Rnordman

In recent months there has been a lot of debate stimulated by Bryan Kramer’s article entitled “There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human.” The article makes the point that the way in which businesses communicate their product or service has moved on and argues that “the lines are so far blurred now between the two marketing segments that it’s hard to differentiate between the two anymore. We all need to think like the consumers we are, putting ourselves in the mindset of the buyer instead of trying to speak such an intensely sophisticated language full of acronyms and big words, in order to sound smarter.”

Furthermore Kramer concluded that

“Businesses do not have emotion. People do. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. 
People want to feel something.  People want to be included.  People want to understand.”

It was these last points that got me thinking about how we perceive today’s explosion of content marketing, and how this message is perhaps the most misunderstood concept in all of digital marketing today, and that in fact we might be turning a full circle on the concept of trade and returning to core human instincts.

Digital content marketing of today is littered with a lot of white noise and false promises.  Many organisations and marketers have acknowledged the importance of content marketing in their digital mix but have only applied a superficial understanding to this and have completely missed what Kramer refers to in the H2H concept that “people want to feel something, they want to understand.”

In the context of content marketing, the point of trade is the author passing on knowledge or information to help the consumer to understand, where as the consumer is trading their time and power to share the content and spread the brands message.  However, like any transaction you have to have something people want, and I feel as we progress to an era of H2H many organisations create content that is not up to the standard expected.

At the time of writing this, I’ve managed to take one of my first holidays away from work in a long while and found myself sitting on a harbor waiting for some family members to join me, when I saw numerous fishermen heading out to sea for their daily quest to conduct what must be one of the human races oldest forms of trade.  This trade has stood the test of time as the fishermen constantly return to shore with something that people want to consume.  If they do not then they do not get paid! Metaphorically speaking a lot of todays marketers are coming back from a day at sea only to try and trade the bits of rubble and dregs caught up in the nets, rather than the good stuff.  If content marketers want to stand the test of time they need to be delivering sea bass on a regular basis!

So is it really that we have a world full of bad content creators or is there a deeper underlying reason for people forgetting the H2H aspect here?

Our belief at Klood is that it is one of two reasons:

Firstly, there are a lot of organisations that have decided to blog or create social content just because they feel they have to, much like when they built a web site 10 years ago because, it seemed like the right thing to do and they did not want to get left behind. On the whole these organisations are not really committing to the process. As a digital marketing agency, we offer blogging as a service because we understand how important it can be and that some companies simply don’t have the resources. However, it is without question that there is no substitute for content based on the wealth of knowledge and expertise the vast majority of businesses house within their office walls. In fact, it took nearly 12 months for us at Klood to get into our groove of effective content marketing and truly commit to the process, and we are an organisation that is built on the concept of content marketing!

As humans we are bombarded by pages and pages of content on a daily basis, as such we tend to bypass most of it.  Only great content consistently gets our attention, and increasingly content is finding us via our peers, much like that TV show your friends saw and kept telling you to try.  Great content will find a natural home, which is why organisations need to commit to the process with the same rigour they commit to designing their product or service.

The second reason is that organisations fail to hit the H2H spot through fear of ‘letting the cat out of the bag.’  We have worked with numerous B2B and B2C companies since our inception in 2011 and we have spent many hours trying to convince organisations (particularly B2B) that they should share their deepest most insightful thinking to stand out online.  Many simply stare back at us like we are crazy, pause for a few moments, before pushing back strongly as they worry about sharing their USP or IP and making themselves vulnerable.  Here is where we often cite the book, which helped me build our first tech consultancy company, “Love is the Killer App” by former Yahoo COO,Tim Sanders.  The big takeaway from the book is that we should continually let the cat the out of the bag! By acting like “love cats” (cats that indiscriminately share the love) by indiscriminately sharing our organisations knowledge (and not just at the superficial level).  The end result is that your organisation will forever be associated with insight and in many instances people will come back to buy from you when the time is right. No hard push!  No sell!  But appealing to the basic human instinct of helping people to understand, letting them be part of something wider, pushing you to the front of their consciousness for when the time to transact comes along.

Two companies which I greatly admire in the digital marketing space today are Hubspotand Moz, their respective founders Dharmesh Shah and Rand Fishkin both display the “love cat” approach to sharing knowledge and killer content forms the bedrock of their marketing strategy and they provide some of the most insightful content to ‘humans’ online today and the success has followed.

Human beings are innately complex yet strive for simplicity. Our challenge as content marketers is to find, understand and explain the complex in its most simplistic form. We need to act like fishermen and stand the test of time by regularly delivering a good catch of content people want to consume, as poor content will simply sink to the bottom of the ocean without a trace.  Organisations need to commit to the process of content marketing and appeal to the human instinct of wanting to understand, and in doing so this may mean opening up deep thinking within the organisation and living like a love cat!

Before deciding what digital or social media channels your organisation should use in its marketing mix, you should first determine what your organisation is going to say; does it make people feel something?  Will they feel they want to be included? And most importantly will it enable people to understand?  If the answer is yes to all three questions, then your digital content strategy will be most likely be ready to succeed in the era of H2H!

The state of the sales pipeline reflects the health of any sales process - and in anything other than the simplest of sales transactions, that process goes through multiple stages.

Those stages have names. Sometimes they simply reflect phases in the sales process - qualified, proposed, selected, etc. There’s been a recent trend towards naming the stages after key steps in the buying decision process.

If you’re seeking to co-ordinate the efforts of multiple sales people, it's obvious that those pipeline stages not only need to be named, they need to be defined in a clear and unambiguous way. But that's not enough...

If you’re responsible for managing a sales pipeline, you’ve probably both named and defined the key stages. But are you absolutely sure that every sales person is interpreting your definition in exactly the same consistent fashion?

Investing time in clear, detailed pipeline stage definitions pays dividends. Even better if those definitions clearly explain both what you what you expect the sales person to do - and what you anticipate the buyer will do - at each stage.

Reflecting the buyer's journey

This is where I often come across issues. It’s unfortunately often far more common for the stages to be solely or largely defined in terms of sales activities than it is to also define the parallel journey that the prospect can be expected to follow.

Expectations of the sales person are frequently poorly defined or incomplete. There's tremendous benefit to making clear what information you expect the sales person to be conveying at each stage, what questions they should be asking, and what tools are available to support them in the process.

Anticipating the issues, motivations and concerns of the key stakeholders at each stage of the process is equally invaluable, as is preparing sales people for the questions they are most likely to be asked by the prospect, and highlighting the materials that can be used to facilitate the prospect’s buying journey.

The missing link

But even then, there’s often still a missing link - and it’s one of the most important foundations of effective pipeline management. Even when stages are well defined, it’s rare for the milestones that establish the boundaries between one stage and the next to be given equivalent attention.

Without clearly defined, unambiguous milestones, it’s hard to clearly establish exactly where the prospect is in their buying decision process. And if you misinterpret that, all manner of bad things follow.

Many of today’s most common pipeline management problems and revenue forecasting misses can be attributed to the failure to insist on clear, verifiable evidence of genuine progress on the prospect’s part before the opportunity is moved to the next stage.

Never confuse sales activity with progress

Let’s be clear: “completed demo”, “submitted proposal” or any similar sales-related activities serve no useful purpose as milestones. The only milestones that matter are those associated with something the prospect can be proved to have done or said.

Without verifiable evidence that the prospect has completed the necessary action or provided the necessary information, the opportunity should stay where it is (or be moved backwards). It’s a simple as that. No milestone, no forward motion, no matter what the sales person says.

If you allow anything else, if you allow opportunities to be promoted simply because of something a sales person has done - or claims to have done - you substitute informed judgement for wishful thinking. And that way madness (and missed revenue targets) lies.

Managing by the milestones

That’s what I mean when I say that you need to do more than name and define your sales pipeline stages. You need to manage by the milestones, and insist that everyone else does the same.

Will the results be worth it? All the research suggests that organisations that master this discipline out-perform their peers by a factor of at least 20-30%, and have far fewer deals that end in an unexpected decision to “do nothing”.

Clearly defined stages and milestones are just two of the many practical recommendations we make in our recently-published Revenue Accelerator’s Guide to Proactive Pipeline Management. If you haven’t already done so, you can download your copy here.

By Kate Prince, {grow} Community Member

A hacker starts an online rumor about a place crash. The “news” goes viral and the airline’s stock plummets. The hacker makes a fortune on stock short sales that day and slinks back to his anonymous world undetected.

A company legally makes a material announcement on Facebook about an acquistion but the “reach” of the news on Facebook is so low only a few company insiders see it. They pounce on the news and buy low-priced shares before the market can respond and make millions in a day. Investors are furious and sue the company.

A large, national retailer uses Big Data to identify emotionally-troubled teens and targets them as a leading demographic for alcohol and cigarette sales. A disgruntled employee blogs about this and the company loses $500 million in market value overnight.

Think these stories are far-fetched? Read on.

Every day, some company’s hard-fought reputation unravels after a damaging revelation on Facebook, an ill-conceived tweet is seen by millions, or a shocking video goes viral. The power of the gatekeepers has shifted, the public’s attention span is shorter, and a company’s reputation could be at the mercy of every person with a smart phone.

Yet shockingly, the corporate and financial worlds have not yet grasped this aspect of social media.

It’s not through lack of trying, but rather due to the fact that social media is a rapidly evolving digital construct and companies are floundering in their ability to change due to slow-moving financial regulators, organizational lethargy, and out-dated legal guidelines.

What happens when a company’s social reputation is left in the hands of a social media platform that can actually influence the emotional state of over a billion people? What if those people were investors?

The Experiment

By now, most of are familiar with Facebook’s infamous experiment on nearly 700,000 of its users to ascertain whether there was a correlation between the positive or negative content in our News Feed and our emotional state.

Enough has been written about that. We now need to take this ethical question beyond the 700,000 Facebook user-guinea pigs and ask: How is Facebook consciously influencing their 1.38 billion users every day? How is Big Data being used to manipulate events and sentiments that can make or break a company?

The answer to this question has vast implications for public companies and their stockholders.

Social Media & the Stock Market

Social media poses an entirely new challenge for reputation management because the positive or negative sentiments previously shared by consumers, clients or investors with their personal networks is now amplified— beyond their control, beyond traditional media and beyond normal PR techniques. And as the public’s collective trust in the media fades, trust in information shared socially is on the rise.

A recent study by Nielsen found that 84% of consumers trust recommendations from family and friends more than any other forms of advertising. So we know that social media has a huge influence on buyer behavior in the consumer world, but how does that influence translate into the financial world?

In 2010, Australian airliner QANTAS first felt the brunt of social media’s inclination to trust “straight from the horse’s mouth” sources when a misinformed tweet about a plane crashing in Indonesia lead to false media reports and a huge drop in the company’s share price.

QANTAS Chief Executive Officer Alan Joyce told The World Today, “we first noticed a problem when our share price started to collapse, and that’s because of these reports coming out of Twitter.”

As the stock fell, the plane in question was still in the air.

Last year we witnessed one very extreme example of the impact social media can have on the entire financial market, when the Associated Press’ Twitter account was hacked, and a fake tweet was published that announced President Obama had been injured in an explosion at the White House.

Although the account was suspended and the information was corrected as quickly as possible, the immediate effect this misinformation had on the stock market was astounding. Over $130 billion in stock value was wiped off the market in a matter of seconds, the S&P500 declined 0.9%, and high frequency trading algorithms wreaked havoc.

Financial Platforms Wake Up

Regulatory investigators began looking into how financial markets and the companies listed on them can manage the proliferation of price sensitive information shared on social media and the impact this has on company value.

In Australia, the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) declared that companies were now “legally obliged to monitor social media and disclose anything relevant to the market.” This was the first step for the financial platform in its attempt to tame the social media beast.

The United States took the next step. The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) changed the rules that determine what platforms companies can use to communicate with investors — widening the regulations to include Facebook and Twitter — so long as the companies made their investors aware of the outlets they intended to use.

If companies happen to use language in their communications that is deemed positive or negative during such an occasion, does that impact how widespread their message is disseminated?

