Rnordman

COPENHAGEN – This is what it’s like to live in Denmark, a nation with a narrower wealth gap than almost anywhere else: You’ve been jobless for more than a year. You have no university degree, no advanced skills. You have to pay a mortgage. And your husband is nearing retirement.

You aren’t worried.

If you’re 51-year-old Lotte Geleff, who lost her job as an office clerk in January 2013, you know you’ll receive an unemployment benefit of 10,500 kroner ($1,902) a month after taxes for up to two years. You’re part of a national system of free health care and education for everyone, job training, subsidized child care, a generous pension system and fuel subsidies and rent allowances for the elderly.

And high taxes.

Denmark’s sturdy social safety net helps explain why its wealth gap — the disparity between the richest citizens and everyone else — is second-smallest among the world’s 34 most developed economies, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, surpassed only by the much smaller economy of Slovenia.

Behind its slender wealth gap are factors ranging from the highest tax burden in the European Union to a system that helps laid-off workers find new jobs and re-training.

They are factors that depend on a level of government involvement — financial and otherwise — that would be politically unacceptable in some areas of the world.

Cause and effect would be impossible to prove, but Danes appear more content than people in most other industrialized nations. Eighty-nine per cent of Danes reported having more positive experiences in an average day than negative ones, according to the OECD — the highest figure among the organization’s 34 countries.

“We don’t have steaks on the table every night, but we’re OK,” says Geleff, who has a house near the city of Roskilde.

While the gap between the wealthy and everyone else is widening in much of the industrialized world, a large chunk of Danes remain firmly middle class. Forty-two per cent of the working population of 4.6 million have annual disposable incomes between 200,000 and 400,000 kroner ($36,700-$73,300). Just 2.6 per cent earn more than 500,000 kroner a year ($91,383).

According to the OECD, the top 20 per cent of Danes earn on average four times as much as the bottom 20 per cent. In the United States, by contrast, the top 20 per cent earn about eight times as much as the bottom 20 per cent.

The idea of a generous government-provided cushion for ordinary people is deeply rooted in a nation with few outward signs of a pampered elite. Members of the royal family often bike to drop off their children at a public daycare centre. Last winter, Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt was seen shovelling snow outside her home in Copenhagen.

With a solid safety net in place, the government has persuaded unions to accept a flexible labour market. Under a model known as “Flexicurity,” companies can quickly lay off staffers during downturns. Laid-off workers, in turn, receive training and guidance in pursuing new careers.

Such training is part of Denmark’s approach to education, which is free for everyone of all ages in this country of 5.6 million. Students of any age over 18 who live on their own can receive a stipend of 5,839 kroner ($1,028) a month. Those living with their parents can receive about half that.

So widespread is education that one byproduct has been something unfamiliar elsewhere: A shortage of unskilled labour. Denmark has no mandated minimum wage. But unions and employers’ organizations have agreed on a minimum of 111 kroner ($20.3) an hour.

Torben Andersen, an economics professor at Aarhus University, sees political unity as a factor in Denmark’s narrow wealth gap.

“There are not the same strong conflicts and very strong parties and views like you will see, for instance, in U.S. politics,” he said.

Some issues do tend to fan tensions in Denmark. One is immigration. With net immigration of about 2.25 people per 1,000 citizens, Denmark welcomes nearly as many as the United States. Many come from war-torn Middle East countries with few qualifications. Some of them struggle to find jobs, leaving some Danes to complain about immigrants benefiting from the welfare system without contributing to it.

Such anxieties have lent support to the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party. Its influence has led to a tightening of immigration laws. It’s become harder for foreigners to obtain residence permits and for refugees in Denmark to bring relatives into the country.

Despite the heavy tax burden, public support for the social security system remains high. In a Gallup poll published this month, 38 per cent of people who were asked whether they were happy to pay their taxes said they “fully” agreed. Fifty per cent “partly” agreed. A poll last year showed that 66 per cent opposed cuts to the welfare system.

Kay Xander Mellish, a Wisconsin native who’s lived in Denmark for 13 years, says one reason Denmark’s system enjoys public support is that pretty much everyone, regardless of income, shares in its benefits.

“If you are a high earner in the U.S., you can pay a lot for social services that you will never use, and I can see why that upsets people,” says Mellish, who’s enjoyed a year’s paid maternity leave and subsidized daycare. “At least when I pay for social services, I can see what I get back.”

In Copenhagen, teacher Per Broenholt ticked off the government benefits he values. A father of two, he has six weeks’ vacation a year, which he uses to visit a summer home or foreign destinations such as Thailand or Turkey. He cycles to work and uses the family car mainly to drive to the grocery store on weekends.

Still, he acknowledges, taxes are a burden. Income tax rates in Denmark range from 30 per cent to 51.5 per cent. There’s little incentive to work toward a promotion, Broenholt says, because “the taxman would take half” the additional money earned. And gas is expensive, at around 12 kroner ($2.18) for a litre (0.3 gallon), a result of environmental taxes.

Advocates of low taxes, in the United States and elsewhere, have long argued that high taxes act as a drag on economies, stifling investment, hiring and spending. As with many countries with high taxes, Denmark’s long-term growth has trailed the pace of expansion in the United States and some other major economies.

Among Danes, though, distaste for ostentatious wealth tends to outweigh dissatisfaction with taxes.

“Elite is a dirty word here,” Mellish said. “The whole idea of ambition is embarrassing in Denmark. It’s like being gay in the 1960′s: Everybody knows it exists, but no one talks about it.”

Wealthy Danes make up a lower proportion than in many other countries. About 0.3 per cent of Danes earn more than $370,000 a year. In the United States, a full 1 per cent had income over $394,000 in 2012, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

As the cost of their social welfare systems has grown, Denmark and other Nordic nations have embraced work incentives — a trend that’s led to a slight widening in income disparities. Sweden has gradually cut income taxes for the employed by up to $330 a month. Denmark has pushed to lower the maximum period for full unemployment benefits from four years to two.

Prime Minister Thorning-Schmidt said she’s committed to helping businesses stay competitive.

“We need to continue to take decisions to ensure that our model is sustainable and preserves prosperity,” she said in an email to The Associated Press.

In the end, there’s an economic trade-off, says Danske Bank’s chief economist, Steen Bocian.

“You could probably have higher growth in Denmark, allowing for more income inequality,” he said. “But it’s a political question whether you would pursue that.”

___

Rising reported from Stockholm.

The post As other countries grapple with wealth gap, Denmark finds welfare system narrows disparities appeared first on Canadian Business.

It’s the big on site customer meeting coming up.

or

It’s the follow up to your last meeting.

or

It’s the first meeting since you cold called in.

or

It’s any other prospect, customer interaction.

You’re meeting with the customer, your investing your time, they are investing theirs, so what’t the goal? What is it you want the customer to do?

Every prospect interaction needs a goal. You need to understand what it is you’re asking the prospect to do or deliver. What’s the purpose of the interaction?

If you don’t know, you’re not in the driver’s seat. You’re giving something away for free and that’s silly.

Even if the buyer asked for the meeting because they wanted to learn more about a certain feature, or to get a better understanding of the pricing, you still need to have an action goal for the end. The buyer is asking for something from you. What it is you’re going to get in exchange?

Every step of a sales cycle is a series of little deals or sales. It’s a barter dance, each side offering something in exchange for something else. We’re exchanging time for information, access for time, insight for information, access for insight, etc. and knowing what you’re bartering for is critical.

The buyer has something you need, access, information, their time etc. You have something they need, insight, information, expertise, or knowledge. The key is to know what is being bartered and it’s value. You’d never barter a stick of gum for car, yet sales people do it all the time.

Know what you want from your prospect and what’s being bartered. Don’t take too much and don’t give too much. Fair deals are always good deals.

Too often we get hung up on the end game, the end goal of wining the deal and we lose sight of the deal(s) in the deal. Every sale is a series of little deals or sales that must be negotiated. There is ALWAYS consideration at play, it’s just rarely money. The key is to make sure you know what the consideration is and what you’re paying in the deal and what you’re getting in return.

Are you a good sales barterer? You need to be.

 

 

 

 

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Last week, marketing automation system Autopilot released a new type of automation tool designed to save time, increase revenue, and help companies grow.

But no, it’s not for marketing.

Instead, the company’s new tool is a sales automation system that Autopilot says takes the grunt work out of sales, provides much higher numbers of warm leads, and can be implemented in companies using any marketing automation system — or none at all. Plus, in the process, will allow sales people to focus on what they do best: selling.

That’s interesting, because there’s been a trend lately of sales teams using low-end marketing automation systems to do what CRM doesn’t typically do: help with outbound. But marketing automation systems, by design and by name, are not really intended for salespeople, nor are they typically tailored for the specific sales process.

I asked CEO Michael Sharkey for more details on this new type of automation.

VentureBeat: What is this actually? Marketing automation, CRM, or a new combination, sales automation?

Sharkey: We call CoPilot a Sales Automation application, but I think it speaks more to the convergence of marketing and sales technology in general. It’s not marketing automation, it’s not CRM, it fits into this gap in the market that is completely unserved.

In one corner marketing has marketing automation, in another corner sales has CRM, but there is this third corner where sales development representatives live and that’s who CoPilot focuses on. Marketing doesn’t want salespeople using their marketing automation solution, and CRM doesn’t have the technology to help automate outbound prospecting. So instead, we’ve seen task driven applications try and tackle this problem: email tracking, email reminders, and template management for email clients like Google Apps.

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We’re studying free or cheap marketing automation systems.
Help us, and we’ll share the data with you.

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All of these are great tools, but as a result of their use, sales development reps have to become task masters and rely on manual tasks everyday to stay on track. In fact, they’ve become so busy being task masters they hardly focus on creating opportunities, qualifying and having conversations with engaged prospects.

CoPilot removes all of these manual tasks and allows sales development teams to add potential prospects to CoPilot. CoPilot will automatically engage prospects through an outbound campaign (that sales teams can design and test) based on the prospects’ behavior. CoPilot will then automatically follow up and only land engaged prospects into the sales person’s inbox. A real time activity feed and sophisticated reporting give sales teams complete insight into prospects’ behavior whether that is clicking on a link or opening one of several touches.

VentureBeat: How does it integrate into Autopilot or other tools?

Sharkey: We think of CoPilot as the perfect sales companion for Autopilot, but in reality, CoPilot will work in any organization no matter what solutions they are running; it’s truly a stand alone application. And of course Prospect Ace (our targeted prospecting application for Google Chrome) allows you to seamlessly add new, and highly targeted prospects into your CoPilot campaigns.

VentureBeat: What size of teams does this work best with?

Sharkey: We have launch customers with anywhere from one individual sales development rep right through to accounts with over 20 users. While CoPilot is targeted towards sales prospecting with sales development reps, we see everyone from VPs of Sales, Account Executives and Sales Ops all using CoPilot for automated prospecting.

