Rnordman

Here are 10 tips for building a sales negotiation training program that maximizes profitability and customer satisfaction.

1. Focus on the specific skills. The first step in improving sales negotiation skills is to provide the training and tools that teach your salespeople how to protect pricing and prevent unnecessary discounting.

2. Hold regular team meetings focused on deal negotiation strategy. Allocate time during sales team meetings to debrief on past negotiations and critique future negotiation strategies. This reinforces sales negotiation training skills and also improves bottom-line results in real situations.

3. “Talk the talk.” By using the terminology you provide as part of your sales negotiation training in day-to-day conversations with sales reps, you reinforce program concepts and demonstrate how to apply them.

4. “Walk the walk.” It’s critical for managers to be perceived as successful models of good selling and negotiating. Some managers demonstrate this by taking the lead on tough accounts and showing their salespeople how they use the sales negotiation training concepts to plot their negotiation approach.

5. Organize key account sales plans. Sales strategies for the largest and most important customers are often created jointly between the regions and corporate. One way to improve sales results in these critical situations – and reinforce effective negotiations at the same time – is to structure the presentation of key account plans by organizing the selling strategy around fundamental concepts like positioning, targets, information management, negotiation power, customer needs and concession strategies.

6. Make sure everyone is trained. As new sales professionals join the team, it’s critical that they’re brought up to speed on the skills they are expected to use with customers. It’s also important that others who are involved in the sales process – marketing, sales opps, etc. – are trained on effective sales negotiation skills as well.

7. Take the sales negotiation training yourself. This not only helps you build your skills, it also demonstrates to your team that you take effective negotiation seriously. It sends a key message: “When it comes to negotiating with our customers, I want you to do what I say, and what I do.”

8. Assess everyone’s skills. Implement a formal testing process to assess sales negotiation skills, and require your sales professionals and managers to take it.

9. Require them to plan…on paper. Require your salespeople to create written plans on important agreements. You can use these to help them integrate the following concepts into the overall account strategy:

a. The appropriate concession plan
b. The relevant negotiables
c. The value proposition
d. That targets are set high enough for this negotiation

10. Take follow-up sales negotiation training. Improving your group’s sales negotiation skills is a process, not an event. Consider implementing an advanced follow-up program.

Read here to learn more or contact us at info@corporatevisions.com.

It's hard to discern what lies at the root of climate deniers' logic. But an argument you often hear is that addressing climate change would add unnecessary costs to corporations. 

President Barack Obama says that argument doesn't make any sense, because, according to him, the corporations themselves have all acknowledged climate change is occurring and are trying to figure out how to adjust their operations accordingly.

In an interview with The Economist published this weekend, Obama said most businesses are instead hungry for clarity from Washington about what kind of regulations are going to be imposed to address climate change. 

"There aren’t any corporate CEOs that you talk to at least outside of maybe—no, I will include CEOs of the fossil-fuel industries—who are still denying that climate change is a factor," Obama said. "What they want is some certainty around the regulations so that they can start planning. Given the capital investments that they have to make, they’re looking at 20-, 30-year investments. They’ve got to know now are we pricing carbon? Are we serious about this? But none of them are engaging in some of the nonsense that you’re hearing out of the climate-change denialists." 

Here's the exchange in full. Obama also explains that he meets with business leaders more often than many would believe, though accuses them of a degree of hypocrisy,  saying their professed values often don't coincide and what their lobbyists are actually doing on the hill. 

The Economist: Do you really think that's true? Because when I talk to corporate CEOs, that’s one of their complaints. If you ask for a complaint about the White House, they’ll say it is the attitude. Every CEO nowadays is involved in nine different social responsibility things—it’s ingrained in most public—

Mr Obama: Well, I think—here’s what’s interesting. There’s a huge gap between the professed values and visions of corporate CEOs and how their lobbyists operate in Washington. And I’ve said this to various CEOs. When they come and they have lunch with me—which they do more often than they probably care to admit (laughter)—and they’ll say, you know what, we really care about the environment, and we really care about education, and we really care about getting immigration reform done—then my challenge to them consistently is, is your lobbyist working as hard on those issues as he or she is on preserving that tax break that you’ve got? And if the answer is no, then you don’t care about it as much as you say.

Now, to their credit, I think on an issue like immigration reform, for example, companies did step up. And what they’re discovering is the problem is not the regulatory zealotry of the Obama administration; what they’re discovering is the dysfunction of a Republican Party that knows we need immigration reform, knows that it would actually be good for its long-term prospects, but is captive to the nativist elements in its party.

And the same I think goes for a whole range of other issues like climate change, for example. There aren’t any corporate CEOs that you talk to at least outside of maybe—no, I will include CEOs of the fossil-fuel industries—who are still denying that climate change is a factor. What they want is some certainty around the regulations so that they can start planning. Given the capital investments that they have to make, they’re looking at 20-, 30-year investments. They’ve got to know now are we pricing carbon? Are we serious about this? But none of them are engaging in some of the nonsense that you’re hearing out of the climate-change denialists. Denialists?

Click here to read the full interview at The Economist »

Join the conversation about this story »

More bad news for Samsung.

After announcing its worst earnings report in two years, Samsung is no longer the leading smartphone maker in China. 

According to the latest market research from Canalys, Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker that sells cheap smartphones and tablets that look eerily like Apple products, is now the number one smartphone vendor in its home country. Xiaomi accounted for 14% of China’s smartphone sales in the second quarter, while Samsung accounted for just 12%, according to Canalys.

But Xiaomi isn’t alone. Samsung’s other rivals in China, including Huawei and Lenovo, are now ahead of Samsung when it comes to global smartphone market share, according to a report by Strategy Analytics. 

China is the biggest smartphone market in the world, so losing control of the market is a big deal for Samsung.

Companies like Xiaomi are finally figuring out how to release phones and tablets with impressive specs and big, beautiful displays that cost a fraction of Samsung’s devices. Samsung’s Galaxy S5 costs at least $600. In contrast, Xiaomi’s newest Mi4 flagship costs just $320. 

Samsung, as always, has plenty of devices waiting in the wings, including a new Galaxy Alpha handset that looks like the iPhone 5S and the Galaxy Note 4 "phablet," which will likely be unveiled just ahead of this year’s IFA conference in Berlin in early September. But as this chart shows, Samsung’s profits are taking a bit hit as it seeks to compete with numerous, cheaper rivals, and the company acknowledged as much during its earnings report. 

Samsung's sales are still going strong in the U.S., as noted by comScore. Apple has about 42% of the market share there and Samsung has about 28%. No one else is even close. But Samsung, as well as Apple, may become more vulnerable to these Chinese smartphone makers if and when they begin to sell their low-priced handsets in the U.S. After all, when the technologies are equal, price is usually the biggest deciding factor for consumers.

Until those cheaper handsets start arriving in the western hemisphere, however, Samsung will need to fight tooth-and-nail to find new product categories that'll make up for some of its dwindling mobile profits.

According to the company, Samsung plans to “hire like crazy” in Silicon Valley to find “the next big thing.” But unless the company decides to be a premium electronics company like Apple, a strong dose of R&D may be Samsung’s best bet to fend off this new wave of cheap-but-powerful devices coming out of China.

SEE ALSO: Look How Much Samsung Has Transformed In The Past Few Years

Join the conversation about this story »

Do you send out flurries of emails about jobs to be done – and hope that somebody somewhere is keeping track of them? Does your own inbox fill up with instructions that you can only sort by date or by sender, but never by priority? In either case, you may have realized that it doesn’t take many tasks – handed out or received – before you need something better than just your webmail to organize your work.

What Task Management Software Does

Task management apps put into a logical, automated format the tasks and priorities you would otherwise have to wrestle with manually. They can assist you with:

• Individual and group achievement of goals (like Natural Insight and Sellsy Teamwork for enterprise revenue generation)
• Task capture on the go (such as Evernote)
• Task phases of planning, execution, tracking and reporting (for instance, Confluence from Atlassian, or ProjectPlace)
• Management of task duration, notification, priority, recurrence, resources and status (Deputy for workforce management is one example).

Matching Task Management Apps and Personality

Task management may sound cut and dried, but personalities can play a big role in how it is handled:

• Task oriented. Schedule and status are priority items, even if you recognize the importance of fostering good working relations with the task assignees. You want to move as many tasks as possible from planned to finished, as soon as possible.
• Relationship oriented. For you, people are the main focus, because that’s how tasks get done. Communication and collaboration are uppermost in your mind, even though you also want to make sure that tasks get done by their individual deadlines.

So pick the task management app that suits your personality and approach.

Email as an Entry Point to Task Management

Email alone may not be powerful enough for task management, but email is known to everyone. It’s not surprising then that some task management software leverages the popularity of email as an interface. Wrike for example is a project management application with a strong focus on task management, and was first developed as an extension from email systems.

Meet the Neighbors!

Task management software may have elements in common or be used with apps for:

• Calendaring. Scheduling of events and appointments, collaborative scheduling, automatic notification of appointments (Sellsy Teamwork offers this in combination with CRM functionality.)
• Collaboration. Communications and social networking tools to enhance collaboration between local or remote teams. Evernote is an example of how informality and efficiency can be blended together.
• Process management (workflow). Allows processes to be defined and automated, automatically routing the output of a previous phase of a process to the next phase (such as Confluence.)
• Project management. Uses task management as a basis for aligning priorities, organizing overall schedules, assigning resources and resolving potential conflicts, for instance in ProjectPlace.
• Time tracking. Tracks time spent on tasks to generate reports and timesheets, and possibly integrate with accountancy or billing applications to generate invoices to customers (Deputy and Natural Insight.)

Steps to Enhancing Your Task Management

Task management can often be improved by focusing on certain key aspects:

• Clear description of the type of work so that both assignees and ‘interested parties’ (stakeholders) can see at a glance what is to be done. Evernote provides a quick, effective tool for this.
• Mapping of tasks onto overall plans. Some tasks that are essential for progress to an overall goal may only be truly meaningful when viewed in that global context. For example, a task to reserve a stand at a trade show, in the context of an overall sales and marketing plan, or product launch plan (using ProjectPlace for example.)
• Prioritization. Using a common system understood by all users, tasks are assigned priorities to help allocate resources and make decisions in case of resource or timing conflicts. When tasks arrive ad hoc, Confluence is one app that can help users to integrate and make sense of them within the existing operational framework.
• Collaboration. Some tasks require the efforts or contributions of more than one person. Task ownership still needs to be clear and unambiguous.
• Monitoring. Up-to-date task status information should be easily and immediately obtainable.
• Compliance. For tasks that require a documented history for compliance (health and safety regulations, for instance), keep full data on what has been done. This also helps to identify any outstanding actions or any changes that should be made in processes linked to the tasks.

Task Management for Handling Distributed Workloads

A specific yet sizable area of application for task management applications is in managing distributed workloads. This may be between the headquarters and branch operations of the same enterprise. Or it might also be between business partners – for example, a central manufacturer and independent retail outlets.

The central entity often needs the assistance of the remote offices or outlets to accomplish different tasks such as offering temporary sales promotions or updating prices on merchandise in stock. The hours of work required can be considerable. Task management with functionality to define task duration and track time spent helps both parties to budget for the time needed. It also helps them to see whether employees are efficient when performing the tasks. Natural Insight offers a number of examples of use specifically for this kind of requirement. Deputy and Sellsy Teamwork also have income generation-oriented functionality built in.

Advantages to the central and branch organizations include:

• Being able to send tasks to employees or roles at specific locations
• Matching tasks with work shifts to monitor the percentage of time spent on tasks
• Track with different levels of granularity down to specific task, assignee and status
• Capture and share data, feedback and if appropriate images on tasks in real time

Whatever the size of your business, it’s likely that you’ll quickly outgrow email alone as a task management system – or perhaps you’ve already bumped up against its limits. In that case, see what SMB task management apps or mid-size enterprise task management apps might suit you. And check out the possibilities of freemium task management apps to explore entry-level services at no cost and decide on an upgrade afterwards.

The post The Pain-Free Guide to Generating Valuable Leads From Online Forums appeared first on Copyblogger.

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As an entrepreneur, it's beneficial to put together a smart, invested board of advisors to help get you through your beginning years and beyond. That's why we asked 12 startup founders from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) what is most important when choosing your board. 

Vest Their Equity Over Time

It is extremely difficult to find the right advisers for your business. You need to make sure they have a strong work ethic, sufficient spare time to commit to the company and that they can provide solid advice and resources to your business.

Instead of giving advisers all of their shares at once, consider having their equity vest over time so you have a fair solution if these factors do not line up, which is often the case. 

—Doug Bend, Bend Law Group

Bring Them In By The Boatload

I would get a large board of advisers at low equity cuts (between a quarter and a tenth of a percent) so that you can really create a huge list of people that can help you with your initial launch. The more advisers you get the easier it will be to get more, and the more you have for your launch the bigger your splash will be. I've seen quite a few few companies pull this off (about.me being a fantastic example).

—Liam Martin, Staff.com 

Be Selective

Most people will informally advise you. Have as many of those kinds of advisors as you like. For your actual board of advisors you should be a lot more selective.

They get small portions of equity, so they should really know what they're talking about and really help you with the business. They should have experience in startups or your field. They should be somewhat noteworthy, have an exit, experience or strong personal brand. Plan on three to five people. The spots should be coveted.

—Carlo Cisco, Select

Seek Counsel, Not Advice

It’s important to seek people who can provide counsel instead of people who just give advice. Anyone can give you advice, but counsel is a very specific type of advice that comes from people who have vast knowledge or experience in the area of your business.

You should always try to surround yourself with people who have more experience or are more knowledgeable than you are. You do not have to be an expert in every area of your business, but you should put together a council of people who are the most knowledgeable about every critical area of your venture. It’s your job to know what those areas are.

