of the modern marketing industry, featuring speakers from brands including LEGO, Tesco, Barclays, FT.com and more.

Successful email marketers use their understanding of behavioral psychology — what makes people tick — to maximize engagement and sales.

It’s believed that we have 50 to 70 thousand thoughts per day. Many of these (95%) are repeated daily considerations and inner dialogue. The question is: How can we change a tiny fraction of the other 3,500 thoughts to, “Gotta click on this and this. Oh, and buy this?”

You have a lot going on during the day and as an email recipient, you don’t go through all your emails inspecting and digesting each detail. You skim your inbox, grabbing obviously important emails, and you may pick one or two promotional emails to open. What is it about some emails that grab you and compel you to engage?

As a sender, you have about 20 seconds to grab the reader’s attention to open the email. Here are five simple email hooks based on marketing psychology that you can experiment with in your own email campaigns.

1. Personal Connection

Do you enjoy reading terms and conditions or other cold, corporate verbatim? No? Me neither, and chances are neither do the vast majority of your contacts.

Tone of your email

Conversational newsletters are a great way to draw your readers in and engage. This approach allows you to become more than a branded email — it humanizes your business by allowing your contacts to connect with you. Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, suggests that the “likeability” of a seller can boost engagement and sales.

Personalizing

Personalizing your mail can also help create a great connection with your customers. Making an effort to tailor an email for an individual (even in a small way) shows that you care! Simply using someone’s name can be a nice addition. A study on brain activity has shown that using someone’s name lets them feel acknowledged and boosts self-worth. In fact, one study found that emails with personalized subject lines had a 17.36% higher click-through rate.

2. Exclusivity

Gold, diamonds, platinum. Shiny? Yes. But what creates the buzz and desire — even for commodities of paradoxical value? Exclusivity and scarcity! Who doesn’t want something rare and special?

When you have a limited stock or a set number of places, it can help to remind your readers how many items (or spots) are left. This is a powerful marketing psychology tool. Your contacts have opted in and are clearly interested in what you have to offer. Many people will jump on board quickly when they know that a particular service/product is about to run out. And if they do miss the boat, they may act more quickly next time.

Just don’t do this so often that you cross the spam line and fatigue your customers.

3. Reciprocity

When someone helps you or gives you a gift, you may want to return the favor. After all, it’s nice to be nice. Coupled with the fact that everyone loves a freebie, giving your contacts something for free will help garner loyalty and some great stats! Here’s a great example of an email where offering a free gift led to a CTR that’s off the charts!

4. Social Proof

The theory of “social proof” (a.k.a. informational social influence) suggests that we’re all influenced by the views and actions of those around us. Your peers buying or liking something can grab your interest, have you taking a closer look, and even following the same actions.

For email marketing, a great way to adopt this principle is to tell your readers how many customers bought a particular item or even “liked” your previous promotion via social networking sites. This serves as a social “thumbs up” regarding these actions. Also, adding a customer quotation that gives a glowing recommendation of your product/service can be a great use of social proofing.

5. Reverse Psychology

Do not, under any circumstances, click THIS link! Feeling an itch anyone? Wondering what could be possibly behind this link and why you’re not allowed to click? If so, you’re experiencing reverse psychology, where you have an increased intrinsic interest in something after being given extrinsic reasons not to take action. If you didn’t click — due to your awareness of this persuasive technique (the title was a giveaway!) — then you are expressing the Inoculation Theory.

Some time ago I came across a Mad Mimi ad with a playful use of reverse psychology:

Since I work for Mad Mimi, I obviously knew what was behind the banner, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It immediately piqued my curiosity and made me want to click. Crazy? I thought so, but it struck me as an amazingly effective and simple ad. This technique may work particularly well with stubborn types. I don’t recommend using it with your active contacts, but try using it in a subject line directed toward subscribers who haven’t opened an email for some time. See if they’ll reconnect so you can remind them why they signed up in the first place!

Marketing Psychology Calls for Experimentation

PLEASE NOTE: Marketing psychology, much like email marketing, is not an exact science. I’m not saying that these techniques are a silver bullet and will all work on your particular audience. They have been proven but may not be right for you. Use them as guidelines. Test, test, and test them, and see what works best. :-)

Image source

Are list posts part of your content marketing strategy?

If they’re not, they definitely should be! List posts are the second most-shared form of content, after infographics. They’re easy-to-digest for readers, and have an instant viral quality. That doesn’t mean you can sit down to pen the perfect list post without effort, though. There are tactics you can use to improve your content’s performance. Here is some of the latest data to improve your approach:

1. Use the Right Number of Items

10 items is better than 5. 7 items is better than 8. There’s some serious data science behind using the right number of items for list posts, and it’s to your advantage to know it and apply it.

Buzzsumo’s analysis of 100 million blogs found that lists of 10 items always perform best. 23, 16, and 24 also do pretty well. Use this knowledge to create the perfect list post.

2. Stay On-Topic

List posts that wander and ramble are confusing to readers, who will most likely abandon the content in favor of a better read. Your list items should fit within a narrow niche, and all work to enhance the same message.

In fact, Buzzfeed’s own advice for viral content writers recommends “thinking laterally” and “appeal to niches.” What does that mean? A blog on “27 Reasons You Know You’re a Content Marketer” will almost definitely outperform “15 Tips for Content Marketers,” because it’s simply a more cohesive concept.

3. Say No to Strange Formatting

If you’re aim is to the write the perfect list post, just say no to doing anything really avant-garde or experimental. The following tactics aren’t recommended:

• List items of significantly different lengths
• Extremely long list items
• Using multiple types of formatting throughout the article
• Using different types of list item titles

Your readers expect your content to be formatted consistently. Deliver what they expect!

4. Include an Introduction

Have you ever read a viral list post that lacked an introduction?

I bet you haven’t! Every perfect list post requires an introduction. Set the stage for your blog, and let the reader know what they’re in for. Articles without an introduction can seem amateurish or feel jarring to the reader.

5. Write Longer Posts

You can certainly write 600-word list posts, and they may perform well. However, to have the best shot at penning the perfect list post, your content should be slightly longer.

SERPIQ research has found that the best-performing content is always longer than 2,000 words, based on a major research study. Among these top-performers, longer was almost always better, with content around 2,400-2,500 words coming in first place. Your list posts must be long enough to provide some serious value!

6. Take a Numeric Approach to Your Title

It may come as a surprise to you, but one of the following blog titles will always outperform the other:

1. 10 Tips for Hiring the Perfect Copywriter

2. Ten Tips for Hiring the Perfect Copywriter

The first option will win every time. What, really?

Julie Neidlinger points out that this fact is related to the laziness of the human brain. As readers, we’re more likely to instantly recognize “10 Tips” as being a list post, and click on it.

7. Brainstorm Items

Readers know when they see “filler” content on a list post. This tactic is sure to leave a bad taste in their mouths, and ruin your chances of having your content shared on social media.

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse recommends starting by brainstorming more items than you need for a list post. Eliminate the candidates that don’t fit your theme, are silly or common sense, or

won’t provide much value. By working backwards to compile a list of items for your outline, you’ll achieve the perfect list post.

8. Use Numbers

Image source

This may seem like common sense, but it isn’t always. If you fail to use numbers in your list post, your readers may struggle to wade through your content. Even worse, they could feel cheated by your content: “I was promised 10 tips, but all I got was this huge, rambling blog!”

Incorporating numbers is crucial to a successful list post. I don’t recommend trying otherwise, without exception.

9. Conclude with a Bang

Do you really need a conclusion on list posts? Yes, you do, and they need to resemble a conclusion. Neil Patel’s research indicates that reader engagement is 10% better with list posts that include a conclusion. In fact, many readers start with the conclusion, and then work backwards to read the list.

From introduction to conclusion, formatting, titles, and length, there are a lot of elements that go into creating the perfect list post. By using these data-driven content marketing tips to your advantage, you can leverage the natural viral quality of this type of content.

Are you an avid reader of list posts? What are your pet peeves when it comes to these types of blogs?

Believe it or not, most people still believe that sales success boils down to getting a lot of people to agree to watch a demo.  While that's the case with technology, it doesn't vary too much from that in non-technology sales where most people believe that sales success boils down to one of two things - either a critical mass of meetings, or a proposal or quote.

On the other hand, depending on which experts you listen to, sales success boils down to how effective one is with either Inbound, Social Selling, Consultative Selling, Qualifying, Value Selling, Solution Selling, Relationship Selling, The Challenger Sale, acceptance of the Buyer Journey, Sales Process, Sales Methodology, Prospecting, Telesales, Reaching Decision Makers, Closing Techniques, Value Propositions, Capabilities, Presentations, Metrics, Tools, CRM, Pipeline Management, Training, Coaching, Sales Management, Selection, or Timing.  I'm sure I've missed a few, but you get the gist.

Once upon a time, executive coaching was viewed as a remedial intervention for executives and managers who needed to be “fixed” in some way. Managers were not expected to be particularly involved in the coachee’s exploration or journey. Coaching was even sometimes viewed as “outsourcing” the management of a difficult employee.

But today, executive coaching is often viewed as a strategic investment in human capital – a perk reserved for employees with high potential — and managers have realized that they need to participate in the process. If you are a manager with a direct report who is working with an external coach, there are several things you can do at the beginning of a coaching engagement to help make it successful:

Set broad objectives and frame them positively. At the outset, the more specific you can be about how you define success for the participant, the better. But when you do so, be sure to emphasize professional development goals. So, for example, your objective might be that the individual should “advocate more persuasively for resources, information, and support” by “navigating organizational politics and priorities more effectively” instead of telling your staffer that he or she “needs to fix contentious relationships” with others. Or you might suggest that he or she “manage workload, expectations, and deadlines more effectively” instead of telling them they need to stop over-promising and under-delivering.

