Rnordman

The fact remains there will be a finance person involved in most strategic buying decisions. The inclusion of finance in the process of making a B2B strategic buying decision will cause a chain reaction of additional issues for sales professionals that must be considered. However, first let me prove the point by citing a research report contracted by CFO Magazine. Martin Akel & Associates conducted a study in 2011 for CFO Magazine on the trends in procurement by US corporations. The study, “The Senior Finance Team and Corporate Purchasing Decisions…” looked at the role of finance teams in corporate purchasing decisions. This study stated the following:

• “Nine of ten executives report that members of their company’s finance team are now collaborating with business management on key issues affecting the selection of vendors.”
  • 98% collaborate on developing / reviewing business and functional requirements
  • 95% collaborate on preparing / reviewing financial justification and ROI analysis
  • 85% collaborate on speaking with and evaluating prospective vendors

This single change of using the finance department in the Buyers process will cause many additional issues for today’s sales professional to consider. The first issue is the language of the C-Suite is different than mid-level management. When you communicate at the C-level they are more concerned about your value as it impacts their business metrics like, cash flow, debt to equity, profitability, DSO’s, etc. These metrics are the foundation for the language of the C-Suite. Today’s sales professional will need to learn what metrics are used, what the metrics mean and finally, the Seller’s value as it relates to the Buyer’s C-Suite metrics.

Caution, this is not a trivial task. Learning the metrics will take time and effort. Learning how to identify your value and its impact on the most important metrics will become a must have to compete in the future. There are as many as thirty metrics Buyers will use in consideration of a major purchase. At the top of the list is, cash flow, operating costs, DSO’s, Profitability, and earnings. This is a good place to start.

We came across a great web site on financial metrics (C-Suite metrics) norms by industry from Inc. magazine. The web site is http://www.inc.com/profitability-report/index.html. Please note that the data is supplied by Sageworks, Inc., www.sageworksbenchmarking.com. The web site displays financial metric norms for 19 different industries, including mining, construction, retail, and management services, among others. It gives you the normal range for metrics like earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), net and gross margin, debt-to-equity ratio, return on assets, return on equity, and accounts receivable days’ sales outstanding (DSOs). There are about 20 different metrics divided by industry that you can examine for free.

The next change for sales professionals caused by the finance department involved in the strategic buying decisions is the need to be able to communicate with the C-Suite. It is one thing to understand your value, it is another to be able to articulate it. In our example of the fork lift, a mid-level manager and a CFO would have very different views as to why a new fork lift is needed. The mid-level manager would discuss the issue as improving efficiency in their warehouse. i.e.. moving goods quicker and more efficiently around the warehouse. The CFO on the other hand would consider the efficiency improvements, but would want to understand the impact on cash flow, profitability, operating costs, and perhaps corporate growth strategies. The ability to communicate effectively with both positions is a major key to being a successful sales professional.  Sales professionals will need to learn to be a chameleon as they communicate at different levels within a Buyers organization.

In the study conducted by Martin Akel & Associates one of the questions that caused me to realize an additional issue for sales professionals was this. Check the situations that cause your firms finance team to become involved in the vendor selection process.

              “Purchases that affect multiple functional areas or departments” is a result of involving the C-Suite and specifically the finance department. Having finance involved for this reason will cause a sales professional to perform a different deeper research effort. The future Buyer will expect the sales professional to have a global understanding of their needs. If they are expanding or contracting the business for example. Information you can only get from news articles, investor calls or an annual report. The sales professional will need to understand and learn to use research tools like Hoovers (www.hoovers.com), InsideView (www.insideview.com) or ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo.com).

The Buyer is going to rely on the finance department to provide strategic buying input including Return on Investment (ROI), Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and other economic impact indicators. The sales professional on the other hand, will need to learn and understand their value and its impact on these analysis reports provided by the finance professional on the Buyer’s team.

The post Finance departments are getting involved in strategic buying decisions appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.

Six years ago, in the summer of 2008, NYU and Polytechnic University came together to create NYU Poly, NYU’s engineering school in downtown Brooklyn. When I saw the news, I called NYU President John Sexton and asked for a meeting. He agreed and I went down to Washington Square to meet with him. I told him he had just acquired a jewel, but a jewel that had fallen on hard times. I told him he needed to invest in bringing that jewel back to it’s former luster and that if he did, it would be an incredible thing for NYU, for Poly, for Brooklyn, and for NYC. In typical John Sexton fashion, he got up, gave me a big smile and a big hug, and said “I will do it but I need your help”. And that is how I found myself on the board of NYU Poly and NYU.

Here’s the thing I know. Engineering schools and engineering degrees are the most valuable degrees you can issue in higher ed. Here is the data:

You might be surprised to see Stevens Institute and NYU Poly on that list. But I am not. NYC is starved for the kind of technical, quantitative, and analytical minds that engineering schools generate. Combine a big urban center with a top engineering school and you have a recipe to print money. And you have a recipe to change lives. Many of the kids who go to NYU Poly are from immigrant families and are graduates of the NYC public school system. They are smart and work hard. And with an engineering degree and a big city like NYC, they can earn more in a year than their parents earn combined.

The value of a diploma is set by the marketplace, by the laws of supply and demand. There are more technical jobs open than qualified candidates to fill them. It is the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak employment picture. We need to be investing in our engineering schools and we need to be investing in a K-12 education that gets our children ready to go to these schools.

When I am not working at USV and/or hanging out with friends and family, I am working on this problem. It is an important one. I plan to post more on this topic in the coming weeks. I have been looking at enrollment data and we are seeing some really interesting things. It is very encouraging and exciting to me.

Mindfulness has become almost a buzz-word. But what is it, really? Mindfulness is, quite simply, the skill of being present and aware, moment by moment, regardless of circumstances.

For instance, researchers have found that mindfulness can reprogram the brain to be more rational and less emotional. When faced with a decision, meditators showed increased activity in the posterior insula of the brain, which has been linked to rational decision making. This allowed them to make decisions based more on fact than emotion. This is good news since other research has found that reasoning is actually suffused with emotion. Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive and negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds. We push threatening information away and hold friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators but to data itself.

In order to reap the benefits of mindfulness, there are specific techniques that you can practice to improve your skills. You may have heard about a mindfulness-enhancing technique where you sit in stillness and practice meditating for a period of time before going about the rest of your day. This is definitely valuable. But I have a bias for being able to practice mindfulness all day, in every circumstance. In essence, you start living all of life mindfully and over time there is no distinction between your formal practice and making a presentation, negotiating a deal, driving your car, working out, or playing a round of golf.

Try a technique I call “micro meditations.” These are meditations that can be done several times a day for 1-3 minutes at a time. Periodically throughout the day, become aware of your breath. It could be when you feel yourself beginning to become stressed or overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time, or perhaps when you feel yourself becoming increasingly distracted and agitated.

In becoming aware of the breath, notice how you are breathing. Is it shallow or deep? Are you holding your breath and in so doing perhaps also holding your stomach? Or hunching your shoulders?

The next step is to start breathing so that you are bringing the breath into the belly. Do not strain. If it feels too unnatural to breathe into the belly, then perhaps bring the breath down to the lower chest. If the mind wanders, gently come back to the breath — without judging yourself for momentarily losing focus.

You will notice that by regularly practicing this micro-meditation you will become more aware and more calm. By practicing this regularly you will train yourself to be more and more mindful, and increasingly calm and focused. You can create reminders for yourself to practice these meditations two-to-four times a day; every hour or so; or before you go to a meeting — whatever is feasible. You can also use them on an ad-hoc basis to prepare for a meeting or a presentation, when you are stressed, or when multi-tasking is eroding your concentration.  Micro-meditations can put you back on track, an help you develop your mindfulness muscle.

A second technique I use is “mindfulness in action.” Instead of adding a new routine to your day, you just experience your day a little differently by paying attention in a particular way, for seconds at a time.

For instance, if you have ever found yourself in a meeting and suddenly noticed that you missed what was just said or that you were “somewhere else” for the last few minutes, chances are you stopped listening. You could have been thinking about your next meeting or everything on your to do list, or perhaps you just zoned out or were focused on an incoming text message. This is incredibly common. Unfortunately, it is the cause of huge misunderstandings, missed opportunities and wasted time.

When in a meeting, try, to the best of your ability, to only listen for seconds at a time. This is harder than it sounds, but with practice you will be able to do listen  continuously, without a break in concentration. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered, come right back to listening to the voice that is speaking. You may have to come back dozens of times in a single meeting. That is extremely common; we don’t actually realize how often the mind wanders. Always bring yourself back gently and with patience. All you are doing is training the mind to be right here, right now.

These techniques quite literally train the mind and rewire the brain. And as a result, three critical things happen. First, your ability to concentrate increases. Second, you see things with increasing clarity, which improves your judgment. And third, you develop equanimity. Equanimity enables you to reduce your physiological and emotional stress and enhances the chances that you may find a creative solution.

Practicing mindfulness – and reaping its benefits – doesn’t need to be a large time commitment or require special training. You can start right now – this moment.

Why content marketing?

Content marketing is the new SEO — for the most part. That means, getting found online, even getting your ads to show up on the first page, relies heavily on content marketing. Content marketing also develops your reputation and gives buyers a reason for choosing YOU over your competitors.

Content marketing, when effectively tied to a sound Social Media Marketing strategy (SMM), develops a buzz about your brand, gains recommendations that REALLY influence buyers (buyers increasingly ignore brand messaging in favor of even strangers’ brand recommendations), and develops your brand’s personality.

Lessons from the content marketing periodic table

Setting priorities

Just like advice for shopping your local grocery store to buy the healthiest foods, cruise the perimeter of the periodic table and get that right before you jump into the center containing less healthy, but really tasty prepared foods.

That means spending a LOT of time developing your content marketing strategy and setting goals for your content marketing. I know. It’s more fun to start hangin’ with your peeps on Facebook or Tweeting out stuff. But, without an overarching strategy, you’re wasting your time and MONEY.

As an example, I recently took on a new client who’d spent a lot of money on Facebook advertising. I forced him to take a step back to focus on goals and strategies to achieve those goals and STOPPED his Facebook advertising. He was really unhappy because he’d developed a strong group of Facebook fans and felt scared about changing.

Changing your social media strategy isn’t fun and it isn’t fast. It’s like changing the course of a ship in the middle of the ocean and we know how well that worked when the Titanic encountered an unexpected iceberg. But, the client eventually realized their expensive efforts on Facebook weren’t getting them any closer to their overarching goals.

Now, a couple of months into the strategy reset, we’re focusing on corporate goals with our content marketing strategy. We’re now curating content as well as creating more content designed to reach goals. The biggest change has been in the advertising strategy on Facebook where we’re now focusing advertising dollars on activities that reach our goals. Rather than just creating ads, we’re targeting them to folks our analytics tell us are engaging in behaviors that reach our goals — like becoming members — rather than simply expanding the fan base.

In fact, analytics showed us the majority of existing fans DIDN’T help us reach our goals. That’s required an overhaul in our strategies for gaining new followers. There’s lots more to do, but the clients now sees the value of prioritizing efforts to focus on strategy and goals first.

Creating great content

Across the bottom, you’ll find critical elements about creating great content.

Ask yourself, what interests you when see content online?

You want something representing value — something entertaining, informative, interesting, or something that solves your problem. Creating content that’s boring, poorly written, superficial, lacks research and insights, ugly … doesn’t help your brand image. So, spend some time crafting your content marketing to give readers something they’ll value.

And, don’t talk about your brand. No one wants to hear how wonderful you are.

But, great content doesn’t just serve up value to your community. It has to think about on page SEO, research and crediting other sources of information, formatting to make the post appealing (adding images and chunking text to make it more scanable), headline optimization (and calls to action, if used), and finally thinking about device optimization — will your content look good when visitors use a mobile device, tablet, and desktop computer.

If you’re an ecommerce site, visitors likely use multiple devices before consummating a sale. You’ll need to ensure the experience is not only optimized for each individual device, but that the devices work well together — creating a seamless experience for connected consumers.

