The sales process is dead. Forever gone into the history of the sales profession. It was great while we had it. You know, the one that resembles something like this:
Almost every sales team and rep has been trained to follow a process similar to this one. I personally made a lot of money following this type of process. But it is no longer effective.
“What is the best app for sales reps?” is an extremely subjective question. What’s the answer?
It depends!
This question is so subjective because the best app for sales reps depends on the task at hand. The beauty of apps is that users can quickly move from one to another for specialized tasks.
There is no silver bullet. No magic app that does it all.
And we are glad! That’s why we love the iPad as a sales tool.
Think about it. Just like your laptop, the best program to write emails is different from the best program to present slides.
Much like our laptops, there a few apps that we use consistently to accomplish specific business tasks with our iPads and recommend to our customers.
This is by no means a comprehensive list or a “best of” list. But these are great apps that are all 100% compatible with FatStax and can be useful to our customers’ sales teams.
1. iAnnotate – Signing PDFs | Price – $9.99
For signing PDFs and circling important items in brochures, I prefer iAnnotate. It’s intuitive and easy to use. My typical task in open a PDF, sign a document, then email the document with the signature to myself or a customer.
2. PDF Expert – Completing forms | Price – $9.99
When comes to fillable forms and checking boxes, I like PDF Expert. The app detects the fillable forms in PDFs and makes it easy to type where the creator intended you to type. I’m pretty sure you can sign documents with it too. I just don’t use it for that.
Both PDF Expert and iAnnotate are compatible with FatStax and you can easily punch documents from your sales app to these specialized apps for quick manipulation.
3. QuickOffice – Editing Microsoft Office documents | Price – Free
This app is my “goto” for working with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files. All these seem to work well in QuickOffice and can be edited easily. We anticipate Microsoft will eventually offer an iPad app for their office files but for now QuickOffice is our choice.
4. and 5. Dropbox or Box – Moving single files to and from the iPad | Price – Free
Personally, I’m a Dropbox fiend when comes to easily moving files between my laptop and iPad. Both Box and Dropbox are compatible with FatStax making it easy to push files from us to them. Have a lot of files you want to load into FatStax? You can do that by connecting your Dropbox or Box Account to our Cloud content manager.
6. and 7. Evernote and Skitch – Note taking and annotating images | Price – Free (upgrades cost)
I put these two together because they are both Evernote owned apps that I use for two distinct purposes.
Evernote is pretty straight-forward. Take notes sync them to a central file sharing system to refer to later. I use it a lot to remind myself of cool stuff and ideas for customers’ apps.
Skitch is what I use to point out things on screen shots from my iPad. See something cool in a magazine – take a screen shot and open it up in Skitch to draw on the image and take notes. Save the image to Evernote and I have permanent record or email it to a colleague.
8. Salesforce1 - Pushing files to CRM | Price - Free with Salesforce account
FatStax is compatible with both the old Chatter App and the new Salesforce1 app. It’s simple to push a file from FatStax to either one and comment on it in Chatter. You can also send activities and files from FatStax to CRM to save them to an Opportunity in Salesforce.
What apps are you currently using that are useful for daily tasks and saving time with the iPad as a sales tool?
Let’s keep this list growing!
A couple years ago, I launched a membership-based online community I called my Clubhouse. I’m a career coach for creative types, and I wanted to find a way to serve more clients at a (much) lower price point.
I’d been working on it in the back on my brain for months, and quite actively for 8-ish weeks. Everyone I told about it reacted super favorably, offering tons of encouragement and kudos. I even asked my virtual assistant if she’d want more hours, as I’d already mentally banked The Clubhouse Money.
Let’s say I was Law of Attraction-ing it up, but in a I-really-believed-it-way. I was sure. I was confident. I was On To Something.
Despite my confidence, the first launch of my Clubhouse was a disaster. But I’ve learned a lot since then.
I wrote an announcement and scheduled it via blog and email newsletter for 7 a.m. Eastern the Tuesday after a national holiday. I felt confident that around 20 people would join that day, expecting the first one to sign up by 7:01 a.m.
Um … not quite.
The first “official” Clubhouse member came in at 1:16 p.m. Eastern. I told myself, “Everyone had a busy morning back at work … the sign-ups will be pouring in now!”
The second member came in at 2:48 p.m. Eastern. I told myself, “OK, here we go — be at the ready!”
The third member signed up at 9:51 p.m. Eastern. I told myself, “(Gulp).”
And then I went to bed, too tired from my unnecessary waiting at the computer.
A full week after launch, I only had one other person sign up.
I tried not to break down the 27 hours I prepped for the Clubhouse into the money I made, including the refunds. But I did. $138 divided by 27 hours is (gulp) $5.11/hour.
I calculated that Month 2 would bring me … $327. That’s still only $12.11/hour.
Can you see The Travesty? The Embarrassment? The Head Scratching and Brow Furrowing, especially as I get emails and blog comments and tweets about how amazeballs The Clubhouse is?
Here’s what I’ve learned since:
I “should” have known better. People at corporate gigs were rushing in to work and didn’t come up for air until lunchtime at the earliest. Moms were getting their kids ready for school and out the door. Men and Women of the World (aka entrepreneurs) were also digging out of inboxes. My newsletter had a 3.6% lower open rate than normal, with 1.4% less clicks than usual.
How I Fixed It: I knew that f I sent that email on Wednesday or Thursday — or even 6 hours later on Tuesday! — it would’ve made a huge difference. But I did what I could, sending another newsletter a week later, admitting my screw-up and telling everyone the details. I also put it on my blog, and admitting this “failure” so openly made it a popular post. A good side effect? More Clubhouse sign-ups.
OK, that’s not entirely true. I’d told them all about The Clubhouse casually, and, as I mentioned before, they’d been super enthusiastic. But, um, I didn’t tell them when I was opening The Clubhouse, so I didn’t have much help spreading the word.
How I Fixed It: I sent out an email to my amazeballs colleagues, clients, and cohorts, asking for some tweets or a blog post (or some other way to help me spread the word).
I have to admit — I might’ve gotten a bit cocky. At the time, I had 6,000+ Twitter followers, 1,700+ Facebook fans, and 2,000+ newsletter subscribers. I mean, I didn’t think my numbers were huge, but I just figured there’d be at least 20 people who’d be picking up what I’d be putting down, yaknowwhatI’msayin? I thought, “Well, I built it! … Where the hell are they?” Not only was nobody spreading the word for me, but I was barely spreading it myself!
How I Fixed It: I placed three blog ads where I knew my people were: Alexandra Franzen (who doesn’t offer ads anymore), Kind Over Matter, and Kelly Rae Roberts.
I had almost 200 people look at the Clubhouse page that first day … and only three joined. While I was super proud of my sales page, I knew there had to be something missing if something like 98% (math ain’t my strong suit) of the peeps who checked it out (which must’ve meant they were somewhat interested) didn’t sign up.
How I Fixed It: I spent three hours pulling quotes from my Clubhouse members about why they joined, making them pretty, and adding them to the sales page. I also took out the few times I said I needed to build something “hands-off” for myself, as I decided it could give the impression that I won’t be around the Clubhouse very often (which so ain’t true!). I added a new question to the FAQs and added a free downloadable exercise to that page, too.
I originally wanted to launch this on my birthday, but since it was a Saturday, “nobody would pay attention.” Well, on one hand I convinced myself of that, and on the other I decided to run a 34-hour sale in honor of my 34th birthday for my newsletter peeps only (no tweets, no blog posts, no Facebook updates) that started — you can probably guess this — on Saturday morning. I sold 27 workbooks by the time the sale ended on Sunday night. If that many people had joined my Clubhouse that weekend, I woulda been thrilled. Thrilled!
How I Fixed It: I told the “shoulds” to take a hike and continued to conduct my business in the way that felt good and made sense to me.
I initially had 3 tiers of membership that people could buy into, and I think that led to paralysis when people tried to assess what they needed. I knew that the offer was complicated, since it always took me a while to explain it to people.
How I Fixed It: I streamlined it a few weeks later and only offered one membership option. I also hired Stacy of Ethical Launch to help me untangle the mess and rewrite the sales page.
Two years and lots of change later, the doors of the Clubhouse are still open.
Last year, I made $82/hour for my Clubhouse work, and it currently has more than 60 members. At the end of the day, I have achieved what I set out to: connecting, coaching, and serving more clients at a lower price point.
So no matter what … I Did That. And I’m proud.
GUEST POST
Investing in marketing automation tools is a costly exercise. You spend time evaluating tools, implementing them, training your staff and setting up automation sequences, all before the most costly task of all — maintaining everything you’ve created.
But if you don’t invest all that time and resources, you will not be successful.
The fact is this: The monthly cost for your marketing automation tool is not your biggest outlay.
If you’re struggling to get a return on your marketing automation tool, here are 5 things to consider:
Your output is only going to be as good as your input. There is a lot of functionality in marketing automation and many different skills required.
“Many people make the mistake of underestimating the amount of effort it takes to support a strong marketing automation program. Instead of trying to have one person take on the entire task, consider creating a team composed of a marketing strategist, a content creator, and a salesperson. This allows an agency to deeply integrate marketing automation into an overall cohesive sales and marketing plan.”
– Rick Carlson, CEO, SharpSpring
However, even when you have the right people on board, you still need to invest in training.
When you’re setting up your automated processes, a skilled practitioner will show you the typical mistakes that people make and the errors that lead to lost revenue opportunities.
Invest in your training, and you will reap the results.
Ian Cleary’s full report is available on VB Insight:
How to dramatically increase revenue with marketing automation tools
The problem with marketing automation software is that there is no end to the amount of functionality you can add on to it.
As vendors add more and more functionality, they may end up with some features that are weaker than those you can buy from specialized vendors.
For example, landing page functionality is typically part of a marketing automation tool, but based on my experience, many do not have the functionality that is available through specialized vendors such as LeadPages or Unbounce.
Not using the best landing page software means that you may not get the best conversion ratios.
“Our marketing automation tool landing page software lacks simplicity in design, it’s rather clunky, and I don’t like the end result.”
– Justin Mullen, MSS Solutions
So consider each piece of functionality they provide, but don’t rule out using an external vendor for certain components.
Setting up your marketing automation is not a simple process. It’s impossible to get your sequences right the first time around, and there’s no such thing as perfection.
Marketing automation is a process of continuous improvement. You create your processes, optimize your workflows, and measure results. You then make the tweaks necessary and the whole process begins again.
There is no end to this. There will always be changes to existing sequences and new ones to build as you find areas for improvement or if your business requirements change.
Prepare for making continuous improvement if you want the results.
You can’t do all your marketing and sales with one tool, so you’ll need to work with other providers.
Does your marketing automation tool provide good integration with external tools?
For example, if it integrates with your CRM tool of choice, you want that to be a two-way integration.
When you have a lead that needs to be closed by a sales guy, you should be able to sync this to your CRM tool and provide any relevant information.
But you also want information synced back to your marketing automation tool that shows if the sale went ahead or not. This person could then form part of another sequence based on the action that occurred. And, of course, you want all of this automated.
There is a wide variety of marketing automation tools out there, and it’s difficult to evaluate and pick the correct one.
If you pick the wrong vendor, you may be locked into an expensive contract, and it could be costly to move to another vendor.
Not all solutions will be suitable to your needs so it’s essential you spend the necessary time evaluating each solution to ensure you pick the one most suitable for you.
Marketing automation can generate a lot of profit for your business, but if you don’t invest the time and resources in finding, implementing, and improving what you have, you will not achieve the potential ROI you can earn.
Ian Cleary is the CEO of RazorSocial which has become one of the top social media sites globally since launching in just over a year with over 100,000 visitors per month and 7,000 subscribers.
Starbucks is planning a massive expansion in China over the next couple years that will nearly double its locations in the country.
It might seem risky for a coffee company to expand so aggressively in a culture of tea-drinkers. But Starbucks has altered its stores and products to adapt to local tastes and the strategy appears to be working.
The company's same-store sales grew 7% in the region for the most recent quarter and it's planning to open 500 new locations in China by the end of the year, which would make China Starbucks' second largest market outside the U.S.
Here's a few ways that Starbucks is doing things differently in China:
1. The stores are bigger with more seating space. "Unlike Americans, who can’t cope without a morning cup of joe, most Chinese customers don’t just grab and go," writes Violet Law in the Global Post. "Instead, coffee shops here are a destination. People sit back and chat with friends and family. Some come to meet with clients or do business."
