Misalignment between the Buyers process and the Sellers process is a major issue for today’s sales professional.  Buyers have obviously made significant changes to their process. They have added several steps around the financial impact of a strategic buying decision.  In addition, Buyers have taken into consideration more risk mitigation steps and inserted a lot more time for due diligence. Buyers are simply more careful and more apprehensive when it comes to making strategic buying decisions.

 The problem exists today and will continue and grow in the future. Unless and until Sellers adapt and change their process, there will always be frustration trying to strategize or forecast.  For example, the Buyer performs four steps at the beginning of the sale: Economic impact, buying strategy evaluate options and alternatives, and determine needs. While at the same time, the Seller is either unaware of what is going on, or they are following their standard sales process once they are engaged.  These two options do not align with the Buyer’s ever changing process. The Seller is far behind the Buyer in process flow. Later in the sale the Seller jets ahead of the Buyer by moving to proposal too soon. Remember all issues must be resolved to mitigate risk. Prematurely submitting a proposal or Business Case can be a disaster for a Seller.

Alignment is a key success factor in most sales methodologies too. Sales professionals will need to be aware of the Buyers process and adapt their own process steps to align. Mirror the process when possible. Be sure you perform discovery, presentation and proposal stages at the right times in the Buyers process. Sales tools can ensure this occurs. If you want to change a sales professionals behavior patterns, implement sales tools and mange to the completion. Remember, if you are ahead or behind the Buyer’s process you will likely either lose the opportunity, or be very frustrated trying to understand why they are not making a buying decision or moving forward.

Mis-alignment in the sales process is the cause of many missed forecasts too. Buyers are going to change again and again putting more emphasis on economic impact and risk mitigation causing the Seller to make more adjustments in their research, discovery, and presentation phases of the sale. The lines between theses phases will blur and may go away all together.

The post Are you Aligned with your Buyer? appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.

Are you working endlessly but not accomplishing all you want? Mystified that continuous attention to work is not resulting in satisfactory progress toward your goals? So focused on work that you’re not thinking about or doing much else? If so, you may not be giving your brain the benefit of adequate downtime. A recent article in Scientific American, Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime, summarizes the evidence that “mental breaks increase productivity, replenish attention, solidify memories, and encourage creativity.”

How can hard-working business leaders get the downtime they need? In my executive coaching practice, I help clients reach peak performance by actually doing less work at key times—and by engaging in downtime activities that cutting-edge research shows to be effective in boosting productivity.

Here are five tips for getting downtime so that you can perform better than ever:

DAYDREAM AS OFTEN AS YOU WANT.  Letting your mind wander has significant benefits. Neuroscience research on the brain’s default mode network reveals that the brain is active and productive during states of daydreaming and mind wandering. In an article entitled Rest is Not Idleness, researchers describe evidence that a robust default mode network enhances perception, attention, and cognition. They argue that “constructive internal reflection”— the term they coin for daydreaming and related “rest” states—is essential for learning, problem solving, and goal setting. This may help to explain why some of our best ideas come when we’re in the shower, not sitting at a computer. We can create that shower effect in the workplace by intentionally paying less attention to work and letting our minds wander wherever they please.

STOP PREPARING FOR MEETINGS AND PRESENTATIONS.  Evidence that brain rest is beneficial should have practical implications for how we work. Many of my clients focus intensively (or obsessively) on meetings and presentations they believe can make or break their careers. Drawing on accumulating downtime research, I encourage them to spend less time attending to details of what they’re going to say or put on PowerPoint slides. Instead, I coach them to think about almost anything else as the meeting or presentation approaches. A senior biotech executive in my practice was initially wary of this advice, as he had always entered fits of anxiety as presentations to his executive team approached. When he began to pay less attention to upcoming presentations, his performance improved. And then he gave the presentation of a lifetime—one that was so powerful that it led to a major promotion and to a company-wide shift in how these kinds of presentations are made by everyone across the firm.

SPEND LESS TIME ON KEY DECISIONS.Research shows that we make sounder decisions when we analyze less and empower our subconscious minds to do the heavy lifting.  A 2006 study compared two groups of 40 people who were asked to make a decision about the optimal car to purchase based on specs of several different vehicles. One group spent 4 minutes concentrating exclusively on the task, while the other group spent 4 minutes with the specs while also distracted by solving anagrams. The distracted group made the wiser choices. The researchers observed that “it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing.” As long as the distracting task isn’t too complex, a “deliberation-without-attention” approach can be extremely effective. Always having a crossword puzzle, People magazine, Sudoko book, or other enjoyable distraction nearby can be surprisingly valuable.

BE MORE “MINDFUL” THAN FOCUSED. Research on daydreaming and distractions should prompt us to build such “mindfulness” activities into our work lives. How is that possible? Most of my clients can’t break away from the office and go to a yoga or meditation studio during the workday. But with coaching (plus disciplined practice on their own), they can make real progress in this area. Many of my clients, for example, benefit from periods of rhythmic, controlled breathing for short durations (even a minute or two) while at work. I encourage them to pay close attention to their breathing, purposely slow their respiratory rate, and take deeper and longer breaths. This is a form of “biofeedback,” which research shows is an effective self-management tool in high-stress workplaces.  Another mindfulness strategy is to have a “mantra,” a word or phrase that can foster a meditative state, diminish stress, and foster creativity by giving the brain the rest it craves.

SHORTEN YOUR WORKDAY. Research shows that top performers only work for stretches of 5 hours or less, taking restorative breaks at least every hour. Some employers recognize this fact and give employees adequate time away from narrowly focused work tasks (more should follow suit). In my coaching practice, I work with clients on rigorous “behavioral scheduling” of essential work and non-work tasks, so that they can obtain appropriate downtime. When this approach does not suffice, sometimes I advise my clients to take part or all of a workday off periodically. Under some circumstances, even a sick day may be justified to give the brain some rest. Most of us should reduce our time at work in order to work more effectively.

Compelling new research reveals that “less is more” for human brains—and that mental downtime should be among our highest priorities.  If you aren’t making progress on that to-do list or performing up to the level you need to, just give it a rest.

Whether or not your sales team knows it, conversations they’re having with prospective buyers can spark some of the most effective content marketing material.

But why do these experiences get lost—and wasted—in the day-to-day lives of salespeople and content marketers? Because it’s easy for these two teams to put their heads down, focus on the work at hand, and stay in their silos.

If we want to avoid this common scenario, we must establish systems that allow sales to consistently and clearly express their ideas and findings to the marketing department, who can transform those findings into valuable content.

Here are some easy-to-implement approaches that will ensure the wisdom of the sales team is shared with their marketing counterparts.

1. Share Questions, Comments, and Feedback

Mark Hunter, a sales expert and keynote speaker believes “every question that a customer asks, every objection that a customer has becomes a viable blog post and/or a viable e-book.” In other words, there are no ideas too small, too one-off, or too abstract to be ignored in the content marketing production process.

Sales teams should start a list of ideas based on the questions, comments, and feedback they receive from customers.

Sales teams should start a list of ideas based on the questions, comments, and feedback they receive from customers. This list could be aggregated from the team during regular meetings, or compiled on a collaborative platform, physical or digital. Sales should then share this list with marketing. While it may seem simple, this process can generate some big opportunities.

2. Share Your Content Needs

Sales-focused content ideas are important, but identifying the biggest content trouble-spots is essential. Where does your sales team need the most support? In a specific vertical? On a particular handout? Pointing out missing sales-oriented content will help the marketing team identify gaps, and start allocating resources to fill them.

Encourage your sales colleagues to be proactive. If they notice one piece of content, such as a case-study, list of testimonials, or best practices that works particularly well in a certain vertical, but haven’t seen much of that type of content produced for other verticals, why not request it to be made?

3. Offer To Create Content

There is some merit to the idea that if you want something done right, you might have to do it yourself (for a little while, at least). The sales team, with guidance from their content-centric colleagues, can contribute to the content creation process and provide valuable assets for all stages of the funnel. In doing so, they’ll not only get what they need, but will be building up their own personal brands by contributing to the industry conversation.

How much content a sales team has the capacity to produce will vary from company to company. However, the truth remains that every sales professional wants and needs more great content to help them do their jobs well, whether they know it or not. These solutions can help meet those needs by facilitating a better level of communication between sales and marketing.

In the last several years, social media has evolved from a way that we keep in touch to a way that we do business. The companies responsible for our favorite social networks, for their part, have been pretty good about constantly innovating so that those platforms contain a certain duality: for those who just wish to communicate, they are afforded quick and easy ways to do so. For those who wish to dig deeper and connect with brands and customers, to build business relationships and brand awareness, these sites are constantly improving. One of Twitter’s newer features, Twitter Cards, is a great example of how the process of lead generation is being streamlined through social media.

Following Facebook’s lead, perhaps, Twitter has become much more visual — displaying photos in your feed and creating more aesthetically pleasing profile pages. There’s even been talk that Twitter is testing a new Facebook-inspired profile design. It makes sense, then, that ways of doing business on the platform would also become much more visual. What Twitter has done with its Twitter Cards feature is to take lead generation — something businesses have been doing on Twitter for quite some time — and streamline it, thereby freeing up time and resources to put to use elsewhere (like building those relationships out).

From Twitter’s blog post about Twitter Cards:

You can see here what the Twitter Card looks like. It’s a brief bit of text and a link that will expand the tweet. When it’s expanded, there is an image (helping you to stand apart from other tweets) and a section for blank fields. In this case, that field is simply collecting an email address that will allow the user to quickly join this business’s loyalty rewards program (in fact, Twitter will automatically fill the field with whichever email address is associated with the user’s account — although there may be options in the future to change it). Once that user clicks the submit button (“Join the club!”), he’ll be enrolled in the program without ever having left Twitter.

Easy for the user. What about your business?

If you’re using a CRM solution that allows you to track from Twitter, you can set it up as an endpoint. (More about that in this post from Social Media Examiner.)

If your CRM isn’t currently set up for this (and not to worry, because if it’s not now, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be soon as lead generation techniques such as this one become more prevalent), you can log in and download the info that you’ve received.

So why use Twitter Cards for lead generation?

Ultimately, this is about simplicity — for you and for your customers and prospects. No matter how easy your form on your website may be, many people simply aren’t going to take their attention away from what they’re currently doing to go check it out. If we think (and we usually do — with good reason) that there’s going to be a complicated process involved, we’re just not going to spend the time to find out unless we are already 100% committed. Our attention spans are shrinking. In fact, according to StatisticBrain, the average attention span in 2013 was eight seconds — which is one second less than a goldfish’s attention span. That means you don’t have long at all to capture your target’s attention and keep it.

A Twitter Card will take about 8 seconds (possibly less) to read, expand, and click submit, so it’s perfect for the current state of our attention spans. Then they can continue about their business. Easy for them, and more lead gen for you. Everybody wins.

Looking to get started? Check out NextPrinciples’ Social Lead Management Solution Buyers Guide.

Do you plan to use the Twitter Card feature for lead generation? If you’re already using it, what’s been your experience so far? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

How do buyers check out a professional services firm before purchasing? For ages, the conventional wisdom held steady: references and referrals reigned supreme. But the ready availability of information online has changed the game.

We recently wanted to see how buyers were really learning about providers today…and see if the conventional wisdom still held true. If not, that would mean many professional services were focusing on the wrong marketing priorities — a critical insight for firms looking to build visibility and grow.

The Hinge Research Institute surveyed 1,028 professional services buyers to discover the answers. These buyers purchased services including accounting and finance, marketing and communications, legal, technology, management consulting, and architecture, engineering, and construction.

Our findings? Buyers are checking out providers in some surprising new ways — and many sellers will need to realign their priorities to keep up.

The new age of social media

The top sources of information for buyers were digital: provider websites and Google searches. That’s not necessarily a shock. But the decisive rise of social media stood out:

• 60% of the buyers surveyed turned to social media to evaluate sellers
• In comparison, 55% of buyers spoke with provided references

That’s right. Social media has eclipsed provided references. Yet many professional services providers invest comparably little energy in their social media efforts.

The reference isn’t dead, of course, and isn’t likely to grow irrelevant anytime soon. But firms focusing chiefly on references are missing the bigger picture and missing opportunities. It’s not enough to get a good reference anymore — your expertise needs to be visible online.

Of course, it’s also not enough to know that you need to use social media. Where should you concentrate your efforts? Which social media platforms will represent the best use of your time, and which ones matter less in your marketplace?

You’ll want to take a close look at these questions when you embark on a social media strategy, but our study paints a compelling picture of what works and what doesn’t in the professional services marketplace.

Connections are key

Among respondents who used social media to check out sellers, a whopping 70% used LinkedIn. This makes sense for several reasons.

The professional focus of LinkedIn makes it a natural space for professional information gathering. What’s more, it’s a complex ecosystem of data, offering insight on a provider, the firm’s individual team members, their participation in industry Groups, and more. It also gives buyers an easy way to get in touch with colleagues and other contacts that have experience with a seller.

This density and focus of information explains why LinkedIn is so far ahead of the rest of the pack. Only 5% of respondents used Twitter, and 25% used other platforms like Facebook or Google+.

For sellers looking to understand how buyers evaluate them, the message is clear. You need a thoughtfully diversified strategy, but you don’t need to use a lot of different platforms for the sake of using a lot of different platforms. Find out where buyers are looking — and make sure you’re there. Today, buyers are looking at much more than references. Increasingly, they’re heading to LinkedIn.

Too many brands continue to fail at convincingly placing what they have to offer inside the lives of the people they are trying to reach. A lot of that seems to come down to a simple mis-alignment of priorities: while marketing teams ponder data and speak earnestly about really understanding their buyers as individuals, those interests are not reflected as clearly as they should be in what they end up saying.

Brands often seem most interested in talking about:

• Who they are
• What they sell
• What it retails for
• Their size and geographical spread
• Their ownership
• Who their customers are (usually in demographic terms)
• Their financial performance
• Their innovations/news
• Their CSR and what they sponsor
• Their social media/content marketing initiatives

Contrast that with the priorities that play on the minds of consumers:

• Is the brand desirable both aesthetically and functionally?
• Does the brand’s image and reputation fit with who they are? Is this a brand they will be proud to be seen with?
• Is the brand well made?
• Is it well supported across a range of channels? Can it be easily accessed? Does it respond?
• Is it made by a company that behaves ethically?
• Is the brand interesting? Is it in the news? Do people talk about it?
• Who’s the brand associated with? Who speaks for the brand? Are they someone the buyer admires?
• Is the brand consistent? Do consumers get what they think they’re getting?
• Is it easy to find? Is the choice set manageable and not overly-complicated?
• Is it priced right?