This is compounded by the fact that due to the already restrictive algorithms and the plethora of content in the News Feed daily, many Facebook pages’ organic reach is down to only 6.15% in February 2014 (If you have 1000 ‘Likes’, your posts will only make it into the News Feeds of 61 users).

Is that fair to everyone? Couldn’t a company actually make an announcement on Facebook (complying with the SEC) but in reality “hide” the information because the organic reach is so low?

Markets Impacted by Emotion

Legal scholar Ryan Carlo warned that we are vulnerable to “digital market manipulation” — when companies use Big Data about a consumer’s background and emotional state to coerce them into purchasing goods they don’t need, or paying more than they should. But the issue at hand is that companies are now just as vulnerable to being cut off from consumers, or becoming the victim of negative market sentiment artificially driven by the platform they’re operating on.

A recent survey in the United Kingdom by Finextra Research has shown that 62% of brokers and heads of trading desks believe social media sentiment influences share prices.

This was investigated more thoroughly in 2010 by Cornell, who published their findings in the Journal of Computational Science—”Twitter mood predicts the stock market.” The research looked at whether societies at large can experience mood states that affect their collective decision-making. The study notes that:

“We know from psychological research that emotions, in addition to information, play an significant role in human decision-making. Behavioral finance has provided further proof that financial decisions are significantly driven by emotion and mood… It is therefore reasonable to assume that the public mood and sentiment can drive stock market values as much as the news.”

They weren’t wrong in that assumption—their results showed that certain public mood aspects could predict the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average with an accuracy of 87.6%.

A data team from the University of California took it one step further and created a computer model that “predicts the future of the stock market” by scanning public sentiment indicators on Twitter. The software was up to 11% more accurate than other models at predicting both the volume of trading and the value of stock the next day.

Though financial regulators are finally recognizing social media as a true player, the revelations coming out of Facebook’s emotional manipulations have changed the conversation. The financial regulators — the SEC in particular — need to decide whether they are comfortable blindly allowing Facebook to be so influential on the market while  keeping their algorithms private.

Taking that question to Twitter is of secondary concern, as the platform is fundamentally different; on Twitter, what you sign up for is what you get, their stream is unfiltered. Not only is Facebook designing the algorithms that decide what users see or don’t see, they’re also manipulating the News Feed for supplementary purposes, and have the potential to influence markets in this way, including the one that they are listed on.

The Ethical Concern

The critical issue for companies whose value is intrinsically linked to their public reputation is not knowing how Facebook plans to use this proven capability of emotional influence in the future. A Facebook researcher, Dr J Fowler, told CNN “If we want to make the world a better place on a massive scale, we should focus not just on changing a person’s behavior, but also utilizing the network to influence that person’s friends.”

It should be a serious concern to all Facebook users that we are so easily manipulated; as Jacob Silverman, author of Terms of Service: Social Media, Surveillance, and the Price of Constant Connection, told Wire Magazine, “as long as the platform remains such an important gatekeeper—and their algorithms utterly opaque—we should be wary about the amount of power and trust we delegate to it.”

Companies that are financially vulnerable to the whims of the public’s perception should be even more so.

I would welcome your observations and ideas about this topic in the comment section.

Kate Prince is a financial communications consultant from Sydney, Australia. Kate specializes in assisting listed and unlisted companies develop strategies and manage issues across social media. Follow @kate_prince on Twitter.

The post Social Media and the Stock Market: A Lesson in Global Manipulation appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

Comments

• Hi Kate, this is a fantastic article. I don't think anyone ... by Kostas Chiotis
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• Great thinking Kate. It's nice to see real life examples that ... by Steve_Dodd
• Great, relevant post Kate. Focusing on a top-down approach to ... by Jeff Reed
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The recent headlines about retailing are nothing if not provocative. “Shoppers Are Fleeing Physical Stores.” “The Great Mall Exodus.” “Macy’s Confronts the Crisis of the American Mall.” They seem to bolster Marc Andreessen’s prediction that by the end of this decade “retail guys are going to go out of business and e-commerce will become the place everyone buys.”

Regrettably, the scary articles completely miss the real story. And panicked retailers who get confused about what’s really happening will head off in dangerous directions.

There’s no doubt that digital technology is transforming the retail industry. Digital devices are changing how customers discover, evaluate, purchase, receive, use, and return products. And, yes, more and more customer interactions take place entirely online. Over the past 20 years, e-commerce sales have grown to about 6% of total retail sales (excluding gasoline and food services) and about 11% of Forrester’s top 30 product categories.

But though the e-commerce growth rate is attractive, it has slowed from about 30% per year in the early 2000s to less than half that rate today. If the trend continues, e-commerce sales will increase from 11% of Forrester’s top 30 categories to about 18% by 2030—higher in some (such as music) and lower in others (such as food). While 18% is a significant number, it does not exactly spell the end of physical stores.

The current hyperbole also misses the mark in other important ways:

• About half of those e-commerce sales are actually going to retailers with physical stores. Brick and mortar retailers still control between 94% and 97% of total retail sales. Several large store-based retailers (including Apple and Macy’s are growing their e-commerce sales even faster than Amazon.

• It’s more and more difficult to distinguish e-commerce sales from others. Imagine that a customer goes to a Macy’s store, learns that the product is out of stock, and uses her smartphone to order the product from another Macy’s outlet, which ships it to her home the same day. Is that an e-commerce sale or a physical one?

• Pure-play online retailers don’t have the economic advantages that many observers ascribe to them. Analyzing the profitability of public e-commerce retailers, including the mighty Amazon, Bain finds that e-commerce’s pricing advantages mostly stem from unsustainably lower profit margins rather than from lower costs. The information technology, distribution centers, shipping, and returns processing required by e-commerce companies can actually cost as much as running physical stores.

All of these issues point to one conclusion: Omnichannel retailers—those that seamlessly integrate the best of both digital and physical worlds at each step of the customer experience—are likely to enjoy significant advantages over retailers that try to pursue either one alone or both independently. For omnichannel retailers, websites and mobile apps are not just e-commerce ordering vehicles, they are front doors to the stores. Stores are not just showrooms, they are digitally-enabled inspiration sites, testing labs, purchase points, instantaneous pickup places, help desks, shipping centers, and return locations.

Stores don’t necessarily need as much foot traffic as they have had in the past to succeed. If 20% of their sales are shipments from online orders to nearby customers, they are still valuable. That’s why so many companies that began as pure e-commerce plays have added physical stores, including Warby Parker, Athleta, BaubleBar, and Bonobos.

As Bain’s research has found, these principles apply far beyond retailing. In most industries, digital technologies are transforming physical businesses rather than annihilating them. Indeed, the fusion of digital and physical innovations—we call them “digical”—creates opportunities that most businesses have barely begun to tap. A digical experience is what consumers want and have come to expect. A digical strategy, when well executed, almost always outperforms competitors and turbocharges profitable growth. Retailers may be on the front line of these changes, but no company can afford to ignore them.

(Shutterstock)

The Great Statistics Canada 200-Jobs Mystery is generating loads of headlines, as it should. The botched labour report for July, which, initially, and erroneously, claimed Canada produced just 200 jobs that month, has once again sparked questions about the quality of Canada’s statistical data. (Revised figures are due Friday).

But this is far from the only thing troubling regular StatsCan users. I made the following chart to illustrate one of the great frustrations that journalists, economists and academics have with StatsCan. One minute, the agency, tasked with measuring the tick tock of the economy and society, tracks seemingly vital data (such as detailed breakdowns of public sector employment and wages by all levels of government, or the total value of government transfer payments to persons by province and type of transfer), the next, *poof*, they’re terminated.

Good thing StatsCan still tracks the square footage of fungi production.

Perhaps, buried somewhere deep in CANSIM—the agency’s socioeconomic database—there exist new data series that pick up where the above leave off, but I can’t find them.

Last year, Stephen Gordon railed against StatsCan’s attention deficit disorder, and its habit of arbitrarily terminating long-standing series and replacing them with new data that are not easily comparable.

For what appears to be no reason whatsover, StatsCan has taken a data table that went back to 1991 and split it up into two tables that span 1991-2001 and 2001-present. Even worse, the older data have been tossed into the vast and rapidly expanding swamp of terminated data tables that threatens to swallow the entire CANSIM site. A few months ago, someone looking for SEPH wage data would get the whole series. Now, you’ll get data going back to 2001 and have to already know (StatsCan won’t tell you) that there are older data hidden behind the “Beware of the Leopard” sign.

…

Statistics Canada must be the only statistical agency in the world where the average length of a data series gets shorter with the passage of time. Its habit of killing off time series, replacing them with new, “improved” definitions and not revising the old numbers is a continual source of frustration to Canadian macroeconomists.

Others are keeping tabs on the vanishing data. The Canadian Social Research Newsletter for March 2 referred to the cuts as the CANSIM Crash Diet and tallied some of the terminations:

For the category “Aboriginal peoples” : 4 tables terminated out of a total of 7
For the category “Children and youth” : 89 tables terminated out of a total of 130
For the category “Families, households and housing” : 67 tables terminated out of a total of 112
For the category “Government” : 62 tables terminated out of a total of 141
For the category “Income, pensions, spending and wealth” : 41 tables terminated out of a total of 167
For the category “Seniors” : 13 tables terminated out of a total of 30

As far as Statistics Canada’s troubles go, this will never get the same level of attention as the mystery of the 200 jobs. But, as it relates to the long-term reliability of Canadian data, it’s just as serious.

The post The case of the disappearing Statistics Canada data appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It's always hard to tell someone no, but it's often a necessary evil.

And the most successful people know that how you say no can be the difference between maintaining someone's respect and ruining a relationship.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Brian de Haaff, cofounder and CEO of Aha! Labs Inc., argues that "telling people 'no' does not need to be an act of rejection." He says learning to say no the right way can prove you're an attentive teammate. 

Here are four things successful people do when saying no, according to de Haaff.

1. Understand the request.

Hardly anyone will ask you to do something without a solid reason, so it's safe to assume that when someone requests a favor, it's meaningful to them, de Haaff says. Successful people take the time to understand why each request is important to the person asking, as it shows they care even if they don't have time to help. "Total immersion in the request for even a very short period of time tells the other person that you value them and what they are trying to achieve," de Haaff explains.

2. Define your vision.

It's crucial to fully understand your own objectives before you can decide which requests you're able to dedicate attention to. Successful people take a "goal first" approach, in which they define their major goals and only agree to help with projects that work toward these goals, de Haaff says. Adopting this practice will help you focus on what's most critical at the time, so you can easily say "no" right away to other requests, instead of stalling and wasting time.

3. Respond quickly.

Successful people don't wait to answer requests; they promptly give the other person a yes or no answer. "The key is to digest the information and its importance as quickly as possible so you can get on to the next one," de Haaff says. Marinating on requests you know you don't have time for simply because you don't want to say no wastes everyone's time. You'll be more respected for making decisions in a timely manner, even if not everyone likes your choice.

4. Explain why. 

Saying no without an explanation makes your answer come off harsh because it doesn't allow the other person to understand where you're coming from, de Haaff warns. "Explaining the 'why' makes the 'what' simple to digest," he says. "You need to be more than just nice." Successful people aim to be as transparent as possible because they understand that showing the other person their perspective helps them understand both why they have to say no and that it's not personal. 

Click here to read the full LinkedIn post.

Want your business advice featured in Instant MBA? Submit your tips to tipoftheday@businessinsider.com. Be sure to include your name, your job title, and a photo of yourself in your email. 

SEE ALSO: How To Say No To Your Boss

Join the conversation about this story »

Former Imasco CEO Purdy Crawford in 2003. (Chris Reardon)

From the Archives: Prominent Canadian lawyer and businessman Purdy Crawford died on Tuesday August 12. The former CEO of Montreal-based Imasco Ltd. was a long-time advocate of better corporate governance. In 2003 he gave this interview to Canadian Business on what he’d learned in the course of his career.

When people used to go fishing, they would put the fish in water in the hold of the boat. One of the difficulties was that the water would get warm and the fish would die before they got back into port. They discovered that catfish created electrical impulses that kept the other fish alive, so they put catfish in the holds. The moral of the story is, we need more catfish directors.

