Rnordman

This handy infographic shows you the recommended fuel type for car models built in 2012 or newer. We hope this clears up any confusion you might have about what type of gas to put in your car. If your car isn't listed here, refer to your owner's manual or the inside of your gas cap for the recommended octane.

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The internet has revolutionized the way consumers shop so significantly that online sales account for more than 8 percent of all retail sales in the United States. According to Forrester, the growth of ecommerce is expected to outpace sales growth at brick and mortar stores over the next five years, reaching $370 billion in sales by 2017. By that time, ecommerce is expected to account for a full tenth of all retail sales in the U.S.

This was no accident. Online retailers have thrived in the past decade because of the development of data mining and analytics. But this isn’t the end for physical retail locations. Through business-specific predictive analytics, traditional retailers can also benefit from this predictive technology.

Retail predictive analytics enables a retailer to have the right product, at the right place and the right time, proactively, before a customer walks through the door. This ensures that many of the perceived disadvantages of purchasing from a traditional retail outlet all but disappear.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into how and why predictive analytics works in the retail industry.

1. Retail predictive analytics helps retailers create advance demand forecasts.  The key to inventory management is having the right product quantity at the right time, and at the right place. Retail predictive analytics empower retailers with a reliable forecast of demand that calculates proper orders reconciled with costs and budgets. Furthermore, predictive analytics helps retailers work out appropriate allocation and replenishment quantities, taking into account existing inventory, expected demand, frequency of shipments, custom business rules, and more.
2. A predictive analytics solution optimizes pricing strategies. Price is one of the main factors influencing the quantities of products consumers buy. Ultimately, the amount of products sold at a given price determines total revenue and profits for those goods. The price strategies for different products can be based on factors including cost, competitor’s prices, inventory targets, brand reputation and store traffic. In each case, the optimal price can be calculated through a predictive system that factors in all of these variables in its algorithm.
3. Inter-store inventory balance can be achieved through predictive analytics.It’s not unusual for a product to sell out in a particular color or size (SKU) in one store, while a nearby location has a surplus of that exact item. Inter-store inventory balancing via predictive analytics is an increasingly popular way for retailers to get aheadof imbalances. Incorporating all costs associated with the transfer – from logistics to store capacity, demographic diversity to the sizes and colors most likely to sell at the specific location – retail predictive analytics solutions anticipate the necessary transport of an item before the transfer becomes tedious or overwhelmingly expensive for the retailer.

According to a recent Gartner report, 70 percent of the most profitable businesses will manage their processes using real-time predictive technology by 2016. Online shopping and mobile technology has undoubtedly transformed the retail industry, but through intelligent retailing traditional brick and mortars can prevail in an increasingly mobile retail world.

In an effort to one up it's Infrastructure as a Service competition, Google announced on Wednesday that they would be reducing their prices for the popular Google Compute Engine due to shrinking hardware costs. The average discount on services is 10% when you factor in all of the different regions that Google Compute Engine covers. This price decrease comes in the wake of Microsoft mentioning price decreases for those who buy Azure services directly from within the Azure portal.

A post on the Google blog mentions, "And, as predicted by Moore’s Law, we can now lower prices again. Effective immediately, we are cutting prices of Google Compute Engine by approximately 10% for all instance types in every region. These cuts are a result of increased efficiency in our data centers as well as falling hardware costs, allowing us to pass on lower prices to our customers."

In other Google cloud news, Google Drive for Education is now offering teachers and students unlimited cloud file storage. A couple months ago, Google introduced Google Drive for Work.  Google Drive for Education will follow much of the same guidelines and work in the same fashion as Google Drive for Work. The service will work as a way for educators and students to work seamlessly together. Educators biggest question is if Google Drive for Education will provide mischievous students an unlimited cloud storage site to store files not related to education.

Google has already done its homework on these types of situations. If a student were to put a pirated movie into the cloud, Google's algorithm would detect the movie and remove it from the cloud. Google Drive for Education also bundles Google Apps for Education inside of the popular Google Classroom suite for free. Google mentions that they will not disclose the contents of an educational drive without a court order and they will ensure that educational data is encrypted both in motion and at rest.

The post Google’s Pricing Changes & Unlimited Storage for EDU appeared first on CloudWedge.

Your B2B customer deserves a B2C experience like these

Comparing B2B and B2C marketing used to be an Apples-to-Oranges situation, but they’re becoming increasingly comparable.

True, you don’t issue RFPs (Requests for Proposal) when you buy a Blu-ray player, and yes, a CRM decision requires a lot of research. But if you take some of the benefits that are common in B2C and implement them into your B2B space, you can create a customer experience that improves relationships and increases profits.

Three B2C Experiences to offer your business customers

Here are three things B2C experiences offer that your B2B customers might be missing out on:

• 1. Products or service reviews

B2B service reviews often consist of heavily starched long-form case studies and videos, which can’t hold an audience’s attention for long. Reducing the length of this information and implementing a real-time reviews feature like Salesforce’s app exchange can increase engagement.

• 2. The Notion of Abandonment

B2C marketers often use remarketing 'in a big way'. By remarketing in AdWords Display Network or other ad networks  to buyers who have completed a category browse or cart build, but not a purchase, B2C marketers capitalize on a well-informed buyer who simply needs an extra nudge.

B2B can also capitalize on this. If someone has been to your pricing page, immediately follow up with an offer on a relevant media site or with a remarketing promo on your own site. Create ads that allow buyers to pick up where they left off in a previous buying experience, and when someone views a resource, offer another relevant piece of content.

• 3. Visible Pricing

Many businesses still don’t publish basic information like solution pricing and a visible customer experience. Frankly, most buyers don’t just expect this — they demand it! Housing pricing on your site lets buyers know exactly how you engage.

Tacking the giant - CRM

While these B2C benefits can (and should) be carried over to B2B, how you use CRM data makes the biggest difference in the customer experience. The key to improving this is equipping sales with the content, information, and processes needed to open doors with prospects.

Sales, however, is often the biggest fall-off point in CRM data because the team doesn’t see the value in properly denoting information within CRM to benefit sales. Rather, it’s seen as a chore that tracks progress or monitors actions.

What’s more, marketers are constantly cranking tons of content without realizing that it essentially dies on the resource page of websites. Marketers need to create the type of content that the buyer and the sales representative need and implement this useful content into the sales cycle.

"Quality over quantity starts with enabling the sales team".

One step further

Once you understand the benefits of the B2C space and smooth out the processes in your company, fill in the holes to give your business customers the high-quality experience that individuals have come to expect.

Improving your CRM strategy in your B2B strategy

Here are four ways to incorporate aspects of B2C marketing into B2B strategy to improve CRM:

• 1. Let your buyers refer friends. If you’re providing value, chances are customers will want to share it. The best way to capitalize on trust is to give customers a way to impress friends by passing along great info while also benefiting themselves.
• 2. Embrace real personas. A buyer persona isn’t a job title; it’s a window into the buyer’s mind. Create intelligent personas based on who the buyer is, how he builds trust, and what stimulates him.
• 3. Maximize technology. Make your content and messaging easily digestible on a mobile platform. A ton of research takes place over tablets and phones, so make your content look great. Take Amazon, for example. The e-commerce giant is known for the ease with which buyers can make online purchases, and buyers flock.
• 4. Make it fun. Take a look at how Jason Miller at LinkedIn is marketing with fun content. B2B doesn’t have to be boring. After all, business is where we spend the majority of our time, so let’s lighten up a bit.

Although B2B will never be identical to B2C, the two are more similar now than ever, and they can be married to create a better customer experience. The trick is to implement the best aspects of both B2B and B2C into your strategy so you can put your best foot forward with your customers and reap the benefits.

Image copyright: iQoncept/ Shutterstock.com

 

If you can't make your funnel flow faster, can you lose fewer buyers throughout their journey?    We've argued on recent blogs why you can't speed up your buyer just because you have quotas to meet, but that you can improve your conversion rates. We had a ton of email requests for specific tactics.   So this week we're making a series of specific tactical recommendations to improve your conversion rates throughout the funnel.

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In a recent post on content marketing strategy, Britt Klontz described a common problem: Helpful content is often scattered across a website, getting posted in multiple locations (and in multiple formats) rather than in a structured, centralized place. The solution, she contends, is to create a resource center: “Essentially, a resource center is a site within a site, where all of your content is organized.” 

She continued: 

“Without a resource center, all of this wonderful content can become buried on a blog’s archives or get dispersed across several sections of a company’s site. This makes it very difficult for consumers to find, and it essentially means that a piece of content’s usefulness will continually decline as it ages, as it simply won’t be findable over the long term.” 

In addition, another regular CMI contributor, Manya Chylinski, outlined additional benefits that B2B content resource centers can provide.

But it’s not just B2B brands that can benefit from structuring your business’ content marketing in a centralized way. Resource centers can play an equally important role for retail businesses that create B2C content marketing.

For example, I encourage you to consider the examples of two highly successful content-driven retailers: Crutchfield Electronics and B&H Photo, Video & Pro Audio. Both have successfully stepped into the retail vacuum caused by the rise of internet ecommerce and almost-overnight disappearance of independent bricks-and-mortar audio/video retailers and photography stores.

Crutchfield and B&H have prospered by effectively using B2C content to target an engaged market segment — individuals looking for a more satisfying buying experience than what’s offered by Amazon.com or so-called “big box” retail chains like Best Buy. Both businesses are using resource center content to educate their prospects and retain customers by educating them and keeping them informed and enthusiastic about their purchases.

What distinguishes resource centers from FAQs?

Content found on Crutchfield’s and B&H’s resource centers goes far beyond what you usually find in a B2C retailer’s Frequently Asked Questions page in terms of scope, depth, and tone:

• Scope refers to the range of topics available for reading or viewing.
• Depth describes the amount of detail covered in the resource center’s content.
• Tone refers to the credibility of the content; specifically, the empathy the content projects. For example, does the information sound like it was written by an advertising copywriter or does it sound like it’s coming from a knowledgeable expert who understands the audience’s needs and shares its enthusiasm for the product?

Granted, their decades of direct-marketing experience give both Crutchfield and B&H a head start on providing consumers with useful information. However, just about any B2C business can likely benefit from applying the following eight takeaways that I’ve gathered, based on what I think makes their content marketing resource centers so successful:

1. Visually brand your resource center

Your resource center needs to be more than just another drop-down menu item on your home page. Educational content should be visually distinct from your catalog or product pages, as well.

Both Crutchfield and B&H have visually branded their resource centers by creating a dedicated logo and header for them. For example, the Crutchfield Labs icon builds on the firm’s main logo, yet visually sets its educational content apart from product-oriented content.

B&H went even further: The company started with a unique (i.e., ownable) word —”explora” — which carries with it positive connotations of discovery and innovation. It then branded the term by turning it into a logo using a unique type treatment and colors. (Note how B&H changed the “x” in explora to make it more distinct.)

In addition, as you can see, above, Crutchfield and B&H then incorporated these logos into their resource centers as horizontal header graphics. B&H went even a little further by extending the explora color palette into a unique color scheme for the contents of its resource center.

2. Provide content that isn’t available anywhere else

Both Crutchfield and B&H have expanded the scope of their resource center content far beyond product descriptions and reviews. Both offer numerous “how to buy” articles and videos that educate prospects in each of the product categories they sell.

As a result, Crutchfield and B&H’s advantage is that their resource centers help them do an admirable job of serving their prospects’ and clients’ needs — sometimes even better than the content that’s provided by the vendors whose products they sell.

For example, vendor-supplied brochures can be filled with arcane jargon and technical specifications that can quickly become outdated. In addition, vendor-supplied information can often be myopic and overly focused on comparisons with the competition (i.e., the copy highlights isolated areas of product superiority, rather than speaking directly to prospective buyers about their needs).

Crutchfield and B&H both offer content from a user’s perspective, helping buyers address the basic questions they have as they try to make purchasing decisions. Only after providing educational content and helping buyers pre-qualify themselves, do these companies focus on moving those buyers toward a sale.

For example, Crutchfield has published numerous, detailed articles and videos in its resource center that help consumers build confidence in their ability to accomplish DIY installations of audio systems in their cars.

