First, they brought us the 10 Commandments of Typography. Then they came up with 10 Commandments of Colour Theory. Now, they attempt to teach us all about logo design through… you guessed it — 10 commandments. Who are these guys? Click to enlarge. via DesignMantic
Read the full article: 10 Commandments of Logo Design
There’s an inconvenient complicating detail in the Great Stephen Harper-Justin Trudeau Showdown of 2015. His name is Tom Mulcair, his New Democratic Party still holds 98 seats in the House of Commons and, the other day, he dropped a big hint about how the 2015 election will go. Almost nobody caught the hint. Let’s take another look.
Mulcair has not had an easy time of things. He is still the leader of Her Majesty’s official Opposition. But, outside the Commons chamber, where he is a formidable slugger, Mulcair has a hard time getting traction. The NDP has suffered a steady trickle of defections—one MP went to the Bloc Québécois, one to the Liberals, one to the Greens, one to sit as an Independent. Olivia Chow quit to run for the Toronto mayoralty; the NDP lost her seat in the resulting by-election. Liberal MP Denis Coderre quit to run for mayor of Montreal; the NDP could not pick up Coderre’s riding, even though it’s right next door to Mulcair’s Outremont fief. The party is third in every national poll. Mulcair doesn’t shine in reflected light from the memory of Jack Layton; he’s eclipsed.
He keeps showing up. On Aug. 20, he spoke to the general council of the Canadian Medical Association. He had a few topics on his mind.
He talked about the Harper government’s cuts to veterans’ service centres. “Earlier this year, I wrote to the Prime Minister, asking him to make military suicides and mental health a personal priority. He never bothered to respond.” He mentioned marijuana precisely once, so, of course, most of the day’s headlines were about marijuana.
He also announced a plan to send billions of dollars a year out of Ottawa to provincial governments. Billions more than Harper, even. It was the kind of big directional policy announcement we sometimes complain we’re not getting from our party leaders. But it contained words of several syllables, and he also compared pot to oregano, so, well . . .
Here’s what he said: “After promising to protect all future increases to provincial transfers, Conservatives announced plans to cut $36 billion, starting in 2016,” Mulcair told the CMA. “This spring, Conservatives will announce, with great fanfare, that there is now a budget surplus. I’m here today to tell you that an NDP government would use any such surplus to, first and foremost, cancel those proposed cuts to health care.”
This needs parsing, but first, let’s let Mulcair finish: “Mr. Harper, it’s time to keep your word to protect Canadian health care. After giving Canada’s richest corporations $50 billion in tax breaks, don’t you dare take $36 billion out of health care to pay for them!” He said that part in English, then repeated it in French, which has become the way a Canadian politician delivers a line in italics.
Well. Let’s begin with the $36 billion. In December 2011, Jim Flaherty, then the federal finance minister, met his provincial colleagues to announce his plans for health transfers after a 10-year deal set by Paul Martin ran out in 2013-14. The 2004 Martin deal declared that cash transfers to the provinces for health care would increase by six per cent a year for 10 years. Harper simply kept implementing the Martin scheme after he became Prime Minister.
What Flaherty announced, without consulting with the provinces first, was that health transfers would keep growing at six per cent through 2016-17. Then, they would grow more slowly—how slowly would depend on the economy. The faster GDP grows, the faster transfers would grow. But, if the economy tanked, the rate of growth could fall as low as three per cent per year. Flaherty said this scheme would stay in place through 2023-24.
Add up all the shortfalls between three per cent and six per cent over seven years and you get a cumulative sum of $36 billion. Despite what Mulcair said, this isn’t a “cut,” it’s a deceleration in increases. And $36 billion is the gap’s maximum amount. If the economy shows any health, the gap will be smaller.
We could have fun complaining that Mulcair calls something a “cut” when it extends what is already the longest period of growth in federal transfer payments in Mulcair’s lifetime. But it’s more fun to take him at his word. He promises to spend as much as $6 billion a year in new tax money on health care. Mulcair couldn’t buy much influence over health policy with that money; he would simply send larger cheques to provincial governments. If he has other plans for the federal government, he’d have to pay for them after he’d sent that up-to $6-billion cheque to the provinces.
How would he afford it? He’s sworn not to increase anyone’s personal income taxes. That leaves the “$50 billion” in corporate tax cuts he complained about. In short, Mulcair is calling for a very substantial further decentralization in Canadian federalism, funded, perhaps, out of a major reversal in corporate tax cuts.
In important ways, this would actually continue the hard work Harper has done, restricting any federal government’s ability to run new programs out of Ottawa. Of course, it would: Mulcair, like Harper, grew up in a province whose elites mistrust the federal government.
The 2015 election will, or should, turn on big questions about Ottawa’s role in an era of economic uncertainty and aging populations. Tom Mulcair has begun to propose his answers. He is, in other words, doing his job.
The post Mulcair’s not-so-secret weapon appeared first on Macleans.ca.
Jim Davis/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
George Bernard Shaw, the famed Irish playwright, was not a fan of America’s national pastime. He marvelled at baseball’s “slowness and stupidity,” and wondered why anyone would ever sit through a second game after enduring a first. “A totally unanswerable question,” Shaw famously wrote in 1924, after attending an exhibition game in London between the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox.
The only “delightful” part of his afternoon? That “spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game”—namely, throwing the batter “off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife’s fidelity and his mother’s respectability.”
Nine decades later, little has changed. In baseball, three strikes is still an out. The Chicago Cubs are as cursed a bunch as ever. And legion of loudmouthed fans continue to believe that a sharp, biting heckle—executed just right, like a late-inning sacrifice bunt—has the power to alter a final score.
He heard me. I made him swing through that curveball.
More than any other venue, a ball yard is indeed a heckler’s paradise: a game of predictable, quiet lulls begging to be filled by a booming voice. The athletes caught in the crosshairs do so much more standing than actual moving—in the on-deck circle, in the bullpen, in their lonely patch of outfield—that the player-heckler dynamic is almost unfair. At least stand-up comedians, barked at nearly as much, have the ultimate equalizer: a microphone. Ballplayers have little choice but to stay put and pretend they’re deaf.
Like baseball itself, the art of the heckle has evolved (somewhat) since Shaw sat in those bleachers. Thankfully, the kind of vile, racist taunts that once greeted Jackie Robinson are no longer tolerated, and even the most woefully unoriginal hecklers—the “You suck!” bunch—rarely stoop to mocking wives and mothers anymore. And, in this modern age of smartphones and YouTube, mere razzing isn’t enough; insults need to be recorded, uploaded and shared with everyone who didn’t have a ticket. (One clearinghouse of clips, HeckleDepot.com, was created by a fan who was such a dreadful heckler that a player actually told him he was the worst he’d ever heard. His offensive jab? “Hey Hansell!” he yelled to Minnesota Twins pitcher Greg Hansell. “Where’s Gretel?”)
That guy is hardly alone in his awfulness, which is the one thing that hasn’t changed since Shaw’s nasty critique. The vast majority of hecklers, to borrow their term, suck at it. The truly gifted ones—those talented few who understand the rules, the etiquette and the point—are as rare as a .300 hitter and, for my money, just as enjoyable to watch.
There really is a set of rules, first published by the Sporting News in 1948 and inspired by Philadelphia A’s superfan, Pete Adelis, the so-called “Iron Lung of Shibe Park.” A giant of a man with equally enormous vocal chords, Adelis (also known as “Leather Lungs” and “Foghorn”) was so good at aggravating enemy players that the New York Yankees offered him free tickets to their stadium so he could torment their opponents, too.
His “Rules of Scientific Heckling,” as the Sporting News described them, have not aged a bit. Know your players. Take it, as well as give it. Nothing purely personal. No profanity. (Translation: Screaming “F–k you!” to a batter, especially with young children sitting nearby, is not a brilliant heckle. High-fiving those kids immediately afterward doesn’t make it better.)
Robin Ficker, one of sport’s most legendary badgers, adhered to a similar mantra during basketball games: Do your research, consume no alcohol and never spew anything that can’t be printed in the next day’s newspaper. A Maryland lawyer and longtime Washington Bullets fan, Ficker had courtside season tickets directly behind the visiting team’s bench throughout the 1980s and ’90s. During one memorable game against the Chicago Bulls, then coached by Phil Jackson, Ficker screamed out excerpts from Jackson’s 1975 autobiography, Maverick, which included some unflattering details about his off-court life as an NBA player. “Phil was getting mad at me for reading what he wrote,” Ficker later told a reporter. “I told him if he was that mad about it, he shouldn’t have written it.”
Whatever the setting—athletics, politics, the local comedy club—the best hecklers are the ones who realize there’s a fine line between wit and idiocy. They remember that young ears might be listening. They know how to prepare for battle, e.g., sift through autobiographies. And they understand that at its core, heckling is not about being an inebriated, belligerent jerk. It’s about making everyone else in the section laugh, even if the target on the field pretends not to hear.
As, for instance, the two New York Mets fans who showed up to a recent game in Queens with a few black Sharpies and some neon bristol board. Without screaming a single word, they managed to raise baseball’s heckling canon to new heights.
In town were the San Francisco Giants, including their eccentric, dugout-dancing right fielder, Hunter Pence. An eight-year major-league veteran, Pence has weathered his share of taunts, mostly because his swing is so unorthodox, so violent, it’s baffling how he ever makes contact. (One writer described him as “the best worst baseball player of all-time.”) And if that’s not ammunition enough, his nickname is Captain Underpants—because apparently “Hunter Pence” sounds like “underpants,” if you say it fast enough.
But when the Captain took his position that August night, the men with the markers launched an attack that was even more unconventional than Pence’s batting stance. “HUNTER PENCE CAN’T PARALLEL PARK,” one of their signs declared. “HUNTER PENCE EATS PIZZA WITH A FORK,” said another.
“HUNTER PENCE LIKES THE GODFATHER 3”
“HUNTER PENCE CAN’T SHUFFLE PLAYING CARDS”
“HUNTER PENCE THINKS GAME OF THRONES IS JUST ‘OK.’ ”
By the finale of the four-game series, the pair’s neon posters had gone viral. Fellow fans crafted their own copycat versions—“HUNTER PENCE PREFERS BATHS,” “HUNTER PENCE HATES BACON”—and the hashtag #HunterPenceSigns was born.