—Arian Radmand, CoachUp 

Build A Fortune 500 Board

I would advise an entrepreneur preparing to put his/her board of advisers or board of directors together for the first time that there is potentially no more important task than this in the early phase of starting a company. An advisory board lends credibility, industry expertise and a wide range of introductions and advice that can be crucial to one’s early days as an entrepreneur.

A dear friend of mine, venture capitalist Emily Melton, advised me early on that “if you want to build a Fortune 500 company, start with a Fortune 500 board.” I took that advice to heart and always went after dream advisers in the wine/ beverage/technology/media industries.

—Alyssa Rapp, Bottlenotes 

Listen And Reward Them

Your advisers should be people that you’re truly excited to listen to. Don’t put people on your list who you wouldn't be excited to chat with for 20 minutes.

That said, advisory boards are not as practical as you would think. While you will certainly benefit from your advisers' feedback, a board is also an important way to build and maintain your network. Think about who has helped you in the past, who will be there in the future and who you want to bet on.

—Bhavin Shah, Refresh 

Take Your Time

I know many companies that have given away cash or stock options to advisers too quickly, often before getting to know them well or understanding their commitment to the company. Don’t rush into it. Most advisers worth their weight will happily spend time with you and prove their value long before they ask for an official role or any kind of compensation.

—Robert J. Moore, RJMetrics 

Bring Different Perspectives Into the Mix

Don't fill the room with a bunch of people who will think the same way. It will generate a crippling form of groupthink. Bring different perspectives to the table, because they'll offer a more comprehensive and effective solution. Get a good money guy, operations guy, marketing guy, etc. You'll be able to gain better insights that consider all areas of your business.

—Andy Karuza, Brandbuddee 

Look for Passion and Availability

Don’t chase a title or a company. Instead, look for board members that are excited about your business and vet them based on their skills, experience and availability. This will help you build a passionate board that is committed to your success.

—John Berkowitz, Yodle 

Have Skin In The Game

Don’t rush it, and don’t feel like you have to put a board together right away. By making sure your board members want to be engaged and involved, you can avoid wasting resources like time and money.

Furthermore, make sure your board members have some skin in the game and have made an investment in the company. This will prove to you that they believe in the company and the leadership, and that they will be willing to work hard to associate themselves with a winning business.

—George Bousis, Raise Marketplace

Seek Specifics

When building our advisory team, we drew our dream team of advisers on the whiteboard. We included specific, sometimes famous and out-of-our-reach people.

Once we had a team we were happy with, we identified the important factors that drove us to include each person on the dream team. Were they a subject matter expert in our space? Did they know influential investors?

Once we completed this exercise, we were left with specific features, experiences and connections we were looking for in each seat. The rest was easy. We networked to meet people with those specific sets of features. Once you know specifically who you're after, people will help you find them.

—Brennan White, Watchtower 

Be Respectful

Anyone worthy of being on your board of advisors will be an extremely busy business professional. Be respectful of their time and do your homework in preparing and structuring every interaction.

—Björn Stansvik, MentorMate 

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock; headshot collage by YEC

I have suffered through reading more social media books than you can imagine.

Thanks to ten years of blogging and writing several marketing books along the way, I’m clearly on the “official” list of potential book reviewers. Unfortunately after reading dozens of these hastily published books over the years, I find it hard to recall even a handful that I might recommend for someone to read to get better at using social media.  The sadly predictable fact about most of these social media guides is that the longer the page count, the more useless they generally are.

One of my favorite books to recommend instead is a book that hardly anyone would even consider a social media guide, written by a prolific actor, writer and banjo player who is just over a year away from turning 70 years old. It is only 103 pages long.

Steve Martin is surely an unlikely social media guru.

In fact, in 2010 when he first started using Twitter Martin notes that he approached it much the same way any celebrity might:

“I started tweeting purely for commercial reasons. I realized that when I did a television show to promote a book or record, and that television show had an audience of, say, four million people, about four hundred of them rushed out to buy the book or record. I figured if I had a Twitter audience of four hundred thousand–and audience that was tuned into me–and I promoted a book, then four hundred thousand of them would rush out and buy my book. Instead, forty of them rushed out to  buy my book.”

Two years later, he published a book based on his tweets called “The Ten, Make That Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make That Ten.: The Tweets of Steve Martin.”  The book, however, was inspired by a very interesting thing that Martin uncovered only after using Twitter for more than a year.  In the introduction to the book, he shares his discovery:

“When I started, around Labor Day of 2010, I didn’t really understand the ins and outs of Twitter, and it wasn’t until four months later that I noticed people were tweeting me back. Then, I started noticing how tuned-in and funny the responses were, and then a few months later I started saving the best of them (cut and pasted by hand, by me) in a file. This was real enjoyment: I would run to my wife quoting someone’s latest clever response, laughing hard.”

Rather than being a compilation of Martin’s funniest moments on Twitter – his book is a result of those tweets and responses that he collected over more than a year. Reading them is entertaining in the same way that reading a book filled with jokes might be … but the book has some deeper lessons for anyone considering building a social media following, using it to promote themselves or a business, or just trying to improve their content marketing and use of social media:

1. Observe reality.

When you have as much old content as Steve Martin, it’s tempting to focus on just sharing all of that … but some of his most frequently shared tweets are interesting observations and comments on more current topics that anyone might relate to … such as the appearance of Twitter spam or the constancy of news headlines that you can’t seem to escape from.  He is, in essence, doing the same thing that Seinfeld managed to do for years in his “show about nothing.” When you can observe reality in an interesting way, people will follow and engage with you.

This might be my ego talking, but I feel my weight-loss spambot followers care about me. They really, really, do.

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) June 19, 2014

The world is not creating enough news. I need a new headline every hour. — Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 26, 2014

2. Engage with personality.

As soon as you have people responding, it may seem like a challenge to find time to respond to all of them.  The solution is simple … don’t respond to everyone. Instead, pick and choose the people and tweets that you can respond to, but find a way of responding with a real human personality instead of corporate lingo.  The more human you can be with your responses publicly, the more likely people are to see a value in engaging with you and your brand through social media on Twitter or any other social media platform.

I’m standing right next to you. RT @ErikJones1502: you gonna be in Tennessee anytime soon? — Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) June 17, 2014

That was 20 yrs ago. Hard to keep up the good work. MT @CrappyMom: watched Roxanne last night. Keep up the good work. — Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) May 22, 2014

Not the way you spell it. RT @TexasBrandon: @SteveMartinToGo any chance for a 3 ameigos 2?? — Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 25, 2014

3. Self promote with authenticity.

Of course, one of the benefits you likely want to realize from your efforts with social media is to have the opportunity to promote yourself or your business. This can be a tricky thing, as you don’t want to focus only on yourself and risk alienating those who are following you.  If you look at Martin’s tweets, he isn’t afraid to promote his own efforts or what his working on.  Yet every time he does it, he is authentic and shares a bit of his trademark humor along with the promotion to soften the blow.

I’m excited to play in Hartford, CT on Thursday! When I think of bluegrass and comedy, I think of Hartford, and some initials!

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) June 17, 2014

It would be so great if I were to win an Oscar tonight. — Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 2, 2014

4. Admit your mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes and it can be one of the most challenging things to deal with in the public and real time forum of social media.  When writing his book, Martin shares a story of how he once accidentally tweeted his own name while attempting to search for mentions of himself.  Instead of being embarrassed, he immediately tweeted “Steve Martin oily muscles beach Speedo photo.” Then a few minutes later he tweeted again: “Sorry, meant to Google myself.”  This trademark honesty and humor is something he has used over and over to admit and correct his own mistakes … a technique well worth considering for your own use.

Because it’s wrong and has been corrected. RT @CAGoldenBear: Why does your profile say “(not on tour currently?)” Shhhh! — Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 10, 2014

Tomorrow’s show is somewhere in California. RT @johnpm: Sorry but where exactly is tomorrow’s show. — Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) March 13, 2014

5. Create your own schedule.

When you start using social media – most experts will tell you that you need to create a schedule and stick to it.  Sometimes life or work gets in the way.  For Martin, that’s just another situation to share honestly that he may be taking a break from Twitter to focus on other things.  You may lose some followers who need the constancy of your content in order to engage, but most will likely stick around and come back when you do become active again … as long as your content when you return is worthy of their time and attention.

Taking a hiatus from Twitter for a while to concentrate on @ediebrickell ‘s and my musical “Bright Star,” opening in San Diego in Sept.

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) July 6, 2014

There are plenty of books on social media – and some are truly useful if you happen to be sitting in front of your computer and need a step by step guide to executing some tactic. But if you’re looking for an unexpected guide to help you change the way that you approach social media strategically, I highly recommend picking up Steve Martin’s “The Ten, Make That Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make That Ten.: The Tweets of Steve Martin.”

Not only is he one of the most clever writers and comedy actors alive today … but he might just be one of the most under appreciated social media gurus too.

TORONTO – When Walmart Canada introduced free shipping on all online purchases last year, it was a clear message to its rivals that it was gearing up for a fight.

Craig Patterson, an analyst who runs the online news magazine Retail Insider, said the move by one of the world’s largest retailers was bold, setting a new standard in going the extra mile for consumer dollars.

“This means war. It’s a declaration of war, no question,” he said from Vancouver.

For the last few years, a battle has been waging among retailers trying to set themselves apart, as entrants such as U.S. giants Target and Nordstrom arrive to compete for the same customers.

“What this comes down to is building trust with the customer,” said Patterson. “Walmart knows that if they offer free shipping, they are coming out punching. When someone like Walmart does it, there is going to be scramble from other retailers to see how they can compete either by adding extra value, better customer service.”

While a behemoth retailer like Walmart may be able to absorb the costs of shipping, it would be a challenging task for smaller retailers to be able to offer the same without raising prices, he said.

The head of e-commerce at Walmart Canada says it wanted to offer a seamless transition between online and in-store shopping by eliminating any minimum purchase requirement.

“It’s not about an e-commerce channel, or about a store channel anymore,” said Simon Rodrigue, vice-president and general manager of Walmart.ca. “It’s really about the customer in the middle. If they want to buy online, if they want to buy on the phone, if they want to buy in store, we want to make sure we’re servicing them.”

Retailers have long struggled with free shipping in Canada, given the size of the country and the cost of shipping quickly to remote areas. The compromise, it seems, is to offer free shipping on minimum purchases, which can offset some of those costs.

Rodrigue said Walmart’s ability to offer free shipping to 97 per cent of the country, and even free next-day shipping to most big cities, has helped it lure customers who either didn’t know they could purchase online the same items found in the store, or were reluctant to try shopping on the website.

The Walmart Canada website now lists more than 175,000 items and gets about 400,000 visitors a day. Next month, Walmart is preparing to launch its new click and collect service, which allows Ontario customers to buy items online and pick them up – with a special access code – from lockers at 10 designated stores or at the company’s head office.

Last month, online retailer Amazon announced that it was offering unlimited free shipping for six months to students in Canada through its Amazon Prime Program. After that, students pay half price for the annual service, which is regularly $79.99 in Canada.

“We designed this by thinking about our customers and finding a segment of our customers that have interesting needs that we can fulfil,” said Alexandre Gagnon, country manager for Amazon.ca.

The offer is aimed at students who live in residences or dormitories, who usually don’t have access to transportation, but still need regular deliveries of groceries, household items and stationary supplies. The hope is that the service will be so valuable that these students will turn into long-time customers.

Gagnon said Canadian consumers are coming to expect low-cost and free shipping with their purchases, but they still expect retailers to offer the whole package: a wide product selection, competitive prices and excellent customer service.

With more consumers opting to shop on their mobile phones, tablets and laptops, retailers are quickly realizing that they must be able to offer the same kind of experience online that customers receive in-store, said marketing strategist Brynn Winegard.

“It’s a growing expectation among consumers, especially around heavy shopping times like Christmas, that there’s free shipping,” she said. “Everyone’s busy so it becomes increasingly required and valuable for retailers to give them their time back and online shopping is a way to permit that.”

___

Follow @LindaNguyenTO on Twitter

The post Free shipping may soon be the new normal as retail competition intensifies appeared first on Canadian Business.

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community — VCs, business angels, incubators, and others — convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they’ve delivered and the incredibly large and valuable companies that their ecosystem has created.

But the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs never take any venture capital.

Take Claus Moseholm, co-founder of GoViral, a Danish company created in 2005 to harness the then-emerging power of the Internet to deliver advertisers’ video content in viral fashion. Funding his company’s steady growth with the proceeds of one successful viral video campaign after another, Moseholm and his partners built GoViral into Europe’s leading platform to host and distribute such content. In 2011, GoViral was sold for $97 million, having never taken a single krone or dollar of investment capital. The business had been funded and grown entirely by its customers’ cash.

In fact, venture capital financing may even be detrimental to your start-up’s health. As venture capital investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures puts it, “The fact is that the amount of money start-ups raise in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success. Yes, I mean that. Less money raised leads to more success. That is the data I stare at all the time.”

Wilson’s observation reflects the fact that there are a number of serious drawbacks entailed in raising capital too early, drawbacks that have profound implications at all stages of the investment cycle:

1. Pandering to VCs is a distraction. Trying to get a fledgling venture off the ground is a full time job, and then some. But so is raising capital, which demands a lot of time and energy on its own. It will distract the entrepreneur from doing the more important work of getting the venture onto a productive path. As Connect Ventures founder Bill Earner argues, “Finding the right customers and getting them to fund your business [constitute] a great step-by-step guide to raising venture capital — build the business first and the investments will follow.”

Why spend your time trying to convince investors to invest, when you could spend the same time convincing prospective customers to buy — or perhaps learning why they won’t — before you burn somebody else’s money! Besides, as customer-funded entrepreneur and investor Erick Mueller recalls, “It’s a lot more fun dealing with customer needs than pandering to investors.”