3. Focus on providing complete solutions

Another way Crutchfield’s and B&H’s resource center content differs from the typical vendor-supplied content is the focus on complete solutions. This is because they can focus on their customers’ “big picture” needs instead of messaging on their unique competitive advantages.

Here are some examples that illustrate this “big picture” approach:

• Crutchfield’s 2,500-word article on how to buy multi-room audio systems uses photographs, screenshots, and diagrams to provide an in-depth overview of a complex topic.
• Similarly, B&H provides “complete solutions” through content that helps professional photographers master the skills they need to achieve specialized business goals, like becoming a better wedding photographer, nature photographer, or low-light photographer.

4. Follow the long tail, and go deep

In addition to covering a broader spectrum of topics than available elsewhere, Crutchfield and B&H’s resource centers offer in-depth treatment of even the most long-tail (or rarely-purchased) product categories. Neither is afraid to get highly technical with their resource center content.

It’s one thing to offer helpful buying and user information about popular product categories (e.g., surround sound music systems), but it’s another to go deep into advanced product categories like power protection, studio lighting, professional recording mixers, and home security.

Here’s an example of an article that, by going deep into a relatively technical field, adds credibility to the product offerings from dozens of vendors. From a content and style point of view, note that the first sentence establishes the relevance of the article and reflects empathy with the readers: “Because most people, from surround sound novices to A/V experts, find new formats a little confusing, we’ve provided a quick description of how each format works.”

Going deep into a product category also provides an opportunity for astute retailers to be pioneers, creating markets in new categories where demand has not yet been crested.

Here are two examples:

• Power protection buying guide For TV and home theater. By simply explaining the relevance of this category, and how to evaluate different systems, this Crutchfield article creates demand where none previously existed.
• Likewise, B&H’s 2-hour video, Migration to Mirrorless Digital Cameras, is enough to turn curiosity into an entirely new profit category. It buys B&H “equity loyalty” from photographers who may be entirely happy with their current DSLR cameras.

5. Make resource center content easy to find

Content must be easy to find, no matter how broad in scope or deep in detail. Having a branded resource center is just the first step. The next step is to create a navigation system that breaks broad topics into narrower and narrower units. Both Crutchfield and B&H offer alternate routes to their resource center content.

 

Take a look at Crutchfield’s three-step resource center navigation system:

• Step 1: Choose the category of products you’re interested in browsing (as shown above).
• Step 2: Select the type of products within the category.
• Step 3. Narrow the category (see image below). At this point, you can select from numerous articles and videos.

 

Another technique that Crutchfield uses to keep prospects reading its educational and credibility-building resource center content is by suggesting additional related resource center topics.

For example, next to the Pro audio mixer buying guide, there are links to resource center topics likely to interest those who have just read the article.

Crutchfield goes one step further: Links to relevant articles and videos often show up on its product pages, leading interested consumers back to the resource center for further explorations on the topic that first drew their interest. For example, consumers who read the above article on sound formats might see links that lead to other resource center articles on home theater receivers and set-ups. 

6. Emphasize staff credibility and enthusiasm 

As Robert Cialdini pointed out in his Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, there’s a universal tendency to trust those with whom we can identify because they share our background or values. The bylines that accompany the articles in the Crutchfield resource center and the descriptions of the video presenters in the B&H resource center are powerful credibility builders. 

In the image above, for example, there’s a comfort factor in mentioning that Steve Kindig has been an electronics enthusiast for over 30 years and has been involved with car audio at Crutchfield since 1985. The Crutchfield and B&H bylines also tap into another influence factor: the power of authority. We trust those who have more experience and knowledge than we do. 

You’ll also notice in the above example, that Steve shares his passion via community radio which also sends out powerful “trust vibes.” In an age of often impersonal clerks, the credibility of your content sources offers a powerful competitive advance — just as an author’s books help differentiate his advice from other service providers.

7. Add “star power” to your content creation

Live events that are associated with acknowledged experts in your field offer you a way to boost your firm’s credibility and add a sense of urgency that can motivate prospects to action. Live events also provide an easy way to create compelling video content that you can add to your resource center content.

B&H, for example, has a dedicated Event Space where it frequently hosts seminars that support its role as a professional resource. For example, B&H held a presentation entitled Baseball, White House, and War Photography, with renowned photographer David Hume Kennerly (see image below), which was later turned into a video for the B&H resource center.

Live events like this offer win-win opportunities for attendees, influencers, and B&H itself:

• Attendees get a chance to meet, learn from, and ask questions of world-class experts in their field — often those whose work has inspired them or who have expertise in areas they are currently struggling with. (After all, if you were a serious amateur photographer, wouldn’t you go out of your way to hear a National Geographic or White House photographer share the stories of their iconic photographs?)
• Influencers get an opportunity to speak to audiences in locations that might otherwise be inaccessible to them. This, of course, enhances their loyalty to B&H. And, like all presenters and teachers, they will probably gain new perspectives from their audience’s questions.
• B&H reinforces its reputation as a source for professional information, but also attracts qualified and enthusiastic floor traffic to the store. Most important, of course, B&H gains valuable video content that lasts for years.

Don’t forget your own customers can become an additional source of credible influencer content. In the image below, you can see how Crutchfield invites car stereo buyers — often non-professional “everyday people” — to share their installation tips and vie for a chance to become its next Custom Car Showroom Team Member. Again, it’s a win-win proposition for both Crutchfield and the people whose stories are featured. Installers can point to their featured stories and tips with pride, and Crutchfield gets premium resource center content that it can use to help overcome a prospect’s hesitation to replace or upgrade a factory-installed car stereo.

8. Keep customers informed and enthusiastic with timely, newsworthy content

B&H and Crutchfield clearly recognize the value of “fanning the fires of customer desire” with a constant flow of information about the latest products. Often, their blog posts and videos originate at conventions and trade shows in their industry, and frequently, they’re timed to appear in the resource center at the same time as formal product announcements.

This comes back to the idea of cultivating engaged customers or business professionals who aspire to the next level of pleasure or competitive edge.

For example:

• B&H’s resource center serves commercial photographers’ aspirations on becoming more skilled, and more profitable professionals. Their frequent articles and events focusing on photographer marketing or tips for selling profitable wedding photography helps fuel their readers’ passion for their profession.
• Likewise, Crutchfield’s resource center content helps homeowners upgrade from mismatched stereo components to integrated home theater systems, and helps car owners experience the pride of replacing their car’s factory-installed stereo with a far better unit on their own.

In addition to a continuing flow of new articles and videos, B&H and Crutchfield feature monthly blog post and video roundups that highlight the latest advances in each of the key product areas on their respective resource centers. These roundups direct prospects to articles and videos they might otherwise have overlooked.

What about you?

Clearly, as Britt Klontz and Manya Chylinski wrote in their articles, resource centers can make sense for both B2B and B2C marketers.

To help you evaluate the state of your firm’s current resource center offerings, and explore ways to build out your own resource center by incorporating some of the ideas in this article, I’ve created a downloadable B2C Resource Center Checklist for you.

Use the Comments section of the worksheet to insert ideas you’d like to implement as well as deadlines for upgrading your resource center. 

Let me know how the checklist works for you, and any comments you might have about the B&H and Crutchfield implementation of the resource center idea. Share your favorite takeaway ideas and questions as you begin to create your own online content marketing resource center for your business.

Couldn’t make it to Content Marketing World this year? You can still catch up on the biggest issues, ideas, and innovations in Content Marketing. Check out our Video on Demand portal for more info. 

Cover image by Jarmoluk via Pixabay.com

The post Drive Retail Sales with B2C Content Marketing: 8 Tips + a Checklist appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

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Love it or hate it, you have to hand it to BlackBerry — the Passport is different.

Whether it’s a good kind of different or a bad kind of different is still being hotly debated, but at least the company that has been roundly criticized for doing a poor job of playing me-too to Apple, Samsung and others, is attempting to break free of the pack and blaze its own trail. You have to respect that.

The real question is, can we respect the Passport, with its odd, square-ish shape, heavy weight, and its unusual implementation of the physical keyboard? Perhaps. Here are the top good and bad aspects of the latest BlackBerry.

The Good

The Screen

Though it lies at the heart of the Passport’s atypical dimensions, the 1,440 x 1,440 screen is superb. Not only does it provide plenty of contrast, brightness, and off-angle visibility, its pixel density (at 453 ppi) is better than that of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, and the Samsung Galaxy S5. It’s so good that, even though it’s a phone, you’re tempted to view the desktop version of websites (something the browser lets you choose if you want).

Unlike typical rectangular screen phones, there’s no real-estate benefit to rotating the Passport sideways because it’s a perfect square, but since the keyboard is touch-sensitive and can be used to scroll, a sideways orientation allows for scrolling without impeding your view of the screen which is a nice touch.

 

The Speaker

BlackBerry made a big deal about the Passport’s internal speaker at the launch event, claiming it had significantly better specs than both the HTC One M8 and the Samsung Galaxy S5. There’s no doubt about it, it sounds good — really good. It’s easily the best BlackBerry speaker so far. Which is to say it’s now as good as the iPhone 5s.

The Keyboard

Let’s assume for the moment that you actually like physical keyboards, because if you don’t, you probably wouldn’t even consider the Passport. If you do like them, you will — with a little bit of learning curve — like the Passport’s keyboard a lot.

Its three-row layout takes some getting used to, as does the fact that extra keys appear on-screen immediately above it along with predictive word suggestions. But as with all other BlackBerry keyboards, the tactile feel is superb, as is its responsiveness.

But the part you will learn to love is the way BlackBerry has made the keyboard touch-sensitive, allowing it to respond to gestures. While typing, swipe up with your thumbs to select suggested words as they appear, or swipe to the left to delete an entire word. When on a scrollable screen, swiping up and down scrolls the content. None of this is groundbreaking — these are the same gestures BlackBerry has used on its Z10 and Z30 BB10-based devices — but it marks the first time a physical keyboard has been more than just a keyboard.

Above: Sample photo taken with an iPhone 5s. Click for full image.

Above: Sample photo taken with an BlackBerry Passport. Click for full image.

The Camera

I’ve always felt a little sorry anytime I’ve seen another parent trying to snap photos or video of their kids with a BlackBerry. I just know they’re not going to be super happy with the results. That changes with the Passport. For the first time, a BlackBerry now has a camera that is equal — and in some cases superior — to any smartphone on the market. The specs just can’t be denied: 13 megapixels, OIS (optical image stabilization), a 5-element lens, f-2.0 aperture (a full f-stop faster than even the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus), and backside illumination. Compared to the iPhone 5s, the Passport produces photos with greater detail, richer color, and better contrast.

Amazon App Store

Though it was possible to access Android apps via the Amazon App Store prior to the Passport and its 10.3 version of BB 10, it wasn’t officially supported. Now it is, and it works well. For the first time, BlackBerry users can dispense with the awkward “side-loading” technique for installing Android apps. Of course, the degree to which these apps are compatible may vary, but at least BlackBerry verifies that every app downloaded via Amazon has been checked for viruses and malware, which goes a long way to making BlackBerry users feel secure. And we know you like security!

BlackBerry Blend

This might just be the most exciting thing BlackBerry has produced since the original BlackBerry Bold. BlackBerry Blend is a software suite that lets you access the contents of your Passport from any PC, Mac, or tablet (iOS and Android) with a free app — a brilliant way to bring your phone’s capabilities onto a bigger screen and to provide productivity-insurance for those times when you accidentally leave your device at home or the office. Blend will let you access your Passport from anywhere in the world. You can also manage and transfer files to and from the Passport. The software isn’t bullet-proof yet, but it will be, and it’s amazing.

The Bad

The Size

Let’s just state the obvious: The Passport’s dimensions make it among the least pocket-friendly phones on the market. And while it’s steel-I-beam-inspired construction pretty much guarantees it won’t bend in your pocket, that’s not going to be much help if you can’t get it into your pocket in the first place. It’s just too wide to make it into the front pocket of most pants or jeans, and even if you were to cram it in there, its squared-off shape means that it won’t be able to shift around as you move to accommodate standing vs. sitting positions, which most rectangular phones do automatically.

