Rnordman

Since cryptocurrencies were first introduced, they’ve be disrupting industries with new currencies and ways to invest. But blockchain is valuable for far more than just cryptocurrency. The blockchain is a decentralized ledger that records transactions in way that is both accurate and secure. Blockchain can potentially be used with anything that can be expressed code, giving it unlimited potential for business applications.

Part of what make blockchain so useful is smart contracts. Smart contracts don’t require a lawyer, notary, bank, or any other middleman because they’re secured and authenticated by blockchain. The smart contract is defines and enforces an agreement, and any penalties for failing to hold up your end, and cutting out the middlemen could potentially save industries millions of dollars.

In 2017 the market for blockchain was $411.5 million, and its expected to keep growing with more startups every year. For business applications, blockchain access can be restricted to a private network, rather than than the public blockchains used by most cryptocurrencies. This would make the blockchain accessible to only approved personnel and offer a multitude of benefits.

With private blockchain, companies would be more secure from single point of entry hacks, as their data would exist across multiple nodes and couldn’t be hack from a single weak point, usually a phishing scheme. The decentralized nature of blockchain also acts as a internal backup, preventing accidental data loss or deletion. Companies would save money by using blockchain and smart contracts, reducing the amount of time spent verifying transactions and following up on missed payments.

Regardless of your industry, blockchain has potential benefits for your business. The goal now is to figure out which applications work the best in which industries. As blockchain is still in its infancy, its limitation have yet to be discovered. Learn more about blockchain’s potential across multiple industries in this infographic.

Infographic source: Opinion Blockchain

Imagine this: Your marketing team has created new value messages for a product launch or update to support marketing’s online content and demand-and-lead-generation campaigns. Marketing will incorporate the new value messages in all customer-facing content assets they are creating for the sales force.

In parallel, the product management team prepares product-training services for the same product launch. As you can imagine, their training approach is based more on the product rather than the business problems the new product can solve or the business results that can be achieved. Furthermore, and this is the crucial point in this context, the value messages they use (if they use any) are old ones from a similar product.

Additionally, the recently established sales enablement initiative wants to justify its existence and has created interactive playbooks for all major product lines, based on, yes, the previous value messaging approach they had access to. Sound familiar?

What does such a misaligned approach mean for the sales force? It means confusion, inconsistency, zero adoption and, of course, ineffectiveness.

How should salespeople get their heads around all these different, inconsistent enablement services that are pushed to them from different directions? Actually, it often feels like enablement services are thrown at them. What would you do in this situation if you were a salesperson? You would probably merely switch off the noise, decide you can only trust yourself, and do what you think you should be doing. And that’s using what’s on your laptop and what your colleagues used last week in a similar prospect or client situation. Now, let’s look at some data:

The majority of organizations (64.7%) lives with enablement inconsistency. Their sales content and their product training services are not purposefully aligned with each other.

A bit more than one quarter are not directly aligned (26.8%), and more than one-third are only aligned at a high level (37.9%). The latter means that in most cases, the different teams may be aware of the other teams’ activities, but without co-creating enablement services. And not being aligned at all is a classic silo scenario. This lack of enablement consistency should be considered as what it is: enablement chaos. And the cause can be easily identified. It’s not having a consistent, overarching value messaging approach covering the entire customer’s path that all contributing teams are required to use.

Aligned enablement services are worth it: If sales content and product training are aligned at least on the value message level, the win rates for forecasted deals are 7.5% better. The costs of misalignment, the costs of doing nothing, are worse: 22.6% decline in win rates.

Win rates for forecasted deals are remarkably better (55.7%) if content and training services are aligned at least on the value messaging level. Enablement services that are not aligned, or are only aligned at a high level, lead to win rate performance way below average (40.1%). Based on the 2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study’s average win rate of 51.8%, the improvement is 7.5% or 3.9 percentage points, but the decline or the cost of doing nothing is much more substantial: 22.6% decline or 11.7 percentage points.

Four ideas to improve your value messaging approach:

1. Establish clarity – Who owns value messaging
   Value messaging is often considered to be owned by marketing. But in the age of the customer, an approach that is only focused on the early stages of the customer’s path doesn’t work any longer. In the absence of a chief CX officer, a strategic sales enablement function that orchestrates all enablement efforts from content to training to coaching along the entire customer’s path is in a great position to own the value messaging approach along those lines. That doesn’t mean at all that marketing has nothing to do with value messaging any longer. In fact, marketing’s role is growing because of the broader scope along the entire customer’s path.
2. Establish a standardized value messaging framework:
   Orchestrating value messaging across various functions requires a solid foundation for all teams involved, ideally designed with the customer’s path at the center. CSO Insights has developed a dynamic value messaging framework that defines the different value messaging types for each phase of the customer’s path. Also, the framework shows how these different value messages impact your enablement content, training and coaching services. Without a standardized framework, you will never achieve enablement scalability and efficiency in the messaging space.
3. Establish clarity on the criteria that impact different value messages:
   These criteria can cover a broad range. Think about the business challenges your products and service solve, the business results they can help to achieve. Also, consider the relevant buyer roles and the different phases of the customer’s path. Additionally, don’t forget the impact of varying buying situations and their particular risks (renewal versus new problem to be solved), and also factor in your own position as a vendor (start-up vs. established vendor).
4. Orchestrate the required cross-functional collaboration:
   Initially, workshops with all teams involved (marketing, sales, product management, industries, enablement, etc.) are ideal so that this group can actually create the new value messages. But to ensure that you will end up with value messages that cover the criteria defined above, have a moderator who is familiar with your approach. Capture the rough value messages, structured by your specified criteria.

Sales enablement should orchestrate all value messaging efforts along the customer’s path to ensure that all enablement services are consistent, valuable and effective. These efforts pay off, with 7.5% better win rates. The cost of doing nothing is worse: a 22.6% decline in win rates.

 This article was initially written for Top Sales Magazine, May edition.
Photograph: Unsplash, Elija O’Donell

Check out Sales Enablement A Master Framework to Engage, Equip and Empower a World-Class Sales Force!
There is an entire chapter on value messaging, its relevance for sales enablement including a phased approach how to get started.

The post Value Messaging And Why It’s Key To Sales Enablement Success appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

While gamification continues to gain popularity in the business world, there are still some who believe it to be a simple tool that leverages competitiveness to draw performance from and motivate employees. In reality, gamification doesn’t do that at all. It promotes and encourages behavior that companies value. What else can you gain from gamification? Here are 10 surprising benefits of gamification.

1. Creativity and Imagination

It’s easy to get lost in mundane work to a point where routine tasks cloud your vision, imagination and creativity. Your work becomes a “paper in, paper out” kind of gig that’s utterly boring and demotivating. Gamification has the ability to promote creativity and imagination by letting you explore new ways to get things done. With its problem solving and decision making tests, you’ll be creatively challenged at every level.

2. Overcome Frustrations and Enhance Patience

Challenges in the workplace can be frustrating and often test our patience. It’s normal and part of the package. However, with gamification you can walk through these challenges in a simulated environment, tested your abilities to overcome frustrations, think logically and patiently navigate your way towards a solution.

3. Workplace Environment and Culture

New recruits often get overwhelmed with what to expect in a new work environment. It’s tough settling in and finding your space in an already defined culture. Thanks to gamification the real work environment allows you to get a clearer understanding and familiarity of your new workplace environment, culture, expectations and how you fit in.

4. Rational and Calculated Decision Making

Gamification isn’t just a game that’s set in a made up world. It throws you into a real work situation where you’re faced with real work challenges and problems. Along your way you’ll be making rational and calculated decisions that’ll help you with your real job. It’ll test your ability to make decisions and showcase your problem solving skills.

5. Accept Defeat and Gain Learning

You can’t win at everything, and that’s pretty much true for work as well. While the wins you’ll enjoy and celebrate, the losses will be there as well. The defeats aren’t something to mope over. It’s something you learn from and adapt to. You gain strength from your losses and bounce back stronger and with much more resolve. That’s what gamification offers to you.

6. Social Skills

An essential part of gamification is not just your personal success. The gameplay incorporates elements of teamwork whereby you’re using your social skills to progress in the game. This of course tests your team player and collaborative skills and how well you move ahead in unity.

7. Customizable, flexibility and reduced cost

One of the biggest advantage that companies gain from gamification is the flexibility of the platform to be anything they want it to be. Its customizability makes it relevant to the specific company. All the while you’re able to save on resource time and costs.

8. Team Learning

The strength of any high performing team is the collective effort and alignment of their abilities, personalities, traits and skills. Knowing your team member’s abilities and skills is essential and through gamification you can gain much insight about each team player. You’ll learn how to adapt yourself around people’s personalities and traits and how best to utilize their abilities to ensure you come out winning.

9. Feedback

Performance reviews can often be delayed as they usually occur at the end of the year or mid-year. Thanks to gamification, feedback on your performance is instantaneous and real-time. This way you’ll learn faster and know always be aware if your performance is on track or not.

10. Motivated and Engaged

Being recognized in your workplace is important to you and gamification does that seamlessly. Your contributions never go unnoticed and you’re always aware of and engaged with the company’s objectives, goals and vision.

Have you experienced any surprising benefits that gamification has offered in your workplace? Do share your experiences in the comments below.

Pricing is a holistic discipline. It requires integration of ideas from many different disciplines, in order to design pricing that will support new products and services. The same is true of data. Any data that gives insight into how users get value from a solution is an input into pricing.

One of the most powerful frameworks to emerge for this in recent years is service design thinking. This approach emerged in Scandinavia in the 1990s and was initially applied in the finance sector. It is now accepted as a critical tool for the development and understanding of service businesses. You may be thinking, that's fine, but I am responsible for a product, not a service. Are you? More and more companies are wrapping services around their products and even selling the product as a service. PaaS generally means 'Platform as a Service' but I have also seen it used as 'Product as a Service.' As you transition your product to a service, wrap services around the product, or move to enterprise solutions, you will need to understand the entire customer journey, from the first time they become aware of a need, to when they transition off your product/service.

Customer journey maps are becoming a standard tool for understanding value and pricing. Many customer journey maps include some measure of emotion, frequently the degree to which the buyer and user are feeling positive or negative about the experience. This is a good start, but it is not enough to help us with value-based pricing.

To build a customer journey that factors in value and pricing, you need to add some rows to the customer journey. Map out the following:

• Value Understanding - Which aspects of the value proposition are understood by the customer?
• Value Resonance - Which aspects of the value are felt, at an emotional level, by the buyer?
• Value Delivered - How much value has the customer gotten from using the service? Here it is important to track each of the economic and emotional value drivers separately.

Mapping these across the customer journey is a beginning. One still needs to layer price in. There are two aspects to consider here: price communication and invoicing.

• Price Communication - How are prices communicated and how does that connect to the three value streams? If price is communicated outside the context of value, then you are inviting the buyer to think about price and ask for a discount. Pricing, and the logic of your pricing, needs to be communicated differently as part of Value Understanding, Value Resonance and Value Delivered.
• Invoicing - There are two things to consider here: value communication and the connection between the amount charged and the value delivered. The invoice is a tool to communicate value. More important though, is the connection of how much has the client been charged compared to how much value has been delivered. In services models it is common for these to track each other closely. This is very different from pricing models where the customer pays a large amount upfront and then recoups this investment over time. The invoice should communicate value and help the customer understand their ROI. Regular communication on ROI can have a big impact on renewals.

We are going to have to get much more flexible in how we design pricing and value capture. Obviously, we need to capture back part of the value we deliver. If we don't do this, we will not be able to continue to support the solution, make ongoing investments in innovation and provide a return to our stakeholders. Flexible pricing design is a subject for another day, but it is important to include the rhythm of the customer investment (not just invoicing, your customers make other investments in your solution) and customer return on investment in your journey map. Seeing the balance of investment and return, and bringing these into balance as quickly as possible is an important part of understanding the customer journey.

At Ibbaka, we frequently build customer value journey maps to help our clients align their pricing strategy with the customer's needs. Contact us if you would like to learn more about this. 

Subscribe

Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates.

Email Address Sign Up

We respect your privacy.

Thank you!

‘Customer experience’ refers to putting the customer and their needs at the center of everything a company does. It means identifying all the touchpoints – individual interactions – throughout each customer journey and designing each of those touchpoints to deliver what the customer needs flawlessly.

As the customer moves through the journey, from touchpoint to touchpoint, they also move through the buying cycle, from Awareness to Consideration, to Preference, to Purchase and hopefully to repeat purchases and Advocacy. And they require different levels of attention and detail at different points depending on where they are in the cycle.

If your company is losing customers between the Awareness and Consideration phases or between Consideration and Preference, it indicates a shortcoming in differentiated communication for customers at different points in the cycle. This could be a content problem or a reach problem. But digital insights from search and social listening can help with understanding what the problem is and digital channels can be used to test and optimize messaging.

Arguably, the most important element of the customer experience and therefore, of marketing, is the content that a company offers to its customers. As I’ve mentioned, content must deliver on customer needs to be effective. In fact, Content, along with Search and Social are the three legs that support customer experience. Here’s how that works: Use social and search listening to gain insights into customer needs. Build content from the ground up based on the insight. Then use search to pull customers into that content that they’re looking for and social to syndicate the content to the various conversations customers are taking part in.

A word here on content development

Whether it’s for product pages, collateral, PR, blogs, social, or anything else, content is expensive. But it becomes dramatically more so when it’s created in company silos that are producing the same content at the same time. Or when it’s used once and forgotten.

Events, for instance, tend to be huge forcing functions for the creation of high-volume content. But once an event is over, that content is often abandoned and never used or seen again. It’s much better to work from a common editorial calendar, tag by audience and customer journey point, and store all content in a common repository. Then, when content is needed on any topic, it can be easily found in the repository and reused if it already exists.

For the most part, customers have relatively simple and straightforward needs. They need information. They need attention. They need value. And they need it to be easy for them to get these things. When companies are small, it’s easy to respond to these customer needs. But over time, they add scale, regulation, record keeping, data gathering, as well as increasingly complex approvals and workflows. These continually and unwittingly add friction to the fulfillment of customers’ needs.

So at some point, the enterprise needs to evaluate this natural progression. Redesign and automate processes and add tooling to reduce the friction. This improves the interactions that define the company in the customers’ minds.

A digital transformation provides an excellent opportunity to streamline interactions at critical touchpoints and add employee focus and tooling where it’s needed most. The key is to make the customer journey a delight rather than a chore. This should be the ultimate goal because satisfied and even delighted customers drive the most revenue over the longest period of time.

When we discuss potential campaigns with our customers and prospects, one question inevitably arises: “what sort of results can we expect?” In truth, sometimes that question can be hard to answer – every business and every campaign is different after all. But we can share results we’ve seen with previous, similar campaigns.

Below we look at push notification opt-in rates. Where they are today, how you might improve them, and what sort of results we’ve seen in the past when running these campaigns. Hopefully you find it useful – and inspiring!

There’s just one little problem – you need a user’s permission to send push notifications on iOS.

The Importance Of Push

Companies need to communicate with customers, and push notifications are one fantastic way of doing this. Just as email provided a way to speak to online customers when they were away from the site, so in the mobile age push notifications allow mobile-first businesses to communicate with customers when they’re away from the app. Even better, although most people spend plenty of time away from the desktop, few of us put the mobile down unless we’re sleeping. And even then a few can’t let go. The result is an increase in metrics that actually matter – engagement, retention, and conversion.

There’s just one little problem – you need a user’s permission to send push notifications on iOS.

The Problem Of Opt-In

About half of all users, on average, opt in for push. Using my advanced mathematics skills, I can tell you that this means about half of all users opt out – a huge amount of customers that you are missing out on communicating with outside the app on mobile.

This only tells part of the story though, as different industries see drastically different results for opt-in rates. Travel, media, and messaging apps have the highest percentages of opt-ins, while finance, retail, social, and gaming apps have significantly lower ones.

Why is this? Well, some apps have very obvious reasons for opting in that customers are probably already aware of: essential travel updates, such as your flight has changed gates, or your taxi is 1 minute away; breaking news on the latest political/celebrity scandal or sports story; a message from your mum to remember to call your dad because it’s his birthday. For other apps, it can be less obvious why, even though the reasons can be just as helpful and desirable. As a result, opt-in rates can suffer.

Are You Doing It Wrong?

Frustratingly, organizations often don’t help themselves – we’re all familiar with being served context-free and poorly timed requests. This typically occurs when opening an app for the first time, and a default gray system prompt pops up, offering no reason why you should opt-in. Spam alarm bells ring in users’ minds, and thumbs gravitate towards ‘don’t allow’.

Once someone has opted out it can be hard to get them to reverse that decision. Worse still, with each new app we install that serves us default prompts, we get further conditioned to instantly dismiss them. It’s time to stop doing this folks!

How To Optimize Opt-In

Thankfully there is a smarter, more effective way of asking for permission. It’s simple: demonstrate the value of opting in, provide context of the type of information users will receive, and watch your opt-in rates soar.

Incorporating permission requests into your onboarding flow works well. Hold back on the system prompt, and instead deliver an in-app message that is in line with your app’s branding, which gives the user a reason to opt-in. A bank can say they’ll send an alert for a fraudulent transaction; a retail app can let a customer know when an item is back in stock; and a game can remind a player when a major tournament is coming up.

When someone decides to allow push notifications, only then should the default system prompt be served. If they decide against granting permission, save the system prompt for another time.

For customers that have denied permissions, do not give up. Try a re-permission campaign using an in-app message explaining why they should rethink their decision. It’s just as important to let them know how they can reverse their decision, by deep-linking to the relevant settings page on a user’s device where they can opt-in.

A Look At Customer Successes

Now let’s take a look at the results some of our customers have seen by priming for push permissions. A noted publisher saw a 45% uplift of opt-ins across multiple publications throughout 2017 by targeting users who had opted out with a re-permission campaign. In-app messages were triggered when users viewed certain content e.g. clicked on a new recipe or a news story about a specific designer. The messages explained that if customers wished to be notified about similar content, they could opt-in for push notifications.

