Rnordman

What if you found a way to build extreme trust before you ever interacted with a customer?

I was speaking recently in Boston at an event for Straumann, where the audience was a group of very successful oral surgeons. After my talk, one of the attendees came up to me afterwards. His name is Dr. Glenn Gorab, and he lives in Clifton, New Jersey. He has an amazing program that builds extraordinary trust with his patients before he ever sees them.

Here’s how it works. Every Friday his office gives him a call sheet of all the patients who are coming in the following week who are brand new patients, have never seen him before, have never been to his practice ever. He calls those new patients on the weekends, when he’s driving or just kind of laying around the house watching football.

And the reaction is extraordinary.

He says, “Hey, this is Dr. Gorab. I understand you are coming in next week. We are delighted to have you as part of the practice. Do you have any questions about what we are going to do next week? Do you have any questions about me, about the practice, before you come in?”

It blows people’s minds.

They say, “I’ve never have a doctor do that,” because doctors never do that. It builds bonds and trust and kinship and referrals that make a real difference in Dr. Gorab’s practice. He says people come in all the time who are new patients and say, “Hey, I’m here because one of your previous patients told me that you are the doctor who called them before they ever even had an appointment.”

That is an amazing piece of marketing. It’s got me thinking about how can we build trust before the sale? How can we build trust before the transaction?  I suggest that you think about ways to start building that trust in that all-important point between when somebody raises their hand and when they actually transact with you.

Sprout Social Shoutout

Today’s Sprout Social Shoutout is for my friend Brian Carter, a fantastic social media marketing guru, especially good in Facebook and Facebook advertising. Brian has a new book coming out called “The Cow Bell Principle“. A lot of personal branding and career development advice, good stuff from Brian. It comes out the same day as my new book, “Youtility for Real Estate.” (November 4, 2014).

This video is from Jay Today is my near-daily 3-minute video where I talk about social media, content marketing, business and life. JayToday is available on Youtube, iTunes (as a video podcast, and now as an audio podcast too), and at JayToday.tv.

The show is sponsored by Sprout Social (which I use for my social media), and Candidio (a great video editing service).

More Jay Today Videos From This Week:

Chrome's address bar doesn't do much at a glance. Type in a URL and you're taken to a web site. But it can do a lot more if you know how to use it.

Read more...

Today’s “Age of the Consumer” has empowered shoppers with instant access to information on products, pricing, service and support full of customer reviews and coupons that can distract a brand’s path-to-purchase. This instant information access gives consumers increased control over their shopping experience, requiring brands to understand and quickly respond to consumers if they wish to capture their loyalty.

Forrester Research reports that the balance of the retail relationship between brands and consumers has experienced a dramatic shift from the manufacturer to the consumer over the past century. At the turn of the century and for decades beyond, the Age of Manufacturing (1900-1960) saw the balance of control in the hands of the manufacturers largely due to monopolies and a lack of market information for consumers. The next thirty years saw this power shift to distributors in the Age of Distribution (1960-1990), where retailers had the bulk of influence over shoppers. The Age of Information (1990-2010) started to move that control to customers, with growing access to product information. And in the past few years the balance of power has shifted to the Age of the Consumer (2010-present), allowing shoppers to have unprecedented control over their shopping and buying experiences.

Many retailers lament today’s “Age of the Consumer,” pointing to the challenges and disadvantages it presents to brands, indicating the real-time information access consumers have to products, pricing and reviews is diminishing loyalty in the eyes of many organizations. This is certainly true for brands that fail to strategically utilize the robust amount of information consumers are providing on a real-time basis. However, many innovative companies are recognizing this increased intelligence as a path to understand consumer needs in order to build and foster long term relationships while driving greater levels of loyalty.

Understanding Consumer Loyalty

Today, brands can understand consumers like never before on a multidimensional level in regards to their shopping tendencies, purchase actions, loyalty triggers and brand affinities. The emergence of advanced consumer management, or the ability to strategically track, measure, optimize customer loyalty, has empowered brands to understand consumer preferences and decisions. With this knowledge they are able to effectively shift offerings and promotions in real-time as their consumer base shifts.

While consumers are able to change between brands easily today, many consumers still demand an experience that provides reliability and convenience.  There are several major advantages advanced consumer management solutions provide to drive a new customer to a loyalty one:

Universal View: Given the omnichannel experience of customers across the online, in-store, mobile and social channels, achieving a comprehensive view with a consumer management solution delivers powerful insight into customer behaviors and tendencies for brands to strategically build and enhance a consistent customer experience across all channels.

Deep Understanding: The intelligence consumer management provides is both broad and deep, detailing insight on both transactional and non transactional activity, including purchase behaviors, social interactions, and campaign engagement. This allows brands to understand and ultimately influence customers to build affinity and loyalty.

Real-Time Access: As consumer trends and tendencies shift, brands are able to read and react to these changes on an immediate basis, delivering a powerful impact on the consumer by providing exactly what they desire when they desire it.

Multidimensional Engagement: With all of the consumer management intelligence available, brands can now drive campaigns on an array of dimensions from customer type to frequency to timeframe and even specific products. This not only helps drive sales and brand affinity, but also can help manage inventory and costs.

Impacting Influence

While strategic consumer management provides a central focus on the consumer to provide what they want and build loyalty, the approach’s robust customer insight also empowers the brand to strategically adjust their loyalty program. Instead of surrendering to the mercy of shopping engines, programs are able to drive sales and, perhaps most importantly, build a stronger relationship with the customer.

Brands are realizing that relying on short-term, non-strategic promotions doesn’t build affinity or sustain the business. Rather, building customer loyalty starts with gaining a deep understanding of the consumer to craft the right experience, which begins by listening to their preferences and understanding their actions.

Achieving the Impact

Today, even with access to customer management technology advancements, brands are challenged with making the transition from a product-centric to a customer-centric organization. While having a data-driven approach can help build the customer focus of a brand, breaking down traditional silos between operations, technology and marketing is critical to make a full transition.

This is often easier said than done yet can be achieved more effectively with a centralized consumer management platform that addresses the needs of each group across the omnichannel needs of online, in-store, mobile and social customer engagement.

Many brands realize that today’s informed, savvy consumers are not only here to stay, but can be good for their business. However, this can only be accomplished with robust consumer insight rooted in the actual behaviors of customers. These brands are also seeing that deep understanding of these consumers through their shopping, loyalty and interaction activities can elevate their business by enhancing affinity, driving loyalty and ultimately increasing sales.

Content marketing is a critical component of your company’s marketing strategy. In order to be successful marketing with engaging, educational or entertaining content, it’s essential that you have a “content engine” in place.

What’s a Content Engine?

A content engine is the people, processes and tools that deliver high quality, targeted and consistent content in a variety of media types including blog content, webinars, ebooks, infographics and slides.

So what’s required to develop a Content Engine for your business? How do you develop the capabilities to produce powerful content that separates you from your competition, attracts prospects and appears more than once in a blue moon?

Here are the essential components of a content engine:

1) Executive Buy-in

If you’re lucky enough to be working for a company where the executives “get” content marketing, then you’re in good shape. If not, use the resources available in the Content Marketing Institute library to make the case that strategic content that helps prospects, customers and partners find, like, engage with, follow and connect with your company are a good thing.

2) Strategic Context

Strategic context is a key input for the content engine. Garbage-in, garbage-out is the saying (and it’s fitting). The inputs for the content engine will determine the quality of the outputs. Your content marketing efforts don’t stand in isolation to your company’s broader strategy and the marketing strategy. In addition, other key inputs include a content marketing strategy and target segments with relevant personas with prioritization and details on roles, pain points, interests, and desires.

3) A Content Hub

In most cases your company website serves as the hub of most of the market-facing content. This “hub” should include all of the standard pages that prospects expect (e.g. products, about, pricing, demos, contact us). It also should include key content marketing tools such as the company blog and resources pages (e.g. pages that feature relevant videos, webinars, ebooks)

Business blogs are built to be published to often. They make social sharing easy. The writing style can be more casual and articles can literally be produced and published same day (while web pages typically take a lot more fine-tuning and reviewing).

The resource pages can be built linking off the blog and/or website for things like webinars, ebooks, videos, white papers and more. These resource pages can focus on specific topics or types of readers. Or they can be more generic, including all of the resources your company would like to promote to any visitor.

Your content hub should have an appealing design, social sharing buttons should be in place (so people can share your content easily from the site), visuals should be featured and it should allow topic or persona-based navigation so people can find the content that resonates with them and their current situation.

In most cases, you’ll need a strong working relationship with your web team and you should build as much flexibility as possible into the blog (or other parts of your hub) so the team can do minor updates themselves such as putting up content or changing out things like an ebook banner.

4) Content Creators

All content, whether it’s a blog post, ebook or video needs to be researched, written, storyboarded and produced. You need people who can write, edit, visualize and ultimately manage the production of the various pieces of content based on the priorities (and other inputs) provided. Make sure you have resources lined up either internally or externally based on your content requirements. Ideally these producers are familiar with the nuances of content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. This will save you time with training and post-creation modifications.

5) Designers and “Content Technicians”

In most cases your content producers can’t completely finish much of the content (although I strive to get them doing as much as possible on their own). This is where the “content technicians” come in. These are your graphic designers, video editors, infographic specialists or ebook producers. These people don’t need to know your business, but they do need to be able to understand your goals and polish or design to create small pieces of “business art”. Similar to the content producers, the more they understand about content marketing and associated disciplines the better as it will save you time and hassle.

6) Strong Social Media, Advertising, SEO & Marketing Automation Connections

Your content will be the proverbial tree crashing quietly in the forest unless you are working intimately with one or more (and hopefully all) of the teams mentioned above. Content and social media marketing need to work hand-in-hand. Content should be created with an eye so social share-ability (great headlines, pictures optimized for social, easy to scan, etc.). Social should promote the content well, in the right places and often enough without being spammy. If the connection with the social team is broken or if content isn’t being promoted quickly or enough, that will stall the spread of your content.

Similarly, the more content is SEO-optimized, the better it will do in the search engines. Working with search specialists to optimize during creation will save time and improve results. Social advertising, pay-per-click advertising or retargeting are other key ways to promote your great content.

Marketing automation allows you to collect email addresses or other content information from prospects who visit your site. You’ll want to work closely with this team so you can use calls-to-action such as a banner for an ebook or webinar to collect information on these prospects. Then you can establish a longer term relationship by nurturing them (via email) with targeted content such as relevant blog posts, ebooks, templates or webinars (e.g. CFOs should get content that CFOs care about; marketers should get content that marketers care about).

Establish strong bonds with these teams to ensure the proper spread of your content, to aid in discover of your content and to turn one-time visitors into repeat visitors.

