Rnordman

Personalization doesn’t stop with the creation of content; it should continue throughout the distribution process.

Understanding how to build buyer personas helps us reach the right people and focus on topics your target buyers care about during their purchase journey. We use buyer personas to create content that’s useful, furthering the intended message and giving buyers the information they need to progress down the funnel.

Strategic content distribution means targeting buyers based on how and where they engage with content. It takes the personalized content that you’ve developed and tailors it via, selective distribution channels. In this way, your messages may actually reach your intended audience.

Buffer Sets a Good Example of Developing Buyer Personas

Buffer, one of the top 50 content marketing brands, offers great insight into the questions a content marketer needs to ask about the buyers they’re targeting. Buffer demonstrates beyond the basic understanding of each persona’s needs and interests, you might want to consider these additional aspects of your buyer persona:

Strategic content distribution means targeting buyers based on how and where they engage with content.

• Computer literacy—How adept are your buyers at using technology in their lives? Are they comfortable signing up for a webinar, or do they know how to use Twitter and LinkedIn?
• Where they get their news—This takes into consideration how a persona seeks or receives trusted information. Do they get a newspaper everyday or scan their Facebook feed for the latest news about whatever topics interest them?
• Online community — Which blogosphere circles do your buyers interact with? What are the qualities and personality traits of the online communities that they engage in? And, more importantly, what motivates your buyer to belong to that community?

Dell Demonstrates Tailored Content Distribution

Once you’ve identified your buyer personas (and the online spaces that they hang out in) the next thing to do is distribute content in a manner that resonates with the platform.

Use Dell as an example.

Dell uses Facebook to engage users with beautiful visuals, inspiring quotes, and fun technology-related trivia—because that’s the kind of content that works for Dell on Facebook. Take, for example, two of their recent Facebook posts:

Dell’s figured out that engaging people with interesting questions, presented visually, activates their user base to engage with the content. For them, visual, quirky questions take advantage of the strengths of Facebook as a distribution channel.

To figure out how the strengths of each of your specific distribution channels, try thinking through some of these questions:

• On each of our content distribution channels (email, social, blog, video platforms, etc.), which content assets have historically seen the most success?
• Are there any patterns across top-performing assets for specific channels? For example: do images work well in email? What about social? Are short blog posts driving more leads than long-form?
• What are our competitors doing, and what seems to be working for them?
• Are there tactics we haven’t tried, but should?

By asking yourself these questions, you’ll get a better sense of what resonates with your audience on different channels.

How @dell and @buffer target the right people, on the right channels, with the right content.

When you’re ready, put your content to the test. Develop a strategy around distribution channels, the buyer personas on those channels, and the kind of content that should be created to match the style and tone of each channel. Don’t forget to write your strategy down!

Record data and metrics as you execute your strategy to track your success (as see if your initial strategy is working). As you test, don’t forget to iterate based on what you discover. Use this information to add details to your personas so you can create even better content on the channels that matter to them.

Has your organization integrated personas into your personalized content distribution strategy? What are other key aspects of each persona that determine when, where, how and why a specific customer type gets content delivered to them in a certain way?

Making social networking part of your selling strategy requires making a change in your life.

But it’s scary to make a lifestyle change. I know that. I did it two years ago myself.

It means a different routine. It means you need to find time. It means you will be out of your comfort zone (at first).

Over the years, I’ve interacted with thousands of people who want to begin creating content on the web for sales purposes. I’ve discussed how to get active on social networks like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the like to reach buyers directly and at the moment they are interested.

Social selling means making a lifestyle change

The advice I give to someone who, say, wants to start a blog to reach buyers and sell more is they need to make a lifestyle change. You can’t just dabble here and there. You need to be consistent and update the blog a few times a week because each post is a real-time update of your expertise and every one is a link that search engines will find and index.

So how do you find the time to create several blog posts (or YouTube videos if you don’t like to write) a week? Simple! You make it an important part of your life.

I recommend that you don’t even try to find the time to create content and participate in social networks. You’ll fail, just like finding the time to exercise leads to failure and wasted money on health club memberships.

Many people are surprised when I say that I probably spend about six hours a week on social networking—about the same amount of time I spend exercising each week. I don’t even think about it. It’s important, so I do it. And I can’t really say how. It’s mainly in microbursts of one or five minutes throughout the day.

Exercising and getting fit

I’ve found that finding the time to participate in social media is much like exercise; you need to make it an important part of your life. If it is important to you, you don’t even think about it anymore. It just is.

Two years ago today, I started the P90X fitness program, a series of videos starring Tony Horton. I’ve “graduated” from all three of the 3-month routines: P90X, P90X2, and P90X3.

The P90X program focuses on “muscle confusion” a fitness philosophy of mixing up routines. The idea is that while running every day of the week is good, doing seven different things during the seven days of the week is better.

I now do a modified P90X. Most weeks I’ll do a day of gravity routines including push-ups and pull-ups, a day of core work such as Pilates, Yoga a day a week, a day of swimming, Dumbbell work another day, some lower body stuff another, and if I’m near a beach or trail I’ll go for a run or a mountain bike ride.

I hit all the muscle groups and never allow my body to become accustomed to the same exercise.

My fitness level has increased significantly.

I’ve gone from being able to do 2 chin-ups two years ago to 15 chin-ups in one go today. I even do some crazy stuff like pull-up-crunches and 4-medicine-ball-push-ups. Today, at age 53, I am more fit than ever before. I’m stronger than when I was a teenager and have much more endurance than when I was in my 20s.

You have a choice

You can choose to exercise regularly in order to stay fit. The most effective way is when exercise becomes part of your routine.

You have the same choice with implementing social selling. Make it a part of your life and you’ll succeed.

Brilliant sales ideas are overlooked every day. Sometimes things seem so simple that they never get tried. Sales professionals often tend to over think things – so the combination of missing a simple idea and then over thinking can equal lost revenues.

I missed the original post on the Nimble website written by Craig Elias, creator of Trigger Event Selling™ so when I heard Craig in Boston recently presenting this idea I was stunned.

“It’s so simple, ” I said. “It’s also something I rarely see anyone do.”

Craig concurred, and here is one SINGLE simple sales strategy that can give you HUGE new visibility, so eloquently presented by Craig:

When your prospect or your customer moves to another company:

1. Follow your contact to their new position – don’t wait for them to reach out to you.
2. Find out where the person they replaced went and call them, too.
3. Contact the person who replaced your prospect at their previous position.
4. Find out where the person who took your prospect’s job came from because that company now has a vacancy and whoever fills that position will be new in their role and is now up to 10X more likely to become your customer.

Research shows that new decision makers and recommenders in a company are ten times more likely to become your customer for a number of reasons. One reason is that they did not build the current environment but rather inherited it – so if there are big problems and issues, they are more likely to want to fix them. Existing decision makers with problems are sometimes the cause of them. If you point out problems to existing executives, that’s like calling their baby ugly.

There are tools now that help you track prospects and contacts like never before. Use them.

DiscoverOrg.com shares that:

80% of the newly hired or promoted IT Leaders who would spend $1,000,000 or more on new initiatives did so within 3 months of starting their new job

So I ask you – ARE you tracking where your contacts are going? Are you calling them regularly? Can you see how this ONE idea could offer you hundreds of new, highly qualified opportunities by keeping in better touch with those buyers and prospective customers who know you or would warm up to you through knowing you are connected to the person they followed?

Craig shares an example of how simple tracking of buyers and prospects (I call them collectively “contacts”) leads to thousands of opportunities in the first year. They are not just any leads, either – they are going to lead to opportunities more likely to close.

It’s a simple concept anyone can grasp. Elite sellers do this and have benefited greatly – why not give it a try?

The full post with more detail can be found at Follow the Bouncing Email to a Gazillion Leads. 

I challenge you to create an experiment out of this idea – put it in place over the next 90 days and see what happens. You’ll need a good contact tracking system – many options to choose from.  If you need help getting started, and are in B2B sales or sales leadership – contact us for a brief strategy session – you won’t regret it.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

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. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

The post Follow Up Strategy to Grow Sales appeared first on Score More Sales.

The New Rules of Lead Generation. Proven strategies to maximize marketing roi. David T. Scott. 2013. ISBN 9780814432617.  The author is certainly very experienced in this role and topic.   His point of view is measurement and so he gives a great baseline education for applying measurement to the suite of marketing tools available.   He says this book is for companies that have whole teams to execute on sales and marketing and I tend to agree.  Most small companies  are really resource constrained.   That said, his first five chapters are some of the best setup for any marketing team I have found so far. He brings a refreshing and pragmatic view to how sales and marketing should work together.   He has a little something for everyone on these chapters and the ideas work.  In his ending chapters he talks about some good tools, however this is the only flaw in the book as time is not kind to this type of example as some of the tools discussed are no longer available.  I enjoyed how he differentiates between the high value  marketing generated leads and lesser value sales generated leads.  Good cross country air flight read – Easy to read style as well.

Related articles

• The New Rules of Lead Generation Book Review (business2community.com)

So you’ve got calls coming from direct mail, billboards, newsprint campaigns, email blasts and more. Business is great – but you could be missing out on a significant opportunity to amp up your leads even MORE.

How? SOCIAL!

No, it’s not just for cat photos anymore. Many businesses, even those with a following, aren’t making the absolute most of their social pages – missing out on a direct opportunity to get people interested in your business (and by interested, I mean ready to buy).

Sounds simple enough, right? Post your new product. Give the price. People show up and buy. Not quite – it’s not THAT easy, but there are a handful tips & steps that can help turn an intrigued fan on social media into a customer at the checkout.

Show them something NEW

You’re sitting on a landmine of photos, ideas, and stories – your own customers! So start sharing their stories. Brag about them – whether it’s a first time buyer who just got an all-new 2014 Jeep Wrangler, or the loyal family who has bought their cars from you for the past 45 years. These are things that make people interested, motivated, and maybe even a little bit envious! This type of content will get people talking, swapping stories and experiences, and most importantly – get them asking questions that your team can answer not just online, but in the showroom when they’re taking a test drive!

Ask for something in return

Handing out coupons and prizes on your Facebook wall is a great way to get people interested – but make your fans work for it! Whether you ‘Like-gate’ a discounts tab (so fans MUST like the page in order to see the coupons), to hosting a promotion or sweepstakes just for people who are fans of your social channels with a form asking for a few simple tidbits of info – you’ve gotta have the user give you something back.

This way – you’re still grabbing information, be it a mailing address, email, phone number, or all three. Use them for a direct mailer or email blast down the road – if they’re interested now, chances are they’ll be interested later.

Keep pushing

Push your fans… but not in a salesy way. Push them to WANT to know more about you. Your call to actions may not do the trick – so push fans to want more information from you. If you’re doing it right, your content is intriguing them. Be there to lead them to the right spot for more information – whether it be a blog on your site, an ebook, an interesting video, etc.

Targeted ads

Spend your ad dollars wisely and talk to an audience with a crafted message, JUST for them. Think about it – you’re located in the country, where most of your customers are farmers. What do farmers tend to like & what do they typically buy? We’re talking sports teams, music, clothing, food, movies, hobbies – use Facebook’s high level targeting options and get in front of their faces in a snap.

The idea is to push your contest in the best way to the right people. Take advantage of these simple to implement socially savvy steps and the leads will flow in! Your sales team will thank you.