While most Starbucks stores in the U.S. are hectic and bustling, Chinese consumers seek out Starbucks to "nurse their drinks and lose themselves in their laptops... enjoying tranquility that's usually elusive in teeming China," Law writes.
2. The coffee is more expensive. Starbucks charges up to 20% more for its coffee products in China compared to other markets. The Chinese state media has attacked Starbucks for this practice, but the company says the prices are due to the higher costs of doing business in the country.
3. Starbucks stores in China offer a menu of Chinese teas and treats like mooncakes. But one of the best-selling item in the region right now is actually a Strawberry Cheesecake Frappucino, which is topped with a cream cheese whipped cream, graham cracker crumbles, and strawberry syrup. The frappuccino "set instant records for the top-selling limited-time Frappuccino offering ever," Starbucks chief operating office Troy Alstead said on a recent earnings call.
4. The food is labeled with the country where it was imported from to address Chinese consumers' concerns about food safety.
5. Starbucks management makes an effort to get to know employees' families. "Starbucks has ... factored in family dynamics and expectations in China, where success can be judged by the title on one’s business card," the company said in a statement. "Family forums have been held for parents of store partners to hear managers discuss gratifying career paths at Starbucks."
SEE ALSO: Here's The Tiny Swiss Company Behind Starbucks' Espresso Machines
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Moscow has placed a one-year ban on all meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, dairy and poultry products from Canada in response to sanctions imposed against Vladimir Putin’s regime over the crisis in Ukraine. Also banned are food products from the United States, European Union, Australia and Norway.
Here’s a look at the effect of Russia’s sanctions on Canada and other countries.
We use technology for every little thing – from waking up on time each morning, to getting our morning cuppas, identifying that great song we heard on the radio, to finding our way to that morning meeting in an unknown part of town, to finding a great guy or girl that matches our personality. Yes, technology lets us be more efficient, active, satisfies our curiosity, acts as our personal travel guide even doubles up as Cupid.
If we have embraced technology so wholeheartedly in our personal lives, it’s only fair that we allow it to work its magic in our professional lives too. Here’s my pick of the four most inspiring productivity apps that have the potential to make your online business a tad more efficient and loads more creative. Take a look.
Every wannabe ecommerce entrepreneur out there would like the pleasure of focusing on the process of attracting customers to their site and selling their products and services, instead of spending weary hours figuring out such convoluted things as online payment mechanisms, ensuring watertight security for customers’ payment information or even designing a checkout process that actually improves conversions.
With ShopIntegrator, budding ecommerce entrepreneurs can do just that. ShopIntegrator is an amazingly easy to use, multi-functional shopping cart plugin that lets you focus on your core job of running your ecommerce site while taking care of the complicated backend stuff for you.
Key Features:
What It Looks Like
Price: Unlike most other ecommerce apps, ShopIntegrator has a lifetime free option if you plan to sell 50 items or less in your online store.
Paid plans begin at $9.50 per month and go up to $66.49 per month paid in annual installments. This wide range in pricing is a dependent on the number products and features you opt for.
Every online business worth its salt ought to know every last thing about the traffic and transactions on their site. This is even more true in the case of a medium that has truly exploded in the last few years – mobile apps.
Flurry with its three pronged approach offers mobile app owners the chance to understand in-depth app analytics, allows publishers to pick the right ad to be displayed to the right audience for maximum clicks and enables advertisers to choose which apps to advertise on based on rich data insights.
Features
What It Looks Like
Price: Flurry Analytics comes free to app users worldwide. Flurry for Publishers is free for the basic version of ads, higher level segmentation and targeting of customers attract a fee based on the type of targeting you choose. Flurry for Advertisers charges users on a CPM basis with prices varying based on the level of detailed targeting required.
Every online business has a bunch of different teams that work very closely with each other and are highly interdependent.
Asana lets you do away with the hundreds of back and forth email chains that get sent during a typical project and brings collaboration and team work to a different level of efficiency.
Features:
What It Looks Like
Price: Asana has a totally free option that works for teams under 15 members and allows them to work on unlimited number of projects. For teams with 15 members or more, paid plans start from $50 per month and keep getting more expensive based on the number of members involved in the project.
Content Marketing is the latest ‘It’ thing in marketing circles. Every company worth its salt – online or offline – has begun investing heavily into producing and sharing content that draws users to the brand instead of earlier marketing scenarios where brands chased after users.
Percolate is an end to end content marketing platform that covers every step of the content marketing process. From planning to creation to publishing to measurement it manages the entire spectrum.
Features
What It Looks Like
Price: Unlike the other tools we spoke of here, Percolate does not work on rate cards. They offer hands-on demos and pricing on request only.
So those were my four picks for productivity apps that give more than they squeeze out of your pockets, leaving you ample time and resources to get creative with your business. Know of any fun apps that achieve similar results? Let us know in the comments below.
Running ad campaigns on Twitter may become easier and more useful, thanks to an update announced today. According to the official Twitter Advertising Blog, the new features include objective-based campaigns, reports,- and pricing.
The idea here is to allow advertisers to more easily create marketing campaigns that actually work. And you only have to pay for the actions that you want people to take when faced with your ads. If you want to get more clicks to your website, that’s the action you’d pay for — nothing else.
Okay, so let’s run down what these features actually entail. For starters, objective-based campaigns allow you to select from numerous objectives like website clicks, conversions, new followers, email signups, app installs, or tweet engagements. The options are available beneath the phrase, “I want more…” You can’t get much more straightforward than that.
(Of note: Facebook’s self-serve ad campaigns have had these features for some time.)
Then you can pick your preferred ad format based on what works best with your objectives. And since you’re only paying for the objectives you want, you’ll get the best ROI out of the deal. At least that’s Twitter’s reasoning.
These features are currently in beta right now, but are only available to small-to-medium sized businesses and API partners. The next couple of months will see managed clients receiving invites to try the ad features out for themselves.
After launching a campaign, you can track your results. New reports show you specifically how your objective-based campaign is fairing, making it easy to see where it could use some help. And you can download it all via a CSV file, no sweat.
Twitter says the alpha has shown promising results so far for these new features, with participants calling the new platform “intuitive” and designed to help “deliver extremely strong results.”
More changes are on the horizon, of course. Twitter says it wants to, “make it easier and faster for all businesses to succeed on Twitter Ads,” so it should be interesting to see how objective-based campaigns perform as they transition out of beta.
Twitter Ads first launched in 2010 with Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. In November of last year, the social giant rolled out new ad targeting capabilities. And a year ago, it launched Lead Generation Cards, which proved to boost engagement considerably.
Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations. At the heart of Twitter ar... read more »
The Disruptive Age Doesn’t Care About You is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino
The Disruptive Age doesn’t care about you or your problems.
The social, economic, political, cultural, and scientific factors impacting your business don’t care about your business model. They don’t care about your pricing model either. All of the events taking place in the world don’t care whether or not you are interested in them. They are going forward, with or without you, and regardless of the impact they have on your business or life.
You don’t want an economic downturn because you have made commitments to the board, to your management, and to your investors? So what. The economy tanks anyway. Then it takes off whether you are ready to capitalize on it or not.
You can’t afford a tight labor market and the fact that you are going to have to pay more for the talent you need. So what. The price you pay for A-players goes up whether you like it or not.
You don’t think it’s fair that your competitors have found a way to use the new marketing tools to capture mindshare, that they are engaging the young market on places like Instagram? You don’t like it, and you think its tacky? Tweet your problem to @cluelessandfallingfurtherbehind since you don’t have a Snapchat or Instagram account.
You don’t like creeping socialism and the massive increase of regulations? You don’t think we’re building a large enough social safety net and you believe you are being hurt by Corporatism? I hope your political leanings Left, Right, or Middle keep you warm at night. The Disruptive Age doesn’t care. It’s motoring.
You’re worried that driverless cars and robots mean the end of manual labor and the final nail in the coffin of the Industrial Age? Yeah, me too.
Time marches on relentlessly. We progress, never straight forward or straight upward, and often with as many backwards steps as forward steps. We’re moving forward now, and in a few years you are going to look back and recognize the breakneck speed of change–and the massive disruption.
Darwin never said the strongest of the species survives. He said the “most adaptable” to change survives. And the fastest to adapt not only survive, they thrive. Get moving.
“Why do they mess with our customers again? Will this hurt our business?” – these were my first thoughts when hearing the news. Now I think it doesn’t matter a lot.
Have you heard the news?
In 3 months time Facebook will shut down the like-gate (or fan-gate or reveal-tab, as you like) for Facebook Pages.
No more comfortable way of growing your fans with a bribe, like a downloadable ebook, a sweepstakes or a contest.
So it means that you can’t run pages like this.
According to the new rule, the condition of seeing an app’s content can’t be a “Like” to a Page.
Here is what they say:
“You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, check-in at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page.”
Facebook wants Pages to collect more genuine fans, and not those who became fans for a random sweepstakes prize. In a recent post (that I can’t find ever since) they say that people Like too many Pages making ads less effective.
Understandable. Especially because at the end of the day, incentivized fan-collection is a competition to Facebook ads.
So they decided to cut it.
This is how they explain:
“To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.”
Clearly, cutting the Facebook Like-gate is not great news for smaller businesses that do social media without advertising, and hope their posts reach 2-3% of their fans. Here is what we predict:
Antavo, the company I am co-founder of helps marketers to run sweepstakes and contests on Facebook, mobile and web. I still can’t say that we are happy for the changes, as the Like-gate is an important element of our low-end pricing.
But I understand that these changes started a lot earlier, and we are prepared to react in time. We are slightly moving away from Facebook, and this is what we recommend for our customers too.
Don’t build your house on a rented land.
As they say.
Contrary, email marketing remains stable, and bringing more people to the marketing funnel you really own. And this is the real reason you should have downloadable ebooks, contests and sweepstakes.
Removing the Facebook Like-gate clearly proved that we are on the right track with our company’s strategy. We are building the best lead generation and qualification solution that serves our clients’ interest.
You can still ask people to like your Page through the app, like “Please like us to receive updates!”
And Facebook’s new rule will take effect only in 90 days. So when you are using a tool like Antavo, where you can customize apps that are almost ready, then you are still able to run a Like-gated app for 90 days.
This is a possible way of encouraging fans to “like” your page. You can briefly remind, but you can’t oblige them.
Are you happy / unhappy about the changes? Or just don’t care? Also: do you think there is a workaround?
Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a marketer quite like being asked to write a blog post. Some marketers would rather wrestle with pivot tables (or grizzly bears) for days on end than write a blog post – but why?
Writing doesn’t have to be this painful.
Writing is intimidating to a lot of people, particularly those who don’t write for a living or blog on a regular basis. The good news is that writing doesn’t have to be agonizing, and almost anybody can hone their writing skills with a little discipline and a willingness to learn. In today’s post, I’m going to share 16 ways you can start improving your writing skills right now.
Before you can start writing incredible content, you’ll need at least an intermediate understanding of the basic principles of writing. This doesn’t mean you need to enroll in a prestigious creative writing program at an Ivy league university, but you will need to know the basics of grammar and spelling. Every writer should have a copy of “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White on their bookshelf, as this small but invaluable book is one of the most comprehensive resources on the correct use of grammar and other helpful topics. For quick and easy online resources, bookmark Grammar Girl and, of course, Merriam Webster.
If you want to get better at something, you have to practice – and writing is no exception. Unfortunately, there are few shortcuts that can transform you into an amazing writer overnight, and even the most talented writers had to learn their craft over a period of many years.
If you want to improve your writing skills, writing on a regular basis will not only diminish your fear of the blank page (or blinking cursor), it will also help you develop a unique style. So, even if nobody reads it, keep writing. Practice makes perfect.
The best writers are also keen readers, and reading on a regular basis is an easy way to start developing your writing skills. I don’t just mean blog posts, either – diversify your reading material. Expand your horizons to more challenging material than you typically read, and pay attention to sentence structure, word choice, and how the material flows.
The more you read, the more likely you are to develop an eye for what makes a piece so effective, and which mistakes to avoid.
If you work at a reasonably sized company, the chances are pretty good that there is at least one other person who also secretly harbors a desire to become a better writer. Although writing is typically considered a solitary activity, the best writers know when it’s time to get much-needed feedback on their work.
