Rnordman

The collaborative economy empowers ordinary people to share their unused resources, such as time and goods, often in a peer-to-peer commerce model. We tend to think of this model impacting us as individuals, as illustrated in the popular Honeycomb graphic. However, shared services (many of which I use) aren’t limited to personal use. The collaborative economy model is expanding to include these strategies and technologies at the B2B level. See my quick guide on how companies are integrating them into their own strategies.

This successful expansion of applications begs the question, “Can the sharing model work for individual professionals?” Not only will it work, it already does work. Now that these services are available for personal use, we’re also seeing them expand into the business world. These services help professionals outsource tasks in their work life so they can focus on their core responsibilities and competencies.

Here’s a list of collaborative economy services targeting business professionals. As you’ll see, this market isn’t just about ride sharing and home sharing. If you know of other similar services, please share them as comments below.

Fon hotspots in Paris, France. Photo credit: NRKBeta.

1. AirPR: On-demand PR professionals in two-sided marketplaces of providers and communication buyers, AirPR tracks actionable insights into what is, or is not, driving engagement.
2. CloudPeeps: On-demand community managers, ready to help your company scale up for launches or during seasonal periods. CloudPeeps provides the services of experienced professionals to assist with everything from startups and small businesses to mature enterprises on an as-needed basis at a fraction of the cost of a full-time manager.
3. PeerSpace: Does your team need a creative or inspirational workspace? PeerSpace offers both sides of the unused space sector, bringing together those who need workspace with those who have unused space. There’s even an app for that.
4. Zirtual is a virtual executive assistant service that matches busy people with dedicated personal assistants to manage details so that you don’t have to.
5. Trunk Club: Are you a busy, male executive who wants to present yourself as stylish and professional?Personal stylists are available to help you look your best. Trunk Club sets up a profile for you, then saves you time by sending you a new “trunk” of clothes selected especially for you on a regularly scheduled basis. Keep and pay for what you like. Return the rest. It’s shopping at its best.
6. Refashion your clothes. Female executives have access to a million dollar wardrobe, yet keep expenses low and closets manageable. See Threadflip, Bag Borrow or Steal and Rent the Runway.
7. CrowdSPRING and 99designs can help create your new website, microsite, logo, or PowerPoint presentations and make them look amazing using crowd-sourced experts.
8. oDesk, the world’s largest online collaborative workspace, and Elance, providing access to more than two million skilled, independent contractors, bring together savvy professionals and professional freelancers, offering a large market of workers that can help you with copy editing, online research, translating, digital production, programming, administrative work and much more.
9. Breather. Need a place to work? Executives will like Breather, an online repository of beautiful, private places to work, meet, or relax in several big cities. This is a step up from the more pervasive Regus (over 2,000 locations worldwide) or a loud coffee shop.
10. Sprig delivers inexpensive hot meals on demand to you or your employees, or you and your boss, or you and your family, within a few minutes in the San Francisco area. This is not fast food. These are hand-crafted meals created by former Google executive chef Nate Keller. And, yes, there is an app for this service, too.
11. Fon offers free, shared Wi-Fi in over three million locations.
12. Shapeways: Get custom-made, 3D printed, products, or gifts for your customers and colleagues including jewelry, miniatures, desk accessories, and art.

The collaborative economy is exploding, reaching into all areas of life and work. These services enable any professional to have access to a broad marketplace of talent without having to hire them on a full-time basis. On the flip side, it enables the providers to set their own schedule, work on projects they want, and have more control over their work life balance. Even the invention of sliced bread was not as good as this.

Author: Rachel Kavanagh

There’s no doubt about it: automating your marketing can bring incredible efficiencies to your business, allowing you to scale your efforts without losing precision. But you don’t want your automated messages to feel automated – you want your marketing to feel personal, to build connections, and you also want it to amplify your brand.

After all, it’s widely accepted that it takes at least seven positive marketing messages to make a brand stick in a potential customer’s mind. That means that every single message counts – especially until you’ve “stuck.” If your communications are not consistent with your products and company values, or are insensitive to information you’ve already collected, you may lose some of your highest quality leads.

Unfortunately, many companies are not effective enough during this delicate phase. Their brand messages aren’t building their credibility, or resonating with the audience receiving them.

Consumer brands like Coca Cola, on the other hand, are excellent at this – they have comprehensive, enforced brand guidelines to control every marketing message across all channels. They can justify huge spend on media like TV, radio, and print, and they enlist the help of high-profile celebrity endorsers, to simultaneously resonate with consumers and their personal values. They’re conscious of how brand voice, narrative, and imagery should all tell a consistent story.

B2B marketers generally have less money to spend and fewer channels to leverage than consumer marketers, but they also control a large proportion of brand transmissions in your emails. Luckily, automation can actually make your marketing more personal, and can also help you remain consistent in your messaging across every channel.

Here are four easy ways to create more on-brand emails which resonate with your prospects, using marketing automation, your data, and a little creativity:

1. Sender Personalisation and Brand Ambassadors

As people, we are hard-wired to crave connection with others, which is why, as marketers, we want to introduce our brand as authentic and personal. Despite this, many B2B marketers are still sending emails from “marketing@mycompany.com”, or signing emails with “Sincerely, Your Marketing Team.”

In other words, they’re simply begging for unsubscribes – who wants to be reminded that they’re on a marketing list. Instead, make sure you’re sending your emails from a real person – one who represents the values of your product or organization, and who fits with the message you are trying to convey. Choose brand ambassadors wisely. To give a widely publicized example, Coca-Cola chose Taylor Swift as the face of Diet Coke last year, which, due to her controversial, polarising persona, many blamed for a drop in Diet Coke’s sales.

If possible, send emails from a person who is highly relevant to the message – ideally, an expert in the subject matter discussed. Include an e-signature, links to Twitter, LinkedIn… whatever you decide will demonstrate authenticity. You might also include a photo of the sender in the email’s signature – try a little A/B testing to find out what drives the best results.

If you’re using marketing automation, you can tailor your “from” names to appeal specifically to each email send’s audience – you might use your own name, include contact information, or use the name of someone in your company (with their permission, of course!). This is where knowing your brand comes in – do you have a charismatic CMO whose name you’d like to highlight? Or do you position yourself as friendly practitioners? You can dive a little deeper into these options with our ebook, Creating Your Email Marketing Subject Lines and From Names.

2. Segmentation and Geographic Relevance

Nothing encourages an express opt-out like a message in the wrong language, or an event invitation from the wrong continent! These messages are highly irritating, and are guaranteed to result in unsubscribes. If you’re marketing globally, an incorrect geographic filter can even have legal implications.

That’s why we recommend segmenting the audience you send emails to. Beyond geography, you might also consider segmenting your audience by gender, age, job title, company size, industry, interests, and more. Marketing automation makes segmentation easy to implement, helping you avoid this major (and surprisingly common) faux-pas.

3. Use Your Data to Find Other Data

Data has a way of hiding right under your nose. Often, marketers will waste time gathering info, only to discover only that they’ve had what they needed all along.

For instance, some industries and countries require you to address potential customers formally – typically with both a salutation and last name. If you don’t have this information for every prospect in your database, you might be daunted by the idea.

But if you’re looking for a last name, these are often included in email addresses…can you pull from there? If you’re looking for a prospect’s gender, can you discern it based off of first names? Both country and state can often be derived from contact fields.

You can also derive a prospect’s interest in a product based on behavior, which marketing automation can help you track. In short, don’t re-invent the wheel – take advantage of automation to cleverly embellish your data with information you already have.

With a little creativity and the help of automated campaigns, your database will rapidly fill up with the personal details needed to make emails feel individually tailored.

4. Create Resonance with Scoring

And finally, use lead scoring – an essential, but often overlooked marketing tool that is used to qualify and pass along leads to sales. If you’re using marketing automation, lead scoring presents a ready-made yardstick to measure how responsive new leads are to your content.

First, marketers define levels of buyer interest (i.e. early, mid, and late stage), and then set parameters to determine a lead’s qualification for each level. As each lead progresses from one stage to the next, the messages they receive can be adjusted in turn.

You know how interested a lead is in your product or services, so you can be sure you’re communicating in a personally relevant (but still automated!) way, sending the right content at the right time. Remember those first, most crucial seven touch points? Carefully plan your content streams for the most resonant results. This is often the difference between a marketing message that results in qualified leads, and a marketing message that results in an unsubscribe.

So how can you measure success? Your response rate!

You know you are making personal connection with the right brand messages when someone responds to an automated email. Honour this with a response whenever you can. And congratulations! It’s not easy to achieve.

So those are my four most effective tactics to make automation feel both personal and on-brand. Any questions about putting them into practice? Want to share a few successes of your own? Let us know in the comments below.

4 Simple Ways to Make Automated Emails Feel Personal…AND On-Brand was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Having a well-built LinkedIn page is a crucial part of a company’s visibility online, as well as an effective tool for marketing no matter the business size. The following four tips can help business owners tap into the power of LinkedIn and learn how to use the site to make their company more successful.

Create a Memorable Page

Steve Phillips is a personal branding expert and founder of Linked2Success, a company that helps businesses build a presence on LinkedIn and use it as an effective marketing tool. He suggests business owners first create a compelling company page. When designing the page, it is important to feature company products and services with the use of eye-catching graphics. For example, online home decor retailer Joss & Main presents attention-grabbing, colorful graphics and features industry-related articles on their LinkedIn page.

For business owners who need helpful tips on how to create an effective company page on LinkedIn, the book “How to Create a Step-by-Step LinkedIn Marketing Strategy for Your Business” provides plenty of helpful tips on determining a target audience, creating a successful page and understanding what features LinkedIn offers to help businesses get noticed.

Ask Others to Weigh In

Business owners should ask their customers for a recommendation. Similar to a review, a business recommendation will be visible to visitors on the page, serving as a wonderful advertisement for the company and its products and services. In addition, the user’s profile picture is displayed alongside the recommendation, lending credibility to the fact that people are happy with your products or services. And the recommendation will be featured to all their contacts too, which gains greater visibility for your company.

Post, Post, Post

To use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool, managers need to post pertinent updates at least once a day to the site. In addition to sharing items from a personal page, he or she can post updates about the company, business-based milestones, specials and employee highlights. Posting frequently and keeping a LinkedIn page current takes time and effort, however the return is great, and it’s an effective way to increase consumer traffic online.

Launch a LinkedIn Group

Another good way to effectively market a business using LinkedIn is to create a LinkedIn group. In addition to gaining visibility, creating a group can launch a company into the coveted position of an industry leader. The most successful groups on LinkedIn include members with similar business-related goals. In addition, top-notch groups are well-managed and run in an effective and engaging way. Business owners may find it wise to delegate the duties of LinkedIn page management. When choosing an employee to take on the role of group moderator, it’s wise to select an individual who will interact with consumers and fellow group members by engaging in an open dialogue.

We don't like to think about it, but it can happen: whether by hacking or by theft, someone can get access to your computer and everything on it. When the unthinkable happens, here's how to pick up the pieces.

Read more...

The next battleground for smartphone market share will be emerging markets, the poorer countries where most people still use regular phones and are slowly making the transition to smartphones.

Lately, there have been a handful of smartphone makers that produce cheap smartphones with really nice build quality. Xiaomi and OnePlus, two Chinese smartphone startups, are perhaps the best examples of companies attacking the low end of the smartphone market with affordable phones that rival features found in top-tier phones from companies like Apple and Samsung.

In China, for example, Xiaomi recently surpassed Apple in market share, largely because its phones are much cheaper. They usually cost $200 or $300. Apple and Samsung phones cost at least $600. Some think Apple's reluctance to make a cheap smartphone will cause it to fall far behind competitors that make affordable Android devices.

According to a survey by Jana, a mobile technology platform for emerging markets, most people in the countries Xiaomi sells in don't want to pay the sky-high prices Apple and Samsung typically charge for smartphones. Instead, they're in Xiaomi's price range, which explains why the company is expanding its business to those countries.