So while companies focus on what they are doing and think about that quantitatively and in terms of deliverables (because that is how they are judged internally), consumers focus on how the brand makes them feel and which of the many brand options available to them feels most like them (because that’s how they make their decisions).

The contrast between marketer and marketed also reveals itself in how consumers feel about brand intrusion into social channels. In an article in Forbes, Avi Dan quotes research from Altimeter stating that 42% of companies considered social media monitoring one of their top three priorities last year. Yet research from JD Power shows that 64% of consumers  insist that they don’t want companies to step in and respond to social comments unprompted but rather only when spoken to.

In short, too many brands are trying too hard to be friendly. The result is an uncomfortable over-familiarity.

The onus in my view is on brands to make a shift to a more human level of interaction with their buyers. It’s not enough for companies to listen and respond to what their research tells them, because in the hands of a major brand that simply becomes another intrusion. To be truly responsive, and not just processive, brands need to find ways of talking to their consumers that are more natural sounding, more personality based, more give-and-take, more intuitive, more versatile. They need to put in place Relationships teams whose role is not to slavishly respond to the analytics but rather to swim deftly in the social tide.

I suspect that’s the real role of social media going forward and that more brands will devolve to using social media this way once they have worked through their instinctive need to sell or talk about themselves. Doing so will require marketers to intrinsically change not just the nature but the speed of relationships. Some are doing so already of course, but my view is that we will see much more convergence of media, entertainment, community building and product in the years ahead. Alongside carefully crafted campaigns designed to instil memories over the longer term brands will need to engage in very short response programs that take place in real time as ideas and mentions ebb and flow as trends. Different conversations, some scheduled, many not, taking place at different times across a finite range of topics.

Interestingly, some brands have chosen never to engage. As Lakshmipathy Bhat observes over at bhatnaturally, Apple has gone out of its way not to involve itself in one-on-one conversations. Instead it has fostered affinity by doing the exact opposite – raising mystique by keeping the walls up. The George Clooney strategy. It’s a reminder that there is room in every market for one player at least to pursue the absolute opposite of what everyone else is fighting about. In a world of clamour, Apple have chosen to shut up, and their customers love them all the more for doing so.

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FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

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Adobe just fired a big shot across the bow of enterprise marketing competitors Salesforce, IBM, and Oracle with a huge update to the Adobe Marketing Cloud that sees major changes to almost all of its components.

The biggest change?

A new common layer, called Core Services, that deeply integrates all six of the company’s marketing solutions in what Adobe says is an unprecedented way that will take the pain of IT integrations away from already-busy marketers.

“We believe this will differentiate one marketing cloud from another,” Adobe VP Suresh Vittal told me in a series of interviews over the past week. “Marketers should not have to deal with the nitty-gritty of integration while they’re integrating … it just takes away from time spent on the customer experience.”

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VB recently studied marketing automation with over 1,000 marketers.
Here’s what we found.

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Adobe’s marketing cloud consists of six sets of marketing functionality.

Adobe Marketing Cloud components

There’s Media Optimizer, which helps brands make the right ad buying decisions and integrate with demand-side ad platforms. There’s Adobe Social, which allows clients to monitor, share, and participate in conversations, and run social media campaigns. There’s Experience Manager, which helps companies build web experiences, manage content, and build communities, and Target, which allows them to personalize those experiences, run multivariate content tests, and automate custom product recommendations. Finally, there’s Campaign, which is marketing automation software that came to Adobe in the Neolane acquisition, and there’s Adobe Analytics, which helps brands understand what’s happening and why, and what to do about it.

All together, it’s a significant set of functionality. And it’s something that 17 of the top 20 online retailers and  major brands like Audi and Lenovo and Intel and Safeway are already using to deliver 460 billion assets and complete over 18 trillion digital transactions annually.

Core Services

But now, with Core Services, Adobe is taking away complexity and integration challenges. Not at the software level — that’s already integrated — but at the data and marketing campaign level.

“Competitors are forcing marketers to deal with integration, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Vittal told me. “Core Services includes things like our Master Marketing Profile, a one-of-a-kind in the industry which helps marketers harmonize their customers into one single actionable view.”

The key idea behind Core Services is that datasets you create or campaigns you define once, anywhere in any of the six major Adobe Marketing Cloud tools, are available everywhere, instantly.

For example, if you find in Adobe Analytics that people who visit your top five product pages are the most likely to buy, Adobe Campaign picks that up “auto-magically,” Vittal says, and allows you to create an email program, a personalized direct mail coupon, or a mobile app experience that is built just for that set of people. Adobe Target picks up that segmentation and can run A/B tests to determine just the right offers and just the right language. And a new Shared Assets functionality allows brands to sync, store, find, and use digital assets all throughout the six cloud tools.

“The audience is created once in any of the solutions,” Vittal says. “And then integrated across the cloud to create actionable views of the customer.”

Enterprise marketing clouds from competitors certainly allow their clients to integrate customer data, but don’t provide as clean and simple a set of tools that automatically sense campaigns, segmentations, and assets like Core Services promises to do.

Adobe will announce these changes at its Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City today, but there are many more.

In addition to Core Services, Adobe is releasing Marketing Mix Planning, a tool that promises to give CMOs direct, clear insight into exactly how each of their marketing channels is performing. This, of course, provides answers for the age-old attribution problem: which of my ads are working?

“If you only had one more marketing dollar to spend, Marketing Mix would tell you the best place to spend it,” Vittal says.

The company will preview Marketing Mix at Summit, and release it “in a few months.”

New mobile goodies … including iBeacon

In addition, Adobe announced that PhoneGap, its open-source cross-platform mobile development tool that allows developers to build apps for iOS, Android, and other platforms simultaneously, has now been integrated with Adobe Experience Manager — one of those six core tools in the Adobe Marketing Cloud. That’s very significant for marketers, because what it allows them to do is to treat mobile app content exactly the same way they treat website content: something to update, change, test, and deploy in basically real time. In other words, freeing marketers from having to ask developers to make changes every time they want to update an app.

“Mobile development shouldn’t be a point solution,” Vittal told me. “Marketers should be able to this all centrally.”

A little bonus for those on the cutting edge? With its update, Adobe says it’s the first mobile platform provider to support integration with Apple’s in-store iBeacon project. The capability is built into PhoneGap and managed via Adobe Campaign.

This kind of integrated cloud capability differentiates Adobe from less sophisticated single solutions like most marketing automation systems. But it also defines the company’s target market.

Enterprise, and the modern marketer

These services don’t come cheap, and they don’t come without some effort. Adobe’s clients tend to be fairly large enterprises in verticals like retail, media, financial services, and the travel and hospitality sector. While “turning the key” on an Adobe Marketing Cloud implementation may only take two weeks for existing Adobe clients, new client should expect a four-week start-up. And internal training and adoption will take several months at least.

But the functionality is something that the modern marketer needs. Taken together, the tools represent an almost-unfair advantage — and a key helping hand for those struggling to keep up or catch up.

“Very simply, today’s new marketer must adapt and shift,” Vittal told me. “Delivery methods are changing, data is growing, and real-time marketing is becoming more prominent. Additionally, marketing is bleeding into new areas including customer experience and product development.”

Clearly, at least one enterprise frenemy thinks Adobe has the right goods.

SAP and Adobe

SAP is one enterprise competitor to the likes of IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle that has not really invested in or acquired marketing capabilities to the same degree as the others. Clearly, however, the company has felt that lack, and is addressing it today by announcing, with Adobe, a global reseller agreement to market Adobe Marketing Cloud and integrated it with the SAP HANA platform, along with its SAP Hybris Commerce Suite.

“Together, the Adobe Marketing Cloud and the SAP HANA platform will enable companies to analyze massive data sets across various marketing channels and help engage customers in real time, unearthing opportunities like never before,” SAP executive Vishal Sikka said in a statement.

That’s significant.

Not only is it an acknowledgement that enterprises today need marketing clouds, it’s also an acknowledgement that Adobe has built something significantly good enough that SAP is partnering with it to acquire and pass along that capability.

Content marketing is a big deal, but the term will disappear as we realise all marketing is defined by its content.

Econsultancy's Chris Lake made a similar point when recently introducing a list of great content from brands. He argued that the difference between advertising and content is moot.

Shouldn’t all advertising be thought of as at least one of: funny/useful/inspiring/informative etc? Obviously the answer is yes, but the reality is a little different.

Content marketing is still a hugely popular term. One can point to tens of thousands of Google searches every month, the jagged rise of the term shown on Google Trends, and the astounding success of Lake’s periodic table of content marketing, which has been shared more than 5,000 times in less than a week.

The broader trend though is a consumer enabled by the internet to become ever more informed, an instantaneous autodidact on a previously unimaginable scale. Basically, savvier than ever.

So how do brands make sure that savvy customers’ power is appropriated? The answer is through communities, through providing content that effectively takes ownership of a particular question or problem. This can be as simple as ‘should I buy a Nissan Leaf?’ (read on for more) or ‘how do I care for my baby?’.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

Nissan Leaf campaign

This Nissan Leaf landing page is great.

 

It doesn’t permit the Nissan brand to shout about how great its own products are, but allows customers to interact with each other, and takes ownership of conversations previously taking place over at publishers and on online review platforms.

With 87% of new-car buyers using the web for research, number of visits to a dealership before making a purchase has come down from eight to somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8.

This means the opportunity for brands to affect the customer decision is pretty much entirely online.

The Nissan campaign is called “Real Owners. Real Questions.” Current LEAF owners share their stories about what it’s really like to go electric. 

Tiles and search functionality allow the consumer to explore the many answers that are largely practical and constructive, without ever making the Leaf look bad.

Video is used effectively to showcase current owners, and this will likely increase time on site, as well as putting a real, trustable person’s face in the window.

HSBC Expat Explorer

HSBC had tremendous success with its expat campaign, which featured educational community-based content aimed at a group of potentially high-value customers. 

With most people only considering banking late in their research process, HSBC wanted to engage earlier.

The bank created useful ‘informal’ content for this niche audience in the form of hints and tips, alongside some country comparison tools. The Twitter account @expatexplorer proved very popular, and was used to direct consumers to the website.

You can find out more about this campaign in Econsultancy's marketing case studies library.

If you've got more examples of brands creating an educational or community resource around a product, please let me know in the comments.

Successful content marketing initiatives have many moving parts.

Creating powerful content that grows your business can be a discouraging process. It’s possible to spend countless hours producing something to help your brand reach the next level, only to discover that it does little in the way of improving engagement, traffic, or sales. The good news is that there are many content marketing tools available to help you streamline the process.

The team at Social Media Strategies Summit researched the marketplace of content creation, curation, promotion and distribution, and tracking/analytics tools to assemble the infographic below. It illustrates which brands use the 25 tools they reviewed, what’s great about each one, and who theywork best for. You’re sure to find something that will help you jumpstart your content marketing programs.

Content Curation Tools

These tools help you discover and gather content around the Web that is related to a particular topic, then display it in a meaningful and easily digestible format.

1. List.ly (free/paid)

Good for any brand or business with a blog, List.ly creates lists that can be shared easily, edited quickly, and embedded anywhere. It’s simple to curate, crowdsource, and engage readers. The available WordPress plugin makes it easy to share your lists on your blog.

2. Storify (paid)

A favorite of many brands and media companies, Storify enables you to build multimedia timelines and tell stories using a combination of digital content. Stories can be public or private, and can be created by collecting content from 20 different social channels and websites.

3. Curata (paid)

If you’re looking to increase visibility and generate leads, Curata’s content curation software will help you find, curate, share, and analyze content on numerous issues and topics.

4. Magnify.net (paid)

Publishers and brands interested in video curation will find Magnify.net’s fully-customizable cloud-based app ideal for digital publishing. It’s easy to curate, upload, and aggregate content related to your content marketing strategy.

5. Echo (paid)

Echo is a real-time comment and reaction-managing platform for companies and brands with vast amounts of content.

Content Creation Tools

Visualize digital content — without the need for designers — with these tools.

1. KnowledgeVision (paid)

Useful for all companies — from startups to enterprises — KnowledgeVision helps you create video and audio presentations and make them available via Web browsers and mobile devices. It’s a great tool for webinars, ebooks, and product demos.

2. Lingospot (paid)

Lingospot serves program-related content on TV viewers’ tablets and smartphones, anticipating what viewers of a particular show may be interested in.

3. Visual.ly (free/paid)

Great for all brands and media outlets, Visual.ly enables you to create or outsource the creation of infographics and data visualizations with a range of templates.

4. Prezi (paid)

Prezi is a robust tool for everyone. It’s cloud-based software helps users create dynamic visualizations and presentations. You can import your PowerPoint presentations and take them to the next level with this useful app.

5. Issuu (paid)

If you create digital publications, Issuu is for you. The platform makes it easy to collect, share, and publish ebooks, white papers, and any number of other content types and make them look their best for your audience.

Tools for Finding Content Writers

If you want to create great brand content, you need someone to do the heavy lifting. These tools help you find writers and designers to take your ideas and make them come to life.

1. Scripted (paid)

When you submit the kind of content you’re looking for, Scripted matches you with high-quality content creators who can fulfill your needs for blog posts, Web pages, white papers, tweets, Facebook posts, newsletters, press releases, video scripts, and custom photos.

2. Contently (paid)

Contently helps you find high-quality freelance writers and content creation tools, and offers applications to help you manage your workflow.

3. Skyword (paid)

This cool platform enables you to find writers, manage your editorial calendar, research keywords, and create writing assignments, then edit/review the content that’s created on your behalf. It includes SEO functionality so you can optimize for search and attract your audience.

4. Zerys (paid)

Zerys helps you plan your content strategy, create engaging titles, crowdsource qualified writers, review the content they create for you, and export or auto-publish to all of your brand’s platforms.

5. WriterAccess (paid)

If you need writers and help with content management, you should check out Writer Access. You can manage your workflow and publish yourself or via API integration. Each account is assigned to a manager, a strategist, and a talent manager/editor. Includes an editorial calendar and analytics tool.

