Rnordman

As seminal punk band NOFX once sang, “Electricity / All we need to live today / A gift for man to throw away.” The data center industry has a love-hate relationship with electricity. It’s obviously a crucial resource that enables the productivity and innovation gains of cloud and large-scale computing, but it comes from polluting power plants, it’s expensive, and it’s delivered from an increasingly unreliable power grid in the United States. Data centers are also using more and more electricity every day.

New developments in electric generation and delivery as well as data center design innovations could help develop the much-hyped smart grid, bringing cost savings, increased reliability, and cleaner power generation. How can data centers and the electric grid work together to create the future of electricity?

The Electric Catch-22

The transformers hooking data centers to the grid might as well be chains. Servers, cooling, storage—infrastructure can’t run without access to grid power. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Electricity has enabled countless innovations. But the state of the power grid, especially in the United States, is worrisome.

We’ve noted on the blog before that blackouts can be caused by squirrels (a favorite fact of mine). Many components of the grid have reached the end of their lifespan, with original pieces built in the early 1900s and many structures still running after 70 years. Data centers are on the front lines when it comes to negative business impact from the aging grid. Recent natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy may have made this dramatically apparent, but even common brownouts lead to server downtime after UPS batteries die and generators run out of fuel.

In addition to unreliability, grid electricity comes overwhelmingly from polluting power plants that run on coal or natural gas. Renewable energy only contributed about 13% of the total United States power in 2012.  A 10 MW data center emits 33,000 – 91,000 metric tons of C02 even at the relatively low PUE of 1.2. This electric use is attracting attention from the media and activist groups, and while many data centers are striving for efficiency, there’s no escaping the grid.

Finally, energy is simply expensive. Demand spikes, hot days, and the cost of fuel at generation plants can all lead to dramatic increases in costs.

Instead data center managers and researchers at universities across the world are starting to look at ways data centers can turn their energy use into a benefit rather than a necessary evil. Here are three of the ways future data centers can help build more reliable, more efficient “smart grids”.

1) Increasing on-site generation and cleaning up the grid

This is one area where data centers have already taken action. Rooftop solar panels and large solar arrays are relatively common and some lucky data centers are located near hydroelectric or geothermal power generators, allowing them to use entirely renewable energy. If a facility has some on-site generation, there are two primary models to use both that energy and the grid: grid ties and transfer switches.

Grid ties combine on-site electric generation from rooftop solar, hydroelectric turbines, or wind turbines with grid sources. Electricity produced on-site reduces the net draw from the grid, which fills in the blanks when on-site generation can’t cover the entire server and equipment load. When there is excess energy generated, it feeds back into the grid for a net profit.

Transfer switches keep the on-site generated energy separate from the grid entirely. The equipment only receives energy from one source at a time. This falls victim to the same, if not worse, reliability issues as the grid without a very steady source like geothermal or hydroelectric as there is not always a steady source of solar or wind power.

When using renewable energy, data centers must choose between performance and green power. Battery technology is improving but still cannot store enough renewable energy to power a facility during extended periods of low generation. Alternatively, performance adjustments can be made to lower the power draw, but in an enterprise data center this is unlikely to be a real solution due to SLAs and the requirement for constant uptime.

Alternatively, companies can support increased renewable generation by the power companies operating the grid itself. Google and others have made large scale investments into wind farms. Renewable Energy Credits also support the development of renewable generation on the grid.

2) Migrating data center loads cross-country to avoid peak demand

Here is where things start to get crazy with smart grids and data center infrastructure management (DCIM). These new tools can help avoid brownouts or blackouts as well as peak-demand, when energy rates increase dramatically.

Hardware, software, sensors, and controls can be tightly integrated into data center operations and tied to the electric grid with programming and data center automation software. With real-time pricing and energy information from grid providers, this software can migrate entire data center loads geographically according to increasing and decreasing grid loads.

These tools still need development, but experiments have been performed as proof-of-concept. Studied data centers took about eight minutes to move their loads and reduced 10% of their energy use. Another study found energy decreases of up to 46% by moving data center loads.

By dynamically moving workloads, the overall demand is lower and energy cost is less. This improves the grid reliability for everyone, not just data centers. The opportunity is greatest for non-critical loads, which are risky to move. Rescheduling routine backup and storage for off-peak hours is one method of demand reduction that can already be implemented in data centers.

 

3) Energy storage and micro-grids

Data center technology can give the grid a boost in other ways besides feeding it excess renewable energy or reducing peak demand. Energy storage is developing rapidly, enabling self-healing smart grids within a data center facility itself. These systems store large amounts of energy and constantly monitor the flow of electricity throughout the facility, allowing power to be rerouted during emergencies. Generators are still necessary but their use can be minimized.

Micro grids and backup systems (even current UPS systems) can be combined with DCIM for frequency regulation or boosting power during peak demand. One can even imagine a scenario where data centers are sitting at a low internal load with fully charged battery systems, selling power back to the grid to meet peak demand. Many power utilities pay hourly for frequency regulation, enabling a new (though minor) revenue stream for data centers whose UPS systems and batteries are sitting idle the majority of the time. Of course, this has to be balanced with SLAs to ensure that unexpected outages don't cause downtime.

These solutions may be a ways off from wide scale implementation, but it’s exciting to see how such a major consumer of electricity can actually help improve the generation methods and reliability of the larger grid. Instead of being power hogs, the data center industry can aim to help save electric infrastructure in the United States through innovative power management, onsite generation, and new storage technology.

Posted By: Joe Kozlowicz

Don't believe everything you read. Or hear time and again, even from really smart people. That goes double for some of the business "truths" we've all heard many times. If you're thinking of starting your own business, take a step back and consider what advice you should ignore.

Read more...

Amazon may be turning dynamic pricing on its head, but you don't have to join the race to the bottom.

Hart Lambur and Yinon Ravid spent more than a collective decade in finance, where they had access to a resource most of us can never tap: The trading floor.

The hidden value in the floor, they explain, was that it served as a sounding board.

"We were able to ask people, 'What do you think of this stock? What do you think of emerging markets?'" remembers Ravid. "From our perspective, it wasn't that they were financial professionals, but that there was a place to talk about this stuff with people you trust."

Now, they're creating a sounding board for the rest of us in the form of their online investing tool, Openfolio.

The site, founded in 2013, just announced it's raised $1.3 million in a new funding round led by FinTech Collective. 

Here's how it works: Once you sign up (for free) and link your brokerage accounts, your information is aggregated into networks segmented by characteristics such as sex, age, industry, and even college. You can view the progress of these networks, or you can follow individual investors and see everything from what they're holding to how their investments are performing.

Essentially, you can see how your investments stack up compared to the people around you.

Openfolio was created when the cofounders realized how tricky they found personal investing, even with their backgrounds in finance. "Right now, you're reading articles, fending for yourself," says Ravid. As part of the Openfolio community, he explains, "you can rely on the people you trust to show you what you care about."

Lambur adds that millennials in particular tend to value their social circles' input over the opinions of experts. "When you go to choose a restaurant," he says, "you don't pick up Zagat. You go to Yelp or Foursquare to see what the people around you think." 

The site doesn't reveal dollar amounts, but rather progress in terms of percentages. For instance, here's a shot of my network's performance, with the flat blue line at the bottom representing me (who hasn't yet hooked up any accounts).

Or, you can check out an individual's activity. For example, cofounder Ravid:

Although Openfolio could be considered a robo-advisor since it's an online-only investment platform, it doesn't manage your investments for you, and it isn't meant to be a hands-off tool. "That's what's different from Wealthfront or Betterment," Lambur says. "They offer you a set-it-and-forget-it solution, but we'll keep you engaged."

It's worth noting that Openfolio does assume a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the investor, highlighting the activity of individual stocks and funds that a 401(k)-only investor might find a little intimidating. In the future, they plan to build out the site in order to allow users to take action based on the feedback they've gotten, but currently, active, informed investors might find the site most useful.

A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Openfolio raised an additional $1.1 million.

SEE ALSO: Robo-Advisors Manage Over 36% More Money Than They Did 3 Months Ago

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When you're in the hot seat answering questions such as, "What's your greatest weakness?" and, "Why should we hire you?" — a query like, "What are your hobbies?" will probably seem like a piece of cake.

But before you start babbling about your lifelong obsession with horses or your newfound passion for baking, consider this: The hiring manager wants to get a better sense of who you are, so it's important to think about which hobbies best showcase your strengths, passions, and skills — and then only discuss those in the interview.

"The employer is trying to determine whether you'd be a good fit, and getting insight into your interests, hobbies, and personality all help in evaluating that," says Amy Hoover, president of the job board TalentZoo. 

Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," agrees. "By learning more about your outside interests, they can glean more about your personality, and even draw some conclusions about how you may thrive in the organization."

For example, if you like to paint in your spare time, and you're interviewing for an account executive position with an advertising agency, your creative flair might be viewed as an asset when working with your creative counterparts, Taylor explains.

Or, if you're involved in orchestrating community events, where organizational skills are critical, that would translate well into a promotional or event planning type of position.

"That said, they are also looking for well-rounded individuals, so you don't want to limit your pursuits to only those that relate directly to your career," Taylor says. 

While there are no wrong answers per se, there are some smart choices you can make when answering this question in an interview, Hoover explains.

Here's what interviewers are really looking for when they ask about your hobbies:

1. That you're team oriented. 

"Since most jobs involve a certain level of group interaction and support — and cross functional work teams continue to thrive — any kind of activity that you do in your spare time that demonstrates your ability to be a team player, such as playing a team sport or working with a group on a volunteer project, would be well perceived by your prospective boss," Taylor says.

2. That you possess strong leadership skills.

"If you lead a group in a leisure activity, such as anything from a book or hiking club to a charitable effort or community activity, that speaks well to your ability to lead on the job," Taylor explains. Not all jobs require leadership or management talent, but those kinds of activities project the desire to make a difference. 

3. That you actively work on honing your skills.

If you stay with a particular leisure pursuit, and try to better yourself — which could relate to anything from artistic or musical talents, to bettering your communications, writing, or research skills — you will likely be viewed as having perseverance. "And that would certainly be viewed as a plus in the position at hand," says Taylor.