That also means it won't be long before a large chunk of the smartphone market will be using cheaper phones instead of premium, pricey devices.

Here's the chart from Jana:

SEE ALSO: Xiaomi is poised to wallop Samsung and Apple in China

Join the conversation about this story »

With the recent debut of Amazon's streaming music service and the upcoming launch of what will likely be a new smartphone, it's easy to forget about a major part of the company's business: It's computing services platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon Web Services accounted for 37% of the $9 billion infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in 2013, according to analysts from equity research company Evercore. The IaaS market is growing by 45%, but Amazon Web Services has a growth rate of 60%.

AWS also has more than five times the computational capacity of its 14 next IaaS competitors combined, according to a Gartner report published last fall.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon is just as competitive with Web Services pricing as it is with its retail pricing. Just days after Google announced that it was reducing costs of some of its cloud services, Amazon slashed its own prices, proudly touting its 42nd price-cut in six years.

Here's how Amazon stacks up against the competition when it comes to revenue:

SEE ALSO: Everything We Know About Amazon's Phone

Join the conversation about this story »

Email remains one of the most effective and versatile channels available to marketers. 

One of its main strengths is the variety of goals that can be achieved through email, including sales, customer service or aftersales.  

Each different campaign may have slightly different KPIs, but there are some that are universally applicable.

Here I’ll summarise some of the most important email KPIs that marketers need to be aware of – it’s for beginners, so experts should already be well versed in all of these.

And for further information on how to get more from your email campaigns, download Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Census Report 2014.

Open rate

The most basic measurement of email success and one that doesn’t actually reveal all that much, the open rate simply shows the proportion of recipients who opened your email.

One major flaw with this metric is that it’s generally tracked using an impression pixel, so if a subscriber’s email client doesn’t automatically download your images then it won’t register as an opened email.

Nonetheless, it’s worth tracking this metric over time for any major fluctuations or long-term trends, and for comparing the efficacy of different subject lines.

Marketers should also benchmark their efforts against other their industry peers.

Clickthrough rate

Another basic measure of email success, revealing the proportion of people who clicked on a link within an email.

Email service providers setup different tracking URLs for each CTA, allowing marketers to compare the efficacy of each link in driving clicks, as well as users' subsequent on-site behaviour.

Click-to-open rate

This metric is more useful than a standard clickthrough rate as it shows the percentage of unique clicks compared to the number of unique opens.

It is therefore a more accurate indicator of how well your email content is performing.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate tells you how many people that clicked through your email went on to achieve a certain goal.

This doesn’t necessarily mean sales, it can refer to any action that is relevant for your business, such as a downloading a white paper or even booking a test drive.

By tracking this metric over time you can get a good idea of the type of content and creative that is most effective for your subscribers.

However it is obviously influenced by other factors such as design and your product offering, so it’s a good idea to compare the conversion rate from email against other marketing channels.

Price per email sent

Another important KPI as it tracks the actual ROI of your email marketing. There’s no use bragging about the £5 earned on average from each email sent if you’re spending £6 per email sent.

The price per email sent is essential for tracking the profitability of your campaigns.

Unsubscribe rate

It’s inevitable that email subscriber lists will decline over time as people grow tired of your marketing messages and decide to opt out forever more.

However the rate at which people opt out is impacted by the frequency, quality and relevance of email marketing, so it’s important to track this metric to ensure your messages aren’t repelling potential customers.

Industry data varies, but in general an unsubscribe rate of around 0.5% or lower is praiseworthy.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate refers to the number of emails that failed to deliver due to an invalid or non-existent email address.

This may not seem like a major problem, but in the eyes of internet service providers a high bounce rate is the hallmark of spammers.

Therefore you should carry out regular hygiene checks to remove invalid emails or you may end up being classified as a spammer. 

Doubts on search results and ranking flux early in May? Cleared. The roll out of Panda 4.0 update? Confirmed. The list of the biggest losers and winners? Seen. So, what’s next? Well, it’s time to take steps to recover from the Panda 4.0 penalty, and create content that is Panda friendly.

We have come up with the complete story of Google Panda 4.0 update, how did it affect websites, and what you can do to recover from the Panda 4.0 penalty. We have also prepared a list of guidelines and tips that will guide you to have a Panda proof content strategy. But before jumping into it, here’s what you must know about the new Google algorithm- Panda 4.0. It was in 2011 that Google first rolled out the Panda algorithm as a step to boost the rankings of websites with quality content and prevent the low quality content from reaching the top positions in the search results. Google has already made 25 refreshes in a span of 2 years before Panda 4.0.

Here Comes the Panda 4.0 Update: Although Google has stopped updating us about Panda refreshes after they started rolling out one every month, there was something big about the 4.0 update which made Google talk about it. Panda 4.0 was an update to the original algorithm rather than a mere refresh, affecting about 7.5 of English queries. That is why Panda 4.0 had a greater impact on major websites.

Panda Winners and Losers: While Panda 4.0 brought serious trouble to the sites with low quality content, it rewarded others for standing in line with the norms of Google.

How Panda 4.0 Affected the PR Sites? Google has frequently indicated it is not much pleased with the press release websites. Matt Cutts once stated, Google regards press releases as owned content and links in them are not considered of much value for SEO. Last year Google also updated the Webmaster Guidelines, asking webmasters to remove links with optimized anchor text in press releases. Following the Panda 4.0 update, major wire services lost a great amount of traffic as well as online visibility. A major PR website lost more than half of its traffic within a single day. Individual press releases lost almost all rankings in search results.

So what does this mean for those companies which use the PR wire services? If your company has been releasing press releases in the right way, you will just do fine. Google wants the search results to show natural and organic web pages which provides useful information to the users. Anything which tampers with the Google algorithm can be dropped from the search index. This is why the Panda 4.0 update led to a drastic fall in the rankings of all those press releases which employed spammy link building tactics.

What the Panda 4.0 Update Taught Us? All said and done, what can you do to recover from the Panda 4.0 penalty? We have prepared the following list of tips and guidelines to make sure that your content remains Panda friendly: Concentrate on Unique Content: Focus on the creation of 100% original and unique content. Duplicity of any form, onsite or offsite, is hazardous, and Google penalizes sites with duplicate content strictly. So make sure your content is in alignment with the Google norms.

• Concentrate on Unique Content: Focus on the creation of 100% original and unique content. Duplicity of any form, onsite or offsite, is hazardous, and Google penalizes sites with duplicate content strictly. So make sure your content is in alignment with the Google norms.
• More Focus on Quality Content: Content is the king. Create content which is of high quality, fresh and engaging. Make sure that the content is of some value to the users. It should be informative, educative and entertaining rather than just crammed with keywords. The content should be inspiring and should strive to solve the problems of the readers. In order to better understand how your content can add value for your users watch this video by Google:

• Topical Authority Content: Rather than a generic all-inclusive site, be more of a topical authority in your niche. Content based topical authority websites get more online visibility as compared to those which provide only a brief description of the topic. If you write more articles on the same topic, it increases your chances of being called a “Topical Authority Content Site” for that particular topic.
• Powerful Content Strategy: Work on a powerful content strategy to focus on all the pillars of SEO including social, email, PR and PPC.
• We recommend building your brand with unique content, high quality links, and a powerful social strategy.
• Determine Your Target Audience: Your content must have a target audience. It should serve a particular group. Don’t just write on anything and everything. Choose a particular domain and then serve the concerned group.
• Engage Your Audience: Writing is a form of storytelling. Your content should be such that the reader can easily understand it and connect with it. This will help them engage with your content.
• Ditch the Old Low Quality Content: Remove the old low quality content from your website. Do away with duplicate or thin content and consolidate pages.
• Incorporate a site audit for content and surf volatility.
• Look for spelling and grammar errors. Asksomeone else to do the quality check for you.
• Break up long paragraphs into several smaller ones. Use headings, subheadings, lists, and relevant images to simplify the content for your audience.
• Finally, make sure that your content is easy to find, navigate and share.

Now you know that the formula to avoid getting Panda-ed is creating high quality content. But how to bring new and unique ideas for creating quality content so frequently? If you are totally dry and exhausted on fresh ideas, have a look at these points to know where you can find some unique ideas for your content:

• Look into the Frequently Asked Questions section and determine which of these queries you can expand to create a detailed article. Instead of writing five small articles on almost the same topics, write one lengthy article combining all of them. You can also add an inbound link after each of the query which directs the user to the relevant article in your blog.
• Ask your customer service department about the type of queries they receive everyday and use these queries as ideas to write articles which provide standard solutions to the readers on most common problems.

However, there’s another side of the coin too. Apart from punishing the websites with poor quality content, Panda 4.0 has also rewarded those websites which had unique and quality content. Also, the businesses, which were playing by the norms of Google but were still punched hard by the earlier updates of Panda have got their rankings back. But there are still some chances that the list of winners and losers might change and more changes could be awaiting us in the coming weeks.

As of now, the only thing which is certain is that, if you keep working on the quality content, providing readers something worth reading and sharing, you will no doubt be rewarded by Google. Hopefully, this will help you get things back on track. We will keep you updated as more information rolls out.

You might think that it is not important for you to write call to action in your blog post. But, is it so? If you want your readers to leave their comment on your blog, you write call to action. If you want your readers to follow you on Twitter and become your fans on Facebook, you write call to action. If you want your readers to sign up to your mailing list, you need call to action. The same is true when you promote your product to your blog readers. You need call to action. So, call to action is important for your blog, and it is necessary for you to learn about how to write it effectively. Here are 5 creative ways to write persuasive call to action in your blog post:

1. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask People to Do Something after Reading Your Post

Many bloggers are afraid to write call to action because they don’t want to come up as pushy and demanding toward their audience. But, this is just not true. When you write a call to action, you are not being pushy or demanding toward your audience. In fact, you are motivating and encouraging them to take the next action. You are not forcing them. You merely invite them to do so. So, don’t be afraid to ask people what they need to do next after reading your blog post. This is important, because when you feel afraid, you won’t be able to write an effective call to action and it will not be compelling enough to motivate your readers.

2. Tell Them the Benefit of Taking Action

You have to remind your audience about the benefit of taking action in the end of your post. It’s not about the benefit for you or your blog, but it is about the benefit that your readers will instantly get once they do the proposed action that you ask them to do. For instance, if you want them to sign up to your mailing list, you should tell them about the benefit of signing up to your list that they can get instantly. Remember, people will not be motivated to do something unless they can get the advantage of doing it. And it is much better if they can get the advantage instantly instead of later.

3. Make It the Next Logical Step

Make their action the next logical step that they should do after reading your blog post. It will go like this. If your readers love your content, logically they will want to get more content, right? Thus, if they want to get more content from you, logically they should stay tune with the latest updates on your blog. In order to do this, they need to follow you on social media because you will always post the latest blog updates there. So, it’s the logical step that they have to do. If your call to action can become the logical step that your audience can do after reading your content, they will just go with the flow. But, if the call to action is completely off-course for them, then they will not respond well.

4. Give Them Time Limit

People are constantly buying limited edition products because of one thing: lack of availability. The rarer something is, the more demand it will get, provided that it has good value to offer. So, it can be applied to your call to action as well. When you give your readers the time limit to take action, you will be able to encourage them to take action immediately. For instance, if you are giving away an exclusive offer to your mailing list subscribers for only the next 7 days, your readers will be willing to sign up to your list immediately just to get a grab on your offer. But, if there’s no time limit, your readers will not feel the sense of urgency to join your list. As a result, it will give less positive response for your call to action.

5. End with a Question

When you ask question to someone, he or she will naturally answer your question. Try it with your call to action. If your call to action is a question, then naturally your readers will respond to it. This is true when you are asking your readers to leave their comment. Once you write a full blog post, you will end it up with a question: “What about you? Do you have some other ideas that you want to share?” And it will automatically motivate people to write comment to share their ideas. Thus, the discussion will start. So, it’s a good strategy for you to end your blog post with a question in order to encourage people to take action immediately.

