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• Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel weeks of the year.
• According to The Washington Post, the TSA is projecting that a record-high 27 million passengers will pass through US airports around the holiday.
• The mathematician Jordan Ellenberg described a quantitative way to approach the question of when to get to the airport in his book "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking."
• The key is to estimate your expected utility, based on balancing the cost of spending a lot of time waiting at the airport and the cost of possibly missing your flight.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel weeks of the year, and millions of Americans are getting on planes to visit friends and family across the country.

According to The Washington Post's Natalie B. Compton, the TSA is projecting that a record-high 27 million passengers will pass through US airports between November 22 and December 2. 

One of the most stressful parts of air travel is figuring out when to get to the airport. Show up too early, and you could end up wasting a ton of time sitting around a large, crowded, unpleasant room. Show up too late, and you could miss your flight and mess up your entire travel plan.

Fortunately, it turns out there's a quantitative approach to figuring out when to arrive at the airport, based on your values and preferences.

Math, once again, is the answer. Or at least it can guide us to it.

What's the best time to get to the airport for you?

In short: It depends on how much you hate waiting around versus how willing you are to risk missing your flight. However, if you've never missed a flight, you're probably showing up too early.

University of Wisconsin mathematician Jordan Ellenberg explores this problem and many others in his book "How Not To Be Wrong: The Power Of Mathematical Thinking," a collection of fascinating examples of math and its surprising applications.

According to Ellenberg, the issue comes down to expected utility. Utility is an economic concept used to analyze the costs and benefits of different goods and services for different people. The idea of utility is to try to put some kind of quantitative value on how useful something is to a particular person, giving us the ability to analyze that person's choices. It's basically, "How good this thing is for me?"

Read more: The same basic math concept behind your retirement account's growth explains why it feels like the robots are taking over

Figuring out when to go to the airport involves a trade-off: The earlier you show up, the more likely you are to make your flight. But showing up early also involves a cost in the form of time spent at the airport rather than elsewhere. This may be especially true around Thanksgiving, when the terminal is liable to get extra unpleasant. 

The idea of utility lets us try to quantify this. Say each hour at the airport costs you 10 "utils," or units of utility, and missing your flight costs 50 utils. In other words, missing your flight is about five times as annoying to you as the accumulated nuisance of spending an hour at the airport.

We also know that you're more likely to miss your flight the later you show up. Let's say that if you show up a half hour early, you have a 20% chance of missing your flight, an hour early gives a 5% chance, and two hours early leaves you just a 1% chance of missing the flight.

This lets us figure out what your expected utility loss is going to be depending on when you show up at the airport. Expected values are a useful tool for analyzing something probabilistic, giving us a kind of average value of the outcome.

Say you show up at the airport an hour early. We have two costs to compute: the utility loss from waiting at the airport, and the expected value of the utility loss from maybe missing your flight. The loss from your waiting time is just 10 utils, as we assumed above.

The expected loss from missing your flight is the probability of missing the flight times the utility loss from missing the flight. If you're at the airport an hour early, you have a 5% chance of missing the flight, and this would cost 50 utils. So, the expected loss is 5% × 50 = 2.5 utils.

Putting those together, we get a total expected utility cost of 12.5 utils from showing up an hour early.

Now, if you get to the airport two hours early, you lose 20 utils from your waiting time, but the expected loss from missing the plane is just 1% × 50 = 0.5, for a total expected loss of 20.5 utils.

This is a much worse expected loss than getting to the airport an hour early. Even though the odds of missing your flight drop quite a bit, the extra time stuck in the airport creates a cost that outweighs the benefit of those reduced odds. You're better off taking that slightly higher risk of missing your flight.

Of course, if you cut it too close, the risk of missing the flight can dominate. If you show up at the airport a half hour before your flight, you lose only 5 utils from waiting, but with a 20% chance of missing your flight, you get 20% × 50 = 10 utils of expected loss from the risk, giving a total expected loss of 15 utils, worse than showing up an hour early.

This variation among expected utility losses indicates that there is some particular airport arrival time for which the risk of missing your flight and the misery of sitting in an airport bar balance out and you minimize your expected loss.

Naturally, that exact time is going to vary from person to person, depending on each individual's preferences, which form what a mathematician would call an idiosyncratic utility function.

For example, I don't mind sitting around the airport and reading Twitter that much, but I absolutely hate missing flights, so my ideal time to arrive at the airport might be earlier than someone who despises the airport but is fine with missing the occasional plane. The calculus also naturally changes if you are looking forward to some swanky lounge or trying to avoid some terrible terminal, or if you're a member of a security-pass-through program going through an airport that makes the most of such things. Also, one should note that lines are more liable to spiral out of control during the holiday season, since more inexperienced flyers are in the mix, bringing with them what a statistician might call behavioral variability — more popularly known as not knowing what to do.

Regardless of the exact amount of risk of missing a flight a person is willing to take, that risk will always be greater than zero. So, at your ideal, utility-maximizing time, if you take enough flights, you should miss one sooner or later. If you haven't ever missed a plane, then you're likely not arriving at your ideal time. Probability and its sibling, risk, are unavoidable parts of travel.

As the economist George Sigler put it, as quoted in the book by Ellenberg, "If you never miss the plane, you're spending too much time at airports."

This type of expected utility analysis is a foundational idea in economics. Many models are based on the idea of a person trying to maximize their utility.

"How Not To Be Wrong" is full of interesting and weird mathematical tools and observations, and if you liked this post, you should check it out.

[via News.com.au]

• Read more:
• The number of solutions you could fit into your weekend Sudoku is mind-boggling
• The beautifully simple method Archimedes used to find the first digits of pi
• Any Rubik's Cube can be solved in 20 moves, but it took over 30 years for anyone to figure that out
• Fractals are math's trippiest concept, and they get even weirder when used to solve a puzzle involving the British coast

Join the conversation about this story »

Just about anything author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell has to say is interesting, even if you disagree with him.

He went on Reddit on Monday for an Ask Me Anything session to answer users' questions, respond to critics, and offer insight into the way he thinks.

Here's a look at the highlights:

On the "10,000 Rule," which, as defined in "Outliers," states that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve mastery:

"It doesn't apply to sports. And practice isn't a SUFFICIENT condition for success. I could play chess for 100 years and I'll never be a grandmaster. The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest."

On his appearance on Glenn Beck's show:

"I don't agree with a lot of what he says. But i was curious to meet him... We actually had a great conversation. Unlike most of the people who interviewed me for David and Goliath, he had read the whole book and thought about it a lot. My lesson from the experience: If you never leave the small comfortable ideological circle that you belong to, you'll never develop as a human being."

On humanity's worst common trait:

"I do not understand the impulse that many people have of looking first for what they DISAGREE with in another person or idea, instead of looking first for what they might learn from."

On degrees from elite universities:

"People going to college and in college vastly over-estimate the brand value of their educational institution. When I hire assistants, I don't even ask them where they went to school. Who cares? By the time you're twenty-five or thirty, does it matter anymore?"

On accusations of being a "pseudo scientist":

"...I think it is important for me to stress that I'm not a scientist. I don't write for academic journals. I'm a journalist who uses ideas and findings from scientists to try and get people to look at the world a little differently. That's a very different kind of intellectual enterprise that the writing that is done for academia."

On Steve Jobs and entrepreneurs:

"[I]n order to make something new and innovative in the world you need to be the kind of person who doesn't care about what your peers think. Why? Because most of the greatest ideas are usually denounced by most of us as crazy in the beginning. Steve Jobs was a classic disagreeable entrepreneur. That makes him a difficult human being to be around. But were he not difficult, he would never have accomplished an iota of what he did!"

On privilege:

"If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree. And so on. Those kind of examples suggest that 'categories' of privilege aren't all that useful. Is it better to be black or white, male or female, rich or poor? Well, it depends on where you live and who you are and what you want to do.

"If you want to be President of the United States or the CEO of a company, its probably not a good idea to be female. But it is if you want to be a college professor. It also depends on how you interpret your disadvantage--which goes to the discussion of dyslexia in ['David and Goliath']. Some--but not all--dyslexics benefit from their 'disability.' I suspect that is true of everyone who stands outside the center of society."

SEE ALSO: Malcolm Gladwell Explains What Everyone Gets Wrong About His Famous '10,000 Hour Rule'

Join the conversation about this story »

Hubspot and Litmus recently released The Science of Email 2014 that presents a report of observations about attitudes towards email marketing. The data includes both observational and self-reported data and gives insight into the science behind successful emails.

Observational and self-reported data were both a part of this report in order to show the difference in what people say they do and what they actually do. For example, two-thirds of respondents said they prefer mostly image-based emails, but according to observational data, the click-through rate decreased as the number of images in an email increased as seen below.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t use images in your email messages, but you should experiment with various images and text content to optimize your emails for the best response.

Here are some of the top takeaways we found in the email report.

Customers are more sophisticated with their emails

It was found that only about 12% of respondents read all of their emails. And 54% say that they use email filters to sort their emails automatically. This means that people are more advanced with inbox management and more sophisticated in how they use email. So it’s even more important for companies to have a strategic way to reach their audience and provide compelling value in order to be successful.

Younger audiences are more skeptical of emails

The survey found that Millennials (ages 18-29) were more likely to have a second email address to avoid unwanted email messages—meaning they are more skeptical of brand messages. It’s important to know that many in your target audience might not be providing an authentic email address. So in order to combat this problem, be sure to provide valuable content to your audience and be sure they know what they will be receiving when they sign up. Give them a reason to give you their real information.

Optimize for all devices

As expected, the younger survey respondents use their phones to read email more than the other users. However, desktop/laptop is still the most used device for all age groups. Surprisingly, people over the age of 30 were also likely to use a tablet to view email, so it is important to optimize for all devices when creating your emails.

In addition to devices, you should also optimize your emails for HTML and plain text. 79% of respondents between the ages of 30 and 44 prefer HTML, but only 49% of those over 60 do. Therefore, it’s important to know your audience to be sure you are giving them what they want.

Experiment with timing

Based on the survey, emails sent on Saturdays and Sundays had higher click-through rates (CTRs) than emails sent during the business week. During the business week, the last 3 days performed better than Monday or Tuesday. This is most likely due to people having a higher volume of email in the beginning of the week—meaning there is less of a chance of your email will be read. Additionally, an email is opened by 50% of recipients within the first 24 hours of sending.

While there are ideal times to send out emails, it mainly depends on your specific audience. The best way to get the most engagement is to perform A/B tests and send out two batches at different times. Then, continue to experiment with your emails until you determine the best times that work for your audience.

Top email platforms

The iOS platform has an overall market share of 39% (iPhone and iPad) in opened marketing emails. This is positive news for marketers as CSS and HTML are well supported in iOS, so your formatting will come through as intended.

However, Outlook took spot #2 at 13% and Gmail took spot #4 at 10% of the market share. Both of these platforms can strip the CSS from your emails and not render as you expect. That’s why it is important to know the email best practices for the top email platforms.

Impact of copy on success rate

A main takeaway from the report is that emails with 300 to 500 total non-HTML characters tended to have the highest CTRs. So marketers should focus on using very direct calls-to-action without a lot of extraneous text.

It was also found that as the length of a subject line increased, the CTR of those emails decreased. Subject lines should be short and to the point. Give enough to catch the attention of your audience, without being lengthy. Thirty to forty characters are a good guideline to follow.

Interestingly, the survey also looked at the CTRs of emails that included the word “newsletter” in the subject line and found that emails that included the word had lower CTRs. The difference was approximately 30%. This is probably due to recipients interpreting it as a “newsletter day” rather than an email that contains important or valuable information for them.

Personalization matters

Emails that include the first name of the recipient in the subject line were found to have higher CTRs than emails that did not. Personalizing your emails makes your content seem even more valuable and relevant to individuals. Also, emails that use the word “you” in the subject line have higher CTRs than emails that do not.

Email marketing is a key component of any online marketing program. The key takeaways are that people want emails that are optimized for mobile and personalized to them. They want content that is valuable and relevant. In doing this, you’ll see your CTRs being to rise.

 

Are you working glowing customer testimonials into your landing pages? Are they making it clear to your landing page traffic that your business is the bee’s knees and working with you is a privilege?

If you are doing this, that’s awesome. For you, this article will help you understand why customer testimonials work and ensure you’re following the most current best practices.

If you’re not, that’s not so awesome. For you, this article will teach you why testimonials are actually one of the most important elements on your landing page.

I’ll be dropping tips on how you can get customer testimonials and also discuss why not all customer testimonial are created equal (and how some can actually decrease your conversions).

Let’s get rolling.

The Wherefore

Why are customer testimonials so important? Why are they (genuinely) my favorite element of landing page optimization?

Because they’re versatile:

• They feature real and relatable people, increasing the personality of your page
• They feature people similar to your landing page traffic, increasing the chance of that traffic trusting the rest of your message
• They can showcase specific value points of your product or service you may not otherwise mention
• They can be specific, offering almost case-study-like metrics, KPI’s and analytics in real-world and concrete terms (“We increased our site traffic by 74% in three weeks and had an overall ROI of 522%. Awesome!”)

I like the honesty of them. I like how you can (if a customer agrees to it) feature a customer testimonial as your landing page’s main image and that image will speak to everything you’re trying to communicate.

The value of engaging with your business is never clearer than when a previous customer is willing to stand ahead of you and say “Seriously, this business behind me had a huge influence on my own success.”

I’ve said a few times in previous articles (but it’s worth repeating) that what “a person like you” says online is becoming more and more important to customers. We don’t buy a thing on Amazon unless it’s been given an average of at least 4.2 stars. We don’t watch a movie unless Rottentomatoes, IMDB and all our friends have said it’s good.

What makes you think your business is any different? Word-of-mouth marketing has always been the best, most reliable, and most influential marketing possible. Customer testimonials are online word of mouth.

The How

Customer testimonials, like case studies, are primarily an incentivized piece of content. They’re valuable to your business, and your customers know that. Just like most forms of lead gen, you have to give something of value in order to get something in return.