Interestingly, this is the first BlackBerry I’ve ever seen that doesn’t come with some kind of holster or protective sleeve. Maybe BlackBerry figured the Passport was big enough without making it bigger still with an accessory. The bottom line is, if you don’t carry a purse, where the heck are you going to keep this thing? The inside breast pocket of a jacket seems to be the most logical choice, but how many buyers wear a jacket all of the time?

The Weight

If you like your devices to feel super meaty, the Passport’s curb weight of 196 grams — which is 13 percent heavier than even an iPhone 6 Plus — might be a good thing. However, given how much time we spend holding these things, I’m going to argue that lighter (all else being equal) is better.

Slim Port

So far, all of BlackBerry’s devices that have run BB 10, including the PlayBook, have come with two ports: USB (for data and charging) and Micro HDMI for video output. The Passport is the first to eschew the multi-port design for a single USB-based Slim Port. Slim Port is similar to MHL in that it can use the Micro USB port to output video via one of three available adapters, but it can’t act as a device access link the way MHL does. In other words, you can’t browse the contents of your Passport via your TV’s navigation system. Slim Port certainly works as well as the cable-based solutions that attach to the iPhone’s Lightning dock connector, but MHL would have made a lot more sense.

The Keyboard

Yes, I know I put this in the “good” category, but the design is so radical that it may irritate even long-time BlackBerry users. Though the keys are well designed, backlit, and very accurate, there are only three rows, which means there are plenty of times when the OS has to supplement the physical keys with soft keys on-screen. This hybrid approach may be the logical way to preserve as much screen real estate as possible, but from a usability point of view, it’s painful – at least until you get used to it. After playing with the Passport for five days straight, I am still far from used to it.

Bottom Line

The Passport probably won’t win over many converts from the iPhone or Android camps, but it won’t be for lack of trying. This BlackBerry does more to address the shortcomings of previous handsets than any model so far. The size, shape, and weight will no doubt give many buyers pause, but those who take the plunge will be rewarded with the best BlackBerry experience the company has ever created.

So you’ve heard all about how well inbound marketing works, and you are ready to go. Your first step is to get started writing blog posts, right?

WRONG.

Writing blog posts is definitely not the first step you should take if you want to succeed with inbound marketing.

Instead, you need first to figure out your inbound marketing game plan.

No One Builds a Custom House Without a Blueprint

Have you ever built a custom house? If you have, you already know that long before the foundation is poured, you need to make a significant investment made in creating a blueprint.

No one in their right mind would ever start construction prior to talking to architects, contractors, designers, and a host of other trades so that a detailed set of blueprints could be created. Only then, can construction begin.

Surprisingly, many people who are new to inbound marketing actually start writing blog posts without having invested the time needed to create a detailed inbound marketing game plan.

Want to take a guess at what happens for them? Nothing…except a lot of time & money goes down the tubes.

If you want to succeed with inbound marketing, just like building a house, you need a blueprint for success.

You cannot have a successful inbound marketing program without a great content strategy, just like you cannot have a symphony without a director leading multiple instruments into harmony. – Kasie Hilburn, Mojo Media Labs

How to Create an Inbound Marketing Game Plan

Creating a detailed inbound marketing game plan is an intensive process that requires diligent research, knowledge, and experience, and in the rest of this post, I’m going to do my best to teach you how to do it right.

(If this isn’t something you have the time or resources to do, you can just hire us to do it for you)

Step 1: Create a Map of Your Buyer’s Evaluation Journey

According to the CEB, today, thanks to the vast amount of freely available information available online, 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before the buyer ever contacts your company.

Don’t believe me? Just think back to your own last meaningful purchase. How did you start? Did you call up companies and talk to their sales reps? I doubt it.

Instead, I’ll bet you started doing research online as well as asking a few of your friends and colleagues for their input.

If you started your research online, chances are you started with a search engine and started typing in queries. Then, as you looked at the search results, you got ideas for new queries, right?

In fact, you probably went several layers deep to find the really good stuff.

Perhaps you also ran some searches on Twitter using hashtags and various keywords that you might have uncovered during your Google search?

Once they start down their journey, most buyers are going to go through the 5 major steps shown below.

Do you have content to address each step? If you don’t, you have gaps that need to be filled.

Step 2: Define Your Buyer Personas

If you’re creating content for your blog and you don’t take the time to define exactly who you’re writing for, and who you want to attract to your blog, ultimately you’re going to fail in three really important areas:

• Relevancy
• Engagement
• Sharing

If you fail in these areas, your results will suffer mightily.

To be relevant, create engagement, and stimulate sharing, you need to know exactly whom you are writing for.When you get this figured out, you will have created what is commonly referred to as a buyer persona.

Having one figured out is good…but chances are you will need more than one.

For example, the decision maker might be the CEO, or a VP, etc…but in virtually all cases, they aren’t the ones that started the research process. Most likely, they delegated that to a member of their team. This person then spent a few days/weeks diligently gathering information on potential solutions, and then presented their findings in a summary report of some kind.

If that is the case, you don’t need to write for just one buyer persona, you need to write for every buyer persona that is involved in the buying process. (which is part of the buyer evaluation journey)

When creating your buyer personas, the things you want to specify are much more than just demographics like age, income level, education, etc…

In addition to the demographics (who), you are also going to need to address psychographics. These are the reasons why they are looking for information to help them make a buying decision. Understanding why people want to do things is absolutely critical.

I explain more in the video in this post.

To sum up, you want to have a very clear idea of what problems each of your personas has, what motivates them, and the types of information they are looking for.

Step 3: Create Premium Content Offers

Now that you know whom you are writing for, you are going to need to plan your inbound campaigns around several pieces of cornerstone content. We call these premium content offers.

Most commonly, premium content offers come in the form of eBooks..but you could also use webinars, industry reports, how-to-guides, or virtually anything else you think would be of interest to each of your buyer personas.

The goal is to create premium content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. As you can see on the right, there are 3 stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

In the Awareness stage, buyers don’t yet care about you. Instead, they are focused on finding answers to their questions.

To be successful in attracting traffic, you need to publish blog posts (which we’ll talk more about in a minute), and Top-Of-Funnel (TOFU) premium content offers that can be used to capture leads.

If you get these offers wrong, or do a poor job of creating them, failure awaits.

Some percentage of people that are in the Awareness stage will start to become interested in your brand and then move down into the Consideration stage. This is the stage where you can start to use content to help you sell the merits of working with your company.

In Consideration stage, you will need to know each buyer persona well enough to know their common questions and objections so that you can automatically deliver relevant content to address these questions before they ever come up in conversation.

If you do this correctly, and have properly designed automated workflows, some portion of the people in the Consideration stage will move down into the Decision stage without ever speaking to your sales team.

The people that move into the Decision stage are now what we call Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). SQLs are where the money is. These people actually want to talk to your sales team and are largely pre-disposed to buying.

Step 4: Lead Nurturing

As you might guess, when you first capture a lead, they are at the top of the funnel, in the Awareness stage. 99% of the time these leads are not ready to buy…or even talk to you.

So how do you get buyers to progress through your funnel automatically? That is done with lead nurturing and is something that we’ll help you create if you hire us to create an Inbound Marketing Game Plan for you.

If you decide to do it on your own, just make sure that you create email sequences that address all the most common pre-sales questions and objections for each buyer persona.

These sequences of emails should also link to additional pieces of content (video is very powerful here) that help to answer questions and remove objections to moving forward.

Step 5: Three Month Blogging Strategy

Having gone through steps 1 to 4, now it’s time to start blogging; assuming you have already built a lead capture and nurture system (which is what we use HubSpot for). If you haven’t, we can build this for you.

Once you are ready to start blogging, you need to ensure that you create blog posts that your target buyer personas actually want to read. For our clients, we normally suggest enough blog post titles to last them for their first 90 days.

At the end of the 90 days, you will have gathered enough data from analytics to know which content was most popular and that will then guide you on what to write more about in the future.

Warning: If your blog posts are all about your company’s products & services, you will not generate much interest.

Instead, you need to start blogging about things that your target personas are interested in reading!

Typically, topics that work in this regard are topics that answer frequently asked questions.

For example, in the post that you are reading now (which, for us is a piece of middle of funnel content), I have spent most of my effort to teach you how to succeed with inbound marketing.

The only reason that this post contains any links that suggest you hire us is because this post was created as a middle of funnel (Consideration stage) content piece.

Most of the people that read this post will have discovered it by clicking on the link in an email that they received after downloading one of our eBooks.

Let’s Review

Just like the undertaking of any major project (like building a custom house), achieving success with inbound marketing requires that you start out with a detailed Inbound Marketing Game Plan that will address the following items:

• Your buyer’s evaluation journey
• Your target buyer persona(s) and the problems they want to solve
• The premium content offers you need to create to capture leads
• The automated nurture sequences you need to create to nurture your leads to the point of purchase
• The blog post topics you need to attract the right traffic to your blog

If you skip any of these steps, the results you achieve (or lack thereof) will be underwhelming at best.

Can We Help?

If you like what you have read and want to schedule a complimentary discovery call, please click here or call us at 208-391-2057.

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It’s no secret that inbound marketing is the way of the future, and that outbound marketing has begun to take its place in the past. Buyers in today’s world know what they want and know how to go about finding it. The Internet has become a huge tool for people to educate themselves and make informed decisions about their course of action. Buyers are in the driver’s seat, while marketers are in the passenger seat. The concept of inbound marketing is still new to some people. For this reason, we want to clear up any confusion by outlining 7 common misconceptions about inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing Relies on Luck to Connect with Customers.

Some traditional marketers believe that inbound marketing releases messages into the abyss of the internet in hopes that luck will drive leads and sales. This is incorrect. We know our buyers very well. In fact, we have methods, data, and analysis techniques to build and refine remarkable content to attract, engage, and delight our website visitors.

2. Content is not targeted.

We monitor our techniques in order to provide the best solutions at every stage of the buyer’s journey for our website visitors. We build on human connections by giving the people what they want: solutions to their problems. We can also personalize our content by asking the proper questions on our website forms. The more information we have about our visitors, the better able we are to determine what they are looking for and which type of information should be distributed to them.

3. Social media is forgotten or pushed aside.

This is not only false, it’s a bit ridiculous. Social media is one of the most powerful tools associated with the inbound methodology. Social media has become a platform for human communication, news, and marketing in recent years and it would be silly of us not to take full advantage of it. Social media sites also provide us with an audience that is interested in our brand, who we can engage with, and ask questions to. According to HubSpot, social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.

4. It takes months/years to build an audience for your content.

I would be lying to you if I said inbound marketing as a whole doesn’t take much time. It is a time-consuming discipline, and if you are just starting out setting up your blog and social media accounts it may take time to gain followers. However, if you are already an established brand or product, chances are this process will go quick. If not, clarifying your buyer personas and where they hang out online (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr) will be key in identifying and attracting your audience.

5. You Can’t Measure ROI

Ha ha! This makes me laugh. Just because inbound marketing is done online, doesn’t mean it isn’t trackable. In reality, there is a ton of data to choose from, including clicks, downloads, and blog comments to make sure you know what’s working and how. Programs like Google Analytics, or our personal favorite – HubSpot, can help increase your brand’s SEO, reach, and track the success of your campaigns in order to ensure your business is reaching the correct audience and sending the right messages.

6. Customers have no idea an offer exists.

Outbound marketing fans believe that their method puts a product or service directly in front of the customer with no questions as to what to do with it. It is possible to make social media posts and write blogs that have no clear direction or offer, but inbound marketing doesn’t do that. Inbound marketing strategies promote content for specific campaigns that are developed for their buyer personas. In fact, calls-to-action are a critical part of each campaign we build. We are always striving to tell our visitors exactly what they need to do to get an offer or what their next step will be.

7. There is no proof inbound works.

Inbound marketing may be the new kid on the block, but its success has been proven. Hundreds of case studies have been done showing its achievements. Inbound marketing is more affordable too. In fact, according to HubSpot, inbound leads cost 61% less on average than leads from outbound marketing methods like radio ads, direct mail, or billboards.

