Rnordman

Argentina’s Lionel Messi, left, and Sergio Aguero react after Germany’s Mario Goetze scored the winning goal during the World Cup final soccer match between Germany and Argentina. (Martin Meissner/AP)

Padre José María di Paola postponed celebrating Mass on Wednesday for something less solemn: watching soccer. The man better known as “Padre Pepe” instead set up screens in his shantytown parish for fans to watch Argentina advance to the World Cup final—besting Holland on penalty kicks. “Soccer fans are really intense here in the vilas,” says Padre Pepe, a minor media sensation in Argentina for his work with drug addicts in the Villas de Miseria—Misery Villages—covering an ever-increasing part of the Buenos Aires cityscape.

Soccer is a religion in much of the world, including Argentina—though few countries could count the Pope as a supporter. It’s also a distraction in the South American country, where fans are celebrating soccer success as the economy slumps. Argentina, once one of the wealthiest countries in the world, suffers a century-old curse of careening from crisis to crisis, even while overachieving on the fútbol field. Improbably, the country could claim the World Cup and default on its debts shortly thereafter, although Argentines appear more preoccupied with Sunday’s final than any financial misfortune. “We’re not thinking of anything but the World Cup,” say Fernando Farías, a host with national public radio in Buenos Aires. “The administration can use this to cover whatever is happening in the country.”

Using soccer for political purposes or papering over problems isn’t without precedent. Argentina won the 1978 World Cup on home turf, which the then-military dictatorship used for propaganda and “promoting patriotism among the population,” says Argentine economist Nicólas Alonzo. It didn’t work then and Alonzo doesn’t expect it work now. Not that the government won’t try. “The effects of victory will be moderate,” says Alonzo, who works with the Orlando J. Ferreres & Asociados consultancy in Buenos Aires. A win, though, gives the government time to “take unpopular measures to correct the main macroeconomic imbalances.”

Argentina devalued its currency in January and raised interest rates as it ran low of foreign reserves—funds previously used for increased social spending and programs aimed at the poor, students and single mothers, all of whom vote overwhelmingly for President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The devaluation cut the purchasing power of Argentines accustomed to saving in U.S. dollars (bought on a burgeoning black market) and copiously consuming everything from cups of coffee to cars to foreign trips.

In June Argentina slipped into recession for the first time since 2001, when the currency collapsed and Argentina defaulted on an estimated $95 billion in debt, which left it frozen out of foreign capital markets. No analyst expects a repeat of 2001, but today’s troubles date back to the debt crisis and a group of bond holders who refused to settle for 35 cents on the dollar and held out for full payment. The bond holders  recently prevailed in U.S. courts and stand to collect $1.3 billion. It’s a sum that Argentina cannot afford.

Analysts attribute Argentina’s recurring crises to short-term thinking in the political and social arenas, something economist Adrián Yarde Buller, also with Orlando J Ferreres & Asociados, sees seeping into soccer. Argentine clubs previously developed stars such as Diego Maradona. Now, European scouts are spotting players at earlier ages and developing them abroad. “Clubs, together with the domestic league, (being) increasingly less competitive on the international level complicates the chances of placing placers in European leagues,” Yarde says.

Argentine fans fretted about team defence prior to the tournament. Early tournament reviews were underwhelming as Argentina scraped by the likes of Bosnia Herzegovina, thanks to star striker Lionel Messi, “who can perform magic at just the right time,” Farías says. For Farías and others, it reinforced old stereotypes of Argentines not working well in teams while excelling as individuals. “We tend to prioritize individuality and get carried away with infighting,” says José María Poirier,  publisher of the magazine Criterio in Buenos Aires.

Still, Argentines point proudly to international icons coming from the “end of the world,” such as Pope Francis, Queen Maxima of Holland and strikers Messi and Maradona (revered for his “hand of God” goal in Argentina’s winning World Cup campaign in 1986). With Francis being elected pope, some speak of a “Francis effect”—first on display after his favourite soccer squad, San Lorenzo, unexpectedly won the Argentine league in 2013. “Many say, between seriousness and smiling, that the prayers of an Argentine Pope help,” Poirier says. “The problem is that Benedict XVI prays, too,” presumably for Argentina’s opponent Sunday, Germany.

The post Argentina’s soccer gift—and economic curse appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Today’s most competitive marketplace isn’t technology but talent. The challenge of attracting and retaining talent is particularly acute for marketers. Their function has been turned upside down and inside out as a result of digital technology, empowered employees, and connected customers.

In this new world, the best marketers exhibit five superpowers – each of which requires new types of talent. Our previous article describes each of these superpowers with examples from Intuit, Sephora and others. As a recap, they are: To hear what no one else can hear; to be part of the conversation, even when you’re not in the room; to leap tall piles of data in a single bound; to make silos disappear; and to bring out the superpowers in others.

How can you attract and retain the talent that can give you these superpowers?   What will create the gravity that pulls top talent into your company’s orbit and keeps them there? As a provider of marketing talent to Silicon Valley’s top companies, one of our firms, The Sage Group, has seen a consistent pattern in the talent strategies of the most effective and innovative companies. These strategies address who you hire, how you hire, and what you do once they’re on board.

Who: Look for dual superpowers

It used to be that top talent was exceptional at a particular skill or function. But the demands of marketing today means that top talent is able to combine skills that don’t often go together, and might even seem to be opposites. The combinations we see in most demand are:

• Creative + analytical: These people use both the left and right sides of the brain to reach the head and the heart of customers.  As the data gets bigger, you have to know what questions to ask to turn information into insight.
• Leadership + digital acumen: Many digital natives lack leadership experience and many seasoned leaders lack digital expertise. Truly top talent is skilled at both leading internal teams around a shared vision and building digital products and communities.
• Content creation + product expertise: Brand marketers are becoming more and more like publishers. There are content creators who can engage an audience but don’t know the product, and product experts who lack the ability to tell a good story. The result is an ability to connect and engage both colleagues and customers.
• Innovation + execution: Marketing teams can no longer be divided into those who come up with ideas and those who execute them. The best talent has an ability to envision what’s possible and make it happen.

How: Think of it as marketing, not HR

Ironically, many marketers don’t think of recruiting as a marketing challenge. Instead, they think of it as an HR issue. But acquiring and retaining talent is really no different than acquiring and retaining customers.

Most marketers would never think to execute a customer acquisition strategy without a clear value proposition, segmentation, pricing, collateral, sales enablement, metrics, and brand. Yet when it comes to talent acquisition, we forget these marketing basics.

Here are things to consider as you apply what you know (marketing) to get who you want (talent):

• Value proposition: What is the source of your differentiation? Do you have a compelling elevator pitch and consistent messaging throughout your communications?
• Market research: Where can you find the talent you want? What is important to them in a job, career, team and employer?
• Pricing: What are the key elements of compensation (salary, bonus, benefits, equity) and how do you compare with competitors?
• Sales: When you have found the right candidate, do you move quickly to close?
• Metrics: What are marketing’s KPIs for attracting top talent?
• Brand: Are you visible in the marketplace with a reputation for innovation and excellence? Are you known for creating “marketing that matters”?

What: Meaning over money

Keeping great talent is tough. We know one marketing executive of a top brand who has seen turnover of 30% on her team in the last year. It’s not enough to pay people well. In today’s talent market, you have to offer meaning as well as money.

The organizations we’ve seen do the best at retaining talent put effort into the following areas:

• Shared purpose: Create a vision that unites and inspires the team. At SAP, Jonathan Becher has aligned 1200 marketers in 50 countries around the idea of engaging with people (instead of companies or buyers) and rethinking marketing as a growth enabler.
• Stretch assignments: Empower people to go beyond their comfort zone. Visa is bringing in digital natives and giving them senior roles in brand marketing rather than digital marketing.
• Removing obstacles: Don’t let politics, bureaucracy, and roadblocks get in the way. Williams-Sonoma aligned e-commerce, marketing and brand leadership to gain rapid consensus and accelerate decision-making on key priorities.
• Great coaching: Recognize the vital role of employee’s relationships with their managers. Google has gone from reluctantly accepting the role of managers to embracing their pivotal role in employee engagement and productivity.
• Intrinsic rewards: Look for ways other than money to reward people. For its Great Manager award, Google replaced a cash bonus with a one-week retreat with other winners and senior leaders.

These strategies help to create what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman calls an “ally” relationship between employers and employees.

In a broadcast world, marketers’ success depended more on hiring the right agency than hiring the right talent. But in today’s digital landscape, you need top talent to create content, build community, leverage data, and drive revenue. It’s time to take recruiting back from HR and turn it into a marketing mission. We know how to attract and retain customers with an exceptional customer experience. Let’s do the same for talent. What’s your talent experience?

The New Marketing Organization
An HBR Insight Center

There’s no doubt about it, most eCommerce sites only convert 2-3% of site visitors. What if you could understand why the other 98% of them left your site? Were they looking for that hard to find product or a product at a certain price point? Recognize that the shopper is more in control of the buying process than ever before. Today’s online shopper can visit 10 of your competitor’s in the matter of minutes and gather enough reviews and peer feedback to feel confident in their decision. For eCommerce operators data about potential customers’ needs and wants while in the buying process on your site is the Holy Grail. We’ll review two ways to gather this information and remarket in a targeted way based on what the customer tells you they are looking for.

Tracklf Web Tracker App

TrackIf is a great tool for shoppers and eCommerce operators alike. TrackIf’s mission is to help eCommerce companies monetize their on-site, non-converting traffic; typically 98% of visitors never purchase anything. For shoppers, TrackIf alerts the consumer when a selected product of interest is on promotion, in stock, out-of-stock or reaches a specific price point. This allows the customer to share their specific product interest in exchange for getting a good deal. Consumers can track anything from price drops on your favorite bathing suit to new job openings sites like Monster and Career Builder. eCommerce site owners can partner with TrackIf or install the TrackIfy App to gain insights into what products their customers are interested in and send targeted emails to convert the sale.

TrackIf is a multi-tenant solution that is used by both retail stores (e.g. Neiman Marcus, Cost Plus, iRobot, etc.) and an open marketplace. To give you an idea of size the TrackIf open marketplace currently helps over 375,000 people track more than $1 billion of product from over 1,200 websites save money. The solution allows eCommerce stores to gather rich data and run manual or automated promotions to customers on the products they already told you they were interested in purchasing!

More Repeat Buyers with Windsor Circle

Email marketing is the corner stone for most successful eCommerce businesses but doing it right can be very complex and time consuming. That’s where Windsor Circle can help. Windsor Circle helps businesses automate their email marketing campaigns by integrating with their eCommerce platform. The result is emails being sent based on customer’s actions or inactions over time. For example, if a customer hasn’t purchased in an extended time period they can receive win-back emails offering discounts. It’s much cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to win new ones. Windsor Circle is an inexpensive way for eCommerce operators to do just that.

Don’t concede the miserable eCommerce conversion rates of the past. Look to new technology partners to help unlock the mystery of online shoppers and give them the means to tell you what they want and when they want it. Your conversion rates will love you for it!

Image via Shutterstock

In our work, we often see a few problems reoccurring within sales organizations. These companies are not identical. They come with their own processes, standards, structures, and methods of communicating. They are small or large, B2B or B2C, an unknown start-up or well-known corporation. When we visit with sales leaders and assess their capacity to increase sales to avoid a plateau, we ask them all sorts of crazy questions. And we almost always ask some version of questions like:

• Who is your biggest competitor?
• How is what you do different from what they do?
• Who do you think has the advantage in the market?

These conversations vary depending on the business and industry, of course, but it usually boils down to this one statement:

“We’re just better than Competitor XYZ.”

We all want to believe that we do a better job than anyone else, that no one else can compare. And while confidence is an important part of succeeding in sales, it isn’t true.

A company’s success is largely based on its ability to articulate and execute why it is DIFFERENT and BETTER than the competition.

Being “better” than someone else won’t get you very far. It might just make you feel good in the short-term. And assuming that your competitor will never “catch up” to you is a dangerous game to play.

If you bring this down to the salesperson’s level, those that tend to succeed are skillful at catching their prospect’s attention. They offer information. They send a ‘thank you’ note. They think ahead. On the flip side, the average low-performing salesperson requests information and time from their prospect (rather than offering it), avoids sending a handwritten thank you note (because that would “take too long”), and thinks on the fly (rather than thinking ahead).

Successful salespeople seek to be different, not just ‘better’. Because being different makes them better (i.e. more successful) in the long run.

We were curious about how our fellow sales pros thought about differentiation at the salesperson’s level, so we asked a few experts this question:

“What is ONE way a salesperson can differentiate him or herself from their competition?”

It turns out, there are plenty of ways to be different. You just have to choose a few and test them out.

In no particular order, here’s what the experts had to say:

Mark Hunter: The Sales Hunter

“Ask shorter questions. Salespeople in general don’t ask enough questions and those that do ask ones that are far too complicated. The best questions are the short questions that follow up on a response the customer just shared. A few short questions I like include: Why? How come? Could you give me an example? Could you share with me more?”

Geoff Winthrop: Acquirent

“Be prepared, be sincere and ask great questions! Now more than ever prospects are inundated with sales calls, voicemails and emails. It is crucial that we constantly differentiate ourselves from all the noise. I have found that if I am prepared (i.e. knowing about the prospects business and the potential challenges they face), sincere (using the phrase “am I catching you at a good time” or “I know you aren’t expecting my call”) and ready with great relevant open ended questions that this has opened up a ton of opportunity that we would not have otherwise had.”

Jack Malcolm: Falcon Performance

“Ask smart questions. This actually requires two interrelated skills that are in short supply among salespeople: outside-in mentality and proper preparation. Outside-in is the approach that understands that the best way to get what you want is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and figure out how to help them get what they want. You need to prepare properly to ensure that you ask questions that get to the heart of their problems and opportunities; that’s the key to differentiation and the first step on the road to trust.”