VentureBeat: Who would you position this with, ideally?

Sharkey: I think logically it positions against sales use cases of marketing automation today.

Take a sales team I talked to recently pitching CoPilot. Their marketing team were using Pardot, and the sales team has approached marketing to run sales promotions and some mass outbound campaigns. The complexity involved with setting up such a simple automation use case in Pardot was incredibly challenging for the sales team … so much so that while they could accomplish what they wanted, the pain involved and learning curve meant they had never bothered since. Instead they found it more simple to revert to a manual email and reminder based approaches.

CoPilot has taken this overly complex process for the sales use case and simplified it to an intuitive, step by step process. Once it’s setup it can be re-used over and over to start conversations with engaged prospects.

VentureBeat: What kind of results can you expect with this? what will it do for you?

Sharkey: In sales teams, the ultimate goal is predictable revenue. For every 5,000 prospects I reach out to, X percent will become qualified leads, Y percent will become qualified opportunities and Z percent will become new closed business. Everyone talks about predictable revenue in sales by having a process, but the problem is the process of today turns salespeople into task masters, outputting so much energy for each of those 5,000 prospects.

CoPilot removes the manual work from prospecting. Whenever a prospect engages with an outbound campaign, CoPilot can automatically send a personalized response based on that person’s actions. Interested prospects land directly into the salesperson’s inbox while the rest continue to receive automated nurturing giving teams more time to invest in engaged prospects.

The real secret sauce and “magic” of CoPilot though is the feeling when an engaged prospect who is ready to buy lands in your inbox and the first conversation you have is about getting a deal done. That’s the predictable revenue dream!

VentureBeat: What’s the cost?

Sharkey: Pricing starts at $39/per seat/month and includes 5,000 emails per month and a bonus 500 Prospect Ace Credits to help sales teams discover new prospects.

With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at t... read more »

Pardot is a B2B cloud marketing automation software provider that increases revenue and maximizes efficiency for companies with multi-touch sales cycles. Pardot's platform features CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead... read more »

Autopilot is next generation marketing automation that anyone can use. Market Smarter, Close More. We created Autopilot with one simple goal in mind: build an end-to-end solution for marketing automation and content marketing that ... read more »

If you’re a veteran seller, you likely appreciate a good sales conversation. So what makes a sales conversation stand out? One that’s focused on customer needs and the unique value your solution provides.

A well-defined sales messaging strategy drives these types of conversations, and ultimately results in overall sales productivity and bottom-line revenue impact. Without a framework to implement your sales messaging strategy, you run the risk of lagging sales, quarter after quarter.

Here are six components that every sales messaging framework should have:

1. Value Drivers

Purchase decisions aren’t made on product features alone. Instead, buyers want to know that their needs are understood and that you can provide them with the best possible solution.

An effective messaging framework outlines the driving reasons a customer would choose to purchase your solution. It aligns your company behind the value that drives your customers to make decisions. As a result, it enables your salespeople to have sales conversations that are focused on the value of your solution.

2. Differentiators

Most salespeople have the ability to speak about the benefits of a strong product all day long, but ask why you should buy their solution over the guy’s next door, and the less skilled sellers will uncomfortably jostle on price and features, rather than true differentiation.

To truly differentiate your offerings from competitors, your sales reps should be armed with tools that help them clearly speak to your company’s differentiation in a way that maps to the desired buyer outcomes. A framework with well-defined differentiators helps your salespeople clearly articulate how you solve buyer problems better and differently than the competition.

3. Ability to Quantify Business Pain

If you spend time talking about features and functions that your prospect doesn’t need, two things will happen:

1. They will perceive your product as too expensive, or as more than they need.
2. They will feel like you don’t care enough to take the time to understand why they came to you in the first place

An opportunity is won or lost on the discovery process. Uncovering your prospect’s pain effectively gives you the ability to quantify the largest business issue. By having the ability to understand and quantify your prospect’s business pain, you can demonstrate how your products and services can solve their specific pain points.

When your salespeople become accustomed to asking the right questions and listening to customer problems, they will be able to guide the sales conversation in such a way that the buyer can see how their admitted problems will be addressed. A sales messaging framework gives your salespeople a valuable tool to quantify business pains by helping them execute an effective discovery process.

4. Outcomes of Doing Business With You

Proof points. Proof points. Proof points.

We can’t say it enough. For a buyer to be truly convinced that your product or service can alleviate the business pain, he/she needs to be assured of the positive outcomes that come from working with you.

Effective proof points speak to the priorities and the perspective of your customer. If you’re going to articulate to buyers how your solution is better than your competitors, you need to make sure your proof points are solidly in place. A sales messaging framework should include these valuable references and make them consumable for the entire sales team.

5. Ability to be leveraged by the whole organization

An effective sales messaging framework should drive message consistency across the organization. For example, your sales team will leverage marketing more because their collateral is built with the same customer language. Your services department better understands the promises made to the customer in the sales process. A framework that is customized and built with the right inputs intrinsically aligns your entire organization behind those value drivers.

6. Executives who manage to it, inspect it, and reinforce its use

You can have all the pieces in place – a way to understand buyer pain points, a way to sync problems to solutions, a repeatable process for every member of your sales organization – But, without leaders who are willing to drive adoption of the framework with the sales team, then nothing will stick and any hope for sales results will fall flat.

The framework is only as strong as the leadership’s ability to reinforce it. An effective sales messaging framework should have a plan for executives to drive adoption and front-line managers to reinforce the concepts.

Remember those interviews where they do a one-on-one with a prominent movie director and it becomes a sort of resource for fans for possible speculations?

Things like that are actually big reasons why you can’t just rely on mass marketing tactics to have a conversation with an entire target market. It’s one of the most clear-cut differences between B2B appointment setting services and B2C advertising firms. Both work in the marketing industry but the flaws of the latter are often the reason why the former is so bent on taking its time talking one-on-one.

Here’s one example. With the recent conclusion of Game of Thrones Season 4, Entertainment Weekly tapped the finale’s director Alex Graves on why they didn’t include a particular character that book fans were dying to see on-screen.

You can read his justification here. But frankly, letting the speculation run out of control among fans is really just more real-life proof that processes like appointment setting are a necessity among B2B organizations. It’s good for generating buzz among consumers but you can’t let loose ideas run around forever if your organization relies on directly winning over prospects to produce large sales.

Asides from that, here are other ways that going one-on-one helps fill in the information gaps for B2B buyers:

• They’re hearing straight from the source – Media interviews don’t even cut it. Imagine you’re researching CRM software for the first time and you end up reading about new developments in SalesForce. Unless you’ve got a heavy IT background, a lot of the stuff you’ll find could just make your head spin. Wouldn’t it be better if you just spoke one-on-one with someone who actually works there?

• You have fewer representatives – One more reason why speculation gets out of hand is because you have one too many representatives. Chris Abraham talks about a similar problem about the ephemeral nature of digital advertising. Sure you get exposure and coverage but only as long as you’re paying. You’re not as involved when you have too many parties representing your products, your services, and your brand.

• It leaves little room for second-guessing – When you’ve heard it straight from the source, it’s hard to second-guess. Besides, being overly skeptic al has its own drawbacks as a buyer. (You can’t make up your mind. You’re self-paralyzed with trust issues etc.) As impractical it may be for consumer businesses, going one-on-one has been the traditional MO of B2B organizations just for rapport reasons alone.

So instead of being the director that’s tight-lipped on the details, learn to love being the sales rep or the entrepreneur who’s keen on sharing ideas. Too much guesswork all the time can really be bad for some businesses!

In a world where “content is king” and one wrong move on social media can send your brand reputation into a nose dive, there is a lot of pressure on companies to maintain a successful online marketing strategy, from the website and company blog to social media pages. One topic that’s often debated is the balance between content creation and content curation. Does your company create and publicize unique content or share existing, external content with its audience? There are pros and cons to both scenarios, and a successful content strategy for one company may not apply to others.

Content Creation

When a company creates its own content, it owns it. The ideas and insights belong to that company and reflect the varying opinions and skill sets within the organization. Sharing your own ideas contributes to your brand’s thought leadership. As long as you’re providing value to your audience, they’ll be interested in what you have to say and keep coming back for more. If you respond to new developments and share relevant news when such situations arise in your industry, people will learn to come to your blog or website to see what you have to say about breaking news on a regular basis.

In terms of audience and leads, original content can also drive conversions. When you share content that lives on your website, you’re not only driving traffic to the individual piece of content, but you also have the opportunity to turn your audience into leads. (If you want to learn how to turn your audience into meaningful business results, don’t miss our webinar – ABCs of Marketing Your Blog and Brand – on June 18!) Additionally, you can tailor content messaging to specific goals your company is trying to achieve at any particular time, from lead generation to product sales.

Content Curation

Sharing external content, on the other hand, informs your audience what else may be happening in your industry and that your company is engaged and aware of developments. Brands should demonstrate that awareness to their audience, which builds a reputation for being aware of the competitive landscape and space as a whole.

Curating other companies or publications’ content and sharing it with your audience shows that you care about informing them, and not just pushing out your marketing messages. No one wants to be at the receiving end of a never-ending sales pitch. Your audience should feel as if they are able to come to you for information, without feeling like you’re constantly trying to sell something.

How to create and curate content

A brand’s position on the spectrum between content creation and content curation depends entirely on resources. So, how you can use both content creation and curation, even with limited resources?

• Engage your employee network. You may have untapped resources right under your nose in your other employees. Reach out to people outside of the marketing or content creation team to come up with story ideas or commentary. Employees are often a company’s best advocates.
• Take advantage of free tools. There is an exorbitant amount of news aggregators out there. These apps and tools pull content from all over the web based on interests, trending topics, industry, etc. Find what tool works for you and use it! Feedly, Flipboard and Alltop are just a handful of options. Give them a try!
• Be aware of what your competitors are doing. There are great insights to be found in a solid competitive analysis. Do your homework and then think about what your company can do better or differently! Have the creative chops to do something but take it to the next level rather than copycatting.

Not every company will be able to draft unique blog posts or spend a few hours finding interesting industry news to share with their audience every day. Knowing the audience, as well as where the company fits within its competitive landscape, will help determine content goals. And don’t forget – ramping up a content strategy doesn’t happen overnight. Do your research, don’t be afraid to start slow, and see what happens!

Recently, I have been following a LinkedIn discussion where the following question was posed?

When calling, should you ask a prospect whether it’s a good time to speak?
Living in a consultative sales world, and teaching the principles of a consultative sales process, to me the answer was simple. Yes. Being mindful is one of the core principles of consultative selling and it should be the core principle when doing business. Where do you stand?