Measure, analyze, decide

Wow, what a good title for a book — in fact, I have a book with that title and you can grab the introduction and 1st chapter here.

Continuing our trip around the perimeter of the periodic table of content marketing — let’s look at metrics.

A few words about what you measure — tie it to your goals!

Now, back to our regularly scheduled message –

How do you measure? Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Pinterest Insights, Twitter Analytics, …

I monitor clients’ analytics EVERY DAY. More importantly, when I see an anomaly or when we’ve tried something new, I investigate the metrics to understand WHY we achieved a certain value and what the value means for our future plans.

Thus, we complete the chain of measuring results, analyzing the whys, and finally deciding how results impact our future plans.

What to write about?

Anyone who’s stared at a blank piece of paper — today a blank screen — knows how hard it is to create content on a consistent basis. Creating a content marketing calendar helps a lot.

You can create content on how-tos, surveys, lists, demonstrations, expert advice, and lots of other options exist for creating great content. In my own unscientific observation, demonstrations, how-tos, and lists tend to have legs — meaning they get picked up by other websites more frequently. So do infographics, obviously.

Reading widely really helps. I spend hours a day reading both posts and news related to social media and marketing in general and trending topics so I keep up with what the rest of the world is up to. I set up a Feedly feed containing feeds from some really great colleagues.

Headlines are critical, as they’re what shows up in search and when you share on social networks. So, is using subtle forms of influence.

One thing to think about is repurposing your existing content. This really helps with being consistent. If you do a webinar, repurpose it on your blog. If you do a presentation, share on Slideshare and on your blog. Sometimes I’ll take a blog and create a video using the same information. Another good option is to package a bunch of related blog posts together to create an ebook on the topic — check out my content marketing ebook.

The inside

Inside the content marketing periodic table we find all the tactical elements of content marketing — using platforms and actually writing/creating content. Here you need very specific skills — writing, graphic design, video editing, photography … A good agency or content marketing department contains individuals with these skills who work closely in teams.

Community Managers, who create and curate content using a content marketing calendar developed between the Account Executive (who also monitor analytics), Community Manager and the client, manage content marketing. Community Managers coordinate other assets, such as videos, podcasts, infographics and graphics with the creative department; detailing needs and setting deadlines to ensure the content is complete based on the content marketing calendar. Community Managers research and write content, curate content, share content, and manage engagement on various social platforms. For more sophisticated clients, content goes through an editor.

Critical elements involve knowing how various social platforms work and knowing which types of posts work best on each platform. Inside the periodic table of content marketing also involves developing insights about your target market (personas), especially understanding how your target market responds to influence efforts.

An alternative

Now, I really like the look and interpretation of the periodic table of content marketing, but I created my own infographic a few years ago containing many of the same elements.

Here it is: (I’d love to hear your feedback)

Elements of successful social media marketing

I want to thank Chris Lake at eConsultancy for creating this incredible infographic on content marketing — select the image to make it bigger.

Last week I wrote about the big picture of what it would take to attract 1,000 leads, both the philosophy and structure of what would create the attraction. I also talked about all the research I did to find “the best time” to tweet, re-tweet, post, and take other social actions in order to get the full measure of exposure. Turns out no one really knows the best time. Pretty interesting.

CLARIFICATION of purpose and process:

THE WHY: These messages, promotions, and solicitations will be used to attract people interested in becoming Gitomer Certified Advisors. Certified Advisors will be able to use, teach, and resell my classroom and online offerings.

THE SYMPHONY: We are going to use all our social media sites and outlets, in harmony, to achieve this objective and strategic plan. In order to do so, I must message all of my LinkedIn connections, Twitter and Facebook followers, blog subscribers, e-zine subscribers, and YouTube subscribers. From there, I am going to send out a master email every week with the subject line “Build your own or expand your existing sales training business.” This same message contained in the email will be broadcast worldwide through all of my other social media and Internet sources.  

Based on that information, and the fact that I am all about value-based (non advertising) messages, tweets, and posts, the campaign will take place “at random” until we discover the best times and places to elicit response.

Luckily we’re in the age of data analytics, so it should be a relatively easy task to see what comes from where, and when. It will not be a 100% accurate evaluation, but over a short period of time we’ll be able to take smarter (analyzed) guesses.

WHAT’S IN THIS FOR YOU? As you read (hopefully study) our plan of action, see which elements you might be able to use to build your own lead-generating program. For me, this will be the measure of how valuable my social media time investment has been. What could it be for you?

Achieving 1,000 leads will be an amazing return.  

Here’s the detailed outreach game plan:

Strategic E-Blast. An initial mailing to my entire list on a Wednesday morning. Thereafter on the following Monday. And 11 days later on a Friday. This gives me maximum penetration of my own list. The email will link to my promo video and information site (gitomercertifiedadvisors.com). The copy in the email will be short and sweet. It will make NO promises other than “start or build your own sales training business using my material and my brand.”

• Facebook posts on both my personal and business page. We will link the post to our informational video promo, and offer a value message rather than an ad. It will be a message based on better presentations or better selling. It will ask questions and create a desire to find out more. When they click the link, there will be no registration barriers whatsoever. 
• Facebook testimonial posts from existing advisors. Both video and text. This will authenticate my requests, and make interested people less reluctant to respond.
• Daily tweets with varying messages. All with a shortened link to take the interested people right to my info site. No barriers to the information.
• Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter ads that will target similar sites and messages. That’s right, you can put target ads on the competition’s social media pages. Love it.
• A small but targeted LinkedIn ad campaign. Similar to the ads on my competition’s pages, but intended to reach people based on background and title.
• Daily LinkedIn messaging to my entire group of 19,000+ connections. Sending them a link, requesting they take a look AND make their contacts aware of the opportunity.
• Targeted LinkedIn messaging. Searching for people with training, sales management, and coaching backgrounds and inviting them to “take a look.”
• Several short YouTube information videos in addition to my existing ones. They will be loaded with keywords and hash tags. 
• Blog posts twice a week with information on how to be a better sales trainer or coach. Value-based information with an ability to click for more information.
• Weekly e-zine ads and informational tips. Similar to the blog, my weekly e-zine, Sales Caffeine, will feature training tips and a “for info on how to become a Gitomer Certified Advisor and build your business using my name, my brand and my material,” click here button.

THE EXPECTED RESULTS: A steady flow of semi-qualified incoming leads who will discover our team of knowledgeable, friendly people who can convert them to happy, enthusiastic buyers.

THE PLATFORM IS THE MEDIUM: The reason I’m able to attract anyone to my message is because I have (slowly) built a solid platform of customers and followers. So can you. I started with ONE. Pretty low number. So can you. 

Study my sites and follow my results. Those lessons will teach you the real law of attraction: VALUE ATTRACTION.

If you’d like to see the exact email and subject line I’m using, and links to all my social sites, go to www.gitomer.com and enter the word ADVISOR in the GitBit box.

One of the most daunting tasks for any new business is developing a marketing analytics model that can scale and grow with the company.  

With a fast-growing startup, the value of every marketing decision, from website design to content creation to attending conferences, is critical. 

Individual startups will have differing needs dependant on various factors. However, we found that there were five key points that helped us to successfully grow our strategy with the business as we went from 10 people to more than 100.

1. Think about the bigger picture. Profit, not cost

On average, the sales cycle for enterprise software companies ranges from two to 12 months, making the role of consistent marketing more valuable than ever.

Marketers need to work more creatively to keep prospects interested until they’re ready to buy.

We found that controlling churn is critical and should be looked at on an aggregate level (percentage of overall customers and associated revenue loss), as well as an account level (product downgrades, reduction in users or licenses).

2. Be relentless about organisation

Make sure that metrics-driven marketing is a habit. The first step is to define the marketing channels and programs that generate leads for your company, whether that’s inbound marketing, conferences or outbound marketing – diligently categorise them into your CRM and marketing software.

Step two is to optimise your website. Ensure that landing pages and forms are accurately tagged to capture leads from each channel and program.

NewsCred's homepage

3. Use metrics to matchup your sales and marketing

Most companies have a system in place for tracking top line metrics – traffic, engagement and conversions – but rarely delve deeper than this.

We use an analytics system that is a collaborative process between marketing and sales. This keeps the two teams glued together with singular goals, rather than working in silos. 

4. Obsess over data (but not too much)

Simple analytics frameworks provide an easy way to compare progress over time. We always ask ourselves a few consistent questions: What marketing channel is performing the best, and why?

What trends have we seen monthly and quarterly, by channel? Are there any red flags we should be reacting to? This keeps us close to any changes, big or small, month on month.

5. Experiment. When something works, go big

Every quarter, we would experiment with a new demand generation channel such as LinkedIn, trying native advertising or seeking sponsorships.

Once we’d figured out what we were going to invest in, we set up an analytics model to make it easier to compare and assess results based on the quality of the leads generated and how quickly these leads become opportunities. When you find a channel that works, invest more. 

Some things can’t (and shouldn’t) be quantified on such a minute level. It’s important that you keep yourself honest and look at the big picture.

Take a step back and ask: What does the market really say about our company? How does our brand awareness rank compared to our competitors? What do I want to improve?

Most often, a mix of intellectual curiosity, creativity and analytics will lead you to the right answer.

In the long run, setting a strong data-driven foundation has the potential to really pay off for startups. It gave NewsCred the creative and financial flexibility to take bigger risks.

We soon learnt to adapt to trends. It helped guide our hiring decisions and team structure. Most importantly, it will help to build a metrics-driven culture that will allow your company to grow.

Luke Bencie is the Managing Director of Security Management International, a global security consulting firm.

The ongoing tiff between the U.S. and China over economic espionage activities took an unexpected turn recently, with New York Times revealing alleged spying by the U.S. on Huawei. The Chinese company, which had been blocked by the U.S. government from acquiring companies in the United States due to security concerns, was itself reportedly being targeted by the U.S. intelligence community. 

Most experts still agree, though, that the Chinese are winning the industrial espionage game. According to the FBI, since 2008, economic espionage arrests have doubled, indictments have increased five-fold, and convictions have risen eightfold.  Many of these cases include a Chinese nexus.

There are three primary reasons that we don't hear more about corporate espionage: First, because businesses often don’t realize they’ve been compromised. Second, if they do find out, a public announcement would be counterproductive, eroding investor confidence. Finally, industrial espionage works both ways — companies may keep compromises quiet to preserve their own business intelligence gathering activities.

Here are five ways Beijing is still eating America’s economic lunch: 

Buying Trade Secrets:  Earlier this month, naturalized Chinese American Walter Liew was found guilty of 20 criminal counts, including industrial espionage and theft of trade secrets.  Liew was hired by a state-owned company in China to buy trade secrets pertaining to the production of chloride-route titanium dioxide from an American engineer employed by DuPont.  Liew convinced the engineer to make copies of over 400 pages of secret documents and to provide photographs of restricted DuPont facilities.  Liew and his wife were paid over $12,000,000 by the Chinese company, which in turn got access to technology that DuPont refused to license. 

Digging Up Dirt, Literally:  In 2011, a farmer spotted two men rooting around in his field.  When he approached them, the Chinese men seemed at a loss for what to say, and when the farmer turned away to make a phone call they sped off in their car.  After more than a year of investigation by the FBI, five Chinese men were charged with stealing — from DuPont as well as Monsanto and LG Seeds — a special strain of corn.  The FBI alleges the men tried to “covertly transfer the inbred seed to China,” with a resulting estimated loss to the US company of $30 to $40 million.  All five were employees of a seed company based in Beijing.  They are currently awaiting trial.

Employee Poaching:  In mid-2013, the Department of Justice handed down an indictment against Chinese company Sinovel Wind Group for stealing the source code for wind power generators from Wisconsin-based manufacturer ASMC, resulting in an alleged loss of more than $800 million.  The indictment alleges that Sinovel’s head of R&D and one of his employees recruited a Serbian employee of ASMC’s European subsidiary to leave ASMC and secretly download the source code for ASMC’s “Low Voltage Ride Through” software from a computer in Wisconsin.  Sinovel reportedly offered the Serbian employee double his ASMC salary, more than $280,000 per year.