Directors should be quite active. I’m on the phone a lot with companies I’m on the board of. I’m not being difficult, but sometimes you go to a meeting and something dawns on you a day or two later, so I call up to chat about it. I don’t always wait for the next meeting if I think it’s important. Early on, the boards I was on were public boards of companies I was the lawyer for. That’s a no-no today, and properly so. Boards then, depending on the circumstances, were quite the creation of the CEO. You still get quite a bit of that in the US, but here that shouldn’t happen very much anymore. At least it doesn’t happen where I’m involved.

Over the last eight or nine years, boards have taken much more control of companies, and CEOs are much more beholden to boards. You need a director who is compatible with the CEO, but the selection should be through the nominating and governance committee. You wouldn’t want to select a director without the CEO meeting him or her.

Directors need an inquiring mind. They must be able to work hard and be prepared to put their cards on the table. It’s amazing: you can sit around a meeting and nobody speaks up, but if somebody does–boy, you find others waiting to speak as well. I’m a great believer in diversity of backgrounds. You need people who understand human resources, incentive and compensation systems, finance. Fundamentally every director should, over time, get a grip on financial matters. Everything ultimately comes down to what the results are, and it’s very helpful to have the big picture on that.

Experience is a wonderful thing. I’m all in favor of introducing new directors and director education, but it takes a long time to develop the experience. You might have thick books, but it’s not as daunting as it may seem if you have experience. I chair the five year review committee. We recommended that the Ontario Securities Commission be given the power to make governance rules, but we didn’t necessarily mean they should always exercise that power. It would be a question of pushing and pulling with the TSX. You have to recognize that there’s a conflict with the TSX, which is trying to make money and get listings.

When I joined Imasco, I thought I’d been around so I didn’t have a lot to learn. That was true of a lot of areas, but it wasn’t true of operations. It was an exciting learning curve to understand how Shoppers Drug Mart operates and start adding value. The same was true with Imperial Tobacco. I became a great believer in great operators. Business schools pay a lot of attention to strategy, but they don’t pay enough attention to execution.

I really admire the companies that can go from generation to generation and rejuvenate themselves. That was part of our mission at Imasco, but we didn’t always succeed.

I went in at Imasco to become the CEO. I wouldn’t have gone to become a lawyer. I might have done that today, by the way–the legal general counsel office reporting to the CEO has become much more significant. The remuneration is comparable to a fairly outstanding lawyer in a law firm. There are no pension plans with a law firm.

MORE: 10 Trends in Corporate Governance »

There were no lawyers in my family, and we didn’t see much television to see Perry Mason. I just decided early on I wanted to be a lawyer.

Hal Mockridge, who was head of Oslers when I joined and a great lawyer, took an interest in me. He helped straighten out some of my use of English, which I got from growing up in rural Nova Scotia. For 10 years of my career, he was sort of a mentor.

I’m a cynic about business golf. I used to be involved with a company and the CEO would tell me, ‘Oh, I golfed twice with the head of Simpsons-Sears or whatever.’ And I would say ‘Look, do you think that’s a good thing? You’re so goddamn competitive you couldn’t play without him getting mad at you. I see so many people going to play golf and coming home frustrated, so I think the boom is starting to wear off. I can golf and enjoy it. There’s a little nine-hole course in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. I like it because it’s easy. It makes me feel good.

I like to do my own investing, with what little money I have. As Warren Buffett says, an investor makes a better businessman.”

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Syracuse University professor Sam Van Aken spent nine years growing a single tree.

"The idea is that I could collapse a whole orchard and put it into one tree," he told Business Insider.

Each of the colors in the photo above represents a variety of flowering tree. Collectively, as one plant, they produce 40 different edible stone fruits (ones with pits, like peaches and plums). The tree above is just an artist's rendering, but the trees do exist.

To create his unique tree, Van Aken, a sculptor at SU's College of Visual and Performing Arts, uses a process called "grafting," which is used frequently by orchards and gardeners.

When two plants are grafted together they are cut so their "veins" flow into each other, letting them share a vascular system. These veins, known as the phloem and zylem, transport water, sugar, and minerals between the plant's roots and leaves.

Grafing a plant with a weak root system onto a plant with a strong one can enable the weak plant to grow better. Grafting has been around for centuries. It's actually the reason we still have wine — a disease threatened to kill all the French wines, until a resistant plant was found to serve as a host for grapes of all different varietals.

Though it's used frequently, 40 is an extreme number of plants to graft together. To do so takes years and years.

He'll let a tree grow for about three years, until it shows four or five branches. Then, he'll slice each branch and attach buds from four or five other types of tree on each one, grafting their vascular systems together. At that point, the count stands at about 20 or 25 plants attached to one very strong trunk.

"What you're essentially doing is injuring the tree and then attempting to trick it into believing that the part you placed in it is actually itself," Van Aken explained.

After that, those 20-to-25 varieties grow together for about two years and start to show new branches, to which Van Aken will attach more buds. Any that don't graft properly, he prunes away until about 40 varieties remain within a single tree.

"They all maintain their own genetic variety," Van Aken said. "You can see all the different types of flowers and fruit."

"But the science is almost like a byproduct," he also noted. "It's really, for me, a metaphor."

The amount of labor involved makes the tree fairly impractical for the world of agriculture. But as a work of art, Van Aken sees considerable value. "It definitely won't cure world hunger. But I hope that it could inspire that type of thinking," he said.

Van Aken also created a timeline of sorts to keep track of when the various types of tree will flower. Thus, he can control the color by timing the grafting appropriately.

Syracuse University actually picked the tree as a commemoration of September 11. As such, the institution plans to plant one on the quad.

The number 40 represents "somewhere between finite and infinite," according to Van Aken. Western religion, especially The Bible, popularized 40 as an uncountable number. Think 40 days and 40 nights of rain circa Noah's Ark. Thus, the tree's combined variety represent growth, hope, and renewal, as Van Aken explained — important topics to keep in mind in a post-9/11 era.

While the project seems abstract to some, Van Aken hopes people will see the value. "That day [9/11] was so vivid and tragic for me. I don't think you can make a piece that can adequately represent that tragedy," Van Aken noted. "It's too horrific."

Right now, 14 of Van Aken's stunning trees (not counting the two in his backyard) exist around the country. But come fall, he starts plans for an entire grove in Portland, Maine.

Below, an architect created a rendering of how that might look. In a word — gorgeous.

SEE ALSO: Tiny Flying Robots Are Being Built To Pollinate Crops Instead of Real Bees

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I recently had the opportunity to present to a few hundred sales leaders and other executives at Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference. During my session, I discussed key skills that can help them achieve win-win outcomes on future opportunities—skills that are mastered by the top 5 percent of sales performers.  The material has been so well received that I wanted to share this content with other sales leaders whose teams may be struggling with similar issues.

We all recall a time when we lost a deal that we were sure we won.  It’s a painful memory we’d love to forget. The problem is that many sales leaders think of “closing” as an event—a key presentation or a point in time where we either win or we lose. But closing is much more than just a single event. Rather, it’s a process of successful decision-making that happens long before the contract is ever signed, and winning or losing the sale depends on whether your salespeople have—or have not—added value to that decision-making process.

Your salespeople may think that their primary job is to close deals, but top-performing salespeople see this differently. They understand that their primary role is to influence good decisions in order to achieve win-win outcomes. When your sales teams engage clients with the intent to do what’s best for the client, the client is far more likely to open up and share their beliefs about what success really is. This enables them to become more of a trusted advisor rather than merely a solution provider. And the more the salesperson understands the client’s needs, the better and more mutually beneficial the decisions become.

Once your sales teams begin to view closing differently, they are ready to learn and practice five key skills 

Skill 1: Identify the “End-in-Mind Decision”

Salespeople often focus too much of their time on trying to “sell” clients on their deal, which can overwhelm clients with too much information (much of it not relevant to the client). They also often rarely clarify the one decision to be made with their clients before a meeting. These tendencies can create confusion—and worse—resistance.

At the end of every sales interaction, a client should confidently and comfortably be able to make a single decision that moves the business forward. While this decision will be unique to each meeting and circumstance, it should always serve both the buyer—and the seller’s interests.

Skill 2: Address “Client Key Beliefs”

Clients’ beliefs significantly influence the decisions they make to move forward, or not.  To confidently make an End-in-Mind Decision and move toward a final business decision, clients must believe that: 1) the salesperson understands their business situation, and 2) that the solution being offered will meet their unique needs. To address these client key beliefs, your sales teams must provide proof points for each of their Client’s Key Beliefs. These proof points allow the client to see, know or feel that the salesperson really understands them. Whether it’s a piece of research, a report or a third-party testimonial, every proof point must satisfy the Client’s Key Beliefs to effectively enable good decision-making.

Skill 3: Resolve objections

Anticipating questions and objections is an important skill for any sales professional; viewing objections as an opportunity rather than a threat is essential to success. An objection can open the doors to explore other options that truly meet a client’s needs. In fact, we’ve found that your sales teams can effectively resolve client concerns by following a simple three-part process to 1) acknowledge, 2) understand and 3) resolve the objections. When handled correctly, clients help to resolve their own concerns and the result is most often a mutually beneficial “win” for both sides.

Skill 4: Prepare the conditions for good decision-making

Far too often, salespeople cave into a client’s request to simply send a proposal rather than meet in person, or they attend client meetings that don’t include the right decision-makers. Other times they may present when the allotted time isn’t enough to adequately reach a decision. To prepare the conditions for good decision-making, your sales professionals must gain the client’s agreement on the meeting agenda, its duration and attendees well in advance of the meeting. This allows for good decisions to be made more quickly and efficiently.

Skill 5: Open purposefully, close powerfully

Top performers close powerfully by getting a decision. It’s that straightforward.

A powerful close begins with a purposeful opening that is clear, client-centric and proposes the End-in-Mind Decision.  When clarity, language and flexibility are skillfully combined in an opening statement, people will often willingly collaborate with you. In addition, if you’ve preconditioned the meeting by gaining agreement on the End-in-Mind Decision and ensuring the right decision-makers are present, you’re more likely to get their buy-in.

We have seen that as salespeople adopt these mindsets and skillsets, they dramatically improve their win rates. By enabling their clients to make better decisions, your salespeople are far more likely to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes so that closing the sale becomes an enjoyable and rewarding process for everyone.

Are any of your salespeople struggling with unacceptable “win rates”?  What have you seen your successful performers do differently?

Social Is One to Many is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

Social Media was once called Social Media Marketing because, when marketers grabbed hold of the tools, they recognized them as one to many. The battle over whether or not the tools are for community or marketing can be traced back to 1999, and I offer the best of all evidence, The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Your Facebook post is worthless if it is only seen by one person (unless that is how you define your market). Your Tweets are seen by all of your followers. If your tweet was seen by only one person, you wouldn’t need Twitter. Now LinkedIn offers a publishing platform, recognizing that part of the value of having a network is being able to communicate with that network.

Social. Selling?

Let’s pretend you found your dream client on LinkedIn. You research the client, looking at their background, their interests, what groups they belong to, and maybe you find something they created and posted themselves. There is nothing social about that. It’s research. The only thing that has changed is the tool you have used.

Now you reach out make a connection request. That’s a one-to-one activity, and it feels like sales because you are asking for a commitment (albeit a very small commitment, often one with as much significance as being someone’s friend on Facebook).

What do you do next?

Let’s say you are one of the nervous kind who wouldn’t dare email your dream client to ask for an appointment. Nor would you dare to pick up the phone call them, cold calling being dead and all. So you decide to publish on LinkedIn, hoping that your dream client will read your excellent opinion on the industry. Maybe you believe that, upon recognizing your brilliance, your dream client will pick up the phone and call you, begging you to come in so they can give your their business. Publishing is one-to-many, and that makes it marketing and that makes it not sales (it’s publishing!).

Pretend that your published post didn’t grab your dream client’s attention. I know, it was a great post. Just pretend. You and your dream client are both members of an industry group. You find a question your dream client has asked, and you post a killer response. That post is public, so it’s mostly one-to-many. But wait. Your dream client responds to your comment. Now it’s one-to-one. But there was no ask, no commitment, and you’re not one inch closer to a deal than you were before he commented. No, you’re still not selling.