7) Workflows, Asset Management and Collaboration Tool

It’s impossible to scale your content engine without having clear and easy-to-use workflows in place. Establish standard processes, timelines and approval flows that happen each time. This prevents the “Why did that ebook get released without me seeing it!” or “I thought the design team was working on it but they’re not!” moments.

In most cases, this requires having a workflow, collaboration or project management tool that allows for the creation, usage and tracking of the workflows used for your content engine. In addition, assets such as graphics, pictures, video and written content need to be stored centrally and they need to be easy to access and find. Workflows and the content associated with each project need to be intimately connected – either in the same collaboration tool or a linked asset management tool.

8) Editorial Calendar

You’ll need to have an editor in place who can take the strategies and priorities described above and generate content ideas as well as collect various ideas that will come from research, hallway conversations or other sources… and turn it into a logical editorial calendar.

The editorial calendar is the list and description of the content that your content producers need to research and create, all laid out on a timeline.

Long Term: It’s important to have two views – one view is long term and includes big items such as big events, holidays, produce releases and big content projects or campaigns. In the long term view, the editor needs to plot out these big items and decide the implications for the content team. Will videos be needed? Are webinars planned? Is there a major ebook required? Work backwards and determine what’s needed and the timing.

Short term: This is the calendar where the rubber meets the road. In this calendar the editor can list out the cornerstone content (the big ebooks, webinars or videos, for example) that take more work, will have a major impact on the audience and will attract significant attention if marketed correctly. The other content can be related but smaller content including blog posts, checklists, infographics or even social media posts (although I typically don’t drill into that last part in my calendars). These smaller items can support the generation of interest in the cornerstone content and can drive sign-ups via calls to action in the posts or on the blog, website and in social media accounts (but don’t overdo).

Other considerations include goals of the content. Are the pieces of content designed to drive awareness like a blog post or slideshare that will share well in social media (top of the funnel), to turn visitors into prospects by collecting contact information, like a useful ebook (middle of the funnel) or to convert someone to a trial or sale, like a case study showing specific use cases of your product (bottom of the funnel).

9) Voice and Brand Guidelines

Brand voice is the style of writing, look and attitude that the company uses for its content. Typically it’s intended to both express the personality of the company as well as to resonate with the prospects and customers. Brand guidelines can include things related to colors, design do’s and don’ts, use of logos, font requirements and other specifics that help company’s unify their brand appearance to the outside world.

If brand guidelines exist, make sure all of the teams are well aware of the guidelines. For brand voice, a certain tone may already exist or can be developed by the content marketing team or the broader marketing team (working with other company stakeholders).

10) Analytics

To measure the success of your content marketing efforts, you need to understand, ultimately, how many new leads and/or revenue your content drives. In addition, you should be able to track other key indicators such as website visitors, social media shares, links from other websites and search engine traffic. Analytics should be in place to measure the results of your content marketing efforts. There will be holes in your data, but makes sure you have at least basic analytics (like Google Analytics) in place as a start and that you measure new leads and sales (and the source of these leads).

Is Your Content Engine Revved Up?

Do you have all the key components in place? More importantly, are you able to take the inputs and create compelling content in a variety of media types easily, quickly and with high quality?

What components are you lacking and why? Let us know in the comments.

GUEST POST

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Just over six months ago, I made an early prediction that cloud storage would reach $0 over the next 12-18 months. Well, it hasn’t become “free” just yet, but it is now unlimited thanks to Microsoft. This week, Microsoft set a precedent by making storage unlimited to all users — business and consumer — for their respective subscription fees. It will only be a matter of time here before Google and Amazon follow suit, marking the “death” of the cloud-storage market. While that may cause deep concern for some and send others into storage bliss, I am unfazed by the news and can humbly say, “I told you so.”


Let’s face it — there is no way for the small cloud service providers that built their businesses around storage to compete. With the vast numbers of apps and features these bigger companies can offer, it is seemingly impossible for the smaller companies to stay afloat. This will spell acquisition for some, bankruptcy for others, and doomsday for everyone else involved that isn’t named Google or Amazon, right?

Not so fast…

At one time, companies like Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte were all grouped into this publicly defined “cloud storage” market, but we have since evolved into much more robust platforms, playing inside a broader ecosystem than originally thought. So while small companies (and when I say small, I mean sub-multi-billion dollar revenue companies) will face extinction or succumb to pricing pressures, this just signals the start of the next chapter.

This breakaway from a commoditized cloud storage market is just in the beginning stages, and there is undoubtedly a massive stream of innovation on the horizon. While there may not be one aligned definition for this new market yet, a cloud-computing industry set to be worth $75 billion by the end of this year is leaving the door wide open for new and old players alike to find a successful formula.

What’s next?

Everyone will continue to try and play Nostradamus, but those who are strong enough to survive the cloud-storage era know that there is never just one golden ticket. Cloud service providers will now need to create a secure and unique ecosystem where files can actually live, not just be stored. While everyone’s approach to this new era will be different, there will be three must-haves:

Security

It goes without saying that security has become paramount for any file-services solution out there. End-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication are two security protocols that will become much more common in this next generation of the cloud. Thanks to Edward Snowden and shady practices from the National Security Agency, these are no longer nice-to-haves but must-haves, as far as businesses are concerned. Otherwise, they may have to accrue an expensive balance-sheet item for liability insurance. Just ask folks at Target and JPMorgan Chase.

Mobility

Everything will have to work on mobile. Period. With more than 6.5 billion people currently subscribed to a mobile network worldwide, there is no reason for an organization to struggle with mobility. If files cannot be accessed wherever an employee might be, then they are of no use to the employee and will actually hurt an organization’s productivity, rather than help to improve it. Whether it is via tablet, smartphone, or even smart watch, employees having access to their work at all times is an invaluable asset for the future of business.

Collaboration

We are now in an era of business where processes are expedited and workflow has accelerated, so much so that projects which have historically finished in months are now being completed in weeks or even days. This would be impossible without the use of real-time, meaningful collaboration. Files will now not only need to be secure and available anywhere. They need the ability to be reviewed and revised efficiently across teams, both internal and external.

The first stop for the cloud’s evolution was storage, but we cannot stop there. As organizations continue to evolve and find new ways to do business, we need to find new ways to leverage the cloud for optimal business performance. We are now moving on to more complex use cases that require us to move into another pivotal time — the second stop on the road of the cloud’s evolution.

The jury is still out on whether users want to be vertically integrated and use just one underlying brand for all of their business needs, or if they want to have the option of building their own portfolio of apps to get the job done on their own terms. Regardless, it is very exciting that we can finally lay the cloud-storage market to rest and embark on more evolved, full-bodied solutions in the cloud that can bring real value to businesses. As the saying goes, “As one life ends, another one begins.”

Fortunately for us, a new life is just beginning!

Vineet Jain is chief executive of enterprise file-sharing company Egnyte.

Egnyte powers enterprise file sharing and access for more than 40,000 customers globally. The award-winning platform optimally balances IT's need for security, control, and compliance with users' demands for simple access to highly sen... read more »

In SaaS sales, it’s not enough to sell your customers on buying your product. You need to sell them on using it too!

Many founders underestimate how much this matters, and their SaaS startups will never gain traction until they get this right.

I recently talked with two talented founders working on their early-stage startup. They did a lot of things right. They had a bright idea which they packaged beautifully, and sold their product succesfully.

Great hustle & vision is not enough.

They had signed up 100 businesses for their alpha, and they were confident that they could get 1000 businesses to become paying customers within one year.

They told me about their grandiose marketing, sales, PR and distribution strategies.

They told me about product improvements they had in the pipeline, and features they would implement over time.

But there was one thing they didn't talk about:

The value their current users got out of using their app.

Which users get the most value from your product?

I asked them a simple question: "Who is your most successful user currently? Which of these 100 businesses you signed up get's the most value out of using your product?"

They told me the name of some company.

How much value are your most successful users getting from your product?

I asked them: "How many contacts has that user imported into the system?" (We had previously established that the number of imported contacts was an meaningful gauge of the value a user would get. It would take at least 300 imported contacts for the product to be truly valuable for a user).

Do you know how many contacts their best user had imported? 30! 

Their very best user would have to import 10 times more contacts to even begin getting value out of using the product!

To put this another way: none of their users got any true value out of using their product!

Make your customers successful before you sign up more customers.

If your product doesn't deliver value to its users, don't worry about sales, marketing, PR or growth. Forget features and functionality. Even if you've got the sales chops to win businesses as paying customers, it's meaningless if they churn after their first or second month.

In the case of this particular startup, they needed to make at least 10 of their current users successful. And we already had defined what "successful" meant in this context: having imported more than 300 contacts, and using the app on a daily basis. 

Your minimum viable product does indeed need to be viable!

What's your product's perceived value?

In SaaS sales it's all about value perception in the eye of your customer. There are some truly valuable products that don't get perceived as valuable. And there are inferior products that do get perceived as super valuable by the people who pay for it. This perception matters a lot, because it's what will keep your customer paying month after month, or cause them to churn.

If you call up your best customers, and they don't tell you how amazing your product is and how much value they get out of it... put everything else on hold on work on fixing that first!

 

Prefer to listen? Here's the audio-only version of the video:

*Editors Note: Guest post by Steli Efti, CEO at Close.io, a sales software / social app organized in a compelling way around the tight inner loop of today’s sellers. This blog post is based on a presentation he will give at Sales Hacker Conference on November 6th, 2014.

If you’re a startup founder or part of an early-stage sales team, it can seem like a daunting task to develop a solid sales process. There’s so much you could do to increase sales that it can be hard to prioritize.

Here’s how to score some easy wins: simply fix the most common causes of lost deals. Read about three easy to avoid, but shockingly frequent sales mistakes startups commit.

Mistake 1: Failing to follow up

I can’t overstate how many sales people underestimate the importance of following up. They follow up politely once, timidly twice, and maybe embarrassedly a third time, but few people go further than that.

Want to know where winning happens in sales? In the follow up. You want to be the one who’s still running when everyone else already gave up and is out of the race.

If you’ve had a conversation with someone, and you didn’t get closure… keep following up! Friendly, professional, polite, but shamelessly. Follow up until you get a clear response. It’s better to get a strong no than a friendly maybe.

Mistake 2: Closing like a coward

Many people deliver great sales presentations, convey all the benefits, manage all the objections, customize their value propositions to the prospect… and then fail to ask for the close!

They end their presentation with vague words like: “Thank you for your time and attention, we sincerely appreciate this opportunity and hope it will lead to a fruitful partnership.

They shake hands, pack up their stuff and go. Maybe they ask the prospect hopefully: “Well, what do you think?”

No! That’s not how you close. Selling isn’t an effing gala dinner. Ask them to buy. Ask early. Ask often.