4. That you're well rounded. 

Hiring managers like to know that you have an array of interests and are not just focused on the type of work you do 24/7. "It's assumed that if you engage in a diverse assortment of hobbies, you may be better equipped to manage a broader array of experiences and people on the job," she says. However, be careful not to list out too many hobbies. This can imply that you're indecisive; you don't commit adequate time to each hobby; and that you're stretched too thin. 

5. That you're able to set and stick to goals. 

Hiring managers like to see applicants who set goals in their leisure pursuits. "For example, they want to see that you enjoy completing a project and have the desire to reach certain milestones in your leisure activities," says Taylor. "Goal-setting is essential in any job, as managers like to see that you have a sense of purpose and determination to reach goals that you've mutually established." 

So, if you're training for a 5K run or taking a class in an area that you wish to excel, this is the time to talk about it.

6. That you're passionate.

If you're excited about your leisure pursuits, it can show a side of you that interviewers typically appreciate and value. "You're demonstrating that you are capable of enjoying what you do and being passionate about it, whether inside or outside of the office," Taylor says.

7. That you're not too passionate.

"If you talk about how passionate you are about a particular hobby to the point where it sounds as if you want to make that your primary career, that may send up a red flag," Taylor explains. For example, if you're interviewing for a sales position at a software company, it's fine to mention your interest in fashion. "But if you wax on about how invigorating it is to keep up on fashion trends and pursue fashion related activities on the weekends, you could do yourself a disservice at the job interview," she says. "It might be perceived that you would be happier in that industry."

8. That you won't be distracted at work.

You may have a few entrepreneurial interests on the side. "Even if you claim that such endeavors have nothing to do with the job at hand, you are still raising a red flag," Taylor says. "No interviewer wants to feel as if you're just trying to gain a salary or work experience until you're ready to launch your own business."

9. That you do, in fact, have interests outside of work.

Here's a terrible response to this question: "I have no real specific outside interests. I'm just too busy."

This tells the employer that you're a workaholic (which isn't a good thing!) and that you don't take time outside of work to refuel and recharge by doing the things you enjoy.

"Overall, the best policy is to bring up leisure pursuits that speak to your team orientation, good people skills, tenacity, and thirst for knowledge in the areas in which you are passionate," Taylor says.

Also, try not to emphasize hobbies that can be construed as vices, such as wine tastings, craft beer making, or cigar clubs, says Hoover. "And finally, please do not say 'Facebook' or 'social media.' Those aren't hobbies; they're distractions — especially at work."

SEE ALSO: What Hiring Managers Really Want To Know When They Ask 'What's Your Biggest Weakness?'

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Content marketing is hot!

And so content marketers and content strategists are one of the hottest job titles in marketing.

And with the shift away from paid promotion, through attempts at earned social media and into “owned” media approaches that require content marketing strategists, the demand for content marketing skills is far exceeding the supply.

Once people move beyond the need for content strategy, one of the questions I get asked a lot includes “what skills should I look for when hiring a content marketing director or content strategist?”

So if you are looking to build your content marketing team, here are 7 skills (and 1 bonus skill) to look for.

7 Skills To Look For When Hiring A Content Marketing Strategist

1. Digital Strategy: Experience and ideally management of the resources responsible for the publication of a brand’s content through social channels. More than just a community manager, you need someone who understands the channels your audience is using, knows the nuances and context for each, and knows how to maximize your company resources to drive impact across digital channels.
2. Project management: Editors are project managers with a deep understanding of what your brand should be saying and how it should be saying it. I think you can teach editorial skills and you can train someone on your brand voice. But they need to have the ability to manage a plan and define a continuous publishing schedule (vs. campaign-based mentality).
3. Analytics: Content marketing requires a deep knowledge of common analytic tools (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.) and optimization approaches (A/B testing, multivariate tools). My first content marketing hire was for an analytics person so we could understand what was working and how to improve,
4. Business Acumen: You need your content marketing leader to have the ability to translate what you are doing, why you are doing it and to be able to present the business value of content marketing to business people. This means showing both the volume of content marketing KPIs (pageviews, social shares, etc) and also the business value of your efforts.
5. Content Strategy: Your content marketing strategist has to understand how to make magic with limited resources! This means having a point of view on how to combine original content creation with curated, licensed and syndicated content to maximize the reach and potential of your own media properties.
6. Inbound marketing mindset: Maybe I should have made this number 1. But inbound marketing and content marketing are a mindset. You need someone with demonstrated proficiency in earning audience attention through classic inbound techniques (search, social). This includes a solid understanding of SEO and the way to create content that attracts attention.
7. Social Proof: I required every one on my team to contribute to our content marketing efforts. You don’t need to be a great writer or have a huge social following. But I was looking for people interested in learning how to create consistent content and grow their personal brands through content and social. So look to see if they understand how to use content on social personally themselves (Twitter following, publishes regularly on a blog, active on Facebook or Instagram, etc). Or, if they are not active, gain an understanding of what brands or people they want to emulate if they were active.
8. (Bonus) A Sense of Humor: Life is short and we all work hard. One of the best ways to reach your audience is though funny, entertaining and lighter content that breaks up the day. Hire folks who can bring a sense of humor or some creativity to your brand’s content strategy.

Looking for more advice?

When people ask me this question, I also refer to Hubspot’s hiring practice of looking for DARC skills: Digital, Analytic people who can Reach an audience with Content. They have also suggested you need people who know how to GSD (Get, um, Stuff Done) and Growth Hackers. I agree!

Joe Chernov, Hubspot’s own head of Content recently offered these helpful tips for hiring a content strategist.

And Melissa Breker also offers a great roadmap to hiring a content strategist on the CMI blog.

Now it’s your turn, what do you think are the most important skills needed for content strategists?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Employee satisfaction surveys suck.

They’re such a big waste of time, and nobody likes them, not even managers.

What always blows me away is how much these surveys cost companies to create.

If companies are going to do these surveys, why not try and do it in an inexpensive way? I haven’t fully figured out why, but I have a few theories.

It could be the classic cover your ass attitude, where if the surveys don’t work, they can shift the blame to an outside vendor.

It could be because whoever is conducting the survey is so nervous about getting it wrong and upsetting their manager, that they bring in a consultant.

It could be because the manager responsible for implementing the survey “doesn’t have the time”, so they outsource it.

Whatever the reason, it’s silly.

Only you know internally what the appropriate questions are to ask, and you probably already know some of the major problems in the company.

Next time you want to run a survey, build the questions yourself, and try and use a free or very inexpensive tool.

First, let me talk about what I think 3 of the major flaws with employee satisfaction surveys are (three are a lot more), and then some simple ideas to make things better.

1. Survey Fatigue

To me, this is the biggest problem by far.

Managers need to understand that people get bored very easily. You can’t put together a 150 question survey, and expect them to take it seriously.

Especially since employees often see no value in it. I’ve never seen a company once explain to the employees why filling out the survey will do anything for them.

When creating the survey, you need to able to answer the question “what’s in it for me?”.

But be careful with this, a lot of managers will just offer up some arbitrary prize like an iPad to incentivize people to complete the survey.

Without going into detail on the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, the iPad won’t work, and might actually skew the answers.

You don’t want people filing out the survey just to get the iPad.

In a peer review of 128 studies on the effects of rewards Deci et al. (1999, p. 658) concluded that:

tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation (…) Even when tangible rewards are offered as indicators of good performance, they typically decrease intrinsic motivation for interesting activities.

2. Too Much Time

This is another huge issue.

There are so many companies that do employee satisfaction surveys once per year, I’ve even heard of companies doing them once every two years.

That’s nuts!

That’s way too much time. If an issue comes up in February, but the survey only happens in October, I’ve probably already forgotten about it, but it would have been nice to address it then.

Also, the time it takes once the survey results come in to when things are actually done takes too much time.

Usually, there are committees that go through the results, and take their time analyzing and deciphering the responses, and then they have to come up with a plan to implement the results, establish another committee, have meetings for months, and then start implementing.

We want results right now.

If I tell you that I don’t like something, and it takes you more than six months to fix, that’s a pretty easy way to disengage me as an employee.

3. Senior Management Isn’t On Board

If senior management isn’t on board, then you’re really just wasting everyone’s time.

Please, don’t conduct an employee satisfaction survey if you’re not ready to act.

Listen to this statistic. According to a study by Aon, in companies who administered an employee engagement survey, 27% of managers never reviewed the results at all, and 52% reviewed the results but took no action.

Don’t think for a second that a survey is enough. The point of the survey is to collect data, so that you know what you can do next, but of course, you need to be ready to something next.

How To Make It Better

There is a way to make it better, and as you might imagine, it involves doing everything opposite of what I just mentioned.

The 3 most important things to think about if you’re trying to make satisfaction surveys better are:

1. Show value to the employee

This is so important. When you’re designing your questions, and you’re already thinking about what to potentially do after the survey comes in, try and give employees the impression that this will help further their career.

As a simple example, personal growth is a huge reason for engagement. If employees report that they don’t have enough access to training, use that as proof that you need to spend more on training programs.

2. Spread it over time

Instead of an annual satisfaction survey, check in with your employees frequently.

You can do this stuff online as well, and there are a ton of great tools out there like 15Five and TINYpulse.

3. Ask Less Questions

Only ask what really matters.

Keep the concept of survey fatigue in mind, and make sure to keep it relevant.

Also, ask questions in a more informal and fun way, you’ll probably get a higher response rate, which is exactly what you want.

What Do You Think About Employee Satisfaction Surveys?

Do they work? Is the process broken? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Dilbert creator Scott Adams is not a fan of investment advisors.

In a new post titled "How to make more money in stocks" Adams, who also holds a degree in economics, argues that the financial industry is the world's biggest scam and that investment advisors make stocks risky. 

From Adams:

An investment advisor needs to justify his pay, and that means pretending to have stock-picking magical powers that science has never discovered. Every study on the topic shows that the professionals generally don’t beat the market average over time. But they do cause a lot of churn that causes a lot of unnecessary taxpaying on gains. And the professionals charge enough to take perhaps 25% of your potential annual gain in fees.

