Rnordman

As generations-old business models are upended by innovations in retail, financial services, bookselling, and a host of other industries, companies must continually adjust their strategic positioning to edge out rivals. But senior executives often find it difficult to conceptualize all the tweaking and retweaking that must be done — let alone explain it to their employees. As a result, people throughout the ranks are often confused about what their company is trying to accomplish in the marketplace.

To help my clients fix this problem, I’ve devised a tool that draws on a simple metaphor: the volume control on a computer. Designing and revising strategy requires regular repositioning on key components of competitiveness – that is, moving those sliders up or down to control the “volume” in each area.

McDonald’s provides an excellent illustration. Some years ago, after decades of nonstop growth, the fast-food chain made a loss. But then it recovered by innovating — fast. The company repositioned itself on four strategic factors: product range, image, store presentation, and price. To identify those four, it reviewed societal changes and trends in health, looked at what competitors were up to, and got back in touch with target customers’ tastes and preferences.

The chain turned up the “volume” on its product range, expanding its menu beyond traditional offerings to include more-nutritious foods, such as Salads Plus and grilled chicken, along with some higher-end treats, such as McCafe lattes, smoothies, and cakes. On image, McDonald’s moved from its unhealthy pigeonhole to a more wholesome position through advertising, in-store nutritional information and product labeling. On store presentation, it went from dated to modern by changing the layout and colors and by adding wireless Internet connections and plasma TVs. Price was the one strategic factor that didn’t require much of an adjustment — McDonald’s decided to keep that low.

As a result of the repositioning, customers had additional — and more nutritious — products to choose from, they liked the stores and the changes in image, and they spent more. Getting the levels right on all four factors produced a competitive advantage.

To stay ahead, however, the company had to keep refining its strategy and adapting its business model. It next turned to suppliers. To build a supply chain based on partnership and collaboration that made it possible to serve consistently safe and high-quality food, McDonald’s had to move the sliders on factors such as long-term contracts, clear specifications, and on-time payment. The result: improved quality of suppliers’ products and services, keener pricing, and timely fulfilment. Those adjustments and improvements were congruent with those already established for customers. The company then made changes that improved working conditions, organizational culture, and professional development for its staff — all of which created the right conditions for employees to get what they needed from suppliers and deliver what customers wanted.

As you’re adjusting your own company’s sliders, consider these principles:

Look outside and inside: A.G. Lafley, the CEO of Proctor & Gamble, re-energized innovation within his company some years ago by taking an outside-in perspective on what the company did. He recognized that key decision makers were spending far too much time at their desks and an insufficient amount of it out in the field. (Executives at most companies are guilty of this.) So P&G created its “connect and develop” model, linking to a vast network of outside innovators around the globe that complemented the company’s own capabilities. This meant that executives remained in touch with emerging consumer trends. The company’s sliders then moved accordingly, on a just-in-time basis.

Continually rethink your business model: A business model is not simply a flowchart of your organization’s activities. It involves tending to stakeholders in a way that benefits the company. Finding the right balance right isn’t easy, partly because it’s a moving target, but again the volume-control metaphor will help: As McDonald’s did, think of the relationships your organization has with each key stakeholder group — not just customers but suppliers, employees, and so on. Consider which sliders you should move for each one, and how you can get them all working in concert to obtain competitive advantage.

Nothing is more critical to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business than pricing strategy. Pricing is the moment of truth for a new product … and doubly so when it is a company’s first product. But far more often than not, I’ve observed new startups leaving “money on the table” when it comes to pricing enterprise products. I’ve seen founders say their product saves hundreds of thousands of dollars — yet their product is priced as if it’s only saving thousands of dollars.

One reason for this is assuming the need to price and program similarly to competitive products. With a potentially disruptive product, however, falling into the trap of pricing like a legacy competitor not only leaves money on the table — but it could fail to surface your differentiation. Said another way, your product is your price and how you price your product reflects value from the buyer perspective as well as what your company believes is valuable. SaaS products also have the advantage that they are priced not just for the service they offer, but for the potential of saving massive capex/opex spent directly by the customer.

From your business perspective, SaaS products have a level of stickiness that would be the envy of the packaged-and on-premise software generation.

Since the uncertainty and social science aspects of pricing can be uncomfortable, especially for technical founders, here is a framework — from the perspective of a product manager — to consider when pricing new SaaS products. The product manager role is critical in SaaS because the ability to fine-tune the monetization of the product is closely tied to its features and implementation. The product needs to be designed with such flexibility in mind when it comes to making features available, prioritizing features, or even just choosing where to spend engineering time.

Just remember that “business isn’t physics”, as Bill Gurley notes in his excellent post on some of the metrics here. Andreessen Horowitz also has a detailed primer on understanding SaaS valuations as great background for pricing discussions. Because pricing is math, there’s a tendency to create the spreadsheet model and assume it will all work. But there’s also a ton of psychology that comes into play: beyond math, pricing involves judgment, vision, and flexibility.

How do you solve an unsolvable problem? Bound it.

In a new business, it’s easy to spend money, but the combination of a new product and the unknown cost of acquiring customers leads to an “unsolvable” problem. One approach is to take lean/iterative methods and apply them to finding the right pricing fit. This post is about a framework to arrive at such early prices, which will change. (This is very different from what happens in an existing company with existing customers, where you really only get one shot at pricing something right).

The business side of SaaS involves a complex array of variables such as customer lifetime value (LTV), customer/subscriber acquisition cost (CAC), average revenue per user (ARPU), cost of goods sold (COGS), and churn; as well as pricing models such as freemium, tiered, and time based. Then, depending on whether you’re targeting consumers or enterprises, there are very different sales models that influence your pricing approach (for example, business products invite complexity, especially when dealing with purchasing managers). Similarly, the product side of SaaS is a complex set of equations related to usage patterns, scenarios, and variable costs of a large number of resources.

The most critical costs are related to customer acquisition and sales/marketing expense — which can appear to erase any potential for profit by traditional accounting measures — so the key to early-stage SaaS businesses is to focus on understanding customer acquisition costs relative to the estimated long term value of a customer. Since we don’t know how much it will cost to acquire a customer yet, we will just have to move forward assuming some budget (along with some allocation for margin in the ultimate price relative to this long term value). This post focuses on the pricing models relative to product and features and assumes a higher level view of customer acquisition costs and long term value.

One way to approach this is to establish upper and lower bounds on pricing:

A lower bound for your pricing

The lower bound represents your costs to serve a customer your product. One common example is the basic costs of spinning up the IaaS/PaaS elements of what you do — creating accounts, allocating minimal resources, other infrastructure, and then subsequent usage.

It might be convenient to think of this lower bound as what you could offer for “free” to some customers. You might make some assumptions about the use of variable resources such as compute, egress, storage, etc. in order to arrive at this lower bound. (Note, since this is a product-centric view these bounds are absent the allocation for fixed and variable costs outside the product/technology, so do not not include opex, S&M, etc.)

It is important to understand this bound across the full breadth of your product. While you might initially view some features as “premium”, you also want to assume that over time capabilities will migrate from advanced to essential and you will fill in new features at the top. I think it is a good exercise to consider the full product as a base case initially.

An upper bound for your pricing

The upper bound represents your costs to serve a “depth” user: in this case, the customer using the parts of your product that drive ongoing costs to scale (for example, this customer is using increasingly more bandwidth, storage, or compute). Now this is where you can look at what you offer relative to your competition, and want to understand if you have scale attributes that are better/worse/same. By knowing this you can begin to separate out variables for your model.

Presumably in developing your product, you created a unique architectural approach relative to existing competitors. Do you scale better for more tenants, use storage more effectively, or maybe your mobile app is more efficient at bandwidth? The importance of knowing your own strengths and weaknesses will inform what variables to use in your pricing.

You can also think of your upper bound as a competitive foil — the stronger you are on some attribute, the more you should use this attribute to differentiate your offering. This might allow you to charge more for capabilities that are just too expensive for your competition.

These are the core attributes for pricing

When you’re pricing a new offering, it is worth understanding where your product is today relative to a core set of potential pricing attributes.

Whether it is Bronze/Silver/Gold, Free/Select/Premium, Trial/Select/Premium, or Individual/Business/Enterprise, the norm for SaaS is to offer a “3xN” matrix of 3 pricing plans and N attributes — as inthese examples. The more mature a SaaS product, the more rows and columns its matrix has. (One SaaS product I researched had five top-level features organized into an array of 27 price points based on combinations of the three to five of the features and number of users.)

A broad range of SaaS products can be considered across the following core service attributes:

Features

If your product lends itself to dividing the features themselves — such as import/export, visualization, view/edit, or connectivity to other products — into good-better-best then differentiating price points here might work. In a freemium model, dividing must-have features among free v. paid users can be a customer-hostile way to differentiate or optimize pricing, so beware.

The reason to hesitate on this dimension is because customers understand that you’re basically just inhibiting access to code that is already there and hence being draconian. Another reason to be cautious with this model is that as usage of the product deepens over time, paid features will tend to get pulled into lower-priced tiers — which means you need to fill in new features/prices with every release or update. As easy as it is to communicate general-use features in pricing tiers, there’s a level of distaste with this approach for many customers.

Administration/IT

One of the most common approaches to differentiating a SaaS product designed for business is to separate out the IT-focused features as a pricing attribute. These could be features for security, audit, identity integration, domain names, sharing, control, management, etc. Businesses understand what it is like to both value and pay for these features.

Commonly this approach is used to rectify a product that has become viral within an enterprise, so be careful about how you approach an enterprise with pricing here. Otherwise you might come across as an arsonist-firefighter who is offering to contain the very situation you knowingly created.

Scale in consumption

Another broadly used SaaS pricing attribute is storage consumption (even for products for which storage is not a primary attribute): It’s easy to measure, easy to articulate, and is relatively expensive. The benefit of using storage is that people “get it” to some degree. It also gets cheaper faster than people can consume it (and in most scenarios customers need to be doing something fairly extreme to consume vast amounts of storage). At the same time, the platform companies have been steadily increasing free storage or ultra-low priced storage as a base, no-frills service so simply using storage as a one-dimensional offering might not work. With a new SaaS product, be sure to consider ways to avoid basing costs on storage given challenges.

One novel approach seen recently is using third-party storage and letting the customer establish a paying relationship such that storage is not part of the pricing of your product, since that way you do not serve as a pure pass-through for a visibly priced third-party element of your product. There are many novel attributes in modern software that can be used as consumption variables; one relatively new one is to use depth consumption of APIs/calls as a price tiering structure. (Box, where I’m an advisor, recently announced pricing for Box APIs as an example.) Developer-oriented products work especially well for consumption pricing because developers understand the product architecture and what can drive costs, even if those costs are variable with usage.

Scale in consumers

SaaS products used by small teams, cross-organizations, or that just scale with more members collaborating/sharing/using are almost always priced by number of unique users (and subsequent integration with organization-based directories). Pricing this variable is straightforward and over time you will see distribution of engagement and resource usage that will further let you refine the discrete price points.

Because most products priced this way also want to encourage more users/usage, carefully consider where you put the first step or two. But large-scale customers like this approach because it allows for predictable pricing on a metric they understand: number of employees/users. In general, you can think of this as per-seat pricing but can also apply to device end-points, servers/CPUs, VMs, etc.

Segmenting your customers

Every product is used by different customer segments — whether measured by size of organization, industry segment, geography, or type of individual within an organization. Common pricing tier labels here include “government”, “non-profit”, “academic”, “healthcare”, “small business”, and so on.

As a product matures, you will almost certainly either label or expand your pricing tiers to account for this. Before you jump into this level of differentiation, however, you want to gain more data on usage — are you seeing customers across some set of segments, and are they using the product differently? More importantly, do you see a path to develop differentiation that allows you to target and sustain these segments (or are you just optimizing revenue along these lines)? Some products are designed only for specific segments like education, which allows you to further refine within them: e.g., public, private, post-secondary, etc.

But one customer segment that is almost always special is the engaged technical user. These folks can push a product through an organization when required, or develop custom solutions on your platform that either deliver or enhance the value of your work.