Provide data. Coaching is most effective when the participant and the coach have multiple sources of information, which might include past reviews, personality assessment reports, or online or interview-based 360 degree feedback. While the employee may already have this information, it’s often helpful for you to share what you have in your files directly with the coach. If the coach will be conducting 360 degree feedback interviews, you can make sure that he or she speaks with a representative sample of colleagues for the participant, who can provide a broad, not biased, perspective.

Be specific about concrete action steps the employee can take. A good coaching engagement can go to waste if the manager, the coach, and the employee haven’t clearly articulated specific things the employee can do differently or better.

For instance, the head of a division in a pharmaceutical company had a staff member with a reputation for being brilliant but over-committed. When the coach sat down with the manager to define goals for the coaching, the manager was able to articulate two clear prescriptions for the direct report who was working with the coach: 1) Respond to everyone within 24 hours, even if the response was just a simple reply to set expectations about when a full answer to the voicemail or email would be forthcoming and 2) Create a “not to do” list of tasks that the participant would either not take on or would delegate to others. These two prescriptions, which the coaching participant put into practice, helped him satisfy his stakeholders while simultaneously prioritizing more effectively and focusing on his highest value-adding activities.

Define clear parameters on confidentiality. A coach is not acting as a psychologist, and different confidentiality rules apply. On the one hand, there should be confidential aspects of the process, such as the feedback the coach collects on behalf of the participant (otherwise, feedback providers might hold back in their comments due to concerns that their input may have implications for how higher-ups, or Human Resources, evaluate the employee). You can also understand that your direct report might not want to share all of his or her personality assessment reports, or the 360-degree interview feedback that is collected, with you.

On the other hand, coaching is an investment by you and the organization in the development of your subordinate, so there needs to be accountability built in to the process. Therefore, while assessment data should remain confidential, the development plan based on the data should be shared with you, and possibly also with your Human Resource Business Partner or Leadership Development counterpart.

Be blunt with the coach – blunter than you would be with the coachee. While a coach should not become a messenger between you and your staff member, there is an opportunity in the context of executive coaching for you to provide more specific and candid feedback to the coach than you might feel comfortable delivering face-to-face with your employee.

For example, the manager of a talented investor relations executive at a financial services organization told the employee’s coach that he hadn’t been promoted in the last cycle because the executive was viewed as too self-promotional and political. The manager had been reluctant to share her perspective directly with the executive because she was concerned that he wouldn’t find the feedback credible, coming only from her. However, since other feedback providers in the 360 process shared that same observation, and the coach was viewed by the participant as a neutral and supportive outsider, the coaching participant was able to hear the feedback in a way he wouldn’t have had it been provided directly by his manager. The participant got the message when positively communicated by the coach, became more collaborative and supportive of his colleagues, put the firm’s interests above his own, and was promoted the following year. This happy ending was only possible because the manager had been an active sponsor of, and participant in, the coaching – and had been honest with his coach.

By carefully considering your role in the executive coaching of your direct reports, you can help retain talented members of your team while helping them learn and grow as managers, leaders and teammates, and supporting them as they take their performance up to the next level. Your direct reports will progress further and better on their coaching path if you help show them where it is and where it leads, and then provide direction and support along the way.

Creating a steady stream of content that speaks to buyers and propels them toward purchase isn’t always easy. Even if you have processes in place for understanding the content topics that resonate with your audience, it can be hard to craft them in a highly engaging format.

That’s why we created this list of templates. Built by some of the best in the industry, these templates reveal the formulas behind the best performing blog posts, eBooks, videos, social media posts, whitepapers, and more.

1. Social Media Image Template, HubSpot

For HubSpot, photos on Facebook generated 53% more likes than their average post, and photos on Twitter drove a 55% increase in leads. To help other businesses reap similar benefits from incorporating images into social posts, they created a kit for creating compelling images on every social network.

2. Email Template, MailChimp

To help their customers send high-performing emails, the content champions at MailChip created predesigned templates that include standout imagery, exciting formats, and winning copy formulas.

3. Marketing Persona Template, Buffer

Before creating content, you need to know who you’re creating it for. This buyer persona template from Buffer is a great blueprint for identifying the perspectives, activities, questions, and needs of your target audiences.

4. SEO Template, Brightpod

If you’re writing online today, you need to take responsibility for optimizing your content. Brightpod’s free template, “The Beginner’s Guide to On Page SEO,” is a great guide to get you started.

5. Content Marketing Workflows Template, Kapost

If you want to produce a steady stream of content, you need to put streamlined tasks in place. These content marketing workflows provide customizable step-by-step processes for creating blog posts, eBooks, landing pages, emails, and more.

6. Content Mapping Template, CMI

To identify what information each of your personas needs throughout the buying cycle, you need a map of what content assets you have, and who they’re serving. This step-by-step template from CMI shows you how to build one. To get a grasp on your current content situation, start with a content audit.

Check out contentauditor.com for a tool that pulls all your past content, then allows you to tag and categorize it.

7. Reporting Template, DigitalSherpa

To improve, marketers need to understand what digital marketing strategies worked, what didn’t, and why. Reporting is the key to answering these questions. This reporting template from DigitalSherpa will help you make a data-backed, educated analysis of your marketing reach, cost per lead, lead per channel, and much more.

8. Pitching Template, Improve Presentation

Need to improve your pitch deck? This free template from Improve Presentation does the hard work for you. Get buy-in from your board, your CMO, or your team with these customized slides.

9. Infographic Template, Piktochart

Piktochart is an online graphic generator tool with a host of beautiful infographic templates that you can customize to your own needs.

10. Slideshare Template, Canva

Canva, another online tool, is one of the best places to find templates for SlideShare. Their graphic library, drag and drop features, and real-time editing allow you to create a clean, professional presentation with no help from a designer.

Do you have any other favorite digital marketing templates? Share them in the comments section below.

Decades ago, a high-performing salesperson would spend a typical workday in his office, making phone calls, meeting with prospects, developing sales materials, and asking his assistant for a cup of coffee, to schedule an appointment or to make lunch reservations. Today, the typical salesperson sits in a cubical, coffee shop, or at home, without the help of an assistant.

Let’s detail some of the other key changes we’ve seen in recent years.

1. Virtual, not physical, offices

What ever happened to the huge office table where you could kick your feet up while on the phone with a prospect? The adoption of a mobile lifestyle has rendered big office spaces nearly obsolete for sales reps. With the internet and mobile CRM platforms and the ability to work wherever and whenever, more and more sales reps are going virtual, with their laptops as their offices and a bundle of apps as their assistants.

While the mobile lifestyle is appealing in many ways, there’s nothing like a place to call your home away from home, where you can fellowship with your colleagues at the water cooler and woo your clients in the conference room.

2. Social media, not phone calls

The primary tool for salespeople to reach their customers and would-be buyers has changed many times throughout the years. It used to be a knock at the door, then a direct mail piece, then a telephone call, then an email. Today, savvy sales reps are recognizing that by using tools like content marketing and social media, customers will come to them. A single post can reach thousands of prospects simultaneously.

Salespeople are able to flaunt their subject matter expertise to a larger audience through the power of the internet. If not used carefully, however, this approach can remove the sales reps’ greatest asset, their personal touch from the sales process. Gartner Research predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships without talking to a human at all.

3. From persuader to problem solver

Not so long ago, every salesperson knew their cold-calling script and deal-closing statements by heart. It was imperative to master the technique of persuading the prospect that their product was the best, with a not-so-subtle aggressiveness that pushed prospects into the sales funnel. Today, prospects have made about 60% of their buying decision before even talking to a sales rep, according to Corporate Executive Board. They have checked user reviews, talked to friends and done research on the internet before deciding that they want to buy a product.

The old tactics of pushiness and force selling no longer fly with knowledgeable consumers. Today, the sales process focuses on getting to know customers better, discovering their pain points , uncovering their needs and presenting them with options that solve their problems.

Yes, a lot has changed since the days of your dad’s sales team. While we are never going back to each sales rep having their own executive assistant, it still makes sense for companies to find ways to limit the admin time that burdens their reps.

 

Harvard's Clay Christensen is today's most influential modern management thinker. His 1997 book, "The Innovator's Dilemma," detailed his theory of "disruptive innovation" — explaining how smart incumbents are toppled by upstarts in an era of fast technological change. He has continued to apply his theory to other industries. Christensen's concepts are widely cited in Silicon Valley and across a wide variety of fields, including education and journalism. 

This summer, his theory was the subject of a highly critical analysis published in The New Yorker by Harvard historian Jill Lepore. 

Christensen and I had a chance to sit down recently to discuss all this and more. The following is edited for clarity and length.

Henry Blodget: You have predicted – which is staggering – that half of universities will go bankrupt in the next 15 years.

Clay Christensen: Yes. Everybody else thinks that it's absolutely crazy. But I think I'll be right. I have made an observation that relates to this. It is as follows: Many of society's most important and vexing problems were created by unnamed people in the past who decided unilaterally to combine things that should be separate and to separate things that should be together.

So, for example, there were three antagonistic ethnic groups, and somebody said, "Let's put them all together in one country, and let's call it Iraq." And that created all kinds of problems for mankind, because they actually ought to be separate. And whoever decided that we should teach literature and history as separate topics? You could teach them together, and you would get so much more out of both. And in a bigger way, somebody decided that there is education and then there is employment.

In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn't learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know. So things that we thought were important, like having a degree, get supplanted by achievements because a degree per se doesn't mean as much.

HB: But doesn't everybody who goes to Harvard Business School think, "I've now been anointed. My future is secure. I know the 200 or 300 other people who are going to be running the world in 40 years." That in itself is so valuable it justifies the entire investment.

CC: Yes. Effectively that's "I need to get a brand." And so there will be more people continuing to pay higher and higher prices to get a Harvard MBA. But over time, it loses its salience. Already we don't teach management at the Harvard Business School. Where management is taught is when somebody at Wal-Mart tries to open a store in Accra, Ghana. That's real management. And that kind of stuff is just gone from Harvard Business School. Selling is gone. So we have a lot of finance and a lot of strategy. Its value is for people who don't leave the school to be managers, but they are people who become analysts and investors, buyers and sellers.   

