Rnordman

In our previous entries, we have already mentioned and discussed the fact that users of mobile devices are an action-oriented group of customers. When it comes to research, they very often start it on their smartphone or tablet and finalize their decisions later on via desktop device or offline, e.g. in the company’s shop. Today we would like to focus on one of the aspects of encouraging the customers to contact you during their research.

According to research made by Google, 61% of people claim that it is very important for them when they have the possibility to call the business during their decision making process. This is when click-to-call buttons come in handy. Below, we will try to show you the importance of those tiny thingies and give some nice advice.

Small Element with High Numbers

First of all, adding a click-to-call button to your webpage is a great way of helping the potential customer contact you during their research process. Why? Well, there are numbers that prove these benefits.

Google surveyed 3,000 mobile searchers and asked them direct questions concerning click-to-call buttons to define the role of those buttons in the customers’ decision making process. About 70% of the searchers tend to use click-to-call buttons (and when compare it to the previously mentioned 61% we see nice efficiency here).

What is more, 47% of the surveyed mobile users claim that if a business does not have its phone number as one of the search engine results, they will more likely check other brands. When it comes to numbers for specific businesses, local services and auto services are among top vertical industries the clients would likely call if there was a click-to-call number provided; about 69% of the surveyed searchers answered for local services and 60% for auto. But, regardless the type of business, it is visible that if you want to build a good image of your brand, you need to apply those buttons!

Why Do They Call?

In the survey, many people gave reasons for using click-to-call buttons rather that contacting via website or other means. The most frequent answer (59%) was that this gives the ability to quickly achieve what you need. Some of them (57%) think that talking to a real person is a significant factor, while there is also the possibility to ask questions and receive information that is not on the website (54%). Speaking of possibilities, the surveyed people also claim that you can definitely achieve more with a phone call than by website (44%) and the information you get are more accurate (43%).

Ok, but what they exactly want to accomplish when calling a business? Well, people call to perform a variety of actions. Most of them want to just check the business hours, make an appointment (or reservation) and ask questions concerning availability of a certain product or service. The less frequent actions mentioned are pricing comparisons, inquiries about promotions, or just calling in order to get directions or local information. As we can see, people use or want to use click-to-call buttons to perform various tasks. What happens when they do not have this possibility? The most frequent answers are that these potential customers just find it frustrating and most likely go away to visit websites’ of other brands. Many of the surveyed mobile users feel disappointed by your company.

Check out some of our customers’ websites where click-to-call buttons are everywhere, so that they improve their business efficiency:

No More Disappointment

We hope that we have managed to present the big meaning of this small-sized element. Lack of a click-to-call button greatly harms the image of your brand. Over 40 million phone calls are made thanks to Google ads. Then, reconsider implementing click-to-call buttons, so that you will not disappoint potential customers and keep your image flawless.

Rackspace customer Mark Cuban Companies relies on Rackspace Managed Cloud to power many of its businesses and recommends it to a number of its startups to help them avoid being swallowed up by the Shark Tank Effect.

Is it necessary to pre-qualify inbound leads? That’s the overarching question I recently presented to a panel of industry experts. Over the course of this three part series, you’ll hear from 15 leading voices in the world of B2B sales, marketing and lead generation, as they share their insight in response to the following questions:

• Are companies wise to invest money and time to pre-qualify inbound leads from marketing automation systems that have been assigned a “perfect” lead score?
• Should CMOs feel confident that these leads from marketing automation are ready for sales to close?
• Without additional qualification measures (such as tele-qualifying), will these leads inevitably clog and choke the sales pipeline?

I'm really enjoying my series of videos with top selling author Jeffrey Gitomer. He is a great thought leader who is always thinking about the future and energizing audiences with his enthusiasm and new ideas. In the video above, we discuss how mobile devices have changed the game of sales. As he points out, more than 70% of social is mobile. If you don't develop a mobile strategy now, you are dead in the water. Watch the video above to see his tips on how to develop a winning mobile strategy that will keep you selling successfully now and in...

Alzheimer’s disease is a form of dementia that affects millions of Americans. This condition is more common in older adults, but has been known to appear in younger adults, as well. This disease has both mental and physical implications that can impact a senior’s independence. As Alzheimer’s progresses, it can also impair basic bodily functions. Since Alzheimer’s is such a widespread disease in the United States, it’s important to understand the intricacies of it, its prevalence and cost. Let’s take a look at Alzheimer’s in the following infographic.

VAISHALI, India – The executives mingled over tea and sugar cookies, and the chatter was upbeat. Their industry, they said at the conference in the Indian capital, saves lives and brings roofs, walls and pipes to some of the world’s poorest people.

The industry’s wonder product, though, is one whose very name evokes the opposite: asbestos. A largely outlawed scourge to the developed world, it is still going strong in the developing one, and killing tens of thousands of people each year.

“We’re here not only to run our businesses, but to also serve the nation,” said Abhaya Shankar, a director of India’s Asbestos Cement Products Manufacturers Association.

In India, the world’s biggest asbestos importer, it’s a $2 billion industry with double-digit annual growth, at least 100 manufacturing plants and some 300,000 jobs.

The International Labor Organization, World Health Organization, the wider medical community and more than 50 countries say the mineral should be banned. Asbestos fibers lodge in the lungs and cause many diseases. The ILO estimates 100,000 people die every year from workplace exposure, and experts believe thousands more die from exposure outside the workplace.

The asbestos executives who gathered in the ballroom of a luxury New Delhi hotel wanted to knock down those concerns. The risks are overblown, many said, and scientists and officials from rich Western nations who cite copious research showing it causes cancer are distorting the facts.

More than two-thirds of India’s 1.2 billion people live in poverty on less than $1.25 a day, including hundreds of millions still in makeshift rural dwellings that offer little protection from insects, harsh weather and roaming predators such as tigers and leopards.

“These are huge numbers. We’re talking about millions of people,” Shankar said. “So there is a lot of latent demand.”

Yet there are some poor Indians trying to keep asbestos out of their communities, even as the government supports the industry by lowering import duties and using asbestos in construction of subsidized housing.

“People outside of India, they must be wondering what kind of fools we are,” said Ajit Kumar Singh from the Indian Red Cross Society. “They don’t use it. They must wonder why we would.”

___

In the ancient farming village of Vaishali, in impoverished Bihar state, the first word about the dangers of asbestos came from chemistry and biology textbooks that a boy in a neighbouring town brought home from school, according to villagers interviewed by The Associated Press.

A company was proposing an asbestos plant in the village of 1,500 people located about 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) east of New Delhi.

The villagers worried that asbestos fibers could blow from the factory across their wheat, rice and potato fields and into their tiny mud-and-thatch homes. Their children, they said, could contract lung diseases most Indian doctors would never test for, let alone treat. Neither India nor any of its 29 states keep statistics on how many people might be affected by asbestos.

The people of Vaishali began protesting in January 2011. They objected that the structure would be closer to their homes than the legal limit of 500 metres (1,640 feet). Still, bricks were laid, temporary management offices were built and a hulking skeleton of steel beams went up across the tree-studded landscape.

The villagers circulated a petition demanding the factory be halted. But in December 2012, its permit was renewed, inciting more than 6,000 people from the region to rally on a main road, blocking traffic for 11 hours. They gave speeches and chanted “Asbestos causes cancer.”

Amid the chaos, a few dozen villagers took matters into their own hands, pulling down the partially built factory, brick by brick.

“It was a moment of desperation. No one was listening to us,” said a villager involved in the demolition, a teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company. “There was no other way for us to express our outrage.”

Within four hours, the factory and offices were demolished: bricks, beams, pipes and asbestos roofing, all torn down. The steel frame was the only remnant left standing.

“Still, we did not feel triumphant,” the teacher said. “We knew it wasn’t over.”

They were right. The company filed lawsuits, still pending, against several villagers, alleging vandalism and theft.

___

Durable and heat-resistant, asbestos was long a favourite insulation material in the West, but has also been used in everything from shoes and dental fillings to fireproofing sprays, brake linings and ceiling tiles.

Scientists and medical experts overwhelmingly agree that inhaling any form of asbestos can lead to deadly diseases including mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis, or the scarring of the lungs. Exposure may also lead to other debilitating ailments, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

About 125 million people worldwide are exposed to asbestos at work each year, the WHO says. Because the disease typically takes 20 to 40 years to manifest, workers can go through their careers without realizing they are getting sick.

Dozens of countries including Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and all European Union nations have banned asbestos entirely. Others including the United States have severely curtailed its use.

Most asbestos on the world market today comes from Russia. Brazil, Kazakhstan and China also export, though some have been reviewing their positions.

Canada’s Quebec province was the world’s biggest asbestos producer for much of the 20th century. It got out of the business in 2012, after a new provincial government questioned why it was mining and exporting a material its own citizens shunned.

Asia is the biggest market. India last year imported $235 million worth of the stuff, or about half of the global trade.

The global asbestos lobby says the mineral has been unfairly maligned by Western nations that used it irresponsibly. It also says one of the six forms of asbestos is safe: chrysotile, or white asbestos, which accounts for more than 95 per cent of all asbestos used since 1900, and all of what’s used today.

“Chrysotile you can eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner!” said Kanat Kapbayel of Kazakhstan’s United Minerals and a board member of the International Chrysotile Association.

Chrysotile is a serpentine mineral, meaning its fibers are curly and more flexible than the other more jagged and sharp forms called amphiboles. The lobby and its supporters say this distinction makes all the difference.

A vast majority of experts in science and medicine reject this.

“A rigorous review of the epidemiological evidence confirms that all types of asbestos fiber are causally implicated in the development of various diseases and premature death,” the Joint Policy Committee of the Societies of Epidemiology said in a 2012 position statement.

Squeezed out of the industrialized world, the asbestos industry is trying to build up new markets and has created lobbying organizations to help it sell asbestos to poor countries, particularly in Asia, it said.

___

Developed nations are still reckoning with health and economic consequences from past asbestos use.

American businesses have paid out at least $1.3 billion in the largest and longest-running collection of personal injury lawsuits in U.S. legal history, according to a 2012 report by the California-based Rand research corporation. Two years ago, an Italian court sentenced two businessmen from Swiss building material maker Eternit AG to 16 years in prison for negligence leading to more than 2,000 asbestos-related deaths. Billions of dollars have been spent stripping asbestos from buildings in the U.S. and Europe.

Arun Saraf, the Indian asbestos association’s chairman, said India has learned from the West’s mistakes.

He said the lobby’s 15 member companies maintain the strictest safety standards in their factories. That includes limiting airborne dust, properly disposing of waste and insisting employees wear safety masks, gloves and protective clothing.

The vast majority of asbestos used in India is mixed with cement and poured into moulds for corrugated roof sheets, wall panels or pipes. Fibers can be released when the sheets are sawed or hammered, and when wear and weather break them down. Scientists say those released fibers are just as dangerous as the raw mineral.

AP journalists who visited a working factory and a shuttered one in Bihar found both had dumped broken sheets and raw material in fields or uncovered pits within the factory premises. Workers without any safety gear were seen handling the broken sheets at both factories. The working factory was operated by Ramco Industries Ltd., while the other owned by Nibhi Industries Pvt. Ltd. was supplying materials to UAL Industries Ltd.

Saraf, who is also UAL’s managing director, said the materials left strewn across the factory grounds were meant to be pulverized and recycled into new roofing sheets, and were no more dangerous than the final product as the asbestos had already been mixed with cement.

He said Nibhi was not an association member, but “I have been informed that Nibhi workers are provided with all the personal protective equipment.”

Some employees of Ramco’s working factory said they were satisfied that asbestos was safe, and were delighted by the benefits of steady work. But several former employees of both factories said they were given masks only on inspection days, and rarely if ever had medical checkups. None was aware that going home with asbestos fibers on their clothing or hair could put their families at risk.

Ramco CEO Prem Shanker said all employees working in areas where asbestos was kept unmixed were given safety equipment and regular medical checkups that were reviewed by government authorities. “Ramco has consistently gone the extra mile to ensure a safe working environment,” he said. AP was not given permission to visit these indoor areas.

Indian customers like the asbestos sheets because they’re sturdy, heat resistant and quieter in the rain than tin or fiberglass. But most of all, they’re cheap.

Umesh Kumar, a roadside vendor in Bihar’s capital of Patna, sells precut 3-by-1 metre (10-by-3 foot) asbestos cement sheets for 600 rupees ($10) each. A tin or a fiberglass sheet of similar strength costs 800 rupees.

“I’ve known it’s a health hazard for about 10 years, but what can we do? This is a country of poor people, and for less money they can have a roof over their heads,” Kumar said.

“These people are not aware” of the health risks, he said. But as sellers of asbestos sheets wanting to stay in business, “we’re not able to tell them much.”

___

The two-day asbestos conference in December was billed as scientific. But organizers said they had no new research.

One could say they’ve gone back in time to defend their products.

The Indian asbestos lobby’s website refers to 1998 WHO guidelines for controlled use of chrysotile, but skips updated WHO advice from 2007 suggesting that all asbestos be banned. The lobby also ignores the ILO’s 2006 recommendation to ban asbestos, and refers only to its 1996 suggestion of strict regulations.