Those are some creative ways to write persuasive call to action in your blog post. If you want your readers to engage with you and become an active part of your blogging community, writing an effective call to action for your blog post is necessary. If you apply those creative ways for your call to action, you’ll get better response from your blog readers.

Simply put, anchoring is how people live their lives… Woaah! *We gotta bad ass over here*

Anchoring is all about comparing a certain prospect to another. The base-line product, base line sale, menu option, service, vacation, relationship, , etc. etc. etc. – we all live by comparing our current life system to potential options that we see.

Bar Rafaeli will never date you, cuz Leonardo DiCaprio is a thing. She’s gonna anchor her decisions based on who she’s with right now.

[Slow clap for the ones that couldn't make it to the rich guy boat party]

So, you know how it’s so hard for businesses to tap into clients in the B2B space? That’s cuz clients are anchoring their existing providers with you. If you can anchor yourselves with the existing provider and compete on only one or two key differentiators – then it makes the decision easier for the client.

Examples of Anchoring?

1. A $55 Filet Mignon coupled with a $60 Lobster will make the decision easier if anchored against a $25 Roast. Its a no-brainer – I’m not spending twice as much on something that fancy – although, if I order the Roast, and I like it – I’m gonna think about how incrementally more delicious the $60 Lobster is gonna be.

2. Expensive audio equipment.

Beats by Dre Pricing comparison – Click to enlarge

So a consumer walking into the digital store will have a set budget in mind, and looking at the expensive price point of $449.95 – the decision is clear. He’s gonna go for the cheaper headphones. Anchoring works in this way. You gotta check out their product pages – their UI is quite above average – check it out

3. Digital newspaper subscriptions – I love this experiment by the economist  Dan-the man-Ariely’s. *Props*. I pulled these images from Peep’s blog at ConversionXL (another interesting resource)

Here’s the setup – a group of MIT students (the top 1% of the worlds smartest) were asked to choose a subscription model for the Economist magazine. They were free to walk away from the deal as well. [Not sure about how the questions were phrased]

One of the groups saw the following options  -

1. Web Edition- $59.00

2. Print Edition – $125.00

3. Print and Web – $125.00

84% went for the last option, and 16% for the first.

Option 2 was a decoy. An anchor stimulant – if you will. Consumers base their anchor point at the web edition, and imagine their lives with Options 2 and Options 3. Option 2 seems like a waste of money, and option 3 appears to be a gosh-darn bargain. I’ll pick option 3.

Now here’s where the experiment gets realllly interesting -

When they removed the second option for group II, only 32% went for the last option. A huge drop! When group II anchored themselves at $59, they were too focused on the incremental cost of a print edition – and then they considered themselves environmentalists *guppies* and went for the web edition instead. Too much of a processing load to handle.

A huge drop in revenue.

Here’s another gem from Peep at Conversion XL -

“When people were offered to choose a trip to Paris (option A) vs a trip to Rome (option B), they had a hard time choosing. Both places were great, it was hard to compare them.

Now they were offered 3 choices instead of 2: trip to Paris with free breakfast (option A), trip to Paris without breakfast (option A-), trip to Rome with free breakfast (option B). Now overwhelming majority chose option A, trip to Paris with free breakfast. The rationale is that it is easier to compare the two options for Paris than it is to compare Paris and Rome.”

I think this sums it up.

Types of anchors

Pricing anchors -

i. First digit anchor

The magic of “9″…*spoooooky*

Why is everything on this god-damn planet priced at $49 or $499.95, or Rs. 19,900, or something of the sort?

That’s cuz we anchor the price of the product to the first digit we see.

In the case of $49 – We instantly associate the price of the product as being $40 + $9, instead of being $50. This is huge. Because now you’re looking at these numbers separately and they’ve become an acceptable amount for placing an order.  $40 bucks works for me, and what-the-heck – $9 isn’t that expensive either.

This also works incredibly well for the $1 a day campaigns. A few insurance companies and cell phone providers say that their service only costs $1 a day instead of saying $30 a month. Why? Because you can ANCHOR $1 and compare it with your daily bus fare, coffee, bag of chips, energy bar, etc etc etc. Instead of comparing $30 to a pair of shoes, or a bag, or something of higher value. Consumers will automatically anchor onto the $1 and won’t budge.

We can’t help it – that’s just how people are. If we like something we see, we wanna convince ourselves to buy it. And if there’s an external influencer like a pricing anchor – then damnit we’re sold!

*To Note* This doesn’t kick in during discounts. Selling a $50 product and discounting it by $5 is too much of a load on the consumer’s mind. Now she’s gotta factor in the after-sales tax, and she thinks “When you add it all up, it comes up to the same price”

[#NEVER DISCOUNT]

ii. Comparison anchor -

Having a dummy price-point  built in to your pricing, works great.

When I look at the MacBook Air’s 64 GB hard drive – I’m like NO WAY is anyone gonna pay that much for that little. And now – I’m sucked in. The ad has got my attention, and got me thinking about the other three brands. The Macbook’s also intentionally placed on the extreme left – like its almost automatically distanced from the true mid-range selections. (:0 Genius)

Credit goes to Price Intelligently for spotting that.

iii. After Sales – Upselling ancillary items after someone has made a huge purchase has a lot to do with anchoring as well. The cost of the accessory is now compared to the price of the overall product. The product now being the anchor.

E.g. A car with a music system. A flat screen with a set of speakers. A PS3 console compared to a game that costs almost 25% of the price of the PS3. Compared to the investment that the consumer has just made, the price of a smaller commitment/product/upgrade on a flight/extra leg-room/ super-sizing / etc. etc. etc. seems inconsequential. “Go ahead n do it, but make it fast.”

Service Anchor -

a. Customer Experience -When a customer walks into a store, and they’re treated with respect & made to feel affluent, it creates an anchor. An anchor where the consumer starts believing the script, and ends up spending more during the stroll-around or atleast leaves the store with a smile. Bob would recall his experience and tell Cindy,” I didn’t buy anything from that store, but man were the staff helpful. Great bunch of people. They’ve even got a decent winter-coat.”

[Slight Caveat] Sometimes the staff is just a bit rude to their customers – especially in high end outlets. Bunch o’ bitch*s. I haven’t imagined an interaction where that would pay off – unless you want to influence an existing customer who’s browsing. The fact that the sales person didn’t bother me, made me feel like I belonged to that store, that brand, that ideology, that socio-economic class.

I remember listening to an episode of Freakonomics or maybe it was NPR, where a guest talked about a guy (a stranger) in the subway telling others (strangers) whether they’re ok to enter the subway or not. The man would simply say, “You can enter. You can’t. You sir, can enter.” Kinda made him feel like he was in a nightclub. He later gushed and said,”It felt nice.”

b. Ownership anchor –  A Starbucks coffee will have your name written right on it. Starbucks is the largest chain of coffee shops in the world. Correlation? Maybe.  Just the fact that someone publicly acknowledged your presence and wrote your name on your order – does have a significant impact. I think it was either Dan Pink or Ariely that mentioned this in a TED talk a few years ago, but the principle still holds true. When you have ownership of a certain product or a service – you value it much more. Starbucks made you the owner of that cup-o(insert_fake_italian)-cinno, when they wrote your name on it and called it out to ask you to claim your property. The anchor now being the fact that you now have ownership of the brand’s product, which inclines you to value it more, enjoy it more, and return for more of the same in the future.

Matter-o-fact, here’s an oldie from Dan Ariely -

Credit - Youarenotsosmart/anchoring

“Drazen Prelec and Dan Ariely conducted an experiment at MIT in 2006 where they had students bid on items in a bizarre auction. Ariely explains in his book, Predictably Irrational, that the researchers would hold up a bottle of wine, or a textbook, or a cordless trackball and then describe in detail how awesome it was. Then, each student had to write down the last two digits of their social security number as if it was the price of the item. If the last two digits were 11, then the bottle of wine was priced at $11.

If the two numbers were 88, the cordless trackball was $88. After they wrote down the pretend price, they bid. Sure enough, the anchoring effect scrambled their ability to judge the value of the items. People with high social security numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with low numbers. People with numbers from 80 to 99 paid on average $26 for the trackball, while those with 00 to 19 paid around $9.”

c. Brand Anchor - Brands perceived to be a certain way, will find it incredible difficult to convince consumers otherwise. Walmart will have a hard time selling $1000 Louis Vuitton hand-bags, customers will never forgive Enron, and Barack will always be seen as a caring father to Malia & Sasha, regardless of how many drones or the extent of the NSA program. Celebrities make constant appearances in advertisements, or the paparazzi – they want to anchor themselves in your minds as having a certain trait or certain personalities. Miley has anchored herself as a crazy wild performer, and hence can’t be pictured in a Disney production – unlike singer and actress Selena Gomez.

Communication that anchor is crucial.

Take Virgin. They’re into everything. Even space exploration.

What do you think Virgin has anchored itself onto? Being the best in the music business?  The greatest network provider?

No, its the experience. Virgin anchors itself on experience.

I love love love flying virgin. I’ll pay a little extra and change flights to fly virgin -because the experience is far superior to any other airline and its not that expensive. This superior experience can be literally translated to any and all businesses, and consumers know that deep down. Want proof? Branson’s signed up 700 folks to fly in space, asking them to pay $200K upfront per seat. Why? Because he’s gonna take good care of em, and because they know they’ll enjoy the experience.

Well then, what should a brand do?

Experiment – and track the experiment closely. It’s a lil bit of work but it’ll pay off, and you’ll make millions – I promise.

I) Choosing an anchor – Pick a dummy comparison price point, pick the $9 pricing trick, select the $1 a day effect – choose whatever you want, but keep in mind about the communication strategy around it. If your competition is spewing the same numbers as you are – then its no fun to be in that game. Pick any anchor based on your current objectives, market trends, competition review, and brand profile.

II) Setting up the anchor – Next, you want your major communications channels to reflect the anchor effectively. Ads, radio jingles, 20 second spots, social media, etc. etc. – make sure you rock each one.

III) Executing the anchor – You want to make sure that the anchor is presented effectively at the point of sale. Website, shelf space, Amazon, sales staff, in-store, on mobile,  in-air, in person, whatever and wherever. You need to have it reflected across platforms to maintain a consistent consumer journey. Plus it’ll be a huge headache to track multiple anchors across the country if you get feedback data with inconsistent metrics.

This is the end of the article. You did it! You’ve absorbed most of this information subconsciously, so ease up and chill if you didn’t quite remember everything that was covered. Take care! More at www.fivemv.com/anchoring-psychology, where that came from.

How many times have you experienced someone reaching out via email or LinkedIn, asking to schedule a time to talk on the phone or over coffee, only to get into the conversation and realize that all they really wanted was to get you to introduce them to people you know so they could grow their business? If you’re like me, this has happened to you a lot, and you might be left wondering, “I’m growing my business, too. But how can I do that, when so many people are just trying to get me to introduce them to other people so they can grow their businesses?”

The “get” mentality in growing your business: “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” Gross.

The Get Mentality for Growing Your Business

The “get” mentality for growing your business is based on the fundamental philosophy, “I’m going to go out and get some business. I have to get people to send business my way.” It’s all about what you can get from other people and how you can get people to do what you want.

The problem with the get mentality is that it turns people off fast. In general, people don’t want to be sold. They want to buy, but they don’t want to be sold.

Just think of the last time you were in a store where the salesperson was overly pushy and imagine how you felt. Didn’t you want to leave, just to get away from that person? Even if you like what the store is selling, if the salesperson is all about making the sale and doesn’t understand the delicate balance between helping the customer and giving him or her the space needed to make a decision, you’ll feel uncomfortable and leave the store, rather than making a purchase.