Developers are key in this regard. For any platform-oriented product, it is worth considering how you offer developers the ability to experiment with and use the full product in a development environment at a very low price. One way to accomplish this is to separate out usage-as-development versus usage-as-production, and price accordingly.

* * *

As a new offering with any established competitors, pricing will be the easiest point of attack. And if you are a disruptive product, you want to have the deepest possible understanding of the value you are bringing to the table so you can maximize the initial pricing model. So the most important suggestion for pricing I have here is to wait until the last possible moment to price and announce.

Even for enterprise products, things like round-numbers, 9′s, and discounts all matter. Do keep in mind that discounting will be substantial in enterprise products with direct sales and 50% or more off “list” price is not uncommon (and often required). That’s not an excuse to bloat the price, but it is important for purchasing managers and for empowering your salesforce that you enable a level of customization — and know what variables you are using to do so.

Some say that you can never change or raise your prices once you’re out of the gate. Always keep in mind that once you have customers, price changes or product composition relative to price are never viewed as positive changes, even if you think for some customers you are lowering the price. And when you do change your prices, always offer existing customers time to adapt and grandfather them in (at least). Finally, remember to engineer a product framework that can support pricing flexibility.

Create the model, use the model, but don’t let the model do your thinking. Price carefully!

–Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch.

Sales is a high-pressure field, and maintaining motivation, energy, and drive is incredibly important for success. It is normal to feel discouraged when a deal doesn’t work out, but the ability to stay upbeat and productive when the going gets tough is what sets apart truly great salespeople. Sales team leaders and managers have a responsibility to help their teams stay motivated even during difficult pushes and slow seasons.

Psychologists who study motivation speak in terms of two general categories of motivation that influence everyone: intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation. Career analyst Dan Pink does a great job explaining how these affect business in his TED Talk, “The Puzzle of Motivation.” Understanding these motivation types can be a great tool for sales leaders.

1. Intrinsic Motivation is driven by a desire to learn, grow, and master skills, and by the belief that by pursuing an activity, it is possible to reach personal goals.

2. Extrinsic Motivation comes into play when money, social acceptance, or negative consequences like punishment are the main drivers behind a given activity.

Everything from a pat on the back to a structured financial reward system can be used to increase both the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors for a sales team. The best sales leaders should always be learning more about what motivates every individual on their team, but there are a few basics that tend to be consistent across sales teams in every industry.

Invest In Your Sales Team By Providing Coaching

It is so easy now to quantify everything and get obsessed with optimizing sales processes through automation and calibration. What is hard is remembering that these processes still require smart, dedicated people, and those people won’t excel if they aren’t happy in their jobs.

Paying attention to the individual needs, the career aspirations, and the unique motivations of each member of a sales team is one of the best ways to keep a whole team motivated.

Sales experts Trish Bertuzzi and Steve Richard of The Bridge Group wrote an excellent ebook on the topic, entitled “How to Lead, Motivate & Retain Sales Reps.”

The book outlines in detail some of the most important ways of motivating salespeople, and one of their primary recommendations is to provide regular coaching for every member of the sales team. Providing coaching shows that the company is willing to invest time and effort in each salesperson’s career development, which can help them earn more money now and in the future. Sales coaching taps into both the intrinsic motivator of career advancement, and the extrinsic motivator of added earnings, making it a heavy hitter for motivating top sellers.

The Bridge Group’s blog offers more excellent advice for sales leaders in another post entitled “Making Room for Sales Coaching.”

Customize Your Monetary Incentives for Your Team

While coaching appeals mostly to the intrinsic motivators that push sales reps to excel, a well designed monetary incentive program is one of the most tried-and-true ways to offer extrinsic motivation to a sales team. Sales commissions are the classic way to encourage salespeople to close more bigger deals, but commission is just the first step towards a great incentive program. Offering tiered incentives, in which the percentage of commission or size of bonus steps up after hitting certain benchmarks, can encourage average sellers to really push themselves to reach the next level with their sales performance.

As outlined in an excellent post by Suzanne Paling from Entrepreneur.com, tiered compensation plans offer superstar sellers a reward for consistently blowing past quotas, while also giving lower performers an attainable reward for pushing themselves a little further.

Although there’s a growing body of research, concisely summarized in the Harvard Business Review, that says that money isn’t the primary motivator for most people at work. Offering monetary incentives should never be the only way you try to get your team motivated, but at the end of the day, the possibility of financial gain can absolutely encourage people to work harder.

For more excellent tips on how to motivate every segment of your sales team, check out Inc’s great post, “Motivate The Middle: Getting a High Yield from Sales Reps.”

Sales Contests

A great way to offer additional compensation on top of regular commissions and bonuses is to hold a sales contest involving all team members. Running a sales contest can foster friendly competition between members of a sales team while also boosting sales. These can take many forms, but a few factors can really help them work well as a motivation tool.

1. Clear, attainable goals and parameters, so everyone knows the rules, and what they need to do to win. This means picking a timeframe and sticking with it.
2. A real time leaderboard encourages competition and lets people know where they stand.
3. Prizes for different levels of success prevents one clear leader from demotivating others from continuing to participate.

An excellent blog post from Les Lent on the Sales Gravy blog outlines a few other features that make sales contests a great way to pull a sales team out of a slump.

Give Plenty of Recognition & Praise for Success

Finally, one of the easiest and most often overlooked ways to keep a sales team motivated is by recognizing success, and praising progress. Public recognition for success on a sales team can be spontaneous, but it is also possible to build a system for regularly recognizing reps who meet or exceed certain goals.

Sincere, personal praise from a manager or authority figure can be an incredibly motivator for sales reps. Any sales leader who takes time to recognize and acknowledge the successes of anyone on their sales team will find that it positively affects the bottom line.

This blog post from Selling Power outlines how recognition and praise can be among the most motivating factors for sales teams.

Wrapping Up

In the end, it takes a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors, including financial rewards, recognition, and investment in career growth to keep any salesperson motivated and excited to keep selling.

The best sales leaders know how to balance these motivating factors to keep an entire team cohesively motivated. With these tools, a great sales leader can whip even the most sluggish team into shape.

Hostile. That’s what describes the environment your sales team faces today.

Buyers take advantage of their dramatically increased leverage to demand more concessions and lower prices. And most sales methodologies and typical approaches to preparing for sales conversations may actually be counterproductive to your cause.

Watch this video to learn three tactics to empower your salespeople to change the conversation away from price and back to value where it belongs.

 

A mobile and email festival this week in the US, with stats on devices, retargeting, content consumption and even some TV thrown in.

There's also some titbits on webrooming and ecommerce, including a beautiful infographic.

For more digital marketing stats, check out the Econsultancy Internet Statistics Compendium.

Without further ado, let's get into the stats.

Email on mobile

Movable Ink’s Q1 report looks at email across devices. 

Opens by device

• Smartphones and tablets combined to account for 66% of all email opens.
• 18.5% of email was opened on a tablet in Q1, stealing some time from desktop but also from mobile.
• 47.2% of opens were on mobile in Q1, versus 48.2% in Q4 2013. 

Flavour of device (Apple VS Android)

• iPhones and iPads accounted for 54.5% of all opens in Q1, compared to 49.9% in Q4 2013.
• Android took 10.8% of opens, down from 14.4% in Q4 2013.

What about time viewing email?

Android users viewed email for longer than Apple users.

Email by state

13 “desktop states” remain.

This number is down from 15 in Q4 2013 and 24 in Q2 2013. 

In Q1 2014 the state of Mississippi overtook Texas as the nation’s top smartphone state.

“Heavy” means that more than 50% of recipients in the state open email on a smartphone or desktop. “Leaning” means that fewer than 50% but still leading device (tablet represents a third category).

Retargeting, social and mobile

A survey from Chango questioned 400 media buyers, agency executives and brand executives in the US and Canada on their use of retargeted advertising and how social and mobile fits into their marketing strategies. 

• 41% of both brands and agencies indicated that social media ad exchanges are “key” to retargeting on mobile devices.
• 38% of buyers are using Twitter’s Tailored Audiences.
• 67% are using Facebook’s FBX. 

Social media ad exchanges can serve as a workaround to the problem of cookies and mobile as social reaches users wherever they are and on every device.

Chango’s survey found that retargeting as a general tactic continues to be very popular among brands and agencies. 

• 56% of brands and agencies rely on retargeting to acquire new customers
• 42% use it to build brand awareness and increase direct revenue.
• 11% of brands and 7% of agencies use retargeting to acquire their competitors’ customers. 

Other findings include: 

• 73% of brands put 0-20% of their online budget to mobile while 26% moved 21-50% of their budget to mobile.
• 63% of respondents take retargeting budgets from display advertising budgets.
• 10% of agencies and 9% of brands give retargeting its own budget.
• 33% of brands and 36% of agencies give paid social its own budget. 

Online to in-store

Merchant Warehouse looked at data revealing ‘webrooming’ (browsing online and then shopping in store).

Although 50% of consumers have showroomed (browsing in-store then purchasing online), nearly 66% had ‘webroomed’.

Motiviation for ‘webrooming’: 

• 47% of consumers wanted to avoid shipping costs.
• 23% didn't want to wait for delivery.
• 42% wanted to check product availability. 

In-store pick-up and product levels meet these concerns when available on a retail website. 

• 37% preferred to shop in store after looking online because they found it easier to return a product.
• 46% of webroomers said they like to see an item before making a purchase.
• 36% said it was important to them to be able to pay online prices in-store. 

Offering in-store returns is more and more an expectation of consumers.

(click to see full infographic)

Retail and mobile

Nearly 60% of respondents in a 2013 Acquity Group study state that browsing product images on a smartphone played a role in their decision to make a purchase in store.

TV ads

Astonishingly, US TV viewers were exposed to an average of more than one hour of TV ads each day in 2013. 

That’s according to the "Advertising and Audiences" report from Nielsen.

Ads accounted for 14minutes 15 seconds of each hour's worth of network TV programming in 2013, up 50 seconds since 2009.

Americans are estimated to watch an average of five hours of TV each day, with ads taking up a quarter of this time.

Other trends:

• 15 second ads accounted for 44% of all commercials aired in 2013, up from 35% since 2000. 
• 30 second spots decreased from 62% to 53% over the same period.

This trend is partly attributed to changes in video wrought by increased media consumption online.

Win-back emails

The content of win-back emails was observed in a study by ReturnPath which looked at a representative sample of 300 million email messages sent to 100 million consumers by brands from the most recent Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

Content played a big role in their effectiveness. Those containing “miss you” and “come back” performed better than simple promotional offers. Among discounting offers, fixed amounts were significantly more widely read than percentages, but used less frequently.

Mailers that deployed win-back campaigns stopped sending messages to 4% of recipients, but most of these removed subscribers (85%) were not inactive – at minimum, they read the win-back message and didn’t unsubscribe.

At least some of these removed subscribers represent marketing relationships that didn’t need to be abandoned.

• 12% of all win-back messages were read, typically within a few days of delivery.
• However, as many as 45% of recipients later reengaged with the sender’s email program, taking an average of 57 days to read additional messages.

The findings show that mailbox providers’ definitions of inactivity are different enough to necessitate customized win-back campaign formulas.

Content consumption by device by sector 

Certain categories of online content are increasingly being consumed on mobile devices, but not in all sectors.

A comScore/Millennial Media survey showed 80% of time spent online by US adults on B2B content, for example, was through a PC, with smartphones at 12% and tablets just 8%.

Overall, PCs are in decline when it comes to content consumption across all categories. PCs took a 44% share of online time, equal with smartphones, and ahead of tablets with 12%.

Eight of the 14 categories had greater use on PCs than any other device, as follows: 

• Automotive - 76% PC compared to 19% on smartphones and 5% on tablets.
• Travel- 68% PC, 21% smartphone, 11% tablet.
• TV - 67% PC, 22% smartphone, 11% tablet.
• Business and finance – 62% PC, 36% smartphone, 2% tablet.
• Food – 58% PC, 27% smartphone, 15% tablet.
• Sports – 56% PC, 38% smartphone, 6% tablet.
• News – 55% PC, 39% smartphone, 6% tablet. 

Health was split evenly -  50% PC, 50%, smartphone, 5% tablet.

Mobile devices took a greater share of content consumption than PC in the remaining categories.