Talk to your coworkers (or friends) and ask someone if they’d be willing to cast an eye over your work – they may spot mistakes that you overlooked. Finding a writing partner is also a great way to hold yourself accountable and keep going.
Most people balk at the idea of standing in front of a room full of strangers and baring their soul to the world, but joining a writing workshop can be immensely beneficial – and a lot of fun (if you manage to find a good one).
You don’t need to have an unfinished novel hidden away in your desk drawer to join a workshop. These days, content marketing meet-ups and professional development groups are becoming wildly popular. Join one of the many content marketing groups on LinkedIn to meet like-minded writers, or search for writing workshops near you on sites like Meetup. Pick a topic, write something, listen to the feedback of the group, and then revise it. Rinse, repeat.
Most people read the same blogs or sites on a regular basis because the material appeals to them – but fewer people understand why their favorite blogs are so appealing.
Find a handful of recent blog posts you really like, then print them out. Next, just like your high school English teacher did, take a red pen and highlight things you liked: certain sentences, turns of phrase, even entire paragraphs. Examine why you like these elements, and see if there are any common threads in your favored reading material. See how writers take one subject and transition into another. Apply these techniques to your own work.
Let’s take a look at a particularly powerful (and memorable piece) from Copyblogger that serves as a great example of this.
Immediately, you’re hooked by Morris’ opening. You can’t not read to see what happens next. The pacing is excellent, it grabs your attention, and best of all, it keeps you reading. This piece was first published back in June, and I still remember it. Read the full post here, and see how Morris masterfully tells the story of a band named Death and how this relates to writing content.
Before we go any further, a disclaimer – imitation is not the same as plagiarism. Don’t rip off anyone’s work. Ever.
Just as you probably have a list of blogs you read often, you’ll likely also read the same writers on a regular basis. Identify what it is you enjoy about their work, and see if you can use it to improve your writing skills. Does a writer you like use humor to spice up dry topics? Try it. Do they use pop culture references to make their work entertaining and useful? Try that, too.
When I first started writing, I imitated some of my favorite nonfiction writers and essayists, such as Joan Didion, Truman Capote and Bill Bryson. I also attempted (and failed) to imitate writers such as Dave Eggers and Dan Kennedy, but soon realized that I wasn’t funny enough and gave it up. Over time, I eventually developed my own style, but reading the works of these writers and seeing how they constructed their essays and books was immensely helpful to me as a writer (see tip #3).
The blinking cursor of a blank page is a considerable foe, even for the most experienced writers. Before putting pen to proverbial paper, sketch out an outline of what you plan to write. This will be your battle plan, and it will help you win the war. Very few – and I do mean very few – writers sit down to write anything without a solid plan in mind.
An outline doesn’t have to be complex. A simple framework of which sections should appear in a particular order, along with a few sentences about what each section contains, may be enough. If the topic you’re tackling is a little more complex, your outline might have to be, too – but having an outline before you write is like having a roadmap in the glove box of your car before a road trip. If you start to feel lost, refer back to your outline and get back to kicking ass and taking names.
Let’s take a look at a real example – one of my own outlines:
Introduction
Brief summary of the post
Section 1 – What is Brand Voice?
Paragraph(s) explaining the key principles behind brand voice (style, tone, and messaging)
Examples of each
Section 2 – Developing Brand Voice with Content
Explanations of how to develop brand voice using content (written, visual, video)
Considerations for content producers/marketers to bear in mind when producing content (strategy, goals, overall brand messaging)
Section 3 – Examples of Content That Builds Brand Voice
Several examples (three or four) of content that aligns well with marketing positioning and branding of recognizable brands
Conclusion
Wrap-up
This outline eventually became my recent post about brand voice. I deviated from my initial outline slightly, but the overarching structure was always there to keep me on target.
So, you’re writing every day (or regularly, at least), and you’re feeling more confident about your work. Awesome! Now you’re going to become your own harshest critic.
Editing is a tough skill to learn for beginner writers, because they place immense value on the time and effort they put into writing in the first place. However, a lot of writing is actually rewriting, and this is where the cold, hard eye of an editor will serve you well.
Develop the discipline it takes to eliminate extraneous words (more on this shortly). Resist the temptation to wax lyrically and get to the point. Not sure if a paragraph works? It probably isn’t. Be tough on yourself, and know when to delete or rework something. Your work will be much stronger as a result.
The best writers make it look so easy. After reading a great post, it’s tempting to imagine your favorite bloggers effortlessly turning in incredible posts with minimal effort before spending the rest of their day reading obscure books in a quaint corner café somewhere. Take comfort in the knowledge that this isn’t how writing works.
First drafts are almost always crap, and that’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t create a masterpiece on your first attempt – chances are, you probably won’t, and that’s okay, too. Just get your ideas down on paper first, then go back and start cleaning up. Writing is an iterative process, and even the best writers have to spend a lot of time reworking material they were probably too embarrassed to show anybody.
Whether you’re trying to make the case for a content strategy to your manager or want to start guest blogging on your favorite sites, finding and working with a good editor is one of the best things you can do to improve your writing skills. I’ve worked with dozens of editors over the years, and in my experience, the best are those who show you why something doesn’t work, rather than just telling you that it doesn’t.
Allowing someone else to read your work can be brutally difficult for some writers, especially when they’re just starting out, but it’s crucial that you develop good habits from the outset and learn to accept constructive criticism about your work. Remember – writers are desperately needy creatures who need to be constantly reassured that they’re the creative geniuses they believe themselves to be, but you’ll need to develop a thick skin if you’re serious about your work, and a good editor is invaluable when it comes to toughening up.
Another common mistake among beginner writers (and some more experienced writers who should know better) is writing overly complex sentences in an attempt to “sound” more authoritative.
In many cases, shorter sentences can have a greater impact. You may have heard of a six-word story that was supposedly written by Ernest Hemingway, which reads, “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” Whether Hemingway wrote this or not is irrelevant – the power of these six words shows that brevity can be a powerful tool when used correctly, and not every sentence needs to be overwrought to get your point across.
Let’s look at another real example from one of my posts – my very first post for WordStream, as it happens. This lengthy sentence is a prime candidate for a ruthless red pen, even if my lame jokes were intended to give it a little more flavor. I’ve edited the sentence to show you how you could edit a similar line in your own work (additions italicized).
“Whether you’re a newcomer to AdWords or have been running PPC campaigns since Google launched the platform in 2000 (with a grand total of 350 customers) for years, you’ve probably given a great deal of thought to about which keywords will result in more clicks and higher conversions – not to mention that vacation home in Lake Tahoe you’ve been dreaming about.”
I’ve been writing professionally, in one way or another, for the past ten years. When I look back at my early work, which I do every so often, it literally makes me cringe. I don’t do this because I’m a masochist, but to remind myself how far I’ve come.
Writing should be fun, and along with the thrill of seeing your byline for the first time, seeing how far you’ve progressed is one of the most satisfying parts of being a writer. Every now and then (but not too often), re-read your earlier work and marvel at how much better you are now than you were then. Pat yourself on the back. You’ve worked hard, so don’t be shy – congratulate yourself.
Most content on the web is bland and dreadfully boring. This is because far too many bloggers focus on regurgitating the same news as everybody else without bothering to add their own opinions. Obviously you don’t want to fall afoul of libel laws, but that doesn’t mean you can’t (or shouldn’t) say what you think.
Once you’ve started to discover your own “voice,” don’t be shy about sharing your opinions. This makes for more interesting reading. Don’t be contrarian for its own sake, and don’t set out to purposefully piss anyone off, but make sure there’s enough of you in your writing to make it a worthwhile read for your audience.
Aside from plagiarizing someone else’s work, nothing will undermine your credibility faster than failing to do your homework.
In their eagerness to be done with a blog post (or even major newspaper article), many writers try to take shortcuts with the facts. This can range from accidentally fudging a statistic out of haste to being lazy when it comes to sourcing or attribution. Not only can this land you in big trouble with your editor/content marketing manager/other boss-type person, it also makes you look like an amateur.
Everybody makes mistakes, and you don’t need to spend weeks cross-referencing every last statistic (see the next tip), but common sense should prevail here – don’t rely exclusively on sites like Wikipedia, and use current, primary sources whenever possible.
You should definitely take the time to write as well as you can, proofread and edit your work thoroughly, and ensure that your piece flows logically from one point to the next. However, this doesn’t mean you should take weeks to write something.
No blog post (or any piece of writing, for that matter) will ever be perfect – you have to know when it’s time to let it go. This is especially important in content marketing, because you’ll rarely (if ever) have the luxury of crafting agonizingly beautiful blog posts full of poignant sentences and evocative imagery. As you become more confident, the “writing” part of writing will become easier and faster, but never lose sight of the fact that deadlines, or editorial calendars, are just as much your masters as any boss or manager.
As for me, I’m going to take my own advice and call this post done. I hope you find these tips useful, no matter how long you’ve been writing. If you have questions or want to share your own advice, leave a comment!
Studies show that unstructured interviews are poor predictors of performance. Credit: U.S. Department of Defense
There are a few things that can kill a business. Some bad publicity. A defective part. A lawsuit.
And the unstructured job interview.
There have been several in-depth studies on unstructured job interviews, and most of them say the same thing: they are bad predictors of performance and are subject to bias. That means the companies who use them are at a disadvantage in the war for talent, which can hamper any organization.
“Interviewers probably over-value unstructured interviews,” University of Pennsylvania Professor Jason Dana wrote in his study about the practice. “Our simple recommendation for those who make screening decisions is not to use them.”
The Studies
There are several studies that have looked at the effectiveness of unstructured interviews and most agree they are poor predictors of performance. Dana’s study, which was published in 2012, actually found that people could more accurately predict performance if they didn’t conduct an interview at all compared to conducting an unstructured interview.
In the study, Dana had 76 participants predict two students’ GPA for the upcoming school year. For the first student, participants just looked at the student’s background information, including their GPA in prior semesters. For the second student, the participants received all of that information, but conducted an unstructured interview with the student as well.
What Dana found was that the people who just looked at the background information made more accurate predictions than people who had the background information and conducted an unstructured interview.
“The assumption is, if I meet them, I’ll know,” Dana told The Boston Globe. “People are wildly overconfident in their ability to do this from a short meeting.”
But there are more consequences to unstructured interviews than just potentially hiring the wrong people. Other studies have found that they are inherently biased in nature, with hiring managers generally choosing people who are like them.
One study conducted by the American Sociological Association (ASA) found that people were likely to hire people who they would be friends with – or even want to date.
“It is important to note that this does not mean employers are hiring unqualified people,” Lauren Rivera, who conducted the ASA study, said in an ASA press release. “But my findings demonstrate that – in many respects – employers hire in a manner more closely resembling the choice of friends or romantic partners than how one might expect employers to select new workers.”
That’s troubling. Not only is that unintentional bias bad for the company because strong candidates are being excluded, it is fundamentally unfair to the applicants.
The Solution
Studies show that the solution is using a more standardized hiring process to hire candidates, including using structured interviews where all candidates are asked the same questions. ERE.net, one of the most influential recruiting sites on the web, agrees, suggesting more standardized interviews and focusing in on other data to screen applicants.
The best example of this is Google and its hiring process. Google has a data-rich hiring process that combines both structured interviews and background information to determine the best people for the job. And they constantly analyze their process to ensure it remains effective.
Through this method, Google’s founders have put aside their own biases after they were proven irrelevant. Specifically, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin both originally believed a candidate’s college GPA would be a good predictor of their performance, but when the numbers proved otherwise, the company stopped even looking at it.
“One of the applications of Big Data is giving people the facts, and getting them to understand that their own decision-making is not perfect,” Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations at Google, recently told the New York Times. “And that in itself causes them to change their behavior.”
We've got so many beautiful stats for you this week.
From native advertising to online TV, paid search spend to site search conversion, social media in travel to banking online. Please enjoy and share at will.
For more online marketing statistics, download our Internet Statistics Compendium...
The IAB and Edelman Berland surveyed 5,000 consumers of business, entertainment and general news as to their perceptions of native advertising.
Nearly nine in 10 (86%) consumers feel that online advertising is necessary to receive free content online. Additionally, 60% of consumers are more open to online ads that tell a story than ones that simply sell a product.
Sponsored content awareness was around 70%.
Does sponsored content add value?