2. Term sheets and shareholders’ agreements can burden you. Investors don’t like risk any better than you do. If you’re raising money before traction is in hand, so-called “market risk” is higher than if demand has already been proven. To protect their downside, investors will require what are often seen by entrepreneurs as onerous terms. And when the concise prose of the term sheet is fleshed out into the fine print of the shareholders’ agreement, the terms get even worse.

3. The advice VCs give isn’t always that good. According to an analysis of venture fund returns by Harvard Business School’s Josh Lerner, more than half of all VC funds delivered no better than low single-digit returns on investment. Worse, only 20 per cent of funds achieved 20 per cent returns (or better), a figure that they might be expected to deliver. Incredibly, nearly one in five funds actually delivered below-zero returns.  Given this performance, you would be forgiven if you wondered just how helpful most VCs’ support or “value-add” is likely to be! Unfortunately, you will very likely to be obliged to follow their sage “advice.”

4. The stake you keep is small — and tends to get smaller. When you raise angel or venture capital early, as Jobs did to fund Apple, you start giving away a portion the company — often a substantial portion — in exchange for the capital you are given. And that portion grows over time, as additional rounds of capital are raised. Dell, on the other hand, used his customers’ pre-payments for their PCs to fund his start-up and its early growth. Claus Moseholm and his partners, who managed to go the distance at GoViral without ever raising outside investment, retained their stakes in the business (bar one co-founder, who sold his stake to a growth capital investor) until they eventually sold.

But the best news is this. If you raise money at a somewhat later stage of your entrepreneurial journey, you’ll find that many of the drawbacks have largely disappeared. Why? Because with customer traction in hand, you’ll be in the driver’s seat, and the queue of investors outside your door will have to compete for your deal.

5. The odds are against you. Even worse, perhaps, than the difficult terms, the questionable advice you may get, and the dilution you will incur if you raise capital too early, are the difficult odds faced by companies that do win VC backing. In the typical successful fund, on average only 1 or 2 in 10 of the portfolio companies — the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world — will actually have delivered attractive, and occasionally stunning, returns. Facebook alone accounted for more than 35 per cent of the total VC exit value in the United States in 2012. A few more portfolio companies may have paid back the capital that was invested in them, but most of the rest are wipeouts. In the VC game the very few winners pay for the losers, so most VCs are playing a high-stakes all-or-nothing game. Are these the kind of odds with which you’d like to put your new venture into play?

Recently I listened to Brad, the CEO of a $20 million technology company, conduct his pipeline review with his sales team. It might sound odd that the CEO was running the sales meeting, but it is not uncommon to see CEO’s running the sales organization in companies as large as $40 million in revenue. Brad had their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool projected on the wall. He sorted the opportunities by salesperson. As he went through each opportunity, Brad asked the designated salesperson, “This one says it’s closing by the end of the month. Anything new? OK. How about this one? Anything new?” In each case, the salesperson would give a brief answer along the lines of one of three things: 1) “I’ve got a call into them.” 2) “We had a good discussion/meeting, and it looks good.” Or 3) “I think it’s going to slip into next month.”

Does This Sound Familiar?

If you manage salespeople and this sounds familiar, don’t be alarmed. It’s candidly how most of the sales meetings I observe have been conducted for years. The simple problem is that style of pipeline review is centered on what you want (i.e., The Sale) instead of what the customer wants or needs (i.e., Results). Here are 4 questions managers should ask salespeople, and answers salespeople should know for each of their customers. Do this, and you’ll have a clear sense of which pursuits are real, and which ones are a waste of time. Each question should be answered in the customer’s words. It doesn’t matter what you think. All that matters is what you know you heard from the customer.

Top 4 Questions You Need to Answer For Each Customer?

1. What Happens if They Don’t Solve It?

My research shows that the first question an executive asks about a purchase comes down to “Why do we need it? “ or “What problem does it solve?” However, most sales managers don’t ask the question, and salespeople similarly don’t ask their customer “What happens if you don’t solve the problem?” Top sales performers always know the answer to this question and uncover this piece of information from the customer early in the process. If the customer’s answer is insignificant to their business, then your sale probably won’t happen. For example, the response “We’d just like to get a newer model” probably won’t turn into a sale. However, when the customer says, “If we don’t get a newer model then we’re likely to lose market share to our top competitor” that just might be sufficient. Ultimately, you have to not only know the Issue, but also the Impact and associated Importance.

2. Who Else is Impacted? Are They Involved?

One of the biggest complaints I hear is that the right people are not involved on the customer’s end. That means you need to know who should be involved. If you ask your customer, “Who is the decision maker?” You’ll always get the same answer: “I am!” Instead, ask your customer “Who else is impacted?” The people most directly impacted by solving the customer’s problem need to be involved early in the sales process. If not, then be assured they’ll surface in the eleventh hour and doubt your ability to deliver the right solution (since they were not involved early).

I know – Some of you are saying that the customer or purchasing person protects those people and shields them from you. I understand. It’s your job to help the blocker understand why engaging those other people early in the sales process is in everyone’s best interest. The seller who gets them involved early in the process generally wins. But, you can whine about it to your manager and coworkers instead if you prefer.

3. Why Would We Lose This Deal?

Salespeople need a certain degree of optimism. However, realism prevails. Know why you would lose each opportunity. Oh – and take price off that list. Price matters most when the person selling believes price matters most. If the customer tells you it was about price, all that means is that they felt they were getting better value from someone else. You can deliver better value without being the low bidder (by delivering more or better results per invested dollar). Think seriously about why they would (or would not) pick you. It’s a tough discussion. But, if it seems likely you’ll lose, you probably will. I’m not trying to rain on your parade. Just trying to help you not waste your valuable resources on opportunities you may not win.

4. Why would your customer change from what they are doing to what you are selling?

Your single greatest competition is the status quo. Let’s say you identified a deficiency in their current solution. If they have an existing vendor, the customer might prefer to simply tell that vendor to do what you suggested so they don’t have to “fire” them to be able to hire you. If you build a list of every reason why a customer would change from their existing vendor or solution to you, then you’ll be hard-pressed to have a list of more than 10 items. The good news is that once you identify the list of reasons why your customer would definitely switch, then you can ask great questions to see if those conditions exist.

Effective sales leadership is about asking the right questions to the right people. Managers need to ask good questions of their salespeople, and salespeople need to be comfortable asking what might appear to be tough questions of customers. Remember that how you ask is as important as what you ask. When in doubt, practice before you get to the big game.

It’s Your Turn

What great questions do you ask salespeople or customers to determine if a pursuit is real or fantasy?

Every week or so I get an email asking for advice from someone who is interested in becoming a independent sales consultant. In some cases they’ve found themselves out of a job. Others want to transition into what they consider a dream situation.

I’ll answer a short question or two by email for those who selfishly just want to pick my brain. However, if they have a compelling story, or even better, some value for me, I’m glad to help. With that in mind, here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Alan Weiss is really the consultant’s consultant. I’ve learned more from him than from any other resource. I took a two-day workshop with him 15 or so years ago and am still using many of the strategies and tactics I learned in his session. He was brilliant.
  

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• If the phone doesn’t ring, your revenue will be precisely zero. When you’ve got a corporate job and you’re earning $100, 150, 200k, with benefits (like health care) and perks (like a computer), going cold turkey as a consultant will be a serious dose of reality. Many smart consultants leave their corporate jobs only after they have an agreement in hand with their first client. That client is often is the company they are leaving. It would be extremely rare for someone to purposefully leave a corporate position to be a consultant with no client engagements already under contract.
  

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• If you are billing by the hour for consulting time (not including speeches and book sales), the most you can make is a million a year. That’s 2,000 hours X $500 per hour = $1 million. Sure you can up your rate a bit, but 2,000 hours is a lot of hours. That’s 40 billable hours a week for 50 weeks. (I learned this easy math from Alan.) If you want to make more money, or are not interested in working that hard but still bringing in some real cash, you have to adopt a different strategy. What’s the strategy? One is project or deliverable-based engagements. Another is licensing your content. See my next point.
  

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• This one is a biggie: Turning your service into a product with specific deliverables and value will get you and your client away from discussing your dollar (or Euro) rate per hour or per day. When a client is making $160k a year (divided by 2,000 hours = $80 an hour), and they calculate that you are proposing to charge them $500 an hour, a problem will develop. Here’s the answer: Building a set of selling tools, getting a sales team educated, trained, and using LinkedIn every day, and other specific projects with defined outcomes, should be quoted at a fixed fee. Years ago I developed a hiring process for evaluating and selecting candidates for sales rep, sales management, and sales VP positions. I’ve installed it at dozens of companies for a fixed fee. The process works. I have dozens of references. The value to my clients is immense. My hourly rate for installing and helping to implement each new client is commensurate with that value.
  

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• Be willing to work on contingency or shared risk/shared reward if you really want to make some money. For many years I consulted as a sales strategist on big, critical, competitive, sales deals. I continue to do so. For some companies, I quote a daily or hourly rate. Period. But I’d rather not do that. I’d prefer to have a stake in the game. With some clients I’ve taken a piece of equity for part of my fees. For others, I’ll push for deferred fees with commission-type bonuses based on pre-determined success metrics, such as securing those contracts.
  

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• It was at a Boston chapter meeting of the National Speakers Association years ago that I first heard the term “mailbox money.” That’s income that isn’t directly associated with hourly work. Licensing your IP (intellectual property) to resellers, franchisees (with money upfront for you!), or other consultants is one way to accomplish this. There are additional ways to generate mailbox money, such as building public or client-specific e-learning content. Notice what’s for sale on Alan’s site. His website technology is dated, but you’ll get the idea.
  

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• Here’s an old one that still applies more than ever: Simultaneously under-promise and over-deliver. Unless you’ve got a big marketing budget or 20 hours a week to spend immersed in social media, you’re going to have to depend on referrals. The only way your client will contact someone they know, on your request, in order to share what a great job you’ve done, is if you over-deliver against your promises. Fortunately, I’ve never had a challenge in that area.
  

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• Occasionally “fire” certain clients. I’ve chosen to fire a few over the years. Sometimes you do it to re-align your fees at a higher level. Sometimes it’s because a client demands everything and then adopts nothing you’ve recommended. And sometimes the situation is so dysfunctional that you have no chance of success and your reputation is at risk.
  

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• Find your niche. Few successful consultants I know are general practitioners. It works well for your family doctor, but even they refer you to a specialist. You need to be that specialist.
  

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• Sales training generates significantly more immediate income, but less long-term client satisfaction than consulting or a combination of consulting and training. There are big margins in training—far less in consulting. This is a misguided approach of many sales training companies. They heap on the training while cutting back in the less profitable, but critical, consulting work. It’s the combination of both that delivers results. (We can talk about proportions some other time.)
  

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• Get a fee deposit up front. I used to get the first month’s fees up front along with an executed contract before I would begin work. I found that my clients were uncomfortable. I felt as if I was under an electron microscope during that first month—until they realized that I was really helping them. Later I changed my terms to 50% of the first month’s fee up front. (That left the second half of the first month’s fees payable when the engagement was over.) This arrangement made my clients feel much safer from the start. Since I always over-deliver, I always received that last payment.
  

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• Vacations. This is another subject to think about if you’re a consultant. There are no vacation days in consulting, nor sick days, nor personal days, nor time off to take the kid to the doctor, unless you are willing to forgo income. Let me modify that. During some of my vacations, such as when I’m at home and friends or family are here to visit, my client will never know, since I keep to my regular schedule of calls. If I’m delivering a “product” rather than a series of weekly calls, my client will never know. But when I am truly out of touch, I let my clients know at least a month in advance. And this is what I do: I tell them I’m going on vacation and that I will add the one or two weeks on to the back end of the agreement at no additional charge. In other words, they lose not a single day of my time. I can relax during my time off. And they appreciate my honesty.
  

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• Speaking of honesty, integrity has been my primary value behind everything I’ve done in business for the past 25 years. That is certainly one of the reasons I have been paid on every invoice I’ve submitted during my many years as a consultant. No lawyers, no lawsuits, no threats, no hassle. I sleep well at night.
  

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• Most of my engagements have been retainer-based. I typically start with six months, but many have gone on for a year and in some cases, years. I become a virtual member of the management team, phoning into management calls, sales meetings, and deal management sessions. I’ll often coach challenged sales managers or reps as one of the ongoing tasks I perform.  I’m certainly not an expert in every aspect of B2B selling, but I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, and therefore provide my clients with, at a minimum, the questions we have to ask ourselves before we can make real progress together.
  

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• I have a very “benign” contract. I just want to be protected against the most egregious offenses. Hey, if I do lousy work, I shouldn’t expect to get paid. I’ve only had three clients ask for minor contractual changes over the years. One client, Chevron, asked me to sign their contract. It wasn’t an issue. They were a wonderful client, by the way.
  

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• Do not ever consider borrowing or re-purposing someone else’s intellectual property. I’ve had a few people lift mine, and with the help of my social media friends, we outed them. The problem ceased, quicker than immediately. I always get permission before re-purposing someone else’s content. Always.
  

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• I have pro-bono clients, where there is no available cash and success is just a hope. If they are good people, and are willing to take my advice and build a strategic plan, I’m happy to help. I don’t do it for this reason, but some of those pro-bono engagements have had great rewards later on.
  

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• If clients ask you to perform arduous tasks, conjure up a fee that would make it outrageously profitable for you, even if you think it’s a real reach for them. I was asked to run a workshop in Phuket, Thailand a while back. I quoted a ridiculous number—after all it was 35 hours there and 35 for the return trip, eight flights in all, not to mention my pre-session discovery and post-session reinforcement. I went to Thailand with a smile on my face, riding first class on Thai Airways, and came home exhausted, but with a pocket full of money.
  

