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It sounds like the set up to a joke: a former FBI hostage negotiator and a founder of an artificial intelligence startup walk into a room ...

In this case, though, it's no joke, but the basis for a lecture series. Sponsored by AI startup Node and targeted at sales and marketing executives and managers, the series is designed to help companies understand how they can boost their business by combining AI with the emotional intelligence possessed by their human workforce. 

"We're going to marry AI with emotional intelligence and we are going to smash through barriers really fast," said Chris Voss, the CEO of Black Swan group, who is teaming up with Node founder Falon Fatemi to put on the lecture series, which kicked off with a half-day event Tuesday in San Francisco.   

AI technologies such as Node's have become so advanced that they can not only help managers find the right people to talk to for potential business deals, they can even suggest conversation openers. That's potentially taken a lot of the tedious work out of sales jobs — and opened up new opportunities. 

"Technologies like artificial intelligence are going to be so pervasive we’re going to be freed up to really be able to focus on interactions with one and other," said Fatemi. 

That's where Voss, the former hostage negotiator, comes in. As he explains it, AI and other technologies have created the Jetsons-like world that we now live in. But emotionally and psychologically, people are still in the Fred Flintstone era. Business leaders can use technology to get sales leads, but they still need to know how to relate to and interact with other human beings. 

"My stuff helps you understand what's going on in Fred Flintstone's head so we can get to live in a Jetsons world." he said. 

The marriage of the two approaches could offer big benefits. Voss said he's seen people who have combined AI with human-based emotional intelligence techniques quadruple their sales rates. 

The initial event on Tuesday included sessions on advanced negotiating techniques, scenario planning, and examples of how to pair Voss' human skills with AI to close sales deals. 

Node plans to offer future events in the series in New York and Los Angeles, depending on demand.

SEE ALSO: Once Google’s youngest employee, this woman just unveiled a new search company that might make Google worried

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NOW WATCH: HENRY BLODGET: Technology may destroy jobs, but it also creates them

“Our customer experience team really wants to make systemic and strategic changes that span the company, so we only tackle situations that our normal business-as-usual processes are not normally suited to tackle. Those tend to be situations that span multiple parts of the company, span multiple processes, and where there is no one that is holistically looking at a problem, that’s where our customer experience team steps in.”

Take a page from VMware’s playbook. In my 2015 Customer Experience Transformation talk show with Eric Wansong, VMware’s Vice President of Customer Advocacy, he explained how his team adds strategic value across all company departments. “To warrant the investment that the company is putting in our team, we need to be doing significant things to change the company, and to do significant things you have to involve multiple parts of the company, you have to create a collaborative situation to solve complex opportunities.”

Transformations this team has brokered within three short years include changes to their software development cycle, structure of R&D teams, and new product development positions focused on human factors and user experience (novel approaches for the company). Eric explained: “Behavioral change needs to first happen within. Prove yourself first, and that will ultimately improve the customer experience. You’ve just got to get to the root of a problem and it’s often very deep in the organization and not on the veneer. Only changing or improving the veneer that surrounds the company is a pretty fragile approach.”

My commentary: This is a departure from prevalent practices of many companies’ focus on changing customers’ behavior and on optimizing customer touch-points and customer-facing staff. VMware’s practices are a more strategic type of customer experience transformation relative to the typical one-by-one follow-up with customers who gave low survey ratings and single departments chipping away at voice-of-the-customer insights they unilaterally control. VMware does that, too, but the focus is on cross-functional transformation. While rare in today’s mainstream customer experience management practices, VMware’s approach is shared by several other companies. These firms comprised the best-practice profile in the four-year study conducted by ClearAction. Note: systemic means holistic, whereas systematic means step-by-step. Both are needed in customer experience management in order to produce sustained growth.

A major driver of VMware’s customer experience methodology is the fact that customers now own more than one product across the VMware portfolio of solutions. “Now as customer’s use cases span multiple VMware products, their desires of us are not just functionally-oriented but they are becoming more experience-oriented.”

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“If you ask any leader here at VMware what they could do better, they probably have a list as long as their arm. There are time constraints, resource constraints, and financial constraints, so which ones do you tackle first? The biggest value that my team brings is saying ‘Here are the top two or three things that, if improved, would move the needle the most for our customers. Contextual information about the voice-of-the-customer helps to prioritize people’s thinking to change how programs are funded and resourced, and how projects are prioritized in response to that customer feedback.”

My commentary: Adding context to customer feedback ideally includes both internal and external data about what was going on in your operations and with competitors and other forces that preceded or accompanied customers’ perceptions. One of the best ways to do this is to present line graphs over time and super-impose contextual data on top of the customer feedback data. Percentages will be more compelling than averages because managers are motivated by seeing the size of their business that is at-risk or otherwise growing.

“After our analysis of our semi-annual relationship survey, the very first thing we do is we read out to our CEO and his leadership team. Then, based on the top drivers, we go out into the organization to the next level of leadership. We relay what was communicated to our executives, and we go into further levels of detail. Then we expand to every group within the company. So it is a cascade of information, and it typically takes about two months from the time the analysis is done.”

My commentary: A roadshow is a great way to build shared interpretations of customer insights. Cross-functional action planning workshops are one of the most powerful things you can do to inject customer-centricity into your culture, and simultaneously broker significant changes that your whole customer base will reward. After the first two or three roadshows you can train and coach people within each organization to conduct their own presentation as if you were there, in addition to driving progress within throughout the year.

“We’ve been doing this for close to three years now. First, we had to earn the trust and confidence of the executives that what we are doing is trustworthy and credible. Everything must be evidence based. Prioritizing top customer drivers of satisfaction and loyalty is key, keeps the company focused. Makes action planning easier. We often must bring disparate parts of the company together, for meaningful and systemic change to happen.”

My commentary: Prevention of issue recurrence is the best way to drive customer experience ROI. Recurring issues are costly for many reasons: as your customer base grows so does your servicing of these same old issues, they take a toll on employee productivity and satisfaction, and they erode customers’ trust and the hard work of your branding team, and they incur great remedial expenses by marketing and service in attempts to make up for what should have been done right the first time.

“This job and this organization is a privilege. VMware existed before our team was in place, and did very well. We are evidence of VMware’s commitment to continuous improvement and the growing importance of the customer experience. But, we must smartly use the money that’s being invested in this team by delivering value that is not already being delivered by another part of the company. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be a good user of corporate resources. Therefore, we uniquely solve complex, multi-faceted issues that require cross-company collaboration and coordination.”

Image licensed to ClearAction by Shutterstock.

Are you getting talent acquisition wrong?

Effective talent acquisition is about getting qualified candidates in front of decision-makers relatively quickly, but for various reasons this just isn’t happening.

Many studies indicate over 60% of applicants to a given job aren’t qualified.

Understanding the “why” of less-than-optimal talent acquisition is more nuanced, but here’s one place you can start. In a survey of 1,500 recruiters and hiring managers, their biggest turnoff about the hiring process was the time it takes to screen irrelevant resumes.

In fact, 43% of recruiters said they would “black list” those candidates from other roles in their ATS.

It seems that one of the major frustrations is simply the time involved on the hiring and recruiting side. Time is the most valuable non-renewable resource we have, and at work, time isn’t always your own. You are often called into meetings or needed to put out fires.

Talent acquisition professionals want to do more value-add work around building relationships, connecting with candidates, or setting long-term strategy, but they can’t because of demands on their time.

And one of those largest demands is the screening process, which becomes frustrating because so many resumes just don’t qualify.

How can we fix this time issue?

Introduce better tech

Technology and recruiting have had a spotty relationship, in large part because the ATS have been used badly for candidate experience.

On the backend, most ATSs aren’t “smart” systems. For example, it’s traditionally been hard to find old candidates or engage with passive ones.

Thankfully, that’s changing pretty quickly.

Newer smart software are powered by artificial intelligence, meaning they can increasingly learn what makes people effective in a given role.

Coupled with their ability to scan through resumes significantly faster than a human being, AI-based recruiting software is decreasing time-to-hire while increasing candidate quality.

That’s the sweet spot.

Will adopting more tech mean recruiters losing their jobs?

Ideally, no. The promise of any technology is to take your human talent and re-channel tasks and deliverables, while letting the software handle the more tedious parts of a role for you.

Effective companies should transition recruiter screening time into more value-add tasks around strategy-setting, outreach to new candidate pools, meetings with hiring managers to better understand new job roles, and interviewing.

What about diversity? Wouldn’t an algorithm keep picking the same types of people?

AI-driven hiring has the potential for increasing diversity from what we’ve seen so far.

What are some of the big KPIs that can be achieved with better tech?

Some of the main ones would include:

• Reduce time to fill from 34 days to 9 days
• Reduce cost per hire by 70%
• Increase their efficiency by 4X

Is the future of talent acquisition all about AI?

It’s about a mix of concepts including AI and automation, a focus on candidate experience, breaking down silos, and freeing up recruiters’ time for valuable tasks.

I just attended the HR Tech Conference and AI was definitely the theme of the day. The fact is, AI is becoming increasingly normative in business and HR and recruiting can’t afford to get left behind.

We need to research, understand, and embrace these technologies as productivity boosters and be thoughtful about how they’re changing how we practice talent acquisition.

It’s no secret that there’s more to delivering a push notification than typing out a ‘buy now, selling out fast!!!!!’ type message and sending it to your entire user base. In fact, that kind of indiscriminate spam is just one of many pitfalls that can damage relationships with your brand when it comes to push notifications. But get them right and they are by far the most effective way to communicate with users while they aren’t inside your app, helping improve some of the key metrics that your business may depend on.

Over the years, we’d like to think we’ve seen it all regarding what to do, and what not to do when it comes to push. We’ve helped world-leading brands build success by implementing simple techniques and tools that make the difference between an unwanted push and something of value to the customer. And what better way to demonstrate than by taking a look at some examples of the kind of push campaigns that in our experience really work. Hopefully they can inspire you!

Campaign 1 – Reducing Cart Abandonment In A Retail App

The unavoidable truth is that 7 out of 10 carts are abandoned on mobile. That’s a big number, and as a result reducing that figure is a simple way to immediately grow your business. That is exactly what a fashion app that we work with did by implementing abandoned cart recovery messaging. A push notification campaign enriched with unique personal and contextual data for each user increased conversions by 15.8%, generating over $6 million dollars that would have otherwise been lost. I think we can all agree that $6 million dollars counts as a successful campaign.

Campaign 2 – An Airline Reimagines Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Mobile apps have created new opportunities for companies looking to measure customer satisfaction. For instance, one of the world’s largest airlines sends push notifications to passengers when flights land and passengers are still on the runway – the perfect moment. These messages are triggered when airport geofences are broken, and ask passengers to take a quick and easy survey. When clicked on, the push deep-links to the simple in-app survey. Some 300,000 customers have already taken part in this ‘Rate My Flight’ campaign, with 92% rating that they were satisfied with their experience. A huge PR win (and more accurate and helpful feedback for the company).

Campaign 3 – Increasing Revenue Per User In A Casino App

Sometimes it’s the simple things that deliver the strongest results. A leading casino/slots business used a time-sensitive push campaign to notify users of a 20% bonus on tournaments for that day. But in a twist, these were targeted specifically to users that had been identified as having spent less time in the app recently. The results were impressive, with revenue per user increasing by 35%. Of course, it’s not always wise to offer discounts, as you don’t want to devalue your service or cannibalize product revenues. However, as shown in the example above, they can also be very profitable when sent to the right users.

Campaign 4 – A Games Company Sends Campaigns At The Perfect Time

At heart, push notifications have one core goal: bringing users back to the app. One of the world’s largest games companies used optimally-timed push campaigns to improve response rates to campaigns and thus drive greater engagement rates (a key metric in mobile gaming). Optimal timing simply identifies the most common time that each individual user has historically visited the app, and then sends push notifications at the specific time within a given window that each individual is most likely to respond. Again, this simple technique was incredibly effective, with an over 200% increase in engagement over the non-optimally timed variant.

Campaign 5 – A Learning Brand Increased Retention With ‘Day+X’ Messaging

Like any relationship, the early stages on mobile are the most crucial. People have large numbers of apps on their phones – and getting onto that screen is only half the battle. Staying there is the other. A customer specializing in online learning sent reminders and encouragement notifications to their students to nurture the relationship and make sure that they use the app regularly and get ‘in the habit’. Day 1 messages saw an increase in retention of 28%, Day 5 19% and Day 7 16%. This made a huge difference to revenue down the line.

The average office worker receives 121 emails every day.

For most people, an overloaded email inbox is anxiety-building, and often frustrating to deal with. So the last thing your customers need is ANOTHER boring email newsletter crowding their workflow.

Many of those 121 emails are likely coming from businesses, and some will get opened, while others will get redirected straight to the trash.