Sometimes you can convince a previous customer that the awesome success they found or impressive ROI is reward enough, and they’re happy to return a little favor with a few sentences of endorsement. But, by in large, you’ll need to give a little to get a little.

Here’s what I recommend:

• If you’re B2B or SaaS, go over your merchant accounts or talk to your account managers, ask if there’s a client who has found noteworthy success in the past month or so
• If you’re in ECommerce, keep an eye out for glowing reviews in your review section, or periodically send out online questionnaires to your previous customers
• Incentivize testimonials with an offer of 50% off their next purchase, credit, or anything else you can think of
• If you’ve found an especially noteworthy case, send a personal email asking them their story
• Don’t be afraid to be straightforward with your customers so long as your incentive is valuable or their success was particularly impressive
• Try taking a point of your client’s success (for instance, a screenshot of your analytics graph showing their success) and asking them to tell you what they did and how it affected their business

The What

Are there actually customer testimonial best practices? Does it make a difference so long as the testimonial says your business is awesome?

It does, actually.

Without a few often overlooked elements, no visitor to your landing page will trust your customer testimonial any more than they’ll trust the rest of your page. In fact, if they have the slightest suspicion that you’re making up a testimonial yourself they won’t trust another word you say from there on in.

How to ensure your customer testimonials are believed:

• Feature the full name of your customer (as well as job title and business name if we’re talking B2B or SaaS). This increases the chance of your landing page traffic relating to the customer on a personal basis
• Feature the face of your customer. This has a huge effect on whether or not your testimonial is believable. A testimonial without a corresponding face next to it (your landing page traffic thinks) could easily be fabricated
• Ask that they under-sell it: Something subtle like…

 

 

• Ask that they get specific: The recommendation I gave above (of screenshotting an analytics graph and asking, specifically, what a customer did at a certain point of and how it benefited their business) is a great of getting real-world insight and real-world numbers

Not every customer testimonial is created equal. Don’t think that you have to accept a testimonial that won’t actually increase your landing page conversions. If it’s overwhelmingly positive it’s possible it will cause your landing page visitor to doubt what you’re saying. Don’t be afraid to send a testimonial back or prompt with specific, straightforward requests.

For instance:

• You mentioned in a review that you found our tool easy to use. Can you speak specifically to what made it so simple or compare it to tools you’ve used in the past?
• You mentioned in our chat that you appreciated how helpful and personable our customer service team was. What was it about us that stood out to you?
• Our analytics graph show that on December 7th you guys doubled traffic to your site with online ads. Did this result in a positive ROI for you? Would you mind giving us numbers?
• You mentioned that you’d been looking for a tool like ours for over a year now. Can you be more specific about what part of our tool really made the difference? What were the problems you were facing before?

Don’t be scared to be straightforward!

Conclusion

Customer testimonials are an incredibly powerful force behind your landing page’s success. They offer value, increase personality, showcase existing customers (so traffic knows, on the most basic level, that they’re not the first people who have gotten involved), and speak to the most human part of your business.

Remember that – no matter if you’re incentivising or not – your customers have gotten (or are going to get) something from your business. Successful clients will often be entirely open to giving a testimonial, so don’t be afraid to prompt and direct them clearly.

 

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a day with Ken Krogue, co-founder of InsideSales.com, inside sales pioneer, and Forbes columnist It was great. Ken spent the day talking with customers, partners, and prospective customers about the ins and outs of remote, professional selling – also known as “inside sales”.

Here are some of my favorite takeaways in no particular order – just things that make you think a bit as you grow your sales career.

1. A CSO Insights study found that companies who had put CRM into their sales process only increased revenues by 17%. Now 17% is great, but not a lot when you consider the investment. CRM helps to organize the process a bit (if done right) – but it doesn’t leverage it or help you make more calls.

2. A specialization model in inside sales yields  a 7 point higher close rate – do you have specialists?

3. In inside sales, leading indicators are effort and results. Do you measure both effort and results?

4. Use the CLOSERS model to grow leads every day.

C  campaign  (strategy)
L   list / leads
O  offers
S  skill
E  effort  (increased dialing, etc)
R  reporting / results  (benchmarking)
S  systems  (dialing technology)

5. Instead of the old BANT model of budget, authority, need, and  timing, there is a new model. 2010 Demandgen study, done on behalf of Genius, said 2 out of 10 organizations make purchase decisions based on annual budget. This means that 8 out of 10 allocate budget when the see a need. Don’t worry about budget so much – instead sell with the new model: ANUM

Authority
Need
Urgency
Money

If you are talking to the right decision maker and the need is strong enough – they will find the money and do it quickly.

6. Use systems thinking to grow your territory and your team. “Everything is a system and you must realize how the system works.”

Analyze
Design
Implement
Evaluate

7. THE STADIUM PITCH

Imagine you can present to 1000 ceo’s of companies that all need what you do – they have to come, but as soon as you stop being interesting, they can leave. You will give them industry information, research, and insight. Results in a 3% close ratio – giving away industry information that is compelling – that leads them down the path to hear more.

- courtesy of Chet Holmes

8. The resources page at InsideSales offers 27 different campaign strategies – good way to get the brain thinking about new ways to prospect.

9. Connecting – always ask a prospective client after you speak by phone if you can connect on LinkedIn. Now that you have their OK, reach out and should the conversation go dark, you have another strategy to reach them.

10. It takes about 5 interactions for someone to think about you on their own. So make at least that many interactions with those you are wanting to get in front of. For example, when at a trade show:

Grab their business card
Send an email while fresh in mind
Ask, “can we connect on LinkedIn? ” – professional
Analysis – or give something of value – seminar – webinar
Offer

And we haven’t even talked about the TRUST ladder yet – I’ll have more about Ken’s talk in a future post.

Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the “Top 30 Social Sales Influencers” worldwide. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | My LinkedIn Profile | twitter | Visit us on google+

The post 10 Inside Sales Ideas From Ken Krogue appeared first on Score More Sales.

Everyone loves a comeback story, and this year’s underdog media tale may star an unlikely protagonist: print magazines.

According to Folio, we’re on pace for almost twice as many magazine launches in 2014 as 2013; 45 magazines launched in Q1 2014, compared to just 23 the previous year. Indie publishers like Monocle, PORT, and the gentlewoman (amongst many others) are blazing trails with financial models that rely less on advertisers and more on subscription revenues. Newsweek returned to print with a big launch at SXSW. And big-time digital publishers like Pando (Pando Quarterly), Pitchfork (The Pitchfork Review) and POLITICO are trying out print for the first time, discovering that it helps them stands out in an increasingly saturated digital landscape.

“I think one of the keys we’ve had in terms of success was having a print product,” POLITICO CRO, Roy Schwartz, told Folio. “In DC, we have a magazine and a newspaper, and there’s nothing like that in the New York market.”

Similarly, Business of Fashion recently decided to publish its own print magazine. In an interview with The New York Times, Editor-in-Chief Imran Amed said that despite being a digital-first company, Business of Fashion chose print because it appeared to be a great medium to seize the moment and get the industry’s attention.

Brands are discovering this is true, as well, with companies like Net-a-Porter launching their own high-profile publications. According to a 2013 Custom Content Council study, brands still invest in print magazines due to their effective customer education, retention, and brand loyalty. Studies also show that print magazine readers recall specific advertisements better than digital ones.

So how is this new wave of publishers making print work so well? Here are a few ways they’re innovating for the modern age.

1) Publishers are focusing their circulation on key influencers and loyal subscribers

As I wrote for Hypebeast, the print magazines succeeding right now don’t rely on an enormous circulation; in fact, they focus on satisfying smaller numbers of subscribers and charge premium prices. POLITICO is adopting this strategy: it’s monthly Capital New York Magazine doesn’t have a large number of subscribers—at least in the eyes of traditional circulation numbers. Instead, this monthly magazine is distributed to 8,000 specifically-selected key political influencers in New York City and Albany.

The strategy of low circulation works out for brand publishers. In an interview withThe Guardian, Chango’s VP of Marketing Ben Plomion said that they landed a top-five retailer in the US because of The Programmatic Mind, Chango’s print magazine. And that wasn’t the only success. Though the first issue of The Programmatic Mind was only shipped to only 1,000 clients, influencers, and prospects, it brought in some of the company’s biggest deals, said Bryan Bartlett, The Programmatic Mind‘s Editor-in-Chief.

2) Print is the vinyl of publishing

As Discovery Channel Magazine editor Luke Clark said at WITnext, “Print is like what vinyl is to music. It’s nostalgic and it’s coming back.”

Similar to many people’s fondness for their first cars, or their old high school, the physical objects of print magazines elicit memories of earlier eras of our lives, where most of our information was consumed through paper and found using dewey decimal systems. (It’s worth noting that this association will likely grow weaker with the new generations.)

Chango’s Bryan Bartlett explained that his team had suspected that—in spite of all the digital marketing they’re writing about—the nostalgia of print could seize the attention of their audience. As the issues of The Programmatic Mind rolled out, Bartlett realized he was right: print magazines grab digital marketers’ attention. At the time of writing, The Programmatic Mind has become a crucial tool for Chango’s sales team, grown significantly in circulation, and been nominated as a finalist for aDigiday Content Marketing Award.

(Editor’s Note: Contently’s print magazine, Contently Quarterly, utilizes a very similar strategy.)

3) Print is part of a larger publishing ecosystem

Although print has its value and specific uses, it’s best used as part of a larger effort in the marketing ecosystem. Sometimes, this can mean literally combining it with another media format—CBS Television commissioned a musician to compose a score for an issue of its print magazine, Watch.

Print magazines also supplement their digital counterparts, and vice versa. After publishing an issue of their quarterly print, Chango republishes content online during the following few months. There’s a similar symbiotic relationship between the digital and print versions of POLITICO, Pando and Pitchfork; their print editions sell for premium prices and largely appeal to the publication’s most loyal readers—which is why it appeals to advertisers.

4) You can still track ROI

Although tracking subscribers could be a good way to measure the success of a publication, this isn’t always the best metric for branded content. As a company, Chango is a master at retargeting and tracking conversion paths online, but offline, their system is far more rudimentary. Still, it works.

“Anytime a salesperson gets a call, and it’s clear that the prospect came from the magazine, they’re going to go into Salesforce and note that down,” Bartlett said. “It’s up to our sales team attributing leads and calls to the magazine.”

Bartlett also says that the sales team notes comments—positive or negative—in the system so that he can get feedback and ideas for the magazine. While he admits it’s not the perfect system, it still appears to be a systematic way of measuring results for now.

5) There’s still room for circulation growth

While the first print issue of The Programmatic Mind was shipped out to just 1,000 people, the second one doubled to around 2,000. At the launch of the third one, the subscriber base had doubled again to 4,000.

To continue its impressive growth, Chango will be partnering up with Adweek in the U.S, and distributed to a targeted list of agencies and marketers. In the UK, The Programmatic Mind will be distributed along with Contagious Magazine. These strategic partnerships allow for Chango to reach a circulation of 16,000.

Net-a-Porter’s brand publishing play, Porter, started out with a 400,000 print run, but with circulation in over 60 countries, they hope to see that number grow quickly.

There’s also an added bonus for brand publishers: instead of carrying around standard content such as whitepapers or reports, Chango’s sales team can bring in beautiful magazines for prospects and clients. Similarly, during conferences, Chango’s booth has a newsstand stocked with stacks of the most recent print issue ofThe Programmatic Mind.

It sure beats a stack of business cards.

Your sales leads are starting to slow and you don’t know why. You believe you are doing everything you did before, but the leads just aren’t flooding through your gates like before. So what should you check? In this article we will let you know the 4 things you should investigate if your sales leads start to slow.

The Past Predicts the Future

It’s time to look back in your past and read the future. So your leads are decreasing, but is this a normal trend? Many industries go through cyclical business trends due to their product or service. For example, pest companies tend to have down periods during the winter months, since there are fewer insects and bugs out and about. Before you start to stress about lower leads, make sure this isn’t just a common occurrence.

You also need to make sure you are doing everything you did in the past. Were you posting more on social networks? Was blogging more consistent? What are you doing now that is different from what you did before?  Analyze your own process and make sure you are along the same lines of your previous strategy.  As strategy continues to evolve, you may have eliminated a process you did previously that helped increase leads. So make sure you take  a second look at yourself before looking elsewhere.

Traffic Sources

Traffic can also be a great indicator as to why your leads are down. First off has your overall traffic been dropping? This is a perfect reason as to why you are getting less leads. How do you expect to reach the same amount of leads with less people coming to your site?  It usually doesn’t work that way unless you decided to put yourself in a niche with less but more qualified people.

Next, you will want to look at all the different sources of traffic. Compare these numbers with your past traffic to check for any major differences. What was converting at a higher rate in the past compared to now? Find which source is lacking and try to find the problem.  Maybe your paid ads are not as efficient anymore and they need revamping. Maybe your blogging is attracting the wrong type of people and you need to change that strategy. Pay attention to the conversion rate and overall leads to try pinpoint the problem within your traffic. Then you will need to dive deeper into that source as to why it is underperforming.

Has Google’s Algorithm Changed?

Google is constantly altering their algorithm and if they did happen to change it within this period of time where your leads started to drop, then you may have lost some rankings. This can be very frustrating; Believe me, we know. But the only thing you can do is read up about the new algorithm and see how you can start improving your website. Find out what they adjusted in their algorithm (this could be anything from how they rank keywords to how they treat meta descriptions) and improve it.

Recent Changes to Site

Did you make any recent changes to your site design and layout? Website redesigns are used to improve the ease of use, look and flow; but sometimes this isn’t always the case. And if you happen to be a part of the latter, you may have experienced a drop in leads. This could be due to website confusion or a poor layout.  Either way, if this is the case you should look into redesigning your site again.  Maybe even changing it back to your old design. Your website needs to be clean, while offering the correct information to persuade your visitor to sign up for your offer. If this is not presented the correct way, users will become frustrated and will leave your site without converting on any offers. Make sure your website redesign isn’t hurting  your leads.During your redesign you could have also lost some keyword rank due to lack of meta descriptions and keywords in URLs. Check your page performance and make sure this is not the case.