• Streaming radio - 79% smartphone, 16% on tablet, 5% PC.
• Games – 79% smartphone, 6% tablet, 15% PC.
• Social media – 61% smartphone, 28% PC, 11% tablet.
• Weather - 61% smartphone, 31% PC, 8% tablet. 

From Facebook to World of Warcraft, the word ‘profile’ has become synonymous with customizing. Could the same come true for buyer profiles?

Think about it.

During the appointment setting process, don’t prospects already choose their schedules and specify the topic of the sales meeting? This and more already indicate that they could very well be making their own profiles.

While it’s true that they may not indicate everything (or even prove contrary) to a prospect’s whole identify, paying attention to them should be as early as possible. Don’t just brush off things like time or method of communication as just minor details. See if they can indicate things like:

• Management style – Will your salespeople deal with a Type A personality or a complete introvert. From the details of the appointment all the way to the tone of voice, you can learn about how a prospect would like to control a conversation. And as a lead generator, it can also help you match up a particular sales rep so that the wrong ones won’t keep butting heads.

• Openness – Does a prospect prefer talking over the phone or would they rather see you all in a web conference meeting? Your appointment setting process should be as accommodating as possible, allowing various forms of communication to facilitate a sale. However, even the simple act of not showing one’s face can indicate how open (or anonymous) they’d like to be.

• Goals – What do they hope to achieve from your company? Their goals could be another indication how they’d like to run their business in general. Do they focus more on sales? Business culture? Are they looking for career advancement or are simply doing this so they can keep their job?

• Position – Of course, you can’t forget the role of knowing your prospect’s job title. It does more than just indicate their authority to make the buying decision. It could also add more to the picture that other details have painted out. It could include style of thinking, their other obligations, and even possible reasons for why their schedule seems so packed.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, geeks can think of this like getting a new player to join your guild. Do you just let your friend make whatever character they want or do you actually take the time to watch them customize and see what kind of role he/she might play in the game? That’s what it means to let buyers create their own profile. Whether they know it or not, it’s another way of expressing their needs and preferences.

Since it opened up to foreign investment in the late 1970s, China has become increasingly important to the global economy. As a result, brands are constantly looking to expand into the country in order to increase revenues and profits.

However, China is not an easy market to crack and many global brands have tried and failed. Below are some tips to increase the likelihood of success in your Chinese expansion efforts in 2014 and beyond.

Do your research

This applies to any strategy that your business decides to implement but it’s even more important when attempting to enter a market as diverse and complicated as China. Research of your target market and audience, competitor analysis and a thorough review of your organisation’s internal capabilities would need to be conducted to determine if entering the Chinese market is viable. This might seem obvious but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t get this right.

For instance, Home Depot attempted to enter the Chinese market in 2006 and was embarrassingly forced to retreat in 2011. The American retailer of home improvement and construction products blamed the fact that they misread the country’s appetite for DIY. “The market trend says this is more of a do-it-for-me culture,” a Home Depot spokeswoman said of China. Market research could have saved the company a lot of time and money.

Alter your business strategy to suit local conditions

The business environment in which you operate should directly influence your approach. Trying to shoehorn the strategic approaches in your local markets to suit different regions and audiences can end in disaster as these regions have very different business environments and consumers have different spending habits than their western counterparts.

A good example of this is Best Buy’s attempt to break into China. They tried to replicate their superstore strategy that worked so well for them in the United States to their retail stores in Shanghai. What they failed to realise was that it is extremely difficult to obtain reasonably priced retail spaces in Shanghai because it has one of the largest population densities in the world.

Spotting this mistake, local competitors such as Gome and Suning opened small stores right next to Best Buy offering high demand, high margin products.  As a result, Best Buy made huge losses and was forced to close its branded stores in 2011.

Find a reputable Chinese business partner

The Chinese don’t typically conduct business with people that they don’t know personally. So when your business is attempting to break into China, having a local partner that can conduct business on your behalf is a good way of increasing the likelihood of success.

However, finding a reliable, trustworthy partner can be difficult in China – particularly if your business is new on the scene. It is recommended that businesses work with consultants who understand the Chinese business ecosystem and have experience with other companies that have achieved success in China. Even large multi-national organisations know this and look to partner with local firms to achieve success.

Tesco, the supermarket group, initially struggled to gain a foothold in the Chinese market and recently decided to enter into a joint venture with China Resources Enterprise in an attempt to break into the world’s second-largest economy.

Don’t ignore the importance of local culture

The Chinese are a deeply traditional society and local culture plays a big part in business negotiations.

In China, there is a concept known as ‘Guanxi’, which is a central idea in Chinese culture and has a huge influence on business. Guanxi encourages building social connections and long term relationships through trust and mutual respect. This might seem trivial but many large tech businesses have failed in China as a result of ignoring this significant cultural phenomenon.

For instance, when eBay decided to enter the Chinese market in 2004 by buying a local company called Eachnet, they assumed that their platform was going to be an instant success as it had been in many western markets.

eBay’s store didn’t have any systems to facilitate guanxi, unlike their main competitor Taobao, who implemented live chat functionality in order for buyers and sellers to communicate and build trust and rapport. TaoBao, being Chinese, didn’t underestimate the power of guanxi, and as a result currently holds 96 percent market share in China. eBay, on the other hand, shut down its Chinese website and issued a formal announcement of its withdrawal from the online auction market in China.

Avoid corruption

Showering business prospects with expensive gifts or providing facilitation payments used to be the norm in China – but things are starting to change. The Chinese government has recently stated that it starting to take a zero-tolerance approach to corruption and as a result, our advice would be to steer clear of corruption. Your business reputation could be damaged if you are seen as corrupt but also, the penalties for being caught can be severe. In addition, under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, UK businesses and nationals can now be prosecuted in the UK for acts of bribery or other illegal activity committed overseas.

Recently, Chinese police accused the former British boss of GlaxoSmithKline’s Chinese business of corruption, after it was alleged that the firm made billions of yuan from elaborate schemes to bribe doctors and hospitals. If found guilty, he could receive a long prison sentence.

Plan for the long term

China’s economic growth is slowing and local companies are complaining of a double whammy of rising costs. The supply of cheap labour from rural areas is beginning to dry up and wages are starting to increase substantially. The country is also beginning to experience a credit crunch which has been engineered by the government to reduce lending. This has led to an increase in the cost of borrowing.

So if you intend on doing business in China in the next few years, you should factor in the increasing wages and ensure your profit margins are high enough to allow for higher wage bills in the future. Similarly, if your business has access to capital, there may also be opportunities to take advantage of any gaps in supply that may arise as a result of the increasingly difficulty in Chinese companies obtaining cheap credit.

Starbucks has spent a long time (more than 15 years) in China in an attempt to persuade the Chinese to adopt the American coffee culture. The company planned for the long term and priced their coffee relatively high for the Chinese market in an attempt to build a luxury brand. Many Chinese consumers go to Starbucks with friends, family, or business partners for the lifestyle experience, rather than simply to drink the coffee and the company has over 800 stores in around 60 Chinese cities.

Register your .cn domain name and host your site locally

The dominant search engine in China is Baidu with a market share of over 70%. Baidu prefers to list Chinese domains within their search engine results and obtaining a good ranking with a gTLD (generic top-level domain – such as a .com or .net) is extremely difficult. So to ensure eCommerce success in China, you need to use a Chinese (.cn) ccTLD (country code top-level domain).

Similarly, you should attempt to host your website in China or Hong Kong. Not only will your site take less time to load for your target users, but sites hosted locally are also more likely to appear in local search results.

Don’t ignore mobile

M-commerce is predicted to surpass $50 billion in sales in 2014, nearly double the total for 2013. According to Gartner, Smartphone penetration in China is expected to reach 90% this year. Businesses who want to succeed in China ignore mobile at their own risk.

Don’t just translate, transcreate

Transcreation, sometimes referred to as creative translation, is the process of adapting a body of creative work for use in another language or culture. It is more than a direct translation as transcreators focus on capturing the desired persuasive or emotive effect of the original message and transferring it into the adapted translation.

In China, transcreation is crucial – mainly because Chinese culture is so different from many other cultures, particularly western ones.

Brands that fail to transcreate their marketing messages often run into trouble and waste time and resources. Most large brands are aware of this.

For instance, McDonald’s recognisable strap line “I’m lovin’ it” works perfectly well in many western cultures when translated literally. However, in China, the word “love” is taken very seriously and never used lightly.

As a result, McDonald’s decided to adapt their strap line into a Mandarin phrase and came up with:

我就喜欢

…which literally translates to “I just like (it)”.

The adaptation of the message allowed McDonald’s to convey its brand values while not making its Chinese customers feel uncomfortable.

Protect your intellectual property

Intellectual property rights are territorial. So IP rights which are protected in the UK or US are not typically offered the same protection in China. Intellectual property theft costs global companies huge amounts of revenue annually. An IP Commission report estimated that IP theft is costing the US and unprecedented $300bn a year. Furthermore, the report stated that 50%-80% of the theft is attributed to China.

In order to protect your intellectual property you need to ensure that your business applies for Chinese trade mark protection and maintain a degree of vigilance when doing business in the country. Registered trademarks for Mainland China are issued by the China Trademark Office (CTMO). However, be aware that trademark applications in China are relatively expensive.

There are many examples of US and European companies in legal battles with Chinese businesses over the improper manufacture or sale of trademarked and IP protected products.

For example, Apple is currently involved in a patent lawsuit relating to Siri, the voice-driven personal assistant, with a Shanghai-based company. I expect that there will be many more infringements of intellectual property rights and court cases involving Chinese firms in the future.

True story. Before a meeting, a potential customer downloads, and then watches 11-videos on SAP’s CRM. So by the time the meeting rolls around, the last thing the potential customer wanted was more information, because they’re drowning in it. All they wanted from the salesperson was insight into three key areas.

So how do you sell value and differentiate your product to these empowered buyers?

It’s difficult, because buyers have already done their research online. So by the time they engage a salesperson, they already know what they want, and the price they’re willing to pay. And when your product is complex, selling value is especially difficult, because customers lack the time and expertise to form an accurate buying vision on their own. So if salespeople don’t challenge what customers have learned online with insight, then sales will be forced to follow the customer down the road of commoditization and discounting, because the customer has a limited view of the value of your product.

Insight Selling Fail

But insight selling is more than just using data, facts, and your brilliance to shock and awe buyers about the error of their ways.

Picture this. It’s 8:37 am, and one of your salespeople is on the elevator riding up to the 37th floor to see one of your largest potential customers. The 27-years old salesperson is about to sit at the boardroom table with a c-level executive with 25-years of experience, and deliver insight by teaching the executive the error of their ways. How do you think that conversation is going to go?

I call this the ‘black eye and bloody nose’ approach.

Insight Selling Win

Instead of using a direct approach to deliver insight, we suggest an indirect approach. By wrapping your sales insight up in a customer scenario, your salespeople will be able to challenge your customer’s thinking without challenging the customer. Because an Insight Scenario is about someone else, the customer won’t feel attacked. It simply presents a scenario that allows the customer to draw their own conclusions. Without feeling pressured, the customer can now relax and listen to your message, and possibly gain enough insight that they start to tell themselves a new story, where new choices make more sense.

And Insight Selling through StorySelling presents companies with a huge opportunity for a big win, because according to Ben Horowitz (one of the most influential Venture Capitalist at Andreessen-Horowitz- investors in Airbnb, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter) “Storytelling is the most underrated skill.”

“If you don’t have a great story… it’s hard to get people to invest in the product.” (source: “Your Story Is Your Strategy” Forbes 4-29-14.).

So through a combination of Insight Scenarios, listening, and questions, we show salespeople how to reframe the customer’s buying vision so that they can sell value and differentiate their product.

See what your peers are saying about the book Insight Selling:

“In 18-months, our pipeline tripled. Thanks largely to the improved conversations with clients by applying the principals in this book.”
Gord Smith, Director of Sales – Hitachi Canada.