When asked why the association ignored the most recent advice, its executive director, John Nicodemus, waved his hand dismissively. “The WHO is scaremongering,” he said.

Many of the speakers are regulars at asbestos conferences around the world, including in Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia, Ukraine and Indonesia.

American Robert Nolan, who heads a New York-based organization called Environmental Studies International, told the Indian delegates that “a ban is a little like a taboo in a primitive society,” and that those who ban asbestos are “not looking at the facts.”

David Bernstein, an American-born toxicologist based in Geneva, said that although chrysotile can cause disease if inhaled in large quantities or for prolonged periods, so could any tiny particle. He has published dozens of chrysotile-friendly studies and consulted for the Quebec-based Chrysotile Institute, which lost its Canadian government funding and shut down in 2012.

When asked by an audience member about funding for his research, he said some has come from chrysotile interests without elaborating on how much. A short-term study generally costs about $500,000, he said, and a long-term research project can cost up to about $4 million.

He presented an animated video demonstrating how one special kind of human blood cell called a macrophage can engulf a squiggly white asbestos fiber, dissolve it in acid and carry it out of the lungs. He said his research concludes that smaller doses for shorter periods “produce no fibrosis.”

“We have defence mechanisms. Our lungs are remarkable,” Bernstein said. To suffer any health problems, “you have to live long enough.”

Other researchers have drawn different conclusions. Their studies indicate that most chrysotile isn’t eliminated but ends up in the membrane lining the lungs, where the rare malignancy mesothelioma develops and chews through the chest wall, leading to excruciating death.

Research such as Bernstein’s frustrates retired U.S. Assistant Surgeon General Dr. Richard Lemen, who has studied asbestos since 1970 and first advocated a chrysotile ban in 1976.

“His presentation is pretty slick, and when he puts it on animation mode, people think: ‘Wow, he must know what he’s talking about,’” Lemen said by telephone from Atlanta. But Bernstein or Nolan “would get shot down if they stood up and talked about their research” at a legitimate scientific conference, he said.

Debate has ended for richer countries, but that has not stopped asbestos use in poorer ones, Lemen said.

“I’ve been saying the same thing over and over for 40 years. You feel like Sisyphus rolling the stone up the hill, and it comes back down.”

___

Research conducted around the world has not convinced some Indian officials, who say there is not enough evidence to prove a link between chrysotile and disease in India.

Gopal Krishna, an activist with the Ban Asbestos India, calls this argument “ridiculous.”

“Are they saying Indian people’s lungs are different than people’s in the West?”

The permit for the asbestos plant in Vaishali was cancelled by Bihar’s chief minister last year after prolonged agitation, but some in his government still rejected that the mineral is hazardous.

“From the scientific information I have received, there is no direct health hazard with asbestos production,” said Dipak Kumar Singh, who until recently was Bihar’s environment secretary and oversaw industrial zones at the same time. He’s now in charge of water management.

The state health secretary, Deepak Kumar, disagreed.

“It’s not safe,” he said. “Of course it can affect the health system, create a burden for us all and especially the poor.”

India in 1986 placed a moratorium on licensing any new asbestos mining, but has never banned use of the mineral despite two Supreme Court rulings ordering lawmakers to bring the law in line with ILO standards.

Last year, an Indian delegation travelled to Geneva to join Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Vietnam in opposing the listing of chrysotile as a hazardous chemical under the international Rotterdam Convention, which governs the labeling and trade of dangerous chemicals. Without unanimous support among the convention’s 154 members, the effort to list chrysotile failed again.

An Indian Labor Ministry advisory committee set up in 2012 to give a recommendation on asbestos has yet to release a report. The Health Ministry has said asbestos is harmful, but that it has no power to do anything about it. The Environment Ministry continues to approve new factories even as it says asbestos may be phased out.

The position of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s new government is unclear, but during 12 years as chief minister of Gujarat state, Modi oversaw a boom in asbestos manufacturing and in the asbestos-laden ship-breaking industry.

Meanwhile, village-level resistance continues. Vaishali sparked other protests, including in the nearby district of Bhojpur.

“We’ll start a people’s revolution if we have to,” said blacksmith Dharmatma Sharma, founder of a local environmental group.

“Many people are not aware of the effects, especially the illiterate,” said Madan Prasad Gupta, a village leader in Bhojpur, while sipping tea with other villagers at the roadside tea shop he built decades ago when he had no idea what asbestos was.

Over his head: a broken, crumbling asbestos cement roof.

___

Follow Katy Daigle on Twitter at http://twitter.com/katydaigle

The post Asbestos going strong in developing world, where industry glosses over scientific consensus appeared first on Canadian Business.

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In a few weeks, thousands of students will enter the college campuses of our country, dreading the hundreds of dollars they’ll have to spend on textbooks, several of which they’ll barely open.

But one startup, Packback, just closed $1 million in seed funding to attempt to help these young adults. Its short-term digital textbook rental business has a presence today in 80 college campuses and touts 1,500 customers.

Unlike the traditional e-textbook model in which students can download textbooks in digital form for slightly lower prices than they’d pay for hard copies, or the hard-copy semester-long rentals many college bookstores offer for half the price of the purchase, Packback charges between $3 and $5 for a 24-hour rental of a digital textbook.

While this model might not work for all classes (we’ve all had those classes that required us to be glued to our textbook every night), it could be a good alternative for many classes where professors assign reference books that end up being used only for a paper or project.

Packback is currently partnered with McGraw-Hill Higher Education, one of the largest publishers of college textbooks, a deal it struck back in March 2012, and the two companies piloted a program at Illinois State University, where the founders went to college, starting in August 2013. During the pilot program, Packback offered textbooks for 21 courses on the campus. The company is also currently working on teaming up with additional pilot partners.

“There’s a severe public misperception of the higher education publishing industry as being overly conservative and stagnant in evolving towards digital. We’ve found this to be simply untrue and are excited to have established strong working relationships with some of the most innovative thought leaders in the space,” said Pacback co-founder Mike Shannon in a statement.

“These companies have truly evolved from traditional publishing companies to digital learning companies, and we’re pleased with Packback’s role in the industry’s continued evolution,” he said.

As mentioned, Packback is not the only player in the digital textbook field. Companies such as Boundless, Flat World, Flooved, and Chegg, among others, are all taking on the digital textbook challenge with their own flavor of business model. Even tech giants Apple and Amazon are in the game, offering digital textbooks through their respective e-reader platforms. Last week, Chegg, which went public last summer and is best known for its print and digital textbook business, reported $64.5 million in total revenue for Q2 2014, with roughly 29% of it coming from digital, slightly missing its digital revenue guidance for the quarter.

Packback appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank television show, during which it secured famed investor Mark Cuban’s investment of $250,000, a significant chunk of the $1 million in funding the company has just closed. Howard Tullman, Mark Achler, Mark Tebbe, Rishi Shah, and several other angel investors also contributed to the round.

Packback was founded in 2013 by Kasey Gandham, Mike Shannon, and Jessica Tenuta, and is located in Chicago, Ill.

Chegg, the student hub, is transforming the way millions of students learn by connecting them to the people and tools needed to succeed in college. As a part of the company's philanthropic efforts, Chegg is dedicated to its Chegg For... read more »

Since Mark Cuban purchased the Dallas Mavericks on Jan. 4, 2000, the team has become one of the NBA’s most successful franchises. Under Cuban, Dallas has won 50 or more games in 11 consecutive seasons, including three 60-victory seas... read more »

Why do so many B2B software demonstrations fail to move the customer to do anything beyond hoping that it might end soon? Why do they so often descend into a serial showcase of irrelevant functionality?

In short, why are so many demos so bad? I’ve sat through too many truly tedious demonstrations in my time. No doubt you have, as well (if not, you’ve clearly led a charmed and blameless life).

So what’s wrong? I think there’s a simple explanation: too many salespeople are demonstrating the wrong things. Let me explain what I mean…

By the way, my comments relate to demonstrating complex, high-value B2B software applications – the sort of solutions that customers buy to help them address important, high-impact business issues. The sort of solutions for which self-paced demos are typically inadequate.

A different type of demo is required

And therein lies the challenge. Assuming that you’re demonstrating to a businessperson, rather than a geek with a salary, your audience probably isn’t half as much interested in your product features or functions as they are in hoping that you will demonstrate how you can help them solve an important business problem.

Rushing through a stream of your finest product features in the hope that the audience can relate a few of them to their business situation isn’t going to help – in fact, it can only serve to make matters worse.

Start with the problem, not the product

But here’s the issue: if your salespeople are to demonstrate how your solution could help your prospect to solve an important business problem, they need to understand the problem in the first place.

They need to understand how the problem arose in the first place, how it was recognised, what the symptoms and consequences are, who else is affected, how the prospect has previously tried to deal with it, and why the prospect needs to solve it now.

Discovery must come before demonstration

In short, they need to do their research ahead of time. They have no hope of demonstrating your “solution” if they haven’t defined the customer’s problem – and they will inevitably be reduced to showcasing a stream of bits on a screen.

That’s why a period of detailed discovery needs to precede the demo – even if it means postponing the demo – and why the demo needs to be about their problems and your proposed solution to them, and not about your product.

Diving straight into the product is almost always a bad idea. Great demos start by setting the scene, by exploring the issues and their consequences, and by seeking agreement about the need for change.

Themes and narratives

Great demos have a theme, and a narrative. They specifically showcase how often a tiny fraction of your solution’s total capabilities can be used in the context of the prospect’s particular business situation. They tell a story. They contrast the before-and-after.

They are supported by anecdotes that illustrate how some of your existing customers have followed a similar path, and highlight the results that can be achieved. They follow the dictum “less is more”. And they avoid overloading the audience with irrelevances.

Prepare – or fail

But there’s an obvious challenge: great demos require preparation. They require a familiarity with the prospect’s problem, and with how others have managed to solve it with your help. They require the discipline to restrict the presentation to what really matters.

They require that you employ smart sales people and a similarly smart supporting cast. They require upfront research. They depend on establishing clear goals and success measures for the demo and agreeing them with the prospect.

They require that you anticipate the interests, concerns and motivations of every member of the prospect team that is attending the demo, and not just what your sponsor or champion wants to see or hear.

More than product familiarity

One last point: your sales people still need to be familiar with the details of your product and the techniques for successfully showing it off. It’s just that product familiarity isn’t enough – you need product familiarity in the customer’s context.

Yes, this all involves hard work. But the alternative – of perpetuating tedious, irrelevant demos that are more likely to turn the prospect off than on – is ultimately much harder.

By the way, if you liked this article, I think you might also like “Steering sales people away from the 3Ds: Demo, Discount, Develop“.

Finally: choosing when to do a demo is just one element of implementing a buyer-aligned sales process and just part of implementing proactive pipeline management. To find out more, please request a copy of our latest guide.

The post 3 Invisible Elements Your Sales Page Needs to Convert (One is Truly Unique) appeared first on Copyblogger.

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In season three of Mad Men, Sterling Cooper’s rainmakers — including Don Draper and Roger Sterling — are planning to leave the ad agency and to take as many clients as possible with them. They’re in the firm’s Manhattan offices on a Sunday morning, plotting their exit, when the knowledge dawns: they don’t know where the client files are. They stare at each other, aghast. Fans everywhere screamed, “Joan! Get Joan!!” And indeed, the hyper-competent office manager, Joan Holloway, joins the men in the next scene, finds the files, and later recreates Sterling Cooper’s smooth-running routines in a new agency.

Sekou Bermiss, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, had the same response as the fan base, but from a different perspective: he was well into a research project examining which executives in ad agencies do the most damage when they leave (and add the most value when they don’t) based on data from New York City ad agencies from 1924 to 1996. A paper reporting on that research, co-authored by Johann Peter Murmann, is forthcoming in Strategic Management Journal. I spoke with him about his findings.

HBR: What’s the main takeaway of the research?

Bermiss: We separated the executives into two groups – internally facing people in charge of things like production, HR, and finance, and externally facing people like account executives and creative directors. Then we measured the effect of their departures on firm survival. Losing people from the first group – the internally facing executives – was significantly more damaging than losing people from the second group.

Why do those less-glamorous roles end up mattering more, do you think?

Those people know how the internal business operates – how the pieces fit together – and that turns out to be very valuable knowledge and, more important, fairly difficult to replace.

It’s not that creative people aren’t valuable! Of course they are. But there’s pretty good evidence that they’re more easily replaceable. It’s really hard to replace people who know the firm-specific routines and structures that make an agency competitive. It’s this specific knowledge, like how to manage the cash flow, the people, the production process … but it’s also knowing how the different functions fit together.

Did this finding surprise people?

It surprised people in the industry, yes, partly because all the media attention goes to the creative and account executives. When I discuss the findings, I get asked, “Did you control for this factor…for that factor?” But the truth is, we controlled for everything we could think of, and the data hold up.

Were academics surprised? Not as much. I could have argued it either way, in advance. As an empiricist, I was really curious to see what the data would tell us. We know from prior research that losing executives matters, and that different functional areas have different effects, but nobody had looked at the internal-vs-external question through a mobility lens before.

You didn’t have detailed data on profitability, so the outcome you looked at was firm failure. Is that a worry?