No one is a greater proponent of the social marketing toolkit than me (except maybe Koka Sexton, Jill Rowley, and Jamie Shanks).

You have never had a better set of tools for building your personal brand. You have never been able to project the value you create to the people who would most benefit from what you do as easily and effectively as you can now. If you aren’t using the tools, you are woefully behind right now. The line between marketing and sales is so blurry right now it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. So let me draw the line for you.

One to many is marketing (your posts, your tweets, your pictures, etc.). One to one with no ask and no commitment-gaining is nurturing, a more personal form of marketing. One to one with an ask and a commitment gained is selling.

Directly asking one-to-one on social is taboo (but Gary Vaynerchuck does it without fear). It looks self-oriented. The social folks generally look down on pitching. Pitching one to many is marketing. Pitching one to one over social is weird.

Directly asking for commitments face-to-face or on the telephone is personal. It’s one to one, as it should be.

I never thought I would find myself looking forward to receiving emails from a yoga studio.

I’ve never done yoga. I don’t know anything about yoga. And something tells me I wouldn’t be very good at it.

But when my girlfriend Ashley told me I had to see the emails from her favorite yoga studio, I decided to check them out.

Ashley knows, that as a Constant Contact employee I’m always on the lookout for cool things small businesses are doing to market themselves. And when she saw her yoga studio, Treetop Yoga, was a Constant Contact customer, she knew I’d be interested.

Like with most things, she was right.

Their emails were packed with great information and content that I found interesting, even without any prior enthusiasm for yoga. I learned about their different classes, read inspirational quotes, saw pictures of their studio, and read interviews with yoga instructors.

Soon, I found myself clicking to open each time an email landed in my inbox. And that was just the start.

A few months after signing up, I was looking for a gift when I received an email about buying gift certificates for Treetop Yoga online.

I decided that a gift certificate and a new yoga mat would make a good gift. When I went to the store to buy a mat, the staff was very friendly and asked which studio Ashley went to. All of a sudden, I was engaged in a conversation, talking about all of the cool stuff going on at Treetop Yoga.

Within a few months of joining their email list, I had not only purchased a gift certificate but I was also a loyal fan who hopefully helped introduced the studio to a new student.

But what does this have to do with my marketing?

When most of us hear the term “marketing,” we immediately think of our own experience as a consumer. The only problem is many of these experiences aren’t always great.

From commercials on TV, to ads that pop up when we’re reading or watching something online — many of the marketing messages we receive get in the way of the things we want to do.

But what if the marketing you created was actually the sort of stuff customers looked forward to?

What if instead of constantly trying to convince people to buy your products or sign up for your services, you took an approach like Treetop Yoga and created an experience that entertained, informed, and engaged the people you were trying to reach?

It worked for this yoga studio, and it can work for any business willing to give it a try.

Let’s take a look at how you can put a similar strategy into action:

Step 1: Think about the audience you’re trying to reach

Start by thinking about your ideal customer. Who are they? What are they interested in? What problems can you help them solve?

Relevance is one of the most important factors of any successful marketing campaign. But more than that, the goal of your marketing should be to create something that customers and potential customers will thank you for.

That’s the type of experience people are going to pay attention to, and it’s also the best way to bring customers back.

Step 2: Match their needs, interests, and expectations to your business goals

Once you’ve shifted your focus to meet the needs of your audience, you can then start to match these ideas with your business goals.

Here’s an example to consider:

If I’m a potential student who signed up for a yoga studio’s email list but I’m not familiar with the different types of classes, it’s unlikely that I’m going to be receptive to an email asking me to sign up for a new class.

But when I receive an email from a yoga studio like Treetop Yoga, and it not only explains what the different classes are but also includes information about the instructor, her experience, and philosophy — it’s much more likely that I’ll pay attention.

Whether you’re trying to fill a class, generate sales, or attract new clients, you’ll be much more successful when you put the needs of your audience first, and then match those to needs to your business goals.

Step 3: Plan your content

The type of experience that’s offered by businesses like Treetop Yoga, is part of a marketing strategy known as content marketing.

Content marketing is different from traditional marketing, because it’s about providing value to your audience as a way to create and grow relationships. You still leverage popular channels of communication — like email, social, mobile, and web — but instead of putting a generic ad in front of them, you use content to showcase your business’s personality and expertise.

The content you create can be something simple, like a post on social media, or something a little more extensive, like a blog post or an article in your email newsletter.

Then there are things like photos, videos, how-to guides, quotes, blog posts, infographics, and podcasts.

But content marketing isn’t just about creating more content. It’s about creating content as a way to move your audience to take action.

As Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute explains in his book Epic Content Marketing:

“Content marketing must work to enhance or change a behavior. If it doesn’t, it’s just content.”

Step 4: Do the work

Even the best marketing strategy won’t do you any good if you’re not willing to follow through.

The good news is that as a small business owner, you’re in the ideal position to create marketing messages that people look forward to.

You know your customers. You understand their needs, interests, and expectations. And you create memorable experiences every single day.

It’s okay to start small.

Choose one channel — maybe it’s email or one of your active social networks — and look for ways to give something valuable to the people you’re trying to reach.

For Treetop Yoga, that value comes in the form of helpful articles, engaging stories, and a good balance of informative and promotional content.

Finding the right balance for your business could mean more opens, more clicks, and most importantly — more opportunity to do more business.

Ready to get started? Download our new guide, Overcoming Your Content Challenges: How to create engaging content for your marketing campaigns.

You—yes, you—are measuring your content wrong. Want to know how I know that? Well, I don’t. But my chances were good, considering only 9% of marketers are confident that the key content metrics they’re using are effective in measuring business results.

Despite that the technology surrounding marketing has been evolving at a rapid pace, enabling marketers to connect with consumers in many different ways faster than ever before, the metric system simply has yet to catch up.

Personally, I have been astonished by the amount of change I have witnessed just in my lifetime (if you can consider 22 years to be a lifetime). And yet, in those same twenty-something years, the marketing world has seemed to be faithfully indebted to the pageview for the revolutionary powers of measurement it originally crowned marketers with.

However, according to a report from Contently, marketers have since been dethroned. In continuation of this monarch-filled metaphor, the report blames the ruler of the content kingdom for the lack of progress: “The king metric of the web—the pageview—and its evil queen—the click—have held the media and marketing world under their tyrannical reign for two decades. And they’ve kept many smart people in the data-illiterate dark ages.”

In keeping with the Middle Ages-esque theme, there seems to be only one solution to dethrone this king…

Death to the Pageview!

To be clear, the pageview isn’t totally useless—it’s actually a simple way to assess the kind of interest your content is getting, but only on a superficial level.

The biggest downfall that comes as a result of this metric is the extent to which it’s used, with 69% of marketers still using pageviews to measure the success of their content.

But in reality, pageviews aren’t a real reflection of the ROI of your content.

• There is no correlation between clicking on a piece of content and actually reading or watching it.

• Marketers often mistake a user’s action—the pageview—as a positive impression, and can misinterpret the experience

• Placing such large emphasis on clicks puts marketers in danger of delivering content that users don’t actually want.

Views don’t equal value. Friends don’t let friends live and die by the pageview.

Long Live the New Leader of the Content Kingdom

With the pageview no longer ruling the content kingdom, there’s room for a new era of marketing analytics. The next age of measuring content will not be like the last; it will not be easily obtainable, easily quantifiable or easily understandable.

The key to transforming analytics into valuable, actionable insights will be driven by a mentality centered on people, not visitors. In the past, metrics have represented the aggregate of a mass of people, but engaging and building relationships—the true measure of content success—simply can’t be achieved en masse.

Establishing enduring relationships, just like finding the perfect value system for content, can only happen over time.

Growing customer advocates is one of the most important goals in managing your customer base. Advocates buy more, they recommend more, and their new business referrals close at a much higher rate. In fact, a 12% increase in advocacy can generate a 2X increase in revenue .

Given this impact to the top line, how do you grow your number of advocates? Focusing on the renewal rate isn’t enough. You need to ensure your post-sales teams understand the Hierarchy of Customer Success in order to grow advocates from a customer experience that first focuses on building their satisfaction, then their loyalty, and finally, their advocacy.

Here are 3 things you can do now to drive an advocacy-obsessed organization:

Analyze your Advocates

As you examine your current advocates, you need to determine how they got on the list.  What was their onboarding experience? How did they adopt your product? Are there certain features they are using vs. other customers? If so, how did they discover and use them?

You also need to understand if there are common patterns in your advocates’ use cases. Do your advocates fall into a specific industry or is there a certain way they are using your product? Is there a particular region or country that houses most of your advocates?

It is also important to study the individuals who are your key evangelists. What is their role in the company and are there any common patterns? What is the mix of end users vs. system administrators vs. executives? What can you learn about the profile of your power end users? Is there a common pattern regarding their role in their respective companies?

Answers to these questions are key because it will unlock your ability for new customers to repeat the advocacy journey.

Leverage Usage Data

Now that you have a rear-view mirror understanding of your current advocates, it’s time to drive your go-forward plan. Usage data is one of the most important signals that will help in this effort.

Analysis of current advocates should reveal the key features and usage patterns associated with these customers. Make a proactive plan to drive awareness of these features and nurture customers appropriately. Once a customer starts to follow this usage path, recognize their efforts and let them know they are on the right track.

It is also important to share usage success more broadly. True customer advocates consist of more than end user evangelists. And yet, executives may not be the power users of your product. As such, make certain you communicate the adoption of your product and associated business value to all of your customer’s key stakeholders.

Unite Customer Success and Customer Marketing

The two teams that ultimately drive your company’s ability to grow advocates are Customer Success and Customer Marketing. It is critical that these two teams unite around this cause. While Customer Marketing owns the program in managing existing advocates, Customer Success is the team that discovers and nurtures new ones.

The focus of Customer Success is driving the adoption and usage of your solution. They are the trusted advisors who help your customers unlock the full value of your solution. Given their role and focus, make certain Customer Success Managers understand the path to advocacy. How can they build satisfied customers that will renew? How can they move beyond retention and ultimately drive long-term advocacy?

Customer Success Managers can help ensure that key features are utilized and proactively reach out to customers who may need an extra nudge. They can also follow up with customers who are on the right track and help communicate early success to a broader audience. Your Customer Success team needs to share the new advocate numbers and collaborate with marketing accordingly.

While Customer Success identifies the customers for proactive outreach, Customer Marketing must help with the messaging. The power of these two teams together is the ability for one Customer Success Manager to reach many customers via intelligent campaigns. With Customer Success as the eyes and ears to product adoption, Customer Marketing can supply a variety of templates that the Success team can leverage. This can include getting a customer back on track regarding usage or recognizing early success.

Once new advocates are identified, it is important that Customer Marketing has a plan to manage, reward, and maintain their evangelism. Maintaining evangelism also includes ensuring the proper internal tools are in place in order to avoid advocate “burn out,” or when advocates are being asked to do too much by different departments.

Customer Advocacy is truly the new way of marketing and one of the most trusted ways to sell to new customers. Once you have the process in place of how to discover and grow your advocacy program, you are well on your way to driving an advocacy obsessed organization.

Photo credit: Flickr user Tulane Public Relations

Far and away, my favorite movie character of all-time is George Bailey from It’s A Wonderful Life.  I remember the first time I saw that movie. I believe I was 9 or 10 years old and even then, I felt drawn to that character.  George Bailey is an incredibly complex and conflicted man and I hoped and feared I’d be just like him when I grew up.  On one hand, he was everything I wanted to be: Big dreamer, idealistic, tenacious, a dedicated father and husband, hard working, affable, dependable, loyal, trustworthy, caring, helpful, and a leader.  On the other hand, he was everything I didn’t want to be: An unwitting participant in the rat race who always felt like he was behind the 8-ball.  He was a man who never felt fulfilled.  He was stuck in a perceived rut and never felt like he was making a difference.   Worst still, he believed he was not making the most out of life.