Meanwhile, wise people such as you buy your market index ETFs and avoid all of the risks injected by the professional investment advisors. But your potential stock gains are suppressed because so many other people are using professional advice and losing money. That makes the category of “investing in stocks” look riskier than it is.

So my suggestion for permanently lifting the value of the stock market to new sustainably high price-earnings ratios is to pass a law making it illegal to offer financial services without disclosing the truth – that they are mostly a waste of your time.

…I know you don’t like big government getting involved when it isn’t needed. But the financial industry as it stands now is the world’s biggest scam, and most of us agree that the government is the right agency for rooting out crime, pyramid schemes and the like. And I think most people would agree that putting warning labels on cigarettes, and nutrition information on food, has served us well. It’s time to do the same with investment advice.

Adams suggests that the government do for investment advice what it did for nutrition: set up a pyramid "that shows most people should own broad market ETFs under a certain set of simple conditions."

Ann Marsh's piece in Financial Planning, which first pointed us to Adams' post, has planners pointing out that advisors do more than just pick stocks. They keep investors from acting impulsively. 

Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York, tells Marsh this "this is the type of thing you see toward market peaks. ...It's just one more form of overconfidence."

Read the entire post here »

SEE ALSO: There Is No Such Thing As A Truly Passive Investor

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Negotiating with integrity is central to the Win Wisely™ approach; after all, if we are in search of positive leverage to artfully move the other side closer to our way of thinking, we must have integrity. Integrity gives us the foundation to make value arguments that are believable. When we are perceived as people who constantly play games with the truth and are slippery during discussion of the challenges, our leverage predictably erodes.

However, there are situations in which being too forthright needlessly damages your position and erodes your leverage as surely as being untruthful would. Imagine that you are negotiating with a manufacturer whose specialty component is critical to your upcoming product. The week before, you dismissed an alternative provider after lengthy negotiations, leaving this manufacturer in the “sole provider” position.

There is rarely anything to be gained by revealing that your entire strategy now hinges on this one provider, thereby offering your potential supplier a free boost up the leverage slope. Remember, you must protect your weaknesses when possible.

Let’s look at three options you might consider once you realize the position you are in:

1. Urgently re-engage with the supplier that you dismissed – with your hat in your hand.
2. Bluff and posture to over-compensate for your sudden weakness: “We can go with you or your competitors. It’s up to you.”
3. Artfully omit your weaknesses: “Of all our alternatives, you are our first choice. I am hoping to create a relationship that makes further consideration of other alternatives unnecessary. This would require your best terms and prices.”

About the first option: it is good insofar as you are reestablishing contact with a potential supplier you may need in the future. But this doesn’t completely solve your leverage problem in the short term. Your urgency to reengage may also be a clue to the shrewd supplier that you have come back because of your reduced options, making renegotiation even tougher than the first time.

The second alternative leaves you without options if your bluff is called. So, so let us consider the third and best option, which is an example of effectively managing information. This allows you to offer the inducement of a “sole source” relationship with the vendor, extracting better terms from what is, in fact, a disadvantage. An additional argument for taking option three is that you simplify your supply chain by having a single vendor. The downside is that you have no alternatives in the event that your chosen vendor has problems. (This is a serious consideration.)

Sole sourcing is not something that K&R endorses if you are a buyer. If you go down this path, know that it requires very careful contract construction that protects you and your organization.

To keep integrity and leverage, you should never lie, but you do not have to tell the other side everything, especially about confidential negotiations with their competitors. There is an artful balance to managing negative information while maintaining credibility.

What's driving the great tablet slowdown?  

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, forecasts that global tablet shipments will grow at just a 9% compound annual rate over the next five years, an unexpectedly quick deceleration from the triple-digit growth rates seen in the tablet market's early years. 

We conducted a BI Intelligence survey on tablet ownership, usage, and purchase intent to gain insight into why tablet sales have slowed, and which brands are vulnerable. 

Access The Full Survey Results And Insights By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

We generated close to 700 responses, here are the five most important highlights of what we learned. 

1. The core market for brand name tablets is saturated: 92% of our survey respondents already own a tablet, and 80% of them own high-end brands, including Samsung, iPads/iPad Minis, and Nexus devices. Because of their demographics (Over 70% lived in the U.S., U.K., or Canada, and 59% earned incomes higher than $100,000 annually), our respondents represent a good sample of tablet manufacturers' core market — affluent consumers in developed economies. 
2. Tablet owners are taking a long time to replace their aging devices with new ones: 44% of our respondents had bought their tablets in 2012, 2011, or 2010. But demand for replacement devices was soft, even for three- and four-year-old devices. People aren't eager to upgrade. 
3. Tablets are not true mobile devices, so they see less wear and tear: While a majority of respondents said they use their tablet daily, 93% told us they use their tablet primarily on Wi-Fi (this includes 20% of people who had cell access but still used their tablet mainly on Wi-Fi). 
4. Phablets are competing with tablets for consumer interest. One-third of our survey respondents said they are considering buying a phablet in the next two years. 
5. Despite the tablet market's overall weakness, Apple still has good positioning among prospective tablet and phablet buyers. For example, 54% of consumers planning to buy a tablet in the next year plan on purchasing an iPad or iPad Mini. 

The report is also full of charts and data that can be downloaded and put to use.

In full, the report: 

• Gives detailed survey results including purchase intent/loyalty among iPad and iPad Mini owners. 
• Breaks down full numbers on tablet user stats including percentage who use cell plans with their tablets, percentage who share their tablets, frequency of usage, and interest in phablets. 
• Analyzes the tablet market's recent quarterly performance. 
• Discusses market share trends for tablet makers like Apple and Samsung.
• Forecasts annual global tablet shipments through 2019. 
• Correlates recent tablet market trends with recent consumer sentiment, revealed by the survey's results. 

For full access to all BI Intelligence's charts, data, and analysis on the mobile industry, sign up for a free trial here.

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The goal of marketers used to be to capture a buyer’s attention in 8 seconds or less. Today that target has shrunk (along with humans’ attention spans, it seems) to zero. With consumers now connected 24/7, marketers must be on their marks to go at any given moment, ready to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience in real time.

Real-time marketing is now a must-have for B2B success. Fueled by a variety of drivers, such as improved targeting capabilities, the evolution of data management solutions and advanced analytics, marketing in the moment has become the trend – and the customer expectation – with relevant messages triggered across channels that respond to what customers are doing now.

Here are some ways you can make real time a reality for your company:

1. Perfect the short-form video: Video has been a favorite of B2B companies for some time now, with 58% of B2B marketers believing that the medium is an effective form of marketing. And they’re right:

- Posts with videos attract three times more inbound links than plain-text posts.

- Viewers spend 100% more time on pages that have videos.

- 90% of all Internet traffic in 2017 is predicted to be video.

But many businesses have struggled to figure out how to make their content fit in a quick-consumption model. Moving forward, perfecting short-form video and being able to capture and to draw in viewers within 5 to 10 seconds is going to be the norm.

2. Shorten buyers’ search time: As mobile devices keep consumers constantly connected, marketers are not the only ones being kept on their toes; search engines are also changing how they operate in order to become more consumer-centric. Engines are overhauling their algorithms to deliver more relevant,quality content to consumers. And new initiatives, such as schema.org, a collaboration among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that creates a structured data markup schema supported by major search engines, are changing the way search results are displayed as well. What does this all mean? Relevance matters. Those companies that produce the highest-quality, most-targeted content are likely to be given front-door access to those consumers requesting information.

3. Make content-delivery automatic. Developing relevant, engaging content and waiting to be found is not enough. Marketers know that they now have to be able to deliver it to the right people at the right time and at the right place. However, 79% of B2B marketers are not yet engaging in lead scoring, which could be argued as the easiest part of lead life-cycle management. Those businesses that take action have an opportunity to gain an advantage.

4. Move from one-to-many to one-to-one: Businesses’ ability to target a very specific audience and segment them has become increasingly better, and these capabilities are only going to continue to expand. As more data delivers more insights into buyers’ behaviors, hyper-segmentation and targeting can enable companies to market one-on-one with highly personalized messaging.

5. Know what buyers want before they themselves do. Data analytics helps marketers decide not only what to do now but also what they should do next. As more information is accumulated about user -behavior, the use of predictive analytics is sure to expand, enabling marketers to identify and target activities that predict purchase behavior and serve relevant messaging and offers when that behavior is captured.

Producing compelling content for the right buyer in the right stage of the buyer journey can be daunting. But those businesses that embrace new methods of gathering information about their buyers and connecting with them through new channels can be better prepared to act in the moment and deliver relevant, memorable experiences that keep buyers coming back for more.

Learn more must-haves for B2B success. Register now for the August 14 gyro webinar, “6 Trends for B2B Marketing Success: Year-to-Date Check-in,” to learn what trends you should be acting on to raise your marketing to the next level and attract buyers to your brand.

This post was co-authored by Sam Laber, the Director of Marketing at Datanyze. He began his career in sales development at Gigya, where he managed a team of 8 SDRs conducting outreach in Europe and Latin America. Sam is decent at tennis, average at painting and miserable at guitar, but loves all three.

At SalesLoft and Datanyze, we spend the majority of our time helping sales development teams. We’ve learned lessons from some of the best (and worst) efforts in sales development. Here are a few best practices we’ve gleaned from this experience:

1. Create An Efficient And Standardized Hiring & On-Boarding Process

a. What To Look For In Candidates, Managers, Etc

One of the key points to hire around is culture. The best SDR teams are comprised of a team that meshes strongly and follows the same core values.

At SalesLoft, our core values are to hire candidates who we’d classify in the top 1% of the following traits: positive, supportive, and self-starting.

Let your current reps spend time with the candidate until they decide whether they would enjoy being in a canoe with them. Would they trust the new candidate to paddle? Or enjoy the time spent talking with them? Answering yes to these questions is far more valuable than hearing that he or she is a “nice person,” or “seems smart”.

