Rnordman

Today’s workforce is increasingly becoming multi-generational. If your business can’t meet the demands and expectations of all of them, you’re going to experience costly, unnecessary turnover. By recognizing how to bridge the gaps between multiple generations, you can reduce turnover and give your company a competitive edge.

What Generations Are Represented In Today’s Workforce?

There are four predominant generations:

• Traditionalists – Born between 1922 and 1945
• Baby Boomers – Born between 1946 and 1964
• Generation X – Born between 1965 and 1980
• Generation Y – Born between 1981 and 1994

Each of these generations has its own particular set of work ethics, characteristics, and expectations from their employers. In order to attract, retain, and engage your workforce, your small business must recognize the distinct differences between these groups.

What Are The Key Differences?

• Traditionalists: With their years of experience, in most large organizations traditionalists are typically presidents of companies or serve on boards of directors. They value strong leadership and loyalty, believe in conformity, and prefer hierarchical organizational structures.
• Baby Boomers: Baby Boomers want to work for companies with solid financial futures and are looking for a place to work long-term. They are motivated by opportunity and compensation, and value individual choice, group decision-making, ownership, and prosperity.
• Generation X: Generation X workers value stability, but also want to work for a company that is flexible. They prefer hands-off management and opportunities for growth within a company, technology over traditional interactions in the workplace, and strongly dislike corporate environments.
• Generation Y: Generation Y employees want to work in a casual workplace that values self-expression over self-control. They want a challenging career in which respect is earned, demand opportunities for growth, and need instant feedback and high compensation for good work.

How Your Small Business Should Respond To The 4-Generation Workforce

While it may seem like the four generations have distinct differences, there are still ways you can attract and retain the top talent from each generation. First, and most importantly, you need to value each generation for its unique skills and perspectives. Appreciate the loyalty of your traditionalists, while valuing the go-getter attitude of the Generation Y workforce. Then you need to implement strategies that target each type of employee.

Recruiting

Each type of generation has its own reasons for working for a company. Baby Boomers, for example, are looking for a steady business from which they can retire, so you should emphasize your retirement benefits, stability, and leadership opportunities. Generation X recruits, on the other hand, look for fast rewards, hands-off management, and a career that affords them a comfortable work/life balance.

Engaging and Managing

Each type of generation likes to be managed in distinct ways. If you respond and lead effectively, you can keep each generation engaged and productive. Generation Y workers, for example, enjoy collaborative working styles, diversity in their day-to-day tasks, and guidance from management. Baby Boomers, on the other hand, want to be valued for their experience and given rewards through status (such as a new job title).

Training

Training varies from each type of workforce generation. Baby Boomers are traditional and like the classroom or hands-on style of learning. Generation Y workers, however, want mentorship, training that uses advanced technology, and an understanding of how their contributions impact the company’s success.

What’s Next?

Look out for Generation Z, which are people born after 1994. Also known as Gen 2020, these “kids” seem to be attached to their smartphones. They want jobs that have a social impact, and they are entrepreneurial, community-oriented, prudent, and more tolerant of racial, sexual, and generational diversity. Will your small business be prepared for these “digital natives.”

By taking the time to understand the core differences in your four-generation workforce, you can effectively attract and retain the best talent within those generations.

It amazes me how often technology salespeople from all corners of the industry are afraid to sell directly to the business side of our prospective customers. Far too often, there’s a Chinese wall that we’re leery of crossing partly because it isn’t in our comfort zone and because we don’t think we have the tools, insight and messages that will be successful. Unfortunately, this negatively impacts everyone involved.

In 18 years of selling software, in every senior management conversation and in each interview I conduct for sales roles, we all agree that, “We need to sell to the business.” In the deals that are most successful for our customers and for us, that’s exactly what happens. Getting the business on our side and engaged makes the outcome far more guaranteed for them as well as moving the deal size (and value creation) higher by many multiples for us. It works for everyone.

Mr. Sales Rep, Tear Down That Wall

But the Chinese wall persists all too often. That’s a shame because it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, before IT existed as a department, we sold technology directly to people who likely didn’t know (and didn’t need to know) how it worked. They just had to know in clear, business-friendly terms how it furthered their business goals and needed to see validation from third parties that it worked – references. Global trade and software empires were created before the first CIO was minted.

I recently played a role in getting the smartest people in the room for an exercise in creating the approach and messaging for selling machine data software to the business. It could have been techie nirvana but it was a beautiful, business-facing thing instead. In a focused day spent with the Force Management team, we honed the tools and process that will allow sales reps to prepare for business-facing meetings by visualizing discovery questions that help the customer discover and understand the urgency of their challenges and the Positive Business Outcomes that require their focus the most. Far from drudgery, the meeting was energizing because everyone involved knew that when salespeople have and use the tools, it transforms the conversation.

Don’t Let Fear Hold You Back

So what are you afraid of? What holds you back? Maybe you don’t think you have the skills or the tools, but that’s just the devil on your shoulder making you second guess. Every business has real challenges and needs that go unmet each and every day. For every successful company, there are many more that need to get their head around what they should be doing and to create the urgency to get it done. That’s our job in sales…to facilitate that conversation with the people who are charged with increasing revenue, decreasing cost and reducing risk. The problems are there and they exist within the business. Take the conversation to the biggest business problems and you’ll be rewarded in every way.

A lot of factors go into keeping your customers. Especially in the case of B2B companies, customer retention can be a complex challenge. However, despite its intricacies, reducing your retention rates can have a significant effect on your profits.

Research has shown that reducing customer churn by a mere 5% can increase your profits by 25-125%. With those kinds of numbers, your current customers suddenly seem a lot more valuable.

How to Use Your Online Customer Community to Improve Customer Retention By Increasing the Value Customers Get From Your Products

While there is a lot that goes into keeping customers over the course of their lifecycle, it starts with a strong foundation. One of the cornerstones an effective customer retention strategy is ensuring your customers get value from the relationship, specifically get results your products of services.

When they’re achieving real business-level outcomes, they’re more likely to remain customers. This helps minimize intangibles, like how a customer feels about your company or a specific frustrating customer service interaction. In many cases, as long as your product is working for them and continuing to produce results, your customers will generally be happy.

The tricky part is making sure your customers are making the most of your product of service to really receive that level of results.

Quick Customer Retention Example

For example, consider a marketing software company. In that case, your business is providing the base platform and then it’s up to your customers to leverage the tools in different ways depending on their specific objectives, markets, and capacity. This can create a disconnect when companies sell a product, but don’t create a clear path for how to get the results their customers need.

Luckily, your online customer community can help bridge this gap by providing customers with the guidance and support network they need to get better results from your products or services.

5 Ways to Leverage Your Online Customer Community for Better Retention By Helping Customers Get Results

Tip #1) Provide Quicker Access To Answers

Often your customers will get a faster response from other customers and partners within the community than they would from a traditional “submit a ticket” system.

The ability to connect with other product users leads to a support network that can readily dispense quality advice. This helps to avoid potential frustration customers might experience when they’re questions aren’t quickly answered, as well as strengthens the value of your community.

Putting It In Practice: Direct customers to forums and listservs as go-to places for getting advice. Put processes in place to help customer create a habit of asking and answering questions in your customer community discussion forums.

Tip #2) Increase Access To Helpful Tips And Experts

Since the information and groups in online communities are segmented, customers won’t have to dig through the irrelevant content to find helpful tips and tricks for making the most of a product.

Customers can even search for help by using profile searches to find experts willing to connect. While having experts in your community adds to your company’s credibility, their advice can also unlock hidden potential for your customers to get value from your solutions.

Putting It In Practice: Content delivery platforms built into online customer community software, like blogs, videos, and file libraries, are often used to house helpful tips, tricks, and how-tos. You can even host events and webinar series to demonstrate how customers can get more out of your products and services.

Tip #3) Expose Customers To What Other Customers Have Done

Being able to read through posts from other customers who have had similar struggles or experiences can be extremely eye-opening and helpful for new customers.

Viewing examples and learning from descriptions of how other customers have achieved success can help more complicated processes click for customers who otherwise might not have figured it out on their own.

Putting It In Practice: Learning from other community members can happen just about anywhere in your community, but publishing educational case studies is an especially effective way to draw attention to product successes.

You might even consider featuring certain community members in an ongoing “featured customer” blog who have found ways to get tangible results from your solution as examples of how it can be done.

Tip #4) Highlight Specific Uses

Learning a new product can be overwhelming for people. Most of your customers focus on a specific feature set to solve an acute short-term problem when the relationship begins. Unfortunately, many don’t expand their understand of your products and services over time.

Don’t be afraid to simply tell members about how to get the most value out of your products or services. They most likely want to know and no one knows your products better than you do.

Your community can be an ideal place to centralize and share this information with a large population of your audience. By systematically zeroing in on one specific feature or strategy, you can help customers who might be overwhelmed by too many choices.

Putting It In Practice: Create a special column in your customer community’s email newsletter that highlights a new feature each issue or create a video that walks viewers through a tutorial on what they can do with your solution.

Publicize the additional uses for your product through various types of community content so customer community members will have several opportunities to notice.

Tip #5) Provide Better Product Training

Though products are getting easier to use, product training is still an important part of helping your customer base fully take advantage of your products and services to get results. More importantly, customers expect it.

This training might come in the form of self-serve training from videos and documentation in your customer community’s resource libraries or live event training that you can manage through your customer community software.

Taking the time to creating train programs customers might seem like a big undertaking at first, but the potential benefits to your company’s profits make this process well worth the effort.

Putting It In Practice: Online webinars, videos, or documents in your file library can all provide quality self-serve training. However, make sure you promote these materials and direct your community members to training resources. Live training makes participation a bit easier since customers are physically present to learn about obtaining real business outcomes and network with other customers.

Improving Customer Retention Takeaway

Customer retention plays a large role in your company’s financial stability and growth. Customer retention starts with delivering the expected results for customers when they purchase your product or service.

If your customers continue to derive measurable value from the products they’ve purchased, they’ll have little reason to stop patronizing your company. However, these results are not instant, especially with more complex products.

Leverage your online customer community to teach customers how to produce results. Consistently highlighting the value of your product beyond its basic uses shows that your company is focused on helping customers succeed and gives your customers a reason to stay in the relationship.

A few months ago, a new study was released that gained no small amount of traction within the online marketing community. The study essentially alleged that e-mail marketing generates better results and better ROI than social media or really any other digital marketing discipline.

Some online marketers celebrated the study while others thought it a bit dubious, but regardless of the legitimacy or impact of the study, this much seems true: E-mail marketing is something people should take seriously. It remains a vital online marketing strategy, and to ignore it in favor of the bright shiny newness of social media marketing could be folly.

Note, however, that doing e-mail marketing and simply sending e-mails to your clients are not the same thing; likewise, sending advertisements to “cold” prospects, though it may work in some scenarios, is more likely to get your company’s e-mails lumped together with all the spam.

In fact, there are a number of e-mail marketing mishaps that can threaten the integrity and efficacy of your campaign—and a few of them are as follows:

1. E-mailing too often. You might have expected us to say not e-mailing often enough, and that’s a mistake as well, but when you e-mail the folks on your e-mail list every day or even every week, it can start to smack of desperation—and beyond that, it’s really Plus, it is highly unlikely that you’re coming up with compelling new content on that kind of a basis. Stick with e-mails once, twice a month at the most.
2. Sending e-mails that offer no value. You want to promote your products and perhaps to offer some kind of a discount or promo code, but even the act of reading your company e-mail should provide customers with some value—else, why will they keep reading it? Make sure to offer some interesting points of content or some company news—just a paragraph or so will do fine.
3. Sending e-mails that offer no links to external content. Ideally, your e-mail newsletter serves several purposes, and one of them is boosting your existing content. Make sure that each new e-mail includes links to at least a couple of really good, solid blogs from the past month.
4. Sending e-mails that offer no call to action. You know how we feel about the call to action. If you want your readers to do something after reading your e-mail newsletter, then you’ve got to tell them what it is.
5. Sending e-mails loaded with spam words. We’ve written about this before. Don’t slip up and use a bad word that’ll land your company e-mails in spam folders instead of inboxes.
6. Sending e-mails without opt-outs. Consumers like to have some choice—something Apple and U2 recently learned the hard way—so always include a means for users to unsubscribe.

October is Small Business Month in Canada!

To celebrate, we are sharing helpful resources and holding special training events to help small businesses improve their marketing, and do more business.

In honor of Small Business Month, we’ve also compiled some of our favorite success stories from small businesses in Canada.

These businesses have achieved impressive results, and have great advice for other Canadian business owners, and business owners around the world!

Here are four email marketing tips from successful small businesses:

1. Use a clear and concise design

Business: The Avenue Gallery

Location: Victoria, British Columbia

Results: Standing out in a crowded market; staying connected with loyal customers

When you open an email from The Avenue Gallery, you know right away what you’re receiving, and why it’s important to you.

That’s because owner, Heather Wheeler, uses a few simple best practices to make sure the gallery’s emails are easy to read and interesting to the people receiving them.

This includes, adding an instantly recognizable logo at the top of each email, using concise language and a clear call-to-action, and including eye-catching images that support the content she sends out.

According to Heather, the gallery gets calls each time an email goes out.

Key takeaway: Using a design that’s clear and concise is more important than ever in today’s increasingly mobile world. This means choosing an email template that looks great on mobile, and keeping the content of your email as focused as possible.

2. Provide a personal touch

Business: Second Bloom Design

Location: Dorchester, Ontario

Results: Doubling their business in the first year; generating new orders with each email

Second Bloom Design isn’t your typical furniture store. The family-owned business uses their passion and craftsmanship to create handcrafted furniture from reclaimed wood and architectural salvage.