Although respondents seem to suggest more often than not the content doesn’t add value, they believe that placing in-feed content enhances the brand reputation.
This perhaps points to this being a good time for brands to jump on board the native advertising train.
For more detail, check out the report.
Ofcom’s annual communication report has some interesting findings. Let’s start with online TV.
As you can see from the chart below, subscription view on-demand services are rapidly increasing their revenue. Free-to-view ad revenues are also increasing, perhaps fuelled by the increase in tablet computers in UK households.
(Click to enlarge)
More from Ofcom. Digital display advertising grew more than 22% in 2013. The chart below shows how bullish Google’s control of advertising is, considering it accounts for the majority of the nearly £3.5bn spent on paid search.
38% of all clicks on paid search ads in the UK are from mobile devices, according to research from Kenshoo into Q2 2014 data from 6,000 advertisers and agencies.
The increased share for mobile could be due to the success of Google’s Enhanced Campaigns.
Between July 7 and 13 2014, eDigitalResearch looked at the social media activity of 80 top travel brands. The research looked at productivity and quality of content.
Here are some of the findings:
(Click to enlarge)
See the report for more detail on Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus.
Chemist Direct updated the search function on its website in January 2014 to include auto-complete and machine learning functionality.
The improved site search certainly seems to have aided customers in navigating the retailer’s 20,000 SKUs.
Of the 3.5bn global searches conducted each day on Google, 16% to 20% involve phrases that have never been searched before.
Covario has been looking into the decline of industry ‘head terms’ with some simple Google Trends searches.
The simplified charts below (without axes) show how search terms are changing. Why not head over to Google Trends and try similar phrases for your sector.
Head terms
Long tail
The number of household bill payments made via PCs, tablets and mobiles will exceed 20bn this year, representing approximately 16% of all global consumer household bills.
Usage of online banking is expected to continue to increase over the next five years as consumers, especially Generation Y users, increasingly use mobile channels to manage their accounts.
These findings come from Juniper Research and its 'Mobile & Online Banking: Developed & Developing Market Strategies 2014-2019' report.
570 individuals from across 25 countries participated in Lionbridge’s 2014 Global Email Marketing Survey.
Highlights include:
The chart below shows what aims email marketing serves for the respondents.
For lots more stats from the survey, see the infographic below.
(Click to enlarge)
Copywriting company Stratton Craig polled 700 people on the subject of ‘the price of bad content’. Respondents were male and female, and aged 18 to 65+.
Findings include:
For more fun from the survey, check out the infographic.
(Click to enlarge)
Most people think that to get ahead of your business competitors, you need to give customers the latest, the most innovative, the most groundbreaking etc, etc. You don’t normally think of marketing anything that’s common knowledge.
The thing with common knowledge though is that it’s still being sold. A good example would be kindergarten. Toddlers are the best proof you have that not everyone knows how to read. You can extend this to other subjects that are unfamiliar to your prospects even though they may be common knowledge elsewhere. Sometimes your B2B marketing strategy works best when you go back to basics instead of striving so much to tell them something new:
Now there are obstacles to this. Thanks to the internet, decision makers and executives are likely to have more resources to solve their own problems. If the internet’s one big pool of free information, you can bet they’d dig their hands deep into it.
Researching is just one thing though. Putting it into practice can be another. Furthermore, there’s also the case that some decision makers can’t spend all their time on research. It kind of proves that the internet is still far from a substitute for formal education.
That’s why a back-to-basics approach still gives quite a few edges to your B2B marketing strategy such as:
Basic knowledge still has value. And for marketers, any knowledge of value can win over potential clients. If you’re exhausting your campaign from creating the latest buzz, sometimes a typical 101 review can net your next generation of clients.
Make Your ReTweets Go ViralLearn how with these tips
What type of content attracts the most retweets?
There are certain ones that create more social sharing than others. This is important to track and measure for your brand or business as you build influence.
Here are seven ways people are attracting retweets with great content:
People love news, especially when this pertains to a product or service that can meet their needs. Special announcements attract attention, and can become viral very quickly. The key is to share this information in a timely manner whether it is from your own brand or business or another.
Images immediately grab a reader’s attention, but these need to be shared in way that is eye-catching and informative. Tweets that are shared directly on Twitter are most effective in generating retweets, much more so than from Facebook or Instagram.
Facts and figures are very popular on Twitter. Sites like Mashable and Factbrowser are great resources to gather information to share with your community.
Engage your audience by asking them to retweet or respond to your tweets. Not only will you receive more mentions, but your content will be retweeted to other followers for their comments.
Because Twitter only allows 140 characters it’s important to keep in mind that people who share your content will be adding their own call to action such as, ‘RT.’ Try to condense your tweets as much as possible with the use of link shorteners like bit.ly and Buffer. The most retweets come from tweets that contain between 100 and 115 characters according to HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella.
Do you have a great guide to share or some helpful tips? Perhaps a video or Slideshare presentation that speaks to the needs of your audience? This is a great way to attract more followers and encourage retweets.
Every now and then a brand or business can spark engagement with a hilarious tweet or say something that is unique and grabs your followers’ attention. Keep it clean and positive, and stay true to your brand’s image.
All in all your social media marketing on Twitter will be most effective when you apply these elements, and stick to the voice of your business or brand. Make adjustments as necessary and track your progress in Twitter to find out what is working with your particular audience.
Can an audience or a community be owned? What does it mean to be owned? You have invested time and resource into building and nurturing your social community. Do you think you have a right to control them?
The truth is you can NOT own your audience. We should not be trying to control communities or the human beings within them.
It is more about communicating and engaging WITH other human beings versus communicating TO them.
Instead we should be inspiring, energizing and influencing conversation. The focus should be on value, context, relevancy and giving, not control.
In this episode of Social Zoom Factor podcast I discuss very openly my thoughts on attempts at controlling and owning your audience.
Episode Highlights
Finding talent for your organization is an ongoing process. It’s even ongoing-er today because the average work tenure of a Millennial is 2 years. The below strategies should aid you in your quest to recruit the next generation of leaders.
The software development company, Zendesk, has a recruiting video that is a prime example of what resonates with Millennials. Even though this video was created forever ago in 2012, there are many learnings for those looking to effectively recruit the right Millennial talent through video.
17 Crucial Elements For An Effective Millennial Recruiting Video
Question: What other aspects have been effective in your Millennial recruiting efforts?
A test fleet of self-driving Volvos roams the roads of Sweden. (Volvo)
In Google’s videos of its driverless cars, people buckle themselves into toy-like vehicles and ride around, holding hands and enjoying the scenery, as if ensconced in the world’s most delightful taxi. There’s a hint of cinematic fiction to the scenes or, at best, of a stunt that’ll never work in the real world.
The foreseeable future will be nothing of the sort—but that doesn’t mean there isn’t potential for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Quite the opposite: The business of making cars drive themselves will be worth US$87 billion by 2030, according to Boston-based technology consultancy Lux Research. The opportunities for software developers alone will total US$25 billion a year.
Just get it out of your head that cars will drive themselves all the time on all roads and in all weather conditions. Not just technological challenges but also legal, social and insurance-related obstacles stand in the way. Most AVs will instead boast capabilities such as lane-departure warnings and collision-avoidance braking. More sophisticated systems in luxury models will enable the car to make its own decisions three-quarters of the time.
The technology will cost you: from $1,000 to $5,000 for the high-end features, Lux predicts. But car buyers are accustomed to adding options, and automation could boost value by increasing safety and potentially lowering insurance premiums. Indeed, since human error is responsible for 90% of fatal crashes, AVs present a huge opportunity to reduce the perils of personal transportation. Plus, there is convenience. Imagine driving your car right to the door of your destination, then leaving it to find its own parking space. Add in productivity gains and fuel savings from more efficient travel, and a switch to fully automated car fleets could save the U.S. economy a staggering US$1.3 trillion a year, Morgan Stanley estimates.
READ: The electronic highway: How ‘connected cars’ will change driving »
“I’m not exaggerating when I say AVs will have as big an impact on our cities and society as the arrival of the first cars over 100 years ago,” says Barrie Kirk, head of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence (CAVCOE), which is striving to build an ecosystem of organizations to supply the market’s needs.
Most automakers have R&D projects devoted to autonomous capabilities, with Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Ford leading the way, says Cosmin Laslau, lead author of the Lux report. Volvo is currently deploying a test fleet of 100 largely autonomous cars among ordinary drivers in Sweden, though the AVs will be restricted to certain roads and speeds.
Systems suppliers such as Continental and Valeo are forming partnerships with the likes of IBM, Cisco and Nokia. California’s Velodyne Lidar is developing new radar aimed at AVs using lasers. And, of course, Google has its research program.
“I think [AVs] are a really interesting opportunity for new business models,” says Laslau. For example, he envisions third-party financiers stepping in to help consumers pay for autonomous add-ons on a per-kilometre basis instead of up front. Self-driving cars could also make car-sharing networks more appealing. Instead of having to return the car to where you got it, as Zipcar members do now, the vehicle would drive itself “home” or to the next person who ordered it.
There are additional business opportunities beyond the car itself. “Autonomous cars are going to need extremely high-resolution maps, far beyond what we have today,” Laslau says. Hamilton-based GeoDigital International, whose main business is developing 3-D maps power utilities use to inspect transmission lines, recently landed a multi-year contract with an unnamed carmaker to map America’s roadways using the same technology. BlackBerry subsidiary QNX Software Systems, meanwhile, is supplying the operating system for an experimental vehicle being developed at Italy’s University of Parma.
READ: How Apple, Google and BlackBerry are fighting to control the future of Smart Cars »
These firms are exceptions, however. “Technology companies in Canada are not yet sufficiently aware of the opportunities in this market, or they think they’re too far in the future,” CAVCOE’s Kirk says. “AVs are here now only in one form,” he adds, referring to the automated trucks deployed in the oilsands—importantly, on private property.
California has introduced regulations to allow AVs on public roads, and Ontario may follow suit. But it will take time and feature improvements for the public to embrace them. Describing the units atop Google’s cars as “bulky,” the Lux report concludes that “no automaker would ever go to market with [such technology] in a mass-produced product.”
The post How the coming boom in self-driving cars will affect every business appeared first on Canadian Business.
The best sales people I know are those who are life-long learners with a true passion for communication. They read books about the psychology of sales, visit workshops about persuasion techniques, listen to audio recordings about influence strategies, and they utilize the knowledge they acquired in their day-to-day job.
That's great. But there's a hidden danger many aren't aware of, and I see many junior sales reps running into the sales psychology trap. It's hurts them, and it hurts their prospects.
I'm talking about oversimplifying things to a point where it distorts the reality of what's happening in front of them. I'm talking about overeagerly applying labels to people. Don't make generalized assumptions based on isolated signals.
Especially because we sales people possess more knowledge about human nature and the psychology of communication, we need to be more attentive to other people. It's too easy to become a victim of our own "good judgment".
It's great if you're able to read body language. It gives you an advantage over most other people who not only aren't aware of how to read body language, but don't even look at others closely enough to notice their body language. But don't overdo it.
It's great if you can profile whether someone is predominantly processing information visually or auditory or kinestetically... but don't assume that they "are visual" just because they used a couple of visual predicates and speak quickly.
It's great if you are perceptive enough to notice these things. You want to have that kind of awareness which allows you to read between the lines and consciously pick up signals.
All these signals are just the tip of the iceberg. People are more complex than that. Don't assume to understand their deeper feelings because of your superficial observations.
The danger is that you'll often find your first interpretation to be the right one. And that can make you believe that all your first interpretations are right - which is always wrong. But at that point you're so confident in your own judgment that you're not open-minded enough to notice it.
Acquiring the knowledge is easy. Applying it (correctly) is much more important.
Fortunately there's a simple three step process that you can use to keep your own judgments in check.
Most sales people are pretty good at observing their prospects. They watch their body language, listen to the tone of their voice, pay careful attention to the exact words they use.
Get out of your own head and focus on your prospects.
2) Interpretation
The next step is to interprete what you observed. Ask yourself: what could this mean? (Not what does this mean!
This is where your knowledge of body language, personality types, sales psychology, NLP and influence techniques is helpful. Many of them provide helpful frameworks that help you to quickly classify an observation, and come up with a set of likely explanations.
But just because an observation you made matches something you read in a book doesn't mean that this is the case. So you need to validate your interpretation.