The Give Mentality for Growing Your Business

In the “give” mentality, the philosophy is fundamentally different. It’s more about “What value can I provide to this person so that he or she feels like they’ve received honest value and they feel valued themselves?”

Many business owners misunderstand the “give” mentality and think that by rephrasing their sales conversation in such a way that they think about sales in terms of how they’re “giving” customers and clients the “gift” of working with them, or they actually ask people, “How can I help you?” which is actually just another way of saying, “What can I sell you?” Even when I hear people say, “How can I serve you?” it’s just another way to sell.

If you’re concentrating on the selling, then you don’t have a “give” mentality for growing your business.

If you’re focusing on building relationships and getting to know people and provide true, honest value to them, whether it’s a part of your business or not,then you probably do have the “give” mentality for growing your business.

But…But…When Do You Sell?

One of the questions I’m asked time and time again when I talk about the “give” mentality to growing your business is, “Okay, great, so I build relationships. But when do I get to sell?” The bottom line is that, if you’re doing your job and getting to know people, you shouldn’t have to sell much. That doesn’t mean you won’t make money, it simply means you shouldn’t have to be doing much selling (meaning, convincing), simply because the people you’re building relationships with will let you know when they’re interested in buying. This type of exchange is not only easier, but yields customers and clients who are more loyal and happier about hiring you or buying your products.

Don’t get me wrong—you do still have to pitch and explain your services in the most appealing way possible that lets your prospective clients and customers know what value you bring to the table. The difference is that you wait until they ask you to tell them about what you do, versus pouncing on any possible opening, which makes your opportunity to sell a much more organic experience.

How to Stay in the Give Mentality

It’s not always easy to stay in the give mentality when you’re growing your business, especially if you’re struggling or really need the business, but most importantly, it’s hard to stay in “give” when so many people out there are stuck in “get.” Here are a few ways you can stay in the “give” mentality to grow your business.

Be Aggressive…In the Right Ways

Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean that you are aggressive about pushing your business on people in conversations. Some of the most successful people I know are aggressive about pursuing their work, sure, but not about pressuring people to hire them or buy their products. So be aggressive when it comes to delivering an exceptional product or service with unquestionable excellence and be aggressive about serving your clients and customers impeccably. The result will be referrals and recommendations to people who want what you have to offer.

Educate by Example

Even when others are bombarding you with sales pitches and pressure tactics, you can provide an excellent example of how to be successful without those strategies, and in the process, teach others an alternative path to success.

Choose Your Network With Care

Being aware of who you surround yourself with. If you’re connected to someone who just doesn’t get it, and who continuously lives in “get” mode, eventually you’ll naturally gravitate away from that person. Over the years I’ve experienced a few people who seemed very “get” oriented. Gradually, I became uncomfortable with the relationships, simply because the conversation always seemed to be about what they could get, rather than what they could give. And when I think about my business, I think about who and how I can help, rather than how I can get business. It’s a fine line, but a line that makes a world of difference in a relationship.

Deal With Your Money Junk

If you have brain junk around money, it’s affecting the way you conduct business—plain and simple. Money brain junk makes you live in fear and anxiety about making ends meet—no matter how successful you are. And if you don’t deal with that junk you’ll be stuck in your fear and ultimately, a “get” mentality, as in “how do I getmy bills paid?” And that will keep you stuck in the wrong mentality to help you in successfully growing your business.

Have you made your buyer personas yet?

A couple of weeks ago, the Grammar Chic blog offered some quick tips on creating buyer personas—explaining that buyer personas are essentially “summaries of the individual and identifiable groups of people who might be interested in buying your products.” When you develop a buyer persona, you are profiling one specific segment of your consumer population, listing things like gender, age, income level, hobbies and interests, purchasing motivation, and so forth.

Creating buyer personas helps you to be better informed in your content marketing endeavors. The catch, of course, is that it’s really only valuable to you if you use that information—so what are some specific and practical ways in which you can use your buyer personas to inform your content marketing? We’ve listed five strategies in the bullet points that follow.

Using Your Buyer Personas

Once you’ve made your buyer personas, here’s how you use ‘em:

1. Address specific people. Sending out an email newsletter is less effective when you have to address it with an anonymous “you,” or when your message can’t be targeted to address the specific needs of your clients—but when you can talk to specific groups instead of the general consumer population, it makes your message sharper, clearer. At Grammar Chic, for instance, we use buyer personas to tailor some content toward job seekers who might be interested in our resume services; other content is geared toward small business owners. By using buyer personas, we can ensure that all of it is geared toward a specific rather than a general audience.
2. Position your product as the solution to a specific problem. What kinds of problems do your consumers deal with? Your buyer personas should tell you—and then you should use your content marketing to position your product as the solution to their problems. If your buyer personas suggest that your customers are all busy, on-the-go professionals, then, it might be smart to position your product as something that will spare them time and hassle.
3. Speak to certain values and beliefs. Again, your buyer personas should reveal some potential avenues for you here. If you’re manufacturing food products and you know that your customers are often parents, you can use content to appeal to their desire to offer healthy and nutritional foods to their kids.
4. Put your content in the right place. Buyer personas don’t just tell you who your customers are, but where they are. Dealing with small business owners? Then you need some content on LinkedIn. Dealing with crafty, stay-at-home moms? Then Pinterest is the place for you to be.
5. Offer the best value. A final thing that your buyer personas should tell you is the approximate affluence level of your customers—which will enable you to showcase products and services that are actually affordable. You don’t want to promote your high-end products to your most budget-strapped customers, and with buyer personas, you don’t have to.

Wanna know a secret? The headline of this post alone, with proper placement and sharing of the article of course, might take this viral. If so, everything I’m about to share will be validated. If not…hey, you won’t know until later anyway, so you may as well read on now. What else are you going to do?

Make it SHINE

The good people over at KISSmetrics did some research a few years back about what makes a good headline, and the results were very helpful. The interesting thing about writing is that while verbiage and colloquialisms will change over time and distance, the basics of communication always remain the same.

All that to say that a quality formula for developing a headline will stay pretty evergreen, as true a decade or two from now as it is today. The method the author developed became SHINE, and I personally found it very helpful. So why not share it?

SHINE stands for Specificity, Helpfulness, Immediacy, Newsworthiness, and Entertainment value. The highlights are:

Specificity: Numbers are good, names, places and other specifics which project easily pictured ideas.

Helpfulness: Solve the problem they wanted solved when they clicked to your article.

Immediacy: The headline should make them want to read further right now. People rarely go back to read the stuff they bookmarked for later reading.

Newsworthiness: Say something they haven’t heard before.

Entertainment: Be humorous without being silly or cheesy.

Digital enthusiast Lenka Istvanova came up with a winning formula for the perfect headline as well, Numbers + Adjective + Target Keyword + Rational + Promise. Her example was 10 bitchin tips for writing irresistible headlines, another would be 7 Things That Will Improve Your Life TODAY, which also adds the element of immediacy.

The Statistics

In addition to using this checklist when you are crafting the headline of your articles, there are some numbers to keep in mind. Roughly eight out of ten people that see your headline will read it, but only two out of those ten will read the rest of what you wrote, according to Copyblogger.

In the KISSmetrics research, they found that people scan headlines just as they scan most text online, something we all know intuitively. They found that the first three words and the last three words of a headline were what were noticed and remembered, while the rest was practically mentally discarded. Which means, of course, that a six word headline is just about as optimized as you can get.

However, keep in mind that marketing (which is really what most of what we write is) is a subjective science where you can’t go strictly by the numbers or a formula. Creativity and striking a chord personally with someone can shatter all of the rules. Play with your headlines using both a loose six word limit and no limit, and see which get better results.

Measure Your Audience

All of that advice is a great start to making your headlines sparkle and attract attention, but when it comes to your business’ marketing campaign you want to see and track results. If you can’t quantify your effort in any way, then that effort might be a waste of time. To get the best data, you need to be able to cast widely and listen well.

By casting widely, I mean that sharing across numerous networks is a must. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and any other relevant sites possible should all have your headlines there to be seen and shared. Don’t go to irrelevant platforms, but cast as widely as possible within the relevant internet.

By measuring specifically the reactions to various headlines from your set audience, you can take those results and bounce them off the formulas discussed to see which of the methods had the best and worst effect for you. From there you have the raw data for baseline and can simply continue refining the process until you hit the stride that resounds with your target audience.

Listening well is accomplished with the same piece of social media management software that will make your wide casting a breeze. That’s a social dashboard, with which you can post your headlines to any number of platforms simultaneously. Once you’ve made your posts, which can be in real time or scheduled, the software will monitor the web for any likes, clicks, mentions, retweets, or links, and then run analysis on the results to produce reports for you.

It has been said that 90% of good writing is developing a good title or headline, and that’s true for more than one reason. People have scan-through attention spans, they get bored or lose interest easily, and they try to consume more content than they are humanly capable of consuming. What will get them to read your pieces above all the others clamoring for their attention? Well, good content will keep them there once they dive in, but only a great, viral-worthy headline will entice them to move to the edge of the pool and lean forward.

Nothing glazes over the eyes as much as Payroll… Contract Management… Recruitment… Insurance… Attendance… Compliance… Spreadsheets… It’s so dull that even deep-pocket investors are desperately seeking alternatives. In fact, since the start of the year, venture capitalists have bet more than $80 million on Zenefits all-in-one human resources software as THE alternative to boring HR professionals and start-up founders to tears.

Why would investors be pouring so much money into Zenefits, a company that’s barely a year old? In short, they believe in the hope that there’s gotta be a better way.

If you’re a big company, you have folks to take care of each essential employee detail. But if you are a small business or start-up, often the founders are themselves dedicating precious days each month to processing payroll, negotiating with insurance brokers, on-boarding and off-boarding staff, implementing tax deductions, and the list goes on… You did not start your own business to just spend your day in Excel.

You want to focus on building a successful business, but you know you can’t do that without assuring your employees’ happiness. And what is the bare minimum you have to do to make that happen? Pay them regularly, of course! Then you should make sure they have basic needs covered like health insurance, life insurance, access to vacation days, retirement packages, stock options, and decision-making power over it all.

After struggling with these necessary burdens as a start-up founder, Parker Conrad felt it was time to build his third company as a solution to these challenges he faced creating the first two. And thus Zenefits was born.

What’s the value of automating human resources?

Well, first and foremost, utilizing a human resources software means significantly less work for you. It also means that everything your company does is more transparent and organized.

Zenefits is these things and more. Hiring a new employee takes 20 seconds by filling in five blanks that then go into generating and sending the necessary forms to your new teammate who can then process and sign it all right there. Then, the employees can manage their own benefits, dependents, 401(k)s and the like without having to contact you, feeling in total control of their personal information. And when you’re ready to remove that same employee from your team, simply click “Terminate” to stop all payments and to help enroll American employees into COBRA.

Zenefits does all this both for your full-time employees and contractors and freelancers, creating for an eased and transparent workflow, keeping all those different paychecks and tax forms in one place. Plus, Zenefits cuts down on paper cuts, space-gurgling filing cabinets, and, most importantly, processing time, by doing it all with legally binding electronic signature.

Even for those of us who see true value in business software, we aren’t eager to dedicate even more time to set it up. We think the best part of Zenefits is probably how you can integrate and implement this HR solution into your existing processes, allowing you to log in and export information from Intuit Quickbooks, ADP, and another apply named app ZenPayroll, so you’re improving your company’s most tedious processes without reinventing the wheel.

And this “Zen” isn’t just coming to HR departments

Here at GetApp, we believe the cloud is where your business should be. There’s been a lot of talk about how cloud-based software is floating away as investment in the arena dies down. But with Zendesk’s big IPO last month and Zenefits’ baller investment this one, we’re quite confident that there is s serenity to be found in cloud-based solutions that will only continue to grow. And we’re pretty sure you agree, since Zenefits’ assumed value is half a billion and Zendesk is about double that. What’s that say? The cloud is not only profitable for them, it’s a no-brainer for your business, too.