Right, I’d love to have had a complete set of data on firm performance, and I’m looking now at industries where it’s available. But for the larger firms that we can get more specific performance data on, the main effects still hold even after we’ve tortured the data. And remember, small firms do start up and die all the time – survival is a pretty good metric.

Should I be embarrassed that I immediately thought of Don Draper and Joan Holloway when I read about your research?

Not at all! I use clips from the show when I present the research. I’m a huge Mad Men fan.

I’ve set up several LinkedIn Groups for clients in the past few weeks and I have realized it is much more complicated than I originally thought. There is a lot to think about and sometimes there are balls flying from all directions and you aren’t sure where to look next. So, let me help simplify the process a bit.

To create a Group, hover over Interests, click Groups, and then scroll down the right hand side to “Create a Group.”

Then you have to ask yourself: Do I want the Group be Open or Closed? I set up 2 Groups last week. The first was an Open Group for anyone wanting to learn about Wellness. The second was a Closed Group. This means that only the business builders of this Group can join and exchange ideas. Once this first step is complete, we jump in to the technical part.

You have to come up with a name for your Group, and make sure it is still available. How do you do this? Just search the Group name you want in the search bar and see if it pops up.

Next, it’s time to add some imagery:

Group Logo (up to 100×50) 
Your logo will appear in the Group directory and

on your Group pages.

Small Logo (up to 60×30) 
You must upload a large logo in order to have a different small logo.

Hero Image (646×200 or larger)This acts as the large cover image inside your Group, so make it interesting and the right size.

What type of a LinkedIn Group is it? You can choose from:

The LinkedIn Groups that I set up were both professional Groups; a place to exchange ideas, share and gain information.

Then you can add a Description and Summary and link it to your website. You want to explain the purpose of the Group – what it’s for and what you hope everyone will gain from it.

Next, go to the Group Settings section on the left hand side. Here is where you can decide what people can publish in your Group. You do have the option to approve things before they are published, but this can be a lot of work for the administrator and it can hold up the flow of information. So, think about that carefully and decide what’s right for you. There are no set-in-stone rules; and you can always go back and adjust if something isn’t working for you.

Posting Content

There are 3 sections for posting content in Groups- Discussions, Promotions and Jobs. Some features allow LinkedIn to move Jobs, Promotions or Discussions around if a member posts them in the wrong place. It is critical to have a second set of eyes to help put things where they go.

Templates

There is now an area to manage all of the messages you send out to connections. There are 4 templates: 1) Request to join, 2) Welcome message, 3) Decline message, and 4) Decline and Block message. Templates are a great time saver, that help with consistency. We are HUGE believers in templates at Intero.

Invitations

Once you have your Group set up, you want to invite people to join. The easiest way to do this is to send invitations to join the Group. If they accept your invitation, they will automatically become members of your Group. The subject line will have the Group owner’s name in it, and the message cannot be changed. It will say, “I would like you to join my Group on LinkedIn –Group owner’s name.” This is a really easy way to quickly invite all of your connections to join your Group.

Another nice feature is the Pre-Approved People feature. You can add email addresses or upload an entire file of email addresses to this area and those people will be automatically accepted into your Group.

Discussions

Now that your LinkedIn Group is all set up, you need to give people a reason to be there, so add some content. It helps to have a plan for how regularly you will be posting in your Group. People like consistency, so plan to post on the same days of each week.

Groups are like children: they need nurturing and moderating. You need to keep checking in to see what’s going on, to make sure that everyone is being respectful of one another and adding value. In Part 2 of this series I will talk about the best ways to moderate LinkedIn Groups. So, get your gear on in case a fly ball comes your way!

Times are changing. Many of the old school marketing tactics that use to work for marketers in businesses from startups to Fortune 100 organizations no longer work today.

It’s clear there is not a need to send mass numbers of tweets or Facebook updates to fill space. The social inter webs are tearing at the seams with an overwhelming amount of noise. It’s getting harder for brands to stand out and unfortunately many of them are falling to noisy, interruptive and spammy tactics.

It’s not about pushing content to the masses as fast as we can and hoping we get eyeballs, ears and mindshare. Hope is not a strategy, nor is spam.

Smart marketers are quickly learning they must stop the interruption marketing tactics and instead focus on delivering value, meaningful conversation and connecting at the human level with the people within their communities and circle of influence both online and offline.

In this episode of the Social Zoom Factor podcast, I help you do a reality check on if you are interrupting conversations versus providing value. We’ll dig into tactics and strategies to identify such negative strategies and transition to an approach that will deliver much higher result for both you and the members of your social media communities.

Episode Highlights:

• Interruption marketing defined
• Acknowledging if you are guilty of interruption marketing
• How to quit interrupting and start providing value
• The difference between value and noise
• How to talk with your audience, not at them

This post is written by Dale Davidson of The Ancient Wisdom Project and originally appeared on Cal Newport's blog, Study Hacks.

During college, all I wanted to do was become a Navy SEAL. I won an NROTC scholarship, got accepted into training, and was ready to start my career as an operator.

Unfortunately, once I got to training, I realized I didn't want to become a SEAL, and I quit.

Not knowing what to do with my life, I looked to bloggers for help. I discovered Tim Ferriss, and decided that what I needed to do was build a passive-income web business and travel the world.

So I did. I started a (unsuccessful) web business, took off to Egypt to teach and travel, and tried to create the life I thought would make me happy.

The thing is, I wasn't happy. None of the standard blogger advice worked for me. I felt like I would never have a meaningful career or professional life, that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

So a few months ago, I changed strategies. I started to look outside the blogosphere for help. I began studying and practicing ancient religion and philosophy to figure out how to live a meaningful life. Over time, I added some structure to this project and began to blog about it: calling the whole endeavor the Ancient Wisdom Project.

The reason I chose to study ancient sources of wisdom is because they have survived centuries, and in some cases, millennia, of cultural evolution. They must have done so for a reason – they work. It would be a shame to ignore these philosophies and religions and not extract the hard-earned lessons of billions of people over thousands of years, especially if I can apply those lessons to my life today. 

The Rules of the Project

When planning this project, I realized that learning everything about each religion would be impossible. Scholars can spend their entire careers specializing in a single aspect of a religion or philosophy. I want to improve my life now, not in 30 years.

With the goal of self-improvement and not scholarly expertise, I ultimately settled on the following rules to structure my efforts:

1. Every month I identify one positive trait or quality I'd like to cultivate in myself (tranquility, compassion, etc.).
2. I then choose an ancient religion or philosophy that I believe will help me develop that particular trait. These philosophies or religions must be sufficiently ancient (at least 500 years or so) and must still exist in some form today.
3. After I match the religion with the trait, I select one practice from the religion to adopt for a 30-day period that I feel will be particularly useful. Ideally it's a practice that I can perform on a near daily basis.
4. Then I do the practice for a one-month period and study the ancient philosophy or religion in order to maximize the effectiveness of the practice.
5. Finally, I write about the experience on my website.

For example, the first trait I wanted to cultivate was tranquility. After a bit of research, I decided that Stoicism would be perfect for helping me develop this trait.

I then decided to adopt one physical practice and one mental practice.

For the physical practice, I decided to take daily ice baths, (to expose myself to physical hardship), and for the mental practice, I chose negative visualization, the act of imagining all the ways your life could be worse.

Over that 30-day period of ice baths and negative visualization, I learned the importance of managing my perceptions of external events and observed noticeable improvement in my daily anxiety level.

Over the past six months, I've explored several sources of ancient wisdom. In addition to Stoicism, I completed 30-day experiments in Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.

In this article, I want to identify several unexpected pieces of advice from these experiences. I will focus, in particular, on advice relevant to your career, as this is an area that can have a dramatic impact on your wellbeing (for better or worse).

These ideas are not what lifestyle designers will tell you to do, and they aren't always as easy to follow as what you might find in the standard listicle.

But they're based on insights that formed over thousands of years of cultural evolution, and therefore represent some of humankind's best thinking on these issues.

I hope you find this advice as useful as I have…

Contrarian Career Advice from Ancient Sources

Tip 1: Don't pursue promotions.

Promotions are a wonderful tool for companies to motivate their employees. They'll say that if you work hard, you can get a raise and a fancy new title.

For many employees, this is a worthwhile pursuit. There is nothing like external validation and more money to make you feel good about yourself.

But there are two problems with approaching your career this way:

First, promotions are not within your control.

There are a few reasons for this. There are a limited number of positions and titles in any given company. You are restricted by the inherent supply of positions that are available to you.

In addition, someone else will ultimately decide whether you receive a promotion. It might be your boss, it might be a committee, but it's not you. You can't waive a magic wand and give yourself a promotion.

Stoicism, an ancient Greek philosophy, teaches that you should only desire things within your control. Otherwise, you are doomed to be unhappy.

And what is within your control? Here's what Epictetus, a slave turned Stoic sage has to say [Note: All cited passages in this section are from Epictetus]:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Promotions don't fall into the list of things you can control; therefore, you shouldn't desire promotions. If you receive one, you'll soon get used to the new title and larger salary and begin desiring the next promotion. If you are passed over for one, you will be unhappy.

The second major reason you shouldn't seek promotions is that it is likely you will have to compromise something you value in order to attain one.

Are you a creative type in a conservative company? Well, it's unlikely that you'll get a promotion without hiding your creativity to some extent.

Do you like to work on your own but your company emphasizes teamwork? If you stop showing up to meetings, people will question your dedication to the mission.

The pursuit of a promotion will come at a price, and it will sometimes be a price you shouldn't pay.

Is anyone preferred before you at an entertainment, or in a compliment, or in being admitted to a consultation? If these things are good, you ought to be glad that he has gotten them; and if they are evil, don't be grieved that you have not gotten them.

And remember that you cannot, without using the same means [which others do] to acquire things not in our own control, expect to be thought worthy of an equal share of them. For how can he who does not frequent the door of any [great] man, does not attend him, does not praise him, have an equal share with him who does? 

You are unjust, then, and insatiable, if you are unwilling to pay the price for which these things are sold, and would have them for nothing.

Cal Newport, author of the popular blog Study Hacks, says that you should become so good they can't ignore you. I agree that you should become "so good," as that is in your sphere of control, but I say you should be indifferent to whether or not others ignore you. The Stoics would say instead:

"Become so good and stop worrying if others ignore you."

If you happen to win praise and recognition for your good work, great! Just don't let it get to your head. If you do good work and no one cares, be indifferent.

But, for your part, don't wish to be a general, or a senator, or a consul, but to be free; and the only way to this is a contempt of things not in our own control. 

Tip 2: Cultivate humility.

If you've ever taken part in a workplace gripe session with your friends, you know that the conversation usually includes complaints about "idiot coworkers" or "clueless management."

The universality of these comments would make you believe that all employees and bosses everywhere are clueless or evil idiots whose only purpose is to make your work life miserable.

We know this to be false, so what explains this phenomenon?

When you say your coworker or boss is an idiot, the hidden assumption is that you are better than them as human beings. You are not conducting a dispassionate analysis of their behavior and coolly explaining how they can do things better; you're just being arrogant.

This arrogance is making you miserable.

The word Islam, means "submission [to God's will]." Implied in this definition is that you are not the center of the universe, that you shouldn't follow your own desires — you should follow God's desires.

Focusing less on yourself is a key component to humility. Islam reinforces humility by requiring Muslims to pray five times a day (the practice of Salat), which includes a physical act of prostration.

Islam didn't just teach people to practice humility towards God; they also taught that it was important to be humble in the way you relate to others.

Rumi, a famous Sufi poet, once said, "The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize."

Criticism of your coworkers is not really about them; it's about you and your own issues.

In my own experience, I found that by practicing humility, I became happier at work, or at least, less frustrated. If a coworker did something I thought was dumb, I would ask myself, "Am I capable of making similarly stupid mistakes?" Yes, I am. When I thought senior management was making a stupid strategic decision, I asked myself, "Do I know how to run a company better than they do?" No, I don't.

Cultivating a humble attitude towards others at your work will yield better emotional and psychological results than venting at happy hour with your friends.

Tip 3: Ditch work-life balance in favor of sacred rest.

Work-life balance is a hot topic at the moment. We live in an age of distraction and fluid boundaries between work and the rest of our life. We answer work emails at home, personal emails at work. "Leisure" doesn't even seem that relaxing. I'm guilty of binging on Netflix for hours and hours on the weekend. When I'm done, I feel sluggish and unhappy. I'm not working, but I'm not quite resting either.

Modern advice that advocates work-life balance doesn't go far enough. Even the term "work-life balance" doesn't convey the importance of what we need to truly flourish as human beings.

What we need is something like Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest.

Shabbat begins on Friday night and ends on Saturday night. If strictly observed, you are not allowed to cook, write, or really do anything that would be considered work. You are also prohibited from using electronic devices, as that would be considered "igniting a fire" (due to electrical sparks in the circuitry of the device).

Does this seem outdated? Overly strict?

I don't think so. To truly rest, you need to commit yourself to activities that are meaningful and rejuvenating, and ruthlessly cut out those that aren't.

When you can't use your iPhone, buy anything, or even drive, you will naturally do activities that are inherently meaningful. You will spend time with your family, go out for long walks, have fun conversations over long meals (with food you prepared before Shabbat), etc.