HB: So let's talk about disruption a little. Like so many in business over the past 25 years, I was a huge devotee of "The Innovator’s Dilemma." I was surprised when I picked up The New Yorker several months ago and read what to me was a very personal attack, not just on the theory, but seemingly on you for having advanced the theory and having it become so popular. And the author, Jill Lepore, seemed to be saying, “It’s just demonstrably wrong.” What was the story behind that?

CC: Yes. It's interesting. I have a couple of thoughts. One is sociological and has to do with the English language. Michael Porter had this problem with the word "strategic." Think of how may times somebody says, 

What bothers me so much is that all of the points that she raised were not just wrong, but they were lies. Ours is the only theory in business that actually has been tested in the marketplace over and over again.

“This is a strategic investment,” meaning you're not going to make any money in it but you want to do it anyway, so we'll call it a "strategic investment." And that has just destroyed the original meaning of the word "strategic." How many times have you heard “This is a new paradigm”? None of them read Kuhn’s "Scientific Revolutions" book, but they used the word "paradigm" to give credibility to whatever crazy things they're talking about. And so they use the word "disruption" in a similar way. [Lepore] didn't point out that this is something that happens over and over again, where an important idea is bastardized.

So it was an important idea in the article that didn't get developed. But through the rest, as it became personal, what bothers me so much is that all of the points that she raised were not just wrong, but they were lies. Ours is the only theory in business that actually has been tested in the marketplace over and over again. Porter's theories haven't been tested in the marketplace, but ours has. And for her to take that on, to take me on and the theory on – I don't know where the meanness came from. 

HB: In responding to the article, you did say, “Now, having had another 20 years, there may be parts of the disruption theory that we should look at again.” Have you modified the theory over time?

CC: Absolutely. Thomas Kuhn said that a theory improves when you can find something that it can't explain. He called them anomalies. So we ask the students, every class, to come prepared to show what the theory can't explain. And we've learned enormous amounts from that.

So, for example, a student about five years ago came in and said that it doesn't apply to the hotel industry. So a Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market in the 1950s, but they have not gone up market. There wasn't any core in the hotel industry that would allow you to go up market. But then Airbnb changed that, because they can now go up market by just changing the mix of the rooms available to them. And holy cow, they go up, and while they are going up, there is nothing that Marriott can do.

HB: You've been vocal for years on Apple having a not particularly desirable business model, because they have a closed system. It has surpassed lots of expectations. Why has the iPhone not failed?

CC: Well, A, they’re smart. B, their marketing was trying to find jobs to be done in people's minds where there isn't anything to get the job done. But the basis of that concern for Apple is another theory that we have, as spelled out in "The Innovator’s Solution." And what it says is, in the early years of an industry's life, almost always the dominant products are proprietary and interdependent in their architecture.

In the smartphone world, the first one was Nokia — excruciatingly interdependent architecture — then RIM, which was an even more excruciatingly interdependent architecture, and then Apple. And Apple was kind of halfway. Inside of the device, it’s proprietary, but it initiated the modularity in that you could develop apps and stick them in. But then just like IBM identified modularity with the PC, Google gave us Android. And now I think the Android operating system as a platform, modularity, accounts for about 90% of the units, even while Apple makes all of the profit. 

So if Apple keeps its strategy of very high prices, their share of that market will diminish. And so ultimately they'll make a lot of profit on 100 units. And Samsung, if they win, they will be making all of the units in the industry but no profit. Either way you're screwed, but that's the theory behind why I said Apple won't succeed, because in the end modularity always wins.

That's the theory behind why I said Apple won't succeed. In the end, modularity always wins.

HB: And what the Apple believers will say is, “You don't understand. This is like the car market. Apple is BMW. There will always be a market for those of us who like the nice things in life. And Apple brings them to us. And by the way, they're going to sell 65 million iPhone 6’s in the first quarter, so could you be more wrong?” That's what they will say.

CC: That's right. And what Clay will say in response is that you can never predict where the technology will come from, but you can predict with perfect certainty that if Apple is having that extraordinary experience, the people with modularity are striving. You can predict that they are motivated to figure out how to emulate what they are offering, but with modularity. And so ultimately, unless there is no ceiling, at some point Apple hits the ceiling. So their options are hopefully they can come up with another product category or something that is proprietary because they really are good at developing products that are proprietary. Most companies have that insight into closed operating systems once, they hit the ceiling, and then they crash.

HB: Your most recent book is called "How Will You Measure Your Life?" You’ve talked about a lot of the people at Harvard Business School and elsewhere — just extraordinarily smart, Rhodes scholars, graduating with these incredible pedigrees — and how down the road they are embarrassed to come to reunions because their personal lives are in shambles. They're divorced. They're alienated from their children. And one of the things you pointed out is often we have this tough time with work-life balance. How do you excel and compete in an incredibly competitive world and also find time to make sure you take care of your family?

CC: Well, the first lesson or insight for that is you've got to understand why that's happening. In our individual lives if we have a drive to achieve, and we have an extra ounce of energy or 30 minutes of time, we'll spend our time and energy on whatever activity yields us the most immediate and tangible evidence of achievement. Our careers provide immediate evidence of achievement. Every day you can put your hands on your hips and look at something that you accomplished. But in raising family, on a day-to-day basis, the relationships with our spouses and relationships with our children don't provide any immediate achievement. It takes 20 years to raise a child. It's a very long investment.

Our careers provide immediate evidence of achievement. Every day you can put your hands on your hips and look at something you accomplished. But it takes 20 years to raise a child. It's a very long investment.

And so people with a high need for achievement systematically under-invest in their families and overinvest in their careers. And the way that my wife, Christine, and I — the way we wrestled with that problem — we decided that Clay is an incorrigible driver of achievement, and he's never going to change. And so let's put a boundary around that. So we decided I would never work on Saturday. That's for the family — and Sunday for God. And I wouldn't work past 6 p.m. Those were kind of the rules that we made a commitment for. Then, when I worked for BCG, about a month after I started, the leader of my team came to me and said, “Clay, we're going to meet on Sunday at 2 p.m. because we've got a big presentation on Monday, and this is what you've got to be ready for. So we're going to do a dress rehearsal.” And I told Mike, “I can't do this on Sunday,” and explained why.

And he just went bonkers, and he said, “Everybody works on Sunday.” And I said, “I just can’t. We made a commitment to spend that day for God.” And so he blustered away really mad. And he came back, and he said, “Look, I talked to the rest of the team. Let's meet Saturday at 2 p.m.” And I said, “I can't do that either. I'm sorry.” And, boy, he was mad at me. So then he came back, and he said, “Do you happen to work on Fridays?”

And it was a very important decision for me to make because the logic is just this once, in this particular extenuating circumstance, it's OK if I do this. The problem with that logic is that your life is filled with an unending stream of extenuating circumstances. And that was just a little decision in a life of tens of thousands of moments of decisions like that. But if I had given in that once, then the next time it comes up it'll be easier for me to get in again “just this once” until just this once isn't once. And I decided that if you set a standard it easier to keep the standard 100% of the time than it is 98% of the time.

HB: And was it important to your overall career success, given that you transferred out of management consulting, which can be an incredibly all-consuming job, legendary work hours and so forth, into business academia, where you have much more control over your time?

CC: I think that's the wrong category scheme. There's a type of person, and you see them in the consulting firms for sure. You see them as investment bankers, private equity players, buyout shops. You see them on the trajectory for tenure at the Harvard Business School, at the Harvard Medical School. All of these people are just driven to achieve. And so that's the category of people, and that's not all people. These are the kind of people who end up driving their families into misery, divorce, and the kids hating their parents.

HB: But it is possible to drive and reach whatever goals you want without doing that if you set limits.

CC: If you set limits. Now I'd say just one other thing ... I've done quite well. And especially when our kids were young, those rules were very important to me. So how could I be successful professionally as well? And this comes from my religious commitment. And what that means for me is if I do what matters to God, which is my family and my commitment to helping people be better people, I feel like God magnified my capabilities. I don't think that if it was just plain old Clay Christensen, with a certain number of hours in a day, I could have done what I've done because the competition — how many jillion people who have the same amount of time in their life — that's a tough game to win. But I felt like God blessed me, that my brain could be much more productive than it otherwise would be because I put first things first.

At age 30, Christensen was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which he treats daily with blood-sugar tests and insulin shots. In 2007, he suffered a massive heart attack just as his book on heathcare, "The Innovator's Prescription," was about to be published. In 2009, he was treated for lymphoma. And in 2010, he had a stroke, requiring up to eight hours a day of therapy to regain his ability to speak. He discusses that last illness below:

SEE ALSO: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner On Mistakes Made Out Of Fear, And One Time He Really Doubted Himself

SEE ALSO: Richard Branson Responds To Elon Musk's Criticism; 'We're About To Prove Him Wrong'

Join the conversation about this story »

No matter what group or industry I’m working with, people want to better understand how to work more effectively across the different generations.

A few weeks ago, I shared my tips for selling to Gen Y buyers. But, beyond a sales shift, the workforce is changing fast. Millennials (anyone born roughly between 1980 and 2000) are taking over. By 2020, half of US workers will be millennials. (Read more about the demographics of our changing workforce in this study from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.)

Generation Y is challenging the status quo and forcing employers to change the way work works. A lot of those trends and changes are positive for employees across the generations. Leaders have an opportunity to learn from younger workers. Gen Y has a progressive perspective, and they’re coming to work ready to contribute and make a difference immediately.

So, what makes Gen Y employees different than their Gen X and baby boomer predecessors? Let’s consider how millennials look at work.

Millennials at Work

They’re the most engaged generation.

According to a fall 2013 Modern Survey study, millennials are the most engaged generation in the American workforce. I recently talked to Modern Survey President Don MacPherson about his latest research on millennials at work.