Wow, that was a lot! Now that we’ve summed up some common inbound marketing misconceptions for you, we hope you have a better idea of just how well inbound marketing can and will work for your brand. The best part about inbound marketing is that you get to connect with your customers and deliver information they want and need. You’ll be seen as a problem-solver, inspiration, and expert in your field. What’s not to love?

Research from Content Marketing Institute has found that having a documented content marketing strategy is one of the key distinguishing characteristics of an effective B2B content marketing program. However, many firms are operating without a strategy in place.

In fact, more than half (56%) of B2B marketers who use content marketing, are running their programs without a game plan, jumping into content creation and promotion without a documented strategy. But those who do have a documented content marketing strategy are not only far more likely to consider themselves effective, but they’re also less challenged with every aspect of content marketing.

So what’s involved in setting a strategy for content marketing?

Define content marketing’s role in your marketing plan

As part of setting your strategy, you’ve got to figure out what role content marketing will play in your firm’s overall marketing strategy and marketing plan. Is it just an add-on to all the other arrows you’ve got in your marketing quiver, or is it going to be a primary focal point? The truth is, adopting content marketing as a primary marketing strategy will greatly impact your approach to virtually everything else marketing does, including your website, online marketing, email, trade shows, direct mail, advertising, and other marketing efforts. So it’s important to know going in just how central content marketing is going to be in your firm’s overall marketing plan and take the time to properly define the role, whatever the role may be.

Assemble the right team

Once you’ve defined the role, the next step is to assemble the team. Who’s going to be involved, both strategically and creatively? What roles are needed for your content marketing team and whom do you have internally to fill the role? Is an outside consultant or agency needed to augment internal staff and skills?

You need to think about who is going to:

• Contribute the subject-matter expertise
• Write and produce
• Design and develop
• Publish and promote
• Monitor and measure
• Oversee and manage the whole program

You should also consider who outside of the marketing department needs to be involved (e.g. IT, legal/compliance, sales, etc.) and kept in the loop. The important thing is to assemble the team and define each team member’s role in your content marketing program.

Carve your niche

Now, a lot of firms are using content marketing to build thought leadership and to help differentiate their firms. But content marketing doesn’t establish differentiators—it only emphasizes them. So one of the critical things you have to figure out is what’s going to be your content marketing niche. Establishing your niche is important because your content marketing needs focus. You simply can’t cover everything, or be all things to all people, and expect to be effective. So you’ve got to figure out your niche and stick to it.

One of the ways you do that is by answering 2 questions:

What is your firm truly an expert in? Your content needs authenticity, so you want to only cover topics that you are knowledgeable about and can truly speak about as an expert.

What do you want to be known for? In other words, what subject matter expertise will have the most impact on your business development and revenue objectives?

Once you’ve answered those questions, look for where there is alignment. That will help you carve out a niche.

Identify your key target audience and build persona profiles

A key part of your content marketing strategy is identifying and understanding the key audience(s) you want to engage. And one of the best ways to do this is to build out audience profiles, or “buyer personas.” Personas help you visually picture your target audience and understand them on a deeper level—leading to more relevant and valuable content and ultimately better results.

Personas represent profiles of your typical clients and provide key information that will be incredibly beneficial to content planning and content creation efforts. Using research, surveys, and (ideally) one-on-one interviews of your target audience, both current clients and prospects, you can start to build out these personas.

Consider the client journey

Once you have identified your personas and the journey they typically follow from visitor to prospect, prospect to lead, lead to customer and customer to evangelist, you can start to identify the types of content and topics that will resonate most with those personas at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Content should play a role in every stage of the lifecycle to help create awareness, generate leads, convert leads into customers and turn customers into evangelists. A lot of content is focused on the beginning of the journey: the sales funnel or buying cycle. But don’t forget about existing clients and ways your content can continue to engage and nurture those relationships as well.

Set goals and define key performance indicators

One of the primary components of your content marketing strategy is setting specific goals and determining quantifiable metrics that align with those goals. Examples of goals might include:

• Building awareness in a particular region or vertical
• Developing thought leadership
• Establishing credibility
• Driving web traffic
• Generating website leads
• Nurturing leads
• Attracting new clients

Once you have goals in place, establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) plays a critical role in tracking the ongoing performance of your B2B content marketing program. Establishing a dashboard of KPIs can help you measure marketing success and will identify any areas that need improvement.

Document the strategy

Once you’ve set your strategy, be sure to write it down! Put it in a document and be sure that every member of your content marketing team (including outside partners) have a copy and that it’s consistently used as a reference and a point of departure for meetings and planning sessions. You’ve probably heard that writing down goals is one of the keys to achieving them. And based on the research, it’s a proven fact that successful content marketers have a written strategy and closely follow it.

Creating a B2B content marketing strategy is not rocket science, but it does require intentional effort and dedicated time and resources to get it completed. But taking the time to create a documented strategy could mean the difference between effective content marketing and ineffective content marketing.

Someone walks into your store, or they visit your website and fill out a form… what do you do with this lead? You pounce on them, move them away from the door and begin shoving your sales pitch down their throat; or you call them immediately and start sending emails like crazy. Yes, yes, ka-ching, ka-ching!

No, back off, slow down and think about what you’re doing.

Most people like to browse and taste test first before they get serious about buying a product or service. They like to create a process of discovery and do research at their own pace. As a business, your role should be to facilitate the discovery and research. Gently hand them a fork so they can poke around and explore who you are, what you have to offer, and why you’re the tastiest and best choice.

The fact is, you need to cook up some thoughtful and helpful content. Different types of content should be provided, as part of the lead nurture process, to help guide the leads through all the options available until ultimately they trust you and are convinced that your products or services are what they need and want. TechValidate provided this chart showing effectiveness of various forms of content:

 

The Appetizer: A Taste of Who You Are

This first course is about educating and building a relationship with leads. Here’s where you provide general information about your company and your industry. Resist the urge to start selling and keep branding to a minimum. Leads need to feel that educating them is your priority. Right now they don’t know how hungry they are until they begin to consume some of your informational pieces such as these suggested below:

• Whitepaper or POV: These are excellent for presenting industry research and data, and for conveying your point of view on trends and new developments. Thought leadership needs to shine through in this early phase and meaty documents such as these can certainly do the trick. Please keep in mind who your audience is when creating these documents so that they’re not too highly technical for their taste.
• Blog Posts and Articles: Short pieces of content can be very timely and can show that you’re always monitoring the temperature of your industry to stay on top of it. Regular blog posts can be utilized to build trust as your leads will learn they can rely on your blog for consistent information.
• Ebook: When written by someone on your staff, ebooks are great for showcasing your expertise. Remember, in this phase the book needs to be about general, helpful information and not all about your company.
• Webinar: What better way to educate, introduce your staff and provide a platform for live question and answer sessions than a webinar? Nothing works better to show off your knowledge and personality and create an emotional attachment for your leads.
• Free Guide: These pieces of content are both highly visual and informative; therefore, they can be leveraged to your advantage for helping to build a solid relationship between your leads and your company.
• Video: During this first phase, entertaining videos work well break the ice. Generating laughter can only help to seal the deal that your business consists of real people who are caring and engaging.

The Main Course: What You Have to Offer

Now that you’ve whet your leads’ appetites and they have a better understanding of what they hunger for, your content can get more specific in this course. You can begin to introduce your menu of items and leads can start to form a connection between what you have to offer and how they will satisfy their craving. More trust is being built up here so you can start to sell, but go easy. Here are some pieces of content that can be presented:

• Newsletters: Provide an option to subscribe to your newsletter. These are perfect for showcasing content that you’ve produced, company news, product or service updates, and company community service.
• Product or Service Webinar: In this course, you can go ahead and conduct a webinar that demonstrates what you offer and how these offerings can be used to solve problems, make situations better and possibly save money.
• Infographics: Always popular and appetizing, these visual pieces can be lightly branded and can present product/service information, industry information, or just be fun and sharable.
• Product or Service Specific Blog Posts: Feel free to share on your blog about new products or services. Be sure to give background information on why they were developed and how you feel they will benefit those that use them. Tread lightly on selling as opposed to just informing.
• How-To or Demonstration Videos: Create videos that show your offerings in use. Remember that YouTube is its own search engine and how-to videos are highly searched for and consumed.
• Case Studies: Have you had clients that shared the success they had with your products or services? Hopefully you collected the data around this success and have created case studies. These pieces tend to be text heavy but adding charts and graphs can really show the story of how what you have to offer has helped others.

The Dessert: Do They Really Want Some, Is Yours the Best Choice?

Decisions, decisions. Are they going to stick around and have dessert, or are they done with your experience? Keep the momentum going and demonstrate how yours is the best choice for them in order to solve their problem. Give your qualified leads the right content at this time to help them evaluate the options, narrow the field and reaffirm that they should work with you. Compare and contrast content is important here:

• Testimonials: As a company, you should constantly be in touch with your clients and see how things are going. Ask them for a testimonial and for permission to share it on your site or in content. A survey from TechValidate showed that “67% of customers rated customer testimonials and case studies very effective for lead nurture.”
• Free Trial: Sometimes the best way to find out if something will work for you is if you try it out. If your service is such that you can provide a free trial period, this could certainly sweeten the deal.
• Comparisons: Being able to see the ingredients, details, features and benefits of one product as compared to another can be a real eye opener. When presented strategically, this can be very advantageous for your sales numbers.
• Reviews: If you’re able to provide a platform for reviews, you should seriously consider it. Research has shown that information from Buyer to Buyer earns 92% trust, as soon in the chart below, while different forms of information from a business earns much less.
• Pricing and Coupons: If prices haven’t been shared yet, now is the time. A well-written proposal that’s personalized and shows that you understand the lead’s pain points is a must. Coupons or deals are the age-old way to push someone over the edge to buy. If appropriate for your niche, coupons can keep them coming back for seconds.

 

Remember Your Social Media Channels

If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, etc., make sure someone is monitoring them closely. These are prime real estate for leads to post questions and comments. Leaving these questions unanswered, and not responding to comments, whether good or bad, shows you don’t care. Why would anyone want to do business with a company that doesn’t care?

Creating all this content is challenging. But if you do it on a regular basis it gets easier, and you’ll find that you’re able to influence buyer behavior by providing it. Remember, if you don’t feed their curiosity, they will feast elsewhere.

Most B2B companies that I run across miss two very important factors for their success.

They fail to have a strong Value Proposition (some haven’t got one at all), and they fail to differentiate themselves (even though they feel they have).

So I did some research, and I found some interesting stats, insights and B2B business differentiators by some of the world’s best B2B research firms.

HBR/SAP – Winning at Sales in a Buyer-Empowered World

• 65% of sales organizations say rising customer expectations are their number one challenge.
• 72% of decision makers say the sales rep’s ability to help solve business objectives is a major influence on their buying decision.
• 37% of businesses expect revenue increases when applying analytics best practices to sales.

“The vendor has historically been the primary source of information, and that is no longer true,” says Gerry Murray, research manager at IDC’s CMO Advisory Service. “That is a radical change in the exploration process. If you are still training salespeople on the old model, you are going to struggle to connect with buyers.”

The key for sales organizations—and the marketing leaders who collaborate with them—is to do their own research as well as collect and analyze data from their customer interactions and the digital footprints that customers leave behind when they, for instance, participate in online communities, download white papers, or attend a webcast.

The Sales Imperative

Sales organizations need to enable their sales representatives to act as trusted counselors and advisors who can offer decision makers advice on solving important business problems and preparing for trends—counsel that often extends beyond the products or services they’re selling.

In an IDC survey of information technology buyers, 25 percent of respondents said the ability to help solve business objectives was the most important quality in a sales representative, even ahead of technology expertise.

Meeting customers’ rising expectations requires a multipronged effort that includes the following.

1. Aligning sales and marketing.
2. Creating analytics-driven processes that inform sales teams
3. Developing expertise in customers’ business challenges

Tools

Such technology platforms and tools can analyze customer interactions to identify high-quality prospects, suggest next-best actions, and provide insights that enable them to deepen customer relationships.