One of my favorite business books is Jim Collin’s classic “Good to Great.” In chapter four he shares how a great company “confronts the brutal facts of reality head on” as opposed to the average organization that firmly plants its “head in the sand.”

As sales professionals we face brutal facts that conflict with our view of the world every day. The world around us is constantly evolving and shifting the requirements of our role. Some of this change is neither welcome nor easy to deal with. Nevertheless great sales people confront the brutal facts and create strategies and make decisions in response to current reality. Others waste valuable time trying to hold onto the way things were or searching for that elusive silver bullet that promises to make everything right again.

So … which are you? Are you David standing up to Goliath fully aware of the challenge? Or are you Big Bird neck-deep in sand? To help you ponder the question I thought I’d share my top 3 brutal facts of reality sales teams face today along with the implication to your sales success.

Brutal Fact of Reality #1

In the eyes of our prospects we all look and sound the same.

Ouch!! Sorry but it’s true. You think it’s hard to differentiate your offering. Well guess what? Buyers are finding it harder to discern relevant differences between suppliers. Simon Sinek sums it up in this quote from his best seller, Start with Why, “There isn’t a single product or service that we can’t buy from someone else for a similar price at similar quality with similar service.”

Implication to your sales success: If you rely on the features and benefits of your product or service to create differentiation… good luck! Start differentiating through the quality and relevant value of your daily interactions with your customers and prospects. Challenge their thinking in ways that serve them, regularly bring high value market data that supports their business success, demonstrate your understanding of their world in every e-mail, phone call, presentation or meeting. Stop trying to “look better” than the competition… develop your sales approach to be a valuable differentiator and “look relevant.”

Brutal Fact of Reality #2

No-one needs your information.

We are neck-deep in information overload. I recently read that over 150 billion (yep that’s a “b”) e-mails get sent every day. (I swear 149 billion are unsolicited sales messages, follow ups and updates sent by sales people.) And get this … out of curiosity yesterday I googled the words “sales training.” Within 27 seconds I received 332 million results! So why would anyone want to receive information from me about sales training!? The world is drowning in information so it’s the last thing we need from professional sellers.

Implication to your sales success: Putting out information is easy for sales people to do. And for many it counts towards your metrics. Frankly it’s lazy… and ineffective. As a potential buyer I don’t need your information… I need you to connect your information to me, my world, and my priorities in ways that contribute to my success by my definition. This requires you to do your homework … and to put deep thought into, not just the “content” of that next e-mail or proposal, but also the “context.” If you want to hit my radar or engage a response from me … then make the connection to what matters to me now!

Brutal Fact of Reality #3

No one wants to pay more than necessary for anything.

Of course they don’t. This includes you and me… right? But this doesn’t mean we always buy the cheapest option. Price has become a “scape goat” for buyers who want to let an unsuccessful seller down easy… and for sellers looking to abdicate responsibility for a lost bid.

Implication to your sales success: Selling isn’t easy … your success requires you to think deeply about any buying situation. If you can’t, or choose not to, compete on price it’s your role as a sales pro to be the catalyst to having the buyer feel the need to pay your fair price. And I don’t mean by preaching, convincing or persuading. If you lose on price, and it comes as a surprise to you, it suggests one of three things:

1. You failed to understand that lowest price is in fact a primary condition of the sale.
2. You failed to uncover the interests / priorities from the buying organization‘s perspective that would have tipped the balance of price versus value.
3. You identified the priorities but failed to effectively connect your value in ways that hit home to the influential stakeholders. In short your proposal had the content but missed the context.

There are, of course, other brutal facts of reality in selling today. So here’s a valuable and fun exercise for your next team meeting … Have the group identify a common sales challenge and then consider the associated brutal facts of reality.  Use the brutal facts as a starting point from which to make decisions or create strategies to address the issue. You’ll uncover fresh thinking that will help you move the sales process forward when competitors come to a grinding halt.

Every once in a while a company comes along that completely changes the world. Google is one such company, making the Internet accessible and meaningful to billions of people. So is Facebook, which increasingly connects those billions of people. And then there's Apple, which has set the standard for what is possible with mobile devices.

Still, it's too bad Apple can't be more like Tesla, the electric car company founded by Elon Musk. Because Tesla, unlike Apple, is determined to share its innovations.

Opening Up Innovation

Up until this past week, Tesla was much like Apple. It sought and hoarded patents, proudly displaying its patents on the wall of its Palo Alto headquarters. But last Thursday, Tesla made a bold move: it open sourced its patents. Every single one of them. The reason? As Musk opined on the company's blog, sharing innovation is better than stockpiling and suing over it:

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

Nor is this some unselfish act whereby Musk plays the part of global benefactor to others' innovation at the expense of his balance sheet:

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales....

Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

In other words, competitors haven't caught up. They're hardly in the game, and for Tesla to truly grow, it needs a vibrant, competitive market in which to build and sell its cars. A consumer that starts with a low-end competitor is more likely to then upgrade to Tesla's premium brand. Hence, as he stresses, the market would benefit, "from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform."

As for concerns over losing Tesla's edge, Musk quashes that notion:

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

It's a brilliant strategic move and it's one that would be unfathomable a few miles south in Apple's Cupertino.

The Mobile Patent Quagmire

Mobile computing has been a morass of patent suits and countersuits for years, nicely summarized by PC Mag's infographic. With so much money at stake, the reasoning goes, of course companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft would engage in IP jockeying to lock in their share.

And, boy, have they ever. Apple, in particular, has been an active instigator of such suits, and has filed more than 350 cases with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office since January 2008. Steve Jobs was the heart and soul of Apple and he once famously accused Google of "grand theft" over Google's Android operating system and threatened that he was "willing to go to thermonuclear war on this."

Which is exactly what we've seen.

While Apple and Google's former manufacturing arm Motorola thawed the mobile patent warfare in March, agreeing to drop the suits they'd launched against each other, years were lost while Apple and its competitors fought each other in court. 

Since the launch of the original iPhone, we've seen different screen sizes, more memory, faster chips and sharper resolution, all resulting in fat profits. But real, groundbreaking innovation equal to Apple's original touchscreen? Not so much. In fact, in 2013 reports surfaced that Apple's board was concerned by Apple's slowed pace of innovation. 

There's a very valid argument that Apple doesn't need to constantly introduce new products, given how much it earns from existing products. Such earnings are fueled, in part, by the patent-encrusted moat Apple uses to defend its profits. No one can look at Apple's balance sheet and credibly call it a failure.

Innovation Is The Best Protection

Apple should not be lauded for resting on its patented laurels. As Musk noted last week, "If a company is truly relying on patents it means they aren't innovating, or not innovating fast enough. You want to be innovating so fast [that] you invalidate your prior patents." 

Tesla is doing this. Apple could, too. Apple regularly wows the world with beautiful, brilliant products. Imagine the innovation we might have seen these past few years if Apple were forcing itself and the entire industry to look forward to new developments rather than constantly cashing in on old achievements. It could be advancing the mobile industry far faster while still plumping its bank balance if it, too, opened up its innovations as Tesla has done.

Tesla's decision to open its patents isn't dissimilar from what the open-source software world does. Years ago Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst pointed out that open source business models align customer and vendor interests by forcing vendors to "innovate or die." In the open-source world, customers only pay for subscriptions when software is constantly being improved. They only pay when their vendors deliver real value.

That may be a scary proposition for Apple, but given its culture of innovation, it is one Cupertino should welcome.

In 2012, Jason Vitug found himself on top of a temple in Myanmar.

"I realized I was living a childhood dream," he says of that moment, near the beginning of his year-long, 21-country travel adventure. "And I started wondering why I was the only one there. "

That epiphany became the first seed of his financial education website, Phroogal, which crowdsources high-quality answers to anyone's burning financial questions in order to help them afford the lives they want to lead.

Vitug returned from his trip ready to help others have their own top-of-temple moments.

Traveling through countries including the Phillippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Brunei, Timor L'Este, and Belize, "relates a lot to how I view finances now, and what it truly means to live life rich," he says.

Here, Vitug shares the personal finance lessons he absorbed on his way — along with photos of some memorable moments from his trip.

A goal is the first step.

"Everything starts with a goal in mind," says Vitug, whether that's a trip around the world or paying off $80,000 of student loans and credit card debt, a project he had partially accomplished when he set off on his global tour.

"Your goal needs to be clear and stated. I started backpacking with a goal to see 20 countries in 12 months, and I exceeded it." Twenty-one countries later, he's also debt-free.

A plan is crucial to achieve your goals.

A goal is the first step, but it's nothing without a plan, Vitug explains. "Even with backpacking, you need to plan to get from one part of the country to the next."

A plan keeps you on track to to accomplish your goals, he says, and "a financial plan can help you achieve the lifestyle you dream."

When you don't know the answer, seek out advice.

"I learned the value of seeking advice from locals and fellow travelers," remembers Vitug. "I discovered the best places to eat, cheapest accommodations, and the most beautiful places hidden from many tourists. In general, people are willing and happy to help."

The same applies to money: "Ask experts, or even people who lived through what you're currently going through, for guidance. You're not expected to know everything."

Employee engagement is a vital aspect of business success. Towers Watson performance gurus wrote in a global workforce study that: “When engagement starts to decline, companies become vulnerable not only to a measurable drop in productivity but also to poorer customer service and greater rates of absenteeism and turnover.”

Building an engaged workforce starts with effective communication. That isn’t as simple as it sounds, particularly for big companies spanning various geographies and time zones.

One solution that is gaining in popularity is the corporate social network (CSN.) A CSN, sometimes called an enterprise social network, is a collection of secure in-house social networks that allow employees to bond and communicate.

But the million-dollar question is: Does it really work? Or is it just another technological trend that may soon die a natural death?

Leveraging technology for a more productive working experience

Gone are the days when collaboration is made possible only by teams that are physically co-located. As things stand today, distributed teams are growing at a rapid clip. More and more work is being outsourced and done remotely. And, more than ever, businesses rely on round-the-clock information to keep their operations on the BAU (business as usual) map.

How public are you willing to go?

While public social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are powerful in so many ways, they are difficult to control and far too public for data you’d rather keep in-house. If status updates aren’t given much thought, they can potentially tarnish your organization’s reputation.

There’s an app (and a second one, and a third!) for that

There are disparate tools like Skype for messaging, Dropbox for file sharing, a tool for calendar syncing and another for remote viewing, and yet another for some other functionality your company needs on a daily basis.

These can definitely be leveraged to create a more productive and engaging work experience, but constantly switching from one tool to another to get things done can be a tedious exercise for the user in the long run, if not a drain on the company’s resources that can include licensing costs, storage and bandwidth.

Get it and tweak it

And then, there’s customization of commercial off-the-shelf solutions like Microsoft SharePoint to suit your company’s unique business needs. This business strategy works but comes at a potentially hefty expense in terms of time and coding expertise.

Making the case for corporate social networks

The corporate social network, from its humble beginning as a static intranet that justified its worth only when employee details were needed or HR forms were to be downloaded, has evolved into a social collaboration tool where users are allowed to share ad hoc and unstructured data for faster and easier problem-solving.

With features supporting status updates, profiles, real-time discussion, file and document sharing, centralized calendars, event organizers and contact exchange, the benefits are to be reaped by many. A social collaboration tool:

• Facilitates communication
• Increases employee engagement and worker productivity
• Breaks down silos and improves collaboration
• Increases the organization’s speed and agility in responding to stakeholder requests
• Enables innovation
• Promotes transparency and bottom-to-top communication
• Builds a connected organization with a strong corporate culture
• Captures customer loyalty
• Connects geographically dispersed teams anywhere, anytime via various channels – PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones
• Makes in-house thought leaders and experts easy to locate

As to why a collaborative work environment such as a corporate social network warrants some serious thought, here are figures to consider:

• As per a Deloitte survey, 83 percent of executives and 84 percent of employees rank having engaged and motivated employees as the top factor that substantially contributes to a company’s success.
• According to employee assessment specialist Cognisco, on average, U.S. and U.K. businesses are losing $37 billion (£18.7 billion) every year because their employees do not completely understand their jobs.