What is it that entices people to open and click the emails they receive from brands? And perhaps more importantly, how can you replicate that for your business?

The main purpose of this article is to answer those questions by illustrating how some of the best brands deliver compelling email newsletters. But before we get into that, you need to ask yourself one important question…

Should you have an email newsletter?

Email newsletters help nurture prospects at every section of the sales funnel. They can help onboard new audience members, and inform the user right through to customer retention. When used in conjunction with a full digital marketing strategy, email newsletters and sequences can really help drive home your product or service.

But they aren’t necessarily for every business. Maintaining a consistent email newsletter is time-consuming and requires a certain level of discipline, not to mention a regular injection of relevant content at your disposal.

If you DO, however, decide that sending out a regular newsletter is a good fit for your business and its customer group, then it’s important to learn from other successful examples to make sure yours stands out from the crowd.

Creating a great email newsletter for your audience involves a winning combination of style and substance. Consistent branding and a compelling headline are key to getting lots of opens and clicks, but without great content and strong calls to action, the newsletter itself won’t serve much of a purpose.

Fortunately, there are plenty of best-in-class examples of newsletters out there already that you can use to help style your own. I’ve picked some favourites from around the web and highlighted what I think they do right. While they are varied, targeted at diverse audiences with different needs, I find they do many things the same, including:

• Consistent branding
• Responsive formatting that works across devices
• Calls to action
• Clear social sharing buttons
• Personalisation (such as addressing the recipient by their first name)
• Credible business information in the footer
• Effective, to-the-point copy organisation and formatted with compelling design

Below you’ll find 13 of the best email newsletters along with descriptions of what I think they do right – from their content through to their design. They are in no particular order.

1. NextDraft

Dave Pell’s NextDraft is a trusted daily news aggregator that’s run by a human instead of an algorithm. Visiting about 75 sites daily, Dave picks out the best of the best and delivers it straight to your inbox.

While NextDraft has an app, the email newsletter is the lifeblood of this service. Without it, NextDraft simply wouldn’t exist. Pell really needs to make it work and we think he does. Here’s why:

It has memorable branding, big and bold at the top of the screen, NextDraft’s typeface is eye-catching and the logo is memorable and simple. ‘Powered by Betabrand’, a San Franciscan clothing company and current NextDraft sponsor, is also clearly visible. Previous sponsors have included WordPress.

In an interview with Techcrunch back in 2014 Pell says of his newsletter:

“The idea is I want you to feel like you are just getting an email from me that you could reply back to… it’s always the personal stuff people remark on. We’re all dying for human connection on the web”.

In keeping with its editorial and curatorial tone, NextDraft’s layout is simple and consistent. 10 sections clearly divided by number and heading outline key stories for the day in Pell’s witty, concise fashion. Outbound links clearly marked in green, a colour thematically relevant to the branding. It is this minimalist approach that makes NextDraft so appealing to around 200k subscribers.

Each section is comprised of a couple of paragraphs, with subdued social sharing buttons at the end of each section. In keeping with the minimalist nature of the layout, these grey buttons work well. In a brighter, more visual layout, they might be lost in the grey.

Finally, Pell ends each newsletter with

Thanks

Dave Pell

Managing Editor, Internet

This cheeky, confident sign off creates a personal connection and is terrific branding. After all, who wouldn’t want to be managing editor of the internet, even if it is a made up job? Social sharing and the ‘head’ logo are also included right after, along with business information and calls to action in a separate grey box.

Like just about every email newsletter I look at in this article, there is also an option to unsubscribe.

2. InVision

InVision is a prototyping application for UX designers. It helps you take an idea and turn it into something more tangible, with clickable designs and smart workflows.

Seeing as their whole organisation is built for designers, InVision needs really high standards for their own marketing collateral, and they certainly don’t disappoint. To a database of over 2 million users, they distribute a regular email newsletter with a collection of the best design articles from around the web.

Here’s what it does really well…

First of all, they kick off the newsletter with a compelling headline. It leverages “Halloween” to make it current and contextually relevant based on when the email was sent. But that’s not the best part.

The phrase at the end of the headline is where this one gets really interesting, “only designers will understand”. They know exactly who their audience is, and they also understand that their audience, “designers” like to be included in an exclusive group. This headline makes them feel like they are apart of the inner circle.

The other great thing about the top of this email newsletter is that it starts with the InVision logo on the left. Brand recognition is immediate, and trust and credibility follow.

As you make your way down the newsletter the brand colours are consistent, and there is absolutely no confusion as to who this email has come from.

They then round out the email with one more subtle logo and some social sharing buttons. The social sharing buttons create familiarity and encourage people to interconnect with the brand on other platforms. The logo? Well, that just further embeds the brand name in the reader’s subconscious.

Another thing that works really well with this email newsletter is the use of a diverse set of visuals and regular call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

They start off with a caricature, but as the email continues there is real-life photos used, as well as graphics. All of the images are high-quality and contribute to the overall experience of the email.

To reinforce each of the images and their supporting articles, there is a strong, brand congruent CTA button under each. The CTA text for each button is also descriptive and varied, drawing the eye to the button and increasing the chance of someone clicking on it.

3. Medium

Medium is a social blogging platform with a reputation for long-form writing, minimalist design, and authority on a wide range of topics. Medium’s success is down to leveraging those key traits to encourage writers of all backgrounds to make great content that others can engage with, comment on and share.

Medium’s email newsletter has a pretty simple goal. The daily digest is a small, curated list of popular daily articles delivered to your inbox in the hopes that you will spend more time on Medium. Let’s break down some of the key elements, starting at the top.

The subject heading is eye catching and makes good use of the space provided. “The Polygamy Question” is an enticing topic, not outside our understanding, but potentially outside of our experience.

This is one area where great Medium articles can really work their magic, by being easy to understand, yet pitched from a position of authority. The rest of the subject line backs this up “Published in Arc Mag by Berry Belvedere”.

The sender isn’t just ‘Medium’, it’s Medium Daily Digest. This helps with consistency and differentiates these emails from account related emails the recipient might have from Medium.com. A small but important detail.

In the newsletter itself, we see the Medium logo and newsletter name in grayscale, as it would appear on the website. The first text tells us the content is recommended by Medium staff, then you get into the first image, which relates to the feature article.

A quick perusal of the Medium site shows their love of particular colour palettes, bright green, deep blues or purple and a not-quite-fuschia pink. You see this colour scheme reflected in the main image. This consistency subconsciously orientates the regular reader with the Medium colour palette and branding.

It’s also worth noting how the four recommended articles are laid out:

• The first includes a large feature image, larger text and takes up more than half the email body.
• Article 2 features a long title and is text across the width of the email.
• Articles 3 and 4 have featured image thumbnails accompanying the text.

Not only is this cohesive yet visually diverse layout a bit more exciting than a simple list, it is also a great opportunity to run a bit of A/B split testing on what people actually want to read and how the position of that content affects readers.

The bottom of the newsletter offers up a strong call to action ‘Follow your interests’ in Medium’s traditional green, followed by familiar social icons and app store icons to download the medium app. It’s a three-way party for Medium.com. Their newsletter not only drives traffic to their most popular articles, it also encourages social sharing and app downloads.

Finally, we see relevant business information and unsubscribe options in the footer.

4. Brain Pickings

Brain Pickings is a fabulously bespoke website and blog by writer Maria Popova. It delves into topics of art, science, philosophy, poetry and history as a self-styled ‘one-woman labor of love’. Donations fund the progress of the website, which began as an email newsletter among friends founded in 2006.

Brain Pickings history as an email newsletter shines through. This isn’t merely a short reminder of what you can see at the Brain Pickings website, it’s a fully-fledged document, rich with content. There’s a solid 20 minutes worth of reading here. Interspersed we find:

• Inline citations and links that encourage readers to delve deeper
• Robust quotes marked in their signature yellow. Popova doesn’t only review books, essays, and texts, but includes deep quotes, giving insight into the texts under review.

• Images and pictures, some intimate portraits of authors and muses, others stunning and moody artworks that amplify the reading of the text.

The bottom of the newsletter includes another yellow box with a gentle call to action to donate and support, mirroring the same request higher up the page.

Brain Pickings is a rare sort of newsletter. A literary journal of kinds that extends outside academic circles. Its success is an inspiration for any small organisation or self-starter, and lessons in care and attention to detail, with a focus on beauty, should be heeded.

Tip: Spend a little bit of time on the Brain Pickings website and you’ll be greeted by a popup to subscribe. The popup auto fills your email (if your browser allows it) and addresses the ‘pop-ups aren’t classy’ issue by focusing on Brain Pickings as ‘contemplative reading’. While the audience for BP might be deep thinkers and readers, the lessons here are valid for any organisation.

5. General Assembly

Let’s get right to it with General Assembly, as there’s plenty of ground to cover. General Assembly is a collection of international learning and accreditation campuses for all things digital, from web design and coding to marketing and data science.

As such, General Assembly’s website must be clean, functional and cutting edge. It’s a fine line to balance, but the team does it well. Elements of this can be seen in the General Assembly newsletter. Starting from the top:

The subject is ‘Keep Rising’. Anyone that’s been around the digital industry knows that almost all industries on the web evolve at a rapid pace. Coders must keep up to date with the latest libraries and languages, marketers need to know trends and best practice, product managers must be on the pulse at all times. In this primordial world, General Assembly knows their customers, people who either work or want to work in digital industries, want to be at the top.

This is how General Assembly positions itself and right from the get go they show us that ‘Yes, we understand what you want.’

The newsletter header is straight from the website, clean, bold, and with several menu options that can drop the user onto a relevant web page if desired.

What comes next is where this General Assembly newsletter really shines. GA’s goal is to sell courses, but the purpose of this email is to address the digital industry through a particular lense. It’s right there in the big text.

“What if you’re really good at…”

Who among us hasn’t felt some sort of dissatisfaction with their current career or life path? Who hasn’t thought; ‘Maybe I’d be better as a…’

General Assembly is banking on that.

Let’s look at this paragraph of copy.

Things it does right:

• Asks questions, provides suggestions.
• Highlights (in bold) the key text.
• Brief and to the point copy.
• Includes statistics.
• Suggests sharing with your boss (Part of GA’s target market).

Next, we get a series of coloured boxes with bold letters as acronyms for the various qualifications (and jobs) you can learn at General Assembly. Each box is underlined by the actual name of the job, a quick blurb and a link to the syllabus. Great!

What’s really unique here, is what these boxes look like. Remember, the aim of this newsletter is to help readers figure out what ‘type’ of a digital expert they might be. Does this layout remind you of anything?

The Myers-Briggs Personality test is often presented in much the same way. Here, General Assembly is leveraging this common presentation of a ‘type identifier’ to stimulate our curiosity. It’s not easy to make work seem exciting, but General Assembly has really nailed it.

The newsletter closes out with copy inviting us to an info session and a strong call to action. GA know its stuff!

6. SaaS Weekly (Hiten Shah)

Saas Weekly, as you might have guessed by the name, is a weekly newsletter about all things Software as a Service. It’s produced by Hiten Shah, a fact we know immediately as the header contains both his name and a display pic, as well as calls to action to both, view the newsletter on the web and reply to Hiten with suggestions for next week’s digest.

Viewing on the web is a common call to action on many newsletters. Not only can web-hosted versions of your newsletter act as search engine friendly anchors for discovery, it can also help readers who use email clients that might not format your newsletter properly.

The subject header promises a blog worthy topic, 7 Principles to Mastering Growth Marketing, a topic that would be of interest to a SaaS audience and with a high degree of shareability. The sender is also personalized, it’s not sent from SaaS Weekly, but rather Hiten Shah.

The body content of the newsletter is detailed. In many ways, it is similar to the Brain Pickings newsletter, though with obvious differences in content and target audience.

Sections are clearly defined by black box/white text headers, each touching on a broad category in the SaaS world (Business, Marketing, Product) as well as Hiten’s Pick. There’s also a plethora of infographics, image quotes and a collage that help break up the text blocks and give context to each section.

Calls to action are represented by compelling and clickable headlines and in-line links. The actual content is curated, sourced from a variety of websites around the web. Each of these is listed beneath the article copy.

Hiten also does a few other interesting things to keep this lengthy newsletter interesting:

• Use of dot points breaks up reams of text (like I’m doing right now).
• Copy is to the point.
• Format is consistent and works across desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.
• There is credible business information and unsubscribe options in the footer.

Hiten Shah’s SaaS Weekly is a great example of how to create a long form curated newsletter. If you work in the software, technology and digital marketing space you might want to check out SaaS weekly as both an informative newsletter and a best practice guide to newsletter formatting.

7. BuzzFeed

When we think Buzzfeed we think news and current events in a mixed media format. Buzzfeed’s listicles and pop culture approach to news have made the news site one of the most popular websites in the word. In fact they are so popular Buzzfeed is able to segment its news and entertainment delivery into several ‘channels’.