If you’re a CSM, you were probably drawn to the role because you, like George Bailey share most of his positive traits.  Also, like George Bailey, I bet you too at times feel like you are tirelessly grinding away to ensure everyone is happy and satisfied, yet never feeling like you’re getting ahead.  But, keep in mind; your success is measured in a series of very small wins collected each day.  Like a pebble tossed into a lake, these wins are so small, they’ll barely make a ripple, but save those pebbles over time, gather them up and see what happens to the water when you toss them in.  Your seemingly minor daily contributions make an enormous and profound impact on your customers, co-workers, and company as a whole.

Want to get a true sense for how much you matter?  Remember, George Bailey was given a gift.  He got to see what the world would look like if he weren’t in it.  He learned that, without his influence, many friends and family members had a troublesome life.  In the end, George realizes that he does matter and his actions both big and small have enhanced the lives of many others. Let’s explore if you too had that opportunity and see what your world would look like if the CSM role had never been born.  With respect to your time, the following examples will be abbreviated:

Frontline Customer Support team – With a CSM
What happens if the Support team does not perform up to the customer’s standard?
What happens if the customer is being unreasonable or unresponsive?
How does the Support team gain knowledge of the customer’s overall strategy?
In all of the above cases, the CSM will typically step in and smooth out the wrinkles.   This keeps problem management out of the hands of the Support team and allows them to maintain their break/fix focus.

Frontline Customer Support team – Without a CSM
The Support team will now have to handle those types of escalations as they’ll no longer have insight into the customer’s long term goals and plans, they’ll have no one to help reengage unresponsive customers, and they’ll no longer have an established relationship to cushion the blow when the “you know what” hits the fan.  Oh wait, yes they will.  They’ll just funnel much of this over to the Sales team!

Sales – With a CSM
The Sales team’s job description is pretty cut and dry.  They are required to meet with new prospects, close deals, and then renew them.  Anything else on their plates is merely unnecessary and detrimental.  Fortunately they have a CSM that can keep the vast majority of daily account management duties from derailing their sales efforts.  In fact, a CSM will aid in the sales process by keeping existing customers satisfied and that in-turn should make the renewal process fairly easy for the Sales rep.

Sales – Without a CSM
In addition to their primary responsibilities, now they also are responsible for maintaining customer satisfaction levels by not only working closely with Support, but also host regular cadence calls with customers, respond to customer inquiries, collect/file/manage product feature requests, provide product roadmap updates, organize training, and meet with internal team members to provide updates on each account. By the way, their typical account list is between 10-15 or more accounts.  The Sales team will begin to resent the Support team every time they kick something over the fence to them.  Why? Because, for every extra task they do that detracts them from selling, they’re losing money and they are jeopardizing their jobs.  This all but cripples the sales process and will in effect; destroy the company’s bottom line.

Engineering – With a CSM
Simply put, this group builds, maintains, and enhances the product.  It’s common for them to handle a technical issue that can’t be solved by the Support team.  In some cases they might provide direct updates on an on going or persistent issue to the CSM.  In rare instances they’ll even join a customer call, but by and large they are isolated from the customer.  This team gets most of their customer feedback on the product from the Support team and CSM.

Engineering – Without a CSM
What changes most for these guys is the flow of information.  With the Sales and Support teams now overwhelmed and the lines blurred between each, the Engineering team should expect a lack of customer feedback due to each team thinking the other was communicating with Engineering.  On the flip side, the Engineering team may receive too much information, as it’s highly likely that the Sales and Support folks will be providing duplicate feedback.  Not only that, there could be variances in that feedback which creates confusion.  This confusion will only cause frustration for the customer because now they’ll have Sales and or Support coming back to them frequently to clarify…assuming these teams have enough bandwidth to do that.  Otherwise, when the product features are released, they’ll likely miss the mark and that will cause an even higher level of frustration for the customer.  In turn, the Engineering team will have their own resources taxed, as they’ll have to go back to the drawing board and rebuild a feature.  As you can deduce, this mess is costing the company money as their resources are chasing their tails instead of being productive.

Marketing – With a CSM
Commonly, Marketing is more closely tied to Sales.  A CSM’s involvement with Marketing may vary from company to company or across industries, but generally the Marketing team will look to the CSM for referenceable customers that they can utilize for promotional materials or events.  They may also ask the CSM to provide overviews on customer use cases and to get an overall sense for what customers like and don’t like about your company’s product or service.

Marketing – Without a CSM
Admittedly, the impact of not having a CSM is not as great here as in other groups, but the Marketing team will take a hit.  Instead of having a CSM to call on for referenceable customers, they now will have to contact Sales and Support.  This isn’t so burdensome for Marketing as it is for Sales and Support considering they now have yet another item on their to do list.  However, Marketing can expect to have to chase each group around for this info and, like Engineering, they’ll surely end up with not enough feedback, duplicate feedback, or conflicting feedback.  Support might refer one customer and Sales could suggest staying away from the very same customer.  This would then be Marketing’s job to sort out what customers are approachable and those that are not.  And again, like the aforementioned groups, they will very likely end up running around in circles.

Product Management – With a CSM
The folks on the Product Management team rely heavily on the CSM to provide them with a solid understanding of what customers want the product to do, why, and what the specific requirements are.  The CSM is also responsible for providing the level of importance on each request and ensuring that the customer’s wants and desires are heard loud and clear.  It’s this insight that helps guide the decisions made by the Product Manager.  At times, the CSM may even facilitate a conversation with select customers and the PM.  These collective efforts enhance the product and keep the roadmap on the right track.

Product Management – Without a CSM
The Product Manager struggles to make informed roadmap decisions.  They have no choice but to follow suit with the other groups and lean on Sales and Support for this information.  What they’ll get is the same disjointed information that Engineering and Marketing received.  What Sales and Support will get is yet another headache.  The lack of reliable guidance will cause the road map to go off the rails and ultimately the product will suffer.  The customers won’t find the product as beneficial and renewals will dwindle, sales will slide, and the company will lose value.

Customers – With a CSM
They buy a product or service and then are assigned a central point of contact to guide them and advocate for them over the course of their contract.  The CSM is there day in and day to look after their best interests and make sure their needs are being met.  If the CSM is doing their job effectively, customers, even despite some technical bumps or pricing concerns, will likely renew when their contract is up because they know they are well cared for, respected, and have a voice within your company.

Customers – Without a CSM
All of the strife at your company will cause the culture to breakdown and inevitably it’ll reflect back out to the customer.  Not only will they be put off by the bad mojo, but they’ll also begin to feel neglected, uninformed, and in essence unwanted.  What choice do they have but to take their business elsewhere?  As the customer relationships begin to wear down in concert with the internal turmoil among cross-functional teams; the managers, directors, and executives will be forced to spend chunks of their days putting out fires and solving problems while revenue projections are not met.
As you CSM’s can see, you really have a wonderful life.  Your efforts, though not always measurable when taken individually, truly have a tremendous impact on your customers and your company.   Know that you are valued and keep on keeping on!

Are you working full time, and considering going back to school for your MBA? You’re not alone. Hiring rates for MBA candidates are expected to grow by 16% in 2014 alone, and a typical MBA graduate incurs a salary increase of 53-81% after graduating. But the returns of an MBA are more than financial. According to this infographic from MBA@UNC, 94% of graduates rate the value of their degree highly rewarding personally, and 3 out of 4 graduates say they could not have obtained their current job without their degree.

Fortunately for professionals who are working full time, going back to school doesn’t mean you don’t have to quit your job and uproot your life. Thanks to online MBA programs like MBA@UNC, students can earn the same degree from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School via a robust technology platform while applying a new skill set at work the very next day.

Take a look at the infographic below for more statistics about the ROI of an MBA.

Over the next five years, how you train and educate your staff won’t just change; it’ll transform. What’s the difference? Changing means continuing to do essentially the same thing, only introducing some variation in degree. Transformation means doing something utterly and radically different. For example, moving our music from cassette tape to CD was simply a change. But going from a CD to having all your music in digital format on your smart phone and with you at all times was a transformation.

Exponential changes driven by processing power, storage, and bandwidth are now impacting how organizations need to train their workforce, and this transformation will certainly accelerate. The only question is whether your organization will take advantage of it.

So what does the future of training look like? To get a clear picture, you first have to know a few facts:

• Your employees’ phones are actually multimedia computers with internet access. That alone has huge ramifications for training them.
• One-third of all PCs sold globally are tablets, and most of them are iPads. So smart mobile devices like phones and tablets are the new platforms for training and education.
• These smart devices will get exponentially smarter every year, giving us new capabilities. It used to be to access a super computer you had to be a university or major corporation. Today, even a small company can access (from their phone) a super computer in the cloud and run advanced simulations.

Knowing these things, it’s time to rethink how to train your employees from here on out. Here’s how to do it:

• Implement Just-in-Time Training

For most people, the best way to learn something is by doing it. That’s what just-in-time training enables people to do. Rather than sit in a classroom or one-on-one with someone and learn, people can learn in real-time. Remember, most employees have a multimedia computer with them at all times (their phone or tablet). With just-in-time training, they can access any element of what they need to know at the moment of need. If they have a question or need assistance, they simply touch an icon on their device’s screen and are connected to a live trainer who can help. If the trainer needs to see something to give assistance, the employee can aim the device’s built-in camera to the problem so the trainer can see it. This alone would cut training costs tremendously.

Does this mean we eliminate classroom or other formal training sessions? No. There will still be formal training, but less of it because now we can have distributed training in real-time that’s just-in-time. So this isn’t about getting rid of something; it’s about using a new tool for training and education.

• Create Interactive Training Materials

We also now have the ability to create interactive training manuals and textbooks. In the past, e-books have been static, basically an electronic PDF of the book. Now they are becoming dynamic e-books where you have embedded audio, video, and links to other resources. And thanks to visual communications, you can even have a way for employees to tap a special button in the training manual and be connected to someone who can give more advanced training on a specific subject.

Additionally, employees can tap into a series of videos that allows them to personalize the training for their specific needs. Since the training manual is no longer static, employees can personalize the manual by plugging into a menu of more advanced training options embedded within.

• Tap Into the Gameification of Training and Education

Gaming isn’t just for kids. Interactive gaming is a tool that can transform training and education. I’ve identified five core elements of gameification that when applied together can dramatically accelerate learning. They are:

1. Self-diagnostic. Interactive, competitive, and immersed training modules can know each person’s skill or knowledge level and progress accordingly. It can know where someone left off and give next steps from that point when the person logs back in. This is the best way to allow for individual training and learning.
2. Interactivity. Regardless of someone’s inherent learning style, learning is much more effective when you’re interacting with the material, not passively sitting there. When you learn by gaming, you’re interacting with the information and concepts and actually doing things. It’s no longer passive training.
3. Immersion. In the recent past to the present, video games use interspatial 3D, where you go into worlds. So instead of images popping out at you, you go inside to them. That’s how games on the Xbox 360 and others have been working for years, by using a regular television set or flat panel display. This sort of technology gives an immersed effect, which engages people more.
4. Competition. Humans are naturally competitive beings. When you’re sitting in class or doing one-on-one learning, there’s little competitive value. No one advances until the session is over. However, when you’re competing, as in a game, there’s an adrenaline rush that keeps you engaged and focused on the task at hand. In an effort to “win,” people master concepts faster.
5. Focus. When you’re playing a game, you’re forced to focus. You have to do A in order for B to occur. If you don’t do A, then you won’t get far in the game. Focus is the result of interactivity, competition, immersion, and self-diagnosis. When you can focus, you can learn virtually anything…fast.

Embrace the New Era of Training

The ideas mentioned here are already possible. Use them to redefine how your company trains its employees. Since businesses spend large sums of money on training and education, anything that can accelerate or enhance learning will save both time and dollars. And always remember, if it can be done it will be done; if you don’t do it someone else will.

When media outlets discuss growth prospects for small and medium sized businesses, they tend to focus on a general narrative rather drilling down into the intricate details. While this offers an indication into what SME’s can expect during a particular financial quarter, however, it is not enough to gain genuine insight into the economy or cultivate actionable commercial strategies.

For genuine insight, small and medium sized business should instead look out for official, national publications such as the Bank of England Inflation report. This is due for release imminently, and early indications suggest that the prevailing rate of UK unemployment claims will represent the most sought-after data set. This is just of many statistics that will be included in this and similar reports from around the world, however, and the majority will have a direct or indirect impact on small and medium sized businesses.