• If an employee removes a small amount of waste from repetitive processes through an idea, that idea can save a business about $1,000 annually. Multiply that by the number of employees with similarly effective ideas–say 100–and you add $100,000 to the bottom line.
• Across the consumer packaged goods, advanced manufacturing, retail financial and professional services sectors, McKinsey Global Institute reports that social networking technologies could potentially contribute an annual value of between $900 billion and $1.3 trillion.
• An average of 17 hours of downtime a week is spent by businesses with 100 employees clarifying communication, which translates to an average annual cost of $528,443.

Conclusion

Corporate social networks are fast becoming business staples. But like every other business tool that’s out there, CSNs fail to meet expectations largely because organizations do not have clearly defined adoption goals.

If you’re on the lookout for a project management software built on top of a reliable corporate social network, consider Comindware Project that comes with a free Comindware Team Network framework.

Try Comindware Free for 30 days!

Take a moment to get up from your desk, if you aren't already standing, and have a look around. If you see rows of desks, you're in an open-plan office. And if you're an introvert — one of those quiet, retiring types — you're stuck in the ninth circle of hell. Most employers opt for open spaces in the name of collaboration and creative thinking, in spite of recent studies suggesting that the setup generates more energy-sapping distractions than electrifying ideas.

Susan Cain developed some of that research for her 2012 New York Times bestseller, Quiet, in which she championed the value of introverts in a culture that prizes gregarious extroverts. The book struck a chord in many readers but failed to turn the tide the rankling bullpen offices where the bulk of Americans still work. Now she is working with the Michigan furniture manufacturer Steelcase to reshape office life. The collaboration will design a new collection of discrete spaces for introverts seeking refuge from the constant buzz of their colleagues. Read more...

If you’re old enough to remember (Google it if you’re not), think about the original VCR, first built in 1985. Then take a look at today’s DVD players, or cable/satellite TV boxes or video game consoles. You’ll see a startling difference in the physical interface of the two models.

The VCR built in 1985 will have an abundance of buttons readily available on the faceplate of the unit, many of which remained a mystery, since the manual was lost roughly three minutes after the box was opened.

The DVD players of today, by contrast, will have only a few buttons for the key features people use: play, fast-forward, reverse, stop, and eject.

Take a look at an XBox or PS3 game console and you’ll find two controls: power and eject. These newer components have infinitely more features than those built decades before, but they’re all tucked away, some behind a panel or a sliding door, some only accessible onscreen via remote control.

The point is that these features and functions are accessible only when needed. They’re there when you need them, and are completely out of sight and (more importantly) out of mind when you don’t.

The lesson is this: while it’s important to ensure that the most frequently used features are readily available, you must avoid the temptation to put everything onscreen.

• Don’t load your menus or toolbars with rarely-used options.
• Don’t provide 12 categories when only 3 really matter to your users.

As most of us know, too much of anything is too much, and this is no different. Offering too many choices at the same time results in cognitive overload, which results in them choosing nothing. That’s known as choice paralysis among cognitive scientists, and it’s often the main reason new apps, sites or other digital products fail.

So it stands to reason that design and development teams – along with their client counterparts in Marketing and Product Development – should spend some serious time considering and analyzing which features can go “behind the panel” instead of up front on the faceplate, so to speak. And the main reason for that is because…

Our Reach Exceeds Our Grasp.

In terms of website or app features and functions, what we say we want is rarely what we actually want. Not because we lie or because our egos get in the way (although that does happen), but because of the physiological wiring of our grey matter.

For example, nearly every designer or developer has, at some point, been confronted with a stack of features from a client. And an equal majority has asked the next obvious question: “which of these features are most important?”

I’ll give you three guesses as to what the answer is, and the first two don’t count.

If you ask users the very same question, you’ll get the very same answer: all of them. While on the client side this can be motivated by worry or uncertainty about what people will want or will use, more often it’s a case of our innate need to have more choices.

The non-scientific-sounding version goes like this:

• When we have more information, we feel like we have more choices.
• Having more choices makes us feel like we have more control.
• Having more control makes us feel like we’ll survive better.

The survival instinct is programmed very, very deep into the rear part of the brain, what’s known as the reptilian brain. It’s where our survival instincts are. And as crazy as this sounds, lots of tiny little insignificant things trigger that survival response.

The inherent problem for people who make things for other people to use, however, is the fact that even though we want everything all at once, too many choices paralyzes the thought process. An overload of options actually paralyzes people or push them into decisions that are against their own best interest.

Sheena Iyengar wrote an excellent book in 2010 called The Art of Choosing. In it, she detailed what has come to be known as the “Jam” study, which does a really good job illuminating this phenomenon.

In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of 6 jams. On average, customers tasted 2 jams, regardless of the size of the assortment. Now here’s where it gets good.

• 60% of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40% stopped by the small one.
• 30% of the folks who sampled from the small assortment decided to buy – compared to 3% of those confronted with the two dozen jams.

Over the years, versions of that study have been conducted on any number of things, from retail chocolate to speed dating. And the results have been remarkably consistent. The net-net is this: at the point when a person is confident in a decision, he stops seeking choices. Once we find the core things we need, we basically ignore everything else.

So in terms of developing websites or apps or systems, the key takeaway is that less truly is more. Surfacing every feature possible only results in use paralysis.

So time – and money – has to be spent figuring out what really matters. Otherwise every dollar you spend after that, every hour your team spends designing or developing, is completely wasted. As such, I offer you…

One Guiding Design Principle Above All Others.

One of the easiest ways to put all of this into practice is to make sure every designer and developer involved in your project follows what I believe to be the single-most important principle of design:

All features (and elements) in a design are not equal.

In the 25 years I’ve spent with organizations of all sizes – across nearly every industry and in designing all manner of digital products – this single principle is the one that makes or breaks the finished product.

From mobile apps to ecommerce websites to web-based applications, this is the golden rule. It’s the single, core best practice that determines whether or not the product gets used and is considered to be useful. It’s the difference between true ROI and a wasted investment.

In almost everything you will ever design or build, roughly 20% of that product’s features will be used 80% of the time. So your efforts – from strategy to scope to design and development – should focus squarely on those features. This is not a new idea, and it’s not just my opinion.

The Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule, has been proven true time and again since the early 1900s. I wholeheartedly suggest you check this out for yourself, but to summarize, the following maxims have been true for several hundred years now:

• 80% of a product’s usage involves 20% of its features
• 80% of a town’s traffic is on 20% of its roads
• 80% of progress comes from 20% of the effort
• 80% of errors are caused by 20% of the components

Successful companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and others use the 80/20 rule religiously to assess the value of features, the volume of content and the number of options available to the user at any given time. Despite what people may ask for, they really don’t want it all at once and they’ll really never use it all at once.

Focus on the 20% of your features that deliver the most value – both to users and back to the business – and save everything else for possible future releases. Make those features visible, accessible and obvious in the UI. Those are the places where money gets made or saved, and those are the places where user adoption and market share grow most consistently.

That 20% is what will make or break you. It’s what will cause people to Tweet and Retweet your praises (or not). It’s what will cause them to tell everyone they know about it because they cannot imagine they lived this long without it.

Sales and marketing – two branches of business operations that were once shockingly, inexcusably poles apart. Fortunately, as the world of business has moved into the digital space, that has changed. Now, as you know, sales and marketing are more closely aligned than ever. By now, you’ve gotten comfortable with the “oneness” of sales and marketing, and you’ve worked to instill the philosophy of unification throughout your organization. So the question becomes: are you using the right tools to maintain the close relationship between sales and marketing?

If you have any doubt about the applications in your sales and marketing arsenal, the apps on this list are for you. These are tools that make it easy as pie to not only align, but also automate your sales and marketing activities.

Let’s dive right in!

Salesformics

Salesformics is a relative newcomer to the field of all-in-one customer relationship management (CRM) apps, but if ever a company “came in hot” it’s Salesformics.

You see, the development team at Salesformics has forsaken that stale bastion carried over from the Xerox PARC of the 1970s: the file menu.

What a thought, right?

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense to have a menu-free design in this age of smartphones and responsive designs. Rather than digging around in a file or context menu, in Salesformics, you simply search for what you need. Need to find data on a specific customer? Search for the name. Need to see a list of customers? Type in “list customers.” It’s just that simple.

In a way, it’s like computer usage has come full circle. Where decades ago, when it was all command lines, you would type commands like “run” in to start a program. Now, thanks to advances in search engine technology ad data management, a tool like Salesformics lets you just type in what you need to do and have it happen. Talk about “user friendly.”

And that’s before we even get to the automation features. Here’s what Salesformics has to offer in that department:

• Social media monitoring to identify new leads
• Drip campaigns
• Automate content publication and track results
• Automated marketing segmentation

Additionally, although Salesformics is newish, they’re adding new sales and marketing automation features all the time.

RelateIQ

RelateIQ, as the name implies, is a decidedly smart sales automation app.

RelateIQ helps you make smart moves when following up on leads. In fact, it lets you act on lead opportunities in real time by putting all the relevant data right at your fingertips.

RelateIQ has a feature called “Close Connections” that helps you spot warm leads to grow your sales, as well as other highly accurate data tools that put the underlying science behind RelateIQ at your disposal.

If what you need is a surgical sales automation tool that pars favorably when it comes time for human interaction, RelateIQ is a precision instrument worth considering.

More features of RelateIQ:

• Tight integration with inbox and calendar
• Chrome extension
• Automatic, customized follow ups
• Development API for creating third-party integration
• Easy collaboration

RelateIQ puts data to work making your sales process more automated so your team can do what it does best, close more deals!

SendinBlue Email

Email marketing is one of the best tools around to attract leads and earn sales. It’s also one of the most important channels to automate.

SendinBlue does email marketing automation exceptionally well – in fact, that’s the app’s whole focus.

SendinBlue allows you to automate email campaigns, segment contacts, and respond automatically as leads interact with your emails.

More features found in SendinBlue:

• Marketing email creation
• Scheduling and delivery
• Contact management
• Contact segmentation
• Tracking and analytics
• Hard bounce analysis tools
• Personalization

Send emails personalized for the individual to grow your sales with ease, using SendinBlue Email.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft brings together a full suite of automated tools to provide one of the most robust feature sets of any marketing and sales automation apps around.

Infusionsoft provides comprehensive CRM, marketing, email, and e-commerce, and sales automation all in a single app.

With an eye for freelancers and small businesses, Infusionsoft is easy to use and to get started with right away.

On the marketing automation front, Infusionsoft has some of the best autoresponse tools around, making it easy to nurture leads to conversion on full autopilot.

In fact, Infustionsoft is an end-to-end sales and marketing solution that is capable of capturing leads from forms, automating the email response chain, and closing sales nearly hands-free on your part.

More features of Infusionsoft:

• Full CRM suite
• Marketing automation tools
• Reports and analytics
• Landing page creation
• Referral program management
• Multimedia marketing tools
• Social media integration
• Publishing tools

If it’s starting to sound like Infusionsoft is the veritable “Swiss Army knife” of marketing and sales automation, that’s because it is!

Oktopost

Oktopost makes our list based on the strength of its specialty: Business-to-business (B2B) social media marketing.

Oktopost makes it easy to reach out to the biggest possible audience for B2B marketing purposes. The app makes it easy to automate posts and track reactions, helping you to respond appropriately as new leads present themselves.

Oktopost is especially helpful at making the most out of the high search value of using LinkedIn as a marketing tool – a true essential for B2B sales professionals as of now.

More features of Oktopost:

• Content scheduling
• Posting automation
• Content performance analytics
• LinkedIn Group insights
• Unified social media dashboard
• Comprehensive social media monitoring

With unique features like these, Oktopost is a no-brainer for B2B professionals!