Buzzfeed News provides a daily update of what’s popular in the media, delivered straight to your inbox in newsletter format.

Here’s what they do right, starting from the top with the subject line: “Better off without their support”

Framed a quote, it entices us to open the email.

• Who said this?
• What were they referring to?
• It seems controversial, maybe I should read it?

The sender is Buzzfeed News. We already know Buzzfeed has multiple channels. This tells us exactly which channel it’s from, and what you can expect inside.

Like most of the newsletters I’ve reviewed, BuzzFeed’s logo is great branding and helps further orientate the reader. From here, the newsletter is clearly delineated into sections.Using red coloured ALL CAPS text, we can easily find:

• ‘Here Are The Top Stories’
• What BuzzFeed is keeping an eye on (i.e. trending).
• Did you hear about this? Sounds intriguing, I want to know more.
• Quick things you should know. A recap of news from around the world.

BuzzFeed’s approach to media delivery includes lots of gifs, captioned images, and tweets. In this newsletter, tweets are used to underline two of the top stories, one about Donald Trump, the other about Samsung’s exploding Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. Both are comical in their own way but serve to highlight the reality of the news reports and give a sort of ‘connected authenticity’ to BuzzFeed’s reporting.

Similarly, the final captioned image from a Kardashian not only finishes the news report on a lighter note but helps to ‘sum up’ the newsletter.

Finally, Buzzfeed’s use of inline citation links as calls to action is probably best in class. As I noted in some of the examples above, there are a few ways to use links in a newsletter. Some sources, like Medium, prefer a more structured approach. While Buzzfeed’s newsletter is structured, the links are placed contextually over phrases that match the news story. This lets BuzzFeed supply multiple links for a single story, and gives the reader more insight into the angle of the article they are clicking on.

8. J Crew

Crew is an American fashion brand that focuses on functional, well-priced garments. Their newsletter is a great example of how a fashion brand can use email marketing to both showcase products and provide value to their audience.

One thing that jumps out straight away in this J. Crew email is that there is no mention of discounts or specials in the subject line. Instead, we’ve got two solid calls to action in a news-style format.

Crew’s newsletter clearly offers discounts between the header and the ‘Freak-Out List’ text, so why isn’t that included in the subject line?

Here are some reasons why I think J. Crew took this option:

• Standing out: Our inboxes are full of ‘10% off till Monday’ and ‘Buy 2 get 1 free’. It’s not uncommon for us to scan our inbox and ‘discount the discount’. J. Crew offers value in the form of a curated list.
• Taste: Your audience matters. J. Crew markets itself as tasteful basics, fashion that is affordable and timeless. The discount is more tastefully placed inside the newsletter
• A/B split testing: Trying different subject headers gives you opportunities to test open rates and see what works.

In keeping with the understated style of the newsletter (and brand), the body is simple and effective. Images with short copy and links to each of the products. The image and text pairings are alternately justified to give a ‘lookbook’ style to the newsletter, and model and product shots alternate to make the copy that little bit more compelling.

Crew uses text minimally but effectively. The goal is to suggest how and why you might wear this product.

Two strong calls to action are featured near the bottom of the newsletter, offering the audience the whole list of curated topics, and to shop for new arrivals. Presenting two options can be better than one, as it empowers the reader to chose, rather than decide and move on.

The subject line made a bracketed promise to show us the new workout collection. At the bottom of the newsletter, we have a single image and some copy introducing a New Balance/J. Crew tie in. It works as a value add. The use of a different model and imagery tells us it’s something different, and mentioning New Balance, a known sports brand, works as a kind of reveal (as it’s not mentioned in the headline).

9. NY Times

The NY Times is an international news source and one of the most well-known ‘newspapers’ in the world, so you’re expecting big things from this newsletter. Of course, the NYT delivers.

The main topic of the newsletter is, “What we’re reading”, which isn’t about articles published in the New York Times, but rather from other sources written by or selected from New York Times contributors.

The sender is NYTimes.com, a stylistic choice that helps advertise the website and provide authority. An actual domain name would appear in lower case (nytimes.com). Here, the newsletter team has chosen to capitalise the NYT. This choice leverages the clout of a well-respected news service.

The newsletter begins with classic New York Times branding and a large heading that echoes the subject line promise ‘What We’re Reading’. This is followed by a strong call to action to share with friends.

From here, NYT employs an almost fanatically consistent formatting for the curated stories in their newsletter. Framed and bordered, each article stub includes an equally sized feature image, article heading, source website, copy, author and link to the full content. Most articles use the ‘Go’ link while the first also uses an inline citation.

The framing of each article snippet in near identical formatting provides New York Times level of consistency and NYT-ifies the newsletter and the content. The articles might be published on other sites, but NYT is the curating authority, keeping their brand front and center in the hearts and minds of their audience.

10. Startup Digest

Startup Digest is a hyper focused newsletter about startup culture. Depending on where you are located, the website will change to suit your local area. So for us here in Sydney, the top banner says: “For all things startup in Sydney and around the world”.

It’s highly focused subject matter and the newsletter creator, Miriam Meima, leverages that by personalising the email using her own name. The newsletter name is contained in the subject line. Though her target audience isn’t necessarily small, startup culture is a community that networks heavily and relies on personal branding. Knowing each other is important, and Miriam knows that.

Startup Digest uses some fantastic elements in the newsletters that help it really stand out. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the Medium and General Assembly newsletters. Let’s take a closer look.

• Consistent pallet: The use of colour symbolises technology on the cutting edge. Though the digest isn’t directly about technology, it’s safe to say that most startups and startup culture participants are interested in tech.
• Topic/Theme: While the digest is dated, it’s also themed. Startup Digest is telling us right from the beginning that this week’s newsletter is about Leadership & Resilience. That makes it both topical and evergreen, as well as shareable among coworkers, colleagues, and friends.
• Authorship near the top: I already noted the personalised nature of the Startup Digest newsletter. Right after the first paragraph of copy, you’re drawn to the author. There’s an image, a clickable email address, and Miriam’s name is mentioned 3 times in the space of a dozen words (not to mention it’s viewable above the fold from the sender. When it comes to personal branding, Miriam has it on lock.

Startup Digest provides a couple of ads before the content begins. One asks a question, the other provides a time limit ‘Applications closing soon’. Both are relevant to the audience and include the branding of their advertisers.

The newsletter then links out to 4 articles from around the web. It’s interesting to note that the newsletter doesn’t produce this content itself. The actual sources; Inc, HBR, and Mashable, are listed next to the author names and beneath the eye-catching and consistently coloured header links.

Startup Digest shows how a small operation can provide great value by simply curating an interesting list and presenting it in an eye-catching format.

11. Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a fun, popular website that helps users find products and services that are trending around the world. Users can filter by niche and product type. It’s a great discovery tool, and the Product Hunt Daily Newsletter keeps to the theme of providing discovery of new and exciting software, products and services.

The subject line is one of the best examples of email done right. “The geekiest email you’ll receive today” is both a challenge and a promise. The glasses and chart emojis both reinforce that, as well as offering a glimpse into what it’s actually about. Most importantly, in a world of bland and overused subject lines, they stand out.

Product Hunt does all the little things right. The sender is Product Hunt Daily which tells you immediately what it is and what it isn’t, and the address hello@ is friendly, cheerful and easy to remember.

This cute, geekish aesthetic continues into the body text, where you’re greeted by a rather eye-catching image of a spreadsheet. If you never thought you’d hear those words together, you’re not alone, but it does go to show just how well put together this newsletter is.

The first ‘theme’ in Product Hunt’s geekiest email is ‘spreadsheets’. Note the image takes up roughly the same amount of space as the text which is divided into:

1. A paragraph of copy that talks about spreadsheets without being dry or boring.
2. A series of dot points each linking to a spreadsheet product.
3. A call to action to learn more about Google Sheets.

Product Hunt makes use of several calls to action throughout the newsletter. We see a blue box with some quick links to API libraries and another brand colored CTA ‘See more’ after a list of ‘Yesterday’s top hunts’.

You also encounter more emojis throughout the newsletter, making the experience fun and personal. Product Hunt also makes use of social proof by using a collection of display pics underneath each product to ensure that each listing is endorsed by real people.

I’ve touched on how cohesiveness and consistency in branding, layout, and design can make an email newsletter a success, but Product Hunt also shows how creativity and personalisation can make a newsletter more entertaining and engaging for the core audience.

12. UX Design Weekly

There’s not really any doubt who UX Design Weekly is targeted at. User Experience Designers, coders, User Interface Architects, Digital Media Specialists and more broadly, people who build the front-end of the web.

Similar to Dave Pell’s Next Draft, UX Design Weekly is a regularly issued newsletter of links from around the web. In keeping with the design focus, UX Design Weekly makes use of white space, consistency, and brevity.

Broken up into sections using a simple colour scheme ‘Articles’, ‘Tools & Resources’, ‘Media’ etc, each curated link is coloured in the same electric green of the brand logo with a brief text description in a soft, easy to read grey.

While the taste might not suit everyone, UX Design Weekly knows it’s audience. It closes out with a quote from respected art director Dan Mall, and the footer offers options from sponsorship and job posting to following on Twitter. There’s also a heart emoji used to personalise a fairly impersonal newsletter.

As we close this one out, it’s also worth noting the subject line. Three tantalizing tidbits squeezed into a small space.

1. Interaction Design is Dead: This seems like big news for anyone involved in UX.
2. iOS 10 Lockscreen UX: iPhone’s iOS is incredibly influential in User Experience and Design. The lock screen represents a new space to build on.
3. Obvious Always Wins: Like the newsletter itself, UX loves clarity and obviousness.

UX Design Weekly’s newsletter combines minimalist curation with a deep understanding of their audience to produce an excellent and eye-catching newsletter.

13. Buffer

Buffer is an app and web service that helps people and companies better coordinate and manage their social media platforms through a single, user-friendly interface.

The sender ‘Kevan from Buffer’ is Kevan Lee, Director of Marketing. Dropping the surname makes the email personal while retaining Buffer’s brand awareness.

The subject line also name checks another popular web service, Shopify. Both services are about delivering content on the web, so there’s definitely a cross section of interests for Buffer’s audience of about 3 million plus users.

Like some other newsletters, Buffer’s tone is super friendly and personal. There’s no header logo, but the team manages to keep Buffer front and center by colouring and highlighting the word in their initial ‘Happy weekend’ greeting.

Kevan loves exclamation points. While three in as many sentences might seem a bit extreme for some of us, he’s addressing social media managers, marketers and others involved in the world of Facebook, Instagram and other high energy focused mediums.

There’s even an invitation to hit reply and email Kevan back in the opening address. Like all great social media experts, the copy is brief, paragraphs short, and the message is warm, open and personal.

An image quote separates Kevan’s address from the curated links, that include a list of articles from relevant sites around the internet (including Buffer).

What’s your favorite?

Have I missed an email newsletter you love? Let me know in the comments below.

The myth that social media was created solely for millennials and marketers to use is quickly fading. A report published by LinkedIn shows that, in 2016, roughly 90% of top performing salespeople used social selling to demolish their sales objectives. It’s clear that social selling isn’t just the way of the future. It is, in fact, the secret sauce your competitors are already using.

Learning how to reach your sales goals with the assistance of these powerful tools will put you and your team ahead of the game. Here’s how to dominate social selling and get your reps closer to achieving their quotas today.

Track Prospects Like A Champ

While press releases will continue to remain a staple in our marketing and business communications, the benefits of social media cannot be denied. Think of smaller yet still important changes prospects may have made to the company that aren’t perhaps worthy of an official letterhead but are important to the way you work with them and close the deal.

This could be anything from a change in the official title of a new employee, to an acquisition of a competitor’s property, to a simple company anniversary announcement. These details are important in your pursuit of strong and authentic relationship building.

The challenge here is your ability to remember most (or even some) of what you read on social media is limited. Studies show that engaging in lower levels of focus, as is our default mental approach to perusing social media, can actually inhibit memory formation and retention.

This is because memories like that status update you read in three seconds get stored in your short-term or working memory. But when your working memory is exposed to hundreds of short lines with separate information it is easily overwhelmed.

All of this is to say don’t just rely on your limited short-term memory when you create a strategy for social selling. Online tools, like CRMs, are extremely reliable places to record and store important updates from your network.

Simply add their social links to their individual CRM profile. Then, when you come across something noteworthy, simply record it in your CRM and set an automatic follow up reminder. Doing so will ensure you never miss the opportunity to continue building trust with clients. You’ll also have a succinct history of only the most important updates from your prospects to refer back to from time to time.

Put Your Analytics to Work

You already know that we here at Base are gluttons for data, but here’s why these statistics matter when it comes to social selling.

