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Pinterest’s Promoted Pins are great for big brands, but what about medium to small ones? Now there’s an offering scaled just to them—a new do-it-yourself Promoted Pins tool.

Pinterest for Business was launched 18 months ago and in that time the social discovery platform has made it so anyone, from big-time corporations to teensy personal blogs, can sign up for a business account. Since last October, Pinterest has been testing Promoted Pins, a way for those businesses to pay for their pins to show up in relevant searches and user feeds. Promoted Pins don't come cheap though—Ad Age reports that Pinterest is looking for $1 to $2 million commitments for cost-per-impression deals. 

Needless to say, small businesses don’t exactly have millions to spend. A self-serve alternative may be a simple way for Pinterest to scale its offering. 

Is This Pinterest’s “Wild West” Moment?

Pinterest’s Promoted Pins ad product costs quite a bit. My recent conversation with Joanne Bradford, head of partnerships at Pinterest, shed a bit of light onto why. 

“Partnerships [with brands] aren’t just, ‘Go get ad dollars.’ That’s not how we think about it here," she said. "We’re really about teaching partners how to be their best on Pinterest."

Outreach takes time and manpower. It’s a work in progress and Bradford continues to hire community managers all over the globe. Partnerships that require educating companies are, by definition, not very scalable.  

In that regard, self-serve ads for the masses are the fast and dirty approach. That's essentially how Google made most of its money with its keyword auction real-time bidding network. For Pinterest, instead of initially coaching companies on how to best use the platform, it can just monitor the ads from small and medium businesses as they come in. 

Unlike Promoted Pins, Pinterest's new self-service ad platform is cost-per-click, not cost-per-impression. With that sort of pricing model comes a certain kind of desperation from would-be ad buyers. If you look at the companies on Facebook and Google who use cost-per-click, they’re less about “beautiful” and more “made you look.” Anything goes in the Wild West.

“In the absence of a formalized ad channel, social networks are like the Wild West,” said Apu Gupta, CEO of Visual Web analytics platform Curalate. “Brands do whatever they want to garner attention—whether or not it's in keeping with what the networks aspire to. I believe that creating a formalized channel for placing ads will ultimately help prevent spam by enabling Pinterest to monitor what types of ads go out.”

Of course, Pinterest isn’t going into this blindly. Don Faul, Pinterest's head of operations who oversaw the new tool’s development, formerly launched the self-serve ad tool at Facebook in 2008. Dozens of Pinterest employees came from Facebook. Still others came from one of the other largest self-serve ad platforms, Google—including CEO Ben Silbermann. They have seen firsthand what happens when cost-per-click ads get ugly. Perhaps they’re trying for a redo. 

A Need For Speed 

The self-serve Promoted Pins tool isn’t officially open for business. Right now you can register to be on the wait list. According to Pinterest, only a few small to medium brands are testing it. 

It’s par for the course for Pinterest to go slow and steady on new features. But when you consider that Pinterest tested the first Promoted Pins for six months prior to launch, the announcement of a self-serve tool two months later seems downright speedy.  

There are two reasons this might be happening, one good and one bad.

Starting with the negative, perhaps Promoted Pins have not performed to Pinterest's expectations. Asking for $1 to $2 million is a lot, even for a big company, if the return on investment isn’t great enough. Since Pinterest has shown it cares more about the user’s experience than making brands happy (through conservative pin promotion and extensive audience testing), big brands might feel like they can get a better deal and more exposure somewhere else. A cheaper self-serve alternative might be just the ticket.  

On the positive side, this might be Pinterest employees’ Google roots coming out. Even today, Google ads are democratic. The search engine wasn’t built by huge brands, but by small businesses hoping for a little exposure that were willing to take a chance. Here’s an opportunity to compare Pinterest to Google yet again, as the visual search community continues to measure up. 

We still know very little about the self-serve tool, as it’s only open to a select few businesses. It’s hard to tell how Pinterest will look once it opens the advertising floodgates. But if Pinterest’s past activity is any indication, it’ll be a while until that happens.

Photo courtesy of Pinterest

What do you want this person to accomplish? I asked my client.  “I need this person to hit the revenue mark for their territory,” he stated.  

“So, if they do this by giving away margins, or most of revenue coming from one or two customers, while not doing their sales reports, failing to turn in expense reports on time, and being late for sales meetings, under these conditions would hitting their revenue mark be ok?” I asked.  

My client responded, “No, I didn’t say that!”  We then, spent time identifying what specifically they expected from the person that filled the role of Regional Sales Manager.  

In 1989, Stephen Covey’s published the book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It has sold more than 25 million copies in 38 languages.  Most hiring managers today have not read the book or it has been a while for the ones that have.  

Here’s a quick refresher from his book on Habit #2: Begin With The End In Mind:  

As with my client, having your salespeople hit their annual sales mark is an important goal and one reason why the sales role exists. At the same time, it is equally as important to identify what elements of success are needed along the way towards hitting the annual revenue goal.  

Typically we recruit people from within our industry.  When you do, we often assume that these candidates share our insights into what it takes to be successful in the role. This assumption leads to a lot of false starts and misaligned expectations.  

Here's how to make it clear what you believe are the required success elements. 

Imagine you are meeting with your new hire on their employment anniversary date.  You say to them that you are happy with their progress.  Not ecstatic but also not disappointed, just happy.  What would have to happen in order to get that response from you?  Write down whatever comes to mind.

After you have written everything down review your list and check the ones that can be measured quantifiably.

Here are guidelines to make this an effective exercise for you:  

1. Happy with their progress is they key.  Not the result, the progress. It could be that they can demonstrate they know your product lines and its applications by making a presentation to the staff within sixty-days.  Maybe its completing the top 10 customer reviews within the first six-months. 

2. Your success elements must be objectively and quantifiably measured.  If they are subjective I'll guarnettee you will be disappointed and your employee will be frustrated.

3. There should be no more than six success elements.

4. For each one ask yourself, “Has anyone ever achieved this before?”  If no one has, I suggest you have set the bar at ecstatic not happy.  Adjust your expectations to a happier level.

5. Keep in mind that you are not setting career expectations, just expectations for their first year. Surely the expectations you have for a new employee would not be the same ones you would have in their 3^rd year.  You should expect people to continue to grow and develop their skills.  Especially your salespeople. Reset your level of expectations  to each year.

Start with the end in mind by defining what success in the job looks like and then recruit, hire, onboard, and manage towards those goals.    

Having identified your elements of success you can incorporate them into your job posting and your screening process.  This way you will:  

• Attract candidates that want to meet those expectations.

• Not waste time interviewing candidates that wll disappoint you by not meeting your expectations.

• Save yourself from hiring someone you’ll spend endless hours coaching.

• Free yourself up to do what you really should be doing – leading and directing instead of babysitting and being your team’s best closer.

At Performance Group, we have identified 62 measurable expectations (in 12 categories) which you can set for your new hire.  If you want to learn how you can leverage this into building a stronger sales team than the one you currently have, contact us.

We are constantly searching for the hottest, most up-to-date tips and trends that will make you an effective salesperson.

With Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s release of the first part of their new book, we found them.

The duo are writing a Predictable Revenue Guide to Tripling Your Sales, which will be released in parts, and are taking feedback from readers along the way.

“The best way to triple new sales isn’t by tripling your salespeople (the traditional method) – but by tripling your qualified leads.”

The key takeaways from part one revolve around growing a sales organization with a great customer success team.

Here they are:

Keeping customers satisfied is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to customer success.

“Customer Success is NOT free help, glorified support or an afterthought!”

The hard work you put into helping others succeed is referred to as “planting seeds.” You’re able to achieve what you want by helping others get what they want. It’s mutually beneficial to both parties.

Let’s explore how effective Customer Success teams do this.

2. Aim For Negative Churn

You read that right, negative churn. In essence, your business generates more revenue each month than the previous month.

How is that possible?

The customers that you retain, buy more from your company than you lose from customers leaving. Results like this come only from a powerful customer success team that helps drive your growth.

3. Frustrated Customer Support Creates Frustrated Customers

When your customer support team is happy and knowledgeable about your product, they will have successful interactions with customers.

One business, Topcon, handles 25,000 calls a year with the goal of providing predictably great service. We should all focus on being more proactive in providing great service to the people who ultimately grow the company – the customers.

4. Create A Model Of Predictable Excellence

Topcon got it right with their customer service by doing five specific things:

Getting Agents Away From The Phone:
Spending 40 hours a week on the phone is a recipe for burnout. Get your customer success agents away from their desks regularly for product info sessions and face-to-face customer meetings.

Using Technology To Help Customers As Well As Yourself:
As technology advances, don’t fall behind. Topcon uses NewVoiceMedia so that customer calls are automatically routed to the right person without lengthy wait times.

Continuously Listening To Feedback:
Encourage your entire company to talk to the customer support team. They are the voice of the customer and can provide valuable knowledge to your team.

Creating A Career Path:
Set a career path for your customer support team. Doing so will attract motivated candidates who are interested in developing their careers.

Specializing Agent Roles:
Specialization in sales is the key to a successful sales development organization. Make sure that extends to your customer support team by supporting agents who facilitate general issues as well as those who specialize in a specific application or industry.

Stay tuned, Part II will focus on lead generation and inbound marketing.

How are you building effective customer success teams? We’d like to hear from you in the comments below.

“Don’t get me wrong,” my colleague on the demand generation side of the office said, “everything you guys are making is cool. I just can’t use any of it.”

This was from a conversation at a previous company, in a different job, and in what feels like a different lifetime. But if you work in content marketing or with marketing automation, it probably sounds familiar.

The folks charged with producing content crank out “cool stuff,” which those running the lead nurtures and demand programs insist that content can only work at the top of the funnel. Those with the keys to the marketing automation instance meanwhile craft content on their own, putting together the materials that will work at the middle or even bottom of the sales and marketing funnel.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

These kinds of conversations—and one of the reasons SiriusDecisions found as much as 70% of B2B content goes unused—are usually the result of a lack of communication between the content team and the demand gen artists running your marketing automation. You can address that issue by following these three steps.

Get on the Same Page

Too many content teams are put on an island. Their assets are considered great for driving up links and traffic, but not suitable for lead nurture campaigns.

If the content team wants to be involved at every stage of the funnel, and the demand generation crew wants a steady stream of high-value content, the first step is to get on the same page. That means outlining the specific purposes for your content. From a content team perspective that might involve writing out your inbound strategy, particularly the themes or topics you’re trying to tackle.

Similarly, those charged with running the marketing automation instance should map out the specific guidelines they set for deciding which content is going to get sent out to those leads already inside your pipeline. This would include mapping out all segments within the database, key buyer personas, and all current and planned lead nurture tracks.

And when I say mapping, I mean it. All of these data points should be written out and shared among anyone producing content.

When communicating openly, both teams can begin to tailor content to address those particular segments, buyer personas, and lead nurture tracks. The content team can then not only create high-level assets that build traffic and awareness, but also derivative assets that can be deployed to various segments and nurtures.

The next step is to print out and review content that’s been produced by both teams. This might include big assets, like eBooks and videos, or smaller pieces, like emails. Both the inbound and outbound teams should put these under the magnifying glass and look for inconsistencies in messaging, tone, and voice.

Identify the key aspects of your brand’s message and style, and draft up a style guide. Treat this as the guidelines for content delivered at every stage of the funnel, not just the top.

Get on the Same Field

The goals for content are widening, but many content teams get stuck simply trying to drive traffic, SEO rank, and form submits. If the content team and marketing automation masters are to get along, you need to have a similar set of goals.

The demand generation team should share the specific metrics or benchmarks they set for the content they deliver in the form of emails, webinars, landing pages, and nurtures. The content team should then take those goals and apply them to their own. This doesn’t mean your inbound goals disappear; they’re augmented.

By setting specific goals for how your company’s content will be received within the middle and bottom stages of your funnel, the team producing the content will be incentivized to develop a holistic approach to production. And those driving the marketing automation are far more likely to use that content.

Get on the Same Calendar

“I don’t have any visibility into what your team is doing.”

How many times have you heard that comment? The visibility can often be boiled down to an issue of timing: what’s being developed, who’s working on it, and when it’s supposed to be released out into the world. That’s why an editorial calendar is essential for both content and demand gen teams.

If your marketing automation and content campaigns are planned out in separate calendars, combine them. Your inbound, outbound, and paid teams all need to plan their campaigns in tandem. A single editorial calendar gives a “master view” into all these efforts—and in many cases they reveal opportunities for collaboration and repurposing of content. (If you use content marketing software, you can plan and develop all these different campaigns and channels in one calendar while filtering for individual team members, campaigns, and content types.)

Visibility shouldn’t be an issue given the tools available to marketing teams. So get your marketing automation and content on the same calendar.

Great collaborations start with communication. If your content and marketing automation systems—and the teams running those systems—aren’t talking, you can’t expect a synchronized effort.

These three simple steps are the start to a beautiful friendship.

My search for a someone to run HubSpot's social media efforts has been an eye-opening, albeit frustrating, one. It seems that of the applicants that can boast any goal or metric from their job, the one thing they point to doing is "driving engagement." While engagement metrics can be tied back to a business' bottom line, more often than not, social media marketers aren't moving the metrics CEOs care about.

Years after the first "Can we measure the ROI of social media?" blog post, the role of the social media manager has not evolved much in the ways of goal-oriented, metrics-driven marketing. It's possible that this is because many companies haven't figured out the right way to measure the ROI of their efforts -- so they don't know to hire someone that can help them drive real business results. It becomes a vicious cycle -- with little focus on the bottom line efforts from social media, companies relegate the social media role to people without much experience proving bottom-line results, and then once hired, those social media managers don't have experience proving those bottom line efforts. 