A noted publisher saw a 45% uplift of opt-ins across multiple publications throughout 2017

A financial services customer also implemented this strategy with great success. Push opt-in was particularly important for their business, as during tax season they needed to increase engagement with customers to increase conversions. They also needed to nurture brand loyalty by delivering relevant content through the long offseason, to reduce the number of customers deleting the app. An in-app message explaining ways that the app can help customers was delivered to all users after they hit the home dashboard of the app twice. It was a massive success, providing an uplift of 45%.

Take Away

Priming for push is a simple strategy to implement, and will significantly increase your push opt-in rates. This will give your business a solid foundation to deliver relevant, contextual and timely messages to customers that will improve metrics that you business lives or dies by: retention, engagement and conversions. There’s really no excuse not to do it.

To grow your e-commerce business in 2018, you have to be willing to invest in email marketing. As industries become more saturated and competition heats up, you have to work harder and harder to establish and nurture real relationships with your leads and customers.

Email is one of the most powerful channels you can leverage when it comes to communicating with and persuading the people who are ultimately going to buy products from you. Consider the following statistics about the power and value of email marketing for e-commerce:

• The number of email users worldwide is forecasted to rise to 2.9 billion by 2019 (WordStream).
• 73% of millennials identify email as their preferred means of business communication (WordStream).
• Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter (Campaign Monitor).
• Every dollar spent on email marketing generates a $38 return and delivers a three-fold increase in purchases compared to spend on social (Content Magazine).

As an e-commerce business owner or marketer, you’re likely already sending the occasional email campaign to your list, but you might not have a clear or proactive strategy in place.

This guide will provide you with 6 tips that you can use to build a clear strategy and start getting more ROI from your email marketing efforts now and in the months ahead:

1. Know Your Audience

To build an effective email strategy for your e-commerce business, one of the first things you need to do is make sure you have a firm grasp of who it is that you’re actually trying to reach. Taking time to know and understand your audience is crucial to your success now and in the future.

Every time you send an email out to your list (or a segment of your list), you’re creating the opportunity to connect directly and personally with your prospective customers in ways that you just can’t do on Facebook or Twitter. If you’re sending messages that don’t resonate with your subscribers or motivate them to take action, you’re wasting your time and potentially damaging your reputation in the process.

Your email marketing strategy needs to be built upon a foundation of knowledge about your audience.

To get to know your audience better, consider these three tips:

• Tip #1: Dig into Your Customer Data – If you haven’t already, spend time digging into your existing customer data in order to get to know your customers better. Look for trends relating to age, location, and purchasing habits. You probably have a good amount of subscribers on your list who have never purchased from you. Use the data you can collect from past customers to inform how you communicate with your future customers.
• Tip #2: Build Audience Personas – If you want to think more broadly about who your target audience is, spend time working with your team to build a few audience personas that you can reference and refine over time. Need help getting started? HubSpot has a great template that you can download and customize for your business.
• Tip #3: Check Data from Your Social Pages – You can also find a wealth of data from your social media page analytics about your audience. Dig into demographic and engagement data to get ideas about what kind of content to send to your email subscribers and when to send it to them. Not sure where to start? Click here to go through some of the resources Facebook has built for page managers like you.

Once you are confident that you know who your audience is, you can start thinking more about how you want to interact with them through future email campaigns.

2. Build an Actual Strategy

When you’re new to e-commerce, it’s easy to fly by the seat of your pants for a while until the dust finally settles. If you’re like a lot of other e-commerce business owners, you might not have ever really had the time to sit down and work on an actual email marketing strategy for your business. But building a specific strategy that you can work against is important. Here’s why:

• A strategy can help you focus. There are a lot of directions you can go with email marketing. A strategy can help ensure that you are not getting too distracted. It can help you prioritize efforts and focus on the ideas that matter most.
• A strategy can help you understand what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t have a clear strategy in place, it’s hard to know what’s working and what isn’t.
• A strategy can keep you and your team accountable. A strategy can help you and your team stick to deadlines, priorities, and goals.
• A strategy can help you set clear goals. A strategy forces you to think about the why. It forces you to think about why you want to send emails to your list, and what you’re hoping to get out of it.
• A strategy can be built upon and evolved over time. Without a clear strategy in place, it can feel like you’re starting over every 6 months. You don’t remember what worked, what didn’t, or why you tested one campaign over another. With a strategy in place, it’s easier to learn from the past and think about what you need to do differently in the future.
• A strategy can be handed to someone else. As an e-commerce business owner, you have to be able to delegate tasks in order to grow your business. When you take the time to build a clear strategy for email, it’s much easier to give the responsibilities and tasks to someone else on your team.

Email marketing should never be an afterthought. It needs the same amount of attention that other areas of your business are getting from you on a regular basis. You shouldn’t approach it as a one-off tactic that you can use whenever you need an uptick in sales. To get the most value possible out of the channel, you need to think strategically, proactively, and often about the communication that people on your list are getting from your brand. You need to see the bigger picture. That’s where mapping the customer journey comes into play.

3. Map The Customer Journey

When it comes to investing in email marketing for e-commerce, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to only send sales and promotional emails to your leads. When you’re new to e-commerce, it’s sometimes hard to think about what kind of emails you should be sending outside of the ones that offer discounts and free shipping notifications, but there are a lot of other types of campaigns you can and should be sending in order to nurture relationships and build loyalty.

To go beyond the sales email and understand where the opportunities lie, it can be helpful to work on mapping out the actual journey that a typical customer navigates through who buys from you.

The customer journey, or buyer journey as it’s also called, looks different for every business, but here is a helpful example of what they typically look like:

Image Source

As you can see, there are a few primary phases that your prospective customers will enter in and out of as they navigate through their journey toward buying. The phases are: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention (or Loyalty), and Advocacy.

As an email marketer, your job is to determine how to leverage email to help move people along in the process toward conversion and eventually advocacy.

Here are some examples of email campaigns you could send during each phase of the customer journey:

• Awareness: Welcome Emails, Product Education Emails, Blog Post Emails, Company Origin Story Emails
• Consideration: Product Feature Emails, Video Emails, Customer Story Emails, Abandoned Cart Emails, Promotion Emails
• Purchase: Promotion Emails, Order Confirmation Emails, Shipping Confirmation Emails
• Retention: Feedback Emails, Thank You Emails, Promotion Emails, Recommended Product Emails, Video Emails
• Loyalty: Special VIP Offer Emails, New Product Emails, Blog Post Emails
• Advocacy: Referral Offer Emails, Customer Story Emails, Customer Delight Emails

To learn more about customer journey mapping as it relates to e-commerce, read through this helpful blog post from Shopify.

4. Write Like a Human

In order to convince your email subscribers to take the action you ultimately want them to take, you need to connect with them on a personal level. You can’t just send the right types of email campaigns—to be successful, you need to make sure that the messaging you’re including in your campaigns actually resonate with your audience. Words and writing style matter a great deal with email marketing. The wrong message or positioning can not only lead to low CTRs, low open rates, and a lack of sales, it can also drive people to unsubscribe from your list altogether.

To ensure that you’re crafting messages that will resonate with your audience, focus on writing like an actual human being with a unique and distinct personality. No one wants to be sold to anymore—they want to feel connected to the brands they shop from on a personal and authentic level.

To ensure that you’re adding personality, style, and voice to your email marketing campaigns, keep the following tips in mind:

• Tip #1: Don’t try to be overly clever or funny. When you try too hard to be clever or funny in email copy, it can sometimes come across as inauthentic or forceful to recipients.
• Tip #2: Use active voice. Instead of saying, “the product will be shipped to you,” consider saying something like, “we’re shipping your product to you very soon!”
• Tip #3: Write like you would speak. Before sending an email campaign to subscribers, read your copy out loud. If something sounds funny or unnatural to you, it will sound odd to your subscribers too.
• Tip #4: Make sure your emails are coming from an actual person. Don’t use no-reply email addresses or leave your emails unsigned at the bottom. Instead, add personality and a human component to your email campaigns by having them come from a real person who can sign their name at the bottom of the copy.
• Tip #5: Don’t be afraid of exclamation points, emojis, or even ALL-CAPS. Your goal isn’t to write the perfect business email—it’s to write an email that connects with your audience, nurtures them, and convinces them to ultimately try one of your products. For some brands, that might mean going out of the traditional box and using exclamation points, emojis, or CAPS freely in emails.

Your subscribers are getting a lot of emails from a lot of brands every single day. By humanizing your email campaigns, you can cut through the noise and develop stronger relationships with the people you’re ultimately hoping to convert.

5. Look for Personalization Opportunities

Another important aspect of effective email campaigns in e-commerce is personalization. If you want to get the people on your list to visit your product pages and purchase, you have to make them feel like they have a personal connection with you. Personalized emails can help you establish and nurture relationships, build trust, remove fear, create excitement, and drive action.

Consider the following statistics shared by SmartrMail that illustrate the power of personalization in email campaigns:

• The open rate for emails with a personalized message is more than 30% higher than those without any personalization.
• Personalized emails delivery 6 times higher transaction rates.
• 80% of consumers like when emails from retailers recommend products based on their previous purchases.

Here are a few additional statistics shared by Campaign Monitor that further illustrate the value of personalization in email:

• Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%.
• Marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences.
• 53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact.

There are a number of ways you can personalize your e-commerce emails. Here are a handful of ideas:

• first names in subject lines and greetings
• product recommendation blocks that cater to each subscriber
• email campaigns based on seasonality or holiday
• Abandoned cart emails
• Viewing history emails
• special offers for specific geographic locations

6. Ask for Feedback

The final way to get more ROI from your email marketing efforts is by asking for regular feedback from your subscribers and customers about their experience interacting with your brand. This type of feedback allows you and your team to work off of more than just assumptions or quantitative data. It adds a qualitative perspective that you can’t get without the help of your subscribers.

Ideally, you should be asking for feedback throughout the customer journey process. For example, you should be asking subscribers if:

• They have any questions about your products (before conversion)
• They are comfortable with the frequency of emails you’re sending
• They enjoy the type of content you send to them
• They think the offers and promotions you send are compelling and relevant
• They are enjoying the products you shipped to them (after conversion)
• They would be willing to tell their friends about your products and brand
• They had any problems or concerns about their shopping experience

Sending regular feedback request emails will not only help you build trust and strengthen relationships with subscribers and customers, it will also arm you with information you need to improve and grow your business over time.

Over to You

What’s working well for you when it comes to email marketing? Share your ideas and learnings with me in the comments below.

Did you know that only 1 in 4 marketers can prove the impact of their marketing efforts for their business? That’s really astonishing if you think about it. We live in a marketing era with tons of data at our fingertips, yet 75% of marketers can’t prove their effectiveness. How can we possibly hope to expand to new, improved marketing campaigns if we don’t know the impact of our past tactics?

Having the ability to collect and interpret data will equip you with the insight to know if your marketing activities are effective. But, where do you start? What should you be tracking? And what tools can you use to collect the necessary data?

I’ve got you covered. Below are four simple metrics to help you start tracking online marketing success. Some of them may already be familiar, but the key is tracking all of them to get the complete picture and identify areas to optimize along the way.

1. Measure Your Website Traffic

Traffic to your website is a strong, lagging indicator to watch. Attracting interested prospects to your site is one of the most important elements of an effective online marketing strategy. You can have the best lead generating offers and sales process in place, but without new traffic, your pipeline can easily grow stale.

Website traffic can come from a variety of sources. When tracking visits, it’s important to understand which channels are responsible for attracting new and returning visitors. These channels include:

• Organic Search: Traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo
• Direct Traffic: Visits from users with the direct link to your website
• Social Media: People who visit straight from a social site like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
• Referral Traffic: Traffic that is directed to your site through links from other websites
• Email Marketing: Visits to your site that started from an email tool
• Paid Search: Any click from a paid source like Google Adwords
• Paid Social: Traffic that comes as a result of a paid social media campaign

Step one in this process is to make sure that you have a tracking code on your website that logs any visits to your pages. The most common tool to track this type of data is Google Analytics because it’s free. If you don’t have website analytics right now, start by setting up a free Google Analytics account.

After you’ve set up your account, make sure you put the tracking code on each page of your website. This code is how Google can track the website traffic on your site.

If you’ve already been using Google Analytics and you’re looking for a way to take your tactics to the next level, check out other marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, or Eloqua.

2. New [Qualified] Leads

Is your website effectively generating new sales leads for your business? And, are they actually qualified to buy or just blowing smoke? Although there continue to be new ways to generate leads online such as Facebook Lead Ads, it’s essential that you are tracking the effectiveness of converting new leads on your website.

Do you have some kind of lead form on your website? Either a contact form or a lead generation form for a content offer?

Any forms you have on your website should be connected to a platform that gives you the ability to track not only the total number of form submissions but also pass that information to a system (a CRM) that allows you to keep track of the specific people that convert.

Remember the importance of quality over quantity. After generating new leads, “follow” your visitor through the sales process to see if they turned into a customer or not. This will help you understand which online offers [with forms] convert more closed business.

Tracking and managing converted leads is not strictly the job of sales. It’s a combined effort that will take work from both sales and marketing.

Keep in mind, if you’re looking to increase the number of leads your website is generating, look no further than the sitewide visitor-to-lead conversion rate.

Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate Formula:
#of leads / # of website visitors = Visitor-to-lead conversion rate

This will tell you if you’re doing a good job converting your traffic into leads or not. If you are, focus on attracting more visitors to increase leads. If not, you may want to focus on reworking your conversion opportunities to better engage your visitors.

3. New Business from New Customers

In the previous section, I briefly touched on closed business. Not surprisingly, this is likely the most important measure of success for marketing and sales. In order to track how many leads are turning into customers, it’s wise to integrate your automation platform with a CRM system to implement closed-loop reporting.

Again, you’ll want to pay close attention to the conversion rate for this metric, the lead-to-customer rate.

Lead to Customer Conversion Rate Formula:
# of customers / # of leads = Lead-to-customer conversion rate

Also, don’t forget to consider the customer’s or account’s lifetime value when looking into closed business. A new customer may be worth more than just the value of the one-time purchase.

Customer Lifetime Value Formula:
Avg sale per customer x Avg number of times a customer buys per year x Avg years a customer will buy from you = Avg customer lifetime value

If your sales team is uploading deal information into your CRM, this should be easy to track and calculate. With this information, you can accurately calculate the return on your marketing investment.

4. Your Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)

Are your marketing efforts worth it? The timeless question. How can you say a marketing campaign was successful if you don’t know if you recorded a return on your investment?

When measuring ROI, you’ll need to calculate your customer acquisition costs for all online marketing efforts. How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? This includes manpower, technology, and other expenses related to campaigns.

Return on Investment Formula:
(Sales growth – Marketing investment) / Marketing investment

In order to calculate your customer acquisition costs, like the metric above, it’s recommended to integrate your marketing automation solution with your CRM platform.

Keep in mind, if you want to accurately measure marketing ROI, you’ll need to be very diligent recording data and closely tracking the buying journey of a customer. The depth in which you’re able to drill down is dependent on the collection of information. Ideally, you’ll get the correct systems in place and benefit from the ability to truly understand the impact of specific marketing campaigns on your business.

Conclusion

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is an essential part of understanding which of your strategies and tactics are working well for your business and which ones are just wasting everyone’s time (including yours). After all, as Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote, “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”

As I listen every day to news, political, social and business commentary, and even marketing and advertising, I am struck by a recurring theme – a recurring problem – the very loose connection, at best, that many of our current forms of communication and discourse have with anything resembling objective truth. We live in an era where truth appears to be wholly indistinguishable: an era where one current senior political operative offered up an explanation for obvious factual discrepancies as “alternative facts”. And here, I naively thought there were just facts…and not facts. Whatever one’s political persuasion, I don’t think any of us imagined that we would live in a world where there is no objective truth regarding fact or falsehoods; where fiction and non-fiction are no longer distinct; where truth is just whatever you need it to be in the moment. Simply offer up “alternative facts” and anything you don’t like becomes “fake” because you say it is.

Yet, here we are.

So, as I watch and listen to all of this with sadness and concern for where it ultimately leads us, I wonder – has it infected our world of marketing and communications in the non-political realm? Have we as practitioners of the craft of marketing and communications let ourselves fall into the trap of simply marketing whatever is expedient, whatever might move the needle in sales, whatever might drive more transactions? Within the core of what we practice and do every day – the Art of the Story – have we let our commitment to authenticity wane?

I know there are some who think we in the marketing, communications and advertising field are in poor position to comment on what is true or not and that we fell into this trap a long time ago. And, given some particularly egregious offenses in marketing and advertising in the past, I understand fully why some would think that.

However, I respectfully disagree.

The reason I disagree is the reason I am still hopeful that in our discipline of marketing we really are striving to anchor what we do in truth and authenticity. The reason is actually pretty straightforward, and ironic when compared to our current political environment. Apparently in politics today you can win elections based on inauthenticity and fiction. But, in marketing in the business world, inauthenticity will, with certainty, severely damage your company, your relationship with your customers, employees, stakeholders, and can ultimately destroy your brand. In other words, in our world of marketing and business, there is a real hard-edged cost to losing your footing in what is authentic or not: in what is simply true or not.

A lack of truth and authenticity can (and will) kill your company.

The Art of the Story is, and always has been, about understanding and communicating the authentic truth of your story, which is your brand, as a company or organization. The ‘art’ part of that phrase is not simply great creative or copy. The art is in getting to your “Why. The art, and the power of, your story is truly distilling, honing and refining that story – in such a way that your story becomes compelling and transformative for your customers. It’s based on your fundamental purpose as an organization and the impact or outcome you have on your customers. It is how you understand, create, and disseminate your own story about why you do what you do”.

Not just what you do, but why you do it.

In that why, you are forced to be truthful, with your customers – and with yourself. The Art of the Story is crafting and speaking the truth of your story in such a way that it is actually not really even about you at all. It is really about your customers and the difference you make in their lives once they engage with you, buy from you, stay with you. In other words, it is when your customer has been transformed from simply being a customer into being an advocate for your brand, products and company – because you have authentically made an impact or difference in their lives and they want your story and brand to be part of their own story and brand.