Jim Keenan: A Sales Guy

“The greatest sales person differentiator is knowledge. The sales person who knows more about the industry they sell in, the business workflows, operations, the competition, government mandates, and the challenges of their customers wins! Sales is all about contextual knowledge, and those bad ass sales people with the greatest command of this contextual knowledge will be wearing the champions belt.”

Kelley Robertson: Fearless Selling

“The ONE way a salesperson can differentiate him or herself from their competitors is to ask high-value, thought-provoking questions that make prospects sit up and think. Most sales people THINK they do an effective job asking questions but the reality is that most fail to ask enough deep, probing questions to really learn what the prospect needs. By asking these types of questions you can climb into the mind of your prospect and find out what is really important to them, the challenges they face, the decision-making process and the motivators that will influence their buying decision.”

Dan Waldschmidt: Edgy Conversations

“High performing sales people heal broken situations rather than pitch, pander, or prospect.”

Tibor Shanto: Renbor Sales Solutions

“Focus on the buyers objectives, not their pain, not their needs, not on product fit, but their objectives; leave your product in the car. People love to talk about their objectives, and they will tell all kinds of things you otherwise would not hear. If they feel you can help them move towards or achieve their objectives, they will want to talk to you. But most sales people want to talk solution before they even know what, if anything, they are solving. Focus on objectives and impacts you can deliver to those.”

Dan McDade: Point Clear

“A good friend (and SVP of Sales) jokes about the public’s perception of sales people. He says “Enough about me, what do you think about me?”.

A sales rep can differentiate themselves by being genuinely interested in their prospect and their prospects needs and wants. As Stephen Covey said: “Seek first to understand and then be understood.”

Matt Heinz: Heinz Marketing

“One way to differentiate? Build, value and nurture relationships before you need them. This means not just prospects but peers, competitors, partners, past customers and more. Use the amazing tools we have around us now – CRM, social, content, drip marketing, contextual follow-up reminders, etc. – to exponentially scale your ability to foster and improve those relationships without having to take all day doing it.

Seriously, that’s it. Be the person who cares more before there’s anything specific in it for you. It takes time and commitment, and a daily discipline, but those who do it see a widening gap between themselves and their competitors.”

Nancy Bleeke: Sales Pro Insider

“Sales people can differentiate themselves by focusing everything – I mean everything – they do on the What’s in it for Them (WiifT) of the prospect or buyer. Preparing for the sales meeting with this WiifT focus is the beginning. During the sales conversation is where the biggest difference is made. Ditch your ‘pitch’ and make anything you say connected to or followed by the reason it is relevant to that person, situation, and company. It takes work to be focused on WiifT instead of you and your solution, which is why so few of your competitors will do it.”

Anthony Iannarino: The Sales Blog

“If I could choose only one way to differentiate myself as a salesperson it would be caring. I would love to put business acumen above caring, but there are plenty of smart people who don’t generate trust because they are self-oriented. I would love to put resourcefulness above caring, because helping your clients requires new ideas. But caring is what ensures your client that the new ideas are going to be implemented. I’d love to put determination above caring, because you aren’t going to succeed without a pigheaded determination. But you have to care enough to keep pursuing difficult outcomes.

See what I did here? I chose only one but I weaved in three more attributes. The one thing you can do to differentiate yourself is be the whole package.”

Paul Alves: AG Salesworks

“One way a salesperson can differentiate themselves from their competition is to focus on adding value in every interaction with a prospect. Ask questions and listen with a focus on helping the prospect solve a problem or reach a goal versus trying to sell them something so you can reach yours.”

Michael Boyette: Top Sales Dog

“A great way for salespeople to differentiate themselves is by NOT using such “typical salesperson” language as “Are you the person responsible for …” or “If I could show you a way to save 20%, would you be interested?” There’s fascinating research showing that when you use stock phrases like these, buyers don’t even hear what comes next. You could tell them their dog died and they’d say, “Sorry, not interested.” They’ve already pigeonholed you and made up their mind whether or not to continue the conversation (usually not). For more on the research, go here: http://rapidlearninginstitute.com/top-sales-dog/be-unexpected-salesperson.”

Jonathan Farrington: JF Blog It

“I believe that the one term, which sets top sales performers apart from the also-rans, is customer focus. Outstanding sales results depend on the ability to think from the customer’s point of view as well as understanding the customer’s agenda, buying cycle and best interests.

Beyond a superficial reading of immediate customer needs, salespeople must gain a deeper understanding of both the buyer’s long-term goals and the overall business climate. Certainly at the heart of customer focus is the art of listening constructively – the best salespeople are masters at capturing information.

Customer focus also means taking the customer seriously – today, the salesperson who clings to the product orientation of a decade ago is losing ground, because as client companies branch into new markets and unfamiliar territories, they are demanding unique, flexible solutions from their vendors – customized to support specific goals.”

Colleen Francis: Engage Selling

“Adding value at every interaction. Show up at a meeting with success stories, case studies or white papers that the client can learn from even if they don’t by form you. Publish (or reprint what your company publishes) high value videos, podcasts, research papers, articles or opinions in your market that position you as a thought leader not just as a “seller”. When buyers see you as an expert in the marketplace they seek you out. You are no longer an intrusive sales person but an expert that can add value to their business.”

“I use Tide. I’ve been using Tide for the last 40 years. I’ll use Tide to wash the outfit they bury me in.”

“Uh… Thanks Grammy.” I only made the comment that her clothes smelled nice, but her conviction made me realize something very important, “even if they’re on your site, that doesn’t mean they’re going to buy from you.”

Later on, I overheard my 18 year old sister say to a friend on the phone, “Oh My God, UGH, Do what you want, but I would never be caught dead, in clothes from The Gap.”

As I carried about my day, those two interactions lingered in my mind. Later that night, I came across a post titled “Why A/B Testing Isn’t Enough” by Jeff Lawrence, the CEO of Granify & it was this graph that brought everything sharply into focus:

Even though this graph isn’t very scientific, I think it’s safe to assume that it also reflects your situation.

If we’re being real, you will always have visitors who are never, ever, ever EVER going to buy from you. (competitors, window-gazers, people doing research, etc)

You should of course try to minimize the amount of the “wrong” people who visit your site by sharpening your traffic acquisition efforts & doing more advanced PPC like negative keyword targeting and geotargeting, and otherwise stop wasting money & efforts on traffic that doesn’t convert… but this still doesn’t solve the problem.

The Psychological Reasons Why People Aren’t Buying

Between this graph & the interactions with my family, I hit me that it’s not just pricing or persuasive design that influence a person’s desire to buy.

It’s a convenient thought to believe that changing a few graphics here, telling a better story there, and improving call to actions or microcopy will improve your bottom line.

I mean, obviously it can, but it’s only focusing on the top of the curve within the influence zone:

But what about the bottom part of the curve? This is the harder stuff.

These are the people who might be comparison shopping and looking for specific features that are harder for you to offer; like a better return policy, quality customer testimonials, or free shipping.

Even further down on that curve though, right as the traffic moves out of “will not buy” and into the “zone of influence”, there’s something even deeper & more sinister that prevents people from buying from you. These are what’s known as cognitive biases.

For my sister’s friend it was a combination of the Bandwagon effect, Illusory superiority and fear of losing her own Ingroup bias that ultimately prevented her from buying that pair of “really cute shorts.”

According to wikipedia a cognitive bias is :

“a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences about other people [products] and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.”

For my Grammy, this means eating a lighter meal just to afford Tide, if she’s tight for cash. For my sister, this might mean owning fewer outfits overall, but learning how to better mix up her outfits in order to stay within her social circle’s “recommended” brands.

For iPhone fanboys, this means choosing an inferior phone, and defending it, even when you’ve never used an proper Android product in your life. (Go ahead, set the comments ablaze, you’ll only prove my point ;-)

For your visitors, there’s likely a whole mess of cognitive biases that prevent them from picking you.

It’s only once you understand some of those biases that you can convert those who say they’re “never going to buy” from “ok, I’ll give you a chance.”

Understanding Your Competition’s Customer Biases

We’ve talked a lot about feedback loops & qualitative research a lot recently, but it has always been in relation to your customers & how they perceive you. While this is useful, it doesn’t give you a complete picture of how you are perceived in the overall market.

It’s especially important you understand how you’re perceived because it’s not uncommon that prospects & your competition’s customers believe you’re missing a feature or key benefit, when really you’ve had it all along.

For example, I once had a client that sold law office practice management software. When looking at the competitive landscape, I found there were only 3 or 4 direct competitors & a very small handful of periphery competitors that had a similar solutions (like calendars & contact management) but weren’t specifically designed for a law practice.

Sometimes your #1 Competitor is Google

When surveying the competition, their customers, and the market at large, I learned that most law offices wouldn’t even consider purchasing a practice management software unless they knew:

1. That it was being used by real lawyers
2. That the company who designed the software had experience working with real lawyers & could “handhold” when necessary

On a deeper level, it’s because they were having a hard time breaking out of the “Status Quo Bias” – where they found comfort things being the same – and in a way were actively seeking out the false consensus bias – where people tend to overestimate the amount of other people who think, feel & act the same way they do – this is also the underlying reason by things like social proof, testimonials & buyer personas can be so powerful.

I had also learned that many of the competition’s customers didn’t believe my client had either of these things because it wasn’t clear in the design, effectively meaning they were working against a major bias that prevented people from buying.

What they didn’t know was that my client had the largest customer base of all their competitors(over 250,000 users) and over 30 years experience.

Now, unfortunately, a new CEO came in right as we were getting ready to go live with the new changes & my designs were thrown out & research dismissed.

In the end, they decided not to highlight their 250,000 customers & decided to stick with stock photos of fake customers to keep with the more standard “professional” feel. In the end, the information about their customer base & experience looked more like this on the page:

However, it appears as though one of their major competitors was conducting similar research around the same time, because they ended up launching a redesign that looked like this.

Now, several studies show that when information is presented larger, the brain is wired to believe it is more important.

There’s also Ingroup Bias, which we touched on earlier, where people prefer to be around others who look, think & act like we do, while showing distrust for the “out-group.”

Looking at the competitor’s page, their “Thousands of Customers” is certainly more important than my former client’s 250,000 users, and the people they’re showing look more real, which from my own research, I know is important to lawyers who typically aren’t perceived very well.

While it’s impossible to know for sure if this has lead to more revenue, I can compare the current design to previous iterations using the wayback machine, and can see that they’ve have been hiring more positions, are opening a second office, and started holding their old conference as of last year, all of which are traditionally signs of growth.

Surveying Your Competition’s Customers

While you might not have access to your competitor’s customer database, there are more than a few methods you can use to find out what your competition’s customers think.

 1. Conduct A Direct Survey Using Facebook Ads

One major benefit of Facebook having over 1.2 billion users, is that many people have “liked” pages to form connections with the companies they do business with.

Fortunately for you, that “Like” also makes those connections a targeting parameter for a Facebook Ad.

By clicking on the “people” section on their actual Facebook page, you can get a little more insight as well.

Now, depending on your competitive landscape, and how “locked in” a customer might be, you might be better off partnering with a third party to collect the results.

For example, if MailChimp wanted to survey AWeber’s customers, they’d probably get more response if they partnered with the eMail Institute, than if they tried it on their own.

Designing The Survey For Your Competition’s Customers

When you’re designing the survey, you have to overcome your own Illusory Superiority bias, where you think you’re better than the competition & really just get at the heart of why people shop with your competitor.

Asking questions like…

1. What do you like the most about [Competitor]?
2. How does their [product/service] benefit you?
3. How would you describe their customer service?
4. How is their response time?
5. How do you feel about [your service]?
6. What would it take for you to switch?

…along with other Voice Of The Customer, type questions will help you to identify those customer needs, prioritize them into a hierarchical structure, prioritize those needs, and understand your competitor’s customer’s perception of their performance.

This paper published on MIT gives a great explanation and methodology for using a VOC survey to learn more about what’s important to movie theater customers.

From a competitive standpoint, ultimately your goals is to learn not only where your competitors are weakest, but also determine where on their customer’s radar you are.

In some cases, it may just be they’re not even aware you exist, in others, it might be they have a misperception or simply don’t have enough knowledge about your brand. Either way, this intelligence will help you move forward more strategically.

2. Surveying Competitor’s Customers In The “Wild”

You’ve probably already heard a lot about “spying” on your competitors using social media, but do you actually do it?

According to a 2010 survey by Marketing Sherpa, 72% of companies reported that competitive research & analysis presented a challenge to their landing page optimization efforts.

image source

In a 2013 study by Millward Brown & Compete, a similar trend was found, with competitive intelligence being dead last on the list of popular optimization tactics (even more surprising that A/B testing came in second though)

Realistically though, gathering competitive intelligence isn’t difficult at all. Here are a few things I do when snooping on a competitor.

1. Set up a Twitter search for all the @replies to their customer service account if they have one, or at their main account if they don’t, and monitor it on TweetDeck.

According to a study by Accenture, 66% of people will switch companies due to poor customer service.

@mrschicken Okay @comcastcares definitely wins that round. Holy crap that's a hard one to beat.

— Jan Dobson (@mytruself) July 10, 2014

2. Set up an alert using Mention that notifies me of any mentions (positive or negative) they might get across the internet.

3. If they have customer forums, sign up there & keep track of complaints or praises.

4. Check out the reviews & testimonials on the same or similar products.

The reason for doing this is in order to find where their customers are having an experience gap so you can:

• A.) Improve on in your own business or
• B.) Highlight your strengths where they’re weak to snipe customers from the competition

Another thing I like to do is get away from their branded channels and see what conversation is being had in “unmonitored” communities.

This is as simple as searching “[competitor name] intitle:forum” in Google to see not just what questions are being asked, but where these conversations are happening.

MarketingSherpa has a great article that goes into even more ways to gather competitive intelligence offline as well.

Crippling Your Competition At Their Weak Points

This is where spying on your competition & gathering competitive intelligence allows you to understand what their customers are saying & take advantage of the areas where they are weak.

For example, this post in the 3dcart forums exposes a few major weak points in the 3d Cart’s product design & customer service strategy.

