BERLIN — Just when we’ve become convinced the future is mobile, it’s moved home. With close to one in four consumers globally using a smartphone, companies are turning their attention to the connected home — the new arena where players are battling it out to dominate what promises to be a lucrative market.
The Ontario government raised more than a few eyebrows on Monday with a recommendation that a new tax should be imposed on YouTube, Netflix and other foreign-owned Internet video providers.
Traditional broadcasters are currently required to air a certain amount of Canadian programming and must pay a percentage of their revenues into the Canada Media Fund, a pool that helps fund the development of that programming. YouTube, Netflix and the rest don’t have those requirements, a fact that has stuck in the craw of those traditional broadcasters for some time.
Appearing before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication’s Let’s Talk TV hearings, Kevin Finnerty, the assistant deputy minister for Ontario’s Ministry or Tourism, Culture and Sport, took a page right out of the broadcasters’ playbook in calling for a realignment of the rules:
In order to create a more level playing field, the ministry recommends decreasing this regulatory imbalance. The ministry believes the best way to accomplish this is to expand the regulation of new media TV, rather than by lightening the current regulation of traditional TV.
The Ontario government—which is coincidentally looking to sell its lottery operations to those traditional broadcasters, according to a report—suggests foreign online video providers should be forced to contribute to the CMF once they hit a certain size.
Failing that, other online video services—those produced by Canadian companies—could be given other advantages, such as the ability to exempt their products from internet data caps.
As University of Ottawa internet law professor Michael Geist notes, that would be a violation of the CRTC’s net neutrality rules.
A call to the ministry for further comment Monday evening was not returned.
The federal Conservative government was quick to condemn its provincial Liberal counterpart.
“The CRTC has in the past declined to regulate such services—a position that our government continues to firmly support,” said federal Heritage Minister Shelly Glover in a statement. “Canadian consumers can rest assured that our government will continue to stand up for them. We will not allow any moves to impose new regulations and taxes on internet video that would create a Netflix and YouTube tax.”
The federal government is correct in assuming that such a tax would not go down well with consumers. Many respondents to an earlier phase of the CRTC’s wide-ranging review of the broadcasting landscape let the organization know that in no uncertain terms.
Moreover, supposedly neutral supporters of regulating so-called over-the-top video services probably haven’t thought through how such a tax could actually be implemented, or what its repercussions might be.
For Netflix, a paid subscription service, it would be relatively easy. The company would simply pay a percentage of its revenues into the CMF, and then, in all likelihood, increase its monthly subscription fees accordingly.
But for YouTube and other free services, the implementation is hazier and the fallout could be more interesting. Because YouTube doesn’t charge viewers for its service, there’s no way it could pass the cost of regulation on to them. Its owner Google would simply have to eat that cost.
But YouTube is global, and if Canadian regulators were to take their pound of flesh, others would follow. France, taking Canada’s lead, is also talking about a cultural tax on online video providers.
Is Google willing to risk such a domino effect, where country after country could line up and demand its own respective cultural tax?
A while back I suggested the company could instead opt for a scorched-earth approach and simply pull YouTube out of countries making such demands. That’s an extreme option, but other, strong reactions are possible.
What if, for example, YouTube lowered advertising payouts to users in taxing countries? In this way, content producers would bear the brunt of regulatory costs rather than content consumers.
That could in turn result in Canadian video makers hosting their content and associated businesses outside of the country, which would be a perversion of the whole point of the regulatory taxes in the first place.
Imagine that: a cultural tax intended to help produce Canadian content forcing the producers of that content to flee the country.
The Ontario government is also calling for a separate hearing to determine how such regulation could work. The CRTC should indeed follow through so that supporters of an Internet video tax could see just how full of holes the idea is.
You've had a great sales conversation with a prospect, pitched your product, asked for the close... and your prospective buyer tells you: "This sounds all really good, but it's just not a priority for us right now."
How do you respond to that? What can you do to make a sale happen?
There are two ways of handling the "this just isn't a priority right now"-objection. Which of the two you should choose depends on why the prospect tells you it's not a priority.
Reason #1: Your Pitch Doesn't Push Their Buttons
Did you properly qualify your prospects? Do you really understand their needs, challenges and priorities?
If not, you need to ask more questions until you have a clear picture of what matters to them.
If you're going to use a generic, one-size fits all value proposition, you're going to miss out on a lot of opportunities. One of the reasons why sales people can create more revenue is precisely because they can personalize the sales approach for each prospect.
The same product/service can be presented in different ways, to match different needs.
Example: Saving Costs vs Increasing Revenue
Let's say your solution helps businesses to reduce their accounting costs, and for a particular prospect you estimate it could save them $20,000. After qualifying your prospect, you learn all they care about is increasing revenue though.
What do you do? Just pitch them on saving $20k on accounting? Hope that they'll bite, because, well, a dollar saved is a dollar earned?
Nope.
You get creative and present your solution as a way to increase revenue. This will require further questioning. And you make it about identifying opportunities how $20k can be put to use to increase revenues.
Don't expect the prospect to connect the dots - it's your job as a sales person to find ways to create value for them. Sales isn't just about peddling your goods - it's about consulting them to better achieve their goals.
Reason #2: They're Avoiding the Real Issue
You have qualified them and they told you about their priorities. You adjusted your pitch to match these priorities. But when you ask for the close, they tell you: "This sounds all good, but it's just not really a priority now."
What's going on? Maybe you misunderstood them, maybe they just bullshitted you about their priorities.
There's some kind of disconnect - but what do you do about it?
How do you get to the real issue?
You just ask them: "You know what? I'm struggling with this, and I need your help. How come that it's not a priority, since you mentioned that increasing revenue in the next quarter or two is really the number one goal that you guys have in mind? And I think I've demonstrated that our product could help you accomplish that in a pretty powerful way. Where is the disconnect? What am I missing? Why isn't this a priority at this point?"
Don't be confrontational about it - just be upfront and honest, and ask them to resolve this mismatch in a way that allows them to save face.
Oftentimes they just told you a little white lie because they were polite, or they were just uncomfortable to bring up the real issue. At this point, many inexperienced sales people make it about who is right and who is wrong. Yes, you can start to argue with them and prove them wrong, point out their fallacies. But do you want to close the deal or do you want to be right?
Most of the time if you probe, the prospect will then tell you about the real objection, for example:
"You know, it actually is a high priority right now, but the thing is, we've tried this many times with other startups, and one issue we had is the technology looks really cool, but it's usually not mature, and then it takes way longer to implement than we thought, so, I really don't want to get into these problems." → It's really about a lack of trust!
"You know what, the disconnect is that I don't really think you're going to move the needle on the revenue side. Yes, this could bring like a 2% improvement, but we're looking for 30% growth! And we already plan to do X, Y and Z to increase our revenue. This is really a small distraction, its not going to make a big enough difference." → It's about your value proposition.
In sales, an inconvenient truth is always better than a convenient lie.
Because it's something you can use to move the deal forward (or determine this just isn't a fit and stop wasting your time on a bad prospect).
If they still give you "not a priority BS", become more confrontational.
Challenge them.
Ask them: "What would need to happen to make this a priority? If you're three quarters into the year and you're not on track to meet revenue goals, and you don't have more budget to spend? If you fail to grow revenues and your company needs to let people be able to afford more for marketing - will it then be a priority?"
You'll want to get a good sense for who you're dealing with before you take the gloves off, but sometimes that's what it takes.
The thing is, "not really a priority" should never be the reason why they resist your pitch - if you've properly qualified them and identified them as a good fit.
"It's not really a priority" should never be the final argument in a sales conversation.
There's always a next step - it might ultimately lead to figuring out that they're actually not a good fit, but oftentimes you'll see that there's an undiscovered opportunity to create a win-win.
The goal of strategy is profitable growth, meaning economic value above the firm’s cost of capital. There are basically four ways to create that value: (1) invest in projects that earn more than their cost of capital; (2) increase profits from existing capital investments; (3) reduce the assets devoted to activities that earn less than their cost of capital; and (4) reduce the cost of capital itself.
In my experience, most CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite executives involved in strategy formulation know these finance basics. (Or, they learn fast after a few investor meetings.) But far fewer understand and operationalize the core sales factors that materially affect each value creation lever.
Most projects and investment initiatives in firms are driven by revenue-seeking activities with customers. Hence, the customer-selection criteria of sales managers, and call patterns of sales reps, directly impact the first value-creation lever: which projects the firm invests in. But most sales compensation plans focus purely on volume incentives. In effect, the C-suite is saying to salespeople: “go forth and multiply!” That’s precisely what they do, selling to any customers and, in the process, generating a motley mix of investment initiatives in the selling firm. Soon, it really doesn’t matter what your strategic planning documents say. Your real “strategy” is the collection of investments made via this ad hoc process.
To increase profits from existing investments, the interactions between sales and other functions is crucial because those interactions accrete costs, time, and on-going asset utilization patterns in organizations. Consider the order cycle in most businesses. For the seller, an order typically touches multiple functions as it moves from a customer’s request for specifications or quote to a purchase and through any post-sale service activities such as delivery and installation. The process starts with a sale—as the old saying goes, “nothing happens until you make a sale”–and sales is involved in most of these activities, if only because it’s the sales rep who usually fields the customer’s questions or complaints and who then interacts with other functions to respond.
Smartly reducing assets devoted to activities that earn less than their cost of capital requires good links with evolving market realities. (My previous article emphasized how and why these links are broken in many companies.) But creating value also requires senior executives to get more serious and knowledgeable about performance-management issues in sales. Without that understanding of how sales hiring, incentives, organization, and training affect field behavior in your company, asset redeployment becomes an academic exercise that does not affect the actions of those using unproductive assets. Or, worse, C-suite initiatives become an unwitting impediment to the use of assets that in fact remain essential to profitable selling.
It may seem that sales has little impact on the fourth value-creation lever, the firm’s cost of capital. Isn’t that a function of risk parameters and the debt-to-equity ratio? (Call the investment bankers for advice, since they’ve shown how smart they are in managing their risks and leverage.) But consider the basics. Financing needs are in large part driven by the cash on hand and the working capital required to conduct and grow the business. Most often, the single biggest driver of cash-out and cash-in is the selling cycle. Accounts payables accumulate during selling, and accounts receivables are largely determined by what’s sold, how fast, and at what price. That’s why increasing close rates and accelerating selling cycles is a strategic issue and not only a sales task.
Interactions with customers affect all core elements of enterprise value and, in many firms the sales force is the sum of those interactions. If the C-suite can’t make these connections between sales and strategy, then attempts to increase stock price or valuations are at best limited and, at worst, going down the wrong path. For example, as a leader, you can worry prudently and diligently all you want about disruptive innovations in your industry, but you need a sales channel aligned with strategy to do something about it. Or as a character in a John le Carre novel says, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
Because of these Linkedin marketing tips, tomorrow, or possibly within 24 hours, you’ll have people in Linkedin asking about what you do and how you can collaborate with them – that’s how effective these tips are!
This is the one Linkedin marketing resource that you need if you want to get results.
Before I start sharing, I’d like to emphasize the core elements of the tips that I’ll be talking about:
These two elements are what makes my tips work. They are the reason why others will contact you after implementing these Linkedin marketing strategies that I’ll share. If you think you can’t live with the core elements, then you should forget about using the tips since you’ll just end-up hurting your brand one way or the other.
Now that we have that squared away, let’s get started.
Thank the publisher for the article they wrote and tell them that you shared it.
There are three very important reasons why you should message and tell them that you shared their post.
1.) So that you can be more personal in expressing your gratitude for the tips that they’ve shared. This makes your message a lot more meaningful and worthwhile to them.
2.) They won’t really know that you shared it unless they scroll the heck out of their news feeds and see you sharing it. This RARELY happens though so don’t even count on it.
3.) You can open up a conversation with them and look for an opportunity to collaborate.
This tip helps you solidify whatever kind of relationship you have with your connections. This makes them feel like they are connecting with a real human – a warm one at that!
The more human you seem to them, the more likely they’ll contact you if they’ll ever need your help.
* Tip – If you didn’t find value on the article that they published, then don’t even think about contacting them and telling them how amazing their post is. That’s downright manipulation!
