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Product recommendation engine has become a crucial aspect in terms of the website design of an ecommerce site. In order to give your website visitors a unique shopping experience, it is important to make your business site as interactive, engaging, convenient and accessible as possible. Adding a product recommendation engine is an important decision that you should make in order to help your business communicate better to your customers. There are many benefits that a product recommendation engine can do for digital marketing and it can go a long way in making your customers love your website and making it their favourite ecommerce site to shop for.

Product recommendation engine can make your website attractive

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Savvy online shoppers now prefer to purchase from websites that can provide them an engaging shopping experience. Using the product recommendation engine application to your website will make the presentation of your products and services more attractive and seamless. Every online marketer will understand how important it is to make an online store easier to use for searching products.

• All your products can be organized according to categories, price and group.
• Your customer will only find filtered products that are based on their interest and preferences thereby saving them the time and effort to browse through products that they are not interested of shopping for.
• Your products are organized according to categories or groupings as they appear on your customer’s product search results.
• Organizing your products by categories will essentially result to a convenient shopping experience with a better navigation experience to your website visitors.

Product recommendation engine can help convert your leads into a sale

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Using the product recommendation engine will further optimize how your products are being presented to your customers, keeping the interest of your potential customers and encourage them to convert that interest into sales.

• By showing similar or related products to your customers you are essentially recommending products that they are interested of using or one that they need while recommending other products that complement their purchases.
• A product recommendation engine provides an accurate suggestion of products that your customers are interested of buying and will likely to buy.
• Online marketers can gain more productive sale using the product recommendation engine in order to highlight the benefits of a particular product or group of products.
• The application provides your website shoppers an accurate result of products that will likely buy because the recommended products are based on their shopping preferences and needs.
• Using the product recommendation engine also increases the bulk or volume of orders made from your ecommerce site.
• Customers tend to prefer shopping on your website because of the convenience, ease of navigation through your products and the accurate product recommendation appearing on their search. This means a higher potential of return of investment for your business.

Product recommendation engine can be an analytic system for your business

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The product recommendation engine is capable of retrieving data that you can use in understanding your website visitor’s shopping behaviour.

• Understand the behavioural interaction of your website visitors to your products from the time they reach your website until the time that they leave.
• The system can consolidate the collected shoppers’ behaviour and compiles the data for analytics process and make the appropriate recommendation based from the analytics data result.
• Some product recommendation engines are also capable of interpreting the social interaction and value of your website to your customers. Each time your website visitors use their social media account such as Facebook or Twitter to login to your site, the system can evaluate their preferences and the products purchased using a particular social network. You can use this for targeting a specific demographic as your market where peer influence on the shopping activity of your target customers is important.
• The product recommendation engine can also monitor the cart abandonment activities from your website which helps you understand how to improve your product engagement strategy and how to make your customers complete the purchase process.

What makes product recommendation engine valuable to your business

The users of the product recommendation engine reported a significant boost in their ROI. Accordingly, in a study made by Forrester, about 15% of shoppers admitted that their buying decisions are influenced by the recommendation of products while 62% admitted that the recommendations given to them helps them in finding what they want and intend to buy. Some vendors also noticed an increase in their sales between 2% and 20%.

Understanding the caveats about using the product recommendation engine

While the application is very useful and beneficial to businesses, it is important to know that the features of a product recommendation engine have some limitations.

• The application uses an algorithm that is based on the assumption that a customer’s preferences are static. It is difficult to adjust to an unpredictable customer whose needs and preferences change often.
• The recommendation engine is highly dependent upon the feedback given by a customer which may or may not be too accurate.
• Customer ratings and feedback may be subjective.

Practical suggestions on how to integrate the product recommendation engine

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The application uses a dynamic data and information in order to analyze them and to translate the data into one of relevant product recommendation to your website shoppers. It can help online marketers grow their business better by applying these practical tips when integrating the product recommendation engine:

1. Build your customer database before launching the product recommendation engine to your website.
2. Use high quality images for your recommendation engine results. This will make your products more enticing to your customers.
3. Include product description and benefits on each product that appears on the recommendation engine results. This will add more value and relevance of your products to your potential buyers.
4. Choose a product recommendation engine application can seamlessly shows the recommended products without delay and on a smoother interface.

Does your digital marketing campaign needs a boost to gain better search engine ranking and online positioning?

Every city in the world has a unique skyline. But which is the best?

International building database Emporis attempts to quantify skylines by looking at the number and height of buildings in the world's major cities. The result is an ever-changing ranking of the world's most impressive cityscapes.

To rank skylines, Emporis looks at completed skyscrapers (40 floors or more) and high-rises (12-39 floors), and assigns each building a point value based on its floor count. Taller buildings receive significantly higher values (see Emporis' complete methodology here). TV towers, masts, bridges, and other structures are excluded.

Chicago recently fell in the rankings, while Seoul rose two spots.

#25 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has 2,567 tall buildings in 1,182 square kilometers.

Methodology: Each building over 11 floors was assigned a point value based on number of floors. Measurements exclude TV towers, masts, bridges, or other structures.

Source: Emporis

#24 Osaka, Japan has 1,485 tall buildings in 220 square kilometers.

Methodology: Each building over 11 floors was assigned a point value based on number of floors. Measurements exclude TV towers, masts, bridges, or other structures.

Source: Emporis

#23 Jakarta, Indonesia has 419 tall buildings in 661 square kilometers.

Methodology: Each building over 11 floors was assigned a point value based on number of floors. Measurements exclude TV towers, masts, bridges, or other structures.

Source: Emporis

Do you know the fool-proof way to know if someone desires a connection with others? They are breathing. For those playing at home…that’s everyone among the living.

Even the most introverted introverts still have a deep desire to share and connect. Humans crave connection. The explosive growth and adoption of social media is proof. We are all communicating but are we connecting? Why is it that in our always-on and always-connected culture we struggle to truly connect with people?

Perhaps we need a refresher on the truths of effective connection. These truths are timeless but their application has changed due to the three communication disruptions: technology, social media, and the emerging generations.

Truth #1: Connecting requires selflessness.
But first…DO NOT take a selfie. First, focus on others. The moment you become more concerned with your own agenda during communication is when you’ve lost the connection with your audience. Turn “selfies” into “youies.”

Application: Eliminate the words “I,” “me,” and “my” from your social media communications. Post encouraging words on a friends Facebook wall or Instagram snap. Ask a thought provoking question of your Twitter followers and then genuine listen and engage. Share a value-add piece of content with a LinkedIn connection.

Truth #2: Connecting requires energy.
If you text, email, or tweet someone and you do not receive a response in 1-2 days…would you consider that effective communication? I wouldn’t. Timeliness matters. Tech and social media have decreased our response time expectations. If takes energy and intentionality to monitor, filter, and respond across all of today’s communication channels. If you aren’t on top of your communications, you will struggle to connect.

Application: Commit to timely communications across all mediums. Use a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite to monitor your social media streams. Or hire virtual help to better manage your email.

Truth #3: Connecting requires simplicity.
Twitter has confined us to 140 characters and 6 second video communications. Today’s noisy world demands succinct and simple communications. Today’s average human attention span is 7 seconds. Getting to simple is excruciatingly complex but absolutely necessary. Tight communication is right for connection.

Application: Ask yourself, “What are the bare essentials that I need to communicate for people to understand it?” Then ask, “How can I make those few essential points memorable?”

Truth #4: Connecting requires common ground.
Shared interest breeds connection. The Internet is a treasure trove of people’s interests. A simple Google search or social media view can tell you more than you need to know about someone’s unique interests. It’s never been easier to find common ground when connecting with someone.

Application: Review someone’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook profiles to find common interests and then leverage those interests for a deep connection. Secondly, choose to connect over the communication platform or medium you both seem to prefer the most.

Truth #5: Connecting requires authenticity.
In the early days of social media, Millennials grew massively large online networks because they shared (maybe over-shared) who they were online. People could view pictures, read their blog, sense the demeanor of their tweets, and see their interests. This transparency fostered a connection.

Application: Self-confidence precedes selflessness. Spend time on what makes you unique and invest in your personal brand. Be human. Be you.

Question: How do you best cultivate a connection in today’s digital age?

A bit of healthy competition can be beneficial, that’s fair to say. However, there are bound to be several small businesses that feel totally inferior to industry rivals, especially if these rivals are bigger and much more powerful.

It may feel like a continuous uphill struggle, but keeping up with adversaries is essential to survive. The thing is you don’t just want to match competitors: you want to get ahead of them.

Thankfully, there are several ways in which a small business can take on its rivals. Whether you decide to use competitive intelligence methods, such as a company webcheck, or play to your strengths of greater flexibility, here are just a few ways to succeed and prosper.

Concentrate on the customer

Even if your rivals have more customers, it doesn’t necessarily mean they treat them any better. Listen to customer suggestions, build strong business–customer relationships with them and provide the best service possible — and gain a competitive advantage in the process.

Happy customers are more likely to keep on returning and will tell their family or friends about your business. Soon you could be receiving more trade without even having to go searching for it (of course, you should always look to increase trade).

Develop a niche

Most of the time, small businesses exist because they provide a unique, original product or service. Although this might not attract every type of consumer, it’s a clear-cut advantage and you should capitalise on it.

Several big businesses try to cover a little bit of everything, but if you focus on a highly specialised product or gap in the market that rivals aren’t dealing with, then success is a distinct possibility.

Use competitive intelligence

It’s amazing just how many small businesses ignore or disregard competitive intelligence. It might sound like an advanced business practice that only multinational corporations indulge in to spy on rivals, but it’s actually an honest, effective way of knowing what competitors are planning or implementing.

From search engines and online resources to annual resorts and news stories, there are various ways to collect and curate collective intelligence. Have some defined objectives in mind so you know what you’re looking for and how you’ll use it.

Provide added value

With more resources and greater profit margins, big businesses will inevitably be able to beat you on price. Don’t fret. This just gives you the chance to provide added value to customers and reward them in other ways.

Depending on your product or service, you could provide a money-back guarantee or a free quote/consultation. Set-up a reward scheme for loyal customers or put on a fun yet promotional event.

Personalise marketing and promotion

You might not have an extensive marketing budget for far-reaching advertisements or commercials in the press, but small businesses can promote their products in a much more personal way online.

Think about writing blog posts featuring keywords and phrases relating to your business, as search engines will pick them up. Take to social media and interact with both everyday consumers and authoritative industry figures. As well as building a strong reputation, you’ll be able to promote your goods and services.

Large organisations have size and power in their favour, true, but small business have many strengths and resources too, which are just as important. Making money is the end game, but having loads behind you isn’t always the secret to the success.

If you are into marketing, it would not take you much to validate that any marketing effort is destined for success if it’s served with a tinge of humor. We call it humor marketing. There are many reasons that a humorous campaign often gets huge success or at least creates better engagement than others. However, the key factor is, people tend to remember a campaign for long if it brings smile on their face and at the same time touches a pain point.

But if you take up the challenge to make people laugh, it’s your duty to design a full-proof campaign, ensuring nothing goes wrong, else it will backfire badly.

So, let’s get started with the three checkpoints of humor marketing with some examples:

Fun: This is the essence of humor marketing.

We are living in an age where life is faster than blinks and where stress takes a toll on our humorous-self. So, if you provide your audience with a chance to pause for a while and laugh, they will appreciate it.

Just like the Burger King’s Subservient Chicken campaign. Earlier in 2004, the fast food chain introduced the campaign to launch their TenderCrisp sandwich. The campaign had a dedicated interactive website, where a man, dressed in a chicken suit, would perform on a user’s command. The campaign got 15 million hits in the first week.