It reminds you that you have a life outside of work, that humans aren't "beasts of burden," that our purpose here on Earth goes beyond your career or job.

Consider these words from Abraham Joshua Heschel, a famous Jewish theologian:

The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. "Last in creation, first in intention," the Sabbath is "the end of the creation of heaven and earth."

The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.

Instead of complaining that your work is taking over your life, make some portion outside of your life sacred, so you can truly feel rejuvenated.

Cal says that to achieve a remarkable career, we need to learn the art of deep focus at work.

Judaism would say to achieve a remarkable life, we need to learn the art of deep focus at rest as well.

Tip 4: Pay close attention to your feelings.

I've been a slave to my emotions about my work. During particularly boring work assignments, I've fantasized about quitting my job to start a passive income business and traveling the world. In moments of anger, I've wanted to yell at my boss, make a dramatic speech to my coworkers, and storm out of the office.

I found that most lifestyle design bloggers play upon these (normal) feelings and use it to promote bad advice that will lead you to make bad decisions. If your job is boring, they will tell you to quit for an exciting life as an entrepreneur. They will tell you to find your passion or travel the world regardless of what your individual circumstances are.

Your feelings are important, but you need to learn how to correctly assess your feelings in order to make good decisions.

For this, you should follow the Jesuit (a Catholic order) process called the "Discernment of Spirits."

Father Kevin O'Brien, a Jesuit priest, writes:

In discernment of spirits, we notice the interior movements of our hearts, which include our thoughts, feelings, desires, attractions, and resistances. We determine where they are coming from and where they are leading us; and then we propose to act in a way that leads to greater faith, hope, and love.

We pay attention to feelings of consolation, "an experience of being so on fire with God's love that we feel impelled to praise, love, and serve God and help others as best as we can," and desolation, "an experience of the soul in heavy darkness or turmoil."

There are a number of rules to follow when practicing discernment that are unexpectedly sophisticated for a practice that is 500 years old.

For example, take the Third Rule:

With cause, as well the good Angel as the bad can console the soul, for contrary ends: the good Angel for the profit of the soul, that it may grow and rise from good to better, and the evil Angel, for the contrary, and later on to draw it to his damnable intention and wickedness.

What this says is that just because something you're doing feels bad or painful, it doesn't mean the activity itself is bad.

Say you're on a particularly stressful project at work. You feel exhausted and frustrated, and you think you should quit your job.

A lifestyle design blogger would say, "Of course you should quit! A job you love would never feel stressful or difficult."

A Jesuit, on the other hand, would ask you if maybe these feelings are temporary, and that if the project is a good one, maybe it's worth completing. It asks you to consider that maybe the "bad angel" is trying to trick you into abandoning a worthwhile effort.

You may protest that you don't believe in angels or God or spirits, but that's not the point. The point is that the Jesuits had an advanced process for paying attention to your feelings that will help you make good decisions and avoid bad ones. The process is careful, methodical, and more importantly, tested over centuries of human experience.

I've used discernment when assessing whether or not I should stay at my job. My job generally leaves me with feelings of desolation. It may seem obvious that I need to quit, right?

Wrong. Using discernment, I discovered what I needed was to do something meaningful and that it didn't have to come from my job.

So what did I do? I started volunteering at a homeless-services organization. I spend a few hours every month serving meals to the homeless. This has provided an immense boost to my happiness.

Do I still have negative feelings about my job? Of course, but I found a way to make it tolerable, which gives me time to assess what I really want to do for my career.

If a 500-year old Jesuit practice can help me, an agnostic, it can certainly help you, too.

Conclusion: The ancients were wise; you should listen to them.

None of this advice is as easy or as sexy as the standard, "quit your job, follow your passion" advice that Cal Newport has quite smartly pointed out is nonsense.

It's not that lifestyle design bloggers are purposely trying to lead you astray; I believe they are really trying to help people have meaningful lives and careers.

However, their greatest weakness is that their advice is not time-tested. Careers are fairly new inventions, and we're all trying to figure out how they fit with our lives. So the fact that there is lots of bad advice out there is not surprising.

The ancients did not attempt to provide career advice per se (though some did), but they did teach people how to live good and meaningful lives in a world that is often cruel and indifferent to our desires. This same advice which has helped billions of people over thousands of years is still relevant to our modern lives and, can help us navigate even modern artifacts, like our careers.

To live a good and meaningful life, you're better off following the example of philosophers like Epictetus, Catholic heroes like Saint Ignatius, or Islamic prophets like Mohammed than you are of following advice from the latest lifestyle design blogger.

But what do I know? I'm just a 26-year old blogger.

SEE ALSO: Here's How Marcus Aurelius Got Himself Out Of Bed Every Morning

Join the conversation about this story »

I hope you are generating referrals from your clients.  If you’re not you should be as referrals are one of the most effective, if not the most effective, way of growing your business.  But know that once you have gotten the referral your job is hardly done.  No, I’m not talking about contacting and selling the referred prospect, I’m talking about keeping your client in the loop.

One of the primary reasons clients are hesitant to give referrals is that they are afraid of being embarrassed in front of a friend, relative, acquaintance or co-worker by you not performing as you should.  So, when they do give a referral, they have a vested interest in what’s going on between you and the person to whom they referred you.  Their interest isn’t in whether or not the prospect purchases but in how the prospect perceives you and the value being referred by the client.

When a client gives you a referral, you learn a number of things:

1. The client will give referrals.  Obviously, you just received one or more.
2. How well the client understands what you do.  The quality of the referral will let you know how well your client understands what you do and who is a good referral for you.  The better the referral, the more the client understands.  The poorer the referral, the more work you must do to educate them for future referrals (and future sales to them for that matter).
3. How much they trust you.  Generally, the stronger the trust relationship between the client and the referred prospect, the more the client trusts you.
4. They have more referrals to give.  Seldom will a client give you all of the referrals they can make at one time.  If a client gives referrals, you can almost bet they have more to give—if you keep earning them.

How do you get those additional referrals?  Additional referrals are earned, just as the original referrals were earned.  You earn those additional referrals by:

1. Giving your client the assurance that you’re trustworthy with referrals.  You must show through your actions that their trust in giving you a referral was well placed by making sure that the referred prospect has an exceptional experience with you.
2. By keeping your client fully informed of everything that is occurring with the referred prospect.
3. By continuing to deliver superior service to your client.

Does the above mean that you must perform perfectly with the referred prospect?  What if there was an honest mistake or miscommunication?  What if something out of your control happened during the course of the sale?  Will these incidents destroy any possibility of acquiring additional referrals?

No, not at all.

The keys to gaining additional referrals from a client are to treat the referred prospect exactly in the same manner you treated the client and to keep your client informed of what is transpiring between yourself and the referred prospect.

Your client gave you referrals because they understood that giving referrals was in their own best interests and because you earned them through the service you gave them.  You must now demonstrate that same level of service for the referral they have given you.  They expect—actually demand—you perform at the same level—or higher—for those they refer to as you did for them.  That level of service you gave them was what demonstrated to them that they could trust with a referral.  Anything short of that and they will reevaluate whether you should be trusted with additional referrals.

That having been said, most clients understand that mistakes, miscommunications, and problems arise in business.  A single issue during the course of the sale to a referred prospect, even a major issue, will not sever your ability to gain additional referrals from you client if you address and resolve the issue in an exceptional manner.

Clients don’t expect perfection, they expect exceptional service—both for themselves and for those they refer you to.  How well or poorly you handle the issues will be a major factor in determining your future refer-ability.

Keeping your client informed of the progress of the sale with the referred prospect reassures them that you’re doing your job—and that all is well.  It is also your source of informing them if there have been problems and how they were resolved.

It is critical that you let your client know of issues involved with sales to prospects they have referred you to before the prospect has a chance to relate the incident.  You can relate the circumstances and the resolution in the most favorable light—the prospect may not.  This doesn’t mean that you can lie or gloss over it, just that you can give the background and the full resolution without the emotional involvement the prospect will have.  Of course, if you’ve done an exceptional job of resolving the issue, the tale told by the prospect should also be impressive.  However, you always want problems to be related to your client by you—you don’t want to get a phone call from the client asking what happened.

Keeping your client informed doesn’t mean bombarding them with emails, phone calls, and notes.  A simple “thank you for the referral” card immediately after receiving the referral and the occasional call or email will suffice.  The object is to keep them in the loop and to reassure them that their referral was well made for both you and the prospect.  Even better than the occasional call or email is to explicitly ask the client how and how often they would like to be informed of the progress.

Clients are interested in what’s going on with the referrals they make.  They want to know the prospect is being taken care of in the manner the client expected, and they enjoy knowing that they have provided you with a quality referral.  More importantly, they want to know that they haven’t embarrassed themselves in front of an acquaintance.

Simple actions will earn those additional referrals your clients have—you just have to earn them.

Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That

I had the pleasure to sit down to breakfast the other day with a friend who is an executive coach. We started talking about social media successes and he expressed to me that quite a few of his C-Level (CEO, CFO, CMO, CIO, CTO, etc) clients understand that social networking and social media are the latest and greatest thing in business, but most don’t get why and what it means to them and their businesses. So they send an edict down the line to start using it, and it gets delegated to sales or marketing teams. Some even make the mistake of just hiring a 20 something right out of college because they “Get Technology” and expect them to create content that connects with their 40-60+ year old clients or buyers.

You hear the buzz, read the articles, maybe even attend the webinars or seminars, but are you seeing measurable results with your business Social Media efforts? If not, you are probably being fed some inaccurate concepts and information. There are tons of tools and concepts that tell you to just post content and people will come knocking down your door with new sales, but that is often far from the truth. Media is just that, ads, posts, graphics, video, webinars, and more – a deliverable. What is often missing is the “Social” and “Networking” parts. If you want to catch a fish, worms and fake flies work just fine in most instances. If you want to catch a persons attention, it takes emotion and a relational connection that creates the best results.

Real-ationships

Social Media is all about relationships, and information that connects people. Businesses do not do business with other businesses… People do business with people. Relationships are the currency of business. You (no matter what your position in a company) are part of that equation. C-Level people spend so much time insulating themselves from the minutia of business, that the concept of building, growing and maintaining relationships sounds like a lot of, or too much work. When in fact, the right relationship with other C-Level power partners, buyers, and vendors, can create business opportunities that all your competition can only dream of. Yes it’s takes work, but that does not mean you have to spend 4-5 hours a day on LinkedIn. If you have the proper pieces and plans in place, it can take only minutes a day to obtain measurable and profitable results.

What follows is the three components necessary to create compelling social media that can transform you and your business:

1. Purpose – You would never think of delegating or outsourcing your relationships with family or friends. The purpose of using social media has nothing to do with advertising or marketing – it’s about relationships. Once you grasp this concept, you will see how invaluable tools like LinkedIn can be to you and your business.
2. Process – Every business has it’s own DNA. You can’t just install a cookie-cutter process and assume that it will show results for your business. It’s not just a sales or marketing process, but involves everyone from the receptionist to the Board of Directors. Once you understand how segments of your business like engineering, HR, and you fit into the mix, you can start to benefit from relationship based Social Media.
3. Profits – Combining purpose with a process can create profits. This can create a measurable and repeatable difference for new and untapped business. This happens only by becoming the top of mind option and solution for your top 20% of clients and prospects. Once you learn how to maximize and leverage business relationships with LinkedIn, you can put it all on autopilot and watch business grow like wildfire.

Final Thoughts

If it all sounds too good to be true, it’s not. In one example, a client who started to develop more personal touches with their best customers, saw a big increase in activity. Their engagement quadrupled and showed a measurable increase in revenues and profits. It only took a willingness to learn the “Why” behind the “How,” and then talking with people inside and outside of business to gauge interest and how best to create that engagement. Finally it took some active participation in the process, even if it is managed and monitored by a team. Nothing can replace your smile, handshake, and sincere interactions.

I would love to hear your thoughts, questions and experiences… Comment away!

Most people who visit your website, no matter how well-optimized it is as a sales generator, won’t buy from you the first time they see it. This is especially true when expensive products are involved. It’s also true in the B2B world where buying cycles are often lengthy, complex and require multiple decision makers.

Like so many window shoppers and “tire kickers” in the offline retail world, first-time visitors may be “just looking” but could be convinced if you made an offer that was compelling enough. With effective online marketing you can turn casual shoppers into eager buyers. Today, let’s talk about how.

Remember this, but don’t be discouraged by it: most website visitors won’t buy from you at all. Up to 98% of them will leave without buying and will never come back (effective online marketing can lower this number quite a bit). Most who are at least somewhat interested won’t buy right away.

Chances are that when they are ready to make that buying commitment, they will have long since forgotten about you and will go to one of your competitors, unless you remind them about what you can do for them.

If you’ll do some effective marketing that frequently reminds them about you, many of those will buy from you in the future. How can you do that?

Sales Funnel 101

The term “sales funnel” is used to describe the process visitors go through on their way to becoming qualified leads and ultimately buyers. The sales funnel is the path they follow from the time they first visit your website until they purchase, or drop by the wayside.

Rather than engage in a detailed analysis of funnel performance and structure, let’s talk about a very useful tool for moving prospects through the funnel to a buying decision (more on this in a moment).