Leaders such as JJ Imbeaux and Derek Grant suggest hiring millennials who don’t exhibit bad habits and are willing to prospect, cold call, and learn. The goal is to look for candidates who can “punch above their weight class” It will grow your business while simultaneously allowing the reps a chance to build a sales career.

b. What To Cover In Training

The key to developing a successful SDR is to dedicate an on-boarding strategy and training process that focuses heavily on your buyer and your process.

The key on-boarding strategies that we implement at SalesLoft:

• Define Expectations: Make sure that new hires understand their role, what is required of them, who they report to, and how they know if they’re doing it well. Outline a measurement for success at the onset.
• Implement Best Practices: Leverage the best practices that have been successful for the company to date, and to translate those into an on-boarding document that walk reps through all the steps needed in order for them to become great.
  

  The categories of on-boarding that are essential to an SDRs success are: team culture, technology tools, process implementation, significant time spent with role-playing, and getting comfortable with the offering.

• Establish Measures of Success: An SDR is successful when they are consistently hitting their numbers, asking good questions, and providing solid answers to objections from prospects.

A well-defined on-boarding process will position an SDR to have confidence, focus, and provide value to prospects. Sales is a game of confidence, where two people come together and the person with the most confidence has the most influence.

Provide these tools, training and support to your SDRs so that they have the resources to be successful.

c. Devise Ramping Goals

Team goals are set knowing what can be accomplished based on historical success. It takes time for reps to learn the best way to connect with prospects and feel comfortable talking about a new product. You want them to become as confident as possible, as early as possible. Give SDRs one month to gain experience and confidence before going on quota.

Outlining these goals are the onset will manage expectations from a leadership and team perspective, get results as fast as possible and eliminate micro-managing.

2. Support Personnel Growth With Account Growth

a. Identify Your Addressable And Available Markets

A good way to forecast how many SDRs your business will eventually need is to understand how many companies have the potential to buy your product and how many accounts each SDR can cover.

First, let’s define addressable and available market. Addressable market is the total revenue opportunity available for a product or service – for SaaS, this typically translates to every business that has the potential to buy your software. In contrast, the available market includes every business with the potential to buy your software, but is limited to the companies that you have the ability to support (think geographic, technical and resource constraints).

There are a variety of ways for SaaS companies to quantify both markets, such as 3rd party market research, journals and government studies; however, I think a great place to start is LinkedIn.

The below example search I did using the free LinkedIn ‘Company Search’ tool shows every business in a consumer-facing industry with over 200 employees on LinkedIn and over 100 followers. I have only included English-speaking countries, as this particular vendor does not have the resources to support other languages.

b. Consistently Grow Your Available Market

One thing every SDR manager wants to do is add more companies to the list. It gives SDRs more shots at securing a meeting, which gives the sales team more at bats.

But how can this be done?

A great way to uncover new accounts is to look at web technology data. Let’s say the example company mentioned above is a B2C analytics vendor. The below list shows all websites in the Alexa 1 million that are currently using my two main competitors: Adobe Omniture and IBM Analytics (formerly Coremetrics). That’s over 12,000 accounts with the potential to buy your product!

3. Give Your SDRs The Tools They Need To Succeed

a. Identify And Track Buying Signals

A great way to empower your SDRs is to give them the gift of timing by helping them identify and act on buying signals.

The Datanyze Alerts feature enables sales reps to setup daily email notifications highlighting websites that have added or dropped a specific technology. By revealing when a competitor’s software has been added or dropped by a target account, your SDRs will have the ammunition to send a personalized email to their prospect, knowing that the company is experimenting with software in your specific category.

b. Leverage Social Networks To Create List With The Right Contact

SalesLoft leverages the power of LinkedIn for the most valuable source of accurate prospecting information on the Internet. Professionals update their pages because they feel the social pressure to keep their information fresh.

SalesLoft’s Prospector application leverages this valuable LinkedIn data to provide accurate and targeted lists of leads.

The tools provides you the ability to segment prospects by location, job title, or industry to get lists tailored to your needs.

By quickly building accurate and targeted lists of leads, your Sales Development team can spend more time reaching out to prospects and setting qualified appointments and demos.

The Strengths of Sales Introverts
by Alen Mayer

So introverts have game, and quite a bit of it to be exact. The advantages and strengths of sales introverts are multiple, and those who know how to draw upon such strengths have excelled greatly in the sales field as a result, many times catching critics by surprise.

Calm in the Storm

The first major strength of introverts involves composure. Often mistaken for being too reserved or shy, many introverts instead sit back to give themselves a better vantage point. They are able to then avoid getting emotionally entangled in the discussion and see all the players engaged as well as their various interests and directions. The more knowledge a person has obviously, the more he can strategize and manage the sale at an advantage.

Composure also has other side effects that work to the benefit of the introvert salesperson. Being calm and collected has the general effect of putting clients at ease rather than being tense or defensive. Too often, aggressive salespeople are either not trusted or annoying. Potential clients clam up and walk away early when they feel they are being led down a path, often switching to another provider who comes across a bit more honest and less “salesy.” The introvert, however, gets around this problem.

There is no emotional push, no aggression, no hard sell. Instead, he comes in, provides the facts, identifies the problem the consumer or client has, and then offers a viable, practical solution. By getting the discussion away from questioning a salesperson’s honesty and back to focusing on the product or service, a sale and deal is far more likely. By allowing a sales meeting to be comfortable rather than an event of heavy pressure and hard-selling, the introvert is able to land sales where the traditional salesperson would find significant resistance and often fails.

Making the Connection

Introvert salespeople put a high priority on relationship building with customers and clients. They’re not into the deal for a single sale and then off to the next one. Instead, they are far more likely to build long-term streams of revenue by working with the same customers again and again.

Introvert salespeople understand and take advantage of the fact that it was 10 times easier to work with known customers than trying to develop a new relationship with unknown leads. Instead, they leverage known contacts and client interests to keep producing new sales again and again. This is done by focusing on win-win scenarios where both the introvert and the client both realize a significant gain in the deal negotiated.

Lending an Ear

Introverts have a keen, well-trained ability at listening to people. Often, customers want to tell people what they are dealing with, explain the issue, and discuss what really matters to them. Unfortunately, many sales people already have a script they feel they need to follow to make a sale. The two don’t mix. Instead, the customer ends up being turned off because the salesperson won’t do the most simply, easy thing in selling: listening.

Introverts, on the other hand, are quite adept at letting people talk around them. They take in all the details and statements, asking questions for more information, and getting the big picture that matters to the customer versus a script. In fact, many introverts will spend more than two-thirds of the sales meeting discussion asking the questions rather than wasting time on a pitch.

Listening provides access to key information, especially details that are valuable to allowing the introvert salesperson to connect with a client personally versus in generic terms.

In short, the strengths of sales introverts named above (composure, listening, and relationship-building) allow introverts to make in-roads where many of the best traditional salespeople can’t often break through. And they do it with far less effort, time, stress and cost.

————–

Alen Mayer, Chief Sales Introvert, helps sales people who identify themselves as introverts to be successful in sales by writing articles and conducting seminars on how to maximize introvert’s sales potential.  Find more of Alen

Even at successful companies, the Sales Force Automation (SFA) system can be a chaotic mess. Sales reps use Campaigns, Leads, Account Plans, Opportunities, Forecasts inconsistently when they use them at all. Making matters worse, the most successful sales reps often have the least accountability when it comes to using the SFA system. Sales managers and… Read More

Last May, Forbes contributor Mark Fidelman (@markfidelman) shared a terrific and timely study that illustrated how social sales outperformed traditional selling by over 78%.

For the B2B salesperson, the study’s call to action is profound: Ushering salespeople from the old world into the social world.

Here are five nuggets illustrated in our infographic below:

• 78.6% of sales people using social media to sell out performed those who weren’t using social media.
• Social media users were 23% more successful than their non-social media peers (exceeding quota by more than 10%).
• Non-social media users missed quota (by more than 10% or more) 15% more often than social media users.
• 50.1% of sales people who report using social media state that they spend less than 10% of their selling time using social media.
• Top social selling sites (in order): Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Blogging, Google+.

Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google Plus, a blog, etc. are no longer nice to haves, they are salesperson must haves.

- Mark Fidelman, Forbes

Sales teams who have are engaged in deploying social sales strategies are quickly gaining a competitive advantage, because when done right, social media can “positively affect quota – which impacts revenue – which leads to better growth opportunities for business.”

Old world sales appears to be moving to a more social world. What do you think? Is your business embracing social channels as a viable sales strategy? Share your thoughts and sound off in the comments below or on Twitter (@SterlingKlor).

The importance of search engine optimization, or SEO, is well established. What is less understood is the importance of benchmarking your website’s current SEO performance so that you can compare the improvement over time.

Benchmarking SEO performance is something I personally do with every project I work on, and I believe it is fundamental to the success of any project.

Perhaps the most obvious reason to benchmark your SEO’s current performance is so that you can see exactly where you stand at the present time, and can track how and if you are improving month-to-month.

Benchmarking also provides crucial information about which SEO strategies and campaigns are working, and which are ineffective. For example, if you find that 20 percent of your website’s pages are generating the majority of your traffic, you can focus on the specific elements that make that 20 percent successful, while changing or removing the content that is counterproductive or simply inefficient.

Top 6 KPIs to Benchmark Before You Start SEO

In order to successfully track and benchmark your SEO information, it is imperative that you know which specific metrics and elements to track. The following are some of the most important areas to benchmark:

1. Number of Pages in Google

One of the most important metrics to track is the total number of pages that Google has indexed from your website. This is also one of the easiest. As you create new content for your website, one of the most basic roles of SEO is ensuring that the pages are indexed by Google and other search engines.

Poorly written or duplicate Web pages might take longer to get indexed, if they ever are at all. However, sometimes the coding of the website itself can be the cause of the problem and checking Google’s index of your website is an easy way to see if there are any such problems.

Checking Google’s index couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is enter “site:yourwebsitename.com” into the Google search bar, and Google will provide you with every single page on your domain name that it has indexed.