Using HootSuite? You’re not alone. In fact, HootSuite’s social relationship platform boasts a whopping 8 million users ranging from individuals, to SMBs, to large enterprise and fortune 500 companies. In fact, it’s the world’s most widely use social relationship platform.

But if you think it’s just about managing social networks, you’re missing out. While that’s the company’s core functionality, if used strategically, HootSuite can be a content marketer’s best friend, providing you with an eco-system of content marketing tools to help amplify your organization’s marketing efforts.

Managing Social Relationships

Listening for Content Ideas

Listening is a key component of understanding what kind of content your audience is hungry for. With HootSuite, you can get these insights by monitoring specific keywords, hashtags, phrases and conversations. The foundation of good content marketing begins with knowing what your audience wants and the closer you can get to hitting the mark, the better your content will ultimately resonate with people and drive lead generation.

Pro Tip: While some keywords and phrases that you should be monitoring will be obvious, talk to your support and sales team to find out more. They’re on the front lines, talking to customers and leads regularly so they’ll have a good pulse on the types of questions that may come up.

Converse with Prospects

As you’re listening to your audience, inevitably you’ll come across people who are reaching out via social media to get information, ask questions or research a service or product. You may even find people that are talking about your competition, which may also open up an opportunity to start a conversation and share content that you’ve created that speaks to their specific needs. Starting the relationship through social media can be a powerful way to drive people towards your sales funnel.

Here’s a great example from a post by Neil Patel – the user below was talking about an analytics platform, and as Neil points out this left the door open for a response from their competitor.

Be Responsive

If someone is reaching out to you via social media, they expect you to be responsive. WIth HootSuite, you have the tools to react quickly to both customers and prospects providing your content in realtime – when they need it. This speaks to the power of combining social relationship management with good content, not only to attract new customers, but to retain and support existing ones.

This is something we do at Uberflip regularly, and here’s an example from our own HootSuite dashboard.

Which resulted in….

The Content Experience Behind the Share

Let’s face it – sometimes good content isn’t enough. This is especially true if your goal is to drive people to take a specific action. A good content strategist knows that every piece of content has a purpose, which generally falls into one of four buckets:

1. Engagement (sharing and/or commenting)
2. Lead generation (educational and usually more “top of the funnel”)
3. Sales generation (they’re ready to buy, more “bottom of the funnel”)
4. Customer marketing (retaining and supporting customers, upselling)

 

Now consider this: you’ve systematized the process of listening, conversing and responding to your customers and prospects via HootSuite. You’ve established a relationship with them. And then you send them to a less than stellar user experience to consume your content – or worse, you send them to an experience without a path toward the desired action. No sharing buttons (or they’re tucked away so people can’t find them), no compelling CTA and an unappealing interface that doesn’t truly reflect your brand.

As compared to…

Compare that with an experience that is attractive (like it or not, design matters… a lot), compelling and includes the essential elements that will drive action and you’re a immediately one step closer toward your goals. Here are some of the elements of a great content experience that will help entice action:

1. Excellent content. This goes without saying, but as mentioned before it’s not enough.
2. Contextual call-to-actions (CTAs). Your CTAs need to relate to the content to drive the desired result.
3. Discoverability. It should be as easy as possible for people to discover more of what they need, whether it’s educational, inspirational, or support / customer related content.
4. Responsive design. If you’re sharing content via HootSuite, there’s a good chance people are clicking on it from a mobile phone or tablet. If your content marketing experience isn’t mobile friendly, you’re going to see higher bounce rates and you’ll be losing conversions. You don’t need an app, but you do need a responsive interface that will work on any device.
5. Shareability. Don’t hide your share buttons. As you work to grow your network, subscriber lists and social channels, you have to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content.

 

Leverage the HootSuite Ecosystem

You shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by the number of tools or systems you need to use in order to combine all of your content marketing efforts effectively. Nor should you feel shoe-horned into any one stack of solutions. Leverage the robust partner ecosystem HootSuite has created to plug into all of your various content marketing products from a single social platform. You can see a full list of integrations available on the HootSuite app directory or access them directly from within HootSuite itself, but here are a few that provide a leg up when it comes to tying your content marketing to lead gen processes:

For Lead Generation

Use the Salesforce and Marketo apps to create leads from your social media activity. This will allow for seamless communication between your social media manager and your sales/marketing teams and ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. The advantage here is that you’re able to grab more social data and context which is helpful for account managers, helping them understand what their customers are talking about and creating opportunities for engagement.

In the case of Marketo, you can also add social activity to your leads in Marketo to enhance lead scoring and push people further down your sales funnel. Here’s an example of what you would see in your HootSuite dashboard.

For Content Marketing

Having the right content at your fingertips is key to being responsive via social to generate leads and support customers. Both the Uberflip and Kapost apps allow you to pull your content assets into HootSuite, instantly creating streams so you can share content directly from your dashboard. With Kapost, you can also pull in social content from HootSuite, generating more ideas for content creation. Both integrations allow you to grab relevant content and share it in real time so it’s more impactful and ultimately more helpful to potential and existing customers. Here’s an example of what you would see in your HootSuite dashboard.

Great content and a social media work hand in hand to build relationships with your customer and drive growth. With HootSuite, you’ll have your finger on the pulse of your audience, able to hear what they’re saying, chat them up and provide solutions to their pain points – potentially your product.

If you are like most managers, you were promoted to your position because you were proficient at you job.  Top salesmen get promoted to sales managers, top engineers get promoted to chief engineers, top accountants become partners in their firms, etc. 

To stay proficient at your role as a manager, you have to make the shift from getting things done yourself to getting things done through other people.   There are a lot of competencies you must master in order to be successful at this and at the same time, it can be narrowed down to just three.  They are your ability to lead, to delegate and to choose your team.

Since this is true, when was the last time you attended any training on how to interview?  Choosing who joins your team is paramount to your overall success and yet, it is assumed that you are naturally good at it.  The techniques we use are typically the ones that were used on us.  After all, that must work because they chose you!

So, in case you have not had any training on how to interview lately, here are a couple of tips.

How to Effectively Interview

1. Be prepared with a standard list of questions you use every time and on every candidate.  Know not only the proper responses to the questions you ask but also any responses that would indicate a red flag. 
2. Have a scoring mechanism on your interview questionnaire.  It’s ok to weight certain questions more than others if you value correct responses to those questions more than the others.  This way you have a quantitative comparison between two candidates.  This helps take out the emotional appeal one may have over the other.

I had a Texas Hold’em poker player tell me one time that the key to good poker is not watching the cards on the flop but the players’ reactions to the cards.  In Texas Hold’em each player is dealt two cards. Then, three cards are placed face up on the table that every player can use as one or more of their cards to help make their hand.  Those three cards make up what is called the flop.  The majority of the time the flop determines who is going to win the hand.  So, in playing the game, watching the players’ reactions to the flop is more important than you looking at the flop.  “The cards don’t move but the eyes of the players always do,” my friend stated.

Most interviewers look at the question when reading it.  Take my friends advice and memorize the question, ask it while looking at the person, and gauge their reaction.  The questions don’t change but the face of the candidate always does.

How they react is more important than what they say.

Here is quiz that appeared in a blog by the New York Times that tests your skill at reading people:

Can You Read Emotions?

You are good at your job.  Invest in getting good at selecting your team members or use one of your other managerial skills – delegation – and assign it to someone who is.

We're heading into a holiday weekend — and most successful people have planned out (or at least thought about) what they'll do over the next three days. 

"Successful people recognize how important it is to take advantage of a long weekend to refuel their passions and recharge their batteries," says Michael Kerr, an international business speaker and author of "You Can't Be Serious! Putting Humor to Work."

They work extra hard the days leading up to the three-day weekend in order to maximize their leisure time, adds Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job." They also compartmentalize any work-related tasks that slip into their three-day weekends, separating them from their coveted leisure time. "They know that if the two blend into each other, they'll likely feel cheated afterward," she says.

Planning ahead for a three-day weekend is important because you don't want to squander the relatively rare opportunity to decompress from the office. Taylor explains: "These extended weekends are different from the regular weekend because you know you have extra time to relax, tie up loose ends personally, catch up with important people in your life, or get ahead on a project. And time is a non-renewable resource. How you spend it should be consistent with what you need to accomplish short- and long-term to be content." 

Not sure how to make the most of the next 72 hours? We've got some ideas.

Here are 12 things successful people do over three-day weekends: 

1. They prepare at work. "Most of what they do happens before they leave for a long weekend so that they are psychologically free to relax and enjoy it," Kerr says. This includes saying proper goodbyes to colleagues, cleaning up their office, finishing any pressing tasks, and creating a clear plan of action for when they return on Tuesday morning so they can hit the ground running.

2. They plan ahead. Many successful people plan out their activities for the holiday weekend well in advance so that they are not drawn into the temptation of working, Kerr says. 

Taylor adds: "They're strategic enough to have an action plan for the three-day weekend, but flexible enough to tackle any urgent work issues that may arise."

 

3. They set technology guidelines. Successful people set email and phone rules for themselves and the people they work with, so that people understand when, if at all, they will be available to respond or pick up.

"This can communicate to employees how critical it is for everyone to take a complete break, and that any and all work can wait," Kerr explains. "Although employees may assume this, they often need to hear it from their leader to be able to completely relax over a long weekend." 

4. They do a little bit of nothing. "With the breakneck pace of business all week long, many successful people do plan — but sometimes those plans include a little bit of nothing," Taylor says. "The workweek is about deadlines and meetings, so successful people enjoy having a block of time, or a day, to be uncommitted and unscheduled."

5. They spend time with family and friends. During the week, it's hard to give focused attention to those you care about. "A three-day weekend let's you schedule this critical quality time," Taylor says.

6. They volunteer. Many successful people find giving their time to worthy charitable groups or causes to be extremely rewarding.

7. They plan "staycations." "Some successful people plan a mini vacation in their own backyard," Kerr says. "Staycations hold the appeal of still allowing for a complete mental break but without the added stress or planning involved in a trip somewhere away, wherein people run the risk of returning to work more exhausted than when they left."

Another good option: Taking a short trip to a destination that only an hour or two away. This is a great way to visit a new place, but doesn't require too much travel or planning.

8. They get outdoors and enjoy nature. A long weekend is the perfect time to get outside and breathe fresh air, especially after being relatively sequestered inside all week, Taylor explains. 

9. They exercise. Successful people understand how important exercise is to their physical and mental health — so they don't get lazy and skip their workouts over holiday weekends. 

10. They engage in an activity that supports their passion. "This is a great time to unwind with your favorite pastime or hobby, whether it's shopping, golfing, socializing, reading, painting, or something else," Taylor says. 

11. They sometimes switch days off. Some successful people will take a different day off instead, and go in to work on the vacation day when they have the office to the themselves and can get more work done without being distracted, Kerr explains. "If you have the luxury of being able to do this it can be a double win — participating in personal activities when it's quieter, and getting more work accomplished at the same time."

12. They think ahead. On the last night of long weekend, many successful people think about the short week ahead and key goals they need to accomplish, Taylor says. And they do this without stressing themselves out.

SEE ALSO: 10 Things Successful People Do On Friday Afternoon

Join the conversation about this story »

Canada is in fifth place among OECD members for attracting immigrants, based on data collected up until 2012, even though it attracted 258,000 new permanent residents, or a gain of 4%, in 2012 alone.