It's a chicken-and-the-egg problem, but someone's got to break out of the cycle. Whether you're a social media job seeker looking for your next gig or a manager trying to hire your next social media marketer, keep on reading. I'll walk you through what other skills a social media manager should have besides "drive engagement." Here are the six roles that the best social media managers play.

1) Content Creator

Content is a key component in any marketing function, and social media is no exception. Even if you have dedicated bloggers and ebook writers, that content still needs to be adapted to each social network. A good portion of a social media manager's role is creating and adapting content for the specific networks. This includes positioning content in under 140 characters, creating images to accompany posts, creating variations of posts for each piece of content (since the lifespan of a social media post is so short), and even creating content from scratch specifically for growing a following on social media.

Skills Necessary

Copywriting, design, positioning, creativity

How This Drives Results 

Adapting content specifically for each social network yields more clicks and leads. For example, in an A/B test, we found that tweets a link and an image optimized for the platform yielded 55% more leads than tweets with just a link. Adapting and creating content for each specific network is critical to driving results.

2) Marketing Analyst

As all marketing roles become more and more data-driven, a social media manager needs to be able to dig into the data, analyze that data, and draw actionable insights. That includes macro data -- like overall reach, leads generated, leads nurtured, customer cases supported -- all the way down to micro data, like individual experiments around content positioning. A successful social media manager will be able to look at data constantly to make smart decisions. Plus, they should be constantly testing new strategies, new content, and new campaigns -- running tests and analyzing the results every day to constantly iterate and improve their marketing efforts.

Skills Necessary

Data analysis, curiosity, ability run scientific experiments and draw insights from data, data presentation

How This Drives Results

Constantly testing and analyzing results helps you build new standards in your routine that are more effective. For example, that test we spoke about before was run by our previous social media manager -- she designed the test, implemented it, and measured it all on her own. And thank goodness she did -- it's having a serious impact on our social media efforts.

3) News Junkie

Being on social media is like being in a crowded room at a networking event where everyone is talking and things are happening all the time. A social media manager needs to be in the thick of it. They need to know what people are saying, what's changing on social networks and in the industry, and be able to react and respond accordingly. Furthermore, the social media manager can act as an extension of the PR team, connecting your team directly with journalists and reporters, which can result in broad coverage for the company beyond their existing reach. A successful social media manager will be able to find new opportunities for the company by keeping a pulse on the industry.

Skills Necessary

Content curation, hungry for information, professional on-the-spot communication skills

How This Drives Results

Staying on top of trends as they're rising allows your social media manager to newsjack, which can bring spikes in traffic to your website, and connect with journalists when they're looking for story fodder, instead of relying on outbound pitching (in other words, doing PR the inbound way).

4) Customer Service Rep

When someone runs social media, they are the voice of the company to many audiences, including customers, potential customers, journalists, and fans. They will constantly get questions and comments about their company's products, services, and content -- which may not always be positive. You need to be able to communicate with people of different buying stages (for example, customers and non-customers) and different dispositions.

Skills Necessary

Strong communication skills, adaptability, calm, desire to solve others' problems

How This Drives Results

Doing customer service on social media allows you to respond to customer problems in the way they want to communicate with you, and it can be a low-cost way of responding to customer issues compared to a phone call, which will typically require more time for the same response. Also, because social media is a public forum, your social media manager can use these opportunities to showcase your customer service as a company differentiator and amplify happy customer messages as a form of marketing.

5) Community Facilitator

Part of building a following on social media is helping that following connect with each other. True communities don't simply engage with the company or moderator -- they engage with each other, which actually scales your role much better too. But facilitating a community takes work, including asking questions to seed discussions and kicking out people who spam or otherwise detract from the community.

Skills Necessary

Resourcefulness, ability to connect people and stimulate discussion

How This Drives Results

There is immense value to your followers in not just interacting with your company, but also others like them. According to an MSI study, increased engagement on community sites can result in up to 25% increase in revenue. In order to grow your company's following so that you can do all the other things you care about, your social media manager needs to help your community get value from each other. Here are a few tips for the community managers out there.

6) Funnel Marketing Manager

Social media is a powerful tool to expand the reach of your content, attract visitors to your website, generate leads, and nurture them to become customers. That means a social media manager needs to be able to pick and share content in a way that will accomplish each of those goals.

They need to share content that generate leads, and run new campaigns to find the best ways to do lead generation via social media. A social media manager also needs to engage one-on-one with potential customers who are considering your product or service, or simply need your help. Social media is particularly effective as a lead nurturing tool because prospects use multiple media (not just email) to consume information and social channels allow you to engage in a more timely manner.

In order to do all of this effectively, social media managers need to have a strong understand of the sales and marketing funnel, and which leads to monitor and nurture, and what content to use in getting those leads to the next stage in the process.

Skills Necessary

Funnel understanding, knowledge of content for each funnel stage, basic sales skills

How This Drives Results

Sharing conversion-oriented content on social media can attract more visitors to your site and convert them into leads for your sales team. More than 50% of businesses report they have acquired a customer from Facebook, more than 40% have acquired a customer from LinkedIn, and more than 35% have acquired a customer from Twitter. With the right person at the helm of your company's social media accounts, you could be one of them.

With this diverse and highly visible role, it's hard to believe that the social media manager position still has the reputation as an entry-level role anyone can just pick up. These seven roles are certainly in the back of my mind as I interview to fill this position. I believe that if we can change the perception of the social media manager role and attract and hire for these functions and skills, we will have a good chance of mastering the ability to measure and value the ROI of social media.

What do you think? Do you see other facets of the social media manager position? Share your thoughts in the comments below. And if you think you have the drive and the skills to be a Social Media Manager for HubSpot, you can apply here.

Google recently posted a blog about the new ability they are offering users: the ability to look a little deeper into the data from calls placed to AdWords mobile click-to-call ads in Google search. Of the ads, Google says the following:

“AdWords mobile click-to-call ads allow advertisers to connect with customers online in a relevant and meaningful way. In fact, over 40 million calls are made directly to businesses from Google ads each month and that number is growing.”

To offer more to businesses who rely on these click-to-calls, Google has now made it possible to separate phone call data into different call conversion segments. In other words, users can now value different calls differently: assigning more value to a 10-minute phone call that might be more likely to be an inbound sales opportunity than the value assigned to a 30-second call, which might just be someone calling for a business’s hours and location.

This is an interesting development, especially in the context of data that predicts ever-increasing volumes of inbound phone calls to businesses. Clearly Google acknowledges the power and importance of phone calls to businesses…but there is still a missing piece that users may take issue with as they begin to rely more heavily upon call conversion data in their analytics.

Consider this scenario: you’re paying for Google click-to-call ads and incorporating data from those sources into your strategy. You’ve even paid for a responsive site so that mobile users can access everything your website has to offer. What happens when a customer searches for your business online, decides to navigate to your website from your Google ad to poke around (rather than calling you from the Google click-to-call ad button), and then calls you from your website?

Without sophisticated call tracking software, that lead’s attribution data slips right through the cracks. If you’re not tracking calls from people who hit your site back to their Google search, then there’s a critical hole in your lead source data. And your inability to track the origin of that lead weakens the conclusions you draw about which marketing initiatives are successful, and which aren’t. Marketing also can’t get credit for helping generate that call and the revenue it brings in.

The fact of the matter is Google just isn’t equipped to cater to all the needs that businesses have around measuring and controlling phone leads. Call tracking is just one blind spot Google leaves you with: without additional call management tools such as call routing to ensure that when phone calls do come to a business (from any source), they are sent to the right person, store, or office right away, those valuable phone leads you are spending money to generate are less likely to become opportunities and revenue.

If nothing else, Google’s acknowledgment of the importance of phone calls to your business is a vote of confidence for those who are already aware of their value. But don’t stop there. Google doesn’t offer a complete picture for your phone call data, and if you want to ensure your leads aren’t being swallowed up, you need a call tracking tool (preferably with a suite of complementary call management tools) that will fill in that critical blind spot.

In late 2013, the new Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) was passed, which goes into effect July 1, 2014.

CASL is more demanding than the U.S. anti-spam law, "CAN-SPAM" -- it's actually more comparable to laws in EU member states like Ireland and Germany. This post will provide you with coverage of some of the highlights of the new legislation. However, I would like to stress that I am not a lawyer. In fact, I'd like to stress it so much that I'll repeat it and put it in bold. I am not a lawyer. This is not legal guidance, and you should consult your own counsel for legal advice on how to interpret CASL. You can also read more about CASL on fightspam.ga.ca.

What Activities CASL Covers

CASL covers the sending of "commercial electronic messages" that may be accessed by a computer in Canada (which usually just means cases where the recipient is in Canada). CASL covers more than just email -- it also covers texts, IMs, and automated cell phone messages sent to computers/phones in Canada.

To Whom You Can Send Emails

CASL requires you to get explicit consent before sending someone a message. However, there are a couple very limited exceptions to the "explicit consent" rule. There are three situations where "implied consent" -- meaning you don't have a reason to believe you shouldn't send the email -- should be okay:

1) You have an active business relationship with the recipient.

An active business relationship exists if you have sold something to the recipient within the past 2 years, or the recipient has made an inquiry about your products at any point within the 6 months before you sent the email in question.

2) The recipient published his or her email for the world to see with no caveats about terms of being contacted.

For instance, if someone puts their email address on their website, but doesn't include a caveat like "but don't send me anything" or "no spam, please".

3) Someone whose "business activities" are relevant to the message you're sending has given you their contact info without indicating they don't want to receive your messages.

It's important to note that CASL provides some other exceptions that we don't go into here because they're less relevant to an average business situation.

There is a 36 month transition period ending June 30, 2017, during which time consent may be implied if the recipient has not explicitly withdrawn consent AND the recipient has either:

• Purchased something from you in the past, or
• Has made an inquiry of you at some point in the past

Note: This is the same idea as a business relationship explained above except that the time limits have been removed.

What "Explicit Consent" Means

All requests for consent must touch on the following three points:

• Purpose(s): You must specify exactly why you want the consent (e.g., "We'd like to send you newsletters and occasional special offers").
• Information: You must give your identifying/contact information as well as the contact info of anyone else you're getting the consent on behalf of. This includes name, mailing address, and a phone number or email for contact.
• That they can "un-consent": You must tell them that if they want to withdraw their consent, they can.

You can get this in writing or orally, but you should keep a record of when/how you got consent.

It's important to note that the recipient has to manually "opt in," so pre-checked checkboxes are not okay for getting consent. One that the users check themselves is okay, as is a box that the users type their email addresses into with a submission button next to it that users hit, but those must also be accompanied with something explaining why you want their consent (the purpose), who you are (information), and that they can un-consent. Additionally, you can't just put "... and I consent to receive emails" into your website's legal copy.

What You Have to Include in Your Emails

All messages you send must include the following three points:

• Identity: You must identify yourself as the sender of the message, and give the identity of anyone you're sending it on behalf of.
• Contact Info: You must provide contact information that lets the recipient easily contact you.
• Unsubscribe Mechanism: You must give the recipient a free and easy way to unsubscribe via a link to a website. That link has to be valid for at least 60 days, and you have to make sure the unsubscribe request is honored within 10 days.

What Do Canadian Marketers Think of This?

We reached out to one of HubSpot's agency partners, Kula Partners, to see what their perspective was as a Canadian inbound marketing agency. Kula's Carman Pirie had this to say:

"I think, for the most part, marketers are just now beginning to realize that a change is coming. It's also fair to say that most marketers are unlikely to have a plan in place for dealing with CASL compliance or, for that matter, migrating towards it. Candidly, I have talked to a number of marketers who are planning on continuing with their old, soon-to-be illegal practices while simply waiting for the regulator (known as the CRTC, which stands for Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to take an enforcement/compliance action. That's an incredibly dangerous strategy, since all indications are that the CRTC is serious about levying penalties ... and the maximum penalty under the law is $10M (ouch).

If there's a silver lining, perhaps it's this: With the introduction of CASL, a properly executed inbound marketing strategy will be more important than ever before. CASL legally restricts many of the outbound tactics people have relied on for far too long. With these tactics no longer at their disposal, the inbound imperative has never been clearer for today's marketers." 

What's the Bottom Line Here?

Ultimately, as the email-sender, you have to understand your obligations and determine how to be in compliance. You should review the CASL with your own counsel. If you use HubSpot as your ESP, you have the tools you need to run a CASL-compliant email marketing program, though it is still solely your responsibility to ensure compliance with CASL.

You can learn more about CASL on their website -- fightspam.ga.ca.

And Now, Some Legalese ...

This blog post has provided information about the law designed to help our readers better understand the legal issues surrounding internet marketing. But legal information is not the same as legal advice -- the application of law to an individual’s specific circumstances. Although we have conducted research to better ensure that our information is accurate and useful, we insist that you consult a lawyer if you want professional assurance that our information, and your interpretation of it, is accurate. To clarify further, you may not rely upon this information as legal advice, nor as a recommendation or endorsement of any particular legal understanding, and you should instead regard this article as intended for entertainment purposes only.

Imagine that one of New York City's many islands became abandoned, and you came back to see what it looked like 50 years later. It’s hard to visualize. However, the place would likely be overgrown with vegetation, and the buildings would be crumbling.

This is exactly what happened when photographer Christopher Payne visited North Brother Island, a 13-acre island between the Bronx and Riker’s Island that's been abandoned since 1963. After it became inhabited in 1885, North Brother housed a hospital to quarantine victims of contagious disease and later provided housing to World War II veterans. It also held a treatment center for teenage drug addicts.

