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Everyone knows Lewis Carroll as the author of Alice in Wonderland, but he was also a mathematician and logician interested in the ways people learn. Weblog Brain Pickings took a look at four rules developed by Carroll that you can use for better reading.

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It’s 5:00 pm at my house in Nederland, Colorado, and I remember that I have a 6:00-7:30 pm team meeting.  I need to plan the family dinner around it.  I head to the kitchen to prep a chicken and vegetables, timing them so they will roast and rest during my meeting and we can sit down to eat as soon as I am done.  In Grand Rapids, several team members will join the meeting at 8:00 pm, after their dinners and evening plans.  In Hong Kong, it will be 8:00 am and Elise and Yushi will either be at the studio or still at home, since the train commute can take a while.  In San Francisco, Meike will likely call in from the Coalesse Studio.  The meeting today is “no Paris” since it is 2:00 am there and Beatriz will be sleeping.

At Steelcase, we all understand that the rhythm of a global team is not a perfect 9-5 melody.   But understanding something can be very different from living it.   My team has grown increasingly distributed across multiple time zones and regions of the world over the last couple of years, and we have learned, through experience and experimentation, a few ways to leverage the value of a global team while also minimizing the pain and disruption it can create for us as individuals.  Since this is a shared experience for many multinational teams, I thought I would share five good global team practices we’ve adopted:

1. Share the burden of 24/7 across the team.   We will never be able to change our human circadian rhythms, even though some of us may be early birds and others night owls.  Time separation on a global team presents one of the biggest physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges.  Despite all our “understanding” of being a global team, we used to always privilege Grand Rapids (U.S. Eastern Time) in our meeting schedule and make our Asia team members stay up late.  Several months ago we started a rotating meeting schedule.  Every month, each team member now has one evening, one mid-day, and one early morning meeting, and misses one meeting that falls in the middle of their night.  No team member is expected to attend a team meeting between 10 pm and 7 am.
2. Schedule consistent meetings to help far-flung people connect. Serendipitous encounters with colleagues around the world are still limited with our current technologies.  We have learned that having consistent meetings where people can connect in both formal and informal ways is critical for fostering team cohesion. Our team has weekly meetings to provide this structure – and we make them long enough to allow for technology connection hiccups, formal sharing of project work, and some time for catching up on vacations, travel experiences, or lifestage celebrations like engagements or new babies.   We are also prototyping a global “Social Hour” where we are all invited to bring coffee, lunch, or a cocktail –depending on where you are and what time it is—and hang out together on videoconference.   Every team needs to think about what may be best for them, but you’ll want more of these checkpoints than you would need for a fully co-located team.
3. Use as many collaboration tools as you need to – and constantly search for better ones. The tools available to distributed teams today aren’t perfect. There is no one technology that does everything we need, so we use many of them for different purposes – including Google Drive, DropBox, Spark, and Murally.  We have fully adopted Murally (a digital, highly visual sticky note canvas) as a team in the last year and it has dramatically improved our team’s collaboration. We are still searching for the best video conference platform;  telepresence is limited since we always have some team members joining from home; Group Skype and Google Hangout are too unstable; GoTo Meeting is more stable but only allows six video feeds and we frequently have ten people joining.  We are now turning for a second time to a collaboration tool called Sococo.  We’ve found that it takes a lot patience and flexibility to use these tools effectively, and adaptability in swapping out tools in the moment as needed – such as dropping an unstable video connection and switching to conference call because the bandwidth in Hong Kong is experiencing latency.
4. Pay extra attention to your colleagues who are on the phone or on video.  At Steelcase, we talk a lot about the concept of “presence disparity.”  In meetings that bring people together via different communication channels, individual “presences” don’t necessarily have the same weight in the conversation.  For example, people in the same room are more likely to talk to each other and forget about the person on the video screen and the person on the speaker phone.  Likewise, it’s easier to enter the conversation as a distributed participant on video than from the phone because your visual presence makes it easier to get people’s attention.  We are consistently looking for new ways to solve for this reality of modern communications at Steelcase – and yet too often our own teams succumb to its allure by privileging those who are physically present over those who are joining from afar.  The most powerful tool for this is awareness – remember the value that your colleagues around the world bring to the table and honor them with consistent inclusion in the conversation.  Practice eye contact with people on video, gently pause a passionate conversation in the room and ask the remote participants to chime in, or experiment with equalizing presence by having everyone call into the video conference or conference call individually.
5. Invest in bringing the team together on a regular rhythm to foster team cohesion. No tool can replace being together in the same room.  I bring my globally dispersed team together twice a year for workshops, which have proven invaluable for renewing personal ties, building trust, and having unmediated and embodied experiences together.   I have three rules for these workshops:  We should build something together, we should learn something together, and we should have plenty of informal, social time.  I also use these times for us to engage in team strategic discussions or decision-making, since it’s much more effective to reach alignment around complex issues when we are in the same room.  Recently, we all gathered in Paris for our spring workshop and accomplished all of those goals. We finalized our team goal for the coming fiscal year and developed our integrated team plan with clear alignment to our corporate strategy and fiscal year priorities (we built something together).  We spent an afternoon envisioning our team future through an experimental theatre exercise developed at Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Institute at MIT and another afternoon visiting a museum (we learned together). Finally, we ate a lot of good French food and tasted some local wines too (we had informal, social time).   The travel costs for these two weeks every year spurs our team’s performance for the other 50 weeks.  A smart travel budget is a necessary component for a high-performing, globally integrated team.

All of these different approaches add up to increasing our team’s empathy for one another.   This compassion fuels trust, engagement, and collaboration – and drives our business forward.

 

Last week Elon Musk, the iconoclastic CEO of Tesla Motors declared that Tesla would effectively allow any competitor to use its patents portfolio. Shortly after, BMW and Nissan announced that they wanted to cooperate with Tesla on technology and standards. Between them, these three carmakers own almost all the market for electric vehicles and as such are natural competitors. So what motivates this recent cooperation: is it just good PR, is it plain altruism, or is there something more calculated?

Tesla has challenged the automotive business model on other occasions: it disintermediated car dealerships and then adopted a switching station model. Giving up the patent portfolio is a similar move that challenges the traditional business model. At the core of these moves is the realization that the conventional auto business model simply doesn’t work for electric vehicles.

In particular the competitive technology race that has characterized the evolution of conventional auto-makers is just not going to cut it for the electric vehicle industry. Instead, opening up the patent portfolio may finally create a structure where Tesla can capture more of the value of a more viable electric vehicles supply chain. It could do this in several ways:

• Creating scale: High component costs remain the biggest barrier to electric vehicle adoption. Part of these high costs come from the fact that a small number of electric vehicles are sold by a handful of suppliers relative to conventionally powered cars. This means component suppliers do not have the scale nor the reliability of demand to achieve cost efficiency. Given that Tesla’s pockets are far less deep than most other carmakers, it needs a quick way to get scale. Tesla’s best hope might be that its competitors like Nissan and BMW, which between than have almost 60% of the EV market adopt some of Tesla’s designs, thereby giving the electric vehicle supply chain the much needed scale economics long before its own sales will get it there.
• Building a charging infrastructure: As Tesla expands into Europe and Asia, it’s becoming clear that its own resources might not be sufficient to roll out a charging infrastructure at the speed necessary to break into these markets. Again, a faster path might be for the different players to converge on a common standard for chargers. By opening its patent portfolio, Tesla is hoping that some of its standards stand a better chance of becoming dominant.
• Offering upstream opportunities. Tesla’s business model is more than just selling electric cars. It also hopes to market some of its technology to other players. It has already supplied batteries to Toyota and Mercedes-Benz’s owner Daimler. Both carmakers are shareholders in Tesla. One potential future for Tesla could involve increasing proportions of its revenues coming from supplying batteries and other components to bigger car-makers. This will help sustain Tesla’s vehicle business despite its much smaller scale. Again this will be easier if more automakers adopt Tesla’s patents into their designs. It might eventually lead to an acquisition by one of the much bigger players.

In sum, Elon Musk’s opening up of Tesla’s patent portfolio might be motivated as much by strategic necessity rather than by altruism.

According to Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s outgoing Information and Privacy Commissioner, companies don’t just need big data—they need good data. And better privacy policies can help them innovate and compete.

Cavoukian was speaking last week at an event hosted by DNM Analytics, an Irish data analytics firm newly arrived in Toronto. She emphasized that privacy controls and innovation can coexist. “Privacy has enormous value at both the societal level and at the individual level. It forms the basis of our freedoms and allows creativity and innovation to thrive,” she said. “So my most important message is that it’s not an either/or phenomenon.”

There is growing disillusionment with big data, Cavoukian said. “Forget big data, you need good data,” she said. “You want to assure that the accuracy of your findings — the quality of your data — is sound. That’s what we’re talking about in terms of data analytics.”

Cavoukian, who is leaving her role as provincial watchdog to head the new Ryerson University Institute for Privacy and Big Data, said that privacy and big data are not a zero-sum game. “If you can embed privacy as a default setting, you’re laughing, because then you can offer your clients or customers privacy assurance,” she said, noting that some European businesses are starting to use their privacy policies as marketing tools to make inroads in areas of the economy that have traditionally been entrenched in the United States. Building privacy controls into data management systems is a core principle of Cavoukian’s much-lauded privacy by design framework.

Michael King, managing director of DNM, says the firm hopes to extend the benefits of big data analytics, traditionally the preserve of big corporations, to small- and medium-sized businesses.

READ: Stronger digital privacy laws stifle competition and don’t always help consumers: report

“Privacy should be viewed as a business issue, not a compliance issue,” Cavoukian suggested. She cited the backlash against Target as an example of the financial costs that businesses can incur because of inadequate privacy planning and protection. Consumers want businesses that perform good “data hygiene,” she said.