For a company selling products or services, there are only two things that will determine the success or failure of that company: their story, and their customer’s real experience of that story. Everything else in a company is the filler of how you get from one to the other; how you deliver the story followed by how you deliver the proof of that story in the experiences that your customers have with your company, products and services. That will turn out to either be true, or not. “Alternative facts” are not an option.

In other words, we as marketers don’t really have the choice, even if we have tried occasionally in the past, to market or communicate inauthenticity. Unlike what happens in our politics today, your customers are ruthless in making determinations about truth or falsehood, fact or fiction. Because of this, God help the company or the marketer that thinks they can adopt the current practices we see in other areas of communication and marketing today. We, and our clients, just won’t survive it.

And for that, I am grateful.

Starting out on your own entrepreneurial adventure is tempting for anyone looking to go into business for themselves.

Who doesn’t want to ditch the 9-to-5 and work in their pajamas? After all, everything is digital, right? Hence the digital in digital marketing agency.

Well, that’s the problem. Unless you realize that having a successful digital marketing agency requires you to put on real clothes at some point and build a B2B network — your digital marketing agency is doomed.

Why You Need an Active B2B Network

Here’s what I mean:

In order to be successful, you, as the face of your agency, need to get out there and shake hands, smile, and show confidence in your ability to drive local traffic for your future customers.

Without this critical face-to-face interaction, you cannot grow and scale your digital marketing agency let alone ever really accomplish anything beyond a handful of one-off web design projects.

Are there exceptions? Sure, I imagine there are but the general rule is that the most successful digital marketing agencies and those that are truly growing their business all have at least one thing in common — they network. They leverage relationships to build new relationships, they meet their leads to pitch, then they meet those same leads again to close and as many times as necessary to keep and grow their business.

Here are 4 areas of your relationship with your local customers that almost always require face-to-face interaction for success.

Your Pitch and/or Your First Interaction

If you find leads online — whether through inbound methods like SEO and social media or outbound methods like email marketing — then your first interaction occurs online.

This is a great way to get leads and in the digital age, not leveraging technology to grow your agency is not very smart. Indeed it’s the very service you are trying to sell to local businesses so it’s important to be really good at it.

But so is communicating your competencies face to face which is why your pitch needs to be in person. Marketing is an investment and we always feel better about an investment when we can meet the person or business that is supposed to give us the return.

Of the hundreds of agencies we resell white label SEO to, our most successful partners have one thing in common:

A willingness to network in person.

The best places to create initial content that directly impacts your ability to close the sale are trade shows, chambers of commerce meetings, business association meetings, and similar events. But this is not easy, especially for those of you who are more introverted. But it is critical. There is so much more you can accomplish via a handshake than you can with an email.

In a monthly candid conversation we have with our partners and repackage as a training for new agencies, we asked one of our most successful partners if it was ever too early to begin B2B networking activities. He responded by saying, “I got into the networking game much later than I should have. I felt, at the beginning, that I was too new. I wish that I had gotten into networking a little bit earlier.”

Take it from a man who knows his way around an event floor: it’s never too late to start growing your lead pipeline in person.

There is so much more you can accomplish via a handshake than you can with an email.Click To Tweet

Communicate Easier & More Often by Building Trust

Digital Marketing, and more specifically perhaps, SEO, have a reputation that is sometimes sketchy. Many local businesses have been burned by spammy link builders, wasteful AdWords campaigns, or poorly run social media marketing. Even if they haven’t experienced it firsthand, they’re familiar with the horror stories.

You can send as many digital messages as possible but you’re still going to sound like another one of the 10s or 100s of agencies saying the same thing. So how exactly do you set yourself apart?

You guessed it — meeting face to face, shaking hands, and looking your lead in the eye. It’s the only sure way to distinguish you and your agency from all the digital noise in their inbox.

There is science behind the trust that you can build through communicating with someone face to face. Touching, in a business setting, activates the reward system of your brain. Through an interaction like shaking hands, you are conveying warmth and trust.

So whether it’s a pitch, a follow-up meeting, or a proposal handoff, consider doing it in person. Even if you don’t make the sale, you still emerge as trustworthy and reliable — something that they are sure to remember.

Things can change and that trustworthiness might be your ticket to a future business relationship whether directly or via a referral.

Closing the Sale

You would think the case for meeting face to face when closing a sale hardly needs to be made. And indeed, this is an area of selling where most of our agency partners understand they need to meet their potential clients in person. But it’s not a no-brainer, and it should be.

The rate of converting prospects almost doubles when closing happens face to face. This can be attributed to the trust that is built during the interaction.

Furthermore, it stands to reason that the larger the investment on the part of your client, the more necessary it is to meet them in person. But keep in mind, the size of the investment is relative to the size of the business. Meaning, though it seems obvious to schedule an in-person meeting to close a big deal, the deals you are neglecting to meet in person for may be big to your client.

Try your best to meet in person to close these deals as well.

Helping your clients grow turns those smaller deals into bigger deals.

If you’re a new agency, leads and conversions can be in short supply in the early days. Any advantage you can give yourself is well worth your time. New digital marketing agencies don’t always have portfolios and client testimonials to leverage. They can instead leverage sincerity and availability with a willingness to meet in person and answer questions — something your competitors may not be doing.

For new agencies, there is a different concern — knowing what you’re talking about. All the gung-ho in the world won’t make up for sounding like you’re trying to close your first deal so do your due diligence not just as it relates to the industry but more importantly, the business of your future client and how you, as a digital marketing agency, can help them grow.

Ultimately, that’s what they’re looking for and that’s how you’re going to close the sale.

Putting Out Fires

You will, at some point in the relationship with your client, screw up. It’s almost inevitable. But not because you’re incompetent, necessarily. The digital marketing industry is constantly changing, the bar is always being raised and the nature of software development is constantly creating new and better versions. A diligent agency will keep up with the times, but if you slip, it’s understandable.

While it is normal to make mistakes, what may not be normal, is how you deal with those mistakes. Do you own up to the mistake? Call and apologize? Do you try to minimize the impact? Or, even worse, do you pretend it didn’t happen?

Only 21% of people will actually take the active step of visiting the client. Talk about standing out from the crowd. Visiting a client in-person when you’re wrong, whatever it takes, can a turn a so-so client relationship into something special. It can turn a client from a source a revenue to a brand ambassador. Or, a less grand outcome but still worth the effort is that you get to keep that client.

Visiting a client in-person when you’re wrong, whatever it takes, can a turn a so-so client relationship into something special.Click To Tweet

Even if you are unable to fix the mistake, going out of your way, when possible, and meeting face to face is the best step to make amends.

Final Thoughts

Here’s a telling fact: Agency partners that begin their digital marketing agency with an existing and often impressive B2B network are the partners which value B2B networking the most. It would be easy to assume that these partners don’t need to network. The truth is that these are the partners who have learned that face-to-face interaction is the best way to find quality leads and nurture them into customers.

Take a page from their book. But you don’t have to look far to see that networking and meeting future and current clients face to face is an important factor in the success of a digital marketing agency.

On this edition of The Predictable Revenue Podcast, we welcome Brian Gerrard, Director of Sales at fast-growing, Seattle-based sales engagement platform Outreach.

The post Playing the field: how to evaluate your next sales job with Outreach’s Brian Gerrard appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Influencer Marketing is a more professional and disciplined field than ever. One huge barrier for brand marketers trying influencer marketing is: how much of their budget should be set aside to engage creators? What does an influencer actually want?

We recently interviewed 450+ creators of all sizes within our network to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Note: a creator minimum is only a baseline from which rate negotiations should start. Other factors brands and creators should consider when setting a price point are the results that sponsored posts are driving such as CPVs, total reach, campaign length, overall engagement rate, or clicks. Those are detailed in our 2017 Ad Spend Benchmarks Report.

Now, onto the numbers:

• 61% of Influencers reported that they charge less than $250 per post.

We took an additional look at industry to see if that had any weight on minimums as well:

Minimum Cost By Industry

Average rates generally hover around $300-800 per post, with Travel Influencers having the highest rate.

However, there’s a lot of variance here. For example, here are the max minimums across all industries:

Again, these are just benchmarks to begin a negotiation with influencers. However, the point here is that expect to hear anything from “200 dollars per post” to “1,000 dollars” per post when receiving a minimum rate.

Furthermore, the per post basis is only just a small part of the story.

What Influencers Actually Look For

Influencers prioritize alignment over compensation. Brands can’t just target any influencer. Smart marketers should research whether creators would actually be able to create content that actually delights their audiences.

In fact, one anonymous Beauty influencer 1M followers wrote to us:

One of the biggest struggles I have faced of the last eight years, is that brands hand us a set list of talking points and expect us to be chatting billboards. The reason that they want to work with us is because our audience respects our style of content creation and method of explaining experiences with certain products. Having brands that are so demanding and overbearing completely destroys both the sponsorship, and the positive sales outcome for the brand.

Authenticity is just as crucial as compensation. Brands should not only seek to prove out a channel for their goals, but they should also seek to develop relationships with influencers.

Another consideration is that most creators don’t just negotiate on a per post basis. Influencers often split their services into packages. For a travel blogger, brands that leverage influencer marketing could expect to pay $1,600 per two YouTube shout outs. A good way to reduce costs would be to negotiate with the influencer and package different services together. For example, it might cost $1,600 for two YouTube shout outs, but it might cost $1,400 for two mentions and an Instagram story.

Here’s what a typical rate card from a high-level influencer might look like:

Influencer Marketing is just like any channel in a brand’s toolkit. It requires hard work (usually from an in-house influencer team) in order to drive positive results for a brand. Influencer is a behavior, not simply a medium.

• Retail employers like Walmart and Target are spending big bucks to hire and retain workers.
• SEC rules require publicly traded companies to disclose their workers' median annual pay.
• Here's what the median worker gets paid at 19 retail companies, from lowest to highest.

Retail workers have seen their hourly wages increase substantially in the last several years.

Major employers like Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, and more have plowed billions of dollars into pay increases in a bid to get workers to join their workforces — and stay.

Ever since Amazon set its minimum wage to $15 in 2018, more retailers have followed suit by offering starting wages worth more than double the national minimum wage of $7.25. The Federal minimum was last set in 2009.

But hourly wages are just one part of the pay equation. An employee's earnings also depend a lot on how many hours they work, and hours in the retail business can vary considerably, especially in seasonal segments.

To get a picture of what the typical worker makes in a year at various retail brands, Insider looked through the most recent proxy filings that publicly traded companies must file with the US Securities Exchange Commission. Rules following the financial crisis of 2008 require public companies to calculate their median worker's annual salary in order to compare it to the CEO's compensation.

Scroll through below to see where 19 of the largest companies rank, from lowest to highest annual pay.

Hillary Hoffower contributed to an earlier version of this story.

After introducing its Panda algorithm update, Google encouraged webmasters to focus on the quality of content and its value from a user’s perspective. Thus, long-form content came into the light. It is beneficial for both, users and website owners.

E-commerce websites can benefit from long-form content as much as a blog. If created wisely, longer sales pages drive huge traffic and attract customers.

When Do You Need Long-Form Sales Pages

Short pages work perfectly for sales. But they perform the best when users already know something about the brand or product. Those are low-risk products and users don’t need long pages to persuade them.

In case your product is new to the audience, you need more content to make people buy from you. Long-form sales pages will help:

• with costly and complicated offers. Users hardly read much about the average kettle characteristics. But they definitely need more reasons to buy pricey products;
• with high-commitment offers. Users want to know what’s next after they purchase from you. What it takes to use your product, what will be after-sales service, etc.;
• with entirely new products/brands. New brands need to gain users’ trust and persuade customers they offer a valuable product.

Anyway, long-form sales content should be structured well. If the page is poorly designed and boring, it will only frustrate the customers.

How to Create Long-Form Content Effortlessly

You should think through your content structure and information you wish to present. It affects the effectiveness of your offer directly. Let’s check out the essential steps for long-form content creation.

Identify Your Target Audience

It’s the very first step of pretty any marketing activity. Who is your audience? What are their needs? Are you targeting new or returning customers? Identify your audience correctly and add the details that keep them reading your content.

Create highly-targeted content that solves just one issue of one category of your target audience. E.g., if you sell party decorations, you can create a separate page for wedding or birthday party decorations alone. Don’t try to engage with all your customers with one page. Create a piece that shows all the benefits of your product/offer for a particular audience.

Define Your Keywords

Usually, you use organic keywords for your articles and set PPC campaigns for your landing pages. In both cases, you need specific keywords to attract the right audience.

Create a list of keywords that describe your topic. Long-tail keywords are perfect for long articles as well as for sales pages. They are highly specific and explain the topic precisely. Moreover, studies show that long-tail keywords allow you to rank for thousands of other keywords with one piece of content.

Learn more about how your potential customers are looking for your product. Keep the ‘searcher’s intent’ in mind when choosing the target keywords for your content.

Another cool trick is using your competitors’ branded keywords for your benefit. Check your competitor’s keywords in your favorite keyword tool including in search words like ‘better,’ ‘faster,’ ‘cheaper,’ ‘compared to,’ ‘alternative to,’ etc. Such combinations with your competitor’s brand help intercept the customers on their way to purchase. And show them your product as a better/cheaper alternative to the competitors’.

Convince Customers to Buy

The only reason businesses create content is sales and traffic. The traffic should also convert into sales. Otherwise, you waste your investments. High price or complicated offer often stop customers from buying a specific product. In this case, you should explain to your potential customers why they should buy from you in detail.

Your sales page is not the place for bragging about your product. I mean, users don’t care how many efforts it costs to create your shiny smart toaster with WiFi connectivity. Tell your potential customers what’s in it for them! Tell how much more comfortable their lives will be when they have the toaster that cooks the toasts 2 minutes before they wake up in the morning. Describe the features that solve user’s issues.

Source: Morningrecoverydrink.com

Choose a Proper Format

With long-form content, you have many opportunities to get your message out to customers. Use different formats that attract your audience. Thus, you may use lots of photos or videos to show your product instead of telling people about it.

Source: Fiftythree.com

Adding an FAQ section is a good idea. Answer the most popular questions about your product there. You can get those questions by asking your beta-users or first/potential customers. Encourage your social media followers to leave their questions on your page. Keep an eye on the comments where users ask about new features they would like to have with your product.

Choose Testimonials Wisely

Word of mouth outweighs other signals today. The surveys show that over 70% of buyers check out online reviews before making a purchase. Feedback from friends and relatives build more trust than direct promotion.

A section with testimonials is beneficial for long-form pages. Gather the feedback from your customers through social media or emails. But post only those testimonials that prove the value of your product, describe its characteristics and tell how it helped users to solve their issues. Avoid shallow phrases like “Cool product,” “Nice thing,” “Wow!” etc. They bring no value and lower trust to your brand.

Source: Ritual.com

Structure Your Content Properly

Organizing your content on a page the right way, you increase chances that users will go through it to the end and convert into customers. The content structure should encourage users to scroll down and learn more about the product. So, you should use headings/subheadings, bullet lists, images and videos, call-to-action buttons, and navigation elements across the page.

Use enough CTA throughout the long-form content to ‘catch’ users when they are ready to buy. Use traditional CTA statements like ‘Buy Now,’ ‘Watch Video,’ ‘Sign Up,’ etc. People recognize such wording better and are more likely to click those CTAs.

The Bottom Line

There’s no ‘perfect’ length of long-form sales content. That’s why you have to test the already built pages often and find new ways for improvement. A/B testing allows checking the soft spots in your content and removing them.

Long-form content requires more time and effort from your side just because of its size. But having a clear plan makes its creation easier.

To achieve explosive growth, technology startups need to have world-class sales teams. From smart cities and driverless cars to artificial intelligence, big data and SaaS, 2018 is ripe for companies to achieve record revenue and profits.

That is, if they have the right sales team in place. A company’s success depends on the ability of its sales teams to deliver sustainable, predictable revenue at scale.

At Peak Sales Recruiting, we have seen seismic shifts in the industry in just the last year alone. The building blocks of developing a great sales team have not changed – recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training and development. However, the nuances within each discipline have modernized, requiring sales leadership playbooks to be updated.

Here are 3 ways fast-growing startups build sales teams differently

1. Recruit Customer Focused and Tech-Savvy Reps

While being a good salesperson requires innate characteristics – or what I like to call sales DNA – it is important to recruit customer focused and tech-savvy reps. In today’s rapidly changing world of SaaS, artificial intelligence, big data and CRM, a firm handshake and killer smile only go so far. Buyers are empowered by unprecedented information, and as the divide between sales and marketing erodes, startups must hire sales reps that know how to foster a seamless customer journey between marketing and customer success groups. In fact, McKinsey conducted six years of research and found that companies that optimize the consumer journey increase revenue by up to 10% annually. Now that’s a driver for scalability. Combining that cross-functional skill set with strong technical competences means that the best reps don’t rely on their sales engineers to explain how their solution integrates or complements their prospect’s technology stack. They understand their product inside and out. And it’s working for ReadySource CEO Michael Lazar who recently noted,

“Having a standardized sales recruiting process allows us to target tech-savvy reps rapidly and assemble a forward-thinking team that understands sales, CRM and marketing.”

2. Scientific Interviewing and Hiring

Interviewing salespeople is like peeling an onion. It involves peeling away a candidate’s superficial layers and getting past conditioned responses to learn about their capabilities, traits, cultural fit, and if they will yield quality results. And with close to 50% of reps missing target, conducting a successful sales interview is the difference between hiring a top performer who will consistently make their number, or bringing on a mediocre salesperson who annoys prospects and damages market reputation.

So how are the best growth companies interviewing reps? They follow a structured and rigorous process that mitigates subjectivity by creating a set of mandatory hiring criteria all candidates are required to meet to be considered for the position. They then select behavioral based interview questions that correlate with what success looks like in the role. Using their mandatory hiring criteria as the benchmark, candidates interview responses are scored by the same set of interviewers – every time. Combing this objective scoring system with the power of psychometric assessments that highlights a candidate’s behavioral style and underlying motivators, best-fit candidates quickly rise to the top, reducing time-to-hire and future turn-over rates, while  enhancing sales force morale.