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• Getting into speaking can be financially rewarding, but it’s a hard business to make a living unless you’re really good. Two recommendations: join the National Speakers Association first. Go to a year’s worth of meetings. Then if you think you want to continue to pursue speaking as a business, get a coach. I did both years ago and it paid off, big time.
  

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• Other than my trips to Cambridge University and Ireland each year, I basically don’t travel for business. Ninety-five percent of my client work is done over the phone. In fact, I have had clients I never met face-to-face. I don’t necessarily recommend this approach, but it works for me. I thought you should know.
  

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Finally, I’ve never worked for a mainstream consultancy. This post is directed at individuals or small, two- to three-person firms.

Any comments, remarks, ideas, and experiences would be much appreciated.

 Photo Source: mediashower.com

In his magnum opus Critique of Pure Reason, the philosopher Immanuel Kant builds a bridge between what is known, what is unknown and what is unknowable. Innovation is a demonstration of his philosophy in as much as it is the only value proposition that becomes manifest in the future for which we have no data today. It is a creative venture into the unknown to discover what is knowable and how to us this new knowledge purposefully.

Progress pulls the future into the present and pushes the present into the past. This means the normative management techniques used to align organizational processes are of little use when trying to reach the future first. They attempt to stabilize that which by definition is dynamic. When looking forward into the unknown it is the unexpected event that becomes the norm. To navigate from the known to the unknown and beyond requires constant course corrections.

While there are no known maps to the undiscovered country, there are only trends and tendencies that provide some general direction: changes in demography, developing technologies, discoveries in medicine. The challenge is to overcome our present predisposition to make sense of what would otherwise be nonsensical. For example, even after four voyages to the New World, Columbus still believed he had landed in India and never realized the fortunes he had hoped to gain from a shorter route to the Far East.

We need to consider multiple perspectives if we are to look through our own blind spots so that we may see what others miss:

• Create: This is radical, revolutionary thinking mastered by creative and artistic types of people. This perspective values new and different kinds of brainstorming.

• Control: This is pragmatic thinking that values the reliability of systems and processes and high-scale production. This perspective values logic, order, and structure.

• Collaborate: This is patient, participatory thinking practiced by people who come together in nurturing and empowering communities. This perspective values a long-term vision that will join individuals with shared ideals.

• Compete: This is thinking that is driven by profits, speed, and the desire to come out on top. This perspective values fast-paced growth and quantifiable results.

Consider the trends and tendencies you might face in the future through each of these mindsets. Once you’ve done that, you can determine the probability and potential impact of all these drivers and design experiments based on those projections. It is crucial to run many experiments at once.  This is what venture capitalists do: they diversify the array. Instead of picking just one project you think is going to work, design many small projects that you can test. This is how you will know which bridges to cross.

While you run those experiments, you need to be open to change: make adjustments as you go based on what’s working and what’s not working. Failure along the way is inevitable. The key is to fail during the experimental stage, when the stakes are low. Then you can learn from those failures and succeed when it really counts.

None of these strategies in preparing for the future will work if you don’t diversify your gene pool. This means assembling a team of the best and brightest. Remember that innovation is not amateur hour. The goal is not merely to be on par with the field but to lead the field. And the only way to be a leader is to be an expert. This doesn’t mean that you have to know everything yourself. Rather, this means that you need to surround yourself with people who know the things that you don’t. Everyone will have their own area of proficiency. Amassed together, your team will be experts in your chosen field.

Innovators understand that the unknown doesn’t have to remain unknown, but they need to be prudent about which bridges they cross for these will determine where and when they will arrive in the future and if their innovations are timely and valuable. So, be flexible as you consider and prepare for the possibilities that may await you on the other side. Leave many options open.

As Immanuel Kant’s observed, “Human reason is by nature architectonic”. Put another way, you must build your bridge to the unknown as you walk over it.

Social media is undeniably an integral part of our daily routine and brings huge benefits to both our business and personal lives. As these benefits become more apparent, an increasing number of brands and businesses are integrating social media into their overall marketing strategies. These platforms give brands a free and invaluable way to connect with clients (both current and potential), spread brand warmth, monitor competitors, manage customer service, gain customer insights and drive website traffic….so what’s not to love?

Yet, many brands are jumping feet first into the social media realm without truly understanding the basics; mainly, how to post content. This seems like a no-brainer to some people, yet many brands still don’t know the most basic and fundamental ‘rules’ of social media. Yes, social media is integral to your brand, but going out all guns blazing with no planning or strategy may in fact do more harm than good.

And what’s the biggest faux-par of social we hear you ask…Easy; using these channels to broadcast rather than engage.

If used in moderation, broadcast messages can be effective. By using messages to signpost back to a company blog, news piece or article, this can make people aware of content that they may never have seen. It can also work to attract more fans and followers, as by positioning you as an industry expert, the content you post will give people a reason to follow you.

Yet, this must be done in moderation. If you continuously broadcast marketing messages via your social sties, people will soon switch off. Mix these messages up with engaging 3rd party content, network with customers and work to build strong lasting relationships with your followers. Essentially, social media is the long game, so stick with it and you will start to see results.

We’ve all been into a shop and been given the hard sell by someone we’ve never met…and yes we switch off. You wouldn’t train your in-store staff to constantly shout out brand messages in an attempt to sell to customers, apart from looking unprofessional; this would also drive people away. So why then do brands do this on social? The best sales people get to know their customers, they engage them in conversations, find out what makes them tick and then provide a solution or product to match their needs. The same should go for social media.

A report from Brandwatch unbelievably shows that 25% of top brands continue to use Twitter for broadcasting purposes only. If you’re constantly broadcasting marketing messages, your content is without context, meaning no trust is built and ultimately no sales. This can also make your brand look uncreative; your social media sites give a humanistic touch to your brands, use these to showcase your creativity and personality. If you’re only pushing brand messages this makes your business look dull and uninspiring.

The real value comes from engaging your followers in 2 way conversations, interacting with them and showing them that you care. Brands who do just this are winning the race when it comes to gaining new customers, just take a look at Taco Bell and O2, who’re undeniable masters at calming social media storms and reassuring unhappy customers. Over the years they’ve created a huge sense of brand warmth via their humorous and engaging social media posts. Their messages are being retweeted countless times, spreading their brand messages infinitely further than those brands who broadcast. So come on guys, get some personality!

We all know the saying; if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? Well, the same goes for social; it’s all well and good endlessly posting but if you’re not engaging your followers then these posts will fall on deaf ears. Are you really making an impact with your broadcast messages, more often than not, these are ignored.  If you’re constantly pushing out messages, people will soon switch off. Instead start engaging in conversations, joining in with the chatter and building up a strong sense of brand warmth and rapport with your followers.

Social media used to be social….so stop using it to broadcast your marketing messages and get engaging with your customers.

How I Read Books Now is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

I’ve stopped trying to read a lot of books. I used to read a book a week. I read a book a week outside of my assigned reading in college and all the way through law school. I read hundreds and hundreds of books, and I am happy I invested my time doing so (there are few investments with so great a return). But now I have different outcomes, so I read differently.

I read to apply what I am learning to my life. That means slowing down and going over the same ground a few times.

1. Read Through: First I read a book from cover to cover. I highlight passages I find interesting or useful, but I don’t spend any real time thinking about their value or how I intend to use them in the future. I read the book just as I would have in the past.
2. Listen to the Audio Book: This isn’t always possible, because some books aren’t available in this format. But when they are this is my second pass. I listen to the book I just read on audio while I am running, showering, and driving. It’s amazing how different the book and the experience are when you listen to it being read to you. It’s passive, but for me it seems to multiply my comprehension and retention.
3. Second Reading: After I have listened to the book, I read the book a second time. It’s a very different experience the second time through, especially having listened to it. Sometimes you can hear the author’s voice. This time I read with one single purpose that I have managed to capture in a single sentence: Now that you know this what are you going to do different?

It’s one thing to read for pleasure and another altogether to read with intention of using what you read to improve your life. There isn’t any reason to pick up the next book if you haven’t implemented and executed what you learned from the book you just finished. It takes time to digest a valuable work and the ideas therein.

Slow is fast, and fast is slow in all things worth doing well.

Books are magic.

Note: This isn’t worth doing unless you pick really powerful books. I just finished the audio book Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I’m on to my second read. After that, I am back to Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

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

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

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

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

A different type of demo is required

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

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

Start with the problem, not the product

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

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

Discovery must come before demonstration

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

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

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

Themes and narratives

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

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

Prepare - or fail

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

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

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

More than product familiarity

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

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

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

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

Businesses using social media as one of their marketing channels often have two main problems: how do they keep their content on-brand, and on budget. Whether you’re managing a team posting status updates and articles for your business, managing your company’s profiles yourself, or running a business blog, social media can really become a drain on time without good organization, with the potential for simple tasks spiraling into several hours’ work.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some methods you and your team can use to streamline your social media workflow, ensuring you spend your time in the right places, cutting out non-essential activities, and finding inspiration for great content with less effort.

Ensure Your Content Is On-Brand

Searching for a suitable post to share from your company profile can take a lot of time and effort, especially if you or your team need to get approval from other stakeholders before sharing third party content. Wouldn’t it be much better to get pre-approved content sent straight to you or your team, which could then be scheduled to share with one click?

This method below will give you an efficient process to supply your team with approved social media content that’s on topic while avoiding any costly social media fails.

You’ll need two tools to make this work: an RSS reader and a “read-it-later” service. I use Feedly as my RSS reader and Pocket to store articles, because they work well together, but you could use almost any similar services such as Instapaper or Digg Reader.

Using your RSS reader, you’ll want to import a selection of RSS streams from websites relevant to your industry or niche. You might want to include a news outlet covering your industry, relevant industry blogs, your clients’ blogs, or news sites that your customers typically read.

You can also create a custom RSS feed using Google Alerts. This is a great way to get only the most relevant content delivered straight to you, streamlining your process even more by filtering out irrelevant content.

Using advanced search operators, you can create custom RSS feeds with Google Alerts to find content that’s highly relevant to your brand or keywords relevant to your business.

For example, to search for news and articles mentioning the company I work for, I’d type “Selesti” into Google Alerts, save the alert, then get my content delivered via an RSS feed instead of via email. Monitoring your brand name is a great way to find content to share via social media, for example picking up brand mentions in the press or new guest posts to re-share as soon as they go live.

To set it up, simply type your search term into Google Alerts:

Set the alert as RSS instead of email:

Then add it to Feedly:

Continue to add feeds for all content relevant to your business. You could even include a feed from your own blog to ensure everything is in one convenient place.

Next, you’ll want to connect your Feedly account with Pocket. Once this is done, you’ll be able to send content from Feedly to Pocket at the touch of a button.

Within Pocket, it’s then possible to add tags to articles:

The combination of these two types of services can be used in a couple of ways. A member of your team could be a researcher, using Feedly to source the best pieces of content, sending these through to Pocket. There, the social media manager could then approve or disapprove posts for publishing using the tag system.

Your team can then find all the current approved content simply by searching for “approved” within Pocket, or using whichever tag you’ve used to mark approved content. This can then be posted straight in Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or your favorite social media management software.

Once content is posted, articles can then be archived so that only fresh, unused content is available to be published.

Alternatively, you may want to handle the article selection process, sending only approved content through to Pocket, for your team to post at times that will drive the most engagement.

With either of these methods, you’ll be able to cut down the time it takes to find new content to share, since only one member of your team will be in charge of sourcing content, which would only need to be done once a week instead of every time a post is needed.

It also cuts down time spent if you have a CEO, CMO or client who needs to approve content before it is shared, which can be done with ease in Pocket. Again, this can be done in one session per week, rather than every time a post needs to be sent out.

Create Relevant, Timely Blog Content

Another problem that can affect the quality and quantity of social media content output is researching blog content. This can become quite a time drain if your writers aren’t able to keep up to date with the latest happenings in your industry, which may be the case if they are expected to write content every so often alongside their main roles.

Using the method shown above, you can create a repository of the best content about your industry for your writers to draw upon for inspiration and to cite in their posts. This can really help cut down the time it takes to plan and draft a blog article, ensuring research doesn’t turn into a serious time drain.

Once you have a begun building up your Pocket account with content, your content writers can browse through your article queue to find content, and using the tags function, categorize it. Writers can then find all the content for a particular topic simply by searching for that keyword, giving them a load of resources to use in their article. For example if I wanted to write an article on local SEO, I’d search my Pocket account for ‘local’:

This would then give me some starting points for article ideas, as well as resources to cite. I can then contact all the authors whose content I’ve used, asking them to share the article if they think their readers would find it useful. Building relationships with other writers in your niche like this is a great way to open doors for writing guest blog posts, boosting your online reach even further.

Wrapping Up

Thanks to RSS readers and read-it-later services, it’s easy to streamline your social media marketing operations, cutting down on back-and-forth when it comes to posting third party content, while making your content marketing process more efficient. Best of all, these tools mentioned are all free to use, meaning you can build an effective social media marketing process on a small budget.

The result is better content and better results; you’ll have a repository of approved content for your marketing team to use, so content will fit your brand’s persona, while the time it takes to produce quality content will decrease, since the research stage won’t have to be restarted every time a team member needs inspiration for a status update or blog post – reducing costs in the process.

If you have any tips on how you ensure your social media marketing process is as efficient as possible, please let me know in the comments below!

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WASHINGTON – They export BMWs and birdseed and plenty in between. Their middle class is growing fast enough to draw the likes of Marriott and Wal-Mart. China, Europe, Japan and the United States are vying to build roads and power plants there.

No longer are the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, long a symbol of war, famine and corruption, an economic basket case. Six of the world’s fastest-growing economies are there. Higher oil prices, richer consumers and sounder governments have raised so much interest in Africa’s economic promise that it’s being showcased this week at the first U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington.

The question is: Can all this endure?

