Bringing more entrepreneurs into cities is always a smart idea--and a prompt to discuss what's potentially amiss in the world of small-business policy-making.

On the surface, who would dispute the merits of luring entrepreneurs to America's cities?

For many reasons--job growth, branding, bolstered commerical tax bases (ostensibly enabling cities to rely less on residential property taxes)--it behooves and benefits many cities to attract entrepreneurs.

It always has and it always will.

That's why you'll be pleased to read Richard Florida's recent article in the Atlantic about how cities can attract more entrepreneurs.

In the article, Florida eloquently summarizes a thorough report on the topic from Endeavor Insight, which is based on a survey of 150 successful entrepreneurs. The key takeaways include:

• What entrepreneurs want most in a city "by far" is access to talent. "Nearly a third of those surveyed mentioned it as a key factor in their decisions for where to live and work (many specifically prized access to technically trained workers)," writes Florida.

• Tax policies don't matter. "Just 5 percent of the respondents mentioned low taxes as being important, and a measly 2 percent named other business-friendly policies as a factor in their location decisions."

• Eighty percent of the entrepreneurs surveyed had resided in their city for at least two years before starting their companies. On some level, this suggests entrepreneurs might need to like the city for personal reasons, as much as for business-policy ones.

• The larger the city, the better. "These top business-creators gravitated towards cities with at least a million residents in the metro area," writes Florida.

It's interesting material, to be sure. The tax insights, in particular, can help debunk the policies that "so many states and cities continue to promote as silver bullets," notes Florida.

I applaud his idea of debunking the specious policies that so many states and cities consider to be helpful. And it's in that spirit that I'd like to debunk one more specious policy: The emphasis on attracting and retaining startups, as opposed to businesses that have already survived their brutal first five years of existence.

Specifically, I'm talking about a policy problem that Babson professor Daniel Isenberg has articulated in the Harvard Business Review. That problem is the tendency of policy makers to equate entrepreneurship with the mere act of starting a company:

Equating entrepreneurship with startup is not wrong; it is just very incomplete. It is also problematic because of two flawed implied messages: The first is that the most difficult and important task of the entrepreneur is launching his or her venture. The second is a notion we might call "the more the merrier"--i.e., the more startups, the more successful the program. Quantity of start implicitly trumps quality of scale.

Isenberg's overall point is that policy tends to focus too much on the birth of companies; instead, it should focus on the proper way to grow companies. For it's the growth of companies--not merely the birth of them--that produces what cities and states are really seeking: jobs, branding, commerical tax revenues.

If all of that leaves cities and states baffled about what their top small-business priority should be, I can make it simple: Your top priority should be enhancing the local labor pool. Isenberg calls this "an essential aspect" of a growth-business ecosystem. "Entrepreneurs I meet with from Boston to Bangalore to Barcelona who have succeeded in obtaining market traction almost universally complain about the paucity of appropriately skilled people and managers to hire," he writes.

His observation dovetails with what the 150 entrepreneurs told Endeavor Insight: that "by far" they value a pool of talented employees "more than any other business-related resource that cities can offer."

In short: Talented employees come first.

If cities and states have those, then fast-growth businesses--and the entrepreneurs who launch them--will be sure to follow.

Jim Flaherty was one of the longest serving federal finance ministers in Canadian history. He also oversaw the public purse during the most volatile economic period in memory.

Here are 10 charts that capture the dramatic changes that have occurred since Flaherty was first appointed in 2006.

 

 

In response to the financial crisis, and the coalition crisis, Ottawa introduced the Action Plan stimulus program, thus launching seemingly a million Action Plan signs across the country, and sending the federal budget deep into the red. (Earlier cuts to the GST also deprived Ottawa of revenue.) Along the way, untold millions were shovelled into projects of dubious value to the economy. In his most recent budget, Flaherty confirmed the federal government would return to a surplus position by 2015, in time for the next federal election.

 

 

Regular annual deficits have driven up the federal debt, though not to dangerous levels.

Even before the recession, Flaherty’s Conservatives, then in a minority government, had begun ramping up spending at the federal level. The stimulus spending only accelerated that trend. Since 2011 austerity measures have seen the federal ranks begin to shrink. Cutbacks have hit all departments, including Statistics Canada, which cancelled its data series tracking public-sector wages and salaries.

 

Fiscal stimulus was only one tool in the federal government’s arsenal, of course. Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, appointed by Flaherty, worked in conjunction with other central banks to slash interest rates and ease the liquidity crisis. Carney’s conditional commitment in the spring of 2009 to lock interest rates in place for at least a year was hailed for its innovation, and helped catch the eye of officials in the U.K., where he now toils as Governor of the Bank of England. Flaherty’s appointment of Stephen Poloz as Carney’s replacement has not been without controversy.

 

 

Some have harshly criticized Poloz, a former executive at Export Development Canada, accusing him of talking down the value of the loonie in a bid to boost Canada’s manufacturing and export sectors. The Canadian dollar reached parity several times while Flaherty was finance minister. He, like many Canadians, was “irritated” that the high dollar had not translated into lower prices for consumers. His promise to tackle the Canada-U.S. price gap went nowhere.

One obvious result of extremely low interest rates has been an explosion in house prices. Early on the government did what it could to boost the housing market. In his first federal budget Flaherty opened the door to private mortgage insurers with the goal of introducing “greater choice and innovation in the market for mortgage insurance, benefiting consumers and promoting home ownership.” The move prompted the Canada Mortgage and Housing Company, which Flaherty oversaw, to introduce zero down-payment mortgages with 40-year amortizations. As prices soared, Flaherty has repeatedly backtracked, introducing measures to tighten the mortgage market. The response from home buyers each time was to pause briefly, then resume their mad rush to the next bidding war.

And as house prices have risen, Canadians have eagerly taken on more debt. As a percentage of GDP, household debt is it its highest level ever, as is the amount of debt households carry for every dollar of disposable income.

So long as inflation remains relatively tame, don’t expect to see interest rates rise any time soon.

As he departs from office, Flaherty also leaves behind a bloated tax system that has grown increasingly complex as a result of boutique tax credits.

 

 

The post 10 charts that sum up the Flaherty years appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Joseph Campbell, the American scholar, once described The “Hero’s Journey” as a basic pattern of narrative found in many stories from around the world. The journey starts when the hero receives a call to enter a world of powers and events. The hero who accepts the call must face tasks and trials. If he is successful, he achieves great gifts.

Every brand partakes in a similar journey to find the brand purpose, whether the brand describes a person, product, or service. Unique features and benefits provide help along the way. But to withstand the endless obstacles that line every brand’s path, there’s a brand purpose that transcends any functional advantage. Hero’s are hero’s not just because of their actions but because their purpose is considered noble by common consent (love, peace, freedom, fun). Until a brand understands and respects the fact that it ultimately depends on long-term followers more than short-term buyers, it remains vulnerable to competitors—competitors who can readily marshal needed resource to displace a product advantage. The higher brand purpose paves the way for brands to form lasting emotional bonds, bonds that no competitor can overcome.

What Is Your Higher Brand Purpose?

We are humans first, consumers second. And as humans we are always searching for meaning. A strong brand purpose provides that meaning by providing their audiences with causes to emulate, beliefs to uphold, and values to support. Strong brands don’t just sell the church. They sell their religion, too. But defining a brand’s higher-level purpose can sometimes be difficult. For it to be authentic, it must be coaxed out of hiding.

Archetypes to the Rescue

Using brand archetypes can help address this challenge. The psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, used the concept of archetype in his theory of the human psyche. Although there are many different archetypes, here are the basic twelve that symbolize universal human motivations. Each is founded on specific beliefs and values. These can be used to symbolize brand motivations, as well.

12 Basic Archetypes

If your brand is Harley Davidson, you might say your archetype is The Rebel. Apple can be seen as the combination of the Imaginer and The Wizard. Nike is part Conqueror and part Emperor.

There are a number of ways to use archetypes for branding purposes. There are assessment tools available that can help. But barring the use of those, at the very least, using these archetypes can stimulate an enlightening discussion among those in charge of a brand’s marketing. And they work for personal brands, as well.

The strongest aspect of the roundtables Econsultancy runs around the world is that marketers drive the conversation. If they want to jump from emerging trends to what annoys them about digital marketing sales pitches, we’re happy to sit back and learn something.

That’s just what happened at one of our South by Southwest roundtables, co-hosted by Rapp and Adometry. What emerged was the start of this list of dos and don’ts that we hope will help save time and sanity on both sides of the table.

In this post, client-side marketers share their unvarnished advice on how digital marketing sales people should improve their pitches.

The conversation got rolling with old fashioned anger at a new trend, the passive aggressive email from sales people. [Ok, 'new' might be overstating it as we’ve all received and/or sent an email that crossed the line from assertive to pushy, but the practice seems to be getting more popular.)

As one brand marketer described it…

I get these cold emails pitching something and suggesting a time to talk. A week later I get a second email that’s “following up on our meeting time.” They use language that implies I’ve been rude for not having responded and they never quit.

Another attendee picked it up from there.

Yes, this is happening all the time. As if I’m going to feel bad about not replying and my guilt will lead to good things? I recently got an email from a sales person who has been contacting me repeatedly, where he said “This will be my last email.” I cc’d several other executives and replied “Thank you.”

These stories of failure led us to ask more pointed questions about sales pitches in the age of digital proliferation; what can sales people do (or avoid doing) to gain attention and trust?

#1. Don't speak...

It’s a chestnut of epic proportions, but the number one reason a pitch goes bad is that we talk when we should be listening.

It’s the fundamental rule of every sales training, but in practice most people simply launch into their spiel or their deck. Just watch the body language of the 'targets' as you plod through the company history, share some logos of companies that don’t know that they’re customers and just possibly touch on the unique selling proposition.

This is the noble story of you and your product. The people listening could not care less. They care about themselves. We all do. There are no selfless acts, at least in business. If you want to sell someone, you have to know their story and where it’s leading. The quality is empathy, and it appears in every study of what makes for a top sales person.

Think about the position of a brand marketer these days. They’re beset by new requirements, channels, technologies and shifting behavior patterns from their customers.

Change is exciting, but so is throwing yourself off a cliff in one of those squirrel suits.

Even at big, well-funded marketing departments, there are only a few 'top priorities' at any given time. These are the projects that are going to get noticed at the end of the quarter, and they’re where careers are being made.