And while their quality of work is what keeps customers coming back, they have also added a valuable marketing tool to help them stay in touch with customers — email marketing.

“It helps us stay in our customer’s lives without overwhelming them,” explains Sue Bedell, owner of Second Bloom Design. “We decided from the start that we wanted it to be something that people would actually want to read and look forward to seeing in their inbox.”

In addition to keeping customers updated about what’s going on at the shop, Sue also includes a personal note to customers in each email she sends out.

“It’s always nice to hear someone tell us how much they enjoyed reading our newsletter and thanking us for reminding them to come visit the store or give us a call,” she explains. “The personal touch really makes the difference.”

Key takeaway: Offering a personal touch will help you stand out in the inbox, and better connect with the people receiving your emails. Look for opportunities to humanize your marketing and you’ll have more people opening, reading, and acting on your emails.

3. Add value

Business: Wine Station

Location: Ottawa, Ontario

Results: A single email drove 400 customers to an event that is typically only attended by about 40 customers

When people join your email list, they want to stay connected with your business. But to keep them engaged, you need to make sure you’re offering something of value.

For some people, that value can come from knowing about your latest products or services, and for others it may be receiving special offers and deals.

Wine Station, a wine shop in Ottawa, Ontario, provides both. In addition to letting customers know about seasonal and new items, they also include a special coupon for email subscribers.

This has resulted in increased foot traffic at their store, and better attendance at in-store events.

Key takeaway: Think about what your audience will find valuable. If they know your emails will offer something they’re interested in, they will be more inclined to pay attention when you show up in their inbox.

4. Be timely

Business: Island Natural Markets

Location: Nanaimo, British Columbia

Results: Staying connected with customers; generating new business with each email

It’s important to think outside of your business when developing a plan for your email marketing.

This is something Island Natural Markets knows well.

Over the last two decades, they have grown to become the largest health food store and supplier of organic food and products in British Columbia.

One of the keys to their success has been the ability to understand what customers are interested in at different times of the year. This has certainly been true for their email marketing. They send a monthly email newsletter with information about seasonal events, recipes for different times of the year, and products that are popular that month.

Since 2011, the Island Natural Markets email newsletter has been one of their biggest drivers of new business.

Key takeaway: Your audience’s interests, needs, and expectations can change a lot from month-to-month. Focus on making your emails relevant to your audience throughout the year.

Share your expert tips!

Help us celebrate Small Business Month Canada by sharing your best email marketing tips in the comments below.

Most marketers are well aware of the value of customer success stories and testimonials to their marketing efforts. Customer endorsements provide “social proof” of the benefits of your solution. This social proof is particularly powerful when the customer has a well-known and respected brand and is similar to your target customers.

But lining up customers to work with you on case studies can be a nightmare. Obstacles arise at every turn—both from within your own company and from the customer.

Internally, sales reps are protective of their customers. Sales reps won’t let marketing anywhere near their customers if they’re in the middle of a new opportunity or close to a contract renewal. They’ll shy away from recommending customers who are still implementing the product, in the middle of an upgrade, or are having some type of problem. While these are all valid concerns, they severely limit the pool of customers sales reps will be willing to offer up as potential references.

Once you’ve secured the name of a customer as a potential reference and an introduction from the sales rep, you face a new set of hurdles. Customers are often too busy to respond to requests. Their legal or communications departments may have policies that prohibit employees from endorsing other companies. Or they may simply fail to see the value of helping a vendor.

The solution requires taking a multi-prong approach for incentivizing both the sales force and customers to participate in the reference program.

Reward the sales force

Although sales reps typically understand the benefits of customer references to their sales efforts, companies nonetheless often also provide financial incentives to encourage their sales force to speak with customers about reference opportunities. Management may also encourage the sales force to ask the customer to contractually agree to do a testimonial.

Incentivizing customers

Marketing may also approach a customer directly. Your best bet is to offer them a range of options for customer reference activities that deliver value to the customer in the hopes that one of them will provide a benefit that the customer can appreciate. The following are some of the activities you can offer and the benefits they provide.

Publicity—Some customers are looking for publicity. I’ve seen this most often with smaller or less well established companies that can benefit from exposure in the trade press. Offer these customers a press release distributed over a wire service. Your public relations department can also pitch an article idea sparked by the customer’s application to appropriate trade publications. These publications are always in the market for a good story backed up by a real customer.

Now you may ask, what good is working with a smaller company no one has heard of? These customers can make excellent references when the customer has brand-name customers of its own, if the company is up-and-coming with a hip product, or if the customer’s application is particularly interesting.

Industry Recognition—The most coveted testimonials come from large, brand name customers. These can also be the most difficult case studies to secure because large companies often have policies against endorsing vendors.

One way around this obstacle is by creating your own industry excellence awards—and then writing case studies about the award winners. The awards provide value to your customer because they validate the excellence of the group that uses your product. This makes the group look good internally, and it makes their company look like an innovator within its industry.

Help Customers Demonstrate Thought Leadership–Just because company policy won’t allow customers to do a press release or case study, doesn’t mean the individuals involved in a project don’t want recognition for their efforts. One way to help your customer advocates is to give them opportunities to demonstrate their own thought leadership in a way that may not directly talk about your product, but that nonetheless allows you to associate your company with their company. You have a number of options:

• Articles—Many customers that won’t directly endorse your product will be willing to be quoted in an objective article about an industry trend or topic that will appear in your company magazine, newsletter or blog.
• Speaking engagements—Another way you can offer your customers the opportunity to display their thought leadership while having their luster rub off on your brand is through joint speaking engagements at conferences.
• Joint webinars—Webinars offer similar benefits to speaking engagements without requiring the customer to travel.

Follow Up Aggressively

All of these tactics require a tremendous amount of time, effort, and follow up. It pays to make someone responsible for chasing after the sales reps and after customers—and allowing them to devote a substantial chunk of time to this effort.

While the social proof that customer testimonials and case studies offer are priceless, getting customer buy-in and participation can be a tremendous challenge. Meeting this challenge demands a sustained effort that combines sales force incentives with meaningful value for participating customers.

What tactics does your company take to secure customer testimonials and case studies?

Be Completely Sold On You is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

How can you possibly persuade others if you are not persuaded yourself? If you don’t believe that your product, service, or solution is the right choice for your dream client, how do you expect to persuade your dream client that it is? If you don’t believe that you give more value than your competitors, why should your dream client believe that about you?

You have to be sold on two things. First, you have to be totally sold on what you sell. Second, you have to be totally sold on yourself. If you walk around carrying fear and doubt about your ability to deliver, then you will undoubtedly make your dream client feel the same, even without meaning to.

There are some sociopaths that have the ability to persuade others even when they create no value. They are slicks, con men, and snake oil salesmen. You never have to be any of those things to be completely sold on what you sell and on your ability to deliver for your dream client.

You don’t have to believe that what you sell is perfect. You don’t have to believe that you are never going to have the same challenges that everyone else and your industry faces. What you do have to believe is that you and your team are better prepared to help your dream clients deal with those challenges than anyone else on earth. And you have to be committed to delivering.

If you are completely sold on what you sell and your ability to deliver, your dream client will be completely sold with you. But if you aren’t yet persuaded, they shouldn’t be either.

There is a lot to like in the latest book we are reviewing, Nonstop Sales Boom, by Colleen Francis

First of all , this is not simply a sales book. This is a book about avoiding the boom-bust cycles that are a major stress on many businesses and creating systems that will drive consistent business growth over the long term.

Second of all, this book is not written by a sales consultant who sits on the sidelines theorizing. Having worked with Colleen in several accounts, we know that she rolls up her sleeves and applies these systems and techniques to deliver real results.The book picks up where Francis’ last book, Honesty Sells, left off and there is a theme of transparency and partnering with customers to make real contributions to their success. Over the years, I have read hundreds of sales books, and the value of integrity is critical for me to appreciate any of a book’s contents. Life is too short for tricks, manipulations or anything other than helping others be successful, particularly paying customers.

There is a mix of classic and progressive sales advice in this book, but where Nonstop Sales Boom book really excels is providing common-sense and actionable advice in the context of a modern sales world where buyers have unprecedented access to information which translates to leverage over competing sellers.

Booming Companies

Francis argues that top performing sales teams and companies share several key characteristics:

1. They view customers beyond the current transaction
2. They are driven by metrics, beyond the most basic ones such as quota
3. They ensure that 80% or more of the sales force is at target – underperformers are coached or removed
4. They rigorously manage, monitor and renew product and service lines to create exceptional customer experiences
5. They consistently meet forecasts

Business Growth

Sales leaders and business owners interested in long term growth, will find a couple of key concepts presented in the book:

Sales Radar – to compliment the sales funnel, the Sales Radar, characterizes prospects more holistically as business growth opportunities rather than the way they are traditionally tracked, as individual transactions. There are four quadrants in the Sales Radar – Attraction, Participation, Growth and Leverage – and the book is organized around each of these concepts.

Ubiquitous Prospecting – Never more relevant than now is the adage that people like to buy, but don’t like to be sold. In this context, driving demand and creating the conditions for buying are critical. Colleen presents a model for companies and sales people to achieve high visibility with ideal customer prospects, including direct methods such as cold calling and email as well as indirect methods such as social media and speaking.

The book rounds out with a section on the organization and support required for ongoing sales growth. Francis expresses the importance of enforcing a high performance culture, suggesting that “sales managers who do not enforce high performance are the worst performers of all” and that sales managers need to be diligent about weeding out under-performers from the sales force – “find the best, remove the rest.”

With lots of real world examples to support her ideas and actionable advice, Francis’s book is a must read for sales managers and business leaders interested in achieving long term growth and success.

Find Colleen Francis on the web at Engage Selling and on Twitter at @EngageColleen. You will also find her book on Amazon via the link below.

 

The post Book Review: Nonstop Sales Boom appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting | Sales Recruiter.

Each year for the past 33 years, the Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation has recognized Canadians who have developed and successfully marketed their breakthrough ideas. This year’s four winners, unveiled exclusively at Macleans.ca, hail from diverse backgrounds. But they all are responsible for innovations that could affect the world in big ways.

Here are this year’s winners of the Manning innovation awards, who will receive their awards at a ceremony in Ottawa on Oct. 22:

Paul Santerre for his work reducing blood clots caused by medical devices in patients

Tigran Galstian, who developed liquid crystal technology to replace the mechanical focus in camera phones

Charles Deguire for developing a robotic arm that’s changing the lives of people with limited mobility

Glenn Cox, who found a new way to quickly plug dangerous leaks in tanks before they cause environmental damage

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Paul Santerre

Surface modifying macromolecules

$100,000 principal award

Toronto

One of the biggest influences on Paul Santerre’s drive to invent wasn’t a fellow doctor or researcher—it was a patient. In 1982, Barney Clark captured the world’s attention when he became the first recipient of an artificial heart. While the transplant was a milestone, Clark died after 112 days, during which he suffered multiple strokes and blood clots caused by the foreign plastic in his body.

A few years later, Santerre was studying the way blood and plastics interact while he was at McMaster University earning a Ph.D in chemical engineering. Riveted by Clark’s story, he wondered if there was a way to help patients like him—and do it in an affordable way.

Santerre was born in Campbellton, N.B., the son of a high school teacher and a driving school examiner. He had a passion for science, amazed that, by putting together atoms “like Lego blocks,” materials could be formed that could send people to space. While doing an Honours B.Sc. in chemistry at Dalhousie University in Halifax, he spent a summer program studying the reactions of DNA to plastic, piquing his interest in polymers, biology and biomedical engineering.

Santerre was passionate about applying chemical engineering to serious medical problems. Inspired by Clark, he began working on a solution to the clotting problem caused when foreign plastics are introduced to blood. Blood clots that form on the surface of plastics, such as catheters, can become deadly if they break off into the bloodstream and plug a blood vessel, where they can cause heart attacks or strokes. Scientists had found that coating the surface of a polymer after manufacturing prevented blood platelets from reacting, but the process was costly. Over the next decade, Santerre worked to develop a way to modify the plastic’s surface during the manufacturing process, so that an added step would no longer be necessary—cutting costs immensely.

“I’m an engineer,” says Santerre. “You make things that work, as cheaply as possible.” In 1995, he patented Endexo surface-modifying macromolecules, an additive that stabilized the inside and outside of a PICC (peripheral inserted central catheter) to reduce clotting during in vitro testing by 87 per cent, a claim supported by subsequent clinical tests. The BioFlo PICC catheter, invented by AngioDynamics, became the first medical device to use Endexo technology and has sold thousands in Canada and the U.S. following Health Canada and FDA approval in 2011 and 2012, respectively.

He hopes it will help future Barney Clarks. Complications related to PICC clots are estimated to cost the U.S. health care system $1 billion and 50,000 deaths per year. Santerre, now a professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of dentistry and the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, is currently working with vendors to drive costs down even lower—a must in today’s cost-sensitive health care climate. Sarah Barmak

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Tigran Galstian

Tunable liquid crystal lens

$25,000 David E. Mitchell Award of Distinction

Quebec City

As advanced as smartphones have become, many still rely on simple electo-mechanical motors when it comes to focusing their camera lenses. Known as voice coil motors, they are made up of tiny bundles of copper wire that create a magnetic field when electricity is applied, causing physical parts in the camera lens to move. It’s a costly and inefficient process that is one of the barriers to making smartphones more affordable.

Enter Tigran Galstian and the tunable liquid crystal lens, a technology poised to make the mechanical focus in camera phones and other devices obsolete.

Liquid crystals are already widely used in liquid-crystal display (LCD) TVs, but the technology’s potential is far from tapped. It’s not crystal. And it’s not liquid. Instead it is a state of matter that looks like something between the two, says Galstian. “Like glass.”