Compare that to the U.S., which drew in 1.03 million more people in the same year, although 3% fewer than in 2011. Germany leap-frogged into second place from eighth position in 2009, attracting nearly 400,000 immigrants in 2012, up 38%. Filling out the top 10 were the U.K., in third place, Spain in the fourth spot, followed by Italy — coming after Canada — then Australia (about 150,000), France, Switzerland and Sweden.

Since the European Crisis, Spain has been selling cheap citizenship. Buy a house for 250,000 euros in Spain and you can a get a citizenship which gives you full access to the European Union.


Read more »

The US$400-billion natural gas supply agreement between Russia and China announced this week does not bode well for Canada’s nascent liquefied natural gas industry, LNG Canada boss Andy Calitz told the LNG in BC conference on Wednesday, contrary to the reassurances offered by B.C. Premier Christy Clark and others.

“The world does not need Canadian LNG,” the outspoken South African-born former Shell executive said on a panel around Canada’s competitive advantages and disadvantages in this emerging global energy trade. He nonetheless predicted there would be between three and five projects running or under construction in B.C. by 2020. “Right now the fundamentals for Canada look great,” he noted. The problem is price, cost and revenue forecasts prove consistently wrong. Today’s high prices for gas in Asia, for example, owe a lot to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which saw nuclear power substituted with natural gas in Japan—and was completely unpredictable. RBC Capital Markets managing director Greg Pardy predicted the big gas price differentials around the world would ease after 2016 as more export capacity comes online in Australia and the U.S., though other panelists weren’t so sure.

Canada’s big advantage is the upstream cost of the resource—around US$4 per thousand cubic feet right now, compared with nearly $5 in the U.S., $10-12 in Europe and around $15 in Japan. It is also closer to Asian markets by sea than the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The challenges, Spectra Energy’s Canadian LNG leader Doug Bloom said, revolve around three Ls: social licence, labour and logistics. Most existing LNG export terminals are in the midst of offshore gas fields, so the physical impact in onshore communities is limited. And on the Gulf Coast, some 25 proposed plants would mostly be built on brownfield sites with access already to infrastructure and skilled local labour forces. The 14 proposed B.C. terminals, by contrast, are all greenfield projects requiring at least 800 kilometres of pipe from the producing area inland to the coast. Most of that territory is remote. And the liquefaction plants themselves must be integrated with existing coastal communities. They will leave a relatively big footprint, in other words.

They may be negotiating heatedly behind closed doors, but Premier Clark and Shell Oil president Marvin Odum were all smiles and mutual admiration during a casual exchange over lunch Thursday at the LNG in BC conference. Odum shared Clark’s view that the Russia-China gas pact, in the works for a decade, “doesn’t change the outlook here at all.” First, China is only one of several countries on the Pacific Rim importing gas. And second, competition will also be coming from China’s own shale reserves, not to mention coal, which is the prime power-generating source gas producers aim to displace. “The bigger issue is how much of China’s energy mix will be gas,” Odum said.

The two were also agreed that larger national discussions need to be held around climate change, economic development and accommodation of aboriginal rights and title—and that LNG development should be seen as an opportunity to move on these issues. “It’s a pretty exciting time,” Odum said of the atmosphere at the conference.

Certainly some ad hoc working relationships are emerging among the province, resource companies and first nations as a result of the LNG rush, attendees learned at another panel on First Nations Perspectives. “It’s a very loosey-goosey protocol we have with the province,” Ellis Ross, chief councilor of the Haisla Nation in the strategic port of Kitimat said. Basically, as soon as it receives a project proposal within the Haisla traditional territories, the province shares it with the band and Haisla representatives are included in the discussions to follow. If the project is deemed acceptable for an environmental perspective and it helps band members become self-sufficient, “we can make it work,” Ross said. “All this is happening without a treaty.”

More than one panelist noted that it was not acceptable for companies to simply knock on their doors and announce what they had planned, but to work with the first nations individually to finance environmental assessments and generate local employment and business opportunities. “Take the time to understand our values and our goals,” said Lax Kw’alaams mayor Garry Reece, who singled out BG Canada as one proponent making all the right moves. But even in relatively well-governed and business-friendly communities like Lax Kw’alaams (pop. 3,700), a poll showed members split roughly three ways between supporting, opposing and undecided on the prospect of LNG.

“My staff is running ragged,” said Ross Wilson, executive director of the Metlatkatla Stewardship Society. The environmental assessment body for the Coast Tsimshian people is currently analyzing eight different LNG proposals.

Fort Nelson First Nation chief Sharleen Gale said she understood business’s need for certainty before committing to capital-intensive projects. “What does it take to get to certainty? It takes trust. It takes creativity. It takes respect.”

The post Why Russia and China’s $400 billion natural gas deal is bad news for B.C. LNG appeared first on Canadian Business.

Security devices and policies are not enough for a office security. You need to take care of some more things to make it secure completely.

The importance of algorithms in our lives today cannot be overstated. They are used virtually everywhere, from financial institutions to dating sites. But some algorithms shape and control our world more than others — and these ten are the most significant.

Read more...

TheLadders conducted a study tracking the eye movements of recruiters when looking at resumes (online and off) and LinkedIn profiles. Besides revealing that recruiters only look at resumes for about six seconds , the study also points out the most important areas job seekers should focus on.

Read more...

Traveling is the perfect opportunity to soak up some culture, but it's also a great chance to soak up some of the local food and drink—specifically boozy drinks. Avoid ordering your usual bar staples back home and use this interactive guide to find out what the locals drink.

Read more...

As part of my job, I spend quite a lot of time sifting through applications for content roles.

In filtering potential candidates for interview, I always look very hard at the covering emails or LinkedIn summary that accompanies the CV. 
 
You can learn a lot about what makes someone a good planner or creator of marketable content from the CVs and covering letters of those who don't quite have what it takes…

These little self-promotional messages are notoriously difficult to get right. But they really, really matter because that email or intro paragraph is the candidate's opportunity to sell themselves and get across why they're right for the role, how they stand out from the crowd, and why their application deserves to be taken further.
 
In short, the covering message is a critical piece of content self-marketing. Like any piece of content marketing, it needs to both inform and engage.

If the applicant can't make a good first impression of promoting themselves through their content, how will they manage to do it for a client?
 
So here, based on many years of CV sifting, are eight ways NOT to apply for a content role. For obvious reasons, all of these quotes are completely made up. But they each reflect an approach I or my colleagues have often seen.

For each I've added a few thoughts about why it doesn't work for us, and a key takeaway or two… 

Tonal overload

Hey! So I had a great chat with one of your colleagues not so long ago (name of Joe I think? Lovely man anyhow) and he whizzed me over your way (you lucky old so-and-so). So naturally I thought, why not run Dan through a few of my creds and see if I can't wow/threaten/blackmail him into meeting up for a quick cuppa to discuss maybe working together? So – deep breath – let's get to it… (etc etc).

But you don't get to it, do you? You go right round the houses, with lots of self-conscious informality and backstory that isn't really of value to someone who probably has quite a few such emails to read. Get to the point. Respect your recipient's time. Don't overdo the tone.

One size fits all

Dear content director/creative director/head of copy… OR To whom it may concern...

So now we've gone from over-familiarity (pretending to know someone you don't) to a hopelessly generic approach (not even bothering to find out the name of the person you're applying to).

This sort of one-size-fits-all approach just comes over as lazy and unprofessional. Great content makes the recipient think and feel it was written for them. Personalise every job application. 

Can I borrow your career?

I've recently undergone a career change and, following a creativity workshop, digital looks like an interesting avenue for me. OK, so my 20 years in estate agency and HR consultancy, plus the odd spot of acting (The Bill anyone?) aren't the natural progression, but sometimes the brightest lights hide under the most unlikely bushels…

The thing about copywriting or content strategy is that it's a career, like acting or HR. It takes time and aptitude and experience to be any good at it.

So candidates who imply that they can just pick it up, or that this digital stuff is an easy game to play till their real work picks up, tend not to be well received.

Believe it or not, people like me aren't just sitting around looking for a chance to train up people like that.   

If you want to change careers, you have to be prepared to do the legwork. Get some work experience, build up your contacts, study the market.

Don't expect to get much work off people whose jobs you don't take seriously.

The 'creative' approach

For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with the possibilities of verbal expression. Words are my DNA. I love to weave trails of meaning across the tapestry of infinity. And so, ever since I could, I have written – autobiographical fragments, experimental fairy tales, slasher novellas, one epic bildungsroman… and, of course, lots and lots of engaging and relevant seo content. To each task I bring the same attention to detail, the same intensity of purpose, the same creative dynamism.

Just as frustrated reporters don't make the best sub-editors, so frustrated creative writers don't always make the best content marketers.

There is plenty of creativity in content, of course, but it's less about expressing your inner essence and more about being creative on behalf of your clients and working magic within constraints: coming up with interesting editorial ideas about difficult b2b subjects, say, or trying to compress a white paper's message into a compelling tweet.

Dial down the creative writing ambitions and showcase your ability to meet a difficult brief, deal with clients, build out an editorial calendar. If that's not your cup of tea, then maybe this is the wrong application for you? 

The impenetrable slab 

Hello, I'm a digital copywriter and content strategist with nine years' experience working across a wide range of sectors and subject areas – including b2b, b2c, not-for-profit and Government departments. After a couple of years in online PR, where I gained my spurs as a writer of killer press releases, I joined a digital marketing start-up as their all-singing, all-dancing go-to content guru. I developed a series of workshops to support clients in developing the writing skills of their own teams, wrote everything from white papers and e-books to video scripts and e-crm campaigns, and was a frequent speaker on all things content at industry events. Five years ago, I took the plunge to go freelance and have broadened my experience base even further…

In our office, one of the worst things that you can say about a piece of copy is that it's 'slabby'. It's hard to see how someone could have worked so long in digital without having come across chunking, or bullets and bold, or content formats...      

Match your message to your medium. How about 'five reasons why you should hire me'?

Sorry seems to be the easiest word 

Hey, I don't know if you remember me but we once met at a conference and you said to send in my CV. I realise you're probably really busy and bombarded non-stop with CVs, and I know you have a great team in place already, but I thought I could share my details with you just on the off chance that something might come that might possibly be a good match for my skillset.

No one likes an overly pushy person, but this is your one moment to promote your wares. Copywriters use words to drive conversions. If you don't sound confident about your skills, how do you expect anyone else to believe in you?

Think hard about the tone of your message. Worried about sounding arrogant? Go for calm and confident instead. Don't feel confident? Use your writing skills to pretend otherwise.

Misteaks, I've made a few... 

I'm a freelance copyeditor and writer looking for a new roll in a content marketing agency like yours…

Not the best place to plant a howling typo. Attention to detail and quality control are crucial at this high-stakes moment.

Check your words. Run them past another pair of eyes, check out the preview. Then check again. 

Get to the back of the queue

Dear Dan, I'm a content writer with an obsession for food, travel and cinema, both doing and writing. I'd love to talk about how we might be able to match your content needs to my skills and passions.

Funnily enough, quite a few people are keen on food and films and travel, and would love to be paid to write about them.

But in content marketing, you often have to write about familiar or unsexy or technical subjects, such as van insurance or business broadband or boreholes. 