Content Promotion and Distribution Tools

Make sure that your great content is seen and read by your target audience by leveraging these platforms.

1. Buffer (paid)

Have multiple social media channels? Buffer enables you to share content to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and App.net via custom scheduling. It also offers analytics, insights, and more than 50 apps and extras.

2. Outbrain (paid)

This content discovery platform offers audience recommendations based on their interests and distributes relevant content to premium sites as sponsored or related posts.

3. Content BLVD (paid)

This tool facilitates submission of sponsored or guest posts to blogs targeted according to reach and relevance, and manages it all from a simple dashboard.

4. Gravity (paid)

If you’re trying to drive awareness to a specific audience, Gravity will help you promote content or media coverage across its large publisher network. Includes tools to monitor customer preferences and interests.

5. OneSpot (paid)

Turn owned and earned content into optimized ad “spots” that are distributed across thousands of sites and social networks.

Content Marketing Analytics and Tracking Tools

Use these tools to track engagement and analyze the effectiveness of your distributed marketing content.

1. Webtrends (paid)

Webtrends helps you analyze and optimize digital campaigns with multi-channel and multi-platform measurement tools that are easy to manage via a dedicated dashboard.

2. Act-On (paid)

This cloud-based platform helps you organize social-media and email campaigns, measure performance, and manage leads.

3. Marketo (paid)

Another cloud-based platform, Marketo automates content distribution and helps you measure marketing ROI through a series of analytics apps.

4. Genius (paid)

This online sales lead metrics app tracks website visits, email clicks, and lead generation via an automation dashboard.

5. Pardo (paid)

Part of Salesforce.com, this suite of lead management, email marketing, and analytics tools includes modules to build, manage, and activate lead generation components such as landing pages, forms, lead nurturing and email marketing programs.

You want as many leads as you can get for your business, right? Wrong. That is a mistake that many companies fall victim to. You shouldn’t want as many leads as you can get, but the best leads you can get, the ones that you are most likely to convert into sales. A crappy lead just wastes the sales team’s time.

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To say sales and marketing is a numbers game is patronizing to both your sales and marketing teams (who I’m hoping are highly skilled professionals), completely takes your product out of the equation (which should be clearly defined and targeted at specific prospects), and shows little respect to your customers (who should mean more to you than just numbers).

As modern marketers and salespeople, we surely have become too sophisticated to throw a bucket of leads at a wall and hope something sticks.

While you might be lucky to find new customers by simply throwing leads at your best (or worst) salespeople (who, let’s face it, should be nothing but persuasive by nature), it will do little to attract repeat orders, particularly if they feel they have been strong-armed into that initial sale. Poor retention rates are a prime indicator of poor targeting during your initial sales and marketing efforts. Because it should be easier to retain an existing client than win a new one, it is also best to start a relationship as you mean to go on.

You should also remember, generating the vast quantity of leads required for the numbers game approach to sales and marketing is highly inefficient. Inefficient marketing is costly and makes everyone look bad.

While it could be argued that the more you tell, the more you sell, this only works if your campaigns are targeted and relevant. So by all means, target prospects by the hundreds, thousands or even the millions but make sure they are the right prospects first.

Thankfully, today’s digital marketing environment provides numerous opportunities to target, engage and ultimately sell to a clearly defined audience. Meaning you spend less time looking at numbers and more time with the people who count.

Three Strategies to Drive Engagement, Not Numbers

1. Content Marketing: A well-written blog post or whitepaper or carefully crafted press release distributed via a service like PRWeb will not only attract prospects to your website or landing page, it will persuade your prospects to identify themselves as potential customers. This is inbound marketing and will drive warm leads into your organization. A single warm lead is worth a thousand cold calls.
2. Social Media: Stop thinking of social media as a broadcast channel. Social media is a highly amplified one-to-one engagement channel. Help just one person via social media and, because birds of a feather flock together, your target audience will soon hear your name.
3. Email Marketing: This is the most efficient method of targeting your audience with engaging content. Because untargeted campaigns have all the hallmarks of a SPAM campaign, you’ve little excuse to go for the shotgun approach (i.e., the numbers game) to email marketing.

Have you been stung by the numbers game? Share your comments below:

This post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog.

Want to measure the effect your marketing has on sales, but are not sure what to focus on in an ocean of available data? Here’s how to cut through it all.

I have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad.

A study by Fournaise Marketing Group found that 73% of executives don’t believe that marketers are focused enough on results to truly drive incremental customer demand. Ouch!

The marketing world still has what I like to call a Wannamaker Hangover. The retailing titan John Wannamaker (1838-1922) was alleged to have said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

That perception, like a wicked hangover, just won’t go away easily when it comes to the C-suite’s perception of marketing effectiveness and marketing people. There’s still a “spray and pray” approach to marketing. Hope springs eternal that the marketing activity is going to do some good.

Now the good news. It doesn’t have to be that way. Times have changed. Marketing can be more closely measured than most realize. And marketing’s effect on sales and revenues can be closely tracked and continuously tweaked.

Here’s how to measure and “metric” your marketing, put in terms that the boss man is thinking (or saying out loud). These are the types of tough questions marketing people should be ready to answer in order to play a more valued and trusted role. Warning: there will be math.

How much does it cost to get a new customer?

This is your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). It determines the total average cost you’re spending to acquire a new customer.

To calculate it, add up your sales and marketing costs (for a specific time) and divide by the number of new customers. Your sales and marketing costs should include advertising, salaries, commissions, bonuses and overhead.

Here’s the formula:

(SALES + MARKETING) / (NEW CUSTOMERS) = CAC

So for example if your sales and marketing costs were $250,000 and you gained 25 new customers, your CAC would be $10,000.

You’ll want a low CAC, obviously. But once you establish a benchmark, an increasing CAC will indicate a possible problem with your sales or marketing effectiveness.

How much of that new customer cost is for marketing?

To answer that, you’ll need your Marketing % of Customer Acquisition Cost (M%-CAC). This figure is the portion of your total CAC, calculated as a percentage of the CAC.

To calculate it, take just your marketing costs and divide by the total marketing and sales costs.

Here’s the Formula:

(MARKETING COST) / (SALES + MARKETING COSTS) = (M%-CAC)

So if you have a marketing cost of $50,000 and a sales and marketing cost of $250,000, your M%-CAC would be 20%

If this cost is going up it could mean that your sales team might be underperforming, you’re spending too much on marketing, or perhaps you’re investing more to improve lead quality and sales productivity.

Is what we’re spending on getting new customers worth it?

This is where you find out what your customers are worth and subtract what it costs getting them. It is known as Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC (LTV:CAC).

First, calculate the lifetime value of the customer, which is the revenue a customer pays during the average time you keep a customer (minus the gross margin). Then divide by your average customer churn. Then, divide that number by your CAC.

Here’s the formula:

LTV:CAC

So if you have an LTV of $500,000 and a CAC of $50,000, your LTV:CAC ratio would be 10 to 1.

The higher your LTV:CAC the greater your marketing and sales ROI. If your ROI gets too high, however, you may not be investing enough in your sales and marketing, which could slow down your total company growth.

How long does it take to recoup the cost of getting new customers?

This one rhymes: it’s called Time to Payback CAC. It shows how many months it takes to earn back the costs you spent acquiring new customers.

To calculate it, take your CAC and divide by your (margin-adjusted) revenue per month for your average new customer. Margin-adjusted means how much your customers pay on average per month.

Here’s the formula:

(CAC)/(Margin-Adjusted Revenue) = Time to Payback CAC

So if your margin-adjusted revenue is $2,000 and your CAC is $10,000, your Time to Payback CAC would be 5 months.

The sooner you can start making money off of your new customers, the better. Most companies try to make each new customer profitable in less than a year.

How many new customers does marketing bring in?

While this question can often be rife with office politics, here’s how you can start with the numbers. This is known as Marketing Originated Customer %.

This ratio shows what new business marketing drives. It is determined by which portion of your new customers originated from marketing efforts.

To calculate it, you’ll need to know which customers originated with a lead generated by your marketing team. Then take the total new customers and divide by those numbers which were marketing-generated leads.

Here’s the formula:

(TOTAL NEW CUSTOMERS)/(CUSTOMERS STARTED AS MARKETING LEAD)

= MARKEING ORIGINATED CUSTOMER %

The math is pretty straightforward on this one. Say you have 1,000 new customers in a month and marketing generated 675 of the leads for those customers. That gives you a 67.5% contribution.

This shows your marketing team’s contribution to acquiring new customers. Marketers worth their salt like this measurement because of its connection to revenues.

How much does marketing help close sales?

As any sales person will tell you, marketing doesn’t generate all the leads. But does that mean marketing is not providing value? You can answer that with the Marketing Influenced Customer %.

It takes into account all the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads before becoming customers. Lead nurturing with marketing automation software is an example of this.

To calculate it, just take all the customers in a given period and find out what percentage had any contact with marketing while they were a lead.

(MARKETING INFUENCED CUSTOMERS)/(TOTAL NEW CUSTOMERS)

= MARKETING INFLUENCED CUSTOMER %

Example: 1,000 new customers and 820 of them interacted with marketing gives you Marketing Influenced Customer % of 82.

With customer buying lifecycles getting longer, the impact of marketing on a lead will most increase. This ratio indicates how effective marketing is at lead nurturing and helping sales close deals.

Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Today there are an almost unlimited number of marketing metrics that can be measured. And with the ascent of big data, it will increase. That’s why it’s easy to be distracted from measuring the metrics that matter. Keep an eye on these metrics to guide your analysis of all the others.

What metrics guide your marketing decisions?

Editor’s note: Today’s post is from Liz O’Neill from Kapost. Couple reasons I asked a Kapost writer to write again for the Funnelholic. First, the earlier post on managing an editorial calendar was awesome and got fantastic traffic. Secondly, they announced content scoring and I think it’s an exciting breakthrough in content marketing. Oh and they have great writers. Liz is one of those great writers as you can tell by this thorough and well-written post. Enjoy.

There’s no denying the imperative role content plays in propelling buyers down the funnel. 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing and 78% of CMOs think it’s the future of the industry.

Marketers are expected to publish content that results in a constant stream of valuable leads. While innovations like lead scoring offer insight into whether marketers are hitting lead gen goals, understanding exactly why they are — and what content influenced those leads — has involved a lot of “educated guessing.” Until now.

Content scoring is a process that reveals exactly how many leads and opportunities a piece of content generates. Unlike pageviews, uniques and shares, content score applies an actual numerical value (a “content score”) to the content an organization produces based on how leads, opportunities or closed deals interacted with that content.

The result is valuable insight into the true ROI of content, enabling marketers to make informed decisions about which content assets to produce.

How Content Scoring Works

So, how does content scoring work exactly? Put simply, it works backwards from a buyer’s journey to specified conversion stage, highlighting the content that buyer digested along the way.

Let’s explore by taking a look at the journeys of two marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Our first MQL consumed or “touched” 6 pieces of content before becoming a lead.  These six content pieces are all scored since they influenced the buyer’s path to conversion. Since we’re working with a single journey here, we’ll calculate these scores out of a grand total of 1.

If we assume all of the assets had equal influence on this MQL, we would divide the one lead by the 6 pieces of content he or she interacted with. Each piece of content would each receive the same content score of ⅙ or 0.16.

But marketers often prefer to use a different attribution model, prescribing a higher value to first and last touch content since the first interaction is what brought the buyer in and the last interaction induced him/her to convert. Exactly how you weight these touches is up to the organization. In this model, we’ll attribute 45% of the MQL’s total value to the first and last touch, spreading the remaining 10% across the remaining assets in the journey. That scenario would result in the content scores listed in the following table:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our second prospect touched only four pieces of content before becoming an MQL.  Again, because we’re only looking at one journey, we’ll calculate all of the content assets in that journey out of 1.

Because the infographic and the email were the first and last pieces of content this MQL consumed, we’re going to attribute a greater weight — 0.45 each — to them and divide the remaining 0.1 by the two remaining pieces of content, the blog post and the video, resulting in the following content scores:

 

 

 

 

Total Content Score

Now that we’ve calculated the impact of the content assets for each of our MQLs, we can calculate the total content score across both buyer journeys by simply adding up the scores of each asset:

Since we’re looking at two MQLs, the total content score across all assets would equal 2. The content scores above represent the number of leads each piece of content generated.

 

Scoring Content At Scale

While calculating content score for two buyer journeys is pretty easy, doing the same thing across hundreds or thousands of MQLs would be time-consuming and slow.  So at Kapost, we automated this process so customers can pull content scores across all of their assets easily. We do it by pulling the buyer journey data captured within their marketing automation solution (currently Eloqua and Marketo) and their CRM solution (currently Salesforce.com). Customers can see content scores by the stages they set within their marketing and sales pipeline. Here are three of my favorite product features:

1. Scoring Flexibility

Care more about opportunities than MQLs?  Users can score content on opportunities, closed wins, prospects and more.

2. Filtering Options

With content scoring, users have visibility not only into what content is driving the most conversions, but also into which content types, campaigns and even contributors are driving the most conversions.  If you’re only interested in what blog posts drove conversions last quarter, for example, you can collect that data in seconds.

3. Export Function

The export function allows users to slice and dice their content scoring data within any time frame they choose. They can build graphs or generate reports based on that exported data that track the goals most important to their organization.

Content scoring is a game changer for marketers. It reaches beyond the “vanity” metrics that are often used to measure content marketing success, but provide little insight into what is resulting in won business from the top to the bottom of the sales and marketing funnel.  This new insight will allow us to connect in a more meaningful way with our audiences and deliver the right content at the right time.  We’re really excited to see where content scoring will take us.

 

Liz O’Neill is a writer and content marketer at Kapost, a software that helps brands create, manage, publish and analyze their content in one place. Prior to joining Kapost, she managed social media campaigns at Location3 Media, and global marketing efforts at ONE.org, an advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. She’s crazy about human-friendly content, playing outdoors and beekeeping. You can reach her at @lizkoneill

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Since it went private last year, Dell has been reorienting itself toward business needs. Today, it added a new toolset for data visualization and big data analytics: advanced analytics provider StatSoft, which joins Dell via an acquisition deal of an undisclosed amount.