The defining characteristic of a liquid crystal is that its molecules are naturally aligned in the same direction. It is this alignment that makes them ideal for the job of focusing a lens. When electricity is applied to the glass-like matter, its molecules reorient in a non-uniform way, causing the liquid crystal to layer and focus light. Different voltages change the molecular orientation, modifying the focal distance of the lens. “If we realign the molecules of liquid crystals, it can become a ‘molecular’ lens or prism, like if a piece of glass would suddenly start to focus or steer light,” says Galstian, professor at the centre for optics, photonics and laser at Laval University.

Galstian was born in Armenia and was convinced by a team of touring researchers to continue his university training at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Galstian moved to France; from there he moved his family to Canada, joining Laval 19 years ago.

Galstian became interested in liquid crystals as a potential lens about 15 years ago, when, after observing researchers work on new liquid crystal materials, he saw how one such material showed the potential for molecular reorientation. But electronically tunable liquid crystal lenses were considered “laboratory curiosities” in the physics world before Galstian developed the technology into something reliable and affordable to manufacture.

Galstian’s work caught the attention of optical systems specialist Thomas Killick, who saw the product’s mass-market potential in smartphones and other devices. In 2006, Killick and Galstian, with the help of tech startup maven Derek Proudian, founded LensVector in Silicon Valley. Under the guidance of Howard Earhart, LensVector’s CEO, the company’s products are entering the marketplace. The technology is used in some webcams for auto focus and has won awards for its silent and low-power focus performance.

Now some smartphone companies (their names aren’t being disclosed at this time) are looking to integrate the technology. The liquid crystal lens is currently circulating in test phones in China, and Galstian hopes it will be approved for mass production shortly. The technology is also being tested as a way to improve eyesight, with contact lens and intraocular lens companies exploring whether it can help the eye better focus on different distances. It’s also being looked at by health professionals for use in endoscopic procedures.

Galstian believes none of what he has achieved would have happened had he not come to Canada. “I’ve lived in many countries,” he says. “And I sincerely believe that my success in research and development work, including liquid crystal lenses, is because I live in Canada.” Toban Dyck

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Charles Deguire

Jaco Arm

$10,000 innovation award

Montreal

Inventor of a robotic arm for those who can’t move on their own, Charles Deguire named it after his late great-uncle Jacques Forest, an inventor in his own right afflicted with muscular dystrophy. Deguire grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and business owners who instilled in him a passion for inventing and working for himself.

As a boy, he’d spend summers at the family’s house in Bonaventure in Gaspésie, on Quebec’s coast near New Brunswick. There, he would visit his mother’s three uncles, all of whom had the disease. Every summer, he says, he looked on as they lost more of their ability to do simple tasks like move around, open doors and eat meals. One of them, Jacques (or Jaco, as everyone called him), who had lost his ability to walk by age 18, had an ingeniously inventive mind. One summer, using materials he had at hand, including the bendable arm of a desk lamp, the brake cables from a bicycle and motors taken from a windshield wiper, he designed Manipulo, an artificial arm for himself that extended from the back of his wheelchair.

Deguire remembers the day the mechanical arm allowed Jaco to give something back to the family that washed and fed him every day. “One of his first tasks was to get a rose in the yard and offer it to his sister,” he says.

Deguire studied at École de technologie supérieure in Montreal, earning a bachelor degree in electrical engineering and a certificate in robotic electrical engineering. One year before he finished his degree, he realized that he wanted to devote his knowledge to finishing what Jaco had started.

“It struck me that we were sending robots to space, and there was still no solution for people like my uncle to drink a glass of water on their own,” he says. He partnered with his friend and fellow student Louis-Joseph Caron L’Écuyer in founding Kinova Inc., and set about designing a six-axis, three-finger robotic arm that could be manipulated by someone with limited mobility. Deguire says the Jaco—as he named his invention—works because he designed it to do the specific, real-world tasks that people need, such as opening drawers and lifting forks. Launched in 2010, the Jaco’s customers include individuals as well as 27 universities, companies and research labs in 16 countries, including NASA, Toyota and the Netherlands’ health authority.

Deguire says the Jaco is used by more people in the Netherlands, where it is covered by insurance, than it is in Canada, where it costs $35,000 out of pocket. Deguire is now trying to get his invention covered by Canadian public health care insurers. Sarah Barmak

See the Jaco arm in action:

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Glenn Cox

The RuptureSeal

$10,000 innovation award

Charlottetown

In the mid-1990s Glenn Cox was an RCMP officer on Vancouver Island when he was dispatched to an overturned tanker on a remote highway. As diesel fuel gushed onto the road and into a ditch from a two-inch puncture in the tank, neither the police nor firefighters on the scene had any way to stop it. It took another three hours for a special emergency crew to arrive. Cox watched as they mixed powder and water together to create a putty-like substance. After applying it to the gash, the crew then used a shovel to hold a piece of plywood over the area until the spill was reduced to a trickle. By then most of the environmental damage had been done. “There’s got to be a better way,” he thought at the time, but then largely forgot the incident.

More than a decade later, in 2007, Cox was working in the risk-management division of an insurance company when he was reminded of the diesel spill. While attending a seminar on remediating spill sites, Cox realized crews were still using the putty-plywood method to plug leaks. Spill technology had stagnated.

Cox, an FBI-trained forensic artist, sat down and sketched out his idea for a solution, drawing on materials he knew could be found at the local dollar store. The result was Rupture‑Seal, a silicone-based product that can plug a hole or gash in seconds—just tear open the package, insert the zip-like cord into the hole and then pull it tight, pressing the silicone pad over the gash. “It’s able to plug ruptures in chemical tanks, fuel tanks, anything that has a leak,” says Cox, president and CEO of Zengo Innovations, the company he launched to market his inventions. “Even the hull of a ship.”

Since its launch in 2012 RuptureSeal has become a favoured tool for spill-response crews and is now deployed in 33 countries. The devices are manufactured in Canada using Canadian-made components. Among the largest users are federal environment agencies in Canada and the U.S., as well as the Royal Canadian Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Cox initially conceived of the RuptureSeal to fix holes two inches or larger. But after consulting with the fire department in Charlottetown, Cox learned that the vast majority of spills they responded to involved punctures of two inches or smaller. Cox listened, and now kits come in three sizes of the hand-held sealers.

Cox is happy to know his invention is helping to save lives and the environment. “I’ve always been passionate about the environment,” he says, attributing this love in part to his time as a young Boy Scout. “Life, safety and environmental protection are far too important for us not to do everything we can to protect them.”

There are more products coming down the pipeline for Zengo, but Cox is keeping the details to himself for now. Besides, Rupture-Seal keeps him busy enough, touring trade shows and convincing the market that rather than spend heavily on spill cleanup after the fact, it would be better to invest upfront to stop leaks before they get worse. All it takes is a few seconds. Toban Dyck

See the RuptureSeal in action:

The deadline for nominations for the 2015 awards is Dec. 1, 2014. For submission details, go to manningawards.ca.

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The post And the winners of the Manning innovation awards are… appeared first on Macleans.ca.

I feel like we are in this zone where everyone is doing a startup. Of course that is a great thing. Getting people out of dead end jobs and into their creative zone seems like a good thing no matter what the outcome. There is a flood of angel and seed capital flowing through the economy and it is easier than ever to do the thing you’ve always wanted to do.

Another thing that is driving this startup phase is the plethora of information on how to do it. It started with blogs, like this one, but has moved to podcasts, videos, and books. It is so easy to share what you’ve learned these days that more and more people are doing exactly that.

Two friends of mine have recently published books that are excellent and quick reads for entrepreneurs.

Randy Hunt is the Creative Director at Etsy. He built and leads Etsy’s team of designers who help create Etsy’s web and mobile applications. He has taken everything he’s learned in that role over the past five years and put it down on paper. The book is called Product Design For The Web, but it is highly relevant for designing mobile applications as well. The great thing about Randy’s book is you don’t need to be deeply technical to get value out of it. In fact, I think it might be most useful to someone who is just getting into designing interactive applications.

But knowing how to design and build something is not the only thing you need to know. Maybe most importantly you need to know what to build.

My friend Frank Rimalovski has been a VC since the late 90s. He currently runs the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute and the NYU Innovation Venture Fund. He explains in this blog post that in the 16 years he’s been working with entrepreneurs, he has seen countless numbers of them build something first and only then seek customer feedback. Frank believes that seeking feedback after you’ve built the product is tough because by then you are so invested in your product that you don’t hear the negatives well enough. And so he and another friend, and sometimes commenter at AVC, Giff Constable, have written Talking To Humans, a book that explains how to do the customer development interviews in a way that will get you the most accurate and actionable feedback.

Reading these two books in tandem will help you figure out exactly what to build and how to design it in a way that users will love it. And that is a recipe for success in the startup world.

You get people to sign up for your free SaaS trial – great! Trouble is, a significant percentage of users sign up for the trial, log in once, and never come back. You might as well have burned the money it took to acquire them.

The reality is, you’ll never retain all of your customers & some of those reasons you can’t control:

• Not the right fit for their needs features or price wise
• Customer goes bankrupt
• CMO wants to switch technology
• Customer wants features that were never intended to be a part of the platform

But there are plenty of reasons customers churn that are completely in your control:

• Customer doesn’t understand how to use the product
• They have a false impression of what the product actually does
• Customer isn’t brought into the product quickly or frequently enough
• They don’t understand the value

Part of the problem could be that you just dropped them into the SaaS app, and hoped they’d figure it out for themselves. Or, maybe you did do some onboarding, but failed to deliver the “Wow” experience that your marketing sold them on.

Much of this can be solved by creating a solid customer onboarding flow & a compelling first run experience.

What is Customer Onboarding?

Customer Onboarding is a process that starts from the very first welcome email & first run experience, and can span over several months (depending on the product) to keep the customer continue using your SaaS app and receiving value from it.

You’ve seen it before, it’s that guided tour the SaaS app brings you through the first time you actually use the product. Here’s an example from BaseCamp.

The main two questions you’re asking with funnel analysis are:

• What is the primary action(s) we want our user to take within the app?
• What steps does the user need to take in order to reach that goal?

The drop-offs in between steps are where the opportunities lie.

Determine Your Friction Points With User Testing

If you’re looking at your funnel analytics & noticing significant drop-offs during the vital pieces of your own onboarding experince, conduct a usability test, where users walk through the signup flow & first use of the product.

Usertesting.com & YouEye are a couple of the services you can use to gather this kind of feedback from several qualified users.

Matthew Niederberger of Actual Insights gives you an idea of what kind of feedback you could get from a User Testing experience by walking through an older version of AirBnB.

Once you have both the quanitative & qualitative feedback, you can create tests to “unclog” your onboarding process.

For example, when Patrick Mckenize (mentioned earlier) noticed that only 82% of visitors were taking one of the most crucial steps in his onboarding process, he made the progress indicator clearer.

As a result, 90% of visitors ended up moving through to the next step – a 12% improvement!

Out of curiosity, what would a 12% improvement in your conversions from trial to subscriptions look like for your bottom line?

Identifying Your Red Flag Metrics

Looking at what’s going on in the immediate signup flow is a good start to improving the onboarding process, but if you really want to improve things, you’ll need to look at things through a longer lens.

When a person doesn’t end up converting from Trial to Paid, what did their activity look like during the trial period?

GrooveHQ had this exact question when they noticed that their churn was hovering around 4.5%. Using KISSmetrics, they discovered a huge chasm between how their churning & non-churning customers used their product.

It turned out that the users who were churning were barely logging in & spent very little time in the app.

They also knew the average time it would take a user to complete certain tasks within the app, so when those tasks ended up taking longer to complete. To keep things simple, they started testing series of behavior based emails to encourage the user to log back in & help the user get unstuck.

Going beyond the trial period, GrooveHQ also tries to learn from those who didn’t sign up to see if there were any key features they’re missing, or weren’t made apparent during the trial.

Alex informed me recently they’ve been conducting some tests to their onboarding process, which I’m guessing incorporates a lot of feedback they’ve collected into the app and builds it into the app itself.

I don’t know what previous iterations of their onboarding process looked like, but I am seriously impressed by how they use a “sandbox mode” to let you experience the app before connecting your personal accounts.

There’s a damn good reason they’ve been able to grow their monthly revenue from 30k to nearly 90k in the last nine months. These guys are masters of creating feedback loops to get into their customer’s head & conducting tests based on what they find.

Identify The Actions For Your User To Reach The”A-Ha” Moment

The flip side to Red Flag Metrics is identifying the “A-Ha” Moment where your core customer falls in love with your SaaS app and stays loyal forever, and the actions they need to take in order to get there.

Again, this requires that you take a longer view of your retention metrics, but once you understand it, you can work it into your onboarding process to try and get users to take those “core” actions sooner.

Sean Ellis of Qualaroo shared in his presentation at CTA Conf, this example where Twitter discovered that “once a user follows 30 people, they’re more or less active forever.”

Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that when Twitter onboards new users, the process is primarily focused on suggesting users based on your interests & having you import your contacts so they can get you to follow 30 people as quickly as possible.

Mattan Griffell shares a few other customer’s “A-Ha” moments in this article, in case you need some more inspiration.

Conclusion

If you just assume that once people sign up, they’ll start using your software, you’re wrong. You have to work for it as hard or even harder than you did to get the sign up.

Take the time to understand of both a quanitative & qualitative levels where they’re getting stuck, what makes them leave & what makes them successful. Then do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.

Hewlett-Packard has confirmed reports the company will separate itself into two businesses. One business will consist of personal computers and printers. The other would consist of corporate hardware and services.