It’s easy to buy into stereotypes about Gen Y employees being lazy or unmotivated, but falling into that thinking doesn’t help anyone. Embrace Gen Y, help them discover and use their strengths, and be open to learning from them. You’ll probably end up gaining a lot and expanding your own perspective.

They value career development.

Modern Survey research also found millennial employees are much more motivated by career development than security-seeking baby boomers. A third of employed millennials are actively looking for a job and, on average, are projected to stay with an employer only about two years. Millennials are bringing an unprecedented perspective on career mobility to the workplace.

As a result, organizations will need to rethink their retention and development strategies. If you want to retain high potentials, you’ll need to help them grow and learn. Millennial employees who feel stifled or under-used will look elsewhere, fast. Can you blame them?

They value flexibility and open-mindedness.

The 9-to-5 mentality is dead. Does work really need to be done in an office? Generation Y is looking for a more flexible work environment that rewards work done well, without strict rules about when and where it gets done.

For managers who got their experience in a culture where being at your desk on time was important, this might be a tough change to swallow. Chad Estis leads the sales organization at the Dallas Cowboys. He used to enforce a very structured work day. Now, as a result of changing employee expectations, he’s dropped the requirements and doesn’t worry about when sales reps are at their desks as long as they’re meeting their goals.

The results? “There hasn’t been an iota of drop-off in production. And, people’s enjoyment of their jobs has gone way up,” he says. “I never would have thought about making this kind of change 10 or 15 years ago, but it’s been a net positive all around.”

They prefer feedback every day over an annual review.

Most thought leaders in the employee engagement space agree: The days of the annual employee review are numbered. Millennials are looking for regular, consistent feedback from their managers. Giving honest feedback on a regular basis may fall outside of some managers’ comfort zones, but the result is a better-equipped and more confident workforce.

Estis has built trust with his team by giving employees honest feedback. “If we say we’re committed to helping our people, we have to give them constructive feedback. Otherwise, we’re doing them a disservice.”

In a world that is constantly changing, more frequent feedback is good for everyone. At Adobe, Senior Vice President of Human Resources Donna Morris saw that annual performance reviews weren’t resulting in improved business goals; they actually were hurting the company. Because employees only heard feedback from their managers once a year, there was often a negative “hangover” after the review period. So, Adobe dumped the formal annual review and started encouraging people to set expectations for every year, get feedback on a regular basis, and create a plan for growth and development. The results: lower voluntary attrition and happier employees.

They’re digital natives.

Millennials are digital natives. Saying that Gen Y is comfortable with technology is an understatement. They use technology to learn new skills, collaborate with coworkers and communicate with customers. They expect you to be digitally savvy, too.

Progressive leaders recognize millennials’ preference for technology, and they’re changing the way they approach training and development. At Grainger, sales leader Brian Norris found “old-school classroom training” just wasn’t working for the company’s younger sales force. So, his team leverages new media, like podcasts and videos via mobile learning applications, and takes advantage of social media.

They’re lifelong students.

Today, career development opportunities are the number one driver of employee engagement. The bottom line: People want to work for a company that continues to invest in them and supports continuous learning.

Aaron Williams, a sales leader who has led teams at major technology companies including HP, feels encouraged by the youngest employees and students he’s meeting today. He’s meeting lifelong students. “In the past, going into sales was a Plan B,” he says. “Most people got a degree in something else. The college students I’m meeting now decided a year or two ago that they’re going into sales. They’re studying it the same way chemistry majors study chemistry. They’re pursuing it with purpose.”

Once they’re on the job, Gen Y employees keep looking for opportunities to learn, grow, and become more informed. Organizations that encourage an environment of continuous learning (for employees of every generation) will come out on top.

Millennial employees are engaged, comfortable with technology, and have a strong desire to learn, grow and contribute. Exactly what we need.

While they would be nice to have, the Future of B2B Marketing involves more than science fiction inspired predictions about cranial implants and neural marketing dashboards. Business Marketers are simultaneously investing in a more human approach to business content while also further tapping in to the power of data. Which innovations make sense for your B2B company?

From predictive analytics to more scientifically understanding buyer content consumption preferences, there’s a world of opportunity when it comes to optimizing B2B marketing performance.

In this post I’ve curated a collection of reports and one very clever infographic on topics that should be front and center for B2B marketers in Q4 and on into 2015. Click on each report image to download (some require registration).

Insight Venture Partners – Periodic Table of B2B Digital Marketing Metrics and Glossary – A very handy guide of digital marketing tactics with corresponding industry averages for performance. It also includes a glossary for the uninitiated to B2B digital marketing metrics.

Chief!Marketer: B2B Marketing Tool Kit – With insights from a collection of B2B marketing experts, this report from Chief!Marketer offers advice on direct mail, analytics, lead gen, automation, social media, content marketing and team building.

AdvertisingAge: B-to-B Marketing Fact Pack – A collection of stats and insights as well as some of the biggest B2B marketers in the world including AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, GE, American Express and many more. Industry stats cover CRM, automation, social media, content marketing, mobile marketing and lead generation.

CMI & MarketingProfs: 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets and Trends North America – Well over 100 statistics from this 5th edition of the report cover overall trends, tactics and where B2B marketers are investing in content marketing. A great tool for planning 2015 content marketing programs.

Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn: B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report – Holger Schulze, who runs the tech marketing community on LinkedIn partnered with a number of sponsors to identify new content marketing trends, challenges and best practices. This is a great complement to the report from CMI and MarketingProfs.

Marketo: The Definitive Guide to Lead Generation Workbook – Informative and entertaining, this workbook gives B2B marketers a fun way to collect the information necessary to plan and implement a more effective lead generation effort.

Circle research: B2B Market Segmentation – This report from UK based Circle research outlines approaches to B2B customer segmentation and how to implement a segmentation model.

LinkedIn: The 2014 Professional Content Consumption Report – Understanding how business buyers consume content is an essential part of optimizing the B2B buyer journey. Based on the information discovery and consumption behaviors of professionals on LinkedIn this report offers some very interesting insights into optimizing content for attract and engage content marketing efforts.

Demand Gen Report: 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey – This report helps answer key questions about about social media and content affect buyers during the sales cycle. How has the buying process evolved? What kind of content wins more deals? What role does social media play in the research process?

Digital Marketing Depot: Market Intelligence Report – B2B Marketing Automation Platforms 2014 – A Marketer’s Guide – This report provides a breakdown of the marketing automation software market, trends and platforms. Platform features are compared (Adobe Campaign, Act-On, eTrigue, HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, Pardot, Sales Engine, Salesfusion, Silverpop and Teradata. The report also offers advice on selecting a marketing automation solution.

Demand Metric & Influitive: Customer Marketing – Improving Customer Satisfaction & Revenue Impact – Investing all your B2B marketing dollars into new customer acquisition is a lost opportunity when it comes to growing revenues from current customers and inspiring advocacy. This benchmark report from Demand Metric and Influitive outlines everything from the current status of customer marketing to tactcs, metrics, skills and what’s next.

IDC: The Math of Modern Marketing – How Predictive Analytics Makes Marketing More Effective – This white paper discusses how a combination of structured and unstructured data creates a more complete view of the customer that can further the conversation, reveal patterns of customer intent, and provide predictive guidance on future customer behavior.

BONUS

Another resource I’d like to add to this collection is a recent post that summarizes a survey of 200 qualified B2B Marketing professionals by the folks at Software Advice. It’s not a report in PDF format, but is a blog post chock full of insights, graphs and comparisons to other similar B2B marketing reports.

Software Advice – B2B Demand Generation Benchmark IndustryView 2014

 

Top Photo: Shutterstock

---

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2014. | Roundup: 11 B2B Marketing Reports and One Killer Infographic | http://www.toprankblog.com

With Halloween just around the corner, we wanted to feature an “evil” sales tactic: subtle sales manipulation.

The art of influencing people is probably one of the most important weapons in your sales arsenal. Being able to make others feel special and appreciated is a skill not all sales individuals can master.

Whether you call it “influence” or “‘manipulation,'” it’s an action purely aimed at personal gain. But if you want to increase your sales in order to make your company profitable, you sometimes have to visit the dark side.

Playing The Victim And Servant

“Manipulators mask their self-serving agendas by implying or asserting a more noble, selfless cause. It’s incredibly common and can be difficult to recognize.” – Subconscious Security

Borrow a little from this manipulation tactic when trying to sell a product or service. Imply that you are merely a middle-man trying to satisfy the customer and that it fills you with joy to see others happy. Come across as if you exist to serve them and their needs.

This would work well if you aren’t the overconfident, aggressive type of sales individual. If you are introverted, make use of this tactic by being humble and selfless. Customers will appreciate your humility and up making the sale anyway.

Become The Go-To Resource For Your Prospects

Manipulation is about doing what you have to in order to get what you want. It’s just as much about subtle trickery as it is about transparency and a positive attitude. Manipulate prospective customers by luring them into making sales with the content on your website.

Become an online resource within your field. Instead of just expecting people to buy your product or make use of your service – give them something in return. This could be in the form of a well strategized content marketing plan.

Here you can give industry tips, advice, and share company wisdom while subtly advertising your products and services as well. Markus Sheridan explains this strategy in his article, Subtle Selling: The Key to Writing Great Content AND Making Money Online.

As part of your content marketing strategy – tell them stories about how you work and what you have achieved. Give prospective customer something to relate to – but make them draw their own conclusions. These blog posts or articles don’t need to feature specific employees or even a real life event, it’s about telling a story.

Give The Illusion Of Control

Instead of throwing product specifications and statistics in your prospective customer’s face, keep it simple. Share information that is relevant and prompt them into asking additional questions. This will make them feel like they are in control, even though you are steering the conversation.

As a sales representative your gut will tell you whether the customer is interested or not. Don’t bore or confuse them with unnecessary information before you are even sure they are interested.

