Rnordman

Past vs New Customers

We’re in this series called What Is The Perfect Marketing Strategy For Your Business? For this third part, and we’re going to be talking about targeting new customers. Hopefully, you listened to the last one where we talked about examining your past customers. So what we want to look at is: how do we target new customers based on that old data? You have to answer a handful of questions. Who were your best customers, what did they buy, and how often did they buy? Hopefully, you have a good idea of who that customer base is.

Past vs New Product & Services

Now, here are the questions you need to ask yourself: Where can I find more of them? Where are they hanging out and when are they buying? When are they buying and why would they be buying now? Or maybe it might be in the future? And then the last question you have to ask yourself is, why would they buy from you versus your competition? In looking at your new products in order to gain new customers, it could be something that already exists that you want to sell more of, or it could be something that’s a brand new offering. Again you’ve got to ask yourself some questions.

The first thing I want to see is if you’ve established a base of sales, things that you do on a regular basis that are kind of like the foundation of your business. There are only three ways to really grow sales:

1. Sell more to your current customers.
2. Sell more to new customers.
3. Raise your prices.

We talked about the pricing models last time, about the difference between the Walmart pricing and the Nordstrom pricing. What do you offer that’s over and above what your customers are expecting, and more importantly, what your competition is delivering?

Benefits vs Features

What happens a lot is this: when people are trying to sell new products, they tend to focus on features and benefits. Where most people make a mistake is they tend to focus more on the features and less of the benefits. Let me give you an example. We had a refrigerator that died that was 18 years old. Now, I needed to research and figure out where I wanted to go for a new one. Well, I went with somebody I knew, liked and trusted, because they’ve come and repaired the old fridge a few times. Now, they may not be the cheapest, but I trust them and they are gonna come and take out the old fridge, and put in the new fridge.

I called them up and their guy was so knowledgeable. He said, “You cannot order the fridge that you want because you have something called cabinet depth. With cabinet depth, here are the models that are available.” Now, we also had a bunch of features that we wanted. We wanted the pull-out drawer freezer at the bottom, but when I called up the guy from the place that we chose, he said, “Hey, I’m sorry, but in a cabinet depth refrigerator, that’s not available.” Emotionally, we wanted that feature, like, “Hey, if we’re gonna get a new fridge, let’s make it better.” But unfortunately, we couldn’t.

Emotional Connections

A lot of the time, people make decisions on what they buy based on a place of emotion, and emotion is based on benefits. People will rationalize a purchase with features. What are their needs? These are the features that we want, but the benefits are, “Hey, these people are gonna take the fridge away. They’re gonna install the new one. I don’t have to mess with any of that stuff and it’s gonna cost a whopping $60.” For $60, it’s worth it. For us, that’s what it was — the emotion of not having to deal with the stress of all the other pieces. And the best thing about selling to the benefits is that you need to get people to know, like and trust you. Once they know, like and trust you, like I did with this one company, the sale becomes a lot easier.

When it comes to emotional connections, people tend to purchase products purely for emotional reasons. Especially those that include things that they really don’t need, but want. They’re tempted to buy. For example, on social media, a lot of people will make emotional decisions to buy whatever, an Alexa, or they’ll make the decision that they want to look better, feel better, whatever that emotion is. They tend to make those decisions. If you can make them feel it upfront, if you can make them feel the way that they want to feel the way when you’re explaining your benefits, you have a leg up.

The number one way that we do that, to create that emotional connection, is telling your story. Get people to know, like and trust you first. If they feel akin to you, if they feel like they know you and they like you and maybe can trust you, they might pick up the phone and start that conversation. The next thing you want to do is share your client’s stories and their testimonials. But again, talk from a point of emotion with those. The benefits, not the features. You’re going to create more trust through those stories. And then finally, tell them how they will feel when they purchase from you. Not what their needs are, but what their emotional feelings are going to be. If you can get that across in your story and in your testimonials, you already have a leg up.

Make The Plan

So now let’s break it down to a plan. There are three pieces to this. We create a plan, we execute the plan, and we measure the plan.

Plan Out What You Want To Say

The first thing you wanna do is plan out what you want to say, how can your story make them feel something. Figure out how you can take your life experience with whatever it is that you’re selling, and transfer it to them so they can emotionally imagine themselves feeling better, feeling comfortable, sleeping better, whatever that is. What you have to do is take that and maybe break it into a series of posts. Maybe it’s step one, two, three, four and five, maybe it’s just one or two, or it could be just one. But you have to sequence it so that people go through that emotional journey with you.

Execute The Plan

The second part is you have to execute it. Create a plan for each product and service that you’re looking to increase the sales on and focus on those. Map out the content that you wanna put out there and also the conclusion. What is the decision that people make when they say, “I’m gonna buy this thing and this is how I’m going to feel after I attain it.”? And then finally, schedule those posts so that your content is laid out in a sequence that kind of guides people through that story step-by-step, and gets them to feel that connection.

Measure Results

The last piece of this is you have to go back and read your analytics. We’re gonna talk a little bit about having that home base and using analytics a little later, but it’s important to think about that. How do we measure what’s working and what’s not? Which one of those posts got the most attention? Which emotion tended to show the biggest impact on those customers or potential customers? You may not know, you can always ask people, but sometimes you just have to guess why.

Final Thoughts

Finally, how can you adjust your future posts and sequences to build upon that? In order to grow your business and increase your sales and gain new customers, you have to take them on a journey, an emotional journey of benefits that’s gonna take them from feeling hurt, tense or confused, to feeling warm and comforted and also secure. It’s your job to turn that into your story.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

Russell Romney is a Strong Towns member sharing today's guest post with a creative solution to the "missing middle" of biking.

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The benefits of biking — from improving your health to strengthening the economic resilience of your city to saving money on transportation — are valuable for everyone, but especially for low-income individuals or families who can't afford the insanely high cost of driving everywhere: about $8,000 per year, per car, before accounting for the health risks and infrastructure costs.

As Strong Towns tirelessly expounds, towns should focus all they can on making biking safer and more accessible by creating biking infrastructure and building cities at human scale. Doing these things leads to more biking and better quality of life for everyone. However, these changes don't solve an important structural problem: Many people either a) can't afford or b) are not willing to pay the high upfront cost of a quality, transportation-worthy bike.

I call this problem the "missing middle" of biking; there are short-term bike share and full bike ownership options, but nothing in between to bridge the gap between price accessibility and overall usefulness, especially in smaller places where bike share is harder to come by. Today, I'll introduce a system of bike rental that could solve this problem.

These bikes are far too expensive — and unnecessarily blinged out — for the average person, but cheap department store bikes aren't a good option either.

Bad Bikes & Small Hassles

The larger issue of getting more people biking can be seen as a chicken-or-egg paradox: Which comes first, good bikes or bikeable places? Regardless of the answer, owning a good bike is imperative to biking, and attacking the problem from both sides is better than a one-dimensional approach. 

What is a quality, transportation-worthy bike? Let's call it a "Good Bike." Good Bikes have three characteristics:

1. They are comfortable to ride on all terrain.
2. They are reliable and durable.
3. They can be ridden in all weather.

You may be thinking, "These bikes sound a lot like the bikes ridden in Denmark and Amsterdam!" and you're right: bikes in those places are ridden for transportation, not owned as weekend boondoggles or triathlon toys.

But in the US and other places that are not as used to bikes as transportation, people get sucked into what I call the Department Store Bike Trap: They buy a low-quality bike that breaks down very soon. Dutifully, when the bike breaks down the first few times, they take it to the bike shop to be fixed, but it breaks down again and again.

The bike itself is heavy, shifts unreliably, develops ungainly squeaks, and doesn't come with fenders for wet weather or lights for riding at night. In short, the bike just isn't useful as a form of transportation. After the initial high of having a new bike wears off, the owner grows sick of their bike not working well and they start wishing they had just bought a better bike. By this point, however, they've put so much money into the bike that they just can't justify paying for a different one. They stop biking completely, their bad bike sits in the garage, and the cycle of car dependence continues.

This problem is even worse for kids; even though having a bike is seen as a cornerstone of the childhood experience, kids have to change bikes every few years as they grow. The Department Store Bike Trap compounds every time they need a new bike, and kids are notoriously rough on their bikes — kids know what's up, they joyfully run their bikes into the ground — so their bad bikes break down even more quickly. If the cycle is bad enough, a child may not learn to appreciate how fun and useful biking can be. Or, even worse, they may never learn to ride at all.

The neglected and forgotten bike: an all too common sight on your typical college campus.

A second problem, that applies whether someone has a Good Bike or not, is what I call the Small Hassles Problem: people don't like small hassles. Behavioral economists have found that people respond far more strongly to small financial or time costs than the magnitude of those costs suggest. For example, let's say someone has a flat tire. If they have to pay $15 to repair it and having the repair done is worth far more than that, they are far less likely to get it done quickly than the relatively low cost suggests. But if that repair is free, they are far more likely to do the repair quickly.

Problems, compounded

I've see these two phenomena all the time at my university: First-year students show up with shiny (cheap) new bikes that they willingly ride for the first fall semester, until the bikes stop working or the students realize they don't work for their needs. After that, the bikes are lugged around from apartment bike rack to apartment bike rack, rarely used and underappreciated. These are people who, as low income, high-fitness individuals in places that are usually very bike friendly, could benefit most from having a good bike instead of walking, busing, or driving. (And yes, lots of people in college are low income.)

The implications of this problem are that people don't see bikes as useful forms of transportation. Low income individuals who could benefit most don't take advantage of biking. Cities don't see their hard-won biking infrastructure used as often as they want. The benefits of biking are lost.

Buying a Good Bike is hard. New, a Good Bike plus necessary accessories can cost from $500-$1,000; it isn't too bad to find a used bike for far cheaper on Craigslist, but they still usually cost more than cheap new bikes that don't seem worn out. Quality can be hard to judge in the used bike market. Additionally, people are often drawn by mountain, road, or cyclocross bikes built for racing rather than utility, and pay too much for a bike that is not useful for transportation.

Give the people what they need

But this doesn't mean that there is no solution. What people need is a way to get a Good Bike at an accessible price. Car dealerships do something like this all the time: if people had to pay upfront costs of new cars, few people would buy new cars; dealerships offer a low(er) monthly rate that makes car ownership accessible.

One solution? Create a program that rents Good Bikes (with important features like a U-lock and lights) to people long-term for a low monthly, biannual, or annual fee. The rental includes free basic maintenance for the life of the rental at any local bike shop, which bill the program directly for its services. After the rental term is up, offer them the option to renew the rental or buy the bike at full value, minus whatever they've paid toward the program and with consideration given for how used the bike is.

This program gives people access to Good Bikes that work reliably in all seasons. It helps parents afford Good Bikes for their kids without being hit with the high up front cost and swift depreciation of a new bike. People have fewer financial disincentives to perform routine maintenance to keep their Good Bike on the road. Finally, more people can experience biking as a normal form of transportation at a young age and carry this attitude through into their adulthood.

Allowing people to buy the bike gives them a Good Bike to have ownership over and use well; it also funds purchases of new bikes in the program and keep the program's bikes in relatively new and high-quality condition.

Hit the books

Let's go over the financials of this program: the cost of a basic bike and accessories including lock, lights, and fenders approaches $500. Annual repair costs can average about $100 with an annual tune-up and occasional flat repair. So, assuming each bike is used for ten years or so, the bike needs to bring in $55 of revenue each year to cover the outlay cost and the cost of stolen bikes (assuming a conservative theft rate of 5%, and for which a reasonable fee is also charged).

This means that initial outlay costs are pretty high: about $100,000 for just 200 bikes that could service a small university or town. Yearly revenue is relatively low relative to investment. This program is clearly not a "profitable" financial investment on the surface and would be hard-pressed to make it as a business proposition.

However, this program is best suited for large organizations like companies, universities, and cities. These organizations must worry about holistic factors beyond simple return on direct financial investment.

Positive externalities

Cities, universities, and campuses will readily sponsor bike lease/rental programs if they consider the indirect financial and nonfinancial benefits it will bring. Maximizing the benefits of the program requires making Good Bikes as price-accessible as possible, and that takes a small subsidy. Subsidizing this program dramatically increases the number of people using it and by extension, the benefits from it. Economists call these benefits "positive externalities" — benefits to others that can't be collected as revenue.

Here are a few of those benefits:

• More bikers means less road wear, which means less road repair costs.
• Organizations don't need to provide as many parking spots.
• More bikers means less car traffic and fewer people calling for bigger roads and more parking.
• Increased biking inertia means less opposition to implementing other planning policies that will help build a strong town.
• Better quality of life increases property values.
• Bike riders are happier and healthier.

Let's focus on just one of these factors to make the point about how valuable this program could be: parking spots. If a university plans for five hundred more students living on campus over the course of a few years and they currently are at parking capacity, they have a few options: 1) build more parking, 2) dramatically raise parking prices to lower parking demand, or 3) decrease the mode share of cars.

Building each new parking space costs around $5,000, assuming the university already has the land; if not, a parking garage costs about $15,000 per space. Each parking spot may need maintenance and oversight. Even before accounting for those costs, each new parking spot eliminated saves at least $500 per year over a ten year period, meaning the university could buy each new student a new bike every year for the same price as building new parking. So subsidizing a bike program with $50 per bike per year is like a 950% return every year. Not too shabby.

People may see the costs of a bike rental program as prohibitive to its genesis and continuing success, but taking a proper accounting of the costs involved — including better health and productivity, lower car infrastructure costs, and less traffic — shows that the program is a net financial positive.

Strong towns should still dedicate most of their focus to improving bike infrastructure, slowing down traffic, and catalyzing financially responsible and human-centered development; these factors, among others, are imperative to increasing adoption of biking as transportation. But making good bikes accessible to all goes a long way toward allowing people to fully utilize those improvements and grow the economic strength of their communities in the process.

(Top photo source: Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism)

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About the Author

Russell Romney just finished a bachelors degrees in economics and math. He'll be coding for a living, but he is eager to apply his love for biking and urbanism to strengthening his new community of Verona, WI.

Perfecting Your Lead Generation Efforts: A Guide for Service Professionals written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

If you own a professional services business, odds are you’re trying to get leads in the door. What I often see is that these types of businesses develop automated lead funnels, because that’s what they’re told to do, and spend a lot of time vetting these leads, but let’s face it, they probably don’t have a ton of time to do that!

Instead of focusing on building an endless supply of leads, you should only be focusing on the amounts you actually need as well as how to balance bringing new customers in, and keeping new customers around. For example, if you’re a CPA, wouldn’t it be easier to focus on the clients you already have year after year as opposed to constantly be looking for new ones?

Here’s how I believe you should approach lead generation for your business.