A more effective approach, says Jim Dickie, managing partner at CSO Insights, is to create customer-specific workspaces that include collaborative capabilities.

The use of playbooks in sales calls. Informed by analytics, these digital guides can be used with mobile devices to optimize the delivery of effective and consistent sales messages.

Placing analytics at the center of sales efforts can yield numerous use cases to derive business value.

The Ongoing Challenge of Sales-Customer Alignment

In an Alexander Group study, companies that effectively used digital playbooks realized a 6 percent to 14 percent increase in sales. And companies that implement analytics to prioritize sales leads and identify which customers will value additional products and services can potentially double their conversion rates, Murray says.

In other words, winning in sales today hinges not just on what a business sells but also—increasingly—on how the sales team sells it. That means targeting the right customers at the right time, discovering and even anticipating what really matters to customers, and providing valuable guidance and insights all along the way.

New Rules for Customer Engagement

In order to align your selling process to the buying journey and focus on making each interaction meaningful for the customer at every stage, companies must:

• Target the customers where you deliver the most value.
• Discover what customers care about most.
• Guide the customers through the buying journey
• Win by going the extra mile.

McKinsey – Oct 2013 – How B2B companies talk past their customers

Here are three questions whose answers may point to opportunities for improvement.

1. Are you telling the same story as your competitors?
2. Does your sales force say it is facing headwinds?
3. Do you deliver your brand in a consistent way?

If you’d like to improve your sales and marketing processes to close more business, contact me through My Email, and let’s set up a free consultation to see how you can grow your business faster and more profitably.

I am an inside sales rep. There, I said it! I am not ashamed of it. I do not consider myself an outsider to the sales team. I play a pivotal role in acquiring customers. And I am not alone.

A recent lead management study shows hiring for inside sales outpaces outside sales representatives by a 15:1 ratio. However, the role of inside sales is still viewed as not being very glamorous and has historically been described as a necessary evil by organizations all around the globe. Whether outsourced to a third party firm, or managed internally, it is loosely defined by the group or department it rolls up to.

There are many different names used to designate this role, including sales analyst, sales development, market development, demand generation, and lead generation. The responsibilities bestowed upon the role also vary. We are telemarketers, lead qualifiers, cold callers, hunters for the almighty lead, and a grunt to the rest of the sales/marketing organization. Most of us have skin as thick as steel – a necessary trait, as we play a numbers game and get hung up on constantly. The formula for success is simple: You must call X many prospects to obtain Y many leads to close Z amount of business. Simple theory, but think about the last time you received the dreaded cold call from one of us. How many times did you answer and even give us the time of day, much less any insight into your pains and challenges? Yet, we play a pivotal role in the growth of the company.

Traditionally, the inside sales rep has found a home within either sales or marketing, with little cross-over between the two. But times are changing – and Revenue Marketing™ is driving this change. One of the key elements to becoming a Revenue Marketer™ is to align sales and marketing, but where do you start?

In steps the “Inside Sales Team”! Applause, Applause, Applause!!!

Here is where inside sales can play a pivotal role. How? Well, we’ve already built a good relationship with sales, learning their sales process, language and pitch. And we’re working with marketing, reading digital body language from marketing-driven campaigns and tracking prospects’ progress through the buyer’s journey.

So in a perfect world, inside sales is perfectly positioned to bring sales and marketing together in beautiful harmony…

Sorry, I was daydreaming for a second there. In the real world, the transition to Revenue Marketing is not going to happen overnight. Sales people can be tough and marketers can be out of touch with sales goals.

However, the one common thread is that they both put their trust in the inside sales team to get things done. We make sure that we connect with all the leads that marketing has created, document our progress, and vet out qualified opportunities for sales so they can concentrate on closing. We are the engine that drive’s revenue for both sales and marketing. So give us our day in the limelight!

In a day when Social Media is the rage, the reality is that email remains as strong, if not stronger than ever, as a business means to educate and sell online. Email is a universally used tool that everyone sits down to check at work or home. Email gets a business in front of their prospects.

Using Email Marketing to Sell

From a deeper business perspective, email marketing can be a key asset in delivering timely and focused information to customers and potential customers. At a minimum, businesses should be collecting email addresses from existing customers as a means to be able to continue to stay in contact with them and keep them updated on new products and services for future sales opportunities.

The often overlooked fact is that email can be key in the initial sales nurture process.

It can essentially serve as a salesperson via automated sequences of emails after initial sign-up. This is valuable because business research has noted that it takes on average seven contacts with a business before they are ready to call or make a purchase. As well, new customers are doing online research and another study noted that 67% of buyers have already made their mind up and are ready to purchase before they contact a business!

A top priority, then, is growing your email list of prospective customers so that they can be nurtured in the email sales pipeline. That’s a topic to be covered another time.

Below, I’ll outline what a business can do once they have new prospective customers on their email list.

Email Marketing Services

First, it’s critical to understand that to send bulk email to a large volume of email addresses, a business must use a email marketing software. This is critical because these type of software tools comply with anti-spam laws and they give valuable information on what happens per email recipient when a email is sent to a large list. If you try to send bulk email without an email marketing software, you’ll eventually get blocked for being a spammer and even your website could get blocked by Internet providers.

Email software refers to online services such as as Constant Contact, MailChimp, AWeber and iContact. There are numerous services to choose from. Typically they are subscription based services that you log into online to use. All employ mechanisms to allow tracking of email campaigns you send so that you can see how many people open the email and what links in the email they click on. Most importantly, they comply with anti-spam laws by having a “email unsubscribe” or “opt-out” feature within them. A company should never use Microsoft’s Outlook, Outlook Express, or similar desktop computer software to send bulk email.

Automating a Series of Emails

Many of these services offer “automation” or “nurture” email series options. This is the key element to focus on! A business can setup a series of emails that go out in a sequence that you set.

A typical sequence is 4-6 emails sent out over 10 days so that users get an email every 1-2 days. Each email in the sequence should:

(1) build on the last email,

(2) offer more value and resources

(3) direct the user to more information on your website.

In this way the sequence of emails is connected and leads the viewer through a process that helps educate and answer the most frequent questions so that by the last email in the series your business can make an offer for them and they can have enough information and trust to be ready to make a purchase. The entire process can be automated so that upon a visitor to your website signing up to join your email list, they are entered into the list and the sequence starts and deploys based on their sign-up date.

The value to a business is that the sequence can work as a “salesperson” in that the visitor is getting regular information, key questions answered, and the sequence can be strategic to help the viewer become a buyer. The added benefit is that this is automated so that once it is setup, it runs continually. The business can view statistics on open rates, links clicked in the emails, and ultimately track sales back to the final offer in the sequence.

How’s your business doing with email marketing as a sales tool for gaining new customers?

For many B2B businesses, a website is a crucial part of the marketing process. It’s the first point of call for a potential client; it’s an introduction to your brand and your product or service offering. It’s an expensive marketing asset that takes time and money to develop and a lot of resources go into making it the best it can be. There are so many elements to your website that can make it stronger and better at capturing your audience, but it can at times be difficult to ensure you’re ticking all the right boxes.   Wondering how to do that? Here is a checklist to make sure you’re getting the most out of your website and learn more about your visitors.

1. Keep it consistent:

Make sure all your pages are consistent throughout. A visitor will not always land on your home page where you’ve placed strategic calls to action such as data capture forms and social media buttons. So make sure that all your pages include calls to action, that they’re all branded in the same style, and that visitors can land on any page and still figure out what your business is about. As an example, Mashable has a unique option to see what content is the most shared in social media platforms. This encourages the readers to click and read the content.

2. Create good content:

Instead of focusing on what is good content, focus on your client wants and needs. Create targeted information that will solve your potential customers’ problems and reassure them that you are the best business to work with. This will work better for you in the long run, as you’ll create the type of engaging content your customers will keep coming back to. For example, HootSuite’s Blog focuses on providing the best resources and white papers, this way establishing itself as a knowledgeable business.

3. Connect with your audience:

Most of your customers will be active on one or more social media platforms, which opens the door for a more personal type of communication. The crucial thing to remember is you don’t need to be present across every single social media channel, instead choose the right ones, based on where your target audience spends more time, and become great at it. Social media is exactly what it says on the tin: social. Therefore it’s no use getting on social media and talking only about yourself! Interaction is the key! Add a personal touch whenever relevant by sharing photographs of your work, your team members etc. A good example of how significant social media is in terms of connecting with your clients is this conversation between Tesco Mobile and a customer. The entertaining conversation escalated and ended with tea and cake!

4. Add Calls to Action in strategic places:

Now, you have built reliable content on your site and used social media to connect with your customers. What’s missing? Built in calls to action (CTA) options, of course! CTAs are used to guide users through the sales funnel so they end up converting. It’s great to add these across your website and point users in the direction you’d like them to go. Test out different variations of CTAs across different locations on your website, to understand what works best for you. Using  A/B testing via Google Analytics and combining this with heat maps generated using a tool like crazy egg or mouseflow to give you a record of mouse movements, will give you valuable information about what works best for your website. The WWF website shows how this can be done, where all information is straightforward and easy to locate:

5. Tracking:

It’s great to have a good looking website with all the elements listed above but how do you know if you’re attracting the right kind of visitors? For many B2B businesses, they’re looking for a very specific audience and Google Analytics does not always provide enough information. It’s great to have large amounts of traffic but it’s also important to know whether it’s the right kind of traffic. Using a reverse IP tracking tool can give that extra piece of information that will make your website that much stronger at generating sales leads by finding out exactly who is visiting your site. Brands can also use this gathered data to amend content on their website, knowing what their target audience is most interested in. A tool like WhoLooked can provide information about companies visiting a B2B website.

6. Taking that extra step:

There is nothing more valuable than getting feedback from your visitors. Communication here is the key so make sure to listen to your customers. Even better, provide them with a platform where they can express their opinion about your site, product or service. That might be included in a CTA or short form embedded on your site, newsletter or social media platforms.

This list is by no means exhaustive but should give you a great starting point to make sure your website is doing all it can to help your sales and marketing teams. What would you add to this list? Comment below with your thoughts.

Though I often jokingly say, “Nothing new has changed in sales in the last 500 years,” I recognize that, in fact, things have changed. The way you measure your sales organization and track stages in the sales process needs to adapt to how customers make buying decisions today.

I recently received a great question from Ken Carson, an owner and head of sales at Xybix. These guys are seeing explosive growth delivering innovative furniture workstations -911 call centers know their capabilities quite well. Ken and his team attended the Remarkable Growth Experience back in January to further integrate their sales, marketing, and customer experience. Ken knows that top performing businesses see sales and marketing as integrated pieces not silos. Never being one to rest on their past success, Ken asked me about how the stages of the sales process have changed for those who have embraced inbound marketing.

The Old School Selling Stages

Look in the documentation for popular CRM solutions like SugarCRM or SalesForce and you’ll see a list of sales stages that looks something like this paraphrased list from the Sugar CRM site:

• Prospecting– This opportunity needs to be qualified by a sales representative.
• Qualification– The sales rep determines if a sales opportunity exists.
• Needs Analysis – After determining that the prospect has interest, the sales representative now uncovers the prospect’s business problems.
• Value Proposition – After uncovering the prospect’s business problems, the representative maps products and/or services to the prospect’s business problems and describes the solution value.
• ID Decision Makers –Identify the decision makers necessary to close this opportunity.
• Perception Analysis –Prospect’s perceived value of the company’s solution.
• Proposal/Price Quote –Delivers the proposal.
• Negotiation/Review –Review and negotiate the proposal with the prospect.
• Closed Won – You won.
• Closed Lost – You lost.

What Changed

Your potential customers are spending hours researching solutions before you ever speak with them. This means that you have to produce enough content so that your customers can see you as a thought leader. This makes content marketing an integral part of how you sell, today. If you don’t link content marketing and sales, then you have one hand tied behind your back.

I’ve asked 3,000 executives to share the questions they ask when approving a purchase. It starts with “Why do we need it? What problem does it solve?” If you don’t start by addressing that question with your potential customer, you have a long and painful road ahead of you. If you want to attract the right customers to find you, create content that describes the problems you solve for your customers. Suggest ways to solve the challenge. Be sure to deliver value. Don’t include a commercial about your company. Savvy buyers will figure out how to find you.