Cavoukian also hit out at the federal government’s Bill S-4, which critics say would allow business to share personal data without obtaining the consent of their consumers. A Macdonald-Laurier Institute report last week backed the loosening of those rules, with author Solvieg Singleton suggesting that privacy regulations can suppress competition by creating information monopolies. “It’s not this either-or proposition—privacy breeds innovation,” Cavoukian emphasized. “You can have it all.”

The post Greater data privacy “breeds innovation,” says Ont. privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian appeared first on Canadian Business.

You’ve heard it before and you’ll probably hear it many more times again. If you want to be a successful Internet marketer, whether you’re promoting the products and services of other people or you have something to sell of your own, you’ll want to build and establish a great mailing list. The power, as they say, is in the list. The challenge is getting people to sign up for that list and many marketers turn to a squeeze page for that purpose.

That may not always be the best approach. Instead, you might want to consider an alternative solution like OptinLinks. It’s a little more discreet in its approach, but they say that this is better for your long-term success, because you want to build that positive relationship with your subscribers and fans right from the get-go.

Building Your Mailing List

When it comes to adding people to your list, you’ll find that the majority of solutions out there are very much in your face. You get big, bold squeeze pages, for example. You also get those annoying pop-overs and lightboxes that obscure the actual content of your site. OptinLinks takes a different approach.

The way it works is that you can hide your opt-in form behind just about any button or link. When a visitor clicks on that button or link, then you get the lightbox-style optin form for the visitor to fill out. They enter their name and email address as normal and you’ve got yourself a new addition to your mailing list. OptinLinks calls it a two-step optin.

Now, many of us will assume that this kind of approach will hurt rather than help the sign-up rate, but OptinLinks says it has demonstrated the effectiveness of their solution. Unsurprisingly, they’ve worked to integrate with all major email marketing providers like AWeber, SendReach, GetResponse, Constant Contact, iContact, MailChimp and GoToWebinar. You don’t need to mess around with your PHP or form code.

Setting Up the WordPress Plugin

Offered to you as a simple WordPress plugin, OptinLinks is just as easy to install as any other WordPress plugin that you may have used. Simply download the ZIP archive from the membership site and then upload it to your WordPress site. Activate the plugin and you’ll find the new settings tab along the left column.

At first glance, this can look a little overwhelming, but it’s actually really straightforward. Through the Optin Form Management page through your WordPress admin panel, you’ll be able to choose your optin form name, enter the body text and select the button color, border and type. It’s basically a WYSIWYG editor with the live preview shown to the right.

This includes how the lightbox-style pop-over will look for the optin form itself, as well as the resulting “waiting for confirmation” window and the “success” window. Naturally, you’ll also need to configure the details to integrate with your email marketing software too.

In addition to the basic design for the optin form that will appear when visitors click on your call-to-action link or button, OptinLinks also comes with a robust dashboard to keep track of your basic statistics and analytics. Through here, you can see quick stats about your number of optins, clicks, views and unique visitors for today, yesterday, this month or all time. It’s also helpful that OptinLinks can support multiple campaigns.

Pricing Plans

There are three packages offered.

You can get started with the OptinLinks Basic package at $37, which only allows you to use the solution on a single website, though you get no split testing or client management. The $47 Advanced package includes unlimited personal use, while the most popular $67 Professional package bumps you up to unlimited use on unlimited sites, unlimited client management, unlimited split testing, and support for both WordPress and HTML sites.

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The post Grow Your List with OptinLinks appeared first on Blogging Tips.

If you believe the rumors, Amazon.com is going to enter the mobile phone business this week, with most pundits guessing that a mysterious video suggest that it will release a phone with novel 3-D viewing capabilities.

There are obvious reasons for Amazon to be eying the category. The mobile phone industry is massive, with close to 2 billion devices shipped annually and total spending on wireless-related services of more than $1.6 trillion across the world. As mobile devices increasingly serve as the center of the consumer’s world, their importance to a range of companies is increasing.

What should you watch for on Wednesday’s launch to see if Amazon is moving in the right direction? It is natural to start with the set of features that Amazon includes on its phone.

One of the basic principles behind Clayton Christensen’s famous conception of disruptive innovation is that the fundamental things people try to do in their lives actually change relatively slowly. The world advances not because our needs, hopes, and desires change, but because innovators come up with different and better ways to help us do what we were always trying to get done.

Take the big shifts in the music business. People have enjoyed listening to music for all of recorded history. But the biggest industry transformations came when innovators made it simpler and easier for people to listen to the music they want, where they want, and when they want. Thomas Edison’s phonograph was the first big democratization of music, allowing individuals to listen to music without having to hire a live performer, train to be a musician, or go to a concert. Sending sound through the airwaves, received in a radio, furthered this trend, enabling people to hear live sound remotely, or hear a wider variety of pre-recorded music.

Floor-standing radios were relatively expensive and consumed a lot of power. So it was hard for individuals to listen to what they wanted where they wanted until Sony popularized the highly portable transistor radio in the 1960s. The fidelity was low, but teenagers eager to listen to rock music out of earshot of disapproving parents or to baseball games late at night flocked to the device.

It’s difficult to enjoy music if everyone is blaring transistor radios on the subway, so Sony again made it simpler and easier for people to listen to what they wanted, when they wanted, when it introduced the Walkman in 1979. The device, and its offspring the Discman, had one obvious limitation — when people were away from home they couldn’t easily access their music collection. People compensated for this by making mix tapes or lugging around cases with dozens of CDs.

MP3 players, most notably Apple’s iPod, made it simpler and easier to listen to the precise music you wanted when and where you wanted. The first commercials for the iPod highlighted the value of having “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Finally, streaming music services like Spotify removed even the need to build a music collection.

Mobile phones follow a similar pattern. The first wave of growth came as devices from Motorola and Nokia made it easy and steadily more affordable for people to make phone calls and send short messages when they were on the go. Blackberry’s rise came from releasing office workers from their desks by making remote e-mail easy. The next wave of growth came as Apple and Android-based smart phones put productivity and entertainment applications from computers in the palm of your hand.

Leaving aside the hype of 3-D technologies, the big question about Amazon as it enters into this seemingly crowded arena will be whether its offering makes it easier or more affordable for people to do something they’ve historically cared about. Pundits are skeptical, with some calling the potential idea “silly.” But one job a 3-D phone might do better than existing alternatives is enable shoppers to see something before they buy it. People like finding and obtaining new goods, and replicating the in-store experience anywhere in the world could allow more people to shop more conveniently.

Of perhaps even more interest is Amazon’s business model. Market disruptions typically combine a simplifying technology with a business model that runs counter to the industry norm. The prevailing mobile phone model involves service carriers subsidizing the devices in return for locking consumers into two-year phone service contracts and charging them based on usage.

If Amazon were primarily interested in driving more retail purchasing it might come up with completely different pricing and usage models, subsidizing both the hardware and the phone service, perhaps in conjunction with a more disruptively oriented mobile carrier such as T-Mobile, and reaping its profits by taking a cut of transactions enabled by its 3-D platform.

Finally, remember that the true impact of an innovation isn’t always fully apparent when it launches. When Apple launched the iPod in 2001 it was interesting, but when it added the iTunes music store in 2003 an industry changed. Similarly, Google’s super-fast search technology caught people’s attention in the late 1990s, but the development of its AdWords business model a few years later is what made the company what it is.

So on Wednesday look to see if Amazon has found a way to make the complicated simple or the expensive affordable, pay particular attention to the business model it plans to follow, and, most critically, once the dust settles from the pundit reactions, watch what the company next has up its sleeves.

 Today’s big overnight news is that Apple has settled with consumers and states in a pricing suit, the details of the settlement as yet undisclosed. Don’t worry: you won’t have to register a $10,000 windfall with the IRS because Apple asked publishers to raise prices and force Amazon to do the same in order to beat Bezos’ $9.99 stranglehold on the e-book giant.… Read More

Expand Your Definition of Content to Create Value for Your Prospect There is a lot of talk about content in marketing and sales these days. A company no longer has just brochures, datasheets or a company website, it has a pool of content about the products and services it markets. The company makes strategic and […]

Customer relations are in transformation! Pre-sales, sales & after sales are changing at high speed. Companies need to figure out the current customer journey, the role of self service, their data strategy and much more. In April 2014 I conducted a global study on the future of customer relationships in collaboration with data collection company SSI and translation agency No Problem!. The study looks into all aspects of a modern customer relation. This post describes the highlights of the report.

Click here to read the full report on the future of customer relationships:

Adoption of new technologies ‘on speed’

I’m a big fan of Rogers’ adoption curve. His book ‘The diffusion of Innovations’ has a played a crucial role in my life so far. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the classic adoption curve consisting of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Every manager, marketeer and entrepreneur refers to this body of thought from time to time. More than ever, people are aware of what’s available.

50% of the general public know about Google Glass. 54% are familiar with the concept of a smartwatch. 33% had heard of Nike’s Fuelband. These are extremely high figures for new products and technologies. Never before has the public been so aware of the new possibilities that are coming their way.

Apart from awareness, the intention to actually buy all these novelties is very high. I remember studies from the early 90s where respondents were asked about their intention to buy a mobile phone someday. The most popular answer was a firm ‘No!’. Ten years later the mood had changed completely. That’s how it usually went with new concepts: the average Joe or the so-called ‘early majority’ failed to see the point of the proposed new technology. Reactions today are very different: for instance, 66% say they are interested in buying a smart TV one day. One in two are actually looking forward to the introduction of smart cars. Smart shoes and refrigerators are slightly lower down on the wish list but the idea of a smart thermostat is very popular.

The adoption curve ‘on speed’

I’m ashamed to tell my children that we owned the same telephone for the first 18 years of my life. You know what I mean, the kind with a cable that ran to the wall… Today, a mobile phone has become one of many Fast-Moving Consumer Goods. The average consumer replaces his smartphone every 18 months. The tablet was launched in 2009. In just five years’ time this product has changed the world. Things are going fast. Very fast.

The classic Rogers adoption curve probably still exists although its upward or downward tilt is probably slightly more pronounced than before. Life is faster nowadays and that includes new technologies. Also, products often become obsolete faster than before.