Online marketers often become so obsessed with website traffic that they tend to ignore the very important requirement of turning that traffic into leads and customers. Granted, traffic is important. You need plenty of website traffic in order to have a profitable online business. So don’t ignore proven traffic generation strategies such as social media and SEO/SEM.

But place your main focus not on traffic, but rather on converting visitors into buyers. You want to encourage them to spend ample time on your website, not arrive and quickly leave. You want them to return to your site often.

You want them to think about your product or service as a possible solution to the problem they so desperately want solved, the one that drove them to do a web search and visit your site in the first place. You want to attract eager, qualified buyers.

A strong sales funnel can help you do all of these these things. So how do you get visitors to take the journey into and through your funnel? How do you communicate with and nurture a relationship with them, the kind of relationship most likely to lead to a sale in the future?

A proven, very common method is email marketing. You build a responsive email list eager to read the great content you send them. This builds trust and can help them get to know you, two things that can help turn website visitors into eager buyers.

Understand that your visitors aren’t sitting around thinking “I wish I could join another email list. I just don’t have enough to read!” They aren’t anxious to receive more email. So “sell” them on the idea of joining your list. Have a call to action on your email signup form as well as brief snippets of copywriting that hint at the juicy benefits they’ll receive when they do.

Make your email list signup form easy to find. Don’t bury it 5-10 pages deep. You want it to receive maximum exposure. Put it on your homepage and make it impossible to miss!

Offer your website visitors a free valuable report related to your business if they will join your list. For example, let’s say you are a physical fitness trainer running a bootcamp. The ultimate goal of your website, funnel and email marketing is to increase membership in your bootcamp classes.

You are trying to attract prospects that want to enjoy a high level of physical fitness and reach a healthy weight. You could write a special report on effective weight loss strategies, a report you only offer to those who sign up for your email newsletter.

So your website visitors have opted into your email list, and you’ve sent each of them your special report. You now need to email them on a regular basis.

Valuable Free Content!

Remember this content marketing cornerstone philosophy: give the reader plenty of valuable content that he can benefit from even if he never becomes your customer.

But keep in mind your ultimate goal isn’t to give away useful information. It’s to sell your products. Don’t be “over the top” about it, but don’t be afraid to have some very persuasive sales language in your report, including a strong call to action.

Don’t be afraid to sell to your list. You’ve given them valuable free content. If some complain to you or unsubscribe because you include sales messages in your emails, stand your ground and let them complain or unsubscribe.

Wouldn’t you much rather have a smaller, more responsive list that embraced your sales messages and actually bought from you than a large list that resented you trying to sell anything to them and never bought anything, even though they devoured your free content?

A Word On Email Frequency 

So how often should you mail your list? The correct answer is… it depends.

There are lots of opinions on this subject. Some email marketers are adamant opposed to sending emails more than once every week or two. Some are very successful sending email every day. It might take a while to arrive at your optimal solution. This is something you will want to test and refine over time.

As far as when you should send your emails, this also depends, and it’s something you should test. Some days and times will be more effective than others. It also stands to reason that optimal B2B send times will be different than B2C.

For B2B, don’t send emails to your list on Mondays, but try and test sending them on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Avoid Fridays. Consider sending B2C emails on Sunday. A lot of people check their personal email and do online shopping Sunday afternoons and evenings.

If you’ve decided to try sending emails more than once a week, the main advice I have is to test. See what appears to be working, and do more of it. Avoid repeating what didn’t work.

Most people who visit your website will never buy from you. Not everyone who joins your email list will become a buyer. But by using effective email marketing as part of your online sales funnel, you will win the business of a substantial percentage of those who visited your website initially but weren’t ready to buy at the time, and would have forgotten about you if you had not reached out to them often.

As you send emails over time to those prospects in your funnel, some will be prompted to buy from you. Email marketing, done well, is a very effective tool for moving prospects through your funnel. Granted, some will unsubscribe from your list and will exit your funnel before they buy.

Don’t worry about this. Not everyone on your list will be a true prospect for your products. Understand your target market intimately, and write to them. Don’t worry when those who aren’t part of your target market drop out of your funnel.

An Online Marketing Tool You Need! 

To be effective, an online sales funnel is going to require lots of work to set up and maintain. When casual, first-time visitors become eager, qualified leads, they are valuable to you! But they aren’t yet sold. You haven’t converted them from lead to customer, and you can still lose out on their business.

As we’ve often said on this blog, the online marketing process is fragile. Potential customers can suddenly drop out because they lost interest or got distracted.

You want every part of your online marketing machinery to be “well-oiled” and “dialed in”. And your landing pages are no exception. They are an important piece of your online marketing puzzle.

You can have all of the steps leading up to the point of conversion operating smoothly and then lose sale after sale because of a poorly performing landing page.

So it’s worth it to focus on the elements that make up a great landing page – copywriting and content, design, including graphics and images, call to action button placement and so on. It all matters.

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Three and a half years after modern electric cars entered the mass market, there are now no fewer than 17 models on sale in the U.S.

But that impressive number shouldn’t disguise a fundamental truth about the current state of the plug-in electric cars offered today: Only three of them are widely available nationwide.

Those three are the Chevrolet Volt, Nissan Leaf, and Tesla Model S.

Holding back the market

“The single biggest issue holding plug-in electric vehicles back at this point is lack of available product,” says noted electric-car advocate Chelsea Sexton.

“It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s true–even as there are many other challenges to address.”

And it’s not clear that buyers who don’t follow the market closely recognize the differences in availability among electric cars they may read about or see on television.

Plug-in cars on sale today fall into roughly three groups–though there are exceptions and qualifiers for many of them.

Volume or maybe specialty car

The Nissan Leaf, the best-selling electric car in the world, is available as a standard part of Nissan’s product line at most dealers–and the same applies to the Volt at Chevy dealers.

Sales of both cars are clustered in certain areas, though, so while dealers may have one car on the lot, the Leaf or Volt may not be a high-volume item for some dealers. In Plains states or locations with no incentives for plug-in cars, it may be viewed by dealers as a specialty car more akin to a GT-R or a Corvette than a volume car.

Still, you can get a Leaf or a Volt from at least one dealer in all 50 states.

And as for the Tesla Model S, because you order the car online, it can be delivered in any state as far as we know.

Compliance cars

On the other end of the scale are the California compliance cars, whose makers sell them in very low numbers solely to meet the state’s zero-emission vehicle requirements.

Those are the Chevy Spark EV, Fiat 500e, Honda Fit EV, and Toyota RAV4 EV.

ALSO SEE: Electric Cars: Some Are Real, Most Are Only ‘Compliance Cars’–We Name Names

The Spark and Fit are offered in a few other states (Oregon and the Northeast, respectively) whose regulations match California’s, but all four cars are limited in volume to what’s needed to meet the California law.

Arguably the Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid falls into this category as well; its sales roughly track those of the Fit EV, and it’s only sold in California and the Northeast as well.

Low-volume, in-between cars

It’s between those two poles–compliance cars and volume cars–that things get more complicated and qualified.

The common thread, however, is that these nine vehicles are not widely available–for a variety of different reasons–and they sell in low volumes.

Take three cars with plugs that are about as diverse as you can get: the Mitsubishi i-MiEV battery-electric minicar, the Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid, and the Smart ForTwo Electric Drive.

All three makers simply have far fewer dealers than the volume car companies, so simply finding a place that might sell you any of their cars is harder to start with.

Smarts are a specialized car largely sold in cities; Porsches are wildly expensive and dealers are sited largely in affluent communities; and Mitsubishi is a struggling volume brand that doesn’t have the resources to go head-to-head against the likes of Chevrolet, Nissan, and Toyota.

The Ford Focus Electric stands in its own category: Ford makes it available outside the California-rules states, at least nominally, but it sells only at compliance-car levels.

Worse, the company and its sales people routinely talk the Focus Electric down, saying there’s little market for the car–and Ford clearly prefers to sell its hybrids and the associated Energi plug-in hybrids instead.

The Focus Electric is similar to the high-selling Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid, in fact: While it’s nominally available in many areas, the reality may be that even if dealers are certified to sell the cars, they may not be available.

They may sit at the back of the lot, the salespeople may not know anything about the car, or the dealer may not have sold one for months–meaning that determined buyers may have to travel far away from their nearest dealer to buy one.

More worrisome than you’d think

All of this concerns electric-car advocates, who suggest that happy talk about the many plug-in cars available obscures the on-the-ground reality: For huge numbers of buyers who don’t live in California or the Northeast, there are only three electric-car options available.

Of those, one carries a base price of $69,900: more than twice the $32,000 price of the average car sold today.

And the challenge with having only the Leaf and the Volt is that not everyone wants a compact hatchback.

“I’ve been harping on this point and its ramifications publicly since 2011 at least,” said advocate and consultant Chelsea Sexton: “As long as there are only three volume carmakers in the game, the market will inherently be limited.”

No one single plug-in car

“Just as there is no single gas car for everyone, neither will there be a single plug-in–and for now, there are literally only one battery-electric vehicle (the Nissan Leaf) and one range-extended electric car (the Chevy Volt) under $50,000 available throughout the U.S.”

The downsides to that reality are many: Analyst conclusions about market desire for, and viability of, plug-in electric cars is based largely on the sales of just two models. Which means they could be making their decisions based on bad, or at least insufficient, data.

“While Leaf sales say a lot about the market appetite for the Leaf–or even perhaps for a compact electric car with 80 miles of range–the numbers say far less about the viability of electric cars in general,” Sexton cautions.

 

More heads nodding

“We’re nearly four years into this generation of electric cars, and the same three makers are offering cars as we saw in December 2010″–when the Leaf and Volt went on sale within days of each other, joining the then-current Tesla Roadster.

“And even that leaves out that in many places in the U.S.,” she noted, “you’d have to buy a Tesla Model S sight unseen” unless you traveled hundreds of miles to the nearest Tesla Store.”

“BMW may make the official fourth in time, but it’s too soon to say,” she added.

But Sexton suggests that industry and buyers alike are starting to recognize this limited reality.

“I see a lot more heads nod when I make such remarks these days,” she said.

This story originally appeared on www.greencarreports.com.

General Motors, one of the world's largest automakers, traces its roots back to 1908. With its global headquarters in Detroit, GM employs 209,000 people in every major region of the world and does business in more than 120 countries. ... read more »

Tesla's goal is to accelerate the world's transition to electric mobility with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars. Palo Alto, California-based Tesla designs and manufactures EVs and EV powertrain components. Tesla ha... read more »

Nissan is made up of a richly diverse group of people, as reflected in the company's leadership team and the numerous corporate outreach programs in which we participate in the community. Together, we have what it takes to build cars a... read more »

Great content roadmaps result from two things: customer obsession and organizational alignment. The first refers to the need to go beyond sectors and segments to deep knowledge of the customer and their needs, which is ever-changing and dynamic. The second is how you as an organization act on that information in an efficient and effective way and create simple processes to continuously learn and anticipate customer information needs.

Lately, Forrester has been talking a lot about being “customer obsessed”. One of the main tenets is the power the customer has as a tech-enabled, highly connected buyer regardless if they are a consumer or a large enterprise buyer. The trick is finding the “little gems of insight” that allow an organization to be present with information that addresses burning needs or advances their learning and understanding.

In reality, finding the “little gems” is just the starting point of a content forensics process that overlays multiple pieces of data from multiple sources to create deep insights into:

• What specific decision-makers want to know
• Where they go to find the information
• Who they trust to give them straight answers and accurate, objective information
• When the person is most open to that information
• Why they care and the pain points that are driving them mad

Content Forensics can be broken down into six steps that comprise a replicable process for each decision-maker and for each LOB or product line. The process includes:

Persona Creation. One of the most important parts of persona work is mapping the “day in the life” of your buyers. This typically happens after a ton of research including 1:1 interviews to uncover demographic profile, role and responsibilities, buying influences, information preferences, communication style, go-to places, internal interdependencies, current projects and programs that can trigger a purchase cycle. The resulting persona gives us insights into how to create intimacy and relevance; the day in the life snapshot demonstrates how difficult it is to break through and really engage the buyer. This is important information for the roadmap and amplification approach.

Buyer Journey. Once a clear picture of the buyer emerges, the next step is to get inside his/her head and go on a buying journey. This involves defining a buying trigger and then looking for the information needed by the buyer at various points of path-to-purchase. It is important to create journeys for each person in the buying center and overlay findings to inform the content roadmap in a meaningful way.

Topic Modeling. The journey uncovers holes and roadblocks that the buyer faces when looking for information. This information provides the starting point for the content modeling process which overlays multiple inputs to discover the topics of highest interest and need of each persona. The goal is to hone in on topics that drive action and interest while providing a differentiating POV.

Audit. The journey and modeling provide a framework for auditing content against a strategic framework which is born from a real-life understanding of what buyers want and need. This takes the auditing away from an inventory to more of an assessment of what the organization can leverage and what new content will really matter.

Market Timing. Another set of inputs provides forensic data to determine best time to publish or amplify content dealing with specific topics for a specific persona.

Roadmap. Voila. Now an evidence-based, faceted roadmap can be created that plots the topics and type of content needed for each point of the journey for each pertinent persona in the buying center.