Another reason you might want to keep it simple is so that you and your client stays on the same page. As a sales representative you’ve probably repeated the technical details and tricky information numerous times, but that doesn’t mean that your customer will be accustomed with the company’s jargon and brand lingo.

Keep An Eye On the Competition

Just like a sports team would prepare for a game by studying their opponents, so to must your sales team learn how their competitors perform. This doesn’t mean you have to bad-mouth another company – that just shows insecurity.

Instead, use whatever weaknesses you’ve learnt about your ‘enemy’ and incorporate it in your sales pitch without even mentioning their name. If you know that your company offers a 20% discount for first time buyers and your competition only offers 10%, you could say something along the lines of: “We know some companies give as little as 10% discount, but we pride ourselves in rewarding our first time buyers with a 20% discount”.

“At the beginning of a sale, your customer may be looking at a number of different vendors. You can build your stature and diminish that of your top competitor by positioning them as yesterday’s news.” – Sales Training.

Keep in mind not to give away the name of your competitor – this way you will actually be telling your customer which company you are ‘afraid’ of and that might lead to them thinking that company is better. There are subtle ways in implying certain competitors without directly referencing them. First National Bank, based in South Africa had such a clever marketing campaign where the audience could derive the competitor details without them having to spell it out.

Know When To Quit

Some days you won’t even be able to sell water in the desert – no matter how friendly and accommodating you sound or how many jokes you pull. Knowing when to quit should be an important part of your sales strategy.

You are the only connection they have with what your company stands for. If you totally mess up the communication it can damage future prospects. Instead, back out before they get agitated, rework your strategy and come back another time.

“Wishful thinking can propel you into a world of wasted effort. Once it becomes clear that a deal doesn’t make sense or will take too much effort to close, it’s not worth pursuing.” – CNBC

To quit doesn’t just pertain to a sales method gone wrong, but also knowing when you won’t achieve your goal. For instance – if you are talking to the boss’s assistant instead of the boss – trying to close a deal would be a waste of time.

Being a manipulator in the everyday sense of the word is definitely not desirable, but there are certain ways in which subtle prompting and persuasion can help hone a killer sales strategy. Make use of some of the above mentioned tactics and see your company prosper.

When his three-hour board interview ended with an offer to join the executives for a beer, 35-year-old Martin* figured he’d nailed the job. He had spent the last two months interviewing for a position as director of operations at a sporting goods company. His resume was spot-on — he’d spent five years as a sporting goods sales rep and several years as an operations manager doing “everything from ordering for shops, to speaking with dealers, to sales.” Senior management at the new company knew him, his successful track record, and the companies he’d worked for. Slam dunk, right? Wrong.

Martin had participated in five interviews, between which he managed myriad back-and-forth e-mails and deliverables. At the company’s request, he created and submitted a five-year business plan and a master list of vendors and buyers. He was asked to explain his strategies for expanding distribution and introducing new products to market. At the time, Martin had felt uncomfortable about offering so much proprietary information to a company for whom he did not yet work, but colleagues who’d more recently been in the job market told him, “This is how the interviewing process works these days — you jump through hoops.” Martin decided he wanted the job, and if he had to give up the keys to the car to get it, he was going to hope for the best.

But after months of interviews and assignments, Martin said, “Instead of making me an offer, they told me they had to make a ‘really tough decision’ and ‘decided to move in a different direction’” — that direction was giving the position to the most junior board member, who lacked any hands-on experience. “We hope this won’t affect our relationship,” they told him. And with months of his “life down the drain,” but knowing that he worked in a small community, Martin felt obliged not come off as a sore loser. “But the fact of the matter is, I got taken.” His goal today? “To ruin this company.”

Maybe you’re thinking that Martin just didn’t know how to play his cards right. Or that maybe, in the end, he simply wasn’t the best candidate for the position. But Martin is not alone. His utter frustration over the hiring process is pretty much par for the course these days. This type of behavior is happening more and more often. Ask five acquaintances about recent hiring experiences and I bet you’ll encounter one friend who personally has suffered something similar. Data compiled for The New York Times by Glassdoor found that an average interview process in 2013 lasted 23 days versus an average of 12 days in 2009. And time-consuming assignments and auditions for candidates as chronicled in the stories here, and here, and here, are the new normal.

This problem is the result of several factors:

Fear of decision-making. Back when I was hiring people as an executive at a large business, I’d solicit candidates, look at a batch of resumes, decide who had the requisite skills on paper, and then interview the top three or four. Each interview lasted about 30 minutes. I had my standard set of questions that probed their personalities, attitudes, ambitions, skill set, and prospective fit with the company ethos. If two potential hires seemed close, I’d have a breakfast with each and then make a decision. And I personally wrote everyone who didn’t get the job. This wasn’t rocket science.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the hiring process went off the rails, but I believe it began in the late 90s, when cost cutting became a mania and headcount was slashed to the bone, requiring every employee to do the work of many. With so little margin for error, every hire became a fraught decision, and the fear of making a mistake loomed larger and larger. To protect themselves and validate their choices, managers began to seek more and more “evidence” of their thoroughness in vetting their hires. New hurdles were added until someone interested in a director-level position, such as Martin, is now routinely required to submit the kind of analysis and proposals that were once the province of in-house executives or paid consultants.

A culture of rudeness. Rachel, a 60-year-old former news producer turned freelance marketer, was introduced by a friend to the CEO of “a fast growing ‘deep content’ company with clients like GE and Xerox.” The company seemed like a good fit for Rachel’s portfolio of skills, and employed a large staff of experienced journalists, artists, and web designers. After a brief phone conversation, the CEO wanted to meet with Rachel “ASAP.” During their first in-person conversation, Rachel and he discovered shared viewpoints, and after talking for an hour, the CEO asked Rachel to meet with his editorial VP. But first, the CEO gave Rachel his card. “This is my direct line,” he said, “and I return every call on this line. Call me by the end of the week.” Rachel did as requested. Six weeks later, after several awkward interactions with the CEO’s assistant, he finally took Rachel’s call.

CEO: “Hi Rachel, I’m too busy to talk today.”

Rachel: “I understand —maybe Monday?”

CEO: “Well, I can’t commit to that right now, either. And I need to tell you, it doesn’t inspire me that you’ve been calling so much.”

Rachel: “On the day we met you asked me to call you two days later. That was six weeks ago. I’ve called less than once a week.”

CEO: “Well, every time you call your name doesn’t go to the to top of the list – it moves to the bottom! This doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest in you and your work, but it’s not cool to do what you’re doing.”

Rachel: “I understand. I won’t call again. Thank you.”

The colleague who set up the initial contact told Rachel: “There is no bad intent here — like me, he gets 300 emails a day and works 18-hour days across five continents. It’s not personal.”

I wrote a book about emotion in the workplace called It’s Always Personal. And no matter what others say, it nearly always is. People hiring today have precious little time to read, process information, and respond to even urgent issues like staffing. But this comes at great peril to their organizations and to the rude employer. Instead of fostering good will among the prospective hires they interview, enemies like I-live-to-see-this-company-destroyed Martin are made.

My time is more important than your time. An author I know was approached by a publisher to write a book for which the publisher had decided there was a market. The writer was asked to write a proposal, but wasn’t told that he was only one among many other people from whom they’d solicited proposals until midway through the process. That process took “months and months and months,” he says, and “it was always a hurry-up-and-wait situation, where they made me jump through hoop after hoop — every one of them a last-minute-need-it-immediately kind of thing. And then I’d hear nothing for weeks.” When his proposal was finally accepted, they wanted the finished book in six weeks. “It took them about eight months to make a decision to accept the proposal — which, by the way, was their idea in the first place, and which they had approached me about — and then they expected me to just whip the entire book out of thin air in six weeks? What’s wrong with these people?”

This is happening to almost everyone I know looking for any kind of work, even those who have been invited into the process — freelance, contract, full-time. The prospective employer/client needs everything now and then it’s radio silence for days, weeks, months — leaving the prospective supplier/employee in the unenviable position of feeling like they must beg for feedback. During the last decade, it became acceptable behavior to simply not answer e-mails. But that’s the worst kind of ego-sucking, demoralizing power play imaginable. We’re all busy. That’s no excuse for disrespect. And the awful truth? I don’t think the employers have a clue. Fearful of losing their own jobs by making a wrong choice, they’ve lost perspective on what matters.

So what’s lost amid all these changes?

At a time when the buzzwords in corporate America are innovation, disruption, and game-changers — all actions that require recruiting the best talent in the marketplace — organizations, instead, are artificially creating bureaucratic inefficiencies that are inexcusably cumbersome and that result in the creation of legions of antagonists. It’s a waste of human capital, it’s a huge waste of everyone’s productive time, and it damages the reputation of an organization and the individual doing the hiring. Jobs are scarce enough, and the general economic vibe is insecure enough that companies and managers believe that they can be cavalier about how they treat people outside the organization — but in this thinking lies madness. Now that 20^th-century-style employer loyalty and benefits are a thing of the past, employees return the disfavor, churning through organizations at a rapid clip. If a typical new hire is only going to stay at a company for two to four years, why sweat the decision so much? Be responsive. Act fast. Trust your gut.

Employers need to streamline the hiring process, calling upon both common sense and basic good manners. Here are six easy actions:

• Make the process transparent from the outset for prospective hires
• State the timetable for making a decision
• Offer updates if the process extends beyond that timeframe
• Limit the “tryout” requirements — proposals, plans, original work — and make the deliverables clear at the start of the process
• Make the timeframe for submitting any materials reasonable — 3 to 5 business days, never tomorrow
• Make certain that everyone who’s being considered for a position is given the courtesy of a definitive response within the stated timeframe. Just as e-mail has compounded our daily load, so too does it liberate us from making those hard calls person to person. Use the tool to your advantage.

The wildly successful actress/producer/director Lena Dunham perhaps said it best in a recent interview: “I’m never going to be the person who lets e-mail and voicemail sit for weeks — I’m going to be the person who responds, even if the answer is no.” How refreshing.