You should only do this tip if you’ve read his post and you found TONS of golden nuggets in it. If you think you’ve learned a lot of things that can prove useful to how you go about your work/life, then that’s when you should contact them and thank them for the article they published.
Take the time to regularly change your profile’s background.
There is more to using your profile background than just adding a random good-looking image or your website’s header image.
Instead of doing that, why not add a promo-code or a theme-based monthly image?
Not only does this give your profile a fresher monthly look, but it’s also HIGHLY functional.
Using your banners effectively can tell your profile viewers in a whim if you have special offers or an event that your company (or you) are about to launch.
Also, you can share your banner to your employees. Can you imagine how many profile views your employees have monthly? Now imagine all those viewers seeing your promo offers?
You can give your banner ads thousands of monthly impression at no cost at all if you use this strategy.
Contact your network (be selective about this) and ask for their expert advice on an article that you are currently working on.
Of course, you’ll have to mention how you’ll feature them on your article as the source of the idea.
Telling someone that you’ll feature them is akin to saying that they are important to you without actually telling them straight-up. The unspoken message of how you value them is pretty clear since you’re asking to feature them.
This strategy usually ends-up with them either ignoring you, or giving you a “sure, I can help you with that” answer. Once they give you the latter, you can then talk to them or perhaps message them about how you both can collaborate on a project.
This puts you on a strategic position where you can build a stronger relationship with them and be their service provider should they need someone with a skill set like yours.
* Tip – These people are often times busy. So don’t ask them for an entire article’s worth of advice. A 3 – 5 sentence advice should be a good enough length.
This also works since you can contact other experts and feature 5 – 10 experts per article and still keep your article at a reasonable length.
Rent someone else’s profile background.
There’s no harm in asking – provided that you ask the right way, of course.
I’ll be the first one to tell you that most Linkedin users are VERY conscious about their profile. They want it to look as professional as it can be so asking them if you can rent their profile’s background may be a bit of a hot topic to talk about.
But… If you’ve already established a level of trust and goodwill with the other person, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t ask them. Just be professional about it and you surely won’t run into any kind of trouble.
Before you even decide to do this, here are a couple of points that you might want to consider when choosing which person to contact.
1.) Does the person have a huge number of followers?
2.) Is he or she constantly sharing and commenting on posts?
3.) Does he or she constantly publish long form posts? Does his posts get any shares or comments?
The main idea is to make sure that the person is active and interacting with a lot of people. This increases the chances of people seeing your banner / promo in their profile background.
* Tip – Only premium users have a customized profile background. However, rumor has it (or this has already been rolled out by Linkedin to some accounts) that free users will also have this feature.
That being said, be on the lookout on your profile. If you see your profile with a blue background, then you should be able to change it to something that’s going to fit your brand.
Be the first to comment (as much as possible) but be VERY SELECTIVE on which long form post / discussion you’ll comment.
While I totally agree with how the length of a comment isn’t in any way directly proportional to the value that it can give, I urge you to write a relatively long comment nonetheless.
Adding 3 – 5 lines would be great.
This gives the readers the impression that you took the time to write a comprehensive comment for them – at a glance.
Of course, this rule is made to be broken. Just make sure that you provide as much value as you can when commenting. Make sure that reading it is worth the reader’s time.
If they find your comment really helpful, then you would’ve established yourself as an authority in the field adding to your credibility.
* Tip – You’ll be better off being selective on which articles/discussions you’ll comment on. Make sure that the article has a powerful headline and look for indications that the article is going to be viral.
Don’t just go on clicking every niche related long form post you can find and start commenting on them. You’ll end-up wasting your time if you comment on posts that others won’t read.
I’ll tell you right now that not many people take the time to welcome their new connections.
Either they are too busy, they missed seeing the notification, or they just flat-out don’t care. Which ever it is, you’ll be in a better position if you aren’t any of those people.
Taking the time to welcome them (warmly) makes you even more personable to them. It makes you more professional and more human to their eyes.
Question… If they see that you possess the skill set that they are looking for and they are pleased with how you acted towards them, what do you think is stopping them from sharing their business with you?
On the other hand, if you didn’t say hi to them, chances are good that you’ll just be another name on their list of connections – nothing more, nothing less.
* Tip – Mention something personal or perhaps something you both know about.
If you’re both in the marketing niche, you can tell them “Hi ____, I hope you weren’t hit on the latest Google update… blah blah blah”.
This makes your message very personal and worth reading.
Also, the chances of them replying to your message REALLY shoots up!
Use the “Who’s Viewed your Profile” tab
The “who’s viewed your profile” feature is a good place to look for warm leads.
While most users in Linkedin (that’s on the same industry as your target market) can be considered as warm leads, the ones in your “Who’s viewed your profile” section is even warmer.
Why, you might ask?
Simply because people don’t just look at your profile if they don’t have a reason for doing so. Most of these people look at your profile since they are interested about your or perhaps they need someone with the same skill set as yours.
Whatever the reason is, failing to contact them and asking whether there’s anything you can help them with is a big no-no.
Their interest towards you that led them to click your profile can lead to something bigger and lucrative for the both of you if you take the time to nurture it.
Simply saying hi or outright asking them (nicely) if there’s anything you can help them with can be a good way of opening a conversation with them.
* Tip – Instead of simply asking them about how you can help them, you can also ask them about what they do or what their expertise are.
Not only does this tell them that they matter to you, it also helps you learn more about them and how you both can collaborate on future projects.
Capitalize on the “keep in touch” feature.
This feature tells what’s happening on your network’s life events. It’ll tell you if it’s someone else’s birthday, if they have a new job, or if it’s their work anniversary (among other things).
Considering the kind of information this feature gives you, you probably already know by now how powerful it is. This helps make your message timely making it a bit more meaningful to them.
Let me give you an example. If you see in your “Keep in Touch” section that someone got hired for a new job, what’s stopping you from contacting them and opening up a conversation on how you can both collaborate?
You can say something like,“Hey __________, Congratulations on being the new web developer in (name of company). I’m a Copywriter and I think there’s a huge opportunity for us to collaborate. Let’s get in touch in…”.
* Tip – Don’t just use Linkedin’s default message “congrats” when connecting with someone. It looks spammy and quite frankly, it isn’t going to be worth anything because there is nothing personal about it.
Create your own message and personalize it based on what your connection’s new job or life event is.
Always ask for an opportunity to collaborate with them whenever you can.
As you may have noticed, all the tips that I shared involves interacting with your network one way or the other. That’s because I personally believe that conversations win clients.
Once you get the conversation going, take the time to ask them if there’s an opportunity for you to collaborate with them.
You can either do this on your first message to them or probably on a later part. The point is, you need to ask.
This is one thing that a lot of Linkedin users fail to do. They know they want new clients, but they don’t bother to ask because they worry about sounding too salesy.
This issue can be fixed by simply using the right set of words that convey concern and genuine interest to them.
Here’s an example.
“Hey ________,I’m glad to have met you here in Linkedin. I see that your expertise is on __________, do you think we can collaborate on a project together?”
“Hey ________, I’m also in the your niche, do you think we can collaborate on a project together?”
* Important note – This is the tip that you need to integrate in almost all the tips that I shared above.
If you use this tip on every opportunity you can (that makes sense), there’s a very high probability of them replying to you asking about what kind of collaboration you had in mind.
Remember
Before you start doing any of the tips that I shared, please don’t ever forget what their core elements are. If you don’t have your network’s best interest in mind, and you’re doing this out of purely selfish reasons, then these tips won’t work for you.
If you did a quick search on the web about effective Linkedin marketing tips, then I’d wager that you found how all the tips shared are pretty much the same.
Please don’t bother sharing the same things here.
However if you have unique Linkedin ideas that are both actionable and effective, then I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.
OTTAWA – The Conservatives have made the recognition of foreign credentials for new immigrants a top priority, but skilled newcomers have told government-commissioned researchers there are “huge obstacles” preventing them from finding jobs even when they’re qualified to work here.
In a report prepared earlier this year by Environics Research, newcomers in 12 focus groups across the country said other issues hinder their ability to get work.
The participants — including doctors, pharmacists and engineers — said language barriers and requirements for Canadian experience on some job postings pose the biggest problems.
They said they suspected that Canadian experience requirements were “a coded way for employers to favour the Canadian-born,” the report said.
The participants also pointed to a lack of Canadian connections or networks and “difficulty in general social interactions due to language and cultural differences.”
The participants didn’t feel the issue of formal recognition of credentials was a major barrier to employment. There were also differences of opinion on the value of foreign credentials, depending on the participants’ country of origin.
“Many Chinese participants believe their training and work experience from China are of limited use in Canada because they feel that everything in China is so radically different from Canada that there is no way it could be applicable,” the report read.
“It was noted that a law degree from China in no way prepares anyone to practise law in Canada.”
A spokesman for Employment Minister Jason Kenney said the government commissioned the study in order to determine why skilled immigrants had trouble finding work. He added that the Tories plan to unveil initiatives soon aimed at tackling the problems.
“It’s a big priority for the fall,” said Nick Koolsbergen.
Earlier this summer, Kenney announced an agreement with the provinces to recognize 10 new occupations, including welders, carpenters and electricians, to improve foreign-credential recognition.
The government said one of the goals was to help lessen the need for temporary foreign workers by making better use of talent that’s already in Canada.
Two years ago, the Conservatives also introduced foreign credential recognition loans. They’ve issued more than a 1,000 of them to foreign- trained professionals to help them pay to have their credentials recognized in Canada through further training and instruction.
But the participants in the Environics report also urged the government to do more about raising awareness on credential issues. They recommended adding an education component to the immigration application process specifically focused on qualifications and working in Canada.
“From the participants’ perspective, the more details the better and the sooner they can find out about these details in their immigration process, the better,” the report said.
Images are important. There’s just no way around it. As the reach of Internet-based posts continues to grow, so does the importance of using photos that won’t blur or pixelate on a web page. The same goes for printed materials, which can easily smudge as soon as ink hits paper. And as cameras continue to advance, even those that are built directly into our phones, there’s really no excuse for hosting a bad photo. (That is, unless you’re taking screen shots from a favorite 90s TV show, which is itself blurry.)
But with clear images also comes the need for quality poses and facial expressions. (When a questionable picture is clear, it just means you’ll look that much more awkward when making a face.) And considering every image you use is a direct reflection of you, your blog, or your work as a professional, it’s important to be choosy. Especially when dealing with head shots or individual pics.
To get the most out of your pictures, consider the following.
Hire a Pro
For head shots or any other professional photos, look to outside help. Full time photographers will know how to pose, how to best frame the picture, and an entire slew of other tricks that will make you look your best. Best of all, it’s a one-time expense that will keep helping your professional portfolio over time. You can even look into trading services to save even more funds on the venture.
Do a quick Google search to find local pro photographers, or ask your friends to see if they know one who specializes in business photography.
Be Choosy
When posting blogs or other web content, it can be easy to click and download the first image you see. (That is, the first royalty-free one.) But that can also lead to a filler, not a photo that best reflects each topic. Instead, spend a few minutes searching through relevant pictures that will work to compliment each post, not just fill in its excess space.
Follow the Rules
Posting images can mean the need for following all types of royalty laws. Be sure you study these guidelines and understand which posts can and can’t be used in each scenario. And to be safe, opt for a platform that searches through licenses for you, eliminating any costly or illegal misunderstandings.
See What Works
Are your followers more responsive to infographics? Memes? Charts? See what gets the most comments, interaction, etc. and default to those options when given the choice. It’s an easy and effective way to still add visual aspects while ensuring your followers will be the most entertained by each of your posts.
Considering the power photos can add to a post (or take away from it with the wrong type of quality), they should be taken seriously in every instance. From web pages, to business cards, to the daily blog. Consider improving your images’ production value for an easy, yet effective way to boost content quality.
We evaluated the states' economies on the most recently available data for seven measures of economic strength. The states were ranked on each of the seven measures, and then their rankings were averaged together to create the composite index.
Here's the seven variables we used in the ranking:
July 2014 Unemployment Rate: This is the headline unemployment rate, reported at the state level every month a few weeks after the national figures by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Local Area Unemployment Statistics program.