The rise of the digital offline customer relationship

Classic retailers are afraid of showroomers. These shoppers look around your store and ask for your expert advice only to go home and order the product online. This fear is justified: a study has shown that 46% of Americans have been known to ‘showroom’. However, the same study also revealed that ‘reverse showrooming’ is an even bigger trend. 69% of consumers research products online and then visit an offline store to order the product of their choice.

In our study on the future of the customer relationship one of the aspects takes a closer look at changing consumer expectations with regard to the OFFLINE shopping experience. The results are clear: consumers expect the online and offline worlds to integrate in the near future. Our study shows that consumers expect an increasing level of interaction and digitization in the offline sales outlets. 63% expect stores to install interactive screens enabling consumers to look up more details on specific products during their visit. 64% want the option of ordering a product online right away if it’s not on stock. The latter figure illustrates the evolution of offline toward online and back again. What’s more, 73% of consumers feel it’s a plus when an online store also has an offline sales outlet. Flexible pickup and delivery options will become a crucial part of any retailer’s online strategy.

Please recognize me anywhere!

A growing percentage of people – currently one in three – expect sales personnel to know that they checked out a product on the website prior to their visit. The key issue for consumers is to be recognized as a customer across all channels. Consumers exhibit a growing aversion to repeating themselves. They want to hear the right answers right away without having to tell the same story over and over again. Strikingly enough, this phenomenon is roughly the same all across the globe. There’s the odd exception here or there but all in all the major trends are comparable worldwide.

Use data to benefit the consumer

A large portion of the public are still clueless as to what companies can use their data for. The answers to our questionnaire revealed very little opposition to the possible use of consumer data for specific purposes but, at the moment, only a limited number of consumers are clearly in favor of such practices. Most consumers are neither in favor nor against and have adopted a ‘wait & see’ attitude.

If consumers had their way, companies would primarily use their data to send them personalized information, something that 46% of respondents would welcome. It’s striking to note that the Dutch, who are traditionally front runners in the field of digitization, are the most skeptical of the corporate use of personal data. A mere 30% of Dutch consumers are OK with companies using their data. Countries such as Belgium, Spain, Italy and also Singapore are much more open to such strategies: over 50% of their consumers expect better service through the use of consumer data.

The personal digital world

We are living in a digital world. Several years ago, Peter Hinssen wrote that ‘digital is the new normal’. More than ever this is now a reality. Still, it would be premature to write off everything situated in the ‘human’ and offline realm just because the digital society has become a reality. Quite the contrary!

Consumers all over the world share that same basic concern: ‘yes, we’d like to build a great digital relationship but interpersonal, human contact is still extremely important’.

Only a handful of companies can do without

As always, there are exceptions to the general rule. You’d be right in claiming that companies like Amazon.com and Booking.com are hugely successful despite a minimum of human interventions. Google is another case in point but ask yourself this question: ‘How many companies can do today what these leading companies are doing?’. The answer lies in their exceptional DNA. Also, they have an excellent track record when it comes to customer interaction so it’s easy to see why they are exceptions. A company like Coolblue has made a very conscious choice to cultivate human contact. When an online player opens offline stores and records videos of employees recommending the company’s services, this is a well-considered and very intelligent strategy.

The personal touch is key

Never underestimate the impact of REAL people. Human contact is crucial in most customer relationships, even in our digital world. 73% like to have the option of talking to a flesh-and-blood person from time to time even when the digital channels are working perfectly. The simple fact that this possibility exists creates a peace of mind that many people still value.

The personal touch is in the little things. One in two consumers like it when a company addresses them by name. Get to know your customers and personalize the customer experience. 54% like to be recognized across the various channels.

I hope this article gave you some new insights and some confirmations about where the future of customer relations is heading. Thanks for reading it, I appreciate your comments below. And if you like the story, feel free to share it with your friends.

The homepage is the most important page on your website because this is where potential customers are most likely to visit first. The bulk of your traffic will come from your homepage and to make sure you are not hindering any visits turning into conversions, there are 12 critical elements you should have on your website homepage.

1. Headline

Your headline is the first thing people will see when they go to a website so it’s important that you have a clear and concise headline so your readers know exactly what to expect from you as a business.

2. Sub-Headline

Your sub-headline should offer your views a brief breakdown in a few sentences what they will get from your business. This is where you begin to show your value but remember to keep it short and stay away from telling a long story.

3. Benefits

If you can describe what your business does, that’s great however, you also need to know why your business fulfils a customers need. What makes you different and why will people benefit from buying what you have to offer?

4. Primary Calls-to-Action

To see an increase in sales, you need to have at least three primary calls-to-action above the fold of your homepage. Don’t have the same kinds of calls to actions, make sure each is unique.

5. Features

It’s all well and good having benefits on the homepage but without your customers knowing exactly what your key features are around your business, they won’t trust you. Have a list of features to give viewers a better understanding around your products and services.

6. Customer Proof

Including quotes or recommendations from customers is a great way to build your profile and give users some confidence in your business and what you are selling. Having this on your homepage will give you that extra push when it comes to a customer making a purchasing decision.

7. Success Indicators

If your business has been recognised for outstanding contributions or has won awards, make sure this is featured on your homepage. Having success indicators is just as important as having customer reviews.

8. Navigation

Bounce rates are a huge problem for websites which have poor navigation. Make sure you are offering your potential customers the best user experience possible by making sure your website navigation is as smooth as possible.

9. Supporting Image

Most people will respond to imagery more than text so its important you have a relevant and engaging supporting picture or video on your homepage to compliment your written content.

10. Content Offer

Offering an eBook, Whitepaper or Guide completely free of charge to those who want to give you their email address is a great way to bring people back to your website and to also market to in the future.

11. Resources

It’s been reported that 96% of people visiting your website aren’t actually ready to purchase from you so you, as a business need to think of other ways to bring potential customers back to your site so that when they are ready to purchase, they choose you. A good way to do this is to have a resources section where they can increase their knowledge.

12. Secondary Calls-to-Action

It is important that you have a secondary call-to-action at the bottom of your website homepage to make sure that you are covering all basis when trying to acquire a customer.

How many of the above elements feature on your website homepage?

In every marketing channel – whether it’s paid search, content marketing, email, or any other channel you’re using to drive leads and sales – the key to success is standing out from the noise. And there’s a lot of noise!

Americans now consume 10 hours of content per day, on average, according to Nielsen. There’s an unbelievable amount of content being posted to the web: 216,000 photos shared on Instagram, 278,000 tweets posted, 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube, and 2 million Google searches performed every minute.

It’s incredibly daunting for marketers. How can you break through this constant mass of stuff and not only get in front of, but truly engage your potential customers? In this article, I’ll explain a three-step process for finding and delivering what your customers are looking for.

Step 1: Figure out what they really want.

In the early days of online marketing, it was all about figuring out which keywords people used for search and trying to appear there. The organic search landscape was far less competitive, it was easily gamed, and there was little to no consideration for searcher intent.

You can probably figure out some of the keywords people use to find products or services like yours, but do you understand which queries show the intent to purchase? Or an intent to discover new information? Or an intent to comparison shop? In other words, are you giving your prospects the right content depending on where they are in the funnel?

Our friend and AdWords expert Perry Marshall calls this understanding the Happy Juice Principle. “Happy Juice” is an experience that provides real value to your audience, and it should be in all of your marketing messaging.

How do you learn more about what your audience really wants? Tools and data you already have at your disposal are great – analytics, social feedback, email correspondence and customer reviews, to name a few. However, you can dig a lot deeper using simple online surveys and even in-store or phone surveys.

You really need to understand these things before you can even begin to map out how your business uses content marketing and communication to meet audience needs and intent:

• What is the problem?
• What is preventing the person from fixing it themselves?
• How does your business provide the best solution?

Once you understand the answers to these questions, they will drive all of your creative messaging going forward.

Step 2: Entice them with emotional ads and landing pages.

I’m going to tell you a secret a lot of PPC marketers don’t want you to know (but you probably suspect). Ready for it? Most ads suck.

It’s true. In a recent analysis of nearly 100,000 AdWords accounts, representing $3 billion in annualized spend, we found that the average click-through rate of ads in the first position is between 5 and 6%. By the third position, it’s under 3%, and by the time you reach the fifth position, you’re looking at just under 1.5%.

Sadly, most advertisers are happy to aim for average. But why settle? Some people are blowing the average out of the water. The top 15% of ads perform two times better than average and the top 5% three times higher. The top 1% of ads – those we call Unicorns – get six times as many clicks!

This isn’t dumb luck. An analysis of those Unicorn ads is incredibly enlightening, as they all have things in common, which makes those results replicable and achievable for any business willing to do the work. For example, ads with extremely high, double-digit click-through rates tends to be emotional – they focus on big-picture benefits rather than nitty-gritty product features. Take a look at the examples below, for a mountain climbing school. Instead of telling you boring details like hours and prices, they appeal to emotions, and get great results:

If you want to really connect with your visitors and truly blow their minds, you can’t just follow conventional best practices and hope for the average.

Step 3: Give them a truly outstanding offer.

Classic conversion rate optimization wisdom will tell you to test different button colors and headlines, mess around with font size, spacing, and so on to try to get more conversions from your landing pages. But tests like these do nothing to address the burning desires of your visitor. You may see small gains, but they won’t have impact or be lasting.

To really increase your conversion rates, you need an irresistibly compelling offer – something that your audience truly wants. When you’re offering that, they won’t care what color the button is!

Say you’re a software brand offering a free trial. Or, maybe you’re an accountant offering a free consultation. Congratulations, you’re offering exactly the same thing as all of your competitors! It’s not imaginative or creative … and it doesn’t address your visitor’s intent.

We saw huge gains in conversion rate on our landing page when we critically examined our offer. We sell software, but one day we realized that dropping them into a free trial and leaving them to stumble around in an unfamiliar platform for a few weeks wasn’t the best we could do.