The content forensics approach makes content resources work smarter and more efficiently. It uncovers the points in the journey where your content is already acting as an excellent brand proxy while also discovering points where your content is missing in action or inappropriate for the buyer’s needs. The process has natural refresh cycles that provide ongoing insights to keep customer obsession alive. The forensics process also uncovers valuable information needed to drive buyers to your content through a combination of earned, paid and owned assets and campaigns.

The content forensics approach helps provide a common thread across the content production function in the organization, which is typically dispersed and often siloed. Along with external data, each node in the content organization (marketing, PR, product, sales, etc.) contributes some of the pertinent pieces of information that are essential for the forensics process. Socializing how all the nodes work together to create a more effective organization sparks better alignment and shared responsibility for content ROI.

Building Healthy SaaS Revenue: 4 Keys for Landing New Logos 

Cloud computing, and the evolution of software as a service (SaaS), has transformed the technology industry. According to IBM, 85% of all new software is now being built for the cloud, and by 2016, one quarter of all applications being used around the world will be available in the cloud.

At the same time, SaaS solutions have transformed how businesses select, buy, and use software. At least half the time, if not more, SaaS vendors will sell directly to functional or business-unit stakeholders rather than just to IT people. The sales emphasis is now on a SaaS solution’s value to the business — not on the underlying technology. The nature of the sales dialogue between SaaS vendors and customers looks and sounds very different than it did in the days of on-premises applications.

Traditionally, software licensing models were also based on one-time, upfront licensing fees, along with the inevitable (and expensive and painful) installation services and support packages. Such purchases committed organizations to their decisions, often for years at a time.

It’s a very different world for SaaS vendors. Pay-as-you-go pricing and very low installation costs make it essential to deliver lasting value, keep customers engaged and satisfied, and generate stable long-term revenue streams.

This transformation poses major challenges for many sales organizations. New buyers, changing business models, and shifting expectations require innovative new tactics to win deals, build strong relationships, and deliver the long-term value that SaaS customers demand. These tactics also provide a vital competitive advantage in a SaaS market where firms are under constant pressure to stay ahead of the competition.

Phase One, in a manner of speaking, is landing the customer. We believe that two key activities and two key dialogues are essential for success.

Key Activity 1: Understanding today’s SaaS buyers. According to a December 2013 study by Gartner Group, nearly half of all IT buying decisions are made or influenced by business-unit stakeholders. We believe an even higher percentage of these business users are involved in SaaS buying decisions given the ease with which these users can evaluate, select, and implement SaaS solutions.

Most IT organizations still play at least an advisory role in SaaS buying decisions. Nevertheless, it’s important that your sales team develop the processes necessary to identify today’s SaaS buyers, to reach them with effective messaging, and to establish the value of your solution in terms that make sense to them.

Key Activity 2: Establishing a repeatable sales process. Successful SaaS organizations are able to absorb and apply lessons learned from every customer contact function. Sales, marketing, customer service and support, and product development must treat organizational learning as a formal discipline. As customers use the product and achieve business value, the SaaS vendor uses these insights to improve its products and processes to add even more value. The SaaS sales team is a vital part of this organizational learning curve. The sales team must align with marketing and product design, understand how customers buy and use the product, document and validate its sales processes against that knowledge, and finally scale what it has learned for use by the whole company sales force. Organizations that establish a repeatable sales process are better prepared to position their SaaS offerings in the marketplace and to make the best use of sales resources.

Key Dialogue 1: Learning to speak the buyer’s language. We already know that miscommunication between sales teams and buyers can be costly. According to Forrester Research, just 1 in 10 executives say they get value from meetings with salespeople. This problem is quite a handicap to overcome, especially in the SaaS market, where sales teams may be accustomed to speaking the language of IT buyers — not the business-unit buyers they increasingly encounter.

Effective communication isn’t just a matter of speaking “business language” or avoiding technology jargon. The shift to SaaS and the cloud also requires the ability to address decentralized departmental buying centers. Salespeople have to frame the conversation in terms of operating budgets rather than CapEx. They have to focus on productivity, flexibility, usability, and other business-related impacts.

Key Dialogue 2: Communicating value without overpromising. For better or for worse, over-promising on traditional on-premises applications was a low-risk proposition. Once a customer committed to a solution, they typically had little choice but to forge ahead. SaaS applications, by comparison, give customers the opportunity to continually hold vendors accountable for their product claims. If customers are disappointed, they’re less likely to renew their subscriptions.

Successful SaaS sales teams know how to engage buyers in open, honest, and transparent conversations about a solution’s capabilities and benefits. A well-trained sales team will understand how to explain and demonstrate a solution’s business value without resorting to exaggeration or unsustainable claims. They also understand how to begin a dialogue with customers that is based on trust, honesty, and a shared vision of success.

The key thing for SaaS salespeople to remember is once their sale is made, the selling process is not over.

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COMPLIMENTARY BRIEF

Click here to down load our new brief, Selling in the Cloud – 8 Keys to Successful “Land and Expand” Strategy for SaaS Solution Providers.

The post Building Healthy SaaS Revenue: 4 Keys for Landing New Logos appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

As with all the other facets of running your business, content marketing is really all about ROI. Ultimately, it’s successful when it brings in more money than it takes away; in other words, the sales or buzz you generate from content marketing needs to be worth more than whatever you’re paying to have that content marketing done.

There are a couple of ways in which content marketing can be ineffective, then, and the most obvious is that you simply don’t bring in the leads and conversions you need to make it worthwhile. More insidious is the possibility that you may be getting good results, but spending too much time and money to do it—ultimately blowing up your margins.

Now, make no mistake about it: Content marketing is an investment. It’s not going to generate results overnight, and it’s not going to be effective unless you devote some real resources to it. At the same time, prudence is important—and while we don’t recommend cutting corners, we do recommend being strategic.

There are a few particular ways in which you may actually be overextending your content marketing efforts— making imprudent use of your time and resources. A few things to watch out for include:

• Being on more platforms than you truly need. Grammar Chic, Inc. has previously blogged about the pros and cons of being on Instagram—one of a few examples of social platforms that not every company needs. Yes, you want to have a presence on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, almost without exception. Something like Pinterest or Vine, on the other hand, may or may not benefit your brand, just depending on what you do. No need to spend money just to “be there,” when your clients and potential clients aren’t there themselves.
• Not being organized. What’s your content marketing chain of command? If you don’t have clearly defined responsibilities, then you may let certain things fall through the cracks—but you may also end up duplicating work or being inefficient with your internal processes.
• Sending out too many press releases. Grammar Chic sends out a press release every week, because we genuinely have that much newsworthy stuff happening; your company may only have news to report every month or every quarter. Spending money on a weekly press release, just for the sake of doing it, will get awfully expensive awfully fast, and it may or may not yield a positive effect.
• Not monitoring your results. Last but not least: If you’re not tracking your results and evaluating the analytics, then you frankly have no idea whether your content marketing is truly effective or not—and for all you know, you could be wasting a ton of time and money with ineffective strategies.

Content marketing is an important investment—and while you can’t be stingy with it, you also shouldn’t be careless.

I have a confession! For all my social media bravado, when it comes down to numbers and analytics I am as terrified as the next girl (or boy)! I know that if I sit down and concentrate for long enough, I can learn about and adapt to anything. The problem is I kind of glaze over and get easily distracted if I look at them for too long…..oooo shiny! This very reason makes me want to kiss the people who have finally made that side of marketing easier and more interesting with solid marketing software for me to analyze the fruits of my creative labor!

In this fast-paced, ever-changing world of technology, where do we begin? Not only do we have to keep up-to-date with all the latest trends in marketing, but now, more than ever, we need to measure our marketing efforts. The following software provides user-friendly measuring tools and marketing analytics that we ALL understand.

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Pardot: B2B Marketing Automation suite by Salesforce, Providing both Sales and Marketing Tools

Amongst many other features, Pardot provides the ability to synchronize your CRM with Google analytics. They focus on providing marketing and sales teams with insights for measuring their success. A strong email marketing tool and excellent marketing reports put them ahead of the crowd. Here are some more great features from them:

• Lead scoring and grading
• Campaign ROI reporting
• Prospect tracking and analysis
• Sales lifecycle reporting
• Advanced email marketing reports
• Closed-loop reporting

Pardot is perfect for all sizes of business including freelancers, small businesses, non-profits, mid-sized business and larger enterprises, but with a focus on the B2B world. Pardot’s pricing structure included standard, pro and ultimate packages paid by monthly subscription.

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Oktopost: Socially-Driven B2B Content Marketing

Penned as the only social media marketing software created solely for B2B marketing, Oktopost are experts in the field. They allow you to see exactly what leads are generated from specific posts so you are able to act on those accordingly. With a special, unique feature of LinkedIn group posting and scheduling, they are a new generation of marketing automation. Some more features include:

• Campaign analytics
• ROI measurement of Social Media activity
• LinkedIn group insights
• CRM integrations
• Unified social inbox
• Social monitoring

Oktopost works well for all business sizes, scaling along with your team. They have several pricing packages including freemium, starter, marketer, business and enterprise plans.

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Adclarity: Media Intelligence and Competitive Analysis Software for Digital Media

Adclarity are leaders when it comes to competitive intelligence software. They expertly measure your marketing campaigns, discovering what is working for you, what is working for your competitors and measuring cost-effectiveness. Built around data analysis, Adclarity allows you to build media campaigns and measure your ROI. Check out these other awesome features:

• Reports on mediators, agencies and ad networks
• Data collection from 300,000 publishers
• Real-time competitor analysis
• Competitive ads and creative’s reporting
• Competitive landing page reporting

Adclarity works well for all sized businesses from freelancers and small businesses to mid-sized businesses and large enterprises. Their pricing structure includes a free trial, then several packages with monthly subscription.

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Locowise: Social Media Analytics Tools for Increased Engagement and Fans

Offering social media analytics, Locowise provides insights across all social media networks for agencies and brands. Their comprehensive platform offers tools for measuring and analyzing, post optimization and reporting. Measure what your competition is doing so you can copy or better their campaigns. They also have these fab features:

• Campaign analytics
• Real-time post analytics
• Post optimization
• Competitive benchmarking
• Fan and follower analysis

Locowise works well for all business models including freelancers, small businesses, public administrations, non-profits, mid-sized businesses and large enterprises. Locowise pricing is based on the number of social profiles you wish to manage. From $60 for one profile up to $400 for 20 profiles, they have pricing plans that suit all organizations.

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ion interactive: The Marketing Apps Company

As a marketing apps platform, ion interactive helps you to generate leads and revenue. A digital marketing all-round experience designed to be engaging and interactive. Use it to improve the quality of your conversations and therefore increase your engagement. There are hundreds of brands already subscribed to ion interactive, to improve their results and ROI. More features include:

• Creation of marketing apps
• Logic engine for targeting and personalization
• Mobile device optimization
• SEO features
• Real-time reporting and analytics

Ion interactive is designed for all business models including: freelancers, small businesses, non-profits, mid-sized businesses and large enterprises. ion interactive pricing is based on your specific volume of traffic. Priced by the number of unique visitors sent through the platform each month.

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HubSpot: Inbound Marketing Software

HubSpot’s suite of tools offers Internet marketing solutions for business. They are designed to be used by the lay-person, no techie experience required! A perfect platform for marketers, it is web-based so doesn’t require a team of IT professionals to manage it. Take advantage of the research and purchase habits of your customers and act accordingly. Here are some great features:

• Blogging tools
• SEO tools
• Social media tools
• Multi-channel analytics
• Behavior driven communications
• Lead nurturing

HubSpot is a great choice for all types of business marketing such as public administrations, non-profits, small businesses, mid-sized businesses and large enterprises. The software is offered in three pricing versions that meet the needs of customers ranging from small, entrepreneurial companies to organizations of several hundred employees with dedicated marketing teams.

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Let the experts collate the data that is making you (and I) dizzy. You might even surprise yourself and start to enjoy the figures. It is exciting to watch your engagement grow, to see your hard work paying off. Seeing your marketing efforts bear fruit and seeing your leads and sales grow, makes it all worth it. The highs of marketing success are exciting to measure and watch, but it’s so important to also measure the failures, so as not to keep making the same mistakes. Find out what works for you and roll with the punches.

I hope that helps you to make up your mind about the best analytics tools for the job? If not, don’t forget to take advantage of the free trials and demos of each app. Check out our thorough list of marketing automation apps here.

In the business-to-business (B2B) arena, a well-known source of tension has often been associated with the delicate relationship between the marketing and sales lines of business. Whether born out of legitimate complaints or the mutual frustration of not achieving adequate customer acquisition results, the finger-pointing can become predictable, if not childish: “These leads stink!”… “You couldn’t close a screen door in a hurricane!” Fortunately, modern leaders in both practice areas are increasingly held accountable for fact-based, measurable business results that take emotions off the table, and are empowered by contemporary technology tools that promote and reward a more collaborative and team-oriented approach.

Sales Enablement: Fulfilling the Last Frontier of Marketing-Sales Alignment (September 2013) introduced recent Aberdeen research, which reveals a number of best practices and enabling technologies that top-performing companies utilize to better supply their field sellers with agile and effective marketing content. A new report discusses the relationship groundwork that is essential for driving adoption of, and the ultimate success associated with, these approaches.