“Insight Selling provides immediately actionable content to sales people who want to sell “differently” and gain a competitive advantage. … Insight selling has become a must read to all our new sales people and we will be delivering the workshop to 300 people this year. Highly recommended.”
Frederic Page, Sales Enablement – SAP

“Insight Scenarios are critical to selling value in today’s customer-centric economy. This book delivers on how to challenge our customers thinking without challenging the customer – which helps us deliver an exceptional customer experience.”
Jeff Everton, Sales Enablement and Productivity – Epicor Software

“Michael has done an outstanding job of providing not only the rationale but also practical ideas on winning in complex sales scenarios. Insight Selling is a blueprint for excelling in a world where we are increasingly seeing the commoditization of sales. The techniques in this book work – I use them every day to help sellers create interest with their prospects and customers, position unique benefits and unexpected sources of value, and create a sense of urgency to act . I highly recommend this book. ”
Anthony Wallace, Dir. Sales Readiness & Channel Execution APJ – CA Technologies

Google introduced this term to describe the impact of online information, i.e. social media reputation, on the intent of a potential customer to engage with a brand. According to the research that influence, and consumer dependence on it, are growing very fast from year to year. Consumers checked 10.4 sources of information to make a decision in 2011. This is a dramatic increase from the 5.3 sources

This more recent study found that positive consumer reviews increase both intent to purchase, and product value, by about 7%. An online share (customer review, Facebook share or tweet) has a value of between $0.33 for a brand or store recommended by a stranger, and $1.33 for brands recommended by friends or family.

Online content sharing and recommendations now hold more sway over consumers’ buying decisions than brand, or even price.

Given the importance of the Zero Moment of Truth:

1. Why is it so difficult for consumers to find a reasonable number of customer reviews for a specific product? Attention spans are very short and if consumers can’t easily satisfy their thirst for information within seconds, the opportunity to impact their selection is gone.
2. Why is there an information gap? Consumers are looking for factual information, but marketers insist on engaging them with the company’s message (fluff). At the Zero Moment of Truth the fluff repels potential buyers.
3. Why is it so difficult for marketers to understand the ZMOT is a by-product of a customer experience? The recommendations, referrals and other forms of social proof cannot exist without delivery of superior customer experience. The kind of experience that inspire customers to share with others. The term UMOT = Ultimate Moment of Truth holds the key to success:

It’s what happens after the buyer experiences…

• your business (including you and your staff),
• your sales and after-sales processes,
• your product or service,
• your customer service and support,
• your guarantee or warranty claims, etc.

For decades marketers were in control of the customer journey because they could out-shout the voices of consumers with big advertising budgets. The advent of social media changed that by arming customers with a much larger “soap box” to share their stories, and advertising budgets don’t buy as much influence as they used to. Unless you think this is just a fad, it is the time to let consumers “teach”­ you what is important to them. Fortunately, they are willing to do so, and the marketers who have learned to subjugate their ego to the reality of the markets, consistently experience remarkable successes.

Those marketers, who keep treating consumers as “marks”, are not likely to survive the onslaught of Digital Darwinism.

Ever outsourced your appointment setting process and found yourself making complaints? Prospects aren’t showing up. Sales aren’t closing as well as you hoped.

In all honesty, you are entitled to get what you pay for. But if you learned to critique more and complain less, that would be a better way to maximize your ROI.

The term complaint has a negative connotation in both sides of an outsourcing relationship. It both implies that one side is a nag and the other is an unreliable service. How is a critique any different?

• Complaints are more biased – According this article, people who complain are surer of themselves in a sense that they claim no responsibility for a bad outcome. This clearly leads to a biased tendency. On the other hand, a critique can be more objective. It weighs all possible causes for, in your case, why an appointment went wrong. It also evaluates the performance of its salespeople as much as the outsourced appointment setters.

• Critiques offer solutions – When you make so many complaints, a good outsourced appointment setter already knows it’s doing something wrong. However, even the best can only know that much. The finer details of what they’re doing wrong or how they can do it better to your liking requires more input from you. A critique is a lot closer to collaboration than complaining.

• Critiques study costs – Since this is about appointment setting for accountants, it would make more sense to study the costs. Complaints however aren’t necessarily formulated after a thorough research on how much your typical campaign might cost. You’d have a slower time filing them one after the other.

• Complaints tend to be knee-jerk – Finally, it’s fairly obvious that complaints are more knee-jerk than a critique born from long analysis and a bit of patience. You can’t really judge the effectiveness of an appointment setting campaign just from the first bad leads. Seeing it through to the end gives you the complete picture.

The good thing about complaints however is that they act as a wake-up call for both you and your vendor. They call you to help your vendor understand how to serve you better and vice-versa.

Sales forecasting is a critical business function for every company, but sales forecasting templates and tools most definitely aren’t one-size-fits-all. The key to successful sales forecasting is to continually improve the methods you use so that the forecasting model evolves to fit the unique needs of your business.

Using an evolving sales forecasting models doesn’t mean starting from scratch, though. There are some excellent free sales forecasting templates available online for businesses just starting to build their model. A few basic elements need to be in place for a forecasting model to even get off the ground, and even businesses with an established forecasting process should take time to regularly review and improve their processes.

The basic requirements of an effective sales forecasting model are:

• Sales data from the past with numerical data about won and lost sales, broken down by sales rep, product type, and any other axis that can affect your future success.
• A sales pipeline that includes data about each deal at each stage of the pipeline, including estimates of the probability of closing each deal.
• Contextual data and strategic assumptions about the demand for your business’s product, and your ability to meet the market’s demand.
• Processes for continual improvement, including input from sales reps, marketers, and anyone involved in the sales pipeline. Sometimes educated guesses prove to be the most useful data for sales forecasting.

Sales Data Tracking

Tracking sales data from the recent and distant past can help you see which sales tactics are working best, which sales reps sell the most, and which marketing channels are driving the most growth. Many businesses track this information with a relatively simple Excel spreadsheet or dashboard, and there are plenty of free templates that offer a good foundation on which to build your own forecasting model.

XL Dashboards Sales Forecast Charts: XL Dashboards offers video tutorials and example spreadsheets for how to build excellent sales forecast sheets with easy-to-read visualizations comparing any sales metric you want to input.

Tableau Software’s Sales Dashboards: Visualizing sales data is often the best way to tease new and useful insights out of it. Tableau Software offers an incredible range of data analysis and visualization tools for sales data tracking and forecasting.

Insight Squared’s eBook on Data-Driven Sales Forecasting: This ebook from Insight Squared offers strong advice about choosing data to track, creating a clean and easy-to-update tracking system, and deriving actionable insights from the data.

From Misery to Mastery: How to Build A Better Sales Forecast: This ebook from Right90, an enterprise sales forecasting provider, outlines some of the biggest mistakes companies make with their forecasting models, and how to fix them with better data and more stakeholder collaboration.

Starting with a template and a set of instructions might be easier than starting with nothing, but every company is different. If you start with a template, be sure to stay on the lookout for improvements and customizations that can really make your forecasts work for your company.

Using Your Sales Pipeline & Market Research for Better Forecasting

A sales pipeline can make life a lot easier for sales reps by providing a structured system for turning qualified leads into repeat customers, which is great for sales forecasting. Studying each deal’s progress through the stages of the pipeline, and examining each outcome, can provide insights into the sales process that are incredibly useful not only for sales forecasting, but for improving sales overall.

“Your Sales Pipeline Is NOT Your Forecast” – Engage Selling: This blog post from Colleen Francis on the Engage Selling blog offers some powerful advice on how to interpret information from your sales pipeline to dramatically improve the accuracy of your forecasts.

A 6-Step Plan to Manage Your Sales Pipeline: Even though the sales pipeline and the forecast should be distinctly separate systems, the data from each can be used to improve the other. This post from the Baseline blog shows how CRM systems that offer both forecasting and pipeline management tools can be the most useful way for businesses to refine their own forecasting strategies.

Sales Forecasting Methods from Tenato: Understanding which market factors influence your sales the most, and how to incorporate that information into your forecasts, is crucial. This post discusses three methods of sales forecasting that can be mixed and matched for the most accurate results.

Continually Improve Your Forecasting Process

Setting aside regular times to examine your sales forecasting model and find ways to improve it will yield major dividends over time. Following up on errors and inaccuracies will lead not only to a better forecasting model, but better sales processes and more sales.

Inc’s 7 Tips for Improving Your Sales Forecasting: This blog post by Tim Donnelly offers excellent advice on how companies can examine their sales forecast’s effectiveness, and tweak it to improve performance.

SalesClic’s 5 Tips to Improve Sales Forecasting: The folks at SalesClic offer a few easy-to-implement tips that are backed by research for making modifications and improvements to an existing sales forecasting process.

Four Principles for Great Sales Forecasts: Whether you’re building your sales forecasting model from scratch or refining an existing system, these four principles from Forbes writer Scott Edinger are worth keeping in mind.

Intentionally improving your sales forecasting model will start a positive feedback loop in which your forecasting insights improve your actual sales practices, and data from your sales process in turn help you to improve your forecasting.

In the end, only practice and continual, intentional improvement will yield the best possible sales forecasting system for any particular company. The key is to keep finding ways to marginally improve the system in ways that will add up over time, and the resources listed here can help out a lot with that.

Happy Forecasting!

You’ve got leads, but are you focusing on the most promising ones? Use this simple approach to more profitably prioritize your B2B sales efforts.

One of the most important roles for B2B marketers is lead generation. Unfortunately for some companies, that’s where marketing’s job description tapers off. Just generate leads. Lot’s of ‘em!

When that happens, marketing can end up focusing more on the quantity of leads than the quality of each one. This is a problem because lead generation is a means to an end. Not an end in itself. The end goal of lead generation is customers, not leads.

There are other problems, too. When marketing tosses every lead to sales for follow-up, a wrench gets thrown in the works. Sales starts plowing through all the leads to qualify them and discovers the low quality most of the leads have. Sometimes sales becomes discouraged and stops following up altogether, missing those qualified leads that are ready to buy.

That’s when you hear sales pointing the finger at marketing and saying things like “the leads are weak!” Then (wait for it…) marketing points the finger back and accuses sales of being lazy and not following up on the leads.

The first step in fixing this problem is lead scoring – prioritizing the leads.

Lead scoring is a process of ranking a lead’s interest level and sales readiness based on a methodology agreed upon by marketing and sales. Companies can score leads in a variety of ways by assigning points and implementing rankings like “hot,” “warm,” or “cold.” Or A, B, C, or D.

It will boil down to a combination of “fit” and “interest.” If there is a fit but low interest, marketing needs to continue nurturing the lead. If there is a fit and interest, sales needs to follow-up quickly.

But let’s say you don’t have an automated lead scoring system set up that has your marketing automation software integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Another approach to lead prioritization can be based on the interest a lead shows in moving from one buyer stage to another on your website.

You can place all leads in one of three lead categories based on the actions the leads take after the initial conversion:

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

Information Qualified Lead (IQL)

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

At this stage, the lead is an Information Qualified Lead (IQL).

Using a marketing automation platform, the IQL is directed to a thank you page with a link to download the offer and receives a follow-up email with the same download link. A few days later, the lead receives another email with additional information related to what they downloaded. A few more such emails ensue, similarly spaced out over time.

At each one of those interactions triggered by the first download (thank you pages, emails, etc.), the IQL is also invited to learn more about how your company can help solve the problem related to what they have downloaded.

Examples of enticements toward the next stage include things like free webinars, case studies, free samples, product spec sheets and catalogs.

Many IQLs will take the initial information they need but not move on to the next stage. You can certainly keep in touch with them with email newsletters and new content offers, but based on their actions alone, the IQL can be considered a cold lead and a lower priority for sales follow-up.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

Let’s say that IQL becomes interested in how you might be able to solve the problem for which they have been researching a solution. They decide to download the information about your company’s product or service.

Congratulations, you now have a Marketing Qualified Lead. The lead is now warm.

As when they were an IQL, your marketing automation triggers a new workflow that generates a thank you page, a thank you email and other follow-up emails with information about their problem and how you might be able to help.

With each of those contacts, you then guide the MQL to the next stage of the journey, the Decision Stage.

To help an MQL advance to the decision stage you could offer things like free trials, demos, free consultations, estimates/quotes or coupons.

If the MQL raises their hand and moves to the decision stage, you now have a Sales Qualified Lead.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Quick, get sales to call them – they’re a hot lead!