Show you're not afraid to turn your hand to difficult subjects. No one expects you to know everything about everything – they're looking for a journalistic aptitude to tackle the unknown, ask the right questions and learn fast.

Five tips for your covering letter

• Keep it brief and purposeful. Pick out a few key highlights.   
• Match your experience to the position. Show you've thought about the company and the role.
• Be respectful and realistic about your recipient's time.Make it easy for people to contact you.  
• Focus on facts and company names rather than personal mission statements. 
• Demonstrate your understanding of digital and content marketing best practice in what you write and how you present your words.  

A lot of time management advice is about saying no to meeting invites or checking email less often. But those actions can cause conflict with your colleagues. Is it possible to set the boundaries you need to get your work done without negatively impacting the rest of the office? How can you manage your time while keeping relationships intact?

What the Experts Say
“Time management is essentially about how you organize work, so, except in very rare cases, it’s going to affect others,” says Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and author of The Blame Game. With any new approach, it’s critical to think about how it will impact those around you. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying, says Julie Morgenstern, a time management expert and author of Never Check E-Mail in the Morning. “Our biggest trap when it comes to time is getting caught up in a sense of service to others,” she says. The solution, says Elizabeth Grace Saunders, a time coach and author of The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment, is to “focus on the long-term goal of doing your job.” Here’s how to get your work done — while keeping your coworkers happy.

Prioritize work over availability
To start, make sure you’re filtering your time effectively. If you’re overly focused on pleasing others, you’re probably sacrificing productivity. “Your greatest value isn’t accessibility,” says Morgenstern. “It’s your ability to solve problems and get things done.” Saunders agrees: “Think less about people’s feelings and more about the strategic goals of the organization.” Your job is to complete your highest value work.

Get input from your colleagues
Of course, this doesn’t give you permission to implement whatever time-management approach you like. “Don’t be unilateral,” says Dattner. “Don’t come in on Monday and say, ‘I went to a seminar and the workshop leader said to only check email once a day so that’s what I’m going to do.’” Experiment with different techniques to see what might work for everyone. “Come up with some initial ideas and share them with your team,” says Dattner. “You might say, ‘Which would you all prefer: that I don’t check email in the morning or that I take one day off of email each week to focus on projects?’” Also acknowledge the impact your actions might have on others. Dattner suggests saying something like, “I acknowledge that this is going to save me three hours, but there’s going to be a cost of an hour to you. What can I do to make it up to you?”

Take risks
You may worry that others aren’t going to respond well to a new technique, but Saunders says that’s often not true. “Most of the time this limitation is in your head,” she says. “When my clients try new approaches, 99% of the time they work out great.” Morgenstern agrees: “Take the leap of faith and others will often experience the payoff.” This might require bucking the system. “People are so used to being overwhelmed and stressed that you can feel quite guilty taking steps to better manage your time,” says Saunders. “But you need to be willing to exit the craziness.”

Make clear what you’re doing and why
Once you’ve decided on a time-management approach, share your reasoning with your colleagues. For example, if you want to decline meeting invites, Saunders suggests you explain why — you’re working on another big initiative, other members of your team are already attending, you aren’t currently focused on that area, and so on. Or if you’re blocking out time on your calendar to concentrate on an important project, send an email to your colleagues explaining why you won’t be available. These sorts of techniques allow you to respect others’ needs and save you time.

Train people on what to expect
Sometimes just telling people what you’re going to change isn’t enough; you have to help them relearn how to interact with you. “If you answer email every three minutes, you’ve trained people that you’re always going to be there,” says Morgenstern.  When you change it up, make sure to tell everyone — key clients, your immediate team, your boss — how and when they can now expect to reach and hear from you.” Saunders says that some of her clients have had luck putting up an auto-responder. For example, it might read, “I’m responding to email every 24 hours. If you need something more urgently, call or text me.”  This wouldn’t work for everyone, but the idea is to experiment with different approaches until you find some tactics that work for you.

Choose the right time
Changing how you work can be disruptive. Dattner advises timing your new approach wisely. “Make sure it’s not in a sensitive crunch period,” he says. You also want to be sure that you’re well positioned to request the change to your routine. “You want to be performing well and be in people’s good graces. When things are going well, you have social capital to spend,” says Dattner.

Do it together if you can
One of the benefits to changing your approach is that you’ll be modeling better time management for your team. “Managers need to be time leaders,” Morgenstern advocates. “They need to set a pattern for their departments.” Dattner recommends having “a conversation with your team about how the entire group could manage time better.” Maybe you all agree to check email less frequently or to meet less often or for less time. Just remember that the same techniques don’t work for everyone. “Some people think what works for them should work for everyone else, but there is no one size fits all,” says Saunders.

Principles to Remember

Do:

• Explain to others how and why you’re changing your habits
• Propose several techniques to see which will work best for you and your coworkers
• Become an evangelist for better time management on your team

Don’t:

• Assume that you’re better at your job if you’re constantly available
• Take a unilateral approach — involve others in your decisions
• Try to implement a new technique during an especially busy time or when you’re not in peoples’ good graces

Case study#1: Make the reasons clear
Jessica Tucker, a sales analyst at a consumer goods company, found that after six months in her new job, long and inefficient meetings were becoming an impediment to getting her work done. She decided to try declining more invites. “I was inspired by my manager’s manager who has a hard policy about not attending meetings unless there is a clear objective and agenda and she has something to offer and/or gain,” she says. Before she made the change, she told her manager that she was going to try the new approach, then discussed it with her team, and informed her coworkers in other groups as well.

Initially, there was some concern. Other groups were worried that that they’d miss pertinent information if she wasn’t there (Jessica provides sales reports to other teams). But this proved to be a non-issue. Jessica started to share updates with a point person on her team, who would report back to the larger group. “I aim not to put more work on my colleagues but sometimes it is a give and take. I definitely try to be fair. If a colleague goes to a meeting one week, I’ll go the next.”  And now that she’s not as tied up, Jessica also responds to coworkers’ requests more quickly. “Ultimately, I have more time to spend on the aspects of my job that matter.”

Jessica has also found that she’s now more disciplined about the meeting invites she sends. “Sometimes I don’t send invites because I realize certain people don’t need to come to the meeting or I realize it’s something I can discuss with one or two people and don’t need a formal time.”

Case study #2: Be flexible with your new approach
Andrew Watson, a business unit manager for an aerospace company, didn’t have enough time to get his work done. Between attending many meetings and making himself “always available” to his team of program managers and functional leads, he was fully booked. “I had little time left to actually do stuff,” he says. Working with his administrative assistant, he decided to block off his calendar for the same hour every day of the week. “She would not make that time available in my calendar unless a higher authority called a priority,” he says. Since Andrew had a reputation for being approachable and available, he was concerned that the change would disappoint his team and cause them to feel as if their issues were being put on hold.

At the team’s next weekly meeting, Andrew explained the change in his calendar to everyone, making it clear that he was going to do it for a trial period and then would check in. He told them that while his door wasn’t open during that hour, they could interrupt him for important or urgent matters. He also asked for their feedback. “The team was satisfied since I gave them the reasons for the change, and also the opportunity to influence how it was implemented.” Even though the hour was occasionally interrupted (usually by his boss or peers but rarely by his direct reports), the approach enhanced Andrew’s productivity. He was able to focus on important projects but was still available to his team when absolutely necessary.

The internet today is broken (which is why Gigaom recently devoted a series of articles to the subject of fixing it). Control of key elements is becoming more centralized; it is being increasingly censored and manipulated; many aspects are open to intrusion; and the cloud’s need for expensively massive server operations breeds business models that rely on turning everyone’s private data points into dollars.

A bunch of slightly mad Scots at a company called MaidSafe may have the solution. Over an impressively lengthy development period of 8 years, they have come up with something called the Secure Access For Everyone (Safe) network, which they are about to start testing. If it pans out, the Safe network will provide an un-censorable, secure, resilient successor to today’s internet, complete with a built-in economy and the foundations for a distributed, autonomous intelligence.

The idea is not wholly original – a dash of distributed computing here, a soupçon of altcoin there – but it is impressively glued together and actually relatively plausible as these things go. That’s not to say Safe doesn’t have problems, because it does, but they may not be insurmountable.

A post-server world

The Safe network was the brainchild of David Irvine, a network design engineer and serial entrepreneur (his startup Ayrsoft made small business server software called eBoxit) who wanted to improve systems and realized the problem lay in servers. As per the telling of Nick Lambert, MaidSafe’s chief operating officer, servers are an unnatural and unnecessary intermediary in online communications. (“MaidSafe”, by the way, is a play on RAID that stands for “Massive array of internet disks”. Sorry, it’s a horrible name.)

However, there are certain problems with moving away from the server model, as Lambert explained: “If you don’t have servers, what do you log into? You also need to have data that you could almost have with your worst enemy and they still can’t read it and decipher it. The third [problem is] you have to have a network that’s autonomous. The network must be able to heal and manage itself – for a lot of things people are unfortunately the weakest point. They’re very corruptible … this often leads to problems.”

The Safe model is a bit like SETI@home or perhaps even a botnet, federating the spare capacity of its users’ computers and internet connections to create a distributed supercomputer that obviates the need for centralized servers. Users’ computers, the nodes on the network, can all contribute resources to the pooled effort, including storage, bandwidth and processing power, by running a special app. Data going through the network are broken up into shards of encrypted information that are each stored in at least 4 places at any given time, with no one able to reassemble them but their owners or the intended recipient.

The shared resources are bound together through a routing layer based on the Kademlia distributed hash table, which also underpins filesharing networks like BitTorrent. “It’s fast to the point where, if a node goes offline, the network is aware of it in the time it takes a ping to go, so that’s 20ms,” Lambert said. All this runs on top of the standard TCP/IP internet protocol suite, so it can happily use the internet’s existing hardware infrastructure. “But it is basically rewritten from there up. We’re going from Level 3, the networking layer, right the way up to the application layer.”

A big advantage of this approach is resiliency. According to Lambert, the unintended loss of data on the network would require the loss of power in 4 continents at the same time. And in any case, if that happened, data loss would probably be the least of our worries.

From the user perspective, Safe will potentially provide a similar experience to what people are used to, with a completely different back end. Once they’ve logged in from their desktops, services would come from the network as they come from the cloud today – browsers, app stores, messaging and video chat; whatever developers come up with. “There would be nothing to stop people putting operating systems inside the network,” Lambert posited.

Incentives for users and developers

So how does the network avoid the so-called tragedy of the commons, whereby not enough people contribute resources and a few selfish users chew them all up? Well, people can use the network without contributing, but then they won’t earn safecoins, a Bitcoin-derived virtual currency that exists to reward users (“farmers”) and app developers (“builders”) for their efforts. The network pays out safecoins to developers according to how much their applications get used (direct micropayments from users are also possible) and to users according to their contribution, which is calculated in real time.

At the start, safecoins will be quite low-value: when MaidSafe raised $6 million through a safecoin sale in April, it was at a rate of 17,000 safecoins to one bitcoin (worth about $450 at the time). Nonetheless, the outfit hopes Safecoin will become a big cryptocurrency, and that will require a way to exchange safecoins for bitcoins or litecoins or, you know, real money like dollars and euros. Hence, one of the first applications needed on the network will be a distributed currency exchange, perhaps a bit like OpenCoin’s Ripple.