Find out what those initiatives are and figure out how you can help…the company and the person sitting across the desk from you.

#2. Of course you should listen, but...

The worst way to waste precious meeting time is to ask questions you should already know the answer to. It’s the digital era, so I shouldn’t have to explain my role, or the different revenue lines of the company, or how we started in the UK, etc.

There is enormous value to asking for explicit information from prospects, but before you can do that effectively, you need to do your research.

Before sending the first email, you should know at least this much:

• How does this company make their money? What are their revenue lines and how are those changing? Is there a hot part of the company, a new direction?
• What are they afraid of? Are they worried about a key competitor who is tearing up the sector? Are there digital upstarts eating their lunch? Are consumers themselves the main threat to growth?
• What sort of marketing defines this company? Are they aggressive with new tech and channels or do they like to see how trends play out?
• Who is the person you’re meeting with…really? Have they moved around a lot or changes roles frequently? That could mean they’ll take a risk with you if you can help them see a career benefit. If not, they may be more efficiency minded.

The goal is not necessarily to predict the prospect’s every motivation, but to be fully grounded. To be able to contextualize and make use of whatever information they share.

Not long ago I met with a sales person who began our call by saying “Let me tell you what I think I know about Econsultancy and you can tell me where I’m wrong.” She then correctly spelled out the basics and even shared an insight or two based on her own experience of having worked for an international company.

This was very powerful, because it created a dynamic of comfortably exchanging information and established that she had done her homework.

It was the foundation for building trust and worth ten unique features.

#3. Stop. Just stop...

Opportunity cost is one of those basic theories of economics that we all know and most of us ignore. In sales and marketing we are much more likely to pay lip service to “the right message to the right person, etc.” than to actually adhere to the principle.

Instead, we carpet bomb lists of organizations and titles with any shred of relevance to our customer profile (or maybe not even a shred).

But the spray and pray method doesn’t work very well. We know this from countless studies of personal and mass marketing. Worse, it wastes time, the one resource that’s absolutely not going to increase.

With practice, sales people get to know what companies are a bad fit, and marketing should be helping. They should identify the characteristics of solid leads – not just lead scoring but real predictive assistance.

As one CRM sales executive shared with me:

We know with almost 100% certainty that if the current CMO or CIO brought in a solution in the last 40 months, we simply don’t have a shot. It doesn’t matter if their current system is a bust, they can’t admit it.

Knowing when not to bother extends to individual executives as well. Sometimes our natural inclination to get the most senior person possible to hear the pitch makes the sale less likely.

For example, CMOs and their ilk are interested in solutions to big problems or opportunities for significant growth. Most marketing technologies simply don’t qualify; they address a niche within a niche.

They’re useful, but not necessary. If that’s the case, you’re better off with the person who is knee deep in the niche, not their boss’s boss.

The opportunity cost for unnecessary pitches is particularly high for sales people at companies that are moving toward a more inbound approach.

Many industries are increasingly using content to attract leads and define them, and this naturally affects the sales process. We tend to interact with leads further 'down the funnel' and our communication is expected to follow the form of the content marketing that brought them in.

Impersonal emails looking for a few minutes of time are even less likely to work in an inbound world. There’s an expectation of a value exchange.

Crafting an email that anticipates a prospect’s needs and connects them with a piece of content is time consuming, even if marketing is doing its job and producing great stuff to work with.

We kid because we care

Marketers like to joke about sales people and vice versa, but the two should be partners at every level. There’s no harder job than selling, especially to skeptical, overworked prospects who hear about ten new "solutions" every day to problems they're not entirely convinced apply to them.

Some of those same pressures are changing sales too. The shift from push to pull has forced many sales "hunters" to become more consultative. In a long process that involves an array of buyers, marketing is in a position to help sales achieve its goals. That's good news, for some sales people anyway. 

According to the brands at our roundtable, the sales people that recognize and take advantage of this shift will find their calls answered.

Alibaba, the enormous e-commerce company in China, is about to file for an IPO in the U.S. 

The company is relatively unknown in the States — but not for long. 

Here are some facts about the company that help you figure out just how powerful it really is:

1. 24,000 people work for Alibaba. That's more employees than Yahoo and Facebook have combined.
2. Yahoo's entire market value is tied to Alibaba. Yahoo currently owns 24% of Alibaba (though it's predicted to sell back 10% of that stock when the company IPO's.) Yahoo's stake in Alibaba is worth $37 billion. Yahoo's market cap is $39.5 billion. 
3. In 2012, two of Alibaba’s websites handled $170 billion in sales. That's more than competitors eBay and Amazon.com combined.
4. Yahoo only gets a small slice of the total sales, but even a small slice is a lot of money. In January, Yahoo reported (.PDF) that Alibaba's revenue was ~$1.8 billion for the September quarter, a 51% year-over-year increase. Net income was $792 million, up from a loss of $246 million the year before.
5. During the Chinese equivalent of Black Friday, Alibaba processed more than $5.75 billion in sales. That's 3X more sales in just one day than America saw on Black Friday — on just one company's websites.
6. Alibaba's sites account for over 60% of the packages delivered in China.
7. Alibaba has millions of registers users. In 2012, Alibaba clocked in at 36.7 million registered users from more than 240 countries. It also has more than 2.8 million supplier online storefronts and more than 5,900 product categories.
8. Alibaba's IPO could be even bigger than Facebook's. Facebook’s IPO valued the company at $104 billion, but Bloomberg says Alibaba is valued between $153 billion and $200 billion.
9. Alibaba is on track to become the world’s first e-commerce firm to handle $1 trillion a year in transactions.
10. Alibaba's Taobao is one of the 20 most-visited websites globally. Taobao lets users sell goods to one another (like on eBay) and it features nearly a billion products.
11. Alibaba has a mind-bogglingly huge frontier for growth. Analysts predict that China’s e-commerce market will be bigger than the existing markets in America, Britain, Japan, Germany and France combined by 2020.
12. There are two secrets to Alibaba's $100 billion success in its home country. It blocks China's search engine from searching inside two of its most popular web stores, Taobao and Tmall. (To understand that contrast from the norm, Google search "buy ___," and you'll see that Google will pull up product listings from sites like Amazon and Ebay. You can't do that with a Chinese search engine.)
13. By not allowing search engines to display Taobao or Tmall items in search, Alibaba makes consumers start all their searches within each virtual store. It can then rake in cash by selling search ads on Taobao and Tmall – acting more like Google in how it makes money than eBay or Amazon.
14. The company uses a unique payments system. It has Alipay, a novel online-payments system that relies on escrow. It releases money to sellers only once their buyers are happy with the goods received.
15. There’s a annual employee talent show, that's so big that it's held at a local stadium. Employees will rehearse for weeks, and Alibaba's office is filled with photos from past events.
16. The company's name really is a reference to an old folk tale. Founder Jack Ma said in an interview that he chose the name because people all over the world have heard the story of Alibaba and the forty thieves. "We also registered the name Alimama, in case someone wants to marry us!"
17. Alibaba has also dipped its toes in the loan business. For three years, Alibaba been making small loans (average size $8,000) to merchants using its sites. This practice has given it boatloads of data that it can use to help decide the company's business strategy. Its processed $600m in loans in 2012 and predicted that it would reach $2 billion by the end of 2013, with the non-performing-loan ratio below 2%.
18. Jack Ma, Alibaba's founder, has a net worth of $10 billion. That makes him the eighth richest person in China.

SEE ALSO: THE SILICON VALLEY 100: The Coolest People In Tech Right Now

Join the conversation about this story »

Social Selling? Make Sure to Ask for Referrals

Using LinkedIn is a great opportunity to network and potentially receive referrals for new prospects or expanding relationships within existing accounts, but not before you get involved. Referrals are about “give to get” and this video blog post, Jim Brodo, Senior Vice President, Marketing, shares some quick steps to take before asking a LinkedIn contact for a referral, including giving recommendations for skills and competencies. Need some more tips? Contact Jim directly at james.brodo@richardson.com

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Learn more About Richardson’s Selling with Insights® Sales Training Solutions 

Richardson’s Selling with Insights® sales training program teaches your sales reps advanced preparation techniques and dialogue skills to effectively present insights, challenge the customer’s thinking, add more value, differentiate your solution, and build credibility as a trusted business partner. If you would like to learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights workshops and full seminars, please email Jim Brodo at jim.brodo@richardson.com or click here to read more.

The post Social Selling? Make sure to Ask for Referrals appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

[First, a hat update: Many readers know that I shaved my head to help raise money for cancer research, and now I'm collecting hats a) to keep my own head warm here in chilly New Hampshire and b) to donate them all to the Dana Farber Young Women with Cancer program. We'll be posting a link daily with the "latest" in headwear donated to the cause. Today, I'm pleased to share the amazing topper donated by Jonathan Farrington of Top Sales World. Go here to see all the hats donated so far]

It’s funny to hear people debating about how and when social selling will be further adopted. As long as I can remember, selling has ALWAYS been social. We have always had to communicate with potential buyers, ask for referrals, work trade shows, and advertise / market for new business. The big change now is the tools and technology.

Sellers and sales organizations, like most everyone, often see change as hard. Unless you can show me an immediate benefit, why should I change?

This blog will be looking into all of the ways – easy ways, that a sales professional can get “more social” with his clients, prospective clients, and strategic partners. What’s in it for you, if you are a seller or sales leader is MORE revenues, and some great satisfaction in learning new strategies for building business.

We will be diving into:

• The state of social selling
• The basics that are often overlooked
• Why sellers miss this one BIG idea
• 10 tools and technologies to be most helpful
• What companies are doing it right
• What companies are doing it all wrong

All along the way we will share resources and ideas that can be put right into place, or can be worked into a planned effort to grow sales at your company.

We will be sharing thoughts from the top colleagues in social selling and how they are shining a light on strategies that work.

Your thoughts are always appreciated – starting tomorrow, the discussion begins.

Lori Richardson is recognized as one of the “Top 25 Sales Influencers for 2013″ and one of “20 Women to Watch in Sales Lead Management for 2013″. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside and outbound sellers in technology and services companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog and the “Sales Ideas In A Minute” newsletter for sales strategies, tactics, and tips in selling. Increase Opportunities. Expand Your Pipeline. Close More Deals.

email lori@scoremoresales.com | My LinkedIn Profile | twitter | Visit us on google+

The post When Was Sales Not Social? appeared first on Score More Sales.