Stop Bleeding Leads

There are many things that could be affecting your websites performance. Looking at your numbers can help give you some great insight into what is happening to your leads.  If your numbers aren’t talking to you, make sure it wasn’t something you did with a redesign or a process you stopped. And lastly, don’t forget it may not be your fault and it could just be a common trend or possibly Google’s fault. Either way, don’t just sit around bleeding leads, find a new avenue to increase your leads and start making that money.

The majority of business blogs are failures and they do not accomplish what they company intended them to do. They begin to update them less and their readership loses interest because there is a lack of new content. Why does the update frequency dwindle off? The main reason is that businesses have a difficult time coming up with new content ideas and the blog is then left to die. Take a look at some of the business websites you visit and you will notice that some were last updated in 20012 or 2013.

Your website visitors do not want to read a sales pitch on your blog and they don’t want to read a boring press release. They want to read information that makes them think while being blown away at the information you are presenting to them. Every business has a blog these days, so you need to make sure that you are publishing excellent blog posts that your audience will respond well to. Use the following six ideas to help improve your business blog.

1. Size Does Matter

While it is very possible to get your point across in just a few paragraphs, short blog posts often result in higher bounce rates and lower engagement rates. The goal of your blog is to introduce an audience to your brand and the products or services you provide. It is hard to make that personal impact with a short blog post.

Your audience wants longer content and they are more likely to continue reading additional information on your website if you present them with informative posts with some meaty content. Experiment with different content lengths and see what ones hold the visitors attention the longest and which ones receive the most social shares.

2. Provide Useful Information

If you want to really capture the attention of your audience then provide them with useful information. Give them something of value on a regular basis and they will come back on a regular basis to receive that information. An example would be our definitive on-page optimization guide blog post. A business owner can take the information found in that post and drastically improve his or her on-page optimization.

Blog posts that blow your readers away is a guaranteed way to get them to return to your website on a regular basis. Blog posts that intrigue your visitors will convert some into leads, which will then turn into customers that become brand supporters.

3. Use Popular Blog Formats

You want to really stand out and create excellent blog posts? Create huge list posts. These types of posts really grab attention and they tend to be huge posts that keep the reader engaged for a long period of time. For example, if you are a local landscaping business you could do a blog post titled, “50 Ways to Improve Your Yard for Under $25” to draw in your target audience. This goes back to point #2 above as well. It doesn’t need to sound like a sales pitch. Provide useful information and your readership will grow and so will your sales numbers.

4. Avoid BS & Self Promotion

Your blog readers do not want to hear about how great your company is or feel like they are reading a long sales pitch. If you use your blog as a way to “sell” you will quickly realize that it is the wrong approach.

Your landing pages and conversion funnel are the place to do your selling and promotion, not your blog. Your readers understand that you are a business and in the end you want to convert them into a customer. Provide them excellent blog content and they are more likely to end up as your customer. If they feel like they are reading a long advertisement they will not return.

5. Innovate

You want to stand out from the other blogs within your industry, and one way to do that is by presenting information that cannot be found elsewhere. Sure, some topics will be covered by other business blogs and that is to be expected, but think of ways to innovate and provide your readers with something that they can’t find anywhere else.

A perfect example would be case studies and real life examples that you can take from your business and turn into excellent blog posts. Not only will this really draw attention from your readers and build your blog audience, but it will also position your company among the leaders within your industry.

6. Publish How-To & Educational Posts

Educational “how-to” posts always perform well, but if you use this popular blog style make sure to include some substance. Far too many “how-to” posts will simply contain a bullet list of points with no explanation. They completely omit the actual “how-to” part, which is what attracts visitors to this style of blog post.

Make your “how-to” posts packed full of so much information that your readers will have a full understanding of the topic. Use images, graphs, charts, and video to really educate the reader.

Little changes to your blog can really help turn it around. Put the effort into publishing excellent content and you will see your readership increase.

Competition is a natural part of business and software leads are supposedly important for getting a leg-up against rivals.

But when your prospects seem to find preference for both your products and theirs, are they disqualified for being ‘disloyal’?

Problems like this usually spawn debates and accusations regarding monopoly. One relatively new example would be the spat between AMD and Nvidia over the hearts of game developers:

“AMD is no longer in control of its own performance. While GameWorks doesn’t technically lock vendors into Nvidia solutions, a developer that wanted to support both companies equally would have to work with AMD and Nvidia from the beginning of the development cycle to create a vendor-specific code path. It’s impossible for AMD to provide a quick after-launch fix. This kind of maneuver ultimately hurts developers in the guise of helping them.”

This wouldn’t be the first time competition got out of hand this way (yes, I’m looking at you Apple and Samsung). And as always, the customer winds up caught in the middle. A majority of them might prefer one over the other sure but it would be unrealistic to imagine there isn’t at least one who’ll opt for both.

It gets even harder when your lead qualification process is specifically geared towards finding flaws in a competitor’s products. (Seriously, why else would you ask about satisfaction with a current vendor?) Think of it like this, your solution is one brand of kitchen knife and your competitor sells another. Both your knives have their own, unique pros and cons. Now a housewife might be steered towards favoring one or the other but what about a master chef? What if she discovers she can make good use of both?

Of course, it might be more complicated in terms of business software. That doesn’t mean a mark of disloyalty should be a default option when qualifying your software leads. Perhaps instead of a discriminatory set of questions, try asking the following:

• Can you afford both? – If a price war isn’t always a way to win, this is one reason why. Sometimes a prospect can afford to use both solutions without even the slightest drop of an overhead.
• What do you need? – A basic question but one that can still clarify why your software ends up being used simultaneously with a competitor’s. (Think using Mozilla alongside Chrome for different purposes). It helps to know what you’ll be doing and they’ll be doing.
• What would you suggest? – This might border on blasphemy with some of your developers but if a prospect wants your stuff as much as the other firm’s, why not ask for suggestions on making it more compatible?

At the end of the day, isn’t it still just about the sale? A prospect that decides to use both your software and a competitor’s can be a win-win situation if you’re not quick to label them as disloyal.

As companies search for ways to differentiate themselves with analytics, organizations are being challenged to step up their use of data — and to do it in innovation ways.

After several years of growth, the percentage of companies who believe they’re seeing a competitive advantage from analytics has leveled off. In 2010 the number was 37%; in 2011 58%; and in 2012 67%. In 2013, the number was down slightly, to 66%.

That’s one of the findings of new research by MIT Sloan Management Review and SAS into the use of data and analytics by organizations globally.

The challenge is that as the number of companies using analytics increases, it is becoming harder for some companies to gain an edge. “Analytics created significant competitive advantage in the beginning,” says Douglas Hague, chief analytics officer of Merchant Services at Bank of America. “Over time, however, competitors build the same capabilities and the advantage erodes.”

The report notes that to find and sustain a competitive advantage with analytics, companies need to boost their data management skills and address a growing “innovation challenge,” as Hague puts it. Innovation with analytics is happening in parts of companies, but not necessarily extending across organizations.

The report highlights three key strategies for finding competitive advantage with analytics:

1. Become a data provider as well as a data user.

Many companies are modifying their business models to compile and sell data, instead of just consuming it. New opportunities are driven by high demand across industry sectors for accurate and timely information. One example is Entravision Communications, a Spanish-language media company. After many years of paying for research, Entravision now compiles and sells insights into Latino consumption patterns through its spinoff, Luminar Insights. (See MIT SMR’s in-depth case study of Luminar for the full story.)

2. Nurture an analytics culture.

Some people call culture the “secret sauce” for creating business value with analytics. Having an effective analytics culture translates into having more advanced data management processes, technologies and talent, and components such as integration of information management and business analytics into strategy and the sharing of data across functional silos and business units.

3. Ask the hard questions.

Companies that are most sophisticated about using data, what the report calls the “Analytical Innovators,” are good at recognizing the need to push themselves by posing — and answering — five straightforward questions. These questions and answers can provide a smart roadmap for how to build analytics programs that will continually innovate. These questions are:

• Is my organization open to new ideas that challenge current practice?
• Does my organization view data as a core asset?
• Is senior management driving the organization to become more data-driven and analytical?
• Is my organization using analytical insights to guide strategy?
• Are we willing to let analytics help change the way we do business?

The report concludes that organizations that are successful with analytics invest in their analytical skills and technology to stay ahead of the curve. As importantly, they are open to new ways of thinking and will change the way they do business if they have to.

Research for this year’s report is based on results from a global survey of more than 2,000 business executives and personal interviews with over 30 senior managers. The full research report, “The Analytics Mandate,” is available online and downloadable as a PDF.

This article draws from the global research report “The Analytics Mandate,” by David Kiron (executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review’s Big Ideas Initiative), Pamela Kirk Prentice (chief research officer at SAS Institute Inc.) and Renee Boucher Ferguson (Data & Analytics contributing editor at MIT SMR). The report was released in May 2014.

How well do you know your audience? If your messaging just isn’t connecting, resonating or converting to its full potential, you haven’t yet tapped into that elusive marketing sweet spot. Marketers strive to provide the best possible experience to their audience, but reaching that pinnacle of customer connectedness doesn’t happen by accident.

Small business guru and Google AdWords expert Perry Marshall joined us recently for a fun and information-packed webinar on what he calls “the Happy Juice Principle.” We often look to Perry for inspiration and copy strategy and were struck by his unique approach to content creation, lead capture and conversion. It all started with our team reading this post on Perry’s blog – at first, we laughed (happy juice?!), but the underlying principle quickly became apparent.

Today, I’ll share with you Perry’s approach to crafting more compelling, better converting marketing content across all of your channels. You’ll learn how to find your own Happy Juice and inject it in all of your marketing efforts, aided by real-world examples of it in action.

What Is the Happy Juice Principle?

In his post, Perry shared three techniques used by Rich Jacobs to boost email open rates and conversions. As we discussed these tactics, we realized just how deeply Rich understood his audience of busy attorneys – their schedules, time constraints, how they take in and remember information and more. These insights were incredibly powerful; he has people opening and revisiting his email messages five to ten times!

Of course, you don’t inherently know just what it is your audience wants and needs that will generate this level of interest. It has to be learned. Happy Juice goes beyond simple A/B testing, however, and delves into the needs, wants and intent of your audience. It’s the advanced, meaningful insight at the intersection of optimization testing and persona mapping.

In a nutshell, the Happy Juice Principle is the best possible understanding of who your audience really is, so you can create an experience that provides value for both the audience and your business.

It’s just as important to understand what the Happy Juice Principle is not: it’s not testing various page elements like Buy buttons against one another, or other simple A/B tests. Those are great, but you have to move beyond these simple tests to get long-lasting, meaningful results that drive double- or even triple-digit improvements in conversion rate.

“It trumps the A/B stuff by light years,” Perry told our audience. “If you’re really squirting happy juice into their brain, it doesn’t matter if you have a red or a white button. They’ll happily write you a check and stick it in the mail.”

Why You NEED Happy Juice in Your Sales & Marketing Content

We consider ourselves pretty fortunate at WordStream, in that we have access to great tools that help us perform and analyze tests and optimize our marketing content.

However, even small businesses can get on board with the Happy Juice culture. It’s one of constant testing and a commitment to continually learning more about your audience.

What is the value of all of this brainstorming and testing? In our case:

• We’ve grown our website visitors YoY by 116%
• We’re generating twice as many qualified leads for sales
• This has contributed to hockey stick revenue growth for our company.

Do you like sales and profits? Positive ROI? Then you need Happy Juice.

Getting Started – Mapping Your Buyer

The vast majority of your customers will never, ever be like the lawyers who click Rich’s emails 10 times. Most people are non-responsive, so how do you figure out what really trips their trigger?

Perry recommends a simple survey that can be applied at any point in the customer journey to provide the basis for in-the-moment messaging:

1. What’s the most important thing I can help you with that I haven’t addressed so far?
2. How difficult has it been for you to find an answer or solution elsewhere?
3. Why, specifically, would getting this answer or solution be important to you – how would it change your life?

You can use this in email, via web forms, etc. He shared an example of what this might look like:

Throw out all of the ‘not at all difficult’ and ‘somewhat difficult responses’ and ignore them. If it wasn’t difficult for them to solve the problem, they’ve probably already solved it. Take what’s left – those people who said it was very difficult to find a solution – and throw out the short answers. You’re left with the long answers. These people are in pain. They have a desperate desire to be happy! They’ve told you all about their problem, what’s bugging them, what they’re trying to solve – and they’re giving you the language you can use to give back to them what they’re asking for.

Just doing this one simple survey can help you drastically reduce your failure rate, Perry said. It gives you a whole bucket of messaging to test.

You can use this strategy anywhere, at any time, he said, so long as you apply the insights back to your messaging at that point in the customer journey. It might help you reconnect with people who abandoned the cart. It could help you acquire new customers. Whatever your goal, you need to reach out to people in that particular stage and use the intelligence gleaned to better convert other prospects at that point.

Information collection is ongoing, though. Tools like audience insights in Google Analytics can tell you quite a bit about who you are talking to and what they’re interested in.

If you don’t know these basic pieces of information – what the problem is, what is preventing them from solving it, and how your solution will affect your audience – you have no solid ground from which to create messaging.

Learning to Test Smarter with Out-of-the-Box Ad Strategies

Perry shared a number of unconventional ad strategies that helped brands create messaging that drove massive sales.

Celebrity Endorsement

This one simple ad outperformed everything else the company tested by far and helped them become a million dollar company.

Of course, celebrity endorsement isn’t new. You might think it’s too expensive for your brand, making it unattainable. In this case, smart outreach resulted in Oprah featuring the product on her website. The company was then able to confirm that Beyonce used their product and reached out for her permission to share that fact. You might not be able to get Oprah and Beyonce, but you can tap into your notable and influential client base and use that to drive must-have messaging.

Famous Phrases

Well-known phrases can act as emotional triggers for people. We use catchphrases and famous quotes in everyday speech, yet few brands are using them in their advertising.