At its peak, the island had the look of a manicured college campus, full of green spaces, sidewalks, roads, well-kept buildings, street lamps, and fire hydrants. Visit now, Payne says, and you’ll see an island that nature has reclaimed.

“I went there hoping to find the buildings completely intact, full of old artifacts just the way people left them, but what I found was ruins,” Payne told Business Insider. “It looked like it had been abandoned for a century.”

Payne has spent six years documenting the island’s changing nature. He's collected some of the work in a book, "North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City," and Payne has shared some photos from the project with us here.

North Brother Island has been virtually undisturbed by trespassers and left to decay naturally. This is due to the island's natural isolation and its lack of a working dock for boats to land on. In the 1970s, many Bronx kids partied on the island. But after a number of boats capsized in Hell Gate, the surrounding body of water, the city stepped up patrols. People left the island alone after that.

You can only get to North Brother by taking a small boat that lands directly on the shore.  Payne got permission to visit the island by promising to ferry New York City Parks Department employees — who manage the island — to North Brother so that they could carry out various maintenance tasks.

Since it was abandoned in the 1960s, the island has become a nature reserve. New York City is located directly on bird migration routes both north and south and, as one of the few remaining green spots near the city, it has become a natural stopping place for the birds. Nobody can visit from March to September, and only a few guests are allowed on the rest of the year.

The island's longest-running function was as a quarantine facility, so most of the buildings are of a medical nature. This is the Nurses' building, where the island's resident nurses lived. The island famously housed "Typhoid Mary" Mallon, the first carrier in the United States of Typhoid fever.

When Payne visited, he expected to find the interior of the buildings mostly intact and filled with artifacts. However, he found that almost everything had been cleared out of the buildings. This classroom in the male dormitory was one of the few rooms that had anything still in it. The books are mostly cast-offs from the Queens Public Library.

This is what the male dormitory looks like on the outside. Aside from the birds, there is no wildlife on the island. Not even rats can survive because there is no food.

The largest structure is the Tuberculosis Pavilion, the lobby of which is shown here. Payne says the pavilion is the only building that could be saved structurally if the city wanted to restore the island. While in operation, the pavilion housed a fully functional medical facility, complete with x-ray machines.

This is the balcony of the Tuberculosis Pavilion. Payne usually visited the island in either September or late November because it lags seasonally behind the rest of the Northeast. In September, the island is still overflowing with greenery and, in November and December, the leaves are still changing colors.

One of the most striking aspects of the island is how it changes throughout the year, Payne says. In summer, nature consumes the buildings. In winter, it all recedes and the island becomes barren. Payne took this photo of the coal house from the roof of the morgue in September.

This is a view of the boiler plant, also taken from the morgue roof. While it's hard to imagine, Payne says that all of the nature sits over a thin layer of dirt. Below it, one can still find the sidewalks, street lamps, fire hydrants, and streets that used to define the island.

North Brother Island was more or less self-sufficient when it was in operation. It had an industrial plant and a coal house to provide utilities to the buildings and an internal telephone system. This is the collapsing roof of the boiler plant, which provided heat to the island.

Nature has demolished most of the island's buildings, like this church. "At the rate they are going, the buildings are going to disappear," says Payne, who is also trained as an architect. "Most of the buildings are so far gone it would be difficult to salvage them."

Here is another view of the church. As you can see, only the facade still stands.

Payne says he learned this lesson from his many trips to the island: "When people leave, man-made structures break down and get replaced quickly by the natural order. No matter how hard we try, nature will always reassert itself."

SEE ALSO: Incredible Photos Show What Post-Apocalyptic America Might Look Like

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Starting a business is not a walk in the park. There is much more to it than having a business idea and having the funds to open a business. You need a lot of information and strategies to make sure your business takes off and does not crash land after a short while. It is not about how hard you work, it is now about how smart you work in starting and growing your business. The starting part is the difficult part and to succeed, you must be prepared for the period after the start, and this is growth. Here are tips to assist you in starting a business that will grow in leaps and bounds.

Have A Business Plan

Without a business plan you will be walking in an area with a lot of quick sand with your eyes closed. You cannot build a business empire with out a blueprint, you will get lost somewhere a long the way. You must have a business plan to help you start on the success road and remind you what you need to do at different stages. Contrary to what most people believe, your business plan does not need to weigh a lot of pounds or have many pages, you only need to highlight the important factors and provide details that will assist you in running your new business smoothly.

Be Prepared To Own A Business

You want to own a business so bad, but this is different from being prepared, most people jump into business ownership unprepared and this is what leads to the many failures. Being prepared is all about setting both short term and long term goals, preparing yourself mentally and physically for the demanding task of starting and running a business and having everything in order for a smooth operation.

Know When You Need Help

A smart person understands that they do not know everything and in business, there are those who have made it their core business to study all business elements and can provide useful information. You should know when you need an extra hand or advice instead of trying to carry the whole world on your shoulders. There are experienced people who can hold your hand through the harsh times and show you the way to success. You also need to have an employee or two to help you run your startup business since the tasks will reduce and you can have time to plan on growth and expansion.

Be Unique

A part of being a smart business person is being different. This does not mean that you become an extremist or a weirdo, just make your business unique and original. Following what is in the market will only put you at par with your competitors and this will not do you any good. You need to stand out to attract more customers. This should start with a smart choice in branding and business name. Do what you can to make your business different in ways that will work towards increasing sales and growing it to the next level.

The time has finally arrived where our use of mobile devices has surpassed our use of our desktops and laptops.

I guess that may have come to a surprise to some people, but if you have had your head up and been paying attention, it is probably not surprising at all. The irony here, is that we all have our head down, staring at our devices so much that we may just have missed this shift altogether.

Bottom line, mobile devices and the trend of mobility is another trend that is greatly altering the way we communicate.

In the past 5 years, really since the release of the first iPhone, mobile has been on a torrent pace to take over our lives. The aforementioned comment about people staring at their devices; sure that is said somewhat in gest, but if you actually stop and look around it isn’t even the slightest bit surprising to see people ignoring their surroundings to stare at their device.

Maybe these statistics will provide some perspective.

• 1 Billion smartphones were sold in just the year 2013
• 99% of smartphone owners use their web browser daily.
• 91% keep their smartphone within arms reach 24/7/365
• 75% have their phones with them in the bathroom.
• Check out 28 More great mobile stats…

On their own, these numbers show the massive impact that mobile has had on our lives, but what does this imply about the way we communicate?

We Do Our Business On Mobiles

Pun intended, but in serious, we have now reached a point where we open 51% of our email on our mobile, officially putting our mobile opens past our PC opens. This shows not only our dependence on our mobile, but that fact that we are spending more time away from our desks.

We Start And Finish Our Day On Mobile

You think people are reading their email during the workday? Of course they probably are, but mobile has changed our behavior to check our email first thing when we wake up (49%) and more than half of people (54%) check their email again right before going to bed. Considering we have our phones within arm reach around the clock, this isn’t really all that surprising.

We Get Social On Our Mobile Devices

According to a study in August of 2013 by IDC and Facebook, the most popular activity on mobile devices today is still email, but right after email comes Facebook. Yep, the worlds largest social network is also one of mobile users favorite things to do on the device with 70% of people polled saying it is their most used application on their smart device. Furthermore at least 75% of people who own smartphones proclaim to go on social media at least one time per day from their mobile device.

We Read More Content Online

Beyond email and social media, people are using mobile more than newspapers and magazines combined as their preferred way to consume content. Sure they are reading the news, but they are doing so on mobile devices.

We Make Purchases From Our Mobile Devices

Even with all of the security risks and breaches that have taken place in the past year, people are still crazy about shopping online. In fact with 3 out of every 5 searches now being done from a mobile device it is leading to more and more online purchasing. In fact, 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to a purchase or a visit leading to another big shift in mobile; the impact on local search and consumption.

Mobile Is Changing How We Communicate, Period.

While we may on average spend more than 119 minutes a day on our mobile devices, the trend isn’t only affecting our business, or our social lives, but really it is changing entirely how we communicate with one another.

The trends for mobile usage are across the board showing an increase meaning we will likely spend more time in the next year than we have this year and at the rate we are going this may continue until we literally are connected to our devices 24×7.

In the future I see more integration of mobile and life with the proliferation of Glass and other wearable technologies, because we want to be omnipresent and today our devices limit this. This may just be what we need as we evolve from the “Internet of Things” to the “Internet of People.”

Perhaps then we can look at each other when speaking and still not feel like we are missing out on what all those people online are thinking, saying and doing?

This article was originally featured on Forbes can be found here. Image Credit: Creative Commons Via Flickr.

Email marketing is a valuable tool for any business. When it’s combined with cross-promotion techniques, your results can be even better. To help business owners tackle the logistics of cross-promotions, we’ve created this handy guide to walk you through the process.

What does cross-promotion mean?
Let’s start by defining cross-promotion. Cross-promotion is about getting your message out on multiple channels. Your target audience gets information from various sources, right? By using multiple sources to share your message, you help increase the odds of customers hearing about it, says Steven Mintz, a marketing consultant with CLM Prescriptives.

What can you cross-promote?
You can cross-promote just about anything. From an upcoming event to a big holiday sale, with a little planning you can cross-promote a lot of the everyday things that your company does. For instance, you can cross-promote:

• upcoming events
• giveaways or contests
• new blog content
• a sale or promotion

How can you cross-promote?
We live in an email checking, Facebook scrolling, content-on-demand world. Because of that, the majority of cross-promotions happen online. Plan to use the most relevant digital platforms that are available to you.

To breakdown how to cross-promote your email content, we’ll use an example from a cross-promoting giant, Coca-Cola. Recently, the company launched a charitable event, “Happiness from the Skies.” Using remote-controlled drones, the beverage-giant delivered care packages to construction workers in Singapore. The packages contained Coke cans with messages of gratitude.

While most businesses won’t be breaking out flying drones anytime soon, the cross-promotion behind this event is something any business can learn from.

Send an email
The Coca-Cola event happened millions of miles away, so how did we hear about it? Through an email, of course. As part of its regular newsletter, Coca-Cola included a small blurb about the event. Check it out:

Use your newsletter wisely
Coca-Cola placed the information in its regular newsletter, which is the perfect spot for something like this. A newsletter is a great piece of the cross-promotion puzzle.

Be captivating
Let’s dissect this email a little more. We often emphasize writing captivating content, something that draws the reader in. In just a few words, Coca-Cola does that. You want to know more, right? When you’re working to cross-promote an event, spend time creating short, snappy content.

Include a clear call to action
Coca-Cola has your attention. Now, all you have to do is click on the “Learn more” button. It’s another great email marketing tip: make sure your email has a clear call to action. When you’re cross-promoting an event like this, you want content that’s easy to navigate.

Plan for social media
Coca-Cola is already thinking socially. Notice the hashtag in the teaser sentence? The company plans to use #Cokedrones in its social media posts. Whatever you plan to cross-promote, think ahead. What hashtag could you use?

Create a blog post
As soon as the email recipient clicks on the call to action in the email, they’re taken to a blog post that gives more details about the event. Coke explains why it wanted to reach out to the workers and how the company integrated its product with some high-flying technology.

Do the same for your cross-promotion. Make sure subscribers can get more information from your blog.

Use visuals
Coca-Cola doesn’t stop with an email and a blog post, subscribers can watch a two-minute video that shows the drones flying in and dropping off the packages. You get to see the surprised workers open the box and read the messages that are tied to Coke cans.

In addition to the video, Coca-Cola put together a behind-the-scenes slideshow so people can check out the drones.

Both the video and the slideshow are additional visual elements that help the reader see and feel the event.

When you’re cross-promoting something, try to add visual elements like this. For instance, if your company participates in a charitable event, put together a slideshow of your employees volunteering. If you’re cross-promoting an upcoming speaking engagement, email a quick video to show people what to expect at the event. (Need a little help shooting video on the cheap? Check out a recent post on this very topic.)

Share the news on social media
Coca-Cola already had a social media plan with this campaign, but even if a specific hashtag wasn’t mentioned in the email, you should still use social media as a cross-promotion tool. Coca-Cola shared the same blog post that was mentioned in the newsletter. You can see how all three of those elements – the email, blog and tweet – worked together.

Can cross-promoting be done on a smaller scale?
Absolutely. As a small business owner, you decide how far you want to take your cross-promotions. Here are a few smaller scale tips:

Use the big three
To cross-promote on a small scale, use your biggest digital assets: email, social media and your company website. Let’s look at an example.

Send an email
In an effort to promote its new blizzard, Dairy Queen sent an email to its subscribers. It’s short and sweet. In fact, the image is the main seller here. You can do the same thing. Send an email out to advertise a new product or an upcoming promotion.

Promote on social media
Once the email is sent, promote the same information on your social media channels. You don’t want to copy the wording from the email; you want to create something fresh. Here’s what Dairy Queen did.

Use your business website
Don’t forget that your business website is a prime piece of digital real estate. If you are cross-promoting something, make some space for it on your homepage. Create a website banner, or do what Dairy Queen did and make a larger promotion.

What can you do to build an audience and enhance cross-promotion efforts?

Build your email list
One of the key components of cross-promotions is email, so you’ll want to grow your list. One of the best ways to increase subscribers is to get creative with opt-in placement. Make it ridiculously easy for people to sign up. For instance, have a spot on your homepage where people can sign up for your emails, or add a “subscribe now” option to your Facebook page.

Build a social media following
It takes time to grow your email and social media audience organically, but it’s worth your time and effort. To gain a following on social media, make sure you’re consistently posting to the site and that the content you post is of interest to your readers. People will follow you if you’re active and genuinely care about the content you share.

When it comes to cross-promotion, is everything done online?
You do have a lot of accessible, cross-promoting tools online; however, there are other methods that you can use, too.