Courtesy Rules
In my opinion, courtesy should never be ignored just to get to results. As a matter of fact, I would argue that the results could be short lived if you just want to get your point across at all costs.
We live in a world where people are looking at different indicators and measures, not only monetary gain and that’s a good thing in my view. Companies are starting to embrace business practices that show that they care. And it has been proven to help the bottom line whether it’s genuine or not.

Is Sales the Exception?
So, why do some people think sales should be the exception? What is the basis of their assumption that in the sales world we can ignore practices that have been proven to work in other business disciplines?
Nobody Wants to be Interrupted (or do you?)

In my many years of calling on C-Level executives, I firmly believe that when you interrupt somebody’s work day, you should always be courteous and professional – first and foremost. Asking your prospect if it’s a good time to speak and giving the person an option will not only leave a good impression, it will lead to a good conversation. If sales people just start off with a generic pitch – and “fast-talking” – they most likely won’t get the attention of the person they are actually trying to connect with. I know for myself that when people call me and start reeling off their pitch, I’m mainly annoyed. For the most part I don’t even listen to what they are saying. My goal is to get them off the phone.

Teach Your People Well, But Not to be Rude
One of the LinkedIn discussion participants even said that he is teaching his people to never ask that question because they then can’t get their point across and it only invites a “No, I don’t have time”. Making that point just leads me to believe this person has no confidence in the people she/he hires to present themselves confidently on the phone.
Of course it depends on the situation and maybe your introduction could start with a simple way of saying, “Hi, I won’t take much of your time. Would you mind listening to my short business introduction if this is a good time for you?” Wording, timing and applying common sense is essential, in life as well as in business. Teaching your salespeople to basically be rude certainly wouldn’t attract me to work for or with a company embracing that sales approach.

Desperation is a Bad Motivator
Salespeople who start off with a pitch in the fear they won’t gain attention can come across as desperate. And that’s one of the reasons why salespeople often have a bad reputation. One person in the LinkedIn discussion said that people should screen their calls and use caller ID to decide if they’ll take the call. Well, many unsolicited calls come in as “Unknown” on my caller ID, so do some calls from Europe. So I am always tempted to answer the phone because I wouldn’t want to miss a call from family or friends in Vienna, Austria, for example. Does that mean I should be punished with rude sales behavior for picking up?

Do Your Research & People will Listen
If you do your research and you know something about the company and the person that you are calling on, you will always be in a better position to open a dialogue. Also, if you introduce yourself via email and then call to follow up, your “cold call” won’t come across as completely out of the blue.

In closing, there are many ways to prospect effectively. I prospect every day on behalf of my clients with huge success. But ignoring courtesy is definitely not part of my recipe.

“Here be dragons,” incomplete maps warned about lands and seas as yet unexplored by seafaring colonialists in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. In the 21st century, small to mid-sized businesses and marketing executives like you are exploring the digital landscape, cautiously navigating online marketing and slaying the dragons they find.

You may often find yourself allured by trending industry buzzwords and “best practices” like investing in business blogs. The largest dragon gets in your way, however: how exactly do you impact your bottom line through a business blog?

Impacting the bottom line is the ultimate challenge, and to achieve that, you need to overcome a few more obstacles that lead to it:

ROI

The most obvious dilemma that business blogs pose is return on investment. To establish business blogs, you need to invest resources: time, capital, manpower. How do you guarantee ROI?

A few outstanding resources in the web explain the process of calculating blogging ROI, but what you need to know is what business blogs actually do for your marketing that results in justifiable returns: Blogging creates a content platform for branding, search optimization, and content campaigns, all of which contribute to various stages of your sales funnel.

Business blogs offer your audiences content that leads them to into your sales funnel, while also becoming a central platform that promotes discovery via search engines, all the while helping build your brand authority.

Lead Generation

While on the subject of ROI, let’s move on to more specific territory on our quest to slay our final dragon. So business blogs are great for branding, content campaigns, and SEO. What about lead generation?

Well, business blogs are excellent vehicles for inbound marketing. Often, businesses need a core platform – a hub of content where various target audiences in different stages of the sales funnel converge and move on to the next phase of their consumer journey, sometimes returning even after a closed sale. Inbound marketing is a far better investment than interruption marketing in terms of cost-efficiency in the long run, and inbound is a lightning rod for lead generation when performed correctly.

Lead Nurturing and Conversion

Naturally, any leads generated, you’d want nurtured and converted. Many target audiences who find your business blog will be in earlier stages of the funnel – such as need recognition or information research. How do you nurture and eventually convert them through your blog?

1. Same channel engagement – Though a bit rarer than the next type of lead nurturing, you can indeed continuously engage your audiences without leaving the channel they’re on; in this case, the business blog.
2. Cross-channel nurturing – You can use your blog to lead to channels dedicated to lead nurturing such as email newsletters and the like.

It also doesn’t hurt that you can use various types of content to target audiences in different stages of the sales funnel. This means your blog continuously works to nurture and convert leads at various points of their digital consumer journey.

So, that’s three mighty dragons slain, with all triumphs contributing to the big one: actually impacting bottom line. Business blogs help bolster your bottom line by:

• Being a platform of discovery, content, and branding
• Helping generate leads
• Constantly and continuously nurturing leads by same or cross-channel engagement until they convert

All of these lead to ROI, which in turn boost your bottom line. And that is the final dragon you need to slay to establish your little niche in the digital landscape.

(Editor’s Note: scroll down for graphical versions)

In my book, Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization (Wiley) I define collaboration as follows:

The unfettered allowance and encouragement of employees to both contribute and consume knowledge, insight or ideas with any direct relationship via professional or personal networks to achieve an outcome.

If we were to elaborate on the definition, we might suggest there are ‘The ABC’s of Collaboration’:

• Accessible – Be approachable & available to your team & those who expect your insight & opinions.
• Benevolent – To be disposed and to want to do good is a key part of being collaborative with others.
• Challenge – Groupthink does not equal collaboration. To challenge is to professionally debate by collaborating.
• Deliver – Be free from restraint while getting things done. Recognize that the team must demonstrate results.
• Embrace – To accept willingly. To well avail one’s self to an opportunity, to an idea and to those in the network.
• Fluid – Not being fixed to a given mindset, but to readily change opinion as the situation warrants.
• Graft – To attach or incorporate new ideas, concepts and thoughts into old and dated problems.
• Hello – Is there anything more collaborative than saying hello? Try it next time in the elevator.
• Impart – To be collaborative is to disclose and make known both your knowledge and your perspective.
• Jest – Having fun, finding humour and generally having a good time can help all to become more collaborative.
• Kudos – To honour, celebrate & congratulate others for their contributions is as collaborative as it gets.
• Legitimate – Always be genuine and trustworthy. Legitimacy in character is akin to authenticity.
• Marinate – To properly collaborate one might marinate in the moment. Pause before acting prematurely.
• Noegenesis – The production of new knowledge from sensory or intellectual experience will aid others, always.
• Open – The collaboration gold mine: to be forthright, impartial, exposed & available to people, ideas & the unknown.
• Prepared – Being ready to contribute. Being willing to compose. Being apt to create.
• Quietude – To effectively collaborate, one must enter into a state of calmness, serenity & peacefulness.
• Reflective – It’s incumbent upon you to mirror the collaborative spirit of others & to be thoughtful doing so.
• Social – From the Latin socialis ‘allied’ & socius ‘friend’, to be social is to build a collaborative network.
• Technology – The technology train left the station long ago. If you’re not on it, you run the risk of alienating everyone.
• Urgency – A level of persistence & earnestness will ensure others know you don’t subscribe to “all talk no action”.
• Voice – “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, & that voice will be silenced.”
• Warn – Cautionary advice & a proactive heads up to those in your collaborative circles is noble, smart & urged.
• Xenodochial – One must accept that collaboration should happen with strangers too. Collaboration knows no borders.
• Yearn – One must desire to be collaborative with others. To yearn is to feel collaboration is an absolute necessity.
• Zeal – Demonstrate vigour & enthusiasm as you collaborate and others will judge you as positive & disarming.

There are two infographic versions of “The ABC’s of Collaboration” found below. Feel free to use them.

I’m taking a writing break for the summer. See you in September-ish. Thanks for visiting.

The global market size of outsourced services was worth $82.9 billion in revenue in 2013. Manufacturing is the most outsourced sector and Brazil is fast emerging as the offshore outsourcing destination of choice in the outsourcing world.

Lloyd Blankfein recently told a TV audience that income inequality is “very destabilizing” and that “too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.” When even the CEO of Goldman Sachs is worried about inequality, you know you have a problem.

Rising inequality reflects two trends. One is the rapidly growing incomes of those at the top, a phenomenon publicized by everyone from Occupy Wall Street to Thomas Piketty. The other is the remarkable lack of income growth among the rest of the population. In the three decades after World War II, the income of the lower 90%, meaning the broad middle class as well as the poor, nearly doubled. Since then it has barely budged. Yet overall per-capita income growth in the past 40 years has been nearly as strong as in the postwar era (1.9% a year vs. 2.2%). It’s just that the fruits of this growth went to “too few of the people.”

How can Americans create a society where more people share in the growth? We’d like to see a revived labor movement — but with a new business model.

Suspend disbelief about labor for a moment and look at the facts. In the postwar period, U.S. unions were strong. At their peak they represented nearly one-fourth of private-sector workers. Their influence extended beyond their numbers, since many nonunion employers observed union standards in hopes of avoiding an organizing drive. Labor’s negotiators took productivity gains as their touchstone and bargained for commensurate wage gains. As the economy grew, middle-class income grew with it.

Economic analysis bears out the connection between strong unions and less inequality. Union workers earn 15% to 20% more than similar nonunion workers. CEOs of unionized companies earn 10% to 20% less than their nonunion counterparts. In the public sector, unions remain relatively strong — and have helped prevent the rise in inequality we’ve seen in the private sector. Nearly every developed nation with less inequality than our own has a strong labor movement.

But the business model of private-sector unions is essentially defunct. U.S. unions in the past defined themselves in opposition to management — us vs. them, in the famous labor-movement phrase — rather than as partners in building a successful company. They fought for high wages and restrictive work rules regardless of business conditions. That model worked fine as long as large sectors of the U.S. economy were dominated by a few big firms — the companies could (and did) pass the added costs along to consumers. But it doesn’t work in a global marketplace. As world competition stiffened, some unionized companies moved or went out of business. Others fought labor tooth and nail, ridding themselves of unions whenever they could. As a result, labor sank to its current level: less than 7% of private-sector workers now belong to a union.

What would a better business model for labor look like? Begin with an obvious but often overlooked truth: labor and management don’t have diametrically opposed goals. Both sides want their companies to succeed and grow, creating a bigger pie for everyone. Remember, too, that companies with engaged, committed workforces tend to outperform competitors. Involved employees come up with more innovative ideas, figure out how to solve problems, and go the extra mile for customers.