Classified Ads:  In 2012, a classified ad ran in the Sedalia Democrat (from the small town of Sedalia, Missouri) looking for a Pittsburgh Corning employee to help build a foam glass plant in China; an FBI informant with experience in the industry responded to the ad.  When the informant met with Chinese nationals Ji Li Huang and Xiao Guang Qi, the two men promised to pay for documents the informant would steal from the glass plant pertaining to methods for manufacturing insulated storage tanks for natural gas.  They offered the informant a total of $100,000 for information that a court later ruled could result in economic damage to the company of more than $7 million.  Both men pled guilty. 

Cyber Theft:  China has developed a justly deserved reputation for cyber theft of secrets.  In one of the most damaging cases, hackers stole technical documents from a variety of different defense contractors that allowed the Chinese military to produce a fighter jet with many features strikingly similar to those found on America’s new F-35 fighter.  The Chinese government was thus able to reduce its R&D time and save massive amounts of money catching up with American military capabilities.  The information was acquired by a Chinese military unit called the “Technical Reconnaissance Bureau,” which passed it to the state-run Aviation Industry Corporation, which manufactured the Chinese aircraft.  Also compromised were technical documents relating to the new Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missile defense system. 

SEE ALSO: America Is Basically Helpless Against The Chinese Hackers

Join the conversation about this story »

From content writing to website building to social media promoting, the art of brand storytelling has become a crucial element in the success of a marketing campaign.

And while there may be hundreds of ways brands can uniquely portray their story in the digital space, one visual trend that is continuing to grow in popularity is the art of stop motion filmmaking.

Through the quick combination of a series of photos, stop motion videos have provided brands with the ability to show off their creative side while creating engaging pieces of content.

And while not all brands have yet to hop on the stop motion bandwagon, there are many that have chosen to lead the animated movement:

But as with most marketing trends, stop motion has received it’s fair share of critics as well.

Will stop motion video continue to be an important visual asset to brands, or is it just another trend that’s ready to hit its expiration date? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Above: King's Bubble Witch Saga mobile game, which it will keep open.

Image Credit: King

Tech stocks are looking like 1999-style bubble again, according to a story by Jeff Sommer in the New York Times.

Rental middleman Airbnb is valued at $10 billion, or more than the Hyatt hotel chain. King Digital Entertainment went public on a $7 billion valuation on the strength of a single game, Candy Crush Saga. That’s almost as much as Electronic Arts, which has been making video games since 1982. Facebook’s valuation has exceeded $150 billion, making it easy for the company to spend $2 billion on virtual reality firm Oculus VR. The New York Times concluded that this is all a bunch of hot air.

So just how should you play your own hand in this bubble?

Gadget columnist Farhad Manjoo answered that question. In a column for the New York Times, Manjoo said that the bubble’s silver lining is that it has created cheap services for everyone. Box has filed for an initial public offering and revealed that it spent $257 million in 2013 and only took in $124 million.

Yet the company has given away free cloud storage services to its 25 million users over the past couple of years. That has created a bubble in the minds of many people, one that is sure to have a bad ending. But Manjoo argued that consumers could make out in the short run. As long as you aren’t foolish enough to invest in the companies inflating the bubble, you can benefit by taking advantage of the cheap services being offered.

Manjoo pointed out this trend is playing out across a range of industries including information technology services, communications, media, payments, local delivery, and electronic commerce. I would add to that free-to-play mobile and online games, where users can play for free and pay real money for virtual goods.

In theory, the revenues from those who pay make up for those who don’t.

“If investors and acquirers keep throwing money into tech — at companies from Box to Dropbox to Square to Uber to Whats App to Postmates and more — we’ll get more great products at low prices,” Manjoo said. “So long as you don’t make the mistake of investing in dubious tech dreams, you may be able to ride ou the bubble to some pretty great swag.”

Once again, like in 1999, we’re in an age where many businesses see growth as more important than profit. And the companies that are driving the prices for services lower are forcing others to match their strategies. Google recently cut the price of its online storage from $49.99 a month to $9.99 a month for a terabyte of storage.

The data centers that house these services are getting cheaper, as Moore’s Law (the notion that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years) has a deflationary effect on costs. But are the costs really falling that low, or are companies trying to outrun competitors with predatory pricing practices? It’s happened before in many markets, and it eventually runs its course once a bubble pops.

In some cases, you’ll find that it’s the giant tech companies that make their money in some other way that are leading the charge for cheap services in one category, since they make their profits in another. But in other cases, it’s the startups who are trying to disrupt established businesses.

Sommer’s story concluded hopefully, noting that the earnings of large tech companies are far ahead of the vaporous earnings of tech startups in 2000 when the last bubble popped.

The trick, with any bubble, is to not get caught holding the bag.

As with many things in digital, there's always someone proclaiming the imminent death of email.

Its 'killers' are said to include social media, instant messaging, and spam. However, it's still here, it works, and we can prove it. 

According to our Email Marketing Industry Census 2014 sponsored by Adestra, revenue from email has increased proportionately by 28% in one year. 

Forget the naysayers, email marketing was ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment, with 68% of companies rating the channel as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.

This marks a 3% increase since last year, while the previously highest ranked digital marketing channel, search engine optimisation, dropped 8%, possibly due to the effect of ‘not provided' keyword data.

Q: How do you rate the following channels in terms of return on investment? (company respondents)

Marketers are also gaining more revenue from their email marketing efforts.

On average, companies are attributing 23% of their total sales to the email marketing channel, compared to 18% in 2013. This equates to a proportionate rise of 28% in just one year.

Two years ago, nearly half of respondents attributed less than 10% of their total sales to email marketing. This year, that figure has dropped to 39%, a 19% drop in two years.

By comparison, nearly a quarter (24%) of respondents attribute 30% or more of their sales to email marketing, up from 18% two years ago. 

Q: Approximately what proportion of your total sales can you attribute to the email marketing channel? 

However, companies are spending just 16% of their marketing budget on email.

According to Adestra Director Steve Denner:

Yet again we can see that email is an extraordinary channel for delivering ROI. The danger for buyers of marketing technology is that they increase spend on email assuming continued growth in return. The danger for vendors is that they attempt to capture a greater proportion of the budgets available without providing real return.

Email generates fantastic results for those who are making the time to adapt their marketing practice to the changing expectations of their customers.

One proven way to boost ROI is to make use of functions such as personalization, automation, dynamic content and mobile optimization. The report shows that there is a trend where email ROI increases markedly with increased use of email platform functionality.  

Above: The Handshake iPad app.

Image Credit: Handshake

With $8 million in the bank from Emergence Capital, New York-based Handshake is expanding beyond its original focus — mobile order management for sales reps — to make wholesale buying and selling feel more like shopping online.

According to Handshake chief executive Glen Coates, the buying and selling process between brands and retail stores is begging for innovation.

“If a retail store sells out of their last stroller, right now that store would probably send their salesperson an email, or give them a call, and ask if they can order another one if it’s in stock. They’d check if it’s in stock, say yes, and then the person on that phone would type the order into an accounting system.

We’d like to give people operating retail stores a user experience closer to what you’d get as a consumer.”

Back in 2010, Handshake set out to replace the outdated clipboards, fax machines, and spreadsheets salespeople use with iPad and iPhone apps. As we’ve said before, this is about as B2B as a company can get. But even with an enterprise focus, Handshake is taking its consumer-inspired push seriously; not long after the raise, the company even hired a consumer app designer to lead its design team.

Coates plans to round out Handshake with a stronger Web presence and expand the company’s sales team. “We’re a mobile-first company. It really made sense to start there,” said Coates. “But, we don’t want to be a mobile-only company.”

The competition

In Coates’ eyes, Handshake has a wide-open opportunity to drastically improve the buying and selling experience. Unlike Joor, a competitor that specifically targets the fashion industry, Handshake isn’t building a massive marketplace for users. Coates says Handshake will also remain vertical-agnostic.

According to Coates, the wholesale market has incredible potential: “Even Nike only sells 17% of its revenue direct to consumer. The vast majority of brand revenue comes from wholesale.”

Having Emergence as a lead investor certainly counts as a vote of confidence. The investment firm’s portfolio includes the likes of Box, Salesforce, and Microsoft-owned Yammer.

Keeping sales human

If successful, Handshake runs the risk of modernizing the traditional sales industry out of antiquated jobs. Coates says Handshake “is not about cutting people out of the mix. It’s about letting them spend time on the human stuff, and letting machines do the robot stuff.”

Like most tech companies, Handshake’s bread and butter is process improvement. Instead of monitoring phones and fax machines, Handshake hopes to enable salespeople to focus on relationships, and help buyers stock their shelves as efficiently as possible.

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“Until today, no dedicated marketplace existed for companies to hire big data experts for their short-term projects. Experfy is here to fundamentally disrupt the dominance of large consulting firms by providing quick access to the most prestigious analytics talent. Our experts will transform big data problems, across industries, and turn them into solutions.”-Harpreet Singh, PhD, Co-Founder, Experfy

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 31, 2014–

Experfy, innovating at the Harvard Innovation Lab, announced today that it has launched a paradigm-changing, online marketplace that will allow industry leaders to solve their “big data” talent needs. Enterprises now have a central platform for on-demand hiring of vetted experts with algorithmic skills and domain knowledge, primarily for short-term projects related to data, analytics and business intelligence.

CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO

“What was missing from the big data consulting industry was a bidding platform like Experfy, that is driven by a fair and balanced approach, where both sides-clients and providers-are winners in the end. Whether a company has a short-term project need or is looking to augment its existing team, Experfy, with its fully-vetted experts, enables companies to hire on-demand, thereby giving them unparalleled value for their money,” said Sarabjot Kaur, Co-Founder, Experfy. “Our data experts have the ability to deploy advanced analytical skills coupled with deep domain knowledge to solve complex business problems. Whether it is minimizing risk, simplifying supply chains or identifying new channels of growth, Experfy will be the trusted intermediary for hiring data, analytics and business intelligence talent.”

Along with individual experts, Experfy has also signed up smaller companies to provide reliable and cost-effective consulting for data, analytics and business intelligence projects. Experfy’s enterprise-ready dashboard provides collaboration tools to manage agreements, team members, project milestones, timesheets, payments and expert ratings.

Gordon Jones, Managing Director of the Harvard Innovation Lab said, “Experfy is just one example of the many cutting-edge technology ventures that incubate at the Harvard Innovation Lab. It is exciting to see this team launching an innovative marketplace for experts with deep technical skills and insights to tackle complex business challenges put forward by companies eager to gain an information advantage.”

Experfy has also partnered with Project Starfish, an international business development group with a learning and opportunity platform for talented, unemployed blind individuals, to help with lead generation, data mining, market research and social media promotion. Subhashish Acharya, founder of Project Starfish, said “The business relationship with Harvard i-Lab start-up Experfy stands as a model of corporate social responsibility that should be adopted worldwide.”

About Experfy

Experfy is a consulting marketplace where enterprises hire big data experts and vendors for their data, analytics and business intelligence projects on-demand. Experfy brings together the world’s most prestigious data and analytics talent that not only possesses technical skills but also deep domain expertise. Experfy is based in the Harvard Innovation Lab.

About Harvard Innovation Lab

The Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) is a Harvard University initiative fostering team-based and entrepreneurial activities among Harvard students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and members of the Allston and Greater Boston community. The i-lab encourages entrepreneurship and innovation across the University, bringing together many cross-curricular interests, including students from Harvard Business School, Harvard College, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and Harvard School of Public Health.

About Project Starfish

Project Starfish is an international business development group with a learning and opportunity platform for talented blind individuals. Project Starfish seeks to lower the unemployment (above 70%) rate among the adult blind population. Its “shared service” model allows emerging and start-up companies to share talented resources from an amazing talent pool of blind individuals who are virtually available and work on-demand, to help grow their business. Project Starfish offers support in marketing, sales, social media, business research, customer support, content writing and operations.