New and Improved Selling Stages

Buyers have changed how they make purchase decisions. Those companies and sellers who adapt to these changes will thrive, and those who don’t will perish.

Sales stages in selling systems work most effectively when they help sellers focus on how you deliver solutions to customers. The stages in the process also need to be simple to understand and execute. To that end, the steps outlined below combine multiple steps into single steps, and take into consideration the role of content marketing in the sales process.

Once you have content, here are the steps you may want to include in your CRM.

• Qualification– Is there a good fit between the customer’s business challenge and our expertise? Can we deliver extraordinary results? What is the business impact of NOT solving the problem? In short, is the problem a big enough deal for the customer to justify a change, and are we the best people to help them reach their goal?
• Include All Parties –Who else is impacted by this issue and the eventual solution? How do we include them? If you don’t include these people early in the process, you can waste a ton of time.
• Define Results – What results is the prospect envisioning for the solution to make sense? How can we measure those results together? This replaces Perception Analysis – The salesperson and client do this step together. It shows you care about their results more so than the sale.
• Discuss Investment – Once you agree on the impact of not solving the issue and how you can measure the results, you are in a good place to discuss the investment. The first time the prospect sees a number CANNOT be in a proposal. A proposal or agreement should memorialize details that you have already discussed.
• Review –Review the details of the agreement with the prospect in advance.
• Proposal/Agreement –Deliver the agreement.
• Closed Won/Lost –If you follow this process, you’ll know the outcome before you submit the agreement.

Two Critical Components

Throughout the sales process, there are two critical components that will help engage and entice your prospective customers. These elements create a perpetual link between sales and content marketing:

• Share Content to Build Comfort – During the sales process, your prospect continues to get information. If you don’t have content to share, they are probably getting it from your competition. Your content allows your customer to experience your expertise and get comfortable with your approach.
• Open Their Eyes – Share content that talks about similar business challenges and how you have helped others address similar issues. Follow this approach for case studies that we share in Same Side Selling to help ensure that you entice their interest that leads to inquiries.

The way customers research and buy today demands changes in how you sell. No longer can you focus on just your actions. Today, the sales process has to be collaborative. It’s about finding the FIT early in the process, and then helping your prospect gain comfort with your ability to help them achieve results.

It’s Your Turn

How have you adapted your sales process? What areas do you find the most frustrating when it comes to how customers buy today?

The team has a steady stream of leads coming from Marketing.  Furthermore, your team’s prospecting efforts are paying off.  Pipeline size is well above the company’s average.  In fact, your recent research shows you are outpacing industry pipeline to quota ratios.  You should be making your number every single quarter, but you are not.  Why?  Your team cannot execute the last mile.

Marketing and sales really need to get their acts together. I’m almost hesitant to click on a download for an eBook or White Paper.

It’s not for the inevitable box: Name, eMail, Company. Actually, that’s a fair trade for an eBook. I ask for the same, so I have no problem with that.

Where I have the problem is the Phone Call or the Follow Up eMail—-“I see you are interested in our solutions for…”

You know what I mean. You can almost guess the automation systems people are using by the timing of the call or email. Some companies, I can always count on the call within 30 minutes–I guess they are attracted by the CEO title in the box I ‘ve filled in. (I should test them next time by filling in my title as Janitor–on Thursdays, I do run the vacuum around the office. Wonder how quickly they’d call me?)

Some linger a few hours, but never more than a day.

I’m not sure I even object to the call, though I know they can nurture me a little longer, to refine their approach. But in so many systems, it seems nurturing has gotten down to one download.

I think what I really object to is the evident lack of research and poorly executed emails or calls.

Let’s take this week as an example. I downloaded two eBooks from different companies. Within a few hours I got nearly identical emails.

“I saw you were researching…,” “I noticed your interest…” They went on to say, “…our solutions help your sales organization improve its results…”

What was interesting was the eBooks I downloaded had nothing to do with what they outlined in their email. One was an eBook on Sales Management, containing 2 articles featuring me. I just hadn’t seen the final version of the eBook, so I was downloading it to look at the final copy. Of course the sales person didn’t know or guess this, he probably hadn’t looked at the eBook. He also hadn’t looked at my LinkedIn profile or our company website.

The second was virtually the same, just a different eBook in which I was featured.

Those were a little unusual because the materials featured things from me. But I experience the same thing with virtually every eBook or white paper I download. Their marketing automation and scoring systems (I know these companies have them) apparently “score” a sales worthy lead as the first eBook or White Paper download. Additionally, they apparently provide the sales person no intelligence other than the raw lead itself. Takes me back to the days when I used to see piles of “bingo cards” on sales people’s desks. I guess now days we face the same thing, only electronically, so it keeps our desks a little cleaner.

Sales people apparently are either poorly trained, so inundated with leads, under pressure to process leads quickly, that they don’t take the time to do basic research: Who is this person, What is the company, Do they represent a good prospect, Are they worthy of a call? So they make the call, wasting their time, my time, and making me wonder about the company as a vendor.

I actually don’t fault the sales people. They are doing what their managers tell them and measure them on.

I don’t fault them for the lack of coordination between marketing and sales, for not leveraging marketing automation tools properly to gain the greatest benefit. As much as we would like, as much capability as these tools provide, they are dependent on smart implementations and marketing/sales coordinating with each other.

As I wrap this post up, there are a few sales people that get it right.

I had downloaded an eBook, again one in which I was featured. The sales person got my name in his lead list, but his email was different:

“Dave, I noticed you downloaded the eBook. I thought your article was terrific. I know you probably aren’t looking at our products, but I just wanted to thank you for the article an your support of our company….”

Guess how quickly I responded.

Lead response time is a hot topic lately.

Companies have published research highlighting findings such as ‘calling inbound leads in under a minute delivers 3-4X conversion rates’ and ‘calling within 5 minutes vs. 30 minutes drops the odds of qualifying by 21X.’

I believe those studies are well done and their findings are true. But the question remains: for those of us with fairly complex B2B sales processes, do they matter? 

My hypothesis is that contact and conversion rates rarely equal quality of conversation (and ultimately revenue). I see two big problems in our rush to make contact.

Problem 1: A lead isn’t a lead isn’t a lead

At Hubspot’s recent Inbound conference, I asked an audience of roughly 300 attendees how they defined an inbound lead. Was it:

1. Only those who filled out a ‘contact me’ form or requested a demo?
   -or-
2. Anyone that responded to any marketing campaign?

Resoundingly, the answer was the latter.

Of everyone who submits a form for your company, what percent is in your Ideal Customer Profile? Let’s say 50% (although Sales will tell you it is closer to 25%).

That means half the time your Reps are chasing leads that have a low probability of buying. A pulse and the ability to hit ‘submit’ are overriding your collective experience, your lead scoring, and your Reps’ brains. Ready. Fire. Aim.

Problem 2: It takes longer than 5 minutes to not sound like an idiot

Let’s not forget another downside. An immediate response means your Rep knows nothing about the prospect and how they can help them build a better business. The prospect hit submit, got queued, and the connection was made - no preparation or planning involved.

Don’t believe me? Do me a favor. The next time you download a white paper and your phone rings immediately, ask the Rep, “What do you know about me and my business?” If the answer is about the white paper, hang up. You’re being processed like a sausage and it’s unlikely the conversation will create value for you.

This is what it sounds like, when leads cry.

Garrett Hollander over at SalesStaff recently wrote about what it feels like to be the victim of lead speed.

The whole article is worth a read. Here’s a key excerpt:

Here’s my suggestion

If you own a lead qualification team, let a well thought-out strategy dictate your process, not a stopwatch.

There is a time and a place for speed-to-contact. There is next-to-no chance that it is appropriate for 100% of your leads. Focus on lead response time for a highly-targeted subset of your leads that want - and warrant - that kind of attention.

Your buyers don’t want you to be the fastest, but they do want you to be the smartest. Take a breath and give them what they want.
 

 
(Photo credit: glynlowe)

Too many businesses fail miserably at good web site design.

Every web site is a living/breathing digital asset and has to be developed accordingly.

Your business is just homesteading on social media platforms but you own your web site.

Don’t even think about developing a web site until you’ve done a deep dive customer focus.

In start up “billion dollar” speak this is called a persona profile. It’s an exercise you want to go through.

• Has a dedicated customer profile exercise been done?
• How has the customer journey been mapped?
• Who tests usability issues within the company?
• Who owns the customer experience?
• Who responds and/or addresses questions from customers via social media?
• Is a customer relationship technology or platform being utilized?
• Do you have an internal FAQ and external that addressed common customer issues and questions?
• How do you ensure a consistent high quality experience for the customer across all digital touch points?

Over the years one of the most challenging issues all agencies face far too often is web site is driving marketing strategy.

It should be the other way around: don’t think about web site design as a “bolt on” to your business strategy.

In the end it’s going to cost you money and waste a lot of time.

Work on your marketing strategy and marry left and right brain issues: branding, design, User Interface, content structure, lead generation and sales funnel integration.

Once you really know who the customer is you can map out other critical marketing strategies that should be baked in to your design.

• What’s the product or service going to sell for and how to you communicate this to the market?

• How do analytics and sales funnel metrics tie into the web site; what’s a lead or desired outcome for a visitor other than perusing the site.

• What’s your content marketing strategy and how does it mesh with your web site?

• Sense of urgency drivers for the web site. What calls to action are desired for the visitor?

• Legacy content and information; how will this be archived in a meaningful way to continue to drive traffic.

• An understanding of the importance of great Titles and Section headers. These drive the visitors into the web site and help to generate revenue, sales leads and engagement.

• You’ve done a persona profile analysis right? Does your design team understand how to build a web site that piques the interest of and engages this target?

• Cloud integration: apps, third party services, appropriate server and/or hosting vendor.

• Understanding users “read” web site content in F Shaped Patterns.

Tactical Web Site Design Gotchas that Must Be Addressed

1. For good function web site design, think in iterative processes: 1.0 then 2.0 – don’t get bogged down into feature creep. It’s a time killer and 60 day project can easily turn into 3-4 months.
2. Give your designers (in house or agency) enough leeway to give them buy in to the project. You have to balance your business objectives with the creative process.
3. Build your site on a test server first and assess all functionality; then, move to your standard server.
4. Hosting is now almost all generic and the biggest “gotcha” we see with hosting is crowded servers. If your not using a dedicated Server like RackSpace who you use (assuming standard CPanel access is in place) makes little difference who you use.
5. Don’t stand up a web site without some kind of sales funnel with at least “crude A/B testing for product or service sales and an integrated newsletter list.
6. To a certain extent you get what you pay for. The web is loaded with funky looking web template sites where “price” was the overriding factor and many of them reflect what was invested. These markets are crowded and your web site look and feel is a key determinant of branding and customer perception.
7. Recognize 30-50% of your traffic is coming in via mobile – let this be one of the key determinants of your design (UX/UII): less is more.

Here’s a link to a standard two page informal questionnaire we use on all web site design projects that should be helpful in Word format.

You can Synthesize every Web Site Down into these four Steps

Content Strategy: what’s the purpose of the web site and how does it pique the interest of the visitor?

Information Architecture: what’s the structure of content on each page (text, images, videos, menus)?

Visual Design: how do images or video work with the content and enhance the information architecture?

Development Process: making the content, information architecture, lead gen system all work together seamlessly.

Smartphone Summary for Time Challenged Execs

Don’t think of a web site as an asset you invest in and then ignore. You’re wasting marketing resources if you do.

Great web sites are dynamic, with frequency updates to the core content and of course your blog.

Remember, you “get what you pay for” with design and images.

Getty images are much higher quality than most of the low cost dreck that passes for quality images used via many sites.

Last but not least. Infrastructure is so often overlooked as an integral part of web site design.

Your server provisioning, hosting provider, integrated apps and forms and even your Domain Name provider settings are all critical parts of great web site design.