So imagine a partnership approach. The union says to management, We’re here to make your business more productive and profitable. We’re experts in team-based and participative systems. We have the credibility to get employees really involved in the business, and we know how to do so. Over time, the union label might come to denote a world-class company, one with the skills to do things that competitors can’t.

The union’s message to employees would be similar. We’ll make you more productive and we’ll give you valuable skills — the only path to greater job security and future opportunities. In hard times we’ll help the company find ways to cut costs short of layoffs. In good times we’ll negotiate for a healthy share of profits, stock, or both, as well as for higher wages. That seems like an approach worth an employee’s dues.

No U.S. company has a labor-management relationship exactly like this, but Southwest Airlines comes close. Its unions — which represent 83% of the airline’s workforce — have generally cooperated with management on business improvement initiatives even as they bargained over pay and benefits. A few years ago, for example, jet fuel prices were climbing sharply. The company and the pilots’ union launched a joint program known as Plane Smart Business to get pilots involved in tracking their own fuel usage and coming up with ways to reduce it.

Lloyd Blankfein is right to be worried: if nothing changes, our capitalist system will continue to look more and more like that of the Gilded Age, with the majority of households suffering from stagnating income and a relative handful growing very rich. This level of inequality is bound to become destabilizing, which means we should be thinking now about how to mitigate the trend. Unions played a key role in the past. Maybe they can in the future as well.

Girls today need to learn how to code for two reasons: first, there aren't enough female engineers, and second, it will become an essential skill, just like reading, writing, and math.

The tech community used to be a place that wasn't exactly accommodating to women — but times are changing, and Google is making sure the next generation of coders is shaped by today's girls with Made With Code, an initiative to inspire girls (and their parents) to get interested in STEM. Read on for all the ways Made With Code helps grown-ups and little girls understand that it's a big deal to get ladies involved with programming!

The Made With Code Short Film (It'll Give You Chills)

Meet Awesome Female Coders Who've Paved the Way

LittleBits founder Ayah Bdeir (who we had the pleasure of interviewing at SXSW 2014) is just one of the incredible women already working in tech. Get inspired by her go-getter outlook on life!

Meet Girls Like You Who Code

Maddy is 20 years old, and she's creating the future of fashion with programming. Fashion will be fully responsive (just like modern websites), says Maddy. When you're cold, your clothes will warm you up. As it shifts from day to night, clothes will illuminate. These are just two of the ideas Maddy has for what lies ahead for our garments. See her story below.

Get Started With Simple Coding Projects

Even grown-up girls (guilty) will have a blast with the site's quick and easy coding projects. Make your own GIF or 3D avatar with a visual programming language called Blocky.

Last night, our POPSUGAR Moms team was on the scene in New York City, where Google held Made With Code's launch event, and caught some great snaps of Mindy Kaling speaking to the crowd about her dream apps: "'What's his deal' would tell you if a guy is married, etc."

Made With Code is a safer, kinder place for girls interested in engineering. Spread the good word, and pass this along to your daughters, nieces, and friends!

More Ways to Spread the STEM Love

9 Coding Camps Just For Geek Girls  

Engineers Are Superheroes: The Video Every Girl Needs to See

3 Little Girls Rap About Engineering Dreams, Win at Life

3 Projects That Aim to Unleash Girls' Inner Geeks

7 Toys, Games, and Apps Designed to Teach Even the Youngest Kids How to Code

Gif courtesy of Google+ user Made With Code

More stories from PopSugar Tech:

This Video Game Lets You Live the Cat Life
The Craziest Things Google Has Ever Dreamt Up
The Coolest Tech Office You've Ever Seen
Read Unlimited Ebooks All Summer Long
15 Reasons You Should Swipe Up More on Your iPhone

On Monday Oracle officially announced a $5.3 billion deal to buy a company called Micros Systems.

This is the biggest acquisition Oracle has made since it closed Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in 2010 (which actually cost Oracle $5.6 billion after factoring in Sun's cash. With this deal, it actually cost $4.6 billion net of Micros’ cash, Oracle said.)

Oracle paid $68 per share, slightly higher than the rumored $67-and-change price expected, and a nice price for Micros shareholders. The stock had been trading near the $58 mark for the past few days and under $53 for most of April and much of May.

Word of the deal broke last week, right before Oracle released its forth-quarter earnings.

Micros makes software and hardware for the hospitality and retail industries, including "point of sale" cash register tech. It has some huge clients, including the Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott hotel chains.

The latest wave in the POS industry is to replace these devices with tablets, and Micros offers a Windows tablet for this purpose. So, this deal also gives Oracle a tablet.

Interestingly, Micros was already a big Oracle partner, had been helping it sell its database to hospitality businesses for the past 15 years, Oracle said.

Some Wall Street analysts think this was a a defensive move to keep up-and-coming cloud competitors away from Oracle's customers: Matthew Healey, an analyst at TBR, wrote in a research note:

The urgency with which Oracle is evaluating solutions for the retail and hospitality industry indicates that the acquisition of Micros Systems is a defensive move to protect Oracle’s install base [from] other providers such as SAP and Salesforce.com.

But mostly, the acquisition is about buying revenue growth. The hospitality industry is in the midst of a tech revolution, moving from PC-based systems to tablets and cloud software.

In May, Micros reported third-quarter revenue of $349 million, up about 11%, year-over-year. Revenue for the nine-month period was a little over $1 billion, up 7.4% and it dropped $142 million to the bottom line as profits (non-GAAP) for the nine months of the year, so far. It also upped its guidance for the full year, expecting between $1.36 billion - $1.385 billion in revenue and non-GAAP EPS from $2.53 to $2.57.

“We expect this transaction to be immediately accretive to Oracle’s earnings on a non-GAAP basis and to expand over time,” said Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz.

Oracle's fourth quarter and year-end was a disappointment to investors. It was a two-year-in-a-row miss on Wall Street expectations on revenue growth for both the quarter and the year.

Oracle blamed the miss on its transition to cloud services, in which revenue is recognized as it is paid, not when contracts are signed, making it look like the company's growth has slowed.

Some analysts, such as TBR's Healey were good with that explanation and others were more skeptical. For instance, Pat Walravens, an analyst at JMP Securities, wrote in a research note:

While management engaged in a lengthy discussion about the shift toward the cloud, we think it is clear that, even accounting for a shift in revenue recognition, Oracle did not execute particularly well in the quarter, coming in at the low end of its guidance range for revenue, license, and hardware and generating billings growth (which captures the impact of revenue deferrals) of 3%, below consensus of 5%. We think investors should remain cautious on this name as Oracle faces tough and focused competitors in each cloud product category (including Amazon Web Services, Workday, and salesforce.com) and needs to execute better and more consistently.

Join the conversation about this story »

A few weeks ago I turned all of our workflows completely off. During a meeting we realized that we were going about our lead nurturing strategy completely wrong so I shut them off, leaving leads un-nurtured and uneducated.

But then I thought this: would I rather have my leads frustrated and annoyed that they were receiving generic marketing information and write us off as another silly marketing agency, OR would I rather give them the personalized information they deserve with a little bit of lag time?

Well, I chose the latter.

This realignment was aimed to shift our simple workflow-based nurturing to a persona-based nurturing strategy. Before we dive into the reasonsing for this shift, let me first explain the difference between persona and workflow-based nurturing.

A workflow based strategy goes as follows:

1. Visitor comes to your site
2. Visitor fills out form to convert on a premium offer eBook and becomes lead
3. Lead gets put into a workflow based on the offer they filled out
4. Lead gets sent emails in that workflow providing them more information on the offer’s topic. Oftentimes, this information is designed to push the lead further down the sales funnel.

As you can see, with this process the visitor doesn’t get a well-rounded assortment of information and they aren’t nurtured based on who they are or what they are having issues with– they are simply nurtured based on the type of offer they downloaded, with the intent of getting them to buy after absorbing increasing amounts of sales-focused material.

So let’s look at what a persona based strategy entails:

1. Visitor comes to site
2. Visitor fills out form to convert on a premium offer eBook
3. On that form the lead fills out their pain point, position in their company, question about the industry, (whatever you need to know in order to nurture them effectively)
4. Lead gets put into a workflow based on whatever property you choose is most important
5. Lead gets sent emails based on who they are and what they want leading them down the marketing funnel until they become a sales-ready lead

See where the problem lies in the first nurturing campaign compared to the second one? It’s all about giving your lead the information they need in order to be ready to speak to someone on your sales team. Workflow campaigns can still be implemented, the trick is to set up your persona based campaign first. So let’s go through how to implement a persona based campaign shall we?

Step 1: Choose Your Persona and Your Goals

When a visitor comes to your site and fills out a form the first thing you should do is define the specific persona. As an example let’s say you are a business that sells organic produce and want to know if the person is a consumer or a distributor. For the sake of this blog let’s say that they tell you that they are a consumer so they would fall under your “Produce Purchaser Patty” persona. You could go about dealing with Patty in two ways, let’s analyze:

Workflow Based Nurturing Strategy

Produce Purchaser Patty filled out a form for your Seasonal Produce Recipe Book and would receive more information via email about recipes to make with her fresh produce. But this isn’t really Patty’s pain point so she will most likely ignore or opt-out of these emails.

Persona Based Nurturing Strategy

Produce Purchaser Patty filled out a form for your Seasonal Produce Recipe Book and answered some questions on your form telling you she has a household of four people and her biggest pain point is finding healthy and cheap produce to feed everyone.

Because of this, she receives more information via email about the benefits of organic produce, the best brands to buy, and options for seasonal produce. Patty’s pain points are addressed and she will most likely be ready to speak to one of your produce sales team members and purchase your produce.

Step 2: Lay Out Your Path

Nurturing campaigns can get complicated and tricky as you build them out, especially if you have multiple emails in a single campaign. In our case, you’ll need to lay out all the options for Produce Purchase Patty. Different Pattys have different pain points, such as not knowing what’s seasonal, not knowing how to cook with organic produce, or simply just not being educated on the benefits of eating organic.

The trick to building out a path and figuring out what Patty wants to learn about is a web form feature called progressive profiling. Progressive profiling allows you to control which questions appear on a form based on what you already know about a lead.

So, let’s say that when Patty filled out the first form she labeled herself as a Patty with a few additional details. Now, as she moves through the funnel and converts on more forms, she’s going to provide you with more, different information about herself in order to allow you to nurture her specific persona more. It’s personalized nuturing. Still with me? Good! Let’s take a look at a specific example (we’ll call it “campaign #1″)

Campaign #1:

The goal of campaign #1 is to find out what her pain point is. You do this by sending her different emails with various paint points as the subject of them. She will most likely click on the email that addresses her pain point and be offered a piece of premium content that will help solve it. I’ve laid this out below.