Experfy
Harpreet Singh, PhD, 617-642-5833
Co-Founder
or
Sarabjot Kaur, 617-642-5769
Co-Founder

Customer service has always been and will continue to be a driving factor for all entrepreneurs, freelancers and business owners. Without the customer, you don’t have a business so you had better be damn sure you are listening and understanding their needs because if you aren’t, your competitor is. You have the opportunity of creating a brand advocate OR a vocal, viral monster who will inform the world about your lack of service and attentiveness.

Merely satisfying customers will not be enough to earn their loyalty. Instead, they must experience exceptional service worthy of their repeat business and referral. Understand the factors that drive this customer revolution. Rick Tate

Delivering the desirable and effective customer experience is an ongoing process and should extend beyond the close. Don’t let it stop there. You have earned an interested buyer and as in any successful relationship, the attentiveness to caring should not end simply because you sealed the deal. You should always be thinking of the small touches, the nuances and added service to continue to nurture your client. Think long-term partnership.

According to The 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer:

• Social Media Savvy Consumers Have High Expectations: They’ll Spend More When They Get Good Service and Ditch Companies When They Don’t
• More Than Eight in Ten of These Consumers Have Bailed on a Purchase Because of a Poor Service Experience Compared to 55% Overall
• Nine in ten of Americans surveyed (93%) say that companies fail to exceed their service expectations.
• Americans will tell an average of 15 people about positive experiences – up 67% from 9 last year
• Americans will tell an average of 24 people about poor experiences – up 50% from 16 in 2011

Social Media Raises the Stakes for Service (infographic)

Customer satisfaction is your competitive advantage: use it or lose it.

Providing quality unsurpassed service should be as simple as treating others the way you want to be treated. It seems so simple yet many companies fall short of this basic premise. The Golden Rule is your Midas Touch.

Think of a time when you didn’t receive the service you expected:

• How did it make you feel?
• Did you reach out to customer service?
• What method (s) did you use to tell your story?
• Was your issue satisfactorily resolved?
• Did you share your experience with others?
• Would you use this company again?

Create a CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE that infuses:

• Satisfaction in your products and services
• Comfort that they know you care
• Assurance that their issues are heard and respected
• Security in believing in your company
• Trust in your pledge to them
• Loyalty to your brand and values
• Confidence that you will go the extra mile
• Reliance that your team wants to ensure 100% customer satisfaction

When you are able to serve and deliver, you will generate not only happy customers, but brand advocates; the cornerstone of your success because it isn’t just your widgets that open the door. Build your company around real promises, outcomes and solutions to build the trust of your buyers and potential customers. Your business can’t survive online without the trust from your consumers; earn the trust and loyalty of your audience; your community. Cultivate your relationships through authentic communications and reliability. Your network is always looking for validation to ensure that a potential partnership or connection is dependable, trustworthy and “real.” Remove the feeling of vulnerability and risk of doing business with someone behind a keyboard. Read about the 10 Tips to Build Trust Online.

Trust removes fear, doubt, and friction. It dislodges things that are stuck. If you want to help your dream client make change, work first on winning the battle for trust. Anthony Iannarino

How do you create the best ongoing customer experience?

Once called the “ugly duckling of social media”, rising stock prices, an active community, a lucrative advertising platform and a heavy focus on content have made LinkedIn into one of the most attractive platforms for b2b marketers today. (Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Content Marketing client)

In a fast paced, entertaining and metal-infused presentation (the Kiss army appeared on several slides), Jason Miller of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions showed off the compelling opportunities which LinkedIn offers to marketers and businesses at Social Media Marketing World 2014.

If you haven’t taken advantage of the awesome marketing power of LinkedIn for your business, there has never been a better time to start. Here’s how:

1. Establish an Optimized Presence

It all starts with your brand page. Given the huge adoption of LinkedIn within the business community, there’s a good chance people are already researching your company on LinkedIn, so it’s important to make sure that your page makes a good impression.

Some key areas of your business page are:

• Images
• Profile copy
• Products / Services

Similar to your website, you should be including your target keywords throughout your copy to make sure it’s visible for relevant concepts. You should also be linking to your other social channels and company site to drive referral traffic.

For inspiration, check out the great company pages maintained by Capital One, Marketo, or Secret Deodorant.

2. Attract a Following

The key to growing your following on LinkedIn is to provide value to the community. Regularly posting interesting and useful content is a great way to do this, but you should also be interacting with others content. Don’t treat LinkedIn simply as a broadcast media channel by only talking about yourself.

Another excellent opportunity to grow your audience is to create one or more LinkedIn groups. Many brands such as Hubspot have grown very active LinkedIn groups which are paying huge dividends in terms of brand exposure, market research, and the opportunity to engage with their target audience in a very natural and helpful way.

However, before starting a LinkedIn group, it’s important to consider:

• Resources: growing and maintaining an effective LinkedIn group requires dedicated community management to ensure the conversation stays relevant, avoids painting the brand in a bad way and doesn’t turn into a ghost town.
• Message: with some exceptions, the most successful brand owned LinkedIn groups are those that avoid being overly sales focused. Answering questions, providing insights, and engaging in conversations are what LinkedIn members join groups for, not hearing sales pitches. Members who find your group useful, fun and engaging will find their way to your brand page or website on their own when the time is right.

3. Empower Advocates

In traditional media, brand content is broadcast to an audience. In social media, content is broadcast to an audience who also has an audience. By engaging with the right people in social, brands are able to achieve much greater reach through exposure to audiences outside their immediate circles. This kind of marketing is hard to put a price on.

The key is finding advocates who not only know and love your brand, but who will amplify your content to their circles on their own volition. The best place for any business to start looking for brand advocates is under their own roof. Happy employees can be your best brand advocates.

In order to see the benefits of social advocacy, brands need to empower their advocates to freely spread the message, which means being comfortable giving up some control, but the potential gain in audience size and sentiment makes it well worth the compromise.

4. Amplify Through Paid Promotion

For brands looking to achieve more amplification to their presence or generate leads, LinkedIn advertising is worth looking into.

The keys to effective LinkedIn advertising are:

• Targeting: LinkedIn advertising provides a multitude of flexible targeting options, from very broad to uber-specific, including by region, industry, title, company or group.
• Compelling offer: always keep your audience at the forefront of your mind when planning out your Linkedin advertising offers. Meatier content like whitepapers or Ebooks tend to do well with the LinkedIn community.
• Testing: you should always be testing variations of your ad copy, imagery, fulfilment, targeting options and bids. Minor tweaks can make a big difference in impressions, clicks and conversions, and regularly testing variations will help you get the most value from your ad spend.

5. Analyze and Refine

LinkedIn has powerful analytics capabilities built into the platform, including their recently launched Content Marketing Score and Trending Content reports, which together help to quantify the impact of your content across areas of LinkedIn (groups, influencer posts, sponsored updates, etc), rank you against competitors and show which topics are resonating with specific audiences.

Those are all extremely valuable insights that can help you:

• Optimize your content plan for maximum relevance to your audience
• Identify areas of LinkedIn which you should be spending more effort
• Benchmark your performance and find areas for improvement
• Measure and optimize your competitive advantage

In the ultra-competitive world of digital marketing, if you’re not consistently improving, you are falling behind, so make sure to always be monitoring your performance and finding opportunities to optimize.

Brands such as Adobe, HubSpot and Social Media Examiner are investing in their presence on LinkedIn and are seeing huge returns, and all businesses should be taking notice.

How are you utilizing LinkedIn in your digital marketing strategy?

You can connect with TopRank Online Marketing on LinkedIn here.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2014. | 5 LinkedIn Marketing Tips That Rock from Jason Miller of LinkedIn #SMMW14 | http://www.toprankblog.com

In reading many of the blogs and listening to some of the webinars and speeches that have been given about Demand Generation one would think that the path to Demand Generation is just a few simple step away. I once heard at a conference one of the speakers tell a room full of marketers “all you need is the desire to want to make it better, and you will.” Really?

Is success in today’s ever changing B2B buying environment really just a matter of want to? Is success on impacting pipeline and generating demand really just a few simple steps away? Listening to some of the noise that is out there, it seems Demand Generation success can be bought via an infomercial where if you buy now, you will get an extra Shamwow® with your order.

Despite the information that is being peddled by some, all indications would say that what marketers are facing today is a pretty tough climb. Take a look at the following:

According to the Duke Fuqua School of Business:

• Only 35.7% of CMOs feel that they can prove the short-term impact of marketing spend quantitatively
• Even fewer 28.6% – can prove the long-term impact on a quantitative basis

According to IBM:

• 52% of CMOs state they are unprepared for the expected level of complexity over the next five years

According to Sirius Decisions:

• 75% of marketing automation adopters claim they’re not receiving full value from it
• Less than 10% of organizations are deploying marketing automation tools to address programs later in the buying cycle
• 62% of marketing automation owners state that the use of technology did not equate to an increase in sales.

It is time to come to grips with reality and understand that given the ever-increasing complexity of B2B buyers and the pressures on B2B marketing and sales people, that success will not be achieved in a 7-Step Get Well Plan or a series of half-day workshops. Success in today’s environment needs a purposeful and balanced approach to organizational transformation.

This kind of needed transformation starts with a “bottoms up approach” that drives effectual change – See Figure 1. The change begins with an entry point or a pilot program focus on a line of business or specific audience segment. Defining that audience – understanding the various roles involved in the buying process, the market conditions, their path through the buying process and content consumption patterns – this is just the beginning. Once you have documented and have these buyer insights, the real work begins:

- Developing the Content Marketing Architecture that aligns to each step in the buyer’s journey. This includes developing content that can both educate and qualify

- Implementing a Lead Management Framework to ensure leads are qualified and routed appropriately

- Organizing marketing and sales in a way that aligns to the buyers purchase path rather than the siloed approach that exists today in many environments

- Establishing technology and data governance that will enable the strategy – versus expecting the technology to be the tip of the spear in driving change

- Establishing KPIs for program measurement and using that analysis to optimize the program

Figure 1: ANNUITAS Demand Process Architecture

This is the beginning of change, as the results of this program will greatly inform of the other organizational and strategic changes that need to occur. However, this will supply a methodology and process, which can then be replicated across the business to help drive further change and approaches to Demand Generation.

The world of B2B marketing is hard enough, let’s not make it any harder by sugar coating it and stating that Demand Generation success can be found by following a step-by-step plan. This kind of transformation is a process that will have success along the way, but does take time, a new approach and a new way of thinking.

Lead Scoring is about much more than numbers!

I can’t lie.  I hear the term lead scoring and part of my mathematically-averse brain shuts down a little.  I picture millions of numbers scattered across spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet.  I envision quiet drones sitting in a cold quiet room…counting.  It intimidates me.

However, recently I had an internal conversation about lead scoring and it’s relationship to sales and marketing, and it opened my eyes.  While the numbers involved in lead scoring are absolutely the nuts and bolts of the process, the tools you use throughout can pull valuable and qualitative data that can be used across your organization – rich data that can help determine if you are properly allocating marketing dollars, delivering digestible content, and engaging your audiences.

Organizations everywhere are constantly tasked with making decisions regarding participation in endeavors that sound like they MAY be worthwhile.  The problem is that many times, there is not an objective system in place to qualify the return on those decisions.  You need a system of checks and balances. One that will help determine effectiveness of your efforts and provide insight on where you should focus attention in terms of generating new leads that could be cultivated into lasting relationships.

There are essentially five steps to revamping your approach to lead scoring to garner more value and long-term success.

1) Look at your current practices under a microscope. Where are the holes? What needs to be patched?  Assess your process from beginning to end, looking at elements like expectations, reporting, cadence and more.

2) Lose the silos and compartmentalization and adopt a seamless approach with open communication throughout.

3) Hone in on which assets are engaging your audience.  Do they like white papers, infographics, emails, case studies, landing pages, etc.?  What drives them to answer your call to action?

4) Create cohesion between sales and marketing. Both teams need to be strategically aligned and running for the same finish line.  Encourage collaborative planning and visibility between the two departments.