Define your ideal client

Hopefully, you have a pretty good idea of who makes an ideal client for your business, but if not, you should figure that out ASAP.  To get started, it’s easiest to target the group you can help the most, the fastest because you’ll probably be able to demonstrate how you can get quick results and build raving fans.

Develop a client generation system

I have worked with a lot of service professionals, and from what I’ve seen, most of them want to work with roughly ten of the right clients at any given time. That’s it.

The typical service professional acquires new clients by attracting a lead that wants to meet and learn about how they might help them. Let’s say you have four clients now and you’d like to get six more. If one in four meetings turns into a new client (this is very low for our approach but will use this for easy math), it will take 24 meetings to get those additional clients you’re looking for.

You need to ask yourself what it takes to schedule consistent appointments and how you can increase the conversion rate of these appointments. If you can understand this and build a system around it, you’ll remove a lot of headaches that many service professionals experience in their lead generation efforts.

Set a revenue goal

Before you put any meetings on the calendar, you need to determine your annual revenue goal. This will give you insight into how many clients (and in turn, meetings and proposals) you need to obtain in order to reach that goal.

You simply need to factor how many appointments it will take to land one new client, and move forward from there.

Create a workhorse piece of content and focus on Facebook audiences

Content development may not necessarily be in your professional wheelhouse, but it’s essential for your business. You must create a valuable piece of content that will resonate with your target audience. Many find blogging to be the easiest way to format this content.

To ensure this one piece of content is the workhorse you need for your system, spend time researching the questions and problems your audience experiences the most.

Do your research. Interview past clients, conduct keyword research, and/or look at online forums to better understand what your audience experiences and common questions they have. The information found in your research may provide invaluable information as you search for hot topics for your blog post.

Once you know who you want to target, develop a list of people that you’d like to reach. If the list is properly targeted, it doesn’t have to be very large.

Use this list to build a custom Facebook audience and further create an expanded lookalike audience to increase the number of potential targeted prospects.

Add a content upgrade

In order for your promotion to work, add a “content upgrade” to the blog post you created. This is an offer for related content made inside the blog post that entices visitors to exchange an email address to receive the upgraded version of the content as well. Your content upgrade can be in the form of a checklist, ebook, or even a video. The email should then be used for follow-ups and lead nurturing efforts.

Advertise the blog post

Once your audience is in place, create Facebook ads driving people to your piece of content. To make things easier, you can even promote your blog post in a status update and “boost” your post to the custom or lookalike audience you created to get their eyes on it. The post will then show up as a sponsored post in the timelines of those you’ve targeted.

Offer value

Once a person responds to your content upgrade offer, reach out to them and offer a valuable service for no charge as a way to demonstrate how great it is to work with you and the type of service they can expect.

Set appointments

Make sure that your prospect is qualified to move forward before you propose any services to them. Remember, you want to enjoy working with them too. Even if they’re an ideal client on paper, they may not be the best match based on personality which can make it a difficult working relationship for both of you.

Provided all seems good to go, be sure to understand your lead’s objectives, goals, and potential challenges.

Then, make the appointment.

Deliver

Once the lead is qualified, over deliver on what you promised as you set the appointment. Identify the ways you can truly help them and really show them the value of working with you.

Master the close

The key here is to help your lead tell you in their words what’s wrong and what not fixing it costs them. Listen to them before you mention anything related to your services.

Once you’ve heard their story, at that point you can identify ways to help them, but just make sure they know they have been heard. Show them how they can get immediate and long-lasting results by hiring you.

A customer generating system doesn’t have to be that complex, but it does have to be based on your overall growth needs and goals, so make sure you know what those are from the beginning.

Earlier this year, Ibbaka surveyed sales leaders, product leaders, pricing experts and C-suite executives on the challenges companies experience in B2B pricing. There were almost 130 responses to this survey and as is our practice we complemented this with interviews and online research. Responses came from a wide range of industries but were concentrated in B2B software (SaaS and Enterprise) and healthcare.  One of our interviews was with B2B value-based pricing thought leader Tom Nagle.

We took this data and ran it through our internal data analysis and segmentation platform to look for patterns and data clusters. We found that the pricing challenges fell into three main clusters. We think that these will resonate with those familiar with how B2B pricing actually gets done at most companies.

Ad hoc pricing: prices are set arbitrarily without truly understanding customer value creation, creating a fear of leaving money on the table

Inadequate execution: a relatively structured approach to price setting but inadequate execution resulting in discounting and loss of pricing power

Complex pricing: the complexity of product/service offer and pricing, combined with a complex buying process resulting in customer pushback and inevitable discounting

For each cluster, we provide insights into the underlying data and a set of recommendations on what to do if you find yourself caught in the pattern (perhaps we should call these anti-patterns).

About 25% of the respondents were in B2B Software, 11% in Health care Pharmaceuticals and Biotech, and the rest widely spread across other industries including Business Services, Wholesale and Distribution and Financial Services. Company size was distribution was bimodal with most respondents being either small (under $10 million in revenue or large, more than $1 billion (with more than 12% of respondents having revenues of more than $10 billion.

You can download the complete report here.

To get insight into your own pricing, check out our Self Assessment.

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Street trees are often taken for granted and overlooked. But in Akron, Ohio, they’re a mainstay of the urban landscape. Named a 2015 Tree City USA by the Arbor Day Foundation, Akron received the designation due to its commitment to urban forest management, led in part by City Arborist Bill Hahn.

In 2015 alone, the city planted over 2,000 trees and over 3,000 seedlings, in addition to pruning nearly 3,500. And every Arbor Day in Akron, thousands of saplings are distributed to locals by nonprofits and even MadTree Brewing Company (living up to its name).

In fact, the city of Akron, Ohio, is home to over 55,000 street trees. And if you want to know where to find the very best ones, just ask Leah Heiser, the Flowerscape director at the 37-year-old organization Keep Akron Beautiful—a nonprofit whose mission, Heiser says, is “to enhance the quality of lives in Akron through beautification, conservation education, and removing litter and graffiti.” Through the Flowerscape program, Heiser manages and cares for 32 public gardens throughout Akron.

Street trees aren't just attractive, they also provide a myriad of benefits for our neighborhoods and cities.

Her favorites are the variety of trees in Alexander Park, the 60-year-old maple tree on West Market Street near the Keep Akron Beautiful office, and the London planetrees on High Street across from the Akron municipal building. London planetrees, Heiser says, are ideal and commonly used for city streets: “It looks exactly like a sycamore tree,” she explains, “but requires half as much water, and it’s extremely sturdy.”

To some, street trees might seem like an attractive but ultimately unnecessary urban feature. When we walk our streets, many of us—especially those of us lucky enough to live in places splashed with green and lined with flowers—probably take urban trees as a given. Whether they hang over our heads as we bike along the sidewalks or line the edges of pocket parks, trees aren’t usually given much attention or respect.

But ample research indicates that that’s a mistake, as Sarah Kobos wrote last year in “The Magic of Tree-Lined Streets.” Street trees provide plenty of pragmatic benefits in terms of urban planning and environmental wellness, such as shade from heat and relief from humidity, making streets more walkable and bikable and lowering the average electricity bills of surrounding households. They also lower the average driving speed, making roadways safer for pedestrians and drivers alike. There’s even evidence that they improve the health of nearby residents, lower crime rates, and drastically increase property values in an area.

Heiser adds that street trees are essential to a city’s environmental health. They improve air quality and decrease the circulation of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and ozone. “They’re extremely important,” she says of urban trees. “They help beautify the city, help reduce urban heat, help reduce stormwater runoff, clean the air, all those really wonderful functions.”

Horticultural variety, says Heiser, is essential to ensure when selecting trees for urban streets. “You want to stay away from monoculture and promote variety in order to prevent infestations,” she explains. And though this factor isn’t as essential to her personally, she notes that cities generally look for low maintenance trees that don’t require much water or consistent upkeep.

Tree selection also has to be based on the specifics of a particular urban environment. “My overall goal,” Heiser says, “is creating healthy ecosystems that have longevity, rather than instant gratification. I’m focused on creating multifunctional green spaces that are not only beautiful for the community, but also serve as wildlife habitats and food sources for local wildlife.” When planning tree planting in Akron, Heiser looks for gingkos, pears, birches, white pin oaks, river birches, and “native trees that support local wildlife. They grow so well in our environment, without a lot of leaf litter.”

As for Heiser’s plans for the landscaping in Akron, she hopes to add more trees to the Flowerscape sites and to increase the overall variety of trees Akron has to offer. “We want to create more fluidity in our green spaces in the downtown area,” she explains, adding: “We have lots of pocket parks, but we need more of them, and more connectedness between them.”

For Heiser, the value of trees and green spaces in urban environments goes beyond pragmatics into a philosophy of life and the rich history of the city of Akron. “Our history is based off of the canal, and we have a really cool opportunity to beautify the canal area and to link our history to our present through a green space.”

Moreover, incorporating trees into the urban environment, Heiser argues, fosters a greater respect for nature and stirs our innate instincts to connect with it. “We don’t spend a lot of time in nature anymore, so it’s hard to reconnect with it, and we don’t always know how,” she says. “We have a chance to foster that natural respect with interactive green spaces.” The humble street tree presents an opportunity to do just that.

(All photos courtesy of Leah Heiser)

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This essay is part of an ongoing engagement with Akron, Ohio, supported by the Knight Foundation. Learn more about it here.

Naturally, something we’re asked about a lot is how to get referrals. Referrals are key to growing any business, regardless of size, industry, location, or market. While buying patterns have changed dramatically, what hasn’t changed are the basic principles of human psychology: people are more likely to buy from people that they like and trust.

The stats about referral marketing only validate this long-held belief: people are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend, the lifetime value of referred customers is 16% higher, and 14% (yes 14%!) of customers who visit a referral page take an action.

But with all this knowledge about the value of referrals, only 30% of companies have a formalized referral program. This means that the majority of brands have a significant untapped growth opportunity sitting right in front of them.

In this article, we’ll dive into everything you need to know for how to get more referrals 2018.

What’s changed in 2018?

The rise of on-demand services like Uber and AirBnB, that rely largely on referrals to grow, have introduced millions of consumers to a new breed of referral programs. It’s become much simpler for consumers to refer and be referred to products and services… and the incentives are better.

We’ve been working closely in the referral space for more than 6 years and have seen a ton of change during that time. Here’s a couple of the big things we’ve noticed in 2018.

Consumer expectations are higher: It’s no secret that buyers are more informed in 2018 than they ever have been, and there are also more choices available than ever before.

With access to information always at the tip of our fingers, the power has shifted to buyers at unprecedented rates. The expectations of your customers and potential customers are only getting higher. A majority of buyers are most of the way through the buying process before they even interact with your company in a meaningful way.

Growth automation: When we consider the rise in consumer expectations, it’s obvious that marketers need to re-frame how they think about referral programs. We’re seeing an increased desire for more than just give/get referrals. Companies want A/B testing, tiered rewards, detailed analytics, and programs for affiliates and partners.

How to get referrals is no longer just about the top of the sales funnel; it’s about increasing revenue per customer from acquisition through to retention.

An example of growth automation might be something like an acquisition program where you’re targeting customers based upon a characteristic like where they’re located, what time of year it is, or how they interacted with your website in the past. It would include revenue optimization programs, referral programs, and win-back programs.

Know how to measure your referral programs

Before we get to the good stuff – how to get referrals – you need to start with the end in mind. We can’t stress enough how important it is to understand what success looks like before kicking off any referral programs. After all, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

When it comes to referral programs, there are a few key KPIs you should be watching closely (hint: they’re not that different than the marketing metrics you’re already measuring). Setting benchmarks for these metrics is difficult. Businesses across all sizes and industries run referral programs with varying levels of success.

Our recommendation is to align your expected referral results with those of your other marketing efforts. If you’re seeing a 10% conversion rate with other digital efforts, it’s fair to expect conversion rates in your referral programs to be similar.

With that in mind, here are the key metrics you need to measure for all your programs:

Conversion rates

Marketers are used to measuring all sorts of conversion rates, so this one should be easy. When looking at your referral programs, you want to measure conversion rates at different points throughout the process so you can understand where there’s room for improvement.

Not only do you want to know the rate that everyone in your program is sending referrals, you want to know how many of the sent offers are accepted, as well as how many of the accepted referrals turn into paying customers.

Lifetime customer value (LTV)

The lifetime value of your customers is critical: it informs how much you can spend to acquire, onboard, support, and retain customers. If you’re doing referral programs right, you should be seeing an increase in LTV.

Referrals don’t just help you acquire new customers, they incentivize the referrers to spend more and interact more with your product or service.

Customer acquisition cost

Just as it’s more cost effective to market to existing customers and gain a larger share of wallet, it’s more cost effective to acquire new customers via your happy, engaged users than it is to try to convince a completely cold prospect to buy.

The data required to properly monitor these metrics typically lives in multiple systems at most companies. Most organizations we deal with house key customer data in their CRM, engagement details and touchpoints in their marketing automation or email program, and sales history in their billing system.

This means that you need an integrated solution for running and measuring your referral programs to help you realize better results and understand when adjustments need to be made.

Referral SaaSquatch, for example, let’s you integrate your programs with Salesforce, Hubspot, Stripe, Recurly, and many others to ensure full visibility into your programs.

Organizations who have locked down how to get referrals are able to lower their customer acquisition cost significantly. We hear about the importance of social proof all the time, and it’s significant. It takes more effort and money for you to convince someone of the value of your product than it does a trusted friend or colleague.

How to get referrals: 6 strategies to drive growth in 2018

1. Create a killer customer experience

This one may seem obvious, but it’s critical to being successful with referrals. We know the old adage that someone is far more likely to tell friends and family about a poor experience than they are a good one.

This means the bar is even higher. If customers are more likely to share bad experiences than good ones, you need to create an amazing customer experience. This means that everything from your product experience to order processing to customer support needs to be consistent and exceptional.

As a customer, I want to be wowed. And wowed means different things depending on the business you’re in. If I go to an expensive restaurant, my definition of wowed is much different than if I go to a McDonalds.

The expectations of your customers will vary depending on your business, so if you’re wondering how to get referrals, be sure to understand what’s required to provide an exceptional experience. You need to create an experience so good that everyone wants to tell their friends about it.

2. Remove friction

This one stresses on an earlier point: customer expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. Our tolerance for inefficiency is continually diminishing, so if you want to run successful referral programs, they need to be seamless for both the referrer and referee.