Africa has stood on the verge of prosperity before only to see its opportunities fizzle. Yet never before has it stood to benefit as it does now.

“Africa presents enormous opportunities,” says Paul Sullivan, director of international business development at Acrow Bridge of Parsippany, New Jersey, which has put up hundreds of prefabricated steel bridges across Africa.

As African leaders gather to mark a decade of economic gains, they appear intent on sustaining the growth and ensuring that the benefits are spread broadly and not siphoned away by corrupt officials and foreign companies.

In the decades after many of the countries regained their independence in the 1960s, their natural resources — Nigerian oil, Liberian diamonds, Congolese copper and cobalt — failed to support durable growth. They sometimes proved a curse: Proceeds would vanish into Swiss bank accounts of corrupt leaders and give armed factions something to fight over.

Analysts note hopefully that the current resurgence is built on foundations sturdier than the ups and downs of commodity prices. Many African nations have become more democratic, making it easier for entrepreneurs to do business, and boosted investment in education and infrastructure. A decade of solid growth has created a middle class with increased spending power — 350 million strong in 2010 by the African Development Bank’s count, up from 220 million in 2000.

Armed conflicts are down despite headlines about the terrorist groups Boko Haram in Nigeria and al-Shabab in Somalia.

The improved environment has benefited even countries without bounteous natural resources. In resource-poor Rwanda, for example, economic growth rose from an average 1.7 per cent from 1990 to 2000 to 7.7 per cent the next decade.

The consultancy Ernst & Young ranks Africa as the world’s second-most-attractive market after North America. Cumulative foreign investment in sub-Saharan Africa has catapulted from $33.5 billion in 2000 to $246.4 billion in 2012, according to United Nations numbers crunched by the Brookings Institution.

South Africa exports BMW sedans to the United States. Ethiopia has developed a niche making shoes. And it produces the bestselling imported birdseed in the United States.

“We see Africa as the fastest-growing market worldwide,” says David Picard, a manager at heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar.

In 2011, Wal-Mart acquired Massmart Holdings, which runs 350 stores in 12 sub-Saharan countries. Marriott International last year agreed to buy Protea Hospitality of South Africa, a 116-hotel chain in seven sub-Saharan African countries.

Cummins, based in Columbus, Indiana, has enjoyed double-digit sales growth this year in supplying power equipment to Africa. Consumers in the Nigerian capital of Lagos eat burgers from Johnny Rockets and ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery.

No nation has been more aggressive in Africa than China. Its direct investment in sub-Saharan Africa has jumped from virtually nothing in 2002 to $18.2 billion in 2012. China is hungry for oil, coal and other resources and eager to develop the roads, bridges and ports needed to pull them out of Africa.

Africans tend to favour doing business with China in part because it’s less likely than Western nations to demand economic and political reforms to accompany trade and development deals.

“Investors from the U.S. and Europe have tended to be large investors who demand all kinds of facilitation, who expect all kinds of conditions,” says Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, a Rwanda-based researcher and honorary fellow at the University of Manchester. “I do not see Europe and the U.S. catching up with China.”

Indeed, this week’s summit is seen as an American effort to regain some of the influence lost in the region to China over the past decade. Next year, the United States hopes to expand a 14-year-old free-trade deal with Africa.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama is expected to announce that U.S. businesses have committed to more than $14 billion in investments in Africa, money that is being plowed into construction, clean energy, banking, information technology and other sectors.

Before Africa’s continued ascendance can be assured, though, analysts say its countries must resolve some thorny questions. Among them:

— Can it build the roads, railways and power plants needed to sustain its pace of growth?

Rosa Whitaker, a former U.S. trade official and now a consultant specializing in Africa, says sub-Saharan countries need to spend more than $90 billion on infrastructure. Electricity is a big obstacle. Two-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to it. “You can’t do much without power,” notes Stephen Hayes, president of The Corporate Council on Africa, which promotes U.S.-Africa commercial ties.

— Can sub-Saharan nations do more business with each other, as nations in more advanced parts of the world have done?

African countries typically conduct only about 10 per cent of their trade with their neighbours. By contrast, countries in the Europe Union do about 70 per cent of their trade with each other, Southeast Asian countries 30 per cent, Whitaker says. Among the reasons for weak intraregional trade: Poor roads and other infrastructure; conflicts and troubled ties among countries; and corruption at customs posts that can delay shipments at the border.

— Can they transition from supplying other countries with materials to generating their own finished products?

Africa traditionally has supplied raw materials — oil, coal, diamonds — and let other countries turn them into valuable goods.

“We have been exporting crude oil and importing petroleum products,” notes Nigerian Trade Minister Olusegun Aganga, a former Goldman Sachs executive. “No nation has managed to go from a poor to a rich nation by relying entirely on export of raw materials.”

Nigeria’s government has an ambitious plan to industrialize its economy and add value to its natural resources — to turn crude oil into chemicals and other petroleum products and sugar cane into the sugar that Nigeria now imports from South America.

— Can they avoid the so-called resource curse?

Abundant resources have failed to build widespread wealth or stable growth across Africa. Many economists say natural riches have tended to promote corruption and conflict and to stunt development in poor countries. Analysts are studying the East African countries of Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya as they develop newly found reserves of oil and natural gas.

In the past, analysts say, African countries have been out-negotiated and exploited by foreign companies. This time, Cullen Hendrix, a University of Denver specialist in global conflict, wonders, “How can host countries get the best possible deal?”

One encouraging sign, Hendrix says, is that ordinary Africans have grown more assertive about holding their governments accountable for deals they cut.

Assessing Africa’s prospects after a decade of solid growth, Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, thinks the region’s nations have “an opportunity right now. But it’s not a guarantee.”

“Do they use this moment for economic transformation?”

___

AP Writer Rodney Muhumuza contributed to this report from Kampala, Uganda.

The post Long plagued by conflict and corruption, Africa enjoys an economic boost. Can it last? appeared first on Canadian Business.

Realizing that it isn’t a trend going away anytime soon, more and more businesses are starting to utilize social media for marketing. Social Media Examiner recently released their 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report that takes a close look at how marketers are embracing social media and even utilizing it to grow their businesses. The report offers quite a bit of insight into what businesses can do to better use social media for marketing, so in this article we are going to take a look at the report and some quick tips you can use starting today.

2800 expert marketers took the time to answer Social Media Examiner’s questions about what is working for them. The 50-page report, written by Social Media Examiner’s founder Michael Stelzner, breaks down the ideas from these marketers into manageable pieces that even the most novice promoter can implement.

The report uncovered some interesting statistics on marketing.

• Businesses are seeing social media as more important and the statistics are rising. In 2013, only 86% said social media was important to growing their businesses, but the 2014 report saw a rise to 92% seeing SSM as important.
• Google+ seems to be the focus of many marketers, but they don’t quite understand it as well as Facebook and Twitter. About 65% say they want to understand Google+ better.
• Most marketers (58%) feel that original written content is still vital.

Whether you already have a social media marketing plan in place or you are just getting started writing one, these 18 tips will make your strategy smarter and more effective.

Tip #1: Analyze What You’re Doing with Social Media

68% of the marketers surveyed indicated that they measure the effectiveness of social media marketing. You can easily repeat this by creating landing pages specific to different campaigns and utilizing A/B testing of which landing pages work best for different forms of social media.

Tip #2: Don’t Get Stuck on Facebook Marketing Only

The majority of marketers reported that they either aren’t sure or they don’t feel that their Facebook marketing is working very well. The larger the business, however, the more they felt their efforts on Facebook were working. About 52% of businesses with over 1000 employees thought their Facebook marketing was on target but only 34% of small businesses felt their efforts were working.

The takeaway from this is that you should try different types of marketing and not only limit your efforts to Facebook. Programs like HootSuite can help you preschedule posts to different social media and may be a good solution for small business owners.

Tip #3: Go Mobile

State of Mobile 2013 (view full infographic here).

More and more people are using mobile devices. According to the Pew Research Internet Project 58% of Americans have a smart phone and about 42% own a tablet. The marketing report shows that marketing experts are starting to embrace this trend. About 43% of marketers surveyed said that their blogs are optimated for mobile readers. This is still a minority, but that percentage is up 15% from 2013.

Another market study by Super Monitor states that:

• The average age for the first cell phone is now 13.
• Mobile web adoption is growing 8 times faster than web adoption did in the 1990s and early 2000s.
• 50% of the average global mobile web users now use mobile as either their primary or exclusive means of going online.
• Mobile-based searches make up one quarter of all searches.
• 72% of tablet owners make purchases from their devices on a weekly basis.

What you can learn from this is that mobile browsing is on the rise and you should work toward a mobile-optimized blog.

Tip #4: Invest a Little Time

Screenshot from Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Industry Report

The average time marketers spend on social media each week was 6 hours.

About 37% were engaging in social media for 11 hours or more. Even if you have a very small budget, you need to allot some time to social media marketing. If you can afford to hire a social media marketer to do this work for you, however, it will free up your time for writing and other marketing efforts and increase the time spent on this endeavor.

Tip #5: Develop a Fan Base

The report states that 92% of marketers feel one of the biggest benefits of social media marketing is that company exposure is increased. They feel they gain new followers and that these followers are loyal fans. You can use this information to change the way you interact with your own followers. They are loyal friends to your business. Do you treat them that way? Do you engage them and post snippets that will interest them?

Tip #6: Use Three or More Networks

The majority of marketers promote on at least three social networks. The big three are Facebook, Twitter and Google+, but there are dozens of others out there. Does your site sell products crafters would be interested in? Then getting engaged on Pinterest is an excellent idea since the user base on Pinterest is women.

Tip #7: Plan Ahead

70% of marketers state that they post content on social media at least one time per day.

In order to keep up that type of pace, marketers must plan ahead. You should have an idea in mind for how you plan to promote for the month or even the quarter, content should be written ahead of time and posts scheduled to go up on social media in advance.

Tip #8: Partner with Other Businesses

The report also showed that those who have been marketing for a year or more tend to build more partnerships with other businesses. This increases your social media exposure, because these partners will promote your products and vice versa. Once you’ve been marketing for a bit, you may be approached about a partnership or decide to approach someone else. Keep in mind that the other business should be complimentary but not competition. In addition, make sure you want to put your name behind the product. Ask for a sample, test it out, check out reviews of the business to make sure there are no serious complaints. When you recommend a product to your readers, they expect you to have done a bit of research on that other product.

Tip #9: Get Engaged on the Top Platforms

Screenshot from Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Industry Report

As mentioned before, there are dozens upon dozens of different social media platforms to get involved in. However, one thing this report showed was that there are seven that are most frequently used by marketers. Those seven platforms were:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• blogging
• Google+
• Pinterest

There is a reason these are the top seven and that has to do with the number of users they have and how much those users utilize the site. Make sure you utilize these platforms first before moving to others for the best results.

Tip #10: Videos Are on the Rise

Since 2013, blogging has slipped in rank slightly and YouTube has bumped it down. According to Invisia:

• Video was the fastest growing form of ad format in 2012.
• According to ComScore, 45.4 percent of users viewed at least one video online over the course of a month.
• 86% of colleges and universities have a presence on YouTube, according to the University of Dartmouth.

Smart marketers are utilizing videos to engage readers. From how-to videos to funny viral videos, there are a lot of different techniques you can use to engage your readers. If you aren’t already on YouTube, set up a channel for your business and figure out what you have to offer viewers.

Tip #11: Facebook Is Still Vital

Even though marketers aren’t always sure how effective Facebook marketing is, they still see it as the most important social media platform currently available. In a pie chart in the report, Facebook gets 54% as for it’s marketing importance while its closest competitor gets only 17% rating for importance. What this means is that your business simply must have a Facebook presence. Facebook has actually increased in importance even since 2013 when it was at 40%. That is a 14% increase in one year of how important marketers think Facebook is to your SMM campaigns.

Tip #12: Balance Your Marketing Efforts

The report also took a look at what social media marketers plan to do in the future. 68% of them plan to blog more and 67% plan to use YouTube and Twitter more. Apparently, they are seeing the same trends with YouTube that other marketers are seeing. The value of a strong blog with solid, unique content is and will remain vital going forward.

Tip #13: Just Tweet It

Twitter Stats from Mention (info source)

Twitter has moved up from number five in importance to marketers to number three in one short year. About 67% of marketers plan to increase their Twitter efforts. If your business doesn’t have a presence on Twitter, you should at least give it a try. Keep in mind that people can favorite and retweet, which can increase your reach with no additional effort from you.

Tip #14: Add Podcasting

Podcasting seems to be an untapped social media market. Even though the survey showed that only 6% of marketers are using podcasts for promotion, 21% stated they plan to add this SSM method in the near future. Podcasting seems to be growing and you could get in ahead of the next big trend.

Tip #15: Save Snapchat for the Teenagers

Snapchat Statistics & Demographic (original source from Marketo)

Snapchat is a social media site where users can take a quick picture and post it. As soon as the other person views the photo, it disappears within seconds, depending on settings. While there were over 400 millions snaps per day; the app doesn’t seem to be a very viable marketing option at this time. Only 7% of marketers have any plans at all to use Snapchat for marketing with 85% shying away from it at the current time.

Just in case you are keen to dig deeper – here’s how 8 brands are doing it right with Snapchat.

Tip #16: Paying for Ads

Screenshot from Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Industry Report

The report also surveyed marketing professionals about whether they pay for ads on social media sites. It seems that here Facebook is still very much king. About 90% use Facebook when paying for ads with only 20% using Linked in and even less for other social media networks. You could look at this two ways, actually. Perhaps Facebook has a better system for targeting your ads. On the other hand, if nearly everyone is using Facebook for advertising, it might benefit you to be one of the few advertisers on a different social media site. Some A/B testing could help you see which is most effective for your business.