When considering how to improve your social selling skills, try using the scientific method (you know, the one from grade school). First, start with your hypothesis of what types of content are most appealing to your audience. This should be based on your company’s existing insights around your most valuable customer profiles. (Not sure what these look like? This blog post should help.)

Next, pick the best measurements of success to analyze. This can be anything from average number of likes, retweets, or even comments on any given post.

Does the content you post resonate? Why or why not? Attempting to predict the behavior of your social selling audience (with a decent amount of analytical certainty) helps you produce and share content that drives brand trust and loyalty.

You might even be surprised to find that certain accounts, business or personal, have populated your pages from industries or contact titles you may not have even thought to tap into yet. So yeah, those likes really do count for something more than just a personal pat on the back (though you deserve one of those too)!

Focus on Providing Context

Another powerful social selling technique involves building your brand. As John Barrows talks about in our recent interview, personal brand building is one of the most important and effective uses for social media.

Consumers favor personal brands over corporations, and social accounts that feel authentic, like a real person they can connect and relate to. Focusing on the human aspects of social media can make you and your company really stand out from the crowd.

When it comes to creating content that buyers will respond to, companies have two options. The first is to produce original material to share with their buyers. These guides, tips, and articles are essential in defining your brand’s voice. The second is to share content written by others but that is still relevant to your space or offering. Either way, it is important to add context when you share these materials.

Context is the idea of putting your own spin or sharing your opinion on current events, articles, or posts made by accounts you follow. The next time you share a new piece of content, remember to add in your viewpoint on the topic. It could be something that you strongly agree or disagree with, just as long as you explain why. Sharing your insight and thought process regarding the post can help your audience connect with you on a much deeper level.

Like-minded buyers will appreciate your mini thought leadership moment and hopefully feel welcome to jump into the conversation. This conversation can often lead to community, further strengthening these relationships in ways you couldn’t have before. Therefore context is the key performer in building your own personal brand and improving your social selling skills.

Supporting Social Selling

Dominating social selling can be as simple as putting your tools to good use and selecting a CRM that helps you keep track of prospects and get the most out of your workforce. For more on how to find, assess, and select the best possible CRM for your social selling needs, look no further than our free CRM Buyer’s Kit for more information.

The easy answer to the title question is that they have been trained to do that since they first arrived at sales kindergarten.  Whether talking points, bullet points, inarguable facts, competitive differences, ROI, value proposition, brand promise or cost of ownership, these words and phrases have been reinforced since day 1.

The problem is that while salespeople confidently spout off these return volleys, the only thing accomplished is to make it more difficult to sell anything.  When a prospect states an objection their resistance goes up.  When a salesperson attempts to counter the objection with logic or facts, the prospect hears the hard sell and resistance is raised some more.

Logic does not overcome objections.  So what does?

Instagram has surpassed 800 million active users as the Social Media platform has become a must-have for promoting your brand or business. I put together some of the best hacks from the experts to accelerate your account growth to reach more potential customers.

1) Use a DSLR to capture quality content for both photography and videos

My Instagram tip is to get a DSLR camera in order to create your own quality content. We I built our following for our brand organically by posting seemingly professional photos and only reposting photos that are congruent to the brand.

Jules, Founder, and CEO of Deco Miami Cosmetics
instagram: www.Instagram.com/deco.miami

2) Ask customers to take photos of the product and tag the company in the photos

Our main tactic we use to grow our Instagram following is to ask our customers to take photos of our product and tag our company in the photos. It’s a very simple task that requires little effort but provides big results.

By getting your products onto your customers Instagram feeds is a great trusted endorsement as their friends / followers will see it and trust their opinion as this method is great for growing a brand, product or service.

It’s more genuine than influencer marketing where payment for promotion is involved as this is a natural endorsement which holds more wieght. I always ask customers to tag the product by including a leaflet inside the package they receive and also on their order confirmation email to gain braoder brand exposure.

Adam Watson
Hollywood Mirrors
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hollywoodmirrorsofficial/

3) Show the result

Instagram is visual as I’d like to show before and afters of my patients in order to showcase my work and possible patient outcomes so they know what to expect. As a result I often have new patients come in with photos from my Instagram feed as inspiration for what they are looking for in terms of aesthetic outcomes.

Dr. Philip J. Miller, Facial Plastic Surgeon in NYC
Instagram: www.Instagram.com/RhinoplastyNYC

4) Tips for animals in particular

We like to have fun and while showing off our brand’s personality so people feel vested in what we have to offer. Although we enjoy posting on instagram we’re very disciplined by testing and using the correct hashtags, track the best posting times and keeping the images consistent across all posts. We also will share our clients stories as well.

Colleen Wilson, Pets OnQ

5) Earn new followers and business through personal endorsements

An effective Instagram strategy we use to grow our audience is leveraging our target consumers’ personal network to advertise and build brand awareness for us. We incentivize our customers to share our product on their personal Instagram accounts, which allows us to tap into their network of friends and family, effectively amplifying our branding efforts – further helping us earning new followers and business through these personal endorsements.

Matt Edstrom, Head of Marketing
BioClarity, https://www.instagram.com/bioclarity/

6) Share success stories

We’re a newer company in an extremely competitive market as we like to celebrate any wins with our followers such as a phsyical transformation or even simply a moderate result such shedding a few pounds. We don’t like to edit our submissions in order to keep them genuine.

Sean Kelly, Rari Nutrition, https://www.instagram.com/rarinutrition

7) Use other forms of content on Instagram

I share the audio from my podcasts on Instagram on my posts as well as story. By having a different form of cotnent, in this case audio, it provides an alternative then looking at pictures all day. Now with the link feature, I’m not only growing my account, but also attracting traffic to my website.

Jeremy Ryan Slate, Podcaster, https://www.instagram.com/jeremyryanslate

So regardless of whatever industry you are in Instagram is a valuable tool for promotion as these hacks can quickly accelerate the growth of your account.

It sometimes appears that the traditional rules of business are being upended by today’s mega-trends of multisided platforms, big data, machine learning and AI, crowdsourcing, the internet of things (IoT), and more. These trends have transformed the world of business immeasurably. But they have certainly not repealed the timeless rules of strategy.

Yet for too many entrepreneurs, especially those steeped in tech and devoted to product, strategy often seems to be an afterthought. Experiment and create a great product, the thinking goes, then scale, and then figure out the business model once you’ve succeeded. It’s true that nothing beats having a compelling product that customers badly want. However, while good products and good “shopkeeping” are surely good business, they are no substitute for clear-minded strategy.

Savvy entrepreneurs and business founders might come across any number of tool kits and frameworks — from jobs to be done to business model canvases to disruptive business models and industry forces, all while seeking blue oceans, and so on. Each of these has value and can be the source of useful ideas, but each represents only part of what strategy can offer.

The challenge of strategy is to develop an integrated view of the workings of your business and how it creates and captures value within its operating environment. So, rather than develop allegiance to one piece of the strategy puzzle, founders are best served by familiarizing themselves with the basic tenets of the field.

What’s more, my academic research on strategy in the contexts of multisided platforms, crowds, big data, machine learning, and IoT shows that it is only when timeless tenets are applied that entrepreneurs can sensibly plot strategy. Today’s strategy is just too complex, dynamic, and demanding to rely on partial storylines.

As a professor teaching strategy, most recently at Harvard Business School and Northeastern University, I have tried to offer the minimum essential explanation of an integrated view of strategy, to combine the best of the many frameworks that exist, show how they relate to one another, and distill the field to the essentials that entrepreneurs need to know to get started.

I’ve published my notes to that effect in a hundred-page working paper, and I won’t try to sum up the entire effort here. Strategy is hard work, and there are no magic shortcuts. What I offer here is a starting point: the most basic questions that every successful business must answer. Entrepreneurs who design their business around these questions will have a leg up when it comes to crafting strategy.

To begin, you can sketch out your answers to these questions on a single index card.

 

What Value Are You Intending to Create, and for Whom?

Customers buy products and services because they perceive value in them. The first step toward a successful strategy is to clarify how you plan to create value, and for whom. That means defining who your customers are. That’s the first blank space on the index card above: Whom are you serving? Your customers may be defined by any number of attributes — age, geography, interests, the particular scenario or use case they find themselves in, or any number of other things.

The next step is to define your value proposition, also known, among other things, as a job to be done or a problem you intend to solve. That’s the second space: What are you offering? This is an area of strategy that greatly overlaps with other fields such as design thinking, and there is endless reading and an endless numbers of frameworks and practices you can refer to. Central questions to ask include: What dimensions of a solution does your customer value — speed, cost, customizability? In what dimensions is your solution better than the competition? Where is it at parity? Where is it worse? (Remember, it is usually not possible to be better than the competition on each and every dimension.)

You can think of the value you intend to create in a marketplace as akin to a position on a game board. Your position is defined by the combination of your customer scope and your value proposition. The best imaginable position is to offer a product that is highly valued and demanded by customers and sufficiently unique as to defy duplication by competitors (more on that in a bit).

If you’re not sure how to answer these first two questions, think about your customers and their preferences. What do they want more of, and what do they want less of? For example, perhaps your customers value both variety and lower prices. How do you compare with competitors along those dimensions? Perhaps your value proposition is to offer the lowest possible price, but at the expense of the variety offered by your competitors.

How Do You Plan to Deliver That Value?

In plotting your position in the market, defining how you’ll create value and for whom, you also need to define your operating model. The operating model is the set of choices and practices defining how to carry out the business. This will typically imply a set of trade-offs in trying to find a combination of activities that allows you to stake out your position — delivering certain dimensions of your solution better than the competition.

This may be the most difficult of the questions listed above, since designing the operating model means sorting out choices across the entire enterprise that need to work together. A successful operating model is more than just “how you make money”; it’s a set of decisions that together create more value than each would on its own. It’s about doing things that reinforce each other, to create a whole that’s more valuable than the sum of its parts.

To get started, think about the steps in your value chain, and list any key practices that appear to distinguish your company. Then think about how those practices fit together. Where are there complementarities, where one activity is made more valuable by another? Finally, think about how these practices connect to the position you’ve sketched out. How do these complementary activities create value for your customers?

What Is Your Competitive Advantage — Your Sources of Uniqueness?

The last question on the index card is perhaps the central question of strategy: Why won’t you be copied? Even if you’re delivering a great product that customers love and making money doing it, if competitors can easily enter the market and copy you, economic theory suggests they’ll drive your profits down to zero.

There are many sources of competitive advantage, but they come in roughly two broad categories. Resource-based advantages are based in unique assets or inputs that are valuable, rare, hard to imitate, durable, and specific to your organization. Position-based advantages involve your role and the position you occupy in your industry — things like scale and incumbency or network effects and early entry. Think about the resources you have that would be hardest for competitors to copy, as well as any advantages that your position confers. What would keep another company from replicating your operating model?

Understanding LinkedIn’s Business

The questions I’ve outlined leave out plenty of aspects of strategy. (Again, have a look at the full notes for a complete account.) Nonetheless, they offer a starting point for understanding a business and how it plans to succeed. Consider how LinkedIn might have answered these questions: It’s a multisided platform, so its index card may look more complex than most. It has one value proposition for job seekers and another for recruiters and consultants. Its operating model emphasizes free access and easy onboarding, which in turn creates scale. Scale offers a competitive advantage in the form of network effects. The more users LinkedIn has on the platform, the more valuable it is for everyone. (In my notes you can see an example where I’ve sketched LinkedIn’s answers, along with other businesses.) The card suggests some fit between LinkedIn’s activities. It has a theory of the value it will provide, how, to whom, and why its model won’t be easy to copy. In other words, it has a strategy.

One big limitation of this analysis is the fact that this depiction is static: It ignores how competitors react to each other and how industries and technologies change. As you design your business, whether from the ground up as an entrepreneur or by evolving a legacy operation, you’ll want to go deeper into the field of strategy, to expand your theory of how you create and capture value. But don’t lose sight of the fundamental questions that underscore a business’s success: offering products and services that customers want, selling them for more than they cost to deliver, and having some plausible reason for why competitors can’t easily copy you if it works.

Canadians are a compliant lot.  According to the Canada Revenue Agency, in 2012–13, 92% of Canadians filed their taxes on time and 95% paid their reported taxes in full; a remarkable record for a tax system based on self-assessment and voluntary compliance. But the recent controversy that erupted over the taxation of employee discounts on merchandise is part of a disturbing trend that began with changes to the taxation of private corporations in July.

When politics and the certainty of Canadian tax law collide, what’s left is the potential for erosion in the confidence Canadians have in their tax system.

The culprit for the current controversy, began with CRA’s interpretation of changes to Folio S2-F3-C2 which has recently been taken down “for review”.  It had directed that employee pricing below any price offered to the public would be taxable, which would include staff discounts on merchandise.

Interested parties are now being directed to last year’s CRA Employer’s Guide 4130, where the instructions are clear: merchandise sold to employees at a discount will not be taxable unless the following instances apply:

■ merchandise (other than old or soiled items) is acquired by the employee for less than the employer’s cost.