Should We Even Bother?

Before entering into a detailed discussion of how sales and marketing leaders should get along, it is worth confirming that the “why” is even worthwhile. The answer is, quite simply, yes, as demonstrated by the data presented in Figure 1. Aberdeen research is predicated on collecting performance and behavior trends from end-users, and correlating the two. Figure 1 shows that Best-in-Class companies report 38%, and 64% higher propensities, than Industry Average and Laggard firms, respectively, indicating that their sales / marketing relationship is better than neutral. Now, let’s take a look at some of the nuts-and-bolts first steps that under-performing firms should take in order to better support this relationship and drive stronger business results.

Figure 1: Stronger Bonds, Better Results

Learning from the Best: How the Best-in-Class Work Smarter, Not Harder

First and foremost, leaders from sales and marketing teams simply need to get together more often to hash out basic questions such as “what is a lead?,” as well as more strategic agreements, such as shared metrics. They also need to measure collaborative results, gather 360° feedback on messaging and content, and even decide how to push back at one another when leads are legitimately under-cooked (by marketing) or underwhelmingly actioned (by sales).

The most surprising result from the current research may be that the number of formal meetings to discuss these issues averages only 4.7 times per year among all survey respondents. This means that, less often than bi-monthly (every 77.6 days, to be exact) the average company brings its top leadership from the sales and marketing lines of business together to formally collaborate. Considering the growing power and responsibility of the Chief Marketing Officer (note Gartner’s prediction of the CMO’s IT budget exceeding that of the Chief Information Officer by 2017), and the all-important revenue generation burden carried by the VP of Sales, one would think that a higher priority would be placed on an aggressive meeting schedule in order to maximize an environment of mutually-assured success. Nonetheless, we see in Figure 2 that Best-in-Class firms exceed this average in comparison with All Others (the combination of Industry Average and Laggard survey respondents). While top-performing enterprises get their leaders together more frequently, it is, however, common sense to recommend that all companies attempt to maximize the sit-down rate in order to reduce friction — both between the departments, as well as in the sales cycle, and, finally, in order to enhance the most important thing of all: the customer’s experience.

Figure 2: Détente Has Measurable Value — Frequency of Leadership Sit-Downs is Key to Success

Indeed, all of these factors come into play when we look at how Best-in-Class companies inform us regarding which KPI’s they find most valuable in terms of validating their overall sales enablement activity stream. Check them out here.

Content marketing radically improves your marketing AND sales conversion ratios. Companies are slowly realising this and are beginning to turn away from traditional outbound marketing and are moving towards inbound marketing. So being able to create engaging, educational content has become an important skill, amongst others, that any B2B inbound marketer needs in order to create an effective lead generation machine. We’ve found that a lot of companies are a little stuck between the old and new methods of content marketing. If you type “rules for good content marketing” into Google you are going to find a myriad of articles telling you what to do. Now, while some of these make for great tips and give amazing advice, it is the same as with everything: some rules were simply made to be broken. Continue reading if you want to find out what to avoid.

1. Don’t make SEO the sole purpose of your content

SEO optimisation is important, as it drives traffic to your site, no doubt about that, but keyword stuffing can not only harm your content, make it unreadable and boring it can also put potential customers off you forever. The solution to this is simple, write for your readers first and for search engines second, this way you can create relevant educational content, draw readers to you and get on Google’s good side.

2. Don’t make your website only relevant to your business

It’s no use creating content that is relevant to just you, you should be creating buyer-centric, educational content. So if you are a company that sells coffee beans, don’t just write about how great your coffee is. Research what your buyer personas want to read so you can engage them. They are more likely to revisit your site if you can offer them valuable educational content that’s assists them in solving their problems. Write about where the best places are to source coffee beans, write about current coffee trends and regulations and give your buyer personas insight into the industry not just your business. This will not only drive traffic but build trust with potential clients.

3. Don’t post too much content constantly

As much as you want to be found through your content, don’t overdo it. It takes time to build  steady traffic to your website. Make sure you have enough material and topics to last you for a while. With content it really comes down to quality over quantity. I am a big advocate for consistency, set yourself an achievable schedule, to which you think you can adhere. If you commit to blogging once a week, stick to it, it doesn’t matter if this is less frequent than your competitors as long as you ensure your blogs continue to help solve your buyer persona’s problems.

4. Don’t create a marketing plan and never evolve it

As we have discovered in a previous blog post, ad-hoc marketing is a thing of the past. You need a plan to get the best out of your marketing. Have a strategy and a goal to work towards, so you can track how you are doing and how much closer to achieving your goal you are getting. Having said that however, you need to be prepared for the unknown. You are operating a business, which involves human interaction and changing circumstances, so your marketing strategy needs to be flexible. This doesn’t mean you need to be prepared to throw your whole plan over board when things go awry, it frankly means you need to be prepared to adapt and alter along the way. Some previously planned blog topics might not work once you get five months down the line or a previously created ebook isn’t generating enough leads. Don’t panic, this doesn’t mean your whole strategy is flawed, use the opportunity to learn what can be improved. So the rule here is to never get complacent and lazy, be sure to review your content marketing strategy regularly, analyse the results and adjust your tactics so your strategy can improve.

5. Don’t just randomly engage in all social platforms

Yes, you want to be visible, yes, you want to attract as many potential buyers through your content as possible, and yes, social media and web exposure go together like peanut butter and jelly but not all platforms are relevant to your costumer, so make sure you do your research. Know that to maximise your B2B lead generation, LinkedIn generally converts more leads than Facebook, Twitter has more influence than Instagram and Google+ can potentially reach more people than Pinterest. You need to research with your team where your buyer personas ‘hang out’ online and find out:

• Which social media platforms they ‘hang out’ on most.
• Who the key influencers in their industry are.  Influencers are people that your buyer persona trusts for industry advice, who have lots of followers that actively engage with their posts i.e., shares, likes, comments.
• Which industry leader websites your buyer persona visits to read up on the latest news relevant to them.

This will allow you to get the most out of your social media platforms and focus on optimising your posts to fit each platform.

Not all tips and tricks work for everyone and you will only find out which strategy and which guidelines work for you and your business once you’ve tried a few approaches. Never be afraid to break a few rules in order to find your marketing path.

Leads Don’t Hatch Themselves is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

The dealership’s website told me to request more information about the automobile I was viewing by providing my name, email address, and phone number. It had two buttons I could choose from to indicate whether I preferred to be contacted by telephone or email. In a move that is probably uncommon, I chose telephone; I wanted to speak to someone about buying the car. I wanted to speak to them soon. That was two days ago.

The last time I bought a car, I had this same experience with this dealership. I never received a call back. I had to call the dealership and ask them to please sell me the car I wanted.

Your question is a good one, “Why don’t you go to another dealership, one that actually wants to help you?” And your point is a good one: Leads don’t get warmer.

What Your Lack Of Follow Up Means

The lead that comes in today is the warmest it will ever be. There is a person somewhere who wants to speak with you about the possibility of buying whatever it is you sell. You know that they have some need right now, or that they are evaluating their options.

When you don’t respond to that lead you send a strong message. That message is: “I don’t care about your business. It isn’t important to me.” Your prospective buyer feels that message whether you intend to send it or not, and they act accordingly and move on to your competitors.

As time passes, your lead grows colder. Your prospective client finds another salesperson to help them buy what they might have bought from you. They find answers to their own questions. Or they just cool off, deciding to wait until some other time to explore buying whatever it is they needed at that moment.

Immediately, If Not Sooner

The right time to respond to an inquiry is immediately, if not sooner. If your prospective client took the time to fill out the contact form and provide their details at some point in time, that is the very best time to engage with them.

There is nothing good that comes from waiting. Your lead isn’t going to get warmer, your chances of helping your prospective client decrease, and your chance of actually doing business with them is diminished with every passing tick of the clock.

My old man sold for Devry. As a regional manager he told his people: “What are you waiting for, the lead to hatch?” Leads don’t hatch themselves.

Marketers are trained on how to spin…how to write elegantly…how to stay in the brand voice. We’re also trained on how to lie and how to lie well. In all honestly, we lie so well that sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it. All of the half-truths, omissions, and spins we put on all of our marketing pieces could be what is holding us back from an authentic connection with the exact audience we’re trying so desperately to attract.

You could argue that we’ve become such good liars that we can’t even tell the difference between lies and truth anymore. How did this happen?

It probably started with spin

I’m pretty good friends with spin. In fact, I’m so close with spin I’d take him on a family vacation. Many of you have been there. You get some marketing copy that just doesn’t flow as well as you’d like, it just doesn’t sound sexy enough. So what do we do? We edit the bejeebus out of it until the words are crafted into the perfect mix of suave goodness. But, if you really look at it with novice eyes and start picking it apart for what an actual human would say, you have no idea what it says. We see this kind of copy all over the place, but in case you need an example, I’m providing one below. As a note, this was pulled from a CRM company website that I actually like very much, but really this could have come from any of the CRM sites (or any other company site). This kind of language is all over the web.

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is all about managing the relationships you have with your customers. CRM combines business processes, people, and technology to achieve this single goal: getting and keeping customers. It’s an overall strategy to help you learn more about their behavior so you can develop stronger, lasting relationships that will benefit both of you. It’s very hard to run a successful business without a strong focus on CRM, as well as adding elements of social media and making the transition to a social enterprise to connect with customers in new ways.”

I mean seriously, does any human being actually talk like this? Thankfully, I’ve never met anyone that does. This copy was most likely written by a marketer; it probably went through several rounds of edits, had layers of spin added with each, and resulted in a paragraph of marketer speak that most prospects and customers have to decipher. It’s almost as if we think that flowery, non-intelligible language is a sign of our intelligence. And we do this so often, it’s become hard for marketers, myself included, to separate spin from fact. As a marketer, when I read this the first time, I thought, hmmm…that’s pretty solid copy. Then when I started breaking it down and trying to put it into human terms, I couldn’t. There’s just too much in there to adjust. To fix it would require completely starting over and removing all the jargon. Ultimately, it might look something like this:

“If you want to know what’s happening with your prospects and customers, you need customer relationship management (CRM) software.”

Frankly, even that sentence could become more human, but that illustrates my point. I’m a marketer, and it’s extremely difficult to take off that hat and write something that doesn’t sound like fluff. Have we become so good at fluff that we can’t even write like humans anymore?

Then the omissions started

A lot of marketers call this positioning. It’s when we highlight all the good stuff and leave out all of the things we don’t do really well. Because who wants to shine a light on something the company doesn’t do well? So we’ll just leave that out and only address it if someone asks us.

In the same CRM example above, it seems that they left out that the user interface could use some work for the non-tech savvy, and that if you have monthly reoccurring revenue streams that aren’t a static price it’s almost impossible to run an accurate pipeline report.

It seems that companies want to position themselves as the best solution for everyone. Maybe we don’t want to highlight who we aren’t a good fit for because we’re willing to take money from anywhere. The challenge with omissions and not being forthcoming about what you don’t do well is that it doesn’t allow the reader to quickly opt-out if you aren’t the best solution for them. They think you do something well that you don’t, and then they realize it after they’ve become a customer.

Omissions set our prospects and our company up for a failing relationship right from the beginning. In our quest for revenue from any source, we can easily be setting ourselves up to deal with customers who aren’t a good fit. What happens then? They drain the resources of your customer service team, they complain, and they may even share their unhappiness in social channels. It’s easy to point the finger of blame at the customer, but I believe the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the marketers and sales people who use omission as a sales tool.

Omission is lying in its most socially acceptable form, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t a lie. In my opinion, glossing over information that allows someone to opt-in or opt-out is a recipe for a disastrous relationship with your customers.

Then we started downright lying

This is when we make conclusions that are not based on fact. It’s when we make erroneous assumptions about our audience and present solutions as if they are the best or the only way. And it’s when we say things as if they apply to the majority of our customers when we know that they really only apply to a few. This copy is on the same CRM companies website.

“A new world, and a better way to sell. Where field sales closes deals from anywhere. And inside sales is fed nothing less than the best leads. It’s sales managers knowing which deals will close. And when. A world where lead and contact information is always fresh and complete. And everyone performs like an ‘A’ player.”

First, software does not create a new world or a better way to sell. If you really read that, it’s obvious that it’s a ridiculous statement. Perhaps field sales closes deals from anywhere, as long as it doesn’t require data or internet access. Sales managers will only know which deals will close and when if their sales team puts in the right information and keeps it up to date. However, history shows that these dates are always guesses and not based on reality. The next sentence just makes me laugh: A world where lead and contact information is always fresh and complete. Ha! I’d love to see that world because it’s never been true in any CRM system I’ve ever used in any company I’ve worked with. This has a huge requirement for the sales professional, and, after all, they are fallible humans. Finally, software does not make everyone perform like an “A player”. That is a wild assumption about people. People have their own motivations that are not controlled or determined by the software they use.

I used these examples because they come from a software company that I use. It’s a company I respect tremendously. I have friends in their marketing department that are smart, genuine human beings who do not want to mislead their prospects or customers. I know they have the best of intentions in their hearts. And ultimately, that is the point of this entire post. Because I know some of the people behind this brand, and I know they wouldn’t ever lie, intentionally.