No kidding – studies have shown that the faster sales follows up with an SQL, the higher the closing rate. Plus, the responsiveness sends a powerful message about your company’s customer focus and attention to detail.

By putting your leads into three distinct buckets based on your prospective customers’ actions taken on your website, you can make sure that sales is at least following up with the warmest leads. And spending less time with cold leads.

How To Get Started

The secret to getting ahead is getting started. Your company might already have a lot of the content that can be used to help prospects move through these three stages.

Make a 3-column list, with “Awareness,” “Consideration,” and “Decision” across the top. In each column list the content that you have (or need to prepare) to offer website visitors in order to get them to become IQLs, MQLs and SQLs.

Flashback to the old days of sales and marketing: Willy Loman is crumbling under the existential weight of abandonment, betrayal and a shredded American Dream. Times have changed a great deal since the Willys of the world toted their briefcases and sales brochures from door to door. From briefcases to tablets, brochures to multimedia sales experiences, your sales reps’ tools have evolved with virtual abandon – which has led to some striking changes in behavior.

Times have changed, and so has sales.

A recent Brainshark survey of 400 sales reps and managers is an excellent testament to the fact that times and sales have transformed in whirlwind tandem. Mutations in the sales process are stark and salient, and the sales team is a different breed indeed.

Information is at the heart of our age, with mobility as its life-pumping veins. To survive, your sales reps have evolved. They are now living, breathing portals of knowledge: educating your prospects and spreading your message, never with two feet flat on the ground. Unresponsive? They fail. Slow to move, and they’re doomed.

Sales: The new normal.

• THEY LACK TIME TO PREPARE
  40% of reps start preparing for sales presentations within a single day of the meeting, 12% wait until that day and only 16% start at least a week in advance.
• THEY SHOW ON THE GO
  64% of sales reps prepare for presentations in their cars, 58% on the plane, 44% in the prospect’s parking lot, 42% on vacation, 27% in the bathroom and 24% while working out.
• THE TABLET’S THEIR TOTEM
  61% of reps said they’d rather show up to a meeting without matching socks than without tablets, and 47% choose electronics over underwear when presenting to prospects.

It’s painfully clear just how dependent sales reps are on their devices. And who can blame them? These electronics aren’t just shiny toys and trendy gadgets – they’re performance tools and technologies that grant your sales team easy access to sales materials and ironclad insight into prospects, leads and customers.

Your reps need this unguarded gateway to powerful information. They need it desperately.

But the tools only get them so far.

• 33% of sales reps report that they frequently can’t find the materials they need.
• 41% say their information is out of date and unappealing.
• 51% of reps spend valuable buyer-facing time tinkering with marketing content to make it applicable.

Technology has opened the door to flexibility, mobility and adaptability … but sales reps can’t simply saunter through willy-nilly. They must know how to leverage these tools, how to use them effectively and efficiently.

It’s called content management – and without it, your reps are left flailing and frenzied in a rush of information.

Stay tuned to learn how a clear and cogent content management strategy gives your reps a critical key to sales enablement: the vehicle for value transmission.

Your reps may have lots of tools, but do they have the sound technological infrastructure to underpin the entire sales process? 

Meriam Ibrahim gets convicted of ‘apostasy’ and given four days to repent and escape death

$200-million raised from Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, and Valiant Capital Partners

Over the course of a typical year, I attend a number of retail and digital marketing conferences.

Without fail, everybody attending learns a huge amount. But almost everybody I speak to also comments that in heading back to the office they have a whole load more stuff they need to think about.

The ‘to do’ list keeps growing and growing.

This highlights one of the major challenges faced by retailers (and non-retailers for that matter): the myriad of customer experience initiatives, channels and marketing tactics available to them.

Having so many different ways they could invest their budget is exciting but also pretty daunting.

So how do retailers decide how best to spend their money to drive awareness, acquisition, retention and loyalty?

Unfortunately, in my experience, decisions are too often based on guesswork; following the latest ‘fad’, copying the competition or buying a ‘solution’ they don’t really need.

Inevitably, this results in wasted budget, resource and time. But perhaps more importantly, it can mean customer expectations not being met.

With 80% of UK consumers being less likely to buy again after one bad experience (Mckinsey/Nielsen), meeting the expectations of today’s savvy, technology-driven consumer has never been more important.  

So what’s the answer?

There is a simple solution in my view: customer insight. 

Putting the customer at the heart of your retail organisation has never been so important. Every decision taken should begin and end with the customer in mind. 

To achieve this, you need to build a detailed picture of your customers. Whilst profiling techniques, such as ACORN, undoubtedly have a role to play, they don’t necessarily reveal the specific values, behaviours, habits, needs and expectations of your customers.

You can only build this understanding by gathering insight, both solicited (surveys, for example) and unsolicited (via social media, for example).

To highlight my point, here are five very simple insights gathered from surveys we have created and run for our clients.

Before I go on, a disclaimer. In reading some of these examples, you may well think…'What? How did they not know that!'

The point is, these retailers wouldn't have known without asking their customers, meaning key decisions were previously based on guesswork rather than shaped by what their customers actually wanted.

Offer free delivery: your investment will pay off

Insight for a health and beauty retailer revealed that a major barrier to conversion was a relatively high delivery charge on a low average order value.

By offering free delivery, they increased online revenue by 20% within eight weeks. They hadn’t considered offering free delivery until their customers provided the feedback.

In this case (as with most others), the cost of offering free delivery more than paid for itself due to the increase in conversion rate, orders and revenue.

Don't do Facebook 'for the sake of it'

Insight for a garden retailer found that their more 'mature' audience preferred email communication to social media.

By re-allocating budget and resource accordingly, they saw a 224% increase in revenue via email within three months.

The key lesson here. Social media isn't right for every audience. You don’t have a bottomless pit of money - spend it on the marketing activities that are most aligned to the behaviours of your customers.

Get to know the 'sale only' shopper

Insight for a fashion brand found that a high proportion of 'sale only' customers live in the US. Why? Because import duty meant US customers were waiting until sale time to order.

Understanding the behaviour of this smaller, seemingly less valuable segment, significantly changed how they engaged with them.

The client learnt not to discard the 'sale only' shopper. Instead, they developed specific strategies to target them.

You've got to dig deeper than transactional data

For a high end fashion brand, we found credit card purchases from a younger, female demographic were registered to males who had owned a home for more than 15 years. Eh? 

Only by overlaying transactional data with qualitative insight was the client able to understand why - they found that in many cases, the father’s credit card was being used by the daughter (knowingly, we assumed!) The end customer wasn’t who they appeared on the surface.

The lesson? You need to look beyond ACORN or MOSAIC profiling, it's not always a reliable indicator of who your ACTUAL customers are.

Are the incentives you're offering the right incentives?

Insight for another fashion brand revealed that customers would be incentivised to spend more with the offer of next day delivery, sale previews and unique offers rather than the heavy discounting they were pushing.

In fact, the latter was felt to devalue the brand.

Reworking their loyalty program resulted in a 24% increase in repeat sales over 12 months.

They key is not to make assumptions when it comes to incentives. At the top end of the market, price is rarely the decision trigger.

Other incentives, aligned to customer needs and values, are often more important so discover what really matters.

So, what can we conclude from these examples? 

A few things…

• ACORN profiling has a role to play in segmenting your database (or prospective customers) according to a broad set of social factors, habits and behaviours. But it has its limitations.
• Solicited feedback, in the form of a survey for example, can be designed in such a way as to dig a lot deeper when it comes to uncovering the needs, motivations and expectations of your customers, which in turn can be used to shape key strategic decisions.
• Transactional analysis (using RFM modelling, for example) is essential to segmenting your database according to their spending habits. However, I have found overlaying transactional analysis with attitudinal insight hugely powerful to informing customer experience initiatives and digital marketing strategies on a segment by segment basis.
• Don’t follow the crowd. Shape your strategy based on what your customers actually want, therefore taking the guesswork out of decision making. 

Next time, I’ll be following up by looking at 20 or so things a retailer really ought to know about their customers.

Until then, please feel free to comment below. How does your organisation use customer data and insight to shape key decisions?

It’s a perfect time to understand how Pinterest is changing consumer behavior and media habits, as the company is preparing to launch its Promoted Pins revenue model in the next month. After all, media budgets are usually a shrinking pie in this economy, so companies must move the dollars from somewhere. It’s important to examine how active Pinterest users are consuming media, which brands have a right to win on the platform, whom these brands can best reach on Pinterest and how to best reach them.

Active Pinterest users are young, tech-savvy and have more disposable income than non-users. The most active users are what many marketers are now calling Millennial Moms—they have young children in the home and grew up with smart phones and social media.

New research also confirms that active Pinterest users are active doers and early adopters—those who want to try new things and are looking to try out new products from different brands. They are significantly more likely to try new projects and products than non-users, and about one-half of them have tried more than six new activities because of something they saw on Pinterest.

Interestingly, active Pinterest users watch significantly less TV than non-users and they claim to be moving away from reading traditional print catalogs, newspapers and magazines, replacing that media consumption with Pinterest use. Thirty-nine percent of them are also using Pinterest in place of traditional search engines, such as Google. Marketing insiders and heavy users know that Pinterest isn’t social, it’s search.

And, Pinterest is mobile. The platform says that 75 percent of activity is mobile and our research notes that nearly 30 percent of active users pull up the app while in-store to guide their purchases. As Pinterest use becomes heavier, users build the app into their real-life shopping habits, and this percentage increases.

Perhaps surprisingly, active Pinterest users are also fairly open to brand activity on the platform. About three-quarters of them say they would prefer to follow and interact with their favorite brands on Pinterest rather than their favorite celebrities or so-called “experts.” Additionally,when asked about Pinterest’s upcoming launch of Promoted Pins, users are generally open to Pinterest marketing—as long as it keeps with the spirit of Pinterest and adds value to their lives.

Pinterest users are ready and willing to be marketed to—as long as brands do it organically. This could be the year for your business to start or accelerate Pinterest marketing.

As a sales leader, one of your biggest contributions to transforming your sales force is reinforcement. If you want to change behaviors in your sales team, you need more than a two-day training.Your salespeople need to approach their coveted opportunities in a way that demonstrates your solution’s value and its differentiation.

You need a shift in mindset, one that influences the design, development, delivery and reinforcement of your new sales methodology and your sales transformation process.

Most sales organizations have gone through their fair share of sales enablement programs. A lot of your reps and front-line managers probably approach any new sales training with a bit of cynicism. Your job as a sales leader is to set the stage for success.

Think of the trainings you’ve sat through in your career. Which ones fell flat? Which ones made a lasting impression? What made the successful ones change behaviors?

Ensure your next sales transformation initiative is worth the money. Evaluate your organization’s ability to succeed with these 15 key questions.

Your Organization’s Background

1.  How successful were past sales enablement projects?
2.  Why were some more successful than others?
3.  How do recent organizational changes align with this project?
4.  How do recent executive changes align with this project?

Your Priorities

5.  What are the critical few corporate initiatives your organization is undertaking right now?
6.  What is the priority of this project compared to the other initiatives?
7.  What other sales enablement initiatives will be competing for resources?

Your Process

8.  How engaged are senior leaders in the major project events?
9.  What are your success metrics?
10. Who will own, adopt and update project deliverables?
11. What is the communication plan for needed changes and inspection?

Your Success

12.  How have the project outcomes integrated into the management cadence of your front-line managers?
13.  How are managers enabled to reinforce, inspect, coach new processes?
14.  How are you gathering and documenting success stories?
15.  How are you celebrating those who succeed among your team?

Failure is full of lessons and, over the last decade, the demise of several once extraordinarily successful businesses are providing us with plenty of them.

Disregarding the digital age, numerous companies that once dominated their respective markets are now defunct. We’ll explore the downfall of three; Blockbuster, Kodak and Borders. We’ll offer you insight into how each company’s failure to adapt to the digital age was its breaking point, and how your small business can avoid a similar fate. Here are the lessons to be learnt from three big business failures

Blockbuster

“Failing to recognize what’s relevant to your customer is a recipe for disaster”.