3. Next Gen Training and Development

Max Meadow, Principal Advisory Analyst for Brandon Hall Group, said,

“That the 70/20/10 mix of training is the new standard for modern sales training.  It states that 70% of knowledge should come from actually doing an activity, 20% should come from other interactions, and 10% should come from formal learning events.”

At Peak, our experience aligns with this philosophy. Clients who have invested in onboarding programs that offer a hands-on approach experience the strongest return on investment. The Aberdeen Group surveyed more than 200 companies, and those with a comprehensive onboarding program scored significantly higher profits and employee retention, productivity, and satisfaction. Why? The first 90 days of a sales rep’s employment is a critical time. Each week should be mapped out to ensure that a new hire is trained on the product or service, the target market, ideal customer profile, and the selling approaches, systems, and tools to be leveraged. Territory and account plan development should also be used to gauge learning progress and knowledge retention. If your sales manager(s) don’t have the resources necessary to ensure that a comprehensive onboarding program is in place, be prepared for ramp-up times and turnover to increase. To immediately improve your onboarding process, follow this SlideShare.

The post How the Fastest Growing Startups Build Their Sales Teams appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The earliest known use of the term ‘Cloud’ to refer to off-premise computing and storage took place in a 1996 Compaq business plan. The document pretty much foresaw many of the things that would eventually make up early iterations of the Cloud.

It accurately predicted how enterprise software would be replaced by web-based services and that users would access applications through the Internet, not on local machines—exactly a full decade before the official launch of AWS.

Cloud Buyer 2.0

Now, over 20 years on, as the Cloud transitions into what many folks in the industry consider as ‘Cloud 2.0’, it resembles very little of what it looked like even just a few short years ago.

The Cloud used to be all about agility, scalability, efficiency, and cost savings. Originally implemented in stand-alone, low-risk business areas (such as web hosting, development testing, CRM, etc.), the Cloud has now become a key component in almost every business IT portfolio. Today’s cloud architectures are smarter, dynamic, and (more importantly) business-critical.

Alongside these sweeping changes, cloud customers have evolved, too. As I-CIO observes, modern cloud buyers look at cloud technologies not only as cost-saving measures but as part of their core business and overall strategy.

This refocus has created a more diverse ecosystem of cloud buyers, with different customers having their own expectations and requirements. Businesses’ IT buying needs are maturing, and this change is reflected in the things buyers take into account when evaluating cloud providers and services:

• Does the application help the buyer become a leading supplier and serve their customers better?
• Does the time it take to modify an existing application remain within business timelines?
• What are the costs of switching into and out of a cloud service?
• How does the vendor guarantee security and compliance?
• What is the level of interoperability and compatibility with other cloud services?

The Different Cloud Buyer Types You Need to Know

To be more effective at reaching their target audience, marketers clearly need to become firmly acquainted with the different buyer groups that make up today’s B2B cloud market. Let’s dig into the findings of two recently published studies on cloud buyer types to help us get to know potential cloud customers better.

Last year, Bane & Co. released a research brief ‘The Changing Faces of the Cloud’ which tracked the evolution of enterprise cloud buyers since the late aughts up to the onset of Cloud 2.0. The study identifies several distinct types of buyers and explains many of their defining characteristics.

In a similar line of inquiry, ISG’s ‘Provider Lens Archetype Report 2017’ drills down on the different buyer “archetypes” that influence public cloud purchase decisions. The report draws a lot of interesting insight on each group and outlines what customers expect and demand from vendors.

While the two studies group B2B cloud customers a bit differently, the underlying qualities neatly align into five key buyer profiles:

1. Transformational

Transformational buyers consist of early adopters already heavily dependent on the Cloud. Performance and scalability top their list of factors for buying cloud services, and they tend to deemphasize cost savings as a purchase driver. Most transformational buyers look for innovative cloud services and work with vendors that offer best-in-class support.

According to the Bane & Co. brief, transformational buyers already had around 40% of their IT environments running on at least one cloud service in 2011. By 2015, this number was close to 70%.

But as a source of current cloud demand, transformational buyers no longer lead the market. In 2017, they account for 26% of demand for cloud services, versus 47% in 2011.

2. Heterogeneous

These buyers are also starting to move some of their workloads to the Cloud, but are keeping their migration at a slower pace because of the complexity of their current IT systems and their future IT needs.

As a result, heterogeneous cloud buyers maintain an entire mix of public and private cloud components in their IT portfolio. It’s typical for heterogeneous buyers to distribute their workloads across various SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS providers while keeping some of it on-premise.

3. Security-Conscious

These buyers look to become public cloud users but are holding back due to a whole host of factors, mainly industry regulations, privacy laws, and security requirements.

As a result, security-conscious cloud buyers tend to have the bulk of their cloud applications running on private cloud environments. They prefer to work with vendors that offer secure, dedicated cloud platforms.

Bane & Co. estimates that security-conscious cloud customers make up around 20% of the market, while cloud spending represents 26% of their IT budget.

4. Price-Conscious

Price-conscious buyers base their cloud investment choices chiefly on cost-savings. ISG describes this customer group as “pragmatic” cloud buyers whose number-one goal typically revolves around the practical use of cloud resources to make their workloads more agile, flexible, and cost-efficient.

In their research brief, Bane & Co. argues that a price war in the cloud market has little impact on changing the attitudes of most customers toward the Cloud since price-sensitive buyers make up a relatively small percentage of the market. The price-conscious segment represents only 14% of cloud spending and around 13% of the customer base.

5. Slow-and-Steady

Slow-and-steady (also known as traditional) customers have yet to migrate the bulk of their IT environments to the Cloud. This hesitation stems from a number of reasons including regulation, compliance, security issues, or organizational inertia. As such, this buyer’s IT portfolio consists primarily of mainframe and legacy systems.

Bane & Co. believes that slow-and-steady buyers have the potential to become the largest customer segment in the cloud market. In 2011, they only had 1% of their workloads running on the Cloud. In 2016, it grew to 16% and, by 2018, it’s projected to reach 30%.

Data Summary: 5 Types of Cloud Customers

The Takeaway: As both cloud services and customers continue evolving, vendors need to focus on a number of key marketing capabilities to ensure they remain relevant among their target buyers. It’s important that providers clearly identify the right customer segments for their services. As we’ve seen, different buyer types have vastly different expectations and requirements. So, it’s crucial to develop value propositions that speak to each unique group.

This article originally posted at The Savvy Marketeer.

Publishing B2B thought leadership content can have a significant impact on your demand generation strategy. It’s a powerful tool for generating awareness, credibility, brand value and quality traffic.

Over 80% of business decision-makers say thought leadership increased their trust in a vendor organization, according to an Edelman & LinkedIn survey. In contrast, the same survey revealed more than half of the c-suite lost respect for brands who published poor-quality content.

At the same time, data reveals that search also remains valuable in 2018, especially at the top of the marketing funnel. According to DemandGen Report’s 2018 Benchmark Survey Report, search marketing is a top lead generation channel for 50% of B2B marketing organizations.

B2B marketers find themselves wondering whether they should prioritize thought leadership content over SEO-optimized content, or vice versa.

Thought Leadership vs. SEO Content

The concept of thought leadership is often associated with content that delivers a unique point of view, cutting-edge research or extensive experience. More importantly, thought leadership content is ubiquitously associated with quality – it’s almost always content that addresses a topic or question with more expertise or depth than other existing resources.

Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group, writes:

“I define thought leadership as a type of content marketing where you tap into the talent, experience, and passion inside your business.”

Brenner’s decision to highlight “talent” and “passion” is important; expertise matters but years of experience isn’t the only point-of-view (POV) necessary for exceptional thought leadership content.

Within a demand generation organization, the CEO and CMO aren’t the only ones who can build the brand through thought leadership content. Exceptional thought leadership can come from content marketers, developers, sales, customer success advocates, receptionists, or any other individual within the organization who has the requisite insight.

It’s also important to remember that thought leadership isn’t defined by only written content. Sure, writing a full-length, non-fiction book and publishing it traditionally will probably put you on the fast-track to keynote speaking. However, non-traditional demand generation platforms such as LinkedIn, YouTube and even audio podcasts are perfectly viable modes of distributing thought leadership content.

In short, thought leadership delivers a unique, expert POV thanks to original data, expertise, passion and/or experience. It can be technical or experiential. It may be controversial or it can confirm your readers’ existing point of view. It can range from a 600-word op-ed blog post published on LinkedIn to an 80,000-word traditional book. The main point is that thought leadership content is set apart by quality and originality.

The Purpose of Thought Leadership Content

Within the B2B context, the ultimate purpose of thought leadership content is to help prospects and customers overcome their pain-points. Secondarily, good thought leadership initiatives will also support your full-funnel revenue generation efforts by various means, specifically:

1. Increasing exposure: Enables your organization to develop an engaged audience.
2. Conducting and sharing research: Establishes a position as a source of original, quality insights.
3. Entertaining and provoking: By establishing a unique perspective and sharing opinions, thought leadership content can enable a B2B organization to develop brand personality and brand values.
4. Improving brand trust: Consistently delivering high-quality content can increase brand credibility among prospects, customers, industry analysts and influencers, and other thought leaders.
5. Increasing likeability: It can boost your brand’s “personality” and voice, helping it to better stick out in a crowded space, while also growing the brands of individuals within the organization.

The Role of SEO Content

Let’s make one thing clear: SEO-centric content in 2018 has nothing to do with the keyword-stuffed blog posts that defined SEO best practices in 2011.

Google’s webmaster guidelines offer the primary instruction to “make pages for users, not search engines.” There are effectively no SEO shortcuts in 2018. Today, search engines rely on incredibly complex natural-language-processing algorithms to assess content quality and rank search results. There are no shortcuts to SEO content.

Keyword stuffing, cloaking, heavy linking, deceptive titles and other outdated SEO tactics have no place in an effective B2B marketing strategy.

However, there are some types of blog posts and website content that both search engines and users love. These include:

1. Using customer frequently asked questions (FAQs) in blog post titles
2. Integrating relevant visuals, such as data graphics
3. Improving the user experience (UX) with subheaders and other formatting
4. Writing an enticing first paragraph to hook the reader
5. Relying on third-party sources and quality data to present a quality, unbiased perspective

The Purpose of SEO Content

71% of B2B marketers start their product or service research with a generic search, according to Google. Offering SEO-optimized blog posts, landing pages and web pages on your website can position your brand to capture the interest of decision-makers who are just beginning to research solutions, converting them to contacts at the top of the funnel.

SEO content isn’t a full-funnel demand generation solution. While it’s a go-to lead generation channel for 50% of marketers, according to the DemandGen Report’s 2018 Benchmark Survey Report, just 18% of B2B marketing organizations use search for later-stage marketing conversions.

SEO content’s value is primarily limited to the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, but it’s an important one, ranked with websites and email among the top-three lead generation channels in 2018.

Thought Leadership vs. SEO Content: Which Is Best?

If you’re wondering whether to invest in thought leadership or SEO content, you’re asking the wrong question.

Demand generation success in 2018 requires both thought leadership and SEO content, together. The right question is: “How much of each type of content should I invest in?”

As noted before, SEO best practices have evolved significantly over the best decade to favor a very human-focused user experience. So, it’s now much easier to create SEO-optimized thought leadership content.

The key to B2B demand generation success with SEO-centric content is prospect and customer understanding, which happens to be the a primary requirement of good thought leadership. Doing both well is all about positioning your original opinions, insights and POVs (thought leadership) in the context of questions that your prospects are asking (SEO).

A good way to start is by asking yourself:

• “What do my target-account decision-makers type into the search bar when researching solutions for the first time?”
• “What problems are they most curious about, and how do they phrase this problem?”

The questions decision-makers type into search engines can create a powerful framework for creating thought leadership content that’s SEO-optimized.

Further, thought leadership content published on external blogs or in byline articles doesn’t always offer immediately measurable returns, but it can yield powerful dividends over time in terms of awareness, credibility and demand.

By investing in the creation of quality content that answers your customers’ questions at every stage of the buyer’s journey and distributing such resources among a variety of platforms, your organization can build lasting relationships that translate to sales opportunities, customers and revenue.

Investing in B2B SEO and Thought Leadership Content

There’s a place for both SEO and thought leadership content in demand generation strategies in 2018. The best B2B marketers know that SEO-centric blog posts are a powerful tool for both lead generation and extending the reach of thought leadership.

Curious about how the most effective B2B demand generation marketers are creating a 2018 strategy? Download your complimentary copy of the new DemandGen Report’s 2018 Benchmark Survey Report.

Digital marketing comes in many forms, but two often cause confusion – referral programs and affiliate programs.

Are the two really that different? Yes, they are. Here’s why.

Referral Programs Versus Affiliate Programs

Referral programs

A referral program gives current customers and users incentives each time a friend they refer successfully signs up.

Dropbox

A perfect example of this is Dropbox, who has made it worthwhile for users to refer. They offer additional free space for every successful referral. This played a huge role in ramping up their membership signups by 60% in 2010.

Uber

Another brand who has mastered the art of referral is Uber. Each user is given their own referral program, which gives not only the current user but also the newly-referred customer, a free trip. Because of this Uber take the cake in ride-sharing apps and services. Other similar services have adopted such programs and have also seen a large increase in users.

Affiliate programs

On the other hand, an affiliate program gives compensation to actual marketers, bloggers, industry-leaders (who, in this case, are called affiliates) for signups they bring in.

Amazon

When it comes to affiliate marketing, Amazon probably comes to mind. You may have noticed a lot of bloggers recommend products in their articles. If you take a closer look, you’ll see that those recommendations often lead right to Amazon.

To break it down, Amazon tracks where those sales are coming from. When they see sales coming from a specific bloggers page, they compensate that blogger.

Target

A good alternative to Amazon Affiliates is the Target Affiliate Program. They are another big business, who sells a huge variety of product, so it’s very easy for bloggers to fit links easily into their content. The downside is that Target is a popular shopping place, so affiliates may miss out on potential commissions when people choose to shop in-store instead. Nonetheless, it is still a great affiliate program.

A Deeper Look at the Differences

To further understand the differences between the two (and to help you decide what would work better for your brand), here are some key points to look at.

Who does the referring

Referral Program

Your typical referral is an existing customer, fan, advocate. These people, use word of mouth marketing, even outside of a referral program. But, when they do sign up for a referral program, they personally give their referral link to friends.

Affiliate Program

Your typical affiliates are looking to generate income off of a referral. In fact, sometimes affiliates are even sought out by the business or brand. Most of the time, however, affiliates sign up for an affiliate program, get their link, and then slap it on their webpage or in a blog. Then they wait for traffic to click through.

Level of Relationship

The biggest difference between a referral program and affiliate programs is the relationship between the one referring a product or service and the person being referred.

Referral Program

Referral marketing, on one hand, works for people who have an existing relationship. Like friends and family, for example. The trust between the two individuals is what leads to the successful referral occurring.

Affiliate Program

In affiliate marketing, there is no relationship between the two people. The goal of an affiliate marketer is to get as many successful referrals as he or she can. The person clicking on the affiliate link does not necessarily know the affiliate personally but has some trust in their recommendation. For example, vlogger subscribers.

Lifetime Customer Value (LTV)

Lifetime customer value shows you what you’ll potentially earn from a customer within their lifetime. Will this person only make a one-time purchase, or will he or she be a loyal customer with recurring orders?

This, of course, will depend on the kind of product or service you are pushing. Some products are generally for one-time use, but there are always peripherals and other services they can pay for. Naturally, for consumables, it is expected that customers will keep coming back (especially when the product is proven to be worth it).

Referral Program

A referral program can work with a variety of customer lifetimes. However, for products with higher LTV, a referral program works best because long-term trust is needed.

Affiliate Program

An affiliate program would usually work better on products that have lower LTV because of scalability.

Marketing Channels

Remember that in weighing the pros and cons of referral and affiliate programs, you have to consider what gives you the most value over a longer period.

Referral Program

For referral programs, you need a more intentional approach. Remember that a person that is given a referral program already knows that he or she is directly being offered a product or service. There may even be a chance that the person being given the code has not realized the need for the product or service yet.

The great thing about this, again, is the level of trust. Because the referral program comes from someone already trusted, there is usually a higher chance of the person actually moving forward with the next steps.

Affiliate Program

Compared to referral programs, affiliate programs are often more easily shared. It’s as simple as including a link towards a product, service, or piece of content, and blended into content or displaying as ad space. The better the content quality, the easier for readers to trust. Meaning a higher potential for link clicking.

It’s also worthy to remember that the people who landed on the affiliate page are already interested in the product or service is recommended. Thus, making the process of converting a lot easier.

Types of Rewards

Rewards are typically the ultimate driving factor in both types of programs. It doesn’t matter how much someone likes the business, the incentive plays a big part in actually getting people to refer.

Regardless of the type, the reward can vary from program to program. It could be a one time reward or a recurring reward, and a business can ultimately choose whatever they want to reward with.

Referral Program

Generally speaking, incentives for a referral program are usually in the form of discounts, coupons, or products. Normally, users can send a referral code to their friends via email, or through social media posts.

Affiliate Program

On the other hand, affiliate programs are more likely to give out cash incentives. Cash incentives are commonly a percentage of each sale. It’s also common for the affiliate to get a free product on top of their cash compensation.

How it’s Shared

The strategies for sharing these two types of rewards programs are slightly different. Referral programs can take a more direct approach, whereas affiliate programs seem to be lurking in the background.

Are there any similarities? You bet

As you can see the two types of programs are different. Even so, there are some similarities. The biggest one, as you can guess, is that incentives drive people to promote. Whether it be promoting a link in a piece of content, like in affiliate marketing. Or sharing a referral link with a friend, like with referral marketing. The incentive isn’t the only thing on the line, however…

Social Currency Risk

A commodity is being recommended regardless of the level of relationship. This is why in both cases, there is also a level of risk involved.

But what happens if the product or service does not work for the lead or referral? Well, in both cases, a certain amount of trust or social currency is taken from the affiliate or the referrer.