July 2014 Non Farm Payrolls, change since June 2014: As with the unemployment rate, the monthly change in non-farm payroll jobs is published at the state level a few weeks after the national jobs numbers are released, again by the Local Area Unemployment Statistics program.
2013 State Gross Domestic Product per capita: This is a measure of the total economic activity in an area, adjusted for population. State GDP data comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and per capita GDP was calculated using this and Census Bureau population estimates for July 1, 2013.
2012 Personal Consumption Expenditures per capita: This is a measure of the largest part of Gross Domestic Product: consumer purchases of goods and services. The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently developed a state by state estimate of this figure.
2013 Average Annual Wage: This figure comes from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, a more refined and accurate but less timely measure than the monthly employment and wage figures.
2012 State Government Surplus/Deficit per capita: As an approximate measure of each state's fiscal health, we used the Census Bureau's State Government Finances program and took the difference between 2012 total revenue and expenditure, again adjusting by population estimates for July 1, 2012 to account for the size of each state.
In fact, billionaire investor Peter Thiel even pays you to skip college and launch your own startup.
But should this kind of thinking — starting your own company at a very young age, with almost zero work experience — become the norm in tech?
Todd McKinnon, CEO and founder of Okta, a $600 million company that specializes in enterprise security, thinks otherwise.
Before founding Okta, McKinnon was senior VP of engineering for Salesforce.com. Working directly under Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, McKinnon was responsible for growing its engineering team from 15 people in 2003 to 250 engineers in 2009.
“Some people say you should drop out of college (to start your own company), which may work if you have an amazing idea and get really lucky,” McKinnon told Business Insider in an interview.
“But there’s something to be said for working at a big, successful company first.”
McKinnon said there’s tremendous value in getting experience at a company “that wins” and learning what winning looks like. He described his time at Salesforce as “a gift” in that it really gave him a first-hand glimpse into a rapidly growing, successful company.
“My advice to people is to find a company’s that’s going to win and get some experience there, and learn what it looks like. And if you’re going to start something, start it later,” he said.
He added it doesn’t necessarily have to be a huge company, but an established company with some momentum because it will arm you much better for what you’re trying to do.
“If you start too early, the chances are you’re going to fail, which is fine. But you’re not going to learn what winning looks like,” he said.
Okta, founded in 2009, has raised $155 million in funding so far. It was Andreessen Horowitz’s first cloud investment and is now valued at roughly $600 million. With over 1,200 enterprise customers, Okta is one of the largest companies in enterprise security, and is expected to go public by 2016.
We all struggle to create emails that are worthy of being opened.
We have to overcome the instinctive “Delete” reflex by our customers and prospects.
Following are 5 opportunities for emails that provide value, engagement and drive response.
1) Triggered messaging
Triggered messages (meaning those that are personalized, real time, or event related such as confirmations that are sent to subscribers in response to a specific action,) outperform generic emails. One of the reasons these types of emails are so effective is because they are relevant and personalized.
Ideas for triggered emails include:
Cart abandonment reminders
Order confirmations or shipping confirmations that include a personal thank-you with a time frame based thank you discount on their next purchase.
Additionally, according to eMarketer, for retailers, triggered emails enjoy an open rate nearly 75% higher than nontriggered emails, while clickthroughs more than tripled.
2) Transactional Messaging
According to the Experian’s “The Transactional Email Report, transaction-related emails, [prompted by] customers’ buying behavior, can provide marketers with great opportunity for improving customer service, gaining repeat sales and deepening customer engagement compared with standard bulk mailings…the average revenue per email is two to five times greater and can be up to six times greater than the all-industry average of $0.13.”
But don’t send “off the shelf” impersonal sales-based emails. Today’s transactional messaging, according to the survey is “branded, relevant and engaging…to take full advantage of the high level of customer interest and brand engagement that naturally follows a purchase.” Ideas for incorporating personalized Transactional Messaging include:
Re-order reminders, accessory replenish reminders, or sales alerts on products or accessories that obviously relate to a previous purchase.
Win-back emails for lapsed customers with personalized incentives based on buying history and preference data.
3) Engaging Email Subject Lines
Being engaging is more than just using your recipient’s name. Be relevant. Be “to the point” and deliver on what was promised within the body of the email. These, according to Christopher Lester, VP of sales at Emma, an email marketing platform, are the keys to successful and engaging email marketing.
Ideas for engaging email subject lines:
Lester advises that, “The email subject line is probably one of the most important pieces of a campaign… It’s the beginning statement of the story… The email subject line is just a…way of giving the user [a] quick analysis… what is the value of the email compared to the amount of time dedicated to opening and reading the message? …You’re building relationships and making full connections… If you deliver [on] the value consistently, you will never have to beg for an open.”
4) Mixed Media Emails
Mobile is changing many of the rules for email. Marketers must now create messaging that is delivery-friendly to traditional email inboxes as well as those on mobile devices.
Ideas for mixed media emails include:
Today’s consumer is multi-screen and multi-device. Make sure your email messaging provides a mobile device experience that is as good as your desktop experience.
Be sure your landing pages are also dynamic so that mobile or tablet users can view your messaging clearly, get to forms, or be able to click with ease.
5) Personalized Emails
There is nothing more engaging than a truly personalized email that is all about you, the individual customer.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Learn from Amazon how they have taken personalized emails to a new level. The company has the ability to analyze and personalize both online and email content based on preferences, search history and previous purchases. Amazon sends its customers personalized product recommendations that entice a recipient to purchase a previously viewed item.
According to an in-depth white paper from Amazon, “The click-through and conversion rates – two important measures of Web-based and email advertising effectiveness – vastly exceed those of untargeted content.” Recommend that you read this report to gain thoughtful insights on sophisticated and effective personalization.
Any company’s decisions lie on a spectrum. On one end are the small, everyday decisions that add up to a lot of value over time. Amazon, Capital One, and others have already figured out how to automate many of these, like whether to recommend product B to a customer who buys product A or what spending limit is appropriate for customers with certain characteristics.
On the other end of the spectrum are big, infrequent strategic decisions, such as where to locate the next $20 billion manufacturing facility. Companies assemble all the data and technology they can find to help with such decisions, including analytic tools such as Monte Carlo simulations. But the choice ultimately depends on senior executives’ judgment.
In the middle of the spectrum, however, lies a vast and largely unexplored territory. These decisions — both relatively frequent and individually important, requiring the exercise of judgment and the application of experience — represent a potential gold mine for the companies that get there first with advanced analytics.
Imagine, for example, a property-and-casualty company that specializes in insuring multinational corporations. For every customer, it might have to make risk-assessment decisions about hundreds of facilities around the world. Armies of underwriters make these decisions, each underwriter more or less experienced and each one weighing and sequencing the dozens of variables differently.
Now imagine that you employ advanced analytics to codify the approach of the best, most experienced underwriters. You build an analytic model that captures their decision logic. The armies of underwriters then use that model in making their decisions. This is not so much crunching data as simulating a human process.
What happens? The need for human knowledge and judgment hasn’t disappeared — you still require skilled, experienced employees. But you have changed the game, using machines to replicate best human practice. The decision process now leads to results that are:
Generally better. The incorporation of expert knowledge makes for more accurate, higher-quality decisions.
More consistent. You have reduced the variability of decision outcomes.
More scalable. You can add underwriters as your business grows and bring them up to speed more quickly.
In addition, you have suddenly increased your organization’s test-and-learn capability. Every outcome for every insured facility feeds back into the modeling process, so the model gets better and better. So do the decisions that rely on it.
Using analytics in this way is no small matter. You’ll find that decision processes are affected. And not only do you need to build the technological capabilities, you’ll also need to ensure that your people adopt and use the new tools. The human element can sidetrack otherwise promising experiments.
We know from extensive research that decisions matter. Companies that make better decisions, make them faster, and implement them effectively turn in better financial performance than rivals and peers. Focused application of analytic tools can help companies make better, quicker decisions — particularly in that broad middle range — and improve their performance accordingly.
Predictive Analytics in Practice
An HBR Insight Center
You know what’s really boring, those employee surveys that companies force their employees to do a couple times a year.
There are a couple of flaws in the way that the current system is set up that really don’t allow for management to get the most out of employee surveys, not to mention that some don’t strategize before, during, and after they implement surveys within their workplace.
We’ve found some pretty mind-blowing stuff around employee surveys that will make you think twice before just shelling out any random survey to your employees, along with a solution to get the same information faster.
Check it out:
This infographic was crafted with love by Officevibe, the employee engagement platform that helps companies understand the return on investment of organizational culture while making employees happier.
1. Managers Think They’re Useless
¼ think managers view surveys as a “tick-box” exercise
The verbiage used here might’ve been a tad bit confusing, but the context in which it’s being used within the study shows that managers just see employee surveys as a “busy-work” task.
Meaning that it doesn’t have any concrete value and it’s just a way to make employees do something. Which is in our opinion not cool. If you’re sacrificing your time and well-being to be at work, you shouldn’t be bombarded with something that’s not useful.
Employees and leadership have to come up with some form of agreement in order to create an understanding with one another that the surveys are going to be used for good and that good will come from having the employees complete them. Especially if it’s going to be an in-depth survey that’ll take 20-40 minutes.
2. Employees Don’t Like Answering Them
30% is the average employee survey response rate despite all the costs and efforts to administer employee surveys
So much so, that even with all the time consumed in creating a plan around them, they still won’t take the time to complete them for their managers.
The best way to go about this is to create a better experience around employee surveys that will make it a better visual experience, instead of just having to click buttons that say disagree all day.
3. People Abandon Them!
20% abandon rates for surveys that take more than 7-8 minutes to complete
Even when you reel them in, you can’t even get your employees to take those surveys.
This is sadly because surveys are still kind of boring. That’s why we’re working on coming up with a new way to survey your employees that’ll make your employees want to provide more information to their managers.
The best way to combat this is to either make them less redundant and ask for more written feedback from the employees. That’s right, when you make these surveys put less emphasis on ABCD answers and allow for written responses. It’ll provide more valuable feedback.
4. People Think Employee Surveys Are Pointless
29% of employees thought they were pointless
People think employee surveys are pointless and it’s not just employees, it’s managers as well.
A poorly strategized employee survey plan can lead to negative feedback from managers and employees alike. It’s things like this that give surveys and employee appraisals a bad reputation.
Make sure you have a plan already in place for the projected results that you are expecting. If you feel like your employees are dissatisfied or need you to be a better boss, have an action plan ready so you can execute.
5. No Results Come Out Of Them
Only 1/5 believe their manager would act on what came up in the survey
Speaking of results, employees don’t feel as if managers wouldn’t even act upon what they got in the survey.
It’s one thing to obtain the results, but it’s a whole other ballgame to put the results to use.
Remember, when you’re planning out a survey, think about the endgame and what’s going to happen after the fact. It’s one thing to conceptualize all the questions and see the numbers behind everything, but it’s another thing to actually do something with them.
6. No Following Up On Results
20% said their boss never bothered to follow up any concerns raised.
I guess you can say that this is the theme of our research, managers aren’t doing anything with the information and it’s making them look really bad.
The last thing you would want is to be considered a horrible boss because you’re not applying your work to make the office better.
So be a part of the 80 percent that want to create a better workplace and want to do things the right way. Follow up on your surveys and appraisals.
7. Managers Don’t Focus On Improving From It
47% of managers say that they spend only two to five days a year on activities relating to their annual engagement survey.
Improving the office doesn’t depend on a couple of surveys, appraisals, or team building activities that will make your office better.
You have to gather those awesome workplace analytics and put them to good use. Also, if you haven’t check out the new HR analytics guide that was recently released by our own Jacob Shriar, give it a look, it’s a spectacular guide on how to improve your workplace using numbers from .
8. Target Response Is A Bit Tricky
60%-80%: a good target for the response rate on the employee survey. under that, you don’t have enough data. Above that you probably cheated the participation with too many incentives…
Trying to engage 60-80% of people and have them participate on a survey is nearly impossible. Especially when you have a larger team.
So any time you’ve heard of someone with a 90% participation rate, it’s absolutely false and they’ve done something to cheat the system. Try and have realistic expectations for your surveys and try to get the best results without necessarily having to beg for it.