“HUNTER PENCE BRINGS 13 ITEMS TO THE EXPRESS LANE”
“HUNTER PENCE WHISPERS SORRY WHEN HE CATCHES A FLY BALL”
“HUNTER PENCE BEDAZZLES HIS PHONE”
In the end, the novel signage didn’t much help the home side. The Giants took three of four games, and Pence, clearly unfazed, smacked two home runs and drove in seven. But how he performed, good or bad, was never the point. The men in the Mets shirts were focused solely on their own performance—and the pursuit of the perfect heckle: hilarious, catchy and clean enough to be repeated on this page.
By every standard, they smacked a heckling grand slam, so much so that even the brunt of their Sharpies felt compelled to join in the fun. “HUNTER PENCE RETURNS LIBRARY BOOKS BEFORE THEY’RE DUE SO OTHERS CAN ENJOY THEM AS WELL,” he tweeted. (“It’s like Hunter Pence isn’t me anymore,” Pence told a reporter the other day. “It’s like this other entity, and it’s an extremely interesting entity.”)
As an avid fan (and somewhat decent heckler; base coaches are my preferred target), I appreciate seeing a fellow agitator make headlines for all the right reasons, and not because a relief pitcher chucked a chair at him (Frank Francisco, Texas Rangers, 2004). It provides hope, however faint. Maybe, many years from now, those Hunter Pence signs will be remembered as the start of a heckling renaissance. Maybe the drunk and the slurring will finally clue in. Maybe that clown in the Jose Reyes jersey (Rogers Centre, Aug. 10, Section 127) will realize his three kids hear what he says.
Hey, if a Mets fan can learn to print, anything is possible.
Even other ballplayers—channelling the same creative juices as the sign guys—have raised the heckling bar this season. During a rain delay in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips was so harangued by one particularly relentless fan that he tossed him a baseball. Instead of a signature, though, Phillips wrote a personal message: “Dear Drunk Guy, thank you 4 all the love & support!! Now take this ball and shut the phuck up!!” Phillips violated one of the golden rules (no profanity, even misspelled), but, a few weeks later, Houston Astros pitcher Dallas Keuchel nailed it. Heckled mercilessly by an Oakland Athletics fan, Keuchel threw him a ball that read: “Thanks for helping pay my salary for today.”
It was signed with a heart. Delightful, as George Bernard Shaw would have said.
The post The fine art of heckling appeared first on Macleans.ca.
Tokyo (AFP) - Japan's Panasonic will develop a water purification system together with India's Tata Group, tapping into a fast-growing market in Asia, a media report said Saturday.
The electronics giant has developed a prototype of a device that will detoxify harmful substances in groundwater, making it potentially safe to drink, the Japanese economic daily Nikkei said.
The system, which is compact enough be carried in a small truck, has been designed to serve small rural communities in India where water-supply infrastructure is underdeveloped, the report said.
The prototype produces three tonnes of drinking water per day -- enough to supply 20 households of average size.
Panasonic, which regards water purification technology as a pillar of its new operations, and Tata will work to lower the cost to less than 100 yen ($0.95) per tonne of water, Nikkei said.
Tata, strong in the automotive and steelmaking sectors, will offer its expertise and business networks in re-examining design and procuring materials locally, the report added.
The two partners are aiming to commercialise the system by March 2019, Nikkei said.
The value of water related businesses in Asia and Oceania is projected to reach $90 billion in 2020, tripling in a decade and topping Europe as the largest regional market, the daily said citing a private think-tank.
Nearly 80 percent of the demand will be related to water supply and sewage treatment as rapid population growth and industrialisation in India, China and other emerging economies are causing severe shortages of drinking water in the region, the report said.
Japanese water treatment firm Metawater has been entrusted with the task of updating facilities for Cambodia's Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority, Nikkei said.
In China, Japanese shipbuilder Hitachi Zosen is developing low-cost sewage treatment systems for municipalities, using a technology that breaks down nitrogen with microbes, the daily added.
While European and US companies like Veolia Environment, Suez Environment and General Electric are leaders in the business of building and managing water plants, Japanese players are working to strengthen their presence in Asia by capitalising on unique competitive technologies in water purification, Nikkei said.
You can't put a price on childhood memories, which explains why most of your favorite toys and gadgets from childhood aren't worth squat.
Now, you can still make a nice profit off unopened, exceedingly well-maintained or rare items from your younger days, but the majority of your prized possessions are too new to be artifacts and too old to be useful.
Before you try to sell your childhood dreams away, check out the nine items that have much more sentimental value than market value. And if you decide to junk them, think about donating or recycling. Read more...
More about Gadgets, Features, Money, Tech, and 90sConsumers are rapidly migrating to mobile, and expecting the same user experiences and capabilities they have on desktop via tablet and smartphone. Consider the following statistics:
If your business is looking to maintain success and performance, making your site mobile-friendly is no longer an option. But mobile is still uncharted territory for many expert developers, who are struggling to implement and optimize mobile on both the front and back-end.
This blog series will cover 4 strategies to help you successfully create a seamless, high-performance mobile experience:
When building a mobile experience, developers are faced with two choices: mobile website or responsive design.
Mobile sites require developers to duplicate their existing sites, hurting SEO as search engines must index two separate pages. Not to mention, recreating an entire site to fit within a 4-inch screen often results in limited and disjointed user experiences that don’t render well on mid-size tablets.
We recommend that developers go the responsive design route, which is built on a single codebase and offers flexible content delivery by automatically adjusting to users’ individual screens. Responsive design also allows you to build your site on a mobile-ready framework, like Twitter’s Bootstrap or Zurb’s Foundation, to help simplify the mobile development process.
Although you must invest some time to learn the markup used by your chosen framework, this will save you time and headaches when it comes to building your site. Mobile-ready frameworks also enable a more polished look and feel and seamless user experience.
When using responsive design, it’s important to incorporate site elements that don’t just look good, but also make the mobile experience feel native. For example, Social Login reduces barrier to entry across your site, but is particularly useful on smaller mobile screens, as it enables users to register and login with a single tap via their existing social media accounts.
For more information about creating meaningful mobile experiences, download our free white paper, 3 Ways to Create an Effective Omni-channel Marketing Strategy.
The types of tech PR campaigns we do for our clients run the gamut. Whether it’s pitching a thought leader’s commentary around a news story, or promoting a spokesperson’s presence at an industry event, each campaign adds value to a client’s marketing and lead generation initiatives in its own way.
But, arguably, the most important campaign of all is the launch of a new product. A company’s product is often its bread and butter. So, a successful, well-thought-out launch with press coverage, a press release and social media support, just to name a few elements, has the power to help an organization drive revenue and visibility throughout the year.
However, a product launch isn’t always the way to go. Before a company and its tech PR team put in the time and effort necessary of a successful product launch, the value propositions must be clear. By launching a product without this, an organization risks alienating current customers and failing to attract new ones. After all, if it’s not obvious to a company why they need your product, why would they invest in it?
To determine whether or not a full-blown launch is necessary, or to strengthen a launch currently in the works, a company should ask itself a few questions:
When drafting a product press release for clients, we make a point to highlight the hole within the industry, and the way our client’s product bridges that gap. A tangible, clear-cut way to do this is through statistics gathered from a credible third party, like an analyst firm. This helps clarify why a product is relevant, offering examples that highlight the industry need, as opposed to just spitting out facts. It also makes for a strong angle when pitching the news to our press and analyst contacts.
Explaining what the product does is easy, and can usually be done with a spec sheet. Explaining what it all means is the hard part. When working with clients on a product launch we often ask the “why” questions that are more difficult to answer. We do this to better portray the business benefits in all launch collateral.
Is your product especially easy-to-use, meaning IT teams are able to direct more time toward innovation and other areas of the business? Say that! By explaining a product’s high-level value, there’s a bigger chance that it will appeal to CIOs and other IT decisions makers.
If so, ask them to talk about it! Having a customer (even a beta customer!) that is willing to speak positively about your product –whether it’s a quote in the release or a conversation with a journalist — is incredibly valuable for third-party support. Unfortunately, enlisting a customer to speak publically is often much easier said than done. If this is the case, we recommend briefing a friendly analyst on the product and have him or her offer a quote, or simply remain available if a journalist should ask for third party opinion.
There’s often a lot riding on the success of a product launch. To ensure smooth sailing from start to finish, an organization should keep these three questions in mind!
Want to learn more? Check out our free eBook!
In The Ultimate Guide to a Successful Product Launch, you’ll learn:
- How to plan before a big event or product launch
- The strategy behind promoting and publishing collateral
- How to approach social media and influencers before, during and after a launch
- What and how to measure to keep a campaign going
If you’ve seen the ESPN documentary Broke, you’re well aware of how a lot of athletes end up filing for bankruptcy, no matter how much money they make as a professional athlete. It’s all too common, unfortunately. Frivolous spending, unwise investments, and trusting people who are untrustworthy are just some of the reasons. Being responsible and careful with your money is an important lesson, regardless of the payday. Just because you’re making $10 million a year doesn’t mean you’re going to make that (or more) every year for life. The hope of being financially solvent for life creates a trap for a lot of athletes.
Smart and savvy athletes prepare for what to do when they finish playing the game that made them rich and famous. Here are some that made a successful transition into success in business.
LeBron James invests wisely
When you talk about LeBron James, he has the kind of stature where a last name is not necessary to say. He joins Michael, Magic, Kareem, Larry, and so on with his skills as a player. But his recent payout from the recent acquisition of Beats by Apple will earn him even more than he makes from playing basketball.
LeBron already has plenty of investments going well for him; he actually takes less money from the teams he plays with. These investments will continue to work in his favor after he retires. As important as basketball has meant to him, he knows he can’t play ball professionally for life.
Tony Hawk develops his brand
Tony Hawk became a brand name when he was only a teenager. In the 1980s, he dominated skateboarding competitions, was featured in best-selling videos that were seen all over the world, and he helped popularize the sport that was once considered a passing fad. He still skates because he loves it, but he smartly knew how to be a successful business man, even when skateboarding’s popularity briefly diminished in the early ’90s.
With a line of clothing found in all Kohl’s department stores, a popular video game series, a skateboarding company to his name, and a foundation that brings skateparks to low-income neighborhoods, Hawk’s net worth is well over $100 million. He remains a humble man, determined and focused, just like how he became one of the top riders in the world.