StatSoft, founded in 1984, offers cloud-based, on-premises, or software-as-a-service capabilities for data mining, predictive analytics and data visualization used in trend forecasting, identification of sales leads, “what-if” forecasting, and fraud detection. The company points to its successes in agile manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, risk management, fraud detection, and research.

Its Statistica line of products will now be packaged with Dell’s x86 servers. The third-largest computer maker, Dell currently offers such data management and database tools as Toad for Oracle, Toad for SQL Server, Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise, and data/application integration tools like SharePlex and Dell Boomi.

“Advanced analytics and the statistical algorithms that enable them are more important than ever before,” Dell Software information management group VP/GM Matt Wolken wrote on the corporate blog today. He noted that companies’ abilities to pull “knowledge and insights out of data” will distinguish companies that survive from ones that don’t.

The results of this acquisition, Wolken said, can include expanding StatSoft to deliver natural language processing for big data analysis by combining it with Dell’s Kitenga Analytics solution.

In its own announcement, StatSoft envisioned combining its “big data predictive modeling and data mining solutions for various industries with Dell’s wide range of data management and software capabilities on its x86 server platform, all to deliver “big data analytics at a Dell price-point for unbeatable ROI.”

This purchase is the latest in a series of acquisitions that the Round Rock, Tex.-based computer maker has made to boost its chops in software and services. Previously, the company made such acquisitions as software solution provider Quest Software and cloud computing startup Boomi.

Wolken also pointed out that, in addition to StatSoft’s capabilities in analytics, the purchase will help Dell expand its international presence. Based in Tulsa, Okla., StatSoft has operations in more than two dozen countries.

Terms of the deal were not made public, but StatSoft’s employees are expected to continue working in their current locations within Dell’s information management group.

How much of an impact do you think it would have on your business if you had a steady supply of qualified leads for your products and services?

Now imagine that you didn’t have to pay for advertising to attract all those leads.

Seem like a pipe dream? It’s not. It’s actually the natural result of a well defined and properly executed content marketing strategy. In today’s post, I am going to begin by giving you an introduction to content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing, often referred to as inbound marketing is a term that is getting a lot of buzz these days…and for good reason. It works better now than it ever has in the past. We’ll get into why it works so well in a bit.

But first…what is content marketing?

Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – ‘content’ – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.” This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, info-graphics, case studies, how-to’s, Q&A’s, photos, etc. – Wikipedia

Let’s put this another way: content marketing is the process of using high quality, relevant content to attract people that are already looking for a solution (that you have) to a problem that they have.

Content is Your Greatest Asset

Think about the last time you bought a product or hired a company to perform a service for you. How did you begin your search for this product or service?

More than likely, you started off with Google, or some other search engine. You may have also done a search on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Regardless, my point is this: purchasing begins with search and the way to get found is to create valuable content.

Think about this from Google’s perspective. What is their goal? To provide the highest quality, most relevant search results for a given query.

Over time, Google’s search algorithm has changed a great deal, and in its current form, Google rewards websites that:

• Have high quality content
• Have a lot of content
• Continually add content
• See their content regularly shared on social networks

So, if you decide to create high quality content on your blog on a regular basis, what do you think is going to happen over time?

Google will like your site more and more, and reward you with more traffic. The more traffic you receive, the more social sharing that is going to occur and the more social sharing that occurs, the more Google is going to like your site.

Can you see the snowball effect I’m talking about? If you decide to make creating high quality, relevant content the focus of your overall marketing plan, your site is going to receive more and more traffic over time, the by-product of which will be more leads and more customers.

Oh…and did I mention that all this traffic is free?

True, you did have to incur the cost of creating the content; however, this content can have a very long shelf life, and so long as it is timely, you are still going to be rewarded for it.

Let’s compare this to paid advertising.

With paid advertising, you can drive a ton of traffic and you can do it very quickly. The problem is that as soon as you stop paying the bill, the traffic stops.

With paid advertising, you are not building an asset. You are only driving traffic. Worse, any competitor with an advertising budget can easily replicate what you are doing.

Is that much of a competitive advantage for you? Nope.

Inbound Marketing: Your Competitive Advantage from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software

This is not the case with content.

High quality content takes effort to create, and as such, few of your competitors are going to take the time to create it. Instead, they will probably go with paid advertising and continue to attempt to interrupt people to grab their attention.

I’d much rather put my time and effort into attracting people who are already interested in what I have to say/sell.

Once I’ve attracted those people, I can then offer them something for free in exchange for their email address, and now I’m building another even more valuable asset: a mailing list.

With a mailing list, I can reach out to my prospects and customers whenever I like. In other words, I can drive traffic on demand.

Think about how valuable that would be for your company. Think about the types of partnerships you could form with other firms in your niche if you could each drive traffic to the other, whenever you liked.

In future blog posts, we’ll take a much closer look at how to build and leverage a mailing list. For now, just know that it is the natural result of having valuable content for your audience to consume.

Buying Attention is Hard to Do

Remember earlier how I said that content marketing is working better now than ever before?

It’s not like content marketing is particularly new. In fact, it’s been around for a very long time.

The following examples (source: Wikipedia) demonstrate early use of content to disseminate information about a brand, and build a brand’s reputation:

1895 – John Deere launches their magazine, The Furrow, providing information to farmers on how to become more profitable. The magazine, considered the first custom publication, is a success and is still in circulation today, reaching 1.5 million readers in 40 countries in 12 different languages.

1900 – Published in France, Michelin develops the Michelin guides, offering drivers information on auto maintenance, accommodations, and other travel tips. 35,000 copies were distributed for free in this first edition. Eventually, the company began selling these books, yet the publication set a precedent for both informative guides and content marketing distribution.

1904 – Jell-O salesmen go door-to-door, distributing their cookbook for free. Touting the dessert as a versatile food, the company sees its sales rise to over $1 million by 1906.

What has changed is technology adoption.

Today, we all have a smart phone in our pockets, millions of us are on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ LinkedIn, Youtube, etc…and the truth is that we are totally overwhelmed with information and advertising.

As a result, breaking through and actually getting someone’s attention is harder than it has ever been. Back in the day when we didn’t see 5 zillion ads a day, any one ad stood a much better chance of getting out attention.

Those days are gone.

Not only is our attention hard to get, but as a consumer, I have easy access to the information I want, when I want it, so why do I need to pay attention to your ad? I can just go to a search engine and find anything I want, anytime I feel like looking for it.

How Content Marketing Differs From Outbound Marketing

With content marketing, the goal is not to interrupt someone from what they are interested in – by attempting to grab their attention. That is outbound marketing’s goal – and it can be a very expensive one to achieve.

As a content marketer, my goal is to become what you are interested in, and in doing so, my chances of getting your attention go up exponentially.

To do that, all I have to do is design a content marketing strategy that will address the unique problems, goals, and desires of my target audience. We’ll examine exactly how to do this in upcoming posts.

With inbound marketing, the communication is interactive and goes both ways. With outbound marketing, the communication is just one way – from seller to buyer.

With inbound marketing, the seller’s goal is to provide massive value to the buyer. That is how trust is built, and with trust, all sorts of wonderful things begin to happen.

With outbound marketing, the seller is not providing any value to the buyer. Instead, they are basically saying “Hey, look at me!! Buy my stuff!!”

If someone walked into a party and sounded like that, would you be very interested in speaking with them? Probably not.

On the other hand, if you met someone at a party who was incredibly knowledgeable about a topic you were interested in and after speaking with them for an hour or so, do you think you’d be more inclined to buy from them? You bet you would.

In case you still aren’t convinced that inbound is better than outbound, consider a few facts:

• 84% of 25 to 34 year olds have left a favorite site because of intrusive advertising
• 200 million Americans have registered their phone number of the FCC’s do not call list
• 86% of people skip television ads
• 91% of email users have unsubscribed from a company email they previously opted into
• 44% of direct mail is never opened

Why Start Now?

There is no better time to get started than right now. Developing a content marketing strategy is not rocket science. In fact, it is incredibly easy to do.

Unless you believe that the Internet is just a fad and people actually like advertising, there is not better time to get started than right now.

Groove is here to help, so let us know what questions you have and we’ll do our very best to provide you with answers you can immediately put into use.

To get started, make sure you subscribe to our blog so that you will never miss an update.

What Do You Think?

Did this article resonate with you? If so, please share it on your social networks and leave your comments down below.

I become a venture capitalist in September 2007 – exactly 6.5 years ago.

I spent my first year developing proprietary deal flow and learning the business and then the Sept 2008 / Lehman Bros collapse / financial meltdown happened.

As a result I didn’t write my first venture capital check until March 2009 – exactly 5 years ago. That company was Invoca, which just announced a $20 million fund raise led by Accel.

I remain a huge supporter and am very proud of our accomplishments and hugely optimistic about our future.

5 years ago. It turns out it actually takes time to build a high-growth business with differentiated intellectual property and roll out large, enterprise-class marketing solutions. I remember a few years ago people (LPs mostly) used to ask me why I didn’t have any realized returns to show. At the time I pointed out:

“If I had realized exits almost certainly it would be because I invested in a company that failed. Lemons ripen early, great companies take time.”

Still. It was frustrating having to answer what I considered an obvious question to people who I thought would have known better.

In 2010 somebody posed the question on Quora, “Is Mark Suster a Successful Venture Capitalist?” I thought it was a fair question and I gave an honest answer at the time. I divided success into the phases of venture capital and 18 months into writing my first check here was my view (details on each in the link above).

1. Sourcing high-quality leads: 9/10
2. Working with early-stage teams:  coaching, mentoring, setting strategy, rolling up sleeves: 9/10
3. Helping companies get to next financing round successfully: I was just beginning this phase in Sept 2010 and said so.

Since then?

Not just the $20 million round at Invoca, the $70 million I helped us raise at Maker Studios, but I was intimately involved with the earliest funding round at DataSift and every subsequent round which has recently announced $42 million led by Insight Venture Partners and $70 million in total.

I’ve now been involved with many other successful foll0w-on financings. So I think it’s now fair to rate me at 9/10 on follow-on fundings.

4. Getting Exits / Driving LP Returns: This was always the knock on me. The monkey on my back. “Ok, so this guy can write a blog and source deals but can he make any money?” Yup. Heard that knock many times. And in an industry measured by a decade rather than a year it’s hard to refute so you mostly just move on in the conversation. This is what I wrote on that Quora answer from Sept 2010

“I think the best VCs help drive exits alongside their entrepreneurs.  I have done 6 VC investments – all within the past 20 months.  None have exited.  That’s normal.  If they did it would be because there wasn’t a huge outcome.  

 

But the truth is only time will tell whether I’m financially a successful VC and I’m comfortable in my skin saying that.  Any VC 3 years in saying otherwise would either be exaggerating, lucky or an extreme outlier.”

So it’s now March 2014 – 5 years since I started investing. How is my scorecard looking? Here is the first 3 months of 2014 …

                                                                                                                                                                      .

1. AOL Acquires Gravity for $90 million

2. Apple – Burstly / TestFlight

And now this just in …

3. Disney Acquires Maker Studios f0r $500 million and with earn-out potentially up to $950 million.

This investment started with Dana Settle (Greycroft) and I each putting in $750,000 into a young company doing less than $1 million in sales and has blossomed into one of the fastest growing companies in Los Angeles if not the entire country. Because it’s video it is understood so poorly by the normal tech elite but the company has an amazing combination of content production, marketing, talent management and technology (tech team of nearly 60) and I can’t think of a better partner and home to develop this great company than Disney. I feel confident in saying that Maker will perform to any even higher level in the years to come as a result of this partnership.

And while of course the founders & management deserve all the credit for Maker’s success and will no doubt get their accolades in the press, from an investor perspective, Dana & I were hugely active in the company for years behind the scenes in recruiting, PR, product strategy, M&A, etc. And while the press always likes to mention the other big media investors who participated  in the investments (Time Warner, Canal+, Astro, Singtel, Elisabeth Murdoch, Robert Downey, Jr. – there were many), the reality is that Upfront & Greycroft were the largest shareholders in the company.

As a result of this activity I have now personally returned significantly more capital in my 5 years than I have invested. I have huge confidence in the companies that I’ve backed that are still active.

I’m already back to work. I am closing 3 new fundings in April (2 new, 1 follow-on).

At a minimum, I’m glad to have the “exit question” off my back in 2014. I helps me be even longer in the positions I am still in.

All I could think about this morning was this …

featured image from 500px

There seems to be a consensus that referrals are the best form of leads. They close faster, buy more and stay longer. In fact, great sales people have been good at generating referrals for what seems like forever.

Until recently, large corporations have struggled to figure out how to scale the success of individual sales reps to systematically and proactively drive large volumes of referrals.  But that is all changing as technology is now coming to market that can help large brands automate the best practices of sales reps and institutionalize the process of generating referrals from customers, employees and other people who influence the buying decision.

Good technology systems typically are designed to automate manual best practices. Let’s take a look at key functions that great sales people all tend to have in common:

1. They build referral channels. The majority of salespeople are excellent networkers. Whether meeting people via the local rotary club, the area chamber of commerce or at the local pub, great salespeople can be very good at telling everyone about what they do – their friends, family, customers, other employees and even strangers. Great salespeople also know that the more people who know what they do, the better the chance of that specific network spreading the word.
2. They ask their channel for referrals. Most great reps never leave a meeting, business or personal, without asking for a referral – and they are skilled at handling it with a gentle approach. One of the most staggering statistics that I have recently heard is that between 70 percent and 80 percent of all people are willing to refer leads if asked, yet less than 15 percent of individuals and companies ask for them. The great ones ask, and they ask often.
3. They motivate the channel. Compensation is a great motivator (just ask the majority of the 17 million commissioned sales reps in the U.S.) and many of the great ones build professional referrals networks where they compensate people and companies for leads referred to them that can eventually lead to business. There are both monetary and non-monetary ways to incent people to do things that actually work.
4. They nurture the channel. They always thank their network for referrals, they compensate their network in a timely fashion for referrals and they keep them in the loop.

The good technology solutions should help replicate and facilitate those processes to “institutionalize” and scale the process of driving referrals. These solutions must:

• Make it easy to enroll customers, employees and influencers into the referral program. The idea is to build a referral community.
• Provide them with the tools to make it easy to refer.
• Track and manage all the workflows so you can measure results.
• Automate the process of thanking and nurturing these channels for their contributions so they continue to perform.