3) Confirmation
Continue observing until you can see a pattern. Don't make assumptions on isolated observations. You can't know whether an individual instance is a reflection of a larger underlying pattern or just an outlier. If you can consistently observe a particular reaction in another person, only then do you have a stronger basis to make an assumption.
Sometimes people will say "Yes", and at the same time shake their head "no". Now this is a pretty obvious mismatch between their verbal and non-verbal communication. But so far, the observation you made is just this: They said yes, and shook their head "no" at the same time.
Now how do you interpret that?
So now you want to narrow it down to the most likely reason for this mismatch.
One way could be to get them to say yes to something else that you know they are fine with - are they shaking their head there too? If not, then you can conclude that they're not always shaking their head when they say yes.
You can bring up the same topic again and observe how they react.
By process of elimination you can identify the real cause of that mismatch.
Or you could just ask them: "Hey, I noticed you said yes and shook your head at the same time. I just want to confirm if you feel really good about moving forward, of if there's something we should talk about first." The point is that you find an external confirmation for your internal interpretation.
I once gave a seminar where in the front row there was a person who had a totally closed body language: arms crossed, legs crossed. And most body language experts will tell you that this is a strong signal that they're closed to your ideas.
I noticed that person's body language and thought: 'Wow, this person really hates my talk and probably thinks I'm totally wrong!'
Fortunately the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy my talk, so it didn't throw me off my game. I just kept going with my presentation, all the way until the end when everyone stood up.
And Mister Closed Body Language? He got up, uncrossed his arms and revealed a huge brown coffee stain on his shirt. THAT was the reason for his crossed arms - he just tried to hide the coffee stain, not to close himself to my ideas.
Use your senses more than you use your mind. Be open when you communicate so that you are really aware of what's going on. Don't become the kind of person that's filled with well-informed prejudices.
Next time you catch yourself judging or interpreting someone else, ask yourself: 'Or what could be another explanation for that?'
See a guy with crossed arms and legs? 'Oh, this guy is totally closed to new ideas! ... or what could be another explanation for that?'
See someone using a lot of abstract words, appealing to reason, making logical arguments? 'Oh, this is obviously a left-brain person! .... or what could be another explanation for that?'
Move beyond the easy answers to understand (and influence) people better. You'll experience the depth and richness the world on a deeper level. You'll make more sales and close more deals.
Pop quiz: you have a brilliant new idea, well outside the core of your current business. Where should you spend the most time?
a) Writing a detailed business plan
b) Deploying a survey to ascertain customer interest
c) Hiring resources to build an accurate prototype
d) Testing and iterating your business model
No doubt, each of these are important, requiring appropriate time, sequencing, and resources. During initial development, however, investing the most time to answer “d” (test and iterate) enables you to validate customer need before committing unnecessary resources, and can have the greatest impact to a successful outcome.
Value Proposition comes first
The question is: how can you truly iterate on the business model without building an expensive prototype? Remember, your initial business model is simply a set of hypotheses. And for any business idea that is striking uncharted territory, it is critically important to test the intended benefit for the customer. Often, this can be done through creative testing of the value proposition rather than the end product.
Let’s look at an example. Say a telecom company wants to introduce an app that connects users to local events, e.g. pop-up stores, live music, flash sales. In this case, the benefit for retailers is ready access to a self-selected group of users. For consumers, they get instant information on sought after events. Does the telecom need to design, test, and launch an app in order to test this idea?
Imagine all the ways that this value proposition could be tested before committing resources to an app launch. One way might be to partner with an upcoming event, and ask users to submit an email if they’d like further information on an app. Or to test variations of an email blast on flash sales and monitor its virality. Another way might be to ask event participants to vote on their favorite type of event. Each of these demonstrates interest and engagement in the intended value proposition itself, rather than a focus on the end product.
Experimentation, the lean way
Through a concept we call Benefit Disaggregation, we work with clients to drive toward clarity around their value proposition. Then we begin to design creative ways to test the customer benefit without having to launch a product. Here are the key steps in the process:
1. Disaggregate the benefit from the offering - What is the customer really getting out of this? Remember the use of technology does not count as a benefit. Make crystal clear the primary customer benefit that should be tested.
2. Ideate around benefit testing – Think of as many ways to test the benefit as possible. How would you design an experiment with as few materials as possible?
3. Deploy your experiment with minimal materials – Get in front of customers and test the basic premise as quickly as possible. Focus on the primary benefit to verify its value.
If you build it they will will they come?
In my experiences with the humblest startups to the largest corporations, I’ve noticed a tendency to zero in on the end product with the belief that the technology will make it irresistible to end users. Let’s call it the “If you build it, they will come” syndrome. This leads to the common mistake of over-committing time and resources to create a perfect “beta” version during the early stages of an idea. I have yet to see or hear of an offering that was perfect on the first go-round, but I have witnessed the crushing disappointment of a launch that fails miserably in first contact with customers.
Through the principle of Benefit Disaggregation, entrepreneurs can avoid this trap and rapidly iterate their business model in order to progress with increasing confidence. Follow up experiments should test other aspects of the business model such as product features, operations, distribution, logistics, revenue generation. However, initial testing of the intended customer benefit will be most effective in turning an early idea into a viable business.
I have interviewed salespeople for over 35 years, and during that time I’ve developed some insights on effective interviewing methods. Here are five of my strategies that will enable you to better evaluate the salespeople you are interviewing:
Here is our preferred process at Performance Group:
If you still have questions or concerns have someone other than yourself conduct the third interview. The other person can be more objective and it gives you a chance to sit in on the interview and be a third party observer.
People will reveal who they are over time. Chunking the process out into separate steps with specific objectives gets them to reveal more of who they really are. Take the time. Through a series of interviews and assessments, we have a pretty good understanding of whom we are dealing with and what they are capable of doing. We rarely get stumped.
When a candidate interviews, they are at their best. If you don’t like what you see, pass on them. You need to pay attention to how they communicate during the interview process; the questions they ask; the follow-up; how they dress; how they adhere to or follow your process; their research or lack thereof prior to the interview, etc. Remember, you are seeing them at their best.
The same goes for you. Top performing salespeople consistently tell me they base a majority of their decisions on how the hiring manager, human resources, and company leadership communicate and respond to them during the interview. The reason is because they believe the way you act during the interview is the way they will be treated when they become your employee. If you want to attract top performers, do what you expect them to do.
Difficulty in a sales role is measured by the amount of resistance the salesperson will receive from prospects. If it is an account manager role and they are tasked to maintain the accounts assigned to them, they would encounter little resistance.
Here are situations where resistance increases. Which ones apply to your position?
All of these situations add resistance. The more resistance the more resiliency is required in the salesperson.
Do you have a reality check on the level of resistance your salespeople encounter and how are you evaluating the resiliency of your candidates?
In the cases where we are looking for candidates that we know are going into a high resistance job, we add a second assessment in our evaluation of them. In addition to the OMG Salesperson Candidate Assessment, which evaluates what parts of selling they are able to successfully execute, we use the TriMetrix assessment. It identifies what motivates them, at a core level, and how developed their talents are. Combine the two assessments and you’ll have a clear picture of their resiliency.
I have learned that a majority of the top performing salespeople have limited interviewing experience. Typically, they seek out and only interview for the positions they truly want. They have rarely interviewed and simply transitioned into their next job.
Typically, these people are in the top 10% in their field, have a track record of success, are well compensated, know what they are doing and know what they want. Because they find their own opportunities, they rarely show up in your candidate pool and therefore, it is rare for you to have interviewed one of them. I have had the unique experience of interviewing a lot of these top salespeople because I went out and found them. I learned that they have beliefs and attitudes that are different than other candidates and they have different answers and insights than most.
For example, I interviewed a top 10% salesperson last week. I asked him how he kept score. Why did I ask this specific question? It’s because I have learned from interviewing hundreds of these top 10% salespeople that they all keep score - it is a top 10% trait.
He responded by asking, “What are you asking about? How I track my results or activities?” The fact that he asked a clarifying question already gave me his answer. We discussed what he tracked. Then, I asked him why he tracked activities and results. He stated, “When your boss calls you Friday at 5 p.m. and asks how your week went, shouldn’t you have specifics for him? Isn’t it your job as a salesperson to track what you are doing so you know how you have done and what you need to be doing?” His response to this one question alone did not validate he was one of the top 10%. It was his answers to the dozen other “top 10%” questions I asked him along with the other forms of evaluation we use during the screening stage of our process that told me he was.
The most effective way is to find out what the top 10% in your industry thinks, believes in, and does and then, formulate questions based on their answers. Please don’t pull these questions from the latest best selling “how to interview” book and stop using your pet questions unless you have validated them. This requires research and trial and error. First, you have to find the top people, and then you’ll have to question them beyond their surface answers because quite honestly they have unconscious competencies in their key skill areas - they don’t know how they do it, they just do it. You get answers like the one Wayne Gretzky gave when asked what makes a great hockey player. He stated, “Skate to where the puck is going to be. Not where it has been.” Really, if I had only known I too could have been an NHL All- Star! What is obvious to the one with talent, is not so to others.
I have had the opportunity to recruit, hire, onboard, train and mentor a lot of top salespeople in my career. In 2009… in the depth of the Great Recession… I decided to conduct some field research on how to maintain revenue during a recession. I had lunch with one of my former top performers. When asked how she maintained her sales revenue in 2008 and 2009 while her peers and competitors were experience 20-50% decreases, she said, “If you listen to what people say they will tell you how to sell them.” Again, if I had only known! She was also one of the few salespeople I ever hired who brought in agreements drawn up on a napkin from the lunch she just had with a prospect. She did not always need formal proposals or agreements; sometimes napkins were fine. Try teaching that skill. The point is you can’t. But what you can do is observe how top performers think, what they believe in, and what they do in order to be consistently successful. You can then take what you learn and formulate questions that will help you identify if your applicant is a top performer.
Here are a couple of my top 10% salesperson questions which I have researched, tested and validated:
Every top producing salesperson I have ever interviewed has answered all three of these questions the same way and without hesitation. I have achieved what researchers call stable data.
What are your top producer questions? Do you know what a good response is to your question as well as a bad one? Do you consistently ask the same questions to every candidate?
The final criterion most people use to hire someone is their gut feeling. It just feels right. Gut reads are important, but at the same time how often have you hired with or against your gut feeling only to have it turn out wrong? That gut feeling you had turned out to be nothing but gas.
Whether you are the only person doing the interviewing and hiring or you have several people involved in the hiring process, a good validation practice to develop is one by which you evaluate your applicants against a scorecard.
Develop your matrix around what is critical for success in the role. Generally, this can be categorized around crucial job or career experience, knowledge, formal education, certifications, culture fit, skills, communication style, teamwork, knockout factors, etc.
I always try to keep my scoring on a scale of 1 to 4. If it is 1 to 5, people default to scoring 3 more times than they should. Scoring 1-10, you run in to the same indecision that drives people to pick 5 too often, and differentiating between 10 points is a little overwhelming. Having to pick a number between 1 and 4 forces the evaluator to be more objective.
Here are a couple of examples of a scoring matrix:
http://versolla.com/pages/pages/files/Interview%20Scoring%20Matrix.pdf
http://www.hope.edu/academic/education/studteach/ProfessionalInterviewScoringRubric.pdf
These strategies have served me well over the past 35 years and continue to today.
Lead generation isn’t like the rest of the sales process, especially when it comes to B2B lead generation. In fact, lead generation is such a specific science that some companies specialize primarily in that phase of the sales cycle.
But is hiring lead generation experts really worth it? The short answer: Yes.
Outsourcing lead generation leaves the rest of your sales team ready to tackle only the most qualified and vetted leads – meaning you have more time to focus on the perfect close. Here are three more in-depth reasons your business should leave B2B lead generation to the experts:
It’s the truth about every sales team: Your most experienced salespeople don’t want to cold call new prospects. They’d much rather be working with warm leads that are likely to close. In fact, the moment most salespeople live for and celebrate is the final close – not the initial cold call.
Motivating salespeople to cold call is both a science and an art, but most companies don’t have much experience with this level of motivational training. Also, teaching a salesperson to celebrate without a close is a difficult process, whereas lead generation experts are perfectly content to warm up a lead and hand it off to a sales closer while not losing any motivation for their work.
That’s where outsourced lead generation experts come in: Lead generation training is a specific type of sales training and outsourcing the job of lead generation to the experts lets you tap into that specialized training and experience.