Instead, we changed our primary offer completely, to a free tool. The tool provides a free AdWords account evaluation – in other words, something very tangible and high-value that visitors could use to their benefit right away. There’s no learning curve to using a free tool, so we immediately started seeing more conversions compared to the free trial offer. Leads went through the roof.

Of course, it’s not easy to come up with an offer that addresses the true needs of your audience. But it’s definitely worth it if you want to blow your visitors’ minds. What are you doing to ensure you deliver what your audience really wants?

Despite all the data you’ve acquired from measuring your email marketing campaign – deliverability, open-rates, conversions – how do you know whether this data compares favourably with your competitors’ efforts or not?

Imagine you’re a travel company running an email campaign and your figures say you currently have a 20% open rate with a 3% click-through rate, how do you know if this is good or bad?

To the non-professional marketer the above figure seems quite low, but according to a variety of sources including MailChimp this is that particular industry’s average. 

Using our own 200 page Email Marketing Best Practice Guide I’m going to try and answer the question of what makes for good email marketing benchmarks and hopefully highlight some figures that may act as a handy reference.

Important response measures

First of all it’s important to know which metrics you should be measuring in order to determine the effectiveness of your campaign. 

These are some of the most important response measures that will be reported for an email campaign by your email service provider.

• Bounce rate: this can be split into hard bounce rate (the recipient does not see the email due to invalid email addresses or domain failure) and soft bounce rate (the email address is valid but the recipient does not see the email because of a temporary delivery problem, inbox full, server down etc.)
• Conversion rate: the number of ‘take-ups’ resulting from the email activity. For instance the number of completed transactions from a cart or the download of a document. 
• Deliverability: there are two main ways in which deliverability should be measured - returned email deliverability (volume of emails sent minus the number of bounces received) and inbox deliverability (volume of emails delivered to the inbox as opposed to the spam folder or not delivered). 
• Average unique open rate: unique opens divided by number of emails delivered. 
• Opt-out: when a recipient unsubscribes or opts out of further communications. There’s more on this in our post on tips for managing email unsubscribes.
• Response rate: the number of actual responses made as a result of the email campaign. 

In the planning stages of any campaign it’s vital that specific goals are considered for each one depending on its desired outcome. A conversion can mean anything from a product purchased to the downloading of a white-paper to simply directing the recipient to a new social channel. The above examples are just a small band of metrics that you can use to measure performance.

Here’s an example of a model showing the best and worst case scenarios from an email marketing campaign. Obviously this is quite optimistic.

 

Blowing email’s trumpet

As an email marketer you may find yourself under-recognised, as many companies fail to accurately attribute success in an increasingly multichannel world.

Email agency Alchemy Work set out to help a retailer who wanted to better understand the true contribution of its email marketing strategy. In particular the influence email has on conversions from other channels.

Alchemy Worx was able to demonstrate that even unopened emails were driving brand awareness and sales in other channels. It was also able to prove that open rates were a very poor indicator of email’s value to its business.

Here you can see that sending an email results in revenue uplift across all channels and clearly demonstrates that email engagement is not limited to conventional open and click 
measurement. 

The charts also show the impact of the 'nudge effect' of email on other channels. The additional revenue generated as a result of the email being received shows the brand impact of email. 

So whilst open rates for emails may have declined over the past few years as the channel has matured, this study highlights that in terms of revenue generation it’s still an absolutely vital tool. 

Email marketers however should not be relying on open or click-through rates as the sole gauge of success, but rather looking at conversions and finding a way to relate their activity to revenue generated across all online marketing channels.

Stats from third party email service providers

I’m including a few studies from a variety of email providers to highlight the differences in open-rates and click-throughs by industry.

This first lengthy list is from MailChimp. It’s based on a selection of its clients, which have at least 1,000 subscribers, with hundreds of millions of emails scanned and tracked.

Click image for the full list

This is from a 2014 survey by Sign-Up.to, it shows the average open and click through rates for UK SME campaigns. It’s fairly similar to the MailChimp study.

Finally here is Silverpop’s email marketing metrics benchmark study for 2014. There’s lots of data in the linked Pdf but here for your pleasure are the tables for unique open rates and click-through rates.

We have all probably found ourselves at some point in a position that seemed a whole lot better on paper than it actually is in real life. Where we were once excited, we now dread the very thought of walking into the office each day. We have talked to our friends about it, and they all ask why we are still in the position. But still, is it that the role itself is bad? Or is it just these specific circumstances?

Imagine that you have been working as an individual contributor for years. You observe managers, and you are fairly convinced that you can do the job. You might even have some ideas that would help make things more efficient or more productive or more fun or whatever. So you toss your name into the ring, and you are soon promoted to a management position.

When you take the manager job, you find out almost immediately that the position is a lot different than what you had thought. Orchestrating tasks, fetching status, and managing the administrivia is challenging enough, but maybe you find that there is a political backdrop that you never knew existed.

This senior leader seems to have it out for your boss, and you appear to be in the crosshairs. You seem unduly criticized and scrutinized. Or perhaps priorities are in contention as teams vie for budget and recognition. Whatever the cause, the politics make job awfully stressful.

What do you do?

In the extreme, there are two possible scenarios here. Either the role itself is just inherently different than you imagined, in which case you ought to consider whether this is the role for you. Or the circumstances are particularly troublesome, in which case the role might be more palatable with a few changes, in a different organization, or at another company entirely. But which is it?

How you answer the question depends a lot on your state of mind, which is why this situation is misread by so many. If you are new to a position, it is easy to let the politics convince you that either the position is not what you should pursue, or that your skills are not sufficient to tackle the new role.

If you have been in a similar role before, you might chalk up the experience to circumstance. You have enough confidence to think that your skills are adequate, and it is just the specific environment that makes things tough to manage.

But how do you know?

First, get a neutral assessment of the situation. This can be hard to do because the very act of asking someone a question will bias their answer towards the way you present it. But you should be able to look around at your peers and determine if your situation is unique. In looking at peers, it is worth looking outside your immediate sphere of visibility, because validating against people in the same organization is essentially creating an echo chamber.

As you start to get information about the situation, consider whether you are logically grouping that intelligence by task or by situation. If you find yourself gravitating towards tasks, it is likely that the activities themselves are the stumbling block. If, for instance, you don’t like the act of managing personalities and careers, then you are likely landing on the side of the role being the issue. Similarly, if you don’t like the increase in meetings or the shift away from hands-on work, then management might be the issue. If, however, you find yourself identifying with certain interpersonal dynamics, then the situation might be the problem.

The key here is to get an outside perspective so you have a control group against which you can measure your own sentiments. For most people who are young in their careers, there is not an easy person to check this against. This is because most people do not actively seek mentoring. If you find yourself in a difficult position, this should spur you to find a mentor in whom you can confide and from whom you can solicit advice. The presence of a mentor can help you diagnose the situation much more effectively.

What do you do next?

If you determine that the role is the problem, the answer is relatively straightforward: get into another role. You need to be clear in this moment that the issue is not performance so much as it is fit. There should be no shame in trying a role and then opting for something different. This does not indicate value so much as skill set matching.

If the issue is circumstance, then you have to determine whether the circumstances are permanent or temporary. This is really situation-specific, so it is hard to provide good advice here, but there are a couple of things you can do.

First, it is difficult to do anything in an information vacuum. You need to talk to people to find out what is really behind the behavior. Do not attribute to malice that which can be attributed to just about anything else. By talking to people about the underlying drivers of behavior, you might find common ground, mismatched assumptions, or some history that is feeding the dynamic. As a matter of principle, I tend to talk to the individuals I am butting heads with, though not everyone feels comfortable being direct.

Second, it is typically worth noting whether the behavior is consistent or erratic. If you know that someone is always a poor planner, then you should be able to prepare for it. While it does not excuse the poor planning, it does prevent you from being unprepared for things when they hit. When behavior is inconsistent, though maddening, it can be planned around. If you choose not to plan around it, then the severity of your experience is actually as much on you as it is on the other person. Put another way, if you are not doing everything you can, then you are at least partially to blame.

Finally, you should never allow a good situational battle to go unused. Even if you can describe the pattern as one-off behavior, you should use every instance like this in your career to examine yourself and determine how you react to these situations. While you might be beyond saving in this spot, the experience will typically strengthen you for future situations, which helps to ensure that if you do change circumstances, you don’t find yourself lamenting the decision again.

More often than not, you will find that circumstances are not immutable. Things can change. But even when they cannot, you are better off for having walked through a measured exercise. The most important thing to remember in these tough situations is that acting rashly and without a plan is the best way to find yourself in another bad situation. Be thoughtful. Collect information. And then make an informed decision, ideally outside of the emotion.

The bottom line

The ultimate objective is not to arrive at an unequivocally correct conclusion. The real goal is to put enough rigor into your thought process that you are left having no doubts. If you can resolve the situation, you will be happier. But even if you don’t, how you exit will determine how you enter your next position.

And that can make all the difference in the world when it comes to your future success.

[Today’s fun fact: Slugs have four noses. I guess I knew that already, but it’s still pretty cool.]

We're well aware that free shipping can work well as a sales driver, but the extent to which shoppers will go to qualify is very interesting.

Stats from a UPS study show that 58% of customers have added extra items to their shopping basket in order to qualify for free delivery. 

So what does this mean for retailers, and how should they approach this issue? 

Free shipping: the stats

According to the survey, four in five consumers see free shipping as an important factor when shopping online. 

While you would expect that people would choose slower standard delivery options to save money, it's surprising how many are prepared to spend more to reach the free delivery threshold. 

Actions taken by consumers to qualify for free shipping (5,849 respondents)

So what should retailers do? 

Well, the top result suggests that they shouldn't necessarily offer free delivery as standard, but should instead offer it if a a certain threshold is reached. 

Of course, this is something to be tested, and what works for one site may not work for another. Indeed, it could be that the simplicity of an across the board free delivery offer beats the use of a threshold. 