George Foreman knows the value of integrity
At this point in his life, George Foreman is better known for his line of grilling products than any time he spent in the boxing ring. After retiring from the sport for a second time, his “Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine” took off, given its simple, yet effective use. He made some great paydays as the heavyweight champion, but his success in business has greatly eclipsed those paydays.
As he stated in an article with Success, integrity is how he conducts his business. He knows what it’s like to have millions of dollars and lose those millions, seemingly overnight. He’s been smart about his money, and that mindset led him to a large payday for the naming rights of the grills.
In a previous post on customer lifecycle management, we covered the first stages from acquisition through delivery. Looking at the next stages, did you know that it’s 81% less expensive to upsell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer? [Source: 2013 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey.]
The secret to sustainable growth for SaaS and subscription businesses is to focus on maximizing customer lifetime value.
Let’s take a look at results from a $500M+ leading online meeting company using ServiceSource’s Customer Lifecycle Management. They have achieved:
How can you quicken your time to profitability and realize the high revenue potential from your existing customers?
UPSELL AND CROSS-SELL
Based on analysis of customer trends and buying behaviors, your account management teams can uncover upsell and cross-sell opportunities to drive higher customer lifetime value and reduce time to profitability.
In fact, a survey conducted by Pacific Crest in 2013 found that of SaaS companies with annual revenues greater than $10M, the highest-growing SaaS companies outperform the lowest-growing in upsells by an average of 14 percentage points.
RETAIN
By consistently monitoring usage data, your customer success team can identify at-risk customers and proactively engage them before you lose them. Cloud companies should seek to achieve 95%+ customer retention rates
RENEWALS AND ADVOCACY
As customers recognize real value from your solutions, they are more likely to renew. We’ve found it takes three to five touches per contract renewal at least 120 days in advance of the renewal event to maximize close rates. By monitoring data, you can develop and run sales plays tailored to each customer segment – and identify high-usage customers known as power users.
Ultimately, power users can be nurtured to become marketing references or advocates that evangelize the value of your products. Once customer success and marketing teams have defined these power users, you can cultivate them by developing user communities and creating loyalty programs.
Delivering customer value starts with measuring and understanding usage.
With a focus on driving growth, not only from new customer acquisitions, but also from your existing customer base, your customer data volume will grow exponentially. You need to make sense of all this data and turn it into actionable insight.
This is why it’s so important to have a system that allows you to capture and monitor ongoing user and customer usage and predict the next best action to take. Informed with these predictive insights, your customer success, account management and marketing teams can run the right play at the right time.
Brand Penetration – This is the concept that I feel more people will be talking about in 2014 and into 2015.
As you can tell from the past few weeks, I am trying to take marketing in a new direction and set a new tone. We are quickly circling back to having a strong company brand that penetrates the market and gets noticed. Today, people are really confused about what a brand is. Companies are buying each other out, changing their identity and trying quickly to make more of a presence. Established brands are trying to keep pace with change and are continuing to reinvent themselves. It is a never ending job for a company. Today, I want to focus on two important reasons to look at this concept of brand penetration.
Serving Client Needs
This concept is the minimum requirement if you want to be in business today. Serving clients means so much more today that it ever has. You may provide a great product or service, but if your ordering system is not quite up to par with Amazon, you may have some work to do. I received a client complaint that our company was not saving his credit card profile and that we make him key-in his credit card each time. It may sound like a small thing, but Amazon and other sites have provided this convenience. Banks would like to serve client needs better, but they need to be careful of violating regulations.
Imagine your front desk person is sick and you put someone in their place and they get upset with the consumer because they don’t relate well to clients. It may have been a one-time event, but one experience is all it takes to lose someone’s business.
On another front, companies are very desperate to attract new business and they may try to compete through much lower prices to take business away from you. How are you going to react? If your only option is to come back with lower prices again, what does that signal to your client. How are you going to build up your brand value so this type of action is not even a consideration by your clients.
Listening to your clients and working toward not only servicing their needs but exceeding their expectations is the only option for companies to continue to make a difference in the market. Also, remember competitors are always selling out around you, it is a prime time to establish your brand like never before and become the place that people recognize and go to.
Online Marketing is rapidly changing
Google is changing the rules quite a bit. Google Authorship is still alive and well. Google wants to collect a database of information from known people and not some type of bot. It is for this reason that personal branding and company branding are huge. Marketers need to develop content relative to their audience and find a way to draw people to their site to learn more. Content marketing is alive and well. Social media makes a great distribution for this information and it helps to maintain a brand presence.
Mobile technology, (smartphones, iPads, tablets) are really changing the dynamic of brand penetration. Google likes to know where you are and provide you with search results respective of your current location. This is great if you are a local company and your audience is all local consumers. For smaller, national companies like Midwest Laboratories it offers challenges, because keyword search does not have the search power like it once did. Companies are going to need to buildup their brands to see if they can have more of a national attraction to them. Obviously, this means other channels are going to be needed then just content marketing to make this happen. Companies are going to need to find a way to get more creative than ever to see if their brand can get more attraction. Colleges and Universities recognize this and consistently include their brand identity with content that they put online.
Summary
Brand Penetration – It should be a goal of every marketing department. In a very noisy and busy world, consumers are making decisions based on information they can obtain. Companies are going to have to find creative ways to insure their brand is being recognized in the market. I believe this new direction will bring about new technology in the future. In the meantime, it is important to continue to follow the direction of the current technology and associated internet platforms and look for trends. Finally, the key really comes back to listening and serving clients, without this piece the other parts quickly go away. Do not lose site of that and always strive to be client-driven.
I would welcome your comments on Brand Penetration. What are ways you are penetrating the market today?
photo credit: dmelchordiaz via photopin cc
If you need to generate more sales, there are two ways to improve the overall productivity of your sales force.
According to Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com
Hiring more reps is the way to go; assuming that you have already created systems and process that have allowed your current reps to achieve the goals you’ve set for them, that is.
But what if your current sales force isn’t yet hitting their numbers? Could productivity be the issue?
In today’s post, I am going to address how to massively improve productivity in just one area: prospecting.
Prospecting, the old fashioned way, takes a massive amount of time, therefore, if your reps adopt the proper technology tools to increase productivity, the payback can be very significant.
Take sales rep Rick, for example. Rick is a prospecting machine, or so he thinks. He spends his day making cold calls and manually sending cold emails.
Rick’s manager expect him to make 100 dials a day and that is exactly what he does. Rick is busy, but given that he spends the vast majority of his day leaving voicemails for total strangers; Rick isn’t terribly productive.
To help improve his results, Rick also sends a lot of emails. For every email, Rick has to guess at the email address (or call the company to ask for it), type up the email and then click the send button.
While personalized, Rick’s approach to cold email is also very time-consuming.
In the old days, Rick would have probably been one of the rock stars on his team. Today, he’s struggling to keep up with reps like his co-worker Dave.
Dave is a young sales rep and is very comfortable with technology. Dave also relies heavily on content to support his prospecting efforts.
As you’ll see, Dave’s method of prospecting is vastly different than Rick’s approach.
Unlike Rick, Dave doesn’t make any cold calls. Instead, Dave has a very focused list of 100 target accounts that he’s thoroughly researched to ensure that they would be an ideal fit for what he’s selling. By focusing on a finite list, Dave ensures that he’s touching each person on his list at least 6 times before giving up.
To build his list, Dave did his research using the search tools available with a LinkedIn premium account. Thanks to LinkedIn, Dave also knows who all the key players are at each company.
To find their email addresses, Dave is using Signals Insights from Hubspot. 
With Signals Insight installed on his browser, Dave can get most anyone’s email address is under a minute and, with a single click, each contact’s pertinent info is imported into the HubSpot CRM (still in beta).
Once he has an email address, Dave uses a tool called Quickmail to put his email prospecting on auto-pilot.
Unlike traditional email marketing tools, Quickmail is not an auto-responder. Instead, Quickmail is a tool that allows you to preschedule a series of emails that will send right from your company’s Gmail account.
Using Quickmail, Dave creates a sequence of 6 emails that will go out one per week over the next six weeks. (you can choose whatever interval you like). As soon as a prospect replies to Dave, Quickmail stops sending the remainder of the six emails that he created as part of the sequence.
As you can probably see, the primary benefit of using Quickmail is that it allows you to take a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to your email prospecting.
As soon as one of Dave’s prospects has replied, he has succeeded in getting their attention and now shifts into ‘helpful mode’.
Unlike Rick, Dave’s goal is to get the attention of his prospects by asking questions and attempting to be helpful. This is where his content comes into play. (Dave’s company has an active blog that he can draw on for content)
When he first reaches out, Dave isn’t trying to sell anything. Instead, he’s focused on inviting his prospects to join a LinkedIn group that he created.
This is actually the exact approach that I use and here’s what I say in the first email:
Subject: CMO Roundtable
Hi {{firstname}},
I am reaching out to invite you to become a part of a group of {name of niche} executives who are all dedicated to creating fast growing, highly profitable companies.
I have created a video that is 1 min 23 seconds long to explain what this group is all about. You can watch it here: [link to page with video].
I look forward to having you join our group.
Trent Dyrsmid
As you might guess, by taking a helping approach from the start, instead of a selling approach, Dave is hugely differentiating himself from reps like Rick.
Using Quickmail, Dave created a sequence that sends this message, plus two reminder invitations. If his prospects reply, the sequence stops.
If they don’t reply, emails 4, 5, & 6 all ask questions and contain links to content that was written specifically for the type of people that are on his list of target accounts. If Dave hasn’t managed to get a reply by the 6th message, he removes them from his list of target accounts and replaces them with a new prospect.
Like Rick, Dave also uses the phone as part of his prospecting; however, rather than making 100 cold dials a day, Dave uses the phone to follow up with the people that he’s already been communicating with via email.
If Dave’s emails were all just solicitation emails, then his follow up attempts on the phone wouldn’t likely work very well. However, as Dave focuses on helping and sharing content, more of his emails are being read, and so when he does pick up the phone, his prospect very likely already know who he is. (this is exactly what happens for me)
When he does get a prospect on the phone, instead of focusing on selling, he focuses on building a relationship by talking about the benefits of joining the LinkedIn group, or by talking about some of the content that he’s already sent to his prospect.