Why should you benchmark the number of pages in Google?

Knowledge about how many pages are indexed by Google and what those pages look like in Google’s search results is a great way to get a sense of how your website looks overall.

I did this quick search below for Gap.com; notice the following results:

We made this easier inside the BrightEdge platform. All you’ve got to do is navigate to Reports > Site, Then, check out the “coverage” report:

2. Landing Pages

Landing pages are the pages through which visitors entered your site. Landing pages are often used to drive traffic to your website.

Why Landing Pages?

For SEO, the more information you have, the better off you are. Landing pages allow you to see how much traffic is increasing based on the specific topics of each respective landing page, as well as how much each landing page converts to traffic and/or sales on your primary website.

In addition, being able to show new landing pages being indexed on Google is a great metric to track.

The snapshot below from Google Analytics shows 258 landing pages getting traffic from organic search. The number of these landing pages getting traffic should ideally improve as you create new pages that are SEO optimized.

Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages to find out total number of landing pages inside Google Analytics:

3. Number of Keywords

Sometimes it feels as though there is a never-ending battle between Google’s keyword search crawlers and SEO content creators. Often, SEO content creators that have misaligned intentions go for quantity over quality in their content; however, Google wants their search results to be as accurate as possible while serving up the highest quality content.

As a website manager and/or SEO content creator, part of the solution to this battle is to simply create high-quality and useful content which searchers can find and use.

However, this is only part of the equation. Like it or not, keywords are and will continue to be an integral part of SEO. The key is to combine high-quality content with intelligently generated keywords.

Use Google Webmaster Tools to find out exactly how many keywords your website is currently ranking in the top 20 for, and how the branded vs. non-branded mix looks.

Note that this is only to find out the total number of keywords present In the top 20, and not the search volume each keyword is providing. The idea is to increase the total number of keywords in the top 20. Traffic will automatically increase as these keywords start improving their positions.

BrightEdge’s S3 platform is even better with Google Webmaster Tools integration, and can help you get the data you need. Navigate to Analysis > SEO Performance and then select “Google Webmaster Tools” as data source to view this report inside the BrightEdge platform.

It is important to benchmark the total number of keywords that are driving traffic to your website. Hopefully, both of these numbers are increasing over time. If they are remaining flat, or worse, declining, that is a telltale sign that your SEO strategy is failing and must be revamped as quickly as possible.

Understanding which keywords are performing best for you can help give you a sense of what type of information your visitors care about, and can help drive the direction of future content and landing pages.

4. Backlink Profile

One of the most important benchmarks for SEO is “link authority,” otherwise known as the number of reputable websites linking to your website. Even with all of the changes made to Google search algorithms over the years, this metric has remained a powerful indicator and metric for SEO success.

Of course, it wouldn’t be practical to check every website specific to your industry for references or links to your website. Fortunately, there are a number of services available that can do this for you.

Services like Majestic are a great way to find out how much clout your content has, and whether this number is increasing or decreasing over time.

When done properly, high-quality and relevant content from your website will snowball over time. More links from your website shared in an increasing number of places will result in more eyeballs and clicks, which in turn leads to more links in more places.

Link-building — good quality link earning when successful — can get your website to the very top of competitive keyword searches, which can quickly cause exponential growth in your website’s traffic. Track this information closely, and do everything you can to drive the sharing of links to your website.

Conversely, links on websites known for SEO gimmicks, or links to your website that appears spammy can actually hurt your website’s search rankings. Make sure you only link your website legitimately, or your website’s traffic will quickly suffer at Google’s hands.

Also remember to benchmark your competitor’s backlinks. If they are getting linked in places you think you should be linked, figure out why and do something to get those links!

This report from Majestic SEO shows the important KPIs like Trust Flow, Citation Flow, total external backlinks, and referring domains you’ll want to benchmark and compare in the future:

5. Organic and Referral Visits

After you have installed GA on your website, you will know exactly how many visitors you have and from what sources. Ideally, organic traffic will grow gradually over time, while referrals will typically cause sporadic “bursts” in traffic, particularly if the referral is in a time-sensitive news article.

6. Social Media

Social media is increasingly important for good SEO. Google wants to see that individuals are sharing your content. It makes sense, as this is a pretty strong indicator of quality content.

One easy way to track your social media presence is to use Pages reports in BrightEdge, which can help you figure out exactly how shared your content is across social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. You can also compare the performance weekly.

In BrightEdge, you can navigate to Reports > Pages, and select the columns to view the social media numbers.

As you put in more effort into your SEO and social media, you should see improved numbers for those pages. Remember that the return is completely variable, and is based on the current condition of site as well as the amount of effort you put in to your SEO.

It’s also interesting to see how improved social sharing effects the keyword rankings and overall website authority. All of this is only possible if you benchmark your website now!

What are your thoughts on benchmarking these metrics for tracking SEO performance? I want to hear your thoughts, so be sure to comment below.

  First off, the idea your price is too high is strictly that — an idea. But like a lot of ideas, it likely doesn’t have merit. Your price is based on the value the customer perceives they are going to receive. It comes down to the sales process you use and how the customer […]

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Last week we announced a significant new strategic investor in Sablono, a startup developing software for the construction industry. Sablono is one of six seed-stage investments we made last year. This little seed company has done very well: Three out of the six companies got externally funded, and we have another big A round on the way. Still, we are constantly discussing how we, as an early-stage fund, need to tackle seed.

The early-stage fund’s core business is the A round – take a relatively large stake, follow up with the winners and wind up with a big piece of the company at the exit. The portfolio is sufficiently small to allow partners to be deeply involved in their companies, and enable the team to be familiar enough with the portfolio to collectively add value.

Still, we are constantly thinking about seed investments. I think most early-stage funds go through a similar process.

Several factors drive VCs to seed, starting with the fact that seed makes up a big percentage of deal flow. A good early-stage fund gets a lot of seed opportunities, because it’s close to the market.

Seed is also a good way for new VCs to meet many entrepreneurs, stay relevant, and train to identify good investments. Associates and principals want to invest too. Letting them write a $100,000-200,000 check is easier than allowing them to write a bigger check without an investment track record or board experience.

Finally, funds also want to be close to the angel community, both for deal flow and because a lot of the angels are serial entrepreneurs. When they come through the door with something they care about, most VC partners want to be in the game.

On the other hand, there is the official line: The idea that investing in seed builds a good pipeline for A-round investing. This is the story VCs tell to LPs, internally and to entrepreneurs.

I tend to agree with the first line of reasoning. But I don’t agree with the value of small-seed investing to the funds financial performance.

A good A-round VC is a “lean and mean” organization. At HPV, we have four people managing two funds with 150 million Euros in assets. We have our own method for sourcing, diligence, investing, assisting, and doing follow-ons in our portfolio companies.

Seed investments are a completely different beast, mostly because of the disparity in time and effort. Since the main focus of the VC is on making and managing the “big” investments, seed receives much less attention. It’s simply not worth it to diligence a $100,000 investment for a month (as we do for A rounds). As a result, the bar is set lower. That is also true for post investment work. Since a fund can’t realistically allocate a Partner’s time to the seed investment (although they may say they will), it’s usually a junior investor who winds up cutting her teeth on small investments.

There’s also the issue of follow-on investments. A lot has been said about the signaling effect of big funds not following on with seed investments. But it is also true that sometimes it becomes harder to say “no” to companies in which you’re already an investor. You get attached to the team, you don’t want to admit to failure — or what usually happens is your investment will trigger another, bigger check, which will keep the company alive. There is a temptation to make one small investment after another and wind up with real money in a company that never went through the process.

None of this applies to “big” seed – $1-1.5 million rounds with a lead VC putting up half or more of the cash. This model actually works, as it can be a way for a fund to become involved early on, and the amount is sufficient to merit treatment like a serious investment. My partner, Yaron, and I have done well with this model, investing in companies like Yadata (sold to Microsoft) and Soluto (sold to Asurion). Such companies also have more runway and a better cap table — both big issues, especially for German companies.

I do think that pre-seed investments are important to keep close to the market and informed, but I don’t believe they should be a burden on the fund. A good VC partner makes sure he or she knows what’s going on by putting some of his or her own money to work in angel investing. That is part of our commitment to our investors and a value we can bring to the fund. And in the end, rules are made to be broken in the VC world, so no matter how we decide to treat seed investment and how iron-clad our reasoning is, if we see something great, we’ll just go for it.

Shmuel Chafets is a partner at Hasso Plattner Ventures.

Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa is an investment company based in South Africa. We actively provide venture capital and growth funding through our first fund of €39m. We invest in innovative technology companies with a proven track re... read more »

TORONTO — If you want to improve your odds of getting a high-paying job after finishing your education, forget that English degree.

A new report by Workopolis suggests that nursing and pharmacy students are most likely to land employment in their field after graduation.

The study, which analyzed more than seven million resumes on the job search website, found that 97 per cent of those who studied nursing, whether it was at the bachelor, masters or PhD level, are working in jobs related to their education.

Other degrees that showed the highest return included pharmacy (94 per cent); computer science (91 per cent); engineering (90 per cent) and human resources (88 per cent).

Although health care jobs may be the most plentiful, the study also looked at data from Statistics Canada and found that engineering jobs were the highest-paying.

Engineering graduates, on average, earned $76,000 as a starting salary, followed by healthcare graduates with $69,600; computer science graduates with $68,000 and law and math graduates with $67,600.

Tara Talbot, vice-president of human resources at Workopolis, says students need to follow their passions but should also be aware that their choice of study could affect how easy or difficult it will be to get a job.

“It’s an awareness,” Talbot says. “You want people to follow their passion, dig into something that energizes them. But I think they need to have a good sense of where that could lead.”

She says that it’s no wonder the jobs in highest demand are skilled positions in the health industry, given the age of the baby boom generation.

“With engineering, math and the financial field, those degrees tend to have a much more direct link to a career path.”

But Talbot adds that it’s also important to keep in mind that along with hard skills — like a specific degree or ability to operate certain programs and equipment— employers also value graduates with “soft skills” such as communication, teamwork and problem solving abilities.