"In short, by transitioning now from one HP to two new companies, created out of our successful turnaround efforts, we will be in an even better position to compete in the market, support our customers and partners, and deliver maximum value to our shareholders," CEO Meg Whitman said.

When a company announces a corporate action that cuts costs, increase efficiencies, boosts profits, or does anything intended to boost shareholder value, you can almost always assume job cuts are coming.

Indeed, CNBC's David Faber first reported that the split would come with 5,000 new layoffs. According to HP's newly released investor presentation, new planned layoffs boost the company's total planned layoffs to 55,000 from an earlier estimated range of 45,000 to 50,000 cuts.

Ever since the financial crisis, many big companies have delivered robust earnings growth despite weak revenue growth thanks cost-cutting actions like the one we are now learning about.

As far as we know, the layoffs have not been issued yet. But employees now know they're coming.

SEE ALSO: RANKED: The 50 US State Economies From Worst To Best

Join the conversation about this story »

I recently gave a presentation to students in the business school at a local university entitled It All Starts With the Customer.

These students are ready to begin primary and secondary research in order to pitch their business idea to classmates.  The professor wanted them to hear about the value of the customer and how certain research methods like surveys could assist in their project.

As I was thinking through how to deliver valuable information in 40 minutes to a millennial crowd with short attention spans, I came up with ‘The 4 C’s’ that describe what we actually want from our customers.

Here are the 4 C’s:
Clarity
Content
Commerce
Communication

Clarity – when you ask people the right questions that provide you with answers that guide decisions, you will have Clarity.

Some questions that provide clarity are:  Who will buy my product?  How much will they pay for it?  How much will it cost to produce?  How will customers access it?

Content – the voice of the customer is powerful and it provides real user data that you should repurpose to generate interest.

Ways to repurpose the voice of the customer to generate interest are, sharing satisfaction stats to attract new customers, posting positive verbatim comments to brag, using customer stories for blog posts.

Commerce – the goal is to have customers who purchase from you and try new products with minimal effort on your part.

Once you get the initial sale you can begin to cross sell additional products, up sell a newer version, and you have repurchasing opportunities.

Communication – word of mouth economics is real.  It will both save and earn you money if you can get it.

Some ways to leverage word of mouth economics is to get your best customers to tell others about you through conversation, social media, or posting reviews.  You also want to understand what your worst customers are costing you by sharing their negative experience with others.
Companies that do this well also save on M&D spend by leveraging the voice of their customers.

It’s time to strip away the noise about big data, customer acquisition, market research and keep it simple.

What we actually want are the 4 C’s   - Clarity, Content, Commerce and Communication.

Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Author: Julie Ritchie

You may have read my first blog post on this topic, How to Make it Rain in the Marketing Department: Selling Event Sponsorship for Beginners, which covers the basics for getting a sponsorship program off the ground. Now you might be asking yourself how do I really make event sponsorship hum? Maybe you want to take your event strategy to a new level in 2015. You want an amazing speaker, a band, an amazing event space, etc…

The good news is that sponsors can help you think about your event budget in a whole new way. Here’s how to structure your sponsorship programs to maximize your success:

1)    Create a communication channel

It goes without saying that generating a lot of money from event sponsorship requires reaching out to a big pipeline of partners. But contacting all of these partners via email can be a cumbersome task and it can easily descend into chaos with lost contracts, etc. An easier way to manage outreach is to develop a channel for “many-to-one” communication. For example, you can use a marketing automation solution to do your outreach and nurturing for you. Perhaps you send a dedicated email to communicate sponsorship details via a periodic newsletter. You can also leverage LinkedIn Groups or your internal community platform. It’s important to get a head start on this process because it can be time consuming to set up.

2)    Offer a Discount

You might be thinking, “Duh, that’s the oldest trick in the book.” Well, it is. But it’s important not to overlook discounts when it comes to selling event sponsorship. A time-based discount can stimulate early demand, which is necessary for creating a strong wave of participation. It’s important to consider which packages you discount. Generally, you wouldn’t discount the lowest packages because there isn’t a lot of profit to begin with. And you wouldn’t create a standardized discount for the highest packages because negotiations for the price of those packages can be complex. Usually the middle packages generate the most value for you and the partner.

You should also consider how long you give partners to send in the signed agreements before the offer expires. Often, selling event sponsorship can be a lengthy process, as your sponsors need to shift around their budget in order to find the money to invest. The ideal amount of time is ~1 month – any less than that, and you risk losing sponsorship dollars because your partners don’t have enough time to act.

3)    Offer a Sweepstakes

Another great way to generate sponsorship is by offering a sweepstakes. A sweepstakes helps generate demand by creating buzz. People are generally excited by the opportunity to get something for free, so it catches people’s attention and stimulates more engagement in the selling process. Consider offering a prize that is related to the sponsorship. For example, you could offer extra full conference passes, access to the VIP areas at the event, etc. Offering a prize that is related to the event has an added benefit: it lets you know which companies are interested in sponsoring, so you can add all of the entries to your outreach list.

4)    Offer historical data to show ROI

One of the simplest and most important things you can do for potential sponsors is to provide historical data. Historical data clarifies how you created your projections and establishes credibility. For example, if you’re projecting that your event will be 2K people, an important detail to add is that the previous’ year event had 1,500 and you’re expecting the event to grow 30% based on the increased size of your customer base. A quote from a repeat sponsor would be a more qualitative piece of historical data. If a sponsor is willing to go on record to talk about why they participated at the event multiple times, it sends a strong signal to potential sponsors that your event will generate a positive ROI.

Have you tried any other strategies that have made your sponsorship programs successful? Please share it in the comments section below.

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How to Make it Rain: Part 2 was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Today's post is by Meridith Elliott Powell, founder and owner of MotionFirst and author of Winning in the Trust and Value Economy. I believe that “soft skills” proficiency is the fastest route to profitability. Here are the top must-have soft skills to succeed in the trust-and-value economy in which we currently operate. 1. Flexibility How stretchy are you? How willing are you to bend to accommodate a customer, a co-worker, or the marketplace? Yes, hard skills tell us exactly what rules, policies, and procedures we need to follow to be successful, but while those serve as a good guide, success...

Designer Paul Rand once said, “An understanding of man’s intrinsic needs, and of the necessity to search for a climate in which those needs could be realized, is fundamental to the education of the designer.” Prototyping helps us to unveil and explore these human needs, opening the door to insightful interaction and more empathetic design solutions.

Low-fidelity prototypes, in particular, are rough representations of concepts that help us to validate those concepts early on in the design process. Throughout this article, we will look at some of the features that make low-fidelity prototyping a unique tool to radically improve your work and to build an environment in which users’ needs can be truly realized.

This article focuses on the practice and general principles behind integrating low-fidelity prototypes in design in general, covering applications that range from graphic, web and user experience (UX) design to business and service design.

What Is Low-Fidelity Prototyping And Why Will It Improve The Way You Work?

Have you ever spent an overwhelming amount of time and resources designing something that a client or user discards in a matter of seconds? I’ve seen it happen far too many times. It is never pleasant, always frustrating, yet often preventable. Designing a product without continual validation is like walking blindfolded over a plank into a sea of sharks. Even Apple, a company that has repeatedly spoken against using focus groups to design products, pioneered a process called the Apple new product process¹ (ANPP), which involves creating and testing hundreds of early prototypes.

Some of us are quick to jump into building (what to us seem like) brilliant products, to the point of pixel perfection, without even stopping to ask whether our user or client feels the same way. The fact is that designing without introducing potential users to raw versions of our ideas is unsafe, uncomfortable and wasteful.

On the other hand, perfection can also haunt some of us to the point of inaction. While some are too quick to act and end up wasting resources, others are completely paralyzed by the “excessive” amount of work behind building something new. There’s just “so much to get done” before delivering the product to the user that we end up feeling frustrated and overwhelmed.

Have you ever overspent resources in a rush or accomplished too little for being a perfectionist? Low-fidelity prototyping helps us to find the middle ground between overspending and overthinking, between too little investment and too much user validation. By building a practical, preliminary version of your product, you will catch potential problems and promising insights faster and earlier in the process.

²

The word “prototype” comes from the Greek prototypos⁴, a compound of protos (“first”) and typos (“mold,” “pattern,” “impression”). This initial, raw presentation of our ideas is precisely what we’ve come to know as low-fidelity prototyping. Unlike high-fidelity prototyping, this method requires less time, specialized skills and resources. Its purpose is not to impress users, but to learn from them. Instead of wowing people with our product, the goal of low-fidelity prototyping is to have users wow us with their insight. In a way, the technique facilitates listening, rather than selling. It opens a conversation in which users’ needs, designers’ intentions and other stakeholders’ goals are discussed and aligned.

Scientist Jim Rudd and his colleagues at IBM helped to define the difference between the two major types of prototypes in a much recommended piece titled “Low vs. High Fidelity Prototyping Debate⁵” in Interactions Magazine:

Low-fidelity prototypes are generally limited function, limited interaction prototyping efforts. They are constructed to depict concepts, design alternatives, and screen layouts… These prototypes are created to communicate, educate, and inform.

“Fidelity” can be a confusing term. In broad terms, it can be defined (according to Oxford Dictionary) as “the degree of exactness with which something is reproduced.” In other words, a prototype’s level of fidelity answers the question, How precisely does this represent the final solution?

Why Now?

Though low-fidelity prototyping has existed for centuries, it has recently become popular with the spread of agile design methodologies, inspired by several movements:

• Design thinking advocates for “thinking with your hands” as a way to build empathetic solutions.
• Lean startup relies on early validation and the development of a minimum viable product to iterate on.
• User-centered design calls for a collaborative design process where users deliver continual feedback based on their reactions to a product’s prototype.

As pointed out, we can’t really say that low-fidelity prototyping is new because people have been laying out concepts on cavern walls since time immemorial. What we can say is that, given the speed with which we are expected to design market-appropriate solutions, low-fidelity prototyping has never been more important to all kinds of designers.

⁶

Advantages

All low-fidelity prototypes, regardless of the type of product being built, bring the following advantages.

Detect and Fix Major Problems Early

Building a low-fidelity prototype that can be quickly exposed to user feedback enables us to visualize and solve core issues related to the product’s usability and proposed functionality. Because the prototype is not supposed to generate insight about the final look and feel of the product (they are rough approximations), users generally submit thoughtful ideas from what they see. By removing the bells and whistles associated with high-fidelity prototypes, we strip our concept down to the core. Addressing whatever problems we detect at this stage is vital to the product’s eventual success.

Consultant Nigel Heaton wrote a key paper titled “What’s Wrong With the User Interface? How Rapid Prototyping Can Help⁹,” presenting it at the 1992 IEE Colloquium on Software Prototyping and Evolutionary Development. He explains that rapid prototyping should be able to solve around 80% of all major interface issues. In the process of designing products that truly match users’ needs, low-fidelity prototyping provides a much-needed wake-up call right from the start.

Aside from helping us to detect major problems, low-fidelity prototyping also gives us the motivation required to fix them. In a 2012 study¹⁰ of the psychological experience of prototyping, researchers at Stanford and Northwestern University found that “the practice of low-fidelity prototyping… led to reframing failure as an opportunity for learning, fostering a sense of forward progress, and strengthening beliefs about creative ability.” The study concluded that building low-fidelity prototyping affects not only the final product, but our level of engagement with the design process itself.

Build Cheaply and Easily

Low-fidelity prototypes can be easily built by individuals and teams with little or no technical skills. As long as the goals of the product and project are clear, then the emphasis with low-fidelity prototyping will be not on form or function, but on focus. Where should we invest our resources next? Where should we avoid investing them? Which features will be key for the user? Are we headed in the right direction with this raw concept? Do we need to pivot towards new models or explore other options?

The best low-fidelity prototypes are built resourcefully, on a small or nonexistent budget and in a short time period. You may also be familiar with the term “rapid prototyping¹¹,” which is merely the practice of “quickly mocking up the future state of a system.” In the spectrum of rapid prototyping, low-fidelity prototypes are on the speedy end.

Draw Feedback That Focuses on High-Level Concepts, Rather Than Execution

In his article “Prototyping for Tiny Fingers⁷⁶¹²,” interaction designer Marc Rettig points to the imminent risk of working with high-fidelity prototypes, which is that you will likely “hear criticisms about your choice of fonts, color combinations, and button sizes.” Being exposed to an elaborate prototype, users might feel compelled to comment on these details and neglect to gather their thoughts on high-level concepts such as user flow, layout and language.

Rather than being focused on validating the product’s underlying assumptions and core value, high-fidelity prototypes redirect attention towards the aesthetics of the product. A rougher low-fidelity prototype, on the other hand, “forces users to think about content rather than appearance.”

Iterate More Willingly

Because the effort and resources required to produce a low-fidelity prototype are significantly less, we are less reluctant to change the prototype completely. Think about it: When has it been easier for you to completely scrap something you’ve been working on? When you’ve invested a few minutes sketching it or when you’ve spent countless hours perfecting a prototype? In Rettig’s words, “Spend enough time crafting something and you are likely to fall in love with it.”

Iteration is key in a truly agile design process. Only by continually evolving our concepts will we be able to create empathetic solutions that will succeed in the current market. Low-fidelity prototypes encourage this type of shameless, stress-free environment of iteration. Making sharp changes, pivoting to a new business model or even starting from scratch feels more natural to us because there is simply not that much to scrap.

Carry and Show Them Easily

While some high-fidelity prototypes require a special device or environment to be shown, most low-fidelity prototypes can be easily carried around and shared. Rudd states, “Low-fidelity prototypes are easily portable — they can be presented on paper, view graphs, or white boards.”

How hard is it to transport a piece of paper? Does it require any special conditions, spaces or advanced instructions? Paper-based low-fidelity prototypes liberate us from the burden of technical and portability requirements.