Unlike Rick, Dave doesn’t try too hard to “sell” anything on the first call. The only thing he’s “selling” is the fact that he’s a helpful resource.
IF, it turns out that Dave’s prospect has some pain that he thinks he might be able to solve, Dave asks his prospect if he’d like to schedule another call to talk more in detail about the problem. By the end of this second call, Dave has created enough trust to allow him to start asking his prospect if they might like to try/buy what he’s got for sale.
While pure cold calls used to work, they don’t have a place in business today. Thanks to blogs and social media, sales reps don’t have an excuse not to know anything about their prospects and the companies they work for.
To be successful in getting someone’s attention today, you need to reach out to them via a variety of channels (email, blog comments, social media, phone) and focus initially on providing instant value to your prospect. You also need to be persistent.
When you take the helping first approach to prospecting, combined with some of the productivity tools mentioned in this post, both your results and how much you enjoy prospecting for new business will both drastically improve.
So, what are you waiting for? Go make it happen!
In everyday life we make choices. From the gas station we choose, to the brand of clothing we wear, to the grocery stores at which we shop, we somehow concluded that these buying decisions are a right fit for us. As creatures of habit, we tend to stick with our choices – that is until something better comes along. We’re then free to change our mind and try something new. In our work life however, we don’t always have that freedom.
On the job, decisions generally come at a much slower rate because they usually involve a number of people, each with a uniquely different perspective. The value in that decision-making approach is ‘collective wisdom’. And the trouble with that approach is also ‘collective wisdom’. So at some point, and for better or worse, a decision is to be made. You then learn through experience that the decision was a good one or not. So how does all of this factor into your decision to engage technology in order to make your work life easier and more productive? Read on…
As a hiring official, you must attract applicants, screen them, interview the ones on your short list, optionally perform assessment tests and background checks, and then make a final decision. After you’ve made that decision, you have to onboard them through the use of required documentation, and then verify their eligibility to work in this country. And once you’ve done that for one opening, you get to do it again for another, and another, and another. Wouldn’t reliable, predictable, and easy-to-use automation make this all so much easier? Welcome to the intersection of you and HR Automation.
Just like your everyday life choices and work life decisions as described above, you’ve elected to shop for the ‘best fit’ automation tool that will addresses your particular needs. After all, hiring is just one of your myriad duties and responsibilities. So here are some tips to help you get to a good decision point:
In closing, your decision to engage automation should not be complicated. A wise decision is made when you’re armed with good information. The tips listed about are offered as a means to obtain that information. So the light in the intersection has just turned green. Please proceed to drive to a well-informed decision.
To learn more about how automation can improve your hiring process, download our guide: Stop Wasting Time and Money—Explore the Benefits of Recruiting Automation.
Meetings. Some welcome the time to connect and get the bigger picture. Some see them as a necessary evil. Much frustration can be avoided by following a few simple steps to save time and communicate effectively. In most businesses, meetings that drag on contribute to employee frustration.
Keeping meetings effective is more than just productivity in the moment. It’s part of building a culture of efficiency. It shows team members you respect them and value their time. Dragging meetings along or conducting them inefficiently communicates the opposite. As much as we love the helpful technology like cloud computing, conferencing apps, mobile gadgets, doohickies, and weebobs built over the years to facilitate communication, sometimes it’s simply most efficient to communicate in person and make sure everyone is on the same page.
Depending on your company, its size, culture, and communication needs, meetings can be as frequent as daily, or as infrequent as once a month. But everyone has meetings at some point. How do you keep them efficient?
Tip #1: Prepare
Any project or company event, no matter how large or small, should be broken into three phases: pre, during, and post. Either create or acquire an agenda template, populate it with relevant information at least a day in advance of the meeting, making sure you leave space for extra information that comes up. Send it to the attendees for review, so you can integrate any necessary information prior to the meeting.
Tip #2: Be Mindful of Time
Someone’s late. How do you handle that? Do you wait for them to begin? Do you pull them aside and let them know that’s unacceptable? Depending on company culture and management style, you may keep this situational rather than hard and fast, but the prima donna who is always late and gets away with it communicates to the other team members that that’s ok. If it goes unchecked, there will be slippage in other areas as well. A target time should also be set for all meetings. Roughly 30 minutes is ideal. Also, the team member who likes to overshare needs boundaries, too. Communicate expectations of length of share time at the outset (this can be on the agenda as well). A good rule of thumb is two minutes. Rather than being the ogre all the time, the manager should assign role of timekeeper to a beloved team member who can set their smart phone in front of them and remind colleagues it’s time to wrap it up.
Tip # 3: Close the Laptops
Every “Zen and the Art of” book reminds us to be here now. We need this reminder even more in the Information Age. Divided attention is unproductive, even though we often excuse it as “multitasking.” Just like being late, letting this go communicates that this information isn’t important, which by extension calls into question the importance of even having a meeting. If it’s important enough to have a meeting about, it’s important enough to have everyone’s undivided attention. Mentioning this at the beginning, or setting this as a “ground rule” at the top of the agenda can be helpful. Ditto with answering the cell phone. This should be explicitly stated at some point, so the prima donna doesn’t take advantage of the ambiguity.
Tip #4: No Response? Have them Talk to a Partner.
Again, depending on company and meeting size, there may be a discomfort to share openly on certain questions. If the meeting is large, and your questions aren’t getting traction, have the group turn to someone sitting next to them, groups of two or three is fine. Have them discuss the question in the small group, then solicit feedback from each group. This simple shift can diffuse tension, and lead to great brainstorm when a meeting stalls.
Tip #5: Capture and Share Next Steps
No matter what organization you’re with, chances are you’ve encountered a situation in which the same people had the same conversation about the same topic and came to the same conclusion twice if not several times in a row. This kind of redundancy leads to organizational inertia. With the right process in place (like, say, an agenda), capture the next steps on a granular level, which means writing down “who does what by when.” This should be established for every actionable agenda item discussed. Once captured, the agenda should be shared with each team member present, whether via email or a documentation platform such as SharePoint.
No organization is perfect, but following simple principles of efficiency can help your company stay productive, retain employees who feel empowered, and gain an advantage on less efficient competitors.
Alibaba is expected to IPO in September and a new financial report from the company reveals that the Chinese e-commerce giant continues to grow at a blistering pace. The company's growth pattern, and its recent entrance into the U.S. market, makes Alibaba a serious threat to e-commerce giants like Amazon and eBay.
Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>
Alibaba is growing ~50% annually in volume terms.
The gross merchandise volume (GMV) — or, the value of all merchandise — sold on Alibaba's e-commerce sites reached $248 billion in 2013, 52% more than it sold in 2012.
GMV in the second quarter of 2014 was $82 billion, which is 45% more than the same quarter last year.
It's useful to compare Alibaba and eBay because they are both marketplace businesses — meaning they don't actually own the merchandise they sell. Rather, retailers, merchants, and consumers use their sites to sell directly to consumers.
Alibaba owns two main e-commerce sites.
One in three dollars that flowed through Alibaba's e-commerce sites came from mobile shoppers last quarter, up from 12% one year earlier.
For context, 30% of eBay's GMV comes from mobile.
Alibaba's customer base is already far larger than eBay's, and it's growing much faster.
Less than 1 in 10 revenue dollars from Alibaba's e-commerce sites come from customers outside China. However, with the recent launch of its U.S. site 11Main.com, that could soon change. For comparison, almost 40% of Amazon's revenues come from outside North America.
Image credit: mintigo.mintigo.netdna-cdn.com
Many small to medium business owners have growing interests about using product recommendation engine which is being widely used by big companies like Amazon and Netflix as part of their data analytic system and business engagement process with their customers. There is no doubt that this kind of data processing helps build stronger connection of a business to its potential customers thereby helping a business grow with better social connection to their website visitors and profitable return of investment along the course of doing business online.
What is a product recommendation engine?
Image credit: cdn2.hubspot.net
The product recommendation engine is a technique that utilizes data coming from the consumers themselves and using the wisdom of the gathered data to recommend the best products to the potential customers of a business based on their preferences and interests. Ecommerce websites that are using product recommendation engines usually display similar products based on the current item being viewed by their website visitors. These similar products are usually presented with the beeline of “visitors who viewed this also purchased these items.” These suggested products are models that the product recommendation engine uses in order to build the business engagement of their visitors to their products with the goal of increasing conversions, encourage purchases and grow the number of orders placed by their shopping visitors.
The technology behind product recommendation engine
This amazing technology can influence the purchasing behaviour of your customers using a recommendation algorithm that predicts which products to offer to your customers that match their interests. The automated product recommendation displays the options in seconds just in time to grab the customer’s current interest about similar products at its peak.
Collaborative filtering technology
The engine collects information regarding the purchasing activities of a customer, the products they rate or bought and even those that they dislike. Variant factors are likewise considered including the popularity of a particular product, its rating, value and relevance which are collaboratively calculated to find the best product to recommend to a specific class of buyers.
Item to item recommendation
Image credit: paxcel.net
This form of recommendation technique is used by the engine to monitor and filter data based from the customer’s purchased and rated items in order to build a list of similar products to recommend to that particular customer.
3. Clustering of customers
This prediction algorithm uses cluster models in order to create a base of information categorizing customers according to their shopping behaviour. The recommended products are then displayed based on the similarity of the interests of a cluster of customers that will typically meet their purchasing interests and behaviour.
How product recommendation engines collect data about your customers
Using product recommendation engines will give your business a profitable advantage because it collects valuable data that can help understand the purchasing preferences of your customers and to influence the buying decisions. While the product recommendation engine providers have their own distinct technology features, they share similar processes on how to acquire vital information from your customers. A user registration form is usually offered to customers in order to encourage them to voluntarily register a customer account to an ecommerce site. The registration process usually includes the disclosure on how the site will be using the collected information from its visitor’s browsing activities. The algorithm of the product recommendation engine then tracks down the activities of a customer, collect them and integrate them in the data system.
Growing your business success using product recommendation engines
Social media marketing companies find product recommendation engines as a valuable tool in optimizing the engagement of a business to its customers. The engine is capable of tracking down the behavioural activities of their customers from the time they enter the website until they leave. Every activity made by a visitor is collected as data that the system uses to interpret in order to find similar products of interest to recommend to a particular website visitor.