Are we blind to all the lies we tell because we’ve done it so often we don’t even recognize it anymore? Do we not see them as lies and rather as good marketing? If that’s the case we’ll need to start making some choices because if being a good marketer means being a great liar, I’m not interested. But perhaps I am already there. Maybe in my quest to be great at what I do, I accidentally became a trained liar and didn’t even know it.

For now, my solution is simple. I’m going to have a really sensitive radar for spin, omissions, and lies. I’m going to actively seek it out because the only way I can see getting out of this rabbit hole is to shine a light on it for myself so that maybe… just maybe… one day I’ll be able to recognize the lies from a mile away and not do it myself.

   

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You’re spending money on trade journal advertising, but is it working?

That’s a good question. Many B2B companies wonder whether ads in trade journals are effective.

Have you thought about using an inbound marketing approach to your offline advertising?

First, let me explain what that means.

To generate leads on the internet, you attract people to your website, then convert them with content that gives them information they are looking for. Offline, though, many B2B companies place ads in trade journals and simply include their company logo and a tagline or phrase stating what they do.

We’ve seen success using inbound marketing techniques with offline advertising.

Because you have the ability to gather so much more information about potential clients on the web, we recommend getting people that view your trade journal ads to visit your website.

How to Take an Inbound Marketing Approach to Trade Journal Advertising

One great way to do this is to make the ad about a guide, whitepaper, video, webinar or other form of content that is relevant to the people that are likely going to be looking at the ad in the trade journal.

In other words, if you’re advertising a healthcare staffing firm in a medical journal, you might have an ad that says, “A Physician’s Guide to Locum Tenens” with “Download here” and a special website address where the reader can download the guide.

Taking an inbound marketing approach to your trade journal advertising requires more work than simply designing and placing the print ad, but it can yield better results.

This approach involves not only creating the actual print ad for the trade journal, but creating a landing page on your website for what you’re advertising. You’ll want to include a short form on the web page that people have to fill out to download the content you’re advertising.

Listing a special web address in your print ad, like http://www.yoursite.com/content-offer that links someone to the landing page on your website helps you track the response of the trade journal ad.

Benefits of an Inbound Marketing Approach

Imagine being able to see exactly how many people visit your website from a specific trade journal ad, then being able to see the names, email addresses and phone numbers of the people who download your content!

Your sales team will be more informed because they will see what your prospect downloaded and how that the prospect found the content from the trade journal ad.

From a marketing perspective, you’ll be able to attribute leads to your trade journal ad, helping you understand the cost per lead of that advertisement.

B2B companies that are generating more leads are finding ways to connect their offline advertising with their websites, and they are doing it with helpful, specific, informational content that addresses the needs of their buyers.

Do you need help thinking through how your B2B company might get better response and generate more leads from trade journals or print advertising? If so, we’d invite you to request a marketing opportunity review here.

Is it necessary to pre-qualify inbound leads? That’s the overarching question I recently presented to a panel of industry experts. Over the course of this three part series, you’ll hear from 15 leading voices in the world of B2B sales, marketing and lead generation, as they share their insight in response to the following questions:

• Are companies wise to invest money and time to pre-qualify inbound leads from marketing automation systems that have been assigned a “perfect” lead score?
• Should CMOs feel confident that these leads from marketing automation are ready for sales to close?
• Without additional qualification measures (such as tele-qualifying), will these leads inevitably clog and choke the sales pipeline?

Have you ever been in a closing situation that seems to have stalled, where your prospect isn’t really objecting, but they sure aren’t going where you want them to go?  If so, then you may find it necessary to re-open the close, so to speak, so you can get your prospect talking to find out exactly what they’re thinking and where they might be leaning. 

This is especially true when you’re not sure how to respond to an objection or to how your prospect or client feels about a specific point or feature you just brought up.  At times like these, all you need to do is just ask a question and let your prospect tell you which direction you need to go. 

Use the following questions to help open your prospect up and to get them to reveal where they really stand, and what you need to do to move closer to the sale:

“I can tell that’s important to you; why does it mean so much?”

“You know, I’ve given you a lot of information, do you mind if I ask you what you think so far?”

“I understand that you need to (talk to someone, check on something, or any other stall), but let me ask you: Based on what we’ve gone over so far, what do YOU think?”

“Let me see if I have this right.  You (restate what they said), right?  What would have to change for this to work for you then?”

“Do I have that right?”

“What else do I need to know to understand how this affects your operation?”

“How would you react if I told you we could handle that and give you this?”

“Can you give me more detail on that?”

“What is your perspective on this?”

“Just out of curiosity, why do you feel that way?”

“What is your experience with this (solution)?”

“When was the last time you tried this?”

“What happened the last time you took a solution like this to your boss?”

“What would have made it work better for you?”

“If you went ahead with this, what would be the worse thing that could happen?”

“I hear you saying X, but I’m also hearing something else.  Could you elaborate on that please?”

“And if you didn’t move on this solution today, how are you going to change your results and get more (leads, sales, production, etc.)?”

“Do you see how this (your solution) has been designed to fix your exact problem?”

“How is this sounding so far?”

“If you had to make a decision right now, what would it be?”

“And what would change that for you?”

If you found these questions helpful, then it’s time to write some of your own.  Make them specific to your product or service, and write them so you’d be comfortable asking them.  But then Use Them!  If you’re a manager, this is a great exercise for a sales meeting.  You could do two: one for prospecting and one for the close.

 Bottom line is that your prospects and clients always have the answers as to why they will or won’t buy from you.  If you’re not asking questions and getting them to tell you, then you’re probably pitching and talking past the close.  And you already know where that gets you….

The team killed it. The presentation was flawless. The proposal was outstanding. You covered all of the bases, but you lost. Searching for answers, the only thing you can think of is that the other guy must of “bought the deal,” right? In the article entitled; Why B2B Sales Leads Don’t Convert (and Who Is to Blame) Marketing Profs.com highlights a recent survey of close to 200 marketers, sales professionals, and president/CEOs on their thoughts on why deals were “lost.” Not surprisingly, 60% said that “price” was the main reason, buy what may surprise you is that percentage is wrong.

To truly understand why deals are lost, you have to get feedback from buyers. Having conducted numerous post mortem analysis of lost deals, and buyer behavior research, here’s what I have learned. Roughly one third of all buyers consider price as one of, or the main driver of a purchase decision. Pure price buyers represent about 5-10% of all decision makers. The remaining portion (20-25%) are value buyers who may, but don’t always, buy the lowest priced product or service. Using those numbers, the research overstates “price” as the reason for a loss by a factor of 2X. What accounts for the remaining thirty percent? Here are three common reasons for losing a deal, that doesn’t involve price.

1. Low investment in the relationship – deals are not solely rationally made purchase transactions, especially as price and product complexity increases. Selling bigger ticket items involves a degree of trust built between a vendor and a buyer. Recent research by Fortune and gyro found that 65% of executives believe subjective factors that can’t be quantified (like a company’s culture and values) make a difference when evaluating competing proposals. Even more executives (70%) said that a company’s reputation was a critical consideration in the decision making process. Investing in relationship building with buyers takes time but as the research shows, it’s worth it. If buyers say that the only time they see a rep is when he/she wants to sell them something…that investment is not being made.

2. Focusing on the wrong message – focusing on only selling the business value (functional benefits, business outcomes) of a product limits sales ability to make the case for a higher price. Connecting the value the product delivers to the buyer, on a personal level, helps reps broaden the conversation. According to CEB research, not only are you twice as likely to win the deal by focusing on personal value drivers (professional and personal benefits, like a promotion, admiration from peers, etc.), but also, buyers are eight times more willing pay a premium. To do this effectively sales people need to be able to put themselves in the shoes of decision mak ers. They need to understand their buyers’ situation, role, relationships, etc., and sell the value of the product or service to those unique needs. If reps only know how to sell “feature functionality” the conversation will all too often come back to price.

3. Missing the real buyer – there is no guarantee that past buyers will be key decision makers in future purchase decisions, or on other types of products. Years ago, I did a post mortem analysis for a medical equipment company on an innovative new product. Sales said they were losing deals because it was priced too high. The analysis proved that they were both right, and wrong. The traditional buyer, did in fact, believe that the product was priced too high compared to others in the market. But a new set of users who had become the primary decision makers had emerged. This group was using the innovative technology as a revenue generating procedure. As a result, they valued the product differently and were willing to pay a premium. Deals were lost because the company didn’t understand how buyers intended to use the product, and as a result, they missed the key decision maker.

The simple answer is that deals are lost because the case for the value of the product or service has not been adequately expressed to meet the needs (professional, personal or both) of the key decision maker. Blaming “price” is a convenient crutch that shifts accountability to the product or pricing team, and away from sales and marketing. Finger pointing may make us feel better about our role, but it doesn’t fix the problem. If you are truly intent on increasing win rates dig deeper into understand why, I can guarantee you won’t find that it is “price” 6 out of 10 times.

Imagine you're talking with a prospect that loves your product, and they would be willing to buy if only _______{insert objection X}. Objection X can be anything, but most commonly in sales it's pricing. So let's use that as an example. How can you negotiate your way around _____ {obection X} and close the deal if you can't actually deliver on objection X?

The prospect wants to buy, but only at a steep discount. What usually happens at this point is a long back and forth between seller and prospect. Sometimes that negotiation leads to a deal, sometimes it doesn't.

How to frame price negotiations

You as the seller want to frame this negotiation around the value your product is creating.

The prospect however will most often frame it around the price. They'll tell you that competitor ABC only charges half of what you charge, or that your product really only costs you $50 to deliver, so how dare you charge them $100? If you sell it to them at $55, you're still making a profit, right?

Wrong.

If your product provides thousands of dollars of value to them, it's totally worth for them to pay a couple hundred dollars for it. 

Always sell based on value, not on cost or market.

Customers cherry-picking features?

Sometimes customers will tell you: we really don't need all these features you have, we just want feature number 3 and number 12 and 18. And because they don't use your other 30 features, they'll argue: "Hey, we're only going to use 3 of your 33 features, so we really shouldn't be paying the full price."

Well, yes, they should. Because these three features they want to use are worth more to them than what you charge. And if not, then they're probably not a good customer.

Negotiation not going anywhere?

But what if your your customer doesn't buy into your value-based pricing and insists on a discount? How can you avoid getting stuck in a endless negotation where you're just running in circles, not making progress?

Most sales people will do one of two things:

• Just keep on pushing and be totally unrelenting? Either win them at your current price point, or lose them as customer. Apply brute force and coerce them to buy.
• Just accept their discount requests. "Oh, you want a 30% discount? Well, ok, we don't really do this, and I'm actually not earning any commission on this deal, but if that's what it takes to win you as a customer, then I'm willing to do it." (And keep in mind: if you give them the discount they asked for, most of them will think: Hey, if can give me 30%, he can probably give me 50% discount as well.' And they'll ask you for another discount and put pressure on you again.)

Both of these extremes aren't elegant. Negotation is often about creating new options, and this is one of these examples. What you want to do instead is to make them experience the value your product delivers to them.

Propose to postpone

Just propose to postpone the negotiation for a month.

"Mr. Prospect, I think we both agree that our product is perfect for your needs. And I want to get you guys to realize the value of our solution as quickly as possible. It seems like right now, it's hard for us to figure out what the reality is, because we're dealing with hypotheticals.

You haven't used our product in a full-fledged, real environment for a month or two. We can't really know what the value is, how it streamlines your workflow, what it truly delivers to you. And this is why this discussion is so difficult. Our negotiation is based on assumptions, and we don't have any real data to back them up.

So here's what we'll do: Buy our product today. Full price. Use it for one month. In full range, in a real environment, all the features and functions, no limits. And in a month we jump on another call.

Once you've realized how valuable it is, once you know what it can and can not do, once you've really actually used it full-fledged, with the entire team, then we'll figure out what the best price is for you. And I'll guarantee you I'll make you a good deal. But let's have a month full of data before we actually decide what the right pricing is."

Nine out of ten times, the other side will accept this reasonable proposal. You process their payment and do nothing but wait.  

 

Why is this better for you?

If your product delivers more value than what you charge, you're going to be in a much better position at the end of the month than you are today.

After a month of using your product the customer... 

1. ... now has experienced all the value of your product.
2. ... has invested a full month on getting their entire team on board. They are using it day in and day out, they rely more on it.
3. ... has stored more data in your application, and connected it to more parts of their business.

They've invested all this time into it, and got real value out of it. It's now much harder for them to walk away.

It's now actually harder for them to churn and cancel than it is to buy and just stay a customer, because they're already using your solution, you're already their default modus operandi.

How many people ask for a discount after a month?

Almost nobody. I've had customer tell me: "You know what, I don't want a discount anymore. We love your sales CRM so much, we're happy to pay full price."

But most customers simply won't say anything at all. They just forget about trying to negotiate, or they just don't care anymore. Oftentimes they just asked for a discount because that's how they buy: they always ask for a discount. But once they already bought, they're over it.

Whenever you encounter a seemingly unmanagable objection, see if you can simply hack the negotiation by postponing it.