“Selling isn’t an effing gala dinner. Ask them to buy. Ask early. Ask often.” - @Steli http://ctt.ec/kDex1+ via @SalesHackerConf

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Expect a yes when you ask, and embrace a no when you get it. If they still tell you no at the end of your presentation, ask them: “What do we need to do to win you as a customer?”

Then listen and learn.

Mistake 3: Dull demos

A lot of startups screw up their demos before they even start giving them. How? By not pre-qualifying people who request a demo.

Only demo to qualified prospects.

Understand the prospect’s wants and needs before you start giving the demo. This enables you to

a) assess in advance whether they’re potentially a good fit, and thus worth giving a demo to.
b) customize your demo to their specific needs, rather than just robotically going through a one-size-fits all demo, which would fail to push their hot buttons and get them excited.

Next thing you can do to avoid a dull demo?

Keep your demos under 15 minutes.

Keep your demos short, even if you have a complex product. Share the most valuable benefits of your product, and leave out the nice-to-have features.
Here’s what you should do during your 15-minute demo:

• demonstrate your product
• tell a story
• sell.

Afterwards, take another 10 to 15 minutes to answer their questions and further explore what they’re most curious about.

Why just 15 minutes? Because most people won’t stay focused any longer than that. You can’t afford to lose their attention. 15 minutes of concentrated listening is a lot better than 15 minutes of concentrated listening and 30 minutes of absent-mindedness.

The Top 3 Startup Sales Mistakes by @Steli --> http://www.saleshacker.com/sales/top-3-startup-sales-mistakes/ via @SalesHackerConf

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Demonstrate value, not how to use your product.

The purpose of a demo is to sell them your product, not to teach them how to use it. It’s a product-focused sales presentation, not a tutorial.

Demonstrate value. Training and support comes after they buy.

Don’t guide them through step-by-step instructions. Show them the magic of your product, and what it can do for them.

Conclusion

By fixing these three very basic, but widespread sales mistakes you can easily start closing more deals without having to spend a lot of time or resources on sales training. It’s the low hanging fruit of sales process optimization that will lead to the biggest wins early on.

I’ll talk in much more depth and detail about advanced ways to improve your sales performance in the upcoming Sales Hacker Conference. I hope to see you there!

 

Browse the other speakers!

They’ll have much more content like this on the 6th. Looking forward to seeing you there!

The post The Top 3 Startup Sales Mistakes appeared first on Sales Hacker.

We are already well into the final “selling phase” of 2014 and, at this time of the year, I always urge a total focus on “closable opportunities” for a really big finish.

It takes courage, and a real sense of realism to focus in on what is probable – not just possible. This is not a time to be optimistic. We need realistic.

You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure your pipeline, then you can’t improve your productivity. There are a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that can be measured, monitored and managed to ensure achievement of sales targets:

KPI     

• Pipeline Opportunities – These should be measured in value and the number of opportunities in the pipeline.
• Opportunities by Milestone – Once these milestones and their different probabilities of closing have been calculated, these figures ensure greater accuracy of forecasting.
• Average Deal Size – This ensures better focus on larger deals and ideally will increase steadily each year.
• Sales Cycle Time – Shortening this can have a huge impact because of the cumulative ‘saved time’ available for prospecting.
• Profitability – Margins can be tracked to ensure that there is sufficient contribution to enable ongoing account handling.
• Conversion Ratio – The number of opportunities won and the % of pipeline potential converted.

Finally, do remember that there are no prizes for having a pregnant pipeline – the prizes are reserved for closed business.

The reality is that, for a number of reasons, 30% of the opportunities currently residing in your pipeline will not happen – do you know which ones they are?

If you weed them out early, you will give yourself so much more time to work on those that will happen.

It takes just as long to work an un-winnable opportunity through the pipeline as it does a winnable one!

Last big push please!

Instagram is one of the most powerful, engaging, and fast-growing social media platforms of the year. I’ve written before about it’s click-through rates (and how they compare to Facebook), tips on using Instagram, and a number of other IG-related topics.

But what about tools? With a few carefully selected tools, you can turn casual “brand-awareness Instagramming” into an actual Instagram marketing campaign. Here’s a list of a few Instagram tools that may be worth checking out.

#1 Hootsuite. Already using Hootsuite for scheduling Facebook posts and Tweets? Did you know you can also use it monitor your keywords and hashtags on Instagram? Check out this video and article to start monitoring Instagram activity that’s relevant to your brand. Note: Hootsuite doesn’t allow you to schedule and publish Instagram posts. At this time, there is no free tool that allows this (due, in part, to the fact that Instagram has still not yet created a third-party API to allow for this capability). See below…

#2 Latergramme. This Vancouver-based platform allows you to schedule and publish Instagram posts from your desktop or mobile device. While you can “get started for free,” you’ll have to pay in order to really get value out of this app. It’s also worth noting, Latergramme offers capabilities for agencies (and those who need to add more accounts and account managers).

#3 Iconosquare. This app (formerly known as statigr.am) is another “must” for any business or firm taking the deep dive into serious Instagram marketing. The facts speak for themselves: 87 percent of Interbrand’s top 100 brands use Iconosquare, including Coca-Cola, Gap, Starbucks, Nike, and others. With this Instagram tool, you can monitor statistics on growth and community, track and respond to comments, and more. Iconosquare even offers the option for creating promotional contests.

#4 Regram. This is an essential for any brand with a dedicated fan base. With Regram, you can quickly repost an Instagram originally posted by someone else. This opens up a wonderful opportunity for sharing content from your fans. The Chemex Instagram account serves as a solid example of how this technique can be effectively implemented.

What Instagram Tools Are a Part of Your Kit?

Are there any Instagram marketing tools you wouldn’t be able to do without? What’s your favorite Instagram tool – and why? Let’s share some ideas!

Depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy. If you’re not convinced that retaining customers is so valuable, consider research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) that shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

The bottom line: keeping the right customers is valuable. One of the key metrics in understanding whether your company is retaining customers is customer churn rate. But what exactly is that? And how to do companies use it?

To better understand this key marketing concept, I talked with Jill Avery, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and an author of HBR’s Go To Market Tools.

What is customer churn rate?

“Customer churn rate is a metric that measures the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a particular period,” says Avery. Typically the churn rate is measured by month, quarter, or year, depending on the industry and the product you’re selling. An annual rate is the default for most companies but any company that prices product on a monthly basis — think mobile phone service providers, gyms, and software as a service companies — looks at customer churn rate by month. Some other firms — those who have a faster churn rate or for whom losing customers is a big issue ­— will also look at it monthly.

Avery says that many executives prefer to monitor and report churn rate’s opposite: retention rate, or how many customers stay. Whether you prefer to look on the bright side or mourn your losses doesn’t matter — both figures look at the same thing. And Avery says she is seeing churn used more often these days.

It’s not just marketers who look at churn, however. Many investors will use the metric to evaluate the underlying health of a firm. The higher the churn rate, the more they question the company’s viability.

How do companies typically use it?

“If I’m interested in keeping customers, I’m interested in understanding how many leave and the underlying reasons why they are ending their relationship with me,” says Avery. Changes in a company’s churn rate could be a signal that something is working well (if the number goes down) or needs addressing (if the number goes up). The idea is that when you know that more customers or subscribers are cutting ties with your firm, you can work to adjust your marketing strategy or customer service approach. “Looking at churn rates by customer segment illuminates which types of customers are at risk and which may require an intervention. It’s a nice simple metric that tells us a lot about when and how to interact with customers,” says Avery.

Marketing managers will typically look at churn rate at a segment level — how many of our 18-25 year old customers left this month, for example. But sophisticated, data-rich firms are also starting to look at the number on an individual customer level. In fact, the rise of big data is making it possible for firms to act more expediently and precisely on churn rates. “I’ve seen a lot of firms use churn rate to not only understand what happened in the last period, but also to predict what’s going to happen in the next.”

Avery points to HubSpot, a Boston-based firm that provides “inbound marketing” software tools to small and medium-sized businesses to attract prospective customers to their websites, as one of the more “sophisticated churn managers”. The company’s software is available to customers through the cloud so it is able to track real-time customer usage of its tools and features. “Churn is really important to their profitability as a software-as-a-service business so the firm takes it seriously. When the economy crashed in 2008 and the company’s churn rate shot up, HubSpot delved deep into its churn data to see what it could find out about which customers were more likely to leave and when. Using that analysis, the firm targeted customers they suspected might cancel and offered services, like extra training on particular features, to convince them to stay. “They worked to eliminate road blocks to usage so that customers could unlock the value of the product,” says Avery.

How do you calculate it?

Since churn rate is simply the percent of customers who end their relationship with your company in a given period, calculating it is pretty straightforward. You take the total number of customers who left your company during that period divided by total customers at the beginning of the period. As you can see, this is a lagging indicator, meaning you can only look at what’s happened, which is one of the metric’s downsides.

What are common mistakes managers make when using it?

Avery says that there are four mistakes companies make when looking at their customer churn rate. The first is “taking churn rate as a given rather than as an opportunity,” she says. Jonah Lopin, HubSpot’s vice president of services, summed up this problem well in Avery’s HBS case on the company’s development of a Customer Happiness Index: “By the time you see an increase in your churn rate it is six or eight months after the point in time when you actually failed the customer. If churn is your only measure of customer happiness, then you’re always six months too late to influence your future.” HubSpot and many other firms have developed analytics and accompanying metrics to predict who is going to leave. “The most innovative firms are using churn rate analysis as an opportunity to get ahead of losing customers rather than just accept it,” says Avery.

The second mistake that companies make is to look at churn as simply a number or metric rather than as an indicator of behavior. The questions managers should be asking themselves are: What are we as a company doing to cause customer turnover? What are our customers doing that’s contributing to their leaving? How can we better manage our customer relationships to make sure it doesn’t happen? Dissecting what’s behind the number will help you determine what to do to change it.

Third, many marketers believe there is a magic number. “The truth is that what’s acceptable varies widely by business model and is largely dependent on how quickly and efficiently a company can acquire customers and how profitable customers are in the short and long term. Some business models thrive despite high churn rates and others rely on low,” says Avery. Instead of fixating on a certain number, the best managers look at what their churn was last year and ask themselves how they can do better. “It’s really a metric that shows how well you’re managing your customer relationships, and you can usually always improve your performance in that area.”

The final mistake is not seeing that often a high churn rate is the result of poor customer acquisition efforts. “Many firms are attracting the wrong kinds of customers. We see this in industries that promote price heavily up front. They attract deal seekers who then leave quickly when they find a better deal with another company,” she says. This was the problem many pointed out with Groupon’s business model. Those deals may have helped companies bring on new customers, but they were typically high-churning customers who didn’t stick around to make another purchase when a heavy discount wasn’t offered.

Before you assume you have a retention problem, consider whether you have an acquisition problem instead. “Think about the customers you want to serve up front and focus on acquiring the right customers. The goal is to bring in and keep customers who you can provide value to and who are valuable to you,” says Avery.