Referral Program

In a referral program, for example, there is a sort of guarantee that the referrer has used the product or service and fully trusts its capabilities. This means that when the referrer’s friend receives a referral, they would expect it to work well for them, too.

Affiliate Program

In affiliate marketing, a lead will come from some other source, like from a blog link. For instance, people browse through their favorite blogs and may see a product link. The reader then decides to trust the blogger’s word and clicks on the link.

Repeatable Marketing Channels

Both options drive growth. They both use a brand advocate to help make sales and increase leads. Both options also provide a high ROI to the business.

Referral Program

Referral programs, often nurture customer relationships. This form of engagement helps drive growth because the customer feels good about sharing the business with friends. Though referral programs don’t produce as high of traffic as an affiliate program, they do bring in higher quality leads and have a high conversion rate.

Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs, on one hand, often have a lot of great user-generated content that they are trying to push for maximum exposure. This content has little to do with relationships and rather works because a lead was looking for the product, and happened to find the affiliate’s content.

Time To Make A Decision

Now that you know the basics of referral marketing and affiliate programs, you can start strategizing on the best approach for your business.

Business Type	Referral Program	Affiliate program
Ecommerce	Definitely	Can be good if products have higher margins
SaaS (Consumer and no salesperson)	Great for giving consumers a credit or freebie	Possible but price points are lower, so not that beneficial to an affiliate
SaaS (B2B)	Yes, just need incentives that align with the referrer	Great for highly transactional sales with no sales person. (Tough to compensate both affiliate and salesperson)
Local Services	Great for monthly services and high dollar services	Much more difficult with offline businesses and longer sales cycles
Consulting/Coaching Services	Can be good, but often lower volume numbers of people to refer	Great but tougher to track electronically in the sales process.
Gyms	Great fit for programs to give discounts on membership or credits	Tougher to target local people for a gym online

In many ways, Google Duplex is very impressive. The ability to replicate natural language is startlingly good compared to both Siri and Alexa. But that pales in comparison to its ability to understand what is being said well enough to conduct a simple business transaction. And that is what it did, it conducted a simple business transaction, as it was designed to do.

Naturally, the Henny Penny class on LinkedIn immediately decided that this technology spells the end of the salesperson, their role now being easily outsourced to the much more dependable technological solution. I suspect that the technology will get exponentially better—and will develop fast from this point. But there are some applications for which it will not do nearly as well as human beings. So, if you are afraid the sky is falling, rest easy.

There is a difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency is about the preservation of energy. Effectiveness is about producing a certain result. Regarding human relationships, effectiveness is better than efficiency. To schedule an appointment, technology is terrific.

The scheduling of an appointment is a transaction. The development of trust is not. If you want to schedule an appointment, a digital assistant is just the thing. If you want to convince someone that you are the right person to help them achieve an outcome they have heretofore never considered, technology is not the right choice, the first being a question of efficiency, the second being one of effectiveness.

The ability to choose the proper response to a question or prompt is a transaction. Meaning what you say and saying what you mean is not. There are people who can say the right thing to a prompt or a question. They may or may not mean what they say. The doubt that exists is human, and our ability to recognize incongruity in one’s words has been finely tuned over thousands of years.

The ability to successfully complete an exchange of value, i.e. a sale, is a transaction. The ability for you to help another person recognize that you care about them and their outcome is not. A computer programmed voice is efficient. A person who spends time with you to make sure you get what you really want and need is more concerned with their effectiveness in helping you.

The ability to choose from a range of options that an algorithm selects as being appropriate is a transaction. The ability to generate new ideas and options, novelty, if you will, is not. Resourcefulness belongs to human beings. As does imagination (including the imagination necessary to build these new technologies).

The ability to mimic a human being is not the same as being human. It’s a transaction.

Are you more likely to trust a computer that has been designed to make you believe it is a person concerned with your wants and needs than a human being? Will you prefer to buy something from an algorithm that has been designed to exploit its knowledge of you to convince you to make a purchase?

Digital machines are not likely to replace humans at the things that make us uniquely human.

A machine doesn’t know what it means to fear. It doesn’t know what it means to feel a sense of loss. It has no perception of what trust is or why it is important. It isn’t thoughtful, and it will not care about you, because it is not capable of caring. It doesn’t know joy or pain or hope or dread. You are not going to have a machine come to the hospital to hold your hand when you are ill.

I will be the first to adopt all technologies that allow me to increase my efficiency in the things that are transactional in nature. But where human relationships are at stake, I will choose effectiveness, believing that high value, high trust, and high caring win out against transactions—even when the technology is a novelty. Nothing will ever be more human than human.

The post Google Duplex and the (Wholly Exaggerated) Death of the Sales Rep appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The debate over the Kinder Morgan expansion project (KMX) has become polarized and politicized. The growing controversy is occurring while there is evidence that the additional capacity the KMX would provide is unnecessary and that Alberta’s diluted bitumen would not get a higher price if shipped to Asian markets.

Alberta’s oilsands presently produce about 2.7 million barrels per day (bpd) of raw bitumen. Forty per cent of the raw bitumen is upgraded to a higher value product that can be transported in pipeline. Sixty per cent, or 1.6 million bpd, is blended with expensive diluents to enable it to flow in a pipeline. The producers of raw bitumen must pay for the costs of blending, shipping and handling the diluent. This significant added expense is referred to as the “diluent penalty” About 680,000 bpd of diluent is required to transport 1.6 million bpd of raw bitumen. The diluent, unwanted by buyers, takes up about 680,000 bpd of valuable pipeline capacity.

Currently Alberta’s upgraded bitumen, diluted bitumen and conventional oil is shipped to U.S. markets, primarily in the Midwest and Gulf Coast, in a pipeline network with the capacity of 4 million bpd. When the Enbridge Line 3 replacement and the Keystone XL projects are completed, the total pipeline capacity will be 5.2 million bpd, an increase of 1.2 million bpd over current capacity.

If the additional 1.6 million bpd of Alberta’s existing raw bitumen was partly upgraded, it would free up an additional 680,000 bpd of pipeline capacity now used for diluent. This would bring the total pipeline capacity to about 5.9 million bpd, an increase of 1.9 million bpd over current capacity. This increase would be achieved without construction of the KMX. Lack of pipeline capacity appears to not be a deterrent to new investment in oilsands production.

Partial upgrading of raw bitumen is expensive. Industry estimates indicate that the capital cost for facilities to partly upgrade 1.6 million bpd would be about $45 billion. The construction of partial upgraders, apart from freeing up valuable pipeline capacity, would produce a product priced at $10 to $15 higher than diluted bitumen It will also remove the expensive diluent penalty which could be as high as $10. The engineering and construction of these projects would create thousands of high paying jobs for Albertans and work for equipment suppliers across the country.

Many believe that the KMX is required to provide access to Asian markets and higher world prices. There is however clear, market-based evidence that higher prices would not be achieved by shipping to Asia. Western Canada Select (WCS), an Alberta benchmark blend, is considered to be very similar in quality to Mexican Maya heavy oil. WCS is presently priced at $52 at Hardisty, Alberta. The equivalent Mexican oil is currently priced at $60 delivered in Asia. If the WCS was shipped to Asia then the price at Hardisty, after deductions for pipeline, tanker and handling costs to Asia, would actually be less than the current price of $52. Continued reference is also made to the WCS price discount against West Texas Intermediate (WTI). The discount is currently at 22% and compares very favourably to the average discount of 24% over the past 12 years. It should be noted that WTI is priced higher mainly because it is of much higher quality.

Since the capacity of the KMX is not required and because higher prices will not be achieved by shipping to Asia, construction of the KMX should be suspended. Investment in partial upgrading should begin and the planned expenditure of $1.5 billion for spill response should be redirected, perhaps into R&D to define new ways to best use of the valuable oilsands resource. A very significant early benefit will be avoidance of the risks associated with shipping 40 billion litres of diluted bitumen annually through an earthquake zone that includes the City of Burnaby and the Burrard Inlet.

Douglas Taylor is a retired engineer originally from Calgary who has an engineering degree and a MBA from the University of Alberta.

By Mark Schaefer

Klout’s parent company Lithium announced that it is shutting down the pioneering social influence measurement system.

Most people hated Klout. There was a time that I disliked it, too … until I began to understand it. In 2011, I wrote the first book on influence marketing (Return On Influence) and had an opportunity to conduct an in-depth study of this company and its founder, Joe Fernandez. Arguably I learned more about Klout than any person outside the company.

And I discovered that the critics were wrong. I was wrong, too. Klout was on to something important … something almost everybody overlooked.

This is what I found, and these are the surprising reasons why Klout impacted our marketing world in significant ways:

They were the first

Today, we take influencer marketing for granted. It is everywhere. There was even a segment on influencer marketing on the CBS morning news last weekend!

But when Klout was founded in 2010, nobody had seriously considered the idea. Sidelined by a jaw surgery, Joe Fernandez had plenty of time to muse and think about data and social media. He noticed that there were certain people whose content seemed to move effortlessly through the web and spread in a viral way.

Was there a way to assess that content flow, and even predict who could influence others? He became obsessed with the idea, hired a team of coders, and soon introduced an early version of Klout, the first tool that claimed to measure online influence. This was the event that kicked off influence marketing as we know it today because for the first time, you could score personal web activity.

It also set off an unfortunate ego-driven competition, a Klout score feeding frenzy. People OBSESSED over Klout.

Fernandez could have never predicted the chaos in his future …

The firestorm

I cannot recall any software company in history that was more reviled than Klout. The fury currently facing Facebook was nothing like the constant stream of hate thrown at Klout in its early days. A certain group of bloggers made it their goal to find ways to humiliate the company and its founder by relentlessly poking holes in its algorithm and business model.

Certainly, the company had its problems.

• It could be easily gamed (and it was).
• The scores and topics of influence were often wrong, and sometimes silly, as Klout tried to iterate and improve under the constant glare of public opinion.
• Most of all, people loathed the idea that an algorithm could assess their personal influence … especially when they didn’t stack up well in the rankings.

I first wrote a blog post about Klout in 2010 and I’ll never forget one comment: “I hope you’ll join in me in fighting this company, Mark. It’s Un-American!”

Even though competitor platforms quickly emerged like Kred and PeerIndex — they both did the very same thing in nearly the same way —  Klout took all the heat.

To his credit, Joe Fernandez answered every question and fixed every problem no matter how bad the haters ranted. In the face of absolute chaos, Joe was a class act. And the nicer he was, the madder the trolls became.

Why Klout was right

In my view, Klout’s lightning rod was its slogan: “The Standard for Influence.” Of course it could not be, and never would be, a standard for influence. But people could just not get past that bold claim.

As I researched my book, I had an exceptional opportunity to peer deeply into the company. I discovered that Klout was not the fluffy start-up people thought it was. This was a fast-growing company fueled by a team of PhD-level scientists and the world’s most sophisticated investors, including Kleiner Perkins.

Klout had made a significant discovery. Their complex algorithm didn’t necessarily measure influence, but it did measure a person’s relative ability to move content through the web.

In essence, they quantified a person’s ability to create buzz. And that, ladies and gentlemen is a very big deal.

Years later, I would write in The Content Code that other than actual conversions/sales, I regard social sharing as the most important measurement for digital marketing. It is an indicator of advocacy. The value of content that is not seen and shared is zero. We must get the content to move to achieve a return on that content investment.

Think about it. To succeed in the content world today, you have to:

• Create or curate content that is excellent
• Build an audience that cares about it
• Engage with those folks in a way that encourages sharing of the content

This complex cocktail is exactly what Klout codified!  In fact, an ability to move content (and measure that movement) is the heart of the mainstream influencer marketing industry today and the single reason brands are investing so heavily in this space. Klout was ahead of its time.

Klout was pervasive

A few years ago, I led a research project on influence marketing sponsored by one of the biggest advertising companies in the world. What I found was fascinating. At that time 85 percent of the U.S. agencies had some sort of influencer outreach program, and they all had their own “proprietary” influence measurement system. But when I pressed hard for the source of these measures, I found that almost every one of these agencies used Klout as the foundation for their calculation.

My conclusion was that Klout was the underlying influence software for nearly the entire advertising industry! Their highly-touted influence measurements were simply “Klout with sugar on top.” Many of the people who made fun of the company secretly used it any way. They built their careers on it.

Susan Borst of the Interactive Advertising Bureau commented: “Many never understood how Klout powered some really big name companies’ “influencer assessment” offerings.”

As Klout shuts down, I think a lot of agencies will be scrambling for a solution in the next few weeks!

And it wasn’t just agencies. Major companies like Audi, Proctor & Gamble, and Coca-Cola used Klout extensively in the early days. So while the critics raged and whined, industry leaders saw the potential of this new thing called influencer marketing, and Klout was the epicenter.

Klout mattered

In 2014 Joe Fernandez sold his company to Lithium and became a multi-millionaire. He got married, started a family, and has been quietly working on a couple new start-ups in the LA area. Once it became part of another company, the energy and innovation that placed Klout at the top of its field dried up.

A Lithium spokesperson reported to TechCrunch that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation “expedited our plans to sunset Klout.”

Klout has never really stopped being the butt of jokes but the fact is, the people making the jokes don’t appreciate what the company actually accomplished:

• They pioneered measurement in what is now a multi-billion-dollar influencer industry.
• Klout has been the underlying technology for many other industry measurement platforms. Even today, the top influence companies analyze data very similarly to how Klout started doing it almost ten years ago.
• They developed a way to quantify the movement of content on the web. While that is not nearly as sexy as “influence,” it is a significant achievement.

Now that Klout is sailing into its sunset, perhaps the jokes will finally stop. At times in the past, I felt like I was the only blogger on earth who defended the significance of what Klout had accomplished. But I am also satisfied that I was right.

Farewell Klout, and thanks.

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.  Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

 

The post As it sails into the sunset, thoughts on why Klout mattered appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

There’s a heck of a lot of new technology available in the market. From artificial intelligence to blockchain, companies are inundated with new tools and solutions that promise to revolutionize aspects of their business they didn’t even know could be (or needed to be) improved. For executives facing intense pressure to keep up with the latest technology trends to remain competitive, figuring out what the true value is, versus more noise, is a daunting task. And unfortunately, this is leaving many companies to decide to stick with the status quo – so they’re falling behind.

A new survey by Gartner found that 91 percent of companies still haven’t reached a “transformational” level of maturity in data and analytics, despite this having been the number one priority for CIOs in recent years. As most businesses have not yet been able to fully implement and reap ROI for data analytics, which is the foundation of popular technologies like AI and machine learning, it’s clear these new tools still have a long way to go before they exit the ‘hype’ cycle and enter into operational reality.

But while the board may evangelize these major technology initiatives, what they need to realize is that these major digital disruptions are a long term strategy that require ongoing thought, planning and incremental tech investments. Simply having an end-goal to make AI a reality in your business to reap the many benefits it presents won’t necessarily get you there. Today, there are smaller tech trends that are fully operational and promise to bridge to the future. One such example is automation.

While not as sexy or media worthy as AI in grabbing business news headlines, software robots today can perform a lot of the repetitive and time consuming business tasks across departments with faster speed, accuracy, and ROI –  directly benefiting the bottom line.

But any business automation roll out has to start from the top. It requires careful planning and backing from the board in order for the c-suite to correctly navigate the changes it brings – operationally, culturally and technologically.

Here are three ways that the boardroom can break out of old habits and bring on the digital revolution.

Remove the bottlenecks

It’s clear that automation is at or near the top of the priority list, and the C-suite is beginning to reflect this.  According to a survey by KPMG, 25 percent of enterprises worldwide now have a Chief Digital Officer to lead this change.

However, the CDO has a long road ahead of them. A recent survey revealed that in 74 percent of organizations, automation is only being implemented by the IT department. Unfortunately, that’s a recipe for failure. On average, 25 percent of technology projects fail, and many more show little return on investment or need significant alteration to be successful. Often, it’s because IT projects are simply that: IT projects.

Automation isn’t just an IT function; it’s a function of the entire business, which means that a top-down leadership approach is critical to success. For IT leaders, getting C-suite buy-in from the very beginning not only establishes overarching business goals, it cements the project scope and removes potential bottlenecks or silos.

Be a champion

As the technology revolution continues, more and more business leaders are finding themselves boasting a new title: digital champion. A recent survey found that 68 percent of executives believe their CEOs are “digital champions,” up from 33 percent just ten years ago. It is clear organizations have come a long way, but there’s still a ways to go.

Today, those in senior positions must take the lead in the robotic revolution, and not just on the project scope. To spur true change, leaders must foster a culture that not only understands automation technology, but openly accepts it as necessary to carry out business functions. When business leaders evangelize the benefits on both an executive and employee level from the very beginning, it removes the fear of the unknown, allowing for open dialogue and communication across all departments.

Fan it out

With recent news reporting that a one third of jobs will be automated by 2030, a common concern for the human workforce is that robots are coming to steal their jobs. However, that’s simply not the case. Automation isn’t a threat; it’s an enabler. And, for employees who are mired in manual work, it will be a breath of fresh air. With effective leadership, employees can recognize the opportunity and shift attitudes towards incoming technology.

As the need for automation increases, business leaders can’t make decisions in a vacuum. Instead of simply swapping humans for robots, the C-suite must solicit feedback from the employees who will be affected by automation and look for ways to retrain or repurpose roles and duties. By focusing on the high-level strategic activities that require empathy and communication and giving them a say in designing new responsibilities, employees can bring real value to the business while feeling safe and secure in the midst of change.  

The business world is transforming, and technology is driving business objectives faster than ever before. There are a number of benefits to implementing automation, but it’s up to the C-suite to design a plan that allows the business to maximize return on investment. As with any new deployment, success starts in the boardroom.

by Dennis Walsh, President, Americas & APAC, Redwood Software

Dennis Walsh is responsible for operations of Redwood Software in North America, LATAM, South America as well as Asia Pacific. Walsh combines his business background and years in the software and services industry to successfully solve some of the most challenging IT and business automation issues.