Ironically, what initially made Blockbuster the champion of the movie rental industry was its innovative use of technology. Blockbuster’s up-to-the-minute inventory system help the company optimize its offerings and it wasn’t long before it was putting mom and pop movie rental stores out of business. But then Netflix made its début.

The movie by mail service, and later movie online service, gave customers the convenience they wanted at a price that blew Blockbuster away. Instead of acknowledging the changing way consumers wanted their entertainment, Blockbuster remained attached to their weakening business model. Six years after Netflix launched, Blockbuster finally decided to test-drive the popular movie by mail model, but it was too late. Stores closed at a rapid rate, and ultimately Blockbuster was bought out of bankruptcy court by satellite television provider, DISH.

Over the last few years, DISH has used the well recognized brand name to develop Blockbuster @Home. The service offers subscribers more than 15 movie channels and access to thousands of movie titles. Best yet, they’re streamed right to the user’s TV, tablet or smartphone. Ignoring the digital revolution brought down Blockbuster, but today DISH is harnessing that same technology to rebuild it.

Today consumer is notoriously savvy. They want value, but they also want what’s relevant. Learn what’s specifically valuable and relevant to your customer- and then give it to them.

Kodak

“Complacency at the top kills the new ideas budding within your organization”.

There’s no doubt Kodak’s failure to move into the digital world played a pivotal role in its unraveling, but there’s more to the tale of Kodak’s collapse.

Leader complacency is a killer, and it did a number on Kodak. Traditionally, Kodak was considered a creative, inventive organization that embraced new ideas and new technology. That’s one reason why the company emerged as a leader in its industry. But as Kodak’s success grew, complacency took hold. Leaders listened less to the inventive voices within the organization and eventually those passionate employees stopped trying to get their ideas heard. Complacency fueled Kodak’s downward spiral.

No matter what level of success your business achieves, the new ideas that key innovators in your business offer are worth listening to. But ignore them, and it won’t be long before they’ll stop generating fresh ideas, or worse yet, take their ideas elsewhere.

Borders

“As the competitive environment changes, reevaluate your core competencies”.

Louis and Tom Borders built a bookselling empire using technology to track inventory and provide insight into sales trends. By the early 1990s, Borders was in full bloom. But it wasn’t long before consumers started altering the way they shopped for, and enjoyed books. And Border’s wasn’t the least bit interested in modifying its business model to accommodate them.

While consumers were increasingly headed to the Internet to shop for books and to readers such as Kindle to enjoy them, Boarders was locked into lengthy leases on its brick and mortar stores. Worse yet, it continued to build more stores.

Eventually, Borders decided to get on the Internet bandwagon- but instead of opening its own online store, it let Amazon sell its products. In doing so, Borders contributed to its own demise. It wasn’t long before Amazon became king of bookselling and its Kindle was catching on like wildfire. Borders held on to its core competencies much too long and its slow response to the digital age sealed its fate. Failing to respond to the industry’s changing landscape, Borders succumbed to its more agile competitor.

Borders buried its head in the sand. If you intend to keep your customers and earn new ones you must Keep your finger on the pulse of your industry and evaluate your core competencies to ensure they’re relevant.

The tragic fate of these three giants proves that no matter how successful your business becomes, arrogance and ignorance will destroy it in short order. Keeping current with industry trends, listening to your most creative employees, and giving your customer what’s valuable and relevant will help your business rise to the top and stay there.

Whether you just set up a new enterprise video platform, or a public facing online video platform, or even a YouTube channel, the key to a successful video strategy is ensuring that your videos can be found via search. If you’re getting started, or if you have already started your video strategy, here are four tips to unlocking the value of your video collections:

1. Optimize your metadata

When you upload a video to a platform, there are fields you have to fill out, which typically include title, description, author, keywords, and creation date. Don’t ignore these! This information becomes the metadata that helps a search engine more easily find your video. Having rich metadata also improves the viewer experience. A perfect illustration is my search for Jimmy Fallon in YouTube:

The titles give an accurate description of what I’m about to see. I can click the “author” section and it will bring to all the video uploaded by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and there is a description of what I’m about to see, making it easy for me to pick and choose videos.

2. Include tags and transcriptions

In short, search engines can only act upon what text they can “read”. A search engine cannot view or listen to the audio track of your video, so it needs text to accompany it. Transcriptions take your audio and turn it into text. Now your video is ready to be “seen” in a search query.

Tagging is the process of leveraging certain keywords from your video to also ensure search and discoverability. Think of it as a way to segment your videos. This will make your video easy to be found and bring up related content.

Insider Tip: The process of tagging and transcribing can be exceptionally cumbersome when done manually. I would suggest the use of automatic transcriptions. This way you maximize your search potential and minimize the time and effort spent.

3. Make your transcription interactive

When your transcript is interactive, it gives the viewer the opportunity to “jump to” the parts of the video they find important.  A good use case for interactive transcripts would be an on-demand webinar. Maybe you only have time or you only want to listen to one segment. Being able to use the transcript as navigation would improve the user experience as the user would only be going to where they are want.

4. Create an eye-catching thumbnail

Whenever possible, try to upload your own thumbnail instead of using the default. Most video platforms will let you, including YouTube. Why is a thumbnail important? It’s the first visual cue your user will see, therefore it can impact your click through rate. If you’re having trouble coming up with a thumbnail, there are many videos and articles out there to help you get started.

Online video consisted of 62% of content on the internet in 2012, and that number is bound to rise significantly for 2014. Don’t you want to make your videos stand out?

What does a good craft beer bar have in common with a great LinkedIn profile?

Well, if you’ve ever walked into a great craft beer bar, the bartender, or cicerone, can provide you an excellent customer experience by asking you a set of questions to lead you to what you should be drinking based on what you like. There is not a best craft beer for everyone, just like there is no one LinkedIn profile format or formula every should use.

The LinkedIn reputation lesson is that as a good craft beer stands out based on what one is looking for, then your reputation needs to describe yourself accurately so you stand out with the correct crowd. And you can get to the realization that you need to change your LinkedIn profile by asking yourself some very pointed questions.

I shared this question-approach with a fellow craft beer lover at one of my favorite watering holes. Acting as a reputation ‘cicerone’ I asked my new friend the following questions that ended up causing a paradigm shift in the way he looked at his LinkedIn profile.

10 Questions To Do Your Own Linked Profile Audit

Key questions to ask your sales teams, your leadership, your marketers or yourself about your LinkedIn profile

• Does your profile pic look like it belongs on the Wall of Shame? Take a professional-like photo, so you stop the social smirking about your silly looking image.

• Does your LinkedIn headline look like a job title that nobody really understands anyway? Why would you use this 120-character space for anything other than an elevator pitch to explain your value to separate you from the crowd?

• Does your LinkedIn summary tell your customer how they are going to help you make it to Presidents Club, 21 Club, or Winners Circle? Make your summary about the customer and network and how you can help them.

• Are you ‘Googleable’; including keywords throughout your LinkedIn profile that sum up your value that people are literally searching for on Google? If not, then include these ‘Googleable’ terms to your LinkedIn Endorsements section, Summary, Headline, Job Experience, Anchored Text to get found by those who are looking.

• Are you using your formal, baptismal, confirmation or any other name that would only be familiar to your mother? Your mother may be in your network, however, you need to include the name which you go by in the work place so others can find you.

• Are you employable? If you don’t have at least three current and past positions that include keywords and accomplishments to explain the value you added then add them immediately. The way in which you describe your job experience can add to the way that your network

• Does your LinkedIn profile show that you play well with others? If not, then get some Recommendations, Endorsements and Awards listed to show others what your first-grade teacher knows!

• Does your LinkedIn profile pass the reading, writing and arithmetic exam? If you are not writing in first person, have typos throughout your LinkedIn profile, use poor grammar and do not include any publications, videos or SlideShares that you’ve created then you fail this test. And, you let your competition go to the head of the class.

• Are you all dressed up (i.e., a polished profile at the LinkedIn dance, but acting as a wallflower would by not participating in the conversation? It’s one thing to get dressed up for a ‘dance’ with a great looking profile, but if you hang on the sidelines, then you are not helping your reputation – telling your story, your brand’s story or just being a part of the process. Get moving with LInkedIn group updates, daily status updates and asking people to connect with you.

• Are you driving your LinkedIn profile like there is no reputation speedometer? If you are fine-tuning your reputation’s engine then pay attention to the speedometer – how many people are viewing your profile, does your network view and share your updates, are people asking to network with you and accepting your invites? Paying attention to your reputation dashboard will help you reach your destination.

Do you have another self-assessment question to help turn a LinkedIn profile from a resume to a reputation builder? If so, please share below.

Did you notice I did not mention the term ‘social media’ once? Working on your reputation is not based on your social media expertise. Your reputation is about fishing where the fish are and having the right bait to be noticed and caught. LinkedIn is today’s reputation hub and you better be fishing there with the right bait. And we all know what goes best with fishing. A nice IPA craft-beer.

When it comes to PPC, metrics are everything. We consume ourselves in pouring over numbers and analyzing our accounts down to the smallest detail. However, it turns out we are being misled by the data we rely on the most. We’re too quick to take our figures at face value without thinking...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Nimble is a clever tool for busy networkers. It is a fantastic CRM for managing your online relationships, but first you need relationships to manage!

I have spent years cultivating strong relationships with people on Twitter. According to StatisticsBrain.com, 135,000 new people join Twitter every day! Here are five ways you can use Twitter to grow and nurture your network:

1. Import your contacts.

When you create a Twitter account, you are directed to import your contacts so Twitter can identify those you know who are already using it. Return to this step from time to time by clicking Discover > Find Friends.

2. Use Twitter Advanced Search.

Super Tip: Search for topics of interest by zip code. You can do this by searching for a full term like “wood working” or “aqua aerobics” (two things I know nothing about). The results will return tweets with these terms in the zip codes you are searching. Don’t forget to engage. Reply and retweet the best content.

3. Connect with Twitter Chats.

Two of my favorite Twitter chats are Mack Collier’s #BlogChat on Sunday nights from 9 – 10 pm EST and Brandie McCallum and Tim McDonald’s My Community Manager chat #CMGRHangout every Friday from 2 – 3 pm EST. Find a chat that suits you and use Tweetchat.com to participate. The more you engage, the more connections you will make.

4. Use Public and Private Twitter Lists.

Note the username of someone you enjoy on Twitter. Now enter the URL: https://twitter.com/NAME/lists.

Super Tip: This reveals Twitter lists that the person has subscribed to. You can also choose “Member of” to see lists others have added the person to. Find the most interesting lists and subscribe to them. You can return often to the lists to see what the members are tweeting. This is especially helpful before and after large conferences.

Super Tip: Create Private Twitter Lists. You may also choose to group people into a private Twitter list. This is a perfect way to stay on top of what your clients and customers are tweeting. You can learn more about Twitter Lists here.

5. Search Bios.

Super Tip: Use Followerwonk to search keywords in Twitter profiles. Find people you have a shared interest with. If you are a veterinarian, search for the term and include your city name in the location section. Click Social Authority to see who are considered the most influential people in that field.

These are five ways you can find new people to follow on Twitter. Following is only the first step in networking on Twitter. Be sure you are replying and retweeting to the interesting people you find. Introduce yourself, provide introductions to people, answer questions being asked, and provide value to people.

How do you find new people to follow?

The hardest lessons I learned in my corporate career were related to office politics. I entered corporate America with confidence in my talent. I believed wholeheartedly that my education prepared me to do a great job. In fact, I did a great job!

But I learned very quickly that in order to make it in today's workplace, good performance is only part of the equation.

In order to get ahead and stay ahead, it's critical that you learn how to navigate workplace dynamics, and that has everything to do with mastering the politics. 

Here are the seven lessons about office politics you must learn before age 30 to be successful:

1. It takes more than talent and hard work to get ahead.

This is the most important lesson of all. It is expected that you will do a good, even great, job. That being said, you need to differentiate yourself in the workplace and let others know how you are contributing to the success of the business. The consequences of just focusing on your work are that you will remain invisible, be passed over for promotions, and others will readily take the credit for your work. 

2. It's important that others see you as reliable, consistent, and resourceful.

Figure out what you're good at and how you contribute to business outcomes. Look for opportunities to help others based on your value. How do you want to be perceived? Make sure that your behavior and communication align with how you want others to think of you. This includes being savvy on social media. 