Digital Psychology is a relatively new discipline that combines theory from the worlds of behavioural economics, psychology and digital marketing to create digital communications that are compelling and persuasive to our unconscious minds. 

The great thing about combining social science theory with contemporary digital best practise is that marketers are able to hypothesise and test assumptions on a statistically significant number of subjects (customers) in a relatively short period of time.  

Also, through the medium of A/B and multivariate testing, put the lessons learnt into practise almost immediately.

This means that there should be some excellent proven examples of digital psychology out there on the web, and I’ve taken the opportunity to rank what I think are the top performers.

From small companies, to international giants, all those listed are employing some pretty clever tricks from the digital psychology toolkit.

Is your company one of them? 

Please note, I’ve used theory and heuristics* taken from The GUkU’s digital psychology toolkit as judging criteria.

I’m aware that there are other theories/heuristics/biases out there that I haven’t included, and an awful lot of websites that I haven’t seen, so if anyone has examples/suggestions, please do feel free to mention them in the comments section.

I’ll be looking to update this list in 2015 and I’d love it to feature a completely different set of websites based on your feedback.

*Don’t know what a heuristic is?  Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Check out my previous Econsultancy article on heuristic theory here.

Let the countdown commence!

10. Adidas Zx Flux shoe app 

Digital psychology tactics used: Effort heuristic and familiarity.

Adidas’s new app allows customers to upload their own images and have them printed onto their new trainers before being delivered. Although still in its early days (and some might say, beta mode), the tool is already proving popular amongst those that can use it.  

But why is it creating so much demand? 

Personalisation triggers two heuristic forces. It introduces familiarity into the equation (even more so when the personalisation encompasses photos taken from your own phone) and it provides clear evidence of the effort the customer has put into the product.  

The more effort a person puts in, the more they value the output of that effort, so a customised shoe is considered more valuable than an off the shelf alternative.

9. Airbnb.com

Digital psychology tactics used: Representativeness.

Holidays – what a stress, eh?  But you’d never tell from looking at the Airbnb site (or any holiday site, for that matter).  

It sounds obvious, but when booking an experience such as a holiday, it’s essential that brands overwrite any previous negative experiences that the customer might have had (such as that time I was attacked by a cow on a camping holiday in the Cotswolds) and replace them with positive mental models, such as relaxing on a beach, or cuddling up to a loved one on a plush bed. 

We estimate the likelihood of an event (such as having a great holiday) by comparing it to mental models that already exist in our mind (this bias is known as representativeness).  

Airbnb uses video incredibly effectively to temporarily override these models (or enforce them, if your models are already positive), and show customers what could be, rather than what might have occurred in the past.  

Great marketing done well!

8. Justeat.com

Digital psychology tactics used: Social proof and consistency.

I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who has ordered a meal with Justeat.com has been influenced by their prominent customer feedback system.  

Go to a regional homepage, such as just-eat.co.uk, and the star rating of each takeaway restaurant leaps out at you as the most prominent items on the page (it’s also no coincidence that the stars are the same colour as the “Find a takeaway” call to action).  

But there’s another string to this bow. Have you considered how the act of writing a review may actually influence your future buying behaviour? The acts of writing and sharing a positive review cements your customer’s positive views on the product they’ve experienced, and means they’re more likely to buy again in the future.

So don’t just think of review writing as a means of acquiring new customers, think of it as a means of retaining your current customers, and persuading them to spend more!

7. Ryanair.com/Easyjet.com (and pretty much any airline you care to think of)

Digital psychology tactics used: Scarcity and anchoring.

The anchoring heuristic isn’t always as blatantly obvious as a crossed our RRP (see #2 in our top ten).  

It can be used far more subtly, such as in the case of airlines, which show the same product across a range of dates and prices. The example below, taken from Ryan Air, demonstrates how by prominently positioning expensive flights adjacent to the better value ones, airlines are able to anchor customer’s price expectations and make mid/low-priced products look even better value.

Airlines are also big fans of using scarcity to drive sales – with subtle “one flight remaining at this price” messages compelling customers to spur of the moment purchases.

6. Freelancer.com

Digital psychology tactics used: Effort heuristic, reciprocity and commitment

The more a brand can demonstrate the time/effort/love that a customer has put into their relationship, the more loyal the customer is likely to become.  Freelancer does this in a fun, and highly effective way, by awarding points, credits and level advances to their customers as they complete tasks on the site.  

The more a customer uses the site, the further they progress on the journey to Freelancing Nirvana, and the more rewards are opened up to them, such as free upgrades and promotions, triggering obligation to the brand through use of the reciprocity principle.

5. Lingscars.com 

Digital psychology tactics used: Autonomous authority, social proof, familiarity and likability.

Ok, let’s get over the brain embolism on a screen approach to design, look behind the dancing chickens and flying pigs, and examine Ling’s Cars for what it is; a highly persuasive website that plays on all sorts of heuristic devices to convert over 1,000 customers a month.

Ling leaves no psychological stone unturned as she physically assaults your eyeballs with her sales messaging.  

Social proof? With over 1,500 customer testimonials displayed on the website, you better believe it. Likability? I dare you not to develop a soft spot for the irreplaceable Ling after spending time on her site. Autonomous authority? With experts such as Little Jon and Duncan Bannatyne (sort of) giving their seal of approval, Ling removes further barriers to purchase.  

She even makes use of Darth Vader, The Titanic movie and Kung Fu Panda (we’ll ignore the copyright infringements if you do) to build familiarity into an otherwise strange and slightly unnerving online presence. Way to go Ling.

4. Warbyparker.com

Digital psychology tactics used: Visualisation, dissonance mitigation and loss aversion

Warby Parker is an American provider of spectacles that has already featured in an Econsultancy blog, due to a unique approach to try-before-you-buy order fulfilment. However, there are greater forces at play here than simply good customer service. 

Visualisation, or the ability to picture yourself using/wearing a product, is a hard trick to achieve for online retailers.  

In the halcyon days of bricks and mortar, this wasn’t a problem, as highstreets provided ample opportunities for customers to interact with a product and ‘try it on for size’.  Today, with digital taking precedence, there’s limited room for tactile experiences.  So, how do brands overcome this? 

Warby Parker’s approach is quite fun.  Their virtual try on tool allows customers to upload their own image to the site, superimpose a pair of glasses onto it, and then share them socially with their friends. Now, I’m not going to lie – the technology needs a lot of work.

I'm trying on glasses! Penny for your thoughts? #virtualtryon via http://t.co/kwJhgfHHJp - pic.twitter.com/V6nwWKvqV3

— David Moth (@DavidMoth) October 23, 2014

I can’t even find a link to this tool on their site, and had to get to it through a Google search for “Warby Parker virtual try on” (I’m thinking maybe a victim of their own success?) – but the theory behind it is sound.

If customers can see themselves in your product, and better still, share that product amongst their friends, they’re building public commitment to that product, and in line with the theory of dissonance mitigation, are far more likely to go ahead and make a purchase.

We can also see a strong element of loss aversion coming through in their fulfilment model.  People feel the pain of loss far greater than they feel the joy of gain (some studies put this variance at twice as much!), and there’s little doubt that by mailing out five sets of frames for a user to try on, Warby Parker are ensuring customers build ownership attachment to their products, who will be loathe to return them.

I suspect that a number of customers even go on to buy multiple sets of frames to negate this loss aversion – and would love to get some numbers from Warby Parker’s sales teams if they are reading this?

3. Facebook.com (and pretty much every social network, for that matter)

Digital psychology tactics used: Self-actualisation, social connection and validation.

As any 1st year psychology student will tell you, the desire to belong and to be valued are intrinsic human needs.

Social media uses these needs to create addictive online environments where users gain validation of self through the opinions and approval of others.  

Every selfie that has ever been posted on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram is a cry for validation of self worth from others – but I’m not going to go into detail myself here, when Charlie Brooker can say it so much better!

2. Booking.com

Digital psychology tactics used: Social proof, consistency, scarcity and anchoring.

Could social proof be any stronger? Booking.com uses five social proof devices to convince customers to purchase.

Not only do they have the star rating system used by Justeat, but they also show the number of customers that have put the hotel on a wish list, the number of customers that are looking at your selected hotel right now, an award for most booked hotel of 2013, and the time your hotel was last booked.  This is powerful stuff!  

Booking.com also makes use of that old anchoring chestnut of showing you the RRP crossed out next to the actual price, and there’s even a bit of scarcity thrown in for good measure, with, in my case, “We only have 5 left on our site” highlighted in red.

And finally... 

1. Amazon.com

Digital psychology tactics used: Pretty much all of them.

There’s a reason why Amazon is the king of online sales. It doesn’t just use the digital psychology toolkit – it pretty much wrote the thing!

Where to start? From the obvious social proof reviews littered prominently throughout the site, and the “three items left in stock” scarcity triggers, through to the incredibly powerful lightening deals, which show time limited discounts that actually have a clock ticking down as you pause to consider.  

It even has a CTA that, get this, actually tells you that the product is so popular YOU CAN’T BUY IT, but can only be put on a waitlist. The compulsion to buy is almost overpowering.

But they don’t stop there, Amazon even uses heuristics offline to convert online sales. Anyone who is signed up to Amazon’s Prime service will have recently received one of these letters in the post, notifying subscribers of their free upgrade to Amazon’s video streaming service. 

 

This letter/card combo achieves two very powerful goals. It triggers the reciprocity heuristic, as the upgrade is presented as a free gift (the card even comes wrapped in a bow to look like a gift) – so customers feel indebted to Amazon, and it triggers consistency, by reaffirming to the customer that they are a very special Amazon Prime customer indeed (look, the card’s even got my name printed on it – I must be a loyal customer!).  

The true genius of this is that the card does nothing apart from triggering these heuristics. Seriously, not a single thing.

You can’t use it to log in, sign up, withdraw cash, get through customs...  It’s just a plastic card, with a hologram printed on it (that’s another heuristic! Iconography of authority).  

Genius. Pure genius.

So there you have it. My completely subjective top ten. Please do feel free to shoot me down in flames, or better yet, come back with your own suggestions.  

Digital Psychology is a new and expanding field – and the more conversation that takes place about it, the more we can define it, and its benefits. Over to you...

Imagine what it’s like to be General Motors CEO Mary Barra. In her brief tenure, GM will have recalled almost 28 million automobiles worldwide. Her firm is besieged by allegations of having a culture of carelessness and a dysfunctional bureaucracy.

Surely these problems crowd her thoughts. Her body is no doubt dumping cortisol and epinephrine at astonishing rates. Both of these neurochemicals can cause a host of physical ailments, such as high blood pressure, as well as cognitive ailments and depression. The longer the body is exposed to these chemicals, the greater their toll.