■ when a special arrangement is made with an employee or a group of employees to buy merchandise at a discount, or if a reciprocal arrangement is made between two employers to enable employees of either firm to by discounted merchandise from either employer.

That should put many minds at ease.  However, this is all a compliance headache for small business owners:  the taxable benefit reported on the T4 slips must be calculated as the difference between FMV (Fair Market Value, defined by CRA to be “the price that can be obtained in an open market between two individuals dealing at arm’s length”) and what is paid by the employee.

The employer must prove that FMV to a tax auditor; other taxes are at stake, too:   the correct amount of GST/HST to include in the benefit, and whether payroll deductions are required.  In short, if the owner of your corner store mom and pop shop gets it wrong, heavy penalties and interest could apply, especially if CRA audits retroactively.

If the onus of proof for tax law compliance is on the employer, there must be certainty in tax law, as well as fairness and equity.  The onus for that responsibility rests with Finance Canada and CRA – the first in the chain of compliance who must get it right.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out, because discounts on merchandise not offered to anyone else have an economic value that does, in fact, enrich employees.

 

MORE ABOUT TAX:

• What’s next in Bill Morneau’s tax reform playbook?
• 10 ways to make tax fairer
• 10 ways to actually bring fair tax relief to Canada’s middle class
• Why the Liberals’ tax reform plan is on the ropes, and how it could be salvaged
• Canadians understand the proposed new tax rules—that’s why they’re mad
• Framing their tax reforms in moral terms has backfired for the Liberals
• Down on the farm: tax reforms will hurt family businesses
• Inside Ottawa’s crackdown on small business tax loopholes

The post Why tax and uncertainty don’t mix appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

As a small business owner or marketing specialist it will come as no shock to learn that your website has a better chance of ranking well in search engines depending on a quartet of SEO factors: those being backlinks, technical, mobile, and content. When all four are utilised effectively, your website will fire on all cylinders. In this article we will be discussing the significance of one of these ranking factors, backlinks, and why it’s not how many you build but how you set about acquiring them that matters.

I’m turning to a visual guide to break down the vital components of link building through the most commonly adopted techniques. The Periodic Table of Link Acquisition for SEO is a digital marketing resource to educate people working in the industry on the value of varying layers of link building tactics. I’ve split the layers into three, categorized here as link begging, link building, and link earning.

How should you decide which tactics to allocate time and resources to for maximum impact? There are many ways to address this, and a great starting point is what to know what Google is looking for from marketers in 2017.

Introducing link earning tactics for SEO

The term “link earning” was publicly coined in 2012 by Rand Fishkin. Once the phrase met SEO mainstream appeal, others followed with best practice guides and ways to transition from the old school of thought to the new. Simply put, it follows the precedent set by Google for a higher caliber of information on the web and a distancing from spammy behavior of the past. It is spoken of in the same circles as content marketing and inbound marketing as all three strive for exceptional content and storytelling. Content of a high grade makes the biggest impact when coupled with a razor-sharp promotional strategy, which is why link earning relies heavily on building relationships with people in high places. This presents a very natural way for a brand to acquire links but also to capitalize on the referral traffic and user engagement on account of the backlink pathway. The table above encourages the following tactics for link earning:

• Partner collaboration
• Influencer collaboration
• Blogger collaboration
• Educational collaboration
• Non-profit collaboration
• Web mentions
• Social
• Communities
• Interactive
• Authorship
• Newsjacking

Introducing link building tactics for SEO

Link building remains a fundamental component for SEO success. It is broad term comprising of older, more traditional methods as well as the more technically sound approach to building a backlink profile. Content marketing experts may insist that link building is dying out however those from an algorithmic standpoint will argue the case for the benefits of being practical about links, no matter how small or low quality they may be. Take the example of listing a business profile to all appropriate local directories – this cannot compete with producing 10x content for mass media, but it may be a smooth gateway to conversions and leads depending on the context. Fixing up broken links and bolstering link count from one page to another can also work to strengthen the link framework of a website whilst complimenting the larger content-led activity.

The table above highlights the following tactics for link building:

• Local directories
• Local news
• Local job portals
• Local forums
• Broken links
• Page interlinking

Introducing link begging tactics for SEO

The web is by no means an environment free of murky tactics and despite Google pushing for change there will always remain an underbelly of back-hat activity. We’re referring to the likes of link schemes as a means of stacking up a link profile and driving higher visibility for keywords through SERPs. Such tactics were once a force to be reckoned with and widely accepted on merit. Paying for links is no longer something to be proud of, nor is it rewarded by Google in any way. Links built on a large scale having been paid for will likely be discounted altogether as SEO signals.

The table above denounces the following tactics as link begging:

• Paid competitions
• Paid scholarships
• Paid advertorials
• Paid blogging
• Text links

Advice for link acquisition in 2017 should be taken as guidance and used where applicable as no two websites may have identical goals or objectives. It’s always wise to take a note from other people in your industry about tactics that are working well for them, and asking link building communities about pitfalls to avoid for greater success.

Wish you could charge more at your agency but not ready to switch to value-based pricing? Use value-anchoring!

Value-anchoring is a sales technique where you explicitly compare the value clients get from hiring you (high) to what you’re charging (low).

Because you demonstrate how you’re delivering more value than what they’re paying your agency, value-anchoring helps justify higher fees. For instance, charging $100K while having the potential to deliver $750K in value is a great deal for the client.

Value-anchoring is not quite the same thing as value-based pricing. Value-based pricing is the “Holy Grail” of agency pricing, but you shouldn’t implement it unless you’re confident about the value you deliver and how to present it in your sales process.

If you’re not ready to fully commit to value-based pricing, value-anchoring can be a great way to get many of the benefits of value-based pricing, without providing the same level of guarantee. Note that your value-anchoring fees won’t have the upside potential of value-based pricing.

Let’s look at a few agency-specific examples of value-anchoring in the pricing phase of your agency’s sales process.

Value-anchoring for agencies: 3 examples

Comparing Lifetime Value to Monthly Retainer: As the head of client services at an agency, I previously worked with a cosmetic dental practice—their services ranged from exams to a $30,000 “Smile Makeover.” Our client estimated the average Lifetime Value of a new patient to be $4,500—so if we demonstrated our efforts brought in 20 new clients in a month, we delivered $90,000 in value. That was a fraction of the $4,000/month they were paying us—which made it easy to renew the retainer.

Comparing Fees to Lost Revenue: A client who does web development for eCommerce normally charges $150/hour for development services. However, a client can pre-arrange to get faster turnaround in an emergency situation (for instance, the site goes down or a key function stops working). The emergency rate is $300/hour, and the client pre-approves spending up to two hours. If the client would be losing more than $300/hour in revenue during the outage, the high emergency rate is still a good value. Especially considering the brand reputation impact of a site outage.

Comparing Investment to Likely Return: An agency providing PPC services should be able to estimate or extrapolate the impact of a particular ad spend. For instance, you might estimate spending $3,000 a month would typically produce $10,000 to $15,000 a month in revenue. That makes the ad spend—and your management fee—seem like a good deal in comparison.

What to do when you can’t measure value

What if you can’t quantify the specific impact of your work? You can still use value-anchoring in other ways—for example, by comparing what they pay you to what they’d pay an in-house person to do similar work.

For instance, if the client needed to pay an employee $100,000 a year but they can get your agency’s expert help for $50,000 a year, point it out—it’s value-anchoring at work. In that situation, if it’s cheaper to hire a Marketing Coordinator, point out that the client wouldn’t get your high level of strategy experience, or your team’s broad range of skills.

Think like a personal trainer—it’s your job to get results for clients and ensure clients understand the value they’re getting from your agency.

Value-anchoring gives you qualifying questions for your sales process

Smart agency salespeople ask the right questions during the sales process. These questions help clients and save time for the agency via “fast failure.” If you find the client isn’t willing to share, it’s a sign they may not be a good fit—at minimum, they don’t trust you.

A prospect’s willingness to share business metrics is an important indicator of whether they see you as trusted advisor or just another vendor as they shop around.

Value-anchoring helps you think like a consultant

People keep bemoaning the rise of consulting firms in providing marketing services. In fact, four of the top 10 agencies are consultancies (Accenture Interactive, Deloitte Digital, IBM iX, and PwC). Those four firms grossed $13.2 billion in marketing services revenue.

Wanna beat ’em? Join ’em—think like a consultant. This includes treating things like a business challenge, not merely a marketing or design challenge. Business people think about results and ROI, rather than creative oomph alone.

When you ask questions that help you measure value for value-anchoring, you’re showing clients you care about the business of their business. And as I noted above, their refusal to share metrics info may be a fast-failure warning.

Applying value-anchoring at your agency

Ready to get started with value-anchoring? Think about your typical services and sales conversations. What are some questions you can ask to make rough estimates of value?

For instance, I can estimate the dollar impact of my help in improving an agency’s profit margins. If revenues are $3 million and profit margins are 15% instead of 20%, my help could add $150,000 in profits. Against that potential impact, my fee is tiny in comparison.

Question: What do you need to change to introduce value-anchoring at your agency?

Golden Gate Bridge photo by Joshua Sortino via Unsplash

Over the past years I have been looking for a metric that could indicate the agility of an organization. After a study of the more common metrics used for products and management reports, I couldn’t really find a metric that indicates the level of agility. For example in the time-to-market metric I missed the feedback of the actual usage of the product or service. So for the past few months I’ve worked to create this missing metric. The new metric is “Time-to-Learn” or T2L for short. It’s the total time between the moment that the work is started until we learn through feedback from our users. So this includes releasing it to market, gathering feedback and studying it in order to learn. The T2L is a good indication of the agility of the organization because it is all about the interaction time with the market. It provides clarity on the speed a company reacts to new market opportunities, as well as how responsive it is to real customer feedback. The more agile the organization is, the quicker it can benefit from new technologies, ideas and feedback from customers.

Example of a T2L of 9 months

Let’s have a look at an example. In the beginning of January a team starts to refine, work out the first details and make the first implementation of a new feature. It’s deployed to customers in May. The gathering of usage data and customer feedback takes 3 months. At the end of September the lessons learned are presented, new ideas are added to the backlog, priorities are re-assessed and some existing Product Backlog Items are removed. The total T2L is 9 months: from beginning of January until the end of September. That does not mean that the team did not work on anything else until they got the customer feedback, but without that feedback or learning the team might not be working on the right, highest value work. In this example, the organization took 9 months to learn.

How to start tracking the T2L

There is a relatively easy way to get a good measurement. Every sprint the Product Owner picks one or two important Product Backlog Items (PBIs) that are tracked throughout the next months. The date the work is started is recorded. Every sprint the team also spends time on learning from actual work it has done several sprints ago. The moment the learning is done, the date can be used to calculate the T2L of that individual Product Backlog Item. Using the data of multiple PBIs the average T2L is found. Tracking the development of the T2L is handy to see if the improvements really result in a better T2L. Start small and start simple, but start thinking about how to instrument your backlog items to drive learning and capture when that learning happens.

3 benefits of an improved T2L

1. Upfront discussion on what we want to achieve

When the team routinely starts applying T2L, it’s more likely to be focused on what they really need to achieve as a team. They ask questions of the work such as: when is a feature successful? When 1.000 users use it daily? When the conversion on the website has increased by 5%? How are we going to measure success? When the team starts thinking about T2L it is often easier to focus on value with both the work undertaken and the solutions selected.

2. Focus on learning more, and not on doing more

Presenting this T2L during the sprint review often removes the focus on the velocity and the details of the planning. Of course how effective development is important, but only in the context of doing the right thing or delivering the right learning. When stakeholders get transparency on the outcome and impact of the features delivered several sprints ago, the mindset of the meeting shifts. It shifts more to long term goals based on value such as usage, market penetration and customer satisfaction. This often results in quicker experiments, learning from actual data and finding improvements more rapidly.

3. Faster learning is faster value

With a short T2L the organization can learn a lot faster on many fronts. The team starts to understand the customer demands better, because it sees if the new functionality or added features are used or not. The Product Owner learns what delivers actual value and what does not. With a long and slow learning loop, so much new functionality is added that it’s hard to deduce what actually improved it. With a short T2L, it’s much easier to know what led to the improvement and therefore what is of real value and what is not.

Additionally, the team gets quick feedback on the quality of their work so they know more quickly what to improve on their craftsmanship. Stakeholders also start to see which ideas were actually good ideas and what the customers really need.

Conclusion

The T2L is the missing metric to measure the agility of the organization. It’s the total time between doing the work and learning from actual customer usage. I hope you start to track the T2L. Tracking the T2L for only a few items per sprint is already good enough to know your T2L. It will give you several benefits like focus on the goal, not working harder but working smarter, and will help develop a learning organization. The T2L metric and the mindset behind it can be used for a wide variety of work. From making an internal memo, updating a report, developing internal software for colleagues to actionable outcomes of the retrospectives and management decisions.