If you decide to build a low-fidelity prototype using any of the software listed at the end of this article, then reconsider whether showing it on a screen is the best choice. A study showed that paper encourages collaborative work more readily than screens in several interesting ways. Researchers at the University of Nottingham, University of Surrey and Cambridge EuroParc examined how paper and screens foster collaboration¹³ in three different work settings: an architectural practice, a medical center and the control room in London’s underground railway. They concluded that paper generates an added flexibility that enables individuals to interact and collaborate in a wide range of ways.

The researchers noticed, among other things, that by handwriting (i.e. drawing, writing or sketching low-fidelity prototypes), participants were able to take notes quickly, while remaining engaged with subjects. This flexibility is particularly important when designing collaboratively and communicating with users to obtain feedback. The natural versatility of paper (it can be folded, cut, scribbled on) also made cooperation significantly easier. Consider these advantages when you decide to expose users to a low-fidelity prototype. Printing out your screenshots or wireframes could radically change the input that you receive.

Types

Paper-Based 2D

It doesn’t get any simpler than a plain old sheet of paper. Marc Rettig estimates that paper-based prototyping frees designers to spend 95% of their time thinking about the design itself and to spend only 5% on technical issues (which he calls the “mechanics of the tool”). Reflect on your own experience: How many times has your attention diverted from the essential elements of design to the technicalities of a tool?

In web design, for instance, paper-based low-fidelity prototypes can include screenshots of interface elements. In his article “Using Paper Prototypes in Home Page Design¹⁴,” former Sunsoft engineer Jakob Nielsen suggests that “Pop-up menus, messages, and dialog boxes can be simulated with Post-it stickers, or transparent overlays printed on overhead foils.” Sunsoft’s experience with redesigning its home page revealed that primitive, rough prototypes are valuable sources of insight into usability.

¹⁵

¹⁸

²¹

3D

If you want to get more creative and provide users with a 3D prototype to interact with, several fascinating options are available. Using cardboard, foam, wood, plastic, clay and building blocks has become increasingly popular, especially with the spread of design thinking’s hands-on approach.

3D prototypes add a level of interaction that 2D prototypes do not achieve. While building it might take slightly longer, a 3D prototype encourages manipulation and could draw a higher level of engagement in the concept-testing phase. The three-dimensional nature will add realism and open the door to valuable feedback.

²⁴

²⁷

Quick Start Guide

1. Define Your Goals: What Will You Show?

Which main features do you want to expose your users to? List two to three pieces of core functionality that you will include in the low-fidelity prototype. In the next step, we will make sure that these aren’t left out.

You can use a simple table like the one below to list your features:

Core features	Complementary features

Here are some sample features that you might include as either core or complementary:

Sample features to prototype in graphic, web and UX design	Sample features to prototype in business and service design
Geolocation Branch finder Contact form Blog roll Instant quote generator Image uploading Feedback system Color customization Social media integration Analytics Gamification Task manager PDF exporting Web conferencing Directory	Collaboration spaces Retail experience Sales pitch Price list and payment plans Customer support Consulting appointments Delivery Subscription payments Reward points Special packaging Business model Content generation Brand personality No-hassle contracts Returns policy

³¹

³⁴

2. Define the Method: How Will You Show It?

Decide what kind of low-fidelity prototype would suit your project best. What could you build quickly that would help users to deliver valuable feedback? How could you display and test the concept simply, investing the least amount of resources? To find the simplest method possible, continue asking the question, “Is there a simpler way to show this?” until you arrive at a feasible way to depict the product’s features.

The level of detail that is right for your prototype will depend on a few factors:

• What type of user will be exposed to this prototype?
  Would they be able to deliver insightful feedback based on the model that you are presenting? Would they need to see a certain level of detail in order to understand the concept?
• What resources are accessible to you?
  With low-fidelity prototyping, agility is crucial. Think of the tools and resources that surround you as you ideate. Be resourceful and find clever ways to use what you have.

Think about it in this way:

What I want to show	Is there a simpler way to show this?	Is there a simpler way to show this?	Is there a simpler way to show this?
Inputting a QR code	37	39	41
Geolocation feature (for browsing nearby)	43	45	47

Note: The prototypes above show the evolution of the design of the payment screen in Foursquare⁴⁹’s existing app and were designed by Marta Fioni.

Still struggling to find a method that suits your project? Here are some ideas:

⁵⁰

3. Execute: Show It

Start out by defeating your “My skill in [x] isn’t good enough” mindset. Low-fidelity prototyping is not about how sophisticated your model looks, but about the conversation it generates about the future of the product. Remember, not form or function, but focus.

Sample Low-Fidelity Prototypes From Different Design Fields

Graphic, web and UX design	Business and service design
user flow sketch board wireframe sketches mood board	sample brochure landing page flyers business cards sample ad scenarios storyboard 3D model explainer video business model canvas

Try any of the following digital and analog tools to speed up your prototyping process:

	Graphic, web and UX design	Business and service design
Digital	Mockup.io53 POP54 (import paper designs) Flinto55 Solidify56 InVision57 Proto.io58 Balsamiq59 Moqups60	Cacoo61 Mural.ly62 Canvanizer’s business model canvas63 Business Model Fiddle64 Stickies.io65 ProcessOn66 Conceptboard67
Analog	paper whiteboard poster sticky notes sketchbook notebook napkin squared paper print template cards overhead sheet cardboard carton plastic wood pieces plastic pieces glue scissors markers foam pieces UI stencil	paper whiteboard poster sticky notes sketchbook notebook napkin squared paper print template cards overhead sheet cardboard carton plastic wood pieces plastic pieces glue scissors markers foam pieces

4. Test: How Will You Evaluate What You’re Showing?

Go beyond the idea that “It’s so rough-looking that users will hate it.” Having to explain the limitations of your low-fidelity prototype is normal. In fact, it is expected. Guide users to understand the aims of the project, and ask probing questions. If it helps, prepare a short guide before you present the prototype. List a few of the questions that you’d like to be answered during the session, and write an introduction that you could read out loud to help the user contextualize what they are looking at. These are some of the types of questions you will want to ask:

• Regarding perceived benefits
  “What, in your opinion, is the key benefit offered by this product concept?” “From the features you have seen today, which ones would make you use the product?” “Which features didn’t you see that would make you want to use it?”
• Regarding positive and negative reactions
  “On a scale of one to five, how much do you like this concept?” “Why?”
• Regarding awareness
  “Having looked at this concept today, what do you remember most about it?” “What do you recall?”
• Regarding comparative advantage
  (If you showed users two or more versions of a concept, ask which variant works best.) “Which of these options appeals to you the most?”
• Regarding emotional reactions
  “How did looking at this concept make you feel?” (Help them by providing a list of emotions — happy, frustrated, angry, excited, bored, etc. — or face illustrations that depict these emotions. Have each user select one or more emotions triggered by the prototype.)
• Regarding intention of use
  “Having looked at this product concept today, on a scale of one to five, how much would you be willing to use it once it has been refined and launched?” “Why?”
• General feedback
  “Feel free to annotate any changes or corrections that you feel would improve this concept.”

5. Learn: We’ve Shown. Now What?

Collect your users’ feedback and find similarities in their evaluations of the concept. Build an affinity diagram⁶⁸ to identify the most common suggestions. Incorporate their feedback, and move on to building a high-fidelity prototype that reflects the product’s look and feel with a greater level of detail. Repeat the testing session with as many users as needed.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the impact that low-fidelity prototypes can have on our design processes and outcomes. The five steps outlined above are meant to guide you through the process of building and testing a low-fidelity prototype, and they will surely improve the quality and depth of your design work. Think about the concepts that you are currently working on: How could you validate them before investing an overwhelming amount of time and effort into polishing them? It isn’t always easy to see that a raw representation of what you are building might just be the right amount of fidelity needed to ask the most crucial questions about its effectiveness. When in doubt about whether you’re ready to test an early concept, always keep author Elizabeth Gilbert’s words close to heart:

Part of the elasticity that you need, in order to continue to try to create, is the foregone conclusion that not all of it is going to be fabulously successful. But it’s all going to be part of a long lifetime body of experimentation.

Other Resources

• “50 Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits, Resources and Source Files⁶⁹,” Paul Andrew
• “Free Printable Sketching, Wireframing and Note-Taking PDF Templates⁷⁰,” Paul Andrew
• “Design Better and Faster With Rapid Prototyping⁷¹,” Lyndon Cerejo

References

• “The Psychological Experience of Prototyping⁷²” (PDF), Elizabeth Gerber and Maureen Carroll, Design Studies, 33:1 (2012), pages 64–84
• “Tasks-in-Interaction: Paper and Screen Based Documentation in Collaborative Activity⁷³,” Paul Luff, Christian Heath and David Greatbatch, Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, (New York, NY), pages 163–170
• “Chapter 10: People and Prototypes,” Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions⁷⁴, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2007), pages 682–723
• “Using Paper Prototypes in Home-Page Design⁷⁵,” Jakob Nielsen, IEEE Software, 12:4 (1995), pages 88–89,97
• “Prototyping for Tiny Fingers⁷⁶¹²,” Marc Rettig, Communications of the ACM, 37:4 (1994), pages 21–27
• “Low vs. High-Fidelity Prototyping Debate⁷⁷,” James Rudd, Interactions, 3:1 (1996), pages 76–85

(ah, il, al, ml)

Footnotes

1. 1 http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/01/24/this-is-how-apples-top-secret-product-development-process-works/
2. 2 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/matt-tyas-large-preview.jpg
3. 3 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/matt-tyas-large-preview.jpg
4. 4 http://books.google.com.co/books?id=O0-9Iw0Qh6EC&redir_esc=y
5. 5 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=223514
6. 6 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/miiverse2/0/0
7. 7 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/miiverse2/0/0
8. 8 http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/wiiu/miiverse2/0/0
9. 9 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=214388&url=http%253A%252F%252Fieeexplore.ieee.org%252Fiel3%252F1485%252F5589%252F00214388
10. 10 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X11000536
11. 11 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/16/design-better-faster-with-rapid-prototyping/
12. 12 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=175288
13. 13 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=143475
14. 14 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?reload=true&tp=&arnumber=391840&url=http%253A%252F%252Fieeexplore.ieee.org%252Fiel1%252F52%252F8878%252F00391840.pdf%253Farnumber%253D391840
15. 15 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/scad-low-fidelity-prototype-large-preview.jpg
16. 16 http://www.iact.in/tag/prototype/
17. 17 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/scad-low-fidelity-prototype-large-preview.jpg
18. 18 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/paper-based-prototypes-large-preview.jpg
19. 19 http://www.floatdesign.net/blog/why-we-%28and-our-clients%29-love-pa/
20. 20 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/paper-based-prototypes-large-preview.jpg
21. 21 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sticky-jots-large-preview.jpg
22. 22 http://stickyjots.com/
23. 23 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sticky-jots-large-preview.jpg
24. 24 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/healthymade-large-preview.jpg
25. 25 http://www.ashleycostanzo.com/healthymade
26. 26 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/healthymade-large-preview.jpg
27. 27 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/lego-serious-play-large-preview.jpg
28. 28 http://www.seriousplay.com/
29. 29 http://www.liquidagency.com/blog/lego-serious-play-is-not-a-game/
30. 30 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/lego-serious-play-large-preview.jpg
31. 31 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/business-model-canvas-large-preview.jpg
32. 32 http://gsjaberdeen.org/sponsorus/
33. 33 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/business-model-canvas-large-preview.jpg
34. 34 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/flower-seed-packaging-sketches-large-preview.jpg
35. 35 https://www.behance.net/gallery/5624949/Packaging-Design
36. 36 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/flower-seed-packaging-sketches-large-preview.jpg
37. 37 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-1-opt.jpg
38. 38 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-1-opt.jpg
39. 39 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-2-opt.jpg
40. 40 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-2-opt.jpg
41. 41 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-3-opt.jpg
42. 42 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-3-opt.jpg
43. 43 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-4-opt.jpg
44. 44 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-4-opt.jpg
45. 45 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-5-opt.jpg
46. 46 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-5-opt.jpg
47. 47 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-6-opt.jpg
48. 48 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/prototype-6-opt.jpg
49. 49 https://medium.com/@martafioni/payfour-foursquare-ux-design-79965f6fb835
50. 50 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/just-build-it-large-preview.jpg
51. 51 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/just-build-it-large-preview.jpg
52. 52 http://provide.smashingmagazine.com/justbuildit_poster.pdf
53. 53 http://mockup.io/about/
54. 54 https://popapp.in
55. 55 https://www.flinto.com/
56. 56 http://www.solidifyapp.com/
57. 57 http://www.invisionapp.com/
58. 58 http://proto.io/
59. 59 http://balsamiq.com/
60. 60 https://moqups.com/
61. 61 https://cacoo.com/
62. 62 https://mural.ly
63. 63 https://canvanizer.com/new/business-model-canvas
64. 64 https://bmfiddle.com/
65. 65 http://stickies.io/
66. 66 http://www.processon.com/
67. 67 http://conceptboard.com/
68. 68 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/01/02/how-working-walls-unlock-creative-insight/
69. 69 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/05/50-free-ui-and-web-design-wireframing-kits-resources-and-source-files/
70. 70 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/29/free-printable-sketching-wireframing-and-note-taking-pdf-templates/
71. 71 http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/16/design-better-faster-with-rapid-prototyping/
72. 72 http://egerber.mech.northwestern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Gerber_PsychologicalExperienceofPrototyping.pdf
73. 73 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=143475
74. 74 http://www.designinginteractions.com/book
75. 75 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=391840
76. 76 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=175288
77. 77 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=223514

The post The Skeptic’s Guide To Low-Fidelity Prototyping appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

The NHL has had what some are calling its “summer of analytics,” as the league’s teams frantically harvest a small world of online amateurs for quantitative power. It started when Kyle Dubas, who had earned an analytics following as stat-crunching general manager of the OHL’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, found himself elevated to assistant GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs at the tender age of 28.