This means a few things:

• Make it as simple as possible to send a referral. Don’t make people jump through hoops to send links to their friends and family or they won’t do it. The more seamless it is, the more likely your customers will be to share.
• Clarity, clarity, clarity. Nothing is more frustrating than being misinformed about what’s required to send a referral and receive your incentive. Be sure that it’s obvious what people need to do to take advantage of the offer, and don’t hide important details in fine print. The last thing you want to do is create a crappy experience at the point a customer is about to refer your product or service to a friend.
• Provide visibility throughout. Similar to ambiguous details, a lack of visibility can make for a poor experience. You want to ensure that both referrers and referees always understand where they’re at in the process.

3. Reach your customers everywhere they are

Gone are the days of either reaching people via phone or email. If you’re like me, you belong to a ton of different platforms that brands can reach you on. In fact, if a brand wanted to connect with me they have upwards of 12 places they can find me online.

This means there are a many ways customers and potential customers will interact with you, and everyone uses each platform a little bit different. Some prefer email for communicating with companies and Facebook messenger for family and friends. Some text friends and family, but like interacting with brands on Twitter. The bottom line is that you need to understand where your customers spend their time online.

If you’re thinking about how to get referrals in 2018, you need to be reaching your customers and potential customers everywhere they are. The experience to offer and accept referrals must be consistent across social media, email, and in your products.

4. Get granular with your targeting

We hear marketers talk about the importance of personalization A TON. For too many, this still means simply pulling dynamic fields into emails (e.g. Hi <first name>). When we talk about personalization, we mean getting granular with your referral program targeting.

It’s about understanding your customers and business. If you offer ride sharing, you may know that certain events or festivals are a great time to offer referrals. You’re more likely to reach people that need transportation, so offering a targeted ride discount referral should result in higher conversions.

Again, it goes back to having an intimate understanding of how you generate business and the characteristics of your users. Getting granular with targeting will allow you to drive higher conversion rates and provide a stronger, more tailored experience.

Take the ride share example: if a successful referrer also gets $10 off a ride, it makes their night out that much better.

5. Tiered rewards

The reality is that not everyone loves your product or service as much as you do. Customers come in all shapes and sizes, and have varying levels of interest or engagement with what you’re offering.

This is where reward tiering comes into play. If conversion rates are low in your referral programs, you may not be offering rewards to the right customers.

For example, you’ll probably want include people who have purchased in the last 30/60/90 days, exclude trial customers, and include your customers with the highest LTV. You may even want to offer an exclusive incentive to “VIP” customers (however you define that for your business).

6. Be creative with your incentives

Being creative with the incentives you offer for referrals can not only improve conversions and LTV, it can make for a unique customer experience. While discounts and credits may be great for most cases, they don’t work for every scenario. It may come as a surprise, but non-cash incentives are 24% more effective.

Think about ancillary products that your customers might be interested in. If you were exploring how to get referrals for on online tutoring platform, such as Varisty Tutors, you might want to think about incentives that would benefit students outside of the platform. Perhaps it’s in the form of a credit for books on Amazon. Or an incentive for the parents if you’re dealing with students outside post secondary.

A great example of where you need to get creative with incentives is in the B2B space. While you might be selling to businesses, you’re ultimately dealing with a person. And a discount on a product their company purchases is not likely to excite them. This is why in a B2B situation, digital gift card rewards are a great option.

If you want me to refer your B2B offering, offer me an Amazon gift card… but only if you’re delivering a killer customer experience.

3 brands that are killing it with referrals

Uber

Most of us who have used Uber have experienced their referral program: refer a friend with your code and you both get a free $10 ride. And a $10 ride is nothing trivial with Uber.

I remember the first time I used Uber and how excited I was about the referral program. We were in Seattle and our hotel concierge provided a discount code for me to use. It was extremely easy to use and paid for our transportation to a Mariners game that night.

Not only was the referral program ridiculously simple, it provided a ton of value. I not only saved on that one ride, it introduced me to their exceptional customer experience. I’ve used Uber as my exclusive transportation method when travelling ever since.

Typeform

Typeform is an online tool that lets you build questionnaires, forms, lists, and simple apps with ease using templates and tools. They’ve been able to drive strong growth with fairly simple in-app referral marketing.

For each referred customer that upgrades from a BASIC version of the software to a PRO or PRO+ account using discount codes sent from your Typeform account, you’ll receive 10% off your bill.

And referrals are limited to users with a PRO or PRO+ account, which helps ensure they’re leveraging customers who are engaged and actively using their product. I.e. they’re targeting the right customers.

Dropbox

Dropbox’s referral program is an excellent example of being creative with your incentives. For each successful referral, you get a boost in your available storage and so does the person who accepts the referral.

What makes this brilliant is that it adds to the value you derive (what’s better than more storage for a cloud file hosting system?), but it also drives use of their product. If you have more storage for the same cost, you’re likely going to use the tool more.

Making your customers work for you

Happy customers are one of the best marketing tools at your disposal. It’s great if you can paint a strong vision, but nothing instills confidence like validation from similar customers that are realizing success with your product.

We encourage you to advantage of the strategies outlined above to help grow your business this year. Let us know what you think in the comments. If you like what you read, be sure to share on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook

 

We are almost at the yearly halfway point for most companies, and for many of them it’s a sad time. The sales manager has only a few weeks to make his or her first-half numbers and if they’re behind, he or she is not sleeping.

It Started With the First Month of the First Quarter

When the salespeople fail to make their numbers in the first month of the first quarter, no one gets too excited, but alarms should have sounded. However, everyone’s still sleepy from finishing the last year.

When the second month is a failure, making the quarter becomes darn near impossible. And so, it goes until the last month of the second quarter.

For most companies, failing at the half means failure for the year is just around the corner. But there might be ways to save the year. It doesn’t involve retraining the salespeople. Most salespeople haven’t forgotten how to sell, so they don’t need retraining, they just need more qualified prospects.

It doesn’t involve pumping up quotas (really now, if they didn’t make it under the old quota, what makes you think…?). Firing salespeople might lower your expenses but not increase your productivity. Also, getting a new sales manager at mid-year won’t have an impact until the following year. 

Offering discounts in the last quarter savages the margin and seldom solves the revenue shortfall. Of course, the salespeople make commissions and the customers save money, but the CFO is thinking that changing jobs is easier than working for a president who can’t control his or her business.

There is just one option left.

Increase the Lead Generation Budget for Qualified Leads

Qualified leads, i.e. people with a declared need and an intention to buy, will save the forecast. Discounts are for weak people who don’t know how to sell. Increase the lead count by 25% with qualified leads and the year will be saved, but it must start early enough in the year, at the seventh month, to fully reap its savings benefit.

Unfortunately, many companies try this too late in the year (after a poor third quarter), when panic is setting in and people are grasping for straws. Nine months into the year is too late for any tactic to work. True, while the increase in qualified prospects will bring in some sales, with only three months to go, most sales will come in the following year, not the current year.

_______________________________________________________________

Why it Matters:

“In B2B, most companies have sales cycles longer than three months. Start pumping up qualified leads in October and the results will be higher marketing costs, crappy discounted margins, poor sales results, but a great start for the coming year.”

_________________________________________________________________

Start driving up qualified leads now, from July through the end of the year, and sales will jump. Qualified leads, where the prospect has admitted in some form or another that they have a need and can make the decision, will purchase within a time frame that will feed the salespeople and cause the forecast to surge and sales to jump within 90 days.

The goals are:

• At least a 25% jump in qualified leads.
• Leads sent to the salespeople without delay. (No requalification; it isn’t needed.)

One Lead Gen Option

If you review your options for creating qualified leads in a predictable manner, you’ll see the options are few.

1. Trade shows and exhibits are long-term strategies.
2. Direct mail is effective and still works, but takes time to gin up the machine, mail and get results.
3. Email blasts worked five years ago but the opening rates are so poor it isn’t worth it because you have no time for guessing and tactics that fail.
4. Unless you have nailed an on-line strategy to create not just quantity but quality, it will take 30 – 60 days to figure out you’re failing and the year is lost.
5. The best option is still the telephone. Massive calling into a marketplace to interrupt current buyers purchasing from a competitor is the single, fastest way to save the year.

Because qualified leads close at 25% - 50% greater than unqualified leads, and it happens faster, you need to prime the pump from a guaranteed source.

By the way, this calling process will also uncover less qualified people (longer time frame, no budget yet, or not the decision maker) which will close in the future.

___________________________________________

Why it’s Important:

“The increase in the marketing for qualified leads is pocket change compared to the punishment of not making quota.”

__________________________________________________________

Sales development reps will dial 10 – 12 times per hour and disposition or complete about one company per hour. Depending on the product or service, you can expect one qualified lead every 10 – 20 hours. One out of every three to five of these qualified leads will buy. Figure out how many sales you need by the end of the year and back into your budget for an inside group or an outside professional group. The outside group will always, always be more productive. The number of dials will be higher, leads will be greater, it will take fewer hours and the qualified lead count will be higher.

Compare the Budget to the Price of Failure 

When you have the budget and the database to call, show management the cost of the program versus the track you are on for failure. Most mid-year sales failures never pull themselves out of the hole because they hesitate, wait another quarter and then push the discount button.

If you are on a run rate to fall short of quota, fresh, highly qualified, leads will create momentum, excitement and enough revenue to pull you out of the hole. If you don’t do it, you will surely fail. In this case, cutting your marketing spend to save money is like stopping your watch to save time. [i]

You may also like:

Outsourced Tele-prospecting: 10% less cost, 90% more revenue

What's it take to generate leads that fuel your forecast?

How to Shorten the Sales Cycle

[i] Henry Ford once said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” 

 

 

Are you looking for a cookie-cutter inside sales process you can implement in your company without changes? If so, you’ll be disappointed. No such thing exists. That’s because you need to tailor your process to your market, target audience and product or solution.

Most importantly, how you approach the sale has to be in sync with your buyer’s journey. How do they make the buying decision? What questions do they ask along the way? How can you help them choose the right product or solution?

To illustrate an inside sales process, let’s take a fictitious example — a company, Zippy, Inc., which offers a marketing automation solution.

The Prelude to the Inside Sales Process

Zippy uses an inbound marketing approach, which means there are a couple of steps in their sales and marketing process before their inside salespeople get into gear. These are outlined below.

• The Origins of an Inquiry

  The director of marketing at B2B Ventures, Sally, knows she needs to invest in technology to increase marketing efficiency and success. So she does a search on Google for “marketing automation.”

  There at the top of the organic results is a link to Zippy’s e-book, “How to Get Started with Marketing Automation.” She clicks through to the page, fills out a form and downloads the e-book. Sally has just moved to the first stage of Zippy’s inside sales process. She is now classified as an “inquiry.”

  Note: see how Zippy has matched their sales process to Sally’s buying process. She’s searching online, and they are right there ready to be found.

• Lead Nurturing that Educates

  What’s important is that Sally’s is not a lead yet. That’s because she isn’t qualified.

  Zippy marketing and sales management have agreed that people need to demonstrate a higher level of interest before the inside sales team invests their time in an inquiry. Plus, there are other critical parameters for lead qualification that their inside salespeople will deal with in due course.

  In this case, the inquiry needs to be warmed up with email nurturing. Sally receives several emails including one that offers a webinar that covers more in-depth information. She signs up for it. Also, over the past couple of weeks, she has clicked the links in several other emails and spent time on Zippy’s website.

  Now that Sally has invested time to educate herself and is showing a high level of interest, she has a lead-score that indicates she’s worth calling.

The Story of the Inside Sales Process

• Lead Qualification the Human Way

  At Zippy, just because a lead-score is high enough to contact an individual, it doesn’t mean the lead is qualified. Digital footprints don’t tell the full story.

  Gerard, one of Zippy’s inside salespeople, calls Sally to find out more about her. He confirms her interest in the product, ensures she has the authority and budget to make a purchase and finds out who else is involved in the decision.

  He also discusses Sally’s situation and the problem that she’s trying to solve. While doing so, he assesses how Zippy’s solution can help her.

  At the end of the conversation, he moves her into the qualified lead category and sets an appointment for a personal product demonstration.

• A Demo that’s Truly Personalized

  Gerard did his work in the previous call to prepare his demo, so he’s not going to bore Sally with all the bells and whistles of Zippy’s solution. Instead, he tailors his presentation to Sally’s needs, focusing on what’s most important to her — how this solution can solve her problems and make her company more successful.

  At the end of the demo, he asks open-ended questions to gauge her interest. He also confirms the next step in the buying process. Does she need to talk with someone else? Can he help her with that? When should he contact her next?

  If all goes well, Sally agrees that she’d like a quote. Gerard tells her when he will send it, and he sets up a follow-up telephone call to review it.

• Quote and Negotiation

  Gerard sends the quote and gives Sally time to review it with the VP of Marketing. He calls her at the pre-established time, and they negotiate a few changes.

• Landing the Deal

  After Sally negotiates the deal, she buys the solution.

Because your market and product are not the same as Zippy’s, your inside sales process will likely be different.

If, for instance, you have just a few large customers you’re targeting, it may be better for you to use account-based marketing rather than inbound marketing. In that case, you wouldn’t wait for the leads to come to you. Your inside salespeople would blaze the trail, making calls, sending emails and engaging potential buyers on social media.

So use the above outline as a starting point. What’s critical is to have a systematic way of determining which accounts and people are worth your inside sales people’s time and a logical way of moving those individuals through the buying process. Your job is to help the right people to find and buy your solution.

Public relations can mean the difference between success and failure for start-ups. Many well-known start-ups including Airbnb and Tesla Motors owe much of their success to effective PR.

Start-ups often delay PR until their product is ready for launch or at least out of beta testing. But PR does more than support product launches. It’s a valuable tool for gaining investor attention and support, a critical resource for start-ups, and for preparing the marketplace. The first requisite for successful start-up PR: Start long before product launch.

With outstanding PR, even a seemingly boring start-up can win attention in a crowded market. Conversely, businesses with worthwhile concepts may go unnoticed due to lack of good PR. Entrepreneurs handle their own PR at times but typically turn to experienced PR consultants so that the principals can focus on core product development.

Start-up PR specialists offer these tips to win all-important media attention.

Create a concise summary. Like the infamous “elevator pitch,” it’s a one or two-sentence explanation of what the company does and what makes it distinctive, without industry jargon, to help readers understand and remember the company. That’s challenging yet extremely important for hard-to-understand technology companies. Beware of analogies. Describing a company as “like United Rentals, but for your own possessions” can help people understand the company but may diminish the brand. In addition, some people may not understand the analogy.

Ascertain what’s newsworthy. Find what’s different or important about the start-up. Sadly, many start-ups simply aren’t newsworthy, because they aren’t unique or don’t offer any added value beyond their existing competitors,” says start-up tech journalist and PR expert Erica Swallow. If that’s the case, consider revamping the product.