With the fact already established that most sales teams don’t want to focus on cold calling and appointment setting, it’s nearly impossible to find and retain great lead generation specialists, and ramping up their training and familiarity with your business takes far too much time.
On the other hand, outsourcing lead generation experts takes that staffing and retention burden off your back.
Firms in the outsourced sales industry hire hundreds of B2B lead generation specialists over the years, and when they house the recruitment function internally, they are better able to hire the precise expert for your company. With years of recruiting under their belt, outsourced lead generation companies possess the well-honed experience necessary to hire, retain and match a lead generation expert that’s best for your business.
Ensuring successful lead generation results for your business is an expensive process when you keep it all in-house, including a number of fixed costs that you simply can’t avoid. For example, the amount of data analytics (and marketing automation software) you need can easily get out of control when your company has to absorb that cost all by itself.
Another major fixed cost to consider is the pay and other compensation for your lead generation staff. When hosted in-house, you can’t hire or fire your B2B lead generation experts as easily. Even if you only need them occasionally or seasonally, you still have to pay in-house staff year-round. But, outsourcing lead generation relieves you of the fixed costs,letting you tap into those specialty services only when you need them.
And finally, hiring your own lead generation specialists is fraught with the headache of paperwork and administrative costs. Not only are you relieved of the burden of hiring and compensation when you outsource lead generation, but you also don’t have to track and administer other HR costs and responsibilities such as employee discipline, unemployment paperwork, insurance costs and a host of other administrative duties.
Lead generation really is a practice you should leave to the experts. When you outsource your lead generation efforts, you allow your sales team to focus on the remainder of the sales process – which means more deals signed, closed and in the bank.
Sales productivity measurements are subject to considerable debate. Unfortunately, there is no perfect formula to determine sales productivity. Nonetheless, these measurements are critical because they are often used to establish bonus and compensation schemes, as well as to determine who is laid off in a downturn. Additionally, sales productivity has a huge impact on the value of a company to its investors.
Below are a few key metrics that sales managers can use to evaluate their sales force.
Conversion Rates – How many leads are your sales reps bringing in? How many of those prospects are they converting into loyal customers? The more prospects the sales team converts, and the quicker its done, the better your productivity.
Cost of the Sales Force – For most organizations, the sales reps themselves are the most significant cost incurred. Perhaps you shelled out a lot of money to secure the top sales rep in your industry and true to his reputation, he’s a quick closer. However, his level of productivity can be deceiving. It’s important to factor in how much money he is costing the company vs. how much money he’s bringing in. If you’re not turning a profit, it’s not worth it.
Customer Acquisition Costs – Another key factor in determining sales productivity is the cost incurred to acquire a new customer. What you may find is that acquiring certain kinds of customers isn’t profitable for your business and focusing on a different market will yield a higher return on investment.
Market Conditions – It’s important to take existing market conditions into account when determining sales productivity. Companies in a fast-growing market with tons of competition require a different strategy than a company who is a leader in an established market. The company in the highly competitive market may find that they need the sales team to bring in more profit at a lower cost in order to sustain the business.
By keeping a close eye on these four key metrics, sales managers will always have an idea of the productivity of their team. A good CRM tool can help to determine some metrics such as how many leads of each their sales reps and their sales team as a whole are converting into customers.
Careful tracking and collaboration with other departments such as Finance may be necessary to determine how much revenue the sales team is bringing in vs how much the sales team is costing the company as well as how much it costs to acquire new customers in a certain segment. While staying abreast of the latest goings on within your industry will help you to predict how the conditions of the market will affect the bottom line.
Marketing is all about results. At the end of the day, the whole point of marketing is to drive sales, right? If your company isn’t getting sales, then your marketing strategy isn’t working.
Consequently, marketers are taught to focus on ROI, or return on investment. The thinking goes, if you’re spending x amount of dollars on your marketing campaign, and you get y amount of dollars in sales back, then you can calculate your ROI. If you’re looking for the official equation:
ROI = [Gain from investment – Cost of investment] / Cost if investment
If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably asked for your team to calculate the ROI of your marketing program. You want to know the effectiveness of your investment. If you’re an employee, chances are you’ve heard your boss say, “How much is this going to cost me? What am I going to get back? What’s the ROI?”
In a simple world, ROI is a fantastic measure. We could just simply calculate the marketing methods that provide us with the highest ROI and invest more money into those tactics. Then, we could cut out the methods that yield the lowest ROI and invest that money elsewhere.
We don’t live in a simple world.
It used to take between 3-5 marketing “touches” to obtain a customer. Example: an individual visits your website (marketing touch #1), he/she receives your quarterly newsletter (marketing touch #2), and then a salesperson would make a follow-up call to close the deal (marketing touch #3).
Studies show that now it typically takes anywhere from 12-25 marketing “touches” to get that customer. In today’s economy, people tend to drag their feet when making a buying decision. It can take months, or even years, for an individual to make a purchasing decision. Your target audience now goes through a journey before making a final choice, and a lot of factors go into the decision making process.
Since so many marketing “touches” influence your audience’s purchasing decision, it’s becoming more difficult to accurately calculate the ROI of your marketing tactics. Sure, you can look at things in terms of your entire marketing budget vs. sales, but it becomes challenging to measure the specific tactics.
I say, death to ROI! Instead, we focus on a new measure: ROO, or return on objective.
For example, let’s say you have a stellar website. One of the main objectives of your website is to generate new leads, and the goal for your small business website is to get 10 qualified leads per month. In August, your website gets you 100 new qualified leads. Therefore, your website had a high ROO for August.
Now, you may counter that with, “What if none of those website leads convert to sales? Isn’t the ROI on my website zero?”
Fair point. However, I would argue that you have to look at things more holistically. Does your marketing program include any follow-up for those website leads. What happens after someone fills out a form on your website? Does your salesperson give them a ring? Are they included in a newsletter or e-mail campaign providing them with more information? Or does the buck just stop there?
You can’t blame your website if there’s no follow-up process! Or, let’s look at this alternative. Your salesperson sends a proposal out to a lead from your website. In a rush, the salesperson includes seven typos in the proposal and miscalculates your fees. The lead declines your business as a result. Again, is this your website’s fault? Nope!
Is death to ROI a dramatized statement to make? Absolutely. Analytics and measurement are critical to any marketing program. However, by looking at things from an ROO perspective, you’re forced to take a closer look at the effectiveness of all your marketing methods and how well your tactics work with one another.
Your marketing strategy should include multiple marketing channels with specific objectives.
So you have just set up your blog and published a few posts. But all you can hear is the sound of crickets. No clicks, comments or meaningful traffic.
That self published e-book, guide and online course is not selling like it should. That dream of a Caribbean holiday is on hold. Your significant other wonders why you are spending all that time late at night writing, tweeting and twerping but with nothing to show for it. Maybe it’s not time to give up the day job.
So…should you pack it in and give up the dream?
Blogging is not a “get rich quick” scheme and it has become a serious business that a few years ago was seen as only an activity for geeks and dorks. Some blogs and bloggers are now making some serious money. The Huffington Post (a blog) was sold for over $300 million and other bloggers such as Timothy Sykes, the Gothamist and Smashing Magazine are making 7 figures. But where do you start ?
You need traffic.
Old fashioned high street retail businesses needed passing foot traffic to make sales. The greater the passing crowd the more money they make. Bloggers need web traffic.
So…how to get more blog traffic?
Here are 100+ tactics including social media, search engines, email, joint ventures and more… to drive traffic to your blog and websites.
The channels and networks you concentrate on will vary according to your business target audience. Lets look at the following tactics for building a global distribution network to reach prospects and fans.
It’s like building your own media company.
Growing your Facebook “likes” combined with fan engagement and contagious content that begs to be shared is one way of earning attention online and driving traffic to your blog.
Here are some tips for improving your organic Facebook reach by attracting more likes
More reading:
10 Facebook contests that captured 10,000 emails
30 Facebook Timeline Contest Ideas That Drive Likes and Comments
The tips above were tactics that didn’t need an advertising budget but time. If you want to accelerate the process then paying for advertising is also a viable method.
One of the easiest ways is to select “Boost Post” option after posting an update on your page that links back to your blog. In essence Facebook now has two types of options.
Read more:
Why Should You Spend Money on Facebook Advertising?
A Quick Run Down of Facebook Targeting Options
Twitter allows an unfiltered stream of tweets. So the better the headline the larger the following on Twitter then the larger your distribution network. Content without promotion is often wasted.
More reading:
How to Build a Targeted Twitter Tribe of 100,000 Followers
40 Ways to Increase Your Twitter Followers
Twitter has 3 key types of advertising options. They all can drive more traffic.
These include:
More reading: 3 Powerful Case Studies that Show you How to Advertise on Twitter
LinkedIn has opened up its platform to content creators with its publishing platform. This has made it more content centric and open.
it looks like Linkedin is awakening to the open social web! Here are some tips to grow your distribution network on LinkedIn.
More resources:
Why LinkedIn’s Publishing platform may Surprise You
Personal Branding on LinkedIn: 10 Mistakes to Avoid
LinkedIn has advertising options and they include two key categories. Self service and partner solutions. For bloggers the realistic option is “self service” . Here are the two ways to advertise on LinkedIn.
More reading: A Complete Guide to LinkedIn Ads
Google+ is Google’s social network that was created to create a social media foundation that would help Google capture important demographic information.
It also helps Google determine by the “Plus ones” what content is valuable.
More reading: 53 Ways to Market Your Google Plus Hangout on Air
Instagram now has over 200 million users and can be a great source of traffic for visual and consumer brands. Beyonce used it to announce her latest album with great viral marketing results.
Here are some tips to grow your followers on Instagram.
For more in depth tips read “6 Tips for Instagram Marketing Mastery“.
Create a YouTube account and make sure that the following basics are done. This makes sure that you follow this best practice to make it easy for people to click through to your blog.
Examples: 4 Ways to Succeed With Your Pinterest Brand Page
Networking on Stumbleupon still works and join a “voting” group if you are looking to promote your article on there.
Triberr is a hidden goldmine for you to promote your newest article on and get a ton of social shares from it. It allows your whole group to easily share your article from your blog.
Organic search engine traffic can often provide over 50% of your traffic for free if you have a well optimized plan and strategy. So what are some top tips to bring free organic search traffic to your website or blog.
For more information read “50 One Sentence SEO Tips for Bloggers“
The reduction of organic reach on social networks like Facebook (For more read “Why You Should Forget Facebook“), is making organisations reconsider their focus social media. It mean building not only your social media presence on other networks but also by building your email list.
So how can you use email to drive traffic and create online attention?
More in depth reading: 6 Tips to Grow a Large Email List
What is important to realise is that the social web allows you to work with other bloggers and businesses to reach each others customers. These “Joint Venture” relationships will amplify and multiply your marketing. With internet marketing this is often called “Affiliate marketing”
Think about this for a moment. If you were able to work with 10 other bloggers who all had 10,000 emails each and you have 10,000 then you have just connected to a network of 100,000. That is an increase of 1,000 percent!
This has to be done with high quality content and must be done with care, credibility and trust.
“Your network is your net worth” – Porter Gale
The steps
Content marketing is the new “black” when it comes to driving traffic. Its about attracting traffic rather than chasing it.
It improves your SEO (Search engine optimisation) for your blog and this drives “organic traffic when you are found in search results. It also leads to referral traffic when people find your content is so good they “hyperlink” back to your articles.
The magazine app Flipboard now allows you to create personal Flipboard magazines that link back to your blog posts. The result more traffic.
More information: 6 ways Brands Can Amplify Their Marketing With Flipboard Magazines
Don’t forget that a lot of people are now reading posts on mobiles. Many people have large mobile phones (often called “phablets” because they sit in size between phones and tablets) and they can raed while travelling on the train bus or even on the beach.
Social proof is a concept that is as old as time. It has just begun to gain traction amongst online marketers as it explains a lot about the success of some online ventures, and the failure of others.
To put it simply:
“Social proof in a social media context is the theory that accounts that have high follower numbers are trusted and followed more often”
It can be used to build trust in a social media environment for your business.
Social proof marketing is not new but often forgotten. It also is a powerful factor in driving more shares and hence traffic
More reading: Insights into the Powerful Influence of Social Proof
You have just read nearly 3,000 words and are overwhelmed. There are four key tactics you need to focus on when you have finished this post :
Blogging is not a “get rich quick” scheme. It takes focus, time and persistence. That’s why building it on your passion and purpose will provide the foundation for a marathon called “blogging”.