Which apps are YOU using to automate your sales and marketing processes?

Why do all the hard work yourself when you can automate things with apps like these?

GetApp has a listing of a whole lot more sales and marketing apps for you to choose from, many with free trails and tons of reviews to help you make an informed decision.

Image Credit: paulaphoto/Shutterstock

We’ve got global brands talking one-on-one with Joe Schmo on mobile messaging apps. Guilds and alliances for trading mobile users. Marketing automated via Twitter and Facebook. Big data marketing platforms that predict the future, and big marketing platforms, period, that include everything including social, mobile, and apps.

It’s all coming in the context of a very literal flood of new marketing tech companies.

Above: A flood of new marketing tech companies

Image Credit: Scott Brinker

What’s going on here?

What we’ve traditionally called marketing, the art of convincing people to consider parting with their hard-earned time, attention, or dollars for the sake of you, your product, or your service, is adding a hell of a lot of science. There’s science in knowing your prospect or customer, learning what he or she does with or around your offering, understanding how your users interact with your product, and endlessly optimizing what you’re doing, how your product works, what messages engage, and how you can be more relevant to your customers’ needs.

That’s growth. That’s marketing tech.

That’s what we’re talking about at our new GrowthBeat event, August 5-6 in San Francisco.

NOTE: Buy one of the first 50 tickets and save $300!

That growth in increasingly happening at finer and finer scale, with very granular data driving very personal conversations with individual users and buyers, and automation technology that allows a brand to scale one-to-many marketing to one-to-one marketing, at global scale.

It all takes data, and it all takes technology, and it all takes a basic re-wiring of what we think of as marketing.

Customer journeys have replaced marketing campaigns, Salesforce says. Conversations are the new clicks. Demographics about who and where are limiting, IBM says: The new demographics is what people do. And all that data which is pouring in is significant. In fact, it’s the difference between corporate life and death.

The bottom third of marketers achieve below two percent conversion rates, Adobe says. The top fifth hit nine percent conversion rates and just keep going, thanks to outsized investments in data, optimization, and integration with the entire organization.

In other words, marketing isn’t just about marketing anymore. It’s about product design. It’s about technology. It’s about the customer, more than ever before.

But that flood of tools and concurrent flood of data brings its own problems.

Without a single system to tie it together, like a Beckon or an Origami, marketers are bombarded with separate and disconnected chunks of data in Excel, in multitudes of dashboards, in PDFs, and on the back of yesterday’s lunchtime napkin. And the result is that drowning-in-data CMOs are actually using data less in day-to-day decision-making than they did a year ago.

That’s why we’re running GrowthBeat this year for the first time ever.

We’re bringing in some of the best and brightest in modern digital marketing to unclutter the landscape, simplify the functions, clarify the goals, and point the way to success. That includes the Chief MarTec himself, Scott Brinker. Salesforce VP of product marketing Gordon Evans will be speaking. VCs who invest in growth and marketing technologies will be there, as will Adam Marchick, CEO of the first mobile-focused marketing automation system, Kahuna.

(Maybe you’ll even want to speak at the conference — let us know!)

We’ll have sessions on user acquisition. Retention. Driving business on mobile. Using social for more than saying hello. Knowing what metrics to track, and which to ignore. Picking the right data to collect, and how to identify influencers who can unlock social networks’ vast potential for bringing you business.

Even more importantly, every attendee will be a growth focused marketer, product manager, or CxO who has his or her own story to share, compare, and provide insight and feedback for your marketing tech journey.

The event is on August 5-6 in San Francisco. Grab your tickets now and save $300.

International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM and nicknamed Big Blue (for its official corporate color), is a global technology and innovation company headquartered in the Northeast US. IBM is the largest technology and ... read more »

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

Whether it's a smartphone or tablet app, a game, a video, a digital magazine, a website, or an online experience, chances are that it was touched by Adobe technology. Our tools and services enable our customers to create groundbreaking... read more »

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1.15 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 w... read more »

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations. At the heart of Twitter ar... read more »

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major glob... read more »

Xavier de le Rue is founder of Palo Alto-based Squadrone System and an action sports filmmaker, and his company is currently raising money on Kickstarter for the HEXO+, a drone designed to autonomously follow you with a video camera for the sake of getting great (and otherwise expensive) aerial footage for your video projects.

The project was born out of necessity, and it's already crushed fundraising goals, raising over six times its $50,000 goal — he and his crew "needed a solution that would make aerial filming possible in the most remote places: on mountains, in the snow, and in all sorts of unpredictable situations that were quite a pain to deal with when trying to sync a drone pilot, a cameraman and a rider."

The drone operates by tracking your iPhone, communicating with it using a protocol called MAVLink (that's "micro air vehicle link"). An accompanying app lets you tell the drone how to frame the shot relative to your body, and all that's left to do after that is zoom off on your motorcycle or snowboard.

It can fly up to 45 miles per hour for 15 minutes per fully charged battery, and can track the subject it's following from over 150 feet away. They're offering a DIY kit to build your own HEXO+ at $300, or you can buy a pre-built add-your-own-camera system for $600. Here's what the drone looks like up close, and Squadrone System's full Kickstarter pitch video is below that.

SEE ALSO: The best drones you can buy

Join the conversation about this story »

There's a radio show whose host has a decades-long, running joke about a town in which all the children are above average. Work long enough, however, and you'll discover that the opposite is true: Most people are actually below average.

I don't mean this as an insult but rather as a statistical truth. The extremes in any group can make the average misleading, especially when there's a floor above zero. As a result, however, it is easier than you might imagine to improve your performance way above average in just about any endeavor.

Yet, few succeed — perhaps because most give up before they even get started. Here are the seven key things that a small minority of people do to jump from meh to amazing:

1. Achieve a level of competence.

All else on this list flows from this first point. You don't have to be the No. 1 expert in your field when you begin, but you do at least have to know what you're talking about.

So if you want to be an elite sailor, you have to learn the basics of sailing; if you want to be an elite marketer, you have to learn the basics of marketing. Don't just pronounce yourself a "guru"; instead, start by putting in the grunt work and learning the basics of whatever field you care about.

2. Think of the future.

We've seen before that great leaders see the future differently. The same applies to anyone who hopes to improve in any field. You will simply be more likely to succeed if you start with the end in mind.

A highly successful colleague of mine offers simple advice to college students: Map your career by looking up the LinkedIn profiles of people you want to emulate, and then plan backward.

3. Set goals worth fighting for.

It's surprising how many people don't think hard about whether they're chasing a goal that is worthy of their efforts. They wind up following someone else's dream — a career that others have picked for them or life choices that someone else has made on their behalf. They find it hard to succeed, and they're unsatisfied even when they have achieved the goal, but they can't figure out why.

As a wise person once said, "It's better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb rather than halfway up one you don't."

4. Leverage technology.

We live in an era of unprecedented technological progress. Thus, it's also an era in which ordinary performers can leapfrog ahead of their competitors simply by applying new technologies to their field before others do.

These don't have to be dramatic or groundbreaking improvements.  As an example, the online jewelry retailer Blue Nile has its roots in a Seattle store that happened to be one of the first to build a website. What would happen if you were the first salesperson in your company to use a smart new organizational tool or the first athlete on your team to use new and better equipment?

5. Put others first.

There are a lot of selfish people who are nevertheless amazing, so although selflessness is a moral good, it's not exactly what we're talking about here. Instead, this is a corollary of the second piece of advice above, when we think of envisioning the future — specifically how we'd like people to react to us — and then figuring out how to get there.

In dealing with people, do you want them to like you more? Do you want them to buy your products? Do you want them to tell others about your services? Envision that result, and work backward.

6. Treat people with respect, and expect them to reciprocate.

Lest you be concerned that the last bit of advice can be a bit Machiavellian, it's simultaneously important to treat others with respect. From the basic to the grandiose, you need their help in order to be successful, and you can't expect people to help you if you don't treat them well.

At the same time, don't forget the other side of the coin. It's hard to treat people with true respect — rather than being obsequious or disingenuous — if you don't respect yourself first. So set the tone and show that you expect to be treated with respect, too.

7. Value honesty and transparency.

You don't have to share all your deepest secrets, but honesty and transparency are usually the best policies. Usually when we hold on to information that others could use to make better decisions, it's because we're fearful — afraid they will choose another solution, be disappointed in us, or even achieve greater success than we will.

Transcend your fears by pulling back the curtain. The little bit that you might risk will be nothing compared with the gains you'll receive in trust and unexpected benefits.

SEE ALSO: What 12 Super-Successful People Wish They Knew At 22

NOW WATCH: 7 Rules For Making A Great First Impression

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Ubiquitous TV and print advertisements once proclaimed that three out of four doctors recommend Chesterfield cigarettes, that Lucky Strike cigarettes are “less irritating than other brands,” and that “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” The campaigns often referenced the findings of “independent research studies” that were supposedly comprised of large numbers of physicians.

Testimonials by white-coated, white-haired MDs extolling the taste of the lit cigarettes perched between their fingers while discounting any potential health risks helped propel brands like RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris into the stratosphere. The “third-party endorsements” and “fact-based research” lent serious credence to claims that would have otherwise carried little weight in the eyes of consumers. Smoking physicians armored the brands with a cloak of credibility.

It was no secret sixty years ago – and it’s no secret today – that companies have limited credibility when it comes to hawking their own wares. While the decades-long cigarette campaigns may exemplify the most blatantly corrupt and irresponsible chapter in advertising history, the point remains that those who sing praises of their own products and services can expect their marketing messages to be met with a large measure of skepticism. Even branded content that appears to be primarily informational and educational in nature will likely be assumed to have a hidden agenda. It’s a different story, however, when the messages and content are coming from independent third-party sources.

That is certainly the case with B2B content marketing. The value of a whitepaper, eBook or other content asset naturally diminishes if it is perceived by the target audience to be nothing more than thinly-veiled marketing collateral. That explains why third-party gated content assets tend to generate significantly more downloads, and also produce higher-quality leads, on average, than company-branded content assets.

That is not to say that branded content assets can’t be successful. Some companies have been extremely effective in utilizing in-house content creation to rise above the noise and fill their pipelines with qualified leads. The more high-quality content a company can produce and distribute the better, and marketers should strive to publish as much of their own relevant and compelling content as possible (client case studies can be particularly valuable).

Ideally, however, a B2B content marketing strategy should also include some percentage of third-party content that prospects may view as less biased and more objective. Good examples are licensed benchmark reports from market research firms and sponsored buyers guides such as the Smart Decision Guides that my company, Starfleet Media, produces independently, and which are then underwritten by companies in selected niche markets. The resource pages on the websites of companies that have enjoyed extraordinary success with B2B content marketing generally feature a nice mix of both internal and external content.

B2B companies need to establish an authoritative voice. They need to demonstrate thought leadership. And they need to educate the marketplace in a way that aligns sufficiently well with the customer benefits their products or services deliver. While branded content assets can be instrumental in helping them achieve these objectives, marketers should also associate their companies with third-party content assets that might be perceived as less biased and more objective.

Just one word of advice: Steer clear of smoking physicians.

Let’s face it. Online marketers like you and I have a huge challenge facing us. Our culture is drowning in advertising and marketing messages. And with each passing year it’s becoming more and more difficult to market our products.

Content marketing was touted as the answer to this big problem, but we are drowning in content too, especially in the B2B world. People ignore “content” as readily as they ignore most image advertising.

The Test Of Time

One of the hazards of today’s digital marketing landscape is that it’s so easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest technology while ignoring proven yet simple tools that have stood the test of time –  tools which have worked for thousands of years and continue to work today.

What we desperately need is a proven way to ratchet up the effectiveness of our content marketing. Enter storytelling. That’s right, storytelling!