According to James Gurd from Digital Juggler: 

My view is that if you can offer free delivery without it compromising your business model, then that's great value to the customer. However, it takes away the use of free delivery as an incentive.

At Betterware we always struggled to get the average order value up much above £24 due to the low ticket nature of the product. We used tiered delivery charges with free above £35 (not sure what they do now) to encourage higher average spend – the end result was an increase in AOV of about 20% with no damage to transaction volumes I.e. The higher spend to get free delivery didn't result in customers just fewer orders, it actually increased gross revenue.

Should free delivery be standard? I don't think it has to be but free delivery does remove one barrier to checkout conversion as has been evidenced by numerous studies. But it has to be commercially viable.  

If you don't offer automatic free shipping, then there are some useful ways to highlight the existence of a threshold and encourage people to spend a little more to qualify. 

Here are a few examples...

Dorothy Perkins

This site has a £50 threshold for free delivery, which it shows in the navigation bar. 

However, it misses a trick by not reminding people about this once they reach the shopping basket and checkout. 

Lego

Nice clear message on the free shipping threshold from Lego, though the reminder on the shopping bag page could be more prominent. 

Busted Tees

The threshold for free shipping is $80, which is on the high side, but the reminder to spend a little more for free shipping is a good idea. 

Waterstones

A good example here, as the red text is hard to miss. A further improvement would be to offer cross-selling options related to the item in the basket. 

BayTree

This is an excellent example. BayTree nudges shoppers about spending more to qualify for free shipping as they add items to the basket. This saves them having to go to the basket or checkout to find this out. 

Brew Dog

Brew Dog has no free delivery on offer, but encourages customers to make the most of the £7 delivery charge by buying more beer. 

A good idea, and well illustrated with the bottle graphic, though the wording 'maximise your shipping costs' is slightly confusing. 

3 years ago I led a panel on demand generation. When I asked everyone on the panel to provide one tip, my friend Tom Scearce said: “In honor of Peter Tosh, my advice to b2b marketers is ‘humanize it'”. Brilliant. Number one, he found a way to weave Peter Tosh into a b2b marketing conversation (of course, his song/mantra was “legalize it” but this is a family-friendly blog). Number 2, it’s a great point: humanizing your interactions with buyers should be a priority across all customer-facing practices (sales, marketing, customer service). Make your interactions about them not about you. I know you have heard it before, but it’s true. As you look at all the touches you make to a prospect, ask yourself where you can humanize it by personalizing it. From the immortal words of the Cheers theme song: “You want to go where everybody knows your name”.

Personally, I give points to anyone who personalizes their communications with me. Point blank. If you can’t relate to this, let me just tell you — it makes a difference. A big one. Let me give you an example, we interviewed a number of buyers for an enterprise software company to understand their experience with this vendor. We asked them for the most important piece of content they received during the buying process. The buyers identified the personalized demo. (They didn’t read whitepapers, etc) When we dug, they all mentioned the fact that the vendor used their name, their numbers, and their process when showing them the product. One buyer demo’d 14 different solutions and gave this vendor the advantage because of the demo. She said: “It showed they knew us intimately.” This is the kind of reaction you want across the entire buying experience.

Let’s look at three examples of personalization that makes a difference:

The Personalized Web Experience

FYI, I decided to write this post after I went to the Demandbase user conference a couple weeks ago. #inspiration. First of all, it was a great conference. Secondly, if they want to channel their inner-Peter Tosh, they could go with “personalize it”. I love their ability to personalize the web experience. I jump off websites in seconds..but if you channel my “inner-me”, I gotta stay. 

The Personalized Webinar Follow-up

For the Funnelholic Sales Summit, Switch Video leveraged their Switch Merge technology to send personalized video as webinar reminders to our participants. We saw 10-15% increase in attendance. Why? It was about them, for them, and sent in a completely differentiated format. #personalizeit

The Personalized Email

Email is the voicemail of the modern outbound prospecting era. Armed with tools such as YesWare, Toutapp, and MyDocket, sales is sending emails to prospects at record rates. The emails that win are customized to the person they are sending to. (If you haven’t heard that before, you have been living in a cave). These emails are critical part of the humanized buying experience. Step one is to make sure you use their name. Step two is to find 1-3 tidbits about the recipient and connects you back to what’s happening in their business. I grabbed this great email from the Vorsight blog. #humanizeit      

 

It’s actually pretty fun when you start to think of the possibilities. So if you can, you should — Humanize it.

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic and a co-founder of Topo. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter

Peter Tosh pic came from this web page which also has a tribute to the man

I walked into a 50,000-person company not too long ago, to talk to them about some software for a business process transformation. When I started talking about usability and end users, as I always do, their feedback–straight up–was, “We don’t care about the end user. They do not get a vote in the process.”

Most companies aren’t that blatant about it, but that’s really where their heads are. Sadly, this is true of buyers and vendors alike.

For almost any type of software you can think of, end users make up ninety-nine percent of the user base. Yet most vendors architect enterprise applications for the 1 percent of people in the company who are trained specialists, not the other ninety-nine percent who will have to transact in the system. End users are the 99-percenters of the B2B world. And everybody is OK with this?

I think it’s dead wrong. The end user is the key to success in all your IT and business transformation objectives.In my experience, businesses consistently underestimate the negative financial impact of the end user not being engaged.

This is how most of my sales calls start:

One of the first questions I ask is, “What are you trying to accomplish? What are your success criteria?”

The prospective buyer will say something like, “ My executives need visibility, and I need to be able to enforce and analyze compliance, see how much we’re buying and what we’re paying.”

I say, “Okay, can you do that today?”

“No, that’s why we’re talking to you.”

“Why can’t you do that today?”

“Because the data’s bad.”

“You know why the data’s bad?”

“Why?”

“Because ninety-nine percent of your organization isn’t using the system you have in place. If you look at your success criteria and you work backwards to where the process begins, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it begins with an end user out in the field, and the end user isn’t using the system.”

Perhaps 99% is an exaggeration, but in most situations I see, probably only twenty percent of the user population actively uses any application, costing companies untold amounts of money.

Feature-function is never the problem. Most of the large companies I talk to have already bought all of the feature-function that my space, spend management, has to offer. I suspect they’ve done the same with their other software as well. The problem is that they don’t own the hearts and minds of the end user.

Empowering the end user would be a change of religion for most companies. But they have to do it. I don’t know any other way to put it. Salesforce is not successful if salespeople don’t want to use it. Procurement is not successful if people do not want to buy through the system. HR systems are a little different; end users only interact with them a few times a year for for reviews, but imagine being a 10,000-person company where nobody can figure out how to put their review into the system.

There are only two reasons people are going to follow your process and use your system. Either they are forced to, or there’s benefit in doing so.

In the B2C online world companies have gotten this right. I go to Amazon, I find what I need and in a couple of clicks it’s on its way. It’s easy and delightful. I don’t have to call Amazon and say, “Can someone help me get this?” They’ve gotten it right because they can’t force you to use their system, and they can see a direct correlation between delivering an outstanding experience to the end user and bottom line revenue.

In the B2B world, that connection is less clear and direct, but it’s there. But forcing people is not the answer. The answer is to look at the end user as a key value driver, not as a tactical extension of the system. People want to do the right thing. They are not trying to break the rules but they will take the path of least resistance, because their time is valuable. Vendors need to build systems that make doing the right thing easier and more delightful than any other alternative.

Software buyers need to start taking end users more seriously. Yes, you always have to align the end user to executive success criteria, but if you can’t get the user to engage, those success criteria or those goals are not going to be accomplished to the degree that you want.

Imagine having this conversation with your executive sponsor after a less then successful rollout:

Executive: We implemented this system months ago. Where is the value we were promised?

Software Buyer: We’re having a hard time with adoption. People are not using the system.

Executive: Weren’t users part of the evaluation process?

Software Buyer: [silence and embarrassment]

Many months and dollars later, you’ll be talking to me, or someone like me, wondering if maybe it’s finally time to change your religion.

There are two kinds of people in digital networking: social agents and prospects.

Everyone in sales knows what a prospect is, but what is a social agent? Who are yours? And what role do social agents play in your social selling strategy?

Social agents grow your business by sharing your content online to amplify your message.

While they may never do business with you, they do business for you by recommending you to others. Social agents are equally as important to business growth as prospects, and the biggest mistake salespeople make is undervaluing them.

Picture this:

Invisible buyers are prospects who seek out information on their own before making a purchase and before you know they exist. Say you own a small company who makes and sells bamboo flooring. One day, a prospect of yours gets on Facebook and posts the status, “Looking to put in new floors in the house. Thinking bamboo. Any recommendations?”

You can’t reach this person. You don’t even know they exist. But you have a friend who sees this status online. Your friend has never bought your bamboo floors himself (he’s a carpet kind of guy), but he knows you do great work, so he responds to the status with your name, website, and his affirmation that you install the best bamboo floors of anyone in the area. While he isn’t your customer, he just found you one.

That’s a social agent. And he just made you an invisible sale.

What Makes a Great Social Agent?

Not everyone you know makes a valuable social agent. You have to invest in the right relationships with the right people to find agents who will want to represent you. Here is the sort of person you should look for.

1. People like you

A good social agent should be “your people.” Look for people who share your worldview and value systems. Your best social agents will be the sort of people you want to spend time with, the sort of people you’d pick to be trapped on a desert island with. Why? It’s psychological. When these people promote you, they’ll feel as if they are promoting a piece of themselves.

2. Background Singers

Not everyone can be the star of the show every time. Good social agents must not threatened by the success of others. (tweet this)

In the example above, let’s say the social agent doesn’t just prefer carpet over bamboo flooring – let’s say he actually owns a carpet business. A good social agent would be comfortable recommending your business anyway because he knows it is what the prospect is looking for. He doesn’t try to push the prospect to buy carpet instead, he’s comfortable enough with his own business to step aside and sing backup vocals for you this round.

3. Givers

Similar to background singers, social agents need to give more than they take. If the carpet salesman only thinks about himself, he’ll never recommend your bamboo business. He’ll always try to convert your prospects into his own. Great social agents love helping others succeed as much as they love success for themselves.