Document the start-up’s journey from concept to launch. Relating the start-up’s trials and tribulations can gain support and publicity. Reality music shows like X Factor and America’s Got Talent follow this approach. Interview key team members, including investors, separately. Then combine their answers to summarize the company history and explain its products.

Start early. Public relations activities require three to six months of planning. Developing relationships with media contacts and analysts before product launches can win more favorable attention than first contacting them when the product actually launches.

Educate the customer base. Well before product launch, develop PR materials that inform the customer base on the problem that the forthcoming product solves – without ever mentioning the product. Focusing on the customer’s problem helps create a new product need.

Know what’s news. Pitching only what’s newsworthy will produce better media relations. Besides the launch of a company or product, ideas include new research, the company’s response to a current event, beta-testing results, regulatory reviews, and news of a high-profile partnership. “The story must be new, unexpected, and/or resonate with the journalist’s readership. Jumping straight into product features and benefits all but guarantees failure,” says Max Marine, director of business development at Venture1st.

Develop engaging content. PR pros hold varying opinions of press releases: Some say they’re outdated; others say they remain a valuable tool when used correctly. Press releases may seem impersonal compared to the more interesting communications methods now available. An engaging video can capture attention on social media. Providing prospective customers or influencers a “behind the scenes look” at product development or allowing them to beta-test the product can pay enormous dividends.

Get analytical. Apply PR measurement to link the PR investment to measurable business objectives. Number-orientated technology experts at start-ups appreciate standardization and predictability. For that reason, they may be uncomfortable with PR, which can be challenging to standardize and quantify. “Start-ups should approach marketing and PR with a focus on quantifiable analytics, and they should look for those PR agencies and in-house hires who think likewise,” Joanna Jana Laznicka, publisher of VC-List.com, told Entrepreneur.

Feature the founder. A charismatic founder and his vision attracts media attention and is crucial for successful PR. Realizing that, many PR pros now favor releasing news announcements through the founder’s blog post rather than a traditional press release.

Avoid common PR mistakes, such as automated pitches, extravagant launch parties, too many follow-ups, ignoring publications’ deadlines and lead times, and poorly timed launch dates.

Bonus tip: Keep at it. Focus on gaining more publicity instead of remaining content with publicity already gained. Apple founder Steve Jobs always urged entrepreneurs and businesses never to be rest on past accomplishments, according to Pressfarm. He felt that too many businesses made the mistake of relying on previous success instead of pursuing even greater heights.

Bottom Line: A comprehensive public relations campaign that starts well before product launch offers valuable benefits for most all start-ups. Creating a groundbreaking product is not enough. A company must create a product need and publicize the product to attract customers and achieve quick success that is sustainable.

This article was first published on the Glean.info blog.

Learning how to communicate more effectively with people who have different communication styles than you do will lead you to more prospects, more productive discussions, and more sales.

Dr. Laurence J. Peter's 1969 "Peter Principle" holds that companies promote high-performing employees to more and more exalted managerial jobs until those employees reach a role that they're incompetent to perform, and thereafter, the employees' negative performance reviews mean that they stop getting promoted, so that, on average, managers are all stuck in jobs they're not very good at.

A trio of business school professors have published a study in the Harvard Business Review that provides empirical evidence that this is basically how things work in corporations. They followed the successes of salespeople before they were promoted to managers for their excellent sales record, then compared it with the performance of the salespeople these new managers were in charge of, before and after the promotion.

The researchers found that "sales performance is negative correlated with performance as a sales manager" and that "when a salesperson is promoted, each higher sales rank is correlated with a 7.5% decline in the performance of each of the manager’s subordinates following the promotion."

Moreover, "firms tend to promote top sales workers into management, even though they become the worst managers."

In our data, among people who were actually promoted, better salespeople ended up being worse managers. But if we could observe the managerial potential of all salespeople, and not just those who were promoted, would we still find a negative correlation between sales performance and managerial performance?

Answering this question is difficult because the promoted managers we observed in the data weren’t promoted at random. For example, if firms promoted by flipping a coin, then poor salespeople could get promoted because they were lucky, rather than being promoted because their employer observed qualities that overcame their deficiencies as salespeople. Although people aren’t getting promoted by coin flips, they are more likely to be promoted if they happen to be in the right place at the right time: using variation in the promotion rates across industry over time to act as our coin flips, we still find that better salespeople tend to be worse managers.

Research: Do People Really Get Promoted to Their Level of Incompetence [Alan Benson, Danielle Li, Kelly Shue/Harvard Business Review]

(via Marginal Revolution)

When it comes to scaling startups, few people are as accomplished or consistently successful as Reid Hoffman .

While the rest of us consider scaling a startup to market domination a daunting task, Hoffman has continued to make it look easy.

In September, Hoffman will join us at TC Disrupt SF to share his strategies on “blitzscaling,” which also happens to be the title of his forthcoming book.

Hoffman started out his Silicon Valley career at PayPal, serving as EVP and a founding board member. In 2003, Hoffman founded LinkedIn from his living room. LinkedIn now has more than 500 million members across 200 countries and territories across the world, effectively becoming a necessity to the professional marketplace.

Hoffman left LinkedIn in 2007, but his contributions to the company certainly helped turn it into the behemoth it is today, going public in 2011 and selling to Microsoft for a whopping $26.2 billion in 2016.

At Disrupt, he’ll outline some of the methodology behind going from startup to scale up that is outlined in his new book, Blitzscaling, co-authored with Chris Yeh:

Blitzscaling is a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup’s life-cycle where the most value is created. It prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and allows a company to go from “startup” to “scaleup” at a furious pace that captures the market.

Drawing on their experiences scaling startups into billion-dollar businesses, Hoffman and Yeh offer a framework for blitzscaling that can be replicated in any region or industry. Readers will learn how to design business models that support lightning-fast growth, navigate necessary shifts in strategy at each level of scale, and weather the management challenges that arise as their company grows.

Today, Hoffman leads Greylock Partners’ Discovery Fund, where he invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo and Microsoft. Hoffman’s place in the VC world is a natural continuation of his angel investing. His angel portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga.

Hoffman has also invested in tech that affects positive change, serving on the non-profit boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org.

Blitzscaling marks Hoffman’s third book (others include The Startup of You and The Alliance) and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him teach us a thing or two at Disrupt SF.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are available now right here.

I saw this tweet today from our friend Arianna and I had a good chuckle:

Love when people cold email me with a pitch and ask to set up a call with management. Hi, that’s me!

— Arianna Simpson (@AriannaSimpson) June 12, 2018

But the underlying issue is not that funny. Someone took the time to send her a pitch email but did not take the time to figure out who she was.

I’m always looking for an excuse to delete a cold email instead of replying to it.

When someone sends me an email seeking to get consideration from Flatiron Partners, a firm that hasn’t been actively investing in eighteen years, I delete it. And I get those emails multiple times a month.

When someone sends me an email seeking an investment in something USV does not invest in; restaurants, movies, oil drilling, etc, I delete it. And I get those emails multiple times a day.

When someone sends me an email saying that they would like to come visit me in our office in San Francisco, I delete it. And I get those emails multiple times a week.

On the other hand, when I get a cold email from someone who has clearly taken the time to do their homework on me and USV, I try to answer it right away. I am not perfect in replying to every email I should reply to, but I do try and I do a decent job at it.

Some people figure that emails and pitches are a numbers game. In some sense they are right. But you can massively increase the hit rate if you do some prep work. And, in this day and age, it is not that hard.

I’ve been trying to moderate my Twitter consumption, but my goodness, did I go on a bender this weekend. Trade wars. The disintegration of the international order. “Betrayal.” Twitter was made for times like these.

That’s not to say that social media was helping matters. There was a lot of anger out there, raising the risk that politicians could be goaded into doing something rash.

The (trade) war dogs also are on the loose. This pack is dangerous. There is no easier way for a Canadian politician to delight voters than to insist that Canada won’t be “pushed around” by obnoxious Americans. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sprung his tit-for-tat tariffs without any discussion about whether it was a good idea. He appears to have guessed correctly that none of his opponents would set themselves up to be portrayed as siding with the Americans. Canada’s need for instant gratification in the face of Trump’s insults is so strong that even Trudeau’s most aggressive political opponents are all-in on fighting a trade war they can’t win. Andrew Scheer, the Opposition leader, Doug Ford, the in-coming Conservative premier of Ontario, and Jason Kenney, the leader of Alberta’s United Conservative Party, all have volunteered for the fight.

So, the trade war is on. Experts insist that unfounded aggression must be matched with equal aggression; Trudeau’s plan to launch surgical strikes on products and companies from the states of important U.S. politicians has been widely praised as brilliant strategy.

If they say so. Still, we should acknowledge that the outcome of this gambit is out of our control. It depends entirely on the ability of members of Congress and industrial lobbyists to persuade Trump to back off. They’ve been unable to do that to date, but maybe this time is different? We can hope.

• Sure Canadians are fed up — but if our relations with America sour further, we all know who loses
• 'Fair trade, fool trade,' Trump takes more swipes at Canada in tweet war
• Trump's aggression against the G7 and Canada: Five questions about what's at stake

And while we pray for a Republican rout in the mid-term elections this year and Trump’s eventual political demise in 2020, we should start taking care of things here at home. Because that we can control.

One of the biggest threats to Canada’s medium-term prospects is political risk. The volatile politics at the heart of the Kinder Morgan fracas could easily spread to other provinces. Ford’s election in Ontario portends inter-governmental conflict, and a Quebec-first party is leading the polls ahead of that province’s election this autumn. Come 2019, it could become very difficult to get big things done in Canada.

But maybe some of this universal outrage could be channeled to a more positive purpose? The sight of Conservatives lining up behind Trudeau presents a unique opportunity to achieve a national consensus on prickly economic issues, assuming the effort is wrapped in the flag and presented as the country shielding itself from Trump’s attacks.

Of all the tweets I consumed over the weekend, the most compelling came from James Moore, the former Conservative industry minister. He called on governments to “respond with action,” and offered a list of suggestions: “absolute free trade within Canada;” get to work on building the Kinder Morgan pipeline; ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership immediately and champion the agreement abroad; and lower taxes on investment in the fall economic update.

All good ideas, although I’d tweak some of them a little.

It’s beyond ridiculous that a country that sees itself as a champion of free trade on the world stage is incapable of erasing barriers to the movement of goods and services within its own borders. This probably isn’t the right moment to launch an aggressive push for inter-provincial free trade since Quebec Premier Phillippe Couillard is distracted by the election. But surely some groundwork could be done in case anti-Trump politics could be used to create the conditions necessary to overcome our own chronic internal protectionism.

The official line in Ottawa is that the ratification of the TPP has been held up only by the legislative calendar.

Fine, but that excuse has done nothing to silence speculation that Canada’s trade priorities have been dictated by the obsession with NAFTA. It is now clear that new North American trading rules won’t be sorted until next year, if then. So it’s time to move on. Some of the energy, resources, and political capital that have been reserved for the NAFTA talks should be diverted to other trade priorities. 

Being among the first countries to ratify the TPP would send a signal to Asia that Canada is serious about diversifying beyond North America. Benoit Daignault, the outgoing head of Export Development Canada, sees just as much opportunity in Europe thanks to the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. Yet Canadian companies have been slow to exploit those opportunities, Daignault told me in an interview last month. They may need their governments to give them a push.

Moore’s call for immediate tax cuts is a trickier one. The case of broad corporate tax cuts is unsettled. “I used to do M&A, and I have never seen a merger that succeeded because it was driven by tax considerations,” Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF and a former corporate lawyer, told me in an interview this month. “There has to be more than that.”

While lowering taxes on investment seems a good idea on its own, what Canada really needs is a comprehensive rethink on its approach to business taxation. The International Monetary Fund recommends a review, as does Kevin Milligan, an economics professors at the University of British Columbia and co-editor of the Canadian Tax Journal, which devoted its latest issue to making the case of for a comprehensive tax overhaul. 

For whatever reason, Canadian governments have been afraid of taking a hard look at tax policy. So the final word to Moore, since he inspired this column: “No more timidity.”

• Email: kcarmichael@nationalpost.com | Twitter: carmichaelkevin

At the University of Toronto last week, tech startups associated with the Creative Destruction Lab came together to present their companies and get feedback from rooms packed with venture capitalists and angel investors.

Prageet Nibber, co-founder of Calgary-based ReWatt Energy got a rough ride. After they finished their presentation the first person to speak was Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState Software and an active investor in early-stage technology companies.

“I don’t understand what these guys do,” Copeland said. “They use blockchain, AI and ML, the three hottest things. It feels like you’re just playing on the tag cloud right now.”

Speaking to the Financial Post afterwards, Copeland said too many startups are just chasing the flavour of the week.

“We’ve just gone buzzword crazy in tech,” he said. “That seems to get certain financiers interested, but smart financiers look past that.”

ReWatt wasn’t the only company that got this kind of response; in a different session, after a presentation proposing to use the blockchain for secure medical prescriptions, a potential investor complained of “blockchain fatigue.”

Several investors said that tech money tends to rush towards the latest fad. Back in the 1990s it was the dot-com boom. More recently it’s been blockchain and artificial intelligence.

The blockchain frenzy has been especially intense, because the underlying secure leger technology has been so closely tied to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. That’s given regular retail investors an opportunity to get in on the action and drive the hype in a way that they couldn’t do with other early-stage tech startups.

Blockchain technology, which creates an indelible ledger to record transactions, has plenty of potential applications beyond digital currencies, and the investors who spoke to the Financial Post all said they’re still willing to bet on startups who are using the technology in sensible ways.

They’re just sick of the hype.

“Sophisticated investors are very quick to sniff out companies that have just attached blockchain to their existing story to make it more exciting,” said Andrew Schoen, principal at New Enterprise Associates, an American venture capital firm.

“It is a small subset that’s truly well-suited to blockchain.”

Jaafer Haidar, on the investment team at Brightspark, joked that the hype is shifting to artificial intelligence, and these days the best way to get extra funding is to put “dot ai” at the end of your company name.

But Haidar said that the frenzy is over for serious investors.

“At this point, we understand the blockchain. Show me what you’re doing with it, and show me how it’s a business,” he said.

“The companies that are really using the blockchain for its transformative effect in supply chain management, contracts, et cetera, are doing that work now, and we’re going to see that come to fruition when all this crpyto hype has blown over.”

Raj Lala, CEO of Evolve ETFs, which has an actively managed blockchain fund, said the companies he’s most excited about are the companies like IBM, Microsoft, Visa and Accenture, who are deploying blockchain technology in interesting ways, such as secure inventory tracking.

Nibber said in the case of ReWatt, blockchain is a minor part of their company, which aims to offer a suite of services for companies operating power plants and marketing energy.