You’ll get unbiased and accurate survey responses in doing so.
9. Some Manager Don’t Look At The Results At All
27% of managers never review survey results at all
Going back to what we had mentioned before, managers will often just ignore the results from employee surveys and go on their gut feeling instead of make decisions based off of data.
If there’s a major no-no, is to ignore the results. Of course, every now and then, you’ll have a case where a gut-feeling or guess will work, but when the numbers and results are in your face, you should probably go with it.
10. No Action Taken
52% reviewed survey results but took no action
One of the reason surveys aren’t popular is because that nothing comes out of them. What good is it to do these kind of things and waste time, money, and resources, if nothing will come out of them.
If you’re an employee (or group of employees) don’t be scared to ask about the possible outcomes of completing one of these surveys and how long it’ll take for something to happen.
Remember, it’s your time that’s being taken up to complete these things.
11. Is The Information Valuable Or Not?
48% of senior managers reported the surveys were highly valuable 45% of employees say surveys had little or no value
Here’s something from both ends of the spectrum, senior managers think that the results are valuable, whereas the employees don’t. I should also add that less than half of managers think that the information is valuable, and less than half of the employees say they have small.
This kind of information make is like hearing about a tie in a gunfight. No one really knows if the information is valuable, employees and management alike.
Why not make surveys a collaborative effort between both employees and managers? They both want to make the office better, so try creating surveys that will make the information valuable for both parties instead of one.
12. Dissonance Between Employees and Management
52% of senior managers felt it provided very accurate assessment; 48% of employees felt the surveys did not provide an accurate assessment
So how accurate are employee surveys? We’ve hit another stand still as both managers and employees feel that they don’t provide an accurate assessment of how they feel.
But as you’ve seen with the previous statistics a lot of people don’t really like them and they won’t really provide accurate results.
Aside from making a killer employee engagement solution, we’re planning on reinventing the way employee surveys are strategized and making them easier for both the employee and manager. So let’s start creating better workplaces.
What Are Your Thoughts On Employee Surveys?
Do you think employee surveys are a useful tool for your office? If so, how can they be made better and what can be done to make the information more valuable.
This article appears on http://www.raintoday.com One obvious purpose of selling is to persuade buyers to buy what you are selling. Most people have no trouble agreeing to that proposition. And yet–the harder you try to get people to do what you want them to do, the more likely they are to push back, resist, […]
At our office, we spend a decent amount of time reviewing our efforts to examine what works and what isn’t seeing the success we’d hoped for.
Last week, we looked into one client’s recent website leads and discovered something exciting. Content we had written more than 10 months ago was still ranking in the top 5 search results for certain targeted long-tailed keywords. This particular blog post earned our client a highly qualified lead who reached out to request a price quote.
All of this excitement had us wondering, what is the lifespan of any one particular blog post?
This particular blog post has the potential to generate website traffic and leads for years to come. All of your blog posts will continue to provide relevant and helpful information to internet searchers.
Want your blog to continue to be effective well into the future? Here are our most important recommendations to make your blog posts relevant and position your company as a knowledgeable industry leader well into the future.
Tips for Creating a Blog Post With A Long Lifespan
1. Make a list of every question your buyers have asked about your product, service, or company.
What are their specific challenges? You might be able to find this information in your email inbox or in responses to contact forms. Pulling all of these messages to one document will allow you to see what information people are searching for most often. If you’re recalling conversations, try to remember the actual words your customers use.
2. Perform keyword research, focusing on specific keywords, 3-4 words in length, which have low competition.
If you write about things your customers are already asking about and you word your blog posts in the way that your customers are searching online for, you’ve won half the battle. It’s important during this process to continue to think about your target markets. What would “Engineer Ernie”, “CIO Chuck” or “District Director David” type into search engines when looking for answers?
3. Answer a specific question your customers asks in each blog post.
You should aim to be genuinely helpful and forthcoming in your blog posts. Share your industry and product knowledge, and do it in a way that is unique to your company’s approach and brand. Providing real answers to customer questions will broaden your reach and help you gain credibility in the industry.
4. Optimize your blog post’s title and meta description for searchers.
Your blog post title will appear as the blue link in search engines, so it’s important to keep it short and one your keyword phrase once. Search engines will show your meta description under the link on a search engine results page, so keep it under 155 characters. Aim for a professional looking description that contains the keyword phrase your audience is searching for, and underscore why a searcher should click the link and read the blog post.
Did you know that you can promote a blog post multiple times on social media? Because the life of a social media post is incredibly short (sometimes just hours), consider scheduling several social media messages containing a link to your blog post.
One thing that we do is to write 4-6 social media messages for each blog post, then schedule them every few days over a 30-day period. After 30 days, we measure the clicks and interactions for each, and save the best-performing blog posts for later use. We then schedule several social media posts well into the future for each blog post we write.
With different social messages posted at different days and alternating times of each day, we can reach different users.
By following the 4 tips above and by promoting your blog posts months after they are written, you’ll give your blog the longevity that you’ve hoped for.
This post is part of a series of Executive Interviews of top sales and marketing solutions company executives. We ask the same questions of every executive so readers can learn about their unique positioning and their vision for the industry.
This week I interview Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView.
Nancy: What does InsideViewdo? What problem/s are you solving for sales and/or marketing organizations?
Umberto: InsideView allows companies to leverage market intelligence to find, and engage with, prospects and customers. In today’s world, companies need to develop targeted, engaging communication with their market, and having relevant, timely intelligence is the key to energizing all types of revenue-driving activities.
We built our technology to maintain profiles on all meaningful companies and decision makers worldwide, from basic data like revenues, employee counts and email addresses, to real-time insights on companies and people, while analyzing relationships that help our customers go to market. We constantly monitor over 30,000 information sources, from financial to news to social networks to company websites.
This real-time intelligence is then integrated with revenue workflow—marketing, sales and service automation—so that it can be used in context to help close more deals more often..
At the same time, we’re helping marketers and customer advocacy departments centralize assets for sales rep use and report which of those assets had actual impact on sales cycles to determine ROI and drive smarter marketing spend.
Nancy: How does your solution uniquely address the problem (or in what way do other solutions fall short from solving the problem)?
Umberto: Most of the other solutions in this market are single-source, proprietary and closed.
Our approach is fundamentally different, based on gathering the best intelligences from tens of thousands of sources, and using technology to organize it, de-duplicated it and create the richest, most accurate profiles in the industry. Proprietary, single-source solutions cannot achieve the level of breadth and depth that this big-data approach can achieve, since they will always be limited to the content available in their own closed database or social network.
We are also uniquely focused on integrating this information into your CRM workflow, and today we have native integrations with 15 of the most popular marketing and sales automation systems. No other information company has this breadth of integration.
Nancy: What’s the most important thing that today’s business decision-makers should look for (or ask, or consider, or solve)?
Umberto: The most important question I hear from executives today is, “How do I deal with this never-ending onslaught of data?”
What I see happening is that companies are overwhelmed with new data coming from new sources and being delivered with a virtual fire hose—too much, too fast—which kills productivity instead of helping make your team more efficient. We’ve seen new data-focused tools pop up almost daily for the past few years, and while they can provide macro insights, they don’t parse out the useful bits and push them back to your teams to help them do their jobs.
It’s that last piece that’s most important, and really where the whole “big data” trend fell apart. More analytics isn’t what companies need; they need more insights, more action, more triggers to help them do their jobs better, faster, more efficiently.
So, today’s decision-makers shouldn’t be looking for more data, or even more analytics to understand that data, they should be looking for more ways to actually put that data to work every day to run their entire business.
Nancy: What are you most excited about for the next 12 months?
Umberto: At InsideView, we are beginning to look at the entire enterprise and how we can help make their engagements more relevant, timely, and respectful. We want to help create an informed enterprise. We are seeing the need for meaningful customer and company engagements outside of just sales and marketing. By offering market intelligence to other areas of the enterprise such as HR, Finance, and Operations, we help make information more accessible to everyone helping them be more informed about their customers and helping them transform their business into a more productive and efficient organization.
Nancy: What do you think is the biggest underlying theme or trend for sellers and/or marketers in the next 12 months?
Umberto: It’s the drive to relevance. If you don’t have a targeted, relevant message for today’s busy buyer, your market share will continue to suffer. Marketing needs to be targeted and relevant, because blast emails don’t work. Selling needs to be relevant, because cold calls don’t work. Customer Management needs to focus on relevance because customers have higher and higher expectations. All three functions need to understand their market and their targets so they can deliver a message that the customer or prospect cares about.
Nancy: What would you challenge sellers and/or marketers to think about for the near term?
Umberto: Stepping outside of their typical tactics and embracing the “onslaught of data” as a benefit, not a burden.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of this data and rely on your tried and true tactics. But, to really be successful these days, you need to find ways to put to work all of the information that’s available for converting leads, closing deals and managing customer relationships.
For example, everyone knows that you need to use social or professional network data to help sales, but that’s not helpful. Helpful is telling your salesperson that the decision-maker at Company X was promoted yesterday, that their replacement is connected to them via a colleague in your customer service department, and then give them the replacement’s accurate email address so that they can reach out today. That’s helpful.
As your business grows, you might need to find new#B2BRockstars to expand your sales team. And when it takes just seven seconds to make that all-important first impression, it’s crucial your new sales gurus are clued up and ready to impress.
So we’ve put together some key traits and top tips to make sure you’re building the A-grade sales team – and converting those hard-earned leads into solid results.
Preparation prevents… well you know how it ends. And when 70% of B2B buyers rate how vendors engage with them as having more impact than what they were actually selling, being prepared is essential if you want success.
A-grade Sales Gurus will go one-step further by understanding their prospect as an individual, their company, and their wider industry issues before even picking up the phone. What pain points of their role can your product overcome? How can you relate to your prospect?
TIP:Investigate key details about prospects that have visited your website including, turnover, SIC code, company size, location and more. Not only will they be impressed with your prep, you’ll be spending your talk time valuably by already having the headstart with them!
2. Keen listener – great at asking the right questions
With the rise of the Human to Human (#H2H) trend, it’s obvious that it’s no longer about ‘selling to businesses’ but identifying the needs of different people and treating them as individuals.
A-grade sales gurus know that the most effective way to present their product or service is to uncover their prospects goals, objectives, concerns and hesitations. By asking key open questions and (most importantly) listening, they’ll know if a need exists and what issues or problems their product can solve.
TIP: By gaining insight into what prospects are looking for, you can better tailor your call to suit their needs and prep to answer any questions that arise. Have they spent much time on your product pages? Did they check out pricing or read a blog post? Uncovering this information instantly profiles your prospect and can save valuable time for both them and you.
3. Organised – They know that timing is everything
Odds of qualifying a lead are a whopping 21 times better if you follow up within 5 minutes of that lead’s creation (instead of 30 minutes after creation).
Your A-grade sales guru’s need to be quick off the bat when understanding how your prospect thinks and when they’re ready to buy, especially as you don’t want them being influenced by your competition.
TIP: Use the Watchlist feature to alert your sales gurus in real-time when a hot prospect visits your website. If they’re looking around pricing or trial pages, you can follow up with a timely call, successfully moving them through the next stages of the buyer journey.
4. Adaptable – Good sales people don’t just follow-up
80% of sales are made between the 5th and 12th contact with a prospect, so it’s key to schedule regular follow-ups if you know they’re not quite ready to buy just yet. And when nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, it’s essential your sales gurus provide on-going value when prospects aren’t yet ready to buy.
A-grade sales gurus won’t just reach out by phone, they’ll connect through social, email and live channels too.They’ll consider key times like business anniversaries or events and provide a personal touch with timely and useful content.
Want to find out more about building a healthy pipeline for your sales team? Download our free whitepaper here.
This blog was originally posted on the Lead Forensics blog. Read the original article here.
What can I do to build a successful sales development team?
It’s certainly not easy to build a team of Sales Development legends overnight.
When revenue is on the line, even one false start can be a recipe for disaster. It is absolutely crucial to focus on the right strategies early on. That’s where these 10 ideas can help.
Implement them into your process and watch your numbers skyrocket:
It pumps life into the rest of the process by providing a framework around your sales team.
The concept is simple: create at least two roles.