Few marketing approaches work to engage, motivate and persuade like storytelling. The human brain responds to stories in such a way that our emotions are aroused. And remember that people make buying decisions, to one degree or another, emotionally.

When prospects have an involvement with a product, they are more inclined to want to purchase it. This is one of the many reasons storytelling is such a powerful marketing tool. When a person is drawn into a story, they have a strong feeling of involvement with it.

Indeed storytelling can be a very effective tool to capture and keep our potential customers’ attention, engage them, interest them and help us market our products to them.

But done poorly, storytelling won’t live up to its marketing potential. Just like they won’t buy from you just because you start using social media or email marketing or video marketing, people won’t buy from you “just because” you tell them a story.

Doing It Right

We have to do storytelling right. First of all, like we’ve talked about so often on this blog, remember that marketers like you and I need to have and use a well-stocked marketing “toolbox”. Storytelling is a tool. It’s potentially a very powerful marketing tool. But it needs to be done properly, and it needs to be used along with other tools.

Remember the rules of effective copywriting when you are crafting your compelling story. You’re telling a story, but the ultimate goal is to sell your product. Copywriting is selling through the written word, and it’s important to your marketing success. This blog has several great articles that talk in-depth about solid copywriting, so we won’t go into detail about it here.

 Focus On “Them”, Not “You”

But remember that one of the main principles of effective copywriting is to focus on the reader. The main focus of your marketing messages, including your stories, needs to be on your reader, not you, your product or your company.

Your readers don’t care about you, your product or your company. In storytelling as part of marketing it’s no different. The story may be focused on a fictional character, but it still needs to revolve around the reader.

And you want the reader to be drawn into it. Write a story in which he can picture himself and see himself as the hero.

“No one cares about your product except you”

David Meerman Scott – The New Rules of Marketing & PR

A Classic Marketing Story

One of the single most effective examples of storytelling as a marketing tools comes from a letter used by the Wall Street Journal from 1975-2003 to sell subscriptions. The letter opens with the story of “two young men”. It talks about how one man was much more successful in his career because he subscribed to and read the Journal. Here’s a snippet from this very successful letter:

Dear Reader:

On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both -– as young college graduates are — were filled with ambitious dreams for the future. Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion. They were still very much alike.

Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation, and were still there.

But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.

The letter goes on to talk about how the Journal was the reason one man enjoyed so much more career success than the other. This is a prime example of effective storytelling used to sell a product.

Imagine for a moment that you are a recent college graduate wanting an advantage to help you land a great job and advance in your career. Or picture yourself as a middle-age executive who isn’t content with his level of career success.

Do you see how this story would persuade the reader in those circumstances? How it would captivate him and hold his attention? How it would give him hope that the product being sold could help him solve a frustrating problem? How it would fire up his emotions and make him crave a change in his current work situation?

Do you see how stories with this kind of emotional power could help your content marketing succeed? How they could help your content and your company stand out from the crowd and get noticed? How they could attract readers and potential customers to you?

Just how successful was this letter?  During the twenty-nine years it was in use, it brought in an estimated two billion dollars for the Wall Street Journal!

Selling Without “Selling”

We naturally resist when someone approaches us to sell us something. It’s no different when we are reading a sales letter or other content marketing piece. We don’t like to be sold to. And that’s one of the beauties of the story from the Wall Street Journal letter. It “sells without selling”. It sets up a scenario where the reader “sells himself” on buying the product.

Your company’s brand is the perception your customers have about your product and service; it’s what they say about you. It includes their customer experience when shopping and buying from you. And you can tell stories that will have a direct, powerful and positive effect on your brand, like the story of “two young men” had an effect on the Wall Street Journal’s brand.

So please harness the power of storytelling in your marketing. And don’t be surprised when your sales results shoot through the roof!

Don’t Neglect This

Congratulations! You’ve included powerful, persuasive, emotion-generating stories in your content marketing efforts. Your blog and website are getting more traffic. Your email subscriber list is growing. You have more social media followers who anxiously wait for and enthusiastically read and respond to your content.

That’s great! But there’s something you can’t neglect. There’s a critical piece of the online marketing puzzle you must have. That’s right, you need landing pages.

Whether you are running a B2B campaign where you are trying to win signups for your latest webinar or downloads for your new white paper, or you are running a B2C e-commerce store, you won’t enjoy the highest conversion rates possible without landing pages as a part of your online marketing machine.

Happy Marketing!

Time and again, Hootsuite has seen companies use social customer service to convert frustrated customers into vocal brand advocates. They resolve issues quickly, motivating customers to praise them publicly and recommend their products or services to social media followers. From the outside, it all looks so easy. However, something important is missing from this picture: significant internal preparation by the customer service team.

Effective social customer service usually occurs in just a matter of minutes, but the organizational groundwork must be laid well in advance. To help your team build that foundation for success, Hootsuite has created a step-by-step Guide to Social Customer Service: Using Social Media to Build a Loyal Customer Base.

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Here are three key steps that every customer service team can take to get ready for proactive service:

1. Discover Your Social Media Footprint

How many social media profiles does your organization have? The average enterprise has more than 178, so your social media footprint could be a lot bigger than you think. Individuals and teams throughout your organization have likely set up their own branded social media accounts, whether they were authorized to do so or not. Now consider the fraudulent accounts that may have cropped up on various social networks. All of those channels are touchpoints through which a customer might attempt to reach you.

In order to create an effective strategy for social customer service, you need to holistically audit your organization’s social media presence. That means looking at your brand from the outside-in (“What do customers see when they look for us on social media?”) as well as the inside-out (“Which departments are currently engaging customers on social media?”).

Once you’ve surveyed your footprint, you can remove unauthorized accounts from the web. Then, you should create a unified map of legitimate social profiles and define which users and teams are allowed to publish to each of them.

2. Map and Measure

You should build a social customer service strategy that aligns with overall business goals. Defining specific customer service objectives at the outset will allow your team to evaluate progress with meaningful metrics and refine tactics to improve business impact. Ultimately, you should be able to tie each of your key performance indicators back to a high-level business goal.

Let’s say your goal is to reduce costs. One of your objectives for social customer service, then, might be to deflect volume from high-cost channels toward social media. A relevant KPI would be the reduced number of calls to your call center for a specific issue. Over time, you could refine your social media tactics to improve call deflection.

3. Educate and Empower Your Team

Now that you have established your objectives, you need to empower your team with the talent, tools, and training to make them a reality.

Some companies presume that younger workers are blessed with inherent digital skills that make them naturally proficient at social customer service. Don’t make that mistake. Regardless of their age or experience, all of your team members need training and support to be effective. Enable them with social media education, so they have a clear understanding of the processes, guidelines, and tone of voice that your company wants to use on social channels.

As you train social customer service representatives, keep in mind that no single team can resolve every customer issue. To maximize your teams’ success, you will need to coordinate social media monitoring and engagement with other teams and individuals from across your organization. To find out how Hootsuite handles 125,000 customer interactions per month, download our guide to social customer service today.

According to folklore, the famous quote “You will know it when you see it” referring to pornography,was provided to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart by his law clerk, Alan Novak, in 1964.  Fifty years later, you can safely replace pornography with Marketing Qualified Leads.

Searching for the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) on Google returns 800K hits.  Most revolve around Hubspot’s version that defines a marketing qualified lead (MQL) as “a lead judged more likely to become a customer compared to other leads based on lead intelligence…”.

Do you see the issue here?  A lead judged more likely to become a customer….If you are like me expecting a more concrete definition, you have just been sorely disappointed. A Marketing Qualified Lead is something so unique to your industry, company, marketing tactics, etc. that nobody else can define for you. Discovering what is a Marketing Qualified Lead for your business is something you will only discover after experimentation.

Modern marketers use a marketing automation platform to ‘score’ leads using a combination of demographic and behavioral parameters. Demographic information typically includes information such as title, function, company size, industry and location. Behavioral information includes the actions they have taken. Did they attend one of your events? Clicked on your call-to-action in your last email? Which pages did they visit on your website and for how long? Once a lead crosses a pre-defined threshold, they magically become a Marketing Qualified Lead.

It turns out that modern marketers are unfortunately still the minority; a recent Sirius Decisions study found adoption of marketing automation platforms to be at an astonishingly low 16% at B2B companies.

To make matters worse, while implementing a marketing automation platform is a prerequisite, it is not a guarantee for success.  So what is a modern marketer to do? Here is what I ‘ve learned the hard way over the years:

Focus your marketing programs on content and context

First and foremost, start by building the right marketing programs to attract new buyers. I have been a proponent of content marketing for years; it is only lately however, that I have grown to appreciate the importance of context even more.  As Michael Krigsman, a well-respected enterprise tech analyst wrote last September, “Content is king but context is God”. How mature is your market? Is it an emerging category where you have to invest more in educating the market? What about your buyers? What are their key pain points and how do you solve them? Which channels are most important to them? I can go on, but I think you get the point.

Don’t fixate on your scoring methodology

You will initially most definitely get it wrong. Remember, you have no basis to determine what the right values and thresholds should be. Take your best guess and monitor the conversions. Most marketing automation platforms provide you with a template. Don’t overthink it. Take what they suggest as a basis and learn from it.

Align with Sales

I cannot overemphasize this point enough. Work hand-in-hand with your sales team to calibrate your definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead. Make sure you understand how the leads are converting.  Initially, you will most certainly be either handing these over to Sales too pre-maturely or too late.  Striking the fine balance is key. Focus on revenues and not Marketing Qualified Leads, which are a leading indicator at best. What has served me well in the past is to start conservatively and manually control which leads get handed off to Sales. While this obviously does not scale, it will provide you with valuable data points early on.

Be patient

Remember that nurturing potential customers to trust you enough to buy from you is a journey.  You have to be committed and not think that whatever nurturing program you put in place will yield immediate results .  If you are just starting out, plan your marketing nurturing cycle to be 2x of your sales cycle. If your funnel is very wide at the top because of your marketing strategy and content, plan on much longer cycles. I recently heard Jon Miller, one of the co-founders of Marketo, speak at an event. During his talk, he mentioned Marketo’s nurturing cycle is 320 days because of their emphasis on top-of-the-funnel content.

What has been your experience? If there is one thing I ‘ve learned over the years, it is to be persistent but maniacal about experimenting and measuring. And above all, don’t be afraid to fail!, Sam Walton, the legendary founder of Wal-Mart, wasn’t either.

Google is adding two new storage and networking features to its Google Cloud Platform ahead of its user conference next week, both designed to make its cloud offerings faster and easier when compared to competing products from Amazon Web Services or Microsoft. Google is adding persistent flash storage, which my colleague Barb Darrow has already covered, and HTTP load balancing across regions.

The load balancing is a fulfillment of the hope for automatic shifting of compute resources from data center to data center without disrupting the workload. It offers developers the opportunity to scale up compute in certain regions closest to demand and could theoretically offer a developer a chance to follow the cheapest computing costs around the globe if Google offered something like spot pricing.

This is a pretty big deal, so I asked Tom Kershaw, product management lead at Google, how the company manages it. He credited three things: the Andromeda software-defined networking platform underlying all of Google’s Cloud Platform, algorithms that can detect networking constraints and then figure out where to move them, and the fact that Google broadcasts a single IP address for its entire cloud.

That’s fairly unique, but lets Google take incoming requests and route them on its own equipment for the benefit of the developer (and requesting users). It also makes the networking side of managing a cloud computing platform a bit easier on the developer. From the Google blog post:

HTTP Load Balancing can easily scale to support more than 1 million requests per second with no “warm up.” It also supports content-based routing and allows you to capture the benefits of Google’s global network infrastructure. More importantly, and for the first time, users can take advantage of load balancing across different regions — balancing traffic among compute resources that are located in different data centres in different parts of the world.

Both the persistent storage and http load balancing are available in limited preview. I expect these are topics that Google SVP and cloud master Urs Hölzle can talk about when he’s on stage this week at Structure on June 18.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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