Use in-store promotions
You can devote some store space to cross-promotions, Mintz suggests. Hang a sign on the door about a sale, or use a flat screen television in your store for promotional purposes.

Team up with a non-profit
Work with a group in your area to cross-promote a mutually beneficial event. Maybe your company is sponsoring a gala for the local animal shelter. By working with a nonprofit, you not only give back to the community but you expose your business to potential subscribers.

Mail invites
If you want to cross-promote an event, you might consider sending a paper invitation through the mail. A week later, you can follow up with an email.

Cross-promoting is about being creative and using the outlets where your niche audience gathers. It does require some pre-planning, but if you take some time to think about what you want to cross-promote, you can easily disperse the information on multiple channels.

DZHANKOI/SIMFEROPOL Crimea (Reuters) - Scrambling to compensate for a lack of water from mainland Ukraine, farmhands are laying row after row of pipe to drip water across dusty fields in Crimea's arid north.

The water shortage highlights the huge logistical hurdles Russia faces to wean Crimea off dependence on Ukraine, from which it seized the Black Sea peninsula in March.

More than two months after the annexation, denounced as illegal by Kiev and the West, Moscow needs to secure Crimea's basic needs - chief among them, the water and power almost entirely supplied from Ukraine - in order to prop up the local economy and sustain its popularity among its 2 million people.

"We've drilled wells, we're using drip irrigation, but there's still not enough water," said Vasily, a burly man whose 50-hectare (124-acre) vegetable farm near Dzhankoi has been irrigated by water from the Dnieper river diverted along a canal across a strip of land that links Crimea to the mainland.

He and other farmers have planted less thirsty crops since, they say, Ukraine reduced flows across its new de facto border with Russian-controlled Crimea - a move Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev decried as political retribution. Ukrainian officials say water is still flowing but will not say how much.

The stakes are high for Moscow, which has said it could spend up to $7 billion this year alone to integrate Crimea's economy with Russia and nurse a euphoric pro-Kremlin mood that saw the majority ethnic Russian population of the peninsula vote for annexation in March.

"People are optimistic about the future but ... the Russian leadership understands perfectly well that if the Crimean economy stagnates, the responsibility will fall on Russia's shoulders," said Yuri Korban, director of one of the many vineyards that dot Crimea's jagged coastline.

Russia's economy is already teetering on the brink of recession amid Western sanctions imposed over the annexation of Crimea, which was completed within a month of the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev and followed a military takeover supported by troops from Russian bases on the peninsula.

Going by the experience of the much smaller Georgian region of South Ossetia, over which Russia gained effective control after a 2008 war with Georgia, the process of integrating Crimea is likely to be both lengthy and very costly. 

SECURING SUPPLIES

Ukraine seems unlikely to cut Crimea off abruptly from supplies. But its grip on some 80 percent of the region's fresh water and up to 90 percent of its electricity is one of the few levers Kiev has in its dealings with Moscow as the new Ukrainian president tries to end another Crimea-style revolt in the east.

Russia knows it needs years and billions of dollars to lay connections across the 4-km (2.5-mile) strait dividing its own mainland from Crimea's easternmost point. It wants talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to keep the border open.

"The political process in Ukraine will probably move forward now, and then we'll hold negotiations," said Dmitry Kozak, a deputy to Medvedev who joined the premier on a symbolic visit to Crimea on May 25, the very day Poroshenko was elected.

For now, though, talks look some way off.

Ukraine says Crimea's regional authorities owe it 1.7 million hryvnias ($140,000) for last year's water and have no plan for how they will pay. "We do not even have an official organization with which we can discuss these agreements," a spokeswoman for Ukraine's state water agency said.

A Ukrainian government source said Ukraine is still supplying water through the canal but would not say how much, while Crimean officials say they are drilling dozens of wells and rerouting fresh water from reservoirs to cope.

Although food deliveries from Ukraine, by road and rail, have not been severely interrupted, Crimean officials have put restrictions on sending sugar, flour, meat and other foodstuffs to the mainland to ensure the region does not run low on food.

Crimea grows more than enough vegetables and grains to meet its own consumption but imports large quantities of sugar, meat and dairy products. Should Ukraine halt supplies, Crimea will import these products by sea fromRussia's southern Krasnodar region, Crimea's regional Agriculture Ministry said.

Russia's Energy Ministry, meanwhile, says there are plans to spend around $2 billion upgrading Crimea's power stations and linking the peninsula to the Russian electricity grid.

Ukraine currently supplies the peninsula with between 60 percent and 90 percent of its power, depending on weather conditions, as Crimea's limited generating capacity comes mainly from solar- and wind-powered installations.

Crimea is largely self-sufficient in natural gas. And its annexation has given Russia access to offshore fields thought to hold the equivalent of 2.3 trillion cubic meters of gas - enough to meet European gas demand for around 5 years. 

BALANCING ACT

Kiev must carry out a delicate balancing act in its response to Russia's seizure of Crimea, a territory bureaucratically transferred to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 1950s and which Poroshenko now views as "occupied." 

Even though Ukraine could halt supplies to the peninsula to punish Moscow indirectly, it is itself heavily dependent on Russia for natural gas and is locked in talks brokered by the European Union to negotiate a lower gas price. 

Ukraine's leaders also risk angering compatriots stranded in Crimea - and their own allies in the West - should they try to use supplies as a weapon. The fragile Ukrainian economy will, however, benefit from not having to cover Crimea's yearly budget deficit of over $1 billion or to replace ageing infrastructure.

For Moscow, the burden of propping up Crimea, whose $5 billion economy will account for less than 1 percent of Russian gross domestic product, could not come at a worse time.

Russia's economy contracted 0.5 percent in the first quarter as investment slumped and capital flight soared to $63 billion in anticipation of sanctions by the United States and European Union over the Ukraine crisis.  

Although the sanctions turned out to be less painful than feared - mostly visa bans and asset freezes - and markets have recovered somewhat, Russia's oil- and gas-dependent budget will be especially stretched this year due to weaker revenues.

Analysts warn the political will for the large-scale investments Moscow has promised in Crimea could fade if Russian economic growth slows yet further.

"Crimea is an investment dead end: the ports are old, the railways and roads haven't been fixed for ages," saidAlexei Bezborodov, director of the Moscow-based InfraNews consultancy.

Despite similarly generous promises to South Ossetia, the economy of the region, whose population is barely a fiftieth of Crimea's, is now almost wholly dependent on funds from Moscow.

Noting Crimea's much greater size, Varvara Pakhomenko, a Moscow-based researcher with the International Crisis Group, said the headache it presents would also be much greater:

"Much higher investment is needed today but there's less money in the coffers," she said. "Russia will try to solve Crimea's problems, above all the infrastructure ones.

"But it will be very expensive, and take time."

(Additional reporting by Denis Dyomkin in Simferop

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Yes, a huge part of reducing the cost of solar panels will be to slash their soft costs — that’s all of those pesky things that aren’t part of the hardware, like the cost of permits, installation, financing, and marketing. But in the future, we’ll also eventually need cheaper, non-toxic, and abundant solar materials to help make solar panels an even more important power source.

At the Department of Energy’s SunShot Summit last month, I got a chance to learn about some of the cutting edge, bleeding edge, and down-right wacky ideas being worked on in dozens of labs around the U.S. that are focused on how to make solar cell and panel materials just plain better. Here are some of the trends I saw:

Apple’s solar farm

1). The non-toxic, abundant version of CIGS thin films: Thin-film solar panels made from CIGS – copper-indium-gallium-selenide — haven’t quite materialized like they were predicted to do a decade ago. There are a lot of reasons for that, and the chief one is that the price of silicon dropped dramatically in recent years (instead of increased), and CIGS panels are at an advantage when silicon is expensive. Well-known (or should I say infamous) companies that have worked on CIGS thin-film solar panels include Solyndra, Miasole, HelioVolt, Stion, and Nanosolar. Japan’s Solar Frontier is probably the biggest company making these panels.

But another concern with CIGS is the price and availability of the rare material indium. That’s one of the reasons why researchers are now looking into thin-film solar panels made from a combination of copper, zinc, tin and sulfur-selenide (CZTSSe), as well as copper, zinc, tin, sulfide (CZTS), as these combos can provide similar properties — low cost, thin flexibility, reasonable efficiency — to CIGS panels.

Zinc ore

There are at least two projects being funded by the SunShot program around CZTS panels. The first is one is out of the University of Washington, which received close to $500,000 from the DOE to work on new ways to manufacture CZTSSe cells. The other program is from Purdue University in Indiana, and they received a $750,000 grant to make CZTS cells using nanocrystal ink.

A reoccurring problem with both CIGS and CZTS solar cells is getting the cells to be able to convert enough sunlight into electricity — the efficiencies are pretty low on these. But Solar Frontier has been hard at work trying to make efficient CZTS cells and recently announced a record of 12.6 efficiency.

2). Photon recycling: Researchers and companies are working on ways to recycle photons to boost the efficiency of solar cells. How does this work?

Well, not all the electrons from sunlight that enter a cell can be collected to create electricity. So using various methods — like internal cell structures, optics, doping and thermal treatments — the electrons can be used to create photons, which can then be used to knock loose more electrons to increase the overall power output of cells. Startup Alta Devices (which was reportedly acquired by Hanergy) was using this method to make an efficient solar cell from gallium arsenide.

Alta Devices solar material

Backed by SunShot funding, NREL researchers are improving the efficiency of two-junction solar cells (cells that use two semiconductor materials that use different wavelengths of light) using a gold backing to reflect photons back into the cell. Last summer they got a world record of 31.1 percent conversion efficiency from a cell made of a gallium indium phosphide cell atop a gallium arsenide cell. They are trying to hit a 48 percent efficiency eventually.

3). Perovskites: Perovskites — minerals made up of mostly calcium titanate with superconductive abilities — were a hot topic at the SunShot summit, because solar cells made from perovskites could be much cheaper than silicon-based solar cells. In 2012 and 2013 scientists were able to boost the efficiency of perovskite solar cells from just a few percent to more than 16 percent.

Perovskite solar cells can also be transparent, so could be more easily incorporated into windows and buildings. Recently a team from Nanyang Technological University published results in Nature Materials about a solar cell made from perovskites that could be used to create tinted glass windows that double as lights and displays.

A perovskite tin solar cell made by University of Oxford researchers.

At SunShot, a Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Drexel University, Jonathan Spanier, called perovskites “game changing,” and able to make “the most of the sun.” While the mineral was discussed as far back as 1839, recently scientists have done some incredible work on various perovskite innovations. Spanier pointed to startup Oxford Photovoltaics as an interesting company making perovskite solar cells, and noted that perovskite materials can also be used for thermochemical energy storage for concentrating solar power.

4). Quantum dots: Quantum dots are tiny pieces of semiconductor crystals — less than 10 nanometers — that are so small that they have different properties and characteristics than larger semiconductor pieces. Researchers are using them to make solar cells because the energy level of the semiconductor can be tuned by changing the size of the dots. Scientists can also use quantum dots to make solar concentrators. These scientists at Los Alamos National Labs are using quantum dots to develop solar window tech.

5). Nano structures — wires, crystals, ink: Nanotechnology has been at the forefront of many solar materials innovations, as we mentioned earlier with the CZTS solar cells made with nanocrystal ink. Other scientists are using nanotechnology to make tiny wires and other nano structures that can boost the efficiency of solar cells.

Nanowires made by Swedish startup Sol Voltaics.

A startup called Bandgap Engineering is developing silicon nanowires, which it says are more efficient and cheaper than conventional silicon solar cells. The company, founded in 2007, went through SunShot’s incubator program and received a grant of $750,000 to make a solar cell from silicon that has a 36 percent efficiency rating. In theory Bandgap Engineering’s silicon solar cell could receive an efficiency rating as high as 60 percent.

6). Inverse design: Inverse design is changing the way researchers are figuring out what solar materials to work on. The process essentially involves identifying specific properties that are desired in a material, and then determining that material’s required atomic structure, tapping into computing power to go through the vast amount of potential options. University of Colorado professor Alex Zunger is the chief theorist at the Center for Inverse Design and he spoke about inverse design at SunShot. Zunger has been using inverse design to find the best materials for solar cells made of quantum dots.

Iron pyrite, or fool’s gold

7). Fool’s gold: Really? Yep, that material you might have had in your rock collection as a kid is being used in some bleeding edge solar innovations. Fool’s Gold, or iron pyrite, is inexpensive, found all over the place and is non-toxic. The big problem is the efficiency of its sunlight conversion is pretty tiny.

Researchers at University of California, Irvine, are using a SunShot grant ($1.4 million) to try to make a prototype of a solar cell from iron pyrite that’s 10 percent efficient or greater. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a team making nanostructures for iron pyrite to make it more suitable for a solar cell.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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While there aren’t many—if any—sales managers who would intentionally undermine, sabotage or harm the effectiveness of their teams, we’ve all probably worked for and seen sales leaders who routinely do this. Sometimes they are victims of the same behaviors that are being passed down to them by other leaders. Most managers who do this simply have a blind spot that’s beyond their awareness. 

In my experience, there are three common missteps sales managers often take that undermine their team’s ability to progress:

1. Acting as the deal doer

These sales managers believe they are “helping” their team by telling them how to close deals or directing them on the next step to take in the sales cycle.  As a result, one of two things happens: Either a dependency is created, where the salesperson won’t act without being told what to do by their sales manager, or the salesperson is doing things that they don’t believe they should be.