The key to a stellar social agent is their desire to help you – social agency is personal. Cultivate strong relationships with social agents so that they’ll go the extra mile to bring customers straight to your product or service.

For more information on how to leverage your network of social agents to win more invisible sales, visit conversedigital.com or purchase The Invisible Sale today — with an enitre chapter devoted to cultivating your relationship with your social agents.

A marketing leader has many marketing activities to choose from. How do you know which are the most effective at reaching new customers? Do they respond to your emails? Probably not. We’ve noticed a consistent decline in response rates. So what’s a marketer to do? Which tactic can you deploy to give you the greatest chance for success? And which is most likely to result in an appointment for your sales team?

The answer lies in social selling. Today’s marketers must be fluent in how to use this modern prospecting tool. According to our research, you are 4.2x more likely to get an appointment if there is a personal connection with a buyer. Is your team spending time building relationships with prospective buyers?  And once you’ve built these relationships, how to turn them into appointments?

Your solution is the last thing a buyer needs. Literally.

The sales model is a solution placement model. It does a fine job assessing needs, pitching, presenting, and placing solutions. Yet we close no more than 7% of prospects from first call, spend huge amounts of money creating presentations, sites, and marketing materials bring that in a fraction of the business they were designed to, spend inordinate amounts of resource responding to RFPs that fail, and attempting to make appointments with prospects who either reject us or don’t buy. We waste at least 90% of a sales professional’s time. As a result we hire more people and set our budgets accordingly.

We have great solutions. Our sales folks are professionals. What’s the problem?

The problem is that buyers don’t buy the way we sell. In fact, a purchase is the last step buyers take along their buy path, and we sit and wait for them to traverse their steps without having the proper skills to influence their journey from the start.

A BUYING DECISION IS A CHANGE MANAGEMENT PROBLEM

To understand how buyers buy, we must understand systems and change. Buying anything, from a shirt to a company, a training program or a piece of software, is a change management activity. Something that has existed, and worked well-enough for a period of time, will be replaced by a relatively unknown entity. Change. And change is systemic: anything that touches the new element will be affected in an unknown way and potentially mess up the system. And systems won’t abide by disruption; we learned that in 6th grade chemistry.

Like all of us, buyers live in systems; everything within them chugs along together like a set of gears so the system remains stable. Stability – the status quo – gets maintained with rules and processes and job descriptions and relationships. Whatever doesn’t fit within the system gets chucked out because the system is sacrosanct. When there is a problem, the system creates workarounds so it can continue functioning; the problem then becomes part of the tapestry of the system. Only when there is no other option will the buyer face the potential disruption of bringing in something that is outside the system.

In order for buyers to buy and be willing to have something foreign enter their system, they need to first manage systemic change: they must get buy-in for the change, design new rules or roles, replace the old solution in a way that insures equilibrium is maintained, and last but not least, involve the managers, department heads, and sundry people who will touch the ultimate solution – folks not necessarily direct stakeholders or decision makers, but folks whose jobs will be effected by the change. Without managing this change, they will buy nothing, regardless of their need or the efficacy of your solution.

A buying decision is a systems problem. And sales acts as if the buyer’s problem were an isolated event.

BUYING INCLUDES A 13 STEP BUY-IN AND CHANGE PROCESS

There are unique change management issues that must be addressed before a purchase can occur. Indeed: until there is a clear path to change, there is no way to even know who is a prospect; before every appropriate voice is assembled and heard, there is no way to define a need. As outsiders focused on placing solutions, we have no ability to enter into the buyer’s environment and facilitate these activities because they are idiosyncratic and personal. And the time it takes them to figure out how to manage the backend change is the length of the sales cycle.

We’re currently entering at the end of the decision path: the very last thing a buyer needs is your solution. The last thing. But we can enter earlier. Here’s what we should be facilitating that is currently outside our purview and skill sets:

1. All – ALL – who will touch the new solution must have their voices heard. Usually it takes buyers a while to understand who must be included on the Buying Decision Team. In a small sale, it’s easier than a larger sale, but the process is the same.

It’s possible to facilitate our buyers in both assembling the full Buying Decision Team on the first or second call, and their discovery of the types of systems change they would need to address. They have to do this anyway: helping them speeds up the buying process and gets everyone at the table for an appointment.

2. Before a purchase, every element that would be disrupted needs to know how to compensate for change: tech folks must figure out their new scheduling or find outsourced support; sales and marketing must have a unified strategy to share budget; HR must get the right groups together, etc. It’s unique in each situation, although totally independent of need.

Sellers can use a facilitation model to navigate buyers through their change before they sell, so all areas that will be affected will know how to manage the change and be ready to buy. This speeds up the sales cycles and makes the seller a part of the Team.

9 out of the 13 steps in a buying decision involve systems change and include idiosyncratic, historic, and personal activities. Using only the sales model or marketing, a seller has no place at the table until it’s time to choose a solution. But we’re missing great opportunities to become real relationship managers and trusted advisors and suffering much longer sales cycles than necessary.

USE BUYING FACILITATION® WITH SALES

Selling and buying are two different activities. Change the way you are entering. Stop:

• pitching, presenting, or discussing solutions before buyers have defined their route to change;
• trying to get an appointment until the entire Buying Decision Team is assembled;
• assuming because you’ve spoken to one or two people there is a need;
• assuming that because there’s a need it’s a prospect;
• basing your sale on your solution;
• basing your sale on price (it has nothing to do with anything).

Instead, before selling:

• facilitate excellence and buy-in, from the first call with the gatekeeper;
• be a neutral navigator throughout the steps of change;
• help assemble the complete Buying Decision Team (even for a small sale) with you on it;
• recognize when a system cannot change and when it’s no longer a prospect (it’s got nothing to do with needing your solution).

Buyers don’t need you: they need to solve a business problem. And the business problem involves more of a solution than just your product. It’s time to help buyer’s buy.

Note: In 1986, to help my own sales folks sell, I coded the steps buyers took before they could buy, from first idea, to assembling the Buying Decision Team, to managing change, to choosing a solution. At that time I developed the Buying Facilitation® model to add to our sales techniques, and our business soared. I needed half the sales folks for triple the close rate. I began teaching the model to other companies in 1988 with my first program to KLM called ‘Helping Buyers Buy’. I have been teaching the model to sales folks ever since.

For anyone wishing to add Buying Facilitation® to their sales model, contact me at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or visit www.buyingfacilitation.com to take a look at some of my books to see if they’ll help. Good luck.

Help Buyers Buy: Facilitate The Buy Path, Then Sell is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Sales has been around since the Serpent convinced Eve to eat the apple. And, unfortunately, the goals have remained pretty much the same ever since.

The sales model was designed for a different time in history, when there were fewer decision makers and products could be easily described in a magazine ad. With the advent of the web, global business practices, and the ability to communicate ideas across distances, there has been a sea change in not only what we can create and deliver, but also in the process buyers must go through prior to being able to make a purchase. The sales model itself hasn’t kept up in important ways.

Let’s take a hard look at what sales is, and how it must shift to keep up with our global economy.

 WHAT IS SALES NOW?

1. The sales model merely manages the needs assessment and solution placement end of the buyer’s decision path.

PROBLEM: The majority of the buying decision path occurs off line (buyers must know how to manage the change, get the right people to buy in, address the implementation issues, etc.) so we are merely catching the low hanging fruit – there when they are ready to buy.

IMPLICATIONS: We aren’t entering the buyer’s decision journey early enough to become part of the Buying Decision Team (i.e. helping navigate through decision issues and collapsing the sales cycle); we sit and wait while they do their internal change management, with no direct skills to enter that area of the buyer’s decision journey.

SOLUTION: Start your conversation by helping facilitate change right from the beginning and save the needs assessment/solution discussion until the prospect sees a path through to change (all can be done on the first call); take the role of a buying facilitator and decision facilitator; help the prospect become a buyer (or not) immediately.

2. Sales treats a ‘need’ or ‘problem” as if it were an isolated event rather than recognizing that a ‘need’ sits within a system: a set of rules and relationships that maintain the status quo (including their ‘pain’) daily. Until this entire system agrees to, and is made ready for, something new, no solution can be purchased.

PROBLEM: We end up focusing on one small aspect within a sea of issues, and then pushing/waiting/pushing/waiting until they get to the point they’re ready to buy, or missing ways to support the necessary change management issues.

IMPLICATIONS: We end up presenting possibly the wrong data, too early, to the wrong people, and waste our time following around folks who don’t buy.

SOLUTION: Buying is a change management problem. We can facilitate this with an additional skill set to help them facilitate change – right from the first call.

3. Sales focuses on understanding needs and placing solutions, but until or unless all of the people who need to be on the Buying Decision Team are on board, and until all of the change management issues are managed, buyers can’t make a purchase.

PROBLEM: We are entering too early, offering data they don’t know what to do with yet.

IMPLICATIONS: The time it takes buyers to come up with their own answers is the length of the sales cycle. We end up following prospects who cannot close (and don’t know that until they don’t close) and don’t have a different skill set to open up prospects who didn’t know they need to buy, but are buyers. Plus we can shorten our sales cycles by at least half.

SOLUTION: With Buying Facilitation®  (a change management model that works alongside of sales) we can lead buyers through the decision steps, help them discern who must be on the Buying Decision Team, and become a member: we become neutral navigators rather than solution-placers.

4. We have assumed that if we can find a need, and our solution fits, that we have a sale. But if it were true, we’d be closing more, and sooner.

PROBLEM: Sales methods such as ‘objection handling’ ‘closing’ ‘getting past gatekeepers’, manage the fallout when buyers don’t buy according to the seller’s time frame. The problem is not a solution choice problem, but a buying decision/change management issue, and needs a different (i.e. non-sales) skill to manage that end of the path.

IMPLICATIONS: Because we don’t know who is a buyer until, well, until they buy, we waste over 90% of our time (and our company’s time) chasing prospects who don’t buy. And we can’t tell the difference until it’s too late.