The main reason behind the huge success is, it tickled the funny bone of people and invoked a little childishness among adults. Imagine, a giant chicken obeys every command; you are putting down from taking a moon walk to doing pushups! The thought itself is amazing, isn’t it?

The campaign went so viral that Burger King has decided to re-launch it this year for their new product, namely Chicken Big King sandwich. Let’s see if it overshadows the previous one, as social media is here to play a big role.

Information: People love funny things but if you create a little scope for information in your campaign, it would add value against their time as well. This is the second and probably the most crucial pointer of humor marketing: giving information while spreading smiles.

This one from California Milk processor Board stands tall in this category.

In early 90s, sales of milk drastically decreased due to other drinks coming into the market. To cope up with the situation, eleven CA-based milk processing companies formed a board, called California Milk Processor Board. The main aim of the board was not only to increase milk consumption among Americans but also to create awareness about the health benefits of milk. So, “Got Milk – The Mustache Campaign” happened.

In this campaign, various celebrities and famous movie characters were shown flaunting a white mustache as a result of having a glass of milk. The fun part of the campaign is, fictitious superheroes like Batman, Superman, Wolverine, Fantastic Four as well as real-life celebs such as Beckham and Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek featured in the campaign with white mustache along with small yet funny messages.

The campaign was one of the most long-lasting campaigns till date that lasted for 15 years. California milk sales grew 7 percent in the first year and the campaign generated 97 percent awareness rate in the state.

Control: Humor marketing is adventurous to add little fun elements in any campaign but at the same time needs you to be over-meticulous. The simple reason being, tickling someone’s funny bone is easy but if you overdo or misuse it, it may end up bringing tears.

One such example is Abercrombie & Fitch’s Asian t-shirt campaign in 2002. They planned to celebrate the Asian-Pacific American Heritage month with a newly designed t-shirt collection. They created some racist t-shirts featuring bucktoothed ugly-looking Asians with disturbing messages like “Two Wongs Can Make it White”, “Wok and Bowl”, “Buddha Bash”, “Eat in Or Wok Out” etc.

Asian Americans went furious over these t-shirts and thousands of emails were sent to Abercrombie & Fitch to withdraw the collection from the market. As last, the company was forced to remove those racist t-shirts from all outlets. In a statement, they said, “We are truly and deeply sorry we’ve offended people. We personally thought Asians would love this T-shirt.”

So, the essence of humor marketing remains, spread laughter but don’t over-sell.

One recent Neilsen study revealed that 92% of consumers trust referrals from family or friends more than any other type of advertising or referral. Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is often considered the marketing gold standard in lead generation and online marketing. For every lead or prospect you can work to attract through a savvy website or clever content, a happy customer can effortlessly send you numerous referrals that become profitable customers for life. Yet many entrepreneurs and small business owners believe that word-of-mouth marketing is something that occurs by accident or at least at the will of customers.

Image source: Flickr User Soumaydeep Paul

While satisfied customers can become raving fans and brand advocates organically, smart businesses use several approaches in their marketing and customer service to encourage this to happen deliberately. From loyalty programs to applying conversion optimization strategies, it’s possible to get your happy customers talking. If you’re struggling to find creative ways to get your fans to be more vocal on your behalf, here are five tips to help you get started.

Ask satisfied customers to send you referrals

Use clear calls to action to get your customers talking about your business. When is the last time you asked your clients or customers for a referral? It’s possible that you haven’t, because you don’t want to burden customers or feel awkward doing so. Yet companies do this in numerous ways every day. Here are some non-spammy ways to ask for referrals:

• Integrate these calls to action in your content, at the right point in the funnel: For example, at the bottom of your invoices and the other customer communications that follow a sale, consider adding a simple call to action such as “Did you love your experience with us? Tell a friend!”
• Implement a structured referral program: Consider implementing a structured loyalty program with incentives (more on incentives below). You can then communicate with your audience about the program, and motivated customers can self-select their participation.
• Initiate a full referral campaign: In some instances, it’s appropriate to email or otherwise reach out to your customers directly and ask for referrals. It’s up to you to decide whether this will work with your audience, and how best to approach it. If you’re asking for referrals, review your customer database to ensure you’re targeting only your most satisfied clients. This step will help reduce awkward interactions and increase your chances of success.
• Use market research to target and filter requests: If you’re conducting market research with customers, such as a survey, it’s possible to use that information to segment your audience. Subsequently, display specific calls to action or defer follow up communications to highly satisfied customers asking for referrals. There are software programs to help you do this, often with a specific industry focus.

Leverage your business’ specific type of WOM

Depending on your product or service, you fall into one of two categories. The first is the kind of business that can be referred anytime, such as a retail store or an interesting product. The second is the kind of business that’s referred to in times of need, such as when you hear a friend asking about a divorce attorney or horse trainer and a specific name springs to mind. If you’re in an evergreen business, it’s possible to use discounts, direct messaging, and regular follow ups to get people to refer you to their family and friends.

For the second type of business, such as in the divorce attorney situation, it’s important to be aware that out of the blue referrals can feel awkward, forced, and be ineffective. Instead, your approach here should be specific: create a repository of information that answers common questions, discusses your processes, and makes it easy to contact you. Ensure that all your satisfied customers know that this resource exists. Consider leveraging leave-behind marketing pieces and ongoing relationship building strategies to keep your brand front of mind. Make it easy for them to refer you when an opening naturally occurs. Don’t waste time creating systems and collateral that’s going after the wrong kind of referral.

Offer rewards to the customers and referred prospects

One of the tenets of good marketing is that incentives, scarcity, and exclusive content can all incentivize people to take action. See the following piece on Robert Cialdini’s model of influence to learn more. These same principles can be used to help increase word of mouth marketing for your business. In some cases, it’s easier to get people to take action on a referral if they genuinely feel that they’re creating value for the person they’re sending your way.

Can you offer a discount, special pricing, or free consultation to anyone who comes you to via a referral? Treating these leads as valued individuals serves two goals. It reinforces to your customer that you appreciate the business and it continues to build on the trust that the prospect is already feeling due to a personal referral. You should also consider what the value is to the customer. Do you have a specific discount, incentive, comped product, or mini-service that you can offer to say thank you? The goal – showing appreciation – is the same and is more likely to get them to take repeat action on sending you customers in the future.

Use social media as a referral channel

By its very nature, social media is the perfect channel for encouraging customers to discuss your business. One raving post could get their happy opinion in front of a person’s entire audience, including family, close friends, colleagues, and more extended networks of contacts. Make sure that your technical infrastructure makes it easy to share your content, easy to make referrals, and easy for you to track that over time.

Personalization is also really important in these situations. One study shows that 81% of social media users say that their purchases are impacted by friends’ social media posts. If a person clicks on something one of your customers has shared, do your best to ensure that they are taken to a personalized landing page that continues to build on those feelings of trust. Acknowledge that they are a referral, and consider using language that explicitly shows whatever incentives or promotions you’re offering to them because of that. Reduce any cognitive dissonance between a personal referral and the landing page to improve the user experience and increase conversions.

Track your WOM data

It’s important to track the influence of word-of-mouth marketing on your business. Before you invest heavily in developing this channel, take the time to learn whether it works for your company, your space, and for you. And if it’s attracting customers, are they the right kind of customers with a high average order value and a high lifetime customer value? If not, then your efforts could better be spent elsewhere.

If the customers coming to you via WOM are your most profitable customers or make up a meaningful part of your business, find out who is sending them your way. In some businesses, especially those where there is a strong passion component, referrals are a natural part of the community. Knowing that allows you to tap into that culture. In other cases, it’s a very small segment of your customer base that’s sending you leads and it’s time to ensure those customers are treated like gold. Don’t overlook the role of both tracking and testing in this space.

Developing the systems and promotions that support your company’s word-of-mouth marketing can yield huge dividends in both increasing sales and deepening relationships with customers. What referral mechanisms do you have in place that are working to help you develop WOM buzz and new sales? Let me know in the comments below.

There are no agreed upon guidelines for determining the value of your brand’s social presence. If you put a group of eCommerce executives in a room and ask them how they measure the value of social, no two answers will be the same.

Driving traffic from social and tracking it as new shoppers convert is one great, and easy way to extract some greenbacks from your social presence. Recently a Social Annex client who sells sporting equipment online drove big revenue by running a social campaign containing these four essential elements.

1. Give them a reason
Featuring a Share and Save 10% widget on its homepage provided a clear and simple CTA to current customers. Repeat customers were happy to share the brand that they love and a 10% discount gave them an extra push. In no time, thousands of customers were sharing the brand with their friends and family.

2. Make it easy
Every customer is different, so this sharing program allowed each shopper to choose how they wanted to share the brand. Most chose to share on Facebook, but many also spread the word through email and Twitter. Integration with social networks allowed everyone to share quickly and easily without detracting from their shopping experience.

3. Track results
The company maximized the outcome by keeping an eye on ROI. They used the Social Annex dashboard to see exactly who was sharing on what networks, where the most revenue was coming from, and who its top influencers were. A share on Facebook drove on average of over $80 in new revenue and every email brought in $95.

4. Double down
With new customers and referral revenue as evidence to support the value of their social presence, the retailer invested in a Facebook Like Gated contest, offering money off of a purchase for a prize. This rapid growth of its social community fed back into the sharing program, increasing the stream of referral revenue further still.

Share and Enjoy

Every night when I was growing up, my family sat down to a home-cooked meal by my mom (aside from Tuesdays: those days dad was in charge of making spaghetti). Anyway, every night my mom managed to make a delicious meal after a long day at work. She juggled a career, three kids, laundry, grocery shopping, and more. She did it all, and she did it well, and continues to do so today. Now that I recently became a working mom, I truly understand how much effort it takes and while I didn’t think it was possible, I value and appreciate my mom even more now.

Being a working mom is all about organization and prioritizing. Prior to four months ago, my job pretty much always came first. While I love my husband, if I had a deadline, I would stay at work late until the project was completed. Now that I have an adorable baby waiting for me to pick him up at day care at the end of every day, I can’t burn the midnight oil like I used to, and as a result, I need to be smarter about how I structure my days. I am not saying my career is not still a priority; I have just, for lack of a better word, been “forced” to have a different mentality when it comes to my job, and in turn have become a more efficient manager.

Whether you are a working mom or not, it never hurts to revisit some of the simple ways to become a more proficient inside sales manager. Here is what I have learned about becoming a better manager since motherhood that every manager should reconsider:

Be more direct. When managing employees – whether disciplining them, training them or mentoring them – be direct. Don’t leave any room for wishy-washy answers, and make sure everyone is clear on the outcome of decisions that are made and are able to move forward. Without clear direction, additional meetings will occur, more conversations will result and more time will be gobbled up with unnecessary discussion. We as inside sales managers need to identify problems, direct everyone down the right path (with input of course) and move on.

Manage time better. Sometimes we need to be reminded that calendars exist for a reason. We are pulled in many different directions throughout the day. In order to meet all commitments, use your calendar and stick to the time allocated for each meeting and avoid running over the time limit.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. This was my biggest downfall as a manager prior to experiencing motherhood. I could never understand how other employees could move on after a huge hiccup occured in the workplace. I would always let it affect me so much. Now that time is more precious, I’ve learned to accept the circumstances. Unfortunately something went wrong, but the best thing to do is put it behind you, stop discussing it, and figure out a way to fix it, address it, and move on.

Since becoming a mother I’ve had to learn to make the most out of every minute of the work day and by doing that, I’ve become a more efficient manager. Overnight it seems I’ve become more concise with every action and more organized in general. Sometimes we all need a friendly reminder that all it takes is being more direct, having better time management skills and not sweating the small stuff.