Surprisingly, this isn’t reserved for junior salespeople or inexperienced sales teams.  I once ran into a very senior sales executive with more than two decades of experience, who was selling a multimillion-dollar business deal for a major corporation.  It was astonishing to hear that his boss had sent him to where his client was and told him not to leave until the deal was closed.  This is despite the fact that he told his  boss that the client was in no way, shape or form ready to close. On top of that, his boss was on his way to join him at the client!  The sales executive knew this added pressure would only create ill will with the customer—but his boss disregarded this concern given unrelenting pressure he was receiving from above. 

We see this happen all the time.  And we see that sales leaders who are successful are those who clear the way for their people.  They don’t just tell them what to do.  Instead, they take the time to listen, help them come up with a plan, and give them the resources they need to get the deal done.

2. Adopting a near-exclusive focus on the short term

There is a massively pervasive mindset among many sales leaders who are focused on what we call “Quadrant I”—believing that everything is urgent and important. (Read more about Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s four quadrants here.) These managers are relentless in prodding their teams to make the quarter or whichever immediate target is at hand.  While they might make the quarter, they do so at the expense of making their plan three years from now. Or at the expense of giving up half of their profit because they discounted the deal to make it happen. They might grow 5 percent, but at the expense of growing 20 percent three years from now.

These sales leaders only focus on the next 90 days—and they don’t start thinking about the next 90-day period until it’s just a day or two around the corner. Then the whole cycle starts over again. This is where private companies have a leg up on public corporations—there isn’t a need to create that undertow as public companies often do.

Successful sales leaders realize that there is a balance between making your number today and making your number more easily and bigger in the future.  So rather than adopting 10 measures of execution and no measures of planning, it can make a significant difference if you can get to 8-9 measures of execution (Quadrant I) and 1-2 measures of planning (Quadrant II).  It’s as simple as taking one day a month to work on planning—setting that aside as a priority and ensuring you spend time planning with each person on your team.

3. Constantly shifting priorities

In many companies, sales leaders often change priorities from one account or product to another, or from selling total contract value to selling in-year revenue deals—and they do this multiple times within one quarter. When this happens, it’s tremendously disruptive to your salesforce. They can’t get into a pattern or rhythm, where the flywheel is spinning and it’s creating a lot of energy (i.e., sales)—instead of these fits and starts.

There’s nothing wrong with changing direction, as long as there’s something that is consistent. Successful sales leaders choose a good direction at the beginning of the fiscal year. They stick with it and see it through. I’ve heard the same story from many salespeople about how “just when it’s about to take off, we give up on the plan and change directions.” We pull the plant out of the ground to see how the roots are growing, which of course kills it.

Again, these three examples are rarely done on purpose—but are ones that we frequently continue to see among sales managers.  What has your experience been?  What stories have you seen or heard when sales leaders inadvertently sabotage their teams? And what should sales leaders be doing instead?

In today’s high-speed, information-intense world, it’s getting harder to grab and hold the attention of potential customers and stakeholders. Visual content has quickly emerged as a powerful tool that can help messages break through the clutter, stand out from the competition, and persuade audiences — but only if it’s created and positioned correctly.

Content Marketing Institute recently conducted a webinar (sponsored by global “ideas shop” gyro) that highlighted some excellent examples of visual storytelling. Presenters Ekaterina Walter, CMO of Branderati and the co-author of The Power of Visual Storytelling, Cristina Heise, gyro’s Director of Brand Experience, and gyro’s Content Strategist John Cramer also discussed their recommended strategies for increasing your odds of success when working with visual content.

Data have shown that the average adult attention span is actually shrinking, with scientists estimating that it is currently around eight seconds. No wonder we have Vine videos that are limited to six seconds and Instagram only supports videos that are 15 seconds or less — they’re designed to grab attention in the fast-moving environment of a newsfeed.

So much information comes flying at us these days that our brains have developed sophisticated filters to process what we want to consume. One type of filter we use is advocacy — reading, viewing, or buying something because a friend recommended it. Visual storytelling is another type of filter. It works because it helps readers understand the essence of an idea much faster than they would with words alone.

Visual storytelling tips

During this information-packed webinar, Walter, Heise, and Cramer shared some excellent advice to help content marketers design effective visual storytelling content:

• Stay on-brand with your visuals: Make sure your designs are brand-consistent, including the way you use corporate colors and logos. The best visual content has a consistent design motif — you can tell what brand it belongs to in an instant.

• Keep it timely: For example, tie your visual content in with a holiday, or interpret a new development in your market in a way that’s useful to your readers. Help people understand emerging trends they should be aware of.

• Customize your visual content to the platform it will be delivered on: Don’t just create one image and try to push it out to every platform. Each social media channel has different image size requirements. Also, the audiences of each network are unique, so content marketers need to respect the standards of communication everywhere their content will appear.

• Add humor: It tends to perform well, as long as it remains tasteful and in alignment with the brand’s voice. For example, H&R Block ran a visual content program that uses a series of funny facts to “hipsterify” the dry topic of tax law.

• Make your marketing personal: For example, last year, Walter tweeted a request to retailer REI in which she asked for holiday gift ideas. Within 30 minutes, the company responded to her question with a personalized video containing a number of excellent ideas. When she asked the REI team how they accomplished this amazing feat, she discovered that they have green screens in the back of their stores where staff members shoot the videos themselves. The takeaway, Walter points out, is asking, “How can you make a person’s day just a little bit brighter with your content?“

• Don’t be afraid to jump into a real-time conversation: Know your community, and make sure your input always adds value — not just noise.

• Don’t think in terms of campaigns: Instead, build tribes and inspire movements. Participate in passionate conversations with people in an ongoing way.

• Create images and graphics which spark curiosity, so readers will make the decision to learn more from you: Design your visuals to lead them down the path to a deeper understanding of your company, product, or service, and see how you are uniquely qualified to help them solve their problem or challenge.

• Add images to your email newsletters to significantly lift click-through rates: But they must relate to the topic of the email and should tell a story (or contribute to the email’s main story).

• Just as Copernicus revolutionized our understanding of cosmology by proving that the sun is the center of our solar system (not the Earth), marketing has gone through a transformation of focus. Historically, we placed our brand at the center of our marketing decisions, which resulted in a lot of wasted effort. Heise points out that we’ve now put the customer in her rightful place — at the center of the marketing universe. “Think about the human at the center and how to make it easier on them. Think about what’s concerning her, what’s troubling her, what excites her, what motivates her, what she wants to accomplish and how you and your brand can help,” she recommends.

• Recognize that visual stories must have a shape: Keep this in mind as you craft your stories, and design visuals to support the flow of that story. For example, you can insert your brand into the “hero’s journey” — where the customer’s life starts out fine, but is soon disrupted by a problem or crisis. She selects your product to help her solve it, which enables her to arrive at a better place. This is the classic model of a case history: problem/solution/desirable result. The lesson to marketers is to pay attention to the emotion and the desired path you want your audience members to take on their journey toward a purchase, and to make sure your visuals reflect those elements.

• When selecting images for your content marketing, give careful thought to the context and mental model your reader is likely to be in: You must appeal to both the emotional and rational sides of the brain. Emotions involved in selecting or purchasing a B2B product or service may include anxiety, longing for recognition, loss of credibility and risk aversion. Rational justifications may include decreasing downtime, increasing productivity, and protecting or growing the business.

• Don’t forget about the visual experience of your website, which should tie in with the visuals you’re placing on your social media outposts, in your emails and other forms of marketing communications. Use the visuals on your website to continue drawing prospects in, using compelling information and graphics. This creates what Cramer calls “attention gravity,” which promises to reveal a deeper pool of resources and answers to their questions. Your website is also an appropriate place to explore longer-form and narrative storytelling that integrates both text and visuals. 

There’s still time to catch the webinar. Register today to view, “Make Your B2B Marketing Memorable with Visual Storytelling” on-demand. 

Innovation is the life blood of any enterprise’s success and growth. Embracing innovative ideas is important for any brand’s sustained leadership in the market. History is testimonial to the fact; businesses which have not implemented new ideas on time have eventually been elbowed out of business by competition… and organizations which have resisted the needed change have perished without trace. While it is normal for organizations to strive for excellence, claim to be receptive to new ideas and accommodative to changes; seldom do we see them doing something real to make innovations happen.

A survey by Price Waterhouse Cooper’s reveals ‘61% of CEOs worldwide say that innovation is a primary concern within their businesses’. A recent Bain & Company survey found that two-thirds of enterprise executives named innovation as one of their top three priorities.

We know well, an organization is a large pool of innovative ideas; people whether they are employees or customers or partners have great ideas to make a business successful. But the real challenge is how to tap this collective intelligence for common good. People have great ideas; they have the wish to participate but there isn’t any platform where they will be heard & valued. People in the bottom rungs of the organization often don’t have access to the top management. But does that necessarily mean they couldn’t have ‘life changing’ ideas?

Let’s accept, managing Innovation is tricky. It needs a lot of deliberate efforts to build an active appetite for innovation. How to build the right strategy for innovation? Could Innovation be managed & fostered?  Here are some great ways an enterprise could make INNOVATION happen!

Don’t hesitate to be repetitive
A professor of Physics in a University used to repeat the same question in every exam he gave to the students. ‘Same question in every exam? Why would you do this?’ asked his fellows in academics. ‘You could always ask different questions?’

The professor replied earnestly ‘the question no doubt is the same but as far as I get different answers I am OK. I get new versions of the answer every time because the students are evolving with every class & exam. In that sense I actually get new ways to solve the same problem every time’.

Innovation is highly iterative. It’s not linear… it happens in cycles. Innovation is a journey. In this journey you often experience ‘déjà vu’…and sometimes frustrations too. It’s a continuous process. If you have developed a great ‘mobile app’ today… chances are the competition comes out with an even better one next week. Mind you! It’s a journey chasing excellence. There is no destination.

‘Suggestions@xyz.com’ is not enough for innovation to happen.
Many enterprises have email IDs such as ideas@xyz.com where people are expected to share their ideas for some great innovation. But…hardly anyone actually shares anything. Eventually the ID becomes a junk box/ a black hole which no one even bothers to check. Such initiatives only increase the chaos. ‘Digital suggestion box’ is not the right way to foster innovation. Innovation doesn’t happen that way. Innovation needs a mature platform.

Provide people with a platform to ideate… They all can’t be in the boardroom
Study by ‘Idea Champions’ reveals- only 3 percent of the people come up with their best ideas at work. The other 97 percent said their best ideas come to them while they are in the shower, on vacation, taking walks, enjoying a glass of wine, or just doing nothing.

Often we too have our ‘eureka’ moments in the cafeteria or while attending a boring conference call J but all we could do is park the idea to be discussed in the next office meeting. No wonder ideas die before they are incepted.

Having an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) doesn’t guarantee innovation

Innovation doesn’t happen by chance. Ideation should be an active, repeatable & quantifiable business process within the organization. ESN could be a great way to enable collecting ideas. Ideas could be crowdsourced from customers, employees, partners etc in the internal & external communities of the enterprise. While this is important for innovation; even more is how these ideas are driven from concept to reality. Most of the ideas which emerge as great ones do not get materialized because there isn’t a mechanism in place to incubate and implement them.

Enterprise Innovation Management (EIM) could make an enterprise thrive on innovations

A true collaborative enterprise should have a platform to make innovations happen. There has to be system which should actively capture, share & evaluate ideas. Ideas should go through a ‘graduation’ process where they are evaluated on various parameters by people from different groups. It’s a process to separate wheat from chaff. It’s a process to separate real signals from noise.

People need collaboration and mobility tools to work anywhere, any time. Ideation could be workflowed into the daily works of the employees. In most of the enterprises Innovation is still a siloed, separate activity.

Implementation of the qualified ideas is key to successful innovation

Once the idea graduates; there has to be the further necessary actions like budgeting, funding, Go to Market, Product Management initiatives, RoI calculations, customer communications, Trials/ POCs etc. Many people are required to bring ideas into action. This could be done assigning people with necessary ‘tasks & projects’ in a time bound manner. Collecting ideas is important but even more important is what we do of the ideas we collect.

Ensure participation & engagement of all stakeholders
Methods for engagement like gamification could help in motivating employees to participate in the ideation process. It’s a way to instill ‘high value’ behaviors in people. As per McKinsey 50% of highly profitable companies have 50% more engaged employees versus unprofitable companies. What drives profit? Excellence & Innovation at work right? Gamification exactly helps in doing that.

Measure. Think. Repeat
Idea Analytics could help in monitoring how the process of ideation is fairing. How people are participating & sharing. Reports/ dashboards/ data visualizations help to keep a tab on the entire Innovation management process right from inception to implementation.

Keep ideas safe so they are not stolen away
Proper Access & Identity Managementcould helpto ensure only the right people see the details of the ideas and all discussions around them. Be pragmatic. You never know, some disgruntled employees might take your nice ideas to the competition before you implement them. Be ware.

Remember no idea is bad… only that its time hasn’t come.
If an idea cannot be implemented immediately; it always remains in the repository to be evaluated later. No idea is bad. Every idea has it’s time. Sometimes a great idea comes out of nowhere and jumps into your lap. You never recognize it at first as a great idea, then suddenly it hits you “it’s a GREAT IDEA” you just never noticed it before.

EIM (Enterprise Innovation Management) is a platform to manage ideas and make innovation happen. It helps to check that ideas don’t slip through the cracks.

A successful enterprise would always find ways to manage ideas properly. It would strive to harness and not hamper innovation.

Unsuccessful enterprises have many options…of which one could be to remain content with an email ID like:
we_need_some_great_ideas_now!_Hurry! send_them immediately@xyz.com

What would you be like?

After years of studying the online purchasing journey, I have a theory that when making an important purchase shoppers draw up a shortlist of four desirable items and/or four retailers to buy them from.  