The product recommendation engine also has a social value because a potential customer is allowed to use their social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter, even their Gmail and Yahoo accounts when registering to your ecommerce site. Marketers can use this social feature of the engine when they are targeting demographic data about a target group of customers whose purchasing behaviour is influenced by their social connections.
Beneficial features of the product recommendation engine to marketers
Digital marketers can derive significant increase in their productivity and ROI when using the product recommendation engines for their business including the following benefits:
By recommending products to your customers that match their interests, it makes your business valuable to them knowing that your business understands their shopping needs and preferences. By providing them recommended products you are able to establish connection after their purchase which increases the value of customer retention that is crucial to every business.
Your business can enjoy a profit increase each time a customer is enticed to make a purchase after seeing the recommended products that match their needs and interests.
Displaying recommended products to your customers will give shopping convenience to them by providing filtered results of products that match their needs. Marketers can deliver better customization services to their customers by providing more personalized product results that are tailored according to a customer’s preference.
Image credit: netdna.webdesignerdepot.com
Small businesses are able to gain a better social media popularity advantage when using product recommendation engine. Because the system delivers better customer service and satisfaction, customers that appreciate the shopping convenience that your business is able to offer them may just be happy to share, mention or recommend your business within their social media networks.
Not only can you sell your products directly to your own site. You can use sites like Amazon that uses the product recommendation engine in order to sell your products with wider range of customer reach. This gives small businesses that have limited budget to embark to a massive advertising campaign to gain better exposure of their products with the help of the product recommendation engine.
If you need help to grow the social value, traffic and search rank of your ecommerce site, Digital Warriors have the expertise in making small businesses conquer the challenge of standing out in a competitive world of digital marketing industry. With our expertise in the fields of IT consulting, marketing analytics, social media marketing, search engine optimization and web design and development, we have the complete package of digital marketing solutions to grow your business.
There are three primary objectives of a marketing campaign:
Many B2B and B2C companies do a good job at the first two objectives. They know where to find prospects, or better yet, they help prospects find them, which is the essence of effective inbound (pull) marketing. They also know how to write clever promotional copy and create compelling offers. But no matter how well you do at the first two tasks, unless you remove every barrier to the purchase process, you will not achieve your potential.
Barriers to purchase fall into four primary categories: time, process, people and risk.
Time – Assume that your prospects are busy, have short attention spans, and that you will get only one shot at their business. If your business is web-based, what is the time it takes someone to go through the education and purchase process? If your business if phone-based, how long does it take you to get back to the prospect? I have related on other posts how I have given business to one company over another simply on the basis of the speed at which the winning company responded to my query. Whether you sell online, by phone or in person, your bottom line will benefit from shortening the time it takes your prospects to go through the entire transaction cycle.
Process – I once worked as a marketing manager in the business process management (BPM) space, even earning a BPM practitioner certificate from AIIM. One of most important lessons I learned was that typically, the more non-critical steps you can remove from a workflow process, the faster and more efficient the operation becomes. The lesson is to study and experience the buying steps and then minimize the total amount of time and effort required. Also eliminate barriers like broken forms or pages that either won’t load or fail to render properly on mobile devices.
People – How many times have you wanted to buy something, but needed some clarification before making the final decision? Perhaps something on the website wasn’t clear or you needed to verify that the product was compatible with something you already own. When you send an online query, or ask to speak to someone, the company can lose your business in four ways:
Risk – Buyers go through a mental checklist that goes something like the following:
Avoiding risk is a key factor in the purchase decision, and anything you can do to mitigate risk will be rewarded with more and faster sales. Don’t make the prospect search for the terms that will make him or her feel comfortable – make them clear and easy to find. Your competitors are probably doing this, so don’t lose profitable sales due to your failure to address the risk issue.
You might want to get some outside opinions when you set out to remove purchase obstacles. Just as a software developer thinks his/her computer program is intuitive and easy-to-use (despite user claims to the contrary), so, too, does the marketing and sales team often think they have created a seamless buying process. In the final analysis, the only opinions that really count are of those of your potential customers.
There will be a time when you want to sell your online business. The process of selling your business is complex, which is why we have asked the brokers from Digital Exits to contribute this post on the selling process. The success of selling your business will largely depend on the reason for the sale, the timing of the sale, your business model, growth of the business, market and business operations.
The following 6 things are the main elements you need to think about before putting your online business up for sale.
The most attractive thing to online business buyers is profit. Therefore the main metric that you want to concentrate on is to make your business as profitable as possible. This can come in a combination of increasing revenues and decreasing profits.
Generally the longer that your business has been making income the higher price it sells for. Alternatively the more profit that it makes the higher it sells for. Let’s take some data we analyzed from recent online business sales in 2013.
For clarification 2.0X means 2.0 times the yearly net profit. For example if your site makes $100,000 per year in profit then it will sell for 2 times $100,000 = $200,000. As you can see the larger and older your online business the more money that it makes.
While traffic and income fluctuates for many online ventures, it is wise to put yours up for sale when there is a steady upward growth. Buyers will better appreciate stats for three years or more, as it is the best way for them to weigh revenue generated and future potential and will allow you to fetch a higher multiple. Buyers will see the growth trend and assume that it will continue in the future and base their projections off that equaling a higher selling price.
Online businesses are more valuable if there is little competition and hard for competitors to replicate your business. Those who intend to sell a website for millions must be creative and create a site that brings unique services and/or products to the market. Because it is so easy to replicate a business it is rare that you find a truly unique business.
Let’s analyze this sales data for a better understanding of competition:
Let’s take the above graph from our recent valuation report. The point I want to make with this graph is that you can see that drop ship based sites sell for a lower price point because of the competition. A real world example is if the owner of this business that sells trolling motors were to sell they would receive a lower price that this business that sells beard oils. The reason being is that the first business is purely a drop ship business and it is relatively easy to start a competing business.
However the second business manufactures their own product out of a warehouse and also sells to retail stores themselves.
Any business can be sold but some are easier to transfer than others are. Branding defines a business but when it is time to sell, buyers opt for brands that are not so closely associated with the owner. This is because a personalized branding is much more difficult to restructure and people would rather pay more than have to do all of the work of rebranding and rebuilding. So ensure that you build your business to make the overall sale as easy as possible. This also includes ease of transferability of other assets like subscriptions for a business.
We have had many times in the past were PayPal subscriptions were linked to a personal account and the business could not be transferred.
Google is the primary source of traffic for a lot of websites but if you want to ensure the success of your business, you can’t rely on only one traffic source. Dependency on one channel might de value your website and puts it at risk, since everyone is subject to constantly changing algorithms and updates. There was a whole subset of Internet businesses that were wiped out because of the Google updates in 2011.
Millions of dollars in businesses were wiped off the map.
That is why it is important to focus on multiple traffic streams to increase the defensibility of your web business.
Poor record keeping causes a lot of problems in Due diligence when selling a business. We have had multiple deals that have fallen over because of this.
Good financial records also save time during the trade, as you do not have to fix any loopholes or confusion before proceeding with the deal. Establish proper record keeping practices if you want buyers to close quickly. It is preferential that you submit tax returns for just one business and have one bank accountant and keep one set of online books per business.
It’s been brutally hard work. In the early days it was about sourcing and reverse engineering all the products. Later you concentrated on mimicking processes and fixtures to manufacture the knock-offs as efficiently as possible. Today, as you survey all that you have created, you can say with confidence that there’s not one new thing which has contributed to your success – it’s a demonstration of the immense power of copying!
Of course – it’s patently absurd. You wouldn’t take that approach…and even if you tried it wouldn’t work.
Except that you are taking that approach with your business development, and while you may not realize it yet….it’s not working.
Why do so many B2B manufacturing companies innovate the bejeebers out of their product and then create a biz dev approach that is regurgitated crap?
You know, the website that looks like:
And of course the corporate overview video and the 8.5 X 11 product data sheets….put a different logo in the corner and see if you can tell which is which!
Your product is different, and the resulting impact on your customers’ businesses is vastly different – shouldn’t that be clear?
The range of tactics, approaches and opinions for how to distinguish your B2B Sales and marketing is endless. So let’s stick with two fundamental points:
That’s where most B2B manufacturing sites (and sales & marketing programs) break. Online catalogs are of limited value – unless you’re a catalog business like MSC or Grainger. Rather B2B sales success is built on a huge variety of focused discussion, information and solutions around the business problems your prospects have. You need a huge array of different, focused and worthwhile pages that each addresses typical challenges. And you need not just written pages but graphics, videos and presentations. And as prospects engage with your resources you need to have more the share – deeper dives and in depth discussions of key topics.
Why did I say B2B sales rather than marketing? After all, we’re talking website, right? Because buyers are increasingly resistant to ‘being sold.’ Instead they buy – at their own pace according to their priorities. And research shows that they are typically >70% of the way to their purchase before they’ll talk to a direct sales rep. So today….your online presence is your early stage sales effort – it’s not just marketing.
If you’ve got 1 more HP; longer life sealed bearings; a slightly more compact design or any of many other technical differentiators – good for you.
But if you want to grow your business you’d better figure out how that’s good for your prospects, and then help them in their business.
You wouldn’t stamp out the same products as everyone else – isn’t it time you stop making yourself look the same?
GUEST POST
I work with B2B companies that rely on us to bring them more leads. In fact, that’s usually the number one complaint when we first meet with a client. “We just need more leads,” they’ll say. In their minds, the only thing holding back their ascent from a $5 million company to a $500 million company is the volume of leads they’re receiving. And you know what, they’re wrong.
In fact, the last thing they need is more leads. Why? Because they treated the last thousand or so like garbage. They screened them, used them, signed up who they could, then like a glutton, threw the remainder on the trash pile. They call it a lead funnel, but really it’s one of the most inefficient ways to manage a sales process.
The real reason they’re not a half-billion dollar company isn’t because of lead volume. They’re a middling company because of how they treat their potential clients.
A Mile in Their Shoes
Let me ask you some questions that we typically ask our clients.