If a competitive shopping cart solution were to run a campaign targeting 3d cart customers, highlighting how their cart

• Fixed the speed & customization problem
• Offered better customer support
• And offered migration services to make switching easy…

It’s not unreasonable to think they’d snatch away a portion of 3d Cart’s customers.

Looking at a more mainstream example of a company using customer feedback to pull ahead of a competitor, it was mostly real consumer feedback that fueled the infamous “Get A Mac” campaign which increased Apple’s market share growth by 42% in it’s first year of being live.

http:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZSBWbnmGrE

When it won the Grand Effie in 2007, jury chair John Butler said (emphasis mine):

“They managed to do it with humor, class, and honesty without falling into the trap of overtly negative competitive advertising”

This is perhaps the most important element when doing any kind of competitive testing in your campaigns. It’s not about brow-beating the competitor, but to do things tastefully in a way that doesn’t make you look like a jerk.

Groove does a very good job of this – probably because they found a good portion of their customers were switching from, or considering, Zendesk from the feedback loop they had for first time buyers.

If you don’t want to be as direct as to call your competitors out on your homepage, you can also highlight those major differences on comparison pages as well.

This is how Clicky does it:

And this is how SugarSync does it:

Vzaar takes an even more personal approach, by picking off it’s competitors one by one:

Conclusion – So Is Understanding The Biases & Doing The Research Worth The Effort?

Given the research from Marketing Sherpa & Millward Brown from earlier shows that competitive intelligence is pretty low on most marketer’s priority list, and that Accunture estimates there is approximately $5.9 trillion dollars in revenue globally from customers switching companies…

I’d say there’s a pretty big opportunity, if you’re willing to take the gloves off & get your hands dirty.

featured image from t-mobile’s switch carrier’s page

Everyone is on a journey.

Our job as businesses is to make the journey of our potential buyers better in some way.

We have to be THE preferred solution – the oasis in a desert of clutter that inspires them to action. This means becoming a distinctive business.

Failing to distinguish your business is to become extinct, at least according to notable author Tom Peters.

Take the Risk of Being Direct

When a business graciously says no, it instantly becomes distinctive.

Does your marketing not only address how your business can help, but what it will NOT do?

If your process is sound, your business knows which customers are right for it. The only thing left to do is to convey this in direct terms.

As we discussed last week, markets are lazy. This is why they respect process. It does the work of thinking for them.

When every other business is selling products, and your marketing explains why it is the right choice for a specific group, alignment is achieved with those buyers, because you:

1. Respect their intelligence
2. Acknowledge their expectations (worldview).

Prepare to Make Strong Moves

Saying yes to the right customers necessarily involves saying no to others.

For example, like my business, yours may serve small businesses, but specifically which ones? They need to know.

The power of saying no helps a business achieve clarity within. When this happens, it gets progressively better at serving and attracting the right customers.

When a business makes strong moves the market responds with equal force, whether that is yes or no. Isn’t that what you really want?

There are a number of distinctive figures in our society that are quite successful. Their fans admire and support them; and the haters reject them with equal vigor.

This is how the game works, and it’s no different for your business or mine.

Be distinct or become extinct. It is a choice that involves risk, and making strong moves that must also be reflected in your marketing.

A New Design Resource

I’m excited to announce that my podcast is nearly ready to launch next week if everything falls into place. We did indeed discover a cool resource along the way that I’d like to share, but first a little about the show.

The name of the show is: This Old New Business Podcast

It’s a weekly podcast featuring sales and marketing experts sharing how businesses are making their old growth practices new again by successfully adapting to a digital, social, and global environment. We have completed 7 interviews already, with the first few ready to roll out!

Now for the design resource.

Our logo was designed from the beginning to stand out among many others in the iTunes podcast marketplace. Yet, we decided to make some late changes to ensure that. That’s when we discovered Swiftly, which we used to change the background and font colors, while also making sure its specifications met iTunes strict standards.

As the name implies, Swiftly is fast. They completed my task within an hour of its submission, and the results were exactly to my instructions. The standard cost for any task that can be completed in less than an hour is $19.

Pass it along.

Parking can stir intense passions, especially in San Francisco, where demand for public spaces often exceeds supply. Hence the outcry over apps that let occupants of slots on streets make money by alerting other drivers that they are about to drive away.

As we went to press, one of the apps, MonkeyParking, was seeking an understanding with San Francisco's city attorney, Dennis Herrera, who had given it until July 11th to cease operating on the city's streets or face a lawsuit. Another app, ParkModo, which also attracted Mr Herrera's attention, is not currently operating in San Francisco, though it says it intends to roll out nationwide in future.

At the heart of the dispute over these services is whether apps should be able to use a public asset to make a profit.

Users of MonkeyParking's service bid between $5 and $20 for spaces about to be liberated by other users.

The firm has also launched the app in Rome, another city where parking is scarce.

San Francisco's authorities point to a local law banning efforts to sell or rent public parking spaces. The app firms say it is not spaces that are being sold, just information about their availability, which thus reduces the number of cars circling the streets searching for them.

MonkeyParking wants its app to be seen as part of the "sharing economy", like those of Airbnb, which lets people rent rooms or houses to others, and Lyft, a ride-sharing service. These also help maximise the use of existing assets. The difference, however, is that the homes and cars are privately owned. Jeremiah Owyang of Crowd Companies, which advises firms on the sharing economy, thinks apps that monetise public assets are "not in the spirit" of the sharing movement.

Even trying to monetise private assets is proving controversial in some cases. Another outfit in San Francisco, ReservationHop, has come under fire for making fake bookings at hard-to-get-into restaurants and then selling them via an app. Buyers are given the false names to use when they turn up to dine. The worry here is that restaurants could lose out if no one buys the fake reservations. Ticket Scalpr is an app incarnation of the age-old business of reselling tickets for popular events, though it says its aim is to cut out conventional touts and let fans swap surplus tickets directly.

There has been a heated debate on Twitter about such arguably antisocial networks, using a new hashtag, #JerkTech. What the apps seen so far have in common is that their creators have identified things that are regularly being priced below their market-clearing level, ie, that at which demand equals supply. And, in Silicon Valley's spirit of "move fast and break things", they are conducting a rapid test of the public's, and regulators', appetite for shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable business practice. Uber, a taxi-hailing app which has no doubt been called a jerk and worse over the "surge pricing" it imposes at times of high demand, agreed this week with New York's attorney-general that it would curb its peak rates.

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Smart marketers know that Pinterest is a valuable social media channel. In fact, one study found that Pinterest drives more traffic to media websites than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Google+ combined.

The referral traffic opportunity from Pinterest is massive. But many companies are unclear about how and whether to develop a Pinterest-meets-conversion strategy. This blog post will explore ways to drive traffic to your site from Pinterest.

Step 1: Really Know Your Audience

As a visually-driven platform, Pinterest has become a highly engaging tool for people to curate their favorite images. Given that the majority of engaged Pinterest users are women, businesses have a tendency to stereotype the platform as one that is valuable for food, DIY, fashion, and home decor brands only.

Yes it’s true — lifestyle brands are a perfect fit for this platform. But there is more to the story, as Pinterest users are complex. The same folks who enjoy pinning images of office fashion are also reading up on entrepreneurship and career tips.

Entrepreneur Magazine is one example company that generates consistent engagement on Pinterest, and they do it with business content for males and females. Their secret to success is no secret at all — it’s highly engaging, inspirational visuals.

Know your audience beyond the general Pinterest statistics. If you’re not sure about whether Pinterest is the right marketing channel for you, just talk to your customers. Put up a Qualaroo survery up on your site and ask if people are using Pinterest. Or better yet, add “Pin it” buttons to your content pages and track clicks on them. If you find they are Pinning, next look at what types of content they’re engaging with on your boards. The answers to these questions will provide crucial direction to your Pinterest-meets-CRO strategy.

Enable Rich Pins to show price information on your pins.

Step 2: Inspire a ‘Buying Mindset’

People love Pinterest because they can curate their favorite products all in one place. As you can imagine, this shopping-focused mindset is invaluable for purchase conversions. Use Pinterest’s brand-friendly features to connect the dots.

Try discounting items on Pinterest every once in a while. Pinners will be alerted when prices change.

Use ‘Rich Pins’ to add extra details about the images you’re pinning. This feature will make your content more engaging by encouraging your audience to connect with your brand in a more interactive way. Product pins, for instance, include real-time information about pricing and details about where people can buy the items that they’re pinning.

Once you’ve enabled Rich Pins for your products, try dropping your prices every once in a while, as Pinterest alerts its users when the items they’re curating drop in price. This feedback loop can help drive conversions by reminding your audiences about the products that they love — it’s a way for brands to stay continuously engaged with their buyers.

Step 3: Include a Call-to-Action on Your Pins

Give pinners the option to Pin It, Like, Visit Site, Send, or Share by activating these buttons on your pin boards.

Audiences won’t read your mind. If you want people to take advantage of a sale, share your content, or visit your website, tell them. A little guidance will help connect the dots between your audience and your company’s marketing goals.

For inspiration, take a look at Urban Outfitters’ collection of pins. Every image is ‘brand friendly’ with the option to share content via likes and re-pins — or to visit the product page directly.

UO is streamlining the path to checkout by adding Pin It, Like, Visit Site, Send, and Share buttons on their pin boards. (Also check out our list of test ideas for the checkout funnel on urbanoutfitters.com.) Make sure that your profile is optimized so that each of your pins include these features. If pinning is important to your business then also be sure to give your shoppers the option to pin from your product pages. Then, Pinterest becomes a feedback loop of new customers and revenue for your business: from your site to Pinterest back to your site.

Add “Pin it” buttons to your product pages if pinning is important to your business.

Final Thoughts

Remember that web traffic is only part of the marketing equation. In addition to optimizing your Pinterest profile, you’ll also need to make sure that your website landing pages are tailored to this web traffic stream — but we’ll explain this topic in part 2 of this blog post. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, share your thoughts in the comments section below. What are your favorite CRO strategies for Pinterest?

Our last few posts have discussed the science of sales enablement for sales reps, outlining and introducing the main variables involved: sales planning, preparing and engaging. So far, we’ve broken out the first two elements of that planning variable: visibility and analysis. Now, onto the third and final one: sales prioritization.

Sales planning: visibility, analysis and PRIORITIZATION.

Opportunity prioritization is a big-time determinant of a sales team or rep’s success. It means knowing how to most efficiently invest their time: which opportunities to go after, where the best prospects are, how far to keep it up and when to move on.

Experience definitely plays a role, but it’s the excellent informational foundation, plus clear visibility and concentrated analysis, that drives sales prioritization fit for winning sales enablement.

1. Sales reps who struggle to prioritize opportunities and workloads usually suffer from the same issue: lack of informed insight (visibility) into the sales pipeline.
2. Without visibility, strategic assessment (analysis) is close to impossible.
3. Without analysis, pipeline management is definitely impossible.
4. Without proper pipeline and lead management, sales productivity (both efficiency and effectiveness) plummets.
5. Valuable opportunities slip through the cracks, overlooked and underwhelmed by the sales team.

While sales analysis requires the analytical eye, account prioritization calls on the organized mind – and not every team is given the potential for structured sales strategy.

• “Companies whose account prioritization exceeds expectations have 11% higher win rates than companies whose account prioritization needs improvement.”
  2013_Forum Proper Prioritization – Optimizing Revenue In 2013
  
• “45% of sales reps report needing help figuring out which accounts to prioritize.”
  Sales Performance Optimization Study via CSO Insights
  
• “48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect;
• 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop;
• 12% of sales people only make three contacts and stop;
• only 10% of sales people make more than three contacts.”
• AND YET, “80% of sales are made on the 5th-12th contact.”
  National Sales Executive Association

Prioritization is the key to getting more out of less, and in today’s market, that’s the key to sales success.

When planning the sales strategy, prioritization matters.

Here’s how a Sales Enablement Platform paves the way for account prioritization in the planning stage:

Activities, prioritized with intellect.

• Notifications and opportunity scoring/ranking help sales reps invest their time in the smartest way possible.
• Meaningful follow-up insight with recommended resources and coaching tips is just a click, swipe or tap away.

Opportunities, assessed for urgency.

• See which opportunities are due for follow-up, so important ones never get lost in the shuffle.
• Spend less time reanalyzing opportunities to decide which need follow-up actions to be taken.

Opportunities, scored for strength.

• Calculate opportunity strength using specialized algorithms and variables for deal size, urgency and fit.
• Prioritize follow-up activities according to this data.

Top opportunities, kept on track.

• Easily track red-hot and important opportunities, evaluated according to a handful of critical analytics.
• Keep those VIP opportunities top of mind and in front of eyes with immediate awareness of all related buyer behavior and engagement analytics.

Critical moments, seized with ease.

• Capitalize on real-time tracking and respond quickly with meaningful follow-up when buyers perform key actions, e.g., downloading a whitepaper or asking a question in the buyer/sales portal.
• Get easy access to buying rooms, recommendations and opportunity health to know which steps to take next.

This marks the end of our sales planning articles.
Visibility, check.
Analysis, check.
Prioritization, check.

Next up in the sales enablement formula is the preparation variable.
Stay tuned for a breakdown of the first element in sales preparation: RESOURCES.

Do you have a proven process for insuring that your relationships with prospects are continually moving forward in a manner that is purposeful and leads to the natural culmination of the process? In other words, are you and your prospect always on the same page, consciously and constantly moving forward to a purchase decision? Or do you, as most sellers do, approach the sales relationship process haphazardly without knowing where the relationship is going—and often not knowing where it should go?

Rather than shooting from the hip, making follow-up calls to prospects without having an idea of how or why to make the call, you can turn the sales follow-up process into an organized and logical progression that makes the sales process comfortable and valuable for both your prospect and yourself.