Of course, stress can sometimes be a positive force, focusing a person’s attention, boosting determination, and energizing action. It can help us buckle down and hold fast. It encourages clear-headed prioritization and resolve. But it can also hobble us. The question is when and why it does so, and what to do about it.

The most important question for executives under stress — whether or not you have Barra-level responsibilities — is how to counter its corrosive effects. Over the past three years I conducted interviews with 127 executives from 18 countries to explore senior executives’ sources of renewal in the face of relentless tension.

To renew themselves, executives take a number of steps, which fall roughly into four categories. Health, including exercise, sleep, and diet, is the most common type of renewal. What I call “removal” is the next most common; removal is anything that whisks you away from work’s struggles. Concerts, sporting events, theater, movies, TV, and fine dining were mentioned, as were stopping by the spa or the tavern. Family time fits here too.

The third category is intellectual activities, such as puzzles, games, the study of history or botany, reading, bird-watching, and hobbies like model building. The fourth is introspection: Transcendental Meditation, prayer, breathing techniques, setting aside time for reflection, therapy (including Neural Feedback Training), and participation in support groups.

These executives are on the right track. Past research has shown that the harmful effects of stress can be at least partially counteracted by spending just 20 to 30 minutes per day engaging in renewal activities.

This is clearly an area where organizations can help their executives. Companies should be making deliberate efforts to raise awareness of the benefits of renewal and should be helping executives establish regimens of such activities. An example of how to do this well is financial services group USAA, whose campuses include meditation rooms and outdoor game areas, and encourage walking by placing colored mile markers around headquarters.

Yet for the most part, this isn’t happening. While 79% of the surveyed executives say they recognize the importance of renewal, only 35% say their firms have programs to encourage such activities.

More surprising is the finding that executives who recognize the value of renewal don’t do much to encourage their own direct reports to follow their example. Only 50% say they encourage renewal activities among their staffs.

Why do executives who understand and have experienced the value of renewal keep their knowledge to themselves? My interviews with corporate leaders suggest that the reason may have to do with the power of the corporate culture of soldiering on. Executives may worry that colleagues would snicker if they knew about the stamp collection or the daily meditation sessions. These vital activities might be perceived as signs of weakness.

So one of the most important things an organization can do to help executives reduce stress is to disabuse people of the idea that stoicism equals strength. They need to educate managers not only about the dangers of stress but also about the need for activities that reduce it. They should make it clear that the kind of strength the organization needs isn’t the strength of clenched teeth and masked feelings, but the strength that comes from reduced tension – in other words, that there is power in renewal.

The Early Bird Gets The Lead

In my last post, The Secret of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale — Part 1, I told a tale about two different sales approaches. One salesperson works like a sprinter, looking for a fast sales cycle and a quick close. The other takes the approach of a marathoner, running slower and longer, pacing himself just right to reach his destination.

The story illustrated that if you treat a sale with the patience of a marathoner, working with executives before they know how they want to address a problem, you can gain an advantage over competitors who take a shorter-term approach.
In fact, the earlier you approach executives in need of help, the better your chances to ask questions, listen, learn prospect needs and orient them to potential solutions.

I know this because some of our early executive contacts have turned into our largest deals.

Beyond the competitive advantage of being the first to know about the business opportunity and having a chance to influence the buyer’s direction, you will get to know their motivations and fears. In the process, you build a relationship that’s hard for a competitor to overcome.

Strategy Meetings: A Door Opener

Once you’ve reached out to and impressed an executive, offer to help them by putting together a strategy meeting. We receive many requests for such meetings which proves that executive buyers are actively searching for help in realizing their visions. It’s an essential step they need to take before they know what they want to purchase. You’ll discover strategy meetings open the doors to other people involved in influencing multi-buyer decisions.

Sell With Finesse

Before approaching executives with telephone calls, make sure you put this task in the right hands.

The tele-consultants you choose should work in an environment that encourages longer, more meaningful conversations. They should have good listening skills.

Also, your tele-consultants should know your products and how to describe high-level benefits. After all, executive buyers are only going to open up to consultants who can talk on their level and provide valuable advice.

Say Goodbye To This Prevalent Myth

Solutions have become more complex, and the impact of strategic product decisions on the growth or survival of companies in the next five years is larger than ever before. Business decision makers are under more pressure to make the right decisions at the right time, and they are actively searching for consultative support to guide them in the right direction.

It is time to say goodbye to the myth that buyers are 60–70% of the way through their buying decision before contacting a salesperson. Include the earlier decision-making phases in your sales and marketing approach and you’re sure to achieve some surprising successes with lead generation for complex sales.

Zig while others zag. Make the early move.

The Dreamforce Conference has grown exponentially in size compared to its humble beginnings. Frequently, when business faces enormous growth spurts, the fast pace sometimes throws the company off of its game, but not this time. This, too, became a rousing success.

What was difference and what can entrepreneurs learn from the lesson?

While insider details are not available, from a sales perspective, no doubt stringent details were in place and closely monitored. Most likely, the larger vision to host a conference of that caliber, hosted in five enormous buildings, and targeted to be the best attended ever, was broken down into achievable milestones. The milestones or projects were then broken down into smaller goals, and those goals into minute details. It is attention to the detail that makes all the difference. Equally important is the building of teamwork devoted to making the conference a success. Collectively, working as a team brings about conference success at its highest level.

Similar to the company paying strict attention to detail, attendance at these type of events require strategic thinking along with attention to detail. This holds true for all attendees should they be entrepreneurs or executives of large companies. The problem that first time event-goers experience is, they become over-zealous of the potential business they will secure but neglect giving thought to detail.

For example, the prospective clientele is seen as enormous, so they rush to schedule appointments to show off their latest services. Or they begin “selling” their services to speakers and vendors alike without realizing they are putting the cart before the horse in the sales process. These are not best-serving strategies. The end result may be devastating by having put off potential alliances by possibly appearing as less professional, disorganized and too aggressive.

Companies, new to a particularly large event, will do best to assign goals to the team designated to attend. In the case, where several buildings are occupied, and keynotes delivered throughout each day, advance thought should be given as to where time will be best spent. Prospective clients, information sought to fast track business, and potential alliances should head the list. Research the floor plan, vendor list, and the speaker schedule, to better strategize the logistics.

Speak with selected vendors to connect personally and learn more. Ask a couple of pertinent questions (given others are waiting in line behind you) to qualify the better match. This is a much improved strategy eliminating future wasted time as opposed to attempting to pre-schedule meetings that turn into not the best matches.

After the event, as the team reconvenes back at the office, you will hear of incidents to be avoided and strategies that worked extremely well. This prepares you well for the next event so that you may perform at your best, Now you have concrete evidence as to what works best for your company and may even consider hosting a side event with familiarity behind you.

The better time to invite the best-matched prospects for a demo or ask for a meeting is after the event. When you do hold meetings after the event, begin the conversation by saying how much you enjoyed meeting the people associated with their company. Then ask how they enjoyed the entire experience. This again is the basis for building the relationship, trust and getting to the heart of the matter, the sale. By exchanging stories with one another about the event experiences, you simultaneously build a sound relationship along with potential business.

“Lead generation” is the kind of term that makes marketers light up…

… and everyone else’s eyes glaze over.

If you have a passionate, talented sales and marketing person on your team, then you can probably disregard this post. They’ve likely got you covered. But, if you’re like a lot of small business owners, the sales and marketing part falls on you (and you’re already busy), gets piecemealed out to various team members, or forgotten altogether.

Lead Generation Can Be Fun And Effective

At BuzzPlant, lead generation is one of our specialties. We use all kinds of tools to help our clients attain new customers and generate more sales. Some of these tools are technical and more “high-level” than what our clients can do for themselves. But a lot of what we do is relatively simple; it just takes work, follow-through, and a little bit of audacity. These are the lead generation tools I’d like to share with you today.

7 Lead Generation Tools You Can Use

1. Gated content. “Gated content” describes any product (usually an ebook, video, learning course, etc.) that requires the user to give something up in order to gain access. This lead generation tool serves two purposes. One, you get information from the user (typically an email address that you can add to your email list). Two, gated content, in our experience, is more likely to obtain warm leads than cold If a user is willing to provide you with information, they’re probably more likely to buy your product than someone who’s only going to read your blog. (Also, the fact that you’ve put a gate in front of the content plants the idea in the user’s subconscious that this content is more valuable than your “un-gated” content.)
2. Speaking of email lists, I strongly suggest you create and use mailing lists. With the hundreds of lead generation tools that have developed since the heyday of email marketing, many marketers have falsely assumed that email is no longer useful. Just Google “email marketing dead” to see all the evidence that this platform is very much alive. (Here’s one of my favorite posts.) Tools like Mailchimp are easy to use and allow you up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 sends with the Forever Free Plan. Not a bad start!
3. Write your own or contribute to someone else’s… just write! I’ve authored a couple of my own books, and frequently contribute chapters to other experts’ books. Get your knowledge out there; show potential clients what you can do.
4. Blogging is good, but syndication is great. I’m a big advocate of regular blogging. But more importantly, get hooked up with some good syndicators. Use blogs to answer the questions that your potential clients have. Give them solutions for their pain points. Some readers might be able to use your advice; others will just buy your product or service and have you do it for them!
5. Talk to current clients. Do you do good work? Are your clients happy with the results? Then ask them if they know anyone else who could benefit from your services. Chances are they do, and they would be happy to refer you.
6. Hook leads with “free.” Dropbox, Podio, and many other cloud-based services are excellent at providing free services to users who have basic needs. But, as those users grow and become more reliant on the service, they eventually upgrade to the paid version.
7. Create viral content. This one’s easier said than done. However, viral content is one of the most powerful lead generation tools you can use, as it spreads like wildfire through your target networks and industries.

If you want your online marketing efforts to resonate with your target customers, then you need to start developing and testing your marketing strategy before you build your product.

Sometimes our marketing efforts can be an afterthought once the product has been built. And then the marketing team frantically tries to figure out
how to reach and acquire new customers.

And often there’s a gap between the marketing promise and reality of the product, which leads to customer dissatisfaction and churn.

Your marketing strategy can be the ‘glue’ that holds together your customer development work and your customer acquisition and retention efforts.

So it’s critical that you start working on this early and instead of making marketing an afterthought, use it to help drive your product vision.

Here are some recommendations on how to go about doing that:

1) Define Your Value Prop & Pricing Hypotheses

The first step is to start by defining your unique value proposition (UVP) i.e. what benefits does your product offer your customers and why should they buy from you instead of your competitors? Your UVP will drive a lot of your downstream decisions, so it’s worth spending the time getting this right.

You should also start testing your pricing hypothesis. You got some early validation about pricing from interviewing your target customers. Now you need to test your pricing hypothesis more methodically.