Are you building a range of organic and earned tactics on a range of digital platforms that drive traffic without relying on paying for it? Are you paying for traffic? Is that Facebook or Google or somewhere else?
Do you have your eggs in just one basket? Is your Facebook activity a diminishing return?
Look forward to hearing your stories and insight in the comments below.
Above: Amanda O'Brien, right, e-marketing manager at Jiffy Lube, speaks alongside Sq1's Jim Badum at VentureBeat's GrowthBeat conference in San Francisco on Aug. 7.
SAN FRANCISCO — Salespeople and marketers at a few companies have been testing out marketing startups’ data-powered tools, and some have found impressive results. These companies’ competitors might want to get in on this whole notion of data-driven sales, just to keep up.
This means that these startups’ technologies could get a lot more popular — if, that is, they can get the word out and keep delivering helpful products at a reasonable price.
At least, that’s the way things looked by the end of VentureBeat’s GrowthBeat 2014 conference this week. Big names like Jiffy Lube, American Express, Hard Rock Cafe, and Hewlett-Packard came onstage to speak the praises of software that they’ve used to improve their sales or marketing results.
Jiffy Lube has watched its conversion rates go up after working with digital advertising company Sq1 to localize offers, said the car-maintenance company’s e-marketing manager, Amanda O’Brien.
“We were looking at things like click-through rate and seeing an average of 3 percent,” O’Brien said. “Now we’re looking at upward of 7 percent.” And conversion rates jumped from 29 percent to 50-60 percent.
“Those increases are turning into cars at the service centers in a resounding way.”
When Jiffy Lube’s competitors get word of that, they might want to find ways to deliver more tailor-made ads, with Sq1 or other programmatic marketing companies like Rocket Fuel or Perfect Market. Same deal with users of some other technologies people talked about at GrowthBeat. And that might lead to founders coming up with sales and marketing tools that use machine learning and other data processes that lead to better results, which in turn will keep plenty of investors busy.
Sales software provider InsideSales, which recently raised a $100 million round, had customer DoubleDutch testify about sales increasing 300 percent. (InsideSales competitors include Five9 and Lead360.)
Engagement increased by a factor of seven at Apartment List after it started using mobile marketing-automation provider Kahuna, the apartment-finding service’s Chris Erickson said. (Others in mobile marketing automation include 5rocks and Urban Airship.)
ZenPayroll marketing head Erin Colbert was impressed with how easy it was to get value out of Radius, which offers data-driven suggestions on which potential leads to contact.
“Literally in five minutes, I was up and connected to Salesforce and was able to see actionable insights,” Colbert said. She could see where ZenPayroll was and wasn’t doing well and which industries deserved attention, she said. Such tips from Radius or other startups, like Infer, could save salespeople a lot of time.
TripIt’s use of Salesforce software during a promotion resulted in a 900 percent bump in adoption of the company’s premium trip-planning service, all because the software tracked customers’ one-year anniversaries. (Lots of companies compete with Salesforce in the customer-relationship management and <a href=”http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/07/marketing-clouds/”marketing-cloud businesses.)
And Xactly has gotten a lot of value out of 6Sense, a startup that claims to be able to predict sales of specific products. Xactly was able to correlate 74 percent of the people 6Sense was saying would buy with the ones Xactly thought was in the sales cycle, Xactly chief marketing officer and senior vice president Scott Broomfield said.
6Sense has received a good bit of interest since coming out of stealth in May with $12 million in funding. (Other predictive-sales companies, including Clari, have also garnered attention.)
“Things are going great,” Amanda Kahlow, 6Sense’s chief executive and a co-founder, wrote in an email to VentureBeat. “Our pipeline is very full, and we have three new six-figure deals in procurement as we speak. All three companies are in the Fortune 1000. … I’d estimate 90 percent of the opportunities we call on we get a meeting, and 75 percent or more are moving forward with us. I almost don’t believe how receptive the market is. The market is hot and incredibly receptive to using predictive [technology] to drive their business forward.”
And, Kahlow added, the whole data-driven sales thing is still relatively new. Give it time.
“It’s worth noting that many companies are still being educated about what’s possible,” she wrote. “Only seven years ago did they start using marketing automation at all. We are focusing our own marketing on education about predictive intelligence (versus just lead scoring) and what it can do for businesses.”
6Sense is a predictive intelligence engine that helps companies measurably grow their business by optimizing all marketing and sales activities. We leverage time-sensitive, behavioral data to identify new prospects that are highly like... read more »
Amanda is a product-focused CEO who is passionate about bringing the power of predictive marketing and sales intelligence to B2B enterprise and mid-market companies. Amanda makes 6Sense customers’ needs a priority, applying her prove... read more »
Recently, I was giving a presentation to a potential client of our customer relationship management (CRM) application, when he asked me, “what’s the difference between CRM and marketing automation software?”
I’m in the industry, so this is an easy answer, but I realized a lot of small businesses don’t know the difference between the two. And because sometimes the lines are blurred between CRM and marketing automation, it’s an understandable question.
If you’ve been wondering the same thing, allow me to shed some light.
What CRMs Do
When you’re too busy to keep track of all the people you’ve met and conversations you’ve had, CRM (customer relationship management) software comes in handy. You can not only log client contact details, but you can also take notes on conversations, link emails, and schedule meetings in order to track all the interactions you have had with them.
CRM is also useful to your sales team (and that might be you, if you’re a solopreneur!). You can track leads and opportunities. You can view, at a glance, the dollar amount of all deals you’re prospecting, qualifying, and closing.
What Marketing Automation Does
Just like you’d guess, marketing automation workflow automates certain processes to make your life easier. That might look like you setting up a welcome email to go out whenever anyone downloads your free whitepaper. Or sending out a survey that then qualifies each lead into certain “buckets” so you can send (automated) relevant content to move them down the sales funnel.
The components of marketing automation include:
1. Lead Generation: get people in your funnel with value-added content or offers
2. Lead Nurturing: send a series of emails to keep your brand on top of leads’ minds
3. Lead Scoring: send surveys or content that helps you determine what stage the buyer is in
4. Website Tracking: get details on which pages leads visit, and what actions they take
5. Email Marketing: automate the right content to spur them into action
6. Landing Page Optimization: make sure the page your leads land on delivers what they’re looking for
Why Marketing Automation Software Should Be Integrated with CRM
To make matters a little confusing, some CRM platforms include marketing automation workflow, while others don’t. In my mind, those that combine the two pack the bigger punch and let you as a small business owner get more done faster.
Having the two combined reduces the need to manually import leads into CRM from your marketing automation platform. One platform means one place you put in customer data.
CRM + marketing automation can also provide you with a 360-degree view for sales people on marketing interactions. They can see what leads are doing online, saying on social, and visiting on your website, then build a plan of action to nudge that lead towards a sale. And with the full view of analytics you get with CRM that includes marketing automation workflow, you can better measure ROI for each marketing and sales activity and determine which are worth investing more in.
Small business owners — more than CEOs of major corporations — need all the help they can get in managing those customer relationships and nurturing them to a sale (and beyond).
Image: PhotoSpin
The half-billion search engine results for “how to start using Twitter for business” tell a heck of a story: small- and medium-sized business owners understand (rightly) that it’s not too late to get in the game. The query leads to a digital treasure-trove of information on how SMBs can leverage Twitter to get ahead of their competitors, even those with an established social media presence. But in the rush to learn how-to, it’s easy to forget a potentially more important question.
How not to.
Sure, there are legitimate disasters (let’s call them Twitastrophes) that can totally damage a brand. Then there are those little pernickety things that SMBs tend to forget in their attempt to dominate the micro-blogging forum. Let’s look at some common pitfalls businesses should be careful to avoid.
Because tweeting is so quick and easy, some companies make it a point to tweet all day long. Others, however, miss the opportunity for engagement by not tweeting nearly enough. The “economy of tweets” is an important consideration for a company looking for maximal engagement. Studies have shown that engagement tends to decrease after the third tweet.
But really, it varies entirely by industry and audience and myriad other factors particular to the SMB’s brand. Your mileage may vary. Fast Company’s Social Media Frequency Guide is an amazing tool to help business owners avoid over- or under-tweeting (among other social media faux pas).
Overly promotional or commercial tweets, clunky calls to action like “BUY THIS!” (yes, this actually happens), or tweeting only links to your product pages won’t do your business any favors. Your client base is on Twitter for engagement, not for constant sales pitches.
Posting company updates and promotions and nothing else is a really great way to lose followers.
This isn’t to say that you can’t promote your products and services, but there are ways of doing so that are more elegant, more effective, and far less annoying. Spend the lion’s share of your time on Twitter engaging your audience, developing that trust and brand loyalty that will lead to conversions once they’re ready to buy.
Twitter’s a great marketing tool for the budget-savvy SMB owner. An account doesn’t cost a dime. Or does it?
Spending too much time on Twitter can hurt your business in the long run because it takes valuable time away from other work that might yield better results. While you should continue to engage, retweet, and respond, fight the urge to respond to every single tweet directed at your business as soon as it pops up. You can get to those at the end of the day and take care of them in one fell swoop.
Finally, don’t scroll endlessly for something relevant to share. Budgeting your time is just as important as managing your actual marketing budget.
According to a recent study, Facebook hashtag overuse can damage a brand’s reputation. It stands to reason that the same is probably true for Twitter. Ten times out of ten quality beats quantity on social media.
Of course, hashtag overuse seems like a pretty easy mistake to avoid. It’s those other, kind-of-seems-creative hashtag ideas that tend to get out of control. For instance, #ExtraLongHashtagsAreHardToRead, and they’re also a lot less likely to trend. Some businesses have taken to using a trending hashtag—even one that’s totally irrelevant to their products and services—to try and force attention to an unrelated tweet.
No, no, and no.
On the flip-side of the coin is under-using or ignoring hashtags. If there’s a trending hashtag, by all means use it! If there’s a creative hashtag you think will create a buzz among your followers, give it a try! Hashtags are extremely useful when utilized properly, just as they’re damaging when used poorly.
If your audience is on Twitter, and if they’re following you, they want to hear from you. As obvious as this may seem, many brands forget it. It can be easy to get a sort of tunnel-vision wherein you’re only focusing on tweets about your brand or your industry. Unfortunately this can tend to send your audience the message that they’re an afterthought, when in fact they’re the very reason you’re on Twitter in the first place.
Reward them for following you. For instance, respond to a tweet or two of theirs even if it’s not related to your business. (Especially if it’s a picture of their kid or puppy.) Every time you get an @mention, you should respond. Your audience may prefer communicating with you on Twitter, asking you questions or even complimenting your products and services. Not responding will lose any brand loyalty you’ve generated.
Common sense goes a really long way. Observe other brands on Twitter and see what makes them successful and engaging. Alternatively, see which ones annoy or offend you. You’ll learn pretty quickly how not to tweet.
Is your content doing what it is supposed to do? When questioned about the degree of success your content marketing efforts are achieving, anecdotal answers like “Readers seem to be interested in our content” or “We are getting a lot of “likes” on our Facebook page” just won’t suffice. When you are trying to prove that your content marketing brings value to your business, you need clear evidence of what’s working, and what isn’t — and accurate measurement is really the only way you are going to get it.
But how do you know what to measure? Or how to measure it, for that matter? Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies, sums it up simply by quoting a former accounting professor of hers: “It depends,” she said. “Your content marketing metrics must relate back to your goals.”
But don’t just think statistics; you can think of people as a measurement tool, too. Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions, notes that feedback the sales team receives from customers is one of the most reliable metrics she has at her disposal, as it can provide direct evidence of “how the content marketing produced has helped to get them in conversations,” she said.