Whether it’s going skydiving, traveling the world without an itinerary, or sampling new (and potentially gross) cuisines, we always seem to admire people willing to take the risks most of us aren’t.

We call them daredevils. We call them free spirits. We call them adventurous. But really what they are is fearless.

Fearlessness is a virtue, enabling seemingly average people to accomplish extraordinary things. But fearlessness isn’t the exclusive domain of adrenaline junkies, globetrotters, and iron-stomached foodies. It’s also imperative for success in today’s marketing arena—at the enterprise level and especially in a startup environment.

What’s a “Fearless Marketer” Anyway?

In my opinion, a fearless marketer is someone willing to take risks that their peers and friends aren’t. No, it doesn’t mean spending precious budget on new technologies willy-nilly or launching a campaign without proper preparation just for thrills.

It does, however, mean that they’re willing to take the challenges of the digital marketing era head-on and turn them into opportunities for improving connection, engagement, and experiences with customers and prospects. Historically, marketers have tried to insulate themselves from risk, failure, or the unknown because they fear technology. They fear the effort required for truly personalized customer engagement (the hallmark of successful marketing!) and the possibility of devaluing their efforts by partnering with other teams in the organizations.

By contrast, fearless marketers embrace novel approaches to their craft. They think creatively about how they approach their jobs, with many adopting agile methodologies from the software world that favor responding to change over following a fully-baked plan, rapid iterations over pie-in-the-sky campaigns, and data enrichment over opinions and conventions.

They work diligently to understand and navigate the increasingly cluttered MarTech landscape that now offers more than 6,800 solutions to devise plans for optimizing the 90 or so cloud technologies their enterprise marketing teams use on a daily basis. And, considering that even the buying process has changed considerably—there’s now an average of 6.8 unique stakeholders in purchase decisions—figuring it all out makes the challenge even more daunting.

Still, fearless marketers aren’t deterred. Instead, they lean into the challenge and happily take on revenue responsibilities, even going so far as to assign their team’s value to the organization and quantify it with return on investment (ROI) metrics. They do it by seeking to bridge traditional disconnects between sales and marketing teams, helping align the entire organization to better target audiences, improve customer acquisition efficiency, and meet revenue goals more consistently.

Fearless Marketer, Startup Edition

It’s fun to talk about Fearless Marketers as a catch-all term. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all descriptor, as a fearless marketer looks different depending on the scope and nature of your organization. More importantly, a fearless marketer in an enterprise has different challenges and experiences than their counterparts in a small company, especially a startup.

Like most things in a startup, every plan, every approach, every decision is heavily scrutinized. Each has exponentially more impact on the success (or failure) of the business in a startup than in an enterprise, where the sheer size of the organization provides a buffer and protects against unintended consequences of poor decisions.

The flip side is that startup marketers have greater potential for positively impacting the future of their businesses, provided they develop the ability to look past their fear of failure. In a startup, fearless marketers are ready for change, even welcoming it. They’re open to change and able to thrive in daily chaos, relying on clean data and analytics to make important strategic decisions even under duress.

However, fearless marketers must not depend solely on their tech stack to drive the company’s success and growth.

A large part of startup marketing success is knowing the limitations of technology—especially visibility and capability gaps that come with integrating so many moving part—and using your MarTech stack as a guide for your marketing efforts, rather than letting it dictate your entire strategy.

Instead, your best bet is to become intimately familiar with your target prospects and customers, using a combination of data-driven technologies and empathy to identify their pain points and address them with targeted solutions and support. Yet, to do that, you must be prepared to break with convention and be creative in your approach.

The Startup Marketer Hustle

Fearless startup marketers are scrappy by nature, often taking on responsibilities such as customer support, account management, and even business development that fall outside typical “marketing” activities. Wearing many proverbial hats means you’ll have to be inventive with how you use your time and resources.

While approaches like bartering or other in-kind payments may be frowned upon at the corporate levels, startup marketers should feel empowered to pull out all the stops to compete for prospects’ attention against larger organizations with deeper pockets. Fearless startup marketers are also resourceful, spurning the newest purpose-built tools with all the bells and whistles to focus on getting the most value from more versatile and utilitarian technologies because they believe they can succeed without spending unnecessarily.

And that brings us to the last, most poignant trait of a fearless marketer in the startup scene: confidence. Fear of failure—of not delivering on revenue goals, of not living up to expectations, of not accomplishing what so-called experts believe you should—is natural and expected, especially in a career path defined by failure (more than 75% of VC-backed startups fail).

Despite that, fearless marketers are self-assured. They’re confident in their own capabilities as well as those of their hand-selected colleagues and team members. They understand that outside influencers and mentors are important for gaining a different perspective and creating a more comprehensive understanding of the market so they can make smarter, more informed strategic decisions.

But they look to those influencers only for occasional guidance rather than a roadmap to success. The most successful, fearless marketers are hyper-focused on success on their own terms because that’s what really matters.

Are you fearlessly leading a startup? Tell me about your experiences in the comments.

The post What a Fearless Marketer Looks Like in a Scaling Startup appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

While B.C. premier John Horgan isn’t known for his love of oil infrastructure, last week it was possible to see him calling for new refineries to ease his province’s sky-high gas prices.

“Let’s make more (refined gasoline) here, creating more jobs here and relieving the enormous pressure on the travelling public,” he said.

Horgan is capitalizating on one of the most beloved and persistent myths in Western Canada: The notion that we would be richer, smarter and more employed if we could simply find a way to refine all of our oil in-house.

Unfortunately, the theory is flawed in almost every way. Below, a primer on why Canada lets people buy our petroleum even if we haven’t turned it into gasoline first. 

Canada already exports more refined products than it imports
In December, 2017 Canada imported 1.4 million of refined products while exporting 2.4 million cubic metres — meaning that Americans are burning way more of our gasoline than we’re burning of theirs. It may seem strange that Canada is simultaneously importing and exporting refined products, but keep in mind that we are essentially a one-dimensional country splayed along a 6,400 kilometre border with the United States; gas stations in Thunder Bay are generally going to have an easier time getting their fuel from Minnesota rather than Alberta. Either way, Canada’s relatively robust export market should make it clear that we have absolutely no problem refining our own oil when it is profitable to do so. As the points below will note, it’s the “profitable” part of the equation that’s the tricky part.

Even our existing refineries aren’t running at full capacity
Nobody has ever accused an oil company of not knowing how to make money. So it is generally safe to assume that if Canada could make more money by refining more of its own oil, someone would have thought to do that by now. Case in point: Even the refineries we already have aren’t running full tilt. In 2017 Canada’s refineries only ran at 84 per cent capacity, according to the National Energy Board. The story is a bit different in Alberta, where refinery utilization impressively topped 101.5 per cent in 2017 — but that still means eastern refineries are sitting on their hands up to one fifth of the time. There’s even some wiggle room in U.S. refineries, who worked at only 91 per cent capacity in 2017. It’s for this reason that Husky Energy CEO Rob Peabody said last month that North America is effectively maxed out on refineries. What’s more needed, he said, are new pipelines to connect Alberta’s oil with some of the continent’s more underused refineries. “If you can pipeline connect Alberta to North America, you don’t need a lot of new upgrading capacity built in North America – there is actually enough,” he added.

 

The people buying our oil generally aren’t interested in our gas and diesel
Last year, Canada exported $67 billion in oil. As with prior years, most of that exported oil ended up in the United States. Pretend that, tomorrow, Canada shut off all its oil exports and informed the Americans that if they wanted our petroleum, they’d have to start ponying up for some made-in-Canada gas, diesel and kerosene. The likely result is that U.S. oil importers would give us a blank look before immediately calling one of the hundreds of other places that could sell them crude oil instead. “They’re not going to idle all of their refining capacity to suit Canada’s needs, they’re going to do what’s best for them, which is to continue to run their refineries,” said Jason Parent with Kent Group, a leading Canadian oil industry analyst. One major problem is that Canada has a pretty hard time making gasoline cheaper than anyone else. The United States is the world’s most prolific refiner of oil — and most of its refineries are already paid off. China benefits from a one-two punch of lower labour costs and lax environmental standards. Against those odds, there are only so many ways in which a brand-new Canadian refinery could expect to make competitively priced diesel and gas. “Although the return is still below that of Asia, a new refinery could work in Alberta or British Columbia given the right circumstances, but not without some risk,” was the most optimistic forecast that a recent report by IHS Markit could muster.

 

Generally, it makes sense to refine close to market
A refinery is a bit like a brewery: You can put it anywhere. Alaska is famous for its beer, and yet the barley and hops to make it is almost exclusively imported from abroad. Similarly, Japan’s coast is littered with refineries despite the country not having a single domestic oil well. There are a couple reasons for this. First off, refined products expire: From the time it comes out of the refinery, a litre of gasoline can have as little as a few months before it goes stale. Secondly, every market decides to use its petroleum differently. For instance, about half of the transportation fuels burned in Europe are diesel, while in the U.S. it’s as low as three per cent. The advantage of selling crude oil is that it can be sold to anyone, anywhere and at anytime. Once it gets refined, however, it turns into a perishable product with a much narrower group of people willing to buy it. Think of oil like lentils. Canada is the world’s largest exporter of lentils, and most of those leave our borders in their rawest possible state as dried, split grains. Canada could try “value-adding” those grains by insisting that they be processed into Bavarian lentil soup before export — but that’s going to be a problem if an Indian freighter pulls up looking for dal ingredients.

It’s not really “raw” oil
It would be wrong to assume that Canada is simply stabbing a spigot into the ground, sucking up oil and then shipping it to the highest bidder. Canadian petroleum goes through an awful lot of job-creating steps before it gets squeezed into an oil tanker. In the oil sands there’s the not-insignificant process of separating bitumen from sand. There’s also primary and secondary upgrading, where the molasses-like bitumen from the oil sands is heated and distilled into a purer product that can move through pipelines without dilution — up to 39 per cent of Alberta’s oil gets this treatment. The gist is that there are already hundreds of well-paid Albertans in hard hats “adding value” to Canadian oil — but only where it makes financial sense to do so.

Western Canada has built precisely one refinery since the 1970s, and it’s kind of a boondoggle
It’s called the Sturgeon refinery. It’s in Alberta, it’s built by North West Refining and the entire project has been plagued by delays and unexpected costs that have more than doubled the initial cost estimate of $4 billion.
Most notably, it was able to open only with hefty government support. The former Progressive Conservative government of Alberta kicked in loan guarantees for construction, and promised to supply up to $20 billion in free bitumen over next 30 years. When it opened in March, 2017, Canada was in the midst of a fuel glut. “They are paying $9 billion to build that plant and its only processing 50,000 barrels a day of bitumen … it was not good investment by the crown,” John Auers, with the energy consultancy Turner Mason & Co., said at the time.

 

Other industries don’t get nearly as much handwringing about “adding value”
No politician is claiming that we should build massive bakeries next to Saskatchewan’s wheat fields in order to stop our national shame of sending “raw flour” overseas to be made into bread by foreigners. We also ship $2 billion worth of diamonds abroad each year, largely untroubled by the fact that foreign jewelers will be the ones to shape them into gemstones. The only exception is the forestry sector, where Canadians have similarly spent decades fretting about selling our “raw logs” instead of “value-added” products. But the theory suffers from the same pitfalls as the “refine-it-here” argument. First, there already is a substantial market for secondary Canadian wood products. Second, the people buying our raw logs wouldn’t suddenly start buying Canadian lumber if we asked them to — they’d simply buy someone else’s logs. “Certainly people would prefer to be sending out a finished product … but if you don’t chop down the trees then nobody’s working,” John Winter, president and CEO of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, told the National Post in 2011. There are ethical argument to be made that Canada should leave its forests in place rather than use them to support a few thousand forestry jobs. But it would be incorrect to assert that we’re leaving money on the table by selling a tree to China without first turning it into a credenza.

Refining isn’t all that lucrative
A common belief within the “refine-it-here” camp is that all the real money to be made in oil production is at the refinery. Last month, Green Party leader Elizabeth May told the House of Commons that the oil sector is foolishly handing foreigners a “low value” product that is “very expensive to produce.” A 2014 report by the anti-pipeline Council of Canadians similarly touted the notion that exporting unrefined oil provides “little benefit to Canadians.” But as Alberta’s sky-high wages would attest, Canada isn’t exactly parting with its black gold cheaply. In fact, oil extraction is the single most profitable and labour-intensive component of the oil supply chain. In 2015, University of Calgary Trevor Tombe published a whole paper enthusiastically dismissing the “dangerous” notion that foreign refiners are fleecing Canadians of their oil. In fact, by plugging in economic data from Statistics Canada he found that oil extraction created more value than any other Canadian industry, including refining. “Oil and gas extraction creates $1.36 million in value added per job per year. This is 15 times higher than the national average,” he wrote. A 2013 report by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute came to similar conclusions. “More value lies in petroleum extraction and its transportation, not in its manufacture,” it wrote. While any country with a coastline can get into the refining business, “only a few countries, like Canada, are blessed with ample oil supplies,” it added.

 

If you haven’t noticed, Canada has a bit of a problem getting its oil products to market
Five years ago, British Columbia media mogul David Black (no relation to Conrad) was in the pages of the National Post advocating for his Kitimat Clean refinery project. To be built at the end of the Northern Gateway pipeline, it would employ 3,000 people and generate up to $1 billion per year in tax revenue. “The refinery I am proposing will also be the cleanest in the world,” he wrote. Black even got the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to back the project and find buyers for its product. But then, the federal government kiboshed the Northern Gateway pipeline and the project fell apart. Meanwhile, Energy East was cancelled, Keystone XL may have been irreparably delayed and just this week, Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson tacitly endorsed stopping Trans Mountain construction with illegal protests. These are not the actions of a country poised to roll out the red carpet for export-only oil refineries. The nightmare scenario is that Canada embarks on a wildly expensive refinery-building spree, only to find that it has no ports or pipelines to sell it abroad. Supplies would glut, prices would plummet and whatever refining profits Canada once had would vanish. “You’d be destroying your own refining industry,” said Kent Group’s Jason Parent.

Good luck getting private investors to fund all these new refineries
Refineries aren’t cheap. Kitimat Clean would have cost $22 billion — about the same as Canada’s annual defence budget. And it’s not exactly an ideal time to enter the refinery trade. We already share a border with the world’s most prolific and experienced refiner of oil (not to mention the fact that most U.S. refineries paid off their mortgages long ago). Any new Canadian refinery would also be poised to celebrate its opening day just as North American oil demand is set to taper off. According to a 2016 analysis by BP, U.S. energy demand will peak in 2027 and “decline from that point.” Within that energy mix, meanwhile, oil is increasingly getting muscled out by alternatives such as renewables and natural gas. Add it all together, and “more Canadian refineries” is rapidly becoming a terrible place in which to bet a few billion dollars. And a note to B.C.’s Green Party-backed provincial government: Expending vast amounts of resources to build doomed industrial facilities is usually quite bad for the environment.

• Twitter: TristinHopper | Email: thopper@nationalpost.com

With the commercialization of the Web, buyers are fully in control of the sales process. Whether it’s a consumer looking for new cookware, or a commercial buyer sourcing new manufacturing materials, prospects are now capable of thoroughly researching and comparing potential purchases long before sellers are even aware that someone might be interested in them. Here is the terrible truth: according to marketing intelligence consultant IDC, two-thirds of B2B buyers engage a sales reps ONLY after they’ve already made a purchasing decision. If you’re a sales and marketing professional, that has to be downright scary.

The challenge for a sales professional is daunting – how can you persuade prospects that your products or services have value and you are worthy of their trust before contact has been established.

How should you use content to build trust

The short answer is, make sure you and your sales team are active online, offering valuable, objective information about your industry, market, and the products or services in it. Have that information readily available in many forms that prospects can access when, where, and how they choose. The good news is, IDC has also discovered that 75 percent of B2B companies considering purchases take up to six months to do so. That gives you plenty of time to get valuable information into the hands of prospects, even if they choose not to immediately engage with you.

Are sales reps irrelevant?

To loosely paraphrase Mark Twain: “rumors of the death of sales reps are greatly exaggerated.” The role of the sales representative is alive and well, it’s just evolved significantly over the past several years. Sales and marketing teams, instead of delivering all-or-nothing sales pitches, are now dispensing timely information to nurture prospects along the sales journey.

And not just any information – it’s a variety of content developed to be highly relevant at different stages of the sales process. Content that addresses the “pains” that cause the prospect to be investigating a purchase in the first place, and then increasingly detailed and helpful information that’s needed as they get deeper into their research and begin to have questions. The image below shows the Inbound Sales process stages aligned with the buyer’s journey stages (awareness – consideration – decision) at the bottom.

So how do you know what content is needed and when?

Fortunately, there are a number of marketing tools available that can aid your own research into customer preferences and needs. For B2B sales teams, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great resource for research into prospects. Social media monitoring tools can help sales gain insight into the behavior and biases of specific prospects and their markets. A content strategy session or two will help your team analyze the data revealed by these tools and develop a list of appropriate topics that can be covered in a wide range of content such as white papers, eBooks, executive guides, and blog posts.

Gaining critical trust and interest from prospects is all about delivering to prospects experienced insight into how you solved for other clients the problems they’re now facing. Be sure to back up those claims with objective third party research and client quotes to prove you actually delivered real solutions.

Trust is everything.

Effectively engaging prospects requires trust. Converting prospects into clients requires developing a relationship that builds their trust in what you say and the value of what you sell.

Building that trust revolves around four characteristics:

Capability Human nature leads us all to believe that we are better at certain things than we really are. Some believe they’re the world’s great lovers. Others that they could have played pro football. The truth, though, is usually less amazing.

What does this mean to sales professionals? That they should not overestimate their capabilities. For buyers to truly trust a sales person and believe in them enough to establish a relationship, that sales rep needs to bring actionable ideas to the table. To successfully demonstrate they can deliver a winning solution – whether it’s the right product to solve the prospects problem or a service that will really save them time and money. Whatever it is, the buyer must believe the seller is capable of delivering and is worthy of trust.

Dependability Honor your commitments. Successful sales reps say what they’ll do and do what they say. Establish clear expectations with prospects on what you will do for them and then do it well. Not just occasionally, but all the time.