One question that will hopefully get cleared up during the tests, for which 500 developers have signed up, is how quickly a user can farm safecoins. “Unfortunately we don’t know until we get the test networks up and running,” Lambert said. “It’s very much dependent on how much resources are on the network. If there’s lots of people farming, there are fewer chances to earn safecoin. There are so many variables that it’s difficult to predict with any certainty what users can expect.”

A more fundamental problem is the shift to mobile. It’s all very well for a PC user to leave their machine on 24/7 in order to earn as many safecoins as they can, but you simply can’t do that with today’s mobile technology and data pricing. The connections and local processing power can probably handle it, but the batteries can’t – there’s a reason phones are forever going to sleep – and data usage caps are too restrictive. Down the line these things may change, but for now they mean mobile users are only theoretical consumers, not contributors. MaidSafe could pin basic access to the possession of safecoins, but those will be scarce in the early days. It’s a fine line to walk.

So the model isn’t perfect, but it does promise access to effectively unlimited free storage and computing power with anonymity and heavy inherent security, all for donating resources that many PC users can easily spare. The farming/mining system makes more sense than that of Bitcoin, because mining bitcoins involves using a lot of computing power to answer essentially pointless mathematical questions. And the distributed, self-optimizing nature of the Safe network could play very well with both the internet of things and content delivery.

Also, the network is effectively a giant computer that may prove very useful as such – Lambert reckons it could be powerful enough to run an artificial intelligence tat draws on all the knowledge in the network, and in fact MaidSafe has been talking with an EU-funded project called RoboEarth about this very goal.

What’s in it for MaidSafe?

There are effectively 2 MaidSafes: MaidSafe.net, a for-profit company, and the MaidSafe Foundation, a charity for education and innovation that owns half of the company and will theoretically be funded through dividends once everything takes off.

MaidSafe the company will earn safecoins by releasing its own apps, and also by improving the core code. A third revenue stream would come from what Lambert described as a “fairly significant intellectual property portfolio which is there for protection.” Yes, patents – anathema to many in the open source world, but potentially useful for protecting developers on the Safe network down the line.

The product itself is open source, dual-licensed under GPLv3. Anyone can freely use it or even fork it, as long as the resulting product is also open source – if it’s not, then the company requires payment. “It may well be that a centralized current incumbent wants to use some of our libraries; for example, our rUDP and routing libraries may be sufficient for content delivery networks like Akamai,” Lambert suggested.

In other words, if everything works out then MaidSafe can keep going, and even if the company drops off the face of the earth for some reason, the project code can live on in some future iteration. Either way, I strongly suspect this concept is where a lot of other ideas have been heading. If it’s going to happen, maybe now’s the time — we’ll find out from September, when MaidSafe hopes the initial tests will be successfully completed and the beta phase will begin.

For more information on MaidSafe and the Safe network, read their whitepaper — also check out my recent report on initiatives to reclaim online privacy through decentralization and other means.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What to consider when architecting your organization for the cloud
• Gigaom Research predictions for 2014
• Who to watch in the growing European cloud market

Case studies are an excellent way to demonstrate the value of your offering, and illustrate how a client uniquely benefited from them. As buyers increasingly conduct research independently using social media and vast online sources, case studies have become crucial to content marketing efforts.

read more

At Inc.'s 17th annual Growth conference, author and entrepreneur John Warrillow wowed the crowd with his ode to the subscription model.

From Birchbox to MeUndies, subscription businesses may be the business model du jour, but John Warrillow is convinced it's both here to stay and pure genius.

The author and entrepreneur mesmerized the entrepreneurs at this year’s GrowCo conference in Nashville, Tennessee as he gave them a peek at his current passion and forthcoming book, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry, due out in February 2015. The book describes nine different business models based on subscriptions and shows how any business can tremendously enhance its value by adopting one.

"It’s the perfect business model because it provides the greatest value to both the entrepreneur and the customer," said Warrillow.

As an example, he contrasted a traditional flower shop with H. Bloom, the subscription flower delivery service that began in New York in 2010 and is now in 10 cities around the country. While the traditional florist has to deal with all the headaches and vagaries of a store-based retailer selling a highly perishable product to customers who may or may not show up, H. Bloom’s founders, Bryan Burkhart and Sonu Panda, realized they could do a lot better by selling subscriptions to customers who bought flowers on a regular basis--businesses, for example. The average sale at the flower shop would be $29. The average sale at H. Bloom is more than $4,000.

That’s just one benefit of moving to a subscription-based business model, Warrillow said. Another is the smoothing out of demand. There aren't any surprises when people are getting the same order on a regular basis, for instance.

Yet another is the model’s ability to reduce the impact of recessions. He gave the example of a company that goes from installing elevators--a business that stops when construction stops--to servicing elevators, which continues no matter what else is going on in the economy.

But perhaps the greatest advantage is the effect a subscription model has on a company’s valuation. Warrillow has observed that effect through his own business, Sellabilityscore.com, which allows business owners to determine the sellability of their companies and to learn what can be done to enhance their attractiveness to buyers. A key factor is recurring revenues. The more guaranteed revenue you can offer a potential acquirer, the more valuable your business is going to be. Because a high percentage of the revenue of a subscription-based business is recurring, its value will be up to eight times that of a comparable business with very little recurring revenue.

Warrillow talked in some detail about three of the nine subscription models. Here's a synopsis:

The Price of Membership

For the membership model, he used the example of the famed Kathy Blake Dance Studios in Amherst, New Hampshire, which developed a membership business for dance studio owners. By signing up, they received regular updates and advice on how to build their businesses.

Getting Ahead

Then there was the front-of-the-line subscription model--for example, the Peach Pass in Georgia, which allows subscribers to use fast lanes, thereby avoiding traffic and, in effect, skipping to the front of the line.

Constant Supervision

The consumable subscription model builds on what Warrillow called “never-again” moments, as when the baby is crying in the middle of the night because of a wet diaper and the half-awake parent reaches for the box of Pampers, only to discover that there aren’t any left. “Never again,” he mumbles. The best example, he said, is the Dollar Shave Club, which guarantees subscribers that they’ll never run out of high-quality fresh razor blades again. He then played its famous YouTube video, which brought the house down.

“The subscription model has relevance to everyone in this room,” he concluded.

Author: Aine Dundas

I was stumped. As an occasional flyer on airline RyanAir, I’d received a marketing email with this simple headline: “We’re Changing”.  It promised lower fares, a better website, allocated seating, and free baggage options. I found myself scrolling to the bottom of the email, looking for the punchline and/or the small print (and indeed, I was expecting both).

You see, RyanAir is a low-cost Irish airline that operates primarily throughout Europe, and is known for offering a “no-frills” service at bargain prices. Of course, lots of airlines offer this type of service; in my budget-conscious backpacking days, I tried and tested a lot of them. JetBlue, Tiger Airlines, Air Asia, Jetstar, EasyJet – you name it, I’ve probably been a passenger at some point!

The key difference between those low-cost airlines and RyanAir, however, has always been their customer service – or complete lack thereof. Confusing and sometimes sneaky online booking experiences, extortionate penalties for minor discretions outside the check-in rules, and an obsession with lowering fares, often at the expense of customer experience…the list could go on. Indeed, a few Google searches will reveal many examples of their marketing antics over the years – and a barrage of customer complaints.  Despite all this, the airline had firmly established itself as a profitable player in European aviation, transporting over 81 million people in 2013.

The Marketing U-Turn

Earlier this month, RyanAir CMO Kenny Jacobs announced that he will be overhauling the customer experience. To facilitate this, the company has expanded their marketing team, launched a new website, established a social media presence, and produced new television advertisements to support the change.

So, what prompted this shift? Perhaps in was the September 2013 drop in share price. Possibly the company was motivated by increased competition from other European airlines. Maybe Michael O’Leary, RyanAir CEO, just got fed up with being the bad guy! I don’t know the reason(s) behind RyanAir’s strategic shift, but they’re on their way to becoming a more customer-focused, marketing-driven organisation. And that gets my thumbs up!

RyanAir is an extreme example, but how could your brand and strategy take their strategic shift to heart? What changes can you make to your marketing to enhance the experiences of your own customers.

Here are some of my own tips:

1. Build Engaging Relationships with Your Customers

RyanAir estimates that 40% of their customers are repeat buyers. To improve customer retention, they are naturally looking to improve their customer relationships. It can be 8-10x more expensive to acquire new customers than to sell additional products to ones you already have, which is why focusing on retention, up-sell, and cross-sell is just good business sense.

To be effective at this, you must engage with your customers in a consistent way, across multiple channels. Automate appropriate email conversations so that they are relevant to specific behavioural triggers – such as a website visit or social engagement. If your customer is showing an interest in a specific product/topic category, then ensure your automated email communications reflect that.

When a customer visits your website, personalise their experience with relevant up-sell/cross-sell messages and information. To get more advanced, score your customers based on behavioural activity and inactivity. Of course, scoring based on activity can indicate opportunities for you to up-sell or cross-sell, but scoring based on inactivity can indicate at-risk customers who need your attention. RyanAir has identified a good approach here – building meaningful dialog and relationships with your customers is a key component in improving retention and loyalty. The challenge for most marketers is doing this at scale, which is where automation technology comes in handy.

2. Manage your Customer Data in a Scalable Manner

81 million customers flew with RyanAir last year – that is a lot of customer data to manage.  And going back to the previous point, it indicates just how challenging it will be for RyanAir to create relevant conversations with such vast volumes of customers.

Never the glamorous part of marketing, maintaining a clean data set of your customers’ demographic and behavioural information is a requisite to deliver successful campaigns. You must constantly listen to your customers, update your data set, and tailor your multi-channel communications appropriately.

For today’s marketer working in a multi-channel, multi-market environment, scalability of programs is also a key requirement – and using a marketing automation platform is the best way to deliver personalised marketing programs, at an unrivaled scale. Like any technology, it works best when appropriately fueled. And for marketing automation, customer data is the fuel.

3. Become a Marketing-First Organisation

To help RyanAir achieve their new strategic objectives, they have hired a CMO and expanded their marketing team. While they certainly made headlines in the past, this shift in structure seems to acknowledge that structural change was needed to improve customer experience.

Marketing truly is both high-pressure and lightning-paced. I graduated from university in 2006, and even in that short time, the function of marketing has evolved significantly. There’s been an explosion of online and offline channels – including web, email, social, video, e-commerce, and mobile devices. In most companies, the marketing departments “own” these channels in terms of building, sustaining, and growing customer relationships to drive revenue.

Marketing is no longer just about open-rates, click-rates, and database growth. The question for marketers is, “Where and how do you invest your budget for maximum return?” Marketers need sophisticated, scalable tools to effectively engage with customers in real-time across a multitude of channels – and the ability to measure, analyse, report on, and predict revenue. 

What do you think of RyanAir’s tactical change in direction? Do you think it’s too late to change customer perceptions and market perceptions of their brand? What is your approach to optimising or improving your customers’ experiences?

---

How One Organisation is Becoming More Customer-Focused – and How You Can Too was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

Six “Killer” Tips to Bring Your Outbound Marketing Back to Life written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

It is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Gal Borenstein – Enjoy! 