2) Develop Your Marketing Website & Funnel

Developing (or updating your existing) marketing website early gives you an opportunity to start testing customer demand for your product. And it also gives you an opportunity to optimize and improve your sales and marketing funnel if you already have an existing product in market.

By now you have developed much deeper insights about your target customer and you can use that information to refine your unique value proposition and focusing your marketing message better on the customer pain points that your product addresses.

3) Define Your Most Important Success Metrics

Before you can start testing your marketing and sales funnel, you need to clearly define your success metrics i.e. what does success look like and
how will you measure that? And if you haven’t already done so, you should put a ‘stake in the ground’ for how much you’re willing to pay to acquire new customers i.e. your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

It’s easier to focus on the number of customers that you’re acquiring, but if you’re not doing so profitably, then your business will be in trouble sooner or later. Are you clear about your customer acquisition cost and your customer lifetime value (LTV) goals? If you’re not, then this should make this a priority.

4) Start Optimizing Before You Ship Your Product

If you’re launching a new product, you can start testing a ‘coming soon’ page to drive email subscriptions. If you already have an existing version of your product in market, then this is a good time to start optimizing your existing marketing funnel.

In both cases, you now have a much deeper understanding of your target customer and your unique value proposition.

And as you refine your messaging and site experience, you may well generate more sales from your existing product. And that not only helps you generate more revenue, but also sets a baseline for how effective your new product is i.e. did your product drive new customer acquisition because you’re doing a better job at addressing your customer’s pain points or was it because you optimized your landing page?

That’s an important insight to have.

5) Kick Off Your Content Marketing Plan

You can use content marketing to reach your target customers well before your product has launched. And with your deeper insights about your target
customers, you can create more content that resonates with them, provides value and demonstrates your authority.

If you don’t already have a company blog, then that’s a good place to start. But content marketing is so much more than just blogging. You can create infographics, videos, guest posts, social media and more. The key is stay focused on creating content which helps your target customers with their problems, instead of using it as a platform to just promote your product.

Key Takeaway

Starting your marketing efforts early can provide key insights for your product development, improve how effectively you acquire new customers when your product launches and also help to reduce customer churn by having a marketing promise that lives up to the reality of your product.

Image: Stavros

This article was originally published here

Blowing hot and cold

We’ve all been there.You’ve struck up a rapport with your prospect. You’ve qualified them to the point where a scope of work has been agreed. Perhaps, a contract has even been drawn up and sent over.Then…nothing.No response to your emails. Your calls are ignored. Your previously warm lead has ‘gone cold’.Sometimes, though, this cooling off doesn’t occur so infuriatingly close to a closed deal.The Harvard Business Review did some excellent research in 2011 (sadly – despite huge demand in the comments section – there has been no subsequent study) looking at how long it took 2,241 US companies to respond to a web-generated test lead:

Although 37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.

In a separate study in the same year, HBR found that firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which HBR defined as “having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker”) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.Fundamentally, regardless of where it happens in the sales engagement process – whether at the start or nearing the finishing line of a closed deal – a warm lead can go cold at any moment.

When a warm lead goes cold

It’s helpful to remember that when a warm lead goes cold, it’s not the same as that lead being “lost”.Perhaps the individual in question had another more urgent issue to deal with or a corporate priority emerged that had to be addressed. Maybe another competing supplier appeared on the scene, and they’ve decided to take more time to consider the options. Or maybe the prospective client got just was not ready to pull the trigger. Without any more lead insight, it is difficult to know what to do.Here is where your content marketing should be an imperative asset for Sales.

Using content to re-engage cold leads

This information is what will keep a customer nurtured until they’re ready to purchase rather than move on the next piece of content. The real trick to making this work is understanding the needs of a customer around the time they’re considering a purchase.

• 1-2-1 Sales reachout with content

A personal one-to-one reachout by the salesperson can work wonders if it is not too nakedly salesy. It will mean you start sending pieces of content to leads with subject headers such as:

“I saw this and thought of you…”

“This might be of use…”

“Remember when we spoke about this?”

Use the unique understanding of each lead that you’ve garnered from talking and listening to them to inform which piece of content you send to them. We all appreciate help, so use content to present yourself as an advocate for their success first, rather than just another sales op trying to close them.

• Nurture campaign

Marketing automation has meant that previously cold leads that would have had to be abandoned by Sales because of various constraints can now be nurtured with a constant drip of automated communications by Marketing.As with a 1-2-1 reachout, take a few pieces of valuable content like case studies, industry recognition, or even just a simple “is now a better time” personal messages and put them to work in your marketing automation system.Unlike the 1-2-1 sales reachout, nurture campaigns enable a longer view of gently touching base with a prospect – perhaps over a 90 or 120 day time horizon (or longer if your sales cycles are very long). You’ll be surprised at the engagement that comes from simply following up over a longer time horizon than this month or this quarter.

• Let inbound marketing do its job

After a point a lead might be so unresponsive that even a prolonged nurture campaign will not be enough to reactivate them. At this point, there is little Sales or Marketing can do other than ‘kicking’ the lead out of the system.Yet here, too, content plays an important role. By simply committing to content marketing, an abandoned or ‘lost’ lead may well find themselves once again reactivate themselves by consuming content on your company blog or social media feed or a piece of native advertising. Each interaction ultimately leading them to becoming a warm lead once again.

Generating revenue for your business shouldn’t be a disjointed process with isolated teams and tasks. Instead, your sales process needs to flow seamlessly from initial warm lead generation to closing the deal.

But with so many different teams working on various sales and marketing goals (like optimizing a marketing channel, setting appointments and finalizing agreements), it’s sometimes difficult to see the big picture of the entire sales cycle. However, if you don’t keep the overall, high-level process running smoothly, your teams become siloed and dysfunctional.

Here are four steps to help you optimize your sales process from initial warm leads to final closing:

1. Define Your Target Audience

If you don’t define whom you’re targeting with your sales and marketing efforts, you won’t ever know if those efforts are successful. Before you start focusing on warm lead generation, you must outline your audience’s demographics and personality traits.

One of the best ways to clearly express who you’re targeting is to develop a buyer persona. This avatar of your ideal customer defines not only demographics, but also psychographics and other qualifying traits. With a solid buyer persona in front of your sales and marketing teams, your revenue efforts are more focused and effective at capturing the exact type of sales you’re looking for – while not being distracted by non-ideal opportunities.

2. Conduct A Multi-Channel Marketing Campaign

With your buyer persona clearly defined, you need to start actively campaigning and pursuing your target audience. And, because your prospects are not likely to engage with your business on only one channel, you need to ensure your campaigns include multiple marketing channels.

The ultimate goal of your multi-channel marketing campaign should be to draw interest to your company’s product or solution. A well-conducted marketing campaign transforms cold visitors or first-time callers into warm leads who want to learn more about your offerings.

3. Qualify Leads Efficiently And Appropriately

Without high-quality, warm leads, your company’s revenue efforts are getting nowhere. Furthermore, website forms and landing pages are only able to qualify your prospects so much before you must have a personal conversation with each prospect.

On the phone, your salespeople need to discover each prospect’s needs, pains and goals to determine if they’re a good fit for your business. Robust lead qualification should involve open-ended questions about the prospect’s envisioned solution and avoid a direct pitch that comes across as a hard sell. The best salespeople ask the prospect a series of questions that leads to no other alternative than your company’s solution.

And finally, a salesperson should also determine if a prospect’s answer to a solution is “no” (and always going to be “no”), because these leads aren’t worth your time or effort.

4. Close The Sale Without Surprises

Closing a sale doesn’t have to be difficult: If your sales team has completed the correct steps through the sales process, finalizing a deal should be a hassle-free procedure. One of those essential steps is setting the right expectations throughout the marketing and sales process.

With proper expectations set and check-ins performed throughout the process, your close should be a foregone conclusion – not a surprise ending – because a properly qualified lead doesn’t have final objections at the last minute.

If your goal is top-line growth, you need a sales process that’s integrated all the way from defining your target audience through warm lead generation and onto the final close. With a unified approach, your sales and marketing teams generate revenue in the most effective way possible, meaning that more of your top-line growth shows up on the bottom line as well.

You might go into a new job thinking you'll take charge in just a few days. But it actually takes the average manager 21 months to transition from a cost to the company to an asset, according to the Corporate Executive Board.

That is, it takes almost two years for most managers to become competent leaders who don't need much supervision from their own boss.

Northwestern University professor William White says that his experience has shown him that this applies to not just managers, but employees of all levels. He teaches that a "power onboarding" plan created in between jobs can cut that path to leadership down to just around nine months.

In his Coursera class "Power Onboarding," which we selected as one of our top free online courses to take this fall, White explains the process necessary to transition smoothly and effectively.

He says that ideally, you will have at least a month to prepare for a new job, but you can do an abbreviated version of the following even if you just have a few days to work with. 

Here's White's advice on how to make the most of your time in between jobs, as well as your first few weeks at your new one:

Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses.

"Reflection is the most valuable thing you can do in the time before a new job," White tells us. If you have copies of your performance reviews from previous jobs, find and collect them together. Scrutinize each one and make note of how you have developed both strengths and weaknesses. Look for patterns.

After analyzing your performance at your previous jobs, take the time to write a plan for your transition. White provides templates in his class, though they're all based on determining how you want to be perceived at your new company. The exercise will allow you to both avoid making recurring bad habits and highlight your greatest talents.

Determine what aspects of your new job require skills that you have not exercised in the past. For example, your promotion may now put you in charge of a team, which requires you to make weekly presentations. Now would be a good time to start working on your public speaking skills.

Get comfortable with your new boss.

"It's natural to have a level of apprehension on your first day," White says, "but 'power onboarding' can reduce that fear."

He recommends meeting with your new boss a few weeks before starting your new job to take some pressure off yourself (ideally, you'd meet 30 days before your first day). Take the time to break the ice and get to know each other a little bit, but even more importantly, learn how your new manager works. Ask them questions like when they come into the office and when they leave, how often they like to meet, and how they like to communicate throughout the day.

The purpose of this talk is to eliminate trial-and-error and make the adaptation to your new boss' work style as painless as possible.

Also use this opportunity to ask them who you will be working with beyond your immediate team. You can use the time before your first day to meet with someone in another department, such as an HR rep, to answer any questions you may have about the work process.

Establish yourself.

Realize that as soon as you walk into your new office, all of your coworkers will immediately be making judgments of you within just a few minutes of meeting you — it's human nature.

White points to Harvard professor Amy Cuddy's behavioral science research that says that the two most important factors of a person's perception of you is based on your warmth and competence. By being friendly and warm, you open yourself up to building trust with new people. By being competent at your job, you communicate power. White says that it's expected that you will make some mistakes regarding competency in your new role, but there's never an excuse to do something that will lower your new coworkers' respect for you.