In today’s cutthroat and overcrowded marketplace, the brands that ditch mass marketing techniques in favor of more relevant and individualized messaging will win. Just ask President Obama – his team of data scientists helped lead him to re-election in 2012 by amassing detailed voter segments based on demographic, financial and behavioral data.

Obama’s big data endeavor helped his camp raise $1 billion, target cross-channel ads and, according to Time Magazine, “create detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.”

Leading brands are taking this presidential approach to understanding and segmenting their audiences based on a number of influential, actionable attributes.

Here are 12 simple ways that you can segment your user database to nurture new and existing customer relationships.

Demographic Segmentation

Too many brands wait until the point of transaction to turn anonymous site visitors into known connections, or rely on inaccurate third-party data for demographic insights. Collecting basic information at site entry can go a long way in developing customer relationships and more effectively segmenting your user base:

Gender: I’ll be honest, I’ve never clicked on one of the ads for men’s Italian suits my favorite luxury brand insists on showing me as I surf the web. It may seem obvious, but keeping gender in mind when segmenting campaigns can have a significant impact on results and save you from wasting campaign dollars.

Birthday: Who doesn’t like to be remembered on their birthday? Virgin America keeps tabs on customers’ birthdays and sends them a 15% discount in honor of their special day.

Language: Language is the backbone of effective communication, but many brands overlook the opportunity to collect data around their customers’ preferred languages and segment their audiences accordingly.

Location: Thanks to the smartphone, marketers are now able to influence consumers’ real-time decisions by reaching them on-the-go. One of my favorite retail brands, Styles for Less, texts me special discounts that can only be redeemed at the store location in my hometown.

Behavioral Segmentation

Actions speak louder than words – and demographics. This age-old adage rings true for marketers, especially when consumer actions can be tied directly to shopping cart conversions and other KPIs. Businesses that successfully segment users based on their on-site behaviors are able to more effectively nurture customers at different stages in the purchase funnel:

Engagement: Users that actively and consistently engage by taking actions like leaving comments or writing reviews should be recognized and rewarded as brand advocates. 24 Hour Fitness takes note of club members that generate the most customer referrals via social sharing, and rewards this segment with thank you packages.

Site Rank: Gamification allows brands to assign value to specific actions and consumer signals, like registering or favoriting items, that ultimately impact KPIs. Ranking and segmenting users based on completion of these actions helps brands reward loyal customers while pinpointing those that need a little extra nurturing.

Purchase Abandonment: After recently searching Priceline for hotels in Napa and then abandoning cart, I received an email from the travel site reminding me of my Napa trip and offering me a selection of discounted wine tasting packages. This is a perfect example of a brand tailoring outreach based on consumer behavior.

Past Purchases: Brands can grow consumer relationships and repeat conversions by sending their existing customer base thank you notes, exclusive discounts and personalized add-ons. Existing customers can be further segmented, rewarded and nurtured based on frequency, number and volume of purchases.

Social Data Segmentation

Social networks house an incredible wealth of consumer data, which is consistently updated in real-time as users login and engage with their connections. By allowing visitors to your site or app to verify their identities using existing social accounts, your brand can request access to specific social data points that can be used to more strategically segment your audience:

Interests: Insight into consumers’ favorite brands, sports, TV shows and more enables you to reach consumers with highly relevant and influential messaging. For example, a clothing brand may discover that half of its audience loves country music, while the other likes pop. To promote the launch of its new footwear line, it could create two distinctly targeted campaigns with 2 very different spokespeople: Blake Shelton and Katy Perry.

Friends/Followers: A customer’s number of friends or followers across a given social network can be used to identify and nurture her as a potential brand advocate.

Education: Not only is education a helpful factor in determining economic standing, but it also makes it possible for brands to customize campaigns and content based on consumers’ alma maters – a strategy that can be leveraged by sports retailers, non-profit organizations, ticket vendors and more.

Relationship Status: The second I changed my Facebook relationship status to “engaged,” my timeline exploded with ads for wedding dresses and engagement rings. Relationships are indicative of life stages that can be used to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.

With more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created each day (IBM), there is an infinite number of ways to segment your audience – but these 12 are a great place to start. To learn more about how to gain a deeper understanding of your customers to more strategically segment your database, download our free guide, Marketers, Wake Up!

One of the question that comes up over and over, whether the discussion is about social media or content marketing or brand storytelling or any of the newer, less “traditional” marketing approaches, is “what does that have to do with our product?” Standard advertising, going back to the 19th century and earlier and on to the Mad Men era of Madison Avenue, was almost entirely product focused. Talk about the product, make it seem cool and interesting and a good value, but always about the product. Lots of companies lived by the idea that a good product sold itself. But more and more, marketers have realized that their job is a storyteller and a confidante and an advisor more than a product salesperson. Which begs the question, then, what are you really selling?

What you’re not selling? Your product.

I know it sounds weird, but a good product alone doesn’t cut it anymore. Really maybe it never did, but certainly now the product alone isn’t enough. A great product with bad support or customer service or questionable business practices won’t ultimately be successful, because in a crowded, competitive market place, there is almost always someone else who can make your product, or one to fill the same need, the moment you slip up. Your product alone really isn’t what you’re selling, and if you think about it from the perspective of a customer, it’s not surprising. We all have companies that we love one of their products, but the support is so frustrating to deal with that we seek out an alternative, or a store whose products we love but whose shopping experience is unpleasant so we avoid it or only go in when we really have a great reason to, or a company with a social or political stance we simply cannot abide and so we refuse to continue to give them our business. And on the other hand, we all have businesses that we work with even though they’re a little more expensive or a little slower or a little less fully featured because their service is exceptional or they support communities and causes that we find meaningful. It’s simply not about the product, or at least not the product alone.

So then what are you selling?

Your reputation - Customers have to be able to trust that your offerings will work the way you promise, and that if something happens you’ll take care of it and live up to your side of the bargain. Customers rarely expect that nothing will go wrong with your product or your business dealings with them, but they do expect that you’ll fix problems that arise and that you’ll operate genuinely, in good faith, and with respect for the trust they put in you. Not only that, but your brand image is part of what draws your customers. They want the intangible things that your brand promises, whether it’s luxury or reliability or homey warmth or a social awareness that they appreciate. Again, it’s not really about the product, it’s about the lifestyle or the story that you offer along with it.

A solution - “Solution” has become kind of a business buzzword and gets used interchangeably with product or service, but it really shouldn’t, because a true solution goes way beyond that. It’s not accident that the word “solution” has been used here, because solving a problem is literally what you’re offering. Customers want your product or service because it solves some kind of problem that they have in their life or their business, whether it’s a big or small one. The size of the problem isn’t what matters. I buy eyebrow wax because my eyebrows can get a bit unruly and it aggravates me and gets in the way of my makeup looking finished. “Unruly eyebrows” is a pretty small problem in the grand scheme of things, but it drove a purchase. I also bought a new truck recently, because I needed something that would be comfortable and reliable and move my family and all our various stuff around. One is a $6 purchase and one is a $50,000 purchase, but they both stemmed from the same idea of solving a problem. If you don’t solve the problem, you don’t get the business, or at the very least don’t make a meaningful enough impact to keep the business.

And most importantly…

You’re selling the outcome.

When you filter out all of the other factors and really get down to it, what you’re selling and what customers are buying is the ultimate outcome of adding your product into their existence. It’s their life being a little easier because their washing machine gets out stains better, their business running a little smoother because their billing system is more reliable, their weekends being a little more fun because they can hop in the car and go wherever they want without worrying about getting lost because of the GPS in their new car, or feeling a little bit better about themselves because of a great outfit or a perfect shade of lipstick — whatever you can do to improve their life. What is the eventual outcome of someone owning and using whatever it is you offer? What is the added value to their life or their business? That is what you’re really selling and what you cannot afford to lose track of.

While a good product obviously has to be your starting point, it absolutely cannot be your final destination, because it is not truly what you’re selling. You’re selling a brand experience and service and a company mission and perspective, but you’re more than anything selling the outcome of someone doing business with you. If you have a clear idea of what that outcome ideally is, and of how your offerings improve customers’ lives one way or another, you can hold onto that and use it to inform your entire marketing approach. How are you adding to your customers’ lives? Answer that, and the rest will follow, because that is what you’re selling. Have an example of a company that deeply understands how to add value? Share with us in the comments, and use that as inspiration!

GUEST POST

Image Credit: Illustration by Eric Blattberg / VentureBeat

Obtaining a patent has traditionally been a long process, which is particularly burdensome for software patents. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

As of March 2014, the average time between filing of a patent application and having that application examined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) is 19 months, and the average time to final disposition (i.e., Final Rejection, Notice of Abandonment, or Notice of Allowance) is over 3 years. Software products are usually developed and launched within months, if not weeks, so taking a long time to get a patent can render the patent useless in deterring copycats.

Certain programs, however, are available from the USPTO that let applicants get an issued patent within months, not years. That timeline provides an effective way for companies in the software industry to protect their products upon release with patents that will deter others from copying their technology. While many of these programs have already been available for a few years, we frequently meet with in-house counsel who are surprised to hear they exist, so they’re worth highlighting. The programs can be used independent of one other or combined to minimize examination delays and maximize the value of an applicant’s filing fees.

For example, Track One Prioritized Examination (“Track One”) allows an applicant to get a final disposition from the USPTO within twelve months from when the application is filed and granted prioritized status (if the applicant is willing to pay an additional fee). As of March 2014, the average time from filing an application and obtaining Track One authorization to final disposition is about 8 months, compared to more than 3 years for applications under regular examination.

This substantial difference in time can be a major benefit to a software company and can easily be worth the fee associated with participating in Track One. After receiving a first examination on the merits (a first “Office Action”) for a Track One application, it is recommended that an applicant request an interview with the assigned patent examiner to discuss the examiner’s rejections and/or discuss proposed amendments. Such an interview allows the applicant an opportunity to clarify the claimed invention and aids in streamlining the patenting process.

Another program, the First Action Interview Pilot (“FAIP”), provides an applicant with an opportunity for an interview with the assigned patent examiner for a patent application prior to a first Office Action. For applications participating in FAIP, the first action allowance rate is 30.2% compared to 13% for other patent applications. In the FAIP program, the patent examiner first conducts a search for prior art. Then the examiner provides the applicant with a pre-interview communication, citing any relevant prior art from the search and identifying any rejections of the patent application’s claims in view of the prior art. Thereafter, during the interview, the prior art, proposed rejections, any proposed amendments, and arguments are discussed. There are no additional fees associated with FAIP.

Yet another program, the After Final Consideration Pilot (“AFCP”), provides patent examiners with additional time to consider an applicant’s responses after a final rejection is issued by the USPTO. Typically, an applicant files a response to a final rejection, and then the assigned patent examiner issues a Notice of Allowance or an Advisory Action. That advisory requires the applicant to file a Request for Continued Examination (“RCE”), if possible, which costs between $600-$1200, in order to continue examination.

Filing a RCE results in extending the life of the examination process, with the average time from filing an RCE to the next Office Action being about seven months. By providing additional time for examiners to search and/or consider responses after final rejection and before filing a RCE, the AFCP helps applicants in many cases avoid filing of an RCE. Under the AFCP, examiners may conduct an interview with the applicant if the applicant’s response to the final rejection does not place the application in condition for allowance. Even when the results do not lead to allowance, the applicant still benefits from the additional time afforded by the program, as feedback from the examiner helps the applicant better anticipate the substance of the next Office Action. There is no fee associated with a request to participate in AFCP.