Unless you are engaged in a one-time close sale, you know going into the initial meeting with a prospect that your sales cycle will require you to maintain contact with them over an extended period of time before the sale is consummated, whether that be a week, a month, or a year.  Since you know you will have to follow-up with additional information, more meetings, a proposal, a committee presentation, and/or a formal needs analysis, you should be fully prepared to carry the relationship forward, knowing exactly what your next move will be before you ever enter the initial meeting with the prospect.

After only a short exposure to meetings with prospects you have seen virtually all of the variances your meetings can take, from the prospect that shows a great deal of interest, to those who show no interest at all, and everything in-between.  Once exposed, you have no reason not to be fully prepared to take control of the situation when exposed to that type of prospect again.

Since you will see the same basic situations over and over again with your prospects, you should know exactly what the next step in your process will be before you wrap up the initial meeting with your prospect.  Instead of going back to your office and wondering what to do next, you should have already agreed with your prospect on the next step to take, whether that be another meeting, sending follow-up information, or simply putting the prospect on your long-term touch program—or removing the prospect altogether because they really are not a prospect.

Think of the sale as a staircase with a number of alternate stairways branching off of the main staircase.   If you are familiar with the drawings of E.M. Escher, think of his etchings of stairways where there are myriad branches but all stairways eventually lead to the same location.  That’s your sales stairway with all of the branches eventually leading to your central location-the sale.  Some stairways are short and direct, others take a very circuitous route.

Your job is to have planned each route and to know exactly what you must do to guide your prospect through the stairway he or she has chosen.  To do that you must have a well defined plan, knowing exactly what your moves will be well ahead of time.

The first step in your staircase is, of course, setting the initial appointment.  That step naturally leads to your second step-the appointment itself.  Unfortunately, that is where the staircase ends for many salespeople, not knowing what the next step for any particular prospect should be.  Don’t allow yourself to ever be put in that position.

Just as the first step-setting the appointment-lead naturally to the second, your second step should lead naturally to your third step, and so on throughout the sales process.  What your third step is will depend on what transpired during the initial appointment since your prospect may choose one of several staircases to climb.

For most of us, the initial appointment serves numerous purposes, one of which is qualifying the prospect.  In fact, for many, the appointment isn’t with a prospect at all, but is rather with a suspect–someone we think, or maybe just hope, might be a prospect.  During the initial meeting one of your primary jobs is to determine if the suspect is a prospect, and if they are, what type of prospect–short-term or longer-term.  Your staircase will branch off in different directions depending on whether you determine the suspect is not a prospect at all, is a short-term prospect, or a long-term prospect.

If you determine your suspect is not a prospect, your staircase ends with this meeting.  There is no need to pursue them further.

If you determine your prospect is a short-term prospect, your staircase will continue, but you’ll have to decide during the meeting which branch of the staircase to lead your prospect–are you going to set another meeting, present a proposal, send or deliver additional information, or is another move appropriate?

The key to building your staircase and your relationship is to have your prospect agree on the next move before the end of the meeting, and in order to do that you must know both what the logical next move for the particular prospect is and where that move is going to lead in the sales process.  Never leave a meeting without agreeing on what will happen next and when it will happen:

• Are you going to research an issue for the prospect?  If so, when will you deliver the results of your research and how will you deliver them-in person, via an email, or will you send them via the mail?   Once delivered, what is the next logical step to have your prospect agree to?
• Will there be a second meeting?  Set a date and time and a specific goal for the meeting before you leave the initial meeting.
• Are you going to get the prospect additional information or data?  If so, agree with your prospect when and how the information will be delivered and the anticipated results of supplying the information, as well as what the next step after the information has been delivered should be.

The key to building your stairway and leading the prospect to the sale is to always have your next step built before you finish the step you are on.  If you are to deliver information, know exactly what information to deliver, how you will deliver it and agree on what will happen once the information is in your prospect’s hand.  If your are setting a meeting, agree on the time and date, the goals for the meeting and the next step to be taken after the meeting.

Don’t rely on chance, luck, or happenstance–plan your moves well in advance and gain your prospect’s agreement and commitment.

Planning your moves is not difficult.  If you are meeting with a short-term prospect you know what the likely next moves will be, in fact, there are probably only a handful of possible moves.  For some prospects the next move will be another meeting, for others additional information, for others possibly a demonstration or a proposal.  Since you know what to anticipate, have a clearly defined plan of action for each eventuality.

Build the third step in your staircase the same way.  During the second meeting you gain your prospect’s agreement on what should take place next and then set a specific time and date for that step along with specific goals for that step.  When delivering the agreed upon research, agree with your client on the next step and again set a specific time and date and goals for the next step in the process.

By continually gaining agreement from your prospect to the next step in the process, you keep your prospect engaged, you continually monitor the prospect’s level of interest, and you prevent yourself from falling into the awkward situation of wondering how to re-engage your prospect.  Never leave a meeting or finish a conversation with your prospect without knowing what will happen next, when it will happen, and what the anticipated results of the step will be.

If you find you are working with a long-term prospect, you build a staircase that, like an Escher staircase, takes a longer, less direct route to the sale, but just as with a short-term prospect, you guide the prospect along a stairway that you know leads to the purchase decision.  Your steps may have longer intervals and may entail less direct interaction, but they must still be agreed upon by your prospect.  These steps may include your monthly or quarterly newsletter, scheduled phone calls at a specific future date, or even calls based on specific future events such as the release of a new product or the passing of a specific threshold such as the beginning of a new quarter.

Prior to your next appointment with a prospect or suspect, create your staircase and map out a logical route to the sale for each scenario you are likely to encounter.  Although you’ll have stairways branching off from your main staircase, you’ll probably have no more than a handful of branches for short-term prospects and probably no more than two or three for your long-term prospects.

Lay out on paper each logical step for each branch and then plan how you will lead your prospect to agreeing to each step along the way.  Although many salespeople believe writing out scripts is fake and insincere, be aware that you will eventually create an effective-or ineffective–script that you’ll use over and over to introduce and seek agreement from your prospect to the next step to be taken.  You can either leave the creation of your script to the spur of the moment as you are standing in front of your client, or you can take the time and care to do it while you can carefully think through the best way to introduce the next step and gain your client’s agreement.  Either way, you’ll eventually end up with a script you’ll use over and over.

You don’t have to be like the majority of salespeople who struggle to keep in touch with their prospects and move them along the sales process.  Instead of worrying about what to say, when to contact a prospect, or how to get your prospect to move along the process, simply build the next step while you’re with your prospect.  Not only will it give you more confidence since you know you’re in control, you’ll close more sales and close them faster-and that’s a good move.

Your marketing team may have created a library of valuable content to inform, engage and convert potential customers—a regularly updated blog, case studies, white papers, tip sheets, product web pages and more. But is all your hard work collecting dust?

Creating marketing assets is only half the battle. In addition to a content distribution strategy of your own, your content marketing’s ROI can be amplified by tapping into some of your organization’s most active players: the sales team.

Here are some tips on creating closer alignment between marketing and sales, by encouraging sales to become content champions.

Communicate and educate.

What may look like sales representative apathy might actually be a case of unfamiliarity. Beef up your internal communications so sales knows what content you offer, and how you can help:

• Sales stand-up meetings: Gather the sales team for weekly or monthly stand-up meetings. Fill them in on the marketing campaigns you’re running and introduce new assets you’ve created. Talk about and demonstrate how featured content can work to sales’ advantage. Report on content performance, such as white paper downloads or top viewed blog posts.
• Newsletters: An internal newsletter is another great way to keep sales in the loop. Link to new pieces of content, revisit older pieces relevant to an upcoming trade show or topic and remind everyone that your evergreen content is almost always ripe for picking. Scoop.it has recently seen a rise in popularity, but a plethora of services exist to streamline the bookmarking and sharing of online content.
• Training: If your sales team is more traditional, some training may be beneficial. Explaining the impact of content on the buyer journey and discussing the advent of inbound marketing and inbound selling will go far in gaining respect and credibility.

The bottom line: Commit to partnering with the sales team. Keep the lines of communication—and content—open.

Make content distribution easy.

Your sales team is busy selling. So don’t ask them to be part-time marketers, too. Make it easy for sales reps to understand and share the content in their artillery.

• Sales cliff notes: Create a sales cliff notes sheet for all content created by marketing. Include the title, a brief description, content type, link or file path, target buyer persona and stage(s) in the sales process when it should be used. Then make it visually appealing, so it stands out on cluttered desktops and corkboards.
• Sample emails and social shares: When you publish new content, send it to the sales team along with examples of email copy or social media posts to help promote it.

The bottom line: Incorporating marketing content into the sales process may not come naturally to some. Help sales know when and how to share content with leads.

Help each other succeed.

Though it may not always seem like it, marketing and sales are both striving for the same thing: bottom-line impact. Find ways to complement one another to achieve perfect harmony.

• Implement marketing automation: Marketing automation software has huge potential to maximize content ROI. Use it to nurture leads, prioritize sales efforts, monitor engagement and recapture lost sales. Once they start to see a return, your sales team will thank you.
• Help sales answer leads’ FAQs: Sales representatives answering the same questions over and over? Ask them to BCC you when responding to a commonly asked question or request, then harvest ideas for blog posts, web content and more- a win-win for everyone. (Note: This idea courtesy of Ardath Albee (@ardath421) at Content Marketing World 2013.)

The bottom line: Help sales win, and they’ll be your biggest fans.

An evolution in the buyer journey has caused a fundamental power shift in the direction of the consumer. The sales team’s role is changing. By positioning your marketing team as sales’ ally, you’ll win some new champions and find the legs your content needs to succeed.

How do you market your marketing internally?

If your branded online community is like most others out there, the majority of your members probably don’t check it every day. Unlike their public social network accounts that they check multiple times a day, your branded online customer or member community is more likely to be a place they visit with intention. They sign in to ask a question in the discussion forum, read a new blog post from your CEO, check out a new how-to video, or follow up on an offer. That’s where the importance of email comes in.

The Role of Email in Private Online Community Engagement

Email is a big part of creating an online community that consistently keeps customers or members engaged. Your target audience is full of very busy people. By sending both manual campaigns and automated emails with updated information, newsletters, and invitations for specific actions, you can stay top-of-mind and encourage community members to come back to the community to get value.

Email is a vital part of your community management plan. That is why you’ll find sophisticated email marketing systems built-in most business-class online community software platforms.

Unfortunately, not just any old email will do. Your members likely get dozens of emails a day, so your email communication needs to stand out from the pack. You put a lot of effort into creating value for your target audience in your online community, so you don’t want to leave “conversion opportunities” on the table.

Better Subject Lines Leads to Higher Online Community Engagement

The emails you send only have value to your members if they actually get opened and subject lines are the primary driver behind which emails get opened. Emailing for the sake of emailing from your online community isn’t going to get you the results you seek—you still have to follow best practices just like you would for any other email marketing campaign.

Subject lines are a crucial element for getting recipients to open emails and click through. A well-crafted subject line can make a big difference in online community engagement, whether it’s coming from a manually sent message or an automated notification.

By following these best practices for creating great subject lines, you can increase engagement within your community by sending emails from your online community software platform.

6 Best Practices for Creating Great Email Subject Lines

Tip #1) Keep It Short

Your subject lines should be brief and to the point so they can instantly catch your community members’ attention without overburdening them with information. Email software provider, MailChimp, found that the ideal length for an email subject line was less than 50 characters. While you don’t necessarily need to count every apostrophe and space in your subject line, you should take care to keep it brief, but informative.

Tip #2) Avoid Certain Words

Depending on the wording of your subject lines, your members might have an adverse reaction that makes them less likely to open your email. According to the same MailChimp study, three seemingly innocent words correlated with lower open rates: “Help,” “Percent Off,” and “Reminder.” Of course, then there are the age-old trouble words like “Free” that tend to alert spam filters.

Tip #3) Balance Consistency With Changing It Up

This is especially important when it comes to the subject lines of newsletters. While, on one hand, you want the subject lines of your newsletters to be recognizable when they arrive in your members’ inboxes, you still want to engage their interest.

Try combining the established branding of your newsletter with varying subject lines that include enticing information about what the newsletter contains. For instance, if there’s a feature article or upcoming event, include that in the subject line after the name of your newsletter. This keeps your customers or members from eventually not opening your emails as a result of getting desensitized to the same old newsletter emails.

Tip #4) Balance Promotional With Educational

As a hard and fast rule, your members are not going to be as interested in promotional emails as they are in emails that are useful to them. Do your best to limit the number of promotional subject lines and instead draw your members into your community with timely subject lines that speak to their needs.

If you do need to send a few promotional emails, tone down the splashy language typically used in promotional subject lines and just keep it straightforward and to the point. People can smell a sales/marketing email from a mile away!

Tip #5) Make Value Specific and Concrete

Along with being very busy, your members aren’t mind readers. Being deliberately vague about the value behind your email offer will only cause them to lose trust and interest. Instead, reference what they’ll get specifically in your subject line so they’ll know that it’s something relevant to them that they want to open.

Each email’s subject line is a promise to the recipient as to the value they will find when the open it. If your subject line is unclear, your members are more likely to ignore or delete the email altogether than click for clarity.

Tip #6) Use Targeted Subject Lines When Possible

MailChimp found that personalized subject lines with users’ names didn’t significantly affect open rates, but targeting by location did. This isn’t too surprising considering most recipients are probably used to spam emails targeting them by name, leading to that level of personalization losing its effect. However, narrowing by location targets your members in a specific way that won’t leave them suspicious.

Keep in mind that location is only one of many options for anchoring an email subject line to something that is familiar to your target audience. Other options include member/customer type, company size, product usage, event attendance, and role in the organization.

Bonus Tip:

Consider what goes in the “from” line of your emails. Having an actual name—rather than a company or business—in the sender spot leads to more opens. Your members are more likely to initial trust the name of a specific person as an email worth opening because it seems more personalized.

Emails From Your Online Community Software: Subject Lines Takeaway

Keep in mind that these tips aren’t hard and fast for every audience. Test and use what works best for your branded online community based on the results you see. Send enough emails to be able to collect data on your open rates and leverage that data to define the choices you make.