*Names have been changed

In big businesses, it’s not uncommon to see a handful of executives in the C suite, a few more than that in upper management, and even more plentiful people filling lower management roles. But when you’re launching a startup, this type of infrastructure is unnecessary and a harmful goal to aim toward. Eric Ries, creator of The Lean Startup, advocates for operating with much less waste. And in the world of startups, every position counts.

So if you are the one launching an organization, or if you’re considering joining one, it’s imperative you know some essential traits that individuals in each primary role should possess. Here’s a look at three of the most crucial functions within a startup (assuming you already have your product developed and services refined), and what each one requires.

Capable CEO

If you’re the inventor of your product, it’s easy to want to be the CEO. After all, this is your baby and the flashy title is arguably the most well respected in business. Right? Not so fast. While it may be tempting to call yourself the chief executive officer, only do so if you have the skill-set required. There’s no shame (and often a lot of business reward) to bringing in a qualified, experienced CEO to run your company instead.

The CEO should be the one to have her eye on the overall company vision strategy. He/she should be able to evangelize about the business, as well as motivate everyone else under him/her. There isn’t a single cookie-cutter personality that makes the best CEOs, but that person does need to be able to excite others and be a natural leader. Sound like you? Then great, maybe you can be your own CEO. But if this is a far cry from who you are, then look long and hard at hiring a chief executive officer.

Marketing Maven (or Master)

Marketing is consistently evolving as both a science and an art. While the CEO is a key position, the head of marketing (whether you call him/her a CMO, VP of marketing, marketing manager, or some other title) holds a large amount of influence over the ultimate trajectory of your company. Choose this person carefully.

Your head of marketing should be extremely creative, as well as likeable. In order to get the entire company on board with marketing efforts, this individual should be able to rally the troops simply because people want to be part of what they’re doing. A leader in this arena ought to be agile and have a firm understanding of a wide range of marketing tools like cloud contact systems, social media analytic platforms, CRM, and marketing automation. As marketing moves into a more and more technical field, whomever you elect to this position may ultimately need to be a hybrid of a CMO and CIO.

Approachable Customer Service Agent

It may be surprising to see a customer service role listed in importance after your CEO and head of marketing, but it makes a lot of business sense. When all is said and done, the person who runs your customer service department is responsible for how your buyers view your organization. This individual will have to direct a team on proper etiquette around dealing with customers, and must be a superstar when it comes to interpersonal relationships. He/she should have extensive knowledge about your product or service, be empathetic, and be a great listener.

Researchers at Rice University found that conscientious employees are the ones with the highest propensity for providing excellent customer service. So seek out people who are meticulous and have a high level of integrity for this position. Your company’s standing, in the eye of its customers, depends on it.

When you have your product or service nailed down and are ready to unleash it to the market, don’t let your excitement cause you to start a hiring frenzy. Instead, begin with these central leadership positions and then slowly add in other important roles as they become necessary. It’s best to be lean in the beginning, and strategic in building the infrastructure of your company. With a little (nominal) bit of luck, and endless thought and hard work, you’ll reap the benefits in no time.

 

Social justice is a hot button word and it’s not your fault that you constantly keep your distance for fear alienating a possible portion of your target market.

But when it’s caught up with your campaign to generate sales leads from social media, how do you keep from getting caught between a rock and a hard place?

Well on the bright side, you won’t be alone in saying that the ultimate answer isn’t going to be a simple one. The best thing you can do though is identify the common hurdles and above all, keep generating those sales leads.

• Social Struggle #1: Politics – Sometimes even Pirates of the Carribbean paints a more preferable picture of politics compared to the hornet’s nest of real political issues. The moment you market a particular social initiative and some of your customers tie it with politics, better batten down the hatches.

• Social Struggle #2: Transparency – This arguably easier to deal with because how you communicate yourself as a business is well within marketing and sales territory. Just be aware though that the line between transparency and protecting company interests can be heavily blurred. Expected discernment and discretion to go hand-in-hand.

• Social Struggle #3: Conflicting data – The information you might obtain on a particular social issue could a very, very mixed bag. Accusations of bias and skepticism will abound. It won’t be like a simple focus group or nothing like a customer survey is going to fix. Be prepared to increase volume when conducting market research.

• Social Struggle #4: Unexpected results – Finally, even all the preparation isn’t going to spare you from unintended consequences. Every plan you make is going to forever be in theory until you start putting your initiatives in practice. As they say, don’t undertestimate the ripple effect of what you do for bad or for good.

Giving your company a social initiative might make for a good marketing pitch but it really is more than just that. It’s a commitment, a contract. It’s like choosing to play as a hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It sounds like a kid’s dream come true but you should realize you’ll be tied to that dream for a very long time.

I was watching the video for the second roundtable video that I participated in at Content Marketing World and Nick Panayi from CSC said, “the funnel is more like a pinball machine, with leads bouncing everywhere.”

Anyway it got me to thinking about one of the big concepts in my next book that I call The Continuum Experience. It’s actually a continuation or extension of the concept of natural nurturing that I presented in my first book a few years back.

Essentially the gist is that the funnel has constraints as a process of elimination based on the limited set of prospects in your database. A bunch go in at the top and a few come out the bottom. If you think about it, it’s like setting yourself up for failure.

Instead, if marketers are willing to look at nurturing as a function that works both with and outside of your database, you then have a construct based on infinite potential–rather than reduced possibilities.

The other thing that the continuum experience does is to eliminate standalone, start and stop campaigns that just halt momentum in its tracks. Why do we ever want to do that?

Creating a Continuum Experience makes sense when you consider that modern marketing is about:

• Meeting and engaging your leads in the channels they frequent
• Providing information that matches prospects needs based on who they are and where they are in the buying process
• Helping prospects choose to become your customers

In marketing, we’ve created a lot of issues for ourselves by naming stuff and then separating it. Marketers have a bunch of functions, including:

• Lead generation
• Demand generation
• Lead nurturing
• Brand awareness
• Sales enablement
• And more…

We segment our activities to address each one separately. But we don’t need to.

• Who’s to say that a white paper that’s being used specifically for lead gen isn’t just as applicable to a prospect in your database and nurture program that hasn’t seen that information?
• What if a prospect in your database and nurturing programs stumbles upon a blog post that fills in a key gap that was holding him back from taking the next step?
• What if your salesperson is in a great conversation when a question comes up and she can share just the right content to help the prospect keep moving? Even if it’s a piece designated to an early-stage nurture program and not publically available.

In any of these situations, should we be sorry that it happened? Or should we be facilitating these types of occurrences as a matter of course?

I’m voting for the latter.

But the only way this works is if our content and communications are consistent and relevant across all the channels we and our audiences use. And it means that we need to be sharing all the pieces of the story across those channels. We can’t just reserve the good stuff for the nurture programs that are only shared with those in our database.

Well, you can, but why would you want to limit potential?

I would stipulate that the pinball thing has always been there, only we now have the technology to see it happening as we engage with prospects in various channels.

If you’re feeling the pinball fatigue, maybe it’s time to change your perspective about nurturing. It’s really about smart marketing that can help you accomplish a variety of tasks in an integrated way that will resonate with more of your prospects.

 Today’s B2B sales and marketing folks struggle with the overwhelming number of channels for finding and reaching new leads. The customer “funnel” continues to expand as buyers do more of their own research before raising their hand to connect with a sales rep. But imagine if you could make the funnel taller by identifying leads when they’re just browsing your site… Read More

HubSpot recently released their annual report, State of Inbound 2014, on how companies are using inbound methodology and content marketing. The report is based on survey results from marketers concerning challenges, priorities, tactics, and results.

There were 3,570 respondents, consisting of both HubSpot customers and non-customers; employees B2B, B2C, and nonprofit companies; and marketing and sales personnel from various company sizes and job levels. The data has been organized into the four sections of budgeting, planning, execution and measurement. There are many shareable results from the survey.

This infographic from Growth Learner highlights the key findings of the 54-page report and will help you plan ahead.

Key Highlights

Budgeting: Performance history has the greatest influence on a budget with 50% of respondents citing past success as the largest factor for securing a higher budget. There’s another incentive to track ROI.

If you don’t have enough historical data, use Service Level Agreements between marketing and sales.

Planning: Half of marketers across all types of companies ranked inbound as their primary lead source, exceeding the average of all other channels combined. 

Outbound is down by about 35% from last year while inbound has remained steady.

Executing: The top priority for “high performers” is exposure. High performers focus on initiatives to get their content and company found. To establish or accelerate your inbound marketing, the data suggests blogging, SEO, and content distribution.

A successful inbound program requirement a cycle of measurement and optimization.

Measuring: Marketers that measure inbound ROI are 17 times more likely to see the same or greater ROI over the previous year. And those who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI.

Remember, positive ROI is likely to lead to budget increase.

Conclusion

Along with your own data, you’ll definitely want to take into account the findings from HubSpot’s report.

And here’s one final note. Leads sourced through inbound practices are consistently less expensive than outbound leads, regardless of company size.

When your digital budget increases, some questions may cross your mind: Who’s going to do all the work? What skills do we need to hire and where will we find the right people?

Exactly.

---

I get a lot of response and questions as it relates to real-life and what-if examples, particularly since many small- and medium-sized B2Bs are just beginning their journey to ‘invest’ (vs. spend) in integrated digital marketing that is driven by data and customer insights. There is a struggle in finding the best way to staff and manage the work to meet the new and often challenging charter that these B2Bs face. It’s scary territory to many who are accustomed to simply hiring a hungry sales force and a marketing support person with a ‘web and SEO guy’ to build the website and get them ranked in Google.

If you decide to dedicate a Corporate Marketing team to oversee and manage the brand while also sharing accountability with Sales for various topline metrics toward growth and profitability, you need to consider various aspects that relate to execution. If a strategy isn’t properly created and executed, none of the numbers will look good.