Once Patty clicks through one of these emails and downloads the offer she will be asked another progressive profiling question. Let’s say this one is about her produce budget, which allows you to give her catered information based on her budget. When she reconverts on a form from the “Pain Point Campaign” she will be placed into the next campaign, “Middle of Funnel Produce Purchaser Patty” and the “Pain Point Campaign” will discontinue.

Based on how Patty answers the question about her budget she could be put in either of the following two campaigns:

And now you know who Patty is, what her biggest pain points are and what her budget for purchasing organic is. However Patty is still sitting in the middle of your funnel unready to speak to the sales team.

Step 3: Make Sure Patty Is Sales Ready

During the campaign listed above you should give Patty numerous options to speak to someone about her produce options, request a free organic meal planning consultation, or whatever your bottom of the funnel offer happens to be. Once Patty requests a bottom of the funnel offer she is ready to speak to a sales team member.

This Time, it’s Personal

With this example, Patty is more likely to continue interacting with your business if she feels like she is getting personalized information and isn’t just another lead on your email list. Generic emails don’t work anymore, either personalize your interactions or don’t bother playing the email marketing game at all.

Reddit user Dan Lin has uploaded a chart showing the mean wage breakdown for every profession in America tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The top wages all belong to specialized medical fields, while the ones on the bottom are all in food and hospitality. The numbers in parentheses are the mean wages, in thousands, while the different shapes show the range of salaries available in that field. 

(NOTE: If you are having trouble viewing the image, click here and zoom in »)

 

SEE ALSO: You Should Probably Buy A House Now

Join the conversation about this story »

They called it the Information Superhighway for a reason — information is constantly flowing faster than you can imagine. But no matter how consumable us bloggers try to make it, it’d be impossible for you to consume it all. That makes online courses, particularly in the B2B world, more important than ever. And there are a lot of business pundits out there, ready to teach you. But there’s a missing link between the two. That’s the gap that talentlms online learning platform looks to fill with its new course marketplace. talentlms looks to become the enabler, meaning it enables yearning students to find great teachers easily.

Back when I was in at uni (eep, nearing a decade ago), I tried my hand at taking some online courses. While I had my hunker of a Dell laptop, nothing about these courses was truly mobile. Everything had to be downloaded with complicated course management software. And then, even my favorite teachers who were so alive in the classroom fell short of their glory online as they simply loathed the cumbersome Blackboard. Even the best teachers were missing the mark in these online classrooms — and I was doing memorization and taking open book exams that I cannot even remember basic theories on today.

Now, things have changed a bit. We are accustomed to learning online in some fashion or another (even if it’s just The Oatmeal.) And most teachers better equipped to share their passions from anywhere. And well past university, we are able to continue learning for the rest of our lives. But outside the somewhat restrictive and rather expensive firewalls of a brick-and-mortar university offering online options or distance learning university, the right online business teachers are now having a heck of a time organizing themselves and finding the right students online.

talentlms works as the matchmaking mediator between online business teacher and online business student, acting like the eHarmony of online learning and training with its new online B2B course marketplace.

talentlms’ marketplace strips away barriers to teaching online

As you can see in talentlms’ infographic above, there are certain barriers that teachers usually have to overcome to transfer their face-to-face educational experiences online:

• CHALLENGE: Students expect to take class from literally anywhere — With talentlms, teachers don’t have to receive loads of excuses from students that they couldn’t download the homework from their iPhones on the WiFi at the motel in Cancun on Spring Break. And instructors don’t have to spend their time acting like tech support for the CEO instead of a mentor.
• SOLUTION: There is no downloading. There’s no worrying about compatibility. It’s all in the cloud. (Our favorite place!)
• CHALLENGE: Adult education customers are more demanding — If a student doesn’t have time to complete a course, a B2B school has to be ready to refund the course. But if a student does complete the course, there’s no doubt that school should be paid.
• SOLUTION: talentlms provides a fantastic experience that makes sure that both instructor and student have flexibility, automatically approving refunds and processing commissions.
• CHALLENGE: Hackers and students alike are trolling for your exams and lesson plans — Most of the time online, if you can build it, it can be hacked. This is especially worrisome for instructors who have spent years creating unique content and lesson plans.
  SOLUTION: Course content cannot be cloned nor shared nor copied to another course. Original files cannot even be downloaded.
  
• CHALLENGE: You don’t know where to sell or market your course online — Back in the day, a flier at the local laundry mat would be enough. Nowadays, it seems like you need to be Matt Cutts to tackle the SEO of your single course. And then you need to wait and be accepted by the various hosting sites.
  SOLUTION: You simply build a regular talentlms course, submit it for approval and are notified when accepted. Your B2B clients find you on the Marketplace.

• Increased security can mean decreased student access — The harder you make it for someone to access a class, the more likely they are to give up on it, and ask for a refund. With firewalls and password-laden software, while your intellectual property is safe…but sometimes even from your paying students.
  SOLUTION: Security without hugely complicated access. Instructors can still easily edit course price and info, add extra units and files, while still choosing to resell if correct licenses exist.
• CHALLENGE: Course Pricing Packages are hugely complicated — Commissions are often mind-boggling algorithms that vary based on class size, duration, or whims of the hosting website. And then how those commissions are paid is another complicated mess.
• SOLUTION: Standardized Commission: 75 percent of the commission goes to the seller (via his or her Stripe payment app) and 25 percent goes to talentlms. It’s that simple.

Ready to simplify your online B2B courses from creation to security to sold?

Click to try out talentlms today!

Or compare talentlms’ solutions with other e-learning software!

OK, so metrics are boring—but knowing your numbers is critical to your success.  Go ahead, read the article and then apply the math to your sales business.

Do you know what you have to do if you want to increase your income by 25%?  How about if you want to increase it 70%?

The obvious answer is to increase your production by 25 or 70%.

But is that the right answer?

Maybe–probably–not.

Rather than thinking in terms of increasing your production by 25 or 70%, ask yourself these questions:

What is your average annual commission per client?

Since most of us have different products and/or types of clients, break it down even further:

What is your average annual commission per client type A (say retail client)?
What is your average annual commission per client type B (wholesale)?

Or

What is your average annual commission per individual client?
What is your average annual commission per corporate client?

Or

What is your average annual commission per client buying service A?
What is your average annual commission per client buying service B?
What is your average annual commission per client buying service C?

Here’s a hypothetical example:

Mary sells widgets to both individuals and companies.  Over the past 3 years she has sold widgets to 300 individuals and 114 companies.

Her average commission for selling to an individual is $375.
Her average commission from a sale to a company is $1,050.

Last year her income was $107,050.

She wants to increase her income by 22% or $23,500 this year for a gross income of about $130,000.

Since she knows her production/commission numbers she knows exactly what she must do:

She needs to sell to an additional 28 individuals and 12 companies to reach her goal.

However, she could refocus her business by concentrating on business sales as each additional business sale would reduce the required additional individual sales by 2.8.

She could also take her numbers one step further and calculate what her averages have been over a shorter period of time such as 6 or 12 months.  When she does that she discovers that:

Over the past 12 months she has sold to 105 individuals with an average commission of $450 and 45 businesses with an average commission of $1300.

With these more accurate current numbers she knows in order to reach her goal she must sell to an additional 23 individuals and 10 new businesses.

So, that’s all she needs to do in order to reach the $130,000 income she wants for this year—simply make an additional 2 ¾ sales per month.

Again, she could refocus her business and concentrate more on corporate sales as each additional corporate sale would decrease the number of individual sales needed by almost 3 sales.

All the sudden that 20% increase doesn’t seem so difficult to accomplish because she knows exactly what it will take to get there.  The hocus pocus of pulling numbers out of thin air, the wondering of how in the world she can make an additional $30,000 is gone and replaced with knowledge—knowledge of what she has done in the past, what she is doing at the moment, and what it will really take to reach her goal.

Reaching your income and sales goals can be just as concrete and just as realistic as Mary’s goals were for her if you’ll take the time to do a little research and math.  These are crucial metrics of your business that you must know.

Don’t play a guessing game.  You can’t afford to operate in a vacuum.  Knowing your sales history is key to reaching your goals for our future business tends to replicate out past business unless we consciously break out of that pattern.  You need to know where you’ve been in order to get where you want to go.

Campbell's CEO says new business owners can differentiate their enterprise with ideals that resonate with consumers, their evolving values and needs.

Today’s Top 500 announcement shows a slight slowing in supercomputer improvement that we began to spot over the last year and a half. From 1994 to 2008 [performance] grew by 90% per year. Since 2008 it only grows by 55% per year. And when you take a close look at the list over the last couple of years, you’ll see that the reason why that declining figure isn’t more pronounced is simply because the top tier of the list is propping it up—most notably with the addition of the Tianhe-2 system, which holds 13.7% of the performance share of the entire list.

When examined as a whole, we’re falling off except at the highest end…but what does this mean for end user applications? Is high end computing getting smarter in terms of efficiency and software to where, for real-world applications, FLOPS no longer matter so much? Many argue that’s the case…and some will await the new HPCG benchmark and forgo Linpack altogether in favor of a more practical benchmark. That hasn’t had an impact yet on this summer’s list but over time it will be interesting to watch.

But despite any perceived stagnation of this chart from the last couple of years, get ready, because the next few years are set to bring strong winds of change due to momentum with OpenPower and perhaps even AMD. The arrival of 64-bit ARM will shake things up as will new choices in chips, but expect a flat list at least through this time next year unless something completely unexpected happens


Read more »

You don’t have to be James Bond or Jason Bourne to find out what your competitors are up to. Competitive analysis for small businesses also doesn’t have to take up a lot of time or money. Differentiating yourself from the competition is something every business wants to do. However, you can’t reach that goal if you don’t get to know your competitors—what they offer, what their customers think about them, what their prices are and, most importantly, what action you can take to stand out.

Here are a few simple ways to understand out you compare to your competitors:

1. Check out their website and ask yourself:

• Does their website look professional or render on a PC, tablet and mobile device? How does it compare to yours?
• What key pieces of information are different between your website and theirs?
• What products/services do they provide that you don’t?
• How are they priced vs. your company?
• Do they have a an email sign up? If so, sign up for it (HINT: use a generic email address so they don’t know it’s you! Some companies will remove or block mailings to an obvious competitor email address.)

2. Look at customer reviews

• Check Yelp, Angie’s List, Google Reviews, Foursquare, etc. to see what customers are saying about your competition. Here are 20 online business listings to browse.
• Are there any trends or common traits among the compliments or complaints?
• How do your ratings compare to the competition?