By thinking about T2L you will get insights into your true agility and what you can do to improve the responsiveness of the organization. In a world that’s changing faster and faster, the urgency to accelerate within that world increases. The T2L is the missing measurement to see if you are moving fast enough to keep pace with your own complex market.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

Samsung unveiled the Connect Tag, a new smart tag that connects to Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) networks and is designed to clip onto pet collars, luggage, or even children to help users track them.

NB-IoT is a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) standard designed to connect IoT devices that use very little power and transmit very little data.

The waterproof device, about four centimeters wide and one centimeter thick, will initially only be available in South Korea. Consumers can, through a companion mobile application, set a geofence that notifies the user when the tag goes outside the set fence. The tech giant didn't disclose how much the device will cost or when it will be released to the public. In South Korea, the device will connect to operator KT's NB-IoT network, which is the LPWAN with the largest coverage area in the country.

The tag is one of many IoT devices that companies are experimenting with in the early days of NB-IoT's availability. NB-IoT is quickly becoming widely available around the world, and in the North American and the Asia-Pacific regions in particular. As it arrives in these markets, companies are experimenting with different IoT use cases that it can support. For instance, Huawei and DHL are testing asset tracking at an automotive assembly plant in China via NB-IoT, and Kepper Electric is testing smart meters in Singapore connected through the network.

The device could help open up NB-IoT networks for consumer applications, although significant hurdles stand in the way.

• Until now, NB-IoT networks have primarily supported enterprise IoT use cases, but the device highlights the additional potential in the consumer space. If these types of tracking applications gain popularity with consumers in many markets, it could provide a significant revenue boost for NB-IoT network operators.
• Samsung's tag will compete in a crowded and limited market. Most smartphones and smartwatches, and some fitness trackers, also have similar functionality, so persuading consumers to purchase an added piece of hardware to track someone or something could be difficult. Additionally, consumer awareness around GPS tracking devices is rather low and costs have traditionally been a high barrier. The market is also currently filled with more than a dozen other GPS trackers. Samsung will need to prove that leveraging NB-IoT will lower subscription costs and demonstrate that the device has a unique value proposition.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting businesses, governments, and consumers and transforming how they interact with the world. Companies are going to spend almost $5 trillion on the IoT in the next five years — and the proliferation of connected devices and massive increase in data has started an analytical revolution.

To gain insight into this emerging trend, BI Intelligence conducted an exclusive Global IoT Executive Survey on the impact of the IoT on companies around the world. The study included over 500 respondents from a wide array of industries, including manufacturing, technology, and finance, with significant numbers of C-suite and director-level respondents. 

Peter Newman, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has conducted an exclusive study with in-depth research into the field and created a detailed report on the IoT that:

• Provides a primer on the basics of the IoT ecosystem
• Offers forecasts for the IoT moving forward and highlights areas of interest in the coming years
• Looks at who is and is not adopting the IoT, and why
• Highlights drivers and challenges facing companies implementing IoT solutions

To get the full report, subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND more than 250 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> Learn More Now

You can also purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store.

Join the conversation about this story »

If you’re involved in complex, lengthy and high-value B2B sales environments, you can’t afford to regard opportunity qualification as a one-off exercise. You need to think of it as an ongoing process, in which you continually accumulate new learning as well as regularly revalidating any previous assumptions.

The level of resource that you have to invest in winning any significant sales opportunity requires that you make thoughtful decisions about which deals are worth pursuing and which ones should be firmly qualified out.

Top sales performers – in my experience, at least – have too much respect for their own time to waste it pursuing opportunities they have little chance of winning. They tend to be ruthless in their initial qualification, and they are typically very aware of changes in circumstances that could turn a previously attractive opportunity into something that is no longer a valuable use of resources.

So how can we equip every sales person to embrace the same rigorous approach?

I recommend that you start by establishing clear and consistent company-wide standards for opportunity qualification that are wherever possible supported by objective fact and evidence rather than subjective opinion or hope.

A PHASED APPROACH

We need to recognise that not all of the information we need to qualify a complex opportunity may be available at the very start of our sales process, and that we may need to sequence the qualification exercise into a number of phases. In my recent work with clients, we’ve typically established at least two such waves of qualification.

We also need to recognise that opportunity qualification has two significant dimensions: first, how likely is it that the prospect will ultimately decide to do anything and second, if they do decide to take action, how likely is it that we will win their business?

In the initial qualification phase, I suggest that your judgement should be informed by the following factors:

Problem Fit

How closely does the prospective customer’s view of the problem align with the critical issues we have chosen to target?

Company Fit

How closely does the prospective customer organisation match our Ideal Customer Profile? (you can download the guide here)

Sponsor Fit

Is our initial contact a potential prime sponsor with the authority and motivation to drive the decision-making process?

Urgency

Does the prospect have a clear and urgent reason to take action within a defined time frame?

Economics

Is there a compelling case for change and a clear source of the funds needed to implement the project?

Assuming that we have enough positive indications from this first wave of qualification, our next interactions with the prospect need to fill in the remaining gaps in our knowledge, namely:

Solution Fit

How closely do the prospect’s stated needs and requirements align with the key capabilities of our proposed solution?

Stakeholders

Have we identified all the key stakeholders in the prospect’s buying decision process, and what do we know about their attitude to us?

Criteria

How much do we understand about the prospect’s decision-making criteria, and how favourable are they to us?

Process

How much do we understand about the prospect’s decision-making process and time frame, and how favourable are they to us?

Priority

How important is the particular problem or project to the customer, and where does it stand as a relative priority against all the other investments that are competing for resources?

The above 10 qualification factors are almost always all significant in any significant buying decision – and you may well be able to identify more that are specific to your own sales environment.

THE NEED FOR CONSISTENT JUDGEMENT

Some of the answers to the above qualifying questions might seem to be issues of judgement rather than hard fact. If this is the case, we need to provide our sales people with the clearest possible guidelines as to how to come to these judgements.

We cannot afford to rely on guesswork or inconsistency when answering these questions: we should expect our sales people to explain how they came to their decisions, and what evidence they can point to in support of their conclusions.

Now, not all of the initial answers to these qualifying questions may be an unambiguous “yes”. Some of our initial judgements might be conditional (and if they are, we need to recognise them as such, and resolve them). But the more “no” or “don’t know” answers we have, the weaker the opportunity.

We need to promote a culture in which is better to acknowledge that we “don’t know” (and take steps to resolve the uncertainty) than to lazily claim a positive qualification based more on hope than on any tangible proof.

DEFAULTING TO QUALIFYING OUT?

We might also (and I have seen this used to very powerful effect) think about adopting the mindset that by default an opportunity is to be qualified out unless there is positive evidence to the contrary – after giving the sales person a reasonable period to establish the facts and make the case for continuing to pursue it.

This principle is, of course, far easier for sales people to accept and implement if we have a healthy demand generation and pipeline building programme. But if we haven't, clinging on to poorly qualified opportunities is hardly likely to improve revenue outcomes, is it?

CHANGING OUR OPINION

Of course, our initial qualification judgements can and probably will change in the light of changing circumstances. As a minimum requirement, I believe that it is sensible and reasonable to expect sales people to reaffirm each qualification criteria before advancing an opportunity from one stage to the next.

More specifically, any significant change in circumstances should trigger an opportunity review. I’ve lost count of the number of times that sales people have claimed that significant external events or changes in the stakeholder group will have little effect on the prospect’s decision-making – only to see them be painfully proved wrong.

PRUNING THE DEAD WOOD

I hope the guiding principles will prove as useful to you as they have a number of other organisations I’ve been working with. There is no doubt that rigorous, consistent qualification drives improved revenue performance.

Every gardener knows that pruning out the dead or dying wood stimulates invigorated new growth and a healthier plant. Exactly the same holds true for sales pipelines. Salespeople might feel a momentary pain when qualifying out a weak opportunity.

The short-term effect might be to make their pipeline appear smaller. But their time and resources will have been freed up to uncover, engage and manage more promising opportunities. And the results in terms of booked revenue will soon be obvious.

Drop me a line if you'd like to discuss how best to apply these principles in your own organisation.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, I'M SURE YOU'LL ALSO LIKE:

• The fundamental principles of value-based selling
• The 5 levels of lead qualification
• Revisiting the buyer's journey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based B2B-focused high-growth businesses, enabling them to systematically establish their distinctive business value in every customer interaction.

My younger sister once won an account and became good friends with the decision-maker she worked with day to day. Each Friday, her competitor would bring donuts to the client, and then sit around and bash our company. As soon as the competitor left, the client would bring the donuts to our staff or call my sister to come get them. They bought one of our teams donuts for months and months, all the while thinking they were making an impact.

One of my clients would routinely meet with my competitors. He’d listen to everything they had to say, much of it an attempt to create doubt about my company. He’d ask them for a proposal, and they would oblige him, believing they were close to a deal. When I visited him, he would hand me a big stack of my competitor’s proposals, including their pricing.

A competitor’s salesperson once called one of my company’s oldest clients. This client had very deep relationships with our company. The competitor told one of our client’s employees that my company was having financial difficulties, that we couldn’t meet payroll, and that they were exposed to a serious risk. When the client heard, she called to tell us what the salesperson had said, having known my company long enough to know that the salesperson was speaking out of turn. I called the salesperson’s manager, asking him to play fair, and he cussed me out. I offered a meeting to discuss how we might handle competing, and he hung up on me.

One client I frequently visited with would get calls from competitors while I was in meetings with him. He would take their calls, put them on speaker phone, and start asking them questions. He thought this very entertaining to ask them about their business, their strategy, and specifically, how they were better than my company while I was sitting in the room.

It is a mistake to believe that you can win hearts and minds by attacking your competitor. When you have no idea how strong the relationship is, you can make a complete fool of yourself, doing more harm than good, and doing nothing to create a real opportunity.

Speaking ill of your competitor is an indication of who you are, not who they are. There are better strategies available to you.

The post Speaking Ill of Your Competitor appeared first on The Sales Blog.

If you’re a sales professional using Google Chrome, you may want to stick around for this…

More than 3.8 billion people access the Internet through browsers and nearly 60% of them do so with Chrome.

Chances are your competitors are using Chrome too. That’s why we’ve built the complete list of best Chrome Extensions to help you get ahead of the ruffle.

Sales professionals should not give their web browsers a backseat behind the company’s official technology stack; namely superstar tools such as CRMs and big data software.

While you should use and optimize every sales enabler in your tech stack, don’t miss out on the most enhanced, streamlined, and powered-up versions of your favorite browser.

How To Boost Your Chrome Browser

It’s called Chrome Extensions, baby.

In the same way there’s a mobile app for just about everything, there’s a browser extension (also called add-ins) for just about any purpose. Chrome already comes as a fully functional tool. However, you can still add extensions on top of it to make it more powerful and better aligned with your workflow.

There’s a host of specialized Chrome extensions that can help you get things done faster and improve your sales performance dramatically.

Some extensions enable you to generate more leads, others help you save time, and a few can help you engage customers with greater impact.

RELATED: The 40+ Best Apps for Salespeople Who Want to Win

Finding the right app for your needs is easy. Just search for what you need in the Chrome Web Store, or just browse our list below.

Here are some of the best Chrome extensions and add-ins that sales professionals should consider:

• Collaboration/Project Management
• CRM Sync
• Email Management
• Messaging/Creativity
• Productivity/Time Management
• Prospecting
• Research/Analytics
• Social Selling
• Fast Breaks, Brain Food, and Fun

Collaboration/Project Management

Add to Trello. Trello is among the most popular project management and collaboration tools on the planet. If your team uses the software, this extension lets you access your Trello boards and create new cards while you’re surfing the web.

Basecamp Notifier. This extension keeps you updated about every Basecamp project you’re involved in. Get desktop notifications about tasks and activities you follow.

Point. Share links and useful information with colleagues and customers. Point allows you to share web pages, highlight important text, and track conversations about these info and other documents.

What to Look for:

• It needs to align with how you execute projects your own way.
• It should facilitate fluid communication and work flow.

CRM Sync

Cirrus Insight. Schedule three times more appointments with prospects using this add-in’s smart integration with Salesforce. Sync your email and calendar with your CRM, then update or track activities and tasks directly from your inbox.

HubSpot Sales. Sync Gmail/Outlook, HubSpot, Salesforce, and other tools in your stack to build the capability to engage clients more efficiently and with greater impact. Schedule and track your email correspondence; access relevant information about prospects; and share presentations, contracts and other documents.

Salesforce Navigator. Enjoy a new level of efficiency by getting to any page on Salesforce directly from your browser.