General advice: B2Bs that are new to strategic marketing should think these questions through and ensure the right people are sitting at the table to help answer them:

1. Who is going to do all the work and what skills are needed?
2. Where do the lines for Sales and Marketing align, cross or stay separated?
3. Do we need to invest more heavily in training and tools to better align Marketing and Sales teams and activities?
4. How do we build the requirements for the technology piece?
5. Where do graphic design and other creative aspects fit in as a priority?
6. How should we allocate staff?  Do we need a new leadership team or just a few consultants and contractors to kick things off?

Specific advice: These scenarios below may come up once you decide to up your digital investment. Some tips on what to do or consider:

Scenario #1: 
We’ve decided to increase our budget 20% toward digital experiences and integration across different channels and the sales funnel. Basically this means we’ve decided to invest in inbound marketing, marketing automation and lead management systems, and content. How to best staff for this kind of workload?

Before you start throwing money at digital advances make sure you have a strategy and plan and know what you’re talking about. The biggest mistake people often make is to implement “ideas” from individuals instead of using a well-thought of plan by someone who knows how digital marketing works. Hire a consultant if you’re not sure what to do. There are many who specialize in helping B2Bs get this right.

From that plan you need to assess the reality of the workload (what its really going to take for the plan to work). Then in order to decide how to staff for the workload, you may need to carve out a separate assignment to analyze the plan through that lens. In other words, decide the what and why, then decide the how.

As for staffing…

You will likely need someone who can oversee all the pieces and guide the workload. A strong Digital Marketing Director/Chef is key.

Other folks you may need:

• Content Manager to own and drive the stories and content needed to support the plan. Some folks hire writers to fill this role but I don’t recommend it. Hire someone who understands the role content should play, is an ambassador for your brand’s voice and can project manage a heavy content development workload. You can always outsource the writing.
• Digital Webmaster to oversee and coordinate all technological aspects, including website development, SEO, Google Adwords, and the integration of separate tools and systems (such as CRM).
• General Marketing Project Manager to create specific campaigns and sales support activities (such as webinars and lead nurturing newsletters), and project manage them to completion. This person could also be in charge of organizing, consolidating and monitoring metrics and analytics for all stakeholders so that everyone on the team is prepared to tell “the story” for return on investment.
• Events Manager. Depending on how important events and conferences are in your marketing mix, you may need someone dedicated solely to events.

This is just one way to look at it and there is no one right or wrong. But this is why the strategy/plan must come first—you should decide the staffing model based on the confirmed plan and priorities and assess where various skills crossover and/or where you’d want to outsource or hire someone.

Scenario #2:

We’ve decided to up our game as it relates to social media. Now what? 

This depends on what you mean by “up your game” as social media is often just a channel within the broader inbound and content marketing plan. Often times the person responsible for the brand’s voice and content also takes on the social media.

The point is to be careful not to think of social media in a silo—it should be part of a larger strategy and many times the workload can be shared among various team members or outsourced.

Scenario #3:

We’ve decided to allocate 10% of the budget to creative design to ensure we stand out visually.

If your strategy is to generate more inbound leads and help your sales team stand out from the competition, you will likely need to invest not only in someone who can create an awesome content strategy but also someone who can bring stories to life via compelling visuals. Visual storytelling is a common buzzword in marketing circles and there are a lot of talented people out there to help take your “look” to the next level. You need to be prepared to invest in the ones who are truly top-notch and who can work with an integrated team (whether a 3rd party vendor or a full-time person) in a potentially complicated business. B2Bs can sometimes be a challenging environment for the creative types.

Bottom Line: Are you seeing a theme here? The answers come back to “It depends on what the strategy and roadmap looks like”. Decide your strategy and plan first; then go back and analyze the best staffing model based on the work that needs to get done and the skills that are needed. There are many consultants that can help if this is not your area of expertise.

If Sales and Marketing were a manufacturing operation starting with raw materials — leads — and ending up with 5% to 20% in deliverable product — won sales — it would soon be shut down to determine what is wrong. However, companies continue to spend untold dollars on lead generation efforts ultimately doomed to fail.

 

Lack of lead management impacts lead conversion and ROI

I think the major cause for poor lead conversion and ROI is the lack of lead management, also known as passing unqualified leads, or marketing qualified leads (MQLs), directly to sales reps.

MarketingSherpa captured some of the key lead management issues in the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report. Of the 1,745 marketers surveyed, the research showed the following:

• 68% of study participants have not identified their Sales and Marketing funnel
• 61% send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified
• 79% have not established lead scoring
• 65% have not established lead nurturing

In my own experience working with companies, I’ve found the top issues include:

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs aka inquiries) have been sent to sales people without qualifying them first or sending leads to Sales based on lead scoring alone.

A lead nurturing program has not been implemented.

Sales has not been given the means to hand leads back to marketing to reengage for further work or nurturing on their behalf.

 

Lead management defined

Lead management is a multi-stage process that manages the conversion of sales leads to customers. It’s the process of managing and tracking customer interactions from first contact to close.

The above illustration shows map of lead management. You’ll notice the funnel is inverted because people are not falling into the funnel; they are falling out.

The idea is that the buyer’s pipeline requires a series of “micro-yes(s)” before getting to that “macro-yes” in the form of the final conversion-to-sale.

Here are the 5 major stages of an effective lead management process:

1. Lead capture (Generating inquiries)
2. Lead qualification and scoring (Are they engaged? Are they a fit? Are they sales ready?)
3. Lead nurturing (Progressing early stage leads from interest toward purchase intent)
4. Lead distribution (Handing off only “sales-ready leads” that meet the universal lead definition, aka ULD to sales)
5. Lead tracking and reporting (Closing the loop between sales and marketing)

Do you have your process for each of these steps documented and understood by key stakeholders? If not, start now.

 

Marketing automation alone doesn’t equal lead management 

Many marketers hope that buying technology and tools will help  marketing automation and drive better lead management processes.

Marketing automation can’t spontaneously generate collaboration between Sales and Marketing. It also cannot  create processes nor will it generate sales-ready leads on its own. Marketing automation tools just enable lead management, but they’re only part of the solution. There are more fundamental aspects of lead management that often get overlooked.

Lead management requires the following elements:

 

People

• Dedicated resources (i.e. sales development reps, inside sales team) directly connecting and qualifying leads
• People focused on getting the highest conversion rates on leads and the most efficient cost per opportunity

 

Processes

• Centralized lead qualification process prior to sending leads to the sales team to filter raw inquiries and disqualify those that don’t fit your ideal customer profile (ICP)
• Clear and universal lead definitions created with the sales team determining what exactly is a qualified lead
• Provide qualification information for each lead while making it clear who owns the lead
• Lead nurturing content marketing to help progress early stage leads from interest toward purchase intent
• Rapid engagement of inquiries to qualify interest and fit
• Clear service level agreements (SLAs) between Sales and Marketing on what Sales will do once they are passed a “sales-ready” lead.  Then, require a time-limit on a turnaround once leads are distributed, and track the lead throughout the process

 

Technology

• Marketing automation tools to enable lead scoring to prioritize the human touch rather than replace it
• CRM tools to manage inquiries and track sales lead interactions from first contact to close
• Effective data management to cleanse bad data and append missing data on leads
• Clear metrics to manage the process of inquiries: MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, closed vs. won business, etc.
• Established training for sales reps on how to engage and convert qualified leads in the CRM

Companies that adopt effective lead management processes generate more revenue from their lead generation investment and have overall higher close rates on marketing generated leads than those that do not.

 

You might also like

Building a Marketing Funnel and More Lead Management Tips [ITSMA article by Chris Koch]

Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop [More from the blogs]

Lead Management: 4 principles to follow [More from the blogs]

Lead Generation: 2 simple tactics to determine cost per lead [More from the blogs]

“What’s more important in content marketing, quantity or quality?”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this question. The debate wages eternally. But my answer is always the same: “Consistency.”

At Kapost, we publish a lot of content – more than 200 assets per quarter. But quantity doesn’t mean much without consistency. Whether you’re publishing one blog post per week or every day, what matters most is that you deliver good content within an established cadence. Your audience should know what to expect and when to expect it.

Many organizations fail on the consistency front. They get jazzed about producing content until their enthusiasm peters out. That’s why SiriusDecisions says 70% of B2B content goes unused and why even Fortune 500 companies abandon their blogs, according to research from the University of Massachusetts.

Write down the formula

Organizations don’t publish content consistently because each effort is like reinventing the wheel. Coming up with ideas, finding an author, crafting the content, getting it approved, and reviewing the results … all of it feels like a Herculean task. Combating frustration and getting stuff done requires instituting visible, repeatable workflows.

Repeatable workflows save time and protect you from frustration. But they also provide visibility and accountability across your organization, as key stakeholders know their responsibilities, their deadlines, and how their efforts contribute to larger organizational priorities. So something as unsexy as a workflow can make or break your strategy.

Put simply, a workflow is like a checklist with the required steps needed to get content out the door. It outlines the tasks, the owners of those tasks, deadlines, approval structures, distribution processes, and the editorial schedule associated with an asset or campaign. For a workflow to be repeatable, it needs to be rigid enough to contain the most common requirements, but flexible enough to work across a variety of topics and content types.

Some of the most common steps found in content marketing workflows include:

• Identifying the topic or theme of the content

• Identifying the target buyer persona and/or sales stage

• Assigning an author or project manager

• Assigning an editor

• Identifying distribution channels

• Setting up approvals from legal and/or communications departments

• Designing the asset or associated assets

• Optimizing the content for SEO and social

• Determining deadlines for drafting, designing, approving, and distributing content

• Promoting the asset

You might look at that list and say, “Yeah, that’s a laundry list, I could totally create this tomorrow.”

Make it repeatable

Not so fast. Sure, you can easily create a workflow for an individual project or campaign. But for it to be repeatable, there are several steps you need to take.