3. Use search engines 

• Do a generic search for your business type and location (e.g., “florist in San Francisco, CA” or “yoga studio in Minneapolis, MN”) on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
• Which page does the competition show up on versus your company in organic results? If your competitors are showing up higher on the page, you probably need to focus on your SEO efforts.
• Are your competitors using Google Ads or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to drive traffic to their website?

4. Follow them on social media

• Follow your competitors on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Facebook recently rolled out the ability to add competitor’s pages to your “Pages to Watch” section and compare their results with yours.
• How is the competition communicating with customers via social media? What types of information are they sharing and how often?
• How many followers do they have compared to you?

5. Set up a Google Alert

• Find out the latest news that hits the web regarding your competitors by using a Google Alert.
• Set up the Google Alert once and any news stories related to your competitors will hit your inbox. You set the topics and frequency.

6. Visit or buy from them

• Do it the old-fashioned way. If they have a physical location or a storefront, go check it out in person. Talk to the employees. Get a sense of how they interact with customers. If your business and competitor offer software or a service, sign up for a free trial, or have a chat with a salesperson.
• If they have an online store, buy something online and note the process. Track how they communicate with customers before, during and after the shopping experience.

With the exception of your time, doing a competitive analysis won’t really cost a thing (well, unless you buy one of their products). It’s time well spent.

What other techniques have you used that have worked to find out what your competition is up to? Share in the comments.

Email is the new phone in today’s sales world. It’s currently one of the most effective online customer acquisition tools according to this post from Wired – ranking just behind organic search and paid advertising, but ahead of social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Email is the new phone in today’s sales world. It’s currently one of the most effective online customer acquisition tools according to this post from Wired – ranking just behind organic search and paid advertising, but ahead of social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

There’s just one problem with the way many businesses have begun to view and deploy email as a sales tool – they’re executing campaigns without first understanding how their current sales process can be optimized for the clients’ buying process in that environment.  

One Company’s Experience with Selling Through Email

Recently, “Randy,” a new client of our firm, came to us with the desire to drive sales through email without involving a salesperson. He’d noticed the widespread increase in Internet marketing and believed that, because customers were getting so comfortable with buying online, that even bigger ticket items like his company’s website plug-in could be sold through online channels like email.

Essentially, Randy thought that email would allow him to increase sales and save significant cash because he could cut back on sales headcount and commission payouts.

In some ways, Randy was right.

His firm’s plug-in could be easily customized for each client without the involvement of a salesperson, and his existing clients had been thrilled with the productivity savings his product delivered. Randy’s firm had written a white paper that outlined those successful client implementations and produced a video with testimonials and a quick product demo. Even better, his metrics showed an incredible 75 percent conversion rate when prospects digested both of those content pieces.

So, Randy naturally assumed that all he needed to do was run a simple email campaign that included the white paper and video, followed up with an offer to try the plug-in, and new sales would roll in.

But that’s not what happened. After three months of email campaigns, Randy’s firm had driven no new sales.

Why Sales and Buying Processes Matter in Email Campaigns

The problem, we discovered, was that Randy’s email campaigns didn’t align with how the company had successfully sold its product in the past, nor did they pay any mind to how the company’s prospects preferred to purchase.

Randy’s email strategy was simple: It began with two emails that revolved around an offer to read the white paper, and followed up with two more emails with an offer to view the video. If prospects decided to view the video, they were greeted with an offer at the end of it to purchase the website plug-in.

So, why didn’t that sales process work?

Because, in the real world, Randy’s sales process typically included meeting a contact in person at a trade show, discussing their productivity challenges, sending the white paper after the show, scheduling a follow-up meeting (during which the video is shown), delivering a pitch for how the plug-in could be applied to that prospect’s unique situation, engaging in a discussion about pricing, and then (and only then) sending the prospect to the company’s website to order.

That’s a minimum of four personal contacts. Randy’s email campaign was banking on just one or two. If every prospect opened and read each email (highly unlikely), Randy’s email campaign mimicked just a two-call inside sales process. Knowing that average email open rate percentages hover around 20 percent, however, it’s more likely that Randy’s email campaign modeled a one-call close sales process in which a prospect was cold called, shown the video, and asked to purchase. In either case, neither was sufficiently robust enough to nurture and educate Randy’s prospects about his product.

Regardless of the Channel, the Sales Process is Still Relevant

Ultimately, I think Randy’s experience personifies the way many business owners sell through email.

They see the channel as a faster and more efficient way to drive sales, but forget that email campaigns must still model, in some way, their offline sales processes. Yes, customers are increasingly comfortable buying online with little engagement with an actual salesperson, but that doesn’t mean their historical buying process should be ignored.

To be truly successfully, your business needs to treat its email campaigns like it would any other sales mechanism – progressively providing the information that nurtures, educates, and builds trust with prospects so that they can fully understand the value of your solution and move closer to a buying decision.

Yes, doing that might mean extending the length and intensity of your email campaigns. But, as Randy’s experience shows, the commitment to that more robust sales process is more likely to pay bigger dividends than a hastily executed campaign.

Showrooming, once a worry primarily for consumer electronics retailers, is expanding into markets we might have thought exempt. Today we can investigate everything from cars to books to groceries in person and then proceed to order them online, often with greater ease and significant savings.

Chalk this up to the efficiency of digital retailers, who’ve systematically dismantled every obstacle to online shopping. Shipping is fast and cheap, returns are a snap, and customer service is often better than what you find in a store. Price competition these days is a guaranteed losing strategy, especially with Amazon, whose long cash floats and high inventory turnover allow them to stay profitable even with no margin. Stores like Best Buy and Walmart once seemed unstoppable as they displaced independent retailers; now the Goliath has become David.

Yet for each Radio Shack and Barnes and Noble fighting for its life, there are still those beloved corner stores and discount chains that manage to thrive. Many keep a close eye on the prices being charged by their digital competitors, and work to keep theirs from straying too much higher. Most learn to emphasize their advantage in immediacy. More than anything, these successful brick-and-mortar stores know to compete on experience.

A satisfying real-life retail experience is something Amazon can never duplicate – but the trick is translating that satisfaction into dollars spent on-site. We should see this as an experience design problem. A look at retailers who succeed despite showrooming reveals three design imperatives.

Design for empathic expertise. When a shopper uses a physical retail setting as a showroom, what are they looking for? A better look at the merchandise, and the benefits of touch and feel – but even more, for expertise that could guide their choice. You probably have a business you patronize for exactly this reason, whether it’s the boutique that knows what’s on trend, or the specialty grocer who can advise on preparation of a dish, or the wine seller who can recommend the right bottle to go with that meal. Backcountry.com and Zappos, for example, are excellent online retailers, but they haven’t displaced REI or the local shoe store, because people value that hands-on expertise. Especially when the purchase is something we really care about, we’re willing to pay extra for a trusted advisor helping us make the right choice.

How could the shopping experience be designed to emphasize your expertise – and get it paid for? The challenge begins with improving staff hiring and training. Good people also need good information. If you can create a data system to give employees quick access to information about products and customers, you can equip them to advise as experts. Conversely, if shoppers perceive that the kid behind the counter knows little more than they do – or worse, has an incentive other than the consumer’s interests to steer them toward certain choices – they will have no qualms about leaving the store and buying online. Design your retail setting to be a showroom for your empathic experts even more than for the products you sell.

Design for whole solution provision. When you buy a new computer, you may also need new peripherals and software to accomplish what you’re hoping to do with it. A new bike often means a new helmet, lock, and lights. A new coat calls for a matching scarf and gloves. Especially in the consumer electronics category, where technologies shift with blinding speed, customers are often happy to take care of these purchases all at once, in person, even if it means spending a few dollars more. Concerns about compatibility are certainly part of it (how do you choose wisely if you can’t tell USB from HDMI, or a Schrader valve from a Presta?), but so are perceptions of price. Spending an extra five or ten dollars seems reasonable when investing in a solution that costs hundreds or thousands. The desire to assemble a combination that works, right away, can derail an obsession with paying the lowest price.

For retailers, this has implications not just for the expertise you need in problem solving, but also for the products you stock and how they are displayed. The extras here are very different from the impulse buys we make while waiting in the supermarket checkout line. They’re considered purchases that weigh current and future needs against budget, and must respect the requirements of the central product they work with. They can also add up to hundreds of dollars.

This means designing your store to serve as a source for solutions, both now and in the future. Again, heightening your staff’s expertise helps immensely. So does offering customers a complete ecosystem of secondary products, rather than simply hanging some earbuds and cases within easy reach. Design with an eye to the outcome the customer is seeking, whether that’s more reliable transportation, more exciting entertainment, or higher productivity. Deliver a system of products and services that works with their primary purchase to provide those outcomes, and they’ll reward you for it, rather than try to reconstruct it all for themselves online.

Design for community. Portland, Oregon, where Ziba has its headquarters, is so saturated with bike-oriented businesses that when a newcomer, Velo Cult, announced in 2012 it was moving its bicycle repair shop here from San Diego, observers wondered loudly whether it had any chance of success. It didn’t help that even the local mainstays were being challenged by online competitors discounting the products they sold at retail.

Rather than compete on price or selection, though, Velo Cult works “to be equal parts bike shop, venue, and bar” – in other words, a community. The large space they occupy is open plan, with long tables and benches, repair stations along one side, and a beer and coffee bar along the other. They offer the space up to local organizations for seminars, meetings, and parties, whether bike-related or not. Within months, Velo Cult became a de facto community center for many of the city’s two-wheeled enthusiasts. It also became a profitable business.

It’s an unusual model, but a great design solution in a saturated market. Any shop can sell you a rack or floor pump, or tune up your road bike; for consumers, the decision of where to shop (online or off) comes down to convenience and trust. By establishing itself as a community hub, Velo Cult showed thousands of potential customers that it was easy to get to, pleasant to visit, and aligned with their own values. If you visit a store three times to attend an event or grab a drink, your fourth visit could be to buy a new pair of tires…even if you could’ve ordered them from Amazon for a few dollars less.

Not every retail environment can be a community center, of course, but the demand for such spaces is huge and unmet, and there are endless ways to build community — even in surprising environments, like financial institutions. Since its “Slow Banking” redesign in 2003, Oregon-based Umpqua Bank has provided ample seating, free coffee, and wifi to its customers, and offered up its branches for meetings, workshops, and concerts. In that time, it’s grown from less than 70 branches to nearly 400, becoming the largest regional bank in the Western US.

Both Umpqua and Velo Cult succeeded by orienting their spaces around community first, and sales second. Companies looking to emulate their success should realize that the visual differences are relatively small, but policy shifts can be fundamental, from encouraging events that generate little or no revenue, to changing the way employees are incentivized and trained.