Is outbound marketing finally dead? Conventional wisdom says yes. After all, how many of us look forward to getting spam emails from businesses we don’t know or open an envelope with an invitation to a “free” event we know is rigged to sell us something we don’t want? Or even worse, what about the ever-annoying door-to-door salesperson telling us how our tree is dead, or our windows truly need replacement? Certainly at some point we have all wished that the “outbound” would die, and justifiably so.

But, before you kill “outbound marketing” in your budget, marketing plan and small business execution, think about the function it plays in each strategy. I contend that outbound marketing is just like the electricity and water that power the daily routines of your business. You’d never notice their importance, until the power goes out or the water stops flowing when you need to take a shower.

Here are six “killer” tips to bring your outbound marketing back to life.

1. Demonstrate your subject matter expertise. In a world of generalists that say they can do anything and everything, dare to be the one that specializes in a niche solution. By doing so, you can easily reduce the amount of competitors and actually help your prospect realize the value of working with you.

2. Customize your approach and don’t use pre-made templates. Remember that your prospects are seeking to differentiate you from your competition. With the bevy of marketing systems that allow you to use the same pre-designed “rush priority” envelope, or a web site and email template that another 200 small businesses are using, you stand to accomplish the opposite of standing out. The rule of thumb you should follow is that if it is a template, and you can afford it, it isn’t that special anymore. If it were worth anything, it would have been more valuable than the $39.99 price tag.

3. Select the most compelling marketing medium that matches your audience demographics. Your prospect demographics are changing and perhaps at the “speed of light” like never before. Digital advertising through Pay-Per-Click, for example, went from being entirely based on using desktop computers to now having the majority of buyers first visiting a web site or landing page via their mobile device or tablet. Is your outbound marketing piece adjusted to their usage reality? Throw the old assumptions away about how people use technology, and ask. You might be surprised to find out that even WWII and Vietnam veterans are purchasing their AARP products and services online.
   

4. Brand your outbound marketing uniquely and creatively. With more competitive venues to create and leave a colorful impression on prospects from the usage of video in content marketing to flooding your prospect’s mind with compelling, funny, or memorable imagery—reexamine your outbound marketing campaign. Does it do that? Or is it boring, dull and uninspiring? A good rule of thumb in branding is that if you can paste your logo on top of someone else’s marketing piece, you don’t have a unique brand to claim. Why waste the opportunity? From Apple’s distinct design of its ads (always clean, lots of white space and few words) to Papa John’s Pizza (Papa is always in it), these brands manage to leave a strong impression with every outbound marketing touch point.

5. Choose quality over quantity. In outbound marketing, we are filled with formulas that are driven by percentage of response, ROI and the number of visitors to a site. What really matters is the quality of your responses. If you are seeking a response that expedites the selling cycle, you should truly focus on setting the bar on an integrated direct marketing approach that starts by ensuring each “touch point” with your prospect provides value versus pure crude exposure.
   

6. Synchronize your in-house operations and your direct marketing activities. For many small businesses, a major direct marketing campaign could represent a significant budgetary investment. Yet, often when I call back to respond to an offer that was emailed or mailed to me, I find that the sales or customer service department doesn’t know what the offer was. Or worse, they say the program doesn’t exist, or ask that I should show them proof. Imagine the colossal waste of your budget associated with losing the opportunity to make a sale.

About The Author:

Mr. Gal Borenstein (@galborenstein) is the CEO and Chief Strategy Officer of the Borenstein Group, a Northern Virginia-based integrated digital marketing communications agency supporting emerging innovators and industry leaders in Information Technology, Management Consulting, Logistics & Supply Chain Management and Professional Services.

Inbound isn’t all about marketing. After all, what happens to all those leads you’ve been getting? Your business can’t run on leads alone -- you need customers who help bring in revenue and fuel your future inbound strategies.

So once you’ve perfected your visit-to-lead acquisition, it’s time to get to work on your lead-to-customers game. Below are some of my favorite tactics that inbound marketers and salespeople alike can use to help nurture and close more leads into customers.

Target your email sends.

How many times have you received an email from a company you’ve never even heard of? What about an email with a subject line that says something along the lines of “Get a great deal on our product!” from a site you just visited for the first time? And how many times have you actually liked those emails and continued to open more like them in the future?

If you said something along the lines of “oh gosh I hate those emails why are you reminding me about them,” you’re not alone. Emails that are either wholly irrelevant to their recipients -- or irrelevant to where those recipients happen to be in the buyer’s journey -- can not only annoy your potential customers, but in fact make it less likely they’ll want to do business with you in the future.

Now let’s switch gears a bit: Think about the last time you received an email directly related to a piece of content you downloaded or an offer you signed up for, or one that offers an answer to the question you’ve been trying to figure out all week. Did you open that email? Chances are good you did.

It’s easy to see why emails specifically targeted to recipients’ needs and interests are much more likely to be opened, but even emails with subject lines like the “get a great deal!” one mentioned above can garner a plethora of clicks if it’s sent to the right person at the right time -- like a contact who is in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. Sending emails tailored to deliver exactly the right message at the right time immediately build recipients’ trust in your organization and make it more likely they’ll continue to engage with you in the future.

Think about email as a tool for building relationships with your leads. The more you position yourself as a consultant within your emails -- ready to help your prospects with their challenges -- the more likely they will interact with you.

Personalization is the magic word.

What do you see when you visit a website like Amazon or Netflix? Probably something different than what your coworker, friend, or relative sees. These websites make the effort (and use the data) to better understand their visitors’ likes and interests and create a personalized website experience.

These companies’ use of personalization goes a long way toward building trust with their website visitors -- and makes it more likely that those visitors will think of Amazon or Netflix next time they’re interested in buying a product or watching a movie.

While you’ll need to use smart content to create a personalized website, you can easily integrate this level of personalized messaging into your emails using personalization tokens. These tokens are small fragments of text you can place into your emails that pull in information your contacts have provided about themselves. Personalization tokens can be used to customize your email’s subject line or body to include the recipient’s specific company size, industry, location, title, or otherwise. Using these tokens can go a long way toward transforming each email you send into a sales-generating tool.

Here’s a real-life of example of how email personalization can work to generate sales. Two months ago, I bought a 30-day supply of protein powder from Amazon.com. Just as my protein powder supply starts to dwindle, Amazon sends me an email asking: “Have you bought your protein powder this month? Check out similar flavors that might interest you!” Amazon instantly hooks me and gets my business yet again. 

Align your sales and marketing teams.

“Our sales team is lazy,” says a marketing specialist. 

“Our marketing team is irrelevant,” says a sales rep. 

Sound familiar? No matter which side of the equation you’re on, chances are you’ve heard one of those two lines spoken before. You’re not alone -- in fact, according to a study done by the Corporate Executive Board, 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative. 

A study by the Aberdeen Group, however, showed that companies with strong sales and marketing alignment get 20% annual revenue growth. Imagine that: 20% growth simply from collaborating with your coworkers!

It pays off for both teams to not only get along, but actively work together toward accomplishing overall company goals. By collaborating and removing the negativity between the two teams, companies can actively close more leads into customers. So if you’re not already getting together on a regular basis, schedule a meeting between your sales and marketing team leaders and take the first leap into aligning to better each other and your company as a whole.

Be an open book & leverage the buyer’s context in the sales process.

Not only has inbound transformed the way we market, it has also transformed the way sell. While the sales process used to consist of weeks upon weeks of cold calls and static pitches, today’s sales process is on the buyer’s schedule and must be tailored to their specific needs and wants. Instead of salespeople acting as the gatekeepers to content and information about products and services, we make that content readily available on our websites for prospects to download and access on their own. Gone are the days where sales rep hold the power in the buying process. Now, the tides have turned and the buyers have all the control. 

In order to succeed with sales in an inbound world, sales reps must be open books -- ready and waiting to provide helpful information to their prospects and customers. Your potential customers can see right through generic scripts or stagnant sales pitches, so don’t be a machine! Breathe some life into your sales process by listening to potential buyers, tailoring sales pitches to each individual and their unique context, being helpful, and always keeping conversations relevant and personalized.

Determine the goal of a call before picking up the phone.

To all the sales reps reading, we get it. You have an ambitious activity number to hit and reaching it can be more than a little stressful. But, that’s no excuse for poor sales tactics. To get the most out of each call -- and to set each one up for success -- always determine the goal of each one of your sales calls before picking up the phone. Research prospects so that when you get the chance to interact with them, you’re prepared and able to have the conversation that’s most relevant to where they are in the buyer’s journey and who they are as people.

Beyond understanding both who your prospects are and what you’d like to accomplish when speaking to them on the phone, it’s important to make sure you know who you’re actually going to be speaking with and how that may influence your goal. Maybe you're calling someone to make an introduction, maybe you have the decision maker's name and number and you're calling to make the sale, or maybe you're just trying to get an internal or external referral. Regardless of the situation, the goal of the call will depend on who you're talking to and where they are in the buying cycle.

The inbound methodology doesn’t end after “convert.” In order to be truly successful with your inbound strategy, you need to effectively close your leads into customers. To dive deeper into how to maximize your customer generation efforts, check out HubSpot Academy’s Inbound Certification.

---

More companies are realizing that making cold calls doesn’t always pay off. They’re trying out ways to predict which sales leads will pay off in order maximize the time of busy salespeople.

Lattice, a startup with predictive sales software, today added new capabilities to help salespeople win money from existing customers, not just people they’ve never worked with before. Now people can tap Lattice to predict the best approach to cross-selling (selling into additional divisions of a company) and upselling (getting a company to buy additional products). It’s the latest startup to attempt to incorporate smart data analysis into sales and marketing.

“Organizations can use predictive analytics and data science to predict who’s not going to renew and who’s going to renew and the products you can sell to people,” Lattice chief marketing officer Brian Kardon said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Other companies have had related ideas. RelateIQ is automating the process of collecting key bits of information. Context Relevant, which announced new funding earlier this week, prioritizes the sales leads that it thinks will lead to the largest profits. Infer predicts which leads will result in sales. And API management and analytics company Apigee bought predictive analytics startup InsightsOne earlier this year.

Lattice, for its part, has picked up customers like Adobe, EMC, HP, Juniper, Microsoft, RingCentral, Staples, and VMware.

Founded in 2006, Lattice can accept software-use logs from its customers and from marketing and sales software like Oracle’s Eloqua or Salesforce.com.

But application and website use isn’t necessarily the most telling indicator of who isn’t planning to renew, say, a license.

“There are other things, too,” Kardon said.

So Lattice also takes lots of other data into consideration as it figures out who salespeople should focus their attention on.

“We’re crawling through 150 million different websites a day,” Kardon said. The software extracts attributes like the backgrounds of company executives, the technologies companies use in their websites, the language in which text appears on websites, how many people companies want to hire, and so on.

Lattice also taps data sources like Lexis Nexis and Experian to round out its data selection.

Lattice’s new features have been working wonders for e-signature company DocuSign. In two months, the company’s salespeople increased their win rate by 38 percent, and they boosted their return on investment in Lattice’s software by a multiple of 131, Kardon said.

Meanwhile the new features have helped Lattice’s own salespeople. Kardon couldn’t provide figures, but he did say “it’s been very good to us.”

Lattice announced a $20 million round of venture funding in November 2012.