Finally, the Patent Prosecution Highway (“PPH”) program allows for an applicant receiving a favorable ruling from one patent office to receive expedited examination in another patent office. For example, if an applicant receives a Notice of Allowance for a patent application from the USPTO, examination of an unexamined patent application filed in another foreign patent office corresponding to that U.S. patent application can be expedited to begin within 2-3 months using the Patent Prosecution Highway. The foreign patent office can utilize the examination results of the USPTO, thereby avoiding duplication of work, creating consistency in outcome, and resulting in faster examination. Similarly, if claims are determined to be allowable in a foreign jurisdiction, an applicant may use the PPH to expedite examination with the USPTO. PPH is available in many foreign jurisdictions where patent protection for software companies would be desirable, such as Europe, Canada, and Japan, among many others.

From the beginning to the end of the patenting process, these programs, used in conjunction or individually, may help a software company get a patent within months of applying for one. Software companies interested in quickly gaining patent protection for their products would be wise to utilize these programs to protect and enforce their intellectual property, increase their commercialization opportunities, attract capital, and reduced any perceived risk seen by their investors or licensees.

Ahsan A. Shaikh is a partner in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery LLP and is based in the firm’s Silicon Valley office. Ahsan’s practice is focused on strategic patent portfolio management and client counseling in the areas of software, computer hardware, internet technologies, and medical devices.

Dwight Yun Kim is an associate in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery LLP and is based in the firm’s Orange County office.

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been talking about user experience quite a bit lately. And by quite a bit, I mean all of our posts this month are about some aspect of user experience- but hey, it’s an important topic!

So instead of going into what UX is and why you should care (I already did that here), let’s jump into 13 overlooked elements of user experience.

In no particular order, here they are:

1. Mobile solutions & responsive design

In this day and age, there’s no reason your website shouldn’t be mobile friendly. Mobile solutions and responsive designs allow your website’s users and visitors to move easily between devices, without sacrificing the design, layout and consumption of your site’s content. After all, we use the Internet for ease of information consumption; make it easy for visitors to do so, regardless of the device they’re using!

If the following stats don’t convince you why mobile is a must, I don’t know what will:

• 57% of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. 40% have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience. (Google’s Mobile Playbook)
• 61% of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience. (Latitude)
• Close to 50% of worldwide Internet consumers are using mobile devices as their primary mechanism for surfing the Web. (Marketing Land)

2. Easy navigation on EVERY page

Here’s the thing: if I can’t navigate through your website with ease, I’m leaving. And I don’t think I stand alone with this sentiment.

Whether you have navigation along the top of your website or along the side, make sure it’s easy to find and easy to navigate through.

One exception to this is your landing pages. Since landing pages serve the purpose of presenting an offer and gathering contact information, you want people staying on that page, and that page only.

3. Social buttons – follow and sharing ones

Americans spend an average of 37 minutes daily on social media, a higher time-spend than any other major Internet activity, including email. (Business Insider)

Whether you realize it or not, social media is where people spend their time, engaging and interacting with various brands. It’s an additional outlet to learn more about a company and their culture, and to gain access to the content they share.

However, how do you expect people to find your social platforms if you don’t promote them on your website? Sure, they can search for your brand, or maybe even stumble across your profile, but wouldn’t it make more sense to provide them with access to your networks on your own website?

I think so.

Here’s my suggestion for helping enhance your user experience through social media: have social media follow and sharing buttons on your website. While the header or footer is a great place for follow buttons, make sure you include sharing buttons on product and blog pages. This little addition will help promote your content, while giving your users easier access to your social platforms.

Seems like a win-win to me!

4. Links from your social networks to your website

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a company on social media who didn’t link back to their website. Not only is it frustrating, it’s not smart business.

If you’ve taken the time to set up a profile, take a few more seconds to throw your website link into the About Us section.

5. Provide contact info and contact forms

You’d be surprised at how many websites fail to include their contact information on their website. Whether you provide a page in your navigation, a phone number in the header, or complete contact information in your site’s footer, make sure it’s there.

A significant part of user experience is providing your site’s visitors with access to the information they want and need. How can they contact you with a question? Where are you located? What are your store hours?

The nature of your business will dictate the contact information you include; however, you MUST make it easy for your users to find it!

Similar to providing your site’s users with easy-to-find contact information, provide contact forms on your website.

Here’s an example of Mainstreethost’s header and footer, complete with our contact information and a contact form:

Please note the importance of testing. Our contact form performs well in the footer of our site, but it may not be the case for other sites.

6. Accurate meta data

SEO may not have the direct impact it used to have on SERPs; however, it’s still an important element of the foundation of a website, being found on the search engines, and enticing people to click on a search result.

That said, complete and accurate meta data – including page titles and descriptions – is a simple, yet effective element that can help increase conversions and click-through rates from the search engines. Titles not only show up on your browser pages, but they’re also the titles you see in the search engines. Same goes with the page descriptions.

Do this:

Not this:

When composing each page title, keep them descriptive of what’s on the page. Don’t try to fool the search engines by stuffing several keywords and phrases onto one page; they will figure it out and they might even penalize you for it!

7. A clear message of what you’re offering (specifically on the homepage)

If I land on your website, I want to know what you’re offering at a glance. I don’t want to have to work for it. I know, I know, I sound lazy, but I guarantee everyone who’s using the Internet feels the same exact way.

Your site’s homepage is prime real estate – take advantage of it!

Don’t make me guess what you do; use your homepage to illustrate what you’re offering and why I should choose you. This could be as simple as a clear headline, or as in-depth as a video.

8. Enticing and effective calls-to-action

CTAs are one of the easiest ways to get people to take the action you want them to. However, you must make sure they’re enticing, or else they won’t be very effective.

Like anything you’re doing on your website, figure out your users’ pain points and play on those. Are they looking for more information about a particular subject? If so, provide them with an ebook or offer based on that – and get them there using a CTA.

You might try something like this:

Or maybe you prefer something similar to this:

Create calls-to-action that make people take the next step.

“Submit” is not one of those. Be clever, be creative – have fun with these! Test out different versions so you know what works and what doesn’t.

9. The right amount of content

Thankfully, gone are the days when keyword-stuffed content made you rank on the first page of Google. Now, whether you have 10 or 100 words on a page, you have the opportunity to be found online.

The key is QUALITY.

Make sure every word on your site serves a purpose. Don’t waste your breath composing long-winded, rambling copy that no one’s going to read.

Instead, focus on creating content that will impact your site’s users:

• Use bullets
• Break up your copy into sections
• Keep it to the point
• Think quality > quantity

Most importantly, keep your buyer persona in mind when creating content. What do they want to digest? How much information do they want on a given page? Are they readers or do they prefer to watch a video? These are all questions to answer while creating your website’s content.

10. A blog and the RIGHT blog content

If your business isn’t blogging, it should be – here are five reasons why.

Beyond the many reasons blogging is something you should absolutely be doing (with a few exceptions), you must be creating the RIGHT blog content.

Create blog content your audience wants to consume. Answer FAQs, address industry news, provide how-tos and DIYs, and anything else your audience wants and needs to know. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, use your blog to add value to your user’s experience.

Here are some business blogging stats for your consumption via Quicksprout:

• 61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post
• 82% of your consumers enjoy reading relevant content from company blogs
• 60% of consumers feel positive about a corporate brand after reading their blog
• 70% of consumers learn about a company through their blog, rather than ads

11. Effective headlines and page headers

Headlines – whether a blog post title, section header or page title – have the ability to draw the attention of your website visitors.

Keep them interesting. When creating headlines and page headers, ask yourself: would I want to read more? If your answer is no, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

12. Take advantage of case studies, testimonials and social proof

Have you done some pretty awesome things for your clients? Have you helped them achieve amazing results? Or do they think your products and/or services are simply the best?

If any of this is the case, create case studies and ask for testimonials to feature on your website. This is an effective way to prove to potential clients what you’re capable of providing, in addition to providing social proof.

Taking the social proof a step further, promote the number of people who have “Liked” you on Facebook and other social networks.

On Bauble Bar, you can see that they have 118,000 fans on Facebook – pretty impressive if you ask me!

13. Videos

People are visual creatures: the more pictures and videos the better (depending on your audience and testing). This is no different for your website.

For some time, videos have been garnering a lot of attention on the Internet – hello, YouTube. Whether it’s a silly video, a product demo, or an about us video, people enjoy watching them, and if you’re lucky, sharing them.

Beyond entertainment value, videos are great ways to engage your site’s visitors. When it makes sense, have videos on your website. After all, many people prefer to watch a video compared to reading website copy.

Some things you’ll want to pay attention to provide great user experience include the length of the video, the placement of the video, and most importantly, the purpose of the video.

There you have it, folks: 13 overlooked elements of user experience.

Is there anything I missed? If so, let me know in the comments below!

Getting personal has worked small wonders for companies working financial services. Banks, advisors, and even accountants tend to work better with clients who actually treat their connection like a real, human relationship.

It’s also been said that the introduction of data technology can only improve those relationships by making it easier to know things about clients and prospects. More data certainly does improve lead generation campaigns and helps you predict buyer behavior.

And yet, is observing behavioral data and tailoring automated marketing responses really the way to communicate? Is it really the sort conversation that nurtures human B2B relationships?

Ideally, many financial organizations and advisers use the latest info on a prospect/customer so that they can find a chance to serve. Sure, there’s a profit motive behind it but the point is it’s not the only intention.

Unfortunately, the electronic nature of simply knowing, analyzing, and sending some sort of automated response puts companies at risk of hollowing out their relationships with customers. True, it may be convenient on both ends for technology to inform one company so to generate an automated response to a client’s.

On the other hand, the convenience becomes more impersonal as the conversation is less dynamic that way. Ironically, one old form of marketing already experienced the ill consequences of automatic response before the big data trend: telemarketing.

Telemarketing has always been on the short end when it comes to either robotic scripts (or just plain old robotic calls). How is it any different when you replace the voice with a generic email copy or some form of automated notification? Real conversation is dynamic, prone to changes in tone, and arguably easier to control.

This brings us to the second irony: Telemarketing does that. The industry just had to make a few mistakes of its own to realize it.

But of course, this still carries other risks. Imagine knowing so much about a prospect but never actually having a conversation. How do you make calls regarding the things you discovered without coming off as overtly creepy or invasive?

• Put it in big, bold letters… elsewhere – Is it really so hard to say, “HEY! FILL THIS UP AND WE’LL GIVE YOU A CALL WHENEVER YOU NEED US!!!”on your website? A prospect is more open to a real phone call if they actually saw firsthand that such is your marketing MO.

• Don’t be too controlling – Like in any relationship, it’s not good to be too controlling. Should a prospect ask for advice (as is often the case), encourage them to solve it themselves as best as they can. Even if some parts of a solution are best left to you, you should avoid micro-managing whenever you can.

• Make the follow-ups more personal – Remember, typical B2B telemarketing usually well with a set sales appointment. And what’s an appointment? It’s a chance to keep talking! Make a note to your salespeople that you actually talked with a prospect/customer and that you expect nothing less from their own presentations/pitches.

The convenience brought by data technology and electronic communication do make a quick work of things. But when it comes to the important conversation between business and customer, there’s more value in being able to just talk.

All of us know that you have to be a little crazy to be an entrepreneur. Launching, let alone sustaining, a new enterprise can be challenging along almost every dimension − mentally, emotionally, and often financially. Historically, this reality has been even more sobering in the health care sector, where the typical hardships experienced by any start-up have been amplified by numerous industry-specific challenges: Extensive regulation, entrenched players with a strong grip on the status quo, confusing paths to entry, and an even more opaque path to payment have made health care a particularly treacherous territory for entrepreneurs.

But ongoing changes in policy, technology, and industry culture are now creating unprecedented opportunities for those with just the right kind of crazy. In our group at Merck, we are witnessing this opportunity firsthand as we collaborate with start-ups in the areas of digital health, big data, and health IT.