While the marketplace is changing at a pace that is liable to cause even the top salespeople to question their sales strategy, there is one thing that will not change.  Networking will always be #1 for driving quality leads that must be nurtured, thanked and motivated.

The only real difference today, is that these steps can be completed at a faster, more efficient pace, generating exponentially more leads and closed deals – and enabling the best salespeople to be even better.

You want as many leads as you can get for your business, right? Wrong.

That is a mistake that many companies fall victim to. You shouldn’t want as many leads as you can get, but the best leads you can get, the ones that you are most likely to convert into sales. A crappy lead just wastes the sales team’s time.

So how do you ensure that your company is getting the highest quality leads that it can get? By defining your MQL, or marketing qualified lead, for you entire Smarketing team. In fact, that is one of the most important steps to unifying your sales and marketing teams.

Why Should You Define Your MQL?

Obviously you are in your industry to sell a product or service, or perhaps several, which you believe can help your potential customers in some way. That’s why you have a sales team, to show those new customers the benefits of what you offer.

The marketing team’s goal is to bring in those leads for the sales team to convert. But by bringing in too many they can actually overwhelm the sales team. That may sound like a good problem to have, but in reality that will make the sales department less productive and less able to find the most suitable leads.

There are many leads out there who are either not really interested in what you have to offer, or just aren’t the right fit for your company. That is exactly why it is so vital to define what an MQL is for your business.

This definition will vary between companies, as everyone’s sales funnel is slightly different, but what matters is that your Smarketing team is all on the same page about what your MQL is and what to do with that information.

Setting your MQL improves efficiency of the sales team, and the company as a whole, by weeding out the leads that won’t be easily turned into sales and focusing on the ones that are most likely to convert.

How Do You Define Your MQL?

The most important thing to consider before defining your MQL is the data you have on your sales and marketing teams, that includes close rates, customers you have and have not gotten, leads you get, visitors you get to your website, etc.

Once you have collected all the analytics you can on current leads and customers, consider the step-by-step process a lead will go to before converting into a sale. This may start with a website visit, then a demo or trial of your product, then perhaps downloading more information or signing up for a newsletter, anything that might get them further down the sales funnel.

Consider your close rate on each of those types of contact, for example if you look at the number of leads that downloaded a content piece you offered, take all the leads that did download it and then converted to clients and divide that by the total number of leads who downloaded. That is your close rate for that activity; complete this on every process a lead can go through.

Once you have determined the close rates for each activity, compare them to one another to see which lead conversion tactics gets the highest result. Many of these close rates will be rather low, but find the ones that rank higher; those will determine your MQL. Every lead taking that action will now be considered an MQL.

Make your MQL known among your entire Smarketing team so that each department knows where their focus should lie. Then the sales team will take the higher caliber leads and close more deals through less effort.

Takeaway

Many companies rely on their marketing departments to generate as many leads as they possibly can, and while that isn’t a bad strategy, it also isn’t the best one. The right way to bring in the most business for your company is to get fewer leads that are higher quality.

Your goal is to actually make the sales team slightly less productive, as in the leads they are getting are already a good fit so they don’t have to work too hard to close the deal. Define your MQL to find the right kind of customers for your company to focus on.

Nobody is a sales genius right out of the gate. The best salespeople are constantly looking for ways to improve their technique, make gains in efficiency, and generally maximize their productivity.

We asked a few of today’s most productive, efficient, and successful sales experts to share their best sales productivity tips, and they came through in a big way.

Time management, efficiency, and relationship-building were top priorities for many of the sales pros we talked to. Any salesperson who is willing to take the time and effort to incorporate these tactics into their regular routine will see awesome improvements in their efficiency and overall sales productivity.

Tactic #1: Prioritize Important Tasks & Manage Your Time

Effective time management and prioritization of important tasks is one of the main ways that the most successful sales pros stay ahead of the game.

Butch Bellah – Sales, Marketing & Business Coach, ButchBellah.com

“Most salespeople could immediately improve their productivity if they’d simply focus on spending their selling hours on selling. Eliminate all other time-wasters and put all their efforts in those hours toward tasks that move them closer to a sale. From needlessly checking email every hour to paperwork to just plain busywork, once they begin to identify these habits they’re much easier to break.”

Jim Keenan – Founder, A Sales Guy Consulting

“Sales people, good sales people, have no shortage of shit to get done, the best know which things to work on first. The key is to focus on the things that have the biggest impact on making your number, and are the least complex ie. take the least amount of time to complete. Knowing which these are is key! Then move to those things that have big impact but are more complex, (take longer to complete). After that, tackle those things that are easy or not very complex, BUT don’t have much impact, and finally do what you can to avoid all things that take a lot of time (are complex to execute) BUT offer little impact to making your number. It’s not enough to get everything done, the key is to get the things that matter done!”

Lori Richardson, Founder & CEO, Score More Sales

“Create a habit of doing specific tasks that lead to revenues regularly, such as having real conversations with potential buyers rather than just talking about having them. Set time aside to be on the phone that is separate from planning or research time. Finally start each day with an idea of what you’re doing – and be ready to go with it. So many sellers waste an hour or two each day ‘getting ready’.”

Jeb Blount – CEO, SalesGravy.com

“The best salespeople map or grid their territory by day. They then plan their appointments and calls each day, within the grid, thus reducing wasted drive time. The key is leveraging the CRM to run call lists by geography based attributes. This makes it easy to stick to the daily plan. Salespeople that utilize this methodology are many times more productive than reps that take a random approach to managing their territory.”

Ron Karr, President & CEO, Karr Associates, Inc.

“According to Ron Karr, author of CEO Bestselling book Lead, Sell or Get Out of the Way, there are two questions sales people should live by when it comes to increasing their productivity.

1. What does success look like to you?
2. Do your actions support your success goals?

Most salespeople are working harder than they have to. Reason is they are task oriented and not purpose oriented. That means they are doing activities that have no impact on their success. Everything we do should be towards hitting our goals. If they are not, then leave them for when you have time or maybe do away with those activities. This also means tracking all activities and seeing which ones have a real ROI for you.”

Colleen Francis, President & Founder, Engage Selling Solutions

“Optimize your number of hours selling — Can you outsource some non-sales work to others so that you can increase the number of hours you spend per week in front of customers? Consider outsourcing low-return tasks such as expense reports, preparation of slide decks, editing. The top sellers I work with often pay a part time business student to help them with these tasks so they can spend more time with clients and prospects.

Improve your closing ratio — Are you asking for referrals every day from clients? Cold leads close at a ratio of 1:25, whereas referred lead close at a ratio of 1:3. Can you make a better productivity improvement than that?”

Tactic #2: Invest in relationships.

Relationship-building is a crucial part of the sales process. High performing salespeople take the time to get to know their clients, to empathize with them, and to work towards a friendship as well as a business relationship. Some of today’s top sales pros offer tips on how a little investment in your relationship with your client can pay huge dividends.

Craig Wortmann – Founder & CEO, Sales Engine

“Say “thank you” and go all the way with it. Salespeople most often thank people via email. But an email “thank you” is more like than spam than it is like gratitude. If you want to truly thank someone, then thank them. Take 20 seconds and write a hand-written note that says; “Chase, thanks very much for the time you gave me today. One thing you said really stuck with me…when you said x it made me think of y. Thanks for that. Best, Craig”

That’s it. No muss, no fuss. But it sure does thrill people to get a proper thank you.”

Alen Mayer – President, International Association of NLP Sales Professionals, AlenMayer.com

“Don’t use hype! Salespeople love hype language because they don’t have to invest time into understanding the product or the customer. Introverts spot the exaggerated information in these traditional types of pitches quickly, and when they find out that the salesperson doesn’t know what he or she is talking about, they shut down the conversation. To win an introvert’s respect, you need to prove your credibility using third-party endorsements, certifications and awards your product or company won. Introverts don’t usually get swept away by a sales pitch, but they can be influenced by objective reviews or media coverage.”

Wendy Weiss, President, ColdCallingResults.com

“Follow the money. When planning your day or week or month or year always determine which activities are closest to bringing in revenue and prioritize those activities. For example, paperwork is far down the list when it comes to generating revenue. Meetings or conversations with existing customers to potentially sell additional products or services would be high on the list. Prospecting is a high priority item although it’s further down the list than meeting with a prospect who is about to say, “yes.” Save non-revenue generating activities for off hours or better yet, delegate those activities. Too many sales professionals spend far too much time on activities that do not increase sales. Prioritize and execute on the activities that generate revenue and watch your sales soar.”

Trent Leyshan, Managing Director, Boom Sales

“Get crystal clear on where you (the sales professional) add the most value to your company and customers. You then structure your time in and around that activity. Take a blow torch to your time wasting activities with conviction. You then create support structures around yourself to allow you to execute. In short, do more of what works.”

Ian Brodie, Expert Sales Consultant

“You should focus your time on finding and nurturing your ideal clients who want and need what you have to offer, rather than focusing on people who don’t think they want it and trying to convince them that they do.”

Jeff Sheehan, Author of “Hired! Paths to Employment in the Social Media Era”

“Keeping your contacts, prospects, and customers organized, as being organized is the key to success. For those who are in sales, or who network extensively, it becomes very difficult to be productive if you have a ‘loose’ collection of business cards, contact, and customer information that can be readily be accessed, segmented, and used for marketing/sales work. Although it may be a bit time consuming to ‘load’ this data into a spreadsheet or CRM system once you receive a business card or other contact from someone, the time that you’ll save trying to find this information later will be incredible if it is readily accessible.

As a starting point, LinkedIn, with its 277 million members, and a decent basic CRM system is a great place to begin the process of organizing your contacts unless you have a CRM system in place. In parallel, it is recommended that you store this information in a spreadsheet, as well, as your contact information will not solely reside on LinkedIn. Furthermore, given the limitations of the LinkedIn contacts feature, you have the ability to store more information about a contact in a spreadsheet and can sort on selected criteria far beyond the LinkedIn Tags.”

Nancy Bleeke, Founder, SalesProInsider.com

“Prepare! Plan first on paper and then mentally just before the contact. Focus on What’s in it for Them (your buyer) during this preparation and ensure that from the first words in initiating through the final closing statements your comments are relevant to them and their situation. Use all the tools available to you to research the person, company, and situation to guide you in this focus. When you make it about Them, every minute of preparation time is gained back two to three times through that sale and follow-up.”

Dave Stein, Founder, ES Research Group

“Relentlessly qualify your sales opportunities. More time is wasted pursuing business that can’t be won or isn’t worth winning than any other activity.”

Tactic 3: Relentlessly Seek Efficiency

Salespeople not only need to manage their time, they need to constantly refine their sales process to weed out useless tasks, allowing them to focus on what really needs to get done. This endless quest for efficiency is a big part of what makes the top sales performers so outstanding.

Tibor Shanto, Principal, Renbor Sales Solutions

“Sales people need to stop seeking time management solutions, and instead focus on allocating time to specific high value activities, and the manage their activity in the allotted time. Time already comes managed, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 12 months, etc, everyone agrees, can’t manage any further. Know what you have to do to be successful, in what proportions, the map it out, allocate the time, and do it in that time.”

Jill Konrath – Author, Speaker, Strategist, JillKonrath.com

“Never, ever multi-task. Your brain is incapable of doing two things at one time. Instead, it bounces back and forth between them. The result? It takes you 30-40% longer to get things done than if you were single tasking. Do one thing at a time — and focus in on it.”

Anthony Iannarino, President & Chief Sales Officer, Solutions Staffing

“There is nothing that will make you more productive than spending time on Sunday doing a weekly review and putting the most important tasks and outcomes on your calendar. Then, like any other commitment you put on the calendar, and keep that commitment. Productivity is about deciding what needs done and doing it. Productivity is about taking action.”

Elinor Stutz – CEO, Smooth Sale

“I learned to keep a running task list at all times of what needs to be done, otherwise. How this works is, at the end of the work week (when everything is fresh in your mind), list bigger projects that need to be completed the following week. And, at the end of each working day, list the projects that need to be completed the following day. Even though interruptions pop up, you are on top of what truly needs to be accomplished. This process will save wasted hours each week enabling many more accomplishments through the year including fast tracking your business!”

Conclusion

Ultimately, there’s no single easy road to increased sales productivity. Being great at sales is hard, but practicing habits that give you incremental growth in efficiency every day can lead to incredible improvement over time.

Getting good at sales is a marathon, not a sprint, and by applying the practices of experienced pros, any salesperson can become a power-seller.

This post originally appeared on the Base blog. If you like what you read, subscribe to Baseline for more like this.

Recently I wrapped up a consulting assignment for the VP of one the country’s leading enterprise software companies. During that time, I was around the elite level sales people on his team and I got to thinking about the differences between sales forces that consistently perform at a high level and those that are consistently average. One of the key differences is the language used by top producing sales teams.

1. Customers - Top sales teams are always talking about customers because customers are the basis of revenues and sales success.  For the highest producing teams, customer centric selling is not a buzzword.
2. Value – Delivering superior service and value to customers leads to higher sales, so high producing sales forces talk about the ways they provide value added to customers and prospects.
3. Work – A career should be rewarding, but achieving big things is not easy and leading sales teams never take their foot off the gas, take anything for granted or pretend for a moment that hard work is not required to be successful.
4. Planning – The old saying “plan the work, work the plan” is often heard around top sales teams, as is the other timeless adage “a failure to plan, is a plan to fail.”
5. Consistency – As in sports, where you can’t play half a game and expect to be successful, great sales teams talk about sustained levels of the right behavior.
6. Honesty – Great sales teams understand that being transparent and honest with customers leads to more sales, but top reps don’t just talk about it, they act with integrity and professionalism.
7. Perseverance – The average sales rep is not prepared to pursue deals that take various unexpected turns, however when you spend time on top sales teams, you hear reps talking about keeping on deals, “bird-dogging” prospects and not giving up until a deal is closed or dead.
8. Brand – High producing sales teams understand the critical importance of being “leaders in their space” so they so they behave in ways that are consistent with their marquee brand and work hard to protect their reputation.