“What I believe is that employers may not look just for someone with a degree in engineering,” said Talbot. “They look for people who have critical thinking skills, communicate well, and can problem solve. Often you get those through an education system… but also through experience.”

Meanwhile, the study also suggests that Canadians are more educated now than they were in 2000, even though the majority say their degrees are not relevant to their current jobs.

Workopolis found that 16 per cent more people list a bachelor’s degree as their top level of education on their resumes in 2014, compared with resumes in 2000. Forty-three per cent more Canadians have master’s degrees listed on their resumes versus those in 2000, while 25 per cent have listed a PhD than 14 years ago.

Despite spending longer in school, 73 per cent of those who recently answered a poll on the job site say their degrees are not related to their jobs. While more than half (56 per cent) believe they’re overeducated for their position.

More than 3,600 people participated in the poll, which was up on the job site from May 15 to June 2.

The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not a random sample and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.”

The post Health, engineering degrees have best return: Workopolis appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Lots of people jumped to the conclusion that Apple's hire of a prominent social-media marketer meant that the iPhone maker might be ready to relax its infamous reality distortion field and dive into the social-media age.

Too bad that's not likely to happen, at least not on the scale Apple really needs. Because it's way past time for the company to embrace modern methods of charming and manipulating the emotions of its fans.

The confusion involved Apple's hire of Musa Tariq, who ran notable social media operations for both Nike and Burberry. 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman, who's compiled a strong record of reliable Apple scoops, broke the news of the hire, writing that Tariq would serve as “Digital Marketing Director, Apple,” and speculating that "[w]ith this newfound expertise on its staff, it seems likely that Apple’s social media presence will grow rapidly."

There's just one little problem. Have a look at this screenshot of Tariq's Twitter profile, taken Tuesday afternoon, and see if you can figure it out:

That's right! Tariq's actual title appears to be "Digital Marketing Director, Apple Retail." Not to diminish the importance of the Apple Store empire, but that's a much smaller playground than all of Apple. So it seems much more likely that Tariq will be focused on campaigns to draw more customers into Apple's big glass boxes than on anything that might speak more broadly for the company.

Which is a huge shame—and maybe even a giant missed opportunity for Cupertino.

Apple, The Anti-Social Company

Apple, the largest publicly traded company on the planet, does not have what the business kids call a “social media strategy.” It doesn’t even have a verified @Apple Twitter account. (The unverified @Apple account has almost 28,000 followers, but follows no one and has never tweeted.)

You can see why folks were excited about Tariq's hiring. He’s the guy who got Nike to dump outside agencies and create a completely internal social media department which partnered with prominent athletes. While at Burberry, his “Tweetwalk” campaign during London Fashion Week in 2011 provided “exclusive” info to followers and kicked significant Burberry buzz on Twitter.

This is the kind of social media savvy Apple could use to dust off its crusty social media accounts and catch up with competitors already on the ball.

Take, for example, how Samsung won the social media #Oscars thanks to Ellen DeGeneres, Jennifer Lawrence, Angelina Jolie, Bradley Cooper, Kevin Spacey, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Lupita Nyong'o, Brad Pitt and half of Jared Leto’s head in an orchestrated celebriselfie retweeted more than 3 million times.

Meanwhile, Microsoft makes the most of its LinkedIn presence with tips on finding and keeping jobs, along with up-close-and-personal profiles on its employees for nearly 2 million followers.

There have been a few signs that Apple officials are concerned about a perceived erosion in their brand image. Ad Age, for instance, reported in June that Apple is building a 1,000-person "internal" ad agency to rejuvenate its marketing message. Phil Schiller, Apple's VP of global marketing, has expressed unhappiness with the company's campaigns and its current ad agency in internal emails that surfaced in recent Apple lawsuits.

All that attention, though, is focused on the company's traditional advertising strategy. If Apple really wants to freshen up its image, it needs to take a long, hard look at engaging on the social front.

Baby Tweets

Apple, of course, isn't a complete social naïf. CEO Tim Cook has 569,000 Twitter followers—not bad, considering he’s tweeted only about 80 times from his verified account.

And the company has a handful of verified Twitter accounts representing various divisions, with a respectable number of followers. For example, @iTunesMusic, which “joined” Twitter in 2009, has nearly million followers. And @AppStore, launching the same year, has almost 3 million.

That doesn't mean social gets a lot of respect in Cupertino.

Cook’s predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, wasn’t one for Twitter, or any social media really—although he was known to answer the occasional email. It was in keeping with that Jobsian reality distortion field, that ambitious vision of the future that engulfed those around him, as well as Jobs' obsession with tightly controlling any and all information in Apple’s dealings with journalists and consumers.

See also: Apple's Abrupt Mac OS X Change Could Block Many Apps

Apple's control-freakdom has loosened up a little under Cook, though not a whole lot. "There is no way that Apple is going to take questions via the Twitter universe for its notoriously secretive earnings call," Belus Capital analyst Brian Sozzi told CNBC in February. "Apple isn't going to be like Starbucks and run promoted tweets offering dollars off a product for a limited time. Apple is a premium experience all around, you go to Apple, they do not go to you."

As 9to5Mac noted, Schiller himself has cuttingly dismissed the value of a focused social media strategy and suggested that social channels are something he can track by himself:

I think paying money for social media tracking tools is nuts. It is easy to track social media, I do it every day, there are lots of summary feeds, groups, and notification tools built right in to the social networking sites, all free. 

Nothing encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of Apple's social interaction better than its official YouTube channel, which currently features 44 videos. Many come with the pretty songs and high production values that Apple commercials are known for—which isn't that surprising, since many of them are Apple TV ads or videos produced for its live events.

None, however, feature input from Apple’s more than one million YouTube followers. The comments are turned off. So when Apple asks in the description of some of its iPad videos, “What will your verse be?”, it seems it's not really interested in an answer.

Tariq, or someone like him, could change that. But someone's going to have to shut off the reality-distortion field first.

Lead image by Flickr user Mahender G

When hiring data scientists, there’s nothing more frustrating than making the wrong hire. Data scientists are in notoriously high demand, hard to attract, and command large salaries — compounding the cost of a mistake. At The Data Incubator, we’ve talked to dozens of employers looking to hire data scientists from our training program, from large corporates like Pfizer and JPMorgan Chase to smaller tech startups like Foursquare and Upstart. Employers that didn’t have good hiring experiences in the past often failed to ask a key question:

Is your data scientist producing analytics for machines or humans?

This distinction is important across organizations, industries, and job titles (our fellows are being placed at jobs with titles that range from Quant to Data Scientist to Analyst to Statistician). Unfortunately, most hiring managers conflate the types of talent and temperament necessary for these roles.

While this isn’t the only distinction among data scientists, it’s one of the biggest when it comes to hiring. Here’s the difference, and why it matters:

Analytics for machines: In this case, the ultimate decision maker and consumer of the analysis is a computer. Online ad or content targeting, algorithmic trading, product recommendations are just a few examples.

These data scientists are building very complex models ingesting enormous data sets and trying to extract subtle signals with machine learning and sophisticated algorithms. These digital models act on their own, choosing which ads to display, making recommendations to users, or automatically trading in the stock market, often in less than the blink of an eye.

Data scientists who produce analysis for computers need exceptionally strong mathematical, statistical, and computational fluency to build models that can quickly make good predictions. They usually operate with clear metrics (such as profits, clicks, purchases) and can piece together a myriad of technical tricks to build very sophisticated models that drive performance. When even small gains are aggregated across millions of users and trillions of events, their efforts can result in huge gains in revenue.

Analytics for humans: The ultimate decision maker and consumer of the analysis here is another human. Analyzing the effectiveness of products, understanding user growth and retention, producing reports for clients are just a few examples of the work these data scientists do.

They might be sifting through the same large data sets as their analytics-for-machines counterparts, but the results of their models and predictions are delivered to a human decision maker (often a non data-scientist) who has to make product or business decisions based on these recommendations.

Data scientists who produce results for people have to think about how to tell a story from the data. Because they have to explain their results to others — particularly those who are not as well versed in data science — they might deliberately choose simpler models over more accurate but overly complex ones. They have to be comfortable drawing higher-level conclusions — the “how” and “why.” These aren’t as easily observed in the data as the clear metrics enjoyed by their analytics-for-machines counterparts.

It’s important to get the right person for either job. We find that the typical profile of a data scientist who produces analytics for machines is someone with a natural science, mathematics, or engineering background (often at the PhD level) with the deep mathematical and computational background necessary to do the really high-powered work. Without the necessary technical skills, candidates will either fail at handling the large amounts of data or apply overly simplistic models that don’t capture the data’s full value.

However, these same people may not be suited to produce analytics for humans. Putting a team of MIT-trained physicists in a role where they are constrained to use “simple” models that management can understand will not be the best use of their talents, especially if they’re thirsting for a “deep” machine-learning challenge. On the other hand, social and medical scientists (again, often at the PhD level) are really well trained at understanding the “how” and “why” and often thrive on this kind of intellectual challenge.

Data scientists with hard science backgrounds have traditionally gotten a lot of attention in the press. In part, this is romanticizing the unknown — mysterious models that magically trade stocks or intuitively understand user preferences are sexier than the tedious work of thinking really hard about causality, sample bias, and the “how” or “why” of your data. But the latter could be what you really need from a data scientist. By asking this key question ahead of the hiring process, companies can go beyond the hype and find the right data scientists for their specific needs.

Social sales is the hot new thing in the world of B2B sales. And with good reason - most prospects have online profiles that can be a valuable source of insights for sales reps. However, most sales people are using social sales the wrong way - and are missing out on a lot of sales because of that.

 

 

I see a lot of sales people using "social sales" as an excuse to do some actual selling. These people will typically spend an excessive amount of time on researching a particular lead or prospect before picking up the phone to call them. 

They seem to think that by spending an hour (or even more!) stalking that person online doing their homework, they'll get valuable insights that will help them close a deal. Which almost never is the case.

How Much Should You Research Your Prospect Before Reaching Out?