Being a sales rep can be a difficult job. Oftentimes sales reps feel like they spend more of their time documenting actions than actually closing deals. That leaves sales managers complaining that they can’t get reps to report their activity or use a CRM system. Everyone knows that in order to speak intelligently about your company’s sales and production, that a CRM is necessary. If you’re having a tough time understanding why reps don’t use your CRM, here are some good explanations.

Too much reporting.

Sales reps spend an average of 90 minutes every day solely reporting their actions. From logging calls, to inputting notes, assigning tasks and adding new contacts – CRM systems can be cumbersome. If your reps see logging their daily activities as meaningless busywork, they’ll never input all the data you want them to. Consider a CRM with simple reporting.

They don’t understand why they should.

Many sales reps believe that sales managers only want them to enter data so they can show what they’re actually doing in a given day. While some managers might enjoy the micromanagement in sifting through every little task performed by their reps, the reality is that you need to better understand the numbers behind your sales team. If you communicate the real need behind your CRM (to measure your conversions, to track lead quality, to discover your cost per lead), sales reps would be far more likely to use it.

They don’t know how.

Lack of training is one of the main reasons that sales reps refuse to use CRM. If the learning curve is too great and they don’t feel that they have adequate support, you’ll have a tough time getting your reps to integrate it into their everyday activities. Instead of just throwing your reps into a CRM, take the time to hold a training class and establish processes for future hires that will help them use the tool most effectively for their purposes.

It doesn’t “talk” to marketing.

If a CRM could offer lead intelligence out of the gate and give marketing a better idea of which leads were good and which weren’t so good – sales reps would jump all over it. A lot of the time, though, CRM systems require the sales rep to do all the work – which can seem cumbersome to a sales personality that is driven for the bottom line and doesn’t like tedious tasks.

It doesn’t actually help them sell.

Too many CRM tools are strictly about data entry. The only way that you can run reports on anything is based on what information has been added to it by your sales team. When you have a system that not only fills out lead intelligence based on marketing efforts, but also gives you company intelligence like annual revenue, key contacts and more – it’s a no brainer for sales reps to use.

The traditional CRM has been cumbersome and tedious. If there’s one thing a personality that’s good at sales doesn’t like, it’s being held accountable for boring tasks and being asked to do the same thing repeatedly throughout the day. Sales reps like to be held accountable for results, not necessarily how they achieve them. By providing the right CRM that gives reps intelligence on their leads, training them properly from the start and shows them the purpose behind their actions – you’ll be much for successful in the adoption of a CRM system.

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled its next operating system for all devices — computers, tablets, phones, and more — called Windows 10. But before Windows 10 launches in early 2015, we thought it’d be interesting to look at the current landscape of operating systems to see what Microsoft’s latest effort is up against. 

As it turns out, the biggest competition for Windows is ...well, Windows. Based on real-time data from NetMarketShare charted for us by Business Insider Intelligence, Windows 7 is still the world’s most dominant desktop operating system — and between all versions of Windows, Microsoft’s operating system comprises a whopping 92% of the global desktop market share. Beyond desktops, when you look at all operating systems across desktop and mobile devices, Windows 7 is still the most-used OS with 38-39% market share. Windows as a whole makes up about 62% of the global market share of all operating systems.

Join the conversation about this story »

Google+ is one of the most under-utilized social platform today! That’s what I believe, I have seen people struggling with traditional SEO practices, people who believe that Google+ is just for techies, and I recently met a guy in India who asked me ‘People really use Google+?‘ I wasn’t shocked with that statement but was in coma for a minute when he mentioned he’s the head of a SEO company.

Google+ is a mixed platform, on which I see friends, followers, acquaintances, hangouts, videos, images, conversations, GIFs and so on. It’s like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, but all in one place. And the best thing is, it’s terrific for SEO. I do see some of the brands considering Google+ these days, but they get lost really soon. Let me share some ways to stand out from the crowd and mark your own niche.

1. A/B Content Testing

How do you know what your audience enjoys or ignores the most? You need to test your content by pitting it against each other, keeping the circumstances of timing and placement the same. Test different type of posts from short/long texts, Image only, videos or GIFs, and monitor how your audiences engage with these different styles of posts. Segregate your posts in various categories and see which one works more.

With those insights it will help you get a better understanding of which piece of content is hitting the mark and which one was a complete fail. That leaves you with the simple thing, more of what your audience likes and less of what they don’t engage with.

2. Catchy Headlines

On Google+ headlines are just not texts, they help in SEO as well. A good headline requires as much effort put in as developing the concept for writing an article. Writing a good headline is like fishing, as it entices your audiences to read the article like bait. Check out this example below-

This post starts with a headline, and then a quick description about how that tool can help you build your influence on Twitter. Headline is majorly focused to catch as many eye balls as possible and at the same time taking care of SEO bit. You can also look at this detailed section we covered earlier, to help you write really catchy headlines.

3. Don’t Use It As Pinterest

Beautiful images propel content on Google+, but do not mistake it for Pinterest! Each social network has its different posting styles, and it is best you adhere to them to receive the best possible results.

This is a learning I am sharing here! You see the two images above? Both are Digital Insights G+ posts. On the left there is a long infographic we shared, it got less engagement and users found it difficult to read. I know there are options where you can zoom images and read but that is a lot of expectations you carry for your visitors. Instead we tried a different format, diving the infographic in two parts. Putting it together makes another graphic with better visibility and more engagement.

4. Use Hashtags Effectively

We have used hashtags on many social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and they look pretty much the same way as they do on Google+. But after reading Mark Traphagen‘s post on Hashtags and related hashtags, I realized that though the hashtag looks similar on Google+,  it has a different way to function. You can make google learn about hashtags and related hashtags by using them efficiently.

Google+ also adds hashtags when you miss out, and it’s not only based on texts. You can try simply uploading an image and Google+ might tag those images which later can be used while searching. You can leverage various themes of hashtags on Google+ so it gets your content exposed in front of a larger audience and in turn brings that much visibility to your brand on Google+.

5. Leverage The Power Of Communities Effectively

Google+ Communities gives brands the opportunity to take an active role in interacting with individuals and active users. Google+ is packed of your power users, your primary focus should be to engage with them and build relationships as you can leverage their power to share your quality content with them, which they will spread it to their circles and other networks.

You can create your own community, which gives your consumers and prospects the opportunity to connect with you and bringing them closer to you which in turn help building lasting relationships.

Bonus: Remember, Every Share, Every +1 Counts

Share quality content on your Google+ page and do so consistently to get better results. The more shares and +1 you get, the better. If you aren’t aware, +1’s get accumulated. For example if I shared a post and 3 of my friends also shared it and got two +1’s on each of them. The total of +1’s I have for that post becomes 10.

Even when your sharing your content on your Google+ page, apart from sending it to your circles, make it public so it increases the chances of it being seen by more and more people, thus it increases the chances of being shared/ +1’ed.

It is imperative you market on Google+ effectively, because if you don’t you’re losing on its SEO benefits. You might also want to use of various Google+ tools to effectively market your brand.

Have any questions about Google+? Please share in the comments section below.

BlackBerry Ltd. has officially launched its Passport smartphone aimed at working professionals as part of the Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s plan to return to profitability.

Vancouver's Grandview-Woodlands and Yaletown — and, surprisingly, White Rock — are among the top 100 neighbourhoods in which to invest in Canada, according Canadian Real Estate Magazine.

What do Hillary  Clinton, Bruno Mars, Arianna Huffington, and Eckhart Tolle,  have in common? They’ll all be participating in this year’s Dreamforce 2014 event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. “Event” is perhaps not the right word to use. Dreamforce is the world’s largest gathering of Salesforce users, practitioners, and evangelists.  It’s equal parts party, celebration, inspiration, philanthrophy and industry trade-show.

This year looks to be the biggest event of it’s 12 year history. More than 1400 sessions, more than 350 exhibitors, 18 keynotes, 20 parties, 2 rock concerts, and 5 opportunities to help charities on site, there is perhaps no bigger event for sales and marketers.

There is too much for anyone person to keep track of.  Whether or not you’ll be attending, you’ll want to keep up on the latest and to help you with that mission, we’re naming the top 20 Twitter handles to follow at Dreamforce.

1	Act-On Software @ActonSoftware	Act-On’s streamlined user interface puts first-rate marketing tools at your fingertips, making campaigns and programs easier and faster. Integrate your CRM, webinar management and more, most with one click. Use Act-On for all your online marketing campaigns.	Act-On ToolSkool Video
2	Avention @Aventioninc	Sales is all about pursuit: pursuit of the right prospects, pursuit of the right message, pursuit of the right applications. Avention helps you accomplish this trifecta. Avention gives you the most up-to-date, most accessible, and most comprehensive information.	Avention ToolSkool Video
3	CallidusCloud @CallidusCloud	Transform your marketing & sales results with marketing automation, territory optimization, mobile learning, sales enablement, configure price quote and incentive compensation management, all in one suite, all in Salesforce with CallidusCloud.	CallidusCloud ToolSkool Video
4	ClearSlide @ClearSlide	Understand your customers’ perceptions, share content that’s relevant and follow-up at just the right time. Sales managers love ClearSlide for the insight it offers into their team’s activities, and sales people love the automatic activity logging.	ClearSlide ToolSkool Video
5	Clari @ClariHQ	Clari gathers information from all your critical data sources like Salesforce.com, email, calendar, LinkedIn, and file storage, presents the content automatically as needed and provides a real-time view into deal progress and relationships.	Clari ToolSkool Video
6	DiscoverOrg @DiscoverOrg	DiscoverOrg for IT and MKt organizations is not your average contact list. You’ll get org-charts on 100% of the 15,000+ profiled companies. DiscoverOrg’s in-house research team of 85+ people, start building the organizational chart from top to bottom.	DiscoverOrg ToolSkool Video
7	DocuSign @DocuSign	Thousands of sales organizations use DocuSign to get contracts signed more quickly than ever before. DocuSign gives you visibility and enhanced control over closing and booking every deal. Sales reps can use DocuSign right from within Salesforce CRM.	DocuSign ToolSkool Video
8	Fantasy Sales Team @FST_Games	Now you can run exceptional sales contests modeled on fantasty sports. This means you can motivate all your reps not just the top performers. Companies of all sizes, in any industry, can use Fantasy Sales Team on any CRM. Keep reps engaged from start to finish.	ToolSkool Video Not Yet Available
9	FirstRain @FirstRain	See clearer and farther than your competition. FirstRain gives you personalized insights tuned to your customers, strategies and end-markets. Get intelligence delivered right within your daily workflow like CRM, portal integration, and mobile devices.	ToolSkool Video Not Yet Available
10	InsideView @InsideView	CRM Solutions for your Enterprise. InsideView delivers the most accurate company and contact information, including business insights, and professional connections to increase sales and marketing productivity. Find, engage and win more deals.	InsideView ToolSkool Video
11	InsideSales @InsideSales	Phone, email, SMS and other channels are the lifeblood of inside sales. InsideSales delivers the power of automation and predictive analytics to increase activity, improve contact ratios, accelerate revenue and record, monitor & report your teams’ improved performance.	ToolSkool Video Not Yet Available
12	KnowledgeTree @KnowledgeTree	No more looking for great content. KnowledgeTree surfaces the best presentations, datasheets, and other collateral for every sales situation. Discover the exact content for each prospects’ needs without leaving Salesforce or their mobile device.	KnowledgeTree ToolSkool Video
13	LinkedIn: Sales Solutions @LinkedInSelling	LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps sales professionals leverage 300M+ professional profiles and 2M+ Company Pages. Sellers can quickly search and filter to identify influencers and decision makers and save them as leads to create high quality lead lists.	LinkedIn ToolSkool Video
14	PostWire @Postwire	Stop spending hours writing emails filled with links, attachments, photos, and text. Instead, create custom pages, filled with targeted content for your prospective clients. Easily drag and drop content to customize your prospect’s personalized page.	PostWire ToolSkool Video
15	Qvidian @Qvidian	Accelerate Sales Ramp Up. Make best sales processes more repeatable for new hires and align value to your customer’s specific business drivers. Qvidian let’s you bettercommunicate value, accelerate sales cycles and increase market penetration.	Qvidian ToolSkool Video
16	SAVO Group @Savo_Group	Reinforce your sales process and accelerate sales opportunities right from CRM. SAVO’s CRM Opportunity Pro shows the moving pieces of each deal, in real-time, so you can leverage opportunity-specific information to move deals forward, faster.	SAVO Group ToolSkool Video
17	Seismic @SeismicSoftware	Makes sure your sales teams can deliver the right content at the right time on any device. Seismic’s mobile-first platform enables compliant materials that dramatically increase selling time, improve win rates, reduce sales cycles & increase customer satisfaction.	Seismic Software ToolSkool Video
18	Tellwise @Tellwise	Give your sales and marketing professionals a unique and easy way to build relationships with your buyers. With Tellwise cloud-based collaboration platform, you’ll get higher win rates, an increase in sales velocity and better forecasting optics.	Tellwise ToolSkool Video
19	Velocify @Velocify	Velocify for Salesforce will help your high-velocity sales teams rapidly respond to new prospects, prioritize daily sales activity, drive more consistent selling practices, and generate predictable revenue. Sell at a faster, smarter pace with Velocify.	ToolSkool Video Not Yet Available
20	Yesware @Yesware	Know what happens to your email after you press send – who’s interested, how interested, and when to get in touch. With email tracking and templates for fast, consistent messaging, Yesware empowers sales teams to make smarter decisions, faster.	ToolSkool Video Not Yet Available

Watch the toolskool videos to learn more about each vendor and click to follow each of these 20. Or, click here to follow all 20 vendors at once! Of course Smart Selling Tools will also be there covering the event and reporting on what we see and hear. Follow us at @sellingtools and @SmartMktTools Hope to see you there!