Your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) will prospect and schedule demos and qualified appointments. Your Account Executives will close deals, only.
Some businesses specialize even more, developing roles for geography, inbound, outbound, and other categories. Insidesales.com has 14 specific roles.
Using this strategy allows each role to be extremely good (and fast) at what they do—because it is their primary focus and objective.
2. Build A Playbook
With the mindset of specialization in place, build specific processes for your reps to follow. It helps onboard reps quickly and effectively defines best practices for your team.
The playbook you build will be a soup-to-nuts guide that includes your hiring strategy to the cadence you use to reach out to prospects.
You’ll be better off building a playbook with as many specifics as possible and updating it as you discover best practices for completing individual tasks. You eventually want your reps to be creative and come up with ideas on their own, but it starts when you can hand over a tried-and-true manual.
3. Hire Hungry Up-and-Comers Who Can Punch Above Their Weight Class
Your hiring strategy must be focused on recruiting reps who are highly motivated and hungry to succeed.
They should have the ambition to talk to executives and prove themselves as not only competent, but incredibly skilled. Because sales is a game of confidence where two people come together, the person with the most confidence influences the other.
4. Provide Adequate Tools
Your sales development team will be completing repetitive tasks by nature.
Removing as much manual labor from these tasks will make them not only happier, but also more productive.
Try using list building tools like Data.com or SalesLoft Prospector coupled with a CRM and dialer (Insidesales.com or Velocify) to speed up your reps’ days and reduce manual labor.
On top of the necessities, there are great tools that can help reporting, training, and coaching. Leaderboards help spur competition and maintain a strong sales culture.
Identify what your team needs and use technology to supplement a streamlined process.
5. Compensate the Team on Performance Incentives
Your sales development reps schedule qualified appointments and demos, and that’s how they should be compensated.
While closed deals are great for your business, your SDRs don’t have control over the final conversation. If a struggling Account Executive blows it, it shouldn’t be reflected on the paycheck of your best Sales Development Rep.
6. Source Accurate and Targeted Prospect Data
Calling incorrect numbers and emailing addresses that don’t exist are sinkholes for your Sales Development team.
Do everything you can to get your reps clean data.
Prospect on LinkedIn for accurate information on the people you’re interested in. It is the best source for up-to-date information, because individuals are responsible for updating it themselves.
More accurate contact information yields more meaningful calls and emails, translating to more demos, and ultimately more revenue.
7. Use Qualification Criteria to Pass Over Appointments
It is key that the appointments and demos your Sales Development team is setting are qualified opportunities.
While not every demo will result in revenue for your business, you want to weed out the completely unqualified prospects at the onset.
Ken Krogue popularized the ANUM strategy in inside sales.
Rather than the traditional BANT concept, ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money) shifts the focus from budget to authority and need. It is fueled by the concept that finding a decision maker and demonstrating value is more effective than honing in on a prospect’s wallet.
In the simplest terms: Generate enough interest, and a prospect will find a way to pay for it.
Make sure the Sales Development team focuses on the right people at the right companies. If you can do this (and what you’re selling is valuable), you’re golden.
8. Train the Team on Top-Of-Funnel Objection Handling
Your Sales Development team will hear completely different objections than your closers.
Instead of opposition to your product, prospects will be opposed to giving you their time, tell you they don’t have a need, or be confused about why you’re calling in the first place.
People are busy. They’re not objecting to you, their objecting to the experience of being cold called. —Steve Richard
Speak from the perspective of a prospect’s peers. If you’re selling to VPs of Marketing, start a conversation with, “I’ve been speaking with other VPs of Marketing and most of them seem to have trouble generating inbound leads. Does that sound familiar?”
Empathize rather than pitch. You need to earn the right to every conversation and that starts with acting like an advisor.
Their ambition translates into eventually wanting to become an Account Executive or team lead, but they lack the necessary experience. Joining a sales development team is a great place to start. By detailing a plan that shows each rep exactly what they’ll have to do in order to be promoted, you’re likely to find better talent.
10. Foster a Great Culture
Our number one priority is company culture. Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand will just happen naturally on its own. —Tony Hsieh
At SalesLoft, we hire the top 1% of individuals in their fields who are positive, supportive, and self-starting.
By hiring around core values, employees are not only motivated, but get along well with one another. Keep culture at the forefront of your hiring process and you’ll build a great team.
Once these ideas are implemented, there is a huge opportunity to tweak smaller processes to fit your team. Stay committed to these 10 strategies, and your team will be able to hit their quota without batting an eye.
Digital marketing in the twenty-teens has a daunting number of components businesses have to develop strategies for dealing with. You have to have a social media strategy, a mobile strategy, and a standout website optimized for search. Behind the scenes, you have to make decisions about content management systems, establish a process for sifting through analytics, and set up workflows for nurturing leads. As easy as it is to be overwhelmed by all the gadgets and all the emerging channels for reaching customers, there is one element of your digital marketing strategy that has to be nailed down before any of the others can even have a chance of working for you. Mastering all the platforms and channels won’t do you any good if you don’t have a process in place for creating quality content.
What Is Quality Content Exactly?
Quality content is media material that has value to your potential customers and is easy for them to find. That second part is where things like keywords in the titles, URLs, and headings come in, along with share options for various social platforms and targeted emails. But if your blog post, podcast, video, white paper, or e-book has no value to consumers they’re not going to search for it or share it anyway. So what does it mean for content to have value? And how do you go about creating content that’s valuable to your potential customers?
Know Who Your Potential Customers Are and Answer Their Questions
Most businesses hate the idea of leaving anyone at all out of their sales efforts. But one of the biggest mistakes you can make with your content is trying to be all things to all people. So at some point you have to ask yourself who you’re targeting with your materials. Once you know who your content is for, then you can move on to asking what challenges, concerns, desires, or problems might make them interested in your business’s products or services. From this point, you can begin to imagine the kinds of titles and links your potential customers will be the most likely to click on.
The practical steps to take to learn about your customers may involve sitting down with your salespeople to talk about what challenges and questions past customers have brought to them. You can also learn a lot from analytics. At some point, you may even what to hold focus groups or conduct online surveys. A simple shortcut, however, is to go to forums that discuss topics associated with your industry and see what kinds of questions people are asking. If someone’s asking questions about a product, it’s likely they’re thinking about buying it. And if they’re posting the question on a forum like Quora, they’re likely searching for it on Google too, and even keeping an eye out for links in their social media feeds.
Where do you get the answers and how do you create the actual content? There’s no getting around the need to have a couple of people who can write on staff. You may even want photographers, graphic designers, or videographers, depending on your specific marketing goals. And you’ll have to establish some process for your content people to either research information on their own or get insights from the area experts in your company through interviews or presentations.
Tailor Content to the Various Stages of Customers’ Decision-Making Process
Some of your content will simply help customers educate themselves about your industry. Some of it will help them understand how the products and services your business provides can help address their specific challenges. You want to get your name out there, and you want to establish some trust with the people who may later make a purchase from you. But learning about your industry or products is just the first stage in the decision-making process. So you’ll want to have some quality content that helps them with the subsequent steps as well, things like comparing products from competing brands, overcoming objections, and evaluating competing vendors.
Consumers today do their best to avoid commercials and advertising. If they want to find out about a product, they jump online and do a search or ask their friends. What this means is that your customers have already gone through a large portion of the decision-making process by the time they contact you or visit your store. So the best strategy for any business is to make sure they’re the ones who are providing customers with the initial information they seek out online. You increase your chances of being the business customers eventually reach out to if it’s your blog they’ve been reading to learn about your products and services. You offer them quality content, and in exchange they remember your name when it comes time to buy.
Whether you’re selling a subscription-based software, a different SaaS solution or some other form of business software, you’re probably regularly looking at how to increase your top-line growth.
Sometimes you need the expertise and reach that only come from working with an outsourced sales and lead generation company, especially one that has in-depth expertise in the software industry.
Here are five ways that your software sales cycle benefits from the work of an outsourced lead generation firm:
Benefit #1: You Stop Wasting Your Sales Team’s Time
It’s no secret: Your software sales team hates cold-calling new prospects.
With outsourced lead generation, you stop wasting the time that your sales team dials into disconnected numbers and poorly updated contact lists. In order to generate more leads, you don’t need a team with expert product knowledge – you simply need a team that specializes in cold calling and connecting you with prospects that aren’t a waste of your time.
Benefit #2: You Smooth Out Your Revenue Generation
Leaving lead generation to your current software sales team means your revenue is bound to be sharply cyclical as salespeople switch between prospecting and closing deals. Since your team doesn’t enjoy cold calling, they’ll likely abandon lead generation work once they have qualified prospects to work with.
Then, once they’ve finalized all the deals in their personal pipeline, they’ll return to cold calling, but they’ll have to start from scratch. The result is a software sales cycle with sharp revenue peaks and valleys – a circumstance no sales manager wants to find him or herself in. With an outsourced lead generation team, you avoid these fluctuations and keep your revenue flow steady.
Benefit #3: You Provide Higher Quality Leads To Your Sales Team
Often, business software is targeted to a specific niche market that’s difficult to find accurate leads for. Outsourced lead generation helps your sales team filter through different candidate companies and provide only leads with a robust BANT (Budget, Authority, Need & Timeline) ready for closing.
Especially in software sales, your leads need to have a specific timeline, a proper budget and leadership buy-in. Outsourcing your lead generation means your closers only receive leads that have been properly qualified according to all of these factors, which in turn means higher quality sales.
Benefit #4: You Help Your Closers Finalize Deals More Effectively
The software industry also benefits from outsourced lead generation because the specifics that are uncovered in the cold-calling process help your sales team close the deal more effectively. For example, many SaaS prospects find ease-of-integration and expected downtime to be key factors in their purchase decisions. When a lead generation expert is able to note these factors and inform your closer of a prospect’s specific concerns, your salesperson is able to address any objections without being blindsided.
Not only do lead generation experts provide details around customer readiness, but they also help the prospect envision their ideal solution. And, when a lead is able to envision your solution as their ideal, your closer has little to do beyond help them sign the paperwork.
Benefit #5: You Expand Your Company’s Sales Reach
For established software companies, outsourced lead generation services help you expand your software sales into new markets. If you want to test multiple market segments, a lead generation company does the grunt work of determining whether or not a segment is worth pursuing further.
In addition, an outsourced lead generation company is able to target multiple outside industries that you haven’t even attempted to enter yet. This not only takes lead generation off of your shoulders, but you also don’t have to do the initial work of adjusting your marketing or fine-tuning your message.
It doesn’t matter which SaaS or subscription-based software you’re selling, outsourced lead generation carries clear benefits for your business. When you outsource the hard work of generating high-quality leads, your team of closers have no problem finalizing the deal.
72% of all new products don’t meet their revenue targets. And a quarter of companies, according to the same survey, confess that not one of their new offerings met its profitability goals.
This new (and alarming) data comes from pricing consulting giant Simon-Kucher & Partners, which conducts its survey every other year with the Professional Pricing Society, a professional association. The 2014 survey polled approximately 1,600 executives and managers from over 40 countries and across a range of industries. (About two-thirds were in B2B businesses.)
I talked to Georg Tacke(co-CEO of Simon-Kucher) and Madhavan Ramanujam (Partner at the Silicon Valley Office of Simon-Kucher) about what’s causing this high failure rate – and how some companies manage to improve their batting average. Not surprisingly, they advocate bringing marketing and monetizing concerns much further forward in the R&D process.
What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
HBR: Is new products’ high rate of failure really a pricing problem, or does it reflect a more fundamental innovation problem?
Georg: We believe that there is a more fundamental problem. Of course, the pricing is always what signals the problem, but behind that it is how the innovation process is set up. However, our experience has been that [when a product fails] it’s not a technology problem or a pure R&D problem — it is really around marketing, customer segments, and of course pricing.
Madhavan: This is very consistent in our experience working with both startups and large companies. They build a product hoping to monetize, but not knowing whether they will be able to. What allows a company to extract full value is having a clear pricing plan from the get-go, not waiting until the end and then saying, “Oops, we need a price!”
Your survey also details how hard some companies are finding it to raise prices. For instance, you found that only a third of all planned price increases actually get implemented, and for every 5% price increase attempted, only about 1.9% is achieved. Why are companies having such a hard time raising prices?