Bonus – Body Language – There is an air of confidence, intensity and urgency on top sales teams. The reps work hard and expect to succeed which is evident in not only how they speak, but how they carry themselves.

To your success!

photo courtesy of pakorn | freedigitalphotos.net

 

 

 

 

No doubt you’ve heard that online video content improves search results. Or how it increases conversion rates as it encourages your audience to spend more time on your website, engages customers and builds trust to drive more inbound leads. You may have even heard of how effective it is to help consumers get to know you and your company better.

With consumer behavior of watching more and more online business video marketing content, the value of having a sound strategy for marketing with online video content is paramount.

Even though you’ve heard all of this, you’re still not convinced because your company has always driven sales with traditional face-to-face interactions meetings to build and cultivate relationships. While these relationships are critical late in the sales process, it may be that a sound B2B video marketing strategy will help your company get more sales opportunities.

In fact, industries that have traditionally driven their revenue with face-to-face relationships are starting to use website video content marketing to drive new business by converting referrals.

CPA’S Gaining Trust With Website Video Communications

With hyper-connected consumers, it is essential that a company builds trust and makes personal connections quickly in order to win them over when they get a referral or go searching online. “People assume that with a firm of our size, we have the brainpower. But [our clients] need the confidence of seeing the people that are actually doing the work. By using video we are establishing rapport even before they meet with us.” States Jim Termniello, marketing manager at Berdon LLP, an accounting firm in New York City.

While videos can’t replace face-to-face interactions, it can help to build trust even before those all-important first meetings with potential clients.

Berdon’s reason for corporate online video production was based on an ever increasing number of clients doing more research way before reaching out to them. Their firm is offering more value because they are making it easy for their customers to do their research, during off hours and via their mobile devices. Potential customers are able to get enough information and build up a comfort level with the company the need in order to make that all-important phone call to set up an appointment.

No matter what industry you are in, people watch website business video daily to make decisions across every stage of the sales cycle.

Sales videos educate and build trust in the relationship

B2B video content marketing is one of the few tactics that work well regardless of the product, service or vertical in which it is used. Across all verticals, people greatly prefer watching video over reading text because of its ability to engage and inform in a short amount of time.

Jennifer Walzer, President of BUMI, a data back-up and recovery company in New York City, notes that using video to answer questions a prospect has as they go through the buying process is a key component to winning new sales. “There is an opportunity to create a lot of videos, especially when we think about the questions that our prospects might ask us.” BUMI’s professional web video productions build relationships early on because it highlights the technical people that are actually doing the work. BUMI engages their customers by showing how knowledgeable they are by using their staff to address prospect’s pressing concerns, building trust, credibility and value.

Because buyers are more educated than ever before, adding professional business videos to your website for top of the funnel lead conversion will actually give your company more face-to-face interactions because buyers will be more comfortable with the people that are doing the work at your company.

Walzer feels that “video can allow a company to explain themselves so the prospect gets the message sooner, which will hopefully lead to a sooner sale. The more that we can help educate and help answers in advance, the easier it will be when we have that real conversation with our prospect. And the idea is that once they have all the information they need, they’ll have no doubt in their mind that BUMI is the service they need.”

Like Termniello’s firm, Walzer is getting the most out of her online business marketing video production, not as a standalone tactic, but using video into her overall marketing and sales process. Terminello adds that website corporate video production “is a permanent and long term component of our marketing efforts.”

Your customers are busy people. Video can give today’s buyers a sense of your company’s personality and how you can solve their problem. Why not make it easy for them to get to know your company better and show them that you’re the right choice?

Anyone who has made a purchase online in the last decade has felt the impact of the online economy. We are more self sufficient than ever before. We do our own research, ask our friends and make purchases based on the wide world of information available to us.

This trend isn’t going away anytime soon, in fact, we may be at the very beginning of a world where information asymmetry is putting buyers and sellers on equal footing, perhaps even putting the buyer at an advantage.

In his new book The New Rules of Customer Engagement, 6 Trends Reinventing The Way We Sell, Daniel Newman drives home not just the trends, but what they mean for business and those responsible for driving revenue and creating satisfied customers, i.e. those in the marketing space.

I spoke with Daniel, who happens to be a friend and a fellow Forbes contributor, to get right to the heart of the matter; to learn more about these new rules of customer engagement and much more.

Steve Olenski: The book starts out talking about a New World with New Rules, explain what you mean by that?

Daniel Newman: Basically we have entered a world where sometimes more than 90% of a sale is complete before a customer engages sales. This means that people are interested in finding information in a new way and that the old “Trusted Advisor” that was once sales are losing applicability. This is especially true if they are still trying to sell the way they did 10 or 20 years ago. Today the average buyer engages with nearly a dozen pieces of content before they pick up the phone or visit a retail store. This means businesses need to invest in being a part of that first 70, 80 or 90 percent and the old hiring more sales people to cold call just isn’t going to cut it.
Olenski: You challenge the idea of immediacy and that consumers want everything “now.” What is shaping this trend?

Newman: When I started researching the book I knew I wanted to talk about how social customer service and real time marketing were impacting business. It didn’t take long for me to find data points that showed just how true this is. I had no idea that nearly 2/3 of people expect same day responses to their online inquiries. Further, nearly a third expect a response in 30 minutes.

In the past there used to be this separation of B2B and B2C where those quick responses we expected in B2C weren’t necessarily expected in B2B. But today we have endless outlets to communicate when we have an issue and our expectations are being set by our best experiences in all of consumer activity. Essentially changing the landscape of B2B and B2C into one ubiquitous experience that I refer to as P2P (Peer to Peer).

Olenski: A lot of your book focuses on your industry experience (Tech and Communications), do you feel your trends span beyond those industries? Moreover, is this book valuable to people in any industry?

Newman: While it is always hard to speak with certainties outside of your own experience, I can genuinely say that as a consumer and part of the P2P group, I truly believe this book is relevant for businesses of all types. It isn’t just tech or services buyers that are being affected by the way people use information in their buying journey. I actually start the book out talking about buying a car, but that could be replaced by the selection of a restaurant, or finding a plumber. Everything we do is different in a highly informed and connected world. I definitely lean on my experience and the experience of those I quoted in the book, I feel very safe in saying that most industries can benefit from better understanding these trends and applying them to their business.

Olenski: In the end you come back to customer experience over everything else. This is a fairly well understood topic. Why do you think CX is such an important topic?

Newman: There are two major pieces of data I found in my research that made this unequivocally the most important trend. First, that businesses rarely recognize how much more expensive it is to acquire new customers than it is to keep their current customers (6:1) and since customers leave almost five times more often for bad customer service than they do for bad product, it became abundantly clear businesses needed to focus on retention. Second, customer experience is a true opportunity to differentiate which is important in a world of choice. For most businesses products and services are very hard to differentiate on but being great at customer experience is something that almost any business can put a plan together to achieve.

When it comes to differentiation, more than 80% of businesses believe they are differentiated; yet only 8% of their customers feel the same. This giant disconnect furthers the need for customer experience oriented businesses. As I like to say, in a world or ordinary and mediocre, people remember great, and that is about it.

For those of you who lead businesses, sales teams or marketing departments, this book is a solid read. It is quick and the tone is conversational, traits that I admire for sure. If it doesn’t spark you to at the very least think hard about how you are adapting to a shifting buyers journey, then your business is either ahead of the curve or your head is buried in the sand.

89% of buyers search on Google, Bing, etc. when planning to make a purchase, according to the Fleishman-Hillard research.

There is a social selling lesson here.

So, what can you learn from this simple statistic? Today’s selling and marketing lessons are influenced by this customer native behavior. They are learning and educating themselves with or without our help using digital and social sources.

We’ve all had customers tell us they have narrowed down their decision to a handful of vendors or products based on their own research. Even worse, we’ve all received an ‘out-of-the-blue’ RFP, with all of the needs and requirements neatly packaged into a PDF requiring our 5-day response. Do these experiences sound familiar?

We need to get ahead of this self-education behavior and build a consulting relationship to help frame our customer’s problem.

3-part Customer-Centric Marketing And Selling Lesson Plan

1. Prove It With Teaching Credentials. Make sure to walk-the-walk when it comes to credentials and reputation management. When customers raise their hands to learn, let’s ensure we show we have the teaching (vs. selling) cred to back up our ability to make a difference. We want to build up and document our reputation by:

• Maintaining great customer-centric LinkedIn and Twitter profiles to show who we really are and that we have a history of helping

• Regularly distributing relevant and valued content and links. Use LinkedIn updates, tweets, blog posts, and comments to show we are keeping current with the customer-centric issues vs. just our product features and benefits

• Participating in community and LinkedIn Groups discussions where our customers are searching to show we operate more like an insight-giving teacher instead of a feature-touting sales representative

This attention to reputation builds our credibility when we are ‘Googled’.

2. Have A Different Syllabus For Each Stage In The Buying Journey. 76% of B2B buyers prefer different content at each stage of their research, reported in recent demand generation research. Awareness, consideration, and purchase are the buying process stages. Once we’ve grabbed the attention of our customer, we need to map the conversation and content to the place in the buying stage. And, we need to deliver the messaging on the customer’s digital and social channel of choice. 98% of B2B buyers continue to learn as they move closer to their decision; using more refined search terms as their research deepens.

3. Tutor Customers To Solve Their Problems. Customers want to hear real-life experiences, and how others handled their situation. They want insight into solving their problems. A simple 3-question framework is a great place to begin the tutoring session.

• What is the problem?
• What does the problem mean to you?
• How can a solution and vendor help solve your problem?

Teaching to the first two questions will help make the sale much easier to complete.

Can you teach us a thing or two about a lesson you taught a customer? If so, then please share in the comment section! Or, contact me directly at MarketingThink.com, on Twitter, on LinkedIn or on Google+.

As Dave Edmonds from Rockpile put it, “No one there to tell me how. A different world – teacher, teacher, teach me now.” It is a different world for all of us, so we need to teach our customers how to solve their problems.

So, be a teacher and not a seller.

One of the best ways to drive more online conversions is to understand not just your buyers, but those at a higher stage in your marketing funnel, who are avidly consuming your content and ideally, watching your videos. These “viewer personas” are people who are more engaged, more likely to become a lead, and more likely to eventually convert. For example, check out these stats on shoppers who watched video:

• Shoppers are 1.81x more likely to buy after viewing a video
• 57% of shoppers are more confident about a making purchase after viewing a video
• Zappos.com saw a 6-30% lift in conversion rates on pages with video versus product pages without video

So, how can you replicate these results with online video? Simple, get to know your viewers. Here is a breakdown of how to do exactly that, and what to look for.

First and foremost, pick a video hosting provider with great analytics. You need to be able to get the data on your viewers in order to understand their behavior, where you can improve your content, and how to keep them coming back for more. The key metrics to look for are the total number of impressions and plays your video gets, the unique number of impressions and plays, the amount of the video your viewers actually watched, their physical location, the device they used, and the URL of the page where they watched your video. Depending on your industry, the number of email addresses captured or leads generated might also be important. If you are trying to increase viral shares of your video, then sharing stats from different social networks would also be important. If this sounds like a lot of data, it is, but a video hosting provider with robust analytics will make these numbers readily available for you.

So what do you do with all that data? There are numerous approaches, but a methodological process works best: you want to drill down from total traffic, to viewers, to conversions. You can start from the top, and see if your most popular videos based on play rate (plays divided by impressions) are generating the most leads or conversions for your business. A popular video might not actually be high performing. Look at your less popular videos, and try to analyze if viewers are dropping off at a certain point in the video, or not clicking play in the first place. Look at all the data again, but use the number of social shares to identify your most popular video. The idea is to get a very clear sense of what is working based on your business goals, and what is not.

Closely analyzing this data can help you improve the performance of your content by placing a call-to-action at an earlier point in the video, or with further editing if it seems your viewers that convert are responding to different types of content than those that do not. If possible, test different video landing pages, poster frames (the image shown before someone clicks play on a video), or video titles and descriptions. An a/b test where you make a side-by-side comparison with incremental changes is ideal, but if you have a small team, sometimes just getting a new idea out there is more important, so long as you can track the difference it is making.

Rinse, and repeat.

Have you ever waded through the data on your audience, with unexpected results? How did you use it to optimize the way you use video? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook and Twitter!

Four weeks ago, I decided to buy a new car: I knew that I wanted an SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle) because of my life-style at the moment, and so I began investigating and researching, eventually arriving at a short list of two – Mercedes and Audi. Moving away from Mercedes would be a huge leap of faith for me, because we have enjoyed a very long affair, which began in 1988, after I deserted my previous “lover” BMW, with whom I had co-habited for more than 15 years. However, the opportunity to drive the fastest SUV ever built – 0-62 in 5.1 seconds and a nominal top speed of 155mph, was an incredible attraction for the oldest boy racer in town.

I was impressed by the spec, downloaded the brochure, read all the reviews, spoke to a couple of acquaintances who were Audi owners, and requested a test drive – all online. Within an hour, I received a call from my local dealer, and the demonstration was arranged for two weeks time – I was going to be away until then. Two hours later, I received a call from a very pleasant young man called Stephan, he is the “Audi Luxury and Performance Sales Specialist” with my dealership, and he called to let me know that he had found a vehicle, which was due to be shipped from Germany by the end of the month. At first, I thought this was a ruse to persuade me to place my order earlier than I intended to and to bolster his end of year numbers (Tax year ends on March 31st) But actually, no. In my haste to be self-sufficient – “no sales input needed here thank you” – I had forgotten to check on delivery times. The reality was, I discovered, that this model is like rocking-horse poo – incredibly rare, with a six month delivery time.

To cut the story short at this point, Stephan has been extremely efficient – and more importantly, responsive and patient. He hasn’t sold me anything, because I sold myself, but he has most certainly “facilitated” my purchase. I didn’t come into the cycle at 70% up the chain, I came in at 90%, as more and more buyers are doing these days. Incidentally, I have been asking and asking how did it suddenly get to 70%? What happened to 30% or 50%? Suffice to say, nobody has been able to answer that question. And are we still at 70%? or have we got to 72.5% now?

What I think my story demonstrates is that in many industries – and sectors – the sales role is changing. Here buyers do not need to be sold to, but they do want to be helped in making the right decisions. Marketing is now creating the desire, and customer service teams are providing the after-sale support – but the sales role has changed forever.