White says that you'll never be able to change where you fundamentally fall on the introversion and extroversion spectrum. You can and should, however, figure out what a good balance is for your first few weeks at your new company so that you can establish new relationships.

He says that since a new job is often the result of a promotion that comes with more prestige and responsibilities, it sets up the opportunity for negative personality traits to shine through. According to White, two of the most common mistakes he's found among employees at new jobs is that they're either too cocky and off-putting or too focused on their work and ignorant of the world around them. Figure out your tendencies and be mindful of falling into any traps.

And finally, "Go in with the right attitude," White says. "Know that you're there to make a contribution."

If you'd like more direction on how to create your own power onboarding plan, as well as what long-term steps you should take on your path to leadership, you can check out all of the videos and reading materials in White's class until November 29.

SEE ALSO: The 4 Most Common Negotiation Mistakes — And How To Avoid Them

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Last October, Joe Marchese founder of advertising company True [X] was out to dinner with one of his company's earliest employees, Greg Hong. Both agreed that the entire night, from booking a restaurant to paying the bill, could have been more efficient.

That conversation morphed into the idea for Reserve, a mobile concierge service that's backed and advised by Uber co-founder Garrett Camp and a bunch of early Uber investors like Chris Sacca and First Round Capital.

Reserve, which launched on iOS today, is one of Camp's Expa startups. Expa raised about $50 million to be a startup boot camp of sorts. Camp's goal is to churn out 3-4 blockbuster startup hits per year, like a movie studio. He and Marchese knew each other from previous work at Fuse; Marchese pitched him on Reserve and Camp agreed to take it under his wing, although he isn't technically a co-founder. Marchese is co-founder and executive chairman of the board; Hong is co-founder and CEO.

Reserve partners with 20-30 restaurants in three cities: New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Boston is a launch city because Reserve acquired a similar startup there, Soon Spoon, which already had deep restaurant relationships there. The app plans to launch in Washington D.C., London, and San Francisco shortly.

Members in those cities can enter a few details about their party size and what they'd like in a restaurant reservation (Mexican? Thai?), and when they'd like to go. 

Restaurants, which are given iPads by Reserve with the app pre-loaded, can see incoming requests and quickly accept or deny them, the same way an Uber driver can quickly decide on a ride request. You can imagine a restaurant having the Reserve app open at the hostess stand, where real-time inventory is managed.

Reserve books a reservation for parties of up to eight people 32 days in advance. It then texts the dinner organizer the details.

Like Uber and OpenTable's new Pay product, credit card information is stored on the application, along with tipping percentage preferences. The app will settle the bill for you without you having to ask for the check, and it takes a $5 flat fee after the reservation is complete.

If a reservation time slot is very popular, Reserve has a bidding feature that lets users offer to pay premium pricing to dine there. It's kind of like Uber's surge pricing but for the food industry, and customers can choose how high the surge goes.

Customers will also be charged $10 per head for canceling less than four hours in advance and $25 per head if they no-show.

Currently, Reserve is only available on iOS. It has no feature that will let a booker split a bill with fellow diners, although Hong says that will be built soon. It's also not clear how this solution is different than Open Table's app, which similarly lets bills be seamlessly paid on an app and reservations booked on a phone.

Also, because OpenTable doesn't have an open API to build off of, Reserve is relying on its partnering restaurants to do some leg work when it comes to managing available reservations. They'll have to monitor real-time inventory and updates from Reserve simultaneously on different platforms.

Hong says Reserve's goal is to help restaurants do what they do best: cooking and creating a great customer experience. All the small business aspects of running a restaurant, from booking tables to paying bills, should be handled by light-weight technology like Reserve.

"We want to be a strong partner to our restaurants," says Hong. "For us, it's how do we partner with restaurants and deliver exceptional hospitality...We want to make [the dining concierge service] widely available. Reserve is almost like someone holding your hand for everything that isn't actually going on inside the restaurant."

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"Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America," wrote Paul Krugman, in a recent New York Times op-ed. 

Wiser, a company that helps retailers to stay competitive in pricing, agrees with this sentiment. Its new campaign, "Don't Get Amazoned," wants to make sure retailers that use Amazon are able to stay competitive. 

"A retailer is 'Amazoned' when Amazon takes the sales data acquired by retailers, identifies certain trends, and then uses that information to undercut the original seller," Wiser CEO Arie Shpanya told Business Insider. Indeed, many retailers feel that Amazon uses them as a product-testing laboratory, the Wall Street Journal reported back in 2012.

The campaign gives retailers practical tips on how to compete with Amazon, like reducing the amount of inventory they sell through the site, and listing products so that customers are redirected to buy the item directly from the seller rather than through Amazon.

There are, of course, many arguments that Amazon is good for retailers. For one thing, Amazon can benefit them by offering them exposure they wouldn't get otherwise. Those that list their items on the website frequently experience record growth through Amazon sales. The Amazon marketplaces gave retailers a way to “come and compete” with Amazon and sell to its customers and prospects, according to Amazon's Senior Vice President of Seller Services. 

"Amazon is a double-edged sword," Thomas Frenchu, chief operating officer of Tabcom LLC, told the Wall Street Journal. "You have to deal with them, you have to be on their site, but we also have to fight harder and harder every day to compete with them."

Amazon has struggled with retailers in the past: its most notable dispute to date has been with publishing group Hachette over ebook pricing, and is ongoing. 

Shpanya believes that retailers could become more competitive by adopting Amazon's data-driven approach to forming pricing strategies, but he is not encouraging retailers to quit Amazon cold-turkey.

"We are definitely against the power of Amazon and are trying to raise awareness about its practice of undercutting smaller retailers. But we do not expect retailers to completely switch gears and shut down their Amazon channel all at once," he told Business Insider.

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The post The 5-Step Process for Writing an About Page that Connects (and Converts) appeared first on Copyblogger.

Nice kids finish first

There's a difference between knowing you should do something and actually doing it. That's the basis of a new study that investigates the link between societal norms and self-regulation. Experimental researchers tested 433 children and found that while most of them thought that sharing was the right thing to do, fewer of them actually shared when playing a version of the Dictator Game. "Prosocial Norms in the Classroom: The Role of Self-regulation in Following Norms of Giving" appears in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.The key finding: "Specifically, we show that failure to follow the norm is significantly related to the ability to plan and follow through on a goal and not related to impulsivity, suggesting that some children are poorer at holding the norm in mind and following through on enacting it."

Dodging the taxman

A common tax enforcement technique is to verify taxpayer self-reports against reports from third parties, such as an employer's salary reports. In "Dodging the Taxman: Firm Reporting and Limits to Tax Enforcement," researchers discuss the problems with this technique. "We find that when firms are notified by the tax authority about detected revenue discrepancies on previously filed corporate income tax returns, they increase reported revenues, matching the third-party estimate when provided," the authors write. "Firms also increase reported costs by 96 cents for every dollar of revenue adjustment, resulting in minor increases in total tax collection."

The showroom dilemma

Savvy consumers sometimes engage in a practice known as showrooming: visiting a brick-and-mortar store to see a product in person, and then buying the product online from another retailer. The case "Showrooming at Best Buy" looks at how the electronics retailing giant dealt with this issue, while facing competition from the likes of Amazon.com.

— Carmen Nobel

Publications

Working Papers

Cases & Course Materials

What's old is new again.

In a recent interview with Glenn Beck, entrepreneur Peter Thiel had some surprisingly positive things to say about the gold standard and how it relates to innovation in tech. This is comes as a surprise as Thiel co-founded online payments system PayPal. From the interview (emphasis ours):

Where we’ve had progress in the world of bits but not in the world of atoms, and this world of bits, we’ve had progress in computers, Internet, mobile Internet. Technology just means information technology. It’s all about bits, but the world of atoms, space travel, energy like nuclear power, biotech, new medical devices, that’s been much slower, and there’s been much less progress in those areas in the last forty years. …

One’s been regulated, the other has not, but we’ve had this sort of dualistic world where the virtual world of bits has been growing very fast, but the real world of atoms has been kind of stagnant. And I think there’s a strange counterpoint where the same thing happened with our currency, where the real value of money became separate from the virtual in August of ’71 when we went off the gold standard. And so, you know, whatever you think of the gold standard, it had the virtue of connecting the real with the virtual.

So I think there’s nothing wrong with cyberspace or computers or anything, but it’s when it becomes separated from the real that it’s bad. And these successful companies have actually been the ones that somehow connected it. Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people. One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be like a cat, and I’d be a dog on the Internet, and we’d have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn’t work because reality always works better than any fake version of it. 

The problem, of course, with connecting the real and the abstract when it comes to the money supply of entire economies is that sometimes it's helpful for the central bank to be able to expand the money supply, which is hard to do when you define it based on how many blocks of gold are sitting in the basement of a government building.

Twitter had some interesting perspectives on this, particularly from hedge fund manager Mark Dow:

In order to remove any doubt cc: @Noahpinion RT @shaneferro: Peter Thiel praises the gold standard https://t.co/E4tN9nXuRz

— Mark Dow (@mark_dow) October 28, 2014 

@cthorm @Noahpinion @shaneferro his whole framework has been wrong

— Mark Dow (@mark_dow) October 28, 2014

@cthorm @Noahpinion @shaneferro I should've said "macro framework"

— Mark Dow (@mark_dow) October 28, 2014

Warm the cockles of Churchill's heart. MT @hblodget: O for goodness sake RT @shaneferro: Thiel praises gold standard https://t.co/t2IU9f0UC9

— Nigel Cameron (@nigelcameron) October 28, 2014

'Finally, something with *real* value. Enough of this virtual nonsense.' [Holds rock in hand]

— Ben Walsh (@BenDWalsh) October 28, 2014

In other Thiel gold news, back in 2009 he called gold the "anti-investment." 

(via Jim Pethokoukis)

SEE ALSO: The US Just Narrowly Avoided A Trade War With Mexico

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When you send a press release out using distribution services, in addition to making sure you press release gets in the hands of targeted reporters, one of the other things your service provider will do is send your press release out across different newswires and news sites that will republish your press release as-is in a special section of their website. Obviously, this isn’t the same as earned coverage whatsoever, but the real question is do republished press releases have any value?

Personally, I believe the answer is yes, republished press releases do offer a level of value for your company, but there are some important caveats that need to be pointed out.

Why do I believe republished press releases can have some value?

• Posting your press release on trusted websites can help increase your overall online presence, making it useful for reputation management as people who search your company’s name may come across these.
• Republished press releases may offer a little SEO value as they could show up in the search results for relevant keywords, but don’t count on the links they contain helping boost your site’s rankings.
• Republished press releases could potentially catch the attention of bloggers and reporters who may not have originally received your press release, giving you a chance of earning media coverage.