The Dirty Harry quote is instantly recognizable and elicits an emotional response in the reader. They know this! It’s a memory – they know how it makes them feel. It’s different and interesting, give it a try.

Onomatopoeia – Words That Imitate Sounds

How can you add sound to a plain text ad or email? Easy:

You can instantly grab attention with auditory words; they enable you to paint an audible picture for your reader.

Sight, Sound & Motion

You can combine sight, sound and motion for even greater effect:

You can actually picture what’s happening here and it’s so much more powerful than the usual boring, dry ad copy.

Metaphors

Metaphors are a powerful linguistic tool. This can help you tap into emotion by getting your prospect to consider a best/worst case scenario.

But my industry is boring…

No, it’s not.

Even professional markets are highly emotional, Perry reminded viewers. People get in heated arguments, even in office environments. Discover the problem, dig into the emotion, and find language to tap into triggering it. Try some things you’ve never done before. Most people don’t even begin to explore all of the potential ideas they could put out there and it all starts with brainstorming around your advanced understanding of your audience.

Perry’s words of wisdom here are worth remembering: No one can stop you from being more clever than your opponent but you.

Applying Happy Juice to Paid Search

Perry shared an example from one of his courses, where a rock climbing school wanted to improve their AdWords strategy.

The company was seeing 4-6% click-through rates and wanted to improve. As Perry led the school owner through exercises to find that Happy Juice, they realized that what people were looking for wasn’t rock climbing courses – they were looking to escape their boring jobs.

Now, an ad for a rock climbing course and an ad that offers an opportunity to escape your corporate hell look very different! So if the problem people wanted to solve was a new, adventurous career opportunity, why were all of the school’s ads the same boring “Rock Climbing School, Take a course in rock climbing” ads?

They rewrote the ads from a completely different perspective. Here were the results – check out those CTRs!

You have to go beyond telling people what you do. That’s boring and average and it doesn’t work. Instead, use emotional copy to show people you can help them do what they want to do.

This isn’t super time-consuming stuff. But it is a shift in your mindset and the culture of your marketing team. If you don’t know if you’re hitting your customers’ Happy Juice spot yet, you’re probably not. You’ll know it by the amazing results.

Here’s another example: by simply using the Search Query report in Google AdWords, we found that people were using very specific phrasing when trying to find tools to help with keyword research.

Adjusting our copy to reflect that intent drove our CTR up by 34%!

Landing Pages Need Happy Juice, Too

We applied this principle to our AdWords Grader landing page, as well. It used to look like this:

Now, there was a lot going on there. Conversion rates weren’t bad by any means, but we felt there was room for improvement.

We used phone outreach, online surveys and a demo at trade shows to better understand what the obstacles were for people considering signing up.

The issues we identified through these discussions and insights from our audience told us to:

• Reduce the amount of information for people to consider
• Reduce friction and improve the flow of the page
• Add security language and build trust
• Include an example of the report
• Break up the experience, asking only for the email first and adding next steps further along in the process

The changes were substantial:

Changing the flow of the page by injecting Happy Juice based on audience feedback enabled us to increase leads by 86%!

Happy Juice in Content & Inbound Marketing

Our blog is one powerful tool in our marketing arsenal. We hold our blog to a “Standard of Awesomeness” and have a goal for each piece of content – that it is viewed, shared and commented on at a certain level.

Of course, you could churn out content all day long and it wouldn’t do anything to drive business – enter Happy Juice. Keyword research, competitive research, social insights and more help us better understand exactly what it is our audience needs and what problems we can help them solve.

Recently, this research showed us there was a need for an article about AdChoices. As Larry Kim put it, it’s a “monster keyword” with tons of volume. Our customer success rep Erin Sagan did a fantastic job of creating a long blog post tutorial for marketers who wanted to learn more about AdChoices, yet it wasn’t getting the traffic we expected when it published.

Turns out this was due to a misalignment of intent. Content Marketing Manager Elisa Gabbert dug deeper and found that a lot of searchers were actually looking for help removing AdChoices. The problem people were trying to solve wasn’t being answered by our content. Another section was added to address this intent, at the point at which you see the red arrow:

Now, it’s getting hundreds of views a day and ranks #2 for the term “adchoices,” thanks to the Happy Juice injected by a better understanding of the problem.

Email Marketing Happy Juice

We serve both agencies and advertisers, who have very different needs and priorities. When a new lead comes into our database, we send a Welcome email to introduce ourselves. We had a decent open rate, but further testing showed us that a one-size-fits-all solution wasn’t working.

We broke it down into two Welcome emails, one each for advertisers and agencies. Subject line testing showed us that what each group responded to was totally different. We created email content to better address the needs of each group.

We were able to get close to a 50% open rate and a 76% improvement in click-through rate by better understanding what each of these two distinct groups were looking to solve.

Key Takeaways

The Happy Juice Principle is a unique approach to marketing content that always puts the needs and wants of your audience first. There’s great value in understanding the emotional triggers of your target market across email, content marketing and paid search. Remember:

• To optimize for organic search, you have to understand intent – check out the competition and make sure your content aligns with your audience goals.
• With paid search, integrate online and offline research to improve the customer experience and brainstorm messaging that reflects their intent and desires.
• Get personal in your email campaigns and never underestimate the power of a great subject line!
• Get into the heads of your audience and map their buyer profiles. Understand their intentions and how your offering solves their problem.
• Write lots of headlines and copy, then test, test, test!
• Crawl if you have to. You don’t need to run today. Don’t be intimidated – just get started.

Want to see the whole webinar? Check it out below:

What sets your organisation apart from all the other companies that are competing for your prospect's attention and - ultimately - their budget? If I may offer a suggestion, it's probably not your latest clever feature or function, even if that can make some modest contribution to the story.

No: it's your ability to help your customer solve a problem that they cannot afford to ignore, better than any other option available to them. This is your unique value position. And if you can nail it, it will dramatically amplify the power of your marketing messages and your sales conversations.

It's a simple idea, but often deceptively hard to put into practice. Here's how you can craft one for for your organisation that enables you to stand out from the crowd...

Note that I have intentionally used the word position, not proposition. According to the dictionary, a proposition is merely a "statement of opinion" - something that can stand (and fall) in isolation. A position, on the other hand, describes your relationship to other things that are important to your prospects.

Ultimately, positioning happens in the minds of your audiences, supported or distorted by how you communicate with them. It helps them relate what you do to the things they want to achieve, and against other approaches they may be considering. And it can help them to decide between action and inaction.

In "Crossing the Chasm", Geoffrey Moore shared an approach that I've used with only minor modifications. My preferred unique value position formula is based on two short sentences that succinctly describe what you do, who you do it for, why they need to do anything, and what sets your solution apart

"For [primary target customers] and others who are dissatisfied with [their current situation], [solution name] is a [category name] that [compelling reason to buy]. Unlike [their primary alternative options] what really sets [company name]’s solution apart is [your primary differentiation]."

The statement is intended to define the centre of your target market, rather than the boundaries. It focuses on the critical problems that you are best at solving for your most promising potential customers. You may never quote it verbatim in your marketing messages. But it should serve as the foundation for everything you seek to communicate.

If you have multiple target customer clusters, you will probably want to develop subtly different value positions for each of them. For example, the current situation, compelling reason to buy and primary alternative option to buy may vary from one target customer cluster to another.

The structure is merely a guide: you may find that your value position comes across more naturally or clearly if you use a different sequence or form of words. But every element of the formula has an intentional and has a specific role to play in positioning your offering.

Now let’s break this Unique Value Position formula down into its key component parts:

Primary target customers: this describes the common characteristics of the ideal customer for your solution. This may describe the type of organisation, the type of role, or a combination of the two. This section is important, because it enables you to target your marketing messages and your sales conversations on your most promising customers.

Current situation: this describes a key point of dissatisfaction with your primary target customer’s current situation. This defined issue may be a goal or problem, or an existing but unsatisfactory solution that they are compelled to do something about. This section is important, because it identifies a reason for them to act.

Solution name: this defines the name you market your solution under.

Category name: this describes the market category within which your solution can be found. When prospects go searching for answers to their defined issues, they often tend to think in terms of well-recognised solution categories. This section is important because customers tend to think in terms of categories of solution, and can struggle to position you if they can’t work out what type of thing you are offering.

Compelling reason to buy: this defines the key benefit of using your solution - normally related to your role in addressing the defined point of dissatisfaction with their current situation. This section is important, because without a compelling reason to buy, they are likely to stick with the status quo.

Primary alternative options: this defines the primary alternative options for addressing the defined issue - this may include in-house solutions, obvious competitors, or radically alternative ways of solving the problem. This section is important, because it defines your point of competitive comparison.

Company name: your company name.

Primary differentiation: this defines what uniquely sets your offering apart from the other options open to them. Your distinctive approach to solving the problem is usually far more powerful than a single product feature. This section is important, because it memorably nails why the customer should do business with you.

One of the most common challenges in developing a unique value position lies in deciding what to leave out. Lengthy value positions serve to confuse, rather than clarify. Great value positions reflect simple memorable themes, rather than lengthy lists - that’s why focusing on the centre of your target market is so important.

Simplicity is hard work as Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Cicero and a raft of other talented writers have long recognised ("forgive me for writing such a long letter, but I did not have the time to write a short one") but the effort is worth it: simplicity resonates and complexity confuses. It's absolutely worth putting in the time to get this right.

So - what's your unique value position? And is it reflected in every marketing message and sales conversation?

In today’s world people have blogs for everything from businesses to hobbies and personal story telling. Regardless of the topic or niche industry, successful blogs understand how to communicate with their people and to facilitate readership. This goes beyond simply publishing content and hoping that it is discovered. In order to achieve more success for your blog, consider these 15 elements that successful blogs share in common.

1. They Focus on Relationships, Not Just Clicks

Successful bloggers understand the value of building relationships. Making a connection with a single individual is more valuable than 10 or 15 page clicks because that one person has just become a lifetime reader. Respond to comments and make an effort to get to know your readers in order to build lasting, valuable relationships.

One of the best blogs at relationship building is the Moz Blog. Despite being one of the most successful marketing, SEO and analytics blogs on the Internet, Moz’s writers and readers are genuinely engaged in each post and comment discussed on the site. Take a look at the comments section of any single post on the site and you’ll see just what I mean.

2. They Have a Clear Vision of Their Brand

Understanding who you are and what you stand for are important elements for developing a blog. Everything about your site needs to be consistent, from the tone of voice you use in your writing to the color scheme and topics you write about. These elements should combine to create one consistent brand image for your blog.

3. They are Highly Active on Social Media

Social media presents itself as a powerful tool for bloggers. Sharing your blog content on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms will increase readership and raise awareness for your site. Also, your readers are likely on social media, meaning that it is another tool for interacting with them and making connections.

For example, take a look at Havahart. This brand focuses on helping customers rid their homes and yards of pesky animals – but without harming them. Because their Facebook presence is alive and well, Havahart is able to drive a substantial amount of traffic to their community blog.

4. They Push Themselves to Come up With Interesting Post Ideas

Content is key when it comes to blogging. Offering people intriguing and useful content is the basis for creating a popular and informative blog. Make an effort to research fresh topics and to come up with creative content ideas in order to make your blog interesting.

5. They Let Their Fans Contribute

Allowing guest bloggers or active community members to write posts for your site is a good way to increase readership, show a little fan service and explore new topics and ideas.  Case in point: Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed is notorious for allowing its humble community contributors to suggest post ideas for the main section of the website. While it’s quite rare that a community member has their post republished, the ones who do keep user interest alive on the site – and Buzzfeed gets some great posts out of it.

6. They Give a Face to Each Blogger on the Site

Blogs with multiple authors should allow each blogger to express a unique identity. Having each blogger write on a particular niche topic and use a byline will give their posts a lot more credit. Even large sites like Lifehack manage to do this cleanly and professionally, and they have a LOT of people writing for them.

Give each of your bloggers  a face and a voice, and your readers will feel much more connected to them.

7. TheyRespect the Ethics of Blogging

If you want your blog to be respected in the blogosphere you must first offer respect for it yourself. This means abiding by the unwritten rules and ethics that successful blogs recognize. Sharing useful links rather than spamming your posts, offering quality content and avoiding keyword stuffing are examples of practices all blogs should employ.

8. They Haven't Forgotten About Mobile

Many people prefer to read blogs on their phones and tablets. Having a responsive site design or using a platform that is compatible with mobile use will facilitate mobile readership for your site. Popular blogs such as Forbes, Mashable and Social Media Examiner have sites that allow for mobile readership and benefit from it greatly.

9. They Actively Manage Their Reputation

Getting people to respect your blog and recognize it as a credible source is critical. Handling negative feedback and addressing the issue is one way to show your concern and responsibility to readers. When dealing with comments, be sure to be polite and seek a resolution rather than attacking people and becoming associated with negativity.

10. They Create Actionable Posts for Their Readers

Readers tend to respond better to blogs that offer specific advice and useful tips. Successful bloggers have mastered this as their content presents people with tangible value.

11. They Consider How Ads Will Impact User Experience

Sure, setting up your blog for Google Adsense is advantageous from a financial perspective, but what impact does it have on your readers? This is something that successful bloggers consider as they realize that losing readership isn’t worth making a small monthly profit. A blog packed full of advertisements might serve as a deterrent for some readers, which will ultimately hurt your blog in the long run.

12. They Write Openly and Honestly

Being honest with your readers and demonstrating that you don’t care what other people think will make people trust you.  Readers are far more likely to be drawn to a blog full of honest, controversial content than they will be to a blog that offers no opinion or transparency.

13. They Know Exactly Who Their Readers are and Relate to Them in Every Post

Blogs with high readership have achieved it by understanding their audience and creating content that speaks to them. For instance, CJ Pony Parts, a large Mustang parts dealer, offers tons of highly relevant blog content geared (no pun intended) toward their industry’s readers. Literally every post on their site is about Mustangs, ensuring that all of their visitors can find posts they’ll definitely want to read.