3 Economic and Financial Trends that Impact on Small Businesses

With this in mind, it is worth considering the most influential economic and financial trends and how they impact on small business ownership. Consider the following: -

1. Geopolitical Conflict and Tension

Since the implementation of the Euro and the formation of the Eurozone, the players within the global economy have become increasingly interconnected. While this has considerable benefits with regards to trade links and commerce, however, it can become counter-productive during times of geopolitical conflict and tension. This can have a direct impact on the value of currency and trading volumes on the commercial market, while also restricting international trade and driving down demand for specific products or services.

This was certainly the case during the recent dispute between Russia and Ukraine, where the performance of stocks and currencies only improved after relationships began to improve. While small business owners cannot be expected to predict the onset of geopolitical conflicts or forecast their outcome, they can monitor social and economic trends in real-time and prepare for instances where trade may be restricted for an indefinite period of time.

2. Inflation and Interest Rates 

Both inflation and the prevailing rate of interest have a big impact on small and medium sized businesses, although they are controlled and manipulated by each countries financial authorities to suit their economic circumstances. Interest rates have been kept at all-time low during the UK’s recent economic recovery, for example, as a way of encouraging consumers and business owners to confidently spend higher volumes of their disposable income. This is unlikely to change any time soon, especially as wage inflation remains minimal and inflation itself is being minimized to keep pace with this.

Low inflation is generally good news for small business owners, as while they may be required to lower their price points they will also have an opportunity to reduce the cost of purchasing raw materials and manufacturing products. The most crucial thing to bear in mind is the importance of being flexible and adopting a proactive approach to changing your pricing strategy to suit the rate of inflation, and it is imperative that you look to share any financial savings that you generate through manufacturing directly with your customers.

3. Increased Global Wealth and the Rise of Developing Economies 

Even during the recession, developing economies such as China, India and Brazil managed to attain levels of growth that were disproportionate to the rest of the world. This not only reflects the fact that these economies are continuing to narrow the gap on traditional financial powerhouses, however, but it also confirms that the world is benefiting from increasing rates of global wealth. With the rate of millionaires multiplying and an estimated 50 to 100 million citizens emerging from poverty every single year, it is clear that consumers will continue to have more disposable income and spending power in the years to come.

Recognizing this trend is critical for small business owners, as there is an opportunity for them to capitalize and tailor their products and services as a result. While this may ultimately translate into the development of luxury products and proportionate price hikes, it should start with subtle refinements to your marketing proposition and the implementation of more targeted promotional campaigns. It may also be worth delving further into the data to determine viable areas of growth as the world’s wealth rises, before diversifying to meet the potential demand.

The recent news that my old company, Microsoft, is going to lay off 18,000 people made me shudder.  This economy is brutal. Yet, though I’m sure that each of those 18,000 people will have a horrible experience in the short term, I am fairly confident that most of those former “Softies” will soon get back on track in their careers.  People with good tech industry skills tend to get new jobs readily.

What about the rest of us, especially those of us on either side of the big five-O?  I think the news is good there is good too, if we are ready to focus on why we will triumph financially despite a bad overall economy.  It’s easy to get discouraged.  Believe me, I’ve been there!  But, if you need some inspiration, let me share 10 reasons why you’re going to succeed today:

1) You have drive – Children of the 50s, 60s, and 70s have drive.  We are the last remnant of America’s great industrial age.  We all carry within us a vision of personal greatness.  We know what it means to have personal drive, to want to make things happen to further our success.  The way we get from here to there may be different from what it was two decades ago, but the drive remains with us.
2) You have commitment – If you’ve gotten anywhere career-wise in the last thirty years, it’s because you are committed to your own success.  This can also mean that you’re committed to your employer’s success. These things run together.  The challenge for late boomers and gen-xers is to transform our earlier commitment to a loyal corporate employer to today’s new work constructs.  In the old days, if you were committed to your job, your job was committed to you. That’s less true today, but the basic formula still applies. If you commit to your contractor/gig/employer success as a way of committing to your personal success, you will see positive results.
3) You have skills – One of the big disempowerments for mid-life workers today is an incessant message that our skills are out of date.  There is some truth to this. We may not be digitally native, but we have skills.  The truth is that core work skills never fade. Selling is selling, regardless of how you find and connect with customers.  Operations management is operations management, regardless of where the facilities are and how they are linked.  The challenge for us is to adapt our core skills to new technologies and modes of working.
4) You have work experience – We’ve been around the corporate world, and that’s a good thing for our personal success long term.  Our challenge is to understand how our experience of different organizations and business cycles can be expressed to our advantage in seeking new work.  We have knowledge of how things work in business that transcends anything that a younger person can possibly understand.  This can be our strength.
5) You have life experience – We’ve also been around in life, and that can give us valuable tools for finding and succeeding in work situations.  Knowing how to deal with people, recognizing consumer trends, having some maturity in the workplace – these are all assets if we communicate their value to potential employers.
6) You have a network – You may not think your network is very good, but it is probably stronger than you realize.  The question is always “What can I offer to my network?” The answers have changed over the years because the structures of employment have evolved.   For example, you might be able to offer your network opportunities to freelance, versus finding full time positions.  But, the dynamics of networking remain the same
7) You have a vision for yourself – We can’t make our skills, experience, commitment, and network propel us to financial succeed if we can’t envision what that success looks like.  The issue is that paths to financial success today look different from what the way they were a generation ago.  Yet, they are very much there for us if we can understand our true value in the workplace and align our vision with our true selves
8) You’re willing to be flexible – This may not be the news we want to hear, but work success today depends on attaining a degree of flexibility.  Market cycles are far shorter than they used to be.  Projects, teaming, and organization structures shift rapidly – probably too rapidly for anyone’s good – but that’s reality.  We have to be flexible to go along with it if we want to succeed financially in today’s business environmen
9) You’re ready to learn – Yes, we still have things to learn.  It’s not just technology that’s compelling us to learn new skills and work patterns.  We have to be ready to learn whole new businesses and ways of doing business.   For example, virtual teaming with colleagues scattered across the map, collaborating on instant messenger, is one of the new ways that work gets done.  If we want to move forward today, we have to master new skills.
10) You’ve empowered yourself to succeed with your true talents – Ultimately, succeeding in today’s difficult economy is about finding personal empowerment.  This isn’t a nebulous fantasy. It’s about bringing together the power that’s within you as described in the previous nine points.  When you align and synergize your skills, experience, network, personal vision, willingness to learn and be flexible – then, you’ll find that you’re empowered for greatness despite anything the economy can throw at you.

Robin Williams was one of my favorite actors when I was kid. You can imagine just how bummed I was with the rest of the world when I learned that he just died at 63. To many a lot older than me, he was Mork, John Keating, and Sean Maguire.

But to me, he was always Genie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Peter Pan, and Alan Parish. These characters were all with me growing up and Robin Williams was the man who brought them all to life.

But like all screen legends, he started small. Have you ever thought that there was a Robin Williams among your own ERP leads?

Right in the childhood. RIP Robin Williams

I’m not saying you could be talking to the next superstar comedian during your telemarketing campaign. I’m saying that very things will tell you that you’re in the presence of future greatness. It’s like when Williams first broke the scene as Mork on Happy Days. Who would’ve thought that this guy would go on to become other such memorable characters in the years to come?

Naturally, it might be too much to ask if your ERP leads could somehow contain messages from the future. Still, many in the enterprise software industry would eagerly point to the next best thing: data and analytics. Number crunching may not be your thing but here are a few tips to help you get started on what to look for:

• Raw potential –Fonz actor Henry Winkler already knew that he was standing ‘in the presence of greatness’ right during the rehearsal of Williams’ Happy Days debut. So it goes to show that while you can’t predict the future, there are already existing standards for spotting potential value. When analyzing your ERP leads, what standard do you have that can indicate raw potential? Is it business culture? Products? The way they organize?
• Long-term willingness – Williams didn’t stop at Mork. You had Mork and Mindy followed by success with Aladdin, Hook, and Jumanji. Potential is usually followed by a willingness to make it in the long-term. An ERP lead could look promising on the first point of contact but how long does that spark last?
• Attention – Finally, rising stars are hardly seen by just one person. Other industry leaders and customer influencers soon take notice. This is often both the mark of marketing success but at the same time, a trait that defines the entities that could be making real headway into the world.

As the world mourns the loss of a great actor and comic icon, let’s not forget that news stars are still making their own mark. It’s not just in Hollywood but even in the enterprise industry.

It’s becoming the rule of thumb that B2B marketers should create marketing content that talks less about your products and your company. Instead, the focus is on delivering relevant information that’s helpful to your readers.

It’s almost rebellious to suggest that the rest of your sales lead generation strategy should be about putting your own business on a pedestal. How much worse when it comes to highlighting how much you’ve grown as a company?

Here’s the thing: You don’t have to highlight just to look back yourself. Ever had moments of personal reflection, looking back (like say, on your childhood), and then coming out with a new idea? This is it, except you’re applying the ideas to your B2B marketing process.

“There you are Peter!”

If you’ve ever watched Hook, a story about a grown-up Peter Pan, you’ll understand what it means to look back on your childhood. You can be surprised at the amount of insight you’ll get when you pause and look back on how far your business has gone. A few examples include:

• What changed – The change could’ve been bad or good but it was ultimately still change. New products had to be made or innovations were just badly warranted at a certain point in time. These changes represent the experience you’ve had in your industry and now you can share that experience to your own prospects and customers.

• What was forgotten – This might sound a little bit cliché but sometimes your current marketing problems could’ve resulted from forgetting something important. Whether it was something as typical as your company vision or simply an old strategy you used to employ, sometimes looking back helps you remember old solutions that you haven’t tried in a while.

• What was missed – Perhaps you noticed something back then that didn’t seem such a big deal at the time. It may have been the sign to a local business or an annual business convention that you didn’t feel was worth attending. A bit of retrospect can go a long way when you can’t get any ideas at the present but get new ideas when you put the past in a different perspective.

• What you’ve taken with you – Sometimes instead of changing something, you realize that you’ve been doing something that carried on even after you’ve gone past the startup phase. The only thing you need to do know is generate more attention to it and how this something can be of great value to also your prospects.

You might be wondering, won’t these ideas apply to everything else outside of marketing? Yes they can! That’s all the more reason to apply them. Remembering history prevents us from repeating it. Remembering your childhood helps you grow up.

If the objective of a training program is for people to apply that learning in the workplace and make an observable difference to an organization’s results, then almost all corporate training fails to achieve its objective.

In a fairly recent study, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) reported that only 3% of training reached Kirkpatrick’s “level 4 of training evaluation results” where there is an impact on the organization. In contrast, 95% of training reached “level 1” where the participants liked the training.

A further breakdown of the study revealed that 37% of training reached “level 2” where participants learnt the material and only 13% of training reached “level 3” where participants applied the learning in the workplace.

There are several failures, which lead to this huge waste of training dollars …..

When training is not related to the organization’s objectives, strategies and management’s day-to-day behaviour, training is ineffective in delivering the desired results. Generic “off the shelf”training which has not been designed for a specific purpose with people from a known organization in mind, may increase an individual’s knowledge, but it does not increase their ability to apply the knowledge. Even if training is devised specifically for an organization, it will still be ineffective when it does not relate to the day-to-day life at the coal face of managers, supervisors and shop floor personnel.

Understanding the coal face before commencing training is the most significant preparation a trainer can achieve.

An organization spending considerable money on training should insist on the training company having that understanding. The first utterance by the trainer which results in a response from their audience, “That does not happen here” is the moment that the trainer begins to lose the trust of the audience.

When trust is lost, so is value and significant parts of the audience stop listening and participating. The worst part of it is that, most times, the response is silent and the trainer may well continue unawares.

A further cause of wasted training dollars is the use of methods, which are not designed to achieve the change in behaviour, skills or knowledge that is desired.

For example, lecture style methods used to change behaviour are inappropriate as they are best used to transfer only knowledge.

To change behaviour, the training needs to be of an experiential type and must be supported after the training is completed by coaching and a structure of formal and informal rewards. If the method used to train is useful for achieving the required change theoretically, it is still at times inappropriate for the audience.