Georg: It’s partly internal, and partly external. Internally, most companies are only thinking about it at one point in the innovation process – usually right before launch. Our survey showed that 80% of companies fall into this trap.
Externally, the reasons vary by industry. Pricing pressure is more intense in retail, less so in areas like top-branded luxury goods or highly differentiated machinery. If you are undifferentiated, then it’s a no-brainer that the pressure on your prices is going go be even higher.
Geographically, we observed that countries like Japan have some of the highest pricing pressures. When there are lots of companies whose goals are to go for high [sales] volume and high market share, that creates a price war.
One of the odder findings in your survey is that 58% of companies say they are currently in a price war – but 89% of those blame their competitors, not themselves, for starting it. Why does pricing feel so out of executives’ hands?
Madhavan: For many years, CEOs and executives have focused on improving the bottom line through cost cutting, finding efficiencies in operations and the supply chain. Companies have gotten better and better at that. Pricing is also a highly impactful driver of revenue, but companies probably spent the least amount of time on it. Often it’s the most misunderstood driver in a corporate boardroom. It’s not something that gets a lot of attention in business school, relatively speaking. However, it is also one of the easiest things to change and companies tend to be more reactionary [than strategic] about it.
Let’s talk about the outliers – the top 10% of companies who, you found, actually could introduce new products and raise prices. What are they doing differently?
Madhavan: The #1 success factor really for us is the C-level involvement. Having senior leaders participate in pricing discussions is a must. They don’t need to be part of every discussion, but CEOs do need to make pricing and new product development their priority.
The second factor is focusing on pricing being considered from the very conception of an idea. Many companies go through an innovation process where there is a lot of focus on R&D and then right before they are about to launch the product, that is when pricing is considered. [Instead,] think about pricing in the R&D stage. What do customers value, what might they value? If you ask someone, “Do you want this feature?” they might say yes—but if you ask them, “Would you pay two dollars for it?” it’s a totally different conversation. And how to charge for the product is far more important than the price itself. For instance, will it be a subscription or a transaction? Will it be bundled with something else?
Third, the companies with the most pricing power use technological tools to measure value and willingness to pay in a systematic way. They let evidence and facts drive innovation processes. Our study found that the top 10% of companies use pricing software and technology 40% more often than the bottom 90%.
What’s an example of a company that really does do a good job of thinking about price at the R&D stage?
Georg: BMW has been very successful in this area. They do all their research and innovation in one building, and all the functions – finance, marketing, engineering – they either come from their offices to that building, or they are already physically located there. Having such a building sends a strong signal that all these different functions are committed to the innovation process.
Companies that are not as strong, they start with a business case that details the four pillars of their new product — value, cost, price, and volume – but then the development team works in isolation. They start adding features, perhaps, because the competition has these features. That leads to higher costs, which then affects the price, which then affects the volume projections. By the end of the process, the four elements don’t fit together any more.
The important thing is to have those synchronized throughout the whole process. The most effective companies ask their teams to sign off on those four elements throughout the process, at different milestones, to make sure they are still synchronized.
Most sales managers or Sales VPs will tell you that in order to meet their quota, they must have a pipeline of X. Whether it is a three X, five X or seven X pipeline, these sales people have a formula that they follow that knows what they need to get them to their stated goal. Having worked with many sales professionals over the years, this X Factor is closely monitored and is one of their top KPIs. However, what if this approach was wrong? What if the whole idea of a three, five or seven X multiple in pipeline was misguided?
I am not advocating that sales managers and Sales VPs not monitor or be concerned about pipeline. What I am advocating is that heads of sales should be much more stringent about what they allow to be put into their pipeline.
Many sales pipelines today are full of “opportunities” that will never close, yet they are in the system and calculated as part of an X Factor. The way most companies deal with this is they reduce the percentage of that deal closing based on the stage of the opportunity. However, what if that deal never has a real chance of closing? If this is the case, it does not matter what stage it’s in or the percentage probability assigned. . . . it’s still bogus.
I was speaking with a company this week that was saying their close rates on qualified leads was less than 30%. Pretty anemic if the leads are indeed qualified (we will not explore this on this post as this is not the overall point). If less than one in three deals are closing for this organization the typical sales approach would be to have a three to five X in pipeline to play to the odds that from this large pipeline, quota will be met. This approach is faulty (and just a bad business practice) as salespeople are now spending time chasing deals that will ultimately yield nothing — or perhaps continuing to include deals in their pipeline that they know are simply not going to close.
How would the game change if — in addition to the qualification criteria assigned to leads that were passed to sales from marketing — sales were more stringent on those leads that were developed into opportunities? Let me explain a bit further.
I recently worked with one client who took a very different approach to lead qualification. In addition to the typical lead qualification criteria, we established a certain set of criteria – a litmus test – on the sales side that would be used for every potential deal. Throughout every phase of the process, sales was required to look for certain signs and signals that would indicate if this qualified lead would, ultimately, make a good customer.
Sales was trained to find out early on if the customers were bought into the organizations approach, if there was alignment among the decision makers, taught steps to take on how to circumvent potential competition, etc. Each step along the way this criteria was applied and there were a fair number of qualified leads that were told they were not a good fit, and that it was not in the best interests of the company or the potential customer to try and work together in the near or long term. This is integrity in selling!
A few things happened as a result of transforming this organization’s sales approach:
- The long-term relationships with clients greatly improved What used to be a vendor-customer relationship turned into a partnership, and was spoken of positively by many of their customers. As a result, there was an exponential improvement in customer lifetime value.
- Sales win rates increased dramatically
By not having to worry about chasing down deals that would never close simply to satisfy the X Factor requirement of the pipeline, sales was able to focus on the deals they knew they would close, which caused their win rates to climb to approximately 80%.
- Pipeline measurement changed
Sales management was no longer worried about a “five x multiple” (the goal they had previously). With stringent criteria being applied and as one sales leader stated, “we only issue SOWs to those that we know we will win” – the entire pipeline measurement has changed.
- Improved alignment with marketing As sales continued to hone their approach, the information was shared with marketing, which then implemented changes to the lead qualification process and standards. This resulted in a much higher qualified lead delivered to sales, thus reducing time wasted on deals that may have a number assigned, but not have a true chance of closing.
- Average sales prices increased
As the sales organization truly became more consultative during their sales process and was more “selective” in the deals they engaged with, they were able to sell a long-term approach and saw the average deal size increase dramatically.
Focus on reality, not the myth of the X Factor sales pipeline.
The impact on this organization has been dramatic and the sales team has truly been transformed in the process. The days of measuring a multiple within the pipeline are gone and the company is seeing benefits in terms of record bottom line revenue. Sales organizations need to be willing to change their approach, define what customer success looks like and sell to that, rather than stuffing a pipeline and hoping the odds pay off in their favor.
In another lifetime while managing the purchasing department at a large homebuilding company I inherited the task of overseeing the implementation of an online software program that construction managers in the field were to use in scheduling and paying vendors. For 2003 such an application of technology in an industry that’s a slow adopter anyway was considered radical. In theory the software claimed it would reduce build-time and issue checks faster. Reality, however, was another matter. Remember I said I inherited this project. The guy before me was let go, so no pressure.
Naturally the grizzled construction managers who relied on phones and faxes to get homes built blamed the technology. It was too impractical and full of glitches. The contractors were equally distrustful. For them the software doubled scheduled their crews and issued the wrong payment amounts. Since this initiative was dictated by corporate, pulling the plug was not an option, and thus, getting to the root of things fell to me. After digging into the matter I soon discovered that the problem was us and had nothing to do with the software whatsoever.
As a general principle when implementing new technology organizations need to ensure their manual processes are as simple as possible before someone ever clicks on a mouse. This had not previously happened. Our related manual processes were overly complicated and inefficient, and the scheduling software only amplified that dysfunction. It took some time, but once we fixed our broken processes, the construction managers and vendors warmed to the software, and in turn, it yielded the intended results.
The misconception that technology will somehow solve a company’s persistent problems is still prevalent today particularly when it comes to sales and marketing alignment. It’s almost unheard of for a sales-driven organization to function without some form of CRM; at the same time companies have nearly doubled their spend on marketing automation over the past five years and by all indications they will continue to do so in the next five. Yet despite the many benefits these two basic platforms offer, even when integrated together they do not ensure the alignment of the sales and marketing functions, and furthermore, as with my opening example, may even create more problems such as lost sales opportunities, an outcome companies can’t afford to squander.
The flip side of this is that when sales and marketing are truly aligned the outcomes are impressive. The Aberdeen Group’s March 2014 report, Sales and Marketing Alignment: A Primer on Successful Collaboration, found that of what they classified as “Best-in-Class” companies, 77% had a strong functional relationship between sales and marketing with 99% of those companies reaching their overall sales quota for the year. These companies also reported a 13.1% year-over-year increase in revenue while 33% noted a reduction in the sales cycle compared to the prior year. In another recent study involving over 1,400 participants across 84 countries, MathMarketing found that those businesses with the greatest alignment grew faster than did similar companies within their industry, and they closed 38% more deals while losing 36% fewer customers.
These results make a compelling case for aligning sales and marketing, but for many the question then becomes how exactly to go about getting these two entities in sync. Like with the implementation of the scheduling software a lot of groundwork needs to be covered before companies can ever hope to get the maximum benefit from their CRM and marketing automation tools. Specifically there are four key areas that need to be addressed once you have management’s buy-in.
Sales and marketing’s efforts both must match to the Buyer’s Journey: This is the starting point. If your marketing team is targeting initiatives at the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the Buyer’s Journey while your sales team is cold-calling from lists then things are seriously misaligned. Instead, get both parties on the same page and work out who does what and when. Keep in mind the Internet has empowered customers to research and form opinions before making a purchase decision, so early on during the awareness and consideration stages marketing will need to do a lot of work to attract and qualify leads before handing them over for sales to close come time to make a decision. This naturally leads to the next area.
There must be mutual agreement on key definitions, behaviors, and triggers: Ask someone from your marketing and sales teams to tell you what a lead is and you will get a wide range of answers which becomes the crux of confusion in who is responsible for a lead and when. Clear definitions need to be established for what constitutes a lead, a marketing qualified lead (MQL), and a sales qualified lead (SQL). Much of this will hinge on what actions and behaviors signal a lead’s progression through the Buyer’s Journey or even what disqualifies them as non-prospect. Be precise in defining the triggers that mark the increased fit and interest of a lead and when exactly the handover between marketing and sales should occur. This will require time and regular feedback to refine things. Most software platforms have tools for this such as lead scoring, but defining terms and behaviors needs to be established first before those tools can ever be helpful.
There should be a single (or limited) point of data entry and a system for closed-loop reporting: Admittedly, this is a bit of personal commentary, but statistically speaking, the more people you have entering data into a system the greater the probability for mistakes. Depending on your setup, if one sale person is entering information one way and another sales person is putting in the same information their own way then it could mess up your reporting. Limiting data entry to a single or minimal points allows for better standardization and, therefore, greater trust in data-based reporting. It’s also easier to manage and stay disciplined in maintaining data over the long term as you track a prospect from lead to client. Identify the entry point(s) early on and as with #2, make sure definitions of the data and how it’s entered are clear.
Transparency and two-way communication on planning and reporting is essential: The left and right hands definitely need to know what the other is doing on several levels. For starters, sales needs to provide feedback on lead quality while marketing needs to know the questions and concerns qualified leads are mentioning to sales. On another level, marketing should not only be aware of the sales team’s quotas, but should also commit to providing specific numbers of visitors, leads, MQL’s and SQL’s necessary to meet those quotas. Finally, your CRM and marketing automation platforms should be integrated and equally accessible by each department to pull reports that, assuming you followed points 2 and 3, should produce trustworthy data on which solid decisions can be made and both entities can be kept accountable.
Alignment of your sales and marketing teams won’t happen overnight. It will require patience and refinement. However, if you can’t agree on these four areas, then don’t plan on technology saving the day or getting you the results that companies with true alignment are achieving.
You’ve been increasing your company or brand’s presence across various social platforms for the past few years and you’ve been using LinkedIn all along. Over time, you’ve optimized your LinkedIn company page and added LinkedIn “follow” and “share” buttons to your content.