What to Look for:

• It needs to work perfectly with your entire tech stack.
• It needs to be smart and intuitive.
• It should reduce your work, not add to it.

YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY: Best Business Phone Systems: 35+ Tools to Keep You Smilin’ and Dialin’

Email Management

Boomerang for Gmail. This extension can very well be the Swiss Army Knife for email. Use it to track responses, schedule messages, or virtually lock the inbox to avoid email interruptions. You can even invoke its native AI to help you write better emails.

FullContact for Gmail & Inbox. Get critical information about your contacts — position, location, social links, photos, tweets, interests, etc. — right inside your inbox. For organizations, the extension crawls the web to get relevant data such as company profile, size, location, and social media presence.

Outreach. Sell smarter while you surf the web. Use Outreach right within Gmail, and on top of Salesforce so you can add prospects to sequences, use templates and snippets, and insert calendar links directly into your emails right from Chrome.

Mail Control. Never be left in the dark again. This extension keeps you notified every time a new message arrives even when you’re not running your email. It displays the number of unread messages and even shows mail previews.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Sell more by knowing your customers better. This extension enables you to gather critical data about your contacts right inside your inbox. Drive a conversation via a topic that matters to your client. Schedule a conference or meet right away when they are nearby. Establishing a revenue stream starts with building rapport.

SalesHandy. This extension empowers Gmail with email tracking & scheduling capabilities as well as additional features like messaging analytics, attachment tracking, open notifications, team templates, and mail merge with auto followups.

ToutApp. Sync your Gmail/Outlook and Salesforce accounts to manage prospects and contacts with flair. Right from your inbox, enable email and attachment tracking, configure templates, schedule meetings, and close more deals.

WiseStamp. Never send an incomplete email again. Your brand matters so WiseStamp automates your email signature, complete with your company logo, your social and professional profiles, and your latest tweets and posts.

What to Look for:

• It should be easy to set up, easy to use.
• It should save time and effort, so you can work more effectively.
• As a bonus, it should help you track the results of your outreach.

Messaging Creativity

BombBomb. Sometimes, it takes more than words to convince your prospects. With BombBomb, you can easily record, send and track video emails to build trust and connect better with prospects.

Full-Page Screen Capture. Capturing a screenshot of an entire web page is often a very, very tedious task. Fortunately, this extension makes it easier to do so without leaving your browser.

Giphy. When emphasizing a point or delivering comic relief, a picture is worth a thousand words. But when you use moving images, the stakes go even higher and the impact gets stronger. Connect with your customers more effectively using carefully selected animated gifs.

Grammarly. Hire an always-on, 24-7 editor to review and polish your memos, blog posts, tweets, instant messages, emails, and documents. For free. Grammarly checks your spelling, grammar, and choice of words to ensure you’re sending the perfect message every time you engage an audience.

Loom. Motion is the medium for millennials. Articulate your brand with more clarity and urgency using videos. Easily record, annotate, narrate and share video clips to better engage your audience. Use it for lead generation, email communication, and conveying a pitch.

Pablo. Sell your brand using crisp, on-target, and memorable imagery. Pablo is a quick, easy, and impactful way of creating images for every social channel you use. Become an instant designer via easy-to-tweak fonts, typography, formatting options, and a robust library of half a million images.

Search and Replace. Grammatical, typo, incorrect data, and other textual errors occur every now and then. This browser extension lets you fix them easily and quickly.

What to Look for:

• It should be easy to integrate into your normal work flow.
• It should add real value to your messaging, not just bling.
• It should provide a good experience for your audience.

Productivity/Time Management

AdBlock. Who doesn’t get distracted by ads? Used by millions, this extension blocks annoying and productivity-sapping ads on social media sites and everywhere else on the web.

Black Menu for Google. If your sales team uses Google Apps, then this extension is heaven sent. Easily access any service from the Google universe via an icon on your Chrome toolbar any time you want.

Sync Google Drive with other clouds…. If you use multiple cloud-based repositories for your documents, then you’ve surely experienced the humongous hassle of keeping track of all of them. Thank goodness CloudHQ came up with this extension that enables you to synchronize and manage all your digital assets stored on Salesforce, SharePoint, Basecamp, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, and other services from just a single location: Google Drive.

Evernote Web Clipper. Use this extension to save online articles or sections of them for reference or later reading. You can also use Evernote Web Clipper to make, edit and save screenshots of the web pages you visit.

Google Calendar. Access your calendar directly from the browser toolbar. Review upcoming events without leaving the page and add new events from the websites you are visiting.

LastPass. Not everyone has a perfect memory and forgetting a password is fairly common. If you have multiple passwords for multiple accounts (like everybody else), then the risk of forgetting some of them skyrockets. LastPass enables you to remember just one highly secure password that will turn the key for every digital account you enroll.

Momentum. Transform new tabs into productivity boosters. Momentum replaces the Chrome’s standard new tab with a personal dashboard that displays task lists, weather information, and inspirational quotes and images.

Noisli. it’s just too easy to get distracted these days. Digital distractions abound and so do analog ones such as everyday noises and focus-sapping ambient sounds. Regardless of your location, Noisli improves your focus and productivity by blocking out noise and creating a relaxed acoustic environment. Listen to background sounds that empowers you to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

OneTab. OneTab is perfect for sales professionals who can’t work well with less than twenty open tabs on their browser. This extension lets you close all those tabs without causing panic by saving their URLs in just a single master tab you can use to conveniently manage the all the links you visit. This way, OneTab simplifies your life and frees up precious computing resources.

Prioritab. Sometimes, all it takes to achieve high performance is to set your priorities right. With each new browser tab you open, Prioritab reminds you of your priorities lest you get diverted by minor tasks. Set your daily, weekly and monthly priorities and you’ll always be on target.

PushBullet. Sync your mobile and desktop devices and always remain in tune with work, friends and everything you care about. PushBullet enables you to send and receive SMS messages from your computer. You can also reply to messages from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and other platforms. Among other benefits, sharing web links becomes effortless with PushBullet.

Strict Workflow. If you get easily distracted, then this Chrome extension is for you. Based on the popular Pomodoro technique, Strict Workflow forces you to focus on important tasks and get things done on time. The extension imposes a strict 25-minute work period followed by a 5-minute break.

Todoist. This extension is a full-featured productivity tool used by millions of people around the world. Manage your tasks with ease, collaborate better with your team, set important reminders, and keep track of projects you are involved in. View, add, and organize tasks straight from your browser.

Wunderlist New Tab. Extend one of the most popular productivity tools into your browser. This add-in lets you create a lighter version of Wunderlist each time you create a new tab. You can then update existing or add new to-dos and task lists.

What to Look for:

• It should genuinely make you more productive, not be just another toy.
• I needs to work the way you work.
• It shouldn’t add too many clicks, note-taking, or other tasks to your busy schedule.

Prospecting

Email and Phone Number Finder by AeroLeads. With a single click, add prospects to your account on AeroLeads.com. You can then transfer the prospect info and contact details to HubSpot, MailChimp and Salesforce.

Clearbit Connect. This extension lets you access a trove of critical information about companies and professionals you correspond with via Gmail. Straight from the familiar email interface, collect corporate and personal data about your contacts so you can engage them more effectively.

Crystal. This extension scours the web for public information regarding a prospect, then builds a personality profile based on this information. This eliminates much of the guesswork in cold calling and other customer interactions. Your job is to leverage the profile to communicate more effectively and to engage prospects on a more personal level.

Pipetop Prospector. This extension lets you improve the process of searching for and engaging prospects on LinkedIn. Generate a pipeline of qualified decision makers and get the right contact information for each.

SalesWings. Monitor your prospect’s behavior and assess their likelihood of opting in. Know the time and the context within which they visit your website. Sync all the tracking and lead scoring data with your CRM. Then act on valuable insights about your leads.

Unomy. B2B sales professionals can use this extension to take their prospecting workflow to the next level. Gather comprehensive information about prospect organizations easily via their websites. Collect relevant email addresses, news, competitor profiles, and other reports to lend actionable insight to your engagement plans.

RELATED: Can Sales Prospecting Be Automated? 3 Steps to Getting More Leads In Less Time

What to Look for:

• It needs to integrate with the tools you’re already using.
• It needs to improve the quality of your leads, not just the quantity.

Research/Analytics

Alexa Traffic Rank. Want to know the Alexa ranking of the website you’re on accurately and quickly? Then use this official extension from Alexa that provides traffic rank and other site Information with a single click.

Datanyze Insider. Purposely streamlined for sales, this extension serves as an all-around research tool for building prospects, nurturing accounts, finding relevant contact information and collecting critical information about companies and decision makers. Datanyze Insider integrates with most CRM and other sales enablement software.

MozBar. Your colleagues at marketing will be at a disadvantage if they go out in the field without this extension. MozBar generates instant metrics the moment you get a search results page. By clicking a toolbar icon, you can derive critical data (link metrics, domain/page authority, page elements, etc.) that will help enhance your marketing and sales campaigns.

Data Scraper (by Data Miner). This extension conveniently extracts website data and imports them into Microsoft Excel or Google spreadsheets. Use Scraper to extract HTML tables, CRM client data, email addresses from social media, pricing data from e-commerce sites, sentiment profile based on social activities, and other information relevant to your work as a sales professional.

SEO & Website Analysis (by Woorank). Generate in-depth SEO reports for any website with just a single click. Get data on visitor traffic, adword profile, keyword attributes, social media imprint, and other critical information.

What to Look for:

• The information it provides needs to be accurate and relevant.
• It should give you the data in an easy-to-consume way.
• It should play nice with all your other tools.

Social Selling

Bitly. Sharing links over social media can sometimes be a pain in the neck, especially when you’re still sharing URLs in their long form. Bit.ly allows you to shorten, customize and share web links so you can add more conversational text about the content. The extension also lets you optimize your message and measure audience response on social media.

Buffer. Buffer is a convenient and efficient way to publish content on social media. With just a single click, this extension lets you share updates and post compelling content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook from anywhere on the Web. Buffer also enables you to track and analyze all your messaging efforts.

Professor Traffic. This extension integrates with Google Analytics and enables you to track how your shares on social media impact traffic to your site and how each of your sales and marketing campaigns on social channels is driving actual conversions.

Riffle.tv. Made for both video streamers and their viewers, this extension lets brands and audiences to have meaningful interactions. Riffle.tv provides Q&A, rewards, gamification, polling, playlist, and other engagement-boosting features.

Ritetag. If you’re running out of clever hashtags to use, then this extension will help you cook up a catchy one. With a single click, you can goad Ritetag to generate tag suggestions on any site, anywhere you are.

What to Look for:

• It should make smart recommendations based on AI or data.
• It should save you time by giving you one-click options.

Fast Breaks, Brain Food, and Fun

Google Arts & Culture. Everyone needs a break. Have one like a Bohemian and enjoy the best of art and culture the world has to offer. This extension displays stunning, thought-provoking, or refreshing artwork every time you create a new tab on Chrome.

Instapaper. This extension lets you save URLs of your favorite web pages for offline viewing. After doggedly working for hours, you can get back to those pages and enjoy them at leisure. It works by saving the current tab to your Instapaper account. Users who aren’t logged in will be taken to a login or signup page, after completing the process they will be redirected back to the original page with the original page saved in their queue.

New Tab for Pocket. This extension creates a new tab displaying your Pocket content every time you click its icon on the toolbar. While unofficial, it’s effective at quickly giving you an opportunity to catch up on your reading.

Save to Pocket. This, on the other hand, is the official Chrome extension from Pocket, one of the most popular services for managing online reading lists. With a single click, save compelling articles and rich media content anywhere on the web for later consumption during your free time, even without an internet connection.

What to Look for:

• It should let you use the app in short bursts of time, so it’s truly a break and not a time-suck.
• It should add a bit of fun to your life.

Perform at your best by extending your browser’s capabilities

Sales is a highly competitive world. In this field, mediocrity is a sure recipe for failure. if you want to succeed, you must always keep your skills sharp, build stronger relationships, and regularly upgrade the tools you are using.

Many sales professionals use the Chrome web browser. It is, after all, considered the best web browser.

Source

But the out-of-the-box setup just gives you standard capabilities. Chrome extensions allow you to expand its features so you can become faster and more effective at lead generation, social selling, email outreach, analytics and other important areas you’re expected to shine in.

The foregoing list is by no means complete –– and there are many other Chrome extensions that will help you deliver high performance. But many of them serve as great starting points.

Whether your purpose is to work smart, get better organized, develop focus, or save time, extensions will help you move the needle. Give some a try and discover how each can up your game.

Then let us know your favorites. Share the apps you love (or hate) in the comments below.

The post The 50 Best Chrome Extensions for Dynamic Sales Pros appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Give Your Twitter Marketing A Boost with These 4 Tools

Today I have some resources to help you get your Twitter marketing strategy back on track. Here’s four links with tips and tricks to kick start your Monday.