5) Make sure everyone gets it.  Rather than having a peripheral understanding of each other’s roles, everyone needs to have a deeper, more complete comprehension. Both teams needed to fulfill their responsibilities, while understanding the impact of the other’s, and then how it all relates to the big picture.

In November of 2013, a SiriusDecisions Webinar called Marketing and Sales Operations: Cementing the Relationship, explored the challenges of a siloed work environment and talked about bringing the silos together to function as a whole.  It discussed the need to gain insight into the notoriously weak areas between sales and marketing, particularly lead management.

The theme was to maintain alignment to ensure a strong connection. By involving everyone in a new process as it is happening, you will strengthen buy in and the team’s vested interested in what happens moving forward.  The end result, in addition to a stronger lead gen program is a greater sense of accountability and ownership across the company.

Finding new prospects and engaging them isn’t always a linear process. Nowadays, sales teams have a number of channels and tools at their disposal for reaching out to and monitoring hot leads or prospects—at every stage of their journey. One of those tools is content.

Salespeople can use content distribution channels like social media and blog feeds to discover and track new potential customers, start or continue conversations, tailor relevant content, and add value outside of traditional sales channels.

How, exactly? Here are some steps that sales can take to be seen as a thought leader.

Create Twitter Lists

Twitter is one of the largest and most readily available listening tools on the internet. It’s a great way not only to track what people are saying about your brand, but also to search for and reach out to your prospects.

By going to search.twitter.com, you can identify the conversations happening both in your network and outside of your network on Twitter that are relevant to your vertical or industry.

Twitter also allows you to create Twitter lists, which an be private or public, to track potential sales opportunities or conversations happening in real-time with the people you place on these lists. More on interacting with these people below.

Follow Blog Feeds

Another way to stay on top of industry conversations and content is to subscribe to your prospects’ blog. While one of the main purposes of every good business blog is to provide value and address the needs of potential customers, a prospect’s needs and pain points can also be revealed in the content they choose to publish.

Studying the kind of content that your prospects are producing to see where you could potentially add value is a fantastic opportunity to delight them. Staying up to date on their blog will also show them you’ve done your homework and care enough to invest time in understanding their business.

Join the Social Conversations

Once you learn how to identify conversations on social media and blogs, you can start participating in them. If there is a Google Hangout, Twitter conversation, or webinar happening that you found through your research, take part in that conversation. Add value like you would during a sales call, ask questions, and nurture these potential relationships with your prospects. Joining a Linkedin Group is another great way to engage and add value.

While engaging in conversations online can be a great way to kick off an an initial conversation with a potential customer, don’t come on too strong with your sales pitch. The goal is to be seen as a thought leader and industry expert. If you jump to the sales messages too soon, you risk compromising the relationship.

As modern-day sales professionals, you have a broad range of social networks, tools, and opportunities accessible for free. The barriers of developing relationships with potential customers is no longer limited by the “who you know” mantra or by how persistent you are with cold calling every day.

Being able to find, track, and infiltrate the conversations that are pertinent to your sales objectives is an essential skill that anyone with an internet connection can master.

You know it….but you’re not sure why

“What is happening…is not a wakeup call precisely but a tugging at the attention, a demand to focus.” Peggy Noonan

At some level you recognize that your B2B sales & marketing effort isn’t working the way it needs to.  The acid test, revenue, is probably the prime tip off.  But there’s more.  Competition seems more virulent and pervasive; margins are compressed; pipelines look like the python that swallowed a rat; and sales cycles are no longer predictable.

Further, while you’re not hesitant to invest in marketing, you’re loathe to simply throw money at poorly defined problems, when there’s no discernible ROI.

It’s a disorienting feeling – to recognize, at least in your gut, that there’s a problem but not really know how to fix it.

You keep returning to it….trying to tweak it

So you do what’s worked for the past 10 or 20 or 50 or 78 years of history in your company.  You tweak the sales & marketing machine.  In the words of Lowe’s Kyle Nel, speaking at the Neuromarketing World Forum, you “are just improving and not innovating.”  And in a B2B world where the “rate of change is now ‘exponential’” that’s a predictably unsuccessful approach.

But improvement is an entirely understandable response.  Most B2B companies approach business (internally and as they fit into their customers’ operation) with an incremental, continuous improvement mentality.  Whether it’s making the basic better, or the cool even ‘awesomer’, it’s the same incremental approach.

And when the basic strategy is working, it’s perfect.  Keep refining and modifying looking for opportunities for improvement.

But that’s not your problem, is it?  The basic business development strategy isn’t working – at least not well enough to generate abundant sales qualified leads; growing revenue with stable margins; predictable growth for operational planning; collegial commercial banking relationships; increasing enterprise valuation for your exit; or internal growth opportunities for young talent.

So is tweaking the answer?

Most people you talk to in B2B manufacturing face the same challenge

But is it even clear that you have a problem?  What if what you’ve got is just the new normal?  After all, most of your peers are probably facing essentially identical challenges.

So are stagnating sales, margin pressure, increased competition and unpredictable project cycles simply a fact of life today like the vacation email tether?

“Yes”, or “no”, you’re right.  Because your outlook and expectation will be baked into your approach – and therefore will predict the outcome.

But before you groan “I knew it” ask yourself one question.  Seriously, honestly, introspectively (on an early Saturday morning when you have a cup of coffee and a clear mind)….

“When did I last buy something in the way that we are trying to sell to others?”

It’s fixable…if you’re adaptable

My strong suspicion?  At least a decade ago.  You’re not buying based on cold calls.  You might find intriguing ideas at trade shows or in magazine ads which you then research further.  And you probably rely on referrals from peers and professional advisors, and even your independent research online (looking for solutions to problems.)  And you probably aren’t interested in wasting time with a sales rep until you’re getting close to actually doing something.  (The statistics say you’re 70% of the way through your sales process!)

Guess what?  As much as we each yearn to be unique, we’re also each part of an environment that shapes us.  And each of your prospective customers is shaped by the same environment – a hyper digital world of constrained time and money resources.

So doesn’t it stand to reason that your prospects are buying like you do today – not the way you all did 15 years ago?

And how do you define your prospects anyway?  By some general industry classification or arbitrary geographical boundary, or with a nuanced understanding of the value your products can create for them and their lifetime value to your company?

Your company can achieve substantial growth if you’re willing (really, gut level, not proforma lip service) to embrace new approaches and opportunities.  Digital marketing (done right, with measurable ROI and best practices – not just sexy design or hocus pocus SEO) will power a sales qualified lead engine where you previously found only frustration.  Dynamic global markets, selected based on criteria around your product and goals (not mindlessly chasing plunging into the BRICs), offer green field opportunities.

Are you open to change and growth?  Tired of that ‘tugging at your attention’?  Check out our approach to business development for B2B manufacturers in today’s market environment.

image credit here, here & here

Some sales people thrive on the stress of an incoming deadline and it’s a skill that can take one to higher positions in business. But for others, particularly those at the bottom, stress at work may have harmful effects. How do you manage your lead generation campaign to benefit either one? Answer: Watch for the signs.

Stress can sometimes be a contributing factor to health issues like clogged arteries, (alongside smoking and lack of exercise). On the other hand, stress also releases adrenalin, the so-called fight or flight hormone. This causes the heart to pump blood faster for dealing with a problem.

But if, for instance, the heart has a restricted blood supply, it may be unable to cope with the demands of a given situation.

And while it’s not believed to be a direct cause of heart disease, it can lead people to adopt unhealthy lifestyles. The symptoms of which include:

• Shorter lunch breaks
• Eating too much ‘instant’ food
• Other unhealthy addictions

These symptoms are one reason why you should evaluate the stress-related behavior of your salespeople and adjust your lead generators accordingly.

What to do:

Make an effective deadline by breaking down what needs to done. You can use it by organizing lead information into an easy-to-read format like a list, a profile, etc. That way they’ll spend less time sitting in front of the computer because information is more organized (and less overwhelming). It also makes it easier to review in case your sales rep wants to make some changes to their meeting plan.

To meet a deadline, they also need to plan according to the amount of time available. Some would like their sales work quick but it’s best to actually divide your work in chunks of least several hours a day. It builds a habit of effectively working towards a deadline and actually getting things done.

What to avoid:

Have you ever tried putting pressure on yourself to get some work done only to fill yourself with more angst? Too much pressure and guilt produces less than what’s necessary because of mental distractions and negative thoughts.

A deadline is supposed to help your reps kick things in gear. But if they just pick a random date, while having lost all incentive for that appointment, then you’re wasting the resources of your lead generators. Too much focus too much on getting things done instead of getting things right might not prove as efficient as you believe.

There is value in giving them time to think. It might look like they’re putting off new leads but they might end up with a fresh new perspective once they do. The quality of the work is more important than the deadline.

It can be easy to think of a landing page as nothing more than a tool to tie up all the loose ends of a marketing campaign. But it plays a much more important role in the grand scheme of converting prospects to sales revenue. When a unique landing page is carefully designed to offer engaging, campaign-specific content, website visitors are more likely to turn into qualified leads, phone calls and sales. In fact:

• Companies with 40 or more landing pages generate 12 times more leads compared to companies with five or less landing pages (HubSpot)
• Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more leads compared to companies with 10 or less landing pages (HubSpot)
• 64% of marketers say landing pages are the most effective way to test value proposition (Marketing Sherpa)
• Yet, only 13% of marketers consider their landing page optimization strategies as “very successful” (Asend2)

Let’s breakdown the basic anatomy of the perfect landing page and see how your pages measure up in comparison. Starting at the top…

1. Headline

When a visitor clicks on a link and is transported to a landing page, what is presented must be concise and engaging. This starts off with an eye-grabbing headline that should be short and sweet. Think of the landing page headline as an elevator pitch: it must explain the specific product or service at the center of the campaign as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If the headline is the elevator pitch, the subheading should provide follow-up; detailed information that introduces the main benefit of the product or service to the visitor. In the headline and subheading, visitors should have the basic answers to the questions what? and why? for the company’s offerings.

2. Image or Video

Just as the headline should be engaging and informative, so too should the main image or video at the heart of the landing page. Visitors can read through long lists of descriptive text and not fully grasp the concept of the product or service being introduced. With a video explaining the offerings or a detailed image, visitors may have a better understanding of what is available, how it can be applied, or why it is important to business. An image or video should take the place of some of the descriptive text so visitors are provided with both textual and visual explanations in a concise format.

3. Benefits

Once the visitor is engaged, you have a limited amount of time to dig more deeply into the value propositions of the product or service. To introduce the benefits quickly and efficiently, remember the website visitor is scanning the material, not looking to read through paragraphs of information. Thus, a bulleted or numbered list of points should clearly explain the value to the customers without drowning them in content.

4. Call to Action

If all goes according to plan, at this point you may have convinced some visitors to pursue the next steps to acquire product or service introduced. This means there must be a strong call to action made clearly available to encourage the lead through the sales cycle.

A call to action comes in many forms for landing pages. The majority of pages will house a button that leads the visitor to more detailed information, a sales channel, or endpoint. The button should be designed with the key target audience in mind.

Make sure the color, shape, and size of the button helps differentiate the object from the rest of the landing page, without creating too distracting of an image. The call to action copy should be simple yet explain what clicking the button will do for the visitor specifically.

A call to action can also include a standard or click-to-call phone number, especially if being used on a mobile landing page. This functionality will allow visitors to call a company directly for support or sales information from their phone. Call tracking technology can be used to trace all phone calls generated from the landing page. Using a dynamic, trackable number for the call to action, call tracking data provides more complete marketing ROI statistics to guide decision making.

5. Page Fold

As you know, website visitors are scanners with limited attention spans. The average website visitor spends 80% of their time above the fold of their screen. Therefore, the most important components of a landing page should be placed above the page fold, or appear on the main screen without having to scroll down. This means content should be adjusted for mobile devices as well to accommodate a smaller screen.

6. Links

Basic digital marketing 101 teaches us that link building is a key component to online awareness. On a landing page, however, where space is scarce, navigational and link options should be limited. Because the website visitors reaching a landing page have already been targeted, they only need a few link options such as to the main page of the product or service.