Now it’s time to take your LinkedIn activity to the next level and position the organization as an industry thought leader.
1. Utilize The Advanced People Search
It is easy enough to find and connect with current and former colleagues, as well as members of industry groups, on LinkedIn. It can be very time-consuming to cull all of these profiles, but you can pare down the lists by using Advanced People Search and looking at who has viewed your profile.
This allows you to focus your efforts on engaging the right kinds of people and use “InMails” and “Introductions” on only the most relevant contacts with whom your message will resonate. Think of it as using the scalpel, rather than the chainsaw.
2. Launch a LinkedIn Group
You’ve already built a fantastic company page and joined groups in your industry. Hopefully, you are posting from the company page and participating in discussions within those industry groups to help position you and your company as thought leaders.
The next step is to launch your own LinkedIn group to further establish your expertise and knowledge. The best way to do this is to make sure your group has a defined focus so you can attract members with similar interests and goals.
Ideally, someone on your team will pre-approve discussion topics, post conversation-sparking questions and screen potential group members (as opposed to having an “open” group). Such moderation will ensure the level of discourse is appropriate for your target membership, which will in turn keep them more engaged in the group.
Ultimately, running an industry group on LinkedIn can propel your image as an industry thought leader.
3. Use LinkedIn Polls
LinkedIn Polls are a great way to have more interaction with your audience. Opinion polls can later be used for blog topics or to decide what types of promotions or offers you should make to attract more members and customers in the future. You can also tweet or share the results of your polls on Facebook as a way of attracting more members to your group or to follow your company page.
Polls can of course be used for direct market research but they are also great ways to generate buzz and discussion around topics of interest in your industry that may not be directly tied to your offerings. By focusing on the latter, you can once again present yourself as a thought leader in the space as you share results and corresponding commentary through blog posts or discussion topics within your group.
4. Optimize the Personal LinkedIn Profiles of Team Members
Plenty of attention has been given to the importance of optimizing your LinkedIn company page. Taking this idea a step further, it is important to make sure the personal profiles of your team members – and, particularly, the company’s leaders and managers – are optimized as well. Make sure the expertise and experience possessed by your team shines through on their profiles.
A few key things to keep in mind:
Make sure the individual’s work history is complete and up-to-date. Visitors to the page should be able to easily see the person’s background and wealth of experience.
Use an informative headline that goes beyond just your job title and company. Create a headline that tells the reader who you are as a professional beyond what your title says.
Avoid generic wording of responsibilities in lieu of descriptive examples of things you actually do. Just as you do on your resume, use an active voice rather than a passive voice.
Solicit recommendations from current and former colleagues, as well as clients. Reading what somebody else has to say about you is much more impactful than what you can say about yourself.
Use an appropriate, professional photo. Profiles lacking a photo are perceived as incomplete and less personal. Profile photos that look unprofessional are unprofessional.
If senior executives at your company can’t be bothered to update their profile themselves, do it for them. LinkedIn users are savvy and will be looking at these high profile pages. A strong executive leadership presence on LinkedIn can be just as important as the company page itself.
5. Connect Your Company Page & your New LinkedIn Group to Other Social Platforms
When you publish a new article to your website or write a guest column for an online publication, post it on your company page and in your group. Tweet the results of your LinkedIn Polls and share them on Facebook. Include LinkedIn social sharing buttons on your corporate blog.
In other words, make it so that people who are interested in what you’re doing on LinkedIn have an easy trail to follow and see what you’re doing elsewhere. Conversely, using tools like Everypost to share LinkedIn content across various other platforms ensures that people who discover your brand elsewhere are able to find their way to your LinkedIn page and join your group.
The LinkedIn Marketing Strategy should be a cog in the wheel of your broader marketing strategy, not a siloed endeavor. What additional recommendations do you have for using LinkedIn to amplify your organization’s thought leadership?
Mark Cuban doesn't like the trolls on Twitter. According to the startup investor, star of Shark Tank and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, he has to think twice before tweeting anything, because there are hordes of jerks on the social network who want to pick him apart.
That's why his application Cyber Dust makes everything disappear.
Cyber Dust is "very much like Twitter," Cuban said on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt event on Monday. "But the difference is, the only people who see it are the people who follow me, and because it’s inline instead of timeline, everyone sees it."
Cyber Dust also is a bit like Snapchat, though instead of photos and videos, the app centers around texts which disappear 20 to 100 seconds after they're opened. The application is built on the follower model, so you'll see updates from anyone you follow which won't get lost in an ever-changing timeline. But as soon as you read a post, it will disappear.
Cuban thinks disappearing messages might make people more honest about what they share, because there is little fear of Internet bullies going through your timeline history and finding something to call out and tweet.
"So many people [on Twitter] are trolls that are just looking for things to say, so no one speaks openly," he said.
The app is clearly targeted to younger consumers, similar to Snapchat, another teen favorite. Cuban used his own pre-teen daughter as an example as a potential user who will, like many other teenagers, eventually send a text she didn't mean.
"That message is ... not something that can be repurposed," he said. "If someone tries to screenshot it, you’ll know it, and we can deal with them."
In his talk, Cuban inadvertently made an argument an algorithm-based Twitter timeline, which may start having features like the Facebook timeline—popular content up top—and less like a real-time stream of information. Cuban said that tweets are often lost in the timeline, and people are never sure how many users actually see what they're saying. With Cyber Dust, you can be sure anyone who follows you and actively uses the application will see your posts before they disappear.
Update: We've corrected this story to note that the expiration time for Cyber Dust messages varies based on length of message and device type.
After years of work and months of teasers, Microsoft has released a tool called "Delve," which will do for Office 365 users what Cortana will do for Windows Phone users: manage their lives.
As of Monday, the company started rolling out the service to Office 365 business customers. Office 365 is the cloud version of Microsoft's uber popular Office apps.
There is no additional fee for Delve. It's included in Office 365 subscription plans, which range from $5/user/month to $22/user/month, a Microsoft spokesperson tells us.
Microsoft Delve, previously code-named "Oslo," searches your emails, meetings, contacts, social networks, and corporate documents stored in Office 365 then uses "machine learning" artificial intelligence to show you the stuff you need to see.
Here's a view of what a Delve search page looks like.
Delve is built on top of a search-engine technology called Office Graph, which will eventually be used for all kinds of other tools, Microsoft says.
The downside to Delve is that it's pulling data mostly from Microsoft apps like OneDrive for Business (the cloud storage for Office 365 documents), SharePoint Online, and Yammer.
Delve will eventually include other Microsoft products like note-taking app OneNote and enterprise chat tool Lync, plus "other content sources, such as email attachments," says Microsoft general manager Julia White in a blog post.
Still, in order to be really useful, Microsoft will have to eventually link Delve to non-Microsoft apps, too, like Box, Dropbox, Salesforce.com and chat rooms like Slack.
That said, this is a big step in Microsoft's promised new direction.
CEO Satya Nadella is pushing Microsoft to become a "productivity and platform company." His vision is that your phone/tablet/PC/TV and business apps know you and cater to your needs before you issue a command.
Machine-understanding of text is part of many marketers’ toolbox, but it is one of the more complex tools. Today, a startup called MonkeyLearn is releasing the beta version of a cloud-based artificial intelligence platform that it hopes can do for text mining what WordPress did for websites and blogs.
“We want to make text mining-driven applications easy,” co-founder Martín Alcalá Rubí told VentureBeat.
Users select or create a module, such as one for “Movies, Music & Games.” Web pages, documents, or emails are uploaded to the platform or direct text feeds are captured via an API.
MonkeyLearn’s algorithm extracts the key features and characterizes the supplied material as belonging to a category (say, movies) within the module. Through an API, the categorized content can be then be utilized by a web site or app. The algorithm can be customized by the user for the industry and refined by machine learning.
Above: MonkeyLearn modules, each containing categories
MonkeyLearn offers a number of possible use cases for this categorization: It can be employed to target appropriate ads or content by profiling webpages or users’ posts. Also, a company could conduct sentiment analysis of tweets to automatically determine if bad or good comments are being bandied about.
The tweets from people you follow on Twitter can be used to characterize your interests, creating an interest profile that can then personalize an online news publication for you. The platform can be used, Alcalá Rubí told us, “to turn any [web] page into a Flipboard,” organized by a user’s interests. (See example for VentureBeat at the top of this page.)
Obscenity or bullying can be automatically detected on social networks, or emails can be machine-sorted and sent to the appropriate department for resolution.
Beyond classification, MonkeyLearn envisions adding such capabilities as automated summarization of content so that, for instance, all posted comments on a movie could be characterized in one paragraph.
Text analytics, used by Netflix’ movie recommendation engine and similar services, is rapidly becoming a key piece of customer engagement platforms. Alcalá Rubí said that the company intends to distinguish itself from such standalone text mining competitors as AlchemyAPI and BigML through its versatility, ease of use — “It’s really easy for developers to integrate,” he told us — and by its customizability.
Or possibly by its pricing. There are no long-term contracts, and a free level allows up to 1,000 submissions or queries per month. Three other levels, topping out at $500/month for a million queries, are also offered.
MonkeyLearn, which opened an alpha version in April for 300 users, is a one-year-old spinoff of the co-founders’ five-year-old artificial intelligence company Tryolabs. To date, it has raised $250,000 from the three co-founders — Alcalá Rubí, Raúl Garreta and Ernesto Rodríguez — as well as from the Uruguay government’s ANII investment fund and from a personal investment by Eduardo Mangarelli, director of technology at Microsoft Latin America.
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Created by the founders of artificial intelligence company Tryolabs and with the support of Eduardo Mangarelli and ANII, MonkeyLearn was founded on the belief that developers, startups, and SMEs in every industry deserve access to cust... read more »
Tryolabs is a Boutique Python/Django Shop & Lab specialized in Internet applications with Artificial Intelligence Components. We embrace Lean Startup methodologies crafting amazing products mainly for Silicon Valley and NYC based start... read more »
The professional social network is a force to be reckoned with. It’s a great tool for businesses looking to increase traffic and leads, as well as for people searching for new career opportunities who want to market their expertise. It’s an easy-to-use portal that facilitates the exchange of ideas whose primary purpose is to cultivate professional relationships, and its mentality and etiquette are vastly different than on Twitter and Facebook.
Social media is unique in its ability to communicate with large audiences. This one-to-many model amplifies mistakes that have the potential to turn off potential customers before they’ve even had a chance to learn about your products and services. Nowhere is this more true than on LinkedIn. It’s important to use your brand’s professional voice at all times and keep in mind that word travels fast when you make these 20 mistakes.
Avoid these LinkedIn mistakes
Don’t send connection requests using LinkedIn’s default text. Personalize them so recipients know why you want to connect with them.
Don’t use the “friend” option when you’re trying to connect with someone. It’s important to provide context.
Don’t forget to use a professional profile photo. Amateurish photos — or having no photo at all — reflect badly on you.
Don’t ask people you don’t know for LinkedIn recommendations.
Don’t ask for recommendations without personalizing them, and offer to reciprocate where appropriate.
Don’t share information that isn’t relevant to business.
Don’t leave your profile incomplete.
Don’t neglect to send a welcome message that provides value when someone follows you.
Don’t treat LinkedIn as a numbers game — you should regularly nurture your relationships.
Don’t keep your contact list private; you should share it with your connections.
Don’t hoard your connections. Offer to introduce them to others in your network.
Don’t delay in responding to messages — you should reply within 24 to 48 hours.
Don’t send spammy messages to your connections. It will turn them off and they will drop you as a connection.
Don’t post too much — once a day is best.
Don’t criticize or make negative comments on posts in groups.
Don’t post self-serving content in groups that provides no value to members. You will either be dropped from the group or your posts will end up in the moderation queue.
Don’t send messages to multiple people without unchecking the option to “Allow recipients to see each other’s names and email addresses”. It’s important to respect others’ privacy.
Don’t ask people to like your Facebook page.
Don’t ask new connections or people you don’t know to endorse you.
Don’t begin messages with, “I noticed that you viewed my profile …” It’s really creepy.