Four dynamics are driving this new era of health care innovation:

Finally, there is a financial incentive to innovate. Government-led measures to reform health care such as the HITECH Act, which infused billions of dollars into improving the sector’s use of information technology, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), create a business case for performance improvement that never existed before. Accountable Care Organization (ACO) models in both the private and the public sectors are rewarding providers for lowering the overall costs of care and keeping patients healthy.

While the managed care movement made a similar run in the early 1990s, the movement towards accountable care, bundled payments, and other population health efforts have not caused the type of backlash that managed care did − in large part because most of these models have not meaningfully restricted patient choice. RxAnte, Evolent, and Humedica are just three of the many new companies seizing the opportunity to help old players comply with new policy standards that focus on improving outcomes and efficiency.

New players are fearlessly sensing the opportunity. Health care is attracting an influx of talent from other industries to tackle some of its toughest problems. Top-tier thinkers from data science, business, finance, and the digital world are coming together to find new solutions. Through the venture capital community, veteran corporate leaders like John Scully, Steve Case, and Gerald Levin are contributing capital and deep business expertise to numerous health-related start-ups. Tech company founders like Max Levchin of PayPal, Samer Hamadeh of Vault.com, and Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare are diving into health care as well, bringing new perspectives and talent into the domain. All recognize the enormous size of the opportunity to make a profit while improving care, lowering costs, and improving health.

According to a recent Rock Health report, venture funding of digital health companies exceeded $1.9 billion in 2013, up 39% from 2012.

Access to data is enabling us to better understand and address problems. Improving the amount of and access to higher-quality data will enable stakeholders across the health care ecosystem to work together to better understand the gaps and flaws in care. While we are only in the early days of the open data movement, innovative uses of data will empower new approaches to improving outcomes. The intelligent use of data will have a transformative influence on all points of care. Entities like Optum Labs are bringing together physicians, pharmaceuticals companies, hospitals, ACOs, and researchers to identify predictive analytic algorithms than can anticipate when patients are likely to get ill — so that we can intervene and improve outcomes.

Consumer technology offers direct access to patients. With unprecedented access to information, patients are being empowered in new ways. The proliferation of wearable devices from companies like Fitbit and online support communities like PatientsLikeMe are sparking a dramatic rethink of how patients can learn about and monitor their health. These technologies currently affect a small share of the population. But as they continue to improve and adoption by consumers grows, there will be a plethora of opportunities for  innovators.

All of these developments spell the dawn of an exciting new era for entrepreneurs, techies, investors, clinicians, and, last but not least, patients.

Beware the copycats, and other advice for entrepreneurs

Only one in 10,000 funded startups hits it big. To learn how yours can avoid being one of the 9,999 startups that fail, I spoke to Mike Cagney, the CEO and co-founder of SoFi, which offers student loan refinancing to college graduates. It has issued more than $500 million in loans so far.

Here's what Cagney has to say about how to manage the three biggest startup risks facing entrepreneurs.

Founders of many failed startups can't handle the challenges that come with rapid growth.

According to Cagney, "If you grow a business fast, there is a danger of outstripping the founding team's capabilities. When you start a company, you might expect to spend two years to prove the concept, then you raise capital and operate the business. But as the business grows, many of the co-founders could lack the expertise needed to manage it."

Founders who run winning startups adapt nicely to changing needs. They manage weak people out of the company and bring in strong ones that can handle the next stage of growth; they invest in products that customers are buying and kill the ones they don't; and they monitor the competition to discover new strategies that are setting the market on fire.

Even startups with great new products and a capable founding team face competitors, which often copy their best features. Winners build defenses to these copycats.

"If you enjoy fast growth, you may attract competitors," says Cagney. SoFi's defense mechanism? "For example, we compete with First Republic on products, but it has higher costs and needs to charge higher prices to cover them while meeting its profit goals. They can't match our lower prices unless they want to lose money. And as we've grown, our costs have dropped--which deepens our competitive advantage."

Startups often fail because they allocate all their equity to their co-founders at the birth of the business. They give out too much equity to someone who leaves the business and has not worked for the company. Then they lack equity to give to key hires and investors later in the startup's lifecycle, which severely hinders growth.

But this risk can also be managed. Noted Cagney, "You should allocate 10 percent among each of three co-founders initially and leave the other 70 percent unallocated. If you have a big pool, you can give it out based on value creation."

I attended the CXPA Insight Exchange last week in Atlanta. As an active member of the CXPA, early adopter and practitioner of Customer Experience (CX), there is nothing better than being with my fellow members who deeply desire to advance CX management practices and develop, manage, optimize and envision how organizations interact with their customers.

Speaking at the Rapid Innovation Showcase was an opportunity for me to share with fellow members how our team is improving customer experience through better sales execution by using a combination of Sales Playbooks & Analytics technology and strategic consulting services.

How, you ask? Here are two simple ways:

1. Change sellers’ behavior to focus on the needs of each customer or buyer by serving up role-based and challenge-based stages, plays and content to help sellers present value that resonates
2. CX leaders working with sales teams can take the usual sales process stages (e.g., Qualify, Discover, Propose, and Close) and turn it inside out to become buyer-centric and focused on the way buyers buy, not on the way sellers sell.

With our Sales Playbooks & Analytics solution, we have over 40 Qvidian data fields such as play name, last play completed with date and time, next play to complete and play items used into Salesforce so they can be combined with existing data fields. (Not familiar with what a play is? Check out this video for more info). Your sales team’s touch points with customers and buyers are mapped out in Playbooks and the Analytics provide visibility.

Whether influencing change in a non-CX driven culture or working in an organization where CX has full executive support, CX is about change. Holistically changing corporate culture is not easy. It takes vision, a long-range plan, a commitment to excellence and trusted relationships. It takes teamwork.

THOUGHTS FROM AN UNLIKELY SOURCE:
The Great Northern Geese travel thousands of miles in perfect formation, and therein lies the secret. As each of

the great birds moves its wings, it creates a steady uplift for the bird behind it. Formation flying is 70 percent more efficient than flying alone.

LESSON:

People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they’re traveling on the strength of one another.

The power of face-to-face interaction in sales should never be undermined. The experience gained while speaking with prospects on a one-to-one basis can be crucial in the skill development of inside sales reps, who will eventually strive to close deals. Getting in-person experience early on is invaluable.

What better opportunity to do so than at trade shows? You can have about 20-30 conversations with prospects, compared to the 8-10 phone conversations that reps will have per day. Inside sales reps can see firsthand who and what their potential buyers look like. This type of opportunity is hard to come by in sales in general, and almost next to impossible for reps in a traditional inside role.

Public Speaking

Let’s face it: In-Person interaction or public speaking is by far one of the most difficult skills to master. You have to constantly be on point with the language you use, your body language, and mastering good eye contact. Many times we’re told even when on the phones to act like we would in person by smiling, sitting up straight, being more direct in coversation, and more. By giving inside sales reps trade show experience, you allow them to become comfortable speaking in person the same way they would on the phone in a concentrated amount of time.

Competition

Tradeshows also give inside sales reps visibility to the competition. Most of the time, inside sales reps know the competition because of what they’ve heard, but rarely do they get to see it “straight from the horse’s mouth.” Seeing the competition in action can help sales reps establish a distinction from the competition within even the initial conversation. On the phone, inside sales reps will often hear the question, “What makes you better than the competition?” By knowing your advantage and what the competition is actually saying, inside sales reps can better position the company in the marketplace and get a prospect excited quicker.

Integration and Alignment

In addition to the actual skills an inside sales rep can hone, bringing inside sales reps along to trade shows allows for more camaraderie with extended members of the team. Sales reps don’t always get the chance to speak with other ISRs, ADRs, Account Execs, Division Managers, CMOs, and other executives from a company. By bringing them all together, everyone can gain perspective on their own daily challenges, help streamline processes, and operate on the same page. We get so ingrained to our own world and issues that we forget other parts of the company have different daily struggles. Seeing everyone come together for one common goal helps unite your inside sales team and brings even more visibility to the inner workings that can help your inside sales reps make their pass-offs and conversations that much more successful.

The experience gained at trade shows, while at times can be tedious, present some of the most value for inside sales on many different, important strata and help develop their career skills for success down the road.

By Tibor Shanto - tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

No, I am not speaking to sales managers, directors or VP’s, but directly and specifically to front line sales professionals. It is your job to lead the customer to the right decision for their business based on their objectives. So why are you not stepping up, why are abdicating the only thing that justifies the job, why aren’t you doing your job?

Your job is to deliver the best solution or product to address the buyer’s requirements, which are driven by their objectives, often both business and personal objectives. While the buyer most often best knows their objectives, I say most often, because there are times where your input or influence can help fine tune or redefine those objectives based on elements you introduce into the dialog. The whole thing pivots on your ability and credibility as a subject matter expert.

I have argued on this blog the best sales people are those who are real subject matter experts, not product experts as many strive to be. As a subject matter expert you bring a number of value points that the buyer will make use of, and benefit from, that “product experts” will lack. This is why I encourage sales leaders to abandon their habit of hiring only sellers with product knowledge over candidates that may not have direct product experience but are truly qualified sellers, one qualification being the willingness to look beyond product, and embrace being an expert. One of the things the expert seller doe swell, and product sellers don’t, is become conduits of best practices.

What these sellers understand is that buyers want a perspective of what is happening in the market. What is working, what is not, what is new, and what is fading, what are others doing? I am not suggesting sharing details of what their direct competitor is doing, what is setting the winners apart from the also-rans. They also understand that often buyers are set in their ways and will need to be lead to new ways of looking at things, which sometimes means taking a stance that contradicts buyers’ premises and ways of thinking; to out and out change buyers’ views and ways of achieving their objectives. To do this you have to lead, you have to be someone they are a willing to have contradict them, someone they are willing to follow to places they have not been willing to go in the past.

When I present to sales people, many respond with a sad and often sickening response, “Oh, I don’t want to be pushy”. Pushy? There is a world of a difference between pushy and conviction. The conviction of an expert willing to share and make sure that the buyer truly achieves what they set out to do, even they do it in a different way than they set out or had ever considered.

Getting to the point where this conviction is justified is not that difficult, as with other elements of sales success, it is about the willingness to go there, and execution. Start by focusing on the buyers’ objectives, understand all the ways that can be achieved, not just those your product can do. Then leave your product in the car, and go and have a peer to peer discussion among experts, the buyer an expert in his/her business, you the expert in best practices around that.

Hey, if you liked what you, have invite me to speak at your next meeting!

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto 

Two different sellers told me in the last week that they are not using LinkedIn as much as I had encouraged them to do because it doesn’t work for them and takes too much time. Both of these individuals have been doing the same old prospecting strategies for a number of years and both really would rather not change. Change is scary. Change involves admitting that you don’t have all the answers. It’s easier to say why something won’t work than try to see if a new thing might be a better solution. My position always gets back to this one thing -

If I can show you one more way to find buyers interested in hearing what you have to offer (assuming you can bring solutions to their challenges and improvements to their lives) – why would you not be open to that?

Here are several ways that more consistent use of LinkedIn WILL help most sellers. [disclaimer: if 100% of your buyers are not online, you're right - LinkedIn won't help you.] For the rest of us – Follow the Buyer:

The most simple strategy to finding many more “probable” buyers is to implement the idea I talked about in the last post – Follow Up Strategies to Grow Sales – on how to create a stream of more likely buyers based on when they are new. It is a very smart system to put into place, takes little time, and reaps great rewards in the form of more buyers in the roles you typically work with. You track down where your last buyer has gone off to in their next position and then back track to see who filled their position at your client company. You put a process in place, do a little research, and voila – soon you have some well-qualified potential buyers to offer insight to and learn about their upcoming projects in their new roles.