3. Understand workplace dynamics.

This is critical for your success. What are the hidden rules in the workplace? What type of behavior is rewarded? Who gets promoted and why? What type of communication is acceptable? Who has the power and influence? Identify potential allies and champions who have the power and influence. 

4. Build your internal network.

Who do you know and who do you need to know to help you avoid political landmines and to help you advance your career? There are basically three categories of networks in the workplace. First, the operational network consists of people who you work with every day. Second, the developmental contacts are people who are potential mentors and sponsors. They are often decision makers.

The third network is a strategic one comprised of those who can connect you with decision makers, influencers, and operational people to help you do your job better. You need to build a network of contacts in each category across the organization. 

5. Build and nurture your external network.

Let's face it. You probably will not stay with your current company forever. On average, people are moving from job to job about every three years. It's critical, therefore, to stay in touch with former colleagues, classmates, and friends.

Pay it forward and respond to their requests for help or connections. When you need those introductions or references for yourself, your network will step up and help you. Also join industry related groups in your community and on LinkedIn. 

6. Learn how to effectively communicate with others.

You may prefer texting to emailing or phone calls, but it's important to identify what type of communication others prefer, especially if you are trying to build rapport. Ask them directly how they like to communicate. How often do they want to hear from you? What format?

Observe these people in meetings. What gets their attention? What turns them off? Prepare your agenda for meetings with your boss and senior management with this information in mind. Figure out what's important to your stakeholders and then position yourself as someone who can add value. 

7. Establish good working relationships across generations.

The workforce today is represented by three to four generations, and for the first time it is critical to master the skill of working well with people your age and younger perhaps, but also the age of your grandparents. You may be the youngest and you may also be extremely bright, but in order to be successful, you must be respectful of the history and experience of others. You must be patient and open to learning from everyone. What can you learn from those more experienced? What can you share with them to help them be more successful? 

You may indeed be a rock star with enormous potential, but if no one knows about your contributions, it won't do you any good. If you stand out for the wrong reasons, it won't do you any good either. Figure out how to position yourself by understanding the culture and politics, and never take your attention away from the workplace dynamics, as they change every day.

Bonnie Marcus is an executive coach, international speaker, writer, and award-winning entrepreneur. Marcus runs the online platform Women's Success Coaching. 

SEE ALSO: 20 Time-Management Lessons Everyone Should Learn In Their 20s

Join the conversation about this story »

In our hectic, tech-driven age of email, texting and web-based communication, is there still space for the humble letter? Businesses seeking to reach out far and wide to new and existing customers often overlook this more humble form of communication, but when it comes to making a lasting impression, a letter really is better. Here are 6 compelling reasons why the letter remains a powerful tool for any business.

1. Make it personal. No matter how targeted an email you send, it will always come across as more impersonal than a letter. Unlike putting a real signature on a letter, emails and other electronic forms of communication leave no trace of the sender on the message. A letter feels far more personal and – because they are increasingly rare these days – receiving one will make your customer feel a little bit special. Establishing a personal relationship between your business and your customers is the secret to building long-term customer loyalty. Sending a letter to your customers as part of a wider marketing strategy is a great way to keep that relationship as personal as possible.
2. Craft exactly the right message. It’s a truism that form follows function and as email is designed as a fast, mass medium of communication, we tend to write emails quickly and often without proper attention. As a result, words can be imprecise and meanings misconstrued, such as when a humorous or throwaway comment is taken the wrong way. At worst, this kind of mistake can cost you business. The very act of sitting down to compose a letter forces us to slow down and think about the message we are seeking to convey. Honing your business message and choosing precisely the right words for the customer may take more time but the impact will be far more powerful and lasting as a result.
3. Reach only the audience you want. Once you fire an email off to someone in cyberspace, you have limited control over where it may end up. Electronic communications can be easily copied and forwarded in a variety of ways, making them less than ideal for more sensitive business content. In contrast, a personally written and addressed letter marked “Private” or “For Your Attention Only” leaves no doubt that the contents are for the intended recipient alone. There’s a certain formal gravity about receiving a letter rather than an email, making them far better suited to conveying important or delicate information.
4. Letters get opened and read. Do you start your day by going through your inbox and deleting most of the emails you’ve received since you last logged out? If the answer is yes, consider that most of your customers probably do the same. As we’re all constantly bombarded by emails, they’re far more likely to get ignored, marked as spam or simply overlooked. While emails may be cheaper than a letter to send, they’re not providing value if your customers aren’t reading them. An email can be erased from sight and memory at the click of a button but a letter on the doorstep is far harder to ignore. As a result, most of us take the time to open and read the contents of a letter that is addressed to us personally.
5. Sending a business letter costs less than you might imagine. While the cost of having a letter delivered is naturally more than sending an email yourself, there are many different ways to make savings on postage costs. Sending franked mail rather than relying on stamps will provide companies with major savings on their mail budget and businesses that have a large volume of mail can take advantage of bulk rate discounts often found within their favorite mail sender. Even companies with more modest mail requirements can save money simply by using smaller envelopes or sending mail second class rather than first class.
6. They’re easy to create. If you’re wondering how your busy company can spare the time to write individual letters to your customers, I’ll let you in on a secret – you don’t have to write ‘hand-written’ letters by hand. Instead, simply compose your message on Word, Publisher, InDesign or any other software you use and then convert your text from the default font to a ‘handwritten’ font instead. A couple of mouse clicks and you’ve got your personal letter!
7. It’s much better than publicly blogging.  While some people ask the question “Is guest blogging dead, or is it propaganda?”, many people believe that publicly blogging or allowing others to blog on their site is similar to a boring impromptu speech.  Writing letters is identical to blogging, but on a more personal level.

Sending a letter tells your customer you value them as an individual and not just a sales statistic. Whatever the message your business wants to convey, it’s far more powerful delivered by hand!

For this year’s annual industry benchmark study, we polled more than 500 marketing professionals and executives to learn the latest trends in marketing measurement best practices. Our expert responses revealed CEOs expect more frequent measurement of conversion-related marketing metrics. The diversity of marketing channels being measured continues to increase with the birth of mobile platforms, underscoring the value of data integration technology. Mobile marketers have embraced the multichannel approach to marketing measurement, and are setting high standards in ROI reporting.

Learn more about industry trends, and check out what activities fellow marketing experts are keeping track of to see how they compare to your strategies.

In a three-part series Martha Hall Findlay, executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy and a former Liberal MP, has argued that Canada’s system of supply management for dairy farmers should be dismantled. This is part 3.

Part 1: Why your milk costs so much and what to do about it

Part 2: Why the dairy industry’s defence of supply management is so flawed

A rebuttal: Critics of supply management are milking the argument

The evidence overwhelmingly supports dismantling supply management for dairy, poultry and eggs—our very own cartel of fixed prices, protective tariffs and production quotas. It hurts consumers forced to pay too much for basic nutrition; food processors and the jobs they could create; the 94 per cent of Canadian farmers who are not supply managed together with manufacturers and other exporters, all looking for access to more international markets. It now even hurts dairy farmers themselves, by being denied growth opportunities.

So why has it not changed? Like the rest of the world, Canada has reduced its subsidization for all other agricultural producers, but has, despite significant international pressure, still retained its massive protections for dairy, poultry and eggs. Thanks to the high prices consumers pay for their milk, butter, cheese, and yogurt, the dairy lobby, arguably the most powerful lobby in Canada, has lots of money to spend. And they spend it—an estimated $80-$100 million a year—persuading politicians to keep the system. Frustratingly, those employed by the lobby, due to their own self-interest, lobby their own member farmers, as well, spreading fear of any change. The ‘arguments’ that the dairy lobby, the Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC), continues to put forward have been shown to be, at best, outdated and misleading, but mostly simply untrue. Unfortunately the lobby seems more interested in perpetuating the “need” for the lobby’s existence itself than in the best options for the farmers that it is supposed to represent.

So what to do? Fighting a powerful lobby is a tough challenge, and too many politicians lack courage if they believe votes are at stake. The answer is two-fold: (i) propose a plan for reform that will benefit the majority of dairy farmers; and (ii) get those farmers to call for the necessary changes themselves.

Win-win reform is possible. There is a plan that would (i) help the more efficient, growth-oriented dairy farmers add capacity, generate more profits from exciting new export markets and make more efficient use of capital; (ii) compensate and provide transition assistance to those dairy farmers who wish to continue to operate their farms in what will be, post-reform, a more competitive environment; and (iii) facilitate, with proper compensation, the exit/retirement of those dairy farmers who choose to leave.  The good news is that this reform can be paid for, not from already-pinched government coffers, but by using the system itself—and spread out over enough time to be relatively painless.

It can be done.

The Australians did it a decade ago—and the majority of the dairy industry there are thriving, thanks in large measure to big increases in exports to those very markets that Canadian farmers could also be taking advantage of.

We Canadians already proved our ability for similar reform, with great success, when we removed protection for our wine industry as part of free trade with the US. At the time, the hue and cry was enormous (just like what we hear now about dairy)—“We can’t compete with big volumes and better climates and soils,” they said. Yet they certainly could compete, and have done so, and the growth and success of Canada’s wine industry since operating in an open market have been immense – not to mention the improvement in the quality of the wine. Yes, it involved compensation and transition assistance – as is entirely appropriate for the farmers who would be affected here. But it was done well, with great results for all concerned.

For dairy, poultry and eggs, an increasing number of academics, economists and analysts are recommending a solution similar to the Australian one:

1. Buy out the dairy quota from the farmers. This will need a formula that addresses the differences between those who ‘received’ quota for free in the 1970s, those who recently acquired quota at $30,000 a cow, and those in between. A new Conference Board of Canada report recommends using book value of quota instead of market value, which they argue is a much fairer approach and much less costly. The current market value of dairy quota is about $23 billion (poultry and eggs another $7 million), whereas book value of dairy quota is estimated to be in the range of $3.6 to $4.7 billion. The actual number, the formula to address historical differences, inter-family transfers and the like would, of course, require some negotiation with the quota-holders).

2. Provide transition assistance. In addition to the buy-out of quota, it would be appropriate to also provide two-pronged transition assistance. One form to those who chose to stay in the industry, in order to enhance their competitive and export capabilities; the other to make leaving the industry economically viable for those who choose to do so.

3. Eliminate all tariffs. This will immediately benefit consumers, who will pay closer to the lower world prices, even with the following proposed levy.

4. Add a small, temporary levy on wholesale milk to pay for the buy-out. This is what will fund the farmers’ compensation. In Australia the levy was 11 cents a litre for 8 years. In Canada, based on the 8 billion litres of milk currently produced annually in Canada, and assuming a buy-out/transition package totalling $5 million, such a levy would amount to only $0.06 a litre if spread over 10 years.

Consumers will pay less than they do now, as the levy would be significantly less than the current difference between Canadian and world prices; they will pay even less once the temporary levy is removed. The beauty of the proposal is that the compensation for the farmers will have come, not from already-strained government coffers, but from the system itself.

Although some proposals suggest a more drawn out, incremental approach, others suggest that all three components would have to happen at the same time. Our trading partners need to see change, and our farmers will need access to those lucrative export markets now, not 10 years from now—otherwise, they will be that much further behind the Australians, the New Zealanders, and now the Americans, in trying to establish a foothold in those markets.

The net result of such reform? Consumers will pay less. Farmers will be appropriately compensated and assisted in transition. The efficient, growth-oriented farmers will be able to consolidate, make more efficient use of their capital, and be able to take advantage of what are now extraordinary export opportunities. And for those farmers who choose to exit, this will provide their retirement fund—an appealing option for many, whose capacity would then be taken up by those who stay in. And finally, Canada will be able to go, immediately, to the world trade tables with open arms, instead of with one hand tied behind its back.

Most observers believe that transition is inevitable, that it’s just a question of time. It’s now up to the farmers. They need to challenge their own lobby, and seek the facts about the alternatives. And if the DFC and others involved in the dairy lobby understand this change, they will start working with their farmers and government leaders to help craft what that transition looks like. There are too many forces now combining to require change – continuing to fight the inevitable risks having something less beneficial forced upon them. The DFC, the farmers—all Canadians—have a vested interest in pursuing reform that benefits everyone.