7. Description

If there is room for an in-depth description of a product or service, often accompanied by images, how the copy is written is of the utmost importance. Content throughout a website can be descriptive and informative. Content on the landing page, however, should have a stronger message that compels the visitor to take the next steps. Playing off the main call to action, word the longer description with encouraging language and concise directions.

8. Trust Elements

To prove that all the claims made on the landing page are legitimate, most companies choose to add third party verifications to build a sense of trust with the website visitor. Trust elements can come in many forms such as logos of brands using the product or service, security seals to ensure data protection, or testimonials from happy buyers. Because this information should act as the cherry on top of the overall pitch, it can be placed below the fold.

9. Testing Capabilities

You may have completed a landing page for campaign and included all of the above components. But you will not be able to properly gauge the efficacy of the landing page without easy-to-use testing solutions.

Furthermore, if you are struggling to decide which landing page design or copy should be used for the campaign, technology that tests success rates will make the decision for you. Simple A/B testing protocols break down performance and give you hard data on which landing page is your winner.

Google Analytics can monitor website visits sourced from a landing page for direct comparison. Call tracking technology can offer the same reporting capabilities for all leads via the phone. Using these tools together will ensure all leads are reported and the stronger landing page is selected for the campaign. Done and done!

For more information on how to leverage voice-based marketing automation throughout a marketing campaign, check out the “Buyer’s Guide to Call Tracking Software for Marketers.”

Most sales professionals are familiar with the qualifying acronym and methodology called BANT – Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. But there are a few fundamental flaws with BANT. For example, the implication with BANT is that “B” or Budget comes first. However, Need, also known as pain, problem or challenges that the company is facing, is really the first and most important area that sales reps must qualify first before talking about Budgets, Timelines or anything else. On one hand, it’s easy to claim that one can just reorder and call it NATB, since Need comes first, speaking to the right decision-maker is second, then Timing then Budget. But that would not resonate well with your sales team who should be using this daily.

Alternatively, you could think that BANT doesn’t imply that you must always ask for “B” first and you could claim that BANT is merely a reminder and that your sales reps can just start with qualifying for Need (“N”) first. But then why not just have an acronym that is both sequenced correctly and one that implies that if you get it right then you are a deal winner, a rainmaker, a closer, a true sales champion?

So here I’d like to share a modern, new “sales qualification 2.0” approach that, once and for all, can replace the legacy BANT and make all modern sales reps more successful. It is time to adopt a more modern acronym that puts your prospects’ needs first – after all, the modern definition for Inside Sales is helping your prospects – and correctly defines the timeline aspect of qualifying leads.

The modern lead qualification acronym that I advise companies and their Inside Sales teams to use is CHAMP, which stands for CHallenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization.

Let’s go through them one by one. I have included examples of qualifying questions in each category. These questions should be spaced out over the course of several sales meetings throughout the buying process. Don’t ask them all at one meeting – that’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date!

CHallenges

Your prospect buys things because they have a challenge. If you have a solution for the challenges that your prospect and their company are facing then you have a real beginning of an “Opportunity” and some potential to sell to this prospect and account. It is the first fundamental part of sales qualification so it deserves the first spot in the modern sales qualification acronym.  A challenge is a need and a pain that your prospect has been dealing with.  And you need to solve this challenge with your solution – only then you will get a sale.

Asking questions early in the selling cycle like, “What are your business’s biggest challenges that you’re dealing with and how have you been solving them so far?” and “What are your personal challenges when trying to do your job?” help you gain the information you need to understand the nature and scope of the opportunity. In the later stages, these questions help you determine if your product or service represents the best fit for the defined opportunity.

The best way to gain insight on your prospect’s pain or need (i.e. their challenge) is to ask them questions and listen carefully to their answers.

Challenge Questions:

• What challenges is your business facing and what problems do you need to solve?

• What is driving your interest in our solution?

• How long have you had this challenge or problem?  What made you decide to solve this problem now?

• What objectives are you looking to achieve by solving this pain?

• What are the likely consequences if the pain is not solved?

The answers to these questions will enable your sales team to determine whether your product or service is a match for your prospect. You’ll know you’re a match if you believe your product or service will satisfy the prospect’s needs.

Authority

Authority is not a blocker – it’s a call to action. 

It is often the most misunderstood step in the lead qualification process. Many sales reps believe that “Authority” means you should disqualify leads with low-influencing contacts. NOT the case! “Authority” means you must ask your prospect questions that help you map out their company’s organizational structure.

It doesn’t matter if the initial contact on the lead has low authority – they can help you get an idea of who the decision-makers are. Who are the 5 key influencers you need to get in touch with? Are they the CEO, the CFO, the CMO, VP Sales, a Board member, a manager? Your prospect has that valuable insight, and you as a sales rep just need to find out.

Once you know who the decision-makers are, it is your job as a salesperson to reach them. I recommend reading our blog posts on how to turn low-authority contacts into customers and how to get past the gatekeeper and reach decision-makers quickly to learn tips and tactics on reaching high influencers.

Authority Questions:

• Who, in addition to yourself, is involved in making this solution happen at your company?

• How are purchasing decisions made for products like ours and who is involved in looking at this solution?

• Who in addition to yourself is the decision maker with most clout?  And next to that person, who is the next person?  How important is it that they be on board with the decision?

• What concerns do you think they may have? If they have any potential concerns, how do you think we should handle them?

• Would it make sense for us to schedule a call together with them to answer any potential questions they may have?

• Are you comfortable, perhaps prior to our next meeting, if I call (Name of Decision-maker / Influencer) to have a brief conversation? My experience has been that while everyone in the organization is pretty aligned on the needs, typically everyone has got a little bit of a different perspective as to what they are looking for in a solution like this. That way everyone will have input in this. And, by the way, if I get a different perspective from him/her, would you mind if I give you a call?  What I hope is that you all have a consensus as to what the solution should look like for our next meeting. Fair enough?

Money

Money is a critical factor in any buying decision. If your prospect can’t afford your product or service, you won’t be able to sell to them. Once you’ve qualified their challenges and needs, it is time to find out their expectations for the investment they’ll need to make to fulfill these needs. Have they set aside a budget to solve this challenge? If they don’t have the funds now, will they in the future? What else are they spending money on? Now is also a good time to mention the typical ROI for your product or service to remind them why the investment is worth it.

Money Questions:

• What are your expectations for the investment necessary to purchase the solution?

• Do you have a portion of your budget allocated to this?

• Is your finance team or CFO involved in approving this? (Note: While this can come off as an “Authority” type of qualifying question, it is equally indicative of how the budget approval  process works at the company depending on the prospect’s answer)

• What is your typical budget allocation process from when you need to invest in a solution like this that was outside of the original budget?

• When do you plan to ask for budget allocation for this investment?

Prioritization

BANT calls this “Timing”. And timeline is a function of prioritization. When a prospect says they need to solve this problem by their next board meeting in 2 weeks, what they’re really saying is “this is a top priority.” So ask your prospect: how important is solving this problem relative to other priorities? What date or event is their priority attached to (end of month, end of quarter, by a certain event)? Is it a top priority for Q2, or is it a goal they want to solve at some point before the end of the fiscal year? If they don’t need a solution until the end of 2014, that means it is in a queue of other priorities. Find out what they are to get an idea of your prospect’s business plan.

Prioritization Questions:

• Do you currently have a contract? If so, when is it due for renewal? Is there a cancellation fee?

• When were you planning on starting the implementation?

• So when is the latest when you would want to make a decision? So you wanna have a decision made no later than 2 months. And ideally, when would prefer to get this done?

• So what’s a realistic kind of timeframe that we should be targeting here? When would you like to have have the problem solved?

• How important is this to you and where does this stack up in terms of priority and urgency? What are some of the other priorities now?

• Do you have the time and bandwidth to begin implementation now?

• Would you like to hear about how other people I’ve worked with have implemented plans like these? (If they are interested then it indicates that this is important and high on the list of priority and timeline)

Prioritization can also be related to how you are ranked relative to your competition. Here are questions that will help you find out:

• Are you looking at or evaluating any other similar solutions to help you solve the problem?

• Where do we stack up in terms of functionality and pricing when compared to these other solutions you’ve been looking at?

• What is your relationship like with your current vendor? (If they have one)

Final thoughts

Asking these CHAMP questions and listening closely is the key to correctly qualifying your opportunities. If you don’t ask questions with genuine interest while actively listening, then you will not successfully qualify them.

Don’t forget that after you go through your CHAMP list and qualify, you should always have next steps. Here are a few last questions that will help you with that:

• Do you have a calendar and what is the best date and time to schedule our next meeting?

• Ideally, what would be the focus of our next meeting?

• What would be the best way to get to you everything that you may need such as customer references and other information about the solution as a right fit for you and so you feel comfortable making the decision in the timeframe that you mentioned?

If you take anything away from this article, it is that discovering your prospects’ challenges and needs should take priority over any other qualification questions. And the other questions, when they flow in the right order, will help each one of your reps to become a Champ if they use the CHAMP methodology!

Marketers are increasingly faced with the challenge of proving the monetary value of social media marketing to the C-suite. Since social media is typically less of a sales tool and more of a means of nurturing new leads and maintaining a relationship with current customers, putting a price tag on social media can be a difficult thing to do.

The C-Suite will always be concerned with profit, so it’s imperative that marketers can either prove that social media is making their brand money by generating new leads or saving their brand money though customer retention.

Nick Robinson of SAP, Scott Gulbransen of DSI (formerly of H&R Block) and Lewis Bertolucci of Humana were all faced with the challenge of measuring social media ROI for their respective companies. At Social Media Marketing World, these big-brand marketers shared their secrets for measuring social media ROI in a session moderated by social ROI expert Nichole Kelly:

Why Do You Think Social ROI Is So Important For Marketers?

Lewis: We have to prove social ROI in order to get budget dollars.

Nick: We found that it was useful to think like a start-up: make a business case for why the C-suite should fund social media.

Scott: It’s important to show how social media is able to provide value to your organization. Get over the hump of being afraid of social ROI because you’re not new to social media anymore. You shouldn’t have a budget unless you can get results; do this by aligning social media with business objections.

What Challenges Did You Face When Trying to Measure Social Media ROI?

Nick:  One of our key challenges was that we were dealing with fragmented data systems that didn’t talk to each other or integrate with social media. We also struggled to find talent that understood social media, data analytics and CRM. At first, it was hard to find staff that was both socially and technically savvy.

Scott: Education was our biggest hurdle. We found that you have to teach people about social media on an on-going basis. Since hard metrics are sometimes difficult to quantify, we learned how to frame softer measurements because they’re still important. We experienced success when we lined our KPIs up with business objectives. It’s important to think like a C-level executive, not a practitioner.

We discovered that it was really effective to focus on the cost saving value of social media. We often focus on revenue going in but what about saving money? Saving money is just as important to the bottom line as bringing money in. And what about customer retention? It’s less expensive and easier to retain customers than it is to create new customers.

Customers want brands to provide them with customer support on social media sites. If you understand how to related to and help the customers, you will keep them longer. When we starting thinking about social media ROI, we realized that we need to service customers where they want to be serviced. That’s why H&R Block provides direct, private customer service through a Facebook app. Twitter has also helped us “save” frustrated customers. Retention and customer interaction is key to increasing social ROI.

Lewis: It was hard to know where to start and what to measure when we first starting measuring social ROI. We experienced success when we were able to align business objectives with key metrics.

We also learned that it’s important to speak in the language of the C-Suite: talk to the C-suite in dollars and cents not fans and followers. Talk about awareness, exposure and virality. Translate reach into something quantifiable like cost per impression. Make it simple: present the top three most important metrics to the C-suite and tie the metrics back to whatever’s most important to your company. You should also set expectations for your social media program: what did you try to achieve and have you made progress?

What Are The Top 3 Data Points That You Measure?

Lewis: Cost per impression and cost per conversion are the two main metrics that we measure because we want to know how we’re impacting awareness. We also want to know how social is influencing the customer journey and where the social touch points occur along the marketing funnel.