I’ve written frequently about why it’s important to develop marketing content resources for specific buyer personas and specific stages of the buying process. This kind of targeted content produces better marketing results because it enables you to increase what I call personal relevance and situational relevance.

There’s also another factor you need to consider when developing marketing content. To make your content more effective, you must understand the type of demand you need to create. The demand type concept was developed by SiriusDecisions a few years ago, and it’s basically designed to describe where your market is in the typical evolutionary cycle.

SiriusDecisions has identified three demand type categories.

New Concept
A new concept is a truly disruptive product or service. It usually solves a problem that most potential buyers don’t know they have, or it may address a condition or set of circumstances that most potential buyers perceive to be an inevitable fact of business life, for which no solution exists.

New Paradigm
A new paradigm is a product or service that will solve a known problem or fill a known need in a new and novel way that differs significantly for other existing solutions.

Established Market
An established market represents a product or service that is accepted by the majority of prospect organizations as necessary and best-of-breed. With an established market product or service, most prospective buyers will understand the nature and ramifications of their need, and they will have a general understanding of what solutions are available.

Obviously, these different market environments require different approaches to content marketing. With a new concept, both marketing and sales must be highly evangelistic. Your first job is to show potential buyers that a given set of conditions constitutes a problem and that an effective solution to the problem exists. Therefore, your marketing content needs to contain a significant thought leadership component that is designed to create awareness of the problem and instill confidence that the problem can be solved.

With a new paradigm product or service, most potential buyers are aware of the problem they need to solve, and they may have already implemented one of the conventional solutions. Therefore, your marketing content must demonstrate why and how the new solution you offer is significantly better than the more conventional solutions. In this situation, your primary competition is the existing solution paradigm rather than other solution providers.

When your product or service competes in an established market, the key to success is differentiating your solution from those offered by your competitors. Since your solution is probably similar in general functionality to those of your competitors, your marketing content needs to emphasize other sources of differentiation, such as a lower total cost of ownership, easier and/or faster implementation, or more responsive customer support.

When you’re using these demand types to guide your marketing efforts, it’s important to remember that the type of demand you need to create will change as your market evolves. Therefore, to keep your marketing content effective and compelling, it needs to evolve in step with your market.

Recently TechTarget summarized the implications of a study conducted by SolarWinds that looked at the “Evolving Role of IT.” Not surprisingly the data shows that nine out of 10 IT professionals agree that an increasingly complex infrastructure has affected their roles over the past three to five years. The executive vice president of products and markets was quoted as saying, “The complexity that it’s creating is tremendous. IT pros are trying to chase a car moving 100 miles per hour, and they are on foot.”

 

From a technology perspective IT Pros report that Cloud and Mobility will see the highest levels of investment in the future according to the study.

And, for large technology investments UBM Tech tells us that an average of 7.2 people can touch a purchase decision – both inside and outside of IT. As a result, the alignment of new business models and emerging technologies brings a great talent and skills gap to the work place – especially in IT.

From a content perspective this can be very daunting for large technology vendors, because IT is expected to both build the business case and implement the solution. In a nutshell, their current and prospective customers need trusted information to help them:

· Stay on the forefront of emerging technology

· Make trusted vendor recommendations for large investments

· Build the business case

· Deploy large scale solutions

· Work with LOBs

· Keep end users happy and productive

· Secure their data

· Deliver business based results

· Save money

And, they need this content yesterday.

Creating content for IT Pros needs to be carefully crafted. You have to understand what makes them tick — to know what to do and what not to do. Tech buyers are looking for a mix of business focused content and the speeds and feeds. Vendor content is essential, but in many cases third party/unbiased content is often more authoritative and trusted. They rely heavily on search and their peer networks both on and offline. IT Pros also expect an optimal mobile experience no matter the content or channel.

If you are responsible for generating content for this audience the best way to start is with your various buyer personas. It is the first step to a content strategy. Don’t have any personas? Check around in your organization first. Some pockets within your company might have done some market research, commissioned studies or conducted interviews/focus groups. Identify your holes and either augment with additional primary research or conduct third party research. Make sure that you have a baseline understanding of their:

· Role in the organization and the purchase process

· Pain points

· Digital, social and mobile behaviors

· Key go-to sources for information

Once you lay this foundation you can begin to put your tech buyers in the driver seat because you’ll have insights into what content will resonate and help the most.

The New Year is underway. The first quarter is nearing an end. Some of the best-laid plans have already vaporized due to unexpected events. While some plans are either tracking on-target – or – will be missed. Each year, B2B business must meet the challenge of our time – keeping up with rapid new developments in digital technologies and changing buying behaviors.

Along with this challenge each year, comes a new set of questions:

1. Should Content Marketing Be Our Number One Priority?

According to nearly 2500 marketers surveyed by Adobe and eConsultancy, 36% believe so followed closely by social media engagement. This report also identified content marketing as the most exciting area for B2B. So, is this a legitimate question? I think so. Here’s why: in several conversations helping marketing leaders over the past few months, I’ve noticed “lead generation” and “content marketing” used interchangeably. An indication many content marketing efforts are being solely judged by as well as seen to be the new high powered lead machine. For example, one CMO had to increase his lead target by 75% in order to justify spending on content marketing. Content marketing is being in it for the long haul. Put in a box governed by high lead expectations can be a difficult challenge to overcome.

2. With Content Marketing Underway, Now What?

This question is closely related to the above. With many believing content marketing being a number one priority, much energy and resources are devoted to implementing. Followed by daily monitoring and tracking. This is a new analytic-centric approach to B2B marketing and analogous to trading. Daily highs and lows based on numbers related to views and downloads. There is much more to the purpose of marketing. B2B marketing leaders need to be expanding their boundaries beyond content marketing alone.

3. How Do We Build Our Brand?

A shift will begin to happen this year. Based on recent substantial number of buyer interviews, more and more buyers are taking note of brands and their brand experiences. These experiences will prove to be powerful influencers on buying decisions. If content marketing efforts are not interwoven into the context of brand experience, they may not be much of an influence at all. Overzealous application of content marketing in the context of a lead machine can turn it into a spam machine. And we all know what this will do to brand experience.

4. In Which Direction Are Buyers Heading?

Let us face it. There are very good B2B organizations who have embraced digital technologies and are advancing at warped speed. Meaning if some of these companies represent target customers you would like to have – then gaining insight into which direction they are heading is essential. If you have no idea where they are headed, you will have no idea how to fit into their plans for the future. I cannot tell you how many times I have said “wow” in buyer interviews when learning how buyers have advanced their organizations as well as buying mechanics.

5. Who Are Our Buyers And Customers?

While it is not enough just know who your customers are in these challenging times, it is still a question which perplexes many B2B businesses. The changing landscape of business and buyers as a result of new digital technologies is introducing new types of customer and prospects. Resulting in many B2B marketing leaders to have this question on their minds continuously.

6. How Do We Make Better Informed Decisions On Marketing Spend?

Decisions on how to allocate marketing spend are becoming high stake. The convergence of digital technologies with marketing means the dollar stakes for each decision has gone up considerably over the past decade. A far cry from the days when printing costs were the most significant expense. We are still in an era, from my point of view, where high dollar decisions are made on marketing technology platforms yet companies have not determined the answer to the question above. In addition, staffing needs related to marketing spend are shifting as new skills and talents are needed.

7. Is This The End Of The Road For The Buyer’s Journey?

Every couple of years, there is a term, which gets adopted as part of B2B marketing lingo. The Buyer’s Journey is one of them. It has even taken on a mythological aura. As if we map out this journey, we have discovered the missing link to never-ending sales. Neat stages and boxes do not exist in the real world of customers and buyers. Situational context and scenarios do. A buyer’s path, whether it is an individual buyer or a buying team, to a decision will be governed by situational context. Meaning decision paths will vary each time. Inordinate amount of time spent on the buyer’s journey can send you down the wrong path. In some case, when I have been on-site helping organizations, I have asked to see their mapped buyer’s journey. They first blow the dust off before handing it to me.

Undoubtedly, there are many more questions we can pose here. My hunch is more questions will fit into a theme this year. Which revolves around content marketing, insight into buyers, technology, and new skills.

Challenging Times

Suffice to say these are exciting times in the world of B2B marketing. Embracing challenges and challenging questions will be a source of growth for many organizations. The key is to keep asking questions and then finding the right answers. And, to be sure the questions we ask are the ones buyers will care about the most.

If you Google the question, “Where do I start on social media?” you’ll be greeted with approximately 1.4 billion results. 1.4 billion.

While many of these results will be duplicate versions, it’s clear that getting started on social media is a question many people are looking for an answer to. Add the word “business,” and run a similar search, and you’ll find around 1.2 billion results.

Blog posts, news articles, corporate videos and more—again, everyone is looking to find out the right way to do social media.

The secret, if it can be called that, is simple: You need to start out right and, much like everything else you do in business, have a plan with measurable milestones and results.

Step One: “Why Do We Want to Be Here?”

From monitoring conversations online to discussing with clients, the overarching theme that prevents successful business use of social media is a lack of understanding of why they want to be on social media.

Typical responses include, “Our competitors are on there,” “Because everyone’s doing it,” and “We don’t want to be left behind.” The problem with these answers is they don’t dig deep enough into the bigger questions that you need to answer:

• What are your competitors doing on social media, and are they doing it well?
• Are you able to identify your competitor’s brand impact—share of voice, awareness, leads, etc.—from their participation on social media?
• Does your core demographic match the core demographic of those social media users your competitor’s are trying to connect with?

These are the three basic questions that need to be asked if you’re using the competitor comparison as a reason to be on social media. Having the answers to those questions will allow you to move to the next stage.

Step Two: “Where Do We Need to Be?”

Once you’ve analyzed and answered the “why” behind the decision to be on social media, the next stage is the one that will more often than not determine how successful you are—where you need to be.

There are literally hundreds of social networks online, and these are the platforms that are actually recognized as bonafide social networks, along the lines of power hitters Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. Add in forums, niche networks, community blog networks and more, and it’s no wonder so many businesses have trouble finding the right path.

This is where smart passive use of social media is needed.