She said in 2016 when they were just getting started, nobody cared about blockchain. Then last year with the spike in crpyocurrency prices, she said mentors were encouraging her to emphasize blockchain whenever possible with investors.

And now as the company works to secure investment as part of a $1 million round of seed funding, she said she can see the investor attitudes shifting again.

“The questions are getting far more detailed. People are starting to do their research and understand where blockchain makes sense, and where it doesn’t,” Nibber said.

“They’re harder questions for us to answer, but I think it’s an important shift.”

How do you incorporate new content into your existing website? Think back to the last piece of marketing content that your team created. Does it target a specific buyer persona? Does it align with a stage of the Buyer’s Journey and move that persona forward to the next stage? If not, chances are that it fell flat because it wasn’t specifically written to resolve the problems people in your audience have at the exact moment they are trying to solve them.

Incorporating new content into your existing website isn’t complicated. However, with careful consideration and planning, your new content can be optimized for greater success by delivering exactly what your audience needs, when it needs it.

What is Consideration and Decision Stage Content?

Before you can successfully incorporate consideration and decision stage content into your site, you must understand how one is different from the other, and how they both fit into the Buyer’s Journey. The Buyer’s Journey is the path buyers take to make a purchase decision, and there are three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

When potential buyers are in the awareness stage, they are just starting to realize and research symptoms of a particular problem. When potential buyers are in the consideration stage, they have clearly identified a problem and are considering different methods of resolving it. Finally, in the decision stage, a potential buyer is ready to evaluate specific solutions, like the products or services that you offer, and compare them to others. Delivering decision stage content to your audience before it is interested in reading it likely will get you ignored.

What does all of this have to do with your website? The Buyer’s Journey, and the stages associated with it, is important when it comes to your website because every potential buyer who visits your website falls into the awareness, consideration, or decision stage. No matter what stage they are in, you want to present visitors with the right helpful information at the right time in their journey. Not only will this establish your brand as a helpful resource for your audience, but it also will educate potential buyers on the solutions available and move them closer to making a purchase.

Incorporating New Content into Your Existing Site

How do you incorporate new consideration and decision stage content into your existing site? First, identify missed opportunities in your content strategy through which you can help your buyer personas evaluate solutions. Next, create your new content offer and strategically promote it throughout your site. Finally, monitor the results of your new offer to determine if your audience found it to be valuable. Then repeat.

Identify What’s Missing

Perform an audit on your existing content to uncover new areas in which you can help your personas evaluate solutions in depth and compare your products or services with competitors. Start with common pain points, questions, and goals that your personas have, and list potential topic ideas. A checklist or comparison white paper can be a good option for helping personas when it comes to comparing solutions. In addition to new written content ideas, consider offers that aren’t necessarily written content, such as cost calculators, demos, free trials, and simple contact forms through which site visitors can get in touch with your team to ask questions.

Here are a few general content ideas and the stages they typically fall in:

Consideration Stage

• Product comparison guides
• Live interactions (webinars, podcasts, live video)
• Case studies
• Product or service FAQs
• Data sheets
• Industry reports
• Cost calculators

Decision Stage

• Vendor comparison guides
• Product demos
• Free trials
• Contact forms
• Audits or consultations

Note: While there may be overlap in the types of content offered in each stage, consideration stage content tends to compare product or service types in general and decision stage content focuses more on your specific product or service.

Create Your Offer

Once you have topics to cover, and have determined the best format to present them in, create your content. Do your research and gather helpful information from trusted third parties such as industry publications, and remember to cite those sources. Also, don’t forget to incorporate keywords. Find out the long-tail keywords your personas are searching for specifically, and optimize your content around those phrases.

Create Your Conversion Path

Now that you have identified topics that will resonate with your buyer persona and created an offer, you need to create a conversion path—the path that website visitors will take as they convert into leads—for that offer. A typical conversion path will consist of a call to action, landing page, thank-you page, and follow-up email. As you write copy for the conversion path, draw upon the questions and pain points you identified earlier and use that information to describe your new content as the answer your audience is looking for. Then, of course, deliver on that promise with truly helpful information.

Place Your Content Throughout the Site

Now that you have consideration and decision stage content, you want to place it strategically throughout your website so that site visitors who fall within these Buyer’s Journey stages always have a clear next step to take—whether it is to compare products, download a case study, or sign up for an upcoming webinar. Start with the pages your website traffic is visiting the most, which likely will be your homepage and your blog, and place calls to action somewhere on the page. Common locations for calls to action are on sidebars, in the middle of the page as inline text, or at the bottom of the page. Proceed to place calls to action across your site so that no page is a dead end and that visitors are always given a direction.

What if a site visitor isn’t ready for consideration or decision stage content? If you’re using an automation platform such as HubSpot, smart content can be used to deliver a personalized experience for each visitor based on the stage in the Buyer’s Journey. If you don’t have the ability to create smart content, consider the contents of each page and the intent visitors have when visiting that page to determine the appropriate call to action you should place there. For example, if someone is visiting a pricing page on your site, he or she might be interested in a demo or a free trial as a next step. Someone who is on your blog reading a consideration stage article may be more interested in downloading a product comparison guide or signing up for a webinar related to the topic.

Monitor Results

Finally, as you place new content on your site, it is important to monitor its performance over time to determine how impactful it is in helping you achieve your marketing goals. First, look at the amount of traffic going to each offer to ensure that it is being promoted properly. Next, look at the conversion rate of the offer (if applicable) to see if visitors who see the offer are converting on it. If conversions are low, try tweaking the call to action or landing page copy to see if you can improve results.

Repeat

Placing content on your site and monitoring its success should be an evergreen process during which you are constantly performing A/B tests and tweaking for improved performance. As you discover which topics or specific pieces of content resonate, it will shed light on new opportunities for content that will help your personas overcome their challenges and help you establish your brand as a partner in their success.

Ready to learn more about how to convert your leads into customers? Download The Busy Marketer’s Guide to Converting Leads into Customers.

M&A and partnership deals are at an all-time high. But what about competition?

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) wants to know too. It is reviewing or arguing this question in court for a slew of proposed mergers — AT&T-Time Warner, T-Mobile-Sprint, CVS-Aetna, and Express Scripts-Cigna, to name a few. A court decision on the AT&T-Time Warner deal is due out soon, and it will likely affect the prospects for many other cases.

Traditionally, antitrust regulation has looked for whether a merger increased or decreased competition in a particular market. Stated in this way, competition sounds like something you can measure, like mass or volume — there can be a lot or a little of it, or too much or too little.

Insight Center

Sometimes this model fits reality. In the case of Baker Hughes and Halliburton’s planned merger a few years ago, the Justice Department detailed how it thought the amount of competition would rise or fall (mostly fall) in 30 market segments. The merger was called off when the companies saw the DOJ’s tally, presumably because the parties expected they’d lose in court.

But other mergers suggest that competition is often more complex than that. It may be hard to measure competition as an amount that can rise or fall. Sometimes, the mergers affect the nature of competition itself: how firms behave, how markets are structured, and even how rivalries evolve over time.

Five types of competition are common in business today. Each type gives rise to certain kinds of deals, and these deals in turn can reshape the pattern of competition.

Horizontal competition occurs when firms compete in the same market — this is the type of competition that comes to mind most often. Think Baker Hughes and Halliburton in oil field services, or Staples and Office Depot in office supplies, or T-Mobile and Sprint in communications. The antitrust question in these mergers is the standard one already noted: Will the deal increase or decrease competition in the relevant market, as measured by market shares of the new entity and its likely competitive behavior?

This kind of competition often drives consolidation mergers, in which two firms combine their production and sales. The combined firm may benefit from economies of scale in doing so, but increases in market power may also result.

Vertical competition occurs when firms compete downstream with their buyers or upstream with their suppliers over the surplus produced in their transaction. This is commonly thought of as bargaining with a supplier or buyer. For example, Express Scripts and Anthem were partners in the medical supply chain. Their partnership recently ended up in court, with Anthem suing for $15 billion that it claimed it was owed from savings that its partner achieved but did not share.

A merger in this context may aim to better coordinate the supply chain by reducing the element of competition from the supplier relationship. While Express Scripts and Anthem didn’t revert to that solution for their conflict, the other mergers in the same space aim at precisely this (CVS-Aetna and Express Scripts-Cigna).

The effect on competition here is trickier to measure than with the horizontal type. The key issue is whether the merger reduces competition in the upstream or downstream market, or whether owning a supplier or a buyer gives the firm too much market power in its own industry. Either way, these mergers that span connected markets change the pattern of competition, because the firms that compete with each other now operate under one roof: CVS won’t need to bargain over the surplus with Aetna, or Express Scripts with Cigna.

Disruptive competition is yet another form of business rivalry, though it is not one often thought of in the context of mergers and antitrust enforcement. More commonly, we think of disruptive competition as the rise of a technology or business model that upends the existing order in an industry. This kind of competition is generally thought of as a good thing for consumers, though, of course, not for the incumbents who are deposed.

This kind of competition can also be affected by mergers and may in itself drive deal making. The DOJ opposed the 2011 merger that AT&T and T-Mobile wanted because it feared that the merger would threaten the role of T-Mobile as a disruptive “un-carrier” in the telecom industry. Incumbents may also strike deals to cope with disruption, as when today’s automotive companies invest in car-sharing services and autonomous vehicle technology. In some cases, firms may form partnerships instead of mergers in order to disrupt an industry — that is what Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase say they are doing in their new health care alliance.

State-sponsored competition is the fourth type of competition that is changing the game in many industries. Sometimes, the state sponsorship is through state-owned enterprises, or through industrial policies that support national champions. Either way, these national firms compete differently from private firms in less regulated economies, because of the financial backing of the state and the protection granted by national industrial policies. This kind of competition is not new, though the rise of China has brought it to the doorsteps of every country and major firm.

A number of Chinese acquisitions in the United States have recently been blocked by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency committee led by the U.S. Treasury Department. The CFIUS argument in these cases has not typically revolved around increases or decreases in competition in the standard sense. Instead, the CFIUS has argued that the deals harmed the U.S. national interest by threatening technology leakage or undermining the health of U.S. competitors. For example, CFIUS blocked the proposed acquisition of MoneyGram by Jack Ma’s Ant Financial over data security concerns.

Collective competition is the fifth type of rivalry common today, though it has been around for years. In this model, firms cooperate with each other in groups to compete against other firms or other groups. Alliances short of mergers are used to coordinate the businesses of the firms that are members of these groups.

The members of these groups cooperate with each other internally and thus suppress competition among themselves. But the groups usually continue to compete externally with the other groups. The clearest example of this pattern is in airlines, where Star Alliance, Oneworld, and SkyTeam compete against each other as groups of allied firms. Smartphones offer another example, in which the members of the Android camp cooperate with each other to compete with the Apple camp.

Even when these groupings do not employ mergers to manage competition, the partners may well violate antitrust rules if their cooperation suppresses competition in the industry too much. (Cartels like OPEC are an extreme example of this collective competition.) For this reason, the airline alliances have been careful to request antitrust immunity before cooperating on pricing. Some airline partnerships have gotten this immunity on the argument that their particular travel markets will remain competitive even with their cooperation.

Because of this variety in how firms compete today, the market impact of mergers and partnerships is often hard to evaluate. In part, this difficulty is because we can never predict the future behavior of firms. But, more than that, there is not one measure or dimension to be evaluated, but several. The key question is how the deal affects the shape of competition, not just its intensity.

Once again, Salesforce presents a strategic look into the rapidly shifting world of sales. The third edition of the widely anticipated State of Sales report surveyed more than 2,900 sales professionals and leaders from around the world. Here’s a quick sneak peak of their sales research report.

Sales technology, buyer behavior, and the need to mingle have made sales more complicated, thrilling, and tougher than it already is. 

In fact, nearly 60% of sales reps expect to miss their quotas this year.

Customer expectations now border on the ridiculous and artificial intelligence brings new insight into the sales process. How should smart professionals turn the next wave of growth pains into profit? What tactics should sales leaders execute to still come out on top?

Jump to the State of Sales Report’s top 5 takeaways >>>

An analysis of their responses signals a tipping point for all players in the sales dynamic — sellers, buyers, technology providers, market watchers, and thought leaders:

• Which trends should sales leaders explore and integrate into their growth strategies?
• How should sales reps find the sweet spot between the bizarre demands of customers and the mesmerizing tools at their fingertips?
• What factors will guide sales team transformation in the future as technology, consumer behavior, and new market realities re-shape the contours of selling?

State of Sales (Third Edition)

The State of Sales report analyzes the responses of more than 2900 sales leaders from several countries and industries gathered in the first quarter of 2018:

• Countries [United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore]
• Industries [Retail & Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Telecommunications & Media]

The report also provides individual country and industry profiles using the following data points:

• Top Sales Technologies
• Top Sales Metrics
• Average Quota Attainment
• Time Allocation Profile for Sales Reps
• Cross-Team Collaboration
• Share of Data-driven Sales
• Imprint of AI Technologies

Key Findings & Takeaways

Here are the top five trends shaking up the sales world:

1) Rising customer expectations impede sales teams’ ability to meet targets
2) Data is the new common sense
3) Artificial intelligence dominates the conversation
4) Sell anywhere, anytime with virtual
5) The savviest minglers tend to be the top sellers

1) Rising customer expectations impede sales teams’ ability to meet targets

A strong majority of consumers and business buyers feel that technology should enable a greater degree of convenience, consultation, personalization, and care from sellers.

This perception forces sales teams to spend more time performing non-sales tasks just to meet a wide variety of customer demands. Overwhelmed reps reveal that they now spend only a third of their time selling.

2) Data is the new common sense

Sales skills and traits as active listening and attention to detail now share the limelight with data-driven insight.

These skills and the veterans who have them will remain relevant. But, tech-savvy sales professionals who know how to read and translate data into insight are being recognized on the sales floor. In twice as many teams, human intuition has given up its prominence to data analysis when it comes to forecasting and lead prioritization.

3) Artificial intelligence dominates the conversation

Majority of sales reps and managers believe that AI will deliver substantial impact over the next five years. Sales leaders expect AI adoption to explode by 155% within two years (2020).             

4) Sell anywhere, anytime with virtual

Compared with meeting clients in person, sales reps reveal that virtual meetings with customers via their computer monitors have increased by 3.2x more. This trend carried over to the recruitment space, with teams now hiring more inside sales reps and development staff.

5) The savviest minglers tend to be the top sellers

Silos are out. The days of getting comfy in your own corner of the organization are gone. Because customers view vendors as one entity, they expect their entire experience to be consistently personalized and convenient across every department in the entire company.

This compels the best sales teams to closely collaborate with every other unit in the organization which also shares touch points with customers. Top teams are more than twice as likely as under-performers to have systems integration with other departments to allow a free internal flow of customer data.   