SOLUTION: Using Buying Facilitation® you enter at the beginning of the path, and help buyers develop a pathway to handle the people, policies, relationship, and change issues necessary before they can buy. Once everyone is on board, and there is a path to a successful implementation, and everyone who will touch the solution is on board, THEN use sales – with no objections or delays.

Sales is vital. It manages the solution choice end of the buying path. It uncovers and supports needs. But it has no direct tools to do change management. We need to do more than sell. I believe the time has come to add a new skill to sales, and use Buying Facilitation® as part of your sales skills to truly help buyers buy. It is possible to eliminate objections, price issues, and closing issues, while greatly speeding up the sales cycle. Would you rather sell? or have someone buy?

To learn Buying Facilitation® contact sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. For more information visit www.buyingfacilitation.com or www.newsalesparadigm.com

Read samples of “Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions”(PDF) and “Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.” (PDF)

Listen to Sharon Drew discuss Buying Facilitation®.

Does The Sales Model Do What We Need It To Do? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Today’s post is by Dick Beedon, founder and CEO of Amplifinity. The consensus is that referrals are the best form of leads. They close faster, buy more, and stay longer. Great salespeople have been good at generating referrals for what seems like forever. Until recently, large corporations have struggled to figure out how to scale the success of individual sales reps to systematically and proactively drive large volumes of referrals. But that is all changing. Technology is coming to market that can help large brands automate the best practices of sales reps and institutionalize the process of generating referrals from...

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Despite all the talk about smartwatches — both the real and the hoped-for — activity trackers like FitBit are way more popular in the real world.

Activity tracker shipments reached 2.35 million during the first quarter of 2014, according to new numbers from ABI Research.

An experiment by graffiti artist, Banksy, can teach salespeople important lessons about positioning value.

Banksy (yes, he’s a one name artist) conducted a social experiment by setting up a booth in New York’s Central Park with lots of other artists. In seven hours, only a handful of original Banksy canvases sold for $60 each. The estimated fair market value for these originals? About $30,000 each when sold in a gallery.

Why would a Banksy original sell for $60 at a booth in Central Park one day, and then resell for $30,000 the next day somewhere else? It has to do with the perception of value. Art sold in galleries is perceived to be worth more. In a booth in Central Park with other “starving artists,” Banksy’s art looked like everything else, turning it into a commodity.

What can salespeople learn from this experiment?

Value is subjective and can be shaped. So, you must avoid creating the perception that your solution is a commodity.

Three ways salespeople commoditize their solutions and how they can fix it:

1)    Describe solutions in a way that makes them indistinguishable from the competition. Like Banksy, if your solution looks and sounds like every other vendor on the street, then your customers will see you as a commodity.

Instead, elevate your conversations to a level that’s worth more. For example, instead of responding to the same expressed wants, explore your customer’s needs, getting to those they may not have considered. Your solutions may include components they’re not even aware of.

2)    Give price reductions on demand. Typically, a salesperson will respond to discount requests, “My job is to make the customer happy. If I give them this discount, I can close the deal and make my quota.” What usually happens is that one discount request leads to another, until you’ve given away everything, including any perceived value in your solution.

Instead, come up with a concession plan that includes price and other negotiables. Start by increasing your opening, then concede in small increments, if you have to, toward a target. Go into your negotiations knowing that one concession will lead to another, so never give everything at once to expedite closing. It’s human nature to ask for more.

3)    Give things away without asking for something in return. People don’t value free. You may think you’re making progress along the buying cycle when a prospect asks for something that doesn’t appear to cost money (assessments, proof of concepts, references, preliminary pricing, etc). But you’ll regret giving these things away when there’s nothing left to negotiate except price.

Instead, look for ways to exchange value. Identify things you can ask for that will help secure a deal and create competitive separation. What senior executive access can you ask for? What data or analytics do you need? What volume guarantees can you ask for? Approach these pivotal agreements as elegant trades that protect your value from leaking out with freebies.

You can increase the perception of value in your customer conversations by focusing on these simple ways to create and then capture the value you provide throughout the sales cycle, from the first time you meet a prospect to when you shake hands and close the deal.

 

Leads are an essential part of your business. The better able your sales team is to manage the leads that come into your sales funnel, the more you’ll see them convert into sales.

You and your team need only to focus on nurturing leads along the way as they traverse the sales funnel, not the relatively laborious task of keeping contacts and interaction histories organized.

But, if you’re seeing a high volume of leads (and hopefully you are), you can’t be expected to manage your leads without a little technological help. Fortunately, “there’s an app for that,” and the ones referenced in this post have the labor-intensive part of nurturing leads down to a science.

Your leads are the lifeblood of your company. That means the lead management app you choose is effectively the vascular system of your organization – it’s the conduit through which your leads are nourished. If you have yet to choose a lead management app, fear not – we’re here to help.

Let’s take a look at some of the unique benefits lead management apps will bring to your sales process and highlight some specific features from some of the best apps around.

Reason #1: Apps put your leads all in one place

Salesforce is one of the biggest names in lead management apps.

The days of keeping track of leads using a spreadsheet are thankfully over. By now you’ve surely heard of Salesforce.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a popular lead management app that allows you to keep track of leads and lead engagements from your computer or smartphone, nurturing the leads on-the-fly, wherever you happen to travel.

Let’s take a look at some of the features of Salesforce Sales Cloud to get an idea of just what a lead management app can do for you:

Marketing/sales integration

• Sales community creation
• In-app analytics
• Real time visualization of leads
• Email integration
• Contact management tools
• Workflow management tools
• Mobile – Android, iOS, Blackberry, Web

Many lead management apps will offer a similar set of features. Any app that misses on one of these core features is not worth your time, so keep that in mind if you try out different lead management apps.

Reason #2: Your customers are everywhere, why aren’t you?

Social media reaches more and more people with each new day. Yelp!, Twitter, Blogger, and YouTube give customers a voice amplified to a level on par with your brand’s own voice.

And leads move through all of those channels. Just as your marketing efforts must engage your prospects through social media, the lead management app you choose has to be ready to facilitate and nourish leads entering through social media channels.

One app that is particularly adept at this is Salesformics. Salesformics intgrates with Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as Constant Contact, to help you keep an eye on leads in social media, so that you can respond to them and interact with them as they engage with your brand on social media.

Salesformics makes it easy to track leads from anywhere, including social media.

Reason #3: For all those times when you just gotta know…

The current crop of lead management apps are mobile-ready. That means they go where you do – on a plane, on a hike, on a boat, on a bike! Whether from your iPhone or Android device, sales can be made no matter where you happen to travel.

And that adds up to peace of mind. If you’re a busy sales professional, you would no doubt like to know when an opportunity to close a deal arises and be able to act on it at the spur of the moment. That’s the major advantage to an app like Zoho CRM, a lead management app that embodies all of the features of the other apps mentioned in this article, while adding tight integration to one of the most robust business application suites around, Zoho.

With detailed visualizations of leads as seen in Zoho CRM, you can instantly react to lead engagements to close sales quickly and easily.

It doesn’t get much easier to visualize where your leads are in the sales funnel than with Zoho CRM.

Reason #4: Not all leads are cut of the same cloth

Let’s face it. There are good leads and there are not-so-good leads. You don’t want to waste time on leads that are never going to come to fruition, so that creates the need to sort them out.

If you field a high volume of leads it can become detrimentally time consuming to have to wade through all the duds to get to the good leads.

Lead management apps make it easy to segment leads into groups based on user-definable parameters, lead behaviors, and pre-determined signals. Fortunately, lead management apps automate most of the process, making it easy to perform complex segmentation with minimal effort on your part.

This type of functionality makes one app in particular, Pipedrive CRM, very popular with aggressive sales teams which need to be able to weed out the qualified leads from the more casual prospects.

Pipedrive makes it easy to nourish qualified leads through to conversion.

Are you struggling to manage your leads?

Why sweat it?

Lead management apps have come a long way. It’s time to ditch the Excel spreadsheet and the (yikes!) Rolodex and get with the times. Cloud-based lead management is in its full prime, and if you haven’t considered making the switch, hopefully this post has shown you that now’s the time.

Why not dig in and do you own research to see which lead management app is right for your business?

GetApp has a listing of all the lead management apps out right now.

We’ve also got reviews, head-to-head comparisons, and Q&As to help you find the perfect app for your unique needs.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of marketers – hunters and farmers.

The Hunter

The hunter is someone who goes out, guns blazing, looking for new business. Typical tools of the hunter marketer are paid search, SEO, PR, telemarketing, content marketing, trade show marketing, and traditional print and broadcast media advertising. These are, of course, acquisition channels that, like the bang of a hunter’s gun, make a lot of noise and cast a wide net to capture as many hot leads and sales as possible.

The Farmer

The farmer is someone who prefers to nurture existing clients and prospects, feeding them with engaging content and reaping a regular harvest from their relationships. The farmer will typically use low-cost tools such as email marketing and social media marketing to engage their contacts and ensure they remain productive. This form of retention marketing is more agricultural (that is, a lot of hard work but very efficient).

So which are you, a hunter or a farmer?

Actually, you need to be a little of both.

Hunting can be an exhausting endeavor (in terms of physical effort, money and motivation). Farming can quickly become unproductive if you don’t take care to introduce new livestock (or leads).

Successful email marketers (who are traditionally farmers) understand that a significant part of their job is building their lists, and this means going out and hunting for new subscribers using all of the hunting strategies mentioned above.

I believe that email marketing should be seen as the profitable component of everything else you do to promote your business. So when you go hunting for new customers, don’t shoot to kill (going for a quick and easy sale). Instead, learn to capture, nurture and retain. You might be hungry for meat now, but a cash cow like email marketing should be able to feed you for many months ahead.

This post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog.

Battling to fight evolving communication demands or the ever-changing face of digital marketing? Never fear, your marketing superheroes are on their way.