• Prior to becoming actively involved in social media, use a passive approach with tools, keywords and data mining.
• Use simple searches with the likes of Social Searcher, Social Mention or Trackur to find out if your target audience is actually using social media and, if they are, on what platforms they’re on.
• Compare the amount of chatter and, more importantly, the level of opportunity for your brand to be active on each channel.
• Identify two or three channels that have active participation, with a good level of questions your brand can answer, and use them as your starting point for actual social media participation.

By starting out slowly, based on analytical evidence on why you should be on your chosen platforms, you set yourself up for a far better chance of success than jumping in blindly. This allows you to create the third stage.

Step Three: Map Out Goals and Success Metrics

Of course, this entire preliminary work means nothing if you’re not going to set goals and success metrics to measure your social media use. Every brand has different needs and requirements. Here are a few to consider:

• Brand awareness;
• Share of voice;
• Market perception;
• Customer experience;
• Lead generation and customer acquisition;
• Loyalty and advocacy.

Social media is a fantastic resource for truly connecting your brand to your customers, both existing and potential. But it also takes a lot of time, experimentation and investment to pay off—so you need to make sure you have certain metrics in place to measure how you’re doing.

• Set up a calendar and break it down into your usual results pattern—monthly, quarterly, biannually, annually, etc.
• Highlight goals for each milestone—percentage shift in brand awareness, impact on competitors, website traffic, social network growth, inquiries to your sales team, customer satisfaction, etc.
• Determine acceptable growth vs. ideal growth, and compare how the former is trending to the latter.
• Analyze the cost of implementation (manpower, hours, technical resources) to the investment return (market share, brand perception, increased customer loyalty, word of mouth marketing, sales and reduced churn).

The ability to measure how you’re doing is crucial when it comes to buy-in across the company. Having a clearly structured plan to measure success will help pave the way for further investment.

To compare milestones, technologies like Pulse Analytics can help you identify your successes, your weaker areas, and which customers/advocates are driving the most interaction and profit.

As you can see, it’s not a quick or simple jump to make, contrary to popular advice. But by being smart when it comes to why you should be on social media and, more importantly, how you measure your effectiveness, you’re setting yourself up for success rather than failure.

image: Steve Garfield

I was sitting in some client meetings recently going over their Demand Generation Strategy, and something struck me as out of the ordinary…but in a good way. All of the usual suspects were in the room – head of marketing, head of sales, marketing automation power users, demand generation leads, content marketer … but also present were the head of their CRM install and the lead project manager of their website and web analytics team — both IT roles in this particular company.

In most B2B marketing planning sessions, the technical team is not involved in any of the strategy discussion. They usually get their marching orders after the fact, and a few things normally happen … there is some pushback on requests because they don’t understand the strategic thinking behind them, timelines are called into question as they have no skin in the game on trying to make things happen, and there is a continuing disconnect between the two departments as a lack of communication has hindered the forward progress of a holistic Demand Generation Strategy.

Guess what, marketers? As much as we would like to push our failures off on an unresponsive technical team, it is your fault for not involving them sooner, and helping them to understand the drivers behind your requests.

Having the technical team in the room was incredibly helpful, for all of the parties involved. With IT included in the marketing strategy, their roles in the tactical requirements of the plan make sense to them as they understand not only the what, but also the why.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Marketing Technologist role is a difficult one to fill, and would likely not be as effective as a CMO acting as the “Chief Marketing Technology Strategist.” I spoke about the CMO’s need to spend more time building and owning the strategy for the usage of marketing technology tools before deployment, understanding the depth and breadth of these offerings and how they work together, and perhaps most importantly effectively managing the individual “power users” of their technology stack. And as I said last time, the CMO needs to own the strategy, and understand (but delegate) the tactical.

There is no doubt that the role of the B2B marketer has changed and this change has been led by the change in the buying process and the access to information that is at the finger tips of todays B2B buyer. In order for marketing organizations to be successful, they must adopt a Demand Process approach which involves aligning their people, process, content and technology around their target buyers so they can better support that buyer’s purchase path.

This path to change is not an overnight fix and will not be accomplished in a few quick steps, but if enterprise organizations are going to improve their overall approach to their buyers and the results they are getting from Demand Generation programs, there must be a transformation.

Step One: People
Moving from tactics-based marketing to strategic Demand Generation will most likely require the development of a new skill set within your team. The Focus-MAI 2013 Marketing Skills Study shows that marketers are ill equipped to tackle this:

• 70% of B2B Marketers receive no training or are self-taught
• Over 65% of orgs spend less that $1,000 annually on skills training
• Only 21% of organizations will provide training for their B2B marketers
• Only 18% of B2B marketers rate themselves as “highly effective” in Demand Generation

CMOs must understand that in order for transformation to happen and for the change to be effective, investing in training and enabling their teams with the right skill sets must be a priority.

One of the more ridiculous trends I have seen develop over the past few years is the “justify my trip” letter to technology user conferences. If you are using Salesforce.com, for example, and you have doubts about sending you administrators to Dreamforce there is a serious problem. Ignore the fact that there are parties and concerts (not that there is anything wrong in having fun at an event), and focus on the learning and training available at an event like this, as it will help your team grow professionally as they leverage the new skills learned and trends observed while improving the ROI on your technology investments.

Having one person as the “marketing technologist-in-residence” is not a replacement for a team of people focused on getting the most out of their individual technology assignments, and being supervised by a CMO who encourages their professional development and rewards innovation and return on investment.

This goes for the non-technical marketers on the team as well.

Step Two: Process

There are two levels of process to discuss here, the Demand Process as well as the technology stack – and any decisions about the use of technology must be made in support of the overall plan, not the other way around.

As I said two weeks ago, when you let the architecture of the technology outline the strategy of the program, it’s not really a strategy. The focus of the content, process, people and technology components in any Demand Generation Strategy is the buyer, and their purchase process must be the backbone of the plan. An effective Demand Process Architecture aligns people, process, content and technology to the Engage, Nurture and Convert sequence of the buyer’s purchase path.

The second aspect of the “process” component is continued improvement. As you enable the professional growth of the teams in charge of your technology stack, you need to constantly leverage their learnings and experiences on the technology side to help inform the evolution of your overall strategy.

Consider quarterly meetings of your technology leads, sales lead and marketing strategy team to discuss how their respective tools work together. Play a little game called “what if…?” where the intersection of integration and innovation comes into play. What if we could roll up all of the interactions tracked in our marketing automation platform to the account level so we can see if there is large-scale activity at that account? What if the web analytics platform could notify the account manager when one of their major accounts hits the support page? What if we could automatically post to social media when a new content asset and landing page are built out?

These are the kind of cross-channel incremental improvements a synchronized technology team can accomplish.

Step Three: Content
Great content doesn’t just happen – it must be well thought out and planned, aligned with each Buyer in the Buyer’s Journey, written to address specific pain points, produced and distributed across all relevant channels and in all relevant formats. Your content needs to address the Buyer’s needs and be something they want to read, as good content drives engagement, which then generates Demand.

Why am I talking about content in this discussion about technology? Because content is the fuel in your technology gas tank. The website is a content delivery mechanism designed to engage new prospects. Marketing automation platforms send nurturing content to your identified prospects and then track their interactions with it. Content conversion measurements and ROI are tracked in marketing automation as well as the CRM system. Social media is content. Business intelligence connects the dots about interactions with content across different channels.

Step Four: Technology
So, finally, we get to the technology portion of this discussion about technology … because there are a lot of steps we need to take before we consider technology. Technology is not the beginning of the process, it’s a tool that can be used to enable a successful program. It’s the roads we choose to drive on after we have planned our trip. If you pick the wrong roads, you take twice as long to get there – if you don’t get lost.

The key to any successful marketing technology deployment is to know where you want to go, plan the most effective route, select the drivers and gas up the car before you hit the road.

Every CMO today dreams of being a transformer—one who can evangelize sales and marketing within the organization and emerge as the hero. Easier said than done! Most often, the problem is because the focus is on strategy and execution but not enough on the outcome. Setting marketing objectives and sales targets is one thing, but knowing the outcome you want is entirely different. As they used to say in the days of traditional marketing, “Your customers don’t want to buy a drill, they want a hole in the wall.” That “hole in the wall” is what you want to sell. It’s the outcome your customers want. Whether you deliver that outcome with a nail, a screw or a drill really does not matter to them.

As marketers, we spend valuable time and resources devising innovative lead generation campaigns. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail, and very often, they only deliver “satisfactory” results. What we view as successful or satisfactory is qualified by what we wanted to achieve in the first place. If it is numbers we are looking at, then it is not difficult to deem a lead generation campaign a success or a failure. A positive outcome, however, goes beyond that.

As a CMO or CEO of your B2B organization, you need to start asking the question, “What is the outcome we desire from our B2B lead generation campaign?” And you need to ask this question BEFORE you plan the strategy and work on the execution. When you do that, your focus shifts from managing the campaign to managing the outcome. Think about it, if you use tried and tested methods, throw in a good measure of innovative, out-of-the-box thinking and apply a defined process, then the campaign strategy and execution should not be your challenge. Your undivided attention can remain then on making sure the outcome is nailed. After all, what could be worse than implementing a top-notch campaign, getting high quality leads, even converting those leads and then failing to deliver the outcome that you sold? Because remember, you are not selling a product or a service; you are selling the outcome of that. You are selling the “hole in the wall” – the one that allows your customer to hang up the picture perfectly—placed at the right spot, pleasing to the eye, attention-grabbing and with no unsightly marks from failed drills!

In a recent interview with CNN Money, this quote from Maryam Banikarim, Senior VP and CMO of Gannett Corp Inc. caught my attention:

“The role a CMO plays today is arguably more critical than ever before, given that the rate of change in business is unprecedented and that consumer behavior is evolving real-time. CMOs need to be able to see “around corners,” anticipate consumer needs, and come up with new ideas, all with an eye towards generating growth and profitability. At the end of the day, if you’re not focused on revenue, you shouldn’t be CMO.”