14. They Consciously Make Their Site Easy to Navigate

Making your site easy to navigate can go a long way toward encouraging people to become regular visitors. This means having easy to use menus and organizing content so that it’s easy to find. Consistency within the format of the content itself is important too, as readers will know what to expect in your posts.

15. They Have a True Passion for What They Write About

One of the most basic and effective things you can do to make a blog successful is to demonstrate true passion. Not only will writing uninspired content be boring for you, it will be boring for readers as well. Choosing something that your care about and making it evident in your writing is your best bet for developing a popular, useful blog.

Having a successful blog goes far beyond creating a site and sharing content. Consider the aforementioned strategies for making your blog a more credible and popular source in your niche blogging community.

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15 Things That Really Successful Blogs Do Differently is a post from: Internet Business Mastery | Escape the 9-to-5. Make More Money. Start an Internet Business, Now!

The post 15 Things That Really Successful Blogs Do Differently appeared first on Internet Business Mastery | Escape the 9-to-5. Make More Money. Start an Internet Business, Now!.

LinkedIn is a powerful social media channel for businesses and professional people. More and more people recognize LinkedIn’s value and they are finding more and more ways in which it can work for their particular businesses.

How you use LinkedIn to help your business

There is a great possibility that you have recognized the value of LinkedIn for your business and that you are interacting through LinkedIn on a regular basis (daily, every few days, etc). You may use it to not only interact but also to do research on a variety of topics, and to connect with new people in your niche or industry. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this on LinkedIn is through LinkedIn Groups.

LinkedIn Groups can enable you to connect with all sorts of people and businesses and you can get a great deal out of those relationships that you may not even have thought of, such as learning from them, sharing your content with them, getting them to share your content with other people with whom they are connected, and obtaining introductions to people who you would not have gained access otherwise. All of this is extremely valuable and worthwhile.

However, you may be faced with a situation where your groups on LinkedIn are not working for you or other people with whom you are connected in one or more of your groups and you feel as though you are wasting your time. There is actually a way to make LinkedIn Groups work for you and there are certain things that you should avoid because they may prove to be counterproductive.

• Define your LinkedIn Group objectives appropriately: As you are thinking about forming your LinkedIn Groups, it is very important for you to make certain decisions up front. The first thing that you should consider is whether the particular group that you are forming should be open or closed. There is a possibility that your objectives may change over time. They may start out completely different from they end up. That is not necessarily an issue. However, the most important thing is that you have goals. Remember to stay as far away as possible from promoting yourself or your business in the process. It is important to bear in mind that the main reason (or objective) is to educate and help other people. Your needs and wants will be satisfied in the process.

• Choose a proper group name: When you are establishing your group, make sure that you name it appropriately. You will want to steer clear of naming the group after your business (in most cases, that will not be appropriate). Don’t shy away from potentially difficult situations or interactions, such as facing your competitors, and make sure that you educate yourself about your target market and establish the direction that you want to go before you form the group. You will be grateful afterward.

• State the group rules up front: The LinkedIn Group that you establish, whether you have chosen to make it an open or a closed group, you still need to make sure that all of your group members understand the rules and abide by them. If you can’t establish that environment, your group will be vulnerable to problems that may be out of your control. If your members follow the rules and respect the other members of the group and respect you, you will all share a very positive experience and will be better off by being a part of the group.

• Appoint someone to be the group moderator or administrator: It isn’t enough to simply write the rules. Those rules must be enforced as well and you don’t necessarily need to be the person to enforce them (or at least you don’t need to be the only one to enforce them).

• You should be the one to take control of the discussion: It is important to remember that it is about quality, not quantity. If you lead properly, everything will fall into place. It will require that you make more effort than anyone else in the group, however, after all, you are the one who established the group in the first place and that means that you feel that it is worthwhile.

• Draw in new members to the group: It may be more challenging than you think to attract new members to your group. People need to be motivated and you need to figure out a way to do that. If you are able to engage your group members, your group will be attractive to other people who have not joined yet but who may in the future. It isn’t enough for anyone to merely be a member of the group. They need to be engaged and to leave comments and ask questions (or provide answers when it applies).

• Nurture your group: If you follow what has been discussed here and you are willing to make the effort to grow and nurture your group(s), you will be successful, productive, and valuable as a group and everyone (at least those who are appropriate) will want to be a part of it.

Conclusion

There is a right way and a wrong way to establish and run a LinkedIn Group. If you do it right, your group will be successful and productive. Make sure that your group is transparent (at least, to your group members) and honest and that everyone has the same agenda, which is to help each other whenever possible. You should also try to promote your group appropriate and whenever the opportunity presents itself. If you go about working the group wrong, it won’t last very long and your efforts will have been wasted. You have the power to control where you go.

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Apple unveiled a sweeping plan Monday to organize all kinds of personal health data in one platform called HealthKit, but with the official launch of the thing just a few months away some big questions remain about just how the whole thing will work.

One of the keys to the success of any new personal health and fitness platform is the involvement of the healthcare community from the start. This part Apple got right.

The Mayo Clinic is Apple’s official health provider partner, contributing a host of health education content that can be used in Apple’s health platform to help users stay healthy and fit.

“The platform will give doctors a chance to say, ‘These are five most important things about colorectal cancer,’” Mayo’s marketing medical director Dr. John Wald tells VentureBeat. “Some indicators will rise to the top and others will fall.”

Apple has been working with the Mayo Clinic for at least five years on the health platform Apple debuted today. Wald says Apple moved slowly on the project, making sure that everything “made sense” along the way.

Wald says the Mayo Clinic sees HealthKit as a marketing tool. It’s hoping to reach out to millions of healthy consumers through its own health app, which will be able to pull down personal health information from the HealthKit repository. Wald says Mayo plans to use the HealthKit data as a way of developing a relationship with consumers long before they ever get sick.

Apple’s Health app and HealthKit will become available with the release of iOS 8 this coming September. And from the sound of it, there’s still a lot of work to do.

“Today there is no linkage between Apple’s HealthKit and any electronic health record (EHR),” Wald says. But, he says, by next fall personal health data will be flowing from the HealthKit repository into Mayo app, and then into the clinic’s electronic health record system.

People from the largest EHR developer, Epic, were on hand at HealthKit’s coming out at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco today. Epic develops and integrates EHR programs for large medical clinics and hospitals, making it a key player in the medical IT world. Epic has been working with Apple in some capacity on the handshake between the HealthKit repository and the Epic EHR.

Wald says that the patient record platforms (not Epic) used at Mayo can already capture health and fitness data from the Mayo app. Personal health data can also flow from HealthKit into the Mayo app and then into the EHR.

Wald says other medical groups and hospitals might use HealthKit data in the same way.

Will doctors use it?

Even if the HealthKit data could flow into the EHR, would doctors really use it? Will a physician really take the trouble to look at a year’s worth of nutrition data from my Health app, and use it to provide context around any illnesses I might have now?

Wald assures me that doctors will have good reason to buy in. “It will be like a snowball rolling downhill,” Wald says. “If it makes life easier for the physician by helping to keep patients healthy they’ll want to use it.”

“We’ll be providing doctors with a set of parameters for keeping patients healthy and fit; we’ll be showing them a way to do this that’s easier and more efficient,” Wald says.

And keeping patients healthy is the name of the game for providers these days. Wald points out that health payers are increasingly using a “value-based” model to pay health care providers. He gives the example of the cardiac surgery department at Mayo. Mayo earns more money from payers if it keeps post-op cardiac surgery patients healthy enough to stay away from the hospital for the first 30 days after surgery. If too many of these patients are readmitted within 30 days, Mayo loses money.

Apple as gatekeeper

All kinds of devices could end up connecting to HealthKit in the cloud. This will no doubt include a slew of consumer wearable devices, probably including one from Apple — eventually.

But, Wald says, it will eventually include more clinical devices. He gives as an example a small wearable heart monitor that listens to heartbeats and reports data back in real time.

But which devices can become “HealthKit Certified” and which ones won’t pass muster? Is this the role Apple wants to play in health, as it has with iTunes? The answer is that it’s yet to be determined.

Apple may have given the world a peek at just the rough outlines of the new HealthKit platform. The app will no doubt be functional and beautiful when it debuts next fall. But lots of questions still remain about the HealthKit platform, and how (and when) health care providers will actually begin to benefit from it.

Calls requesting further information were not immediately returned by Apple. Nor would Apple PR people allow CEO Tim Cook to comment on the new health products after his presentation to developers Monday.

Apple designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes t... read more »

Well-crafted strategies are road maps to places that yield competitive advantage and generate value for the firm. But once you’ve arrived, they don’t take you anyplace else. That’s a problem for companies under continual pressure from investors to find new sources of competitive advantage.

I recently had lunch with the CEO of a large privately held corporation that illustrated this dilemma. After two decades of strong growth, he recognized that that his strategy had run its course. In the minds of his investors, his success was baked into his company’s current value and they wanted to know where he was going to find more.

He presented to me three broad options for growth: diversify into a rather distant, weakly-related industry; develop and sell new services desired by their somewhat narrow set of existing customers; or expand globally into the same services they provide domestically. He asked which I thought made the most sense.

Of course, I did not give him a straight answer. Instead, I suggested that what he needed was a theory about strategy: a mental model about how his company could create value that would help him assess his three options.

In science, a good theory reveals compelling hypotheses that subsequent experiments will validate. A good corporate theory similarly reveals likely hypotheses about how the firm can create most value. It has three components:

• Foresight into the future evolution of their industry,
• Insight into what is distinctive and uniquely valuable in the composition of assets and capabilities the company possesses; and
• Cross-sight into how combinations of internal and external assets and opportunities can create value.

For a company that has a good corporate theory, selecting the right next strategy should not be a problem; the fact that this CEO and I were having such a conversation about such divergent options revealed the absence of a good theory about what strategies were right for his firm.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy to come up with a good corporate theory. And, if anything, companies that have comfortable market positions will find the exercise more challenging than most. Microsoft is a case in point. Although it attained a remarkable position almost decades ago, the company has struggled to find new sources of value creation.

In the long run, firms compete not on their strategies, but on the basis of their corporate theories. For the past several years I have asked students ranging from executives to undergraduates the simple question: If you were given $10,000 to invest in Google, Apple, Facebook, or Amazon, where would you invest?

While the pattern of responses varies, most students quickly recognize that their answers have less to do with assessments of current market positions, and more to do with assessments of each firm’s corporate theory.

Each firm is entrenched in a market position quite distant from the others. Apple makes consumer electronics unrivaled in their ease of use. Google offers a search engine unparalleled in its speed and breadth. Facebook supports a social network unmatched in its reach. Amazon features a web store without equal in scope. But each is guided by a very different corporate theory, distinctly crafted as a reflection of the beliefs and current assets of their firm, which informs how they will move beyond their established and fully valued positions.

These theories (ideally) provide a sense of coherence to the growth initiatives that have pushed these firms into quite disparate and increasingly overlapping market space. Indeed, their theories seem to suggest no limit to the potential for strategic collision. Future results of strategic actions will ultimately determine the worth and accuracy of each firm’s theory.

Bottom line, unlike a strategy, a well-crafted corporate theory can take you beyond the one position or advantage. This is not to say that your theory will necessarily be the best one, but at least it will not be dead on arrival.

When the 2015 cars hit showroom floors this year, some buyers will be looking at features the likes of which no one’s seen before. The Audi A5, for example, has a seven-inch screen that emerges from a slot on the dashboard. It will use a 4G wireless modem built into the car itself to connect to the Internet, navigate Google Maps, surf Facebook, and offer a Wi-Fi hotspot for people in the car.

Shoppers considering the 2015 Hyundai Sonata will find themselves looking at a model with CarPlay, a new technology from Apple. When they plug an iPhone into the dashboard, the whole car will essentially become a smartphone on wheels, using the phone’s 4G connection to connect to the Internet, showing car-enabled iPhone apps on the car’s touch-screen interface, and using Siri to accept voice commands.

The connected car is here, but like any emerging technology, it’s arriving in the form of an all-out melee among automakers and technology giants, all fighting over just how the connected car should work.

“There are two ways to connect a car: There’s the original telemetry readings, but the new phase, now that we have 4G is infotainment devices, and the vehicle as a hotspot,” says Larry Zibrik, vice-president of Market Development at Sierra Wireless, a Vancouver-based company that’s become a global leader in the modules that allow machines to communicate over cellular networks. Their modems are used in Chrysler and Tesla cars.

Telemetry readings, also known as telematics, ­gathers information that the car’s many sensors gather about the machine itself, from tire pressure to oil heat to the speedometer. In a world of connected cars, they could help predictively maintain a car, scheduling a garage visit against its driver’s personal calendar, and making sure that the mechanic has the parts they need in stock.

Cars might also start speaking to each other: A car that notices a loss of traction from its wheels might send out an automatic alert to nearby vehicles, and their drivers, that they’re approaching slippery conditions.

Telematics can offer up business intelligence: Insurance companies like Desjardins, for instance, are offering to adjust rates for consumers who install car-monitoring devices that will analyze their driving habits. (Desjardins says it will only adjust rates downwards, a courtesy that other insurers might not provide in the future.) “What the insurance industry wants to understand is user behaviour within the vehicle,” Tony Stone, an expert in connected devices with IBM in Detroit says.

Public attention is about to be grabbed by the rapid evolution of the auto dashboard, as carmakers and tech giants work out bringing to the car the Internet experience consumers have gotten used to on their smartphones.

There are two competing ways of doing this. Some companies, like Audi and Chevrolet, are selling cars with Internet modems and touch-screen systems built in. This, of course, means paying the carmaker a subscription for Internet service, and right now, the rates are pricey. But carmakers like this approach, because it allows them to control the relationship with the Internet-surfing customer, and make their in-car Internet as a distinguishing feature of the brand.

The flipside is Apple’s approach: The Internet enters the car through the smartphone, using the customer’s existing data plan. Google is also working with a consortium of automakers to bring Android compatibility to the dashboard, although it hasn’t reached the market as quickly as Apple’s.