As any hockey-analytics dude could tell you, the NHL salary cap means that player payrolls are a fixed fraction of league revenues. As teams’ profits grow, each has more money to spend on non-player frippery—including research and advice. Dubas was given the Leafs’ black credit card and told to build an analytics department.

Other teams moved fast in self-defence. Tyler Dellow, the Toronto litigator who spent a decade criticizing the Edmonton Oilers for various species of illogic on his now-defunct mc79hockey blog, was ushered inside the tent by his frenemy franchise. Poker professional and author Sunny Mehta was named director of analytics in New Jersey. Bay Area scientist-statistician Eric Tulsky, a rising figure in the online world of hockey analytics, was hired by . . . somebody: He won’t say who, and the media hasn’t sniffed it out yet.

Meanwhile, Dubas and the Leafs netted Cam Charron, a witty Yahoo “data journalist” who had been one of the Leafs’ many Internet tormentors. They also bagged formally trained statistician-blogger Rob Pettapiece, and Darryl Metcalf, whose Extra Skater site had been the best-ever place to get statistical summaries from NHL game sheets.

This represents a stunning private capture of ideas and approaches that floated free in the commons for a long time. (Extra Skater has dropped from view, as have a million or so words worth of Dellow tirades.) The quantitative gold rush will be familiar to fans of baseball, where something similar happened more than a decade ago. But why is hockey going Moneyball now?

The Maple Leafs’ difficult 2013-14 season was a public experiment that even the most conservative hockey fan could not ignore. Before Game 1, the analytics crowd jeered when the Leafs bought out truculent, opinionated Belarussian centre Mikhail Grabovski. They howled when the Leafs gave New Jersey winger David Clarkson a $37-million contract swollen with ironclad signing-bonus money. Clarkson was then 29 and was seemingly being paid for the one fluke 30-goal season on his resumé.

Anti-analytics dinosaurs in the media cheered as the Leafs got off to a hot start: By Halloween, they had 10 wins and four losses. Stick that in your pocket protector! But the nerds, along with their media tribune, the Globe and Mail’s James Mirtle, warned that the Leafs’ scoring pace was almost certainly inconsistent with their shots for and against, i.e., the divisive “Corsi” concept that is to hockey analytics what on-base percentage was to baseball’s Moneyball revolution.

The movie ended exactly as the nerds predicted. The Leafs, despite good goaltending, sagged to sixth in the Atlantic division. Clarkson’s contract is regarded as one of the league’s biggest, ugliest millstones. Grabovski, paid $14 million by the Leafs to go away, established himself in Washington as an entertaining minor star. The playoffs went ahead without the Leafs: At the start of the tournament, “Fenwick close” figures (a variant of Corsi) pointed to a Kings-Rangers final, with the Western team strongly favoured.

By now, every fan has heard of Corsi—named, a little misleadingly, for former goalie Jim Corsi, who was the first (that anybody knows of) to start counting shot attempts, including missed and blocked shots. Probably, many have heard of the “Fenwick” variant of Corsi, which leaves out the blocks and is superior for some purposes. (Fenwick is Matt Fenwick, a Flames fan and engineer now based in Edmonton.) These statistics have, perhaps regrettably, become the buzzwords of hockey’s analytics revolution.

Their raw predictive power is impressive, as last year’s playoffs suggest. Corsi and Fenwick correlate closely with time spent in the opposition zone, and with scoring-chance generation. They are more reliable from year to year for an individual player or team than traditional stats. Over just one season, they cannot serve as a catch-all measure of player quality, but they provide a sort of microscope that can be used to look for obvious glitches in a team’s line choices, special teams, or defensive pairings.

That kind of specific problem-solving, done in real time rather than leisurely retrospect, is what the NHL teams who hire analysts are looking for. Dellow, for one, was working on faceoff formations before his hiring, using Corsi-like stats to spot problems and follow up with game-video study. The woeful Oilers, who need any edge they can get, will now own whatever knowledge is forthcoming.

The summer of analytics was thus a setback for the public domain, but others will arise to replace the raptured nerds. Number-crunchers like Sportsnet’s Chris Boyle are still pursuing the elusive Nietzschean dream of transcending Corsi and Fenwick, which unrealistically treat all shot attempts equally, by injecting “shot quality” into the model. Elsewhere, blogger Corey Sznajder, influenced by the ideas of Eric Tulsky, is crowd-funding an ambitious project to record the type and outcome of every “zone entry” for every game in the 2013-14 season.

The industrious Sznajder announced, practically as I was writing that sentence, that he has been hired by an unnamed NHL club, but he still intends to complete and release his zone-entry database. His data could ultimately leach some of the dump-and-chase out of hockey, in much the way that baseball stat-heads gradually eliminated overuse of the bunt.

Baseball’s “sabermetricians,” with their prejudices against “smallball” and base-running nuance, are sometimes accused of having made baseball more boring. Whether this fear is germane to hockey will depend on your subjective preferences. The average hockey stat-head imagines the NHL regular-season game becoming more like the playoffs, with fewer staged fights and marquee hits. He does not like the way some teams waste fourth-line minutes on human pylons. He really wants “defensive defencemen” to prove they are paying their way by reducing shots-against.

The nerds have ascended only the first step of the ladder. Some will fail to fit into the NHL environment; some will prove to have left their best work behind them. The league is not without its own internal analytics traditions; after all, Jim Corsi was a coach with the Sabres when he started counting shots. But the day of the first true analytics GM, the boss armed with opinions and data largely formed outside the game, is a long way off.

NET FACTS

Why goalies don’t improve

The biggest challenge for hockey quants will probably always be goaltending. A goalie’s individual performance is reasonably well expressed by a single number: even-strength save percentage. But since most individuals’ save percentages are crowded between .900 and .950, they are mathematically volatile: It can take years to sort stars from duds. Some things we do know:

Starting back-to-back games—bad idea. Goalies have markedly lower save percentages on zero days’ rest, and Tulsky, Dellow, and others have shown that the effect is almost certainly due to the tired goalie, not the skaters.

Goalies seem to peak early in their careers—no later than age 24 or 25 and, possibly, much earlier. Yes, this is your correspondent’s “goalies don’t improve” bugbear. But it has some support from Tulsky and others in analytics-land. Watch for league GMs to gradually split between buyers and sellers of older-goalie labour.

Teams can get themselves back into more games by pulling goalies early. Though professional statisticians have been saying so for at least 25 years, the NHL ignored them in a case of endemic irrationality. Hall of Famer Patrick Roy, named Colorado head coach, changed that in his rookie season. He started pulling goalies with up to 4:46 left in the third. His prestige brought immediate imitators.

The post The numbers game: Hockey is going to the nerds appeared first on Macleans.ca.

 

“No, we’re all set.”

“We’re happy with what we have.”

“We’re not looking to change at this time.”

How often have you heard these words come out of a buyers mouth? Nobody wants to hear these words. They stop sales people in their tracks.

Why?

Because, for most sales people, if the prospect already has what you’re selling then why “push” them on something. No one wants to be a “pushy” sales person.  I agree. No one wants to deal with a pushy sales person. BUT, in many cases the customer doesn’t know what their alternatives are and don’t know what they are saying no to. It’s your job to help them make an educated decision based on what they know and don’t know.

You see, when people buy, or more specifically when they decide they want something new it’s due to one of two scenarios. It’s either because they have identified a problem they need to fix OR they’ve seen a product or service that highlights an opportunity they didn’t know they could capitalize on. It’s really that trait forward.

Let me simplify. People switch or change if:

1. They recognize a problem they want to fix or make go away
2. Something (a product or service) highlights an opportunity they want to take advantage of.

Number two is where the win is when it comes to the objections listed above. When a prospect or buyer says they don’t want to change, that they are not looking, that’s code for — We don’t see a problem that needs to be fixed. Therefore, the first reason to change is not present. Here is the good news, number two is still in play.  Unfortunately, too many sales people walk away from a potential sale, because they don’t recognize number two is still on the table.

Putting number two in play is tricky, but if your product or service can truly improve a buyers environment, then you have a chance. The key to putting number two in play comes down to knowledge of your product AND knowledge of your prospects environment. If you don’t know more about what your product or service does in relation to your prospects current solutions you won’t be successful getting number two in play. And, if you don’t know as much or even more about the environment your customer is in, you’ll fail executing on number two as well. Getting prospects to see an opportunity they didn’t already see is a “knowledge play.” You have to know more than your prospects current and future states than they do. That’s hard and requires serious skill, tact and knowledge.

To get your prospect to see opportunities they didn’t see starts with having a super robust understanding of what the common current state is for their environment and what is good and not good about their environment. You have to understand the workflows, the touch-points, the costs, the failure points, the use cases and more. You have to have to know what your prospects are using their solutions for and how they are using them.

Once you understand what your prospects are using for solutions and how they are using them create a list of three or four questions that can or will highlight the differences in what you offer and what your prospect currently has today. The objective is to create a gap in knowledge between what you know and what your prospect knows.

Here are a couple of my favorite questions to ask when I hear the objections from above:

1. No problem, I understand you are all set, but if I could ask one question. Are you familiar with the difference between “insert your solution” and “insert what ever solution they are using?” By asking this simple question you quickly determine how educated the buyer is and on what basis they said their not interested. This is a great question for creating that gap.
2. I understand you’re all set, not a problem. But, could I ask a quick question, how are you solving “insert a common business or workflow problem you know most of your target buyers are struggling with.”
3. Thanks for your time, if I may ask one last question before we get off the phone, how are you capitalizing on “insert a common opportunity your prospects or buyers CAN’T capitalize on in their current environment.”

By asking any variations of these three questions sets you up to find a gap in your prospects knowledge. Knowledge and information are behind every sale. Too often we assume our prospects and clients have all the information and are making informed decisions. This assumption is a bad one. Prospects and customers usually don’t have all the information, they are too busy running their businesses.  It’s up to the sales person to educate them and sometimes that takes a little push.

When a prospect says they are all set, don’t assume they are right. They usually aren’t, it’s not their job to know it all, it’s yours.

Find the knowledge gap and educate the customer. If they’re all set with all the information then you’ve done your job, until then you’re walking away too early.

Don’t quit too soon.

When it comes to social media marketing, and in this case Facebook, your business goal isn’t to get likes and shares, it’s to do sales!

For that reason every post should have a clear purpose. Ask yourself, “What is the goal of this post?” and “How does it relate to my business goals?“. If you can’t answer these questions you’re wasting time – one of the scarcest resources any business owner has.

If you’re in the wine business your goal is to sell more cases of wine, right? To test your audience and gauge if there is a market for Chilean wine you run a post on a new Carmenere with a question “What’s your favourite Chilean wine?”. Your goal for this post is to engage your audience and gauge their interest in Chilean wine. Wines you may ultimately stock based on your fans interest.

Facebook holds great potential for your business: 41% of B2B companies and 62% of B2C companies using Facebook have acquired a customer from it.

To make sure you’re using this channel effectively here are 10 Facebook marketing tips.

1. Integrate FaceBook into your Marketing Strategy

Be clear on what you need to accomplish with your marketing strategy and the role Facebook will play in helping you achieve your goals.

If for example your goal is to generate 40 new leads a month with 10 of them coming through social media marketing ask  yourself  - How will Facebook support that goal? How many leads will come from your fan base? How will you attract the right fans (use your buyer personas)?

Your fan base is the entry point into your sales funnel and your Facebook posts the digital breadcrumbs that draw your audience into the funnel and down a trail toward a much more substantial piece of content they can download after filling out a form.

Having a plan for attracting the right fans, engaging existing fans and drawing them into your sales funnel using posts is the first step toward reaching your goals.

2. Have a Clear Value Proposition

One of the biggest marketing mistakes is not having a clear value proposition. You must communicate how you solve a problem, what the benefits you offer are and how you’re different to the competition. Then make sure your value proposition is consistent across your marketing channels.

This is Hppy, an application to measure employee engagement, it’s clear as soon as you hit their homepage what their value proposition is – they reduce employee turnover and increase productivity.

However their Facebook page doesn’t communicate the same message. It simply asks “Are you happy?”.  In their defence they’ve just done website refresh and I’m sure their social media pages will be updated shortly. Now go over and become a Hppy fan.

3. Set up Your Company Page

First make sure you’ve setup a company page and not a personal page. Then go into the “About” section of your Facebook page and make sure it’s properly filled out with searchable information.

Provide readers with a clear value proposition, an overview of what your business has to offer with a link to your website, include your address details if you want your ratings to appear and add any products or services with links to relevant pages on your website. Even on your about page take the opportunity to pull fans into your sales funnel.

4. Build an Audience

Chances are you already have customers, friends, and family that would be happy to give you a boost. If your business is a Pop-Up Kitchen reach out to customers, family and friends you’ve served and ask them for their support.

You can do this by inviting relevant Facebook friends to like your Page, or uploading a list of best customers so you can send them an email. All of which can be done from the “Build Audience”section. These are the fans who will build the initial foundation and set the tone of conversation on your Page.

To keep growing your audience you can use your website, blog, or email newsletter. Just be cautious not to over utilize these channels and annoy people. You can also use Facebook’s various social plugins – especially the Like Button or Like Box – to get people to like your Page without having to leave your page and go over to your Facebook page.

 

5. Have a Goal for every Post

Now that you have everything setup you’re ready to start posting. Make sure you have a goal for every post and the type of content you post is aligned with your goal. These are the three main post types and the effect of each post type.