Have you ever had an old lead call you up, unsolicited, six months later and tell you that they’re ready to sign up? Yes. Almost everyone has had this happen. It’s viewed as luck. And if you’re not performing certain steps, it is luck. But what if that was replicable and quantifiable?From these four questions we point out that our clients are not putting themselves in their potential customer’s shoes. Instead, they’re treating them like a name and an email. Their potential customers are either a yes or a no. There is no middle ground. But as these questions have just proven, there’s an entire universe of possibility to be found in the middle.
The Middle
If an average sales funnel has a 10% conversion rate, that means that 90% of leads are not a fit for the company or the sale fell through for one reason or another. The typical company will usually give a weak description for the lost sale that is similar to one of these:
And that’s it! What can a sales team glean from this information? Most of those leads will never develop into anything of significance and will oftentimes just eat up resources by having a sales team waste calls and follow-ups.
Now, what if you looked at that 90% of leads and saw them for what they really are, a goldmine. Just because they didn’t close right away doesn’t mean they won’t refer business to you, or close next quarter, or come to you after they’ve tried a competitor. In fact, if you treat them properly, you’ll stay top of mind and when the time does come, you’ll be the first name on their list.
How is this done? With polite persistence and good data.
Garbage in – Garbage out
We’ve all heard that you get out of data what you put into it. The same goes for data related to leads. A company should develop values in their CRM that cover almost every conceivable reason a lead did or didn’t close. This way, that company can quantify the actions of their sales team and replicate what works.
Once a company has created the hundred or so qualifiers that can be assigned to a lead, they need to create rules on how to handle those leads based on the qualifiers. Was the company too small? Great, we’ll drip them information on a three-month basis, recommend trusted partners that better suit their needs, and give them as much value as possible.
By doing this, you’ve now significantly raised the odds that the lead, even though they’re not a good fit right now, will either refer someone to you or come to you when the fit is right. And what did this cost you? A few extra seconds of data entry and a couple of dozen emails.
And you just rinse and repeat this for the other hundred or so qualifiers. Bad timing, there’s a campaign for that. Went to a competitor, you bet there’s a campaign for that. Went dark for no reason, of course there’s a campaign for that!
Data, Data, Data!
By tracking all of your data concerning your emails, webinars (yeah, you’ll want to be doing those), ebooks (again, no brainer), and all other nurturing activities, you’ll notice patterns and outliers that you can now quantify and replicate. For instance, your company might notice that the sixth email in the “bad timing” funnel seems to convert at a 16% rate while all others in the campaign have a 2% conversion rate. The company can now dissect that email and find what makes it work and then roll it out to the rest of the campaign with hopes that all the other emails will improve.
And that “out of the blue” six-month-later phone call that everyone receives, now it’s trackable. You’ll know what the impetus for it was, and you can replicate that over and over again.
The possibilities for improvement are endless when this is done correctly.
Do it Now
This isn’t groundbreaking information. Lead nurturing and marketing automation is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. But too often they’re being used as buzzwords similar to “big data” and “content marketing”. Everyone says it, but no one really knows what it means.
“But we have a newsletter!”
Oh, pardon me. How incredibly original. Clearly this article isn’t written for the marketing wizards like yourself. How’s that lead generation dynamo been performing for you?
The truth is, very few companies are actually using their marketing automation tools and CRMs properly. They’re spending all of this money on a software that can perform like a Ferarri, and they’re driving it like a 1985 Yugo.
So, no, you don’t need more leads. You don’t deserve them. Start treating your current leads like you should, then we’ll talk about more leads.
Mike Templeman is the CEO of Foxtail Marketing, a digital-content marketing firm specializing in B2B lead generation and lead optimization. He is passionate about tech, marketing and startups. When not tapping away at his keyboard, he can be found spending time with his kids.
When done right, an Android or iOS application can be a new user’s perfect introduction to your company, or an exciting way to engage existing fans. They pose a great opportunity for brands to get creative and try out new, fun ways to get people aware of and interacting with their products and platforms. We took a look at how some of the biggest names in the game are getting it right, and how others still seem to be figuring it out.
Walgreens
It’s no surprise the Walgreens app has a 4.5 star rating on the App Store, along with a slew of rave reviews from happy customers: one from last month reads,“The MOST user friendly and helpful APP!!” It’s a great example of a brand that really knows itself and its services, and thought long and hard about its existing and potential customer-base and how to make their lives easier.
The app is extensive, with basic elements like a store locator and online shopping to more advanced features like a pill reminder and daily steps counter. The three standout functionalities, however, are a prescription scanner for streamlined refills, a photo printing service (“ready in about an hour”), and a guide to weekly sales and coupons that easily sync with rewards cards.
The app is also beautifully developed and impeccably well thought-out. You’d think it couldn’t get any better, but then a message pops up that directs you to a short customer survey, with the aim of improving user experience. With an app so good, it’s easy to believe that they actually listen to feedback.
Starbucks
When Starbucks completely redesigned its widely used app earlier this year, one would think they kept customer reviews in mind. The couple of months that have elapsed since the update, however, have seen a slew of negative feedback. Complaints range anywhere from lost or malfunctioning rewards and tips to privacy concerns and frustration at the loss of previous favorite features such as menus, nutrition facts, and build-your-own drink options. Yet another bummer? You need a rewards card to sign in!
With a 1.5-star average, it’s clear these tech-minded-java-junkies are unhappy. Even though that’s probably not going to stop them from getting their Starbucks fix, there’s no reason why a 5-star brand shouldn’t have a 5-star app to match. Being able to pay for a coffee with our phones is useful, but we’re halfway into 2014 and by now people just want more. Bringing back pre-existing features should be a piece of cake for Starbucks, and getting to work on other improvements a major priority. Good thing they’ve got coffee to keep them going!
Charmin
If caffeine’s not enough, anyone in need of inspiration should take a cue from Charmin. Toilet paper doesn’t exactly scream fun, but this TP brand has found a way to lighten up a topic that’s usually kept under wraps. The company’s SitOrSquat app utilizes mobile’s localization technology to help users find and rate the bathrooms nearest to them; “Sit” for bathrooms that you like, and “Squat” for those you’d rather not revisit.
Charmin’s message is all about the “playful side of TP,” and tapping into the universal need of having to go on the go. Needless to say, the app is super handy – especially for families – and, worth mentioning, also available on Android. Charmin succeeds because the app is memorable and pretty darn funny. If it makes you smile, that might just mean going for Charmin the next time you run out.
Converse
The treasured American sneaker brand hit the App Store few years with an awesome idea: The Sampler by Converse. The innovative app uses your smartphone’s camera to overlay a sneaker style over your actual foot, giving you a glimpse at how the shoe would look in real life – along with a “Buy Now” option.
The concept is great, but the execution could be better. For one, social sharing is limited to email and Facebook. There’s also the fact that there’s been minimal development since the app first launched in 2010. The current version offers a mere four sneakers to choose from and, worst of all, the shopping prompt leads to broken link in your smartphone’s web browser. Think of all the would-be sales! Yikes.
Converse was on to something special here, and with some forward thinking the app could grow into much more. With over 40 million likes on Facebook, it looks like all attention as of late has gone to the brand’s social media strategies. That’s great, but if you’re going to have an app that’s live and in-store, that people see and use, it needs to be in better shape.
The biggest takeaway here? Listen to your fans! A look at customer reviews is a fast, surefire way to find out what’s working and what’s not, and to get inspired for new features and improvements. Converse fans, for example, are obviously excited about the app. They also have lots of suggestions for how to make things better. Remember, mobile apps are all about your audience – and the customer is always right.
Cynicism isn’t the healthiest behavior to have in marketing and business. It’s only refuge (if not excuse) is a need to be realistic when setting goals and defining qualified prospects. But as far as whole campaigns go, the tendency to be skeptical of any method can dangerously undermine objectives.
But if you want a simpler idea on how cynicism can help or harm a lead generation strategy, look at the Ice Bucket Challenge.
At first glance, it looks like any typical social media stunt. However, that’s exactly why it worked. Yet like all stunts, it draws the cynics out of the woodwork.
Have you ever imagined this happening to your B2B lead generation campaign? Think about it. Social media and content were previously thought to be in the realms of unorthodox B2B marketing practices. When it comes to sales leads, most of the work was stereotypically done on the salesperson’s end. It’s not surprising that cynics arise from the decades of catering to a highly-targeted audience of executive decision makers. Proposing the equivalents to silly stunts and casual interactions automatically triggers their defense mechanism.
How does this help?
How does this not help?
Like any defense mechanism, it’s best left to function on automatic. And by automatic, it means you should learn to ignore it when it’s really not helping anymore.
How would you like to pitch your competitors’ leads and customers?
San Mateo, California-based Colabo is now offering that escalation in the marketing arms race.
This week, Colabo released competitive lead discovery capabilities for its data aggregation platform, offering what is describes as “predatory lead discovery.”
“By going off your competitors’ leads,” CEO and co-founder Yoav Dembak told VentureBeat, marketers “become more of a hunter than a farmer.”
“Salespeople are used to looking at the known universe, selling into this kind [or that kind] of company,” he told us.
But these days, he said, the known universe can be deceptive. A salesperson might be looking to talk to “an IT manager at a large bank, [but] that person could be running the video system, managing iPads, or doing virtualization.”
Rather than trying to figure out the best targets from such deceptive clues as job titles, Dembak told us, it could be more effective to hit on those leads or customers who “are already engaging with your competitor.”
“When people [engage with your competitor], it’s a pretty good indicator” they’re interested in your industry.
Instead of a capturing and recapturing of each others’ leads, could Colabo instead be used as a shield?
“Some users have asked, ‘Can I pay you so my competitor can’t see my leads?'”
No, Dembak told us. “We’re not into racketeering.”
The updated Colabo platform draws on public as well as purchased data sources, including tradeshow attendances, LinkedIn groups, MeetUp meetings, browser history via Acxiom, data platforms like InsideSales, Lattice Engines’ big data, question exchanges in Quora, search terms, and other feeds to define the targeted customers. Colabo doesn’t actually supply the data, but it can suggest the data sources and will provide integration.
Of course, it’s not the only company to assemble profiles from disparate data sources, but it says it is only one offering this kind of automated intelligence about your competitors’ leads. Marketers have been doing this manually, Dembak said, such as scoring users on MeetUp and LinkedIn.
The leads and related data from Colabo are integrated with existing systems. “As a platform, we attach ourselves to both marketing automation and CRM,” he told us. Colabo also feeds other parts of a company’s sales funnel.