The technology companies are betting that consumers will prefer a standardized in-car Internet experience from one car to the next over a world in which every car’s dashboard Internet works differently. Of course, this setup lets Apple and Google be the gatekeepers to drivers’ surfing; Google is a voracious amasser of data, which it uses to market its advertising, while Apple is eager to broaden its ecosystem, to encourage people to buy more iPhones, which is where it makes its money. All the while, software developers who’d write apps for connected cars are caught in the middle.

But high-end cars with these systems built-in will only account for a fraction of the 16-odd million new cars sold every year, especially in the near-term, which is why other companies are targeting the aftermarket. Pioneer, for example, has released its first in-car radios with touch-screens that will support CarPlay. (They’re not cheap, either, ranging from $700 to $1,400.)

And firms like Mojio, a Vancouver startup whose products are in pre-market testing, is one of several firms that are targeting the vast base of cars that don’t have touchscreens at all, but whose owners would like to reap the benefits of constant connectivity. “It’s not about the connected car, it’s about the unconnected car that most people own,” says Jay Giraud, Mojio’s CEO.

Mojio is a little box that plugs into any car’s maintenance data port, beaming out information about the car’s internal state, so the driver can use smartphone apps (either supplied by Mojio, or by third parties) to do anything from monitor their car’s fuel economy to find parking spots.

“We think that this is going to dramatically advance the pace at which cars start to talk to one another—to see in blind spots, to see where there’s a traffic jam,” says Giraud. “We look at cars as being able to be a whole new layer of communication between infrastructure and society and general.”

 

The post The electronic highway: How ‘connected cars’ will change driving appeared first on Canadian Business.

Selling mobile apps is easy these days, since everyone is on a smart phone or other mobile device. However, if you aren’t doing a few things right, it is possible to fail. Here are eight things you could be doing wrong as a mobile app reseller – listed below are tips to help sales surge with small businesses.

1. Not Making Yourself Known – Customers need to know who you are, what you offer and how it can help them. If they don’t know who you are, they aren’t going to give you their business. If you’re well-known, you have a foolproof chance of succeeding. Letting your local community know that you are a mobile app developer with an amazing product for businesses is critical.

2. Not Connecting – Once you’ve established yourself, and are well-known, you then need to work to connect with your customers. Build trust and a good report with your clients. One way of doing this is to show potential clients other small businesses you have worked with to gain their trust.

3. Not Creating Opportunities – Once the customers start arriving, you need to keep them, by creating opportunities for them. This means if you’ve already sold them on a mobile app and mobile website, help them implement & market it to their customers.

4. Not Creating Value – Selling apps is all about creating value for the customer through their buying process. If you don’t have sound ideas to sell, you are wasting the customer’s time, and you aren’t likely to make a sale. Remember, features tell but benefits sell. Small businesses need to quickly and easily understand where the return on investment from your product is going to come from.

5. Failing to Get Commitments – Sales is all about commitments, which requires having conversations with prospective clients, moving deals ahead. You absolutely must interact with your customers and ask them for gain commitments. One approach that has worked for many resellers is to give them a free demonstration of what the app can do for their business. This shows you’re serious about winning the deal.

6. Not Gaining a Consensus – You have to become a part of the decision making process. Once a consensus is reached, there is no wiggle room. Be part of the group and win big. This is where becoming a mobile marketing expert really comes into play because your job is to help businesses create a mobile marketing strategy that will bring real business into their establishment.

7. Not Presenting the Right Solution – It is all about selling the right solutions and making the customer see how your product can help them. If they don’t share your vision, it’s all a wash. Buyers will always buy into what they believe is right, so sell your vision. The best way to bring down this barrier is to use other real businesses testimonials!

8. Not Asking Outright for Their Business – Seems like a no brainier, but it can be easy with the right approach! Closing is an integral part of sales – you have to ask the customer for their business. Getting that closing signature is what it’s all about. It may seem awkward at first but when you ask in a way that is mutually beneficial you will win more times than you will fail. Remember, you are helping businesses grow with mobile!

There’s a statistic out there that buyers have, on average, progressed 57% through their buying process before they engage a salesperson. That ‘average’ piece seems to have been lost, and a commonly held-belief now is that this 57% is a fact in all cases.

How you act before and after ‘the 57%’ is a matter of choice, not a function of averages. Buyers buy different things, and sellers sell differently. You get to choose. But first, let’s explore the differences.

As we researched this topic, we spoke to many of our great customers to see what they had observed. Here’s their buyer’s point of view.

• Xerox sells many things, including copier paper. Copier paper is a commodity. As a buyer I don’t need a lot of advice. I’m going to buy frequently and only care that the price/quality is reasonable.

• Hewlett-Packard provides most things an IT buyer might need, including a cool laptop called the HP Envy – a little more complex than my copier paper.

• If I wanted a temperature control system in our building, Honeywell is the place to go. It’s a more specialized purchase than a laptop.  I am probably going to need guidance and advice.

• Harmonic sells media controller systems that manage video workflows in some of the world’s largest and most demanding video environments. That’s not something I want to buy on my own. I’ll need some consultative advice.

• Box provides enterprise online data sharing and large-scale content management services. Buyers want to engage strategically when determining their enterprise content strategy. It’s a big commitment.

• If you are choosing Salesforce as your CRM, it is likely to have significant impact on your business. You know it is important to get some serious advice.

As evident from these examples, there is a lot of variability in how buyers need to engage before buy, so let’s look about how you might deconstruct that.

Organizational Impact is a Driver of Buyer Engagement

If you engage early with the buyers in their buying cycle you will be more successful.  That is a core tenet of my book Account Planning in Salesforce (free extract here). Being a buyer isn’t as easy as it might seem. Understanding and articulating their own needs and then finding the best solution can be a stressful exercise.  The greater the organizational impact, the more stressful it gets.  Buyers need help.

The two axes on this graph are cost and intellectual property (IP) intensity.  As they increase, so does organizational impact. Buyers then need help in establishing criteria, evaluating options and choosing a solution. The engaged salesperson can create value for their customer and gain more control of the deal.

There are also two other factors that matter: risk and frequency. Organizational risk is higher when choosing a CRM system than it is when buying copier paper. The buyer performs greater diligence and needs more guidance. Also, greater frequency translates to greater familiarity and less need for help. I buy copier paper more often than I buy a temperature control system so I know how to make the copier paper purchase on my own.

In the chart here you can see in the top right quadrant, our buyer is more likely to engage the supplier early, because a business process infrastructure project is usually high cost, contains a lot of IP value and a bad decision carries significant risk.

Conversely, there is less IP value in purchasing utilities (e.g. electricity). The difference when buying office equipment is even more striking; Cost, IP and Risk are typically low and Frequency is high, so buyers are less likely to need a seller to guide them.

Here’s the thing: If your solutions don’t fit into the bottom left quadrant, your buyers likely want to engage with you (or your your competitor) much earlier in their process, and there are many things you can do to influence the outcome.

In the next post, I’ll help you understand how to respond when the buyer is in fact well along the path to developing a buying preference. In the meantime, please feel free to download our latest publication Battling the 57%: Deconstructing the Buyer Seller Dance.

When you look at any market segment, at any given time only about 10 per cent of potential buyers are actively in the market looking to buy. Further, not all of these fall into the pained or needy camps. Some are motivated by other factors.

Let’s liken a buyer’s need to a cog in a wheel that moves a cart. If one cog breaks the other cogs create a workaround so the cart gets where it’s going. The cart would prefer not to replace the cog because of the complexity, fall out, and duration of the change: can the old cog be fixed? Will the other wheels pick up the slack? If we need a new wheel, must it match the other wheels – and when could we make the switch to not undermine the trip? Is the cost of a new cog higher than just adapting the other wheels? Will the drivers know how to drive with a new wheel?

When our buyers have a ‘cog’ problem, the cost of fixing it might take a toll on the trip, the cart, the drivers, or the other wheels. To make a change of any kind they must traverse a 13 step process (go to www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com for the steps of the buy path) to figure out the cost to the system of people, policies, and relationships: a purchase is their last resort.  And instead of waiting while they do it, we can facilitate them – but not with the sales model.

You have a choice: you can follow buyers around until they decide they need your solution – about 90% of them won’t – or facilitate their decision path. I developed a change facilitation model called Buying Facilitation® that works with sales to help buyers navigate all steps of their unique buy path.

Buying Facilitation® teaches buyers to assemble all who will address the change on the first call, and to decide if they will fix the cog or buy a new one – your solution – on the second call. You’ll know who is a buyer, who isn’t, and either teach them how to work with you toward a solution or walk away with minimum time wastage.

Call me. I can help you facilitate the buy path of any B2B client, regardless of your solution, and with sales, marketing, and social. You’ll save over 80% of your time wastage, close 4x more, and be differentiated. Unless you like sitting by the site of the road waiting for your clients to decide how they’re going to get their wheel to work. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com or 512 457 0246. Visit www.buyingfacilitation.com to learn about Buying Facilitation®.

The Last Thing Buyers Need is your Solution is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Brand Autopsy Archeology Week continues…

A hallmark of the Brand Autopsy blog has been taking offbeat sources and connecting the dots back to business. In March of 2004 I connected the dots between the business practices of drug dealers to activities we in the legitimate game of business strive to do well.

My seven-part “Street Corner Selling Curriculum” series of posts were based off of Bruce Jacob’s classic book, DEALING CRACK, which shared field research he had done to better understand the ins and outs of selling crack cocaine.

This particular post shares quotes from drug dealers on how they develop enthusiastically satisfied customers.

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first published on March 3, 2004

Today’s topic is:

Developing Enthusiastically Satisfied Customers

Businesses that focus on cultivating enthusiastically satisfied customers will typically generate a loyal customer base that will gladly refer that business to their friends and family. Drug dealers must also develop enthusiastically satisfied customers because nearly all of their sales growth is tied directly to customer referrals.

Bruce Jacobs furthers this thought in his book, Dealing Crack.

In the world of illicit street drugs, the mythic importance of a good connection cannot be overstated. Most people involved in the generic process of purchasing want the most and best product for the least amount of money, and crack buyers evaluate dealers by seeking out those who are perceived to offer the best deal.

A number of sellers attempted to target their market strategies accordingly. Selling the fattest stones, offering more product for the money than was customary, and giving credit were all geared to entice customers to seek them and them only.

Read these smart street-level quotes on how drug dealers develop enthusiastically satisfied customers:

Bo Joe — “The bigger ones [rocks] you serve, the more customers you get. You don’t gotta worry about no one else getting’ the sale because they [users] want you.”

Ice-D — “You give’em more than what you should because they look at their competitors and know that ain’t what so and so gave me [last time].”

Deuce Low — “Everybody try to keep they own clientele. Homie spoiled a customer so much last night, he don’t wanna deal with me – only him.”

K-Rock — “Providing fat stones may hook customers into buying from a particular seller, but smaller quantities – provided sometimes at reduced cost or free of charge – keeps the addiction going. Cultivation is arguably most effective (and most appreciated) when users are at their height of desperation, In the twilight of a binge, for example, even the most meager form of generosity can look colossal and reflect positively on the dealer who is ‘compassionate’ enough to offer a free or cut-rate nugget.”

K-Rock — “When a customer’s geekin’ … I’ll break off some pieces like give’em a fifteen for a ten, or a ten for a five, or just break off like two and three dollar pieces. I kinda feel guilty – know that they got kids. So I don’t be taxin’ like that. You’re gonna lose money, but you’re gonna keep your clientele. You know they get paid at the first of the month, and they gonna keep spendin’ with me [because I did that for them]. I’m true to the smokers. That why my clientele be so high.”

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Street Corner Selling Curriculum:
Lesson #1: Customer Acquisition
Lesson #2: Ten Minute Rule
Lesson #3: Procurement
Lesson #4: Merchandising
Lesson #5: Angel Customers and Demon Customers
Lesson #6: Developing Enthusiastically Satisfied Customers (pt. 1)
Lesson #7: Developing Enthusiastically Satisfied Customers (pt. 2)

The post Developing Enthusiastically Satisfied Customers appeared first on Brand Autopsy.

In the past few weeks I’ve led several sessions for various clients around structuring and conducting more effective sales calls. It’s such an interesting topic to tackle because so many salespeople have become complacent about how they prepare for and run an initial/discovery, face-to-face meeting with a prospective customer. I find this is particularly true for seasoned veterans who’ve been selling for a long time. They take for granted that the call will go well, or they just see it as old hat — been there, done that. 

Frankly, this laisser-faire approach to sales calls makes me crazy. Today, we often have to work so hard to get in front of a high-value potential client. It’s not easy to earn their time, so when we do secure that initial face-to-face meeting we so desperately want, shouldn’t we desire to be as crisp and effective as possible?

Recently I’ve been doing significant writing and coaching around an issue that’s prevalent across of range of my clients: the sellers (even high-level executives who are involved in selling) are repeatedly treated like nothing more than a vendor by the prospect. And from what I’ve observed, it is often the approach of the salesperson and the way he/she conducts sales calls that contribute to the low view/vendor status ascribed to them by the prospect.

While these salespeople yearn to be perceived as experts, consultants, value-creators and professional problem-solvers, it’s their own words, poor call structure and lame attempt at discovery (probing) that doom them to vendor status in the eyes of the buyer.

This is a big topic and I’m sure many of you related to what I was describing as you read those last few sentences. I promise you’ll be hearing more from me on this “vendor or value-creator” issue in the near future. But for today, let’s spend just a minute looking at how great probing questions (one in a particular) asked the right way, can completely reposition the seller in the mind of the buyer, and change the dynamic of the sales call.

I don’t think many would argue that being armed with an arsenal of great question for prospects in an essential prerequisite for a successful sales call. There are entire books and selling systems devoted to the art and science of asking sequences of probing questions. I dedicated a significant chunk of Chapter 11 in New Sales. Simplified. to the four categories of questions I encourage salespeople to master (Personal, Strategic/Directional, Specific Pain/Opportunity-Seeking and Sales Process).