One fundamental point deserves to be underscored, because it informs all three of these design imperatives: shopping is emotional. The internet offers many functional advantages: selection is endless and endlessly searchable, prices are excellent, and there’s none of the hassle of going to the store. Most purchases, though, aren’t purely functional, and a well-designed shopping experience works with that by heightening the positive emotions and countering the negative ones.

More than just satisfying emotional needs, shopping is part of how we form identity. The decisions we make about how we will spend our money are part of how we present ourselves to the world. Offer customers an experience that deepens their sense of identity and reflects positively on it, and you’ll earn the higher margin you’re asking them to pay.

Rather than read all of these self-help books full of things you should start doing to be more productive, it’s often better to look at what you should stop doing that gets in the way of productivity.

Looking at a problem backwards is called inversion and it’s often a better approach.

With that in mind, Tim Ferris recently talked about this in a short podcast. Tim is the author of the cult hit and international best-seller "The 4-Hour Workweek."

Here is Tim’s list of nine things you should stop doing right now.

1. Do not answer phone calls from people you don’t know.

The logic behind this one is that calls from people you don’t know are often disruptions. Further, these calls can sometimes surprise you and that puts you in a poor negotiating position. Just let it go to voicemail.

2. Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, says “One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.”

In fact matching skills to the time of day is one of the most important changes you can make to improve your working habits.

You want to get out of a reactive loop. If you move creative and thinking work to the start of the day, when we’re at our peak, you’ll have the rest of the day to be reactive.

The window for peak performance is two and a half to four hours after waking. In "Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body," Jennifer Ackerman explains:

Studies show that alertness and memory, the ability to think clearly and to learn, can vary by between 15 and 30 percent over the course of a day. Most of us are sharpest some two and a half to four hours after waking. For early risers then, concentration tends to peak between 10 A.M. and noontime, along with logical reasoning, and the ability to solve complex problems.

Email is the king of making us reactive. How many times have you gone to the office, noticed you had a free hour, opened up outlook and had that hour disappear. Email makes us reactive. There is also some psychology at play here, email offers us variable reinforcement. It’s like cocaine for the brain and it makes us feel important.

Tim says checking email in the morning, “scrambles your priorities.” And checking email right before bed, a habit most of us have, impacts your ability to sleep.

3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time.

This is a personal favorite of mine.

Tim says:

If the desired outcome is defined clearly with a stated objective and agenda listing topics/questions to cover, no meeting or call should last more than 30 minutes. Request them in advance so you “can best prepare and make good use of the time together.”

If the agenda is not clear, force people to make it clear. It’s easy to call a meeting, especially in large organizations. The person who wouldn’t otherwise be entrusted to spend $100 of the company’s money can easily call a meeting with 10 people and spend more than the $100 in time. Making the agenda clear and specific inserts friction into the process. Not only will meetings generally be better and shorter, there will also be fewer of them.

4. Do not let people ramble.

This is one I hadn’t really thought of before. Skip the small talk. If you’re answering your phone say “I’m in the middle of something, but what’s up?” That helps people get to the point.

Tim says “a big part of getting things done is getting to the point.”

5. Do not check email constantly.

In "The Tyranny of Email," John Freeman explains:

Working at the speed of email is like trying to gain a topographic understanding of our daily landscape from a speeding train — and the consequences for us as workers are profound. Interrupted every thirty seconds or so, our attention spans are fractured into a thousand tiny fragments.

The mind is denied the experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated thinking occurs. We become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as we try to keep up with the computer. The email inbox turns our mental to-do list into a palimpsest — there’s always something new and even more urgent erasing what we originally thought was the day’s priority.

Incoming mail arrives on several different channels — via email, Facebook, Twitter, instant message — and in this era of backup we’re sure that we should keep records of our participation in all these conversations. The result is that at the end of the day we have a few hundred or even a few thousand emails still sitting in our inbox.

So why do we email all day? I think we like the attention email gives us. Email is addictive in the same way slots are — variable reinforcement. Tim calls email the “cocaine pellet dispenser.”

6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.

While Tim doesn’t extend this to people, we all have people in our circles who consume a lot of our time but add very little meaning or value in return. You can minimize these (unhealthy) relationships.

7. Do not work more to fix being too busy.

This is really a matter of priorities. As in, you’re not making decisions. You need to say no.

Ferris suggests defining your “one or two most important to-dos before dinner, the day before.” Work on those the first thing the next morning.

If you don’t know your real priorities, everything will seem important and urgent, and that’s a recipe for disaster. The sweet spot is feeling busy but not rushed.

8. Do not carry a cellphone or Crackberry 24/7

Tim calls this a “digital leash.” I agree. I hate to tell you, but odds are, you’re not that important.

9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should.

Tim says:

Work is not all of life. Your co-workers shouldn’t be your only friends. Schedule life and defend it just as you would an important business meeting. Never tell yourself “I’ll just get it done this weekend.”

Work expands to the amount of time you give it. This is Parkinson’s Law. When you give it a lot of time, it will consume that time. Give it less time and you’ll be more productive.

SEE ALSO: Why Time Seems To Speed Up As We Get Older

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The Cannes Lions festival the advertising industry's biggest awards show. Winning at Cannes tells the world that your ads are creative and cutting-edge, as well as effective.

Categories range from Branded Content & Entertainment to Radio, PR, and Film. Each category names a Grand Prix winner, the top prize, followed by Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners. 

All of the following ads and campaigns won Grand Prix awards, the top honor at the festival, in their respective categories.   

Here’s a look at some of this year’s best ads in the world:

A hilarious Christmas campaign for Harvey Nichols took home four Grand Prix awards including a Film Grand Prix for the ad “Sorry, I Spent It On Myself.” The Harvey Nichols campaign also won a Grand Prix for its print ads. Cannes Agency of the Year adam&eveDDB is behind the holiday ads. 

Volvo’s “The Epic Split” won a Film Grand Prix for its epic stunt featuring actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors created the Volvo ad as part of the larger Live Test campaign, which demonstrates the strength and durability of Volvo trucks. The entire campaign, which raked in over 100 million views on YouTube, also won a Grand Prix in the Cyber Lion category. 

The Creative Artists Agency out of LA won a Cyber Lions for its work on Chipotle’s viral campaign, “The Scarecrow.” The integrated, multi-platform campaign included a viral video, a website, and a mobile game app.

Pharrell’s song “Happy” is undoubtedly one of the catchiest, most-played hits of the year. But the song wouldn’t be nearly as popular without help from Iconoclast, Paris. The agency created a 24 hour interactive experience, recorded in one shot, showing Pharrell and others dancing to the song “Happy.” All footage was posted to the 24 Hours of Happy website, while the best moments were used to make the music video.  

Ogilvy & Mather's Johannesburg office won big in the Radio category, claiming the Grand Prix for its work on a Lucozade radio campaign. The agency created three dramatic radio spots for the energy drink telling consumers that with Lucozade, they can conquer anything from a kid's birthday party to an Enrique Iglesias concert. 

Lemz Amsterdam and Terre Des Hommes, an international children's aid organization, won the Grand Prix for Good for the Sweetie campaign. Sweetie is a computer generated 10-year-old girl designed to track down and catch online predators. The campaign worked to raise awareness about webcam child sex tourism.   

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By now, you’ve likely heard about the New York Times Digital Innovation Report. The nearly-100 page report was leaked by Buzzfeed last month and became more than the talk of the town in New York city right before Internet Week where I presented on the content marketing imperative.

The NYT’s analysis of its own Digital Innovation also became one of the most talked about reports in digital media, marketing, and even in technology circles.

The New York Time is winning at journalism.

The report kicks off. And while it celebrates the victory of producing great content in the digital age, it immediately warns:

At the same time, we are falling behind in a second critical area: the art and science of getting our journalism to readers.

The report was crated by a committee of the more digitally-minded employees at the company and led by the publisher’s son, A.G. Sulzberger. His father then fired Jill Abramson in a move that was reported as unrelated to the report or its findings.

The Nieman Journalism Lab did a great job of summarizing the main take-aways of the report and called it one of the “key documents of this digital age.”

Some of the main findings of the report paint a detailed picture of what any effective content marketing strategy should consider:

The Value of The Homepage Is Decreasing

The report stated that only a third of their visitors ever visited their homepage. And those that do spend less time on the site and engage less. The report blamed a lack of focus on sharing their quality journalism.

Take-away: Focus on your headlines over your homepage

Re-Purpose Old Content

The report cited numerous examples of competitors who had taken Times content and re-packaged it, often with greater effect. The implication is to think about curating from your own archives, experimenting and re-purposing in new ways.

Take-away: Look back at your previous hits and think about news ways to publish and share the content

Technology Is A Key Enabler

Content Rules Co-Author C.C. Chapman suggested every CMO should read the report and cited technology as his top conclusion: “a solid content management system is the foundation for success.”

The Times report mentions how the company is “woefully behind in its tagging and structured data practices.”

Take-away: use data, tagging and solid technology to serve up the best possible user experience.

Even Great Content Needs A Push

One are the Innovation report spends a lot of time on is the lack of sharing, promotion and social pushing from the Times own staff. The report cites competitors who require authors to submit 5 possible tweets for each story and to share their stories with their own social profiles.

Take-away: spend as much time focused on promoting your content as you do in creating it.

Start Conversations With The Community

The report mentions the lack of commenting on the site and how they “nominally attempt to interact with readers.” It says that only a fraction of stories are open for comments, only 1% of readers comment and only 3% of readers read the comments.

Take-away: use your content as an opportunity to start conversations with your audience and build a community around it.

There were many other areas discussed in the report such as:

• focus on integrating live events
• team work among staffers
• lack of communication among different teams
• lack of clearly defined strategy
• fear of failure
• hiring practices
• thinking “digital-first”

And what really comes to mind for me is that all of the above could appear on the list of to-do’s for many CMOs and marketing leaders from businesses of every size. So remember:

Key Take-aways From The New York Time Digital Innovation Report

1. Focus on your headlines
2. Re-purpose your content in multiple ways
3. Start with a solid foundation in technology that supports the user experience
4. Put equal effort into promotion and creation
5. Use your content as an opportunity to open a dialogue with your community

These are my key thoughts from the report. What are yours?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Ever since Facebook first introduced brand pages in 2007, companies have been flocking to social media. Many business leaders believe that the more they post and share about their products and services, the greater their chances of attracting customers and generating revenue.

But just-released research from Gallup’s State of the American Consumer report suggests that much of these efforts have been misguided.

Social media are not the powerful and persuasive marketing force many companies assumed they would be. Gallup finds that a full 62% of U.S. adults who use social media say that these sites have absolutely no influence on their purchasing decisions. Another 30% say these sites have some influence, and just 5% say they have a great deal of influence.

And although companies may think that people who “like” or follow them on social media are an attentive audience, our research suggests otherwise. Of consumers who report liking or following a company, 34% still say that social media have no influence on their purchasing behavior, while 53% say they have only some influence.