In her book, The Art of Choosing, Professor Lyengar reveals that too much choice renders us overwhelmed to the point of indecision – so it makes sense that we would limit our choices in order to make the decision process simpler for ourselves.

Think about the last time you made a considered purchase, such as a car, new phone or mortgage. How many different items and retailers made your shortlist?

I believe it’s no coincidence that any given market has four major players in it. Look at supermarkets: Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons share approximately 75% of the market. Lloyds, RBS, HSBC and Barclays dominate the banking market and this is mirrored in many other sectors. 

If shoppers are shortlisting four retailers then three stand to lose out on the final sale. With cart abandonment rates averaging at 75%, this certainly seems to make sense. 

If, as a retailer, you are part of this final decision-making shortlist but miss out on the final sale, this is no bad thing. It’s actually a great achievement as you’ve already generated interest in your product from a consumer and they will likely keep you in mind for future purchases.

Broadly speaking there are three types of consumer: browsers, buyers and repeat customers. We’re interested in buyers: people actively visiting your site looking to buy a specific product or service.

They’re definitely going to make a purchase, and have the second highest conversion rate among these three consumer types. Providing you don’t do anything wrong, it might well be you that gets the sale.

Enter email marketing. Research by See Why found that 58.8% of traffic arriving at a shopping cart is driven there by email and additionally, 67.7% of conversions are attributable to this channel.

For an online retailer email is a powerful tool when used correctly.

Here are three quick tips for online retailers to consider when using email marketing:

1. Personalisation is key to customer engagement. In the US a study found that 81% of customers said that receiving emails personalised based on their preferences and shopping behaviours would make them more likely to make additional purchases. More and more data is available to aid retailers in learning as much as they can about their customers, now retailers need to make sure they’re making the most of these findings.     
2. Email frequency can directly affect customer attitudes towards a retailer. As a consumer, being bombarded by emails would make me less likely to open them, let alone make more purchases. Industry standard currently stands at 2-3 emails a week, any more and you risk annoying your customers, any less and you risk being forgotten about.
3. Make sure that your primary call to action is clear and prominently placed within the email. Don’t let it get lost under a flurry of product images – it should be front and centre, with a clear explanation of why the customer should take that action.

It’s not an exact science of course and there are lots of factors that can affect abandonment, from average basket value to the sector you retail in. For example, the travel sector experiences abandonment rates of up to 95%. 

But by ensuring your customers are reassured and well informed at each of the ‘danger’ points, you can expect to see an increase in conversion rates. You might even start to see high abandonment rates as an opportunity.

Free white paper! Free webinar! Free eBook!

We’ve all seen the promotional emails, banner ads and Tweets. It’s Free! It’s Free!

The fine print: we will send you weekly emails with more content you didn’t ask for. We will also give your information to our green sales team and tell them to go close the deal now Now NOW as part of our commitment to make it as easy as possible for you to buy.

In B2B marketing and many high-ticket B2C categories, this is the way content marketing often works today. Everything drives towards that initial information exchange, the transaction where you give up your information in exchange for the carrot the marketer offered.

Transactional Content Marketing

White papers and webcasts are transactional. So are books. You give me this and I’ll give you this back.

The result isn’t the content marketing you hear preached from the content marketing pulpits. Instead, it is a gateway to the same interruptive marketing tactics we’ve been using for years.

A couple of years ago I requested a quote for a car through the manufacturer’s website. Suddenly, I was in their database, or more accurately, multiple databases. But I didn’t want the barrage of emails and phone calls. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to unsubscribe from all the lists I had been added to, I finally resorted to using the spam button. Make it stop!

This was a perfect example of transactional content marketing. I wanted a data point (a quote, if I recall) and gave my information. That was the transaction, and I would have been happy to end it right there.

The Alternative: A Continuing Relationship

Continuing relationships aren’t about a single transaction or piece of content. They aren’t about one single event. Instead you offer up your existing content as evidence of the value of what you provide. Common examples include:

• A newsletter is a classic relationship. Or at least it is the few times the recipient specifically requested it.
• A blog subscription is another classic relationship.
• Following someone on social media also sparks a continuing relationship (although it may initially be a pretty weak one).

Why does it depend so much on what your audience does? Because in this relationship, your audience wears the pants.

Establishing the relationship requires showing consistent value so they will want to hear from you again.

It Is Time For A Relationship Mindset

Do you want a database of sometimes reluctant members, or an audience that wants to hear from you?

It is an easy question to answer, yet many B2B marketers continue to focus their efforts on building a bigger database of people who just want to find a way to make the emails and phone calls stop.

What keeps you focused on transactions in your content marketing and when will you be ready to make the change?

Photo Credit: Steve Snodgrass via Flickr cc

Are you looking for a systematic way for your sales team to generate qualified leads using social media? If so, you are not alone.

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of receiving an email from a guy named Doug, who’d read one of the most popular articles I’ve ever written.

Here’s what Doug wrote to me:

Hi Trent, and thank you for accepting my invitation.

How can you help? OMG, do you have a comfortable chair?

It may be best in a phone call. In brief, we are not on the same page (people at my own company) when it comes to social media.

When we push too many emails to the sales force and determine few even open the information, our solution is to send the information next day air because the emails are not being read. My bet is soon they will not open the next day air letters so we will change to carrier pigeons. Um, what about sending more valuable content? Nah, that can’t be it.

Our social media content does not get enough views so now they want to change the time of day to a optimal time. Argh! How about we send valuable content?

Your article was like a breath of fresh air, validation for what I have been saying.

I need to see how I can incorporate you, or your company, into a presentation.

I need to be upfront. At this time, the company is committed to another, outsourced social media company. In my opinion, our efforts have not been very social.

Call me when it works for you Trent.

The Solution to Doug’s Problem

Doug has the same problem that I, and every other sales guy has: how to make connections with qualified prospects in a way that doesn’t annoy the hell out of them.

In the rest of this post, I’m going to walk you through an ultra detailed LinkedIn prospecting plan that we have developed for our own sales team.

Ready?

Build a List of Qualified Suspects

The first step, and this requires a LinkedIn ‘Sales Executive’ premium account (costs $99/mo), is to build a list of suspects according to whatever criteria you choose.

One you are happy with the criteria, save the list and set it to send you daily updates. That way, whenever someone on LinkedIn meets your criteria, they will be automatically added to the list.

This is done is two steps.

Step 1: Build a List of Leads

This first step will allow you to quickly see how many companies match your criteria. As you are going to be doing personal outreach, I would suggest you keep your list to about 100 people at first.

Step 2: Refine Your List

Once you have created the first list, you can now refine it in a number of ways. As you can see below, I have chosen to narrow this list to just people who are currently a CMO. Further down on the left (not shown in the screenshot, I can select additional search criteria.

As I said before, you are going to need a premium account to access the additional search criteria…plus without the premium account, you won’t be able to see the full name of each person, which, as you are going to see later in this post, is super important.

At this point, you ‘could’ start making connection requests, and if you think that is a good idea, please be sure and read this post before you do it!

Did you read the post? P-L-E-A-S-E don’t do what the idiots I wrote about in that post do. It’s just bad form.

How to Establish a Meaningful Connection

If you want to build meaningful relationships with your suspects, it’s going to take some time to do. There are definitely some things you can do to save time; however.

First, YOU want to be the one who handles all the interactions. What I’m about to describe is not something you should outsource to a virtual assistant (VA) in the Philippines. (I cover what you can use a VA for later in the post).

Once you have determined that you actually want to connect with a person (by looking at their profile), there are a few things that will help you to make a good first impression.

Thing #1: Look at which LinkedIn groups they are a part of. You can see this list of groups down towards the bottom of their personal profile. Once you know which groups they are a part of, you can join these same groups and join in on the discussion.

Joining in on this discussion ‘might’ make you known to them. It also ‘might’ make you known to other potential prospects, too! Do NOT join a group and just start pasting links to your blog. LinkedIn is really cracking down on this. Plus, people will ignore you if the group admin hasn’t already blocked you, that is.

If you can find a thread started by this person, or someone else, and you have something to add, do so. And, after you have made an intelligent comment, it is OK to share a link (in your comment) to one of your blog posts.

A LinkedIn Tip!

The other thing you can do when you are in a group with someone is email them using LinkedIn and you do not have to have a premium account to do this.

If you are going to email someone, I suggest you do one of the following:

• Ask their opinion on a piece of your content
• Share content that you think will help them with a problem you KNOW they have
• Share a case study for a company that you have worked with that is similar to their company

Thing #2: Most people who are active on LinkedIn will have a link to their website and their twitter profile. If they have a twitter account, why not follow them and re-tweet some of their content? If they have a blog, I suggest you share some of their content a few times (make sure you mention them in your tweet so they know you did this).

Once you have done this a few times, it’s perfectly acceptable to send them a connection request and then when/if they accept, there is nothing wrong with saying, “thanks for accepting my request. Our company helps our clients solve X problem. If it makes sense for us to talk, what does your calendar look like?”

Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn Groups

The worst thing you can do is join the wrong group. If you are selling marketing services, chances are the groups that are focused on content marketing, etc…are all populated by other people selling marketing services…which isn’t going to do you any good at all.

You need to find out where your target audience hangs out, and the best way to do that is to look at your list of suspects and see which groups they are a part of.

So, with that said….The next worst thing you can do is to join a group and then immediately start sharing a series of self-promotional blog post links.

I have ‘tested’ this and can assure you it is a complete waste of time. (yes, I was once a Linked-Idiot, too)

Once you join a new group, reach out to the group admin and ask, “what would you like to see more of in your group?”.

Do you think they might like to hear that from a new member? You bet they would.

Taking this approach will put you in their good books, and then, over time, they will likely let you share a good deal of your content in their group.

Once you are in the group, spend at least one week just reading and commenting on other people’s threads. During this time, you should also be making connection request and sending emails as I explained above.

The connections you make in a LinkedIn group not only expand your network, they enhance your authority and bring in new leads. Social Media Examiner

How much time should you spend on this? As much as you have! If you aren’t prospecting, what else are you doing to bring in business?

How to Save Time By Combining the Power of LinkedIn and Cold Email

For some of you, what I have just explained might be too much work, given the lifetime value of a client. If every client is worth $100K, great, but what if they are only worth $5K?

If that is the case, there is another approach that you can use instead of (or in addition to) the approach above.

I learned the approach I’m about to explain via a course on Mixergy (Mixergy has a LOT of awesome courses and it’s only $25/mo).

What I’m about to share with you is how I’m applying it to my business, and the wording of the emails I am going to share below will not be right for you.

With this approach, you start off with the same list of 100 companies that you think would be ideal customers.

Step 1: Identify the Key People

Remember how I said you were going to need to know the last names of all the people on LinkedIn? I’m about to explain why.

With this approach, you are going to email the person you think is likely to be the decision maker, the influencer, their boss, and their boss’s boss. So, if you happen to sell marketing services like I do, you are going to want to simultaneously email the marketing manager, the VP of Sales, the CMO, and the COO (or something like that).

Without LinkedIn premium, finding all these people will be a huge pain in the butt. With a premium account, it’s a piece of cake.

For example, it took me all of 10 seconds to determine that the key players at Rigid Industries were Dave Davis, Taylor Anderson, Jason Christiansen, and maybe Jim Heckman.

Once you know the names, getting the email addresses is also pretty darn easy.

How To Guess Anyone’s Email Address

Watch the video below to see how it’s done.

The important things you’ll need for running through this process:

• A Gmail account, if you don’t have one already
• The Rapportive plugin from Rapportive.com to get rich contact information inside Gmail
• The Google Doc spreadsheet at bit.ly/name2email

How to Craft a Compelling Email

In the Mixergy course I told you about before, you will learn how to figure out what to say in your email. For me, here’s what the email currently looks like.

Subject line: Appropriate person

I am writing in hopes of finding the appropriate person who handles online marketing. I also wrote Person x, Person y, and Person z in that pursuit. If it makes sense to talk, let me know how your calendar looks?

Groove Digital Marketing helps increase the revenue of {insert your target industry here} companies by using Inbound Marketing. Each month, we help our clients publish content that answers the questions their prospects are asking before they buy. Every blog post gives the reader a chance to download a piece of premium content by entering their contact information. The benefit to website visitors is they get helpful information. The benefit for our clients is they can increase website traffic and capture more qualified sales leads. Typical conversions are 1-3% of total website traffic. We provide our clients with detailed analytics so they can measure exactly which inbound marketing campaigns are providing the most qualified leads.

If you are the appropriate person to speak with, what does your calendar look like? If not, who do you recommend that I talk to?

Thanks,
Trent Dyrsmid
Director of Business Development
Groove Digital Marketing

To make this work, you must send the email above to each one of the key decision makers and name the others in it. Do NOT send just one email and cc everyone. That won’t work because everyone on the recipient list will just assume one of the other people is going to reply.

After you’ve sent this email, wait a few days and send them a reminder. If you still don’t hear anything back, wait another week and send this:

Subject: Permission to close your file

Name,

I’m writing to follow up on an email I sent two weeks ago. I just met with my business partner. We are in the process of closing files for the quarter. Typically, when I haven’t heard back from a customer after a few months, it means they are really busy or aren’t interested. If you aren’t interested, do I have permission to close your file?

If you are still interested, what do you recommend as the next step?

Thanks for your help.

Trent Dyrsmid
Director of Business Development
Groove Digital Marketing

Sound like a lot of work? It is, and because this part of the interaction is pretty straight forward, this is not work that YOU should be using your time to do.

Here’s What You Can Outsource

Earlier in this post, I promised you that there was a part of this prospecting that you could outsource to your virtual assistant.