This is a pseudo- continuation from my story on Why I Stopped Listening to Gurus. If you’re a guru, hey, nothing personal huh?

Last night, I went out to eat with my mom. A mom-son date since we haven’t had a good talk in a long time.

She wanted to eat Thai food, so I took her to hell’s kitchen area in NYC where there’s tons of awesome Thai food. (Yeah I miss Thailand once in a while.)

When we go there, there were literally 3 Thai restaurants next to each other. (I knew about them before).

Funny thing is.. they are ALL “Yum Yum” – Yum Yum, Yum Yum Too, and Yum Yum 3. (Of course, owned by the same person.)

At that moment, I wanted to see what she would choose (she has this habit of never looking at the name of restaurant she walks into), so I let her.

She chose the the one in the middle.

Why? The other two weren’t as “crowded”, hence they must be not as good.

What is this? Social “proof”.

We are genetically wired to choose the “wisdom” of the crowd over our initial gut instinct (even though the crowd is wrong or dumb as a rock, and often it is).

I’m sure you’ve seen informercials and sales pages where people use testimonials (videos, quotes, etc.), number of customers they serve (ex. McDonalds – over a billion served), Facebook like buttons that show number of people that like that website/business, etc.

All social proof to indicate that you can’t go wrong since all these other people can’t be wrong.

When one has no idea what to do in a situation (such as determining if you should part with your money in exchange for a product or service from a company), they often look for people that have been there and done that, or at least seem like it.

Suppose you’re in an isolated community where no one has any idea and information flow is limited, who do you listen to?

The guy who’s most confident about what needs to be done. Also known as “gurus”.

(Ever hear of a “social media expert”? What is that? Is there a school for those things? What do you need to get into that school? A pen and paper?)

I hate bringing this up as an example, but Jim Jones, a cult leader and his cult of 900+ members committed suicide with poison pills in Guyana in 1978.

Simply put: Jim Jones was the guy who knew for certain that the way out of their trouble was “honorable” death.

That wasn’t the only time in history where (negative) social proof had disastrous effects on a group of people: Heaven’s Gate, Japanese kamikaze pilots, Order of the Solar Temple, Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, etc. (There are LOTS.)

So how does this relate to business & marketing?

Online marketing (and growth hacking) is hard. Often times, when we encounter things that are difficult to understand, and so we start seeking answers.

When we do, we often encounter people who do understand more than us. Why? Because they blog, they speak in public, they teach you… i.e. more certain than you.

BUT.. this is where you have to fight your genetic disposition to social proof.

Especially in emotionally charged verticals (business, finance, making money, marketing, sales, health/diet, dating, etc.), there are many wolves in sheep clothing waiting to exploit your desire to learn.

Here’s pseudo-scientific reasons why you should stop listening to them.

1) Their Stuff Most Likely Will Not Work for You (exactly)

I bought into a stupid vending machine dream because of a marketing guru who claimed that vending business was the key to financial freedom.

Maybe this vending guru actually DID make the kind of money that he promised (highly highly unlikely, but maybe he did).

Will this business or strategy work for you exactly the way it did for him (if he ever did any of the stuff that he claimed that he has done?)

Most likely not.

Different skills, different personality, different set of resources,.. so many factors that come into play.

Even if somehow brain transfer surgery was possible, you cannot and will not replicate his stuff exactly the way he described or did it. Simply because the market will react differently to the information presented by the person presenting it.

Imitation Rarely Trumps Innovation

I had one customer that I was doing some work for. His product sold like hot cakes and he was the envy of his industry.

I went on a marketing interview and I was basically telling the host (the “guru”) about it, and he went onto tell his followers (who happened to be in the same industry) that they should be doing what my customer was doing.

So one of them DID.

He basically took that hot product, and straight up RIPPED it, including the design, the bottle, packaging design, and even the color schema.

The only differences? The name was off by 3 letters and the girl (which by the way, was the SAME girl) holding the bottle but in reverse direction.

(Notice the same color pattern – purple, green, similar lame theme, etc.)

He managed to find me (smart guy… did reverse IP lookup) and asked me to do the same.

Did it work? Nope. It tanked and he ended up losing over $50k of his intial investment money.

99.99% was the same – demographic targeting, PPC bids, landing pages, sales funnel… same everything.

Why? I have NO idea.

Different domain name, different product name, different people, different market conditions, different who knows what.

In fact, this happens in pretty much every industry: one guy innovates, the some guru tells them what’s working, and the rest copies.

What happens? The market gets flooded and you get brand dilution & confusion.

PPC Copycats = Dead cats

IN fact, I highly advocate AGAINST people using competitive intelligence (“spy”) tools to “get an idea” *cough cough steal…* other people’s campaign.

Why?

• They might be doing A/B testing and you have NO idea which version you’re seeing. Most smart marketers are constantly A/B testing their stuff so don’t be so sure that you’re seeing is the winning version.
• You have NO idea what his negative keywords are (negative keywords can make or break your search PPC campaign). For example, in solar lead gen business, one keyword literally made the campaigns TRIPLE my ROAS over night. Yes, 1 stinkin’ keyword.
• You have no idea what his bid is, nor his ROAS. Even if you have the same product with similar margins, your business is your business and in no way a copy of theirs, so why would you copy his marketing campaign?
• Did you know large volume buyers get preferential treatment on ad networks, including payment terms? That means whoever you’re trying to copy might have easier cashflow management than you and hence can bid higher. You copy his bidding model and ad costs alone can sink your business

2) Their Stuff is Probably Outdated

Sometimes guru tells you old information because

• he/she doesn’t know anything about the stuff the industry
• he/she doesn’t want to give away the secret that’s working for him/her

In either case, sometimes you get delayed information

Suppose a PPC guru told you to bid by device on Adwords because different devices have different ROI.

Great idea, right?

Except, Adwords removed that feature a LONG time ago (well, internet time wise)

Maybe when this vending guru did it in his days (*rolling eyes*), maybe there was no market saturation and hence no competition. (yea, in 1800′s maybe).

Sometimes, the best marketing tactics are never shared because if too many people exploit them, it becomes useless.

For example, AirBNB used HTML exploit to cross post their content onto Craigslist.

That news was posted only AFTER craigslist plugged the hole. Then they used that information to get some free PR and backlinks from marketing and tech sites that give them fanfare as being marketing geniuses (and hence boost to their search rankings).

Imagine if every AirBNB competitor knew about it, that exploit would’ve bee gone in a second.

Now there are tons of other exploits that you can read about…

• Blackhat techniques – uhh yeah, try that now and see how far you get
• Facebook page/app marketing – Facebook is clamping down on free traffic (if you waste time devoting all your time & money onto digital sharecropping, expect to be disappointed very soon)
• Advertising arbitrage – commonly known as CPC to CPA arbitrage.. uhh yeah, good luck with that too.

These were all tactics that some gurus STILL teach, yet they were popular months if not years ago (remember internet 1 month is like real life 1 year).

3) They Might Have Ulterior Motives

The only way (most of) these gurus really know about “making money” is by selling you products of tactics they’ve never tried.

If you ever watch late night infomercials, there are dudes willing to teach you how to be rich.. only price? $XXX.

I went to this real estate seminar where this guy claimed he bought an apartment building for NO money down.. and ended up making him $3k per month in passive income.

He can teach you too.. only if you take his $5k seminar.

Of course, the sucker that I am.. i went (but luckily i didn’t pay this time because I tagged along with my friend who did pay.. SUCKER)

He had 100 people show up.. do the math.. that’s $500,000.

When I asked him, what kind of properties and where he invests in, he said “oh i don’t reveal that because I don’t want unnecessary legal exposures on my assets”.

Oh really?

Is that why BILLIONAIRE real estate investor Donald Trump has his name plastered all over his properties in the most visible cities on earth in the country with the most lawsuit-trigger-happy people?

The only “investing” he does is in his crappy re-packaged info products full of information you can get from a at a local library book for free.

(One of his 1 inch thick binder he gave us as the learning material had about 50 pages of “material”, triple line spacing, 16 point font, and 1.5 inch margins. The rest were BLANK pages with lines for us to write our own notes.)

Here’s the kicker – During one of the seminars, one of these “gurus” upsold his students on some real estate development projects in 2008 in some remote part of North Carolina. The project flopped and the investors (i.e. his students) lost millions.

Last time I heard, the developer of the project and this “guru” is under investigation by the FBI and SEC for possible mortgage fraud and SEC violations (i.e. asking money from people who don’t qualify). My real estate investor friend lost and still owes over $200k on that ridiculous piece of land that nobody wants.

I’m sure there are some good “gurus” out there with good intentions, but I just haven’t found any that happens to advertise him/herself.

In online marketing, this is no different, if not worse. Affiliate marketing, being the poster child, of course.

Make thousands daily at home, pushing buttons… right?

Wrong. Ask any successful affiliate marketer. It’s hard as hell work. Offers going up and down, lead shaves, landing page thefts, advertisers not paying on time… it’s almost much a nightmare as any other business.

Key Takeway

The only way to LEARN is by doing it, via trial & error, asking, reading, and yes, using your own money and time. If you want to be spoon fed, you will get fed information that serves someone else, not you.

If you truly do need more information before you can pull the trigger, i recommend you listen to people who have been there and done that, like entrepreneurs who are doing it or have done it like me , and marketers/agencies/growth hackers that are doing this every day.

It’s no secret; social media marketing isn’t as straightforward as it used to be and consumers are getting more socially savvy by the moment. Today’s consumer no longer just hopes, but expects their favorite brands to continue to offer them new and innovative ways to engage socially.

As the social media landscape evolves at lightning speed, keeping up with trends and exploiting them is time consuming. But we’ve tracked down six unique brands that are doing an exceptional job of it. Sure they enjoy big budgets and professional marketing teams, but businesses of all sizes can replicate their tactics on a smaller scale.

Read on and discover six brands that have their social media marketing strategy down pat and why their approach works. Plus, get helpful takeaways and tips that will kick your social media campaign into the 21st Century.

1. Oreo

Explore Oreo’s social media and you discover more than the iconic cookie with a delectable cream center. You’ll be treated to a wealth of catchy videos that will engage you with the brand in unexpected ways.

What are some of its key effective social media marketing strategies?

Video clips

Through its Wonderfilled campaign, Oreo uses 30 second video clips to show what happens when a variety of people get their hands on an Oreo. From American hip hop recording artist Chiddy Bang to country music artist Kacey Musgraves, and even an ordinary little girl singing about the joys of sharing Oreos with her dad, Each video targets a different audience and has a specific theme, but they are all equally captivating and perfect for the viewer to share on their social media outlet of choice.

Snack Hacks

In addition to these targeted short video clips, Oreo also offers “Snack Hacks.” Snack Hacks are a collection of YouTube videos that are about 10 seconds long and provide the viewer with cool and unexpected ways to enjoy an Oreo. The videos are very simple, short, and effective at letting the viewer know there’s a lot more you can do with an Oreo than dunk it in a glass of cold milk.

Takeaway: With apps like Vine and Viddy, making a short video to showcase your product or service is easier than ever and won’t break your marketing budget. Then share your creation on Facebook, Tweet about it and add it to a board on Pinterest. It won’t be long before your followers will look forward to your short, creative works.

2. Red Bull

Red Bull sold 5.2 billion cans of energy drink in 2012, making it the most popular energy drink on the planet. There’s no doubt its social media had something to do with it, as Red Bull uses content marketing and social media to create a lifestyle that its target is thirsty for.

If there’s any brand out there that knows its buyers persona, it’s Red Bull. Red Bull’s website is smothered with thrill-seeking athletes, rappers and race car drivers who tout the brand. Here are just some of its key social media marketing tactics.

Photo of the week

It’s “photo of the week” gets viewers talking, Tweeting, sharing and engaging with the brand.

Facebook page

Head to Red Bull’s Facebook page and you’ll learn about its crowd pleasing upcoming events or play one of its addictive games.

Red Bull TV

Drop in on RedBullTV and experience all of life’s adventures right from your otherwise boring cubical. RedBullTV lets you watch your adrenaline heroes shred the slopes, surf a radical wave or tear up a BMX circuit.

Red Bull also offers a slew of apps just to add to the mix.

They also go to extremes with its social media, and extreme is what the brand is all about. Red Bull does an amazing job of getting consumers pumped up about its product, and fueling their belief that if they drink Red Bull, they’re part of something bigger. Red Bull’s social media isn’t about the drink, but it’s selling it like crazy.

Takeaway: Just like Red Bull, your social media must be relevant to your target audience to be effective. The first step to creating a relevant social media campaign is to understand your audience persona. Understand who you are creating your Pinterest board for, who you are Tweeting to, who are your Facebook fans? Spend the time necessary to understand your buyer personas and you’ll be well on your way to achieving social media success.

3. ADT

ADT is using social media to reinvent its brand and roll out a relatively new product. Along the way it’s gaining a reputation for riveting entertainment.

Once upon a time, ADT was “just” a security company. Today, ADT products can help you manage your home’s HVAC system from around the world, text you when your kids get home from school, and even give you the power to unlock the front door for the housekeeper, right from your smartphone. ADT has put a great effort into developing technology that not only enhances what it’s known for best (home security) but also in offering consumers new lifestyle products and services like ADT Pulse.

Through social media, it’s spreading the word out about its changes and helping consumers identify with the brand in a new way. As a bonus it’s adding a touch of humor and a dash of entertainment to a product that’s inherently a bit boring.

Here are some of their top tactics.

Pinterest

ADT’s Pinterest page offers everything from crime statistics, to moving tips, spring cleaning tips and an especially entertaining look at how sometimes a guard dog just doesn’t cut it.

Facebook

Its Facebook page offers users the chance to tell their story about how ADT has helped them.

YouTube

Its YouTube videos are second to none. ADT Home Turf Play gives the viewer a peek inside the homes of professional athletes that show off how they use ADT Pulse. Brilliant!

Takeaway: If you’re moving your brand in a new direction or expanding a facet of the brand, social media can be an effective way to get people thinking about it in a new light. Social media is also perfect for jazzing up an otherwise hum-drum product with humor. ADT proves that no matter what your industry is, social media offers the opportunity to generate amazing social buzz.

4. CableTV.com

A popular online source for cable TV information, latest celebrity news, and discounts for service from cable providers, CableTV.com uses social media to learn more about its customers while delivering fresh content they’re hungry for.