Integrity Do the right thing. Weak individuals might be willing to fudge on something to close a sale, but that eventually catches up to them. Have a strong code of ethics and adhere to it. Buyers naturally trust sellers who truly have their best interest in mind, even if it means initially losing a sale. Prospects, however, always remember being treated fairly and that will eventually translate into increased sales as the good word spreads.

Intimacy Don’t be afraid to show your human side – you’re not a sales machine or automatic order taker. You are a fellow human being who has experienced the same or similar challenges and you’re happy to share a solution with prospects. Don’t be afraid to connect on a personal level.

Solve their problem, be genuine, add value and you will win

All prospects, regardless of what they’re buying, are looking for solutions for their problems – whether it’s new shoes with better arch support or a reliable Doppler blood flow monitor. By sharing valuable content centered around their challenges and making that content available at key points along the sales journey, you help prospects objectively research their purchases with solid information. This, in turn, develops trust and encourages prospects to engage. The result? A relationship that benefits both parties and provides the seller with a competitive advantage.

The inbound sales methodology is all about identifying the best prospects and engaging them in a way that delivers value and builds trust. Download the Guide to Inbound Sales and transform the way you sell to the modern buyer.

Image 1 Copyright: 123RF Stock Photo
Image 2 Copyright: 123RF Stock Photo

What’s the difference between business development and sales? Many founders we talk to believe the terms are interchangeable—simply two different ways to describe the same function… right? Not quite. Today, we’re talking business development vs sales.

Let’s start by clearly defining both business development and sales. Then, we’ll dig deeper into the differences, how they support each other, and which function needs to be your focus based on the stage your company is at today.

Want to take your sales game to a new level? Get free access to our ultimate sales resource library today.

ACCESS THE COMPLETE SALES LIBRARY NOW

What is business development?

The definition of business development is generating qualified new leads. The purpose of business development (in the context of a sales team—NOT in terms of product validation) is to research, prospect and create a pipeline of targeted potential customers to pass off to sales for further vetting and closing.

What is sales?

The definition of sales is generating transactions. The sole focus of a mature sales team is to close deals with the qualified leads that are coming from either your business development efforts or other lead generation strategies that are designed to start conversations with the right potential customers.

So… what’s the difference between business development and sales?

Put simply, business development comes first. It’s the act of generating well-researched, qualified leads to hand off to your sales team. Business development is all about generating leads, and the job titles most often associated with business development are roles like, Business Development Rep (BDR) or Sales Development Rep (SDR).

Sales comes second, and is wholly concerned with closing a winning deal with the qualified prospects that come from your organization’s business development activities. Sales is all about transactions. Titles for sales roles vary widely, but typically form around phrases like Sales Representative, Account Manager or Account Executive. 

Moreover, when you’re building a sales team from the ground up, it can be difficult to decide which role (business development vs sales) you should hire first—or to bring on more of in the early days.

The answer, as with most things in business, is… well, it depends.

Now that you’ve got a clear definition of the difference between business development and sales, start by first asking yourself which one sounds like a higher priority within your organization right now. Which role do you truly need today? 

If you’ve gotten clear market validation for your solution and are consistently closing a high proportion of the prospects you speak with, but just need a higher volume of leads to continue flowing through your pipeline, then hiring a business development rep and training them on how to prospect for the right leads should be your number one priority.

If you have more qualified inbound leads than you know what to do with, but you simply don’t have enough time to follow up with every lead, schedule a meeting, do a demo and close the deal, then your focus should be on getting more sales reps on board who can help close more of your hot leads.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but the reality is that it can take a while to get to this stage.

In the earlier phases of your business (or before acquiring funding as a startup), it’s natural for founders and other members of the team to take on both business development and sales-related responsibilities while resources are constrained before sales hiring becomes a viable option.

As long as the founder-driven sales stage is working well and your revenue is growing, that’s ok for a while. 

Over time though, the separation of the two roles should become more pronounced and specialized as your business begins to scale and you can afford to invest in better solving your bigger problem—generating more leads or bringing on salespeople to close more of the leads you already have.

Why you need to separate business development and sales

Let’s examine a few of the critical reasons why your business stands to benefit immensely by separating the roles of business development and sales.

Creating domain expertise in your organization

Since the advent of the world’s first automobile manufacturing lines in the early 1900’s, labor specialization has proliferated into countless other industries with massively positive effects.

Division of labor: Known as the separation of tasks within any system, the primary goal of clearly dividing tasks within your sales team, is to allow individuals to specialize within their roles.

Anyone who spends the majority of their day executing the same sets of tasks (that ladder up to a very clear goal) is likely going to build expertise much quicker than their counterparts who spend the day task-switching between multiple different roles and goals. 

Separating business development and sales within your organization is no exception. When you allow members of your sales team to focus solely on either prospecting or closing, they’ll develop a level of expertise at their role that’s otherwise very difficult to achieve.

Instead of splitting their time (and mental capacity), or task-switching throughout their entire day, your business development reps are able to focus on doing everything they can to bring more qualified prospects into the company’s pipeline. Conversely, your sales reps are empowered to work on nothing but the key activities in your sales process that are proven to close more deals and generate transactions. 

Creating an environment that accelerates the development of expertise is priceless in terms of organizational benefits—you’ll be able to generate more leads and close more of them.

Individual productivity gains

We touched on this briefly in the context of rapidly building expertise within your sales organization as a result of separating business development and sales, but it’s worth highlighting the productivity gains your team will experience at the individual level too.

When you have salespeople that are also doing their own prospecting (researching, qualifying, initial outreach), their calendars can quickly fill up with a myriad of different activities like conducting research, cold calling from a list of inbound leads and sending cold emails to prospects. Their calendars can quickly look like…

Known as cognitive switching, the act of consciously switching from one task to another within your day can leave you mentally exhausted. On top of that, studies have shown the quality of your work declines dramatically the more frequently you switch between tasks.

Psychologist David Meyer, PhD, director of the University of Michigan's Brain, Cognition, and Action Laboratory explains, “Although switching costs may be relatively small, sometimes just a few tenths of a second per switch, they can add up to large amounts when people switch repeatedly back and forth between tasks. Thus, multitasking may seem efficient on the surface, but may actually take more time in the end and involve more error.” 

Meyer reports that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone's productive time in a given day—time that you can’t afford to lose in a startup or SMB.

When you separate the responsibilities of business development and sales within your organization, you’re grouping similar activities together and making individuals responsible for a limited set of goals that are directly impacted by the activities they’re expected to do on a daily basis (having a clear connection to impact being one of the three things that make work most meaningful).

That elimination of multiple different types of goals allows members of your sales team to work on fewer tasks—thus empowering them to execute on single tasks for focused blocks of time. Which allows their calendars to look much more like…  

The fewer objectives your individual contributors (both in business development and sales roles) are responsible for delivering against, the more they’ll be able to focus on excelling and being more productive on the limited tasks at hand.

Business development requires more effort than it used to

The core functions of business development haven’t changed much in recent years, but the process of prospecting and qualifying leads has become much more nuanced.   

Business development roles are still charged with two main responsibilities:

• Prospecting: Identifying companies and people that may be interested in purchasing your product or service
• Qualifying: Determining if your prospect is ready, willing and able to buy 

Once a lead is qualified and has a strong likelihood of converting into becoming a paying customer, they’re passed off to the sales team for closing (and if need be negotiating the terms of the contract).

This means that business development reps do not ideally have quotas. They’re responsible for bringing in enough qualified leads to generate a certain amount of revenue, but actually closing the sale and turning leads into customers is beyond their direct control.

So, what’s changed in the world of business development?

It’s become increasingly difficult to reach decision-makers and to engage them the way they want, when they want. Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I answered a call from a number I didn’t recognize—let alone respond to unsolicited sales emails. 

The proliferation of conversational sales and marketing tools like Drift are proof of this dramatic shift. Your customers time is valuable, and giving them the ability to control when and how they interact with you is a serious experience upgrade, therefore your sales plan needs to grow and adapt with this shift. 

Beyond just better managing the experience of your inbound leads, it also takes more time to adequately research prospects, and requires more touch points on a lead in order to capture their attention.

Business development is more about relationship-building than ever, making it a standalone full-time position on any sales team.

At the end of the day, it’s not a smart investment to have someone responsible for a new deal quota, shifting gears between prospecting, demoing and closing within their work day.

How business development and sales work together (4 common questions)

Now that we’re clear about the separation between business development vs sales, let’s talk about how the two roles should best work collaboratively together, for maximum effectiveness on your sales team.

1. When should business development pass a lead on to sales?

Your sales team has quotas they need to hit, which means they can’t waste time talking to prospects that aren’t already well-qualified. Otherwise, they'll be wasting time and energy chasing the wrong leads and diluting their close rate.

Business development reps should pass a lead on to sales as soon as they’re qualified. However, that doesn’t mean business development teams and sales teams shouldn’t have a collaborative work relationship.

WeWork VP of Business Development, Scott Pollack explains, “business development teams should be identifying, evaluating, and pursuing opportunities to create long-term value for a company. This means BD teams and sales teams should happily coexist—the sales team gets to work on closing opportunities that can drive revenue today, while the BD team focuses their attention on opportunities to open new channels and drive a flood of new leads for tomorrow.”

As Pollack suggests, it’s incredibly important that business development teams focus their time, effort and energy on building relationships only with the most qualified leads that stand a chance of becoming happy customers. Then, they’re worthy of being handed off to sales.

How do you know when a lead is fully qualified and ready to be closed? That can vary a bit based on the type of product you’re selling and the market you’re serving, but starting with choosing from these 42 B2B qualifying questions to ask your prospects won’t hurt. 

In order to qualify your prospects, you’ll want to accurately gauge how well they match your ideal customer profile with key information around company size, location and industry. 

Next, you want to assess their needs to make sure there’s a true use case for your product, develop an understanding of their purchasing process to make sure it’s a match with your selling process, and assess other competitive options they may be considering.

If everything checks out and the prospect still appears to be a strong potential customer, then they’re qualified—and ready to be closed by your sales team.

2. Should there be overlap between business development and sales?

In terms of day-to-day activities? No, not really.

Business development should be wholly tasked with prospecting and qualifying. Sales should be focused only on closing those qualified leads and generating transactions.

However, your business development reps and sales reps do need to be on the same page about who your ideal customers are—their characteristics, qualities and the kinds of problems your offering can best help them with.

Due to the rapidly changing environment in startups, this requires frequent cross-team collaboration.

As CreativeLive Director of Partnerships and Business Development, Kimberly Pousman explains, “there not only should be overlap between business development and sales, but there needs to be overlap, whether you personally want it or not.” 

Pousman continues, “One of the keys to being great in either a business development or sales role, is asking the right questions. When you’re looking to grow and expand, you need to ask the right questions, experiment and actively source feedback from others—so if your teams are operating in a silo, they’ll miss out on valuable opportunities to learn from each other and advance your growth rate.”

Furthermore, the downstream effect is that if this alignment between business development and sales teams isn’t up to par, your sales reps are going to have a difficult time closing enough deals with the leads they’ve got, which leads to frustration and a close rate below the 20-30% industry average for SaaS.

If your sales team’s close rate is below 20%, they’re either not closing as well as they should, or your leads aren’t qualified enough.

3. What’s the difference in the day-to-day activities of business development reps and sales reps?

While the responsibilities of a business development rep can vary a bit based on the unique needs and internal demands of an organization, in general they’re responsible for two main tasks that sit at the core of this role:

• Managing inbound leads: This translates into working through an internal list, qualifying leads from various marketing campaigns and classifying the right ones as sales opportunities to be passed on to the sales team for further vetting and closing.
• Leading outbound prospecting: On the flip side, this kind of outreach involves researching and contacting potential customers that haven’t proactively expressed interest in your product through cold calls and cold emails—with the goal of qualifying sales opportunities for your sales team. 

On the inbound side of things, business development reps sit metaphorically between marketing and sales, filtering marketing leads and qualifying them before assigning them to the right sales rep that can move on to close the sale.

When it comes to outbound, business development reps need to first go through your organization’s sales training process so that they have a clear picture of who your ideal customers are before they go out and begin starting conversations with prospects. Depending upon the size of your company, your business development reps may or may not start with the beginning task of researching prospects before sending an email or calling.

Ultimately though, the goal of any outbound business development work is to start a conversation and develop a relationship that can be passed on to sales for closing. Everything a business development rep does, should revolve around finding more prospects, qualifying the right ones and routing them to your sales team for closing.

Now, let’s talk about the responsibilities of sales reps.

Keeping in mind slight differences to match your unique internal needs, most sales representatives are charged with the following main responsibilities:

• Selling: Closing deals (ideally with pre-qualified leads from your business development team to save time) using solid arguments and objection management with prospective customers.
• Maintaining relationships: Although a prospect might not be a fit to purchase your product or service today, that doesn’t mean they won’t be in a completely different position 6 months or a year from now—so keeping in touch with leads to encourage future sales is a major part of a sales rep’s responsibilities.

Most sales representative roles work against a sales quota—a thoughtfully calculated monthly or quarterly minimum for the number of customers (or revenue figure) they’re responsible to close. Sales reps are often incentivized with increasing levels of bonus payouts for hitting and exceeding quota within a given period.

The intense focus on hitting specific customer or revenue benchmarks each quarter is very intentionally designed to encourage sales reps to spend all of their time only on revenue-driving activities. More meetings. More product demos. More sales calls with qualified leads. More contracts sent out for approval. More follow up emails delivered.

In a mature sales organization, that means sales reps are empowered to spend less (or zero) time researching prospects, qualifying leads, and booking meetings. Those are activities a business development rep should be helping out with.

4. How does a business development call (or email) differ from that of a sales rep?

The biggest difference between the calls and emails that business development reps send vs those of a sales rep, is that most business development activities are done toward either completely or relatively cold prospects—meaning that these prospects have likely had little to no interaction with the company before this initial contact is made. 

That’s when brushing up on your cold emails and cold calling skills come into play.

By the time a sales rep is brought on to an account, the relationship has already been established and the lead is qualified, making the communications much more warm than those of a business development rep. The conversation with a sales rep is about how to make a mutually beneficial deal happen, rather than gauging the initial interest or need.

Bonus: The key traits you need to look for in every business development (and sales) hire

Bringing the right business development and salespeople onto your sales team is crucial in making meaningful progress toward growing your business. If your candidates don’t exhibit these key traits, our advice is to keep searching for the right people that will have a positive impact on your team.

Communication and people skills

If you hope to cultivate strong relationships with prospects and customers alike, having strong communication and people skills—like the ability to lead a friendly negotiation from start to finish so that the new customers you bring on are pleased with their decision, is crucial.

Navigating the process of converting a lead into a paying customer requires the ability to empathize; to fully understand your prospect’s situation and the use case they’ll have for your product to make sure that they’ll truly benefit from your offering.

Hunger and drive

The most successful salespeople (and business development reps) have an internal drive that pushes them forward and propels them to achieve their sales goals.

 In the face of a challenge, they’re not discouraged—rather, they look forward to the opportunity to excel, surpass previous expectations and move up to the next level. They’re often incentivized by the prospect of earning more money, and respond well to financial rewards for performance improvements.

Discipline and confidence

Discipline and the confidence in your process beats motivation every single day of the week when you’ve just gotten ten rejections in a row. No matter how skilled or experience you are, in sales there will be moments of defeat that can drain your motivation levels.

The best salespeople know that sales is a numbers game, and that the only way to recover from rejection & failure is to pick up the phone (or get back into your email) and keep executing. Having the right tools and systems, like our Power Dialer will also help keep your team on track and reaching peak productivity levels each day.

They’re consultants at heart

Just because a salesperson has mastered every tactic in the book and can sell ice to an eskimo doesn’t mean they’re going to bring in customers that’ll still be happy with their purchase decision one, three, six months down the line.

When hiring a business development or sales rep, look for people that view their role as partnering with prospects to make sure there’s a mutual win-win in each potential deal—ensuring that the customer has a genuine need for the product and that they’re actually a fit for your ideal customer persona of people and companies you want to serve in the first place.

Want to take your sales game to a new level? Get free access to our ultimate sales resource library today.

ACCESS THE COMPLETE SALES LIBRARY NOW

Want to increase leads and sales? Wondering how live video can help? To explore how to sell and generate leads with live video, I interview Nicole Walters. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and [...]

The post How to Generate Leads and Sell With Live Video appeared first on .

If used effectively, your CRM email program can be one of the most powerful marketing tools you have for building ongoing, profitable growth. Your program can help you stay in touch with a range of customer segments, providing each of them with unique value, while strengthening their relationship with your brand. To make you CRM email program more effective, here are tactics and strategies that absolutely need to be part of your CRM program.

1. Avoid DOA customer data. Approximately half of all US companies believed their client data was 75% reliable.¹ That means roughly a quarter of the sales leads, or worse, are DOA.¹ To improve your numbers, you can purchase or lease external data and have your data management vendors maintain and update your data. If you have an internal database, a thorough data-cleaning process identifying and deleting duplicates is essential. Anyone in your organization who enters data may need training to improve data capture for your CRM system. Ideally, you may need to choose or hire a data manager. This person’s purpose is to constantly monitor the quality of your CRM data. For all the time and effort your company spends to develop innovative, high-quality products and services, it would be painfully negligent to lose business to misspelled names, incorrectly populated fields, and flawed behavior information.
2. Segment your lists: According to the DMA, 77% of email marketing ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.² By collecting data on customer behaviors and interests, you can tailor the content of your email campaigns to each individual market and significantly increase conversions and sales. There are many creative ways to segment your lists. You may even want to brainstorm ideas for your brand and customers. Of course, you can segment by personas, buying frequency purchase interests. The real pay-offs in segmentation will come from exploring and getting to know the customers who flock to your brand. A recent study on list segmentation discovered that it:

• Increased email open rates 39%³
• Lowered Opt-Out/Unsubscribe rates: 28%³
• Increased Revenue: 24%³
• Increased Customer retention: 21%³
• Across-the-board improvements like this can make all the difference in your campaign.