Final Call

Technology zooms and dazzles while customers remain great at being demanding. Their expectations have risen to unprecedented levels and they want tailored, consultative relationships at the snap of their fingers. Artificial intelligence is outsmarting the best human tactics.

What can sales leaders, reps, account executives, and support managers do amid this new wave of challenges and still win their game?

Download the report to get the answers and a few more surprising insights into the State of Sales. 

The post 5 Game-Changing Trends Shaping the Future of Sales [New Report] appeared first on Sales Hacker.

The Kenmore neighborhood of Akron, Ohio has what a lot of other neighborhoods would love to have: a well-defined and sizable commercial district, laid out along an easily identifiable main thoroughfare. This is no surprise, since Kenmore was a small town of its own up until the late 1920’s, when it was annexed to the city of Akron.

As a result, a 1/3 mile stretch of Kenmore Boulevard remains as the vestige of the former city’s central “downtown” business district. While the businesses located there have generally been in decline over the past 50 years, and the area has become less pedestrian-friendly, the street still retains many of its best features. That includes many older two or three-story commercial structures, all of which are built out to the sidewalk, as well as a curving broad boulevard separated by a median that once provided a right-of-way for streetcars. It doesn’t take an expert to see that the area has great “bones” — and that with a little hard work and imagination, it could be brought back to take full advantage of its human scale, traditional small-town feel and rise to its potential as a true economic hub for the neighborhood.

Tina Boyes, who heads the Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance, which serves as the area’s Community Development Corporation (CDC), agrees. She’s explained that the Better Block program organized for the area in 2017 was the impetus for many of the positive things that are happening on the Boulevard today.

“Better Block highlighted Kenmore Boulevard’s potential for economic development and placemaking,” Boyes said. “Residents, artists, small business owners and investors are now talking to each other and taking action to realize the potential for our neighborhood.”

But that Better Block program was only the beginning. 

Making Kenmore a Great Place to Bike and Walk

Kenmore Boulevard is home to many small businesses, a number of which have been located here for many years.

When we talk about walkable streets, we are focusing on places that are people-oriented, creating an environment that's welcoming, safe and accessible for citizens engaging in all forms of transportation, but especially for those traveling on foot. Taken as a whole, the buildings, sidewalks and other features of the built environment are primarily scaled to people, rather than cars.

Kenmore Boulevard still retains much of this traditional walkability, thanks to the fact that most of its commercial buildings are up on the street and the sidewalk, rather than set back behind parking lots. This allows pedestrians to walk along the street and get a close-up look at businesses as they travel.

It’s not only more space-efficient and appealing. It’s also been proven to be more economically productive. People on foot visit their neighborhood businesses more often and buy more often—and walkable places produce far more tax value per acre than auto-oriented places.

Some of Kenmore Boulevard’s businesses have provided this kind of stability for decades, like Kenmore Komics & Games and the E&S Hobby Shop—the type of traditional storefronts that were common to many small-town Main Streets a half-century ago. As you might expect, they are joined by the types of other small neighborhood businesses you’d find almost anywhere — barber shops, a pizza parlor, a dance studio, a tavern and a branch of the public library.

Today, new additions to the street include entertainment attractions like the Rialto Theater, a small venue recently restored by Nate and Seth Vaill. The Rialto plays host to music performers, spoken word events, comedy shows and other community gatherings almost every night of the week. Another project headed by the Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance is Live Music Now!, a new music and performance venue that is designed to get residents out in the community—and remind them of its history. 

"It's a way to reassert our brand as a music district, while building community, bringing new people into the community and reinventing what that space could and should be," Boyes has noted.

Keeping the Boulevard walk-friendly and enhancing those features that attract pedestrians is important. But making the area more bike friendly—and slowing the car traffic—is also on the agenda. During the neighborhood’s Better Block event, lane reduction and protected bike lanes on Kenmore Boulevard were shown to be successful and were overwhelmingly supported by residents. Thankfully, the local CDC was able to get the city to reconsider its plans to repair and re-stripe the street with the same 12-foot lane spacing they had before, and which encouraged cars to travel down the boulevard at higher speeds. Lane spacing is critical, since it has been proven that narrower lanes encourage drivers to drive slower and more carefully—another benefit for bikers and pedestrians.

As the Boulevard was once home to a streetcar line, it retains a median strip down the center for most of its length. The lanes are still wider than they need to be, even with on-street parking.

To complete the picture, the City of Akron is also targeting the Boulevard as part of it Great Streets program, which is slated for several neighborhood business districts throughout the city. In Kenmore, the Boulevard crosswalks will see improvements to boost safety and competitive façade grants will be made available. These grants will allow building owners to renew and restore the character of the structures, many of which add so much to the early-20th century flavor of the street. It is hoped that the effort will be successful in encouraging the re-population of the street’s empty storefronts, too.

The City’s zoning code has also seen adjustments that will make it more compatible with the traditional character of the neighborhood. Over the years, the code had become oriented more towards suburban development styles, with deeper building setbacks and street-facing parking to accommodate automobile users. That approach simply doesn’t work in an older business district, where buildings are much closer together, and where structures were designed with businesses downstairs and residences above.

All the combined efforts should help move Kenmore in the right direction and enhance the traditional feel of the street. According to Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy, "It's about doing lots of little things that are the details that add up to more than the sum of their parts."

The Pendulum Swings Back

Forty years ago, the Kenmore Boulevard business district was losing traffic and customers to local shopping malls like the former Rolling Acres mall, which was located just two miles away. Today, most of that once-popular mall is being bulldozed as America’s love affair with suburban shopping meccas have faded. With more people desiring to live closer to the places they shop, work and play, the authentic, small-town atmosphere provided by places like Kenmore becomes more attractive and more economically viable each day.

"Having that stretch of storefronts alone sets Kenmore apart,” explains Boyes. “Those buildings are precious."

Integral to that make-over is the importance of the area’s legacy as a hub for musicians. Along with the performance venues like The Rialto and Live Music Now!, the Boulevard is home to several other music-related businesses, like multiple guitar shops and recording studios, that allow people to visit often, linger and interact with others — while enhancing the neighborhood’s sense of identity.

As neighborhood leaders, residents, city departments, local businesses and entrepreneurs come together, a new picture is beginning to take shape — and it’s one that people are getting excited about. For years, the Boulevard was just a broad thoroughfare that was more “drive-through” than “destination.” Dusting off the parts and pieces and restoring it to its more traditional, people-friendly character can change all that.

This essay is part of an ongoing engagement with Akron, Ohio, supported by the Knight Foundation. Learn more about it here.

(Top photo source: Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance Facebook page)

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About the Author

We're taking this Monday off from our usual Week Ahead podcast, but in lieu of that, here are seven fantastic podcasts from the early days of Strong Towns. The audio quality might not be quite as good but the conversations are gold:

1. Just Another Pedestrian Killed (December 2014) - Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns board member Andrew Burleson sit down to discuss a tragedy in Springfield, Massachusetts, where a mom and two girls were hit by a drunk driver on an urban stroad. Marohn and Burleson discuss the engineering profession's approach to safety, the implications for those outside of an automobile and how our approach needs reform if we are truly build safe, productive places.
2. Moneyhall (August 2013) - Chuck Marohn discusses the epidemic failure to understand what creates value within our cities. Applying the approach of baseball sabermetrics to our places reveals important truths.
3. Rick Rybeck on Value Capture (January 2014) - Attorney and job creation, transportation efficiency and economic development expert, Rick Rybeck, joins Chuck Marohn to talk about taxes, fees and creating incentives for a better land use approach.
4. Designed to Decline (September 2014) - Chuck Marohn talks about how auto-oriented developments are designed to decline, an effect that we can see clearly in places like Ferguson, Missouri.
5. Economic Gardening with Chris Gibbons (October 2013) - Special guest Chris Gibbons talks about Economic Gardening, the early days of success and failure in Littleton, CO, the nationwide movement today and how to get involved. This is a far reaching conversation that demonstrates why the smart money in local economic development is in Economic Gardening.
6. Rich vs. Wealthy (September 2013) - Joe Minicozzi and Josh McCarty of Urban3 join Chuck Marohn from Chapel Hill to talk about what makes a financially productive place and the difference between a community getting rich and growing wealthy. 
7. The Hunger Games (January 2014) - Strong Towns member and contributer Gracen Johnson talks with Chuck Marohn about The Hunger Games series and how the insights apply to Strong Towns thinking.

Happy listening!

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The technology change curve continues to steepen, with an increasing number of entrepreneurs developing innovative processes, services and products. When you create and drive growth on a global basis, it’s imperative that you capture and protect your intellectual property (IP). In fact, how well you protect your intellectual property could ultimately be a major key to success.

So why do so many entrepreneurs fail to adequately protect the results of their creativity? It’s simple: Sometimes we forget to protect the intangible because we are so busy producing the tangible (the products or services we provide).

Protecting Value

If you’re asking yourself, “How valuable can protecting IP really be?” consider this: Protecting your IP basically provides you with a type of market monopoly to make, sell, use, import, export and license your property.

Said another way, if your IP has value in the marketplace, then the monopoly IP protection provides will have a similar value times the length of the monopoly.

Three Types of Innovations You Must Protect (and Why):

Your intellectual property may be protected in a number of ways, depending on its nature.

1. Trade Secrets Are Your Competitive Advantages

Knowledge-based competitive advantages like trade secrets are best protected by documents such as confidentiality agreements and employee contracts. In the food industry, secret ingredients such as spices and herbs would be covered under a trade secret.

2. Patents Protect Your Concepts + Functions

If the advantage of your product is its function, the best way to protect it is with a patent or design registration. Patents can protect concepts, including software and business plans. The distilling process for a beverage could also be covered by a patent.

3. Trademarks Allow You to Own Your Brand

If the look of the product is your advantage, you should get a design registration that protects shapes and patterns. Brands, including words, shapes, sounds, logos and colors, can be protected with a trademark.

Overlap in IP Types

A special embossing on a surface would be covered by a design registration; the shape of a product, if unique and distinctive, could be protected by a trademark. Keep in mind that patent and design registrations can only be obtained for products that are not in the public domain, so a confidentiality agreement may be needed first.

How to Mine Your IP

IBM, an international leader in patent creation, has a powerful strategy that can be adopted by any size organization. IBM routinely reviews its unused patents and licenses them to other companies — including their competitors. In IBM’s case, this strategy added about $1 billion to their bottom line. Your organization does not have to be large like IBM’s to profit from this strategy.

Dell and other companies of different sizes have successfully cross-licensed their patents to create new income streams. In Dell’s case, it cross-licensed its built-to-order process to IBM for $16 billion. As with the IBM example, and now the Dell example above, much smaller companies, including entrepreneurships, can adopt a cross-licensing strategy like this to accelerate growth. Your protected IP can also be marketed in a similar way to either a complementary market or an entirely different industry.

Start with an IP Strategy

A key to success is to develop an IP strategy based on your long-term objectives. Consider your competitive advantages, business strategies, existing IP, third-party relationships, internal resources and exit strategies.

Protect Your IP From Cyber Risks

Stealing the credit card numbers of customers was only the beginning of cybercrime. Regardless of the size of your organization, you should anticipate cyber criminals will try to steal your proprietary information, the information that is not protected in the ways I described above, but is key to your future success. Make sure that you have secure backups of everything that is critical to you, and that you have taken proactive measures to prevent attacks.

Use the tenets found in my new bestseller, “The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change Into Opportunity and Advantage,” to help guide you to create the game-changing innovations that will be in high demand in the future.

The opportunity to both create and protect IP has never been greater. The time to start is today.

Do you wonder how often you should send a marketing text messenger or what to say? Read here to learn 8 of the best practices every text marketer should follow.

Gone are the days of TV and print ads being the best forms of advertising. We’ve entered a new era.

Marketing is going mobile.

And what better way to connect with mobile phones than with text messages?

Text marketing provides many unique advantages to other forms of advertising. So what do you need to know to be a text marketer?

Here are 8 texting best practices to follow.

Get Consent

Perhaps no form of marketing is more invasive to somebody’s life than SMS marketing.

Texting is usually reserved for personal communication. You use text to talk to the people you know in real life — friends, family, and maybe even co-workers.

Receiving somebody’s phone number is a sort of rite of passage for individuals. It’s a special territory, and a text marketer should treat it as such.

The number one rule of SMS marketing is to get consent from the customer before sending them anything.

You can do this by having them check an offer box before they make a purchase on your website. Or you could run a contest or sweepstakes to let them voluntarily sign up. You can even have them text in a keyword to sign up for your regular marketing messages.

Regardless of how you do it, make sure you have their clear approval to send them messages via text.

The Need for Consent

Why the need for consent? The first reason is the legal issue.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 put in place protections for individuals from receiving unsolicited, automatically dialed telemarketing calls. An amendment that took effect in 2013 affirmed that SMS text messages also fell under the TCPA.

In other words, if you don’t receive consent to send automatic text marketing messages, you could be breaking the law. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m not a lawyer so consult one before you do anything!)

On top of the legal issues, sending unwanted text messages is simply poor form.

Nothing will upset a prospect or customer more than unwanted messages. So don’t abuse it… be a good text marketer, and get permission from EVERYONE before sending any messages.

Don’t Spam

Once you do get consent to text with someone, don’t loose their trust. Don’t spam people. Its a fast way to have somebody opt out of your messages and to lose customers.

As we mentioned above, text marketing is very invasive. Every text you send in interrupting someone’s life. And since people are already inundated with up to 5,000 ads every single day, it’s not pleasant to see that marketing creep into their personal messaging areas.

The potential backlash to a text ad gets worse the more often you do it. The more texts you send, the more likely you are to have the door slammed in your face.

What’s the right number of messages?

Well, it depends. Most businesses I know text once a week. A few text daily. And I know others who send out clusters of texts around a special event (like a Facebook Live event)… so they might send 2 or 3 in a day… but then not send anything for the days following.

When in doubt, less is more.

Remember that being able to send text ads to someone is a given privilege — don’t abuse it.

Keep It Short

You don’t exactly have a lot of room to work with when developing the copy for your text message.

A SMS text message is 160 characters or less. Some systems (like Betwext.com) allow you to send an MMS message of up to 300 characters! Any more than that and you risk your message being broken up and looking sloppy.

Short and sweet is the way to go with your text copy.

Don’t waste time here. Get right to the point.

Thats not the only tip about your text messages…

Provide Value

Text Marketers know that customers are expecting to get something special!

Use texting to really separate out your loyal customers.

Want a few ideas?