I do agree, but I would like to add to that by saying that revenue and growth can only come from consistent, outstanding customer experiences. To get to that point where you can deliver a rich, memorable customer experience, you need to train your sights on the outcome. And you must get everyone on your team to focus on the outcome. Because if your sales people still think they are selling nails, they will never be able to deliver the hole in the wall. Your customers will never get what they are seeking. Your lead generation dollars will be spent in vain…

Think about recent B2B lead generation campaigns you have managed. Would the results have been different if you had thought about the outcome much more than you focused on the campaign strategy and delivery mechanisms? Share your comments below.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Sales Training Article: Real Opportunities vs. Pipe(line) Dreams

By John Holland, Chief Content Officer, CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company

Image courtesy of BasketMan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In my first sales management job, I took over an office that had finished 27th out of 28 districts the previous year. I quickly discovered I had a fairly inexperienced team and that things would go much better when they worked on qualified opportunities. Inexperienced or inept sellers took comfort in having pipelines that consisted of lengthy lists of "opportunities." One of my primary responsibilities was helping sellers be more selective about accounts they focused on.

Try a public sales training workshop to learn the proven best practices that will produce better sales results.

My biggest challenge was helping them understand the difference between activity and progress. They seemed to believe any prospects willing to talk with them were likely to buy. They felt each call increased the likelihood sales would close. I frequently asked two questions to do sanity checks on transactions they wanted to forecast:

• Why would the buyer spend the money you are asking for now? - Unless or until sellers had uncovered value to show payback it was hard to believe purchase decisions were going to be made.
  
• Have you had access to the person that has or would have to authorize the funding to pay for it? Unless or until sellers had access to higher levels, it was difficult to predict with any degree of certainty that sales would be made.

Verifying that sellers have established value (ideally documented and agreed to) and gained access to Key Player levels are ways that sales managers can assess whether sellers are being wise in allocating their precious and expensive time. If sellers didn't have good answers to the questions, it became clear they had work to do whether by themselves or on calls where I'd accompany them.

In today's environment, sales managers should ask similar questions when outside salespeople begin pursuing inbound leads from Website visitors. The good news is that early on sellers haven't invested a great deal of time and will be less defensive than if they've been working a lead for some time. In further qualifying nurtured leads, establishing value and gaining access to Key Players are necessary to justify pursuing and forecasting leads being followed up on. Doing quality control at the top of funnels decreases the chances of missing numbers later.

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Need some help with your sales performance? Take a look at the sales training workshops available to you and improve sales performance.

Read more sales training articles from CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company.

Here are the two truths I know about modern marketing. First, content has emerged as the best way to attract, compel, and close deals. Second, marketing is now being held accountable for driving real, quantifiable demand.

But while these are both truths, they haven’t always gotten along.

That’s because as the buyer’s journey has changed, marketing teams have had to own the top of the funnel, often holding a lead generation quota much as sales bears a revenue number.

And marketing automation has enabled marketers with the advent of lead scoring, which signifies whether a buyer has reached the point where we can declare them a qualified lead.

With lead scoring marketers know if they’re hitting their demand gen goal, but still lack insight into why they are. Content Scoring—a new methodology—changes that by tracking how individual content assets and campaigns perform in generating leads and opportunities.

View Infographic

Okay, but how does Content Scoring work? Begin by looking at the journey of one Buyer to becoming an MQL (we’ll use MQL or Marketing Qualified Lead, in our example, but Content Scoring can measure from any point in the Buyer’s journey).

Here’s the hypothetical journey of our Buyer, with each “touch” on the journey described by the content asset with which they interacted:

Touch # Description 1 Reads BlogPostA 2 Watches VideoB 3 Attends WebinarC 4 Downloads eBookD 5 Opens EmailE 6 Watches ProductVideoF BECOMES MQL

Content Scoring looks at this journey and allocates the value of the MQL back to the various content assets that were touched. In its simplest form, Content Score would give each of these content assets an equal amount of credit for the MQL. Since there were six touches, each asset receives ⅙ of that MQL’s value.

But most organizations give more weight to the first and last touch: the first because it serves as the first contact point with the buyer; the last because it led the buyer to become an MQL.

If the first and last touch were both given 30% of the credit a piece, that would leave 40% to distribute among the remaining touches (or 10% each). So the Content Score earned per asset for this sample MQL would be the following:

Asset Score Earned from Sample MQL BlogPostA 0.3 VideoB 0.1 WebinarC 0.1 eBookD 0.1 EmailE 0.1 ProductVideoF 0.3

This is the example of a single buyer. The insight becomes richer and actionable when these values are added up for each of the MQLs generated in a given period. Let’s suppose that your marketing team did 2,000 MQLs for a given quarter. You could then look back and analyze the aggregate Content Score of all of the assets which touched those MQLs. Totaling the results of the individual journeys (like the table above), would yield something like this:

Asset Content Score ProductPageA 238.9 WebinarB 122.3 VideoC 97.4 BlogPostD 89.9 BlogPostE 76.6 EmailF 75.9 etc. . . .

The sum of the “Content Score” column would equal 2,000, as the credit of each of the MQLs generated would have been attributed out to each of the content assets. Those individual content scores represent the number of leads, opportunities, and/or closed deals that a piece of content generated. With it, marketers can now look back at their performance (in this case, generating 2,000 MQLs) and understand clearly what worked and what didn’t.

We reviewed one simple example manually. Imagine doing that across hundreds, even thousands of leads. That’s why we built Content Scoring as a feature within Kapost.

We reviewed one simple example manually. Imagine doing that across hundreds, even thousands of leads. That’s why we built Content Scoring as a feature within Kapost, giving users the ability to process the millions and millions of data points of buyer—content interaction that modern marketing efforts generate. This enables marketers to have real-time visibility into their performance and discover patterns.

We also just glanced at one simple approach around Content Scoring. There’s much more to discover: different approaches to weighing touches, different methods to slice and dice results (by persona, buying stage, category, author, etc). We’re going to continue to evolve Content Scoring, both as a practice and feature.

The days of ignorance are over. Marketers now have the visibility into performance that enables success. Lead Scoring made marketers accountable by measuring the activity of their buyer. Content Scoring, the counterpart to Lead Scoring, now makes marketers successful by measuring their efforts to affect their buyer.

Whilst I fully accept that today’s post will not enjoy “universal agreement” because many sales commentators will consider it as somewhat “sensationalist” particularly the protectionists, I do feel that far too many so called sales visionaries are suffering from temporary blindness. Here is a brief snapshot of how I personally see it ….

Marketing is about to claim the high ground in many B2B scenarios. They will take responsibility for not only lead generation, but also “presentation” That is quality of web-site design, functionality, and performance. This is the first point of contact now for all those “crazy, busy buyers” who have already almost made up their minds, and just want to place an order.

After that, new teams will be created to build brick walls around existing customers – pro-active customer care teams.

Technical functions will also continue to grow in importance, to support the other two areas, because customers want instant fixes and reliable back-up.

Those salespeople who remain, will become genuine “business consultants, strategic orchestrators and long-term allies”

The sales professional of the future, will not only be an industry expert, but also have a solid grasp of commercial issues, and as a consequence, they will speak the language – no selling involved!

At the moment, it is my perception that only 5% of the selling population fall into this category, but within five years, faced with possible extinction, a further 15% will step up, rather than perish.

The training organizations who are offering skills development for future requirements rather than past ones, will be in most demand.

It’s only a view! But it is a much considered view.

This is a clarion cry to all sales professionals everywhere …

Whatever got you where you are today will not be sufficient to keep you there. A rapidly changing environment is the regular background, against which organizations must develop, and we can choose to embrace the changes, adapt, and thrive, or we can resist, and risk extinction.

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Wouldn’t it be great if there was a Kickstarter platform that came with built-in relationships with all the big Asian OEMs? Turns out, there is.

Platforms like Kickstarter have become the first option for would-be hardware makers to find crowdfunding and early adopters.

But in the past year or so, backers on those platforms have found themselves always waiting to receive the real thing. Delays were largely due to hardware design and manufacturing issues.

That’s where some Asian original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) see new business opportunities. The key problem, from their perspective, is that some software developer-turned-makers have little knowledge in hardware design and have no idea how much time is needed for producing certain parts.

Taiwan-based HWTrek looks like every another crowdfunding site. The big difference is that it plans to use its resources in the OEM sector across Asia to help makers around the world know which ideas related to hardware manufacturing won’t work before said makers build a prototype or reach out to manufacturers.

Taiwan is famous for its wealth of OEMs. Nest, the smart thermostat that was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion earlier this year, has its manufacturer in Taiwan. HWTrek has partnered with some 130 OEMs in Taiwan and other places in Asia to help make projects from its crowdfunding platform.

There are experts with years of experience in con­sumer elec­tron­ics manufacturing, waiting at HWTrek to review projects submitted to the site and point out problems in hardware designs.

HWTrek is also developing standardized tools for makers to make feasible prototypes online. For instance, HWTrek will provide types of waterproof materials that can be used for a “smart mug.”

Based on the approved prototypes, the platform will help find the right manufacturers out of 130 OEM partners. IIt’s not an open bidding process; rather, HWTrek will choose manufacturers they feel are suitable for the task at hand. For instance, the platform might recommend a manufacturer that has previously produced watch-shaped devices to a smart watch project.

If a project is particularly noteworthy and unique, HWTrek will consider taking a stake in it. So far, the company has invested in three projects. The first projects on HWTrek will ship in the third quarter of 2014 at the earliest.

HWTrek isn’t the only organization that has seen the problems makers have been through. Others also want to take advantage of manufacturing capabilities in Asia — especially in Greater China. The Taiwanese government is working on helping local OEMs take orders from makers. We have also heard that some big-brand smartphone makers in the Guangdong area, a major manufacturing center in China, plan to establish similar crowdfunding platforms. The edge HWTrek has over them must be that it started with projects from the U.S. and Europe that were more mature.

Other Chinese players are eyeing the market too. Online retailing platform JD.com is building a channel sell smart devices of all kinds. Chinese search giant Baidu wants to have all smart devices use its cloud storage services and future data analytics services.

The post If Kickstarter isn’t a solution to everything, you may turn to these Asian platforms. appeared first on TechNode.

This story originally appeared on TechNode.

There has been a lot of talk in the early months of 2014 about how influence marketing is going to make the leap into the mainstream this year.

Given the state of content shock that consumers are in, the idea of finding individuals who can move the needle for a brand makes a lot of sense.

In a world where we are exposed to thousands of advertisements a day, yet we don’t trust a single source of advertising at a rate of even 50%, earning and maintaining the attention AND trust of consumers is imperative for the long-term health of a brand.