You might find that your particular audience responds really well to longer, more informative subject lines—but you won’t know for sure unless you test and analyze the data to inform that choice. While these best practices are certainly a good place to start, don’t be afraid to break the mold if you find out your community members respond in a different way.

Over the last decade, Facebook has become the dominant online social network, with everyone from teens to grandparents participating. They share updates and photos, join groups and spend significant time on the network interacting.

With users being so active and with every major buying demographic on, Facebook is an excellent marketplace for personalities to reach their audience, especially personalities with something to sell – like authors! It’s a perfect place to connect with current fans, build new supporters and an inexpensive or even free way to boost sales.

4 Facebook Strategies for Authors

• Share Your Story

Creating an “author” Facebook Page separate from your personal account can keep your literary world apart from your “regular” Facebook profile. This is a first and most basic business move to help yourself as an author.

Your author/book page, which can be accessible by anyone, includes more biographical information like your background, published items and where the book can be found online. It can even include your upcoming book signing events.

Top selling fiction author Sidney Sheldon’s page, for instance, offers pictures and links to his newer books and series plus different places to find him online.

By sharing about your journey to writing and the background on the book interspersed with personal commentary and why the book was important to you, an author can build connection with their fans. The personal stories and history emotionally connect with your audience and can mean the difference between your book and another in the same genre.

This lets interested visitors go right to your official page. Plus, personal pages only allow 5,000 friends, but there’s no limit to author pages.

• Grow Community with Active Content

Facebook is NOT a “If you build it, they will come” once and done tool!

You must be committed to being active and regularly sharing on your Page!

Because of Facebook’s algorithm, the more you post, the more you’ll start showing up on the streams of your fan’s pages. Likewise, if you only post once or twice a month, you’re far less likely to be seen unless people check your page occasionally on their own. The great posting masters at PostPlanner note that far too often pages post LESS than is helpful for their community.

By posting regularly, like 3-6x per day, a author can increase the conversation opportunities and by doing this they increase the potential to reach friends of those engaging, a win-win scenario!

Here’s 8 great tips on Facebook posting strategy from the guys at PostPlanner to consider.

• Crowdsource to Grow Engaged Connections

Another great way to build loyalty and a stronger bond with your fans is to crowdsource your needs. This is great because it gets your community involved!

For example, posting possible book covers and having fans give feedback on the colors and style is an awesome and inviting way to crowdsource valuable feedback and also to gain the ownership of your community. If they have had the chance to give input and be heard, (particularly if you respond to comments on the post!) then there is more awareness and readiness for them to purchase when the book comes out.

Crowdsource ideas: Book covers, titles, Signing locations, launch ideas

• Drive Leads to Apps & Convert more Sales

Along with promoting yourself as an expert in writing, you also want to get your fan base excited about your current and next projects, so it can be a great ongoing story to chronicle the whole literary process from early drafts to where they can buy the finished product.

Maybe offer opportunities for your fans to read a sneak peek of a chapter prior to publication, or maybe even a chance to win a signed copy. Editionguard, designed for e-book publishers, suggests putting up photos as well, but also blending “here’s my book – buy it!” posts with less promotional posts.

Here’s a example of a author that offers a sales page for current and coming books on her Facebook page.

Simple apps like TabSite offer ability to create these landing pages for Facebook and the web.

That’s a wrap on 4 tips for how authors can use Facebook to grow their marketing. Use these Facebook marketing strategies to take your marketing to the next level. The ideas could help you attract more followers & stay engaged with your fans to ultimately help you sell more copies of your book.

Now it’s your turn…

Any questions or ideas you would add to this list?

Time to Declare Independence and Take Control!

When we review our B2B demand generation campaigns, it is common to have a ready list of factors to blame for non-performance or under-performance.

• Frequent changes in Google’s algorithms
• Pay to play models in social media channels such as Facebook
• All-encompassing policies like the one set by LinkedIn preventing good comments / discussions from being heard
• Legacy software that clings on, thus reducing efficiency and effectiveness of updated programs
• Sales teams that demand continuous generation of new content
• Marketing teams that simply cannot keep pace and end up regurgitating stale content
• And so on…

Finger-pointing is just human nature. We blame everyone and everything that we possibly can. But are we as a breed of B2B marketers becoming slaves to these factors? In my opinion, that certainly seems to be the case. So my question to all you marketers out there is—who is ultimately driving your demand generation campaigns? The social networks? The technology platforms? Google? Or YOU?

This is a call to arms to B2B demand generation experts. Let us, collectively, declare our independence from slavery and become true masters of our marketing initiatives, lead generation and customer experience management.

REMEMBER! 10 Tips to Maximize Your B2B Demand Generation Effectiveness

1. Diversify. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Integrate online and offline, inbound and outbound, branded and non-branded marketing activities to create impactful, results-driven lead generation.

2. Create your own platform. Why rely on existing platforms alone when you can build your own that is customized to your audience’s needs and delivers to your business goals?

3. Invest time and effort to engage your audience. Read 6 Ways to Simplify and Grow Customer Engagement.

4. Go multi-channel. Develop relationships with your target audience across a variety of platforms.

5. Use the email workhorse. It’s tried and true and still rakes up significant, measurable results in comparison with many other newer marketing tools.

6. Bank on REAL relationships. Draw referral traffic from existing relationships with real people and organizations. This way you won’t have to depend solely on the search engines to send you new leads.

7. Break free from the clutches of paid advertising. Free yourself from being dependent on paid forms of marketing and advertising such as PPC. Make sure you are driving people to your email list which you care for like a treasure; remember to nurture it constantly.

8. Listen! Your customers are talking. Make a concerted effort to listen to your customers 24/7. That is the only way to really understand their pains, their needs and their genuine concerns. They may not share feedback with your company directly but there are several ways that you can pick up both positive and negative signals and act upon them proactively.

9. Go above and beyond. You can never put a ceiling on the value you offer your audience with relevant, unique and useful content. Why stop at matching competitor activity levels or meeting audience expectations? Go beyond and it will pay off. Read 10 Ways to Simplify B2B Content Marketing.

10. Stand out and speak up. Don’t just follow what everyone else is doing, churning out content that is the same old, same old. Don’t be afraid to be authentic and different. Speak in your own distinct voice, show your personality, spread your message with confidence.

People look at me aghast when I say it really is simple to take control of your B2B demand generation. Simple does not mean easy. It just means following a proven process, having the right toolkit, equipping your team with appropriate technologies and using realistic, meaningful measurement metrics. I would love to hear your thoughts. 

Image credit: Shutterstock

Attracting qualified traffic to your website is only the first step in a successful online marketing program. The next step is to convert unknown visitors into leads through effective lead generation strategies that prompt them to take action.

One of the primary goals of online marketing for B2B firms is to generate leads and new business, but it takes more than simply having a website and attracting visitors. Here are several key components a company needs to have in place to make online lead generation happen.

Premium Offers

A premium offer in the context of online lead generation is a piece of content that has enough perceived value that a visitor is willing to give some personal information in exchange for it.

Examples of premium content offers include:

• Whitepapers
• eBooks/guides
• Research reports
• Product demos
• Webinars
• Free evaluations/consultations

To keep your offers fresh and the leads coming in, you should invest time and resources developing at least one new piece of premium content every one to three months.

Landing Pages

As we previously discussed, landing pages are an essential part of an online marketing program. Landing pages are website pages with only one purpose: lead generation. Creating an optimized landing page specifically for each premium content offer allows you to more effectively convert website visitors into leads by promoting the benefits of the offer, simplifying the offer process and eliminating distractions. The design of a landing page is critical because it allows visitors to quickly understand what they’re downloading or registering for and how it will be valuable to them.

Lead Capture Forms

Landing pages designed for lead generation contains lead capture forms that “capture” contact information from a visitor in exchange for an offer. They’re a critical piece of the lead generation process as it gives a way for an unknown visitor, with some presumed level of interest in your company or product, to essentially “raise their hand” and make them known to your marketing or sales team. Once they become known leads, you can begin a process to nurture the relationship through a digital lead management process.

Also, marketing automation tools such as Act-On, Hubspot and Marketo can generate real-time lead intelligence from individual leads visiting your website so that marketing and sales can know exactly what leads come to your website, what web pages they are looking at, what content they are interacting with and what brought them there, using just a tiny snippet of code similar to that of Google Analytics.

Calls-to-Action

What good are premium offers and landing pages if no one knows you have them? Premium offers should be featured on custom landing pages and promoted in multiple places on your website, blog, emails, etc. using engaging calls-to-action (CTAs). A CTA is text, an image, banner or button that uses persuasive, action-oriented words to link visitors directly to a landing page. They should be designed in such a convincing way that visitors are compelled to click on it.

An effective CTA will get visitors to your landing page and an effective landing page will contain a lead capture form with a CTA button that jumps off the page with action-oriented text as well. Instead of “Submit,” an effective form CTA button will say something more benefit oriented, such as “Download eBook Now,” “Register Now,” or “Get Your Free Report.”

Many websites were never designed with a lead generation strategy in mind and serve as nothing more than an online collection of marketing collateral. So if your website isn’t fully optimized for lead generation with premium offers, compelling calls-to-action and landing pages that convert, you’re website isn’t serving it’s purpose and your online marketing program is not going to be as effective as it needs to be.

We tend to talk about social networks in terms of their size, because audience reach is one of social media’s biggest advantages.

But as audiences adopt newer social networks, and people’s social activity becomes increasingly fragmented, other measures of social network activity become more important, especially for businesses trying to determine where to best allocate time and resources.

How much time users spend on each social network and how engaged and interactive they are with content there are increasingly important ways of evaluating the sites.

In a recent report, BI Intelligence calculates an Engagement Index for top major social networks and compares their performance in terms of time-spend terms per-user, on desktop and mobile. We also look at how the different top activities on social media — photo-sharing, status updates, etc. — are indexing in terms of activity, and which sites drive the highest volume in each category. This report complements our popular reports on social media demographics and global audience sizes. 

Access The Full Reports And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here are our findings: 

• Social is now the top internet activity: Americans spend more time on social media than any other major Internet activity, including email.
• Social-mobile rules: 60% or so of social media time is spent not on desktop computers but on smartphones and tablets.  
• Facebook attracts roughly seven times the engagement that Twitter does, when looking at both smartphone and PC usage, in per-user terms. 
• Snapchat is a smaller network than WhatsApp, but outpaces it in terms of time-spend per user. 
• Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn made major successful pushes last year to increase engagement on their mobile sites and apps. The new race in social media is not for audience per se, but for multi-device engagement. 
• Multi-device social media: Our analysis is based on BI Intelligence's social media Engagement Index, which compares the effectiveness of social networks in keeping individual users engaged across smartphones and desktop PCs (for an explanation of the Index, sign up for instant access to BI Intelligence). 

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

In full, the report:

• Dives into the engagement numbers for established and emerging social networks, including statistics for time-spend, share of aggregate time-spend, and time-spend per-user. 
• Analyzes how mobile usage is the engine driving time-spend gains at social networks, which benefits Twitter. 
• Explains how streams or news feeds are still creating the stickiest social experiences despite the fact that many social media are moving away from the metaphor. 
• Discusses how photo-sharing in particular and status updates are still ultra-popular social media activities, but how content creation is also rising and drives impressive engagement. 
• Reveals how Pinterest and LinkedIn have championed smartphone and tablet-based usage in the race to drive incremental engagement gains and catch up to Facebook. 

For full access to the report on Social Engagement sign up for a free trial subscription today.

Join the conversation about this story »

OTTAWA – The national unemployment rate was 7.1 per cent in June. Statistics Canada also released seasonally adjusted, three-month average unemployment for major cities but cautions the figures may fluctuate widely because they are based on small statistical samples. (Previous month in brackets.)

— St. John’s, N.L. 6.8 (6.4)

— Halifax 5.5 (5.8)

— Moncton, N.B. 6.0 (5.9)

— Saint John, N.B. 7.7 (7.7)

— Saguenay, Que. 9.7 (9.8)

— Quebec 5.4 (5.0)

— Sherbrooke, Que. 8.0 (8.6)

— Trois-Rivieres, Que. 8.4 (8.3)

— Montreal 8.3 (8.0)

— Gatineau, Que. 6.4 (6.5)

— Ottawa 6.9 (6.8)

— Kingston, Ont. 6.4 (6.9)

— Peterborough, Ont. 9.7 (11.1)

— Oshawa, Ont. 7.2 (7.3)

— Toronto 7.9 (7.6)

— Hamilton, Ont. 7.2 (6.9)

— St. Catharines-Niagara, Ont. 7.9 (8.0)

— Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo, Ont. 6.4 (6.7)

— Brantford, Ont. 6.7 (7.2)

— Guelph, Ont. 7.8 (7.6)

— London, Ont. 7.4 (7.7)

— Windsor, Ont. 9.0 (8.6)

— Barrie, Ont. 6.5 (7.3)

— Sudbury, Ont. 7.0 (6.7)

— Thunder Bay, Ont. 5.2 (5.8)

— Winnipeg 5.8 (5.9)

— Regina 3.6 (3.4)

— Saskatoon 3.8 (4.2)

— Calgary 5.4 (5.4)

— Edmonton 5.5 (5.2)

— Kelowna, B.C. 5.2 (4.7)

— Abbotsford, B.C. 7.6 (7.5)

— Vancouver 5.6 (5.5)

— Victoria 5.2 (5.2)

The post QuickList: Unemployment rates for selected Canadian cities in month of June appeared first on Canadian Business.

Get the duck faces ready, marketers. Selfies became THE hot trend last year and it doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere, anytime soon.  Last year selfies became the buzzword for social media marketers from Samsung Mobile, to Turkish Airlines.

Brands are posting these face-centric images, and fans are loving them. Let’s take a look at a handful of brands that have turned the camera back at themselves and how they’ve made it work!

GoPro wasn’t always posting user lovin’ selfies but when they started to, fans poured in with even more love. The popular action camera brand regularly posts user generated photos, taken with their camera and generally in action-packed situations.