Group Insight:

Find out what groups your buyers (and prospective customers) participate in and join some of them to learn what is being talked about so that you can share insight with prospective clients. This is one way to learn how to have executive level conversations with your buyers. In addition to LinkedIn, you can also go to websites designed for your buyers, such as CIO.com or CFO.com.  Regularly see what your buyers are reading about so that you can be in the same conversation. This shows them that you are a professional, and it shows them that you understand something about their industry and business. It is critical in gaining trust and solving buyer issues.

Stuck on Hold:

Do you have the wrong contact person or is your contact at the company you want to do business with giving you the run around? Did they stop talking to you? LinkedIn is a fantastic source to find alternate contacts in a prospect account. Search by company, and see who you are connected to and what role they play in the company. If they are someone in the decision process for what you represent, contact them. If they aren’t but they could make a recommendation, contact them.  If you are newer to your company and need to work the kinks out of your messaging, contact them even if they can’t recommend you. You’ll be able to ask a few questions and learn more about potential opportunities for you and for them.  Once you have a new name on LinkedIn try calling the new contact or send them an email.  If you have an upgraded LinkedIn account, send an InMail.

Time Saving Idea: 

Parking Lot: The idea of a “parking lot” comes from the world of training. Using Evernote, Google Docs, or even a pen and paper, keep a running list of people, places, and groups you want to learn more about because you have a geographic territory or a vertical market to call on.  A name comes up, and instead of jumping over to LinkedIn, just jot it down for now – then when you have a handful of names or groups to look up, invest 15-20 minutes at one time. By not bouncing back and forth and back and forth between calls, your CRM, notes, and LinkedIn, you can be 20-50% more productive, which is critical in your sales role.

So in the end, if some extra time up front yields more results sooner, is it a time waste? 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 Money Monday – Using LinkedIn is a Waste of Time appeared first on Score More Sales.

If you have not already, you can expect to be hearing more about storytelling as a means for communicating your business message.

Storytelling is one of the cornerstones of sales and marketing, because great stories are memorable, and therefore, readily shared.

Every business interaction with a prospective buyer or customer is a potential story. That’s right, stories about your business are already being shared. Isn’t it time to take a more proactive approach to contribute to the conversation?

Stories are media, and media is media, regardless of the source. This is why every business must become a media company to better manage its story within the communities it serves.

What I’m going to share with you today is that your business can actually use storytelling as a means for accomplishing goals beyond marketing to shape future events that become signature stories.

See the Story Within the Project or Opportunity

During the early days of my landscape architecture and construction business our company was unknown. In order to establish our presence within the industry and local community, we set a goal to complete at least one award-winning project.

One day, we were invited to discuss the renovation of a residential landscape that was such a mess, all of the other contractors walked away from it. As our team considered potential solutions, I got excited because I was beginning to realize that if we could transform this project into an award-winner there would be a great story to tell.

In business and life, you can let chance write your stories, or you can design an ideal result and get to work to make it happen. That’s what we did. It’s a simple practice of starting with the end in mind, and then building the sequential events to manifest that reality.

To accomplish this, we repeatedly asked ourselves one question: Why?

When everything has a purpose it just makes sense. Isn’t that what your prospective customers are looking for from you?

For example, we suggested a gentle water feature and stream for the back yard to create a sense of movement and flow that would naturally guide the eye through the space to the desired focal points. Our client rejected this idea because their dogs would play in the water.

After further consideration, we realized a dry stream (without water) would work equally well. They loved the idea. As a result, whenever a friend asked about the stream built from smooth, water-worn stones, our client shared the story that explained its purpose.

Consumers are attracted to not only what works, but also why, because then everything intuitively makes sense.

Stories Transform Goals into Reality

To succeed with your project, you have to first live the desired result in your mind as if it were real. The story for creating that reality will lead you to the necessary solutions for making it happen. It will identify the challenges that must be overcome.

We did indeed win the highest award possible for that particular project, and many more thereafter, because we always had a story to tell. I’m convinced that first imagining the story that would then become the focus of our marketing is what made it possible.

Facts and even pretty photos are easily forgotten without stories that make emotional connections. Our story captured the drama and imagination of how our team worked to delight our client, and that connected with the panel of judges.

Of course, the panel of judges for your business and mine is every prospective customer that wants to know more about us. Your business may have great solutions, but if you can make them come alive by answering why, you also have a memorable story that resonates with the buyer.

In today’s digital marketing arena, one of the latest buzzwords is ‘big data’. This is the data that is captured by latest digital marketing technologies that allow marketers to better understand the way their marketing message is received, and how customers and potential customers interact with their business.

The problem with the term ‘big data’ is that it is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that the data needs to be ‘big’. If your business is in a highly niche B2B-focused industry – and this can be anything from legal services to industrial technologies – the likelihood is you won’t have the volume of customer data that the big B2C businesses such as Facebook, Amazon and Google have available to them.

The fact is that what really matters is how you understand your customers, and tailor your message and offer to them. If you have a product or service that is targeted at a highly specific marketplace, then you will likely have a very small database of customers and prospects to analyse.

But it is the way you utilise this data that is important.

Through the use of integrated marketing systems, such as marketing automation and CRM platforms, it is possible to measure customer interactions across a wide range of on- and off-line sales and marketing touch points. You can also combine this data with publicly available databases to give you greater insight into your target audience.

You can then use this data to better understand what motivates your customers and prospects; which means you can better understand what your wider marketplace wants from you. This means you can then develop and improve your offer to meet these requirements, and therefore become more relevant to them.

And with this relevance comes opportunities. Opportunities to generate new leads, develop new relationships and grow sales revenues. By taking an integrated approach working with data taken from your sales, marketing, customer service and operations functions, and asking the right questions of it, you can build a truly valuable picture of your marketplace which will give you real competitive advantage.

There is no denying how invaluable social media has become to businesses in our modern economy. Social media allows businesses to reach market specific audiences, connect with potential customers, and best of all- its free.

Given the obvious benefits of social media, it is no surprise that the number of businesses utilizing it continues to grow. However, what most businesses don’t realize about using social media as a business forum, is that simply posting on social media is not enough. In fact, getting the most out of social media requires network specific timing of social posts. Meaning that when you post, is just as important as what you post, and where you post it.

Imagine you have a lemonade stand. There are good places and bad places to set up your stand. Obviously you want to pick the best place to sell your lemonade, somewhere with lots of people. More people more sales, simple. However in order to maximize your profits, picking the right time is just as important. Afterall its useless to pick a location with alot of people if you choose to sell it when theres no people around.

Just like selling lemonade, utilizing social media  requires you to pick the correct place and correct time to maximize your gains. Therefore it is imperative for businesses who wish to utilize social media most effectively to follow some simple guidelines as far as what, where, and when they post their content.

Best times to post on Facebook: 

• Best times – Weekdays from 6-8AM and 2-5PM

• Worst times – 10PM-4AM

• Less engagement on the weekends

Best times to post on Twitter:

• Best times – 1-3PM, especially on weekends

• Worst times – 8PM-8AM

• Unlike Facebook, Twitter engagement increases on the weekend
• Short Tweets with two hashtags get the most engagement

Best times to post on Google+:

• Best times – 9-11AM

• Worst times – 6PM-7AM

• Nighttime posts (like all social media) perform the worst

Best times to post on LinkedIn:

• Best times: 7-8:30AM, 5-6PM

• Worst times – Monday and Friday, and 9AM-5PM

• Often used right before and after typical work hours
• Tuesdays and Thursdays tend to get the most engagement from business people

Best times to post on Pinterest:

• Best times – Saturday morning, 2-4PM and 8-11PM

• Worst times – 5-7PM and 1-7AM

• The average pinterest visit is 16 minutes which means it average visit duration is longer than other social media.

There is more to effective social media use than content and engagement. Having high quality content does not do much good if you don’t know where, and especially, when to post it. Sticking to a consistent social media campaign in terms of timing and placement will help increase your social media engagement. By increasing social engagement your online presence and reputation will grow. This in turn will convert visitors into leads, and leads into customers.

(source: Fannit)

Are you faltering at the goal line when it comes to closing sales qualified leads? The B2B sales lead game has changed. Here’s how you can score big.

Anyone who has been in a sales situation is familiar with this situation.

It’s the sure thing. It’s first and goal. You’re about to score.

The prospect says they love what you’re offering, they have a budget and plan to move ahead. They just need to “think it over.”

And then, it slips away – you seem to have nothing but the prospect’s voicemail.

What happened?

First, let’s review the three different kinds of leads as your prospective customer moves through their B2B buyer journey from awareness to consideration to a decision:

1. Information Qualified Lead (IQL)
2. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
3. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Information Qualified Lead (IQL)

When a lead first converts, they are often providing their contact information in return for some type of useful information, also known as a top-of-the-funnel offer. Examples include an ebook, whitepaper or tip sheet. The buyer is usually just beginning to research the solution to a problem. They usually don’t know your company and how you can help.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Through automated lead nurturing and the delivery of timely content mapped to their buying journey, let’s say that IQL becomes interested in how your company might be able to solve the problem for which they have been researching a solution. They download information about your company and how you can help solve their problem.  At that point you have a marketing qualified lead. The lead is now warm.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

To help an MQL advance to the decision stage you offer more timely content and things like free trials, demos, free consultations, estimates/quotes or coupons. When the MQL raises their hand and moves to the decision stage, you now have a sales qualified lead. The lead is hot.

Sales Has Changed

A sales qualified lead is different from other leads. It is also different from the leads of years past.

For a long time, when a buyer was doing product research, they had to contact the seller early in the process. Only the seller could provide most of the product information that was needed to make a buying decision.

Now with the Internet, buyers can do a lot of their research without having to contact the seller. According to a study from Corporate Executive Board, buyers are now 57%-70% through their research before first contacting the seller.

So in the past, a sales person was able to engage a buyer much earlier in the process and guide the seller from awareness to consideration to decision. But now, the buyer is contacting the sales person much later in their journey. And the buyer is much more educated about the purchase.

This has changed how sales are now closed. In the past, solution selling was king. Sales people would diagnose customer needs, align them to their product and then sell the solution.

Now, the buyers are defining the solutions themselves using their own research data. A sales person who is trying to sell to this type of sales qualified lead using the old solutions approach will falter.

Dan Tyre, HubSpot

To get a front line dispatch from the marketing trenches about these changes, I spoke with Dan Tyre, HubSpot’s Sales Director.

Dan, who has the most positive attitude in the world, said “selling is easier than it’s ever been before, but you have to do your homework.”

To succeed now, salespeople need to be “much more consultative, demonstrate a deep understanding of customer problems and build trust.” Sales people now need to be more like physicians, they “need to do a complete diagnosis at the early stage of the sales pursuit.”

Dan shared with me five tips to help close the modern, sales qualified lead:

1. Be Mentally Prepared

With an SQL, sales people need to remember that they are dealing with a more qualified and better-informed lead. The lead has shown an interest in your company’s product or service, and indicated a willingness to engage with you in order to make a buying decision. At this point, sales people should focus less on qualifying the lead and instead have an attitude of “this guy’s going to close by my helping him solve his problem!” That attitude will give you more confidence and convey subliminal cues that will significantly increase the odds that you will close.

2. Be Professionally Prepared

There’s more information about prospects available to sales people now than ever before. Use it all! The night before (when you can actually review), dig into search engines, website visitor data, LinkedIn and other social media, CRM, etc. Build a picture of who this person is so that you can more quickly build trust with them. Sales people who wait until the last minute to prepare will reduce their closing percentages.