About 5 to 10 minutes is enough. More than that is excessive. (There are exceptions to this general rule, but overall up to 10 minutes should be plenty).

You don't need to know all the things they're favoriting on Twitter, liking on Facebook, which pictures they've uploaded on Flickr (I'm old school I know, Instagram!), what they've blogged about and so on.

You can't gain a perfect understanding of a prospect by going all NSA on them.

The Best Way to Learn About Your Prospect?

Talk to them. Ask them questions. That way you'll get relevant information that actually matters. Use the conversation with them to learn more and dig deep. Don't just ask surface level questions. Ask why they find something important, and how they came to that conclusion, and what they're doing about it, what else they've tried before. What's really crucial right now for them? What's a dealbreaker? What's a nice to have?

Listen to the way they say it, listen to the tone of their voice.

Pay attention to context not just content!

If all this "online homework" isn't actually that helpful, why are so many sales people obsessed with it these days?

The Real Reason Why Sales Reps Over-Research Prospects

What's the root cause of this desire to research people online for hours? Why are many modern sales people spending so much time doing it?

Because it's convenient. Because it's safe. And because they feel insecure about reaching out and interacting with the prospect.

Researching prospects online is risk-free. Nobody will reject you while you're doing online research.

No rejection = No sales.

It's a rejection-free zone. But that's the exact problem. No rejection also means no sales.

There's no selling going on. You're not closing deals. You're not engaging with people. You're just sitting in front of a computer clicking button and taking notes.

When Over-Researching Leads To Over-Confidence

Another mistake that I see a lot of "social sales people" commit is being over-confident. They spend an hour reading all your tweets and Facebook updates, and your last five blog posts... and they think they know you because of that. They think they now have the essence of who you are and what makes you tick, what you like and dislike.

Whenever you walk into a conversation with a human being filled with so many preconceived notions, there's a huge risk that you'll fail to truly interact with that person. It's just the way our brains are wired - we all prefer to have our ideas validated. We all want to be right. But as a sales person, your job is not to be right. Your job is to sell. Let the other person be right and close the deal.

When you're having a sales conversation with a prospect, put your preconceived notions aside. Don't be opinionated, be open-minded. Don't suppose you know what makes them tick. Get out of your own head and really listen to them.

Showing Off Insights

I've seen sales people go as far as bragging about the information they gathered about a prospect. Which is wrong on so many levels. One, it's absolutely boring to the other person, because they know all the things you're telling them about them. They are the ones who shared it online. What's the point of regurgitating that?

And sometimes they make assumptions based on what they read that are just plain wrong. They misinterpret something that person shared online.

Heck, if even the popular Myers-Briggs test doesn't manage to really reveal a person's character in 93 questions, why do these people think they can understand a person because they read a tweet?

Why do they think they can deduct a person's thoughts, feelings, intentions, beliefs and philosophy are, based on a blog comment?

It takes more than that to fully understand somebody.

There Is Value In Social!

I'm not advising you to ignore social. Social can be a powerful tool. But don't buy into the hype. Don't fall prey to wishful thinking that social sales will help you to close more deals without encountering rejection.

You know what you can gain from researching prospects online?

Signals. Tidbits of information. But you need personal interaction and real-time engagement with a person to be able to embed these data points into the right context in order to sell more successfully.

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SAN FRANCISCO — The whole idea that sales can and should become more data-driven? It doesn’t sound that crazy after all.

DoubleDutch, a startup that creates mobile apps and analytics tools for conferences, has increased sales by a factor of 300 percent, and software from InsideSales.com has played a major part, helping the DoubleDutch salespeople spot the best people to interact with in order to maximize results.

“It’s really just helping us optimize everything we do at the company,” Russ Hearl, vice president of global sales development at DoubleDutch, said at VentureBeat’s 2014 GrowthBeat conference.

While the salespeople get concrete tips, Hearl himself can see what’s going on.

“Were always looking at … cycle time,” Hearl said. “As a business, that’s a really important one to look at. But personally, I’m always looking at the conversation to demo rates. If one rep is having a 5 percent demo rate and the average is 18 percent, you know, what’s going on there?”

Small wonder investors have expressed serious interest in InsideSales and other predictive sales and marketing tools that can make the most of sales and marketing employees and ultimately boost sales. InsideSales announced a $100 million round in April, and Lattice Engines has also consistently picked up funding. Context Relevant just got a $21 million round, and 6sense came out of stealth with $12 million in May.

Infer, which offers predictive marketing and sales tools, has been taking on more customers based on last year’s funding round, and Salesforce.com bought RelateIQ, which built ways to automatically collect data from salespeople’s interactions and suggest the best people to contact.

The common denominator here seems to be the startups’ strong belief in statistics and math, which are not historically the strengths of legendary salespeople.

“We believe math is going to trump anything else,” said Mick Hollison, InsideSales’ chief marketing officer. “Science hasn’t been applied to sales in quite the same way it’s applied to marketing or other systems to date.”

InsideSales.com helps businesses of all sizes increase revenues and improve sales productivity with the industry’s first cloud-based sales acceleration platform. Innovations in sales communications for immediate response, gamific... read more »

DoubleDutch is an award-winning provider of mobile applications for events, conferences, associations, and trade shows worldwide. The first to bring a data-driven technology approach to the event industry, DoubleDutch has raised $18.5M... read more »

Mick Hollison joined InsideSales.com in June 2013 with over 20 years of experience in technology marketing, product management and sales. Currently, Mick oversees all marketing efforts including demand generation, product marketing, pr... read more »

Russ Hearl is a VP of Global Sales Development at Double Dutch.... read more »

I’ve lost over a third of my monthly gross income in the past month.

Those are words I never thought in a million years I would ever type – or publicly acknowledge.

I get asked all the time how business is going and I always give the same chirpy reply, “Great! I’ve been so blessed.” Well, honestly right now it sucks.

Most social media pros would NEVER EVER EVER publicly admit they’ve lost a client or a portion of income. They feel it would reflect poorly on their brand or company. Newsflash – this happens to all of us at some point.

In the past month, here’s what has happened…

1. Client A is moving his marketing dollars around and has chosen to stop despite all the great feedback and activity he gets from his Facebook page.

2. Client B feels like they have learned enough from watching me do it that now they think they can do it on their own.

3. Client C loves the work I’ve done but has decided to abandon social media marketing right now.

4. Client D (a non-profit) has had to make drastic budget cuts due to lack of funding and has needed to cut social media marketing.

None of clients cited lack of return or not enough sales, leads, etc. Frustrating? You bet.

So, why? Why this downpour all of a sudden? In moments like this I turn to my faith. I rarely write about it because I want to keep my religion separate from business, but this time I can’t. I’m a Christian and have been since I was 10. I am very deeply involved in my faith. I cannot take credit for the success I have had in my business because I’ve been blessed with people coming to me for my services and not having to make sales calls.

Every time I have had a client come off contract, there’s been on there to replace it and then some. Someone is looking out for me and my business. I know I am doing what I’m suppose to be doing – this is what was intended for me.

However, times like this I start to question and worry and stress. The Bible says in Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” I know there’s something bigger on the horizon and now comes my lesson in patience.

This also gives me time to reflect on what I could have done better.

Could I have spent a few more minutes engaging with fans?
Could I have put together a better strategy?
Could I have not taken on more clients in order to spend more time on who I currently work with?

The questions could go on.

I think every time we lose a client we need to take the time to reflect and really dig deep to figure out what we could have done better. Sometimes it’s not anything we did – it was out of our hands.

I’ll be honest – I was nervous to write and publish this. No one likes to publicly admit what I just did, even though it happens to us all. Does this make me a lesser social media professional? Does this mean I’m not good at what I do? I hope not (and I personally don’t think it does). I have a list of clients who would refute anything negative. For someone who is very private, opening up like this is very much outside my comfort zone, but I feel like it was something I needed to write. Kinda like Jerry Maguire writing his manifesto.

Right now is the time to focus on the positive – the clients I do have and how to service them even better. Clients come and go – it’s the roller coaster ride of this business.

One of my 5 year old’s favorite books is Pete the Cat & His 4 Groovy Buttons. Everytime Pete loses a button, he says “buttons come and buttons go, but do we cry? Goodness no!” I’m going to finish this post with the very last line of the book which 100% applies right now…

“Things will come and things will go. Do we cry? Goodness No!”

White papers, guides and ebooks are time-intensive content marketing projects. It’s surprising that many B2B marketers put lots of time and resources into developing white papers and then simply post them on their websites and hope leads will pour in.

Unfortunately, it’s not this easy.

Here are seven ways you can promote your white papers to get more downloads, shares and leads:

1. Syndicate your white paper.

You can attract more leads by posting your white paper to a syndication service. These services will promote your white paper, and you usually pay for every lead they bring your way. Just be sure that your syndication service can get your white paper in front of your ideal customers and that you’re not paying for bad leads such as your competitors, students and consultants.

2. Collect leads on your blog.

When you publish a new white paper, think about how your blog can support it. For example, write a series of related articles for your blog. Each related article can contain a banner ad or non-invasive popup (such as OptinMonster) that directs readers to your white paper.

3. Give your sales team a cheat sheet.

I once created a two-page version of a white paper that a client could give to their sales team. The purpose of the white paper “cheat sheet” was to have something that was easy for salespeople to hand out to leads.

4. Host a webinar about your white paper’s topic.

Not all of your ideal customers will read a white paper. If you host a webinar that’s on the same topic as your white paper, you can reach a wider audience. There are several ways you can tie your white paper to your webinar:

• Make the webinar a next step readers can take after they download your white paper.
• Use the white paper as a bonus that attendees receive immediately after they sign up for your webinar.
• Include the white paper in your webinar’s resources and send it to attendees after the live event.

5. Convert your white paper into a SlideShare presentation.

SlideShare is a great channel to use if your audience responds to visuals. Post highlights from your white paper in a SlideShare presentation. Be sure to include lots of strong visuals and go light on the text. You can even add a lead generation form to your SlideShare presentation to connect with potential customers.