Why have sales authors devoted so many pages to the topic of probing questions? Honestly, it’s because most sellers don’t do this well. They’re unprepared. They prefer pitching to probing. They lack the tone, EQ and general business acumen to come off appearing both educated and sincere. But even more important, we write so much about probing because we know that excellent probing is not only a key to conducting great sales calls, but it helps buyers perceive sellers as the “consultants” we so desperately want to be. I often tell clients that you can accomplish more great selling with the questions you ask than by how well you present.

A couple years ago I was on a sales call along with my client CEO. This is a client where at times, I play surrogate sales executive and even carry their business card with my name on it. I’d occasionally go on sales calls as an active participant. Part of the intent was to model excellent sales call structure for the executives of this firm. But there were other benefits. When I played the role of senior salesperson on calls, it also freed up the CEO to play founder/CEO/subject matter expert, while I carried the burden setting up the meeting, sharing parts of their story and even asking some key probing questions. During a meeting with a particularly challenging prospect we were struggling to make headway. At some point, I finally just paused hoping to alter the momentum. Then I asked one of my all-time favorite questions.

“I’m just curious, why did you invite us in to visit with you?”

The prospect didn’t answer right away. But my client and I remained patient as the awkward silence built. Eventually, the prospect let out an audible exhale (the good kind), and began to open up about what was going on in his world. Honestly, it was a thing of sales beauty. And from that point on, my client tried to incorporate that question early on in every sales call he made.

I love that question. I’ll ask it at various times depending on how I feel the meeting is going. Sometimes, to be funny, I’ll ask it right up front, particularly if it’s one of those meetings that took months and months to secure. There’s nothing better than cracking a confident smile, looking a senior-level person who you’ve been chasing forever in the face and asking, “So, I’m just curious, why’d you invite me in?”  It’s even better when the prospect is honest or blunt in their response. I’ve had executives smile back and say something to the affect of “you’re kidding, right? You’ve been beating down this door for a year — phone calls, voicemails, birthday cards, referrals. I finally relented just so you’d stop.” 

But you see, important senior-level people don’t’ give meetings for charity. And they don’t meet with people out of pity or because the salesperson tried hard. They accept meetings because they’re curious, because they know they’ll get value from the time invested, or because they think you may be able to help them. That’s why that question works. And when you get the funny or blunt answer I just described above, without hesitation, come back strong with: “Yup, it took some pretty serious effort to get you to agree to visit with me. But you still invited me in. So what’s going in your world that you decided it was worth your time to meet with me? And what would you like to get out of our conversation today?” And then zip your mouth. Say nothing. Nada. The moment that prospect starts to answer your question, you won. You’re now in the consultant’s seat. He/she is about to tell you why you’re there.

• What are your favorite questions to ask prospects?
• Do you have a few go-to questions that can alter the direction of a meeting or get you out of a jam?
• Are you learning what you need to on sales calls, or just rushing into your presentation?
• Do you ask such great questions that prospects perceive you as an expert, consultant and value-creator? Or like so many in sales, does your approach doom you simply to vendor-status?

The post One of My Favorite Probing Questions: I am Just Curious, Why Did You Invite Me in? appeared first on Mike Weinberg | The New Sales Coach.

You can’t deny the draw of Frank Underwood.

We’re big fans of Netflix’s House of Cards here at Monetate, and have done our fair share of quoting it. And that got me thinking: Despite being perhaps the most Machiavellian of all pop culture characters this century has seen, the Democrat from South Carolina can be a guiding voice for marketers.

(Seriously. Bear with me, and you’ll see what I mean.)

What makes Frank Underwood a likeable character—rather than the despicable, hated man he so rightly deserves to be—is his use of direct address. Speaking to the audience, Frank breaks down the fourth wall and, in the process, pulls in the viewer.

You’re not just along for the ride; you’re complicit with the “Underwood scheme to amassing power.”

For a marketer, it’s the perfect example of how to engage your customer and interact with them. Connect with them, deliver an effective message, establish a relationship. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here, then, are some of my favorite Underwood-isms and how a digital marketer can use them as inspiration (provided, of course, that you strip away the evil associated with most of them):

“Any politician that gets 70 million votes has tapped into something larger himself, larger than even me, as much as I hate to admit it. Look at that winning smile, those trusting eyes.” (Season 1, Chapter 1)

The marketer’s message: Build trust.

To build trust, marketers need to deliver valuable, relevant experiences to their customers.

That means listening to your audience, yes; but it also means making sure your audience knows you’re listening. You can do it by using the data at your disposal—demographics, technographics, behavioral data—to deliver those experiences that will resonate with your customers.

Do that, and you will build trust.

“Power is a lot like real estate. It’s all about location, location, location. The closer you are to the source, the higher your property value.” (Season 1, Chapter 1)

The marketer’s message: Meet your customers where they are.

As a marketer trying to deliver valuable, relevance experiences to your customer, you need to ensure that your customers’ experiences are useable. And that means optimizing your channels so that they can more easily interact with you.

In other words (i.e., Frank’s), let yourself get closer to them by eliminating any roadblocks.

For your website and email, think responsive design. It may not be a cure-all for your challenges, but it’s your ticket to entry if you want to reach your customers regardless of device. And for social, a good source of top of the funnel leads, establish KPIs that help you determine the value of your engagements, find those campaigns that are resonating and replicate them.

“Such a waste of talent. He chose money over power. In this town, a mistake nearly everyone makes. Money is the Mc-Mansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after 10 years. Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who doesn’t see the difference.” (Season 1, Chapter 2)

The marketer’s message: Focus on long-term relationships instead of one-time sales.

Consider how often the best brands, the brands that command your attention offer a coupon or discount. It doesn’t happen very frequently, does it? No.

Instead of playing the weekly game of coupons and surreptitious email acquisition, focus on building a relationship with your customers. (Bruce Ernst, our VP of Product Management, recently covered this in a post, “Me and Amazon, We’ve Got a Good Thing Going,” by the way.)

Delivering value and relevance to your customers over the long-term is more valuable than breeding dependence through discounts. After you stop giving your customer the coupons, they’ll leave you for the next lowest bidder.

“What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength; it is their weakness. And if you can humble yourself before them they will do anything you ask.” (Season 1, Chapter 3)

The marketer’s message: Talk to your customer in a way that resonates with them.

It’s no secret that the best communicators understand their audience, their pain points, their needs, and their motivations. They shape their messages on those points.

As a digital marketer, you know that your customers aren’t all the same. Use your understanding of the customer, then, to create a personalization strategy for your best customer segments. Create a message that’s contextually relevant to those individuals: What device is that person using? What is her on-site behavioral history? Where is she located?

Answer these questions to build the foundation for your personalization strategy.

“There are two types of vice-presidents: doormats and matadors. Which do you think I intend to be?” (Season 2, Episode 3)

The marketer’s message: Don’t wait. Take action now.

If you’re starting from zero, planning and acting on an effective personalization strategy can be daunting.

Don’t get be paralyzed by what might seem like an insurmountable feat. Start small, and start fast. If you focus your efforts on the quick wins, you’ll build internal support and momentum.

Perhaps more importantly, though, is the fact that you’ll be engaging your customers in a more relevant and valuable manner than you would be otherwise. If you wait until you have the “perfect” strategy and the “perfect” tactics, you run the risk of losing them. “Action” is the important word here.

If you can learn from these five lessons, you’ll be on your way to becoming a better digital marketer. And, unlike Frank, you’ll be doing it the right way.

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The Multichannel Email Marketer
Explore different ways to benefit from email campaigns that work in unison with other areas of the organization, connecting two crucial elements that have always been treated separately within organizations—knowledge about the customer and marketing actions to deliver a better experience. Download “The Multichannel Email Marketer.”

Aligning your sales and marketing teams means more than just signing a service level agreement (SLA). While SLAs are a great way to get both teams to collaborate on paper, alignment in practice happens when marketers and sales reps proactively seek to understand each other’s goals, activities, metrics, and obstacles.

It can be easy to get wrapped up in your own world and your own team, but Sales and Marketing have a lot to teach each other that will make everyone better at their jobs. If you want to get better at yours, here are the six things you should know about your company's sales process.

What You Should Know About Your Company’s Sales Process

1) What Constitutes an MQL At Your Company

Think of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) as the diamonds in the rough. They're the leads that are most likely to turn into customers, a judgment based on their activity before converting. Distinguishing between MQLs and other leads helps your sales reps prioritize "better" leads and, ultimately, win more deals.

Every company has a different set of requirements for what constitutes an MQL, and everyone on your marketing team should know what those requirements are. It will help you gear your content, forms, and landing pages toward attracting and more easily identifying MQLs so you can get more of them into the sales funnel. Plus, marketing team goals are often based on the number of MQLs generated each month, so your success might depend on it!

2) How the Sales Team Works Leads

Potential for tension between your sales and marketing teams often comes from miscommunications about lead handoff. How does the sales team get notified of a new lead? How long does it take them to start working that lead, and why? What causes sales reps to disqualify a lead?

Eliminate the mystery by learning the process sales reps at your company go through from the moment a lead enters their lead queue until they either disqualify it or it becomes an open opportunity. 

3) How Marketing Activities Support Each Stage in the Buying Process

The reason you do anything in marketing -- write blog posts, send emails, tweet cool insights, host events -- is to guide prospects through different stages in the buying process. (And to continue educating and delighting them once they become a paying customer, of course!) Each marketing activity should clearly support and have specific goals related to a certain stage in the buying process.

For example, even though your blogging efforts are mostly top-of-the-funnel (TOFU), they can also help your sales team close deals, if positioned properly. By writing posts that answer common prospect questions and objections, you could help support your TOFU goals, while also helping someone become a more qualified opportunity or maybe even become a customer. Knowing the effect of your activities is incredibly important for you -- it helps you better prioritize what to do when you have a million things on your plate.

4) What Common Customer Objections Are

Customer objections refer to the pushback sales reps get from prospects, like "I'm not ready to buy," or "I don't think your product will solve my problems." They aren't rejections, they're just requests for more information -- which makes them a gold mine for marketing content. One of your main goals as a marketer is to create targeted content that answers your potential customer’s questions and needs. What better place to find out what those questions and needs are than to see what prospects are saying to your sales team?

Many sales teams keep a document of common customer objections, used to train new hires on how to respond to the most frequent questions and concerns prospects have. Ask your sales team if they have a list of common customer objections. Take a look and think about what marketing content you could create to preemptively answer these questions.

For example, let’s say your company sells lawn care products, and one common customer objection your sales reps hear is that your products are too expensive. What educational content can your marketing team create to help your sales team respond in a way that positions your company positively? Take advantage of this feedback. Perhaps you could write blog post about the return of investing in lawn care early, or an ebook called “Lawn Care on a Budget," or a downloadable “Lawn Care Starter’s Kit” checklist for people just starting to care for their lawns who are unsure where to spend their money.

Make your sales team look good by creating educational content they can show their prospects in the face of these objections.

5) What Sales Knows About the Competition

Sales reps get this question all the time: "Why should I buy from you rather than (name of competition)?" And trained reps know exactly how to answer. They know the competition's strengths and weaknesses compared with their own company's strengths and weaknesses, and they're prepared to have informed conversations with prospects on why their own company is better. They also have a good understanding of the competition's products, pricing models, target audience, mission statements, and marketing strategy.

Although marketers don't get asked every day why their company is better than the competition, you should know just as much about the competition as the sales team does. It's important to gain an understanding of your competitors and lightly monitor their online activity so you can avoid missed opportunities and figure out where your own marketing team is underperforming. The sales team might have the main points written down somewhere, so start by asking them to share those materials or meet with you to explain their competitive talking points.

(HubSpot customers: You can also monitor competitor activity in your own portal by clicking on "Reports" at the top of the page, then "Competitors." Also, if you need help navigating the report, check out this guide.)

6) How Reps Use Marketing Content During Sales Meetings

Your marketing team might produce great content, but is it the right content that will help your sales team educate prospects on topics that will lead to won deals at the end of the day? To ensure the content you produce is helpful for sales efforts, you should have a solid understanding of how sales reps at your company use marketing content during their calls and meetings with prospects.

Which blog posts do the sales reps have bookmarked to answer prospects' frequently asked questions? Which e-books do they refer to most often?

You'll also want to find out which of your downloadable marketing offers have been yielding the best sales conversations. From a sales rep's point of view, the best marketing offers a) generate quality leads and b) spark great sales conversations with the people who downloaded them. Reps often find that some types of content help spark conversations with prospects on the phone. To get an idea of the content prospects found most engaging and helpful during meetings, ask the sales team which offers they found easiest to engage with prospects.

What else can marketers learn from their sales teams? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below!

Web content drives both sales and marketing success.

But it is essential that we take just a little time to look at how the two functions differ. By making certain we understand the difference, we can close the gap between marketing and sales and grow business faster.

Marketing generates attention of the many people who make up a buyer persona, whereas sales communicates with one potential customer at a time, putting the buying process into context.

Reaching many people

It is the job of marketers to understand buyer personas—essentially groups of buyers—and communicate to these groups in a one-to-many approach. Marketers are experts at communicating to many people, and typically the potential customers they reach are not yet ready to have a sales discussion.

The marketing team captures the attention of a group of buyers and drives those people into and through the sales process. The content generated by the marketers—blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books, webinars, and the like—can influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a deep understanding of buyer personas based on research, this content generates sales leads and culminates in the buying process.

Influencing one person at a time

The role of salespeople is completely different because they influence one buyer at a time when the buyers are much closer to making the buying decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyers. They add context to the company’s expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers’ content fulfills its potential at the precise moment the buyer needs it.

When the two functions work together, business grows!

Summer and laziness do go hand-in-hand. As always, it’s bad news for productivity (especially when your sales quota is starting to sound more like the post office’s in-rain-or-shine motto).

But what if there was a way to get value out of this haze? When you look outside and feel like eating out, is there a way to turn that activity into something that generates software leads?

Actually you just might if you adopt the right attitude and can look deep into your own lazy tendencies without falling completely.