3. Be Respectful Of A Prospect’s Time, Position And Needs

Remember that while you have a vested interest in making a sale, it’s not about you and your company. It’s all about solving the prospect’s problem! And remember that while an effective lead scoring system may indicate the prospect is sales qualified, the scoring metric might not always be accurate. You will probably need to back up your thesis with data and facts, and provide information that reinforces your case.

4. Add Value From The First 10 Seconds

A great way to open a call is to reference the information a prospect has already downloaded from your site and ask “What were you looking for help with?” That gives you an opportunity to immediately start adding value around the problem that the prospect has already identified as a priority (and keeps the focus on the prospect, not the sales person and their product features). This should enable you to better understand the prospect’s challenges and more quickly obtain “trusted advisor” status.

5. Ask More Than Tell – For Professional Discovery

Using good questioning skills should help you diagnose the problem and the potential solution more effectively. You should be in good shape if you let the prospect do most of the talking so that you can diagnose the real pain you’re being asked to solve. If you’re dealing with a sales qualified lead and you don’t know what their pain is, you’re probably in trouble. Some of the best sales questions are “why?” and “what is the implication of continuing to do that?”

Your turn: What tips do you have for closing sales qualified leads?

I would like to tell you a short story today about my friend Stanford Smith. If you hang with me through this little tale, I promise you’ll see five important lessons about the economics of social media unfold. And then we’ll discuss how you can make this work for you and your business.

A story at the heart of the economics of social media

Some time in early 2011, I started to see an increasing amount of activity on my Twitter stream that mentioned @pushingsocial. Intrigued, I clicked and discovered Stanford.

I watched his Twitter account and soon began to read his blog. I was blown away. This guy was one of the best writers I had seen on the web. He was also an original thinker who was effectively connecting the dots between an agency, clients and content. I wanted to get to know this man!

So, I called him up.

We hit it off immediately and I think we talked for two hours. He was more than a mysterious Twitter connection now. We were beginning to be friends.

At this point I was hiring my first regular bloggers to contribute to {grow}. Stan agreed to be one of my first contributors and penned dozens of posts that became some of the finest work on this blog. He blogged on {grow} for almost two years, the second-longest tenured blogger behind Mars Dorian.

The exposure Stan received through my blog helped pump up his presence and reputation. He was becoming a social media star!

One of Stan’s dreams was to write a book. As I was working on Return On Influence, I got stuck on the difficult research about the history of influence marketing and thought of Stan. I wondered if he would want to help me on the project. He jumped at the chance and he got his first mention and credit in a published book in 2012.

The benefits grow

About this time, my publisher McGraw-Hill wanted a follow-up to the mega-hit book Tao of Twitter Could I write a similar small, helpful book on blogging? Stan had mentioned to me that he was thinking about writing a book on blogging but wasn’t connected to a publisher. This seemed like a match made in heaven and we decided to write Born to Blog together.

The process of writing the book with Stan was one of the most pleasurable creative experiences of my career. Our working styles fit like a hand in a glove. We didn’t always agree and we exposed our divergent views in the book, making it richer, honest, and human. It is now the best-selling book on blogging in the market.

As I was planning the 2012 Social Slam event, I knew I needed to have Stan on the stage. He volunteered his time for a chance to speak and appear on a panel. He was a huge hit — his first professional speaking appearance.

After our book came out, Stan decided to leave his agency and start his own business. I was able to funnel leads to him that turned into paying customers. I felt great that I was able to help him get some business traction in some small way.

This week Stan had me on his new podcast and we reminisced about how far we have come together in a short period of time. Here was a deep personal connection on display, two people who would support each other over a lifetime.

The business lessons of the economics of social media

This is more than a feel-good story about friendship and collaboration. It also illustrates important lessons about the dynamics of the social web, the economics of social media, and the measurement of social media success. Let’s dig a little deeper.

1. The essential role of “rich content”

Sure, content is king on the web but not all content is created equal. Could this connection have formed through only a tweet, a Facebook post, or a LinkedIn update? Probably not. It was Stan’s blogging that got my attention.

Through his blog I was able to learn about him as a man and as a business professional. I could see his powerful writing skills on display and gain insight into his values and experience.

To have the best opportunity for massive exposure and real connection (for an individual or a business), you need to generate at least one source of “rich content” — generally a blog, video series, or podcast. This becomes the fuel for the rest of your social media platforms.

Content is the catalyst to creating business benefits on the web.

2. The truth about weak links

One of the most misunderstood ideas on the web is that your audience equals power. It doesn’t.

I have 90,000 real followers on Twitter. If I ask them to buy my new book through a tweet, how many will open up their wallets and do it? Probably none.

That’s because most social media connections are “weak links.” They are merely opportunities — doors to be opened — not real relationships ready to take action.

The true business benefits are created by doing the work to convert weak links into strong ones. I recently published a social influence case study where I raised $6,000 for a charity entirely over the social web. But nearly everyone who donated was somebody I had actually met in real life!

3. Networking as a human

The turning point in this story was my first phone call with Stan. Does it seem bold to you that I actually called one of my weak link connections? But making that human connection is the way business has been done for centuries. We conduct business with those who we know and trust and that is not likely to occur if we rely on Twitter alone!

So many businesses I see have created a digital divide between themselves and their customers. We need to remember that behind that avatar is a person who has the potential to have a deep and loyal connection to us. If you don’t do the work and reach out, you may never discover that.

4. Beyond ROI, the economics of social media presence

Let’s quickly list some of the business benefits mentioned in this short story.

• Exposure for Stanford
• Original content for my blog
• A publishing credit in Return On Influence for Stan.
• Research help on the book.
• A collaboration that led to Born to Blog.
• An opportunity for Stan to start his speaking career.
• A high-quality presentation for the Social Slam event.
• Customers for Stan.
• Exposure for my new book on Stan’s podcast.

… And I could go on. Now look at this list and answer this question: How many of these important, tangible business benefits could neatly fit on a spreadsheet or pie chart? Not many.

My point is that benefits like “exposure,” “new content,” or “collaboration” are qualitative, not quantitative. I’m not saying don’t measure, or don’t drive toward ROI if you can. What I am saying is that if you don’t also recognize the real qualitative benefits of the web, you could be missing important value!

5. Expectations and helpfulness

Another characteristic of this case study is that the business benefits accrued over years, not weeks or months.

This is such a huge problem for most businesses today — we manage toward quarterly goals. An economic platform built on relationships doesn’t fit cleanly into that model, so somehow we need to adjust our expectations to fully grasp the opportunities.

One last point. I have had a long career in corporate sales and marketing. I had been conditioned to ALWAYS be selling and I’ve had to adjust toward adopting the mindset of authentic helpfulness. If Stanford sensed in our first phone call that I was “selling” something, would we have become friends?

For somebody who has grown up in a traditional sales role, it is pretty unnerving to stop selling and start helping. And you can’t fake authenticity. You need to make that shift to “If I generously help people, the business benefits will follow.”

Putting it to work

I realize this post has been on the “long” side so thanks for making it this far!

It is important for me to acknowledge that there are many, many economic benefits of company social media applications in customer service, sales, HR, research, compliance, purchasing and more. We have covered just one small sliver of social media economics today and yet, I think MOST businesses and individuals can benefit from the networking aspects of the social web.

I passionately believe that if you understand some of these economic drivers you can make these social media networking opportunities work for you and your business too.

Are you with me?

Illustration courtesy of Flicker CC and Geraint Rowland

Mark Schaefer is an educator and marketing consultant specializing in social media workshops. He blogs at {grow} and is the author of several best-selling marketing books including Return On Influence.

Credit image: www.intersectionconsulting.com

Social media marketing can be a tedious undertaking but digital marketers usually get some help from social media publishing tools to streamline their marketing activities. The tool becomes a part of the social media marketing dynamics that serves as a two-way communication channel that allows you to connect to your social media connections while receiving feedback about your social media marketing campaigns. Social marketing can be overwhelming even to a professional marketer and publishing tools can help simplify things and keep the activity more organized while retaining focus on your marketing goals. There are many social media publishing tools that offer various functions to help every marketer’s distinct goals in social media marketing and here are the top social media publishing tools on our list which are used by marketing pros that can help generate leads and improve your social media traffic.

#1 – Hubspot Social Inbox

Image credit: cdn2.hubspot.net

The Hubspot Social Inbox is integrated with a powerful publishing feature that allows you to schedule posts in advance for all your social media accounts and upload Tweets in bulk using a CSV file or Excel. It also makes easier pulling off content for quick publishing and it works best on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google +. The tool also allows you to be constantly in touch to important people to your business. The tool connects to your contact database and allows you to colour mark contacts according to priority. It also integrates your analytics tool and CRM to track down the lead generation process of your social media marketing campaigns. You can organize the information of every customer including the history of their interaction to your business including the opening of your email newsletter to the number of page views on your website. With Hubspot, you can simplify the process of finding customers that are engaged to your business and to prioritize your social media activity for better leads and ROI for your business.

#2 – Buffer

Image credit: cdn.socialmediaexaminer.com

Buffer is most helpful to small businesses that maintains a business page on Facebook and uses Twitter for social media marketing. The tool helps to simplify the process of making updates on your social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter platforms using the bookmarklet from the tool to schedule when you should post updates. Buffer makes it easier for a marketer to take two clicks in order to add new content and it saves significant time to a busy marketer to manage their social media accounts in Facebook and Twitter.

#3 – WordPress

Image credit: ho9od35yvs05ejqn.zippykid.netdna-cdn.com

There is no doubt that WordPress is one of the most dynamic publishing tools for social media marketers. Small business marketers find the platform very easy to use. It can be used as a hub for social marketing blog campaigns that helps the user to seamlessly change, update and directly connect to their social media accounts for automated posts using its integration feature. There are also advanced plugins that makes it easier to publish WordPress posts directly on your social media pages. The platform is regarded by Matt Cutts as a useful tool that takes care about 80% to 90% of the search engine optimization process in marketing blogs as well.

#4 – TweetDeck

Image credit: www.marketlikeachick.com

This social media publishing tool is very useful to social marketers that are using Twitter to help them automate their tweets according to their own schedule. It is very helpful to simplify the process of social media publishing using the Twitter platform when you manage multiple Twitter accounts. It also optimizes your Twitter marketing activities by tracking down hashtags, trending topics and events. The tool makes it easier to publish posts from each of your Twitter timeline account using a single tool to manage them all.

#5 –Social Oomph

Image credit: aniksingal.com

This publishing tool helps to simplify and save time in increasing the productivity of your social media marketing campaigns. As a publishing tool you can seamlessly integrate it to Plurk, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and your blog site. Schedule your tweets, view mentions and track keywords on your Twitter profile. You can use it to auto-follow Twitter users that start following your profile to help you save time and effort as well. It is easy to pull and publish content from your blog site and integrate them to your social media accounts.

#6 Crowdbooster

Image credit: farm9.staticflickr.com

Crowsbooster helps social marketers to streamline their activities and save time in publishing content on their social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter. The tool automatically posts on Facebook page and tracks down new followers. It also provides statistics report on the number of times a post has been shared on re-tweet. The user gets feedback on how engaging each post is to its readers and it can help to individually reach out to fans of your social media pages whenever you want to. Another best feature of the Crowdbooster is suggesting the best time of the day to post in order to boost your viewer engagement. It also sends a reminder when the user forgets to respond to one of his social media followers. Using the tool allows you to be responsive in your social media marketing campaign progress and keeping you on top of your response time to your followers.

#7 – Social Flow

Image credit: c2.staticflickr.com

Social flow is a great publishing tool in directing its user when is the best time to publish content on their social media accounts. The tool has become useful for small business marketers in capturing the attention of target viewers during the peak time of a social media audience usage. This tool is quite popular among big and popular publishers like The Economist, Washington Post and National Geographic. The tool allows you to expand your social marketing engagement and increase traffic on your posts. It also analyzes social signals to help filter which publishing forms can generate better revenues for your business.