Nick: We measure cost per impression, cost per engagement, pipeline touch, and response time. We regularly send the C-suite a simple report and only show them detailed statistics if they have questions. We found that it was best to make the report simple and easy for people to digest.

Scott: We primarily measure social ROI by net promoter score and customer satisfaction score. (Net Promoter Score, or NPS is how likely are you to refer our company on a scale from 1 to 10.)

We measure NPS because the top of funnel stuff is squishier. The metaphor that we use is that we want to use social media to pass the customer the ball so that they can pass it through the funnel. We also want to know where the customer first touched us in their conversion journey and track them all the way through.

What Changed When You Started Showing the C-Suite Numbers?

Scott: People either became believers and wanted to start to participating in social media or felt threatened by the new opportunities that social brought us to connect with customers. This experience showed us that the more people in your organization who support social, the better. Everyone in the organization should play a part in owning social.

Nick: The moment we first measured social touch along the pipeline was the moment the sales team got on board. We found that the sales team was just as hard to convince as the C-suite. We experienced success when we were able to show how social media affects the sales pipeline.

Lewis: We found that social media marketing is about evolution, not revolution. We use our analytics to discover how we can better use social media. We also found that soft metrics are important even if they’re not profit driven.

What Attribution Models Have You Used?

Lewis: We found that the first touch model is better than the last touch model. The first touch model shows that if we hand the ball off, the lead can make a slam dunk. We also track third party clicks and integrate them into our CRM. Doing this allowed us to discover that engaged social users have a 300% higher MPS (motivating potential score) than non-social users.

Nick: We look at all of the touch points in a customer’s CRM record and a mixed media model helps us craft budget recommendations. We learned that you have to get the data right or you’ll have an incorrect budget forecast.

Scott: We prefer to measure first touch, but the C-suite always wants to see last touch. We found that you have to create your own mixed media model. Start by learning what attribution is and why it’s important to your brand.

What do you think about Facebook Decreasing Reach for Fans of Brand Pages?

Scott: Go somewhere else if Facebook isn’t the right thing for their business. Spend some time deciding which channels are right for your business and best align with your KPIs. Social media marketing is all about understanding your customers.

Nick: We know what channels drive results for us and we’ve seen our customers move from Facebook to LinkedIn. I recommend that you collect data before making spending decisions or choosing which social channels to focus on.

Lewis: Diversify! Facebook isn’t the only social platform out there. What about communities, forums or internal social media platforms? It’s time to become a social business. Start with social internally and grow out from there.

Are you satisfied with how your brand measures social media ROI? What metrics to you think are most important and what analytics tools do you use? Let’s keep the discussion going in the comments below.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2014. | Measuring Social Media ROI – Brands Pull Back the Curtain at #SMMW14 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Lead generation teleprospecting is the art of acquiring sales-ready leads for a sales staff.

When it comes to communicating an organization’s value and credibility, asking the right questions and relieving any anxiety is key to a campaign’s success.

Consequently, wouldn’t it make sense to test and optimize this process?

After all, the knowledge you acquire can be applied to several facets of your marketing efforts, including what you emphasize online.

My goal for today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post is to hopefully influence your approach to lead generation with a few insights that you can use to determine where to find the most improvement in your teleprospecting efforts.

Do you deliver value and mitigate anxiety?

The first thing to consider when launching a lead gen teleprospecting campaign is to make sure that your value and anxiety relief efforts are geared toward your target market.

In fact, a lead generation Research Partner of ours at MECLABS wanted to discover new strategies to increase engagement and encourage deeper conversation. As a result, we ran a test and came away with a discovery and a lift.

Company: A large, well-known insurance carrier.

Goal: To increase the number of lead responses to a scripted voicemail.

Primary Research Question: Which voicemail script will generate the most lead responses?

Approach: A/B single factor split test

In Treatment A, the focus was on building trust by mentioning the size of the company as the fifth largest carrier.

In Treatment B, the focus was on sharing valuable information that is not nationally advertised.

Results

Treatment B was the winner, resulting in a 30.8% lift over Treatment A and in attaining broker information from the decision-maker at an 88% level of confidence.

Although 88% is not ideal compared against the common standard of a 95% level of confidence, you always have to consider the best approach to validity starts with understanding your testing circumstances and using the best option available those circumstances will allow.

So why did we see such an increase from making just a few subtle changes?

One hypothesis is in the value proposition of the script itself. Offering exclusivity at the right time to the right person can help your efforts to move from conversation to conversion.

Test phone calls to learn more about your prospects

If you run a teleprospecting campaign, consider testing your approach to acquiring new leads.

You can determine the specific needs of your client or partner, discover future needs or gain access to third-party vendors that can result in more than just one sales-ready lead.

Testing can also lead to a wide variety of discoveries about your ideal prospects and create multiple opportunities that can benefit your marketing efforts beyond the telephone.

You may also like

Email Marketing: Do you test your legacy marketing? [More from the blogs]

Value Proposition: What motivates prospects to buy from you? [More from the blogs]

Marketing Strategy: 3 steps to help optimize website user experience [More from the blogs]

It can be hard to predict what goes through the mind of Internet users. What can you do to appeal to them? In finding a way to generate leads and turn each visitor into a client, companies strive to make their sites more user-friendly, while facilitating the visitor’s attention through the sales funnel. Oftentimes, the answer lies in the content they can offer each visitor. When it comes to content, here are a few frequently asked questions that leave marketers baffled:

• We’ve got great content, but where do we put it to make sure the customers become interested in reading them?

• Should we have a blog within the site or should there be a standalone publication for each blog post? How does this affect the way visitors get exposed to our brand?

• How can I tell which content would lead to buying a particular product?

All of these questions may have different answers, depending on the nature of your product and the type of content you have. But here are some general guidelines that could help convert a one-time visitor to a frequent client:

• Map out your products into a hierarchy where you determine the order that visitors buy certain products. For instance, in the case of a shop for film cameras, the first-time visitor may buy a standard camera. Afterwards, he or she may start choosing different types of film. Then, they may begin browsing through the basic accessories before heading off to the section with more expensive accessories.

• When browsing through free content, the visitor may find his or her way to other parts of the site. It’s important that they are led to parts where the content is relevant to the page they just visited. This flow can be facilitated by sidebar links that say “You may be interested in…” or a popup box where they can see the other material that they may find interesting.

• Sales messages that suggest a purchase may also be put before the visitor while browsing different pages with related content. In the example of the film camera shop, if the visitor reads through a series of articles and blog posts about camera lenses, a sales message about lenses can show up at each page.

• It may seem trivial compared to the actual content of your site, but the overall appearance of your website matters a lot. Your site’s appearance has a great impact on how well you can keep a visitor in your site for long enough to facilitate them through the sales funnel. The visitor’s experience must feel natural, but at the same time it should hint at a purchase in the end. Too many popups, ads and sales pitches may deter the visitor. However, smooth transitions between pages and easy to read content may keep your visitor’s interest.

Generating leads is one thing, but keeping those leads interested in what your site has to offer is another thing. Your content should be able to keep your visitor interested enough to make a sale. But even when they don’t purchase during their first visit, constantly updated and relevant content can keep them coming back for more information until they feel they are ready to order a product.

Clio founders Rian Gauvreau, left, and Jack Newton. (Clio)

The old saw that technology startups in Canada are starved for capital is sounding less true all the time. Last year was a high-water mark for venture capital investment in Canada and the money has kept flowing in 2014. The latest recipient of note is Vancouver-based IT firm Clio, which sewed up $20 million in series C financing last week in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Bessemer Venture Partners.

It’s quite a change from the “financial nuclear winter” Clio faced during its first round of fundraising in 2009, recalls CEO Jack Newton. “Now in 2014 we saw an incredible amount of interest from Tier 1 U.S.-based VCs,” he says. “The round was very competitive.”

The reason for the interest? Clio was first to market with a cloud-based practice-management system for law firms. Until recently, only big firms that could afford the necessary hardware, servers and IT support employed practice-management systems. Even today, only 30% of American lawyers use them. That could be because the legal industry is fragmented and getting more so. Four in five lawyers practice at a firm with 10 lawyers or fewer. Clio attempts to swap the in-house servers for a cloud-based system available for a monthly fee. Among other things, Clio offers an easy way to track billable hours and enables lawyer and client to work literally on the same page.

“We’re aggressively going after what we see as a greenfield opportunity for dominating the cloud-based legal practice-management space,” Newton says. There are competing systems, such as Florida-based Rocket Matter and California-based MyCase. But mostly Clio’s challenge is teaching lawyers who don’t currently use such systems how they can better manage their practice and deliver their services more cost-effectively.

READ: How entrepreneurs are transforming corporate law in Canada

For example, Clio Connect is an online portal through which lawyers operating out of home offices or suburban locations can offer their clients the same services through a “virtual office”—without the time-consuming meetings in the Class-A office space downtown. Now the company is developing mobile features, apps and collaboration tools so lawyers and clients can work together even while they’re on the go.

The other area where the new capital will come in handy is in building out the company’s sales and marketing capacity. Clio opened a sales office in Toronto and a sales and data centre in Dublin last year. It aims to double its staff to 200 in the next 12 months.

Bessemer sees the next big market in software-as-a-service to be in industry-specific applications like Clio. “Increasingly, we see SaaS companies strike gold by providing specialized solutions tailored to a specific vertical rather than going for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ enterprise software,” partner Trevor Oelschig said in a release.

Newton thinks the current flush times for Canadian tech is more than a cyclical wave. “We have seen now a critical mass of companies able to achieve escape velocity in Canada where they’re able to build beyond a $20 million or $30 million company,” he says. Until recently, that would be the point where a startup would typically sell out to a big competitor. “Instead now we see people who are on track to build big, important companies in Canada.”

That phenomenon is self-reinforcing, in that it helps attract talent to Canada and build the workforce and the expertise for the whole industry, Newton adds. “I see this as more of a building trend in Canada that will accelerate over the course of the next five years. I think we’ll be reading more about these financings in the $10-million and $100-million-plus range over the next five years in Canada thanks to those underlying trends.”

The post Vancouver’s Clio leads a wave of startups making big business out of niche software appeared first on Canadian Business.

If you are a marketing manager, or marketing coordinator, chances are you have either lived through having to increase lead generation without an increased marketing budget, OR you are currently having nightmares as to how to make this happen. This post is for those marketing managers who are struggling with finding your way in the marketing night.

The following information is necessary to survive your nightmare. If you want that knot in your stomach to go away – you must get clarity.

1. Get clear on revenue goals and target Buyer Personas

Marketing managers need to have the information that tells them how big (in terms of revenue) their target is and how many of those targets they need to hit in a given period. For example, if the price point of your service (or product) is $100 per month, a marketing manager will need to target a different type of buyer persona compared to a project that is $35,000.

Think of ‘Buyer Personas’ as the person or people who will be making the decision to seek out your services/products and make a buying decision with the financial means to pay. Your marketing needs to make them aware of your offering and engage them in your selling process when they are ready.

2. Understand lead and sales conversion rates

Marketing managers are not selling your services, but good marketing managers know key conversion rates. For example, a good marketing manager would be able to tell you if you brought 1,000 people to your web site about how many of those would convert into Leads, Qualified Leads (marketing conversions) and eventually Customers (sales conversions).

Conversion rates tell a marketing manager how well the marketing and sales engine is running. If conversion rates are low and not generating the volume of sales needed, you need to examine each step of conversion to see what can be fixed or you may need to examine the type of people you are bringing through the process.

Typically, the Internet is the least expensive form of marketing depending on what your business sells.

3. Have some knowledge of which campaigns are converting

There is no silver bullet in marketing and often times it takes trial and error, but once you figure out what works – it may only work for a certain time. Marketing is continuously changing and evolving – the bull’s-eye on the target for marketing is always moving.

So, since one marketing campaign is not going to get you all that you need for any length of time, a marketing manager might have 5-25 campaigns going at any given time of year. Running marketing campaigns without having the systems in place to measure conversion rates for those campaigns is like building a house without a level or nails. Not good.