6. Drive targeted leads to your white papers via LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has advanced targeting features that let you put your ads in front of exactly the right audience. For example, you can target your audience by company size, job function, title and location. You can buy both ads and sponsored updates.

LinkedIn also offers lots of free ways to promote your white papers. For example, you can mention them in status updates on your company page or have your employees mention them in their status updates. You can also share them in groups that your ideal customers belong to. Just be sure to have a trustworthy reputation in the group before you share links to your white papers. If you come off as too ‘salesy’, you might get blocked from the group.

7. Get bloggers to talk about your white paper.

Getting your industry’s top bloggers to talk about your white paper can bring a lot of leads your way. However, you can’t send a press release to these bloggers and expect them to get excited. If you send a blogger a press release, they will probably ignore it.

Instead, build relationships with these bloggers before you ask them to do anything for you. Share their content and comment on their blog posts. Once you have a relationship, send them a link to your white paper’s direct download page, along with a personal email that explains why their readers will find it valuable.

Try some of these tips to promote your white paper to reach a wider audience. Also, remember to build excitement before your white paper goes live. For example, send out some social media and email teasers to spark interest in your new white paper.

You just finished outlining your buyer journeys.

Your personas are insight-driven. Each stage of the sales cycle aligns with specific buyer pain points and challenges. You feel good, knowing your content will be more meaningful, the process will be more efficient, and you’ll be generating more qualified leads.

So What’s Next?

Do You Know What Your Prospects Are Doing with Your Content?

It’s time to review existing content and tag it with the right persona and sales stage. This practice will enable you to see how much targeted content you already have, as well as where you have holes to fill.

At Kapost, we talk a lot about best practices and what works for our clients. One of our key tenets is “repurpose, reuse, and recycle.” To dig in, let’s look at what you may be creating right now.

Mapping Content to Sales Stages

At the top of the funnel, content is focused on brand awareness and addressing buyer needs rather than product information. Marketing efforts are focused on social media, blogging, eBooks, whitepapers, and SEO measures.

The middle of the funnel represents the consideration or evaluation stage for buyers. They’ve demonstrated a level of interest and are determining what is the best fit for their needs. Webinars, email marketing, case studies, and events educate and build trust.

Assuming you’ve done well to this point, your buyers have reached the bottom of the funnel. Nice work! Let’s bring it home.

At this stage, it’s decision-making time. Marketing efforts are designed to assure buyers of their purchase intent, differentiate the brand as superior to the competition and, let’s be honest, compel them to make a purchase. CRM and sales enablement tools such as product whitepapers, demos, and sales presentations that facilitate conversations are developed for the bottom of the funnel.

A New Look at “Repurpose, Reuse, and Recycle”

Now, let’s get back to that idea of repurpose, reuse, and recycle. We typically talk about this tenet in the context of your development and use of content, creating derivative assets from a large piece of content (called a content pillar) or leveraging previously used content in a new way.

Today, I’m putting a different spin on that idea.

Effective content is created to address specific needs of buyers as they progress from awareness though consideration to decision-making. But, as you’ve no doubt experienced, decisions are not made by just one individual. There are a variety of stakeholders with a variety of interests, which—by the way—is why content mapping is so critical.

Here’s the thing with really good content: it gets passed along, shared, and discussed.

But here’s the thing with really good content: it gets passed along, shared, and discussed. This is exactly what you want to happen. And though you have little control over the secondary readership, it is one of the most crucial elements in gaining consensus on a final purchase decision. When you create great content, your prospects and clients are repurposing, reusing, and recycling your content for you.

We hear from clients quite often how a piece of content created for a buyer at the top of the funnel was instrumental for another persona at the bottom of the funnel and helped close the deal.

There you have it. High quality content that is created and mapped to specific buyer needs at each stage of their decision-making process is going take on a life of its own. And this cascade happens simply because you’re now producing highly relevant and meaningful content.

In Sales & Marketing, Zero Dark Thirty is 30 Minutes Too Late written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

… or why the biggest sales problem businesses think they have isn’t the one they actually have!

Despite the name, marketing automation was never intended to be a marketing technology, even though about 80% of investments in marketing automation are driven exclusively by the marketing department. The expectation was – and is – that the system would be embraced by both marketing and sales because, after all, it’s a tool for educating prospects to action and optimizing conversion along each stage of the buying cycle.

Marketing automation isn’t just a glorified campaign engine for marketing. Sure, it replaces disparate marketing tools like email marketing, web analytics, landing page hosting, and social media marketing. But the real benefit comes from lead scoring and integration with CRM, because it allows marketing and sales to dynamically adjust messaging based on individual prospect behavior. It’s about optimizing how leads flow through the customer lifecycle, all the way from inquiry to loyal customer.

Marketing automation allows Top Performing organizations to determine the best possible way to engage a prospect and automatically route them to sales at just the right time. That should occasion a double-take from even the most skeptical sales leader.

Sales still resists marketing automation

But sales still tends to resist marketing automation. Sometimes reps are reluctant because they don’t know (or aren’t consulted about) what’s going into lead scores. Sometimes changes in sales processes and CRM layouts disrupt the norm. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Figure 1 shows top reasons organizations struggle to embrace marketing automation in sales:

Figure 1: The percentage of companies indicating challenges with marketing automation;
respondents were asked to select all that apply.
(Q4 2013 B2B Marketing Survey, Using Marketing Automation n=67)

What sales leaders should expect from marketing automation

What bubbles to the surface is a general lack of education about what sales leaders should actually expect from marketing automation. Indeed, there are more than a handful of reasons sales should be excited about marketing automation. As an example, 94% of Top Performers that had been using marketing automation for over 2 years reported that they beat their year-over-year revenue targets by 20% in 2013. When such a large majority experiences the same result, it becomes predictable that the same approach and process will produce similar results for others; in other words, it becomes legitimately expectable.

When we talk to sales reps at Top Performing companies, here’s what we generally hear about the benefits of marketing automation in the context of sales:

1. Accountability for marketing performance.

Sales lives and breathes in a performance-driven environment. If you don’t make your quota, it’s hero to goat overnight. To sales, it can seem like marketing gets a free pass when it comes to performance accountability because they spend big bucks and often can’t quantify the return..

It’s still quite common for marketing and sales to squabble over the quality of leads that are passed by marketing. Marketing automation allows marketing and sales leaders to work together to pre-define business rules that essentially gate the quality of those leads. The result: leads that are passed from marketing to sales based on their propensity to purchase.

Marketing can in turn take ownership of generating a sufficient volume of leads that actually meet sales qualification expectations. That means the entire lead lifecycle – from inquiry to customer – can be measured and tracked. Over time, organizations can benchmark conversion in each stage, including estimating the number of qualified leads marketing needs to source and how much it costs to drive that volume based on expected revenue targets.

2. Reps have more reasons to reach out and engage prospects.

It sure would be nice if CRM was more than a management tool. By integrating CRM with marketing automation, multi-channel prospect activity is effectively – and automatically –pushed into contact records, with the honey pot of information being fully accessible from the CRM.

That gives reps expanded context about when to reach out, why they are reaching out, and what to talk about with the prospect. “I’m reaching out because you briefly visited our website today and I wanted to see if I could answer any questions about [Widget B].”

CRM-marketing automation integration turns CRM into a strategic source of insight for reps who become more likely to log in and use their CRM the way it was intended to be used. Naturally, this means marketing automation can also increase CRM adoption among sales reps.

3. Sales doesn’t have to qualify as many leads.

According to research, 7 out of 10 B2B marketers report that sales reps are actively qualifying opportunities that are not ready to purchase and should be engaged by marketing instead. That’s a waste of time for sales reps who should be focused on, high priority, short-term opportunities.

Marketers do the best they can to source quality leads, but without the rigor of a multi-channel campaign platform that can track prospect behavior and employ automated tactics such as lead scoring , it’s arduous (if not impossible) to estimate where a lead might be in the sales cycle. For Top Performing organizations that use marketing automation, lead qualification happens in marketing and opportunity qualification happens in sales.

4. Best practices in sales become scalable.

In any given sales environment there’s a handful of reps who are really, really good. This is typically referenced as the 80/20 rule of sales, which dictates that 80% of the sales are made by 20% of the sales force.

The thing is, the most successful reps always have tricks they rely on to drive the sale. (If only there was an easy way to teach those tricks to other reps.)

Generally the best reps look for buying triggers, profile the prospect, and adjust the message to resonate and spur the prospect to action. Marketing automation can streamline a majority of those activities because the technology allows reps to set up repeatable processes and tasks, and run them automatically.

For example, if your best reps are targeting specific roles in certain industries and using certain content to engage prospects (e.g., datasheets, white papers, videos), you can use marketing automation to replicate these efforts and scale painlessly.

Marketing automation makes targeting buyers scalable because you can set up campaigns to run on autopilot. New prospects enter the correct nurturing campaigns automatically, receiving the right message at the right time, whether you have one or one thousand prospects in the pipeline.

Additionally, marketing automation also disseminates the leads that flow into the system to sales reps at just the right time. In a sense, you can actually replicate the best practices in sales for other reps to benefit from them. Sure, it’s not going to make every rep a rock star, but it could help replicate best practices and give the entire sales organization a leg up. Typically, when marketing automation is well implanted, more reps make quota.

5. Marketing automation helps reps stay in touch with prospects that aren’t ready to buy.

It’s very common for qualified opportunities to fall through the cracks and, for whatever reason, choose not to purchase in the short term. Most of the time, reps make a note to follow up later … and that may or may not happen.

Marketing automation allows reps to actively monitor leads they have engaged, including flagging their activity and alerting reps of buying signals. Nurturing a prospect who has already engaged with sales requires entirely different messaging than nurturing a prospect who was just introduced to your brand. Marketers can set up campaigns into which sales reps can drop contact records in order to keep in touch with them over time. If and when a prospect engages with one of those campaigns, the rep can reach out and re-engage at just the right time.

Want More – and More In-Depth – Information?

For more information about how marketing automation can shift salespeople into higher gear with less effort, take a peek at the following resources:

Read the Report

 

and Watch the Video

“The Resistance Army” by veganstraightedge, used under Creative Commons license.