Tip #17: Use Other People’s Content

Interestingly, while marketers plan to increase original content, they also want to increase their usage of other people’s work. This can include pulling upon reports, as we are doing with this article, and breaking them down for the reader or getting permission to use another writer’s original content (with credit given, of course).

Tip #18: Use Other Forms of Marketing

While SMM is on the rise, the best marketers know that you should never ignore other forms of media for a single type. In addition to increasing SMM, they also plan to use email, search engine optimization and events to pull in new site visitors. Interestingly, female marketers were more open to event marketing than their male counterparts, with 62% using event marketing and only 56% of males using events to market to new clients.

Wrapping Up: Common Sense Wins

At the end of the day, using what works best for your company is always the wisest approach. While knowing what professional marketers are doing to promote on social media is beneficial, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Each business is unique and the customer demographics for that business are unique. Test the different marketing methods you use, pay attention to patterns and keep working on your social media campaigns.

The Internet is ever-changing and to be truly successful you must be flexible enough to figure out what works best for you.

According to the Content Marketing Institute the most difficult challenge facing content marketers is developing original, relevant and timely content ideas.

At BuzzSumo we spend every day analyzing the most shared content on the internet and understanding why content is shared. Based on our analysis the following 7 areas provide plenty of scope for developing engaging and shareable content ideas.

1. Industry pain points

People are interested in challenges facing their industry. You can talk to your own teams and customers to gain insights into what keeps them awake at night and identify their pain points.

One useful way to address industry pain points, and to enhance your own authority, is to create case studies showing how businesses have overcome these challenges and the lessons that can be learnt from their experience.

2. Common customer questions

Content that addresses customer questions resonates well with audiences.

You can talk to your sales people and check what questions customers are asking. You can also review industry forums to find common questions.

Every customer question is a potential new piece of shareable content.

3. Trending industry topics

By their very nature trending industry topics are of interest to customers. As Robert Rose says when researching content ideas “go out and see what the zeitgeist is about a particular topic.”

Search out what are people talking about in the more popular LinkedIn groups or Google+ communities. You can also research the articles that are being shared most on social networks. You can do free topic searches with BuzzSumo to find the most shared content in any industry or topic area. A further step is to identify the key influencers using BuzzSumo and check what they are talking about and see the content they are sharing.

Once you have identified the trending topics explore where you can add value through your insights.

4. Brand stories

Brand stories provoke conversations and create a narrative that shapes the understanding of a topic. See my Kineo elearning brand story as an example. Ask yourself:

• what are your brand stories?
• in what ways can they provoke conversations?
• how can they shape the topic narrative?

5. Data analysis

Jonathan Mildenhall, Coca-Cola’s VP of Global Advertising Strategy, says “data whisperers will become the new messiahs.” According to Jonathan data is the new soil in which ideas grow.

What does the data say in your industry? For example, what does the data say about your competitors? What is the most shared content on your competitor’s sites and why? Do a BuzzSumo domain search to find out. How does this compare to the top five most shared pieces of content you produced in the last year and more importantly why? Understand what content is resonating with your audience from analyzing the data.

6. Applying trends outside your industry to your business

Content that looks at trends in different industries and how these might apply to a different business area is very popular. How might this work in your industry? Are you reading a magazine or blog each week from different industry sectors to see how the latest thinking in other sectors could be applied to your business. Taking a trend from another industry and assessing its application to your industry is a great way to create original content.

7. Industry news and trends

Everyone is interested in the latest industry news and trends, and this is very shareable content. If you are immersed in your industry you will already know the trends and latest thinking. However, we can all become obsolete, you need to keep up by reviewing the latest RSS feeds, the latest surveys and industry reports. What was the most shared content in your industry yesterday? Do a BuzzSumo search and find out.

Finally, you can conduct your own surveys to provide industry insights. Remember every insight is potentially a piece of great shareable content.

Summary

Hopefully by reviewing these seven areas you will generate a wide range of new shareable content ideas for your content marketing.

7 Tips for Effective Strategic Account Planning

Strategic Account Planning isn’t just about a deal. It’s about holistic and strategic engagement. It’s about building a more collaborative and cooperative relationship with the customer. So how does one build such a relationship; one that continues to generate additional streams of revenue year after year, while driving customer loyalty? What does effective account planning actually look like? Consider these account planning tips to get a better picture:

Choose Wisely, Grasshopper

Salespeople have limited time, so it’s critical to choose the right accounts in addition to working them well. What selection criteria is used for prioritizing accounts? Which accounts offer the greatest value to build customer loyalty and produce the greatest revenue? There are countless questions to consider when ranking your accounts. For this reason, scorecards are excellent tools to use when segmenting and focusing on your best accounts. Use them!

Avoid the Tower of Babel

Again, there is nothing worse than wasting time; and we spend too much of it trying to get on the same page with our customers when it comes to articulating common processes and tools. There needs to be a common language. Client, Customer, Account, Account Plan/Account Roadmap – Are you talking about the same thing? Like the Tower of Babel, strategic account planning begins with a vision predicated on successful communication.

Seek First to Understand

Look at your customer’s strategy. How do they measure success? Straight from Steven Covey’s book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand.” Understand your customer’s strategy and the programs they’re already driving. Consider visually mapping this out and most importantly, make sure that you develop this with your customer – or at a minimum – get them to verify.

It Takes a Village

Build an internal team. It may include an industry expert, an executive sponsor, a technical consultant, etc. The team has to be committed, not simply attend the account planning sessions and offer opinions. They have to be putting in equivalent effort at the appropriate place and time, as well as be assigned tasks. Then include the customer on your team, a coach or a mentor – someone willing to invest political capital in you – because they know you are focused on making them successful. Plus, we all have enemies, those who are hard to convert. How do we neutralize these?

Take the Long Way Home

We’ve all heard the saying, “people prefer that you do things with them, not to them.” Collaborate with your customer for success, and work towards becoming a “trusted partner,” even if it means taking the long way home. Account planning is most effective when it simultaneously works to achieve the strategic objectives of both the vendor and the customer. Embark on a journey that is right for both parties.

Don’t Take the Money and Run

Get credit for the value delivered. Let’s say you’re a vendor whose product has saved a customer millions by identifying inefficiencies, but you’ve never engaged with executive management to present the value you delivered. You may get a lot of internal referrals to other BU’s and Geo’s, but you have to re-compete each time for the business. Now let’s say you go in nine months later to show management the value you are delivering. You’ll likely be named a key supplier, negotiate a multi-year enterprise license, and any purchase request for something other than yours will now require approval from the CIO. Plus, you’ve just built a huge barrier-to-entry for your competition. Sounds nice, right? We’ve actually seen this happen…numerous times.

Lather, Rinse Repeat

Make this Strategic Account part of the culture. Then, like it says on the shampoo bottle, keep doing it until it becomes not just part of the culture, but corporate habit.

I recently participated in a group interview that was part of a study designed to identify key differences between millennial buyers (ages 19–36) and older consumers.

The study was intended to help small businesses become more effective in converting millennial buyers, a demographic with an estimated $1.6 billion in purchasing power.*

If you’re running a small business, odds are you’re faced with challenges that larger companies are less likely  to see as concerning. So how do small-business owners create campaigns that reach and retain millennials?

Here are a few key points for small businesses to consider when targeting millennial buyers:

Don’t alienate them: Trying too hard to speak to the millennial buyer in what you think is their language runs the risk of alienating them.  Although they share some common self-centric values, such as happiness, passion and discovery,* this is a very diverse group with a wide range of identities, life stages and preferences. Don’t waste their time beating around the bush or trying to be too clever. Be direct.

Be genuine: Millennials may spend a larger portion of their discretionary income than older consumers, but they still understand the value of a dollar. Said plainly, millennials are cost-conscious. The most effective offer is the one most likely to have a real impact on their everyday lives.

Establish a social presence: No messaging strategy is as effective as one shared through word of mouth. Also, having an active Facebook or Twitter page will help you tap into networks your prospective customers enjoy and expand the reach—and force—of your message.

Continue the cycle: It’s imperative that small businesses regularly provide new offers through their social media channels. The goal in doing so is to continue to build their social profile within this group by multiplying the like/share/check-in cycle.

These key points will help you establish an ongoing relationship with your millennial customers—and will probably capture a few nonmillennials as well.

It’s important for small-business owners to remember that targeting millennial consumers in the social media era is about having a two-way conversation. This dialogue is your most valuable asset.

*CEB Iconoculture Consumer Insights http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickspenner/2014/04/16/inside-the-millennial-mind-the-dos-donts-of-marketing-to-this-powerful-generation-3/

The post Millennials Are Talking. Are Small Businesses Listening? appeared first on KERN.

Content marketing or social selling success is not as easy as turning on a switch. Using content for sales plays to connect with audiences to drive specific results has proven successful for many marketers and sales organizations.

Having a content action plan or play on your chalkboard will help you move the move the sale forward toward the goal.

5 Ways To Use Content To Become A Better Social Selling Rep

1. Blogging is the 24-7 extension of your brand – helping you articulate your expertise and point of view when the customer wants to hear it!

Blog More To Sell More –> a #socialselling strategy. http://t.co/ygN7hYDj7h pic.twitter.com/pVzY82UrqL

— Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) July 29, 2014

2. Your customers do not want to be sold. 70% of your customers want their problems solved, so position yourself as a problem solver with great content on LinkedIn, Twitter or blogging so they pick you!

If 70% of buyers look to solve a problem, why are you selling? http://t.co/QCpPhv71sb #socialselling pic.twitter.com/ma1WuHr4VL

— Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) August 1, 2014

3. You don’t have to create your own content to connect with your customers. There are five simple ways to source it to connect with them earlier in the buying cycle.

5 Content Archetypes To Plan Your Editorial Strategy Around http://t.co/DVZZ3mVUbo #contentmarketing pic.twitter.com/2dRLwbDdWA

— Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) August 1, 2014

4. Many of your customers are Twitter, so knowing how to send a tweet the right way and not embarrass yourself is a key way to leverage content to help deepen the customer relationship.

How To Avoid Sending An Embarrassing Tweet http://t.co/ct0nNA3g4B #contentmarketing pic.twitter.com/BG0aHKfQ0z

— Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) July 30, 2014

5. Before you jump into using content to try to help your selling strategy, map out your plan. This way your social selling activity will have a greater likelihood to succeed.

Step up your approach to #contentmarketing strategy today, even if you are a salesperson. pic.twitter.com/yO3r15E8nG

— Gerry Moran (@GerryMoran) July 30, 2014

Do you have a content play that helped you win the sale? If so, please share below.

To win at social selling, we all need to be delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time on the right channel. Maybe one of these five ideas might help you convince another customer to join your team.

Foodies who can afford a $9.99 fee can finally order from chic restaurants that typically don't offer other delivery options. The service is called Caviar, and you can think of it as the GrubHub for rich people.

The online ordering startup launched last year in San Francisco and is now active in New York City, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., with plans to expand to other cities soon. 

And now, after weeks of speculation, Caviar has confirmed it has been acquired by Square, the mobile payments company run by Jack Dorsey. Though the exact purchase price hasn't been reported, the New York Times previously speculated that the deal could be worth as much as $90 million.

"Together we’ll double down our mission of delivering premium food through a premium delivery service with no compromises — giving buyers easy access to the food and restaurants they love so much," Caviar said in a blog post announcing the deal.

Caviar's appeal is that it allows customers to order from popular restaurants that don't usually deliver, like Ike's Place in San Francisco and Momofuku in New York.

"We look for the best restaurants in the city that have great food," partner John Keh told Business Insider. "Our restaurant partners do not have to be the fanciest in town, but if they make some of the best dishes in their category, we partner with them." 

Once Caviar partners with a restaurant, it send a professional photographer to capture mouthwatering images for the online menu.

"A picture of the food lets you quickly determine if the dish is appealing to you," Keh said. "As the saying goes, we eat with our eyes."

Prices on Caviar, which are set by restaurants, can be slightly higher than prices in the restaurant, as noted by Eater. Users also pay a 18% gratuity charge and the $9.99 delivery fee.

Keh learned about logistics and operations firsthand while serving as a geospatial analyst for the U.S. Air Force.

"That directly tied into my work now at Caviar, of looking at maps and routes, trying to make everything as efficient as possible," he said.

Caviar gave Business Insider an exclusive list of the ten most popular New York restaurants on its site, along with the most popular dish from each. 

10. L'Apicio: Pork Chop

L'Apicio is a trendy East Village Italian restaurant that's been popular with critics since it opened in 2012. Although known for its polenta and award-winning meatballs, L'Apicio also makes a popular $30 pork chop, served with apples and roasted turnips, which Caviar users love.

9. DBGB Kitchen and Bar: The Frenchie BurgerThis gastropub by famed French chef Daniel Boulud offers diners a wide selection of house-made sausages and burgers, among other bistro fare. The $17 Frenchie — a burger topped with confit pork belly, arugula, tomato-onion compote, morbier cheese, peppered brioche bun, cornichon, and mustard — is a favorite with Caviar users. 

8. Taim: Green Falafel SandwichTaim, which has locations in the West Village and Nolita, serves some of the best falafel in the city. Taim's most popular item on Caviar is the green falafel sandwich, a cheap option at just $6. It's served with pita on the side. 

7. Motorino: Cherry Stone Clam PizzeIn 2010, New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton declared Motorino the best pizza in New York City. Caviar users love Motorino, too, especially the $17 cherry stone clam pizza. 

6. Blue Ribbon Sushi: Omakase SushiBlue Ribbon's sushi outpost is a favorite on Caviar, as is its omakase sushi. The fish selection depends on the daily catch, and at $85, it's a pretty steep choice for lunch. 

5. Katz's Deli: Katz's PastramiKatz's Deli has been a Lower East Side classic for decades, and Caviar users can't get enough of its famous pastrami. You can order the sandwich for $18.45 with Caviar. 