3. Personalize or pay the price. No matter the type of business you run personalization makes an enormous difference. For example, by personalizing the service they offer, waiters earn 23% higher tips. In email marketing, personalized product recommendations in transactional emails can generate a 20% increase in revenues because they provide relevant choices to the consumer. In addition, personalized emails had a 29% higher open rate and 41% unique click-through rate.³ With the right personalization technology, you provide each customer, at scale, with rewarding experiences that support your business goals. But it takes more than aggregating data. It’s essential to use that data in context across all desired channels to heighten your brand’s relevancy to customers. Depending on your products, services, and customers, you may want to personalize in real-time, by location, local weather, or time of day—whatever enhances your brand’s relevancy to their needs. For example, Doggyloot, a company that sells pet supplies, added one field to their email signup asking for the size of the subscriber’s dog. This mattered. The email targeting done for large dog owners got a 410% higher CTR than average.¹ If Doggyloot had sent out offers targeting small dogs, their email would have tanked. Also, by personalizing your Websites to specific visitor data points, you can extend the time each visitor stays on the site and increase conversion rates. Let’s say you provide software solutions. Some customers may clearly understand your products and services because they’ve attended Webinars or downloaded white papers. However, other customers who are new to your products will need more introductory information. Tracking visitor behavior across relevant channels can help you personalize their messages more effectively. Mailchimp’s report on email subject lines (based on 24 billion emails) discovered that subject lines personalized with the recipient’s first and last name have the highest open rates. In fact, using the First and last name increased the email impact by .33.¹ The last name increased email open rate by .17, and surprisingly, the first name only had the lowest impact of .09.¹

4. Create email subject lines and content that avoids spam blockers. Spam filters and ISPs are getting more effective all the time. Accordingly, 21% of permission-based emails end up in junk folders.⁴ More than just your subject line, spammy content included your message body, links, images, and headers can raise your spam ranking. Spammy things to avoid include:

• Using special characters in words and phrases, like “Fr3e W!nn@r”
• Links to dodgy sites or content
• Including attachments
• Using URL shorteners, sloppy code and misleading subject lines
• Using hundreds of words like “free,” $$$, guarantee, and 100%
• All cap sentences, and !!!
• Making big claims, like “cures baldness,” “this won’t last,” or “cancel any time”

5. Keep subject lines short. A recent study found that subject lines with 6 to 10 words had the highest open rates. It’s probably the ideal length to communicate an idea, but not long enough to feel salesy or spammy. Another way to measure your subject line is character count. The length that is read most is 41-50 characters, followed by 31-40 characters. Go a little shorter or longer than these counts and you will start to see a decline in critical KPIs.

6. Get emotional in your subject lines. It’s the basic truth. Emotionally charged subject lines also perform better than those that appeal to our rational thoughts. There are a number of emotions you’ll want to test for how they work with your brand and message. For example, urgency is emotional. Remind people they are on the clock. Another good tactic is appealing to your audience’s curiosity. Tease them by saying there’s something they need to know. You could try something like, “John – You’ll love this,” or “YOUR NAME Company is killing it!” You can also simply express excitement and enthusiasm. Send something positive or joyful. These kinds of appeals feel more human and interesting than salesy or spammy.

7. Sending emails without testing the subject line will cost you. No matter how great the offer or valuable the content, if the subject line doesn’t work nothing else matters. Running A/B tests are useful, but there’s so much more to measuring the effectiveness of a subject line. The goal is to collect specific facts that can be repeated until the subject lines no longer work. Consider testing whether to include a first and/or last name in the subject line. Does including an offer improve open or click rates? Do lines that tease get more clicks? So much of this has to do with your brand. If you have an inherently playful brand, your audience may be more open to that kind of message. There is also a myriad of subject line testing tools. Some like Subjectline.com are free while others like Litmus.com are available on subscription. These high-tech solutions will enable you to determine how likely a prospect is to click on a given subject line before sending – this reduces some of the risk associated with traditional A/B testing. You can also use them to get important second opinions on subject lines for critical mailings (which ones aren’t?).

8. Make sure your emails are compelling to click through. In a crowded inbox, your email subject line, message, and visuals need to stand out. This point would make a great stand-alone article but, until then, here are ideas you can use right now. For starters, make the customer feel warm and fuzzy with a friendly “welcome” email, and include an exclusive offer. For example, Backyard Burgers gave away a “FREE” Classic Burger to new customers. This will set the tone for future emails from you. Try grabbing recipient interest with interesting visuals. Southern Proper, a regional clothing company, used a GIF that featured a fun range of long-sleeve shirts. It made the point that they offer lots of clothes without cluttering their email with tiny shirt images. Let’s also remember that CRM is about relationships. If a customer does something nice for you, say “thanks” with a discount or something that offers value. After all, that’s what customers signed up for when they agreed to receive your emails. Whatever you write, remember KISS. A recent study also showed that emails written at a grade-3 level performed 36% better in terms of open rate than those written at a college reading level and 17% better than emails written at a high school reading level.⁵ The study also indicated that free-flowing informal emails had higher response rates.

9. Aim for scannable designs with a clear call to action (CTA). Chances are, your email will be hitting busy inboxes. More often than not, they’ll be seen on mobile devices. A fussy design may look great on a big computer screen, but will look cluttered on a phone. Imagine if recipients were reading the email and had only one hand to scroll and respond to it. For these reasons, make sure your emails are highly scannable with a clear call to action. To create visual interest, try an animated GIF, but try to keep the file from getting too big. Just animate the part of the image that will benefit from the animation to ensure the email stays below 1 MB in size. Static images generally don’t attract the same interest. If someone is interested in your offer or product right away, make it easy for them to respond with a call-to-action (CTA) button at the top and bottom of your email.
10. Automate your email marketing campaigns. The ideal marketing automation platform can save your business time and money, and increase your conversion rates. There’s more to automation than making the sale (which is nice, too). It’s also about engaging potential customers on every step of their journey to becoming loyal customers who account for significant repeat business. Software automation solutions such as, Brandfolder, can help you identify patterns in behavior that lead to purchase. You can set up workflows to nurture clients who are making a buying decision, onboarding or renewing. For example, Brandfolder automated sequences send a targeted email to prospects who download two or more pieces of a company’s content. Once determined which information and service the lead is interested in, the software executes a preconfigured workflow to encourage the lead to take the next step closer to conversion. When handled effectively, email automation tools for lead generation and follow-up can improve results for companies when they don’t have to rely on humans to do all the lead follow-ups and tracking. A recent Harvard study found that customers who were contacted within one hour of their initial engagement were six-times more likely to purchase. That’s a number worth paying attention to.

This is just a sampling of tactics you can use to rev up your email CRM program. For a customized evaluation of your current email marketing, work with an agency that has proven strategic and tactical CRM expertise. Contact.KERN, an Omnicom Agency

[Footnotes]

1. CRM is nothing without Reliable Data! https://www.sparklane-group.com/en/2016/12/06/crm-is-nothing-without-reliable-data/
2. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-list-segmentation

Every B2B prospect is on a journey, whether you’re optimizing for it or not.

They start their travels without knowing where they’re going, and are gradually led down the path to a solution…

With help from every single one of your competitors.

A scary thought, right?

That’s why you need to position yourself as prominently as possible, every step of the way.

Snackable content on social? Here’s a Facebook Live tour of the office by our friendly team. Wondering how to streamline accounting? Here’s an ebook of best practices. Ready to buy? Take this fact sheet that shows how we blow competitors out of the water.

But, here’s the thing. A new buyer wouldn’t be ready for a hardcore competitor comparison if they don’t even know they have a problem yet. They need to be nurtured first.

That’s why you take it slow, and divide your marketing efforts into three primary segments: Top, Middle, and Bottom of the funnel

• Top funnel: Light, widely-appealing, brand-building campaigns that appeal to an audience that has the potential to be interested in what you’re selling.
• Mid funnel: Campaigns that connect the dots between the prospect’s pain and interests and your product’s benefits.
• Bottom funnel: The potent, high-converting stuff. Case studies with compelling statistics and super-relevant, industry-specific scenarios.

For every stage of the funnel, there are many different campaign types to choose from.

But, where do you put your budget?

In this 3 part series we will explore B2B marketing campaign types you can use across each stage of the buyer journey.

Today we’ll cover top of the funnel campaigns.

Let’s jump in…

7 Top Funnel B2B Marketing Campaign Types (with Examples)

Top funnel campaigns aren’t about your product or service. Instead, the goal is to capture the attention of a broad pool of prospects with specific interests and needs, while building a reputation as a valuable educational resource.

But if the goal isn’t to make money, what’s the point?

Leads at the top of the funnel need nurturing before they’ll convert. This is why top funnel B2B marketing campaigns don’t use aggressive “buy now!” tactics. The goal is problem recognition and mindshare.

Top funnel marketing is less about 158-page white papers and more about engaging, snackable, and visual content. These assets reduce friction, which is important because leads are less likely to consider a solution prior to any level of engagement or interest with a brand.

Here are different top funnel B2B marketing campaign types you can try.

Brand campaign

Brand campaigns aren’t the most high-converting content type in your toolbox, but they do net you a lot of mindshare in the market.

These campaigns are all about creating name recognition and building trust through continued exposure.

IBM on Snapchat? Definite branding play.

These campaigns are usually delivered on social media, with the goal of generating followers, engagement, and/or plain old impressions.

Example: Maersk

Maersk is the world’s largest operator of container ships and supply vessels. And, surprisingly, they’re a massive hit on social media.

In 2013, Maersk decided to send an employee from their Russian office out to capture stunning photographs of Maersk ships making their deliveries in harsh winter conditions. The campaign — centered around the hashtag #wintermaersk — was a success because it was launched in the midst of other companies having difficulties making timely arrivals in Russia due to the frozen Baltic waters.

The campaign combined shareable images with the implication Maersk is uniquely equipped to overcome conditions other companies cannot.

Spanning Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Maersk netted 150 new leads, which is huge in an industry with average multi-million dollar contracts.

In the year the campaign was launched, Maersk’s Facebook engagement was second only to Lego, and over three times higher than brands with more widely-appealing social presences like McDonald’s, Oreo, and Red Bull.

(Source)

Assessment Campaign

Assessment campaigns provide tools to prospects and leads that deliver customized marketing experiences based on personal input. This helps to accurately surface a pain point positioned towards the lead’s funnel position, size, or industry.

By getting user input on data like company size, monthly spend/budget, or the kinds of tech the company uses, assessments allow you to build a detailed picture of the lead. This data helps enrich the profiles in your marketing automation platform.

Your KPIs for top funnel assessment campaigns are views (unique and repeat), clicks through to the next step (engagement), and number of lead data submissions.

Example: Runzheimer

Working with Runzheimer, SnapApp created an assessment campaign targeted at decision-makers in the logistics space.

Actually, it’s more like three assessment campaigns in one.

The first question segments leads into three core personas, and offers an assessment based on the answer.

As the lead moves through to the next stage in the assessment, they provide additional information that helps build a picture of their recurring costs and agitate any potential pain points (“We’re really spending that much on maintenance?!”).

At the end of the assessment, the user is presented with the amount they could save by doing business with Runzheimer.

The assessment not only delivers a memorable interactive experience, it also associates a tangible benefit (cost savings) with the Runzheimer brand.

Open Education Assets

Open education assets are the reinforced concrete foundation your top funnel strategy is built on. Unlike ephemeral social ads, open education assets have the potential to place high in search and make you the go-to resource for easily-accessible, educational information.

Types of open education assets include in-depth blog posts, ebooks, and guides — anything big enough to impress leads, and they can get it for no commitment. More brands are using this tactic to stand out in the midst of an explosion of gated content.

Open education asset KPIs to watch include shares, views, and search rankings.

Example: Zapier

Zapier is known for focusing on customer experience. Their slogan alone says it all: Zapier makes you happier.

And what better way to show you value an audience’s time and experience than by offering a 207-page ebook — written partially by the company’s expert CEO — for free, with no commitment.

The book comprised a collection of blog posts, making it a lower cost choice than writing something big and valuable from scratch.

As well as offering leads a convenient package of customer support wisdom, Zapier essentially gets to repurpose past blog posts.

The book was a success, bringing in over 200 votes on Product Hunt; that’s more than a competing book on the same topic written by Intercom, a company that focuses on support.

In addition to the initial rush of attention from the launch and Product Hunt listing, the ebook ranks for over 3,300 keywords and brings in an estimated 2,500 monthly organic visits.

Co-Marketing Campaign

When you run a co-marketing campaign, you take advantage of the audience of another business that is aligned with the goals of your customer base.

For example, if you sell user testing software you could partner with a usability research firm and release content to reach their customer base. And the motivation for the research firm would be to establish themselves as thought leaders in the eyes of key industry players.

Think about how bees and flowers help each other.

(Source)

The bee gets the nectar it needs to survive, and the flower leverages the bees ability to spread its pollen. Both parties benefit from the relationship. The same idea applies to co-marketing. It needs to be a win-win.

According to Yurbi, the KPIs to focus on for co-marketing partnerships include lead participation in sales and marketing campaigns, deals won through partner channels, and partner-attributed attendance at events, whether that’s online webinars or in person.

Example: Apptive, Shopify and BigCommerce

Mobile app creation software company Apptive partnered with Shopify in 2014 to launch an integration between Apptive’s platform and Shopify’s API. This meant it was easy for Shopify customers to turn their online stores into native iOS and Android apps, all while retaining the power of Shopify’s inventory management infrastructure and back end.

“It has become clear that native mobile commerce apps will continue to grow in importance for our merchants. Apptive offers a compelling option for store owners looking for a convenient, affordable solution that is directly integrated with Shopify”, says Blair Beckwith, Head of Shopify App Store.

This partnership was more than just a co-marketing campaign. It empowered Apptive’s customers to use Shopify’s functionality, while Shopify customers could create the native mobile app their store needs to stand out.

Another example of a successful top-funnel co-marketing campaign is the partnership between Taco Bell and Doritos:

Together, they launched the Doritos-shell taco that became a popular menu item at Taco Bell.

Both brands were able to tap into the massive audience of the other, and drive millions of brand impressions.

Lookalike and Similar Audiences

Lookalike audiences (known as similar audiences in AdWords) are created by taking an existing audienc – homepage visitors, facebook fans, blog readers, product page visitors etc. – and finding new leads with the same interests/traits.

(Source)

You can get as broad or targeted as you like:

(Source)

For example, if you know you’re a hit with 35-year-old C-suite operations staff in the UK, there’s a great chance you can use those same attributes to find a fresh and high-converting market in Germany or Norway.

According to AdEspresso, KPIs to manage while refining your lookalike audiences include lifetime value, transaction value, total order size and brand loyalty.

Example: AppSumo

Noah Kagan spent $2,000,000 marketing AppSumo offers on Facebook, and found that the most cost-effective option is to use lookalike audiences based on your own fans and fans of your competition.

Systematically, Noah reduced costs and niched down into a very specific segment, ultimately optimizing his cost per lead to $3, and cost per click to $0.75.

Noah leveraged top funnel content (growth hacking tips) to reach exponentially more people with similar interests to his existing fans.

AppSumo was created in a weekend for $50, and just two years later it was worth over $1,000,000 and had 500,000 subscribers.

And the growth has continued:

Starting out, Sumo’s #1 goal was top funnel awareness. It stayed laser-focused on getting visits, and lookalike audiences were a core part of doing this in a cost-effective way.

Content upgrade campaign

Get more value from top-funnel organic searches and capture leads for your email list with content upgrades. There’s no shortage of evidence that content upgrades work. From Brian Dean’s eye-opening blog post boasting 785% more leads to LeadPages’ 180 new subscribers for one hour’s work, there’s every reason offer bonus content.

You can leverage top-funnel content that ranks for good keywords by creating simple bonuses like PDF checklists, extra tips, or a video version of the post.

After that’s set up, it’ll build your list on autopilot.

Here’s an example in action:

Example: Wishpond

(Source)

Wispond followed the 3-pillar content upgrade formula for this campaign.

It must be: contextual, relevant, and valuable. This means placing an irresistible offer at the right moment in a post, and making the offer directly related to the content.

Wishpond’s 5-step checklist — offered in a top-funnel guide to conversion rate optimization — was indeed an irresistible offer.

“Brian Dean improved his blog article conversion rates by 785%. We improved ours by 1,650%.”

To replicate this, go grab a list of your top 10 top-funnel blog posts by organic traffic and think of one simple content upgrade per post you could offer.

Tools like Sumo make it easy to display content upgrades on specific posts and devices with zero coding required.

Bonus tip:

Strapped for time? Here is a simple strategy I used to increase my monthly email subscriptions by 353%.

1) Go to the Behavior Site Content All Pages report and filter by organic traffic:

2) Turn a top-performing post into a PDF using the free Print Friendly PDF chrome extension:

3) Gate the content inside a popup or behind an in-content CTA.

Native ad branding campaigns

Targeting the publications industry decision-makers read with native ads is a reliable way to improve brand recognition in an age where ads are much more likely to be ignored than read.

According to The Mission:

“The key is grabbing the attention of today’s consumer and driving real engagement through content. Branded content can entertain people or teach them something, resulting in better brand engagement returns than standard pre roll content.”

The KPIs measured in the study in the table above — and the ones you should take notice of, too — include ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent.

Example: H&R Block

It’s important to remember that even enterprise-level decision makers are human, too. While there’s a lot of potential within niche industry publications, making a viral play with a hilarious article on The Onion helped humanize the brand and improve brand recognition:

Despite being of little interest to those outside the enterprise space, H&R Block has a history of a strong brand and good recognition outside its industry. According to FranchiseHelp, H&R Block is “the best known tax franchise in the world”.

Did you spot them in The Office, too?

Spot the brand

By planning to incorporate some of these top of the funnel B2B marketing campaign ideas into broader marketing strategy you can help generate demand and fill the rest of your funnel with engaged, quality leads who can be nurtured into customers.

But the top is just the beginning! Be on the lookout for the Middle and Bottom of the funnel marketing campaign posts in this series coming next week!