For example, role-plays are effective for improving skills as they allow participants to practice what they have learnt. However, if the participants are unlikely to be comfortable with role-plays, then the method is still unlikely to be effective.

The most significant waste of training dollars however, rests with the lack of thought in determining what training is needed. Training is seen as a classroom exercise rather than a combination of learning interventions, which in combination results in developing the change in behaviour, skills and knowledge required. The failure of mangers and supervisors to determine what needs to change and developing an intervention framework to achieve the change is common. The failure of trainers to insist on finding out before completing their instructional design is more common.

Behavioral change needs personal coaching of the individual and support by a strong framework of goal setting and two-way feedback, if not 360 degree feedback. Skills development needs coaching of a different kind, one where the emphasis is on demonstration and practice. The practice needs to be in an environment where mistakes can be made and learnt from.

Knowledge can be learnt from books, lectures and interactive CDs to name a few. However, knowledge needs to be used in context to breed confidence. Therefore, training in knowledge must be quickly followed by the individual being placed in an environment where it is used.

The fact that training fails so often because of a lack of clearly understanding the changes we want to develop and developing a broader training intervention beyond the classroom is not good. Combine it with the habit of many individuals to treat training as a CV builder, absorbing little but the most basic understanding of what was being taught and a recipe for systemic low productivity is created as the blind lead the blind.

Trained individuals using the most basic of understanding learnt in a classroom to make decisions, implement projects and manage their people have a false sense of competence, which impacts far beyond the classroom.

It is the responsibility of managers, supervisors and most importantly, the trainers, to make sure that training does not fail.

Failure costs far too much, and not all of those costs are instantly visible.

The basic premise of content marketing is one that we’ve all known since grade school: Give and you shall receive. Between DVRs, ad blockers, and plain-old banner blindness, it’s increasingly up to the consumer whether or not they get marketed to. By offering genuine value to users, content marketing gives consumers a reason to expose themselves to your marketing.

But can we take it too far?

It should go without saying that any marketing strategy has its limits. We face diminishing returns, and at some point any new dollars we invest will fail to produce additional profit. Still, most of us assume that investing more money or resources will almost always boost revenue, even if the profit isn’t there anymore.

This isn’t always true.

Sometimes creating content can actually cannibalize your revenue.

When Neil Patel shot himself in the foot

In October of 2013, Neil Patel launched a massive resource called Quick Sprout University (QSU), a series of videos. As smart and successful as he is, Neil called it a $45,300 mistake. His previous advanced guides could easily pull in hundreds of thousands of visitors and create thousands of email subscriptions. But the QSU videos actually did far worse than his previous resources. In fact, they failed to make up for the difference due to random downward fluctuations in traffic. In 5 days, they only generated about 7,000 views. At a cost of over $40,000, the videos were a huge brick of wasted expenses.

More importantly, however, was that the videos actually caused his revenue to drop. In fact, it dropped by 27 percent. Why did this massive content marketing undertaking actually hurt his revenue?

According to Neil, his audience was becoming so accustomed to accessing high quality free content that they were less willing to pay for content anymore. The QSU videos were undercutting the value of his core products and actually discouraging visitors from making a purchase from him.

Ultimately, Neil decided to monetize QSU by merging it with his core product (even though he had originally said he wouldn’t do this). We can’t fault him for making this decision — he had three options: Let the course continue to cannibalize his sales, eliminate the videos and admit that they were a huge waste of money, or use them as a draw to sign up for his product.

In the end, the attention that Quick Sprout University earned while it was free certainly might have turned a profit after it became a paid product. But that’s more like having a free beta and a paid final product than legitimate content marketing — even if it wasn’t planned that way.

The conflict between reciprocity and scarcity

Neil Patel’s mistake wasn’t producing an awesome resource for his fans, and it wasn’t investing too many resources in creating content. His mistake was sabotaging the scarcity of his product.

Content marketers can actually damage their revenue when they offer free information that reduces the overall value of their product.

Products solve problems. If you’re a good content marketer, your content solves problems as well. Content that doesn’t solve a problem for users is just a distraction or a waste of time. Consumers need a reason to expose themselves to your content.

But if your content solves the specific problem that your product is supposed to solve, consumers no longer need your product.

The principle of reciprocity only goes so far. As humans, it is certainly true that we have a desire to reciprocate generosity when it is offered to us. But it’s important to recognize why we do this. We reciprocate because we expect to become part of a virtuous cycle of give and take. This is a concept in game theory called “reciprocal altruism.”

If people discover that they can easily take from somebody who keeps giving, with no expectations of reciprocity, they will eventually take advantage of the situation, no matter how virtuous their original intentions might have been.

So when it comes to content marketing, I might be drawn to read your blog if it solves problems for me, and that might expose me to your product, which promises to solve additional problems. But if your blog has already solved those problems for me, my instinct to reciprocate probably isn’t going to be enough to convince me to pay for your product. I might recommend you to a friend and speak highly of you, but I probably won’t give you my money.

As a content marketer, when you decide on subject matter, medium, format, tone, and so on, you need to:

• Think about the problem your product is meant to solve, and the type of person who would have that problem. Think about the other kinds of problems those people will have, and how your content can help them solve those problems, too. You typically want to avoid solving the specific problem your product addresses.
• Avoid attracting an audience of people who expect everything to be free. Never set the expectation that you will give away the farm. You want to be helpful and generous to your audience, but you should be up front about the fact that you are in business to make money. Approach it any other way and people will resent you for the “bait and switch.”
• Avoid getting too hung up on subject matter. Yes, you want to establish yourself as an authority, but your primary goal is to become a trusted source of useful information to your core audience. Subject matter doesn’t play as big a part in that as you might think, as long as you’re thinking about your target audience’s needs, on the whole.
• Realize that it’s sometimes okay to approach the core problem your product addresses with your content, but you need to do it carefully. You can address the problem as long as you don’t undercut your product’s unique selling proposition. In Neil’s case, he talks about online marketing all the time on his blog. This doesn’t undercut his revenue. The QSU videos, on the other hand, compromised the value of its traffic by cannibalizing its core promise. They weren’t one-off blog posts; they were built to serve as a single comprehensive guide — just like his business is designed to do.
• Consider where medium and format come into play. No amount of blog post content can fully undercut the value of a video series, for example. A disorganized group of blog posts is also less valuable then an organized eBook, even if the information contained in both is the same.
• Understand if you aren’t selling an info product, the concern that content will cannibalize your revenue is reduced, but not eliminated. For example, if you sell hair products, and then teach your audience how to create their own hair product from home ingredients, you might hurt your revenue. At best, you’ll attract an audience of people who weren’t going to buy your product anyway.

I can’t stress enough how often content marketers get caught up in subject matter. All too often, we come across:

• Freelance writers who write advice for freelance writers
• Lawyers who write advice for lawyers
• Lifestyle entrepreneurs writing about lifestyle business

The reason we see this all the time is because most online marketers write about marketing in order to market themselves. This is a unique case. Digital marketers (like us) write about marketing because everybody in business needs to know about marketing. Our clients need to be somewhat educated in how marketing works in the digital age.

We are solving problems for our target audience. But this doesn’t necessarily reduce the need for our paid products — our colleagues and our clients are always going to need new information — and our insight and experience at guiding them to implement it effectively will still come at a premium, no matter how many free resources we share.

However, when this same practice is used in other industries, it’s actually another way to cannibalize business revenue. A law firm writing advice for lawyers isn’t necessarily attracting any clients when they do it. But they are certainly providing their competitors with useful advice — and giving away information that they could charge clients for.

This is what happens when we put the focus on subject matter, instead of on our audience.

How to keep content from consuming your revenue

If I’ve been giving you the impression that offering too much value with your content is a bad way to expand your reach because it compromises the value of your product, I assure you this was not my intention. Nor have I been trying to say that it’s a bad idea to invest a lot of resources in content marketing.

I’m simply arguing that content marketing needs to add user value without compromising product value.

It is possible to invest a great deal in content and turn a positive result.

Shopify is a great example. These days it’s practically a household name, even expanding into physical retail with its point-of-sale system. But Shopify started from close to nothing, and its success wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t caught the attention of a man named Tobias Lutke.

Tobias’ primary investment in content marketing was to build an open-source blogging platform called Typo. The platform earned itself over 10,000 installations, and earned a massive audience for his own blog in the process. This audience would ultimately prove instrumental in launching Shopify.

This just goes to show that target audience is so much more important than subject matter. Blogging and e-commerce are two very different subjects, but they are both very interesting to similar kinds of people: namely, web entrepreneurs.

Shopify continues to make big investments in content marketing. One of the most successful was a contest that arose as an idea from Tim Ferris, who suggested that Tobias put up a $100,000 reward to the Shopify store that could earn the most revenue in six months. The experiment was a massive success that more than paid for itself, and even earned exposure on massive platforms like The New York Times.

Both of these are examples of how big, successful content marketing campaigns often stretch the limits of what we traditionally think of as content. Tobias was a blogger, but he owes much of his success not just to blogging, but also to creating his own blogging platform. Similarly, investing $100,000 in a contest was a way to encourage other influential people to create their own content, broadly defined.

Mint.com is another example of massive success. Aaron Patzer launched the site in 2006, and invested in not just blog posts, but also slide shows, videos, and infographics. The important thing to take away from this is not that you should invest in slide shows, videos, and infographics — it’s to take note that Mint.com was the first company to heavily invest in these content marketing tactics.

The strategy grew Patzer’s site to 100,000 accounts in a year, and 2 million accounts by 2009. Just three years after it launched, it was sold to Intuit for $170 million.

Again we see that successful content marketing pushes the limits of content:

• It solves problems, not for similar experts, but for a target audience, often with diverse subject matter.
• It goes deeper than blog posts, often going so far as to invent brand new media.
• It doesn’t cannibalize the core promise of the product.
• It involves other people, including influencers.

Conclusion

We don’t like to hear it, but excessive content marketing can sometimes not just fail to turn a profit, but can actually hurt revenue. Obviously, things don’t have to be this way. Successful content marketers understand why the product is valuable, and craft content that is valuable to the same audience, but in a different way. Furthermore, they push the envelope, continually redefining the meaning of content, and they aren’t afraid to invest in doing something different.

Looking for more insight on creating content that adds value to your brand? Don’t miss Content Marketing World 2014, September 8–11, 2014. Register today!

Warren Buffett has been incredibly successful, and he's extremely wealthy. Warren Buffett's wealth jumped by around $12.7 billion in 2013 alone. But how much is $12.7 billion anyway?

And how good an investor is Warren Buffett really? We've put together some facts that really put him in perspective.

99% of Buffett's wealth was earned after his 50th birthday.

Buffett made $62.7 billion of his $63.3 billion net worth after his 50th birthday.

$60 billion — nearly 95% — is from after his 60th birthday.

Talk about long-term investment strategies.

Source: Fool

Berkshire's Book Value beat the S&P 500 in 43 out of 44 years on a five-year rolling average basis.

From 2008 to 2013, the S&P 500 returned 128%, while Berkshire (based on book value per Class A share) returned 80%. 

Source: Berkshire Hathaway, Business Insider

Among legends, Buffett has the longest track record for beating the market.

That chart compares investors with the S&P 500 over time. You can see the longevity of Buffett's outperformance is greater than that of other great investors.

Source: Business Insider

Are you at the cusp of something new? Perhaps you've taken a new sales position. Maybe you're selling into new markets or to new buyers. You could be launching a new product or service. You might be responsible for onboarding a new rep.

Or just maybe you've finally realized that you're doomed unless you figure out how to deal with today's savvy, frazzled, sales-averse decision makers.

What's common between all those scenarios? You – or your new reps – are thrown into learning mode again.

You're overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of the task. You're not sure you'll ever figure it out. But here's the deal: to make that happen, you need to take control of your learning. It can't be done in bits and pieces, with no rhyme or reason on what you're learning first.

Getting noticed with ‘Three S Timing’ for content marketing campaigns

In my previous article covering the core tenets of the Watertight Marketing Framework, I looked at earning the right to a person’s time. This can be achieved by developing a range of time-chunked materials will help you to steadily increase the amount of a person’s time they are willing to give you. Today, I’m moving on to deciding exactly when you put that material out there. That is, what month of the year, what day of the week, and what time of the day?