Not only is GoPro succeeding at integrating satisfied customer selfies into their marketing plan, but they’re also strengthening the relationship between brand and fan with these portraits.

The Takeaway: If fans are already taking pictures of themselves with and/or featuring your product, why not take advantage? After all, that content is just sitting on their News Feed! Search for content that features your brand with hashtags on Instagram and Twitter, and don’t be afraid to curate it right back onto your social platforms. Don’t forget to give credit to the original Ansel Adams photo taker!

With the help of a couple international sports megastars, Turkish Airlines used selfies to construct the most viral travel campaign of 2013. NBA star Kobe Bryant and Argentine fútbol player Lionel Messi were enlisted as the faces of Turkish Airlines #SelfieShootout, which featured an ad with each superstar trying to outdo one another with images in epic locations. In exchange for chimed in epic selfies from contestants, Turkish Airlines gave away one free flight!

The Takeaway: Using these self-centered photos to hold a contest is a brilliant way to reward consumers for their involvement. If a brand can make selfies a working part of a high-value giveaway, it could go viral. The Turkish Airlines campaign reached a whopping 130 million views after only two weeks.

Turkish Airlines isn’t the only brand that successfully paired with an athlete for a duck face-filled marketing campaign.

Lebron James of the Miami Heat and Samsung Mobile teamed up for a Kodak strategy titled #TogetherWeRise. Samsung aggregated snapshots tagged with the designated hashtag into a three-story by four-story moving billboard mosaic outside of the Miami Heat arena two nights before the opening tip of the 2013-2014 NBA season.

If your photo was one of the chosen mosaic pieces, say hello to bragging rights! The images were published online for some extra “look at me” praise. Who wouldn’t want to be paired with one of the best NBA players in the game?

(The online mosaic is pretty amazing. Go check it out here –> http://togetherwerise.co/ )

The Takeaway: Use selfies to make something bigger than just the initial Polaroid. It doesn’t have to be an enormous mosaic, but that’s definitely an out of the box way that fans will love.

You could spotlight these photos on your social channels, as a “Featured Fan of the Week Friday” type of post. User-submitted photos can be curated for content that will then be shared by those users! That’s how things go viral, wink wink.

Axe took advantage of everyone’s favorite holiday (insert sarcasm here) and ran with these mugshots in a big way. Appropriately on Valentine’s Day, a day when guys are dousing on the Axe to smell good for their honey, the brand launched #KissforPeace.

@yomandiiii, your #KissForPeace is live in Times Square right now. You’re kind of a big deal. pic.twitter.com/zsEFryuQ1L

— AXE (@AXE) February 10, 2014

Over 10,000 tweets and 8,000 Instagram posts were tagged, and some were even featured in Times Square by Axe. Much like Samsung did with #TogetherWeRise, Axe was able to take this simple selfie strategy (say that 3 times fast), and turn it into something bigger for both the brand AND brand’s fans.

The Takeaway: Selfie mugshots can make for quick and timely marketing campaigns to gain virality by piggybacking another holiday or current event. If a day is like Valentine’s Day or National Donut Day is approaching, and it aligns with a brand’s messaging, why not get fans involved by running a snapshot-driven campaign just for the occasion? Be sure to pick an appropriate and easy-to-remember hashtag!

Sometimes pointing the camera back at yourself is more impactful than having superstar or user-submitted portraits. With the Star Wars reboot on the near horizon, the brand took to Instagram with its first post ever on the platform.

Instead of posting something super spacey or a sneak peak behind-the-scene of the new movie set, Star Wars decided to have Darth Vader point the camera back at himself for a humorous little photo inception from the Dark Side. The photo went viral online and currently has almost 70,000 likes!

The Takeaway: Getting users and celebrities involved in portrait contests and social strategies works, but sometimes it’s better to let the brand do the selfie work. When done right, posts like the Darth Vader Star Wars close up can gain huge traction and draw in followers.

Selfies became the new buzzword in 2013 and it doesn’t look like the trend is slowing down anytime soon. In fact, it has already been accepted into the Oxford Dictionary. If you weren’t a believer, you should be now! These close-up, sometimes duck faced, selfies are here to stay.

What other brands have used selfies to create buzz? Share your favorites with us below or tweet us a selfie!

The Differences In Order Acquisition and Client Acquisition is a post from: The Sales Blog | S. Anthony Iannarino

There is a difference in acquiring orders and acquiring a client. You can acquire orders and not have acquired the client (or customer, as the case may be).

Many business-to-business sales organizations get this wrong, especially when they need orders. They follow a sales process that is designed to obtain an order. They ask for an order, and in a lot of cases they get an order. But by doing so, they make it more difficult to acquire the client.

The client gives them a single, difficult to fill order (which some salespeople are naive enough to ask for). The client would give that order to any salesperson who asks. Or, the client is in a bind and can’t get what they want when they want it, so they offer the salesperson who has been hounding them for a chance to get his foot in the door an order so they can get out of a bind.

Because the salesperson and their company behave transactionally, believing that they need orders, they get orders. But they don’t acquire the client, when acquiring the client would get them all of the orders (or at least a significant piece of business). When you behave transactionally, you define yourself as such.

There isn’t a business that needs orders more than they need clients. Your local pizza shop doesn’t want you to order a pizza from them; they want you to order every pizza from them. Amazon.com doesn’t want you to order a book from them; they want you to order all of the books you will ever buy from them–and everything else you will ever buy, to boot. These are highly transactional businesses, yet they work very hard to change the nature of the relationship.

If what you really want to acquire is a client, then you cannot behave transactionally. You can always ask for an order, but you should always do so in the context of a sales process that is working towards an agreement to work together at a much higher level.

Wonder why people unsubscribe from your email list? You’re not alone.

First, let’s talk stats. According to MarketingProfs, the average unsubscribe rate for most small businesses is below one percent. In fact, the average unsubscribe rate is about .25 percent. But what makes that .25 percent jump from your email ship? With the help of marketer Randy Aimone from Leading Results, we’ll count down the top four reasons why recipients unsubscribe your email, David Letterman style; saving the most popular reason for last. And, we’ll include some quick tips on how to keep them from leaving in the first place.

4. Sending to anyone and everyone
You don’t want to send emails to people that were never interested in what you’re sending. To avoid this common mistake, grow your list organically, always ask for permission to add each recipient to your list and only send your recipients the information you said you would (as explained on your signup page). In other words, you shouldn’t bolster your list with names of friends and family, or add a colleague to your list just because you exchanged business cards at a meeting. And you shouldn’t start sending daily promo emails to those who signed up for a monthly event email.

You want a list that’s full of people who are interested; otherwise you may see an uptick in unsubscribes.

To grow your list, make it extremely easy for people to opt in. If you’re in need of a few creative places to include email sign up forms, check out a recent post on this topic.

3. Sending irrelevant emails
If your emails are irrelevant to recipients, your unsubscribe rate will increase. Make sure that every email you send offers valuable content that your target audience wants to read.

Aside from creating high quality, niche-specific content, you should also segment your email list. By splitting your list into different pieces, you’ll be able to send a more targeted message to these groups of people.

If you’re emailing everyone on your list, it’s hard to tailor your message. For instance, this email that was sent by an amusement park and promotes a discount package, but if the recipient already has the gold pass, the email becomes irrelevant.

2. It’s not you! Changing interests
People’s interests change. Email preferences do, too. Maybe a recipient no longer needs your product or service, or maybe he or she found what they were looking for somewhere else. It happens. In some cases, the unsubscribe rate isn’t caused by something you did wrong; it’s just a natural progression.

1. Flooding inboxes
If you’re emailing recipients too much, they may unsubscribe. In fact, that’s the number one reason people leave email lists, Aimone says.

How many emails should you send on a weekly basis? The answer isn’t set in stone but take a look at the example below. Some people would consider five emails in three days a bit much.

Every business is different, but a simple lesson you learned in grade school is actually helpful here: “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it at all.” In other words, if you don’t have a good reason to send an email, don’t. Stay true to the frequency that you promised on your email sign up page and if you need to change it, let your audience know and allow them to choose if they want to stay or go. The key is to let them know what value they receive in getting more frequent emails from your company.

Keep in mind that unsubscribes aren’t all bad. If you aren’t living up to your recipient’s expectations, that’s a problem; however, if a recipient opts out for reasons that aren’t connected to quality or frequency, then it’s best to let those people go and make it easy for them to do so.

How do you handle email unsubscribes? Share in the comments.

We all know by now the power of visual content and it is the future of marketing to your audiences. Images get your brands message across loud and clear to your audiences, compared to only text-based content. Infographic is the best of both worlds, where it is a visual element with snackable bits of text-based information so its gets easier to comprehend by your readers; infographics make a great visual impact!

Don’t believe me? I have done various infographics before, some on Google+ falling, some on mobile trends, and majority on statistics and data. We did an infographic on Social Media Stats in 2013 and its being shared more than 9K+ times since Sep 2013, then I did certain infographics for one of my UK client.

While building these last 4-5 infographics I learned a few important things to create a successful infographic. And that is what I tried doing with this Social Media Statistics in 2014 infographic and we got a great response with more than 10,000 shares in a month. This infographic has been shared across 15+ sites already and is getting published in 2 online magazines soon.

Before I take a call on how we did it? Take a look at these key facts about infographics-

• 99% of sensory information is filtered out by the brain, and only 1% of information gets through; Yes! You have guessed it right; infographics are a part of that 1% information.
• 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visuals.
• Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain, compared to text.

Frankly, I never thought about all these facts before; thanks to people at neomam.com who came up with all these numbers. Infographics are an extremely shareable piece of visual content, if you get it right. I am sure with infographics you can make boring and mundane piece of information very attractive and sharable. I do visit Pinterest and dailyinfographic.com regularly to keep a track on what all people are creating and sharing. And believe me it is as addictive as TheEllenShow videos on YouTube.

Coming to how you can promote your infographic to get 10,000+ shares-

1. Make Your Infographic Eye-Catching

Infographics is all about visual stimulation. So to make your infographic stand out, you need to make use of great color choices which should complement each other and your website as well. Even if you have a great story/data to tell your audiences and your infographic is not visually appealing, it will be an eyesore.

In this new infographic – SM2014 one I created, that wave effect attracted everybody. I still get mails regarding how we did it and if I can share the code.

2. Be Original

Nothing good has ever come out of duplicating work; it doesn’t make you win any accolades. Thus it is very important to be original, than choose the same run of the mill topics. What will truly make your infographic shareable will be the intriguing information and highlighting all the keypoints which need to convey the right message. A lot of research is the key here!

3. Make It Interactive

Interactive infographics are very powerful! This is what I personally have noticed, as it lets your readers engage with the infographic, thus letting them consume the wealth of information without saturating your audiences. It lets you add layers, and sub–layers of information and at the same time makes it look attractive as well.

Thus after our overwhelming response with our SM2013 graphic, we re-created another infographic on the same topic SM2014 and I was damn sure to make it as interactive as possible. We added CTAs with each and every factual mention in the infographic, a visitor has to just click on a button to share that information. Here is how people are continuously sharing it.

4. Distribution is the Queen

I totally believe in If Content is the King, Distribution is the Queen and that is where we tapped. And this was totally a team effort, thanks to DI team specially Omkar. We also used other tactics to distribute this like including this in our newsletter, sharing on Google+ communities, tapping industry influencers and asking them about their thoughts on how it looks and if they can share some feedback. Some shared their inputs and some shared the infographic their followers which gave us a wider reach and shares increased like wild-fire!

Amazing Social Media 2014 Stats: Interactive #Infographic – http://t.co/BcWPHY3XzM #SMWF /@ajmeraharsh @SocialMediaWF pic.twitter.com/1z1Lx0spjX

— Sean Gardner (@2morrowknight) June 11, 2014

Everytime our infographic was embedded in any site, it had those CTAs that in-turn also increases our sharing. So more they include our infographic the better it is.

Have a list of distribution channels where you will be pushing your next infographic. Our plan was to double our efforts in first month and then push it slowly with other infographic sites and directories. We are still on track.

5. Don’t Use Jargons

Use simple and straightforward language which everyone will be able to understand, so drop the jargons as the information you share will be accessible to a wide audience. There will be industry experts, marketers, followers, beginners and bots too :P So save up all your vocabulary, for the future intellectual conversations you have at various social meets; to be understood by a wider audience in a lays man perspective keep it simple!

6. Be Timely

Share your content, when it latches on to a big trend or relates to the issues being talked about on this socialsphere. We tried to keep this SM2014 infographic in sync with Social Media Day and Social Media Weeks around the globe.

This will increase the number of shares and at the same time makes your brand come across as someone who shares viable information which adds value to the on-going subject; making you look like an authoritative industry player who is well-versed.

Infographics grabs your audience’s attention, spreads across your brands message and connects with them as well. It’s a perfect way to help drive traffic to your site due to the reach on your social media platforms. So make sure your infographic is shareable and embed sharing links for all social channels.

Do you think you have some unique data sources which can be converted into another crazy infographic? Let’s collaborate, you can reach us here.

There seems to be an endless fascination with Millennials at work. There are studies, books, articles, blog posts, and white papers — all about what makes them so different from the generations that came before. And as they continue to enter and occupy the workforce, more and more is written about how they behave (or misbehave) at the office.

But are these cries actually true? Is managing them all that different from managing Gen Xers or Baby Boomers? Let’s look at some of the most common claims about Millennials.

They’re completely different from “us” at that age. False.

Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School, has studied the research done on Millennials and says it comes up short. “There is no real serious evidence that there’s a generational difference,” he says.

Sure, older generations look at Millennials and think they’re not like them. Those observations are based on cognitive bias, not actual differences. “It’s easy to assume young people are different in disposition because they seem different from you. But young people are always different than old people. For example, young people are much more interested in dating than those who are older and settled. And they don’t have obligations in the same way that older people do,” says Cappelli.