“What we find,” he said, “is that when you engage with alternative channels [than what you've been using], you get ten times the response rate.”
The company, founded about two years ago, previously offered a lead enrichment platform that qualified existing leads but didn’t discover new leads. About 50 customers have been using the earlier beta version of Colabo’s competitive lead discovery, including Juniper Networks, Cisco, and Oracle.
The co-founders, including CTO Asaf Wexler and COO Naama Halperin, previously sold an application management platform called B-hive to VMware in 2008. Colabo was initially bootstrapped, followed by a seed round that included ex-VMware CEO Paul Maritz and that netted over $2 million.
The software sales cycle has more to do with science than you might first think. Not only is it data driven and analytics fueled, it is also something you need to experiment with and test new theories against old paradigms in order to stay competitive.
While we’ve previously covered the scientific secrets to software lead generation, it’s time to discover how the Science of Sales™ helps you generate more revenue throughout the rest of the software sales cycle.
The most important paradigm shift when it comes to more scientific software sales is the tracking, measuring and analyzing of every piece of data regarding your transactions. You should regularly review which sales activities lead to the top-line results you’re looking for.
Study your sales data to determine which decision-maker is the right person to talk with, which lists are worth purchasing (and which aren’t) and how many times you need to reach out to a contact in order to complete a sale. The more data you track and analyze, the easier it becomes to improve the software sales cycle for your entire sales team.
Track your information according to industry vertical as well, since results may vary across different verticals. If you’re performing well in a particular vertical, stick with it and drill further down into your data until you understand which factors are contributing to your success.
In the software industry, it’s particularly important that you define a narrow target for your ideal buyer, including position title. Without a narrowly defined target position, your sales team wastes a lot of time dialing the wrong people throughout a prospective company – time that could be better spent talking with your sales lead.
Company size is another important aspect to consider in your prospect targeting. Business software and other SaaS solutions are often expensive, so you save time by only targeting businesses that have the budget to support your software’s price tag. As you close more deals, analyze your sales data to determine the exact size of a company that best fits the budget of your software.
Finally, if you’re selling software that replaces a person’s job, double check that you aren’t targeting that person as your potential buyer (self-interest means they often won’t complete the purchase). Instead, make sure you’re pursuing the actual decision-maker of the purchase and that you understand this decision-maker’s thought process. The better you comprehend their decision-making process, the better you’re able to gauge the strength of your sales pipeline.
Tracking your sales data also involves looking at the data around each of your salespeople. In some cases, you need to give your salespeople room to experiment and test new theories – then, once enough time has elapsed, analyze the data from their various efforts and capitalize on any successful trends.
For example, if you notice that nearly all of your sales leads convert on the twelfth call, don’t let your salespeople give up after the fifth call. Similarly, if one salesperson significantly outperforms the others, analyze his or her script, method of objections management and overall software sales approach.
As you continue to identify well-performing tactics, match your incentives to boost those practices appropriately. But just as with everything else in your sales process, analyze your data to ensure your incentives are helping generate better sales results.
A scientific mindset should also guide your decisions when it comes to hiring and training your software sales personnel. When selecting new hires, cross-check their past performance against your expectations for the position. You should be able to prove their fit and aptitude for your sales team with solid data.
When it comes to sales training, you should have an equally data-driven process to ensure you’re maximizing the ROI of your professional development efforts. For example, if you’re going to take someone off the sales floor for six hours of training, you need to be tracking and ensuring that the training session actually boosts the individual’s production and sales metrics. If your sales training efforts aren’t producing a bump in performance, you’re just wasting your time.
Remember that personnel attrition is simply a fact of life for any sales team, so your sales training should also prioritize a smooth and quick ramp-up time. In order to maximize your training investment in new salespeople, compare your training metrics against each new salesperson’s speed to first sale and their total amount of sales in the first month.
With a solid scientific approach, your software sales cycle is more effective in bringing new revenue to your business. Implement these four principles from the Science of Sales™ and your sales pipeline fills with more abundant opportunities.
8 Things You Owe Your Sales Force is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino
A checklist of things you need to provide your sales force.
What you do not owe your sales force is a rationale for not providing these things because, “I never had any of those things.”
Sales process
In the last ten years a substantial amount of time, effort, and money has been devoted to discussing the sales process. Listen to a conversation about the sales process and it usually begins by someone saying something like:
Whether or not you have consciously addressed the topic of putting in place or modifying your sales process – it is happening everyday. It is whatever your salespeople are doing on a given day to navigate the customer’s buying process.
If you want to put in place a more effective sales process, avoid these two pitfalls.
Lack of definitional clarity. Sales process is one of those sales concepts that unfortunately means something different for each person with whom you talk. Some would say if you put in place a new questioning model you have changed your sales process. Others would say that is simply adopting a new questioning model. Try it. Ask someone what their sales process is and a good bet is you will get not just different answers but entirely different types of answers.
To make something better everyone needs to have a clear and common vision of the topic at hand – it’s about being on the same page.
Our best suggestion is to restrict the term sales process to mean the overall set of steps you take from beginning and end of your sales cycle to win the business versus using the term interchangeably with concepts related to selling techniques, models, frameworks, and best practices.
Unbridled compliance. It is not a good idea for a whole bunch of reasons to have everyone do their own thing – that is not the road to success in today’s market. That’s an easy one.
On the other hand, in today’s disruptive buying environment it is equally true that unbridled compliance to a standard sales process can have its own pitfalls.
The greatest risk is that rigorously following any standardized process only works when one is absolutely clear that you are following a path that leads to success. In the B2B market the problem is many companies are going through transformational changes. These changes are impacting what they buy, how they buy, and what they are willing to pay for it.
So, a strategic caution is in order: Are you doing a good job driving compliance to a sales process that is more about what and how customers were buying five years ago versus what they are doing here and now?
Summary. On the sales process scale of “everyone does their own thing to blind compliance” we suggest being somewhere in the middle.
Introduce a well thought out sales process because it can contribute to replicating success and scaling the business. But, beware of overdone rigor and excessive compliance. The latter will tend to eliminate innovation and discourage the positive deviants among you from exploring the ideas that will define what success looks like tomorrow.
You’ve just started a new PPC campaign to generate more leads quickly. In the weeks your campaigns ran, you observe that your clicks are soaring! Before you give yourself a pat on the back, check out your conversions or better yet, your sales report to determine if your extra spend and time is actually working. Focusing too much on just generating clicks can be dangerous and often counterproductive to the PPC plan.
Clicks without conversions mean very little; so here are some ways to improve your click-to-conversion rate.
Develop a Negative Keyword List
Let’s say you own a gym and decide to bid on the word “cardio” as a broad match type keyword. This keyword can be triggered by words like “cardio surgeon” or “cardiologist” which are clearly irrelevant to you. If you start getting clicks based on these queries, you can predict what the conversion rates might look like… not very good. Consider varying match types in tightly themed keyword lists and build extensive negative keywords lists to prevent your ads from appearing for obviously irrelevant searches.
Let’s say you are a small clothing store in City A that only delivers to certain locations. When you set up your campaign though, you chose your whole state. When someone from City X, located 40 miles from City A, clicks on your ad and decides to contact you, they land on a page that says “Sorry, we don’t deliver to your location”. So you just paid for a click that can’t convert. Google allows you set location targets by radius targeting or by specific country, state, city, even zip code, so choose settings that make sense for your business.
Few Conversions Points
Your PPC campaign may be low-converting or non-converting simply because there are few conversion points on your site. If the only place a user can convert or submit information is on the landing page, once they click away from that page, you’ve more than likely lost them as a potential lead. While the goal is to keep them on the landing page and entice them to convert some will navigate away to discover more information. Either craft your landing make so that all pertinent information is clearly and concisely explained or make sure there are conversion opportunities on other high traffic pages.
Bulky or Cumbersome Lead Forms
When a user does decide to convert on your landing page, don’t require any fields that are not absolutely necessary for lead generation. When a form is lengthy or requires personal information, searchers become reluctant to complete it. Considering the huge increase in the amount of searches done on mobile devices, if you don’t have a mobile optimized site, completing forms on the smaller screen can be a hassle. Even if you do have a mobile landing page, form requirements should still be kept to a minimum.
Are your PPC campaigns not performing as well as you’d like? You could be committing on the of the 7 most common PPC slip ups. Download this complimentary eBook, The 7 Most Common and Costly PPC Advertising Mistakes Businesses Make… And How To Avoid Them!
If you have not invited so far by anyone for the ALS Ice bucket challenge, or you have not challenged anyone, or, at the least, you have not had a view on the challenge – you are not a netizen.
Image: BigStockPhoto.com
Social feeds across the world are full of videos and photos of celebrities, CEOs, sportspersons and politicians emptying the ice buckets on their heads in all form, fashion and styles. There are dozens of parallel similar campaigns – a few with some cynicism – doing their rounds in the social media in their full glory – even after a month after it gathered steam (or should I say ‘ice’).
This is sure sign of a campaign turning into a phenomenon, a movement. This is surely made of stuffs the social marketers can only dream of.
Now that we have the advantage of hindsight, we can analyze on how this would have been possible.
First, look at the Viral Coefficient of the experiment. Viral Co-efficient, often referred to as K value is calculated as the average number of invitations sent by each existing user times the conversion rate of invitation to new user. E.g. if your initial set of users refer your message to 10 people and 40% of them actually receives and acts on the message, the Viral Co-efficient (K) will be 4. Any K value that is greater than 1 will fuel a viral growth.
The second important part is the Viral Cycle Time (CT)– that is, after receiving the challenge, how soon a user completes it and sends it forward to the next set of users. It makes a big difference if the referral happens within a few hours or a few days of the first experience of the user, rather than weeks or months. (See the well-known blog Lesson Learnt – Viral Marketing by David Skok)
Here are the 5 factors that helped Ice bucket challenge get a high viral co-efficient (K) value and low Cycle Time (CT):
1. Altruism, feel good with least cost and effort
A selfless act of kindness has a powerful impact on human mind – especially if it can be achieved in an easy and fun way and we have a chance to project it to our social circles. We all like to be in a group contributing towards a larger cause. We like it even better if we feel part of a group that has a number of celebrities, rich and famous.