The secret is in your perspective. If you have a day job mentality towards your work, this may not be the blog post for you. On the other hand, finding ways to see that work in everything you do (including the leisurely stuff) sharpens your eye for hidden opportunities. For example:

• Discovering new markets – Are you looking to expand? Sometimes your best ideas can come in the form of a trip to the local diner. Look the small, day-to-day problems they have. It’s fairly possible that your next source of software leads could be just right down the street. The idea is to simply look around you. Look to the billboards, the ads, or even just what’s on TV. Having time off gets all the more enjoyable when it gives you something you can bring back to work.

• Applying unlikely skills – Sometimes it’s the things outside our jobs that teach everything we need to be better at them. Be it a mom, dad, or even just a best friend, being any of these would require you to have the empathy and communication skills to succeed in marketing. And with better marketing, more software leads should soon follow. What is it in your life after hours that you find subconsciously applying?

• Help out – You don’t necessarily have to go on a charity run or start just cleaning up around the office. Simply see if there’s anyone in your immediate circle who could use help from your trade. If not them, keep your ears out for anyone they might know. You can never tell if a round of drinks might lead you to your next list of B2B prospects.

• Secretly learning from the competition – Suppose you already discovered a new niche but the bad news is there’s already competition. Why not actually go down to their clients’ place and see how they’re operating in it? The thing about niches is that they’re not too many players who might recognize you as another rival in the new space.

Though of course, it’s hard to apply any of these if you’re not that emotionally invested in your company. When you actually take a sort of enjoyment in what you do and what you learn, you tend to take it with you (even during a lazy summer day). It’s what lets you discover all sorts of ways to get software leads even while you’re not feeling all that productive.

We are all aware that the process of engaging consumers has changed — so much so that the cliché of starting a blog post or conference presentation with a series of “did you know the world is changing?” statistics has reached astounding proportions.

Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that content marketing — and how brands use it to interact with buyers at all stages of their engagement journey — is fundamentally reshaping the way businesses create their go-to-market strategies. This impact is both good and bad. As Joe and I have discussed frequently on our podcast, there are strategies and then there are “random acts of content.” Either of those activities will affect the business — it’s just a matter of how. 

As the first rule of holes goes, “If you are in one, stop digging.” So, interestingly, I think we’ve moved well beyond the question of if content can affect our business — there’s simply no doubt that every single business is producing more content than it ever has before. The task at hand is to determine how it should affect our business, and what we should be doing about it.

Where is the biggest impact of B2B content?

With all due irony noted, let me hit you with two statistics. According to Sirius Decisions, business buyers now go through 67 percent of their buying process by consuming content online. This doesn’t necessarily mean sales isn’t involved; it just means that prospects are holistically consuming content as part of their buyer’s journey. Forrester Research has gone even further, stating that buyers may be anywhere from “two-thirds to 90 percent of the way through their journey before they ever reach out to the vendor.”

Though it ultimately doesn’t matter which number is right, what’s important is how businesses identify, create, and manage content opportunities to address the challenges brought by these process shifts. This includes the need for all functions of the business to be facile with content — not just the marketing team.

Are you watching your marketing channels, or are they watching you? 

One of the greatest challenges for many B2B businesses is where to use this content. While many of the most popular marketing channels we deliver our fabulous content on are new, just as many are mature and are solely used for their tried-and-true legacy purposes. For many B2B businesses the website still functions only as a direct marketing brochure; print is still just for delivering promotions or one-sheets; television is still only leveraged for 30-second ads; and email is the way to go for customer newsletters. And just as early television shows were simply filmed radio programs, many content marketing tactics are simply “classic” marketing techniques wrapped in a new format. Thus, when these marketing efforts don’t achieve expected results, the whole process (rather than the channel approach) gets discarded.

Now, remember both the Sirius Decisions and the Forrester number are averages — not best case (or worst, depending on your point of view) scenarios. How much of a B2B buyer’s journey will be fulfilled through consuming content will vary greatly, depending on the industry and the product or service being considered for purchase.

For example, it’s highly unlikely that the purchaser of microprocessors or someone looking for a banker to handle an extremely complex financial transaction would go through two-thirds of his or her buying cycle by exclusively searching for and engaging with content online. No. You can bet that they’re talking to someone early and frequently.

Though content may not be the key to “greasing the funnel” for some of these more complex products and services, it may play an extremely important role in higher-level engagement of the influencers of that purchase. Or, it may play an important role in educating the purchasers of that product that a new approach or solution even exists.

Our new study: Webinars are one prime example

It’s critical that B2B businesses learn to balance the effectiveness of both new and existing marketing channels — and experiment with where it’s best to deliver content during their customer engagement journey. We at CMI have seen evidence of this need while finishing a new study on webinars as a marketing channel.

Webinars have been a method of B2B online communication, literally, since the beginning of the web. From a marketing and sales perspective, they have long been one of the more popular ways to deliver mid-funnel focused content to prospective buyers.

Traditionally, they’ve been used to present sales/product demonstrations, training, and online education illustrating thought leadership around particular topics. And, from a content marketing perspective, webinars have always been a fairly popular tactic, as well: CMI’s broader research shows that marketers consistently rate webinars among the top 12 most frequently used tactics, and among the top five most effective.

So why the gap between usage and effectiveness? How are the most successful marketers using webinars as part of their content marketing strategy? Are webinars producing a good return on investment? To what degree are marketers experimenting with broader uses for webinars (e.g., to create engagement and brand awareness), and are those approaches effective? These are the questions we began asking ourselves prior to conducting this research.

Our hypothesis going into this study was that webinars are effective for engaging audiences across more stages of the buying cycle than previously thought. Ultimately, this research study sought to test that hypothesis.

With the help of Adobe Connect underwriting this research, we surveyed 227 marketers, half of whom currently use webinars and half who do not.

Overall, the study seems to confirm the importance of occasionally revisiting the roles particular channels should play in our marketing strategies. I think you’ll find the results to be enlightening, but check it out for yourself by reading the full study: Webinars: They’re Not Just for Leads Anymore.

Here are a few more key findings from the study:

• Marketers who prioritize tactics other than webinars may be missing an opportunity to broaden their use of webinars and extract even greater value than they may have achieved when using webinars for just one purpose (e.g., training).

• Marketers who take the time to integrate webinars and document them into a cohesive content marketing strategy are realizing new opportunities for engagement, brand awareness, and thought leadership; having a documented content strategy in place increases the chances for success.

• Developing strategies around higher-funnel opportunities — such as audience development, thought leadership, and relationship building — can reinvigorate or strengthen a webinar program.

• Marketers who are broadening the scope of their webinars are finding more opportunity for ROI and cost-effectiveness from this approach. Webinars are most cost-effective when integrated across the customer’s buying journey.

• Generating content and audience development are the biggest challenges for marketers using webinars. However, those with strong, integrated content marketing strategies are less challenged with attracting audiences, which gives them more time to develop quality content.

The opportunity to derive great value out of a (now) classic, mature, and well-worn media channel is here. Webinar tools have evolved, and so too must the content marketer’s use of them.

Download the full report: Webinars: They’re Not Just for Leads Anymore.

Competitor targeting is highly effective. At Obility, we run Competitor campaigns for all of our clients, and they are consistently some of the best performing, measured by cost per Opportunity or sales pipeline generated. Competitors’ prospects and customers are great leads. They are clearly in the market for a solution you provide and more than likely have existing allocated budget. If you are a retargeting network like Perfect Audience, and you target customers of Retargeter, Bizo, and AdRoll, you know that these prospects have already bought into running retargeting ads and have set aside budget for running retargeting campaigns. Competitor campaigns are effective because they hit an extremely qualified audience.

Competitors spend a significant portion of their advertising budget building awareness for their brand. More so, competitors are spending a large chunk of their marketing budgets on building a social audience – a platform that they do not control and an opportunity for you to take advantage. Social advertising is a valuable tool to reach your competitors’ customers and prospects. I have outlined a number of different competitor targeting tactics within social advertising below.

Twitter Ads

Twitter advertising is a great tool for competitor targeting. Target your competitors’ followers with sponsored tweets. In order to get the greatest number of impressions for your Sponsored Tweets, we recommend combining all competitors into one campaign. This lets you to test different offers, such as industry analyst reports and definitive guides. Use Twitter lead generation cards or drive them to a form fill on your site. If running Sponsored Tweets and sending users to a landing page on your site, don’t forget URL tracking parameters when tweeting so that you can attribute the MQLs and Opportunities to your competitor campaigns.

Pro Tip: Limit your targeting to desktop computers and tablets. Mobile devices drive a large volume of clicks, but typically mobile visitors are less likely to convert.

LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn advertising gets your ad in front your competitors’ current customers. When targeting your competitors’ customers, identify pain points with their current solution and outline how your solution addresses this. While not applicable for all marketers, targeting users with competitor skill sets or in competitor user groups can be fairly effective for marketers of software, in particular. Similar to Twitter ads, if you are running Sponsored Updates, be sure to include URL tracking parameters when posting the update.

Pro Tip: LinkedIn Sponsored Updates are often the most effective LinkedIn advertising solution. Sponsored Updates tend to receive more impressions and higher CTR than standard ads and are significantly less expensive than other LinkedIn solutions.

Facebook Ads

With Facebook, you can target your competitors’ followers, similar to campaigns run on Twitter.  Obility recommends running Sponsored Posts as this will be your best opportunity get exposure to competitors’ Facebook followers, but you can also combine your prospecting efforts and utilize your existing prospect database by importing target email addresses into Facebook and running Custom Audience targeting campaigns. Simply upload your target email addresses to Facebook and build a Custom Audience campaign. This will allow you to target email addresses of users of your competitor products directly on Facebook.

Pro Tip:Use tools such as BuiltWith to identify websites that are using your competitors’ tools or software.

YouTube Targeting

YouTube ads are basically AdWords contextual campaigns run on youtube.com. Target your competitors’ brands, products, and videos directly. You can run text, image, or Sponsored Video ads directly from within the AdWords interface. This is another good opportunity to utilize the hard work of your competitors. As they spend their efforts building videos, simply run a video ad campaign to drive traffic to your site.

Pro Tip: You can retarget viewers of your YouTube videos, and so if you run Sponsored Video ads on competitor videos, create a retargeting audiences targeting those viewers and maintain brand awareness with a Google Remarketing campaign.

Social advertising is fairly effective in its own right. Couple it with competitor targeting, and you can run highly effective campaigns, targeting high quality prospects. Get your first Competitor campaign up and running today.

Growing your email list is such an important goal for your business.

It’s kind of obvious but having more subscribers on your list means you’ll be emailing more people and therefore able to generate more leads and sales.

But what’s interesting is that list growth often gets chucked in the too hard basket. And I get why, the phone rings, people are coming in the door, emails need to be answered.

It can be hard to find the time to work towards growing your business when your days are already jam packed.

But growing your email list needn’t be a time consuming, laborious task. Today I am going to share with you 24 easy ways to get more email subscribers.

A lot of these things can be implemented in under 5 minutes. So I’d like to challenge you, don’t just take my word for it, pick one of the tips below that you’re not already doing and implement it today.

Make the most of subscription forms

1.  Add a form to your website. Businesses that have a subscribe form on their website average 193% more email subscribers than those who don’t.
2. Make all of your subscription forms really simple to fill out. Don’t ask for any details you don’t need as this can create roadblocks for potential subscribers.
3. Place your subscription form prominently on your website – don’t make it hard to find!
4. On the topic of forms, if you have other forms on your website such as contact us or request a quote forms include a tick box to receive your newsletters.
5. Include a link to your subscription form in employee email signatures.

Offer something of value

6. Offer educational resources in exchange for email addresses. Create an e-book, tutorial, white paper, checklist or infographic.
7. Offer a coupon or discount for people who subscribe to your newsletter. Here’s an example of an online business who increased sales by 15% using this technique.
8. Offer a series of emails or videos that are available for subscribers only. Create content that will make people feel like they have to sign up or they will be missing out.
9. Hold a competition and have people submit their email address as they enter. Be careful with what you offer as a prize though because almost anyone will enter a competition to win an iPad. You want to attract quality entrants who are genuinely interested in your business.
10. Host a webinar or online event and include a tick box to receive marketing emails during registration.

Offline opportunities

11. Collect emails at point of sale while you’re top of your customers minds. This is a great time to engage people.
12. Ask for emails during customer calls. Just make sure it’s clear you’ll be adding them to your email list.
13. Ask people to sign up to your email list at trade shows, industry events, conferences or exhibitions.
14. Use mobile technology and apps such as email clipboard, which allows you to send email addresses directly to your Vision6 account, remember you still need to get your subscribers permission to use their email address.
15. Create a QR code that links to your subscription form and place it on printed marketing collateral like brochures, fact sheets and leaflets.

Leverage your social media networks

16. Place a form on your business’s Facebook page to collect email addresses. If you’ve already got a form on your website this will take less than a minute to set up!
17. Promote your newsletters to your social networks and ask them to sign up. Be careful, you don’t want to over do this to the point of annoying your followers.
18. Repurpose content from your newsletters on your blog and social networks. Use this to create interest in your newsletters and to encourage people to subscribe.
19. Don’t forget to always have a link to your subscription form on the ‘about’ section of your social media pages.

Create shareable content

20. Add social sharing buttons to your emails to encourage readers to post your emails on their own social networks.
21. Include a send to friend link so that it’s simple for people to forward your email on.
22. Explicitly ask your readers to share your content if they find it valuable.

During the purchasing process

23. Invite people to subscribe to your newsletter when they purchase from your online store during the checkout process.
24. Don’t forget about transaction emails. Add a link for people to sign up for your email newsletters to the bottom of receipts, invoices and delivery notifications.

Always get permission to use email addresses for marketing purposes

It’s really important to note that with all of the above suggestions, you need to be explicitly clear about what you’ll be using people’s email addresses for.

It isn’t about being sneaky and collecting emails without people realising, it’s about creating opportunities to encourage people to willingly sign up for your newsletters. Not to mention with recent changes to privacy laws it’s now more important than ever to be very clear about how you intend to use people’s email addresses.

Have I missed any other great ways to grow your subscriber list? Please share any tips you have in the comments section below. Additionally I’d love to know if you accepted my challenge and which tactic you’re going to implement?