1. Gather your stakeholders

My colleague, Liz O’Neill Dennison, likes to say that workflows aren’t just about managing tasks, but managing people. You need to understand who is involved in your content strategy, not just what is.

Fittingly, gathering internal stakeholders is crucial. These are the people who will make your content, distribute it, optimize it, analyze it, or approve it. Write down the roles and colleagues who will need to participate in getting a campaign created and launched. Then, consider putting together a content board.

A content (or editorial) board can help you not only streamline production, but ensure your efforts serve larger organizational goals. Our own board features members of sales, marketing, product, and customer support – and I always invite a mixture of executive and junior staff so we get both high- and ground-level views of our needs.

Even if you don’t form a content board, make sure you do your homework. Have a list of tasks and the people checking those boxes. And make sure they know they’re on the hook.

2. Document your distribution points

People first. But you also need to research the various channels and technological endpoints touched by your content. This isn’t a thought experiment. These distribution points need to be documented.

This practice can get muddled. Distribution points can mean channels, parts of your technology stack, groups of people, or a mixture of all three. For instance, you’ll want to promote the content through your social media channels, and you’ll likely have an outbound email in the works. What about your sales team? Is sharing the content with them part of your content distribution strategy? It should be.

Workflows should include inbound, outbound, and internal distribution. For help getting started, here’s a list of the kinds of places your content may need to go:

• Owned digital publishing channels (i.e., blogs, website)

• External social media accounts (i.e., LinkedIn, Twitter, SlideShare)

• Software investments and automation products (i.e., CRM, email marketing)

• Internal collaboration systems (i.e., Jive, Yammer, SharePoint)

• Inside departments that interact with customers (i.e., field sales, customer support)

3. Align process and people

You’ve got a list of stakeholders and a list of distribution points. Now merge them. Aligning process and people is easier said than done. The goal is to marry the roles with the tasks that need to be completed. This is intended to increase expediency while ensuring quality.

Needless to say, your workflows may change as new elements are introduced. New colleagues may come on board, roles may shift, or new channels added. The goal isn’t to set your workflow in stone, but to create a process where these changes lead to small refinements in your workflow rather than a complete upheaval of your process.

Make sure the stakeholders agree with, and can provide feedback on, the tasks and roles you assign. If it seems dictated versus collaborative, they’re less likely to be excited about their part in the content operation.

4. Refine your deadlines

Deadlines are a necessity. Your workflows should include deadlines for everything, whether a bigger strategic task or a small check-the-box task. Deadlines breed accountability. As collaborators stay aware and meet deadlines, or don’t, the better your process can become.

That’s not to say deadlines should loom like a stubborn monster. As you go through a workflow, you’ll improve it. The time it takes to complete a task or get approval will become clearer, especially if you use tools like production analytics to track the cycles for content production. Deadlines should remain but be able to shift to reflect your organization’s reality. After all, it’s not about wishful thinking but consistently getting things done.

5. Make a visible template

If you go through all the steps above and fail to create workflow templates that your team can access, the work will be in vain. Workflows are a visual representation of your process. If your workflows are buried or hidden, so is your process.

You may need to establish a series of workflows for different content types. The tasks for a webinar will deviate from the workflow for an eBook.

Having workflow templates for all your content types, and making them easy to access across your team or organization, means all your stakeholders understand their roles and how they fit into the larger process. Without access to these templates, the process gets lost, and you end up starting from scratch every time you want to create something new. And as you are overwhelmed with that Herculean task, that is how your content ends up going unused or your blog ceases operations.

Conclusion

Of course, the workflow process will bend and change as your content marketing operation improves and grows. Revisiting workflows should be done yearly, if not quarterly. But most importantly, if you want to avoid the kind of frustration that leads to stalled efforts and broken processes, take the time to establish repeatable workflows first.

Want more instruction on how to manage today’s content marketing challenges? Sign up for the Content Marketing Institute Online Training and Certification program. Access over 35 courses, taught by experts from Google, Mashable, SAP, and more.

Cover image by Ryan McGuire-Bells Design, Gratisography via pixabay.com

The post 5 Steps to Reduce Frustration and Create Effective Content Workflows appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

According to a CSO Insights study, most sales reps are actually selling only two days a week. What are they doing the other three days?

Look to your right.

If you could give your sales reps even a half day more selling time, how much would that be worth to you?

Less Selling Time By Doing More

There are two reasons sales reps spend relatively little time selling:

• They have inadequate research and sales tools.
• They have multiple non-sales responsibilities.

Start by examining how your reps spend their time. Can you automate, eliminate, outsource, or delegate some of their responsibilities?

The chart below shows a list of responsibilities. Some sales reps actually perform all of these tasks.

The “Rep Must Handle” column shows the essential tasks a rep must perform: face-to-face selling and negotiating deals. The columns “Automate/Standardize” and “Outsource/Delegate to Others” list tasks a sales rep should not have to handle.

More Selling Time By Doing Less

Here are six ways to give your sales reps more selling time:

1. Automate Prospect Research—If your reps are poking around the Internet looking for business, they are wasting their time. They should be subscribing to alert services and using business intelligence services such as Inside View and social media sites such as LinkedIn.
2. Delegate/Outsource Lead Generation/Cultivation—Your marketing department should generate leads, cultivate them, and turn them over to a sales rep only if the lead is “sales ready.”
3. Standardize Proposals/Contracts—If your sales reps are creating their own proposals and contracts, they are not only wasting time, they are putting the company at risk. Have your lawyer and CFO create the templates—with an assist from the sales department.
4. Standardize Sales Tools—Sales reps love to create their own brochures and presentations. That’s another waste of time. And they may not even convey the right message. Your marketing department should create the sales tools for the reps.
5. Delegate Cross Sell/Upsell—Sales reps should not spend their selling time on small projects or products to existing customers. You can train your client services team to do the low-level selling. Let your outside sales reps focus their selling time on the bigger deals with customers.
6. Delegate Customer Service & Admin—Dealing with clients and customers on routine matters can consume an enormous amount of a sales rep’s selling time. Make sure your client services team handles customer service and customer admin tasks. Involve the sales rep only when there is a serious issue.

Less Is More—The Benefits

Relieving your reps of these responsibilities has several advantages:

• More Revenue—If your outside reps spend more time selling, they are likely to generate more revenue.
• More Opportunities—By effectively generating and cultivating leads, your marketing department can give your reps more “sales ready” opportunities. Left to their own devices, sales reps only haphazardly generate and cultivate leads.
• More Deals—Standardized proposals and contracts will help your reps close more deals faster.
• Happier Customers—Your client services team can give clients/customers more consistent and better service that a sales rep who is pulled in multiple directions.

Picture this: you open the office doors just as your do every other day of the week. You make your way to your desk, perhaps stopping at the coffee machine on your way for a fresh cup of joe. Before you can set your cup of coffee on your desk a sales rep stops you and asks you, “How were you able to get all those leads in Salesforce for me? They are great!”

Let’s start at the beginning. How are you able to convert inbound leads that will make your sales team sing your praises? First, sales and marketing needs to decide what a qualify lead looks like. Next, you can offer free, educational content to the visitors of your website to download in exchange for their contact information. Once you have a lead in the system, using the steps below will help qualify the lead sooner and keep sales happy!

Collect the Right Information

As leads continue to consume data, you should be asking different types of question about them in order to gain intelligence on the characteristics of qualified leads. Collecting this information will help you weed out the good from the bad. Here’s a list of form fields you could ask for the initial offers:

• First Name

• Last Name

• Company Name

• Email Address

• Job Title

The email address is critical here so we can continue sending them emails with additional content. Here’s some form fields you could consider including for the ebooks and case studies:

• State

• Number of Employees

• Phone Number

• Biggest Challenges (this would be an open field where they can write anything)

We’re now asking for information that can be leveraged by the sales team to prepare for the phone call. If you can give the sales team all this information with a history of content they’ve consumed on your website, your sales team will be taking you out to dinner in addition to their clients.

Do you have any big issues that prevent you from delivering this information to your sales team?

Offer Additional Content that Makes them More Qualified

Let’s create a fictional representation of your ideal customer, or as we like to call them, a persona. For the sake of this post let’s call our persona Marketing Mary. Mary visited your website and downloaded a white paper that shows your knowledge of the industry. Instead of passing Mary off to your sales team, further qualify her into a lead that they’ll love. You can do this a few ways:

• Offer in-depth webinars that dive deeper into your industry

• Place case studies, testimonials, and other “proof” of success on your website

• Encourage a consultation, demo, or quote request on your website

• Try to obtain more detailed information about Mary by using “smart” fields or progressive profiling with HubSpot forms.

Ideally, we want Mary to complete a form that requests a consultation with someone at your company, but Mary may not be ready for that. When she’s not, it’s time to implement a lead nurturing campaign.

Nurture to the Next Step

Lead nurturing is a series of automated emails triggered by an action from a lead. The emails should be spread out over a 2 or 3 week period of time. The emails should reference the last action the lead took on your website and offer additional resources they can consume. Ideally this content is placed on a landing page where you ask for additional contact information. Examples of content you could include are blog posts, infographics, ebooks, case studies, and demo/consultation requests.

The idea behind lead nurturing is to pull a lead through the marketing funnel so that they become qualified. As marketers, we should anticipate the questions our personas will ask and then deliver that content to them. When creating a lead nurturing campaign, always consider the stage of the funnel the lead is in. For example, if a lead downloads a case study, your lead nurturing campaign will not start with a free ebook. The lead is closer to being qualified than that. However, if a lead downloads a basic, Awareness-stage guide, you can start by offering other free content that becomes more and more serious over time. The latter example will be a much longer campaign than the first example. The goal is to tailor the campaign to the need of the persona, warm them up with enticing offers, qualify them with lead intelligence, and then pass them on to sales.

Delivering qualified leads to sales is extremely important. What steps are you taking to ensure sales and marketing are happy with lead quality?