2. Well articulated, easy and fun Challenge
The objective of the Ice Bucket Challenge is simple and clear: to spread awareness and raise funds for ALS research. It does not require much effort from the users other than emptying a bucket of ice water over the head or to donate via Internet, or both. No downloads, playing games, solving puzzles, feeling forms or any other complicated stuffs. It’s also a lot of fun. Seeing people have ice water poured over them to make them scream or cringe is also fun. Taking a video using your smartphone and sharing in a number of social networks, tagging friends who we want to challenge – all are easy and fun.
3. Clear and achievable target for number of referrals
The challenge asks us to challenge exactly 3 friends, not as many friends as we like, not to all friends in our social network or email address book. We have to publically name those three targeted referrals. It’s then naturally becomes difficult for the friend refusing an easy challenge for a good cause and to look boorish in the eyes of the world. This ensures a very healthy Viral co-efficient (K) of ~3 that guarantees good multiplier effect.
4. Clear and achievable target for a short cycle time of referral
Those asked to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge have only 24 hours to do so. By giving the users a short deadline, we keep the friends on their toes and not allow them to forget to act and refer further. The act of referral (naming 3 friends to take the challenge) is cleverly ingrained as the part the challenge itself. A cycle time of 24 hours with a viral co-efficient of 3 creates a very good distribution effect.
5. Easy access to Digital Social media and technology
With the ubiquitous availability of 3G bandwidth and smartphones with high quality camera, it’s easy to take videos and photos of our act. It’s easier to share them in multiple social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube with a few simple taps. Blog sites, digital media, TV and even newspapers are abuzz with hundreds and thousands of articles and videos of celebrity ice bucket events. With hundreds or likes, comments, shares, tags, favorites and retweets, it’s hard to miss this phenomenon. The short videos – taking somewhere between 30 to 50 sec and utilizing full power of video feed auto-play feature of Facebook, have created an almost mesmerizing effect on the user. You simply cannot miss to view it and then to imitate it.
Epilog:
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their death. The cause of fund-raising for ALS through Ice bucket challenge is a powerful and noble one and have successfully raised funds worth USD 93.4 M to date. It’s wonderful and fun to spread a message this way, but all of us should also be mindful of the cause that we are propagating.
For some reason, in B2B content marketing, we seem to forget about the “whole” buyer. More and more marketers are embracing buyer personas and the idea of becoming customer centric, but we often only focus on the business side of the buyer, as if they walk into the office and leave the rest of themselves outside.
In the personas I help my clients create, a lot of research goes into what I call “orientation.” Orientation is an attempt to identify commonalities across the personalities of people who tend to hold the roles that our marketing and sales programs pursue. These traits can tell us a lot about how to structure content to make it more appealing.
For example, an engineer who is detail oriented would likely prefer content that backs up a premise with research and fact, rather than relying on the company’s credibility for it to be believable.
But a report released by Fortune Knowledge Group, in collaboration with Gyro, makes it very clear that there’s much more to be taken into account. In Only Human: The Emotional Logic of Business Decisions, 720 business executives clearly reinforce the notion that “soft” factors, such as trust, relationships, and reputation still hold sway.
I have heard this first hand in customer interviews during persona projects where the response to why a vendor was selected was a version of “we just felt they ‘got’ us and what we’re trying to do more than the others.” Or “we felt more comfortable with them.” And “they made us feel like a big fish in a small pond.”
While it’s undeniable that insights from data are being used in decision making, the final factor that cements the deal or decision could be intuition or based on a gut feeling. And, marketers may be part of the problem.
You see, the business executives strongly agreed that as information grows and decisions become more complex, they are relying more on those “soft” factors to decide the way forward, including the vendor’s culture (53%) and reputation (70%).
Notable highlights from the study:
So how do we, as marketers, use these insights?
First - add a cultural assessment to your persona development. Review the cultures of your best customers and learn what they have in common. Then correlate those qualities to your company’s culture. How can some of them be woven into your content and messaging wtihout skewing the content back to a company focus? Think of this as a style factor for the way your content is written or created. What words emulate the values that your company shares with your best customers?
Second - use more carrot than stick. Take a positive path with your content, rather than the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) approach that content takes in an effort to build urgency to change. Help your prospective buyers see the success, rather than avoid the failure.
Third - become better storytellers. Stories engage intuition and help people think for themselves. A well done story invokes emotion in the reader/viewer and helps them to anticipate what their future will look like with the objective met or the problem solved. Stories are meant to engage humans – they’ve done so for thousands of years.
Finally - take a serious look at what it takes to build long-term relationships, not quick wins. The study finds that trust is a key soft factor for decision making. Earning and sustaining trust and credibility were proven to trump analytical intelligence. This means it’s even more important to create consistent experiences across the entirety of the relationship, not just during part of it. And this goes for everyone involved – marketing, sales, customer service…
How is emotion manifesting during the buying process at your company?
Your sales process calls for more steps than you might think. Australian media guru and entrepreneur extraordinaire, James Tuckerman, describes in one of his courses how most businesses are under the false impression that online selling is a two-step process: a product and a shopping cart. But the modern online sales loop is a whole lot more than just those two things.
James advocates a seven-step sales process that involves multiple pages to keep customers moving through your sales funnel – by extending it. Without giving away all of James’ secret recipe ingredients, we can tell you that you’re going to need some apps to fill-in your sales process – regardless of exactly how many steps you use.
You’ve seen working examples of the multi-step online sales process already. Anytime you’ve seen a success page, following behind an action taken on a landing page, you’ve been inside an automated sales process. The number of success pages you add to the process will depend on how many offers your poised to make, of course. But once you start getting creative with adding steps to your online selling routine, the possibilities become abundantly clear.
Here at GetApp, we specialize in connecting you with the apps that will get the job done, whatever the job may be.
If you’re interested in extending your sales process to rake in more conversions, you’ll need to get familiar with these tools for automating your sales funnel.
Oracle CPQ CloudFrom start to finish, there are various stages in the sales funnel, perhaps better called sales lifecyle if it keeps on going, as it should. Oracle CPQ Cloud as its name suggests takes care of configure, price and quoting. Producing sales quotes and business proposals are often the thing that has small businesses procrastinating the most.
Oracle works to improve the customer experience and sales process, all by full automating your sales order process from anywhere in the world and on your desk, your iPad, Android or iPhone.
Features of Oracle CPQ Cloud:
Oracle CPQ Cloud is idiot-proof making sure both you and your customers can find the right products, services and prices to include in proposals, contracts and purchase orders, cutting down on that back and forth. We love that not only does Oracle make your sales processes more effective, but that they then give you the analytics to measure the success.
MemberMouseAt some point, you’re going to want more than simply “subscribers.” Sooner or later, you’re going to want “members” – semi-autonomous ambassadors who, as a “collective,” bring your business to life.
MemberMouse works inside WordPress (if that’s a problem, see the next entrant on this list). MemberMouse is capable of fielding memberships from any size audience. It lets you accept payments, manage customers, and deploy premium content with ease.
Features of MemberMouse:
What’s most compelling (to us) about MemberMouse is its scalability. MemberMouse is a value part of your sales process, and it’s been designed from-the-ground-up to grow along with your subscribers. That makes MemberMouse particularly interesting for upstart content creators.
aMember ProaMember Pro is a professional alternative to MemberMouse (or perhaps, MemberMouse is the “alternative” to aMember Pro). At any rate, aMember Pro is a membership and subscription management app that integrates with your existing website.
In your sales automation loop, aMember serves the same purpose as MemberMouse, though in addition to having WordPress integration, you can use aMember with other platforms, like XenForo, vBulletin, and plain old HTML, among others.
aMember offers full Web-based administration, payment systems via PayPal, ClickBank and others, and a smattering of creative protection schemes for files, folders and blog posts.
Features of aMember Pro:
One of the coolest features of aMember, though, is the fully-automated affiliate program built right into it, which makes it easy to incentivize your customers to become your sales force!
SalesformicsWith a slogan like “as easy as a search engine,” you can’t go wrong with Salesformics CRM. It’s simple and very data focused.
Salesformics prides itself on setting the standard of security that should provide comfort for both your and your clients that their information is secure.
SimplyCastSimplyCast consolidates some of the most advanced marketing elements you can add to your sales process, all under one roof (so to speak!).
SimplyCast’s robust toolset includes everything you need to get started extending your sales process, including landing page creation, email marketing, and social media marketing .To that, the app adds novel selling tools like surveys and A/B split testing.
Features of Simply Cast:
SimplyCast is something of a marketing Swiss Army knife. You really can’t go wrong adding it to your arsenal. In fact, you could very well get started with sales automation with just SimplyCast, a membership management app like aMember Pro, and a good customer relationship management (CRM) app.
InsightlySpeaking of CRM, let’s talk about Insightly.
Insightly is a CRM app that helps bridge the automated world of your sales process with you (and your team). No matter how much you put your sales processes on autopilot, you can’t negate the need for human interaction in sales.
Insightly keeps track of your customers and your interactions with them. With tight email integration, you can instantly respond to specific inquiries from customers in situations where automated replies just won’t do.
Features of Insightly:
As leads funnel through your sales process, you generate a great deal of customer data. Insightly helps you make the most of that data, and it helps you keeps the sales process going.
AWeberAn important part of any automated sales loop is an email marketing tool. AWeber focuses on helping businesses of all sizes, from freelancers to large enterprises and all thing in between, stay in contact with their audiences.
Aweber is also the top email marketing app of choice for SmartPassiveIncome.com’s Pat Flynn, who calls it “The Internet’s most powerful email opt-in service and email marketing/broadcasting tool.”
AWeber fits into your sales process because it helps you stage automated responses to incoming subscribers. AWeber has all the tools you need to make your email messages more personal for your audience, which is the key to keeping your automated responses from readily becoming “spam.”
Features of AWeber:
AWeber is the most popular alternative to Mailchimp, of course. Both are great tools, and worth comparing side-by-side, along with ExactTarget.
An automated sales process is one of those perpetual work-in-progress aspects of doing business online. There’s always a new tool out there, always some new step to add to the sales process. When you get one step making money for you, you inevitability find some reason to tack on one more.
While it can be daunting keeping up with the apps you need to run your sales process on the Web, GetApp helps you stay on top of the matter, with its running list of all the best apps for the task.