The only parts that I would have them do for you are the following:

1. Find the key players for each of your chosen 100 companies using your LinkedIn account
2. Build a spreadsheet that lists the names and emails for all the key players for every company you are targeting
3. Send the email template I’m about to share from your gmail account

If you don’t want to give them access to your own account, set up a new account for them and then, using the setting in gmail, allow that account to “send from” your account. That way, the from address will be the email that you use, but your virtual assistant will not have access to your inbox.

Final Thoughts

What I have outlined for you today is a LinkedIn prospecting strategy that leverages social media. This is not about getting likes or followers. This approach is intended to start conversations with qualified prospects.

While this will work as a stand alone activity (just as cold calling did back in the day), it will work a LOT better if you have a well optimized LinkedIn presence (see mine for an example) and you are actively creating content on your blog that will be of interest to the people you are reaching out to.

In today’s world, people want to know who YOU are and what YOU are about before they invest any time talking to you. If you are active on social media and blogging regularly, you are making it pretty easy for them to see that you are a thought leader.

If you aren’t, well…um….why not? Don’t you have anything to say?

If you are wondering what to write about, I’ve got some advice for you on that, too.

A.M. Ahad/AP

Just over a year ago, the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh posed a wake-up call to retailers and manufacturers to strengthen accountability for what happens in their supply chains. For consumer-facing industries like apparel and tech hardware, lengthy supply chains, including countless sub-contractors, pose challenges to effective company oversight. While no company supplied by the Rana Plaza explicitly controlled its working environment, they collectively shared responsibility for the safety conditions within their factories by virtue of their considerable influence over suppliers.

In the past year, a handful of retailers and manufacturers have emerged as leaders by meaningfully addressing their supply-chain risks; however, the root causes of supply-chain violations are not being sufficiently addressed. Company pressures to keep costs low and production volumes high come at the expense of supply-chain workers’ well-being. To attract repeat buyers, suppliers are driven to prove their worth by meeting unrealistically tight deadlines through overtime hours and the use of unauthorized subcontractors. Low wages and substandard working conditions, supported by a lax regulatory environment, keep production costs low.

See more from our special feature on Canada’s top 50 socially responsible corporations:

• Top 50 socially responsible corporations: 2014: For these companies, corporate social responsibility is central to the way they do business

• Unloading on fossil fuels: Universities and other institutions are taking steps to rid their investment portfolios of companies that contribute to climate change

In this context Bangladesh positioned itself as a garment-manufacturing hub, employing close to four million workers and accounting for about 80 per cent of the country’s exports. Yet, according to Bangladeshi authorities, 25 per cent of the 232 factories inspected in 2012 were deemed unsafe. Moreover, before the Rana Plaza disaster, only two companies had signed onto the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which now has over 150 signatories, including Loblaw, Inditex and Adidas. The accord, mandating safety inspections and related disclosure, has been touted as the catalyst to putting the safety and structural integrity of Bangladeshi factories on the supply-chain map.

But what about neighbouring garment hubs like Vietnam and Cambodia with comparatively low wages and a high rate of health and safety incidents? Will it take another crisis like the Rana Plaza disaster to uncover widespread supply-chain risks there and prompt related company action?

Shifting to the tech hardware supply chain in China the picture isn’t much different. Whenever Apple releases a new version of its iPhone, peak sales and a backlog of orders take their toll on supply-chain workers. At the company’s largest supplier, Foxconn, at least two dozen worker suicide attempts have occurred since 2010 in response to unreasonable production demands, alongside ongoing labour unrest. In a move to improve transparency and oversight of its supply chain, and to end the labour unrest at the Foxconn facilities, Apple engaged with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to inspect and monitor three Foxconn facilities. The FLA works to solve abusive labour practices by providing tools, resources and training to factory workers and management, conducting independent assessments of factories, and pushing companies to take greater accountability for their supply chains.

Recognizing that shared problems necessitate shared responsibility, many companies are leveraging collaborative approaches to address the challenges within their supply chains. One of the most extensive supply chain collaborations is the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC), a group made up of global electronics companies that are sharing tools and approaches to improve the environmental and social impact of the electronics supply chain. Many companies on this year’s top 50 list are members of the EICC, including Best Buy, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Philips, and Sony. IBM applies the EICC code of conduct across its entire supplier base, setting minimum social responsibility standards as a condition for doing business with the company.

Within the auto industry, social supply-chain challenges are gaining attention as well. Through the Automotive Industry Action Group, companies such as Ford are able to identify industry-specific supply-chain challenges and explore underlying root causes. Similarly, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, whose members include Adidas, H&M, Inditex, and Nike, are developing tools to reduce the environmental and social impacts of footwear and apparel products, while also bettering the lives of the people and communities that are involved in production of such products.

With the proliferation of social media, disasters such as the Rana Plaza factory collapse and Foxconn suicides are widely known and the companies linked to such tragedies quickly become publicly “named and shamed.” Reputations that take years to build can be eroded in a matter of minutes. At the operational level, companies’ abilities to meet production demands are jeopardized, while losses are incurred through factory closures, strikes and productivity declines. Consumer facing companies simply cannot afford to overlook supply chain risks or address systemic root causes alone. Shared challenges warrant shared solutions.

Heather Lang is the director of institutional relations for Sustainalytics in Canada and Jennifer Penikett is an associate analyst responsible for analyzing companies in the consumer staples sector.

The post Risk and reputation appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Have you ever played the game “nose goes”? It’s where you’re with a group of people and there’s an activity that needs to get done for the group’s collective benefit, like getting up to find the remote so you can all watch Game of Thrones or running out to the store for more beer to keep the party going. Every person quickly touches their nose, and the last person to do it loses and has to go do the task. Deciding who in an organization is going to own the sales operations function is the opposite of that game. Everybody wants to do it, and because sales ops supports so many other business functions, it’s difficult to decide which org structure is best. 

This is with good reason – arguably, sales operations houses the most valuable data in an organization as it’s the hub where all lead, sales, and customer activity is collated into meaningful insights and analytics that are sent to mobile workers and key decision-makers throughout your company. The name can be a bit deceiving, because while sales ops is tasked with supporting sales organizations in particular, many other business units throughout a company benefit from the insights they provide. 

Finance

Who sales operations reports into depends on what its role in the organization is. If the primary role of sales ops is to provide analysis, some companies will have the department report to Finance, although this situation is uncommon. 

Pro: This makes sales ops independent from both marketing and sales so they don’t have to pick and choose between each organization’s initiatives.  

Con: Sales ops might be less focused on supporting the sales team with leads and mobile analytics. 

Marketing

Sales ops and marketing should work hand in hand to generate and distribute quality leads to field and inside sales teams, but does this mean marketing should own sales ops completely? 

Pro: Uniting sales ops and marketing formally can lead to a more harmonious and effective lead generation program

Con: Marketing can be disconnected from the reality of the sales process, so they might inadvertently limit the support that sales teams need from their operations counterparts.  

Sales

Sales operations is undeniably intertwined with sales and responsible for providing sales teams with extensive support, whether that means managing data and helping Sales VPs choose which metrics to use or which analytics to give their mobile teams, providing sales teams with mobile dashboards, maintaing the CRM system, lead management, or pricing and contract support. But making sales ops report directly to sales in your org structure can also lead to other unforeseen consequences. 

Pro: Sales is supported from every aspect. 

Con: Sales leaders can often be focused on short term results, like making next quarter’s quota, but sales ops needs to use the data and insights they glean from it to advise on long term strategy and goals.

Management

Many organizations choose to avoid the battle between sales and marketing completely by having sales ops report directly to management. 

Pro: Sales ops remains independent from both marketing and sales and give better insight into what’s best for the company as a whole. 

Con: In this scenario, sales ops bears the risk of functioning only to provide management with specific metrics while failing to provide the day to day support other departments may need. 

As a Standalone Department

In my opinion, this scenario combines the best of both worlds. It forces sales ops to be more objective and work with multiple internal groups (sales, marketing, finance, management, etc), while also empowering sales ops to focus on their own critical initiatives and goals. 

Pro: Promotes the sales operations department as an objective influence, providing insight and support across the entire company

Con: Sales ops is less intertwined the sales teams. 

Who does sales operations report to in your company? What do you think is the best organizational structure? 

Let us know in the comments below. 

To learn what metrics are most important for sales ops to be tracking, download our eBook today.

Post originally published at www.blog.roambi.com

What is one thing most entrepreneurs do not understand about sales?

1. You Are Not Your Customer

Only a very small percentage of entrepreneurs are the target customer for their own product. Too many companies use the language of tech startups when they should be learning the language of their target market.
- John Rood, Next Step Test Preparation

2. Questions Are Valuable

When I started out, I would spend 80 percent of meetings telling clients about my business and how it could help them. I developed a few relationships, but many slipped through the cracks. I read a great book called Spin Selling, and since then spend 18 percent of meetings asking questions, 80 percent listening to answers and 2 percent telling people how my company can solve their specific problems.
- Mark Krassner, Knee Walker Central

3. You Sell Differently Than Sales Reps

As an entrepreneur, you have a true passion for your company and a solid understanding of how it can help your customer. Hired sales people won’t have your same passion or understanding. Building a sales process where anyone can make the sale will make hiring sales people more effective. It’s about finding people who can follow a repeatable sales process. But that process has to start with you.
- Mark Cenicola, BannerView.com

4. You Have to Sell

Sales are the foundation of any company, whether B2B or B2C. In order to make money, you can’t just have a cool product and expect to get inbound leads. Perhaps that may work for a lucky few, but most need to hit the ground running and make outbound sales to be successful and take the next steps.
- Bryan Silverman, InStall Media

5. Sales Is a Business Partnership

No matter what business you’re in, you are a salesperson. So own it. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling your own products and services or selling yourself to your team, everything relates to sales. Yet, when you start “selling” to a customer instead of working with and helping them, you won’t win. Great salespeople win by serving as business partners, first.
- Marjorie Adams, AQB

6. You Need to Understand Gross Margin and Cash Flow

There are two important things to understand: gross margin on sales and cash flow. Some sales have a high margin, such as banner advertising, since you don’t need to consider the cost of goods sold. In terms of cash flow, you should aim to get paid in 30-45 days. Anything longer than that and it’s simply too difficult to operate your business off of these slow receivables.
- Luke Skurman, Niche.com

7. Sales Can Take a Long Time

You may need to start today to close sales seven to 12 months down the road. In the meantime, build a relationship with your prospects — get to know their budget cycles, where and how they spend now and how you can help them. That way you will be in the best position to close the deal when the client is ready to buy.
- Marcos Cordero, GradSave, LLC

8. You Can Also Be Sold To

Entrepreneurs who are not versed in sales can fall into the trap of being sold to by their own sales team. It is important for entrepreneurs to understand how to set realistic sales goals and look for sales trends alongside their sales team. If you don’t establish these metrics and goals, your sales team may end up selling you a lot of excuses or speculation of why deals are not happening.
- Phil Chen, Systems Watch

9. Sales Requires a Lot of Effort

Most entrepreneurs, particularly those who have never started a company from scratch before, don’t understand the amount of effort and organization it takes to build a real sales engine. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs are good at one aspect of the sales engine. But very few are good at pulling all of the aspects of sales together into one finely tuned machine that continually delivers leads.
- Janis Krums, OPPRTUNITY

10. All Customers Are Not Created Equal

Every sale is not the same. When building a company, it is important to align oneself with the right partners in every avenue, including customers. If a would-be client is difficult to deal with or requires a lot of bandwidth during negotiations, he/she won’t be any easier to deal with after the signature is on the dotted line. Every entrepreneur has a limited bandwidth; focus yours on good people
- Brittany Hodak, ZinePak

11. You Can’t Do All of Sales Yourself

Many entrepreneurs typically generate their company’s first round of sales. As they begin to grow, they are not able to do all the sales moving forward. Realizing when this time has come and hiring rockstar sales people is key. Be sure to record and document all of your systems for winning sales as well as expected sales metrics and ratios that will constitute success for your coming sales team.
- Matt Shoup, MattShoup.com

Everything you do – from the methods you use and the time you spend prospecting to the service you provide potential and existing customers to the way you track your activity – determines how large and accurate your forecast is. Which means there’s a lot of room for error and mistakes that can lead to a poor showing and missed quota at the end of your quarter. In the infographic below, you’ll see some of the most glaring inefficiencies in today’s sales organizations, as well as gain some insight into constantly changing customer buying habits. Sales managers and sales reps alike will need to work hard and train better in order to combat some of these trends.

Quick Tips to Create Better Sales Behavior

Sales Managers

• Implement a Sales Process: One of my sources for this infographic, The Tas Group, also found that only 50 percent of sales reps have a good sales playbook or sales process in place. It’s up to you to map out an effective sales roadmap and train your team to follow it, so they don’t waste valuable hours chasing immaterial deals or unqualified prospects.
• Give Your Team the Best Tools: Often sales reps have innaccurate pipeline forecasts because they aren’t tracking activity correctly or they have trouble understanding their data. Provide your reps with the right mobile tools, including mobile dashboards and analytics, so they can report and review accurate numbers wherever they are.
• Serve Your Current Customers: Most sales organizations spend much more money targeting new customers while allowing existing customers to leave for competing products. Don’t forget the 80/20 rule and make excellent customer service (even after the deal is done) a core principal of your sales culture. This eBook details exactly how you can improve your customer service strategy.