• Status Update = Comments
• Link = Click Through
• Photo & Video  = Likes & Shares

If your goal is to generate traffic to a landing page then have a link type post to pull fans through to that page. On the other hand if your goal is to have fans share content with their friends then use a photo or video type post. Basically, make sure the format matches the goal.

In his online course “10 Mistakes People Make on Facebook Pages and How to Fix Them” Francisco Rosales suggest the following formula for each post:

• Set a specific goal for each post
• Be specific with the numbers you want to reach
• Determine the type of media to reach your goal
• Track the right metrics and ignore the shiny objects

6. Have a Call-to-Action

Once you start posting you’re communicating with your readers. Great! But are you asking them to take any kind of action? Or are you simply creating a dead-end for the visitor? You need to tell fans what to do next otherwise they’re simply going to surf away.

In the example below fans are informed about an event and invited to register for it by clicking the register here button. The whole image is a Call-to-Action link and will take the visitor to a registration page.

7. Use Facebook Insights

Insights is Facebook’s internal analytics tool that will help you measure and analyse the performance of your Facebook pages. Clicking the “Insights” tab will take you to an overview of your page performance. You can then drill down into detailed information about your Page Likes, Post Reach and Audience Engagement.

This is where you measure the success of your Post goals and, based on the data, make decisions on how to adjust your marketing to get the results you’re looking for.

8. Getting Your Posting Time and Frequency Right

There’s a lot of information out there on the best time to post on Facebook and other social media channels. The reality is there are too many variables for this information to be accurate. Your Facebook page is unique so you need to establish when most of your fans are on Facebook.

To do this go over to Insights and select the Posts tab. In the example below the highest fan engagement is around 1pm and continues through the afternoon. This is the ideal time to be posting, keeping in mind a post reaches 50% of its potential in the first 30 minutes.

9. Use the Data Wisely

Make sure you track the right analytics and numbers in Insights. You don’t want to waste time tracking numbers that aren’t relevant to your business or marketing goals. Francisco Rosales from Social Mouths suggests a four step formula to make sure your getting the most out of your analytics.

• Set aside a block of time (30 minutes) to spend quality time going through your analytics
• Learn which metrics are relevant to your business, how they work and what they mean
• Ignore the metrics that aren’t important
• Use the data to make business and marketing decisions

10. Never Stop Experimenting

Today marketing is all about experimenting and testing new ideas. That’s why it’s important you set goals for all of your marketing initiatives. Have a clear goal for every post, analyse its performance and if you aren’t getting the results you want then experiment with something else. Often the Posts you think least likely to have an impact bring the biggest results. So don’t be scared to try something new, just don’t be deceptive or mislead people.

Excited? Want to learn more about how to to use Facebook to Attract Customers? Then download our free eBook: How to Attract Customers with Facebook.

There’s an old saying, “Half my advertising dollars are responsible for all my profits. But I have no idea which half.”

In other words, organizations have long flown blind when it comes to their marketing efforts. Questions about which audiences to target with which messages in which channels were largely a matter of the gut feel on the part of marketing executives, managers, and the sales force.

But today analytics combined with marketing automation can answer these questions, allowing you to market more effectively and at less cost.

Choosing Your Audience

Who doesn’t want the highest yield on their marketing dollars? One way to start is by finding your highest value customers and focusing your marketing efforts on expanding your base of highly profitable clientele.

Start by looking at current customers to determine who’s the most profitable. Beware, they may not be who you think. For example, one company’s business was providing service for heating units. They thought that customers coming to them for smaller orders every few months or every quarter were more profitable than ones that came in only once a year. But by analyzing profitability, the company found that it was losing money on these more frequent shoppers because they had higher fixed costs for order entry, billing, collection, and so on. With this better understanding of profitability, the company was able to target its most profitable customers.

Determine the right messages

How can marketing automation and analytics help you determine what messages will resonate most with customers?

Start by talking to the people in house who deal with customers day in and day out, such as marketing and sales. Based on these conversations, come up with a theory about the types of challenges your target customers face, what their buying cycle looks like, and what information they need at each phase of the buying cycle.

Next, develop a lead-nurture campaign based on your hypothesis about what content will appeal to the buyer at each stage in the buying cycle. Using marketing automation, you can collect data, such as click-through rates and engagement rates, for each piece of content. This data will tell you whether that content really is interesting to your audience or whether it needs to be tweaked.

Because marketing automation solutions progressively profile prospects interactions, you can then track how your audience responds to various pieces of content over time. Use that information to establish a ranking system to identify hotter prospects based on a wide range of behaviors. Continually fine tuning this ranking system allows you to more effectively nurture prospects through the pipeline.

Find the right channels

You can also use the marketing automation platform to analyze the performance of various channels to determine the best ones for your audience. The system can track leads from acquisition through nurture to close. You can see which channels have the most leads, which leads are the highest quality, which have the highest level of engagement, which segment of the target audience clicks on the content, and so on.

For each channel you can see you’ve spent X amount, generated Y leads, X percentage converted, which channels they converted from. This gives you enough data to calculate ROI for each channel. Based on your calculations, you can determine whether you should use more social media, direct mail, telephone, and so on.

Better yet, when you combine analytics with marketing automation, not only can you easily test multiple theories to find out which works best, a marketing automation platform allows you to scale your marketing efforts very quickly once you find the best program—unlike the limited scalability of using sales reps and doing cold calls.

Note: This post was written in collaboration with StratMG, a marketing services firm that specializes in go-to-market strategy and demand generation.

For more information, download our white paper, “Making the Most of MAP.”

Recently, it was reported that marketing automation platform provider Act-On, and the call tracking company Ifbyphone, had announced a partnership that would bring the two technologies together – thereby expanding the reach of marketing automation beyond strictly digital channels. Considering how rapidly marketing technologies have been evolving, it was only a matter of time until marketing automation assimilated phone tracking technology as well – it makes perfect sense in terms of measuring and optimizing every part of the buyer’s journey. Nevertheless, what was inevitable is now happening, and behind this specific technology partnership are a few trends, advantages, and best practices that, in general, have been separating Best-in-Class marketers for some time now.

Connecting Business Development / Inside Sales & Marketing:

Traditionally, business development or inside sales teams have fallen almost entirely under the purview of sales management. Functionally speaking, however, as business development and inside sales primarily use phone-based outreach to qualify marketing-generated leads and verify sales-readiness, these teams actually serve as liaisons between marketing and sales. By integrating phone-tracking data into marketing automation data, business development and inside sales teams can have a stronger connection, and even report directly into marketing along with their normal sales functions. In fact, we’re increasingly seeing these teams report to the marketing function as a way to hack sales-acceptance of marketing leads. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of Best-in-Class companies in Aberdeen’s State of Marketing Automation 2014: Processes that Produce report are taking this approach, compared with 39% of all other companies. As marketing-sales alignment research shows, 73% of Best-in-Class firms have already empowered their sales teams with access to marketing automation data (vs. 61% of Average firms, and 56% of Laggards), so extending this best practice to phone-based activities is both a logical and valuable progression.

Omni-Channel Advantages:

On the customer experience front, one of the most differentiating trends between top performers and their peers is the implementation of an omni-channel strategy – whereby all market or customer-facing interactions across all channels are not only measured, but optimized to be consistent, relevant and insightful to customers. Companies with omni-channel customer experience management (CEM) programs, for example, increase customer lifetime value at an average rate of 4% year-over-year while non-onmni-channel organizations are hemorrhaging in their customer lifetime value at a 23.3% average decline year-over-year. With digital channels managed by marketing automation integrated with data from phone interactions, organizations have the ability to achieve an even higher competitive advantage through omni-channel strategies.

Phone Tracking Informed Lead Scores:

In my recent marketing automation report, the research revealed that the use of lead scoring was a key differentiator in effective marketing automation platform (MAP) adoption with 68% of Best-in-Class organizations reporting usage, while only 45% of Average firms and 28% of Laggards were able to follow suit for lead scoring. With phone-tracking functionality added to the marketing automation data pool, even richer lead scores can be developed based on call and call attempt metrics.

Overall, however, these are just a few of the pressures and possibilities at play behind the integration of marketing automation and phone tracking capabilities. Only time will tell how such integrations will actually play out, but what’s your take on this recent news? Please share your own insights, opinions or predictions of how you think this partnership will impact the marketing space in the comments below.

To maximize the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts, it’s important to be constantly testing and optimizing your campaigns. A/B testing is a way for marketers to test different variables and see which are the most effective at generating leads and conversions.

A/B testing can provide actionable, measurable and (sometimes) immediate results. Often the smallest change can make a big difference. We’ll walk through the basics of A/B testing, what to test, what to measure and how to get started.

Defining A/B Testing

A/B testing is a pretty simple concept. You essentially use two versions of an element with one changed variable and test each version on a different sample. This could be something as simple as two different subject lines in an email or two different landing page layouts. In the end, you choose the version that brings a better response rate and then use it moving forward. It can help you increase effectiveness without having to increase visitors. For example just changing the wording of a CTA button could dramatically increase your conversion rate.

Ways to Utilize A/B Testing

A/B testing can be used to test a variety of elements in your marketing program. Here are some different ways it can be utilized:

1. Call-to-Action buttons – You need to make sure you create the most “click-worthy” CTAs in order to maximize your conversion rate. A simple button has many different elements that you can test. For example, the wording on the button (Download Now vs. Get the eBook), location on the page (top, bottom, left, right), style of button (simple vs. gradient), size (small or large), color, etc. Start with one variable and slowly test different changes over time.

2. Landing pages – When you create a landing page for a premium content download, webinar or other purpose, the design of the page, the headline and the supporting copy can have a large impact on conversions. Test out different designs and layouts, but remember to only change one aspect at a time. If you have two versions, send half of the visitors to one and half to the other. Over time you’ll be able to see which version is the most successful and why.

3. Form fields and length – The type of information you ask and the number of fields on your form can have a dramatic impact on conversions. Marketers always want as much information as they can get from a prospect, but, depending on the offer, a prospect might not be as inclined to fill out a form if it is too long or asks too many detailed questions (i.e. budget). Try testing different forms to see if it makes a difference. We would also recommend using progressive profiling as an alternative way to balance form fields and length.

4. Email subject lines – Subject lines can make or break your email campaigns and are often the reason people decide to open your email or delete it. Before sending out an email to your entire segment or list, test 2 different subject lines on a small sample, then send the winning to the remaining contacts in your list to optimize your email for the most success.

5. Email sender names – Sometimes changing the person who is sending the email makes a difference in open rates. Are your emails being sent from your president, sales rep or just your company’s info address? Sometimes an email coming directly from a sales rep that has an established relationship with the contact will get a larger open rate than an email from your CEO. Test and see what makes a difference.

6. Images – Test different images on your landing pages or emails to see if they make a difference with clickthroughs, views or downloads. Supporting images to your content and offers can determine different actions by visitors.

7. Length of copy ­– Whether it is an email or a landing page, sometimes a shorter message is better, or a longer explanation is needed. Test different lengths of copy to see which engages your clients more to take the action you want.

Getting started

When getting started, one of the most important parts of an A/B test is to keep it simple and only change one variable. For example, if you are sending an email and want to test the subject line, make sure the body of the email is exactly the same in both emails. Don’t change the subject line AND the length of the email because it is harder to see what made the real difference in conversions.

Also, be aware that not all tests will have a statistically significant result. This did not mean that you failed; it just means it doesn’t make a big difference. Find another aspect that can be tested and test again. One last thing to remember: don’t trust your gut—trust the results! Your personal preference might not be the best approach to take, which is where the science of A/B testing is so helpful.

A/B testing is an ongoing process. Each time you test, you take any knowledge you gain and try to apply that in the future. As you write more content, create more landing pages or make changes to your website, A/B testing can help you see what is working so you can improve your marketing efforts.

GUEST POST

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A funny thing happened at a conference. I learned things. And I remembered stuff. And I am still thinking about how I could apply those things to my work. Oh, and I laughed. When talking about B2B technology, I laughed.

I’ve worked in B2B technology-focused marketing for 15 years, and while there are a lot of smart, funny people working in this broad space, the marketing and PR doesn’t always reflect it. At NewsCred’s Content Marketing Summit, there were still a few dry presentations, but many mirrored the current discussions around content marketing — to be memorable and impactful, written content must be approached from a storytelling perspective.

This is no secret. Yet, 60-70 percent of content produced by B2B companies goes unused, according to SiriusDecisions. We’re seeing the consumerization of the enterprise as companies realize that humans use the apps and platforms that make businesses run more effectively. Much of the marketing, however, is still filled with buzzwords and product features that fail to connect with those people. Sirius calls for a shift from “product-centric” to “audience-centric” content to better engage and ultimately drive demand.

Within the remaining 30-40 percent that does get used, there is some great content.

BuzzFeed and VICE are leading the industry in rising above this stat. Jonah Peretti talked about how content and communication are merging, as people increasingly share content and visuals in lieu of their own words. Video and storytelling is the key for Eddy Moretti at VICE. He said “news media today is like a kids soccer game; everyone goes here, then everyone goes there. There is a lot of other stuff going on in the world, and today’s youth want to know about it. We are using video to tell those stories.”

There are well-publicized successes on the consumer side: KMart’s “Ship My Pants” and HelloFlo’s “First Moon Party” were provocative and hilarious, but also received nearly 10 million and 30 million views, respectively, and generates press from TIME to Mashable to The New York Times.

But what about B2B?

Tim Washer, a renowned comedy writer who produces rich media for Cisco, started us down that path. His first slide was powerful: “73 percent of people who read corporate blogs are human.”