In reality what it comes down to for brands is they need to gain trust, and they need to do it quickly. Knowing that consumers will trust a referral from their personal network at a rate of 90% and they gain that referral online more than 81% of the time, what better ways to expedite trust than to pay content creators to blog, tweet and share their strong sentiment for a brand?

It is like shooting fish in a barrel, yes?

Not so fast. While the idea of finding influencers to support your brand seems easy—and more and more brands are doing it each day—I want to caution brands looking to use this tactic.

There may be more to influence than meets the eye.

Finding The Right Influencers Is More Than Metrics

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the Social Intelligence Summit in Las Vegas. One of the speakers was Penny Baldwin, CMO at McAfee. Her stand-out moment was when she said:

“80% of the Internet’s impressions are driven by just 6% of its users.”

Score one for influence, but with this statistic another challenge for brands is born: Who are the right influencers for their brand?

Many brands are turning to data to figure out whom they should bring on to their influence team.

They look at metrics like followers on Twitter, likes on Facebook or Alexa Rank of their blog. All of these numbers have some meaning, but not necessarily as much as one might think.

This is where brands must do there homework and figure out how connected these supposed influencers are to their community and can they move the needle for the specific brand in need.

To figure out whether a specific influencer can move content and drive improved brand sentiment, brands need to go beyond just the raw data to determine what they are trying to do. Is it better to find an influencer who can connect the brand to 20 or 30 really meaningful decision makers, or are 10,000 pageviews more important even if the vast majority aren’t really potential buyers?

The 30 meaningful relationships can mean millions of dollars in revenue (product dependent), whereas 10,000 pageviews will do nothing more than impress people that probably don’t care.

If you consider what your per-customer acquisition cost is versus what the typical investment looks like for a brand-influence campaign, I suggest brands seek out the influencers who can make a handful of meaningful connections over broad reach any day of the week.

Buying Influence Vs. Earning Trust

While brands can buy influence, brand influencers cannot.

Much like the premise of brands buying reach, influencers can do the same through a number of tactics, not all of which lead to highly engaged communities.

However, brands looking to build advocacy through influence campaigns need to steer away from the temptation of reach and instead turn their attention to what the numbers mean.

If brands seek to use influence campaigns to build trust, then those chosen as brand influencers must have the ability to deliver meaningful content that drives brand sentiment within their community upwards. Having an engaged audience is the only way to do this. Reach means nothing if nobody is listening.

We have legitimately reached the point where consumers have run out of time to consume content, making it more important than ever for brands to focus on quality as a means to separate them from the pack. Influence marketing is undoubtedly a way to earn and keep more eyeballs where brands want them, however this can only be done if the influencers can transfer the trust they have built with their community to the brands they choose to support.

Influence marketing will work for brands that understand the connection between their target audience and the influencer and they focus on working only with those that can strengthen that connection not only for the short run, but also sustainably into the future.

Now we all know that content is pretty key when it comes to inbound marketing. Content is what drives traffic to our sites, converts visitors into leads, closes your leads into sales, and keeps customers coming back for more.

Content doesn’t just have to be written blog posts, though. There are a plethora of different forms of content you can use in your content marketing, like infographics, podcasts, webinars, and video.

Each of these different forms can help convey a message better than other forms. For instance, an infographic might be able to share key statistics better than a blog post or podcast. Or maybe you want to show some features of your software, which would be best demonstrated in a video.

Today, we’re going to dive into using videos in your inbound marketing program.

Why Use Video

Videos are a great way to help reach different goals, like…

1. Traffic and/or conversions
2. Brand awareness
3. Social shares

Plus – it doesn’t take a whole bunch of money to do video marketing. All you need is:

• Camcorder
• Lapel Mic
• Lights
• Editing Software

And Wistia gives you this video and this video to help you make it even more cost effective!

Goal 1: Using Video for Increasing Conversions and Traffic.

Videos can be great for helping sell a specific product or service. Not to mention, these videos can really enhance your product or service pages. So what kind of content would you find in these types of videos? You would typically include a soft sell, hard facts, and maybe even some empathy for the viewer.

As an added bonus, you can include the transcripts to provides valuable information for users and unique and relevant text for your product pages.

Now when it comes to how you embed these videos, you’ll want to use a service like Wistia or Brightcove instead of YouTube. Here are a few reasons why:

• If you use YouTube, you’ll be driving traffic to YouTube rather than your site.
• Click-through-rates from YouTube back to a website tend to be very low (we are talking below 1%). That means you could lose up to 99% of potential traffic.
• Using a service like Wistia or Brightcove will allow you to get rich snippets on search engine results.
• These services allow you to create and submit your video to your sitemap.
• With Wistia you can capture email addresses (and integrate it with your HubSpot portal).

Goal 2: Using Video for Brand Awareness

TV ads over the past few decades have showed us that videos can be a great way to build brand awareness. And now, with the help of the internet, people can watch videos on places other than the TV.

There a few different approaches you can take with this type of video. You might share a creative story attached to your brand or you may choose to make it purely informational. Regardless of what direction you take with it, this video should be relevant for an audience unfamiliar with your brand.

Since your goal is to build brand awareness, you’ll want to use YouTube to share this video. Just as you would use Google AdWord Keyword Planner for your PPC ads, you can use the YouTube Keyword Tool for idea generation. And to measure success with this goal, you’ll want to measure user engagement, not number of views.

Goal 3: Using Video for Social Sharing

Video can be especially helpful when trying to produce highly shareable content. The key here is to create videos that people will embed or link to. These videos could be blogging videos (like our Friday Fails), interviews, or anything that people in your industry would like to share.

And as an added bonus – If you’re like most companies, you have a few people helping with your blog content. And writing might not be their strongest skill or favorite pastime. By giving them the option to do a video instead, you might see more engagement and willingness to help.

When it comes to your video hosting, you’ll want to use a service like Wistia or Brightcove to ensure that your videos are only visible on your domain. These services also allow you to customize your embed code so that it links back to you.

Focus on One Goal Per Video

Now that you know the different types of things videos can help with, make sure you pick only one goal per video and know who you want to measure that goal. And just like anything else in marketing, make sure to evaluate after a month, quarter and/or year if what you are doing is working.

Good luck and happy video shooting!

Photo Credit: Shopping Diva via Compfight cc

 

Let’s face it, a lot of us just aren’t the brightest when it comes to equations, percentages, and visualizations of data when its related to marketing. That’s why there’s a bunch of companies out there filled with people who do understand. And, they want to make it easier for everyone else to understand as well. This is where the idea of content scoring comes in, and it will be a massive help for marketers.

Content scoring gives marketers a clear picture about how individual pieces of content are actually driving business results for their company. Content can include a webinar, infographic, podcast, video, email, ebook, or Slideshare presentation; your company spent time and money putting together. By using content scores, marketers will be able to quickly determine how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs), opportunities, and revenue dollars can be attributed to specific pieces of content.

Content scoring adds a numerical score to each piece of content for how it performed during the buyer’s journey. Using this information, marketers can make more informed choices about how to produce, publish, and share content that actually drives results. Which ultimately grows revenue.

It works by combining the content management, workflow and analytics capabilities of the Kapost platform with data provided by a customer’s marketing automation platform (Eloqua or Marketo) and Salesforce. By combining these platforms, one can have clear, instant insights into the results of different campaigns.

So many platforms do great things on their own, but they don’t do everything. (Facebook and the Apple App store are examples). So don’t be afraid to look at new software as help, and not hinderance. Especially when it can be linked to Salesforce, and your business can specify the kinds of Salesforce activities that are relevant measures of sales success — for their own product.

via: Kapost

Most business owners want more traffic, but most don’t realize they might not need more traffic. I have talked about this many times on this site, but online marketing comes down to two components;

1. Traffic
2. Conversions

If you have an effective website, it should be generating you leads automatically. If you are generating at least 100 website visitors a month, you should be generating 3 – 5 leads from your website each month. If not, you might have a website conversion problem. Website conversions are the website traffic that becomes a lead and/or customer.

If your conversion rate is low (1 – 2%), more traffic is going to be a waste of money and time. I recommend focusing on getting your conversion rate to around 5%. So, for every 100 website visitors, your website should generate you 5 leads per month.

Most business owners don’t have a traffic problem, they have a conversion problem. Adam Dukes

4 Proven Ways To Increase Your Conversion Rate

Typically, it is easier to double your by improving your conversion rate, then it is to double your traffic. There are many ways to improve conversion rate, but I will touch on the basics. Neil Patel published an excellent article about this last fall, 9 Ways to Boost Your Conversion Rate on a Shoestring Budget.

Here are 4 proven ways to increase your website’s conversion rate;

1. Communicate Your USP – You only have a few seconds to grab the users’ attention. A strong USP can build instant trust and keep them on the site longer.

2. Simplify your home page – What benefits does your product or service offer? What is the outcome when using your product or service? Explain the benefits you provide, not the features.

Most small businesses make the mistake of talking about themselves on the home page on their website. Your home page should be simple. Think of it as a “door” to the rest of your website. If it’s about the visitor, chances are they will stay on your website longer.

3. Use video – Dropbox used video on their home page and increased conversions over 10%.

4. Set up a sales funnel – Are you asking for the sale to soon? This is a very common way to kill conversions. Some people are not ready to buy just yet, they might only be in the “research” stage. Offer them a piece of helpful content in exchange for their name/email address. This step can be automated, also a very effective way to grow any business.

Always Be Testing

This goes for all marketing. You cannot improve what you do not measure. Install Google Analytics (free) on your website to track your performance. If you need training videos, you can check out these Google Analytics training videos.

I have been testing two different landing pages for the training course.

Landing Page A – Converting at 35%

Landing Page B – Converting at 57%

Everything else is the same on the landing page. The only difference is the two headlines. From the images above, you can see that the only difference is — one word. That one word is responsible for an increase of 163% in my leads for that training program.

This didn’t cost me a penny to run. Just testing out two different headlines. See how powerful testing different headlines is?

Conclusion

As you can see, boosting your conversion rate on your website can be a very simple way to increase your sales leads. There are many pieces of software on the market like Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer and Wingify.

Don’t be surprised if you increase your website leads by a factor of 3, 4 or even 10 by testing your pages. It’s so simple to do and the fastest way to increase the revenue your website generates.