4. Momofuku Má Pêche: Pork Buns

Má Pêche, part of the Momofuku dining empire, is a trendy, upscale restaurant with a dim sum-style menu. Its most popular item is the $10 pork buns, served with pork belly, hoisin, cucumber, and scallions. You can also order from Momofuku Milk Bar, which has five locations serving delicious desserts across NYC. 

3. Otto's Tacos: Carnitas TacoThis new East Village spot serves tiny tacos with a choice of five different fillings. The most popular taco on Caviar is the carnitas option, with slow-cooked pork served on a fresh corn tortilla. Each mini taco costs $3. 

2. Mission Cantina: Lamb BurritoMission Cantina is a new Mexican venture from Danny Bowien, the chef behind the critically-acclaimed Mission Chinese. Lines to get in can be long, and it's a hit on Caviar as well. The most popular item is the lamb burrito, served with beans, avocado, crema, queso blanco, salsa fresca, chips, and two types of salsa.

1. Han Dynasty: Dan Dan Noodles

Han Dynasty is a new Sichuan restaurant in the East Village that regularly has 45 minute waits for a table. It's no surprise delivery service is so popular. The most-ordered dish is an $8.70 Dan Dan Noodles, Sichuan noodles in a spicy sauce containing preserved vegetables, chili oil, Sichuan pepper, minced pork, and scallions.

SEE ALSO: This Is What The Kitchen Of The Future Could Look Like

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Six Emerging Competencies for Sales Success in the Age of the Empowered Buyer

It’s been well-documented that buyer behavior is changing, with power shifting from sellers to buyers. The primary reason for this shift is availability of and access to information.

The buyer is clearly in control and is dictating when, how, and what they want to buy. Even though sales roles are becoming more specialized, we believe the new balance of power requires three traits for all sales reps:

• Be Transparent. Set the proper expectations with your buyers and existing customers. You and your team must be above board and focused on delivering on your promises while resisting overreaching or overpromising to win a sale.

• Be Proactive. Proactively look for opportunities to create value. Don’t sit back and wait for the buyer to come to you, whether for a new account or existing account. If you wait, then you risk becoming a commodity that is constantly competing at dog-and-pony shows and struggling to differentiate yourself. Instead, get ahead of your peers and the commodity curve by being a first-mover. Be proactive, bring value, and help customers understand how they can create value.

• Be Fully Invested in Your Customers’ Success. This might sound obvious, but it’s not. It’s expected that sales reps will do what’s necessary to make the sale. The emphasis here is to demonstrate to your buyers that you have their best interests in mind beyond the sale. Let them know that you’re thinking about this as a long-term relationship and not a short-term sale. Whatever will make them happy will ensure their success and the likelihood that you’ll remain in good favor when the next sale opportunity or renewal comes.

The Rise of New Competencies Common across Sales Roles

In talking about this issue, my colleague Eileen Krantz has helped me to capture the impact of these changes and the consequences for sales teams and individual reps if they are to thrive as more changes inevitably occur.

Our recent work with organizations with subscription-based business models and significant dependence on inbound marketing has shown the following set of six competencies to be predictive of success. Simply put, top performers in this new environment are better at these behaviors than lower performers.

1. Developing Sales Leads. Demonstrates the initiative to uncover sales opportunities; actively attracts the interest of potential customers; networks to increase contacts; stays on top of market conditions to uncover new leads; consistently follows up with leads to assess their interest in the product/service offering. You can’t sit back — you must be proactive!

2. Qualifying Prospects. Uses a formula or series of questions to determine the prospect’s fit with the product; expects to sell to the majority of prospects because they are known to need the seller’s products; reacts quickly and objectively to the answers to standard probes by disqualifying the prospect or proceeding through the selling process. Be transparent with yourself — “Is there a legitimate opportunity here, or am I just dreaming?”

3. Making Persuasive Presentations. Excites the customer with an enthusiastic presentation style; demonstrates value and actively promotes products and services by making an emotional appeal; holds the customer’s attention and interest by keeping the presentation content relevant; varies style to build toward a buying decision. Be able to differentiate yourself, realizing that there’s a fine line between being persuasive and embellishing.

4. Committing Time and Effort to Ensure Success. Thrives on working; tends to achieve higher results in direct proportion to the time committed to work; remains focused on the goal and is not easily discouraged or distracted; uses work as an opportunity for interaction and incorporates interpersonal contacts into task accomplishment; sees work as a major source of personal satisfaction. This starts with a proactive approach that continues beyond the sale.

5. Partnering as a Customer Advocate. Understands the customer’s business, empathizes with their problems, and sets a plan to meet their needs; tirelessly focuses on building strong relationships with customers by acting on their behalf to work the seller’s internal systems to meet their requirements; sees partnering with customers as the most efficient method to reach personal sales career goals. This demands a proactive approach, as well as being fully committed to your customers’ success — by helping them stay ahead of their competition, you’ll do the same with yours.

6. Adapting Approach to Different Buyer Motivations. Gathers essential information to determine the benefits customers need in order to be sold; is willing to adjust sales approach to fit different buyer motivations; influences or persuades others by determining how the other individual can benefit and then communicates those advantages. Being objective and transparent is essential.

By comparison, the previous success models for hunters vs. farmers are shown below:

A comparison of the former hunter and farmer models shows that hunters were generally more opportunistic and proactive and farmers were more service-oriented and responsive. But we’re now seeing competencies that are common to both hunters and farmers that are becoming more common across various sales roles despite the fact that those roles are different. In essence, they are more proactively customer-focused.

While it is still necessary to pursue and win the business and then effectively service the account, it is not sufficient. Sales professionals in this marketplace of educated and proactive buyers must be advisors and advocates who can create and shape opportunities to add value to their customers’ businesses. They must then be able to leverage those successes and lessons learned to develop new business while maintaining and expanding business within their existing accounts.

Do your sales reps possess the right competencies to be as effective as possible in bringing in new business and nurturing existing clients? Help them to adapt and identify which ones won’t make the transition. This gives your sales strategy a clear direction and provides guidance for your sales training efforts, as well as coaching and mentoring objectives for your managers.

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Download our newest E-book,  A Financial Services Leader Guide for Sales Success.     

The post Six Emerging Competencies for Sales Success in the Age of the Empowered Buyer appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Over my three plus decades in sales I’ve seen lots and lots of sales managers.  The vast majority fall into one of these four types:

The Hall Monitor

The Hall Monitor sees their job as one of chronicling activity, taking names, dispensing discipline, focusing on procedures, thinking those are the keys to generating results—or at least to keeping their job.

Hall monitors tend to be oriented to process, are organized, and have a strong sense of discipline.  All admirable characteristics—but they’re misguided.  The Hall Monitor makes a great bureaucrat, a lousy sales manager.  He’ll make sure everyone knows their place and that procedure is followed—at the cost of morale and sales.

Although the Hall Monitor is focused on enforcing procedure on subordinates, she feels justified in fudging (lying) to upper management when completing reports.  She has no intent of letting her subordinates hold her down or put her job in jeopardy.  If numbers aren’t met, margins aren’t being held, or sales calls aren’t being made, she is fully capable of showing management why it isn’t her fault.

The Visitor

The Visitor is going places—fast.  Their current assignment of managing the sales team is in their mind temporary—and the more temporary, the better.  Their key to moving is getting some numbers to catch the eye of management.

The Visitor cares about no one other than himself and that translates into demanding sales at all costs.  Price is never an obstacle—sell it no matter what.  His message to his team members is get out and get orders and don’t come back until you got ‘em.  His implied message to the sales team is “the quicker you get the numbers, the quicker you get rid of me.”

Need help?  Need advice?  Need coaching?  Don’t ask The Visitor because frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.  If it isn’t something that’s going to help him get the next promotion and get it NOW, forget it.

Have a suggestion or advice to give?  Don’t bother because The Visitor doesn’t care—doesn’t plan on being around long enough to implement it anyway.

The one thing you can count on from The Visitor is a sales goal he is sure he can easily obliterate.  Oh, yeah, management will see those numbers destroyed, guaranteed.

The Good Buddy

The Good Buddy is everyone’s friend.  Managing is a popularity contest that he intends to win.  He’ll be a great drinking buddy, a top notch shoulder to cry on, a guy you can trust to cover for you.  He’ll make sure the office atmosphere is loose, that everyone feels welcome, that the office is a fun place to be.

Discipline?  Well, that’s not something you’ll find in his office.  An insistence on hitting quota?  Something else that isn’t a priority.  Coaching?  Nope.  Lots of back slapping and high fiving, but no coaching.  Decisions?  Don’t expect The Good Buddy to make the hard decisions because he might hurt someone’s feelings.

The Good Buddy is weak and lets his team members run the office.  Ultimately, most everyone in his office ends up unhappy.

The Super Closer

We all know the Super Closer—the guy or gal who believes they can close anyone, anytime.  They generally have a massive ego, more than likely a strong sales history, an A type personality, and little respect for the others on their sales team.  The Super Closer sees their charges as grunts who know nothing about sales and whose only job is to go out, work through the chaff to find the prospect, then call in The Super Closer and watch the master work.

The Super Closer is concerned with one thing and one thing only—today.  Get today’s numbers, Numbers, numbers, numbers.  By gosh she’s never missed a quota and she’s not going to start now.  If you suckers can’t get the business—and God knows you can’t, she’ll close it for you.  Her sales team doesn’t have to worry about anything except getting her in front of a prospect.

Planning?  Who needs it?  Reports to management?  All they care about are quotas being met and exceeded, so she’ll tell them what they want to hear and then worry about making it true.

The managers above have developed their own definition of what a manager is because:

• They misunderstand the nature of their position.  Most companies don’t train their new sales managers.  The assumption is that good salespeople will know what needs to be done.  Consequently, most companies simply instruct new salespeople to call their manager if they have questions, maybe give them a day or two introduction to the reports and paperwork they’ll need to complete.
• They believe that today is more important than future days.  Get today’s numbers today and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.  This often comes from a demand by management—stated or unstated—that numbers be met today.  Many senior managers mouth a long-term growth philosophy while demanding numbers be made today so they get their bonus–and to hell with tomorrow (Wall Street anyone?).
• They aren’t manager material to begin with.  A great salesperson will not necessarily be a great manager.  Often great salespeople make terrible managers.  They know what they are good at and want to continue being the sales superstar but with a management title.  Converting to be a real manager is impossible for some of these sales stars.
• They can’t make the adjustment from being one of the group to being the leader of the group.  They want the new position but they don’t want their relationships to change.

The Sales Leader

Fortunately, there is a fifth type of sales manager—the real deal.

Currently it is common for sales managers at all levels to be called ‘Sales Leaders.’  Nice title that really doesn’t fit most managers.  A true sales leader is very different from the more typical managers we saw above.

The true sales leader:

• Isn’t focused on today but rather is looking into and planning for the future with the intent of molding the future instead of being molded by it.
• Is looking to coach his or her team members to stardom, not to be The Star themselves.
• Manages through demonstration and inspiration, not intimidation or fear.
• Is a student, open to suggestion, criticism, advice, and continual education.
• Leads by being trustworthy and demonstrating integrity and honesty.  His/her team members may not like The Sales Leader’s decisions, but know the decisions are honest and based on what the Sales Leader believes is best for the team.
• Is a decision maker, not afraid to make the hard decisions and to live with the consequences.

The Making of a Sales Leader

A Sales Leader doesn’t just happen, they are created, they’re formed, they’re developed.

The development starts with the selection of the new manager.  Traditionally companies have selected top producers to become the new frontline sales manager.  Sales management is viewed more as a reward for production than as a critical job in its own right.

What makes a great manager isn’t what makes a great salesperson.  The activities are very different.  The relationship building needs are different, the communication, planning, and organizational needs are different.  Unless a company is seeking a Super Closer or a Visitor, promoting a top producer may not be a wise idea.

Although the management problems start with the selection of the new manager, more important is the “training” most new managers undergo—none.

One of the most common training formats companies have is upon promoting the new manager, the new manager is given a day or two training on hiring and firing procedures, how to handle sexual harassment issues, and how fill out payroll paperwork.   From there, the new manager is told to call his or her manager if they have questions or need guidance.  After the first few questions directed to their manager, they begin to notice their phone calls aren’t returned as promptly as before, their manager’s tone of voice is a little sharper, the answers and guidance more and more abrupt.

Soon they realize they’re on their own to sink or swim as they can.

No wonder they have no idea how to be a leader.

To create a Sales Leader companies must invest in their new manager.  They must either create a multi-disciplinary, in-house management program or hire an outside company.  In addition, each new manager needs a coach—either an in-house coach or an outside professional manager coach.

Each new manager must be schooled in the skills of management, but more importantly must be guided in the roll of and skills of leadership.  Filling out paperwork, creating a sales plan, assigning territories, and resolving issues with shipping are all important, no doubt.

But far more important to the success of the company and the sales team is getting the most out of team members, developing team members who have the desire to succeed, who are willing to invest the time and effort to be the best.  These aren’t instilled by a manager; they’re brought out by a leader.

The last thing your sales team needs is a manager.  You need Sales Leaders. 

If you want Sales Leaders, do the things necessary to develop them—investing in them is investing in your company’s future success.  Refusing to invest in them is an investment in your company’s failure.

When I spoke with representatives of a tech business recently they indicated they were poised for growth. So when I reviewed their online presence, I was surprised at the results ~ no blog, current social media posts, directory listings or paid advertising plus a website that was clearly out-of-date. I was left wondering how they planned to reach their potential customers and spread the news about their business.

Strategy Reaches Potential Customers
Every business owner I’ve talked to is interested in strategies to better reach potential customers who are truly interested in their product or service.  Inbound marketing pulls quality potential clients to your sales team and makes closing the sale easier and more profitable.