• Send your texting list early bird information. If you’re going to send info out to everyone, give them early access… and let them know they get early access! (This is for special events… not every day blog posts!)
• Give them something special – I know of a few restaurants that have secret menu items… but you only learn about them by being on the texting list.
• Send VIP customers info on a special event… again they have to be on the texting list to get the details!
• Send special coupons… send them out infrequently and you’ll surprise and reward your followers.
• Release limited edition items to your list… again, only if they are on your texting list!

Try passing along exclusive offers, or giving them access to a sale a few days before it goes live to the general public. Make sure you’re giving them something special.

Aim for Instant Action

Because text messages are so engaging for end users and because they are so short… you want to make sure you use a powerful call-to-action.

A call to action is simply a plain english explanation of what you want your customer or prospect to do next. Some examples include:

• Click here now.
• Click this link and watch the video.
• Read this article.
• Call us at this number.
• Reply with your answer.
• “Call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx to order your ____”

Calls to action are all about getting your customers to take quick action.

Use one every single time… and your results will skyrocket!

Regardless of what your message says, it’s important to make sure it get’s read so…

Find the Right Time

One of the challenges for a text marketer is knowing when the right time to send a message is.

The cool thing about texting is immediacy of the message delivery.

What do I mean by that?

When you send an email, it can sit unopened in an inbox for days. Text messages, on the other hand, are usually opened very quickly, often within minutes of arriving. YES – Minutes!

For some companies, specific days work better… like bars and nightclubs often see better engagement on Fridays and Saturdays.

Other businesses will benefit from texting at a certain time of day. For example, some restaurants send messages or even coupons an hour before dinner time. As you can imagine, engagement skyrockets when a message is delivered then!

Because message timing is very business dependent, be sure to track analytics of your messages. Use the data to evaluate the success and failures of your messages on different days, weeks, months and time slots.

Here’s another great texting tip…

Leverage Triggered Messages

Marketing automation isn’t just for emails!

Texts are a great tool for businesses that leverage marketing automation.

You can trigger messages to send when certain criteria are met. You can send a thank-you note after a purchase is made, or deliver a birthday wish and free dessert voucher when their big day comes.

Betwext.com has the ability to add welcome messages and even drip campaigns to go out over time!

Triggered messages are great because they’re relevant and the customer can reasonably expect them. You wouldn’t think a message is spammy if it came right after you interacted with the company. The customer knows you didn’t blast the same message out to everyone, and it makes them feel special.

And now for our final “best practice” tip every text marketer should know…

Remain Professional

Even though they use text messages for communication, a text marketer doesn’t have an excuse to be unprofessional.

Refrain from using “text speak” in an attempt to seem cool, especially if it doesn’t match your brand’s personality. With the introduction of touch keyboards, emojis, and voice-to-text, the need for old-school text speak is in decline.

Unless you’re really crunched for characters, avoid using abbreviations if you can.

That said, don’t be afraid to test new features and functionality – especially if you market to a younger demographic – they will often be more forgiving of the advances in technology use!

How to be a Great Text Marketer

I hope today’s article gave you some great ideas on how to be a great text marketer. To learn more about getting started with business texting, or to learn how to promote your small business check out our special report… “The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Marketing”

The movement to make cities smarter is transforming municipal governments worldwide. But that’s only one side of the story. For companies, smart cities represent major business opportunities — and not only for tech firms selling systems to government agencies.

Technology is reconfiguring traditional roles and divisions of labor. City governments don’t have to provide every type of application and service themselves. In fact, they can’t — and this realization opens the door for other entities with capital and capabilities to step in, particularly where there may be opportunities to generate revenue. Smart cities have become more intricate ecosystems over time, with the degree and mix of private-sector participation varying from city to city.

Even if they don’t become providers of systems or services, many companies will need to adapt in some way as cities become more digitally connected. Digitization has upended industry after industry — and now, as it begins to transform the environments that will be home to two-thirds of the world’s population by 2030, there is good reason to brace for another wave of disruption.

Weighing the three questions below can help business leaders prepare for this shift.

How Do We Need to Adapt Our Current Offerings?

Companies in multiple industries are already altering their approaches in changing urban markets. Utilities are rolling out smart meters and introducing dynamic pricing schemes. Pharmacies are adding telemedicine kiosks. Real estate developers are integrating automation systems, sensors, and mobility options into their properties.

Telecom operators often provide the backbone communication networks required to run systems and applications. Now some are deepening their existing relationships with local governments and branching out into other types of smart technology implementation. Telefónica, for instance, installed 12,000 sensors in Santander, Spain, while Vodafone is supplying law enforcement authorities with body-worn cameras. Other telecoms are offering solutions such as smart parking and waste management systems.

Automakers are adding new options to their vehicle portfolios for smart urban mobility. Although it is posting explosive growth in cities worldwide, e-hailing has relatively limited penetration with certain audiences. New vehicle models could help the concept break through with them. The right kind of shared minibuses, with Wi-Fi, folding work desks, and privacy screens or headrests, could work for business commuters, for example, while families with children and elderly or disabled riders would be more likely to take flexible vehicles with easy entry, generous storage space, and seats that can be reconfigured.

For its upcoming on-demand microtransit service Moia, Volkswagen has designed an all-new electric vehicle concept to bridge the gap between taxis, shuttle vans, and buses. Commercial trucks, too, will need to be able to tap into smart city systems such as load pooling and urban consolidation centers.

A wave of public and private investment worldwide is going into making cities smarter — but that doesn’t change the fact that most municipal governments are working with serious spending constraints. Companies that want to serve them directly often have to think outside the box when it comes to financing. Cisco, for example, has created a $1 billion program with its own capital as well as private equity and pension funds to help cities purchase Cisco solutions and complementary technology. In other cases, smart city projects present opportunities to generate advertising revenue and branding. The technology and media company Intersection builds on revenue from advertisers to offer cities free “Links” kiosks to expand public Wi-Fi.

How Might Smart Cities Shift Value in Our Industry? 

The implications of smarter cities loom especially large for the real estate industry. As cities get smarter, the value of urban properties will shift. The availability of e-hailing, on-demand minibuses, and eventually autonomous cars could raise land values in areas that are not currently well served by conventional public transit. New opportunities for investment and development could open up if some formerly congested, polluted, or crime-ridden areas become more livable. Buildings or areas that are hard to retrofit with smart features may become less attractive. Tech firms, including Alphabet and Huawei, are getting into real estate development, drawn by the opportunity to build smart districts from scratch.

Data — on everything from pedestrian patterns and traffic to crime, school performance, and energy use — can change the way properties are used as well as the way they are valued. The ability to use data effectively will become a source of competitive advantage, with retailers and other types of companies using this information to fine-tune their location decisions.

Smart building automation systems capture even more granular sensor data on the way people actually use interior spaces — and the combination of that data and the growth of the sharing economy can support new leasing models. WeWork, for example, provides “space as a service” instead of providing a fixed amount of space for a fixed time. Sensor-fed software lets the company track precisely how people use desks, conference rooms, and amenities, and then use that information to maximize utilization.

Mobility is another area where smart cities are reshaping the playing field. Digital natives such as Didi and Uber are operating customer-facing mobility platforms in cities around the world. Now several major auto manufacturers, including Ford, are launching their own on-demand services using custom-designed fleets of minibuses. To complement the city’s existing transit network, Berlin’s public transportation provider is piloting its own ride-sharing van service through a public-private partnership. When autonomous transportation services eventually break through, automakers will face a choice: whether to make and sell the required fleets, operate them as a service for other companies and cities, or run their own mobility platforms. 

What Does It Take to Be a Successful Smart Cities Provider?

It used to be that “serving a city” meant selling a product or service directly to city governments. But now the range of possibilities has gotten bigger, and B2C or even B2G2C business models are growing more common.

At the same time, the expectations of municipal governments and of urban residents themselves have gotten higher. Cities have many vocal constituencies and stakeholders. Members of the broader public, whether direct customers or not, can be affected by a company’s offerings. They, and the officials who represent them, often have a great deal to say about smart solutions that shape their environment, such as peer-to-peer accommodations and bike- or scooter-sharing services.

All of this raises the bar for how companies conduct public interactions. Companies have to understand the complexities of each city’s context intimately, including how the local government makes decisions and what the regulatory landscape looks like. They also need to engage thoughtfully with city leaders over the longer term about how to meet their city’s needs.

Most companies lack these types of capabilities in their existing sales teams, so they may need to add urban planners, sociologists, designers, and other specialists to broaden their thinking. At its Center of Competence for Cities, in London, Siemens employs a diverse set of experts, from architects and urban planners to public finance specialists.

In forming new multidisciplinary teams, some larger companies may fail to coordinate their go-to-market approaches — and, as a consequence, different business divisions of the same company may approach cities with uncoordinated pitches. Getting this right involves an often-painful process of enforcing guidelines about mandates and responsibilities. It also requires setting up aligned incentives between city teams and business divisions.

The need to tailor solutions to each city’s context, combined with the unwieldiness of dealing with multiple stakeholders and agencies, has made it challenging for many providers to crack the smart city market and do so in a profitable way. For companies, the trick will be balancing each city’s desire for custom solutions with their own need for scale. Forming alliances and working cooperatively with other providers to set industry standards and shift toward open interfaces may help the entire industry move forward — while simultaneously addressing a common worry among city governments about being locked into certain technology solutions and vendors.

Companies have to consider not only how their offerings perform but also how they affect the public sphere in order to win a mandate to operate. That mandate is worth keeping. After all, some of the world’s urban markets are larger than entire nations.

How many hours and marketing dollars do you spend on widening your purchase funnel to ensure you capture enough people?

Trying to hit conversion and sales targets, many businesses focus their efforts on the purchase funnel fringes, tweaking marketing campaigns or A/B testing the color of call-to-action buttons.

In so doing, they can make a critical misstep: neglecting the mid stages of the funnel that statistically experience the highest funnel drop-out rates and need the most attention.

This doesn’t cancel out the need for driving qualified traffic and people into your funnel. But minimizing funnel drop-out rates has distinct advantages over widening the funnel if you want to increase current and future sales. This approach concentrates your efforts on a group of people who already have awareness and some level of interest. Now you need to focus on keeping that interest.

How? By optimizing your purchase funnel where most prospects drop out.

Companies in different sectors integrate intelligent, conversational digital sales assistants at crucial stages in the customer decision-making journey to do just that. It eases website visitors into the purchase journey and increases the effectiveness of the purchase funnel by tackling the four most common funnel mistakes that usually lead to high drop-outs and missed sales opportunities.

Funnel Mistake #1: Not engaging funnel entrants in the right way

Failing to maintain the initial interest of new visitors is the biggest mistake. This happens if the landing page doesn’t address the specific needs of these first-time visitors or help them quickly find what they came for.

If they aren’t sure what their next step should be, they’d rather save their time and walk away than trying to navigate and explore your website on their own.

For example, KitchenAid uses a targeted banner on product category pages which reads “Choose your stand mixer – Discover which stand mixer is made for you” and speaks directly to visitors unsure where to begin. It leads them into a digital sales assistant that acts as a private tour guide through the assortment.

With thoughtful questions, information texts and even videos, the assistant takes shoppers by the hand and shows them their favorite things.

Example: KitchenAid Mixer Advisor

Funnel Mistake #2: Giving shoppers too many choices

Once, offering ‘plenty of choices’ was considered a good thing. Over the last few years though, it has become increasingly evident that too many options overwhelm customers. The recent Humanizing Digital 2020 Report found that already 42% of shoppers abandon a planned purchase altogether because of too much choice.

Having to choose from hundreds of options (or even 10 options) leads to problems like analysis paralysis, decision fatigue, and buyer’s remorse. If customers looking for a pair of shoes are presented with everything from $40 loafers to $1,250 Christian Louboutins, chances are slim that they will take the trouble to sort and filter.

Instead, a better experience begins by asking where the customer plans to wear their new pair of shoes. Then, depending on their answer, follows up with relevant questions to hone in on their intent, preferences, and needs, and limits the displayed options based on the provided information and persona.

They equip companies with the information to customize the experience and narrow down the displayed products for each visitor. Applying this tactic makes it easier for the customer to pick the best option and increases your chances of securing the sale.

Example: Mizuno Digital Running Shoe Consultant

The process of picking the right running shoes has become very involved. With continuous changes in sneaker design and technology, shoppers have a lot of choices and making the right decision requires a good background and understanding of the biomechanics of running, which not every shopper is privy to.

Like a salesperson in a store, Mizuno’s interactive running shoe consultant asks online shoppers question such as about pronation, the surface they’ll be running on and their personal running style. Using this information, Mizuno guides them to the most suitable selection of running shoes, helping them, both beginners and advanced runners, make the right choice.

Funnel Mistake #3: Not personalizing your offer

If your business provides solutions across various verticals and caters to a variety of buyer personas, you very likely have a large and complex portfolio with some offerings that are irrelevant to a subset of your target audience.

Let’s say you provide a range of communication solutions to various industries from real estate to education and information technology. How can you share the right product information with the right level of detail in the right way to inspire and attract the right buyers?

Example: Saudi Telecom Company STC does it well –

STC provides telecom solutions to SMBs in over a dozen industries. Their digital sales assistant takes visitors to the right products based on their industry and business needs. The telco can dynamically package and offer the right product bundles, solutions and information with every click the customer makes.

Funnel Mistake #4: Making them work to understand benefits

Features tell, benefits sell. Not only do customers want to know what benefits your product offers, but they specifically need to know how that product will solve their specific problems.

Telling your customers that your laptop has an 8-core processor with USB Type-C / Thunderbolt Ports or Nvidia Pascal Graphics will do little to convince and loads to confuse.

What you need to tell non-experts is that your laptop will stream movies and play games faster, display them in high resolution with rich colors, multitask seamlessly and last all day on a single charge.

Microsoft’s digital sales assistant, for instance, which they syndicated to several retail channel partners such as Harvey Norman or Amazon, plays up the selected benefits of each laptop, instead of tossing around technical jargon.

Example: Microsoft – Windows 10 – Perfect Device Advisor

If your digital sales assistant asked the right questions, you will know what your customers intend to do with the laptop, how often and how long they plan on using it and what specific perks they are looking for.

When presenting the product selection, you can then easily play up the benefits they wanted. This makes your customers feel like they have found ‘exactly what they wanted’ and increases their purchase confidence.

In the aforementioned Humanizing Digital 2020 report, 88% of shoppers said that a digital sales assistant made them more confident about a choice. And that’s what retailers and brands should strive for.

If you can elicit that kind of response from a customer, you’re headed towards a very fulfilling sale and possibly a loyal customer. That’s another way that digital sales assistants can help you ease customers in through your purchase funnel and score a successful conversion.