Chances are you have a few different types of prospects. They may ultimately all reach the same conclusion, whether that’s choosing you or your top competitor. But differentiating factors such as role, authority, need and subject matter expertise all impact a buyer’s journey to making a technology purchase.

The process of buying enterprise technology today can take anywhere from a few weeks to well over a year, depending on the product and who’s doing the buying. Generally, though, in B2B tech marketing, there are ample opportunities to step into a potential buyer’s consideration set. But there will also be chances to lose out to the competition.

The best way to keep a potential buyer on the path of becoming a paying customer is to build an experience where the brand is

1. 1) providing the needed information to make a decision
2. 2) delivering it the right time, and
3. 3) communicating it in the right format.

This will ensure the journey is both a pleasant experience for the potential customer and has a higher chance of converting her into a buyer.

What Is a Buyer Journey?

This term refers to the process one takes to obtain a service or product. Usually this includes identifying an issue, researching solutions, selecting vendors and, ultimately, choosing an IT provider. While the steps taken during the process are more or less the same, many other aspects of the journey will differ from person to person.

Take the research phase, for example. One buyer — say, a CIO — may have more experience purchasing high-tech products. Chances are his journey begins with vendor credibility and reputation. He knows which service or product he needs, but is unsure on which brand offers better quality or value. His research phase is short and more tied to his personal views and the reputation of the brand.

Another buyer may be more of a novice when it comes to purchasing IT. Perhaps this is a CMO, COO or other member of a business unit. Her research phase may be longer and begin with more high-level questions. Instead of asking, “Which vendors are best equipped to provide this?” she may be asking, “What technology will enable me to execute this?”

Both buyers are important in meeting sales quota. But the difference in each buyer’s journey begins as early as the first question. Because it’s important to get into both buyers’ consideration set, you have to identify ways on how to answer both of their questions. A one-fits-all strategy will not work.

How to Create The Right Journey

What you’re trying to accomplish is to use your digital properties (i.e. website, social media, email) to have an educated conversation with a potential customer. This means you need to be able to anticipate the buyers’ questions and where they will go to find answers. You need to know the times of day different buyers prefer to read email or browse social media feeds, which news outlets they reference for industry tips and trends, and other behaviors that contribute to decision-making.

It’s difficult to achieve any of the above if you don’t start with a documented buyer persona. Buyer personas include psychographics, demographics and firmographics. You may think you have a solid picture of who your buyers are. But you’ll find the documentation will keep you and your colleagues better equipped to provide someone the ultimate journey to becoming a customer.

What works well for one buyer will not work for another. And while you may have worked with particular CMOs or CIOs in your own experience, this does not ensure an accurate portrayal of the majority in these roles. The best buyer personas are crafted from hard data collected by a variety of sources.

Improving the Journey Through CRO

Once your buyer personas are on paper, try documenting the conversation you believe you’d have offline. Now outline how you’ll provide the information through your online properties. Maybe one answer is provided via a blog post, another by eBook and yet another via email. The purpose is to keep the conversation moving forward. Keep them traveling along the buying funnel.

Through CRO, or conversation rate optimization, you’ll constantly be testing the frequency, timing, and content of your messages. This is how you will learn what’s working, what’s not and tweak strategy accordingly. Inevitably, you will improve efforts to a point of seeing

1. 1) reduced cost of customer acquisition
2. 2) a shortened sales cycle, and
3. 3) better allocation of resources, to name a few.

If you’ve created a strong buyer journey, it’ll be easier to keep the prospect’s attention. Even better, your potential buyers will be less likely to seek answers from another vendor. Your helpfulness and your strong attention to detail will make the buyer’s decision-making process easier. Your persistence in offering the right materials at the right time will not go unnoticed. And your prospects will be much more like to conclude their buyer’s journey with you.

Today is my 9-year anniversary* of joining LinkedIn. I was living in Silicon Valley managing sales for a software company when I first heard of LinkedIn. You don’t get much more “early adopter” than that. I signed up on March 14, 2005 as Member Number: 2,174,063**

Here is What I’ve Learned in 9 Years:

1. It’s not just an online resume anymore. While its use for hiring purposes accounts for half of LinkedIn’s revenue, LinkedIn has moved beyond this single purpose. It’s get more like your personal website every day

2. It is ridiculously underutilized. Like many software applications, the average LinkedIn member uses less than 10% of it capabilities. As one of my friends remarked, “I can’t believe you built a business teaching people to use a free web app.” That’s because people realize its value and complexity.

3. There are hundreds of LinkedIn User Interfaces. Part of the complexity comes from the fact there are hundreds of LinkedIn UIs when you consider the combinations of free and 15 Premium versions, operating systems, browsers and mobile platforms. That mean features and screens are not consistent.

4. LinkedIn likes phased feature rollouts. It is good to be cautious, especially in a network of 275M people. Sometimes, it takes a long time. I have taught classes where some people did not have a feature first rolled out seven months prior. It’s can be frustrating because members often do not know the schedule.

5. It’s a powerful tool for finding people. As more members joined and kept their information up-to-date, smart salespeople realize that LinkedIn is an incredible database for finding prospects. Add the unique benefit of being able to leverage your network for introductions and it becomes one of the top ways to initiate a sales dialog.

6. It’s a powerful tool for building your brand. The “other half” of social selling is build your value and attracting potential buyers by sharing content. LinkedIn continues to add features to position people as Subject Matter Experts to their networks.

7. Linked Giveth and LinkedIn Taketh Away. Just as valuable new features appear, sometimes valuable ones disappear, too. R.I.P. to Events, Reading Lists, Signal, Activities, Linkedin Today, …

8. It’s mainstream media now. If Content is King then LinkedIn is the King’s office. It is many people’s top destination for Business news related to their interests. Acquisitions like SlideShare and Pulse along with the LinkedIn Influencers and the new long form Publishing feature for the masses all support this ambition.

9. It’s amazingly well self-policed. For all the horror stories and misuse of other social networks, I have to compliment LinkedIn and its members on maintaining good business etiquette. Sure, I occasionally see posts of discussions that belong on Facebook or other more personal social networks, but, in general, people stick to business.

* Find your “Member since” date in the Settings area

** Your member number shows up in the browser bar URL when you are looking at your own profile.

What’s your LinkedIn Member Number?

Forget the sleazy salesperson stereotype.

Today’s most successful salespeople act as thought leaders and industry experts, connecting prospects with content. They challenge buyers to be on the cutting-edge of their industries.

But unfortunately, many people still harbor a negative perception of sales reps. So what’s a salesperson to do? Load up on content.

In this infographic, salesforce.com and Kapost have teamed up to explain how content helps sales teams build relationships that lead to revenue.

Click below to see a larger version, and use the embed code to share on your own blog or site!

Priced to sell, an article appearing in Bdaily Business News, touts the use of auctions to ‘achieve maximum value’ from sales.  According to the author, auctions allow “Sellers to have the ultimate reassurance that they are reaching the widest possible markets and getting the best price, while buyers have an opportunity to contribute and pay what they believe something is truly worth.”

WHAT A CROCK!

#1 – ‘Reaching the widest possible markets’ means that your devoting scarce resources to producing goods/services for people who really don’t value them.  That’s not good for your company or the economy as a whole.  Everyone is dealing with limited resources so why devote them to people who don’t really value what you offer.

#2 – ‘buyers…pay what they believe something is truly worth.’  Wrong!  Buyers will pay as little as possible given that option.  Unless you’re willing to place a quantifiable, demonstrable value on what you offer and hold firm to that price, you’re not going to realize full value from your offerings.

Case in point.  I have a hard to fit foot.  Indeed, only one brand of shoe fits comfortably and affords the style I desire.  These shoes typically retail for $185 to $190 a pair.  I would pay that because I don’t have an option except that twice a year a retailer puts them on sale for $100.  Care to guess when I buy new shoes?

You CANNOT maximize value by selling to people who don’t value what you offer.  I don’t know the source of this inane logic or why it is so easily perpetuated, but it’s flat out wrong.

We have very visible contradictions to this logic in the success of Apple, Panera Bread, Kraft Foods, Nordstrom’s and a plethora of companies that consistently charge high prices and enjoy solid growth year in and year out.  Yet we choose to believe the folly of ‘theories’ like priced to sell.

Isn’t it time that we stopped wishing for a magic bullet that will solve all of our pricing problems and deal with the following realities?

• The market for your offerings is much smaller than you’d like it to be, which is why it is so important to be compensated fairly for the value you provide.
• When you’re ‘competitive’ in your pricing, you make your offerings a commodity in the eyes of the buyer.
• When you discount your offerings, you’re basically telling the buying public that it’s not really worth what you were asking.
• Buyers (customers) don’t know how to quantify value, consequently they’re looking to you to help them define that value.
• Unless we’re willing to hold firm on our pricing we confuse the market, customers have no way of knowing what the value is.

Now that I’ve completed my rant, I implore you to avoid the latest, greatest pricing ‘strategies’ and stick with the basics:

1. Have a clear brand promise so that customers know what to expect from your company.
2. Combine that brand promise with a psychographic profile of your ideal customer to create marketing messages that will attract people who value what you offer enough to pay a premium to get it.
3. Develop sales scripts that lead the prospective customer through a calculation of value so that they can get a dollars & cents understanding of the value you provide.  Yes, this can be done in retail as well.
4. Create bundles of offerings and pricing that reflects the value of each bundle.  This provides your customers with choices and an array of budget options.  Keep it simple, no more than three options.
5. Hold firm on your pricing.

Follow these simple steps and you’ll enjoy the kind of success that Apple, Panera and the others are.  Continue to follow the latest, greatest ‘strategies’ and you’ll feel like the proverbial dog chasing its tail – working hard, but never quite getting there.

This is the third installment of a five part series for sales professionals who want to get the most out of HootSuite for social selling. To simplify your social selling workflow, download the new HootSuite guide, Social Selling Action Plan: Closing the Loop From Relationships to Revenue.

What are Buying Signals?

Buying signals are indications that a prospect is willing or able to make a purchase. These cues come in many forms, both online and offline. During a sales call, your prospect may signal readiness to buy with revealing questions or subtle changes in their tone of voice. In a meeting, you can look for tell-tale gestures and facial expressions that signal the prospect is open to making a deal. Social media doesn’t offer that same face-to-face connection, but you don’t need a poker player’s instincts to recognize buying signals on social channels. In fact, they’re often blindingly obvious.