While I do contend that republished press releases have some value, I absolutely believe that earned media is 1000x more valuable than a reposted press release. That brings me to a few stipulations that need to be pointed out:

• Your press release distribution service needs to do more than just blast your release to sites across the web. They should have true relationships with reporters who may want to actually cover your story.
• Reposted press releases that end up on low quality, spammy directories could actually hurt your online marketing/PR/SEO efforts. Make sure you know where your press releases are being posted.
• Your PR strategy needs to consist of much more than publishing your press releases across the web. Period.
• Quality still matters. Low quality, spammy press releases with no newsworthy angle will do more harm than good.

What do you think – Do republished press releases have any value?

Facebook, the social giant, is the social commerce leader by a number of metrics. 

Facebook doesn't just generate more online and offline retail sales than other social sites and apps. It also beats its rivals in terms of conversions, the value of sharing, and visits. 

In a new report from BI Intelligence we break down how social media is impacting retail sales throughout the purchase process — whether a social media user clicks directly from a retailer's Facebook ad to make a purchase, or sees a pin on Pinterest and ends up buying the product in-store a week later. We look at the varied metrics that underscore social commerce performance at the different networks, including conversion rates, average order value, and revenue generated by shares, likes, and tweets.  We also outline the latest commerce efforts by leading social networks.

Access The Full Report And Downloadable Charts And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial >>

• Facebook is growing in the triple-digits in terms of the number of orders generated: The site grew orders 129% in 2013, according to Shopify. Only Reddit, a much smaller player in the social-commerce mix, grew orders by a greater percentage. 
• Facebook drives a significant majority of orders: For example, Facebook accounts for 85% of social-driven orders at stores that use the Shopify platform. Facebook had a less dramatic lead, but was still first, on other e-commerce platforms. 
• And a majority of visits: Large numbers of social visits may correlate with influence on consumer decisions further down the purchase funnel.  
• Facebook also had the highest conversion rate of all the social networks, at 1.85%, also according to Shopify. That’s particularly impressive because the site drives such an overwhelming number of visits. Typically, conversion rates go down with volume.
• A Facebook share is incredibly valuable, most likely because of how many people it reaches. A share translated to an average $3.58 in e-commerce revenue, according to AddShoppers. Compare that to Twitter or Pinterest where a tweet or pin are worth an average 85 cents and 87 cents, respectively.
• Even a Facebook "Like" is worth more than a tweet or a pin. A "Like" is worth a considerable $1.41 in revenue on average.

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

In full, the report:

• Sizes social media's role for retailers compared to other major referral sources
• Looks at how the different social networks stack up in terms of conversion rates, share of social-generated retail sales, and average order value
• Examines why Facebook alone plays such a massive role for e-commerce companies, driving a huge share of referrals and still beating out other social networks for conversions
• Points to the metrics that still make other, smaller social networks compelling for retailers, including sites like Polyvore, Pinterest, and Instagram
• Outlines the latest major commerce moves by Facebook and Twitter, which could help drive up conversion rates directly from social
• Notes retailers that have built whole businesses on Facebook, showing the very real opportunity for  social and commerce to work together

For full access to all our reports, downloadable charts, and daily briefs on the digital media industry, sign up for a free trial.

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While there are many reasons for the changes in Africa over the past 20 years, the release of Nelson Mandela and the spotlight he brought to Africa is a significant milestone. As the world mourned his loss in 2013, there is value in looking back over the past 20 years since his release from prison and the next 20 years and ask the question, "Given the amazing progress and significant changes, what is the role of the Church?" This Missiographic strives to provide some insight into this question.

 

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'

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We want to focus our sales strategies on the Decision-maker. Some have referred to that person as “VITO,” the Very Important Top Officer.

Sales trainers tell us to call high, in the quest for finding the decision-maker. We talk about gate keepers, influencers, recommenders, technical buyers, financial buyers, and any other label we can find.

Finding the decision-maker is tough!

Part of the problem, in complex B2B sales, there is seldom a decision-maker. According to CEB, there are 5.4 decision-makers involved in today’s consensus sale. Even then, they have a very difficult time coming to agreement. CSO Insights reports only 45.9% of forecast deals actually close (in a win or loss). That’s forecast deals, so pipeline deals look even worse.

There are a lot of things driving the consensus sale–some good, some….well. Many of the decisions our customers are making are very difficult decisions. They are trying to solve complex problems that span many parts of the organization. More people are involved, more people need to be involved. People are concerned with risk, they can’t afford to make a bad decision, organizationally or personally.

As my friend Donal Daly often points out–for us it’s only a win or loss of a deal. For the customer, a bad decision could cost their job or have serious adverse impact on company performance.

More decisions are being pushed higher up the food chain for final approval–not so much regarding selection of a vendor, but for whether that’s a part of the business top management wants to invest in. After all, they are trading investments across all functional groups and the whole organization. Upgrading the company cafeteria may (and has) take priority over major manufacturing, engineering, software, systems investments.

So our challenge is no longer finding the decision-maker. It’s become finding the decision-makers, as well as the extended network of people they rely on to advise them in making a decision (some may be outside the company).

Our challenge is even greater. Once we have found those decision-makers, we have to help them buy. Each one has different priorities, goals, agendas. As they work as in a group, power and influence will ebb and flow depending on the dynamics of that group. So facilitating their decision making process is critical—helping them decide how to decide–then helping facilitate the decision itself.

I’ll pause here, I’ll be writing more about this in the future, but I want to shift a little.

If we reflect on the complexity of decision making, and the increasing trend of “consensus buying,” then contrast that with many of the deals we see, something’s off.

In too many deal reviews, I see sales people focusing on too few people. Usually, it’s our buddies and sponsors, even though they may not even be part of the decision-making group. I challenge sales people, “For a decision like this, why aren’t there more people involved?” The response is usually a frustrated, “Trust me Dave, She’s our guy! We just need to focus on her, she will make the decision.”

Often, those are the deals that I later lead the loss reviews for. We know it can’t be one person. It may not be 5.4, but a number of people will be involved, and it’s our job to find those people and work with them.

Sometimes, I talk to a sales person who has had too heavy a dose of “Vito.” That person will say, “He’s the top exec. He’ll stuff the decision on the organization. We don’t need to worry about anyone else.” I’m sure sometimes that happens, but I think it’s rare. I’ve been VITO in a lot of very big decisions. I’d never stuff a decision–my people have to live with it, they have to buy into it, they have to make it work. If I don’t involve them in the decision, if they aren’t totally engaged and aligned, we fail–I fail as a leader and business person. So smart VITO’s never stuff a decision. They may exercise a lot of influence, but they recognize it’s their teams that have to make it successful, so they push the teams to be deeply engaged.

So if you have a deal, and you think you are dealing with the one person–the decision-maker, know that you are likely to be wrong–even if the customer tells you, “I’m the decision-maker.” Keep searching, there are more, it’s your job to find them, work with them.

If you are a manager, reviewing deals and your team has identified the decision-maker. Suspect they haven’t looked hard enough, coach them on who else might be involved, challenge them to look for the real decision-makers.

We no longer can focus on finding the decision-maker. We have to find and work with the decision-makers.

We recently attended and exhibited at a retail trade show in Las Vegas. It was a large, multi-day event with over 14,000 attendees and tons of booths on the show floor – a daunting experience if you don’t exhibit at trade shows regularly or can’t afford a huge, flashy booth.

With that, here are three ways you and your business can break through the noise at any trade show and make sure you come home a success:

1. Personality Counts

The very nature of trade shows demands that you have personality. From the look and feel of your booth to the people who are working at it – does your booth blend in or stand out? Do you use the same cookie cutter booth for every show, or do you target your booth to the type of show you’re attending? Even though it might require more time, energy and money, targeting your booth to the type of show you’re at can really help.

For instance, if you’re at a show about visual merchandising, you want your booth to be visually captivating. If you go with a standard 10-foot-by-10-foot booth with little-to-no visuals, you might be hurting for leads no matter how compelling your product or service.

You also really want to think about who you send to work in your booth. Often this is delegated to entry-level sales folks or junior members of the team. But I challenge you to think about your end goal. What do you hope to accomplish at the trade show? Do you want more leads? Do you want potential partner deals? Your end goal will help you determine who will best deliver that result.

For example, at the show we just attended there was a locker company directly across from our booth. The guy in the booth asked people as they walked by, “Interested in lockers?” I was dying as I watched it happen, because he was breaking the cardinal rule of sales. He was asking a closed-ended question. Also, he had a pretty specific product, so not every person walking by was going to take his line. But in his defense he said, “You gotta keep trying because eventually, someone says ‘yes.’” He earned points for persistence! On the other side of our booth was a group of guys who designed booths and could manufacture just about anything. Their booth was hoppin’ all day long. And their main guy would approach folks who walked up with the question, “What do you do?” He started a conversation, made it about them and was then able to assess how the product would be a fit for the person and quickly tailor his pitch that direction. Guess whose booth got more leads?

2. Be Novel

In the sea of booths at a trade show, a lot can be said for having some novelty to attract folks to your front door. As an attendee, it’s easy to get caught in the tangle of people and not want to break away for yet another sales pitch from a desperate and bored exhibitor. Shake things up in your booth with something unexpected, fun and, yes, interactive, to get folks involved and engaged. Ditch the usual swag of free pens and stress balls and give away something memorable. The same booth with the great staff also had a 7-foot-tall gumball machine. When they talked to folks, they encouraged them to turn the crank and out would pop a mini gorilla. People ate it up.

Another example: We recently attended a show that was focused on dogs. (Lots of dog owners have small businesses that need email marketing!) We gave away dog brushes that flew off our table. People liked them so much they were offering to buy them. Nostalgia is also effective at eliciting response from a crowd. I’ve seen booths giveaway popcorn, cotton candy, cupcakes and good ol’ booze in this effort. How can you give away something cool, but also something that resonates and relates?

3. Stay Engaged

You never know what will happen even if you’re at a show that seems to miss the mark for your company, or that feels slow. Don’t fall into the trap of getting bored, doing other work or ignoring attendees. It’s easy to have happen during a multi-day show when the adrenaline and coffee run out, and the people in your booth lose their show mojo. A woman who sells vintage props had a booth next to us and it was super slow for her. She left her booth for a while and guess what? A huge client came to see her! Luckily the client waited for her (this would not usually happen), and she closed a deal on the spot. She got lucky.

I must admit, our product and service wasn’t a great fit for the show attendees, but we quickly realized it was a great fit for the other exhibitors. We talked to lots of them and ended up closing two deals during the show. Lesson? Seize the moment, stick with it and work it with everything you’ve got. Every show is different, and you never know when that next great lead or deal is going to appear. Will they stop or walk on by? That’s up to you, isn’t it?

What tips would you add to break through the noise at a trade show? Share them in the comments.