As it is rightly said, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, and when it comes to capturing the audience’s attention, you do not want to leave any stone unturned to convey your message. Remember, short attention spans always make lengthy explanations less effective. So how do you make your brand storytelling hold the interests of your audiences? Yes, I am talking about picture storytelling or visual content that build brand awareness, loyalty, and trust and engaged communities.
Is it just the brand awareness? Definitely no. Visual storytelling has also fueled the content marketing race, the quest for producing what is relevant and valuable to a brand’s current and potential customers. Research shows that nearly 60 percent of people are visual learners and human brain processes visualization 60,000 times faster than it does written content. People love visual content and the more enriching the content, the more impactful the impression that the content can make.
But the million dollar question is – how do you make visual content the key to effective brand storytelling?
The introduction of data visualization in the content
Data visualization – infographics, charts, logos, memes, videos, graphs are all visual content media that are designed to simplify massive amount of data. Huge amount of numbers can make you feel like you are drowning in them can be merged into simple charts that can easily tell a single cohesive story. There is no substitute for a strong visual story. By conveying your message in a visually appealing way, you can make people more likely to support your cause, buy your product, or share your message.
Don’t just show but say…
Consumers often do not know what they want, and look for ideas and inspiration. However, if you serve them dessert along with meal, then nothing like it. Don’t just present your products via photographs and graphics but tell an interesting story via them. Make videos of the product you are trying to show to your audience and illustrate the product’s advantages in a unique and memorable way. This works as a successful visual content marketing.
Focus on your audience’s interests
Shape your visual storytelling strategy by listening to your consumers, their frequently asked questions, their interests, popular conversation topics, timely events and problems they care about. Accordingly leverage visuals to draw attention and engagement around popular content topics. For instance, a few months back, BBC news launched Instagram video as news service called Instafax to display 15-second news clips via Instagram video to the busy community who doesn’t always have time to watch news. This proved the useful of this content to the community.
Embrace the power of social media
Your consumer may like the content or the video you create, but are they sharing it with their social community? But when consumers do share your content in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Google+, you’re actually tapping into a powerful word of mouth endorsement from them. This is the time to analyze the most positive, most shareworthy content to date and look for trends in order to amplify what your audiences are sharing.
Be human
Visual content marketing performs better when the content has human elements. Right from user-generated images, to showing behind the scenes content on how product is made, consumers are always keen to see the human side of your brand. Being human also means using visual to shape your story around issues, interests, and causes that are important to the consumers. Compelling visual content helps to humanize an otherwise faceless brand and give people enough opportunities to interact with it.
This is not the end of your responsibility, to make your visual content marketing successful, you have to make an extra effort to make your message stand out from the competition, break through the clutter, and influence audiences.
Make your visual brand consistent
Your designs should be based on your brand ethics including the use of logos and colors. Visual content with a consistent brand motif can help others identify the brand instantly.
Customize the visual content
Don’t stick to one image and push it out to every platform. Each social media channels have different demands. Also, the audiences of each network are unique, so make sure your content respect the standards of communication everywhere it appears.
Create graphics and images that spark curiosity
Design your visuals to help your audiences get a deeper understanding of your brand and services. It helps you to understand how you’re uniquely qualified to solve their problems.
As you select images for visual content, focus on the context and the mental model your readers are likely to be in
Your products and services must appeal to both the emotional and rational sides of the brain. Emotions including anxiety, loss of credibility, longing for recognition and risk aversion are involved while selecting or buying a B2B product or service. Similarly, rational justifications include enhanced productivity, lesser downtime and growing and protecting the business.
Personalize your marketing strategy
For instance, if you ask your audiences for holiday gift ideas, within 30 minutes, you may see excellent number of ideas. The strategy tends to perform well, as long as it remains tasteful and in alignment with the brand’s voice.
Audiences have access to countless content. In order to divert their attention towards your content, it is necessary that your content is cohesive, consistent and visually engaging. It must demonstrate credibility. This shows that your brand is invested in providing value through communication, and that you are considerate of your audience’s time and needs.
Using personalization in your email campaigns is a great way to jumpstart long-term relationships with your customers. Every message you send can make people feel like you really know them. If you do it right, each email will feel like a valuable message, not an annoying interruption.
There’s a reason your inbox is filled with messages that call you by name and ask you how the weather is in your city: personalization works. In fact, according to Econsultancy, 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement. Personalized emails also generate up to six times the revenue per email than do non-personalized emails, according to Experian’s Email Market Study.
But what does it take to find the right level of email personalization? And how can you go beyond saying “Hello FIRSTNAME” to make a message so personal, it feels like you actually know them? (In a good way, not a stalker-type way). Let’s take a look at some examples of what not to do when it comes to personalization, and get tips for developing personalized, relevant email messages that connect with customers and prospects.
Start with the basics
How many times have you received a poorly conceived or badly executed attempt at personalization? Usually substandard personalization creates a lackluster experience for recipients, but sometimes it can really get them angry – and with good reason.
Here are some examples from the average email inbox:
Dear__ , (You don’t even know my name, and you’re calling me “dear”?)
Hello, Misspelled Name! (Is this spam? Or am I bad at filling out forms?)
Dear Mrs. LastName: (Mrs. LastName was my mother. I’m Ms. LastName.)
Hi FIRSTNAME LASTNAME, (Stop SHOUTING at me!)
These are the basics of personalization, and they’re small details that add up to a big difference in the appearance of your email campaigns.
Consider the case of British Telecom. Years ago, they sent a promotion for a calling card to their customers, and several of the mailings ended up with “Dear Rich Bastard” as the greeting. Someone had replaced the default salutation as a joke, and it ended up actually going out the door. (It’s surprisingly easy for placeholder text to make it into prime time. Just search for “headline goes here” and see how many results you get – some of them in major publications.) So if you decide to create an email with personalization, first make sure you’ve got the correct data to populate it. (And don’t joke around with placeholder text!)
Here’s an example of personalization at work as well as dynamic content tailored to two segments (CEOs and CMOs).
If some of the records in your database don’t have information in a field, think twice before using personalization with that field. If nothing else, be sure to use a default value like “valued customer.” Or make sure the marketing automation solution you’re using provides a way to handle the fact that personalization data is missing by removing the surrounding text and punctuation or replacing it with a generic greeting.
Misspelled names are harder to spot if your customer provided the data to you incorrectly in the first place. One way is to send a confirmation email out when they subscribe to your emails, repeating their information back to them asking if everything is correct (and providing a link to make changes).
Another way to ensure you’re addressing people correctly is to include a “salutation” field in your list. You can gather this information through an online form or preference center or through your sales and customer service teams. It’s an extra step, but it’s a good way to build trust in your recipients (and keep your messages from looking like spam). It also prevents you from using the wrong honorific (like Mrs. instead of Ms.) and potentially annoying your audience. In addition, it solves the problem of addressing someone by anything other than their preferred gender pronoun.
With a preference center, you can collect the names or nicknames your contacts preferred to be called by as well. If you’re sending an email to someone named Maximilian who actually goes by Max (or Miles or Junior) and you address them by the long form of their name, it will sound stilted and forced.
These small steps go a long way towards making personalization actually seem personal. And as you can see, there are several safeguards to put in place in order to do it right.
Tips for better email personalization:
If you use placeholder text, make sure it’s something you’d be fine having your recipients actually receive.
Make sure your list contains all the data you want to use for personalization.
If the data is in ALL CAPS, change it to Sentence Case before including it in your campaigns.
Make sure your marketing automation solution can adapt the email if the data is missing from the field by removing surrounding text and replacing it with a generic message.
Send confirmation emails asking your contacts if their information is correct.
Use a preference center to capture information like preferred prefix and name.
A solid personalization strategy is essential for prospect engagement, conversion, and long-term trust. It’s also foundational to more advanced techniques that can increase the impact of your email campaigns, like:
List segmentation to more tightly target your audiences and match messages with the most receptive recipients.
Drip campaigns that send a series of scheduled emails over time based on criteria such as demographics, behaviors, and lead scores.
Nurture campaigns that educate prospects and leads as they move through the buyer’s journey.
Trigger campaigns that immediately launch in response to a specific action taken by a prospect or customer.
Dynamic content to tailor each email to each recipient by automatically customizing specific parts of your email such as text, images or offers.
When it comes to email value and message relevance, personalization can take you from “Go away,” to “Come on in!” As long as you do it right.
People do business with people they know, like and trust.
I’ve heard this sales maxim so many times, I had no idea who actually said it first. So of course I had to research it. Many people have said these words in many different ways, but the original quote seems to have come from Bob Burg.
This is Burg’s Golden Rule of Networking: “All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people they know, like and trust.”
What does this have to do with blog writing?
Everything.
Your business blog is a powerful opportunity to build the “know, like, trust” factor with your audience. And it all starts with making promises and keeping them.
The Promise of the Headline
When writing a blog for your business, the headline is the biggest promise you make your readers. The headline is also the first impression you make on a reader.
An effective, compelling headline entices readers by telling them the benefit they’ll get when they click or scroll to read more.
Don’t pull a bait-and-switch on your readers. When you promise something in the headline, deliver it in the blog post. Otherwise you may lose your reader’s trust.
A well-written headline entices the reader to read on – but more importantly it also establishes trust between your business and the reader.
The Promising Story in Sub-headlines
Sub-headlines are also promises to the reader. Each sub-headline should explain the benefit of reading the text below it. Each sub-headline is a unique chance to deliver on your word.
Use sub-headlines to tell the story of your post. Readers have short attention spans and the easier you make it for them to skim your post, the easier it is for readers to get the value from the post. Since people share what they value, telling the story of your post in the sub-headlines will increase the likelihood that your post will get shared.
For example, in the post that you’re reading right now, I’ve promised you I’d talk about promises in headlines, promises and stories in sub-headlines, and something called “The Golden Combination.” I deliver on each of those promises in the copy under each sub-headline, but those sub-headlines also tell you at a high level what the whole post is about.
The Golden Combination
Writing blog posts that are entertaining, informative and/or educational build the “know and like” factors as your readers keep coming back for more. Making promises to your reader in the headline and sub-headlines and delivering on those promises builds the “trust” factor. Combined, you have the golden combination for turning leads into customers – and customers into raving fans and repeat business.
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This infographic was crafted with love by Officevibe, the employee engagement platform that helps companies understand the return on investment of organizational culture while making employees happier.
At our office, we spend a decent amount of time reviewing our efforts to examine what works and what isn’t seeing the success we’d hoped for.
Digital marketing in the twenty-teens has a daunting number of components businesses have to develop strategies for dealing with. You have to have a social media strategy, a mobile strategy, and a standout website optimized for search. Behind the scenes, you have to make decisions about content management systems, establish a process for sifting through analytics, and set up workflows for nurturing leads. As easy as it is to be overwhelmed by all the gadgets and all the emerging channels for reaching customers, there is one element of your digital marketing strategy that has to be nailed down before any of the others can even have a chance of working for you. Mastering all the platforms and channels won’t do you any good if you don’t have a process in place for creating quality content.
You’ve read about many different ways to increase your software sales and optimize your sales cycle for maximum ROI. But there’s usually a limit to what you or your company can accomplish alone.
In another lifetime while managing the purchasing department at a large homebuilding company I inherited the task of overseeing the implementation of an online software program that construction managers in the field were to use in scheduling and paying vendors. For 2003 such an application of technology in an industry that’s a slow adopter anyway was considered radical. In theory the software claimed it would reduce build-time and issue checks faster. Reality, however, was another matter. Remember I said I inherited this project. The guy before me was let go, so no pressure.
Still, in order to be really useful, Microsoft will have to eventually link Delve to non-Microsoft apps, too, like Box, Dropbox, Salesforce.com and chat rooms like Slack.
The professional social network is a force to be reckoned with. It’s a great tool for businesses looking to increase traffic and leads, as well as for people searching for new career opportunities who want to market their expertise. It’s an easy-to-use portal that facilitates the exchange of ideas whose primary purpose is to cultivate professional relationships, and its mentality and etiquette are vastly different than on Twitter and Facebook.
Using personalization in your email campaigns is a great way to jumpstart long-term relationships with your customers. Every message you send can make people feel like you really know them. If you do it right, each email will feel like a valuable message, not an annoying interruption.