Once you have your range of materials mapped to a buying decision in place, you’ll need to prepare a content marketing timing plan for its release. You can do this simply and powerfully with Three S Timing:

• Selectivity
• Scheduling
• Seasonality

Selectivity – showing up when they’re in a buying mood

You’ll often find that a customer reports that winning their business was a result of ‘lucky timing’. That is, you happened to show up when they were looking for what you sell. Luck has very little to do with this. What’s actually going on here is selectivity. And, it’s where marketing frequency is absolutely essential.

Have you ever noticed how when you learn a new word, it seems to crop up on the news, in the book you’re reading, or in conversation with a friend? It was always there, you just didn’t notice it. The same is true when you’re on the look out for a new car, you’ll suddenly see the model you have in mind passing you at every turn or parked next to you at the supermarket. This is a trick of the mind.

To enjoy the fruits of ‘lucky timing’, your company needs to crop up when a person happens to be thinking about what you’re buying. Which, effectively, means being there all the time. To do this, you need to commit to a number of regular marketing activities rather than one-offs, or big bang campaigns. The frequency of these will depend on buying cycles in your industry.

What you’re aiming for is to act a little like a lighthouse, with a beacon flashing regularly enough to be seen at the right moment. From a content planning perspective, this is about choosing the intervals at which you’ll release each of your selected content types.

CASE STUDY: Comet Global Consulting

When Comet Global Consulting, customer technology specialists, were looking for some strategic marketing support, one of their directors recommended my consulting business. I had worked with him for about six months when I was in corporate marketing some three years earlier, and we had connected on LinkedIn. He had never signed up for a newsletter, or clicked on a blog. There was nothing to say he knew anything about my new business. Every week (without fail) I update my LinkedIn status with my latest blog post. This had the effect of just popping up in this buyer’s newsfeed regularly enough to express what I do. When it came to needing what I offer, he finally clicked on a link. But, without the previous 150-odd updates, he may not have noticed this one.

TIP: Commit to a releasing a set number of key marketing activities at regular intervals. For example, 6 daily Tweets, a weekly blog post, a monthly newsletter and quarterly paper with webinar.

Scheduling – showing up when you know they’re looking

With a commitment to a steady stream of ongoing activities, you can further increase your chances of showing up at the right time by understanding and matching your buyers’ work patterns and scheduling your communications to match.

Mapping a typical day, week and year for your buyers will help you to work out when to get in touch. For example, Mondays and Fridays probably aren’t best for your direct mail to arrive with a business person. And, calling a consumer at home during working hours is pretty futile.

The time of day you interact with your audience has radically altered with social media. You will definitely find people chatting business, and all manner of other things, outside normal working hours. Having social cover in these times can be really powerful. You’ll never get chatting to #womeninbiz at #wineoclock if you’re not online at this time.

TIP: Use scheduling tools to maintain a presence outside normal office hours. If you need to respond in these times, think about using a call-handling service and creating a social cover rota for the key social platforms.

Seasonality – tapping into moments of heightened need

There’s also seasonality to consider. Even if you’re not an ice-cream vendor, there will be seasonality in your market. Financial year-ends, school holidays, industry events, funding cycles and the like, can all lead to seasonal changes in demand or moments of heightened awareness.

Map things that happen over the course of a year that you could talk about or help with. There will be events that happen every year, like Valentine’s day or getting your tax return in on time. Then, there will be one-offs in that year specifically, like a big sporting event in say London or Glasgow. The former should be worked into your ongoing marketing plan, the latter should form part of your specific 12-month plan.

There may also be dated triggers that relate to an individual or specific company, like their Birthday, or renewal dates, that would allow you to time your communications perfectly.

Case study: Desynit

Systems developers and Salesforce specialists, Desynit, have made brilliant use of seasonal events to create compelling content for their blog and social media. For Valentine’s Day they posted - Making the Marketing Automation magic happen: An unlikely love story. The guys at Salesforce loved it, and featured it as a guest post on their global blog! At Easter, they issued their – Good Egg Awards. These featured people they’ve worked with and rate highly. It tapped into a seasonal moment, and with clever scheduling over the Easter weekend, allowed their social marketing to work brilliantly through a holiday period.

TIP: If you collect key data, like year-end or birthdays, when people sign-up for your email newsletter, you can set-up automated emails to go them at these times.

It would be such a shame for your brilliant content to miss its moment to shine, by simply not showing up when people are looking. Using this simple model to create a marketing timing plan for the release of your content will definitely increase your chances of getting noticed.

Image credit / Copyright: stillfx / 123RF Stock Photo

Thanks to Bryony Thomas for sharing her thoughts and opinions in this blog post. She is the best-selling Author and Founder of Watertight Marketing, and a no-nonsense marketer and business speaker, specialising in helping ambitious small businesses set things up. Her blog post is adapted from her 5-star book, Watertight Marketing, described as an entrepreneur’s step-by-step guide to putting a marketing operation in place that delivers long-term sales results. You can download a free sample chapter, get all of Part One, or connect with her on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ or Facebook.

Businesses are organizations. Organizations have a sense of community. At least, that’s the ideal. Sure you may have the typical 9-5er offices with their disconnected workforce. But even now, there are enterprise gurus who are considering the potential of applying the social element to the system.

This may sound like an innovation but it is in fact an acknowledgement. For every monotone, cubicle corporation, there’s a snazzy open spaced startup that wants to be like Google. Why? Because there will always be people who actually know they’re working with other people.

This though isn’t just advice for organizations struggling with a less than chummy business culture. It’s advice for those who want to seek out those communities in order to generate software leads.

Your sales rep might think they only want to focus on one person. That’s true. It’s a rule of thumb for them. You know what’s another rule for them though? It’s understanding their prospect’s environment. I can’t see how anyone can do that without touching upon a prospect’s relationship with their own organizational community.

It’s only natural to be a little overwhelmed by the idea. One prospect can be complicated enough. How much more an entire community? Well, think of it like setting up shop in a new town. You don’t know anybody but you’re going to have to if you want any business done. That’s why you:

• Get yourself a guide – It might sound obvious but what’s more obvious is the person who will serve this role in your software lead generation process: the prospect. Your sales rep did want to learn about their environment right? That makes your first point of contact your primary guide in helping you reach out.

• Listen for notable mentions – If your guide is like the tutorial, then you’d best pay attention. More specifically, you need to keep your ears open for any notable mentions. Are there other decision makers who might quicken or delay the buying process? What can you learn so that your sales rep can get them on board?

• Find something they all have in common – Finally, you can’t spell community without unity. The more united a prospect organization is, the more important for you to discover what that is. It could be as simple as the bottom line or something as profound as the mission and vision. These are things you want your sales rep to take seriously.

Now I’m not going to end this without mentioning how every community has its quirks. (What culture doesn’t really?) If you run into any weird factoids about your prospect, feel free to share (just with the right people mind you). You don’t want any awkward surprises once your sales reps goes to finally meet these people.

It’s supposed to be easy. Sales lead generators qualify a prospect’s inquiry and then send it to a sales rep. Why then is the age-old conflict between marketing and sales still on-going? They’re like an on-and-off couple.

Maybe it’s not as simple as it sounds. The B2B buying process is typically regarded as more complicated than the simple buy-and-sell routines you see at the local convenience store. And in industries like enterprise, healthcare, and insurance, the addition of technical information just makes it worse.

So how exactly do you map this allegedly simple model over a reality where all parties say, ‘Interested’, ‘Maybe’, ‘Interested but must save’, ‘Interested but boss isn’t’, ‘Still need to learn more’ and (perhaps worst of all) ‘It’s complicated.’

To think you’d only get this sort of thing with tweens and social media drama. Sadly, these accursed two words can apply to a lot of business processes and relationships (including everything to do with B2B marketing and sales). Making orders to ‘uncomplicate it’ is hardly the magic bullet solution you’re looking for. Instead you need to nail down the parts of the process that are complicating things:

• Decide on who has the final say – Covering the basics of B.A.N.T. may be enough for lead generators. But is it truly enough for the sales reps? One little detail you should observe is that this is actually a responsibility for sales reps. If they call the shots, they need to mean it. If B.A.N.T. is not enough for them, they need to justify it.

• Bring both together for PIM – Product Information Management requires the participation of both parties precisely because the sheer volume of it can be a problem for both of them. Let them all agree on the limits of prospect understanding so they’ll know how to best implement the right practices and the right technology.

• Equalize the responsibilities of both – Lead generators are responsible for creating leads. Sales reps are responsible for following them up. Avoid making one job more important than the other’s. Marketers have the responsibility of making sure a lead is properly qualified to the letter and sales reps must follow up without any take-backs regarding the standards they’ve set up.

When you firmly assign responsibility, it’s harder to point fingers. You make sure that both parties faithfully live up to each other’s expectations. Be it in human relationships or in business processes, that’s one simple way to keep it from growing complicated.

It rolls off your tongue

It’s habit.  “Sales & Marketing.”  It’s simply what we call it.  All of us.

And habit and repetition make it fact – “fact” pregnant with whatever connotations each of us imbues it with.

Wrong name for an old model

The problem is that the B2B world associates the term with a traditional model which is decreasingly effective.  But as long as we persist in using the term, all discussions around strategies and tactics to improve results will be interpreted in the context of the model which is inexorably linked to the term casually and reflexively used.

Industrial marketing used to be an internal function – and generally one which was accorded somewhat less prestige and importance than its “sales” sibling.  Certainly competitive analysis, pricing, product marketing, product road maps and other functions were and remain valuable and necessary.

But often, particularly in SMBs, marketing was viewed as arranging trade show participation and details, planning direct mail campaigns and designing magazine ads. Of course there were some brochures and presentations to design and an occasional video to produce.  But all of that was oriented around providing the tools to the sales team – the beans and bullets to the front line warriors.

A different era – when B2B sales reps controlled the conversation

There was a time when the direct sales team really controlled the sales process.  They were the repository of information which wasn’t otherwise available to prospects and buyers.

Of course we all know that has changed.  We understand it intellectually – of course the availability of information on the internet doomed the rainmaker juggernaut.  And we understand it emotionally – each of us who is responsible for growing business profitably simply feels that it’s different, and potentially harder than it used to be.

Now there’s less and less selling and more and more buying.  Buyers manage the process according to their terms – and statistically are loathe to speak to a rep until they are 70% of the way through their buying process.

Self service sales

But buyers still go through the same process – perhaps even a more extensive process than they used to.  And if they aren’t navigating that process with a direct sales rep as their pilot, then they are doing it on their own using the results Google serves as their map.

That means that “sales” now increasingly happens virtually.  Many of the same steps still occur (bonding and rapport as credibility building; needs assessment as problem research; competitive comparison and budget throughout the process) but they happen in private.  Sellers have none of the traditional interactions by which to gauge their position.

The problem is that the sellers still assume they are selling once they have active leads…and the marketers still think their role is to generate early stage leads.  And the bulk of the sales/buying process is falling into no-man’s land between parochial and traditional marketing & sales stovepipes.

Time for managers to manage

There’s a straightforward solution.  When you sit down to work on your annual budget and someone suggests incremental adjustments to “Sales & Marketing” throw the BS flag.  Stand up and manage.  Take the organization through the process of divorcing your critical business development process from a dysfunctional and outdated model, and embrace an approach which mirrors today’s buying habits.

It’s really a bit of marketing research which informs a sales continuum.  Much of that B2B sales continuum is virtual and digital (whether that feels comfortable or not.)  But each buyer is different and today’s superb sales folks understand instinctively how to engage at what point in the process, to complement the buyers experience.

If you’ve got a team of brochure designers and cold calling direct reps you may struggle.  If you’ve got savvy, intelligent, strategic-thinking team-players then you have the required building blocks who need guidance and direction.

But whether you have the right team now or not, buyers have changed their behavior.  Simply referring to your growth function as “Sales & Marketing” disregards the change as well as the adaptation required of your business.

Change your language, change your behaviors and change your business fortunes….or not.  Your call.

image – benstroup