The landscape of digital marketing has changed a great deal – and with changes come new challenges. In fact, 56% of marketers have struggled with acquiring the new skills and knowledge required to face said challenges. For many marketing departments, this means recruiting people with the power to allow agility within the department and build consistency for the brand across various platforms.

While individual superheroes can save the day, they are never more powerful than when they work as a team. Those Marvel Avengers are pretty unstoppable when they all work together!

The traditional marketing method relies on specialisation, however today’s super marketing team needs to be agile, connected and unified in a common goal. 

So if you want to build a marketing organisation of the future, make sure you hire these superheroes …

Captain Community (aka Community Manager)

Much more than the ‘person who posts on Facebook’, the Community Manager is often the first line of defence when it comes to customer service and managing the reputation of your brand online – 52% of consumers expect a response within a day of posting a complaint to a brand’s social media profile.

Captain Community’s X-ray vision is legendary – as they most frequently engage with consumers, they are in prime position to see new and amazing marketing opportunities to help bring down the opposition! They are also lightning-fast, staying on top of the ever-changing world of social media with a desire to keep learning and improving.

Power PR (aka online PR Manager)

This is no ordinary PR Manager. But then this isn’t any ordinary PR job. The online PR Manager – or Outreach Manager – understands exactly how to build brand awareness, traffic and sales.

Power PR is a good at building relationships. They know exactly where to post a guest blog, are never too shy to ask for a link, and can craft strategic messaging that connects with future and current consumers at the drop of a hat. 

This superhero also thinks like a media person – they’re on top of industry trends, what’s next for your brand, and understands what content is compelling for journalists and consumers alike.

Wonder Writer (aka content creator)

The biggest weapon that most marketers need to get a handle on is content. While a modern marketing team needs to produce content to survive, most are just not that good at it – only 32% of B2C marketers believe they are effective at content marketing. 

That’s where Wonder Writer comes in. They will add polish to emails, entice consumers into your website with their wit and charm, and their insightful white papers will ensure your brand is seen as a thought leader. Words aren’t their only weapon either – they’ll also be adept at producing interesting visual-led content, including images and video. 

Doctor Data (aka data analytics and SEO guru)

Doctor Data eats reports for breakfast, lunch and dinner! They not only understand how to get traffic to your website, but also what campaigns have brought results.

For most of us non-heroes, metrics are fairly nonsensical – a recent report reveals that only 28% of brands are able to measure the ROI of content. This is where Doctor Data comes in, sharing great insights to help improve your strategy, showing you what worked and what didn’t. 

Throw in Doctor Data’s additional SEO skills, which will help get your website ranked in Google and increase traffic, and you’ve got a serious superhero powerhouse.

Super Sales (aka sales consultant)

For many years a battle has raged between marketing and sales, but this peace-loving superhero is here to bring harmony and unity.

The sales team now plays an earlier role in the buying process and Super Sales sees the impact their role has on conversions and making revenue.

Super Sales understands that the days of hard sell have gone and instead builds relationships. Their super savviness allows them to understand what customers want and how to help them find it.

“Fifty-seven percent of the marketing automation adopters report strong collaboration [between sales and marketing] in capturing insight from customers and prospects, compared with 41% of those that are not automated. The dimension of administering leads and lead pipelines posted a collaborative advantage of 12%.”

The Forrester Wave™: Lead-To-Revenue Management Platform Vendors, Q1 2014

Things to think about:

• Marketing automation software can be the key to success for any modern marketing campaign.
• However, to unlock the true potential of marketing automation software, you need a team of people with the right knowledge and skills.
• Is your team equipped to save the day?

Want to learn more about marketing automation? Watch the free video now: Introduction to Modern Marketing

For B2B companies that sell complex products or services, keeping the sales pipeline filled with qualified leads is vital to sustaining both revenue growth and profits. When it comes to acquiring new sales leads, B2B companies must address two distinct but related issues:

• How can we acquire enough sales leads to enable us to meet our revenue objectives?
• What is the most efficient and cost-effective way to acquire the volume of leads we need?

Historically, most B2B companies have relied primarily on their salespeople to identify and acquire new leads. “Prospecting” was considered to be a core part of every sales rep’s job, and effective prospecting has long been a popular topic at sales training events. Unfortunately, the traditional approach to lead acquisition no longer works very well for many B2B companies.

Today, buyers can go online and find most of the information they need to evaluate products and services. So, many buyers are delaying conversations with sales reps until later in the buying process, and as a result, it’s becoming a lot harder for salespeople to create the initial engagement with potential buyers.

In recent years, a growing number of B2B thought leaders have argued that marketing, rather than sales, should be primarily responsible for lead acquisition. The proponents of this view make two compelling arguments.

First, they contend that lead acquisition is an inherently inefficient activity that has a high input (work required) to output (success) ratio. Because of the inherent inefficiency, it’s important to acquire leads using low-cost resources when possible. Salespeople are expensive resources, and their prospecting activities don’t scale because they’re labor intensive. Marketing programs, on the other hand, scale very easily, and many can be automated on a cost-effective basis.

Second, moving primary responsibility for lead acquisition from sales to marketing will improve sales productivity. Reducing the amount of time that salespeople must spend prospecting means that they will have the ability to manage a larger number of high-value sales opportunities. This allows sales reps to close more deals and generate higher revenues for the company.

Despite these compelling arguments, it’s clear that many B2B companies are still relying heavily on sales reps for lead acquisition. The following table is based on the Sales Performance Optimization surveys conducted by CSO Insights and includes data from the survey results published in 2011 through 2014. The surveys asked participants to specify what percentage of their leads are self-generated by sales reps, what percentage are generated by marketing, and what percentage originate from other sources.

As this table shows, the percentage distribution of leads has remained fairly stable for the past four years. In fact, data from earlier CSO Insights’ surveys shows that little has changed for the past eight years.

It’s clear that most B2B companies should rely more on marketing and less on sales for lead acquisition. This allows a company to use its sales reps to do more of the things that only they can do – have meaningful, personal, one-on-one conversations with prospects who are truly sales ready.

So, what is the right division of responsibility for lead acquisition? The answer will depend on what you sell and on the economic structure of your market. Based on my work with clients and on a review of current demand generation best practices, here’s a framework that should work for many B2B companies:

• Percentage of leads generated by sales reps – 20% to 30%
• Percentage of leads generated by marketing – 40% to 60%
• Percentage of leads from “other” sources – 10% to 20%

OTTAWA – Finance Minister Joe Oliver says the newly-elected Liberal government in Ontario should use its first budget to tackle the province’s serious deficit problem.

The federal finance minister says his government will almost certainly balance its budget next year and that Ontario could take a lesson from that example.

Ontario, which holds a $12.5-billion deficit, elected a Liberal government last week.

The minister made the comments after meeting more than a dozen private sector economists at his office, the first such meeting for Oliver since being named finance minister in March.

The economists advised Oliver that the weather-related first quarter economic dip in the economy will shave about one-tenth of a percentage point from growth projected in the 2014 federal budget.

But that likely won’t impact government revenues, they said. In fact, revenues may be higher than expected because strong oil prices likely will translate in to higher tax revenues.

Bank of Montreal chief economist Doug Porter says barring an unforeseen economic shock, he believes Ottawa may get to a balanced budget position sometime during the current fiscal year.

Once the budget is balanced, Oliver says the government can proceed to fulfil its election promise and introduce income splitting.

The minister also says he does not believe Canada is experiencing a housing bubble, although he adds that the government still plans new measures to lessen the reach of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. in the mortgage insurance market.

The Paris-based OECD recommended last week that Ottawa reduce the percentage of mortgage loan CMHC insures from the current 100 per cent and Oliver says that is one avenue the government could pursue.

The post Oliver says Ontario needs to tackle its large deficit in upcoming budget appeared first on Canadian Business.

I recently took a tour of my uncle's industrial valve company in South Korea. The visit included a presentation given by one of his employees, who emphasized the company's commitment research and development (R&D).

Their principal concern is that anything on the market will eventually be manufactured in China at lower costs. In order to stay ahead, they have to keep improving their products.

Winning With R&D

R&D is one of those controversial line items that companies love to tout. But investors worry about it because it eats into profit margins in the near term.

My uncle takes pride in not having to deal with this particular investor grievance because he owns 100% of the company.

His company is just one of the many that have made Korea one of the beacons of R&D in the developed world.

"Korea’s emphasis on R&D is the main driver that has been bolstering its global competitiveness," wrote Morgan Stanley's Sharon Lam and Jason Liu. "Korea has seen the fastest growth in R&D expenditures among OECD countries over the last decade. It now ranks first in OECD in terms of R&D intensity (expressed as R&D spending as % of GDP), which replaced a long-standing position held by Israel before 2012. We believe R&D will continue to see increasing share of GDP growth contribution in Korea in the years to come."

And Korea isn't just throwing away that money. The benefits of the R&D spending have been very clear in recent years.

"Apart from the direct contribution, R&D spending is, in fact, an intangible asset that is boosting other growth elements as well, most notably exports," said Lam and Liu. "The much-enhanced technology and design are the keys to help Korean exporters to compete on quality rather than on price, in our view. As a result, Korea’s exports have seen little to almost no impact from the substantial JPY depreciation over the last 18 months."

Also known as Abenomics, Japan's ambitious economic stimulus plan has involved loose monetary policy that has led to the substantial devaluation of the yen relative to other currencies. The Japanese yen is down almost 20% on the Korean won since the beginning of 2013 (see below).

This was once considered a risk to neighboring South Korea, which competes in many of the same export categories. The relative weakness of the yen to the won effectively put all of Japan's exported goods up for sale at a steep discount.

But it appears that no amount of cheapness will offset the demand for technologically superior goods.

Rather than struggling to maintain growth, growth is actually accelerating in Korea.

"We are increasing our Korea GDP forecasts to 3.6% and 4.1%, respectively, for 2014 and 2015, from 3.5% and 3.7%," said Lam and Liu in their note.

All this is a lesson for any economy or company competing at the global level.

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