Customers are More Tech Savvy
As the use of smart phones and tablets grows, customers are more often using these devices to find products and services. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, customers will have a hard time navigating your website and will likely move to a competitor’s website in order to make a purchase.

A recent Fast Company article states that customers are often 60% through the buying process before they contact a company about a product or service.

Today many customers are shopping online and often making part or of their buying decision before contacting a business so doesn’t it make sense to create a strong inbound marketing strategy so your customers find you during their online research?

Social Media News Aggregators
Customers are also getting more of their news through social media and using social media as a news aggregator.  If your business isn’t creating news and information and using social media to distribute information about your business,  you’re missing a great opportunity to naturally connect with customers and start conversations.

Develop an Inbound Marketing Strategy 
Clearly define your ideal customer then develop an online strategy where customers learn about your business during their online research process.  There are many touch points customers go through before making a buying decision so make it possible for your customers to find your business online.

Inbound marketing content is written for the benefit of your target marketing. Customers who don’t fit the target profile sort themselves out the sales funnel.  Here is the general process for creating an inbound marketing /sales funnel:

• Awareness – Help your customers learn about your business through Blogging, Email Marketing and Social Media.
• Interest – Create and promote Landing Pages, Offers, Infographics to attract customers to your website for additional information.
• Consideration – Provide your customers more information so they can make an informed decision through FAQs and Featured Guides.
• Intent – When customers get to this phase, they are definitely purchasing and are simply trying to decide whom they want to do business with.  Stories sell so offer prospects Case Studies, Testimonials.
• Evaluation – The final step is ROI Calculations, Offer Price Guides and any final details about your product or service.
• Purchase – Make it easy for your customers to purchase your product or service.  Test and retest the purchasing process using as many different browsers as possible.

Each business is a little different so the marketing tools used to connect with customers may vary but the marketing and sales process is basically the same.

So how is your online business measuring up?  Develop a strong inbound marketing strategy that dovetails with your website and your potential customers will be contacting you to make purchases instead of you chasing them.

It’s easy to find small business statistics that tell us things such as 52 percent of small businesses are home-based or that small businesses account for more than 65 percent of all new jobs. Those are cool stats, to be sure, but what do they have to do with your small business? Probably nothing – there’s little this information could do to help you yield greater profits. The following ten statistics, however, are critical to your small business success . Use them as benchmarks to gauge your own business performance.

1. Average annual revenue of small business: $3.6 million (Entrepreneur)

The average small business brings in $3.6 million in annual revenue; of course, this figure doesn’t lend itself to deciphering the actual profitability of a small business or the take-home pay of its owners, but it does offer a nice “par” figure you should aim to exceed.

What if you don’t bring in $3.6 million? Does it mean your small business is a failure? No, of course not – some business models do not require large revenues to succeed. A sole entrepreneur, for example, who earns $200,000 in revenues and takes home $150,000 of that could hardly be considered a failure; while a multi-employee firm that brings in $4 million but spends $4.5 million to make it would definitely be considered a failure.

The revenue figure is relative, but it does shed some light on what the average small business is doing.

2. Average annual revenue of small business with website: $5.03 million (Entrepreneur)

Do you still doubt the power of the web? If so, you’re missing out an opportunity to substantially increase revenue. One of the most important considerations is that operating a website rarely, if ever, costs $1.5 million per year; in fact, outside of the most massively-marketed websites you’d likely be hard-pressed to identify a site that cost even $500,000 to operate every year. Thus, that additional revenue earned through having a website could prove to yield incredible profits.

3. Percentage of small businesses with websites: 53 (Statistic Brain)

Despite the obvious revenue-related benefits to having a website, only 53 percent of small businesses actually have them. Moreover, based on casual observation we can say the majority of those websites are under-developed – in fact, they might be harming their companies’ images more than they’re helping generate leads.

The fact is a website isn’t an option for small businesses today; it’s a necessity. There is no weight to the argument that a given business continues to thrive sans-website – those businesses are clearly missing out on incredible online opportunities, given the fact they’ve figured out the brick-and-mortar aspects of operating successful businesses.

4. Non-employer businesses average annual revenue: $44,000 (Forbes)

Here’s where reality strikes: non-employer businesses, which make up the vast majority of small businesses, average just $44,000 in annual revenue. That number is skewed by the small percentage of non-employer businesses who make more than $250,000 (3.2%), since well over half of all non-employer businesses make less than $25,000.

What does all this mean? It’s very difficult to generate enormous wealth without help. Non-employer businesses are severely limited by time – one person can only do so much in any given day – and without having help they’re unable to maximize their potential earnings.

If you operate a non-employer business, now might be the time to investigate how hiring even a single employee can help you grow your business. Perhaps the most telling statistic related to non-employer businesses is this: only 368 out of 22.5 million non-employer establishments are able to earn annual revenues of $5 million or more.

5. Direct-mail postcards yield cheaper leads than email (Direct Marketing Association)

Many small businesses rely on email marketing because it’s cheaper to send an email than to invest in direct-mail marketing. However, the Direct Marketing Association has proven postcard marketing to yield a lower cost-per-lead than email marketing, print advertising, and telemarketing.

This is especially true if you have an in-house list, which boasts a cost-per-lead of just over $19. Email, in comparison, costs more than $55 per lead.

It can be tough for budget-minded small businesses to avoid the “more is better” trap; for efficient and successful small business marketing it’s critical to understand your customers and to market to them via their preferred methods. It’s easy to delete an unread email, but a postcard is a tangible, physical object customers get to hold and interact with. Moreover, the USPS says postcards are the most likely form of direct-mail to be noticed and read.

6. Percentage of small businesses that do not work with an accountant: 46 (Bloomberg)

This is a staggering number, particularly when you factor in that forty percent of small businesses spend 80 hours annually directly dealing with their federal taxes – that’s two weeks of lost time that, for most businesses, most certainly would justify the cost of hiring a seasonal CPA.

Think you can wing it on your taxes? Consider that the average additional payments the IRS demands for audited small businesses with less than $25,000 of annual revenue is $5,500 – roughly one-fifth of annual revenue, much less annual profits. The takeaway here is that it can literally pay to work with an accountant, who can not only save you money but keep your business out of hot water.

7. Percent of small business websites optimized for “m-commerce”: 5 (Business2Community)

Another staggering figure, given the ubiquity of mobile devices in today’s market. Don’t small business want to sell their customers, on their customer preferred platforms? If your small business doesn’t have a strong mobile presence, you will almost certainly lose ground – and sales – to competitors that do.

Consider that three out of five consumers search local businesses on their smartphones, 51 percent of customers are more likely to buy from mobile-optimized websites, and that worldwide 4.8 billion people own cell phones compared to just 4.2 billion who own toothbrushes (LocalVox).

If you own a small business and you don’t have a well-designed, mobile-optimized website you’re missing opportunities. Making an investment in web and mobile sites can pay off huge dividends while not doing so can spell doom for your small business.

8. Percentage of adults who are active on social networks: 72 (B2C)

That percentage might be even greater for your customer demographics, particularly if you serve young or tech-savvy customers. So if nearly three-quarters – or greater – of your customer base is on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, then it makes sense for your company to have your own dedicated social media marketing campaigns. If you don’t, you can bet at least some of your competitors will, and they’ll be the ones earning your business.

One of the best ways to motivate customer loyalty is to live like your customers, go where they go, do what they do, and reveal the human side of your company. A strategic approach to social media can help foster your brand image and even motivate direct sales, but even more important is the opportunity to connect with and engage customers in their preferred online environments.

9. Percentage of customers who receive a quick brand response to complaints on social media who would recommend said brand: 71 (Forbes)

One of the worst things about social media is that unanswered customer complaints can go viral and severely damage your company’s reputation in short order. However, you can take advantage of social media by swiftly and public addressing such complaints. When you show you care and take the time to be helpful – to solve customer problems as if they were your own – your customers will recommend you to friends and family members via priceless word-of-mouth. Thus, you should continually monitor social media sites and respond to questions and concerns as quickly as possible. Doing so will demonstrate your commitment to customers, and that will go a long way toward earning new and repeat business.

10. Total number of small businesses in the U.S.: 28 million (Business Weekly)

Specific industry statistics aside, the huge number of small businesses means one thing: competition. That’s competition for customer attention, customer dollars, choice marketing opportunities, media buzz, social media status, and more. The takeaway here: you must adequately market your small business in order to get in front of the right customers with the right offer at the right time. You can’t make money if you’re invisible.

Owning and operating a small business is rife with challenges, but the rewards of surmounting those challenges can be amazing. Studying general statistics can offer some benchmarks, but it’s far more important to analyze your own. Doing so will help you make sound business decisions that propel you

In an upsetting blow to marketers everywhere, research indicates that over 70 percent of marketers failed to deliver quantifiable results for their efforts in 2013.

While there’s much to be said for experimentation with new tactics, there’s also a harsh reality here: A huge majority failed to track and attribute marketing spend to closed business. As budgets continue to increase, this tracking is critical to understanding whether your content strategy is effective. Without a means of evaluation (or by ignoring the data you have, which is even worse), you’re letting your gut dictate your content marketing decisions, instead of letting your audiences’ preferences determine your direction.

How can we turn this ship around?

In short, all marketers need to become agents of ROI.

You need to focus on game-changing, rise-above-the-noise tactics that not only deliver creatively, but also lend themselves to better tracking. You need to find ways to collect meaningful insight from your content and become diligent in your analysis of the resulting data. You’re looking to capitalize on trends you see, and course-correct where you can to become more effective and prove real content marketing ROI. Essentially, you’re content hacking.

Luckily, just as online video content is becoming the most expected and popular format, it’s also one of the most measurable content media you can add to your mix.

Why is video different?

Video content lives in players or containers, so it travels differently than text assets do. When syndicated across the web, you can still access audience engagement metrics from your video players. This isn’t necessarily true with a white paper or other assets, which are typically delivered in a PDF format. You may not know whether the person who downloaded your eBook actually read it (despite giving them a high lead score), but with video content you can see exactly how a viewer engaged.

With that said, how can you become an agent of ROI with video content? Here are some best practices:

1. Track attention span to discover which assets deliver the greatest value: By using a video marketing platform to collect video engagement data, you get to see exactly how your assets are performing. Just a glance at the attention span data below clearly tells me which video campaign was more appealing to my audience on the whole:

As you can see from the two images above, the second video maintains about 60 percent of the audience right to the end, whereas the first experiences a massive drop off in the first 10 seconds. If I were looking at this visual data in a post-mortem analysis, I’d know that Video 1 was not successful, and I’d want to look into why.

Data may not always tell such an exaggerated story, but once you look into something like a steep drop-off at the start of your video, you might discover revealing audience preferences or behaviors. For example, we noticed there was a steep drop off for one of our first home page explainer videos. With a look at the data and some reflection, we realized the audience was probably abandoning the content so quickly because the video was set to autoplay. When someone arrived on our site, they were instantly trying to discover where the noise was coming from in their browser and fumbling to turn autoplay off (maybe for lack of headphones, quiet office areas, etc.). Once we turned off autoplay, the video maintained a strong attention span. This is only one example of the kinds of things you can discover, and this type of data represents your audience’s digital body language. Overall, viewers’ attention span per video can be a great indicator of purchase intent.

Discoveries like these will ultimately give you clues as to how your video strategy can be better tailored to your audience’s real preferences — an analysis and evaluation process that will lead to more repeatable success.

Tip: A good rule of thumb is to aim to maintain over 60 percent of your audience straight to the end of your videos, where they’ll encounter your call to action. If your video data indicates lower performance, look to make adjustments.

2. Use prospects’ video views to influence lead scoring: Video can also help you become an agent of content marketing ROI in that it contributes to more accurate lead scoring within your marketing automation platform (MAP). You might currently score your leads based on text-asset downloads; however, this doesn’t factor in the video assets individuals have consumed — which means you are missing out on valuable audience data.

Consider this example: Two prospects come to your website. Prospect No. 1 hits a few pages and downloads a white paper. Prospect No. 2, however, hits a few pages on your site, watches two overview videos, and then watches a 4-minute product demo and 15 minutes(!) of a recorded webinar. This prospect should get a way higher lead score for the volume of high-value content consumed in a short time frame. Unfortunately, your MAP probably doesn’t track this prospect’s interaction with video as an out-of-the-box feature.

If you aren’t pushing video data into individual contact records in your MAP, you’re flying completely blind when it comes to knowing how your videos are influencing your customer’s next steps — extremely revealing data that can indicate their interest or purchase intent.

Tip: Start tracking individual prospects’ video viewing history as part of their lead score. This will help you attribute conversions to specific pieces of content and clue you in on any existing content gaps along the funnel.

3. Connect video engagement data to your CRM: Video data can be pushed to a CRM, like Salesforce, just like engagement data can be pushed into your MAP. The data appears directly in a contact’s record, allowing you to see which videos they’ve watched and for how long. Once a viewer hits a certain threshold or percentage of content consumed, you can set triggers (or tasks) in your CRM so, for example, your sales team could be alerted to call a lead and ask them questions related to the context of the videos you know they’ve watched.

This CRM connection makes you an agent of ROI instantly because you can pull together pre-configured reports that list which videos have been responsible for the most amount of new business. Reports like the ones below demonstrate a clear connection between money spent on your video campaigns and the ROI they bring in to your company:

Summary

On a whole, we cannot let 2014 be a repeat of last year when it comes to demonstrating quantifiable results from video content. As you strive to create an amazing digital experience this year, monitor your spend on game-changing tactics like video and invest in the tools to quantify your performance in terms of revenue and won deals. You’ll deliver assets your customers will love, and you’ll create a content journey that leads to more (proven) closed business.

Looking for more guidance on taking your video content to the next level? You won’t want to miss Content Marketing World 2014, September 8–11, 2014. Register today!

Cover image by Andrea via Flickr