To help provide a bit more guidance on how to determine the impact that content marketing has on your company’s bottom line, we asked some of CMI’s blog contributors, Online Training instructors, and Content Marketing World speakers to share the measurement tools and metrics they consider to be the most essential. Following are their words of advice:
How long does it take an average person to read the content? What do they do next? Hopefully, it’s to click on a call to action or click to continue the story. If people aren’t spending the time or following your lead, there’s work to be done. —Ardath Albee, CEO, Marketing Interactions, Inc. | @ardath421
I work at a venture capital firm, and our “sales cycle” spans years and years as investors in start-ups. But for anyone dealing with really long sales cycles or targeting customers that won’t neatly fill out a lead-gen form (perhaps you target executives, for instance), the Net Promoter Score survey has proved invaluable for me. The survey asks one question: How likely is it that you would recommend (this company) to a friend or colleague? The results allow you to see the company through your customers’ eyes. —Jay Acunzo, Director of Platform & Community, NextView Ventures | @Jay_zo
If your content doesn’t convert, then your content plan is flawed. Every content object can be tagged with an identifier. In fact, we [at Raven] created a tool to make this easier for marketers. Your goals, of course, will be set up in Google Analytics.
One area we’re looking to track is micro-conversions. We have a good handle on how our current customers use our software and where they derive the most value, but we’d like to understand how users engage with our website or blog before purchasing. —Nicolette Beard, Sr. Digital Marketing Specialist, Raven Tools | @RavenNickiB
Marketers would get better results faster if they paid attention to the conversion rates for each piece of content. Blog posts often inspire visitors to subscribe to newsletters, but some do it much better than others. Which posts have which conversion rates? You’ll know which topics to write about more often, what formatting and types of media are most effective, and which of your old posts to put into heavy rotation on social streams. Really, this is a basic form of blog optimization, but few marketers ever do it. —Andy Crestodina, Principal, Strategic Director, Orbit Media | @crestodina
If the content you create isn’t building a subscription-based relationship with a valuable audience, it’s not working. If your subscribers don’t spend more time than non-subscribers, your content isn’t working. That’s it. You want an ever-growing subscriber base that spends more with you. Content builds relationships. Relationships build trust. Trust drives revenue. —Andrew Davis, Author, Brandscaping | @TPLDrew
Rather than solely looking at top-of-the-funnel metrics like page views or social shares, I have started looking at the number of leads that have consumed a piece of content. Unlike the aforementioned metrics, lead metrics also give me a sense of the quality of the viewership, and how they are tying in to our demand-generation goals. —Pawan Deshpande, Founder and CEO, Curata | @TweetsFromPawan
Google Analytics! I’m always shocked when I learn most content marketers don’t review their website analytics at least weekly. In fact, Orbit Media just did a study that shows nearly half of those surveyed either never or only occasionally review their analytics. —Gini Dietrich, CEO, Arment Dietrich, Inc. | @ginidietrich
Proper attribution modeling is pretty powerful. But good old nurture flows in marketing automation is the starting point. Link it to CRM to track through to money. —Doug Kessler, Co-Founder and Creative Director, Velocity Partners | @dougkessler
A robust marketing automation platform is the essential tool for evaluating the content marketing strategy and individual tactics. The MAP offers myriad ways to track and trend results as well as measure the influence marketing activities have on the sales pipeline. You get both marketing metrics and revenue metrics from a good MAP. —Bruce McDuffee, Interim Content Director at Boeing Digital Aviation Marketing consultant, Knowledge Marketing for Industry (KMI) | @brucemcduffee
Lately, I’ve fallen in love with Buzzsumo to give me a quick look at what content is being shared and how it ranks with other popular content and with content on the same site. It’s especially good for identifying which types of content work better on certain channels. I can also figure out where I need to work a bit harder on the distribution side of things. For example, if I have a post with a low number of shares on LinkedIn, it’s a sign I need to find different LinkedIn groups where I can post it. —Sarah Mitchell, Content Marketing Consultant, Global Copywriting | @globalcopywrite
Looking for more guidance on knowing which metrics to build into your content marketing? You won’t want to miss Content Marketing World 2014, September 8–11, 2014. Register today!
Cover image via Pixabay
Many companies and design agencies tend to look at the design and creativity stage from a narrow perspective. Usually, the design team is locked inside the ideas room with no contact with the rest of the world until it delivers the idea that gets approved by the client or project manager.
Once a project goes into crisis mode and stress increases, creativity is given an even more limited role in the project. This can be a result of the high cost of developing creative concepts or a lack of confidence that creative people are able to handle pressure and provide help at this critical stage of the project.
Additionally, generic models of the development process do not focus much on innovation and creativity, whether partially or holistically, leading enterprises such as BT, Microsoft, Starbucks, Xerox, Yahoo and others to provide the proof that an innovative design process can lead to a competitive position in the market — see “Eleven Lessons: Managing Design in Eleven Global Companies1” (PDF).
Over the last century, many incidents have provided examples that innovation and creativity can play an essential role for an organization in the midst of crisis. Creativity and innovation in such cases take a broader role outside of the ideas room. They can be applied to redesign a company’s structure and devise a more innovative process that leads to products that meet both creativity and business needs.
One interesting example of this is LEGO, the world-famous toy manufacturer. By studying its crisis, lasting from 1993 to 2004, we’ll answer two main questions: Can creativity and innovation help an organization in its time of crisis? And can studying cases such as LEGO’s reveal a model for the broader role of creativity in an organization for other enterprises to follow?
2LEGO is a leading company4 in the toy-making industry and the sixth-largest enterprise in the field. In case you didn’t know, the word “lego” is an abbreviation of two Danish words, “leg godt,” which means “play well.” In Latin, the word means “I put together.” The Danish company was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen, whose small carpentry workshop failed at providing wood supplies, according to David Robertson and Bill Breen in their book Brick by Brick5.
Kristiansen switched from the workshop business to wooden toys, which succeeded in the market at the time. Then, he bought an injection-molding machine and started to create toys using plastic materials, which also did well in the market. After Kristiansen passed away, ownership of the company went to his son, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Brick-toy manufacturing was launched in 1958, giving the company more ways to compete and opening the door to unlimited building capabilities.
6By 2006, revenue reached £717 million, following an 11% increase from the previous year. The company has 5,000 employees around the world, and its main facilities are located in LEGOLAND in Denmark. The company has 12,500 warehouses and more than 11,000 suppliers. In addition to the production location in LEGOLAND, production sites are located in Switzerland, Czech Republic, the US and South Korea. The LEGO design team consists of 120 people in Denmark and 15 others in Slough, UK.
8Since the start of the company, LEGO has maintained a clear vision of “inventing the future of play.” While achieving this vision has been a matter of hard work and continual research into its customers and how to provide innovative products, repeatedly returning to this vision has been a key element that helped to save LEGO’s ship from sinking, as we’ll see later in this article.
Before 1993, LEGO had faced some general troubles with sales but did not experience any hard times, as sales and revenues continued to rise. After a catastrophic period between 1993 and 2004, sales grew again and reached £163 million in net profit in 2008, with sales increasing by 51% in the UK, with an increased market share of 2.2 to 3.3%.
The question is what really happened between 1993 and 2004 to cause sales and, subsequently, revenue to drop off a cliff? And what did LEGO do to retrieve its position in the market and, furthermore, to increase sales and revenue more than expected?
Between 1993 and 2004, two major problems collided. The first occurred between 1993 and 1998, when LEGO toys were already on every shelf and the company had reached its natural growth cycle. In order to keep growing, the company produced more products, but sales did not increase. Subsequently, costs went up and hindered profits (see “How LEGO Stopped Thinking Outside the Box and Innovated Inside the Brick2110”).
In response to this loss, the company laid off 1,000 employees, and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen stepped aside, saying, “Maybe I’m not the right person to lead this company in the next generation.”
The new president for the company, Poul Plougmaan, understood that the company was operating very differently than before. After analyzing the market and its consumers, he discovered that kids were continually getting smarter. Added to this, new competitors had entered the market, such as Toys “R” Us and Walmart, with powerful strengths. And many toymakers had moved their production to China in order to decrease manufacturing costs.
As a company built on innovation to meet customer expectations and market demands, LEGO first responded to financial crisis by inventing new products, hoping that they would lead to new opportunities. LEGO collaborated with production companies behind famous movies and characters such as Star Wars and Harry Potter to create new bricks that children would buy based on their passion for the movies rather than for LEGO itself.
11Some of these products, such as Star Wars, did well in the market and appeared to be saving the company from sinking, while other products were a big failure, such as Galidor. While this innovative thinking might have appealed to LEGO at the time, it had two main pitfalls:
As a result of venturing into these new innovative product areas, LEGO found itself outside the business while trying to get back on track. Furthermore, the new products diminished the market for consumers seeking original LEGO bricks.
These new products were one reason for the company’s second fall in 2003. Once sales for its two main themes, Star Wars and Harry Potter, started to fall, company sales went off another cliff.
The solution to the first drop highlighted another situation that needed to be studied. LEGO’s problem was not its innovation, but rather the connection between its innovation and its business goals. When innovation gets out of control, it disconnects from the company’s strategy, leaving a gap between business and creativity, leading to sales losses.
The short answer to how LEGO solved its market problem was simply by thinking inside the box again. It returned to its ordinary brick themes, such as racing cars, police stations and schools. These products allowed children to reuse the bricks again and again. Buying a new brick set would actually add to the previous one. This is one of LEGO’s key marketing strengths and something consumers really want.
13Behind this conclusion were new innovations in the process itself. Unlike many companies that lock creativity inside the thinking room, LEGO strongly believes in expressing creativity not only in its products but in its production process. To understand how creativity and innovation helped to solve LEGO’s problem, we need to learn more about the role of design strategy in LEGO’s manufacturing process.
LEGO is one of the few companies that has had a clear vision of the role of creativity within its organization. LEGO developed a design process model known as “Design for Business” (D4B) to ensure the continual linkage between innovation and its business plan. D4B also shifts the strategy for innovation from being product-focused to being company-focused.
D4B focuses on defining creativity and design within an organizational strategy. For example, it links the company’s objectives and design strategy in order to achieve these corporate goals. Also, D4B provides for more collaboration between teams to improve the innovation process. It required a number of processes and tools to ensure that innovation was better presented and discussed. According to Design Management Europe’s award poster for LEGO15 (PDF), these tools and methods are divided into being innovation-related and design-related — understandable given that design is the roadmap that turns creativity into innovation.
While the D4B model provided a unique management process, allowing for design and innovation to be more holistically integrated in the organization, a gap still existed between the marketing strategy and creative team. This gap was one of the causes of LEGO’s dramatic fall by the end of the 1990s. We can trace it back to the creative team thinking differently from the company’s initial vision.
D4B was part of a seven-year strategy named “Shared Vision” established in 2004. The new vision was to rebuild the company’s brand identity as a creative toy-manufacturing enterprise. In this strategy, the marketing department was asked to provide a wider vision of innovation and creativity in the product development process. This vision ensures that both the creative side and business side share the same aims and fully understand LEGO’s business strategy and how to achieve strategic goals using the other team’s resources.
As mentioned, LEGO’s problem was not its creativity but in the disconnect between its creativity and corporate strategy. The business and creative teams were working in silos, each having authority to innovate on whatever it wanted. While LEGO struggled with this problem, many companies do not position design and creativity correctly within their business and strategy. Perhaps the problem was acute for LEGO because it is a creativity-based company.
The Shared Vision strategy is the link between business and creativity and puts the process of innovation in its correct place in the organization. It brought the creative team out of its silo and connected it to the company’s business goals, allowing it to create under the umbrella of a company-wide strategy. The move brought LEGO’s strategy back to life, with products that met both creativity and business needs.
While the Shared Vision strategy is a seven-year initiative, it has already affected the company’s sales and revenue. In 2006, LEGO was named the world’s sixth-largest toy maker, with revenue at £717 million, an 11% increase from the previous year. Net profit for 2006 was £123.5 million, a jump of 6.5% over 2005.
This dramatic increase in revenue is a result of a number of procedures, including the application of the Shared Vision strategy with the D4B design process, in addition to a reduction in costs (the company reduced its fixed costs by 33%).
The story of LEGO is an important and rare lesson for designers and design strategists on the true importance of design and creativity in an organization. It also indicates that many current business models do not put design and creativity in their right place in the organizational process. As a result, many of those business models can lead to failure, especially for a company that depends so heavily on creativity and innovation, like LEGO.
In many companies, designers and design managers are not invited to help conceive the corporate strategy, and this is one of the essential problems that led LEGO off a financial cliff and into bankruptcy. Rather, putting design and innovation in the right place can lead a company to achieve its business goals and overall strategy.
How does your company or the company you work at deal with creativity and innovation? Please share your thoughts in the section comment below — I’d love to hear them!
(al, il)
The post Learning More About Creativity And Innovation From LEGO appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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