Sales Reps

• Prospect Smarter: What I mean by that is to spend time where your prospects spend it and reach them on that medium. So if your prospects are on LinkedIn and Twitter, it might be easier to get their attention on these mediums vs eight cold calls over the course of a week. While excellent prospecting will take up your time and provide you with leads that are more like to be qualified, it’s important to remember that the more facetime you get with prospects the more likely you are to close a deal. So prospect more smartly and you’ll have better qualified leads and more time to interact with them.
• Get to Know Your Customers: One of the biggest problems sales people have today is understanding their customer’s problems. Instead of pitching your product, really take some time to listen to the issues they face. Then you’ll be able to guide them to a solution that best fits their needs, and you’ll be seen as an expert in the process.
• Improve Your Lead Qualification: It’s easy to weed out leads are very obviously never going to buy – what’s more difficult is saying goodbye to the leads who make empyt commitments and string you a long. Learn how to spot these and move from them quickly so you have more time and energy to pursue prospects that will actually purchase.

Having more data to understand your sales activity and customer behavior will help you overcome these common hurdles. Learn you can drive every sales with real data by downloading our eBook below.

Originally published at www.blog.roambi.com

Last week on the B2B Roundtable blog, SunGuard Availability Services had its B2B marketing campaign featured for doing what’s normally unconventional in the industry: pop culture references.

This wouldn’t be the first story of its kind and it wouldn’t be the last. Generating sales leads has become as much of an online media activity as gaming, celeb news, and internet memes. This mix of big business and consumer culture was inevitable (as SunGuard easily showed).

The only cause for friction is the fear of not doing it right.

Can you do pop culture right?

It’s only natural to resist the idea of using something like zombies or elves just to boost the eyeballs on your campaign. After all, it sounds too much like a parent trying to be like their teenagers.

And yet, some kids idolize their super-cool parents for being better at a hobby than they are.

The truth is there’s really no solid formula for playing with pop culture references. You just really need to open your mind and don’t be desperate about it.

• Step 1: Be a junkie (or hire one) – Do you like watching movies? Reading books? What about music? See, any of those (and more) can be your gateway to pop culture. And in the occasion, that you’re just not into anything past 1955, why not look to anyone in your work force who is? Having a source of genre-savvy with stock knowledge on popular clichés, genres, and tropes is good enough for a first step.

• Step 2: Make your business part of a genre – A zombie apocalypse isn’t the only fictional setting you can put your business in. You could get similar results with giant monster attacks or alien invasions. It’s not just action scenarios either. If you’re looking for janitorial sales leads for instance, cartoons and sitcoms are never short of funny ideas that feature janitors and other cleaning staff.

• Step 3: Know your role – If you want it to come as fun but still as realistic as possible, just don’t forget what your business is all about. For instance, some problems that seem straight out of science fiction or even fantasy could be easily solved with your products/services. (Professor X’s Cerebro is definitely reminiscent of today’s big data technologies).

Again, there’s no solid formula. These steps are just a rough idea of what it means to play with pop culture references in any part of your B2B marketing campaign. The best way to really learn it is if to try it yourself!

Why isn’t Anyone Subscribing to My Website?

One problem that I am asked about over and over is, “How can I get new subscribers to opt-in on my website?”

Website traffic is the mainstay of the Internet. Without visitors your website falls flat. Yet without targeted traffic – people who want what you have to offer; and, a strong call to action which your visitors are interested in receiving, then that traffic you worked so hard to get has just left the building (your website), probably never to be seen again.  With an increase in traffic AND conversion into your list, your brand or business can reach more potential people consistently which can be converted into sales over time.

In Internet Marketing terms, we say, “The money is in the list.”  But how do you build that list?

Above all else, you need a strategy.  Without one, you are flying blind with your website promotion and the chances of building a list are slim.

Here are 7 ways to increase your subscribe rate and build an email list from your website:

1.Your website is your home base

Choosing the right domain is one of the most important things to start with in order to help your online brand succeed. Think of it as an advertisement to attract leads. When your domain name is your name, or your business name, or your product name – then the chances become higher of attracting your target market.  Your focus in any effort to grow your list should be on getting more targeted and quality subscribers that are a good match for your business versus just increasing your subscriber number with dead-weight non-interested email addresses. I’ll take 50 quality subscribers over 500 uninterested ones any day of the week.  So make sure your website name and content is a ‘message match’ that people will respond to accordingly.

On your website, you need an ‘optin’ or link that is prominently displayed.  Believe it or not, the biggest goal you should have with your website is to capture your visitor’s email, so don’t bury it beneath the fold (what appears in your display without scrolling).  Just because you have a mailing list doesn’t mean that people will automatically subscribe. Don’t just stick a form in your sidebar and hope that people will give you their details – sell it. Mention it in posts, develop landing pages, talk about it in your guest posts. You need to let people know what’s going on. Include your offer often to remind them of what they are missing if they haven’t yet subscribed.

2. Use social media as a feeder

It’s important to be set up an active on the major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and YouTube. Make sure all of your accounts are consistent with your brand and website, and you will want to actively post and tweet at least five days a week. But it is not enough to just share information. You will need to engage in conversation, and even ask questions of our community to build trust and credibility.  Focus on how to be social, not on how to do social media.  Network in the same way you would in person, only do it online.

Does your business have videos or slides to share? When you create a YouTube channel and post valuable and engaging content, your website will attract even more subscribers and potential leads.  With YouTube including a subscriber option on your channel, it’s one more way to stay in touch with your market.

3. A strong call to action

This requires knowing what your target market deeply desires, and how to best meet those needs.

Offer a free report packed full of value if you’re a service provider and both e-books and courses work extremely well. If you sell products, consider a welcome discount for signing up.  If you can give them something good you’ll make an instant fan who will want to receive your emails and additional information from you.  Give them something weak, and you’ve branded yourself as

No longer can you put ‘Subscribe to my Newsletter’ and expect for anyone to give up their email for such a weak request.

4. Use a Landing Page

A landing page, name capture page, launch page, squeeze page or registration page is a way to highlight one particular product, service, event or opportunity designed to sell a product, service or to simply collect leads.  These targeted pages guide your visitor though the benefits of why they want to subscribe and what they will receive in return.  There are third party programs that can make adding these to your website easier than starting from scratch.  Here is a recent tutorial I created via a blog post:  Better Website Conversions with Landing Pages.

5. Subscribe via comment box

Increasing the number of conversions is all about reducing the number of steps between the visitor and your desired action. If your visitor is already entering their email address somewhere like in a comment box, it only makes sense that adding a check mark to also subscribe to your newsletter would increase conversions.  What other places can you add an optin?

6. Garner article placement on other online properties in your niche

Connect with and find other websites and start engaging there. Make sure these have a strong following, and are active. After a few months you can reach out to these websites and offer your quality content, which can link directly back to your website.

7. Don’t be afraid to be different

In fact, it’s necessary to be unique. Being different is the most important thing you can do online. If you have a unique approach or languaging to an otherwise common or boring topic, it is a surefire way to make your brand stand out from the crowd.

When attracting new subscribers to your website remember that persistence and consistency is the key to success. Give the process time and effort, as the more you put into these efforts the more your brand or business will benefit.  Be willing to do split testing with multiple opt-in offers and you may be surprised at which one pulls more people into your list.  If something isn’t working, even if you’ve given it a lot of time and effort, it’s sometimes better give it another go and try another offer.

These online marketing tips have the potential to bring more exposure for you and your business when done correctly, and can open the door to more connections and influence in your niche.

Do leadership styles differ around the world? This is one of the questions explored by our recent International Business Report. We asked 3,400 business leaders working in 45 economies to tell us how important they believe certain attributes are to good leadership.

Patterns in their responses point to some intriguing cultural differences. While the top traits – integrity, communication, and a positive attitude – are almost universally agreed upon by respondents (and confidence and the ability to inspire also rank high globally) not everyone is aligned on the importance of two other traits: creativity and intuition.

Nine in ten ASEAN leaders believe creativity is important, compared with just 57% in the EU; while 85% of ASEAN leaders think intuition is important, compared to only 54% in the EU. More generally, we find greater proportions of respondents in emerging markets falling into the leadership camp we would call “modernist.” They put more emphasis on intuition and creativity and also place greater value on coaching than leaders who are “traditionalists.”

This is an intriguing discovery, but it immediately raises a follow-on question. It’s conceivable that our survey captured a gap that still exists for now but is shrinking, as globalization brings a certain sameness to businesses around the world. Will we see a steady convergence in leadership – and toward the Western style – as developing economies mature?

Many believe so. As one example, Harvard Business School’s Quinn Mills has made this prediction: “As Asian companies rely more on professional employees of all sorts, and as professional services become more important in Asian economies … Asian leadership will come to more resemble that of the West.”

I’m not so sure. Given the superior growth rates of their economies, it might be that leaders in emerging markets are gaining the confidence to stick with the management approaches that have apparently been working for them – or that they have the agility to adapt to whatever techniques and tone prove best suited to their fast-evolving local markets. A separate Grant Thornton study on Chinese leadership finds that chairmen of companies there are deliberately blending imported and home-grown management techniques and approaches to create a new “Chinese Way” of leading, rather than copying and replacing.

And here is the really big factor in play as leadership styles continue to evolve: Women still have far to come as business leaders. Today, just 24% of senior business roles around the world are held by women, but the proportion of female CEOs is on the rise. Awareness is growing that diversity, of all sorts and in any walk of life, leads to better decisions and outcomes. There is now a wealth of empirical evidence proving that greater gender diversity correlates with higher sales, growth, return on invested capital, and return on equity. One recent study from China even finds that having more women on company boards reduces the incidence of fraud. Meanwhile, uniformity of background often yields uniformity of opinion and worse decisions. The pressure is on to make boardrooms and management ranks less “male and pale.”

It has often been claimed that a key way in which business women differ from business men is in their leadership styles. For example, research shows that women leaders, on average, are more democratic and participative than their male counterparts. Studies have also shown that, as investors, women are more risk-averse and, at the household level, tend to invest a higher proportion of their earnings in their families and communities than men.

Looking across the global landscape today, we find women more prevalent in the upper echelons of companies in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Perhaps it is not just coincidence that where we see more women leading, our survey finds more openness to using creativity and intuition – and also a higher value placed on the ability to delegate. In any case, these parts of the world, with their higher proportions of women in leadership, have a fair claim to be arriving sooner at the well-blended leadership style of the future.

Decision-making based on analytics is all the rage now, and certainly represents progress in many areas where managerial decisions have been made in the past on “gut feel.” But there are still many decisions in business that, either because they relate to future possibilities or because they involve trade-offs of competing values, can’t be reduced to data and calculations. One could argue that those are the very decisions – the ones requiring creativity and intuition – where leadership is most called for and tested. In a fast-moving, digitally-powered world, creativity and intuition could be the difference between gaining ground as an innovator and getting left behind.

If only it were that simple. As with most things in marketing these days, there’s much more to it than that. Yet so many marketers today refer to “nurturing” as something that happens only when a prospect doesn’t attain a certain score after one or two marketing touches instead of part of a broader Lead Management Framework℠. And that “nurture program” is merely a notion of emailing that prospect whatever one-off communications are sent to everyone else in the database – whenever everyone else receives them.

I would argue that instead, nurturing should be an ongoing two-way conversation used in order to build and maintain a relationship with your buyers. It’s not merely a score, but a way to do all of the following:

1. Establish yourself as a thought leader who understands your buyers’ struggles, wants and needs. Think of nurturing as a strategically orchestrated dialog that begins with building trust. We’d all love for 100% of our audience to receive a single email from us and immediately score as a hot lead, ready to be passed to sales.

However, the reality is that buyers today are savvy and skeptical. They require multiple touches, but not the kind of product-focused touches most marketers build today. Buyers don’t want to hear how wonderful our product is. After all, isn’t everyone’s? We must build Engage stage content that appeals to their needs and establishes our brand as a thought leader, building trust over time.

2. Gather data about your buyer….one step at a time. We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t propose marriage on a first date” by asking your prospects ten questions in your first communication or touch. Nurturing is the perfect opportunity to date your prospects and gather data gradually… before proposing marriage.

Build a progressive profiling strategy that captures the least threatening data you need first (i.e. name and email) and save the scary / heavy commitment questions like purchase time frame for later. Not only will nurturing allow you to capture the data you need for scoring, it will also allow you to tailor your content based on the answers and/or your buyers’ behavior in a well thought-out manner.

3. Keep your company/solution/product top-of-mind.  Nurturing isn’t just about prospects. Don’t close a deal and then forget about your new customers you’ve worked so hard to gain. Continue to nurture your customers, not because you’re necessarily aiming for a certain lead score this time around, but because you want to keep your brand top-of-mind. Odds are these customers will be in the market for additional solutions or products that your company offers in the near future.

Of course the flavor of communications as well as the frequency should be different for customers versus prospects. A monthly newsletter works well in this scenario.

4. Prevent non sales-ready leads from growing cold. Building what we call a “turnback” nurture program will prevent leads from falling into a black hole. A turnback strategy accounts for all the possible reasons a previously qualified lead turns out to be unqualified. It might be simply because they’re just not ready to buy. Maybe the prospect erroneously answered the progressive profiling questions. Or maybe he/she just doesn’t ever pick up the phone when a sales rep calls.

Think about all the reasons a sales rep wouldn’t want to waste their time following up on these leads and build your turnback program to do the follow-up. This can prevent the leads from becoming a total loss and often, drives real results in pipeline growth. Make sure the sales organization is clear on how to place leads into the proper turnback program once developed and establish criteria for what constitutes re-qualification. The results will be new sales-ready leads with minimum sales involvement.

When done correctly, nurturing will help Engage, Convert and retain buyers. Nurting isn’t a score, and it’s not easy to develop an effective strategy. However, when done correctly, it helps build a perpetual stream of sales-ready leads, increasing pipeline and revenue growth.

Author: Jennifer Harmel @JenniferHarmel2 Vice President, Strategy, ANNUITAS.