The only way to see if today’s 20- and 30-somethings are truly distinct from the 20- and 30-somethings who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s is to compare data. That’s what Jean Twenge, a professor of Psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me, and her fellow researchers did. They used a time-lag research method that compares people of the same age at different points in time. Twenge noticed some shifts between previous generations’ and Millennials’ attitudes toward work, but most were relatively small. And they’re not what you think.

Millennials want more purpose at work. False.

“There are some perceptions that many people have that simply aren’t true and this is one of them,” says Twenge. Her research comparing data from U.S. high school seniors in 1976, 1991, and 2006 shows that contrary to popular belief, Millennials don’t favor “altruistic work values (e.g., helping, societal worth)” more than previous generations. In fact, they place slightly less emphasis on “a job that gives you an opportunity to be directly helpful to others” than Boomers did at the same age.

All those companies offering pay to employees for their volunteer work? They aren’t responding to a need presented by Millennials. That’s a benefit that seems to have always been valued by U.S. workers; and it may be useful motivation for younger and older workers alike. “The same is true for emphasizing how the company benefits society; GenMe is no more or less likely to be interested in the social good than previous generations were,” her report says.

Additional research by Twenge shows that a concern for others is actually lower in this generation than previous ones. “Compared to Boomers, Millennials were less likely to have donated to charities, less likely to want a job worthwhile to society or that would help others, and less likely to agree they would eat differently if it meant more food for the starving. They were less likely to want to work in a social service organization or become a social worker, and were less likely to express empathy for outgroups,” she writes.

The perception that Millennials are more concerned with helping society has always been at odds with another perception: they are entitled and narcissistic. The latter turns out to be true if you look at Twenge’s research. While the shift is small, Millennials do rank higher when it comes to positive self-esteem. “In general, this generation has very high expectations when it comes to education and the jobs they think they can attain,” she says.

But, Cappelli points out what we need to remember. “If on average the age group is slightly different than a previous age group at another time, it doesn’t mean that each kid is slightly more entitled. You’re looking at a huge population,” he says. “And if young people are more narcissistic than old people, so what?”

They want more work-life balance. Somewhat true.

Looking at the data, Twenge did see a slight rise in how much Millennials value work-life balance. “Recent generations were progressively more likely to value leisure at work … GenX and GenMe placed a greater emphasis on leisure time than did their Boomer counterparts,” she writes. Almost twice as many young people in 2006 rated having a job with more than two weeks of vacation as “very important” than in 1976, and almost twice as many wanted a job at which they could work slowly. In 2006, nearly half wanted a job “which leaves a lot of time for other things in your life.”

But Cappelli points out that those changes are still pretty minor. Plus, he says, many managers overemphasize this difference, in part, because they forget what it was like to be young themselves. When you were 22, “you probably wanted to get out of the office in a hurry — you were interested in what was going on after work,” he said in this March 2014 New York Times piece.

Millennials need special treatment at work. False.

Cappelli has a strong opinion here: “That’s ridiculous. If you felt you were part of a special generation, did you get managed differently? Young people today will stand on their heads to get a job. Why do we think we have to manage them differently?” To him, managing people based solely on their age is biased. People have lots of qualities that make them distinct: race, gender, background. Don’t stereotype. Instead of assuming that the Millennials on your team need special treatment, get to know each person individually. “Keep an awareness in the back of your mind that some things are due to age, which is true for older workers too, but what you’re observing might have something to do with other things, like ethnic background,” he say.

Of course, it’s helpful to know how to manage people at different ages. He notes that this is where the cafeteria approach to benefits originated — the idea that people had different needs at various points in their lives. And in researching for his book, Managing the Older Worker, he learned that teams that incorporate different aged workers perform better. “It’s smart to have young people and older people work together. They don’t see each other as competition and are more likely to help each other,” he says.

Above: Toyota's concept hydrogen fuel cell car, the FCV-R.

Image Credit: Toyota

We’re starting to hear a lot about hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles from Hyundai, Toyota, and Honda–and we’re going to hear a great deal more about them in the years to come.

The first 2015 Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell was leased last month, and Toyota will bring its own hydrogen-powered vehicle into selected California dealerships starting sometime next year.

Honda is expected to follow with a production version of the FCEV Concept it showed at the 2013 Los Angeles Auto Show, most likely launching sometime in 2016.

Golden State only

Offered only in California, these fuel-cell cars will not make money for the automakers, at least initially — just as hybrids and electric cars didn’t when each new technology was first introduced.

But there’s a strong incentive for automakers to offer hydrogen vehicles.

Hint: It’s not consumer demand. At least, not yet.

Instead, California policy gives preferential treatment to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in meeting the state’s mandate for sales of zero-emission vehicles.

Hydrogen over battery electric

Under a complex set of rules specifying how much credit automakers receive for each emission-free car they put on the road, hydrogen-powered vehicles earn more points for range and speed of refueling than do battery-electric cars.

And it’s important for consumers to understand why these cars exist, and why makers will be aggressively marketing them to a small number of qualifying Californians.

That knowledge will let buyers better assess how serious automakers are about a technology–and whether it makes sense to put down tens of thousands of dollars to buy or lease a specific zero-emission vehicle.

Electric cars: unsuitable for most buyers

Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota are all staunch public advocates of hydrogen fuel cells as the preferred technology for providing zero-emission vehicles.

With varying degrees of vehemence, they dismiss battery-electric cars as not yet ready for primetime, unlikely to reach a mass market, and incapable of meeting the varied needs and uses of North American drivers.

And the state of California’s policies largely seem to accept that view (despite the recent popularity of the Tesla Model S electric car among executives in the state’s entrepreneurial, technology, and entertainment industries).

But hydrogen fuel cells have been in development at many large automakers for as along as two decades, so why are we seeing them come to market now?

The answer can be found in Sacramento, the capital of California–the state whose chronic Los Angeles Basin smog led it to regulate auto emissions long before the national Environmental Protection Agency even existed.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is the arcane but powerful agency that sets emission standards for vehicles sold in the state.

Compliance cars emerge

Its zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate requires the six best-selling auto companies in the state to sell certain numbers of vehicles with no tailpipe emissions at all.

The volume of ZEVs required were small when the rules went into effect in 2012, producing a spate of so-called “compliance cars”: battery-electric vehicles sold only in California, and only in numbers sufficient to meet the mandate.

Those cars include the Chevrolet Spark EV, the Fiat 500e, the Honda Fit EV, the Toyota RAV4 EV–and, arguably, the Ford Focus Electric as well, though it’s sold in many other regions as well.

None of those cars has exceeded sales of 1,800 a year thus far, and most U.S. buyers don’t know they exist.

The required volumes of emission-free vehicles increases slowly through 2018. Then, after a review of the program and its effects, the numbers will rise more quickly and apply to a larger number of automakers.

Range, refueling speed count

Automakers are now leery of projecting future sales volumes–GM and Nissan were notably burned when Volt and Leaf sales failed to meet early goals.

But analysts suggest that the total number of hydrogen fuel-cell cars delivered in California will be low, perhaps as few as 5,000 a year by 2020.

Each of those cars, however, will be worth more than twice as many points as the existing range of compliance cars.

The math can get complex, but essentially an electric car with a range of 75 to 100 miles earns 3 ZEV credits–but a 300-mile hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle earns 7 points.

Not only is range before refueling factored in–that’s why a 265-mile Tesla Model S gets 5 points–but speed of refueling counts as well. If it takes a driver less than 10 minutes to refuel or recharge the vehicle to its full range, the car gets additional points.

The goal is to put increasing numbers of zero-emission vehicles onto California roads–to the point where 87 percent of the vehicles on the state’s roads have no emissions at all by 2050.

Of those vehicles, the state suggests, hydrogen-powered cars will greatly outweigh battery electrics.

Hydrogen fuel cells: compliance cars too

These are deliberate policy decisions made by CARB, and they’ve largely been in place for many years.

Most automakers don’t feel they can sell zero-emission vehicles at a profit in the short or medium term (five to seven years, say)–though obviously GM, Nissan, and Tesla differ.

But what will be cheaper: Selling hundreds or perhaps 1,000 low-volume battery-electric vehicles a year, or less than half that many hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles?

At least some automakers clearly believe the latter is a better way to comply with the CARB ZEV mandate than the former.

To be fair to the carmakers, they will likely continue to offer electric compliance cars in the short term as well.

Honda is thought to be working on a successor to its 2012-2014 Fit EV, now that the new-generation gasoline version of the 2015 Honda Fit has gone on sale.

Toyota reportedly asked Tesla to work on a successor to its RAV4 EV as well, though Tesla declined because it preferred to use its limited supply of lithium-ion cells for its own vehicles.

Funding a fuel delivery system

To make hydrogen cars viable, refueling stations have to exist–and California will devote as much as $100 million to make that happen.

Electric cars can be recharged at home–from conventional 120-Volt household current or using 240-Volt Level 2 charging stations that cost several hundred dollars to buy and install–or at work, or in some cases, using DC quick-charging sites that recharge up to 80 percent of battery capacity in half an hour or less.

Hydrogen cars can be refueled in less than 10 minutes, as we learned while driving the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell–but you have to find a hydrogen station.

In 2012, there were 27 hydrogen fueling stations on the entire globe, and another 11 opened last year. But the pace will ramp up as California funds dozens of stations to enable the launch of the Hyundai, Toyota, and Honda fuel-cell vehicles.

For widespread rollout, though, it remains unclear what business entities will see long-term profit potential in providing a fuel that will be used only by very small numbers of vehicles for years to come–with all the attendant challenges of land acquisition, permitting, and so forth.

Double the cash in the mail

Finally, California has thrown another sweetener into the pot to encourage adoption of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles: The state’s purchase rebate for the cars is double that provided to any battery-electric vehicle.

From the Mitsubishi i-MiEV with 62 miles of rated range to the Tesla Model S with its 265 miles, any all-electric vehicle gets a purchase rebate of $2,500, which arrives as a check in the mail a few weeks after the owner applies for it.

Buy or lease a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle, however, and the check is for $5,000.

Do you get the sense that the state of California really wants to see hydrogen vehicles on its roads?

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This story originally appeared on Green Car Reports.

These days, marketers are on an aggressive quest for attention. Attention for their brand, their products, their expertise. To get it, they often ditch their long-term strategy for the new shiny toy, from social media trends and channels to alternative targeting tactics and SEO tricks.

Often, the more attention a marketing campaign gets, the more “successful” it’s deemed.

But is there any danger in equating attention with success? Is Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign (which rewarded Facebook users who unfriended 10 connections with a free whopper) really that remarkable? Was Oreo’s “you can still dunk in the dark” tweet during the Superbowl blackout in 2013 truly revolutionary?

I think not.

An extraordinary marketing campaign doesn’t just engage, it informs.

By building an extraordinary marketing campaign, you attract the right attention. It doesn’t just engage, it informs. It fills a need. It’s useful.

Want to learn how to cut through the noise and make your marketing campaign really mean something? Here are a few ways to do it.

1. Simplify

If your marketing campaign is sacrificing your organization’s brand values in an effort to get more likes and retweets, it’s time to take a step back.

In the end, views, likes, and shares mean nothing if people aren’t taking action that drives revenue.

Yes, building brand awareness is important. But you need the right kind of awareness. Potential buyers will tune you out if your message doesn’t resonate with them. Slow down, figure out what you want to communicate and why it matters to your buyers.

2. Listen

To identify the right message, you need to listen. Marketers love to talk about their “buyer-centric” strategy. But the reality is, a lot of these strategies are based on assumptions. Use social media listening tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch, surveys, or focus groups to understand the priorities of the people you’re trying to reach.

3. Watch

What people say isn’t always what they do. So in addition to listening, you must track their activity. While a shipping company’s Christmas GIF might drive a ton of traffic, they’ll probably get more leads from a guide outlining how to properly pack and ship gifts. Either way, actions are what get people in your funnel. So make sure you’re tracking them and identifying patterns in how people interact with your content.

4. Provide

Content is an experience. And it’s an experience that should provide value.

The best marketing campaigns understand that content isn’t just eBooks, web copy, and social media posts. Content is an experience. And it’s an experience that should provide value to its intended audience. Value might come in the form of a question answered or a problem solved. The content experience your marketing campaigns provide should make life just a little bit easier for its users and readers.

“Fun” and “engaging” content is great. But if that’s the backbone of your strategy, I’m afraid you’re not providing a very helpful content experience. Remember, there’s a difference between marketing campaigns and advertising campaigns: the latter seeks attention, the former seeks to serve.

Today’s most competitive marketplace isn’t technology but talent. The challenge of attracting and retaining talent is particularly acute for marketers. Their function has been turned upside down and inside out as a result of digital technology, empowered employees, and connected customers.

In this new world, the best marketers exhibit five superpowers – each of which requires new types of talent. Our previous article describes each of these superpowers with examples from Intuit, Sephora and others. As a recap, they are: To hear what no one else can hear; to be part of the conversation, even when you’re not in the room; to leap tall piles of data in a single bound; to make silos disappear; and to bring out the superpowers in others.

How can you attract and retain the talent that can give you these superpowers?   What will create the gravity that pulls top talent into your company’s orbit and keeps them there? As a provider of marketing talent to Silicon Valley’s top companies, one of our firms, The Sage Group, has seen a consistent pattern in the talent strategies of the most effective and innovative companies. These strategies address who you hire, how you hire, and what you do once they’re on board.

Who: Look for dual superpowers

It used to be that top talent was exceptional at a particular skill or function. But the demands of marketing today means that top talent is able to combine skills that don’t often go together, and might even seem to be opposites. The combinations we see in most demand are:

• Creative + analytical: These people use both the left and right sides of the brain to reach the head and the heart of customers.  As the data gets bigger, you have to know what questions to ask to turn information into insight.
• Leadership + digital acumen: Many digital natives lack leadership experience and many seasoned leaders lack digital expertise. Truly top talent is skilled at both leading internal teams around a shared vision and building digital products and communities.
• Content creation + product expertise: Brand marketers are becoming more and more like publishers. There are content creators who can engage an audience but don’t know the product, and product experts who lack the ability to tell a good story. The result is an ability to connect and engage both colleagues and customers.
• Innovation + execution: Marketing teams can no longer be divided into those who come up with ideas and those who execute them. The best talent has an ability to envision what’s possible and make it happen.