In Summary

So there you have them – the four most common, yet devastating, mistakes businesses make by not optimizing the crucial stages in the purchase funnel, and how a digital sales assistant can lead to substantial improvements.

Things were easier when online shopping was a novel experience and a few good features were enough to win customers over. Today, customers are digitally empowered and demand personalized attention at each step. Digital Advice in the form of digital sales assistants helps you deliver that level of personalization by providing assistance at the right stages of the purchase funnel.

It adds the “human touch” to your digital experience and prevents people from dropping off mid-sale or abandoning carts, yielding higher conversion rates consistently.

This article has been originally published on Guided-selling.org.

Earlier this year, Forrester Research conducted a detailed survey of more than 150 B2B marketing decision-makers with the intent of benchmarking the maturity of B2B marketing best practices, focused on revenue marketing and marketing automation.

At face value, the results, due to be published in a report this June, paint a somewhat dim picture of the state of B2B marketing. I asked Lori Wizdo, Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst, to provide her thoughts on what the survey results say about how where most B2B marketers fall on the revenue marketing maturity curve. (Read more about the survey results on Lori’s blog.)

HJS: What did you find the most surprising finding from the survey?

LDW: Overall, the scores were quite low. The aggregate score overall was 2.71 (on a scale of 1-5), with individual scores ranging from 2.26 for lead management to 3.35 for organization. I was shocked, at first. However, when you consider that, in our model, a 5 represents the most advanced state of practice from a business theory perspective, and a 1 represents basic control and management of a process, you recognize how difficult the transition from 1 to 5 really is. I concluded that, as a discipline, B2B marketing is advancing quite well in what I call the B2B Marketing Renaissance.

HJS: Your survey indicates that a clear majority of marketers are engaged across the lead lifecycle, including customer marketing. Is that a reflection of a larger trend, namely that marketers are no longer just responsible for front end lead generation?

LDW: This was a surprising number for me – in a good way. Several factors have contributed to this. The most significant is probably a shift toward the subscription economy, where vendors are driving revenue through service-based annuity revenues. That immediately shifts the focus from “net new” customer acquisition to customer retention.

However, what’s often overlooked is that buyers don’t stop being self-directed digital consumers when they buy a product or service. They continue to engage with a mélange of digital and human channels. Since marketing has control over those digital channels, marketers are getting drawn into onboarding, value realization, and advocacy building.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has also accelerated the trend. In another, recent Forrester survey, 50% of the marketers with an active ABM program cited their objective as “increase and deepen relationships and expand business opportunities with existing accounts”.

HJS: You report that only 41% of companies reported marketing and sales working from a common strategy and plan. Why do you think sales and marketing alignment is a persistent issue?

LDW: Stunning, right? It begs the question, “How can this still be the case?” But, this is one issue where I think it’s no longer important to analyze for the root cause. The answer to sales and marketing alignment has been identified: it’s the customer, stupid! When sales and marketing calibrate their respective efforts to the customer – to helping the customer through a buying process or to a desired outcome – then they’ve discovered the basis for alignment. Sellers have always calibrated their efforts to the customer. Marketers are just beginning that pivot.

HJS: A significant proportion (71%) of respondents said that inbound marketing is an important source of new leads. That finding would seem to be at odds with the recent attention given to ABM and other (largely) outbound strategies. What do you think that says, if anything, about where most marketers stand in their adoption of ABM as a demand generation strategy?

LDW: Yes, 71% of the respondents said that inbound is an important source of leads. However, respondents also indicated that they’re finding it difficult to drive that inbound traffic: only 34% said they were happy with their organic search results; only 31% were satisfied with their social media efforts; and, less than a quarter (21%) were satisfied with the impact of their blogs. Some adoption of ABM is simply looking for a tonic to those anemic inbound results. Still, despite all the talk about ABM, marketers are making the transition slowly. In another, recent Forrester survey, only 30% of respondents said they had established, successful ABM practices in place for more than a year.

HJS: Marketers scored a mere 2.26 score (out of 5) for their maturity in Lead Management/Nurturing. For as long as marketing automation (the main technology empowering automated lead management) has been around, why are companies still struggling to move beyond the basics?

LDW; This was one of the numbers that really surprised me – for exactly the reason you mention. The tools to automate more sophisticated lead nurturing have been broadly available for more than a decade. But, as is the case with all technology, the tools enable, but don’t deliver, the process change. There’s is a ton of underlying work that must be in place first. For example, you need to have deep insight about your buyers and the outcomes those buyers are aiming to achieve, yet fewer than 20% of our respondents had well-defined personas.

HJS: Your survey reports that 46 percent of B2B marketers say they don’t have the technology they need. Do you think today’s marketers are too reliant on technology?

LDW: Yes and no. I’m ambivalent. I believe that B2B marketers must depend on technology to collect data, generate insights, and deliver relevant interactions. Plus, automation scales execution, roots out inefficiency, and provides real results that replace intuition as a basis for informed decisions. You simply can’t deliver the experience that today’s business consumer demands: timely, well-placed delivery of more personalized content at the right time, at scale, without marketing technology.

However, I also believe that many marketing execs think that the optimal martech infrastructure alone is going to “deliver an excellent customer experience” or “improve marketing ROI” or “enable great digital marketing”. B2B marketing leaders need to realize that technology alone does not drive change.

HJS: Thanks Lori!

If your prospecting plan is not aligned properly with the market in which you sell, then you are missing out on profit.

In my book, “High-Profit Prospecting,” I specifically dig into ways you can fit your plan with your market.  Learn and apply these skills and I have no doubt you will incrementally see your close rate click up.

You can’t afford to not develop the best prospecting skills possible.

A coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!

Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

At the core of marketing, you are simply trying to get someone to do something. That someone happens to be your target prospect, and that something happens to be whatever the next step is in that prospect’s path to purchase—whether that be the initial opt-in on your blog or requesting a quote for your core services.

All human action is driven by psychological principles. When you run experiments and study the way your target audience engages with your brand from a data-driven perspective, you’ll naturally gain invaluable insights. You can then apply this data to optimize your site for conversions or leads. While many studies on brand psychology include expensive neuromarketing tactics, such as MRI, EEG, and facial coding, running basic experiments and testing on websites (like SmartBug does in a GDD capacity) yields nearly the same data in a more manageable and budget-friendly way.

Here are two psychological principles that can be leveraged and tested to increase the desired actions on your website.

Scarcity

Scarcity is an economic principle that is highly relevant in marketing. In essence, a brand that can convey scarcity to its audience can also create more demand and desire for its products. HubSpot’s Sophia Bernazzani points out that “brands can use the scarcity principle to persuade people to fill out a lead form, purchase a product, or take another desired action.”

How does this look in action? Scarcity is often conveyed through copy. Usually, it’s most effective in product sales and with services that are in limited supply. One way to leverage this psychological principle, with products and services alike, is through exit intent offers. These typically look like a pop-up or slide-in text box and act as a last-ditch effort to get a prospect to complete the next step in his or her journey.

For a B2B example, text might include a statement like, “We cap our live webinars to ensure the attendees have more one-on-one opportunities to ask their most pressing questions. Space is extremely limited—don’t miss this chance to join us live.” On the consumer marketing side, you can use text on product pages to note how many items of a certain stye/size are left once the quantity falls below a certain threshold (depending on the item). If someone is on the fence about purchasing a pair of shoes and sees that only two are left in his or her size, that information is going to motivate action.

Social Proof and Fear of Missing Out

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a psychological dynamic. Though all human beings are susceptible to this phenomenon, a recent study by Eventbrite confirmed that it is most prevalent amongst millennials, with nearly 7 out of 10 (69%) millennials experiencing FOMO. This feeling is mainly driven by the ability to tap into social networks around the clock and the resulting comparing and contrasting those platforms facilitate.

What does this have to do with marketing? Armed with this information, marketers (and sales teams) can use it to drive action. There are a variety of tactical ways this can occur. One example is testing call-to-action copy to respond to feelings of FOMO. If you are a company that sells environmentally friendly pet supplies, the call-to-action copy to test on your site might be, “Join thousands of other pet parents who want the best for both their furry friends and the environment. Subscribe to our blog to get the latest scoop on eco-friendly pet products.” HubSpot does an excellent job using social proof on their blog subscription landing page: “Join our community of over 300,000 marketers and business owners and subscribe to HubSpot’s Marketing Blog to receive great marketing content delivered right to your inbox.”

Another tactic you might use to test whether social proof can help motivate action is to confirm that a large number of people are seeking/buying your products and services. You might notice this tactic when you browse sites like hotels.com. When you view a certain property, a yellow slide-in box at the bottom of your screen lets you know that “25 other people looked at this hotel today.”

In another example, if a coupon code is about to expire, sending an email to the recipient letting him or her know that a great deal is about to be unavailable can spark action. Recently, I received one of these emails from The Bouqs Company, a boutique farm-fresh flower company. The subject line was “say goodbye to your special offer,” and upon opening the email, a 24-hour live countdown clock began, coupled with lots of opportunities to “activate my 15% off coupon.”

In summary, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the mechanics of marketing—the automation, the funnel steps, the workflow goals, and the keyword targets. While these tactics are extremely important to a webpage’s performance, it’s important to remember that we are marketing to human beings with natural psychological tendencies. When we take the time to understand our target audience on a more complex level, we can apply tactics that test their behavior in deeper and more meaningful ways. Don’t forget to view opportunities for conversion rate optimization through the lens of psychology and human behavior to get richer data to support your testing and findings.

The sad truth is that most companies and sales teams have NO idea who they are supposed to be talking to.

By my assumptions, if you are reading this blog, either you or someone at your company would agree that it’s time to get your stuff together, legitimize who your business is and understand who you should be talking to.

70 percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy

This is a shocking statistic. As a marketer, you know that having a well-defined strategy for all profiles or personas, as well as different stages of the buyer’s journey, is the key to conversion success! Don’t let this simple process of defining your key audience stand in the way of building killer content.

If the best clients are for the company aren’t clearly defined, that could very well be the crux to why your marketing and sales teams are not succeeding.

More often than not, we help companies that never took the time to really build out their profiles or personas. In kickoff meetings, we often learn that the sales team is selling to a different persona than the marketing team even thought about! Or, the marketing team is filling their funnel with content directed to the position one level above the actual buyer. As you can only imagine, both sides are not meeting goals and are complaining about each other.

So, what is a client profile and how does that differ from a persona? Do you need both? Read on to understand the importance and differences of these critical components of your sales and marketing processes.

What is a Client Profile?

Quick and dirty: a client profile defines either the industry you want to sell to, or, the best client for your products and services. There are some fun and interesting ways to really dig deep and discover who your company is, how you define a good client and then, address how to talk to them directly.

Some very high level items you can define for a profile are :

• Industry
• Demographic
• Location
• Revenue

Buyer Profile Pitch: “We work with accounting agencies that are located within 30 miles of Philadelphia and have an annual revenue of $3 million.”

So, how do you go about getting started with defining your profiles?

You’re just a few questions away from having something drafted up and ready to go. Interview your best clients, your sales team, your prospects and ask them! People love to talk about themselves. You would be surprised how forthcoming they are about their business, challenges and goals.

Here is a great in-depth article from HubSpot with lists of questions you can use to help define and determine your best profile.

Using your defined client profile– it’s time to get creative! Taking what you have discovered about your best client, it’s time to write some content that is going to get their juices flowing!! The whole point of this process is to be able to better target your prospects and provide them with epic, useful, educational content is the passageway to closing deals.

What is a Buyer Persona?

Think of your buyer persona as the job title who works at the profile you just created.

All of your personas are going to fit neatly into a profile. There are probably going to be several personas for each profile. For example: Mary the Manager, Charlie the CEO, Molly the Marketer and Cathy the CFO all fit under your Profile of Accounting Agencies.

You are trying to reach them all through your marketing efforts, but you better be communicating a different message to each of them, as their pain points are so different. You can’t give your sales team the advantages they need to close deals if you are not offering up solid content to each of these personas.

When defining each persona, you really want to put on your therapist hat here and discover the answer to some questions. What motivates these types of people? What are their common challenges? (Which I am sure your sales team would be happy to talk about, they hear these objections all day long.) By placing yourself in their shoes and asking what your company can provide as a solution to each persona, you can then use this information to create sales and marketing content that fills up that funnel, creating some top notch traffic.

Now What?

Ok, so now that you have created effective and exciting persona’s and profiles, how the heck do you make them impactful to your business?

First things first, these are fluid and ever changing. So make the time, you savvy marketer, to read up and refresh (where needed) at least once a year. Then, train up! Don’t just let your shiney new personas die in a Word doc. Be like our content writers and update the staff with what has changed and how to talk to the new personas/profiles, so that the content you produce can be the most effective.

Track your conversions!

What good is epic content and stunning profiles and personas if it doesn’t move the needle forward? Be sure to make this a part of your regular reporting to see what profiles and personas are working. Eliminate the bad, amp up the good!

And finally: content, content, content. Fill your funnel with stuff that actual prospects want to read and will find useful. No content is better than bad content!

And this my friends, is where I leave you hopefully excited to get to business and ask the questions to get your profiles and personas in place, drive more traffic and gain more conversions and leads for your sales team then they could ever imagine!

Ain’t got time for that?

• President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau engaged in a war of words after the G7 summit.
• Trump's decision to hit Canadian steel and aluminum imports and Trudeau's promise to hit back with tariffs was the source of the conflict.
• The fight could have serious economic consequences, since Canada is the US's top trade partner and the largest export market for 32 states.

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President Donald Trump's fight with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not only threatens to unravel the US's relationship with one of its oldest international partners, but also could significantly damage the US economy.

Following the G7 summit in Quebec, Canada, Trump and Trudeau engaged in a war of words over Trump's decision to hit Canadian steel and aluminum imports with sizeable tariffs. After Trudeau promised to hit back with retaliatory measures, Trump called Trudeau "meek and mild," and one of Trump's top advisers said there is a "special place in hell" for Trudeau.

The back-and-forth may represent mostly political posturing by the two leaders, but there could be very real economic consequences. The likelihood of a trade war between the US and Canada appears to be on the rise, and both sides are mulling more trade barriers.

Canada is the US's largest trade partner, with $673.9 billion worth of goods and services going between the two countries in 2017. Also, contrary to Trump's attacks, the US maintained a $8.4 billion trade surplus with Canada last year, mostly due to a large advantage in services.

According to US Census Bureau data, Canada was the top export destination for 32 states in 2016, by far the most of any country. So far in 2018, Canada is also the top export destination for US goods, with over $98 billion worth of goods going over the border.

Of the 32 states that count Canada as their biggest export destination, 20 voted for Trump in the 2016 election.

SEE ALSO: Trump's trip to the G7 summit was a 'burning tire fire' that could push the US into a full-on trade war

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