#8 – SproutSocial

Image credit: www.johnsocial.com

This is one of the social media publishing tools that are best for social business. It helps the user to become highly responsive to their customers or social media followers by creating a single stream box that reminds the user to respond to messages and post comments. It is integrated to different social media accounts like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. It also has rich analytics feature that boosts your social media marketing campaigns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Social media marketing can be a daunting task but with the help of Digital Warriors, the process can become seamless and productive to a digital marketer like you! Talk to our professional social media marketing team to start boosting your revenues and social media traffic. We have comprehensive services like IT consulting, marketing analytics, social media marketing, search engine optimization and web design and development that are designed to optimize your digital marketing success.

We've talked about writing an excellent cover letter before, but your letter could be ignored if you are attaching it to an email. Instead, write the cover letter as part of the email.

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(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org

For years Americans have assumed that our hard-charging capitalism  is better than the soft-hearted version found in Canada and Europe. American capitalism might be a bit crueler but it generates faster growth and higher living standards overall. Canada’s and Europe’s “welfare-state socialism” is doomed.

It was a questionable assumption to begin with, relying to some extent on our collective amnesia about the first three decades after World War II, when tax rates on top incomes in the U.S. never fell below 70 percent, a larger portion of our economy was invested in education than before or since, over a third of our private-sector workers were unionized, we came up with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor, and built the biggest infrastructure project in history, known as the interstate highway system.

But then came America’s big U-turn, when we deregulated, de-unionized, lowered taxes on the top, ended welfare, and stopped investing as much of the economy in education and infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Canada and Europe continued on as before. Soviet communism went bust, and many of us assumed European and Canadian “socialism” would as well.

That’s why recent data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database  is so shocking.

The fact is, we’re falling behind. While median per capita income in the United States has stagnated since 2000, it’s up significantly in Canada and Northern Europe. Their typical worker’s income is now higher than ours, and their disposable income—after taxes—higher still.

It’s difficult to make exact comparisons of income across national borders because real purchasing power is hard to measure. But even if we assume Canadians and the citizens of several European nations have simply drawn even with the American middle class, they’re doing better in many other ways.

Most of them get free health care and subsidized child care. And if they lose their jobs, they get far more generous unemployment benefits than we do. (In fact, right now 75 percent of jobless Americans lack any unemployment benefits.)

If you think we make up for it by working less and getting paid more on an hourly basis, think again. There, at least three weeks paid vacation is the norm, along with paid sick leave, and paid parental leave.

We’re working an average of 4.6 percent more hours more than the typical Canadian worker, 21 percent more than the typical French worker, and a whopping 28 percent more than your typical German worker, according to data compiled by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

But at least Americans are more satisfied, aren’t we? Not really. According to opinion surveys and interviews, Canadians and Northern Europeans are.

They also live longer, their rate of infant mortality is lower, and women in these countries are far less likely to die as result of complications in pregnancy or childbirth.

But at least we’re the land of more equal opportunity, right? Wrong. Their poor kids have a better chance of getting ahead. While 42 percent of American kids born into poor families remain poor through their adult lives, only 30 percent of Britain’s poor kids remain impoverished—and even smaller percentages in other rich countries.

Yes, the American economy continues to grow faster than the economies of Canada and Europe. But faster growth hasn’t translated into higher living standards for most Americans.

Almost all our economic gains have been going to the top—into corporate profits and the stock market (more than a third of whose value is owned by the richest 1 percent). And into executive pay (European CEOs take home far less than their American counterparts).

America’s rich also pay much lower taxes than do the rich in Canada and Europe.

But surely Europe can’t go on like this. You hear it all the time: They can no longer afford their welfare state.

That depends on what’s meant by “welfare state.” If high-quality education is included, we’d do well to emulate them. Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries in literacy and numeracy. That spells trouble for the U.S. economy in the future.

They’re also doing more workforce training, and doing it better, than we are. The result is more skilled workers.

Universal health care is another part of their “welfare state” that saves them money because healthier workers are more productive.

So let’s put ideology aside. The practical choice isn’t between capitalism and “welfare-state socialism.” It’s between a system that’s working for a few at the top, or one that’s working for just about everyone. Which would you prefer?

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock” and “The Work of Nations.” His latest, “Beyond Outrage,” is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new film, “Inequality for All,” is now available on Netflix, iTunes, DVD and On Demand.

The post Robert Reich: Canada is leaving American capitalism behind appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In today’s Information Age, businesses are pondering the art of sales and its place in an increasingly scientific, technologized sphere. The art of sales is not dead. Rather, it has evolved into a science unto itself: The Science of Sales. The science of sales denotes tracking, reporting, and ultimately improvement of an age old prospect relationship building process. Consider it an art form perfected.

The sales process has evolved from start to finish. Beginning with metrics-based coaching, there is now a technology infused training process that focuses on CRMs such as Salesforce, intelligent sales automation, and sales calls tracking software. Further along the process, lead generation and customer engagement too are benefited by the influx of science and technology. Sales personnel that adopt the mindset of a scientist recognize that selling goes beyond offering a product or a service. The science of sales involves analyzing and understanding consumer behavior in relation to the product offered. Below are a few ideas that help convert the art of the sale into a science.

• When was this customer’s initial interest generated and how?
• Is this a new purchase or when was the last time they bought this product?
• What can we learn about the company in regards to what is going on in their industry?
• How does the product or service compare to the competition?

Take for example, Invenio’s B2B Inquiry Management. With targeted lead generation, Invenio’s sales “scientists” are trained to maximize ROI from marketing activities and lead data to fill the pipeline with actionable opportunities, thus leading to increased sales results. To close deals, science – in the form of data – is a seller’s best friend. Data is more than just a buzz word in the world of sales. There is even a precise science to maximizing the efficiency of data – with the basic goal being to keep data clean and updated and building the customer data warehouse from there. When gathered and used correctly, data can match the right leads to the right reps, ultimately closing more deals.

Photo by: Sol Goldberg

Perspiration vs. inspiration and all the other insipid and irrelevant tips!

Sadly, very few B2B manufacturing companies take the step of updating their biz dev approach.  Instead they stagnate as they vainly hammer away with cold calls and other 80s type direct sales approaches.

TRAGICALLY, many that do make the move to a more sensible approach fail.  There’s a huge ‘bait and switch’ at work in most content marketing promotion.  “Write a few blog posts” and sales qualified leads will come streaming in it seems from most of the content created to market content marketing.  That quickly becomes “Well of course it’s not working, you haven’t done XXX, XXX, XXX or XXX.”

Here’s the brutal truth.  Inbound marketing is a ton of work.  There’s a lot of trial and error.  It takes time.  It costs money.  It takes planning.  It takes technique.  Most will quit before they succeed – and many will never succeed based on the haphazard approach they take.

And specific challenges increase the complexity of the task for B2B manufacturers and industrial companies, while simultaneously radically reducing the number of folks qualified to advise, assist and execute.  These challenges tend to trip up the graphic design / PR agency cum digital marketing agency staffed by folks who have never set foot in a factory.

And they really frustrate the DiY types who assume that a “blog” in their site navigation combined with a few blog posts will yield results.

Doubt creeping in?

Did you drink the cool aid?  Step out ahead of competitors with great optimism and bold digital marketing plans, but find yourself now wondering if you made a mistake?

Have you worked diligently at it – even far more than the 5 hours a week some suggest is adequate?  And have yet to move the needle?

Not sure what you’re doing wrong?

The answer is simple – you’re not doing enough and/or you’re not doing it correctly.

Content marketing’s acknowledged ‘secret’ is that statistically success requires a large volume of content, created consistently, across multiple types and channels, promoted creatively.  That is a lot of work.  (Research indicates a minimum of 16 hours of weekly work for a typical SMB to realize reasonable success.)

But what’s only whispered in polite company is that while “doing the work” may be a handy yardstick of commitment and industriousness, it’s only casually related to any degree of success.  In fact it is not only possible, but indeed likely that a company could commit substantial resources to inbound marketing and receive virtually no return.

To succeed, B2B content marketing must be built on careful planning, precise technique and relentless, detailed execution – it’s not enough to work hard.

Missing the mark?

The good news is that the energy and commitment can be channeled into measurable and repeatable success.  It’s a matter of some course correction.  Here’s a list of areas where many manufacturers get sideways in their well intentioned efforts at DiY content marketing:

• content is all product focused – nobody cares about your product!  They buy the result/impact which it delivers.  So you can write, record and draw about your product all day long…fruitlessly.
• insufficient content – statistically there are clear plateaus in the relationship between qualified lead generation and #s of blog posts and landing pages.  Number, frequency and consistency all figure in success.
• poor optimization – this isn’t about the meta tags that your website designer put on your site a couple years ago.  This is about long-tail keywords used with technical precision on your site (in page urls, titles, image tags and content itself) and referenced appropriately in your content, press releases, social media, etc.
• crappy content – if there’s any chance that someone downloads your offer, loads your video or clicks through to your blogpost only to think that it was a waste of their time, then you’ve got a content quality issue.  It matters not a whit whether you’re satisfied with it – if it’s not relevant, helpful, insightful or valuable for your prospects then it’s low quality.
• single content type – your prospects are individuals.  You might prefer to read a whitepaper in the evening on your tablet.  They might more easily digest a concise infographic overview or watch a brief video on their smartphone while waiting in line for lunch.
• doesn’t correlate to how people make decisions – research, evaluation, justification and purchase aren’t a single step, particularly for the complex sales process common among products manufactured by B2B companies.  And yet few companies create content which can be mapped against stages in teh buyer journey.  What a shame it is to have awesome resources for buyers at the earliest stages of their research only to squander the opportunity by providing nothing with greater depth and substance as the process advances.
• no nurturing – you know from your own experience that the ease with which you can search for solutions means you search more often and more casually.  You might really need a solution to a problem….eventually….but not when you happen to take the 4 minutes to look for it.  And a company which then labels you a lead, tries 2X to call you and then gives up is selling according to the “old rules.”  Today’s metrics indicate that traction develops around the 7th contact.  That means that your initiative must anticipate a long, gradual process – and virtually develop the relationships and foster credibility.
• missing a continuous improvement approach – you aren’t going to get this right at first.  And when you do get it right the environment will change so you’ll be wrong again.  If you view your effort as one that is designed once and then executed, you’ll fail.  A/B testing of landing pages, emails, calls to action, site personalization and other details must be ongoing.  And the data must be carefully interpreted and acted upon.
• inadequately promoted – great content which is never consumed creates value for no one.  You’ve got to sensibly use social media (even if you deem it absurd) to introduce wider audiences to your ability to impact their business.  In the B2B manufacturing world that means LinkedIn, followed by a couple others.  You and your staff need to be active in group discussions, and share your content when appropriate.
• low quality email marketing – we all hate email…and we all use it.  Email marketing works (or it can work if done correctly.)  But that doesn’t mean more sterile, corporate speak.  Properly paced, personalized, focused emails which invite specific, reasonable action make a difference.

But is that enough?

How does this fit into a framework for success?  And what else is required?

1. Commit to a digital marketing initiative (this must come from the top and be for at least a year to gauge long-term value)
2. Spend the time / resources (but that’s not enough!)
3. Apply those resources effectively (start with the points above to gauge where you stand)
4. Sweat the details (the mechanics of your execution are critical…and invisible)
5. Adapt your sales approach to the expectations of this new lead type

Later this week we’ll dive into 4 & 5.  But in the meantime, if you’ve made the commitment to digital marketing for your B2B manufacturing business and diligently invested resources – but haven’t yet seen results, check your efforts against these points.  Want to chat about it live?