Lattice is revolutionizing sales and marketing through the power of Big Data. The company's Big Data for Sales platform, salesPRISM, delivers real-time, predictive and actionable insight to sales and marketing professionals wherever th... read more »

New research by the Content Marketing Association found that over half of those surveyed planned to increase expenditure on content marketing over the coming year. With an increased interest in content marketing comes the hard work needed to get a content project moving. An editorial calendar is crucial to managing this process; it is not just a tool for enabling a regular publishing schedule; it is vital in establishing a content strategy.

So how do you create a value-adding editorial calendar that will enable your content marketing strategy? Here are a few tips on how to begin…

Why have an editorial calendar?

First things first, what benefits does having an editorial calendar bring? Well for many writers, the worst part is when you are staring at a blank piece of paper, with your pen poised. Writer’s block can be a nightmare, but luckily an editorial calendar is designed to help with a number of content marketing problems.

An editorial calendar can:

• Encourage fresh and regular content

• Increase transparency across team members

• Create consistency and themes through planning ahead

• Allow for lead time in launching new products and/or strategies

• Decrease repetitive pieces of content

Which calendar to choose?

There are lots of editorial solutions out there, so which one do you choose? Ask yourself…

• Is it easy to open?

• Is it easy to take in?

• Will my team want to use it?

WordPress has a number of plugins, Google Docs is really simple and visible, and there a number of online platforms which can incorporate content budgets, social media platforms, keywords, supporting media and much more. Have a little trial with each and see which one works for your needs.

Fill the blanks

An editorial calendar is designed to encourage regular and fresh content production, even when the dreaded writer’s block occurs. The trick is coming up with the ideas to put in the calendar in the first place, so here a few suggestions to get you started:

• Research upcoming events that are relevant to the audience you are targeting. Chase’s has a great list designed for the US, but if you carry out a little preparation and research, you’ll soon find events and holidays that can be tailored to suit what your audience will want to read.
• Repurpose past content, and ask yourself why it performed well and whether it can be made into something that is still relevant today.
• Interviews can be pretty simple to muster up, either by phone or through a quick Q&A over email. An opinion adds a human perspective to the world of the web, where most content is now published, so it can stand out further than other pieces by offering a more emotionally-open angle.
• The flipside of interviews is of course hard line statistics. Many readers don’t have time to sift through a massive research paper or analyse the results of a study, so by doing it for them, you are providing a service.
• Design a survey and make a piece of content out of the results. Look into how and where the survey would be distributed, although bear in mind that a survey is an investment and it may take some time for the results to filter through.
• Powerful visuals will evoke emotions within readers over copy-led content, therefore creating a deeper engagement with your content. Popping a couple of strong pictures together is quick and easy, and people prefer a visually-led story on the web.

Manage the calendar

Creating a calendar is just the beginning, so take into consideration how the editorial calendar will be managed and updated, as well as who is responsible for it. A free-for-all may be democratic, but it might cost the calendar its organisation. Think about:

• What information to include i.e. the person assigned to the content, the type of content, goals, a brief, keywords etc.
• Will there be any other external applications to take into account, such as content briefs and emails?
• Who can add pieces of content?
• The presentation of the calendar

How to use the calendar

Content is produced to increase brand awareness and industry authority, but ultimately companies want to generate leads too. So content must be created not just for content’s sake, but because it will nurture leads, assist in closing sales and provide value to existing clients who keep coming back.

To create an editorial calendar that can be utilised by other departments, it’s important to understand what the other departments feel about content, and what their goals are. Marketing and PR may have a new product lined up for Sales to go to the market with, as an example, so as a content writer you must align a content strategy to what you are planning on selling. The key here is clear and concise communication internally, so your content is clear and concise to the outside world.

This way, the editorial calendar is not created because you need to fill in some blanks, but because you have lots of content and need to plan where it will go and how it will be distributed. Then, the editorial calendar is marching to the beat of your own drum, and becomes a useful, value-adding tool.

In Part 1 of Why B2B Lead Generation Fails, we discussed the Foundation you need to lay before you can sell in the B2B marketplace. You can watch the video in the previous post.

The second phase deals with the buying process and factors affecting this process. There are four main factors affecting the buying process. These factors are;
1. The Five Buying Stages
2. Social Proof
3. Why B2B Companies Buy
4. The Five Influencers

Today I am going to discuss the Five Buying Phases in detail, and what you need to know, so that you are moving your prospect through these stages properly. The graphic shows the initial four stages.

Making contact with a new customer is much like driving a car that has a clutch. And if you sell new methods or processes, or new technologies, or new ways of doing things — moving too fast stalls the process. Even if you are not selling anything new, you still need to follow these steps to ensure success, and to save yourself a lot of time and stress.

These are the steps for a successful B2B sale.

Phase One: The customer must agree with you that he has a problem. If for example, you sell inventory management software; your customer must acknowledge that he’s got an inventory management problem.

For most sales people, this is the most difficult step in the process. Almost all sales people, who are looking for new prospects, spend most of their time in phase one. However, instead of asking what the problem is, these sales people try to sell a solution first, by trying to tell the prospect what business they are in. They then leave it up to the prospect to figure out if they need their help or not. This is not only the wrong approach. This is also a terrible waste of a salesperson’s time!

Let’s look at the process here for a minute. The sales person receives, or builds, a list of prospects to call. Many have had no training on how to approach a prospective customer. Most have been taught by the “Stuff against the wall method”. This method stated that the more calls you make, the more sales you will make. This outdated and incorrect methodology has been used for far too long. It was a method invented by uninformed sales people, who didn’t know any other way of calling prospects.

So, they pick up the phone and start calling. Most sales people are terrified of this process. They know that over 95% of the people they call will not be receptive or hospitable to their call. The sales call will receive rejection, and most of these sales will people take it personally. I know, I’ve been there, done that!

We need to educate sales people on what they should be doing when they first approach a prospect. Many companies do not know how to do this properly. This is a subject for another time. But, if your sales people are struggling with this exercise, then do not blame them. Get them the proper training and coaching on how to perform this important part of the selling process.

In actual fact, phase one is a marketing issue, not a sales issue. It is marketing’s responsibility to build leads. Depending on the size of your organization, you need to ensure that marketing and sales work together, to make this the driving force behind your revenue generation machine.

Now let‘s have a look and see what you need to do as you move into phase two.

Phase Two: The customer agrees that there is a problem. Now, he has to agree that he “wants to solve” his problem. This can be a very difficult phase to overcome. However, again, this should be a marketing issue, not a sales issue.

You have to convince the prospect that he will only gain by solving his problem. As you know, some people realize there is a problem, but they believe the solution will be more hassle to them than the problem.

As an example, a controller knows that budgeting software will help him in his budgeting process. He also knows that he will have to train all of his staff on the software, and more importantly, how to do their job differently. In the short term, it will be very disruptive to the whole organization, and he does not want to get involved. He has heard the horror stories from friends in other companies.

You need to show him that you are interested in solving his problem, and that if he doesn’t solve his problem, he will be much worse off than he is now. You do not want to make the mistake of trying to sell him something in this phase of the selling process.

What you have to do here is show the prospect that you are knowledgeable about the problem. You can best demonstrate this knowledge in two fashions. An excellent way to show your expertise in this area is through a white paper, a newsletter, or a technical review you or your company has written.

If you (your company) have a white paper describing how to fix this problem through sound business practices, you will start to build trust with the prospect. Remember that someone will not buy from you if you have not developed a certain degree of trust with him or her.

They want to know that they are buying from someone reputable. The best way to demonstrate your reputation is through your knowledge of your prospect’s business, and consequently the problems they have been experiencing.

The other, and better, way to show him that you can solve his problem, with the minimum amount of disruption to his business, is by a referral or through references. In fact, referral selling is the best way to sell.

Phase Three:The customer recognizes the value of your particular solution to his problem. Your inventory management software tracks all of the things that are important to him; it runs on his computers, talks to his barcode readers, and fits within his budget.

Here, you can solidify your reputation with other customer references. The best way to sell of course is through referrals, and the second best way is through references. If these references are in the same industry as your prospect, you will gain trust even faster. If they are with one of his competitors, you will put the emotion of selling into motion. This should help your prospect decide even sooner. They do not want their competitors having any kind of advantage on them in any respect.

A good way to gain trust, and to show your ability to perform, is to let the prospect try out your solution for a short period of time, if this is feasible. If you are selling software, let him try it for a month. If you have a service or other products you are selling, give him an iron clad guarantee.

If you are absolutely sure that your product and/or service will solve his problem, then you should give some kind of guarantee. If you have agreed upon why your product is the best solution for him, and you have shown how it can save him time, money, or generate income, then guarantee a minimum level of results. Let him know that you will ensure these results through your engineering group, or whatever, but let him know that you are there for him.

Phase Four: The customer has come to know you; he likes you and trusts you. He knows that you will do what you say. He knows you are going to perform, and he is willing to risk his career credibility, (maybe even his job) by cutting you a purchase order.

Once you have established yourself as trustworthy, you will now be able to complete the sale. You must also keep gaining his trust by showing your professionalism. You need to have a contract that he can sign. You need to show him all of the steps that you and your company will go through in order to ensure a successful installation.

You also need to demonstrate how you will guarantee his success. This can be done by educating his staff on the system. You can give him and his staff a 24-hour hotline to call with issues. Show him that you have thought of all contingencies, and that you are there to help him look good.

Phase Five: This is the renewal stage, where you sell more to now existing clients.. You will gain more revenue, and easier revenue from an existing relationship than you will from trying to establish new relationships. So, renew your past customers, and keep your current customers abreast of what you are doing.

Please watch for the remaining three factors, coming soon in future posts over the next few days.

In the B2B world, the difference between sales and marketing is an idea that you almost learn on instinct. But sometimes knowing that difference does nothing but create tug-o-wars on what defines a lead or what defines a promising sales appointment.

It doesn’t go away even when you’ve outsourced your appointment setting services to another company. They still come back, asking you for any more specifications. Why is that? Could you really be any more specific? Does it really say more about marketers than it says about salespeople?

Give yourself a test with the following questions:

#1. How much do you know about your target market?

Don’t be ashamed to admit that you don’t know much. It only goes to show that outsourcing was a good decision. Perhaps the industries you’re targeting are unfamiliar to you. Maybe you’re just a relatively young business and really don’t know where to start.

Either way, the experience of an outsourced appointment setter can prove valuable. Use your kick off meetings as opportunities to learn. But don’t’ just stop at learning though. Salespeople should be prepared for the same lessons so that they can do well with whatever leads and appointments they generate.

#2. How much responsibility are you willing to entrust?

Now while it pays to listen and learn from your appointment setters, you should always be careful of how much time that consumes. Sometimes the lessons need to wait for other obligations (e.g. financial management, R&D, other sales etc).

How willing are you to leave them in charge? The more willing you are, the more accountability you hold your outsourced appointment setters. That’s not something every vendor will just take up eagerly. That’s why they’d rather collaborate with you closely and educate you, to keep too much of the work going to them. Try to balance it out by outlining the responsibilities clearly.

#3. Would you rather keep it simple?

People think that simpler terms are all the more better in business communication. But while that is true, simplifying things actually requires an understanding of what makes them complex. That’s why it’s important to both learn as much from what appointment setters can teach you and outline their responsibilities clearly at the same time. It helps you identify what you want from an appointment setting campaign and they get accustomed to your target market now that you’ve identified it.