The post How to scrap supply management—a lesson from down under appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The Best Marketing Doesn’t Feel Like Marketing 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 Mark Penson – Enjoy! 

The relationships we have with the brands in our lives hinge on the quality of the interactions. The more relevant these brands are to us, the more apt we are to read, listen, or watch the outbound marketing content they manage to get in front of us. The best brands manage to find out just what it is that interests us before they get in touch: what problems they can solve, how they best fit into our lives.

Easier said than done, though. Getting specific information from our customers and prospects involves engaging them as close to their interaction with our brands as possible. Mobile surveys and quizzes allow brands to interact with consumers as they actually experience a brand. It’s an unprecedented opportunity afforded because of the near ubiquity of smartphones and tablets.

When to use mobile surveys or quizzes to gather once-unavailable consumer insights

Gathering consumer insights at every stage of interaction with your brand represents a goldmine of opinions and information. It forms the foundation of meaningful future messaging that won’t feel like marketing messaging. With mobile surveys and quizzes, the information you collect is available in real time: no more waiting days or weeks to collect and analyze data collected in the field or hoping your email surveys get answered. Here are just a few examples of how to use a short mobile survey or fun mobile quiz in situations that were once thought to be inaccessible.

• New product introductions – get instant feedback about a new product formulation from customers in-store by having them sample and then swipe their feedback on a tablet you present them or on their own mobile device.
• During in-store promotions – incentivize consumers to engage with you with a contest or other payoff. On your signage or packaging, simply include a URL or QR code they can use to access your survey or quiz. The quality of the input you’ll get as they interact with your brand will be much more valuable than a follow-up effort (if you even have a way to contact them) days or weeks later.
• At trade shows – turn the face-to-face interactions into real-time information gathering. Using their mobile device or one you provide for their feedback, learn of their specific interests, their purchase intent, or why your offering does not intrigue them.
• During events – the people who attend your events have invested their time (and sometimes money). They’re a great source of information if you make it easy for them to give it to you. Intercept them throughout the event, with kiosk-mounted tablets with short, fun, potentially rewarding quizzes or surveys on them. Project your survey URL on screens and compel them to give your their feedback.

Unique in-the-moment feedback helps you create more relevant outbound marketing content

Having collected real-time information from customers and prospects during the situations above will give you relevant insights you can use to create your outbound marketing messaging. Knowing why most people said they’d buy your new product just hours or days earlier should guide your copy development to lead to marketing that resonates with potential buyers. The more relevant and timely the content of outbound marketing is, the better the response to it will be. Mobile surveys and quizzes help you collect uniquely insightful and specific consumer insights when they interact with your brand.

Creating a mobile survey or quiz is fast and requires no design or technical skill

Marketers, event planners and organizations of every size are leveraging the power of mobile surveys and quizzes—and building them by themselves—with point-and-click ease online. They’re branding these new mobile tools automatically by simply uploading their logos. They write the questions and answer choices and can even add photos, video and audio files to make the questions more interactive. When they’ve finished the short creation process, the online platform generates a unique URL and QR code that their audience will use to access the survey or quiz—without needing to download an app. Results are uploaded the instant respondents finish the mobile survey or quiz, giving marketers information they can use instantly to adjust event elements or marketing messaging.

The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing

The closer your relationship with your customers and prospects, the more intimate you’ll be with what is important to them. Getting in-the-moment feedback from them as they consider your product or service, as in the midst of your event, is essential to making your marketing efforts sounding genuine and well informed. The more natural the conversation you have with consumers, the more believable it will be. Believability builds trust; trust induces trial and builds loyalty. Loyal customers will, in turn, pay your marketing forward, recommending a brand they believe in to others. Consider it the return on the investment you make into asking pertinent questions and proving that you’ve heard the answers.

 

Mark Penson is CMO of Survey Anyplace (www.surveyanyplace.com). Survey Anyplace Mobile Surveys provide an app-free mobile survey and gamification tool that generates real-time customer insights at the moment of experience.

How should content marketers drive leads for B2B?

Getting a good ‘lead’ remains the metric that matters the most to marketers. To a Journalist, a good ‘lede’ is a great headline that entices readers to read the full story. As the content marketing revolution marches on, all companies will need to become, in part, media companies. Modern marketers can join the charge forward   and improve program ROI, by adopting a new CPL: the Cost per Lede.

Discussion of two biases in marketing

However, as I work with marketers around the world, I’m struck by two persistent traditional marketing biases that keep them from joining the revolution:

• 1. The bias in favour of director-and-above level professionals, at the expense of individual contributors; and
• 2. The bias in favour of opportunities and leads, at the expense of prospects and suspects.

As the VP of the Global Audience Business at BrightTALK my objective is to deliver the one thing that all B2B storytellers seek — an audience of relevant professionals. I love spending time with clients, helping them organize resources, design workflows, and craft effective strategies to regularly publish content that informs and entertains. After all, that’s how to build a high-conversion sales funnel in the modern marketing era where buyers self-educate themselves towards each purchase.

It’s rewarding to share the insights I was fortunate to develop during my time as publisher of Reuters News with companies of all sizes and stages, and across various industries and sectors, as each of them try to figure out how to build a scalable and cost-effective content creation and publication machine. In effect, helping them become, at least in part, a media company.

It seems fitting that after years of helping news professionals adapt to a shift in the media landscape requiring them to partially regard a sales and marketing mentality, I now spend much of my time helping sales and marketing professionals adapt to a shift in their landscape requiring them to partially regard a publishing mentality.

The cause of both of these tectonic shifts is identical: the drastically reduced cost of creating, disseminating, and consuming information. The effect of being slow to react will also be the same: irrelevance.

Argument 1 – ‘Directors and above, please’ – At the Expense of Individual Contribution?

Historically, influence and decision making inside of the enterprise was concentrated heavily among senior management. This was based primarily on two factors:

• 1. Access to and publication of information, itself, was concentrated among more senior managers; and
• 2. The cost and implementation of on-premises software favoured centralized purchasing and mandated IT involvement.

The Age of Information

That logic is now outdated; yet the bias persists. The cost of creating, disseminating and consuming information has reduced to near zero. Social media platforms, MOOCs, and the proliferation of professional blogs make it nearly effortless to stay abreast of current trends and connect with and learn from a wide variety of experienced professionals.

As often as not nowadays, hyper-relevant content seeks out the professional and offers a non-linear knowledge feed. The Internet has graduated from ‘Our Web’ and ‘your Web’ to ‘my Web.’ Narrowcast has replaced broadcast.

Employee Generated Content

Companies are also rapidly adopting collaboration platforms and encouraging employees of every level to create employee generated content (EGC), share content they are consuming, and exchange views.

Influence has permeated the enterprise. Decision makers delegate due diligence to junior colleagues, and newly minted professionals are pro-actively self-educating and impacting business and buying decisions. This is especially true as the newest generation of employees arrive armed with a superior technology comfort level and natural sharing behaviors.

A New Class of B2B Buyers

At the same time as more employees are exerting actual influence by self-educating and sharing, the proliferation of low-impact, low-cost, cloud-based solutions have disintermediated centralized purchasing and IT departments and a new class of B2B decision makers/buyers has been formed.

On-Premises versus The Cloud

Up until around 2005, software was primarily installed and run on computers housed inside of the company that bought the software (i.e., on-premises software). This meant that the cost of implementation was higher, the impact of a bad decision was larger, and IT involvement was required. Cloud-based solutions offer pay-as-you-go models, and lower overall costs.

Access for an individual, a team, or a single office or department is as easy as typing a username and password. Consequently, more people throughout the enterprise are empowered to be decision makers.

Modern marketers can future-proof the performance of their marketing programs by shedding traditional thinking and implementing a content marketing strategy designed to reach professionals at every stage of their career.

‘SUSPECTS DON’T BUY’

In addition to the outdated bias heavily in favour of senior professionals, the bias in favour of opportunities and leads, at the expense of prospects and suspects, is also limiting the efficacy of modern marketing programs.

Argument 2 –  Suspects/Prospects/Leads/Opportunities – at the expense of Prospects and Suspects

For new marketing and sales professionals, the journey from stranger to customer starts with your target audience (‘suspects’), moves along to someone who has explicitly or implicitly signaled a related need that you can help with (‘prospect’), continues on to a relevant person who you know to have the ability to make a purchase (‘lead’) and, finally, rests with the person who is also ready to buy (‘opportunity’).

Modern marketing does not alter that landscape. Marketing and sales professionals will always prefer the person who has a professed need and the willingness and means to act on that need. 

The difference is that, in the age of information, finding your suspects and prospects and genuinely and regularly helping them is straightforward, scalable and cost effective. The amount of resources required to nurture suspects and prospects has been reduced and the manual process has been automated. That alters the logic underlying the bias. We all still prefer an audience abundant with opportunities, but too many marketers still disregard suspects (the oxygen that feeds a healthy sales pipeline).

Restricting your marketing programs to attracting only ‘bottom of the funnel leads’ makes sense if your content is unable to distinguish suspects from opportunities, resources to create content are limited and expensive, or spray-and-pray is the only publishing option. But those days are long gone.

Content Hacking

A supportive ecosystem has encircled modern marketers  from ideation through publication ,  allowing anyone to content hack their way into becoming a media company.

• For example, InBoundWriter can help you discover content marketing topics that are in-demand and will perform,
• Scripted and Contently can connect you to professional writers who can take those ideas and craft content,
• Sketch Deck can take that content and transform it into a compelling presentation,
• visual.ly can help add engaging visuals, such as infographics, and BrightTALK offers what every storyteller wants, an engaged audience.

Hyper-Relevance of your content

In addition to widely-available and affordable resources to help any company, department or team create and curate more content on a regular basis, marketing automation systems can optimize that content by publishing the most relevant piece to audience cohorts defined by their stage in the buyer’s journey.

An audience that includes suspects and prospects no longer sacrifices program ROI. Resource-intensive and generic campaigns have been replaced by content marketing touch points that have been crafted and executed in a cost-effective and scalable way.

Scoring mechanisms are a common feature of automated nurturing campaigns delivering a hyper-relevant user experience.

Random Acts of Content

No amount of affordable resources or technology can save the marketer bent on committing random acts of content.

Remember when you were a young child, anxiously awaiting a bedtime story? How satisfied would you have been with, ‘Once upon a time, the end’? Not very.

Content marketing is no different. No matter how much time it takes to craft a masterpiece, good content marketing is not any single piece of content.

Modern marketers plan ahead with not only an outline and an objective for one piece, but they also consider the larger story their brand is telling and they tell that story with a regular cadence that connects to their product roadmap, sponsored events, and other business milestones. Modern marketers build trust with their audience with useful content and, in due time, that audience converts.

That’s because helping people is more effective than interrupting them with advertising.

Most of your audience will not have an immediate, unmet need for the services you provide. Publishing at people and then expecting them to be instantly receptive to a telemarketer or sales call is unrealistic.

It’s time to stop content marketing, and start helping. It’s time to stop thinking of your content as a sales opportunity and start thinking of it as an opportunity to help people.

Explore and experiment with the resources widely available to the modern marketer in the age of information. Shed the biases in favuor of ‘Director-and-above level professionals’ (at the expense of individual contributors) and ‘opportunities and leads’ (at the expense of prospects and suspects). Cost per Lede is the metric that matters the most to the modern marketer, and the ROI is extraordinary.

Thanks to Andrew Goldner for sharing his thoughts and opinions in this blog post. Andrew (@agoldner) is a seasoned business leader with global experience and a ‘recovering’ senior technology and media attorney. He co-founded an early new media start-up in the music industry in NYC and Orlando, was an early associate in the technology, media and eCommerce practice group at Skadden Arps, served as Associate General Counsel at DoubleClick (leading up to the Google acquisition), co-founded Thomson Financial News (culminating with the acquisition of Reuters), and served in a number of senior roles at Thomson Reuters in America, Hong Kong and Singapore, including as Publisher of Reuters News. He is an active and passionate advisor (Quibb, Countable, InkFold) and mentor (Tradecraft, Matter, Golden Gate Ventures, Founders Institute) in Silicon Valley.