How: Think of it as marketing, not HR

Ironically, many marketers don’t think of recruiting as a marketing challenge. Instead, they think of it as an HR issue. But acquiring and retaining talent is really no different than acquiring and retaining customers.

Most marketers would never think to execute a customer acquisition strategy without a clear value proposition, segmentation, pricing, collateral, sales enablement, metrics, and brand. Yet when it comes to talent acquisition, we forget these marketing basics.

Here are things to consider as you apply what you know (marketing) to get who you want (talent):

• Value proposition: What is the source of your differentiation? Do you have a compelling elevator pitch and consistent messaging throughout your communications?
• Market research: Where can you find the talent you want? What is important to them in a job, career, team and employer?
• Pricing: What are the key elements of compensation (salary, bonus, benefits, equity) and how do you compare with competitors?
• Sales: When you have found the right candidate, do you move quickly to close?
• Metrics: What are marketing’s KPIs for attracting top talent?
• Brand: Are you visible in the marketplace with a reputation for innovation and excellence? Are you known for creating “marketing that matters”?

What: Meaning over money

Keeping great talent is tough. We know one marketing executive of a top brand who has seen turnover of 30% on her team in the last year. It’s not enough to pay people well. In today’s talent market, you have to offer meaning as well as money.

The organizations we’ve seen do the best at retaining talent put effort into the following areas:

• Shared purpose: Create a vision that unites and inspires the team. At SAP, Jonathan Becher has aligned 1200 marketers in 50 countries around the idea of engaging with people (instead of companies or buyers) and rethinking marketing as a growth enabler.
• Stretch assignments: Empower people to go beyond their comfort zone. Visa is bringing in digital natives and giving them senior roles in brand marketing rather than digital marketing.
• Removing obstacles: Don’t let politics, bureaucracy, and roadblocks get in the way. Williams-Sonoma aligned e-commerce, marketing and brand leadership to gain rapid consensus and accelerate decision-making on key priorities.
• Great coaching: Recognize the vital role of employee’s relationships with their managers. Google has gone from reluctantly accepting the role of managers to embracing their pivotal role in employee engagement and productivity.
• Intrinsic rewards: Look for ways other than money to reward people. For its Great Manager award, Google replaced a cash bonus with a one-week retreat with other winners and senior leaders.

These strategies help to create what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman calls an “ally” relationship between employers and employees.

In a broadcast world, marketers’ success depended more on hiring the right agency than hiring the right talent. But in today’s digital landscape, you need top talent to create content, build community, leverage data, and drive revenue. It’s time to take recruiting back from HR and turn it into a marketing mission. We know how to attract and retain customers with an exceptional customer experience. Let’s do the same for talent. What’s your talent experience?

The New Marketing Organization
An HBR Insight Center

Thanks to The Bridge Group’s insightful research, we know that sales development has been adopted by nearly 40% of B2B SaaS companies.

It’s finally time to ramp up your very own sales development team.

Before getting started, there are six central ideas that need to be addressed. They not only provide the framework for sales development, but are crucial to its success.

1. Know Your Ideal Customer Profile

What defines your best customer?

It sounds simple, but many businesses struggle to articulate exactly what qualities they need.

The more specific you become, the better.

We’ve seen many companies copy the segmentation options in LinkedIn and apply them to their own businesses (industry, company size, region, etc). This will allow you to target specific prospects who are good fits for your business.

2. Create Two Roles For Specialization

Your sales team only has two people.

One can focus on scheduling qualified appointments and demos, while another needs to be entirely focused on closing deals.

In a startup without many resources, the founder(s) can fulfill one of these roles until the team grows. The important thing is that roles are decided upon up front, so that specialization stays in the limelight.

3. Get Buy In From An Executive Level

When a founder or CEO emphasizes the importance of sales development, they’ll spend more time building a team and allocating more resources to them.

It will be a focal point of your organization and attract motivated reps whose self-starting and competitive natures will drive your sales development team from within.

4. Define The Process For Inbound And Outbound Leads

As an inbound rep, the emphasis falls on responding quickly and answering prospect’s questions, before scheduling appointments or demos.

Outbound is entirely different, as you build targeted lists and reach out to prospects who may have never heard of you or your company.

Designing a process for each of these roles will help you be successful when you finally hit the ground running.

5. Develop A Fluid Playbook

Your playbook can (and will) change over time.

It’s a necessity to have thought through and understand the details of your sales development process. Make sure the playbook is available to anyone on your team, especially new hires.

As you build the playbook, outline several items such as:

• What kind of email templates will you use?
• What’s your cadence in phone vs. email?
• Will you use social media?
• Where do you get your lists for outbound prospectors?
• How will you find a decision-maker for inbound leads?
• What email tool will you use to increase efficiency?

The more specific you can answer each, the less questions you’ll need to answer as your team grows. As you work through the process, test slight changes and update the playbook when you find ways to improve.

6. Get Buy-In From The Sales Team

Your Account Executives shouldn’t feel like SDRs are threatening or taking their jobs. They need to realize they’ll be able to perfect their ability to talk to prospects and ultimately close more deals.

Addressing each of these six core points will give you a strong scaffolding on which to build out an incredible sales development team.

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Looking for a way to find targeted and accurate lists of prospects? Visit SalesLoft.com for more.

In today’s inbound world, it’s easy to forget there’s still a place for outbound marketing activities. Search, social media and content marketing, three of the primary drivers of inbound marketing, have become the primary means to achieve brand awareness and lead generation goals for many savvy marketers. That shift was driven by consumer behavior.

But now the services we use are making it harder to flourish with inbound marketing alone.

Content shock is a serious concern among inbound marketers, and many of the channels we relied on for “free” marketing, like social media, are becoming pay-to-play arenas. Even our content needs promotion these days.

That doesn’t mean that inbound needs to be outbound. Just the opposite. As we are forced to adjust our approach to many of the channels we rely on, we should focus on making all outbound activities a little more inbound.

Old Outbound Vs. New Outbound

As inbound marketing grew in popularity and effectiveness, outbound marketing activities became defined by one thing: ineffective interruption. Not only was the interruption annoying to consumers, but those consumers also learned to ignore many of the 5,000 marketing messages they receive every day.

But it wasn’t just the interruption that made outbound, outbound. Those marketing activities were often defined by the notion that people would look at a print advertisement or a billboard or an email blast and be ready to buy. Outbound was product-centric, not people-centric, going straight to the final pitch before throwing out the first ball.

The new outbound needs to take into consideration the full lifecycle, giving buyers a chance to opt-in to the sales process at every stage.

How Not to Do Outbound

With that in mind, how do you keep outbound from being too outbound? The marketing platform you’re using is key. You need to be able to easily integrate all of your marketing activities, whether inbound or outbound, under one umbrella. With all the data in one place, you can determine which activities are producing measurable results. This way if your outbound channel isn’t producing the results you’d want it to, compared to inbound channels, you can adjust the content for better results.

There are a few other consideration you have to take when doing outbound as well:

• Are you educating or selling? If you’re not educating, you’re outbound won’t bring people in.
• Are you automating or personalizing? If you’re not focusing on the individual with outbound, you’re making it more difficult for buyers.
• Are you mass marketing or are you targeting? If you’re audience is too broad, you’re wasting money.

Outbound marketing is more sophisticated than it used to be. And the smarter you can make your outbound activities with the right software and the right content, the more likely a buyer is to opt-in for additional marketing.

Doing Outbound the Inbound Way

So what are some examples of outbound activities that can be done the inbound way? Realistically, any outbound activity can be altered to become a little more inbound, but here are some simple solutions to get started right now:

Paid Emails

Many inbound marketers rely on routinely engaging their in-house email list with content and promotions. However, that doesn’t produce new leads. When it comes to lead generating emails, you can use traditional bulk emails available from most trade publications to promote educational content offers. You’ll generate many more leads this way than if you simply put out an email for a sale or demo request.

Tip: Don’t settle for a non-segmented email. A trade publication with a list of 200,000 raw contacts isn’t nearly as powerful as one with a list of 10,000 highly segmented contacts.

Marketing Automation

No matter how sophisticated your marketing automation platform is, it’s not worth the money you’re spending on it if you’re only using it for drip email campaigns and email lead nurturing. Email marketing needs to be combined with on-page lead nurturing to create a personalized web experience. This way, if a buyer visits your website before that email is sent out, he or she has the opportunity to convert fast. Or, if the buyer doesn’t convert when they see it on the website, your email can be more effective because they’ve already seen the offer before.

Tip: If you have a drip campaign or automation event, mimic the event on your website using personalized on-page content.

Paid Media

With paid media, whether it was a banner, print or search ad, the offers promoted generally drove people directly to the final step on the buyer’s journey: the sale. Today, that budget needs to also be used to promote Facebook pages, LinkedIn updates and other pieces of awareness-stage content in your marketing arsenal. You can also promote content via banners, print and search. Either way, it’s more important to get people to take the first step on the journey with you than to hope those ads convert on the last step.

 Tip: Don’t leave finding content up to chance. Use a service likeOutbrain,Disqus orTaboola to promote the content you have to new audiences.

Direct Mail

The problem with direct mail isn’t that you can’t target personas. In fact, direct mail has had sophisticated segmentation since the 1990s. No, it’s that most people don’t think of direct mail as a place to promote your content. Simply not true. A small section of any direct mail piece should always be reserved to promote an educational content offer. This gives the people who aren’t ready to buy a chance to convert, even if they don’t want to enter to win your contest or request a demo. When these offers are connected to your marketing software, you can determine which ones work best and use that information to better segment your offers in the future.

Tip: You can track direct mail conversions just like any other channel. Just remember to use a tracking URL and a dedicated landing page for your content for easy tracking.

Pitching

Even your media relations activities can be a little more inbound. Rather than encouraging people to publish stories about your product or service, pitch lead generating content, like your eBooks or guides, or exceptional blog posts to trade media outlets. With the right software, you can focus your pitches by seeing which publications are already sending referral traffic to your website.

Tip: Don’t limit your pitches to content you’ve already created. An offer to create an exclusive piece of content for a key publication can increase your chances to get your brand published.

So there you have it. Some simple ways to make your outbound marketing a little more inbound. Are you already combining inbound and outbound? Let me know what you’re doing in the comments below.

photo credit: Someecards

With social media increasingly becoming a core part of every department, it is now necessary for these teams to collaborate on social media management. Not only is this collaboration necessary for security purposes, but it benefits the entire organization when teams work together to quickly and effectively handle social media issues and opportunities.

Here are 3 benefits of managing your social media as a team:

Benefit #1: It Improves Productivity

Social media made it’s business debut, so to speak, in marketing. It also usually made its debut under the management of a single person. Neither of those things hold true today.

Social media data now provides sales teams with new leads and insight into prospective clients and competitors. It provides your customer service teams with the ability to deal with over half of consumers who use social channels for product inquiries. It provides your human resources access to information about potential hires, and the means to reach out to them. The potential benefits of social media are clearly extensive. To expect all of this to fall under the responsibility of one person, or even one department, is simply unrealistic.

Collaborative social media management improves productivity by pushing social opportunities to the people most adept at handling them. To use the example of a potential sales lead, a member of your marketing team can identify a Tweet from someone interested in your product and then assign that message to the sales team using a social media management tool. A sales associate will see the message assigned to them and can quickly reach out with an appropriate response. All of this can be done from the same corporate accounts, so you don’t have to risk confusing the user by reaching out from a personal account.

This scenario applies to any person in your organization, who can assign and share important messaging with the right department and move on to their own responsibilities. If only one person is in charge of social media in your enterprise, they would have to reach out to another department for information before responding, creating inevitable delays— especially if the conversation is an extended one.

Benefit #2: It Improves Security

Despite what you might have heard, social media management can be made more secure by collaboration between departments. A social media management tool like Hootsuite allows you to share access to accounts without actually sharing the passwords. A single social media manager would hold access to all corporate accounts, a situation which could prove problematic when the person leaves the company or those responsibilities are passed off.

Social collaboration also provides managers with the opportunity to approve all social messaging before it is sent, to ensure the Tweets or posts are on brand and that no rogue messages get through. And it reduces the risks associated with employees representing your organization from personal accounts, the same accounts they might use to talk sports or joke with friends . When a potential lead is identified, responding from a corporate account both adds weight to your first contact and allows you to control the entire interaction— from the tone to the content. A social media management tool then provides you with the ability to see who is responsible for a specific message should the need present itself.

Benefit #3: It Fosters Creativity

Collaborative social media management encourages creativity by presenting organizations with a new way to approach traditional tasks, and by opening up these tasks to a wider net of employees.

The ways in which brands get creative with social media marketing are well documented, but there is so much more being done. Human resources teams attract international employees by showcasing their workplace environment on Instagram, Facebook and Youtube. Developers join in social media conversations to learn new approaches to their work and stay on top of the latest industry news. But these are opportunities that really require the members of these departments to get involved and lead on social media. A social media manager in marketing is not going to engage in a developer chat, or know the right language to appeal to potential hires. Real creativity comes from encouraging the people within these departments to approach their tasks with a social media component in mind.

But, they shouldn’t be alone in their efforts. Collaborative social media management is about opening up these tasks to the entire company. Customer service teams can assign a positive social interaction with a client to marketing, who might be able to use it in a promotional campaign. An account manager might assign a client request to the development team in the hopes of finding a creative way to address their need. This collaboration becomes invaluable in campaigns involving several departments. Plus, internal social networks like Yammer are a great forum to discuss all aspects of business with your colleagues.

Use a social media management tool to start collaborating with your social media team

Team collaboration in social media management really depends on the right tool. You need the security features, the assignment functionality and the overall productivity provided by a dashboard like Hootsuite to truly take advantage. Learn more about Hootsuite teams in our Social Media Coach Teams Guide below.

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