You might also find that not one single campaign can be attributed to the end sales conversion. A new customer might tell you that they saw your web site, heard you on the radio and received a postcard in the mail. Don’t worry, just attribute the conversion to the last piece of marketing they saw.

4. Establish proper marketing investment and be clear on what you are getting

To make this simple, a full marketing team like Fannit that costs $3,500 or more per month ($42,000 per year) should have the following roles being played.

• Marketing Manager
• SEO/SEM Analyst
• Content Writer/Editor
• Social Promoter
• Paid Advertising Manager
• Designer
• Brand Manager
• CRM and Systems Manager

If you are currently playing the role of marketing manager, you will want to make sure you have the other roles covered. Your budget should also include marketing automation software, your website, and any other marketing expenses like Google Adwords, print ads, radio, television, direct mail postage and the like.

5. Measure everything, learn and adjust

The most crucial step is making sure you can measure what you’re doing. If you take phone calls, track the calls with services like Call Rail. If you accept emails in forms, make sure you have a back end system that gives you a list of those leads. If you operate a web site measure how the traffic is getting to you (paid search, organic search, direct). Measure everything. If you can’t measure it, you can’t learn from it.

As the following graph by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates, there are plenty of marketing managers out there in the US trying to meet this challenge.

Fannit is committed to helping marketing managers succeed by supporting their marketing efforts in the most cost efficient way we can.

Learning to market effectively and cost efficiently is like any other great skill your business has learned before – make an investment in time, energy, capital and a persistent commitment by those involved to make continuous improvements every step of the way.

Good luck out there marketing managers!

If you’re not using SlideShare in your digital marketing tactical mix, you are missing out. As Todd Wheatland said in his session at #SMMW14, ‘whatever you’re selling, there’s a business case here.’

SlideShare is a fantastic opportunity for marketers and businesses for many reasons, including:

• Huge visibility: over 60 million unique views / month
• Relevant audience: heavily business focused
• Improved search visibility: presentations posted on SlideShare tend to rank high in organic search

Below are 3 tips to help you achieve success in SlideShare:

Optimize Your Content Within SlideShare

Similar to search, great content is a prerequisite, but optimization techniques provide the extra secret sauce that result in improved visibility and views within SlideShare. Because SlideShare content also ranks well in organic search, optimizing is a no brainer. Some key things to think about:

• Keywords: as with search, including keywords which are relevant to your target audience in your title, description, tags, and presentation itself is key to achieving visibility. A great place to start your keyword research is to look at your competitors who have a SlideShare presence to see what they are competing for.

• Aesthetics: The thumbnail image is the first impression people will get of your content, so make sure it’s a good one if you want anyone to click through. Make sure your presentation pages look polished, professional, not too busy with text and represent your brand’s look and feel to the letter. Graphic design not your strong suit? Fear not, for there are plenty of excellent tools that make creating professional quality presentations easy, such as Haiku Deck, Canva and good old PowerPoint.

Promote Your Content Outside of SlideShare

A huge benefit of SlideShare is the flexibility which the format allows for you to promote your content. Embedding Slideshare presentations in external web content couldn’t be easier and the clean, minimally branded look blends well into any blog, website page, or social channel.

Great places to promote your SlideShare content are:

• Blog posts
• Social  messaging
• Resources pages of your website
• As part of promotion for industry events, such as Social Media Marketing World
• Offline via printed versions

Optimize Slideshare Content Across the Sales Cycle

As with any successful content marketing tactic, it’s most effective to create optimized content in multiple formats that speak to each phase of the sales cycle. Say you have a huge, authoritative, extensively researched mega deck that you just know is relevant to your potential customers and will solve all their problems, so you throw it up on SlideShare and wait for the leads to roll in. How could that not work?

Unfortunately, for those unfamiliar with your brand or content, consuming a huge piece like that as the first touch point is asking for more attention than most people will be willing to give until they know you a little better.

In order for your content to be effective in reaching your target audience and resulting in desired outcomes, it’s important to create content that syncs with where they are in the sales cycle: attraction, engagement and conversion.

• Attraction content: short, easy to digest, low barrier to consumption (i.e. no form gating yet)
  • Example: micro-messages such as quotes, industry stats, or images from your slide deck pushed out through social channels, with links to a summary deck.
• Engagement content: longer form, useful content that solves problems, answers questions, provides how-to’s, etc.
• • Example: shorter summary version of your deck, concluding with a call to action to view the full version.
• Conversion content: detailed, product / brand focused, contains direct calls to action (demo / contact / purchase)
  • Example: remember your huge presentation? Now that you have brought people to it via your attraction and engagement tactics, they are now ready to consume it and take action. The final step is bringing them to key conversion areas of your website where they will be ready and willing to fill out your contact form, schedule a demo or buy your widget.

Tricks from the Pros

• Embed social widgets: SlideShare allows for including built in social sharing widgets, which you can add at strategic points throughout your presentations to encourage sharing of micro-messages. For extra credit, include pre-written social messages to help make sharing easy and on-brand.
• Collaborate with influencers: SlideShare presentations are a great format for collaboration with thought leaders in your industry. Not only will you get great contributed content, added perception of authority, but you will have a better chance of getting your content amplified to a much larger audience.
• Include hashtags: a hashtag placed strategically in your presentation title and body can help amplify your content by riding trending topics or starting a conversation when shared.
• Repurpose: if you’re not repurposing your SlideShare content into alternate formats and promoting it across varying channels, you’re not getting the full bang for your buck. If your presentations are high quality, on brand and speak to your customer’s needs, they will play well in many places.
• Try to reach the front page: gracing the front page of SlideShare by becoming a featured presentation of the day means your content will be exposed to an exponentially larger audience. There’s no short cut to achieving this coveted placement, but hopefully the above tips and tricks can give you the extra edge needed to make it.

Are you using SlideShare as part of your digital marketing mix? What are your favorite tips for success?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2014. | SlideShare for Business: Tips and Tricks for Success from #SMMW14 | http://www.toprankblog.com

3.2 billion. That’s how many email accounts there are in the world. Chances are, your customers use email and are part of the 91% of email users who check their email daily.

How can your small business use this marketing platform more effectively? How can you use email to nurture your leads, build brand awareness and ultimately increase your sales conversions?

Email automation.

In this article, I’ll tell what exactly this email automation tactic is, and give you 12 good reasons why your business needs to be using it.

What is Email Automation?

You’ve likely been hearing the terms “email automation” and “marketing automation” a lot lately. Email automation is becoming an integral part of a savvy business’ online marketing campaigns.

Contrary to how it sounds, email automation is about building customer relationships. Through the automation process, you can bring together your customer data and all your marketing channels to build increasingly closer familiarity with your consumer. Email automation can actually be extremely personal – if you do it right.

Email automation campaigns can be as simple or as complex as your business objectives and resources:

• A simple email automation campaign can be made of a few emails that are sent out on a timed basis to everyone who, say, enters your online contest.
• A complex email automation campaign can be comprised of workflow diagrams, with decision matrices based on the actions taken by your prospects. For example, you can set up an automation campaign with the goal of getting a sale of your product. The email path can vary based on whether they download your ebook, click-through to your coupon page, or, say, register to become an exclusive member.

Does My Business Need Email Automation?

Your business needs email automation for dozens of reasons. Ultimately, you need automation to nurture your customer relationships, gain new customer sales and turn your new customers into repeat buyers.

Here are 12 more reasons your small business needs email automation…

1. Nurture your Leads

Email has long been one of the best method to nurture your leads. With an automated campaign, you can send out a series of highly relevant, timely messages that connect with your prospects.

The better you can relate to your customer, the more likely they’ll stay as a customer. And Even better, if you really develop a great relationship, they’re more likely to tell their friends about you too.

Tip: Get your own qualified leads from social media and email-gated landing pages.

2. Send Personalized, One-One Communication

Using a good email automation software and CRM, you can easily personalize your email campaigns.

With Wishpond, for example, it’s very easy to use meta tags to personalize your subject line and email body.

A personalized subject line can increase your open rates by 35% or more. Check out more tips on creating sure-fire email subject lines.

Unlike your social sites, email gives you one-to-one correspondence with your customer. Your message gets delivered directly to them.

3. Reach Your Customer

Speaking of social media, an email automation campaign reaches your customer. We all know that the reach on sites like Facebook is getting lower. With email, you have the control of your reach frequency, and you can be sure that email is going to land directly into your customers inbox.

Twitter is an amazing social site – but let’s face it, most of your Tweets aren’t seen by all of your followers. The same is true for most other platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and even LinkedIn.

4. Email Gets Read and You Get Seen

We all check our emails, just like your customers do. Your emails get read. And even if they’re not opened, your email still gets seen by your prospect.

Every time your email ‘from’ line and subject line is seen, you increase your consumer touchpoints. As a marketer, you know that the more touchpoints you get with a customer, the more likely they are to recognize your brand, remember your name, and buy from you.

5. Easy to Segment and Send Targeted Messages

Studies have shown that segmenting your emails can increase your click-throughs by a whopping 50%.

It pays to setup multiple email automation campaigns, so you can send out highly targeted messages to your demographics.

You could segment your leads by:

• Location (to send info about a local event, promotion, or current events in the geo-location)
• Age (to tone your emails to the age appropriate lingo, or give age related info)
• Interests (to send out automation campaigns relevant to customer likes)
• Gender (to write different email copy, or promote different products)

For example, let’s say you own a beauty salon, and your business is offering a 50% discount for an intro spa treatment. You could segment your emails by gender, and send out a series of targeted messages to connect with your prospects.

6. Streamline Your Sales Funnel

By automating your email campaigns, you make your sales funnel more efficient. You free up your sales team’s time so that they can focus on the quality leads your campaigns nurture.

You can track your click-through rates and other actions customers take when they visit your campaign landing page. Your sales team can then pick the most interested, engaged customers to more easily get the sale.

7. Keeps Your Business Top of Mind

Keeping in contact with your customers means they’ll think of you more often. Email automation campaigns do this.

Send out a triggered, targeted and personalized email automation campaign when someone signs up for an online promotion or other email-gated landing page offer.

You keep connected just when your customer has interacted with you. This deepens your relationship, and keeps your business at the forefront of their mind for a longer time. If you make effective emails to send, you can associate your brand with the positive feelings the customer got when they entered your contest or downloaded your ebook.

Additionally, set up email automation campaigns to keep in touch with your new leads on a daily or weekly basis.

8. It’s Not Expensive

Automating your emails can save your business time and money. That’s what we all want in business, right?

Compared to the costs associated with sending out manual emails, and more antiquated lead nurturing (like those good old cold calls – remember those?), automation campaigns can save you labour, design costs and lots more.

Email doesn’t cost anything to send, either. You might have to spend up to a few hundred dollars a month to use email automation software (your costs are generally based on the complexity of your campaigns, and the number of leads you have). But do a cost/ benefit analysis, and you’ll find the benefits well outweigh the software costs.

9. Reaches Customers on Mobile

Your customers check their email on their phones. Your mobile optimized email campaigns get seen wherever your prospect might be.

Reaching your customer on mobile gives you a huge advantage over your competitors, and gets your email read, clicked-through and converted.

10. Drive traffic to your landing page

You can increase your website traffic through email automation. Create emails that develop trust and deepen brand relationships by inviting your customers to visit you on new landing page campaigns.

For example (after organic search) we’ve found that email marketing is the number two driver of traffic to our ebook pages.

Email works to get people to click-through to your website and to your specific landing pages on your website.

11. Set It and Forget It – Well, Almost

Once you’ve set up a email automation campaign you’ll automatically contact your new leads. It’s kind of super simple.

But you do still need to test your campaigns, through A/B Testing to continually optimize your campaigns.

12. Track and Measure Results

When you’re using email automation software, you can track, measure and improve your campaign returns.

Track your results for Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) such as:

• Delivery rate
• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversions

  

Calculate your ROI, and keep building profits for your business!

Conclusion

Convinced?

Email automation campaigns can be hugely beneficial to your online marketing results. Beat your competition, and try it out before they do!

What do you think? Have you used email automation? What results did you see? What tips can you share?