When compared with more traditional forms of social networking, social media initiatives may actually be the least effective method for influencing consumers’ buying decisions. Gallup research has shown that consumers are much more likely to turn to friends, family members, and experts when seeking advice about companies, brands, products, or services. Social media sites have almost no sway.

These findings raise a question: is there an inherent flaw in the idea of using social media to drive purchasing, or have companies just been using social media poorly? The fact that some portion of buyers credit social media with having real influence suggests the latter may be true. Consumers are drawn to social media because they want to take part in the conversation and make connections. But many companies continue to treat social media as a one-way communication vehicle and are largely focused on how they can use these sites to push their marketing agendas.

To positively influence purchasing through social media, marketers should learn to use it to listen and interact. Consumers are more likely to engage when the brand-related posts they encounter are:

• Authentic. Social media sites are highly personal and conversational. And, as Gallup finds, consumers who use these sites don’t want to hear a sales pitch. They’re more likely to listen and respond to companies that seem genuine and personable. Companies should back away from the hard sell and focus on creating more of an open dialogue with consumers.
• Responsive. The social media world is 24/7, and consumers expect timely responses – even on nights and weekends. Companies must be available to answer questions and reply to complaints and criticisms; ignoring negative feedback can do considerable damage to a brand’s reputation. Instead, companies must actively listen to what their customers are saying and respond accordingly. If they made mistakes, they must own up to them and take responsibility.
• Compelling. Content is everywhere, and consumers have the ability to pick and choose what they like. Companies must create compelling, interesting content that appeals to busy, picky social media users. This content should be original to the company and not related to sales or marketing. Consumers need a reason to visit and interact with a company’s social media site and to keep coming back.

When companies focus their social media efforts on pushing product and not cultivating communities, they overlook the real potential of these channels. Gallup research has consistently shown that customers base purchasing decisions on their emotional connections with a brand. Social media are great for making those connections — but only when a brand shifts its focus from communication to conversation.

We usually digest visual information better than text-based content. We can make use of this when optimizing our social media marketing campaigns to give ourselves an edge over competitors who push out written content via social media.

When it comes to social media, there is no denying the fact that the images we use in our content can have a huge impact on how the content is perceived by the community. See #3, #7, #3, all of which emphasize the same thing.

Whether you are a social media expert, or a newbie in charge of managing content, you will always have to double-check the height and width of every image you post on your favourite channels. Making sure these images look good in all possible formats is a time-consuming and frustrating process, especially since the content is accessible from a variety of devices. Today we’ll show you how to tackle this issue.

In this post we will take a look at some of the most popular social media sites, and give you all the information you need on selecting the best sizes and dimensions for the images that you want to use there. I’ll also try to cover various tips for optimizing these images for your brand strategy and improving CTR.

Interested in tips for a certain social network? Jump right there. Below is the ultimate guide to using images in social media.

Facebook Images Size Guide

Cover photos on Facebook are prime real estate for showcasing your brand. I’ve seen some creative ways in which individuals and brands makes use of this space. The official recommendation is to use an image 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall.

Profile photos

are advised to be 180×180 images which will be displayed as a 160×160.

Twitter Images Size Guide

Twitter allows us to use post images as long as they’re hosted on pic.twitter.com and are shown inline on users’ feeds. They’ve also just announced their support for GIFs, which is a great way to engage with your audience. There are many ways to do this, and we’ll take a look at some of them in the tips and tricks section.

Google+ Images Size Guide

You can use animated GIFs on G+, which is awesome. And they’re not just limited to post images—you can use them in you cover pics or as your profile pic. Use the PSD file from hughbriss.com as a starting point for your cover pic.

Pro Tip:

If you’re an active G+ user, you’ll love this Chrome plugin by Paul Spoerry, that allows you to add text formatting to your G+ posts.

LinkedIn Images Size Guide

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 300 million members. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is one of the most essential social networking platforms to generate leads.

LinkedIn does not play nice with long visuals like infographics, which anyone can easily create using our infographics templates. So I would recommend using a small portion of the infographic for your LinkedIn update instead of posting the whole thing.

Also, company posts on LinkedIn have the option of a custom photo, so you don’t have to use the one LinkedIn pulls in automatically.

YouTube Images Size Guide

Six billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. That’s almost an hour for every person on Earth! Statistics like that make YouTube the go-to place for video content.

Instagram Images Size Guide

Instagram, one of the top photo sharing social networks, is becoming quite popular with small businesses. It’s helping them drive sales and develop their brand. If you have a business that sells an item that can photograph well, then by all means look at Instagram as a potential marketing channel.

Pinterest Images Size Guide

This social networking site with a virtual pinboard interface is certainly picking up steam, and is a great marketing channel, particularly among women. This gives Pinterest an edge over the others, especially if your target audience is largely female.

There are two main ways for images to appear in Pinterest. The first is as a pin on the pinboard, and the second is an image that is opened when the pin is clicked.

Tips and Tricks for using Images in Social Media

Now that we’ve seen which sizes to go for on some of the most popular social networking sites, let’s take a look at some tools and tricks we can use to make sure the content looks awesome.

1. Images: There are quite a few stock photo sites out there, and it’s a good idea to browse through a few of them to find the perfect image to goes along with the content you publish.

2. Personalize: Don’t use the stock image as-is. Add some color, badges, personalized text or other CTA to get more people interested in your visuals. You don’t need Photoshop to do all that—freeware tools like Paint.NET, fotor or PicMonkey can be used effectively to do a lot of image customization.

Two of my favorite tools for customizing and personalizing images are Recite and Canva. There are also a lot of online tools that can help, like those from Internet Marketing Ninjas, Autre planète, and Timeline Slicer.

3. Use images in creative ways: Some interesting tactics I’ve seen include using images with a poll and cutting out answers, as shown below. (This works on the Twitter app and Twitter home feed.)

You can also use the ability to include up to four photos in a tweet. This is available on both the iPhone and Android App, and should be coming to the web app soon.

How about you?

Have any questions? Don’t be shy! Add your comments below, and I will try and get back to you.

Ari Weinzweig, CEO and cofounder of Zingerman's gourmet food company, has made few traditional management decisions since opening Zingerman's Deli in 1982.

Zingerman's Community of Businesses is a collective of nine specialized businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's founded on a unique philosophy that forgoes the standard corporate hierarchy and emphasizes collective decision-making among its 18 partners.

Executive meetings are already open to all employees, and Weinzweig is figuring out a way to turn his company into a worker cooperative where every employee owns a stake in the company and has a voice in determining its direction.

It's an unorthodox approach, but it's worked well for the Zingerman's business collective. Its revenue continues to grow by 8% to 10% annually, Weinzweig tells Business Insider, and it is on track to bring in $50 million in revenue this fiscal year.

Zingerman's management style may be unusual, but it's based on the simple tenets of treating employees well and selling quality products.

In his 2010 book "A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Building a Great Business," Weinzweig details the 12 laws on which he and his partners have built Zingerman's. They are:

1. "An inspiring, strategically sound vision leads the way to greatness."

To Weinzweig, a vision is what the company will look like by a certain year — not a strategic plan on how to get there. "To be effective the vision needs to inspire the people who will be doing the work. It also needs to be strategically sound, i.e., while your goals should be ambitious, you want them to be realistic, too," he writes. Zingerman's outlined its vision for the year 2020 here.

2. "You need to give customers really compelling reasons to buy from you."

This may seem obvious, Weinzweig says, but it's important that business owners remind themselves that they need their customers much more than their customers need them. It's about finding a way to be more exciting than competitors. Zingerman's does this by offering food products that have stories behind them and offering exceptional customer service.

3. "Without good finance, you fail."

"Many businesses that are doing special things fail every year because they don't manage their money well," Weinzweig writes. He says it can be easy to forget that offering a great product isn't enough to guarantee profitability.

4. "People do their best work when they're part of a great organization."

For the past 30 years, Weinzweig has seen that the company's performance increases when employees' job satisfaction does the same. One of the ways Zingerman's engages its 600-plus employees is through the use of open book management, in which all employees are informed of the company's finances.

5. "If you want the staff to give great service to customers, the leaders have to give great service to the staff."

Weinzweig is a firm believer in Robert Greenleaf's theory of "servant leadership," which contends that the service the staff gives to customers is never going to be better than the service that leaders provide the staff.

6. "If you want great performance from your staff, you have to give them clear expectations and training tools."

The 1999 book "First, Break All The Rules" cites a Gallup poll of 1 million workers that determined the top two factors for staying with a job are "clear expectations" and "tools to do their work."

A more recent Gallup Business Journal piece explains: "Describe what each employee is supposed to accomplish, not how he or she is supposed to accomplish it. Don't explain expectations as a process or set of steps; explain them in terms of the outcomes the employee needs to achieve to reach organizational goals."

7. "Successful businesses do the things that others know they should do... but generally don't."

Weinzweig tells the story of how Zingerman's sent someone on a 45-minute trip to pick up an excellent rye bread from a Detroit bakery every morning up until Zingerman's Bakehouse opened. He says great organizations don't cut corners. "They stay open late, they open early, they thank a few more staff and customers, they pay a bit more to get better raw materials, they forgive loyal employees who err, they give a bit more to the community."

8. "To get to greatness you've got to keep getting better, all the time!"

The moment you start to coast, says Weinzweig, is the moment your business starts to decline. He thinks that it becomes harder, not easier, to manage a business well as it matures.

9. "Success means you get better problems."

It's a myth that progress eliminates problems, since there will always be challenges. It's the difference between having so few customers that you struggle to make your payroll and having sales so strong that you struggle to keep up. "The key is to pick the problems you want and then appreciate the chance to work on them, all the while working to get better problems still," Weinzweig writes.

10. "Whatever your strengths are, they will likely lead straight into your weaknesses."

Weinzweig suggests taking a look at your strengths and predicting how they may hurt you — and then plan accordingly. "I'm personally very focused, and I don't let go of something I believe in very easily. Certainly that quality has contributed positively to what I've been able to achieve over the years. But it's sort of inevitable ... that sometimes I'm going to stick with something longer than I should," he says. The same is true for organizations.

11. "It generally takes a lot longer to make something great happen than people think."

Managers should never expect a new strategy to start working immediately and need to give it a suitable amount of time to develop before abandoning it. For example, when Zingerman's adopted open book finance 20 years ago, it had a start that was "mediocre at best." But it started to notably improve the business after five years, and then another three or four to work optimally.

12. "Great organizations are appreciative, and the people in them have more fun."

Weinzweig stresses the importance of creating an enjoyable, positive work culture, where employees work hard because they know they are appreciated.

SEE ALSO: Why Michigan's Favorite Food Brand Is Turning Its $50 Million Business Into A Worker-Owned Co-Op

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