Defining a lead or creating buyer profiles are responsibilities that go back forth between sales and marketers. If you need to make time between the two, that’s what you use it for. Don’t grow weary if your appointment setters ask for something more specific.

The post The 2 Reasons People Don’t Click on Your Buttons … And How to Overcome Them appeared first on Copyblogger.

Related Stories

• The 2 Reasons People Don’t Click on Your Buttons … And How to Overcome Them - Enclosure
• Easy Design Tricks That Will Lift Your Web Sales
• Should Your Site’s Design Be Sexy or Smart?

Ever been to a business networking event and wondered why you bothered.

You had your ear twisted, cards shoved into your hand and the next day emails arrive in your inbox trying to “sell” you? You then thought… “there has to be a better way?”

Recently I bumped into Alex Pirouz, not in a room full of suits and ties but on LinkedIn. I checked him out on Google, then LinkedIn and after that we caught up for a coffee.

Much of the conversation was how he had used LinkedIn to reinvent his business and apply its technology to enable effective and powerful business networking and grow his revenue.

While we chatted over a coffee he revealed how he had used LinkedIn over the past few years to:

• Get featured in over 50 media publications without sending out a single press release
• Grow his business advisory firms by over 328% by securing joint venture partnerships through LinkedIn
• Generate thousands of leads whilst spending $0 on advertising or marketing

I thought that it was worth asking him some more questions so I could share his insights into how to use LinkedIn to build business success.

1. What made you focus on LinkedIn instead of Facebook, Twitter or even Google+?

I came across LinkedIn more out of frustration then anything else. At the time I had just moved back to Sydney after exiting one of my previous businesses (door to door sales company) to start a business advisory firm.

By that point I had failed in 4 businesses and exited 2 so I thought it would be a good receipt when mentoring others. But when I moved back I soon realised that the industry was filled with a ton of coaches, out of which 95% had no business experience.

I knew at that point that the only way I was going to stand out and out compete against my competitors was to build a personal brand both on and offline. After speaking to various PR agencies I decided to do it myself . I also came across an article by the Artike media group which said that over 94.2% of journalists are on LinkedIn. It also revealed that for most journalists, LinkedIn is their preferred social network.

The light bulb went off.

What started off as connecting with journalist here and there eventuated to a network of around about 250 contacts. This resulted in getting featured in 50 media publications over the course of just 6 months.

2. How important is the creation of that optimum LinkedIn profile?

In my opinion how we do business has changed significantly. Nowadays people are buying into people first, your company and than your product. You could have the best product but if they don’t like you they will not enter into that new business relationship, buy your product or try your service. It’s as simple as that.

Because of the sheer size of LinkedIn most often when you Google someone’s name their LinkedIn profile will come up first within the search result before their company website or even blog.

The problem is that most people’s LinkedIn profiles look and read like a resume. I call this approach the inside outside approach instead of the outside inside approach.

Rather then thinking internally on what you should put in your summary, job experience, heading etc you should instead think about the top challenges and objections your clients are facing and build a personal brand around that so that when your clients read your profile they see that you understand them and have a solution to offer.

In this fast paced world your first impression could be your best or last.

3. LinkedIn has recently opened up its platform for its members to publish. How important is this and why should members participate?

The LinkedIn publishing platform is a great way to build a following on LinkedIn and get your message in front of key decision makers and or potential clients.

When you publish an article on LinkedIn those who read your article can then follow you for future posts even if you are not connected. If your content is good it will get liked, commented and even shared which in a relatively short period of time could go viral and therefore get your message in front of thousands if not millions of people. The more people who follow you; the greater your reach.

If your article is good, LinkedIn will publish it in one of the categories within Pulse or even better on the homepage which is exactly what happened to me.

My very first post reached over 65,000 views, over 10,000 shares and I gained 1,500 new followers. Out of that exposure I secured 3 new clients and another media appearance. Because of its viral nature, you just never know who could read your next article.

4. You mentioned that over 90% of journalists are on LinkedIn. How do you use LinkedIn to gain mass media attention including interviews?

Well the first thing you need to do is make a list of the top 5 publications you want to get featured in. These would need to be publications that your audience are currently visiting/reading etc

You then visit each publication and look for journalist and editors who are covering stories on your chosen topic or industry. You simply connect with them, discover what their key challenges are so you can add value and than once you have built a relationship with them, naturally throughout that process they will find ways on helping you gain exposure. What networking is all about, you scratch my back I scratch yours.

5. Business networking can lead to more opportunities and sales. How do you recommend people use LinkedIn for networking?

I mentioned earlier that I originally joined LinkedIn because I was looking to build my personal brand and get some exposure throughout the media.

After getting featured in so many publications I became very excited about the potential of LinkedIn. At the time I was spending a fair bit of money on traditional forms of advertising, so I wanted a more cost effective way to generate and convert leads.

Having had success already on LinkedIn I decided to use it again to find joint venture partnerships. Over the next 6 months I connected with over 500 accounting firms out of which I created 16 partnerships and grew my business by over 328%. So finding, connecting and developing joint venture partnership is my first recommendation.

My second recommendation would be to attract one on one clients especially if their clients are B2B. Over the past 3 years I have gone from 50 contacts to over 7,500 and successfully used that to and hundreds of clients, hold multiple events with some reaching over 300 people in attendance as well as generating thousands of leads for my business.

With over 300 millions members and 49% of them being key decision makers, LinkedIn has become one of the most powerful business tools of the 21^st century.

6. Building online credibility is vital in a digital age where the social web can define you. How do you use LinkedIn to build online authority, credibility and trust?

Going back to my earlier point, in most cases the first thing people see when they search for your name through search engines is your LinkedIn profile. Knowing this and the importance of building your profile based on the outside, inside approach, I would recommend doing the following:

1. Cut down your skills and endorsements to 3-5. This shows you are an expert not a generalist
2. Look at how many recommendations your competitors have and then aim to double it. Recommendations on LinkedIn are perceived to be twice as more powerful than those listed within your own website.
3. Make sure your headline tells potential prospects exactly what you do (try not to make it too salesy)
4. Ensure your summary is written in a story format, targeted at showcasing how your service/product is solving the challenges your target marketing are facing. Also important is having it written in third person. This section is by far the most important within your profile given it’s one of the very first things people look at.
5. List publications, interviews, key achievements, endorsements and provide any links where possible.

7. What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when using LinkedIn?

Whilst there are many mistakes people make, the one that I see the most is not having a plan or purpose for being on LinkedIn. Most people are generally on LinkedIn because a friend or associate told them they should join or maybe they read an article about it and thought it would be worthwhile to join.

And usually that’s where it stops, they put up their profile and visit the network a few minutes here and there without any concrete plan on how they plan to use it as a marketing tool.

My advice to anyone in this position is to look at your marketing objectives over the course of the next 6-12 months. Then think of the people you need to connect with to achieve those results and use LinkedIn to connect with those individuals.

For example, if I own a business advisory firm, my marketing objectives could be to secure a total of 10 new clients over the course of the next 6 months. Then I now know that in order to achieve those goals I would need to do the following, connect with lawyers, accountants as potential JV partners. Also important is to connect with journalists who write on the subject matter.

8. What is one tactic that you have implemented with LinkedIn that surprised you?

I would have to say connecting with journalist and editors. For years now it has been extremely hard getting in contact with those in the media simply because of the red tape you would have to go through. When I first started connecting with journalist through LinkedIn I found the process of finding, connecting and building relationships with them so easy and effortless.

9. How do you identify and then connect with your ideal customer on LinkedIn?

First of all you need to get very clear and specific in terms of whom your target market is. Some of the things you need to look at is: industry, profession, location, organisational role, gender, company size and other demographic data.

Once you are clear on the above metrics, you can than search for them in one of two ways through LinkedIn:

1. Quick Search: Do this if you are looking for one person or wanted to get more of a generic result on your target market. For instance if you are looking for accountants in Sydney, that’s what you would type using the quick search box which can be found at the top of your profile located in the middle
2. Advanced Search: To the right of the quick search box there is the “Advanced Search” function. In my opinion this is the best method to use because of its ability to really drill down and get specific about your target market. Using this function, you can search based on all of the metrics listed above which will ensure you have a more targeted list of contacts to connect with. Once you are happy with your criteria click search and start going through the various profiles within the search result.

Now, in my opinion quality is better than quantity. Even though I now have over 7,400 contacts quite easily I could have 15,000 to 20,000 if I wasn’t as selective with who I connected with.

There is no point having connections for the same of increasing your network if those connections are not going to help you achieve your marketing objectives.

In saying that, there are 3 things that identify whether a contact is going to be a good connection or not:

1. Good profile photo
2. Over 150 connections
3. Filled out at least 50% or more of their profile

If they don’t fit these three guidelines, chances are they are not as active on LinkedIn or take it seriously. So generally what will happen is that they will connect with you but hardly respond to your emails which defeats the whole purpose of connecting with someone.

10. What are your top 3 tips for making the most of LinkedIn?

1. Value Bank

Connecting and effectively communicating with people through LinkedIn is no different than dealing with people outside of the network. Whether they are a supplier, potential partner or customer you need to build enough value for them to trust you in order for them to grow an interest in your company and therefore your product/service. I call this: “Value Bank”

2. Connecting with a purpose

Building your connections for the sake of having a large following is not really a sound strategy if you want to effectively grow your business using LinkedIn. Every connection needs to be linked to your goals and objectives in business both now and in the future.

3. Segment your connections

Most people don’t realize that LinkedIn is in effect a very powerful CRM system that allows you to segment your contacts by tagging them into specific folders. This is extremely important because the key to LinkedIn success is ensuring that your communications is targeted and personalised to each individual person you are connected with.

Unfortunately if you don’t have your contacts segmented you simply can’t do this without going through your entire network one by one which is very time consuming.

What about you?

How are you using LinkedIn? Are you being effective? What surprised you about Alex’s insights?

Could you do better?

Look forward to your feedback and questions in the comments below.

OTTAWA – Canada Post had a $27-million loss before taxes in the first quarter of this year amid an overall drop in revenue as it handled lower volumes of bills and statements delivered by mail.

The Canada Post segment of the Crown corporation’s revenue from operations was $1.468 billion, down from $1.513 billion in the comparable period of 2013.

The volume of transaction mail — mainly bills and other statements — dropped by 6.9 per cent compared with a year earlier but that was partially offset by an increase in domestic parcel volumes, which were 4.9 per cent higher.

In the first quarter of 2013, Canada Post had a profit — mainly due to an unusual gain from the sale of a Vancouver plant.

Canada Post’s profit before tax for the three months ended March 30, 2013, was $68 million.

The postal service is the core of the Canada Post Group of companies, which also includes the Purolator courier service and other business segments.

The group’s total loss before tax in the first quarter of 2014 was $37 million, including an $11-million loss at Purolator and a $2-million profit at the logistics segment. Revenue for the whole group was $1.868 billion including $386 million from Purolator, the second-largest segment after Canada Post.

The group’s total profit before tax in the first quarter of 2013 was $51 million, including a $12-million loss at Purolator and a $1 million profit from logistics. Revenue for the whole group was $1.904 billion including $379 million from Purolator.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version tied the sale of its Vancouver plant to the first quarter 2014 results, but the sale was made in the first quarter of 2013.

The post Canada Post reports first-quarter loss, volume of bills and statements falls appeared first on Canadian Business.