To underscore the magnitude of this stat, he put it into a pie chart. Then he offered some perspective from Oscar Wilde: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

Washer points out that humor can cut through the clutter and demonstrate authenticity, which is exactly what any marketing effort should strive to accomplish. He gives an example: there is undoubtedly nothing funny about a Cisco router, but he shared a Valentine’s Day video campaign where the ASR 9000 product was portrayed as the perfect way to delight a woman. People might not run out and buy it after viewing this video, but a key theme of the conference was around the “content gap.”

The sales funnel is long and divergent, yet most B2B companies focus on getting people into the funnel and then leave the rest of the journey to sales calls, product marketing emails, or boondoggle dinners. Audience-centric content like the Valentine’s campaign supports those gaps in the sales cycle, and can move current or potential customers along the process. NewsCred’s Michael Brenner led a panel with SAP, VMware, and Travelers Insurance that dove into this more. VMWare’s Oliver Roll said that if your team asks “How many sales leads will this generate?” then you’re not ready for a content marketing strategy. I get that, but if we stopped there we would get nowhere, right?

This leads me to my big unanswered question: How do you get a B2B company on board with applying more consumer-like strategies to its marketing? Here are some thoughts:

1. Start Off Small: Trial and error is a big part of content marketing. If you put all your eggs in one big expensive basket, and it doesn’t work, then you likely won’t get to try again. Start off with a small effort that can scale larger so you can more easily get buy in.

2. Small Doesn’t Mean Cheap: Poorly done rich media is VERY obvious. And people will point that out. Although John in accounting might very well have a knack for video, bringing in a creative director who knows how to make content that engages people is a worthwhile investment.

3. Find a Champion (Ideally Outside of Marketing): Content marketing can touch on myriad aspects of your business. It can bring in leads, drive brand awareness, help nurture prospects, bring customers back, and drive press. Getting people to see that a humorous, well-done piece of rich media is not a stunt, but rather a business strategy, is a crucial tipping point in a successful content marketing campaign.

4. Share a Case Study: Behavior change is ultimately the outcome of a content marketing campaign. This includes how someone perceives or recalls your brand, thinks about an industry, or re-considers the problems in their lives for which they need solutions. But this isn’t always visible in the bottom line, so make sure to have some successful examples in your back pocket that measure impact.

5. Tell a Story: Back to that 73 percent — In almost every B2B market, humans are involved and you are likely helping them solve a problem. Tell those stories. Talking about product specs and features is not a story.

The biggest message that I came away with is that content marketing is not a one-off, isolated project, but rather a seismic shift in how companies communicate to their stakeholders. You just have to start somewhere; and even if it is small, make it good. Or funny. Or taking a page from BuzzFeed, contains kittens.

Tyler Perry is GM and Partner, Bateman Group

More often than not, there seems to be a disconnect between Marketing and Sales. Not having these two teams aligned can be a vital — and costly — mistake.

How does your sales team perceive the leads Marketing produces? Be honest.

• They love them — couldn’t be happier!
• They complain about lead quality.
• They complain about lead volume.
• The say leads, what leads? Marketing gives us leads?

If you chose answer No. 1, the first thing I would say is, well done. The second thing I would ask is, when was the last time you talked with your sales team?

Lead generation is an iterative process that requires consistent closed-loop feedback. Closing the loop on a regular basis allows you to constantly learn from each interaction.

Sales and Marketing often believe they are working together, but I’ve found collaboration takes more than annual, quarterly or monthly meetings. That’s why I think we can learn a lot from the football team huddle.

Each huddle allows the team to adjust, get feedback and focus on their next play together. Consider having short huddles daily and weekly between the marketing and sales team members.

In addition to implementing Sales and Marketing huddles, here are 31 ideas you can use to improve alignment and collaboration:

1. Train your sales people on how to optimize your lead generation investment and how to give you feedback.
2. Regularly get the marketing team out into the field with the sales team and channel.
3. Centralize the lead qualification process.
4. Get a closed loop feedback from the sales team on leads, and carefully examine the conversion process with regular face-to-face meetings or conference calls.
5. Understand where the sales team is with their priorities, and help them nurture. Do not force-feed leads at a time when their focus might be on closing important sales efforts.
6. Develop a strategic lead generation plan, with focus on standardizing and documenting the sales process for purposes of tracking and measuring.
7. Conduct frequent, regular meetings to stay updated on developments.
8. Share best-practice lead generation information.
9. Assign revenue goals to joint Sales and Marketing plans.
10. Document the lead hand-off process and accountabilities at each stage.
11. Be flexible.
12. Promote lead generation from the top down and the bottom up.
13. Develop a universal lead definition.
14. Arrange compensation to reflect shared accountability via lead generation.
15. Close the loop on each sales lead generated.
16. Focus on how to increase effective selling time of the sales team.
17. Integrate Sales and Marketing into the same database.
18. Define and map responsibilities shared by Sales and Marketing.
19. Share nurturing content. Learn what content is most helpful to progress customers.
20. Continually reinforce lead generation program strategies.
21. Share new insights gained from customer feedback.
22. Jointly develop a message map and value proposition.
23. Examine and apply what has been learned.
24. Implement parameters from successful campaigns.
25. React to and develop solutions for the prospect’s concerns. Better yet, talk to future customers along with your sales team.
26. Conform messaging to target audiences.
27. Analyze and use competitive strategies as warranted.
28. Improve sales tools and marketing materials.
29. Map out your customers’ buying process and key questions customers ask at each step.
30. Determine the life cycle of a lead.
31. Develop a strategy for lead nurturing.

What am I missing? I’d love to hear other tips or ways you’ve leveraged lead generation to improve the Sales and Marketing alignment.

 

Photo Attribution: Jonathan Skalnes

 

You might also like

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

B2B Marketing: The first step a systems integrator took to achieve Sales-Marketing alignment [More from the blogs]

Sales-Marketing Alignment: How consistent messaging helped ADP engage customers at a faster pace [More from the blogs]

Lead Generation Checklist — Part 2: Sales and Marketing — One Team [More from the blogs]

Sales-Marketing Alignment: 8 tactics from a marketer who has worn both hats [MarketingSherpa how-to article]

Companies have a lot of marketing data, but many don't track and measure it. Or if they do, they don't measure the right things.

Determining the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your business is an art as well as a science. What’s really important to your organization? Well, that depends on your objectives, your goals, and your overall strategy. For many companies, email campaigns might not be measured primarily in terms of how much revenue they generate, or they might contribute to the profitability of the company in an indirect way.

For a retailer, it might be pretty simple. Did the recipient click the “Buy Now” link? And did they actually buy? For a health insurance company, it’s more complex. The call to action might be to get the recipient to read an article about controlling blood pressure, in which case the number of clickthroughs and time spent on the site are key metrics – as well as the reduction in claims costs further down the line.

KPIs for Email

There are KPIs relevant to email marketing that you may want to track on a regular basis, including:

1. New prospects. How many new prospects have you uncovered? This is tied to email list growth. This number includes any contacts added to your nurturing database so that your marketing team can build prospects’ interest over time (using email campaigns and other programs), progressively increasing their lead scores.
2. Response rate. How much reach have you achieved? How many impressions as well as conversions did your email generate? Look at open and click rates as well as social sharing and forwarding, if available.
3. Qualified leads. Of the leads you’ve generated, how many have been nurtured to pass a lead score threshold (usually a number agreed on by sales and marketing) that indicates they’re qualified and ready to be handed to sales?
4. New customers: How many new customers did you your email marketing help generate? Tracking clickthroughs and conversions as well as online behavior is key to being able to attribute the number of closed sales to an email campaign.
5. Total revenue: How much did you make from customers who were captured and nurtured using email? Again, measuring conversion will help you tie the dollars to the customer behaviors.

Remember, not all metrics are KPIs. Metrics measure all kinds of interesting information but KPIs are the metrics that are actually important to your business. KPIs should be tied to an objective, as well as quantifiable, and they should also be actionable, so you can take specific actions that will move the dial to improve them.

Funnel Reporting

A funnel report can provide vital information about how well your email marketing campaigns are turning leads into customers. Usually email marketing programs are used to turn known visitors into leads, or to nurture leads into opportunities. With a funnel report, you can uncover how many of your prospects are successfully traveling through the funnel – and how much revenue they represent once they’ve become open and won opportunities.

With the right marketing automation solution, you can also follow email results using a dashboard that provides an at-a-glance overview of key metrics for each campaign. By including trackable links in your email messages, you can look at results over time, understand which hours of the day or days of the week are the best times to send, compare month-to-month or year-over-year results, and look at overall trends as well as in-depth information about each email you’ve sent.

Once you’ve been tracking the results of your email campaigns for a while, you’ll know what kind of response you can usually expect, and you’ll learn to quickly identify if something is going wrong.

Benchmarks can be valuable for spotting trends and understanding some general information about the kinds of results other organizations in your industry are getting from their email programs. But don’t get too concerned about how your metrics compare with those of others. There are a lot of variables at work, and too many email marketers get hung up on doing “better” than everyone else rather than focusing on improving the metrics that really matter to their business success.

So, are your emails working? Are they getting the results you need? With an eye on the right email KPIs and dashboards, you can know for sure. And with all the valuable information you gather, you can fix a failing program, expand a strong performer, and continually improve the results of every email campaign you develop.

Every year since 2009, HubSpot has released its State of Inbound Marketing report with survey results from thousands of sales and marketing executives. This year, the report spans the globe, with more than 3500 respondents and topics ranging from planning and budgeting for inbound marketing to execution and analysis. Challenges and priorities for this group have changed significantly over the past five years, but one thing remains constant: Those who practice inbound are still passionate about growing their businesses through the inbound methodology. Where are we now? We’re moving in some new directions to leverage data and merge disciplines. Let’s take a look at some of these trends.

#1 – Budget vs. ROI

Marketing budgets are up, to the tune of about 74 percent of B2B companies increasing their budgets in 2014. While the driving force behind marketing budget has always been increasing sales revenues, demonstrating positive ROI has always been a retardent, or at least a question mark. Paradoxically, in this year’s HubSpot survey, marketing executives rank proving ROI as their top challenge while giving ROI a lower priority compared to lead generation and sales conversion efforts.

This is particularly true for small companies (with fewer than 25 employees) focused on building inbound marketing programs and increasing traffic and leads and less concerned with proving the viability of inbound. Marketing departments in larger companies are generally more accountable for their budgets and results and compete with other parts of the organization in regular budget reviews. Regardless of company size, it remains difficult to demonstrate ROI if Sales and Marketing aren’t well aligned in terms of goals, processes and data. Then there’s actually measuring ROI. While HubSpot is creating easier ways for linking marketing activities to revenues through its CRM and Analytics, inbound marketers may not yet have the knowledge or experience to put best practices to use.

Actions you can take now:

• Gain a solid understanding of how marketers analyze ROI
• Find out how to use HubSpot tools to measure ROI

Why Do Marketers Still Argue About Inbound vs. Outbound?

It’s kind of crazy, really. Half of those surveyed rank inbound as their primary lead source, while all other sources (paid media, cold calling, trade shows, etc.) combined are at 42 percent on average. The advantage of inbound over outbound widens as you go from B2B to B2C and finally to nonprofits. The State of Inbound data also shows that inbound is no longer a small company thing. Inbound tactics such as blogs, SEO, social media and opt-in email marketing exceed their outbound counterparts in importance by a large margin in both small and large companies.

I think where we are today is confusing to many marketers. It’s fair to say inbound has done a lot more than gain a foothold across the spectrum of company sizes and industries. While inbound caught on with SMBs, large brands and manufacturers are getting on board quickly these days. What’s interesting is that the role of outbound marketing has also changed. Today, the most effective brand awareness and lead generation campaigns leverage all kinds of media, be it owned, earned and paid channels to reach highly targeted audiences and attract them with relevant or entertaining content. It’s no longer a question of inbound versus outbound. Now we’re using both in a sensible way to attract, convert, persuade and support our customers. The inbound methodology and HubSpot tools allow us to measure the results from all content and distribution channels and make better decisions about what works and what doesn’t. This also goes to proving marketing ROI.

Actions you can take now:

• Think about how your company or institution does its marketing—how can you leverage both inbound and outbound best practices to improve results?
• Read about how HubSpot customers are leveraging inbound marketing.

There’s Surprisingly Little Difference Between B2B and B2C

You might think inbound marketing is still a B2B thing, while B2C companies still focus on advertising. While it’s still true there are more B2B companies using inbound than B2C companies, what’s surprising is they use similar approaches. Yes, B2C spending on advertising still dwarfs B2B spending, but those companies that employ inbound don’t differ that much in how they execute inbound. B2C companies use more interactive content, while B2B companies use more webinars and other thought leadership content. That’s about it for differences.

Actions you can take now:

• Consider that inbound agencies may be a better fit for B2C than you may have thought
• Stop thinking about B2B vs. B2C and start focusing on H2H

The Larger Trend—Customer Happiness

HubSpot has learned a lot and continues to grow and prosper because it pays attention to its own data. The State of Inbound Report for 2014 is a great resource for HubSpot, and for all of us, to understand what matters most to customers and to make moves to make them happier. ROI is a big concern, and we’re getting there in terms of measuring it directly. Marketers are also learning how to better understand the content preferences and preferred channels of their customers and use a combination of inbound and targeted outbound media to satisfy their needs. We’re also learning that inbound is no longer a tactic nor is it a philosophy to be debated. Inbound is a way of life for more marketers and their customers now, and the more we share and discuss reports like State of Inbound, the better we will be at our jobs.

 Imagine how many people end up on your company’s website looking for more information about your B2B product and never call you. These visitors are incredibly useful leads for your sales team, but you just don’t know them. Meet Azalead, a French startup that tells you which company recently visited your website and sends you alerts in real time. Read More