Facebook

One way it does so is through its Facebook page, where fans are treated to teasing headlines and an array of short interviews with some of TV most buzzed about stars. The page is filled with what’s hot, late-breaking and opinion stirring.

CableTV.com also does a knockout job of asking for viewer opinion by posing interesting questions and, in doing so, it’s collecting valuable information about its target.

Google+

CableTV.com’s Google+ page is equally entertaining as its Facebook page, and proves Google+ doesn’t have to be so darn serious! For example, a recent post asked “Thus far, clips from #thetonightshowwithjimmyfallon have ____ many views. Go ahead, take a guess” and then prompted the reader to take a look at the answer here, which smartly directs them to the CableTV.com blog.

Hashtags

On a final note, CableTV.com makes good use of hashtags. Its posts aren’t drowning in them, but they are used when appropriate.

Takeaway: Use tactics like polls, fill in the blank, and open ended questions to learn more about your consumer, and keep them coming back to your social media by giving them consistently fresh content.

5. Airbnb

Airbnb was founded just five years ago. That’s amazing considering the accommodation marketplace has served more than 11 million guests. Whether you’re looking for a loft in London, a farmhouse in Tuscany or a high-rise apartment in the Big Apple, Airbnb can help you discover it. And if you’re looking to make good use of your extra space and earn cash while doing so, listing your pad is a cinch.

Airbnb enjoys enormous success because it fills a niche in the accommodation industry, but it also rocks social media.

Here are some insights on their tactics.

Make social media fun

Through Google+, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the brand offers travelers and hosts tips, asks fun questions that beg you to chime in, and keeps you current on Airbnb events.

Airbnb stories

But what’s particularly impressive about Airbnb’s social media strategy is how each outlet strongly encourages users to share their Airbnb Stories, and in doing so has created an authentic community that generates a sense of camaraderie.

Takeaway: Your current customers are your best source of advertising. They want to tell the world how great your product or service is. Set up your social media so they can!

6. TurboTax

It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Even TurboTax is taking advantage of social media, and its approach proves that how you treat unhappy customers says a lot about your approach to customer satisfaction.

TurboTax offers users a variety of ways to engage, including through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. As you might imagine, because the company deals with the most dreaded of things (taxes), a handful of disgruntled customers use the company’s social media to vent their dissatisfaction.

Handling negative comments on social media

Instead of ignoring the negative vibes, TurboTax addresses every concern. In doing so, its credibility skyrockets, because the fact is, we’re all going to be disappointed now and then. When we are, we want to know someone cares.

Takeaway: When (not if) the time comes that your company receives a less than complimentary social shout-out, don’t ignore it. Address the problem so the world knows you take customer service seriously. In doing so you’ll score major consumer happiness points. Our six featured brands are using social media in different ways, but all are achieving their goals. And you can too. Use our helpful takeaway tips and get started today.

Thinking about hiring any new salespeople in the not-too-distant future? Or are you still suffering from a bad hire? If so, check out my interview with Lee Salz, onboarding expert and author of Hire Right, Higher Profits. I know you'll get some good ideas.

(Note: Click here to download a sample chapter. Or get it now on Amazon. Right now, it's the #1 ranked sales/sales management book on Kindle!)

JILL: In your new book, you introduce the concept of thinking of a sales team as a revenue investment. What do you mean by that?

Lee Salz: Imagine a sales manager came up with an incredible idea to drive revenue which costs $25,000 to implement. How many hurdles would she have to jump through to get approval to proceed?

Now, imagine that same sales manager preparing to hire an inside salesperson with a base salary of $25,000. In most cases, there isn’t nearly the same level of scrutiny for that sales hire.

However, if you consider the purpose of both the idea and salesperson, the intent of both is to drive revenue. They are both investments the company is making in revenue, but most companies don’t perceive them that way. 

JILL: You also take a rather unique stance in the book by saying, “There is no such thing as a great salesperson.” Why do you believe that?

Lee Salz: I’m often taken to task on that statement, but I can prove it. How many so-called “great salespeople” have you hired, but they failed in your company? If they were great salespeople, then you must subscribe to one of the following given their failure.

1. Either the salesperson arrived at your company and completely forgot how to sell – OR –
2. Your company is the absolute worst company to sell for in the history of business.

Which one is it? There couldn’t be another explanation if you believe in great salespeople.

The issue is that greatness isn’t a standalone quality, but rather an attribute of the relationship between a salesperson and a specific sales role. How else could you explain a salesperson being a rock star in one company, but a flop in another – or the converse?

JILL: I was intrigued by your position on hiring salespeople from the competition. Why should executives be cautious when hiring from competitors?

Lee Salz: There is an executive dream which sounds like this. “I hire the competitor’s top salesperson. She arrives at my company and brings $1M in revenue with her…while I master my golf swing.”

While that’s a nice dream, it’s rarely a reality. Executives often see the competition as their best source for sales talent. And they blindly pursue those reps without considering the match to their company.

JILL: So what should executives be looking for in salespeople as they consider them for a revenue investment?

Lee Salz: Before a company can consider candidates, the executive team needs to take a 360-degree look at the role – a process I call the “Revenue Investment 360.”

During this evaluation, every factor that leads to sales success or failure is analyzed for level of impact. This leads to the development of a Performance Factor Portfolio for the role. Each candidate is then compared and contrasted with the portfolio in search of matches.

This changes the sales hiring game from solely looking at closing and prospecting skills as success measures. After all, if those are the sole measures of success, identifying the right candidates for a revenue investment is simple.

JILL: You talk a lot about sales onboarding in the book. I know there are several definitions of onboarding. How do you define onboarding?

Lee Salz: There is a common misconception that the output of the hiring process is the identification of a great salesperson. It’s not. The output is a salesperson with the potential to be great in a specific sales role for the company. That potential is only recognized when a bridge program is put in place that connects the salesperson’s knowledge and skills with proficiency in the role.

Onboarding is the bridge curriculum and measurements that ensure mastery has been acquired by the new salesperson. Without sales onboarding, companies immediately put their new revenue investment in jeopardy. However, companies that have developed sales onboarding find that their salespeople get up to speed faster, sell more…and at higher price points.

JILL: If a company wanted to launch a sales onboarding development initiative, where should they start?

Lee Salz: Most executives begin the sales onboarding development project by inviting a bunch of colleagues to a meeting where the discussion focuses on one question: “What are we going to include in the program?” In other words, they start the initiative by considering curriculum. The two issues with that approach are: 1) Curriculum can be added for an eternity; and 2)There’s no way to gauge if the program serves its purpose.

The best place to start is at the finish line - by identifying expectations. Imagine you had a salesperson who is described as having successfully completed the onboarding program.

Because she is described as having successfully completed it, there are now expectations of her. What are those expectations?

• What is she expected to KNOW (i.e., product knowledge)?
• What should she be able to DO (i.e., conduct a sales call)?
• What should she be able to USE (i.e., CRM)?

The expectations portfolio drives the curriculum development process. This keeps the program finite, on track and focused on its true purpose which is to get new salespeople up to speed, fast.

JILL: In your opinion, what is the right duration of a sales onboarding program?

Lee Salz: There is a common perception that 90 days is the right duration for a sales onboarding program. Given the different sales backgrounds that salespeople have, the various roles (inside sales, outside sales, etc.), how can there be a standard duration for a sales onboarding program?

The counsel I give to clients is that the program should be long enough to ensure every one of the expectations (KNOW – DO – USE) is achieved by the participants. It could be 10 days. It could be 100 days. It could be 200 days. The timeline driver is the expectations portfolio.

JILL: Thanks a million, Lee. And readers, click here your copy of Hire Right, Higher Profits.  Also, when you buy it, you'll also get Lee's virtual training class, "Get Your New Hire Salespeople Up to Speed ... Fast!, a $99 value. 

About Lee Salz

Lee B. Salz is a leading sales management strategist and Founder of Sales Architects^®. He specializes in helping companies hire the right salespeople, effectively onboard them and align their activities with business objectives.

Using his sales architecture^® methodology, Lee’s clients migrate from being "people-based" to "process-based" resulting in explosive, profitable growth.

If you want a snapshot of the user experience on your websites from the perspective of your prospects, just ask them.

This is exactly what James Coulter, Marketing Optimization Specialist, Sophos, did to better understand how prospects were engaging the organization’s website.

James shared some of Sophos’ user feedback that he really took to heart during his presentation at Optimization Summit 2013.

“I really wanted our website to be something that would help them in their purchasing decisions,” James explained.

I would wager there are many B2B marketers reading this who receive similar kinds of feedback from prospects a lot more often than they would like to.

This feedback, while harsh, is some of the most valuable insight you’ll ever receive. It’s also an honest wake-up call for making the changes needed to better serve your prospects.

In today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Blog post, I want to share the three steps James used to implement a testing and optimization strategy for Sophos’ Web experience to hopefully help your team tackle the four toughest words in optimization:

“Where do we begin?”

Step #1. Identify your goals

James explained that although there were plenty of areas where he could have focused on increasing, such as white paper leads, free trial leads and new quote leads, narrowing the list down to the greatest opportunity would be key in developing optimization goals.

“There were hundreds of things we could have focused on,” James said, “and the first thing I tried to understand is: Where should we focus?”

Some of the information he gathered to help him understand where to focus was:

• Feedback from Sales
• A review of all lead sources (average cost per lead and lead/opportunity percentage)

This also gave James the insight he needed to set a clear goal of discovering “where can we have the greatest impact on revenue.”

Step #2. Put together a cross-functional team

Next, James put together a cross-functional team from Sales, Marketing and Product Management to help drive visibility, awareness and buy-in on the new initiative.

Putting together a diverse team is also a fantastic way to look for new ideas outside of your own and create a true sense of ownership in the success of the new approach.

Step #3. Craft your initial hypothesis

Finally, James and his team mapped their entire quote funnel to really drill down and understand where in the process most prospects were dropping out.

This led them to also identify where the greatest testing opportunities existed.

Crafting your hypothesis on customer behavior is also where you truly start to bridge the gap between intuition and data-driven insight and then turn that insight into goal-oriented action.

How would 6,000% more leads than you have now impact your organization?

Ultimately, the Sophos team developed a well-tested and optimized lead generation program that increased leads 6,012% and counting, according to James.

The team’s success also points to a bigger notion – the process of testing and optimization is a marathon.

It’s a long-term strategy that takes time, testing, analysis and even more testing to help you fully understand what works.

It’s a strategy where success is not the destination, but instead, the only option left.

To learn more about the challenges James faced in transforming Sophos’ lead generation program, you can watch the on-demand replay of “How a Long-term Optimization Strategy Led to a 6,031% Increase in Leads.”

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5 steps you should take when exhibiting at your first trade show

Preparing for a trade show can be a challenging experience. From the financial to the logistical, trade shows offer a massive range of benefits for your business but often demand an equally great amount of focus, work and commitment.

If you've never exhibited at a trade show before, the entire process of preparing a booth and readying your sales team can seem unbelievably difficult. In this guide, we’ll look at five simple tactics and principles that you can use to make the process of preparing for a trade show more manageable.

Tip 1. Prepare a detailed, itemised and flexible budget in advance

Budgeting for a trade show is a far more involved and demanding process than most business owners and marketers realise. Preparing a detailed, itemised budget is the difference between running a smooth trade show exhibit and dealing with a costly, stressful marketing nightmare.

The Trade Show Institute offers some practical tips for budgeting: assume that you’ll spend at least three times the cost of your exhibit space, be flexible in order to avoid running into budgeting hurdles during the event, and prepare an itemised budget so you can see exactly where your money is going.

Budgeting for individual items and show services isn’t the result of an obsession to detail – it’s actually a great way to make sure that you’ve prepared for every aspect of the event before it begins.

Tip 2. Know your audience when you prepare your marketing

Trade shows attract a diverse range of people, even if they’re designed to attract one particular industry. Within a show, you’ll likely find executives, vendors, purchasing managers, marketers, founders, freelancers and more.

Because such a wide range of people attend trade shows, it’s important to establish a target audience before you attend so that you can identify great prospects as they interact with your sales team. Develop an ideal customer profile so that your sales team can quickly recognise and interact with the highest quality leads.

Tip 3. Select space that matches your sales and branding goals

More than 400 companies exhibit at the average trade show. Because of this, where you choose to set up your trade show booth is often just as important for success as the event you choose to exhibit at. Position yourself well and you’ll gain a valuable advantage; position yourself poorly and you’ll blend in with the crowd.

Here are some simple questions to ask yourself when you’re selecting space for your trade show exhibit:

• Do you want to attract visitors as soon as they arrive, or after they’ve had a chance to see what your competitors offer?
• What is the foot traffic pattern? You can learn a lot about the best spaces to exhibit by attending an event at the same exhibit hall ahead of time.
• Where are ‘blue chip’ companies that could attract a crowd going to set up their exhibits?
• Is it advantageous for you to be close to your competition? If you offer a product or service that’s a better deal, setting up near your competitors could be a good idea.

Tip 4. Avoid serious logistical issues by being overprepared

Setting up your trade show exhibit is not as simple as turning up and plugging in all of your equipment. Ask yourself the serious logistical questions ahead of time and you’ll prevent common setbacks from occurring on the day of the trade show.

How far is your space from the nearest power outlet? What is the lighting like near your exhibit space? How long will you need to set up your exhibit? These questions might seem simple, but their answers can make or break your exhibit.

Be realistic about the quality of the leads you’re generating

When you have hundreds of leads coming in during the event, it’s very tempting to think of your exhibit as a success before it’s really proven itself. Many of the leads you generate at a trade show may have also talked to five, ten, or even more other companies, so it’s important to be realistic about their value.

Use the entire event as an opportunity to generate fresh sales leads, and don’t feel that you can scale back your sales efforts because you have several hundred phone numbers or business cards already. When you’ve exhibited at several trade shows you’ll be able to assess quality on the fly – for now, just focus on lead generation.

Tip 5. Review - was your first trade show successful?

Over the next weeks and months, as your sales team follows up with the leads you generated at your first trade show, you’ll be able to judge for yourself whether the event was a sales success or failure. As you attend more trade shows, the tactics in this guide will change from being deliberate strategy into natural behaviour.