More new businesses are better for society, right?

That’s a common assumption. For instance, take this recent Washington Post piece, headlined, “More businesses are closing than starting. Can Congress help turn that around?” Sounds ominous at first. But wait a minute – is starting more new businesses always a good thing? Isn’t it a basic economic tenet that well-functioning markets will have many entrances and exits, that weak businesses (including thousands of one-person enterprises) will get recycled quickly (fast failure) and that over time, vigorous, well-regulated markets will support strong and growing companies, which in turn provide dignified jobs and prosperity?

This conflation of startups with entrepreneurship, and more broadly with “business dynamism,” has become so widespread it can muddle even the most serious research. For example, the admired Brookings Institution recently purported to explain an apparent decades-long decline in American entrepreneurship. The supporting evidence? More and more American companies are surviving and growing beyond 16 years. The implicit axiom here is that robust companies that have sustained and grown over the longer term are somehow less innovative. The authors of this study, as well as other commentators, imply or even proclaim explicitly that these dead weight dinosaurs are dampening American society’s entrepreneurial spirit. (It should be noted that amongst this group of apparently innovation-barren 16-somethings are: eBay [19], Google [16], Starbucks [43], Netflix [17], Apple [28], Cisco [30], Boston Scientific [35], and Dell [30].) In attempting to explain the root causes of the decline, the Brookings report also points to the parallel decline in the number of new companies registered during the same period. Their solution: “America needs more startups.”

The danger here lies in our unquestioning acceptance of the assumptions built into these reports, i.e. that having more growing, sustaining companies is somehow destructive of entrepreneurship in the economy; and that the decline of newly registered businesses, in and of itself, is a bad thing. (Note that Germany has witnessed an almost identical “decline” in dynamism over the past thirty years and most experts would agree their economy has been quite strong. And Alibaba is a 16 year-old company, and no one is claiming it is sluggish or un-innovative.) Indeed, empirical evidence shows that the decline in new business formation is associated with increased per capita income, and the more new businesses countries have, the lower their GDPs are.

Most of us who have built or invested in sustainably growing business ventures (as we have) would be thrilled at their survival and growth. Anyone who has successfully built a company knows that it typically takes 15-20 years or more to take root. The WhatsApps are the rare exceptions.

These growing businesses – which we call “scale-ups” to distinguish them from start-ups – represent exactly the kind of long-term entrepreneurship that improves societies, jobs, quality of life, and innovation. Entrepreneurial scale-ups are companies – young or old – which are run and owned by growth-driven leaders, and which at any stage of their lives may launch a new growth trajectory. Study after study shows the following: Relatively high-growth ventures are often at least 16 years old, and are disproportionately high drivers of jobs, growth, value, and sustainability. New company starts are easier to count, but they alone don’t have the positive impact on economies that growing a company does.

In the coming eight weeks, we are engaging in a global effort to focus more of the entrepreneurship conversation on scale-ups and their positive impacts on societies and economies. This effort is primarily targeted towards this November’s Global Entrepreneurship Week, during which millions of people in 140 countries will participate in over 10,000 events to celebrate entrepreneurial start-ups. While of course healthy economies include adequate numbers of start-ups (as well as big companies, family businesses, and micro-enterprises), we believe that entrepreneurial scale-ups deserve more attention than they’re currently getting.

With an eye towards broadening and amplifying this conversation, we have developed a Scale Up Declaration, which we offer as a rallying point for what the entrepreneurship discussion should focus on, and what it should aim to accomplish.

Therefore, we declare that:

• From the dawn of human society, entrepreneurship – the creation of value by growing, or scaling, an enterprise – has always had a positive and unique social and economic impact on society;
• Great and successful entrepreneurs have always been, are, and will always be an essential part of great societies as job and wealth creators, innovators and, very often, philanthropists;
• Great entrepreneurs benefit society first by scaling up their enterprises as far and fast as possible, and then by reinvesting their successful stature in becoming inspiring role models; reinvesting their knowledge by becoming mentors or teachers; and reinvesting their financial gain in the next generation of entrepreneurs;
• A scale-up mindset – the powerful ambition to continually grow the enterprise and have an impact on the marketplace – is the most important attitude of successful scale-up entrepreneurs;
• Scale-up skills – leadership in bringing products and services to new and existing markets; attracting and growing human, financial and customer capital; learning quickly from mistakes – are the most important skills that entrepreneurs can learn;
• The quantity and success of local scale-up entrepreneurs increases the quantity and success of other manifestations of entrepreneurship, including start-ups, small business, and family business;
• Scale-up entrepreneurship applies to every sector, whether services, manufacturing, media, health care, real estate, or biotechnology;
• We all – entrepreneurs, business people, educators, foundations, governments, investors, bankers, and all leaders in civil society – can and should do more to encourage scale-up entrepreneurship in our regions and around the world;
• We will communicate the concepts and principles in this global Scale Up Declaration through every available channel, from face-to-face, to phone, to print, to email and social media.

We hope this Scale Up Declaration will gain momentum and become a major factor in creating an aligned, accurate, and comprehensive view of entrepreneurship around the world.

According to a recent Forrester study, business buyers define a valuable sales meeting as:

• A meeting where the firm’s managing director, sales manager or one of their executives demonstrates that they understand their buyer’s specific business issues and they clearly articulate how to solve them.
• A meeting that helps the buyer think about how to solve a solve business problem.
• A meeting where insights not considered before are shared.

If buyers are looking for the above 3 things from a sales meeting – then don’t you think if you communicate the “value” buyers  are looking for in your LinkedIn profile, then you’ll attract more key decision makers who want to talk to you? Below, is an inside look at how you can communicate through your LinkedIn profile the “value” prospects are looking for.

Example 1: Stratavant’s Managing Director Shows Buyers That He Understands Their Specific Business Issues

When we gave Darrin Fleming (Stratavant’s Managing Director) a profile makeover, we started off by sharing his “story”. We showed how he has first-hand experience, with the challenges of homegrown value-selling tools, which make it hard for key decision makers to quickly understand and visualize the business case. We discussed how in his past life, he was an economic evaluator for Dow Corning and he had to rely on data given to him by sales reps in spreadsheets that were often faulty due to wrong calculations, bad values and hidden assumptions. So, by using Darrin’s story, we are making an instant connection with buyers.

But that’s only the first step we took to show business buyers that Darrin understands their specific business issues. Within Darrin’s profile, you’ll find case studies that shows how top B2B brands (like Honeywell, Nuance, Avaya, IBM and SAP) are using Stratavant’s assessment calculators, ROI tools, TCO tools and value calculators.

For example, you’ll learn how a Fortune 100 conglomerate was having challenges convincing pharmaceutical companies that its packaging material delivered more value than the status quo material because it was 5 times as costly as the entrenched material on a per-unit basis. In one case, an account executive was having trouble getting a pharmaceutical company to even consider the material due to its higher cost. However, with the help of a Value Calculator, Stratavant’s client was now able to quantify the value in other areas such as labor savings, less scrap, lower secondary packaging material costs and increased sales from better patient compliance and persistence. The account executive was now able to get the account, close millions of dollars in incremental business and win the Chairman’s Award for closing millions of dollars in incremental business.

You see, Darrin speaks to unique challenges that B2B organizations with complex solutions and sales cycles are experiencing. He’s demonstrating that he understands their situation and how he has helped other organizations like them generate more leads, drive demand, win against competitors and close more deals.

Example 2: How the President of Wizard Media Communicates Her Value by Educating Business Buyers

When we gave Jimena Cortes (President of Wizard Media) a profile makeover, we focused on educating prospects about the problems they’re facing, the reasons their Facebook, SEO and other internet marketing efforts are failing and what they should do instead.
For example, in her experience section, you’ll find a case study that explains why a Neiman Marcus jewelry designer only had 614 fans (after being on Facebook for a number of years) and why she had zero engagement and zero sales even though she was posting several times per day.

Jimena then shares what she had to do for the designer in order to attract 45,000 fans in 9 months, engage with her new fans where she was able to capture 37% of her fans contact info and increase sales.

Because Jimena took the time to educate her business buyers, a prospect came to her ready and willing to spend at least $36,000 per year.

Example 3: How I Share Insights Not Considered Before on My LinkedIn Profile

Inside my profile, you’ll find links to my articles on MarketingProfs, Forbes and Profit Magazine. Inside my MarketingProfs article, I challenge prospects to think differently about how they position themselves on LinkedIn as they talk about how they are a leading edge, but they fail to prove it. Inside my Profit Magazine article, I’m providing sales directors, managers and executives with insights on the ineffective actions they are taking (even though it’s common practice) and how they should be engaging with B2B buyers on LinkedIn. Inside my Forbes article, I provide mini case studies on how professional service firms, consultants and business leaders are mixing content marketing with LinkedIn.

The insights I shared in my Forbes article not only helped me gain the interest of a large digital advertising analytics software company but it helped me win them over to become my largest account!

Your Next Steps…

This is only a small sampling of how B2B sales and marketing leaders should be communicating their value and differentiating themselves on LinkedIn. Connect with me on LinkedIn and see how I communicate my value to you. Then take a good look at your profile and your marketing efforts – and see where you need to make instant changes.

VANCOUVER – The Asian owners of Grande Cache Coal have signed a deal to sell a controlling interest in the Canadian coal mine for just $2 to Up Energy Development Group Ltd., a Chinese company.

Marubeni of Japan and Hong Kong-listed Winsway Coking Coal Holdings Ltd. had paid $1 billion for the mine in 2012 when coal prices were booming.

Winsway said it has decided to reduce its dependence on coal and to diversify into services for other bulk commodities.

“Although these efforts have not yet resulted in significant earnings, the company is confident that the proposed new business model will enable it to better utilize its logistics resources and contribute to its earnings in the near future,” Winsway said in a statement.

Marubeni also confirmed the deal in a statement Wednesday, but did not offer an explanation for the sale.

Up Energy said Marubeni will receive $1 for its 40 per cent stake, while Winsway will get $1 for 42.74 per cent of Grande Cache and retain a 17.26 per cent interest.

Marubeni, one of the largest Japanese trading houses, will also have the right to buy back a 15.78 per cent interest under certain conditions, while Winsway may buy back up to 16.86 per cent.

Grande Cache is a producer of metallurgical coal and holds coal leases covering more than 22,000 hectares in the Smoky River coalfield in west-central Alberta.

The post Chinese firm buys controlling stake in Grande Cache Coal as owners dump mine appeared first on Canadian Business.