Your future customers are in plain view on social media, talking about their business needs, asking questions about issues in your industry, revealing intelligence about their own companies, and reaching out to their peers for advice. Listening for these real time buying signals on multiple social networks will allow you to not only find new leads but also identify when prospects are at the most important moments of their buying process.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use “buying signals” as a catch-all term for any indication that a buyer is at a key point of their purchase path, when they’re open to being influenced. Let’s break these signals down into two categories — early stage and late stage — and then explore how you can use HootSuite to recognize them.

Early Stage Buying Signals

Early stage buying signals indicate that leads are near the beginning of their decision-making process, when they can be challenged to think strategically. If someone is signaling that they’re in the early stages of their purchasing cycle, then you should give them advice, or empower them with awareness-building content.

Examples of early stage buying signals:

• ‹‹Questions about a business problem
• ‹‹Frustration with a competitor’s solution
• ‹‹An announcement of new senior management hire that indicates budget expansion
• ‹‹Geographic expansion

Late Stage Buying Signals

Does anybody have suggestions for a cell phone provider? My contract with Bell is going to expire soon. I need more data!

— Matt Foulger (@MattFoulger) March 13, 2014

Recognizing late stage buying signals will help you focus your efforts on prospects who are looking for help and ready to make decisions, and stop wasting time on those who aren’t. Look for prospects that are actively considering solutions, then rapidly assist them by answering their questions and providing them with relevant, educational content.

Examples of late stage buying signals:

• Requests for product or service recommendations ‹
• Engagement with a competitor’s sales engineer ‹
• Inquiries about product features, warranty, and pricing information

How to Spot Buying Signals in HootSuite

You can’t spend your whole day monitoring social media for buying signals. The trick is to work it into your daily routine in a systematic way. Here’s how HootSuite helps:

1. ‹‹Set up Twitter search streams in your HootSuite dashboard to persistently look for the keywords and phrases that people in your space use when they start looking for solutions to their pain points. If you work in a geographic territory, you can filter your streams to only display tweets from people within a specified radius.

2. Use Twitter list streams to monitor ongoing opportunities. Organize your prospects into Twitter lists that align with your sales workflow. For example, you can group them by company, geography, or industry. Filter your Twitter list streams by keyword to hone in on buying signals. You can adjust your filters at any time. To discover questions that you can answer for prospects, filter for the “?” mark.

3. Monitor your competitors using private Twitter lists. Keeping an eye on your competitors’ social interactions will not only help you discover more leads, but give you valuable insight into where their prospects are in the buying process: if someone interacts with a competitor’s lead development representative, they’re in the early stages; connections with a competitor’s sales engineer show that a prospect is evaluating solutions, so you’ll need to move quickly.

4. Use the LeadSift app in the HootSuite App Directory to discover new leads. The LeadSift app automatically organizes direct and indirect leads by scanning millions of online conversations. It classifies whether they intend to buy, abandon their current solution and applies a lead rating to every conversation.

It’s not easy being green.

I am guessing that when Kermit The Frog said those immortal words he wasn’t really considering March 17, the day when it is, in fact, very easy to be green. Almost expected, really.

Without green beer, green rivers, and green clothing-clad parades this day would be nothing more than an excuse to drink a lot of Shamrock Shakes from McDonalds (not that I really needed one) as a way to pay tribute to Saint Patrick.

Although, it turns out that Saint Patrick wasn’t even Irish; he was British. Who knew?

But all that green has me thinking about how to make a little more green for your business through lead generation, and, despite the idea behind this leprechaun holiday, getting leads has nothing to do with luck. It has to do with strategy.

Why Should You Generate Leads?

Leads are not actual sales, so they don’t do my business any good, right? Wrong. Leads are where your business is most likely to get customers or clients. They are how you find sales.

Many companies devalue the importance of marketing in lieu of having a larger sales team, but that is a poorly thought out approach, as marketing is responsible for generating suitable leads. You need skilled marketers in place to capture the attention of your target audience and make them knowledgeable about your brand.

The marketing team can monitor the activity of each visitor to your company’s site (preferably through a form of marketing software) and determine how interested that lead is in and how good of a fit they are for your company. That is the information marketers can relay to sales teams to help them complete the sale.

While you are at it, define your sales funnel so that everyone in your sales and marketing teams are on the same page about where each lead stands and the progression they need to go through to become a sale.

How To Generate Leads

The key to generating leads is to be consistent and reliable with your inbound marketing techniques. If you have a blog that you want to be successful follow a reliable editorial calendar that will establish you as a reliable business that clients can trust. The same applies to social media; interact and post consistently valuable or entertaining content to gain likes and follows.

Decide on a voice and brand message for your business and apply it to all forms of communication you have with the public – and even any communication you have internally. Think through and plan your strategy, map it out in advance, and stick to it.

The most common problems with lead generation are an inadequate supply of staff, budget, time, and high-quality data to generate the best possible leads for your company. This comes down to a simple principle of 2+2=4 being applied to your sales and marketing teams.

If you are going to expect XYZ amount of sales from your sales team, then you need to donate an equal amount of time, money, and resources to your marketing team to generate high-quality leads. If you are putting all of your company’s resources into selling and only half as much into marketing, you can’t expect to increase you revenue.

Takeaway

Lead generation should be at the top of every new marketing campaign’s list of objectives. Developing a loyal audience overnight is like finding a four-leaf clover, so do the smart thing and generate as many leads as you can for your business to nurture and convert into sales.

Putting your time and effort into your marketing campaign to generate high-quality leads might just help you cross the rainbow to that lucky pot of gold by next March 17.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

“Many an opportunity is lost because a man is out looking for four-leaf clovers.”

If you’re waiting for luck to kick in and jump-start your content marketing efforts, think again. Success requires doing. It takes planning and process, and that doesn’t happen overnight.

The Challenge: Not Having Enough Time

If you’re leading a content marketing team, you’re probably looking at a pretty busy schedule. It can be hard to find the time to acquire the right assets to guide your team. But, take it from us, you don’t invest time upfront in developing good systems, you could end up wasting more time on things that could be systematized and automated. In content marketing, a proven process can reduce wasteful time spent on repetitive content, bad editing workflows, and communication on iterations.

Here are three key elements to focus on when building out your content marketing process.

1. Keep Content Assets in a Single Place

Your content needs an operational home. Rather than individual content pieces living in Word document and email inboxes, content should live in a single place, where assets can be shared, updated, and collaborated on with other team members. It should also serve as a library of all your brand’s finished work. This aids in content reuse and repurposing down the road, and serves as a useful internal resource for new employees looking to read the literature published by your brand.

2. Plan Meticulously, But Be Flexible

It’s important to start with an organized workflow for content creation and campaign execution. What are the key steps that need to be taken to plan, produce, and promote content? Map these out with your team, and make sure everyone is aware of their responsibilities within these workflows.

But remember that things are always changing from within. As your organization changes during the course of the year, so will your content. Be sure to keep communication lines open between your team members, so you can quickly adapt to the shifting environment of your workplace and update workflows accordingly. So when your highly anticipated Q2 product release gets moved back to Q3, your content will accurately reflect that.

This enables relevant content and ensures less time spent on redoing or reformatting as your business and content roadmaps evolve.

3. Have a Consistent Style

Your brand identity should look and feel consistent across all platforms and channels. You want your content assets published with a similar tone and cadence. Having a style guide helps with that.

Also, in line with the first point, hosting your assets in a single place allows content teams to create uniform brand image libraries, letterhead, corporate PowerPoints, and sales email templates. Use these resources to build your brand personality.

Finally, Ensure Training and Adoption

But there’s one last step you’ve got to do that’s integral to a successful process: adoption. Did you train your team effectively on your new process? Make sure everyone’s on the same page, and hold a training session to answer any questions and concerns. This will make the transition to your new protocol easier and faster.

Process not only saves your organization time and money, but it leads to more successful content marketing efforts. So stop waiting for that lucky break. Make the up-front investment in process, and your organization will thank you.

Data driven digital marketing enhanced by a well-managed lead scoring effort takes the argument out of the equation and puts both teams on the same side of the playing field. For those using it well, lead scoring can change the game of business development – not just in uniting the players, but in driving more leads and increasing sales velocity. View our lead scoring infographic to find out more.

Content, whether it’s social media, a press release, blogs, or Web copy, doesn’t have to be read. Most of the time and effort you put into writing it is wasted on skim-throughs and an overbearing amount of competition from other websites. But content doesn’t have to waste your time, not when you take the right approach.

It boils down to writing content that is intriguing to a specific audience. The “generalized” content you write is hit-or-miss 90 percent of the time. Take the following topics as an example:

• How To Create a Personal Budget
• 10 Ways to Make Homes Eco-Friendly
• Why You Need to Learn Car Mechanics: 101
• 6 Methods for Losing Weight

Very generic, right? The only one that is somewhat targeted is the car one. Unfortunately, “car owners” is an extremely broad category as it stands. The idea is to attract specific readers and increase content searchability, otherwise known as topic targeting.

Let’s revisit the above examples:

• How College Grads Should Create a Personal Budget
• 10 Ways for Homeowners to Cut Power Bills in Half
• The Basics of Roadside Maintenance for First-Time Car Owners
• 6 Methods for Losing Weight Without Dieting

There. Now we have topics that certain people will be more interested in reading. It’s important to accept the fact that not everyone reads your content. You don’t need to write for that super-specific one percent, however, but you should aim for certain readers in order to reel in more clicks.

Finding an Audience

Building up online readership is a topic for another day, so for now we’ll stick to finding an audience that may be interested in specific content. Take a look at your demographics, recent trends in sales, and who is active on social media and blog comments. Is there a pattern? Do you see one group under-represented? Content targeting is a good way to reach out to new clientele as well.

To increase follower engagement and overall readership, you can always poll your social media fans on what they want to learn about. How, for instance, did your business come to produce a specific product? Why is this service better than a competitor’s? What are 10 ways to use this product that I haven’t thought of before?

Asking the audience does several things. For starters, it gives your fans something to talk about on social media. This excitement leads to clicks once the piece is written and, hopefully, shares and likes. My content company specializes in tailoring blogs, social media, and other marketing for businesses in any industry hoping to capture leads. Check out the rest of our website or visit Grammar Chic, Inc. for a full list of what we can do to help you help yourself.