Generating leads and sales through social media is most effective when you take advantage of staying active on the major platforms. In order to reach more people you need to be where they are engaging. Twitter is still a great place to make new connections and bring more eyes to your products or services. Would you like to ramp up your Twitter marketing, but don’t have the right tools? Use these resources and let me know how these work for you!

1) Encourage tweets of your coupons or discounts – TwtQpon

Create a coupon campaign with better results. TwtQpon is a tool that helps to quickly and easily create a new offer that includes a call-to-action for readers to tweet in order to receive a discount. These can be used for online and in-store purchases with either a QR Code or your store’s barcode. Pay for each campaign or subscribe for a low monthly fee to get started.

2) Improve your reach – Tweriod

Find out when the best time to tweet is for your target market. Tweriod is a free service that will analyze your follower’s activity in order to show you the average posting times during each day. Increase your online exposure as you learn when your community is the most active. Generate reports with a full list of who your followers are what they are tweeting about.

3) Find out who unfollowed you – T.U.N.S.

Learn more about why users are unfollowing your profile. T.U.N.S. allows you to connect your Twitter account and generate a list of unfollowers. Many times this could be due to fake accounts, but it’s always good to have a tool like this in place in order to discover whether your business is losing valuable followers in order to improve your presence.

4) Get to know your audience better – TwtPoll

Gain insights on your followers with targeted polls. TwtPoll helps you to create an online survey for Twitter, Facebook and your email campaigns. Ask multiple questions with photos and graphs to make the user experience both informative and fun. People love to answer questions — use this tool to learn more about what your niche wants.

Hopefully you will find these Twitter tools useful to your marketing strategy. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

No one accepts a position at a company without knowing how much money they’d be making. Sales compensation is an important factor when attracting and retaining talent on your sales team.

You want to give the best talent a reason to accept a position on your sales team and stay with your company long-term. In this guide, I’ll discuss the importance of a sales compensation plan, the types of sales compensation plans, and the steps you can take to create one of your own.

Now, let's look at what a sales compensation plan is and why you need one.

The purpose of a sales compensation plan is to encourage positive behaviors across your team, set expectations and standards for compensation for all salespeople, and drive results to achieve overall team and organizational goals.

Creating a sales compensation plan has additional benefits.

Sales compensation plans create structure within the team.

Sales teams are known for their high turnover. The stresses of selling to uninterested prospects and the general lack of advancement opportunities can make even the most seasoned of salespeople hop from team to team.

One way to lower turnover is to create a sales compensation plan that adds structure to the team, differentiating between junior, mid-level, and senior reps. In doing so, you’ll communicate to the reps that there are advancement opportunities within the team, and they won’t feel like they should leave.

Sales compensation plans incentivize individual reps.

Knowing that they could earn more if they sell more will be enough to incentivize reps. Not only that but if you include additional benefits such as an educational stipend, your reps will be incentivized to seek additional training, making them more effective salespeople.

Sales compensation plans help you budget better.

By knowing how much you’ll pay each rep depending on their experience and performance, you can create budgets that better align with your company's financial standing. That way, you know how much of the company’s earnings will be allotted for your sales reps’ compensation. This will allow you to better prepare if the team underperforms one quarter.

The structure of a sales compensation plan varies by business and is typically based on team organization, resources, and goals. For example, one sales organization might offer a higher base salary, while another might prioritize commission based on their budget, business structure, employee needs, and team targets.

There should be a compensation plan for every member of the sales team based on their role, experience, length of the sales cycle, and the type of deals they engage in. Here are some other factors to consider while thinking about your sales compensation plan:

• What’s your budget?
• Does your company culture impact how you compensate employees?
• What’s your competition paying?
• What are living costs like in your area?
• What are your team‘s and organization’s goals?

Before I share how to create your compensation plan, let's take a look at some important sales compensation terms to know.

Sales Compensation Terms to Know

Depending on how you structure your sales compensation plan, the following terms and concepts may come up as you start the development process.

Sales Quota

A sales quota is a time-bound revenue target set by sales managers — either individually or as a group. The most common time constraints for quotas are monthly, quarterly, and annually. They can be measured as the sales managers and company leadership see fit, whether that's by profit, deals closed, or overall activity.

Sales Accelerators

A sales accelerator kicks in when one of your reps hits a specific amount over their quota. Quota attainment, number of products sold, and contract length are the most common types of sales accelerators. This type of payoff is exponential for your reps — they may end up with a huge commission check if they have a highly successful month or quarter (so be aware of your resources and budget). For example, if a rep hits 110% of their quota by the end of the month, you'd pay them 1.0x on their performance above 100%.

Sales Decelerators

Sales decelerators have the opposite effect as accelerators — they penalize underperforming reps. A decelerator may kick in between 40% and 60% of their quota. In other words, if a rep only hits 60% of their quota, their performance would be multiplied by a decimal (like 0.5) to calculate their compensation.

Clawbacks

A clawback kicks in when a customer churns (i.e., stop using your product or service) prior to hitting a specific benchmark. They cause the rep to lose their commission and are common among subscription companies in an effort to keep customer retention rates high.

On-Target Earnings

On-target earnings (OTE) provide salespeople with a realistic view into what their total compensation for a position would be when their expected and reasonable goals and quotas have been reached. Typically speaking, OTE would include the base salary and the realistic commission resulting from closed deals.

Sales Performance Incentive Fund or Sales Contests

Sales performance incentive funds (SPIFs) or sales contests are ways to incentivize high performance among your salespeople.

These tactics are often used to change behavior and include monetary (such as a $500 cash prize to the first rep who closes 10 deals of a certain product) or non-monetary (a nice dinner for every team that increases their retention rate by the benchmark percentage).

These sales incentives and contests should run for short periods of time — about one to four weeks total. If you run them any longer, reps will lose the necessary sense of urgency for this tactic to work.

Also, keep your sales contests limited. The more behaviors you reward, the likelier your team will be pulled into conflicting directions — making it difficult to drive specific outcomes.

Now, let's review a sales commission structure template and examples of different types of compensation plans.

Sales Compensation Structure Template

Download the Free Template

Structuring your sales compensation plan is simple with this free template. In it, you'll find seven different types of comp plans that could work for your business. Each of them is made up of several factors that create the total compensation plan.

Base Salary: The compensation provided to a sales rep before they meet quota.

Projected Sales: The number of deals that the sales rep is expected to close by the end of the selling period.

Commission Rate: A commission amount expressed as a percentage of the revenue brought in by the sales rep.

Bonus Amount: The compensation provided above the base salary that compensates a sales rep for the deals they've closed during the selling period.

Commission Per Sale: The compensation amount paid to a sales rep per unit sold.

These are some of the most common sales compensation factors you'll take into account when developing your comp structure but may not use all of them in the same plan. Below are some examples of compensation plans and how each of these elements fit into them.

Sales Compensation Plan Examples

There’s no one specific way to pay employees in sales. Many companies tailor their plans according to how they conduct business. Generally speaking, there are four main types of compensation: hourly wages, salary, commission, and bonuses. Compensation plans are more detailed and can contain different forms of commission or no commission at all. They are all tailored to the size and scope of the business it applies to.

The following examples include the most common types of sales compensation plans. Each example has a different structure, so you'll be able to tailor your plan to your specific sales team and business based on your needs, resources, and goals.

1. Base Salary Plus Commission Plan

Create a custom version of this compensation plan in our free sales compensation calculator kit.

The most common sales compensation pay structure is the base salary plus commission plan. This structure provides reps with a fixed yearly base salary as well as commission. They get the security of a steady income with the economic incentive to sell.

This plan is ideal for most businesses because you benefit from greater clarity into your expenses (since there‘s less variability) and the opportunity to hire highly-motivated, competitive salespeople. Furthermore, since you’re giving reps a base salary, they're obligated to fulfill some non-selling tasks, such as training new team members.

In this plan, the commission percentage is lower because of the base salary. To determine your base-variable (or fixed) compensation split, think about the following factors:

• How difficult the sale is.
• How much autonomy is needed. (For example, are you providing your reps with leads or are you asking them to generate their own? Are you giving them technical support or none?)
• How much experience is necessary.

To determine the variable compensation, think about the following factors:

• How complex your sales cycle is.
• How much influence the rep has over the purchasing decision.
• How many leads reps work with at a given time.
• Your team's selling function (such as hunting or farming).

Essentially, the shorter and simpler a sale is and the less impact a rep has over the customer's behavior, the smaller the percentage of variable compensation should be.

One standard ratio across industries is 60:40 — meaning 60% fixed to 40% variable. A less aggressive ratio (think 70:30 or 75:25) is common when reps are required to teach the prospect because they're most likely selling a highly complex or technical product.

Account managers may have a similar ratio of fixed to variable pay, driving them to spend more time helping their existing customers than finding new ones.

Best for: Most businesses, as it provides greater clarity into expenses and allows for hiring highly-motivated, competitive salespeople while ensuring reps fulfill non-selling tasks.

2. Base Salary Plus Bonus Compensation Plan

A base salary plus a bonus compensation plan is common when your reps tend to consistently hit their pre-set targets. This approach offers a high level of predictability and still motivates your reps to close sales.

For example, you might pay $30,000 base and $15,000 for selling X amount per year. If you know about eight of your 10 employees will consistently hit quota, and total earnings are $55,000, you can set aside $440,000 in your annual budget for the bonuses. But again, this prevents reps from feeling any motivation to over-perform.

Best for: Companies with reps who consistently hit their pre-set targets. It offers a high level of predictability and motivation to close sales.

3. Commission Only Compensation Plan

Create a custom version of this compensation plan in our free sales compensation calculator kit.

A commission-only structure means you pay reps purely based on their performance. If they don't sell anything during a month, their salary is zero. If they sell $50,000 worth of product in a month, their salary may be anywhere between $15,000-$22,500, depending on the commission percentage you offer your employees.

Due to the simplicity of a commission-only compensation plan, you forgo a lot of risk — when your salespeople succeed, revenue increases; when they fail, you lose nothing.

It also motivates reps by giving them the freedom to earn as much money as they can while saving you time trying to identify any poor performers on your team. However, commission-only plans can make it challenging to forecast your expenses and stick to a tight budget.

In terms of the commission percentage to pay reps, you may decide it's anywhere between 5% to 45%, which is standard.

Additionally, the more support you expect reps to give customers (such as implementation help or account management), the higher their commission should be. Remember to factor in their level of involvement in the sale as well, meaning if they're only producing leads (rather than closing them, too), you should allocate a smaller commission.

Best for: Companies looking to minimize risk and motivate reps to earn as much as they can, while saving time identifying poor performers.

4. Gross Margin Commission Plan

Maybe your company will pay reps based on profit rather than sales. In other words, a rep would be compensated more for selling a product with a $2,500 gross margin than one with a $1,000 gross margin.

This works well because it discourages discounting. Reps can become reliant on discounts to close deals, which isn‘t good for your business. Not only are your margins eroded, but the perceived value of your product goes down and future customers will come to expect a price slash. Tying commission to the product’s final cost encourages reps to give fewer and smaller discounts.

Additionally, gross margin commission plans promote the sales of specific product lines. Not all of your products are created equal — whatever the case, paying on gross margin motivates your salespeople to sell more of your most profitable products.

However, there are three main things to keep in mind when it comes to gross margin commission plans.

• Revenue must be your priority if you use this plan. Perhaps you're trying to build market share or attract the top 20 logos in your industry. You want salespeople to focus on those goals — compensating them on profit may distract them and cause them to pursue the wrong customers.
• Reps must have control over pricing. Reps have to be either selling multiple products at different price points or have discounting power.
• You must be able to track your gross margins. Shifting product and/ or distribution costs, rebates, and territory changes can make calculating this extremely hard.

Best for: Companies prioritizing revenue and looking to discourage discounting, promote specific product lines, and motivate salespeople to sell more profitable products.

5. Absolute Commission Plan

Create a custom version of this compensation plan in our free sales compensation calculator kit.

An absolute (or set rate) commission plan requires you to pay your reps when they reach specific targets or milestones. For example, you might pay your salespeople $1,000 for every new customer they obtain or 15% of upsell and cross-sell revenue.

These plans are easy for reps to grasp, which typically drives good results. And because the output is directly tied to salary, reps are usually highly motivated to perform. In addition, you don‘t have to set a quota — instead, you can set benchmarks or recommendations, but ultimately, you’re only compensating reps for what they sell.

However, this structure doesn‘t take into account market penetration or the number of opportunities. For example, one rep may be getting twice as many leads as their peer, but they’d both be treated equally.

Additionally, you‘ll need to carefully consider what’s best for the overall company when determining the commission. If you‘re trying to drive the sales of a certain product line, you’ll need to compensate reps accordingly (hint: reps will often do whatever is most lucrative for them, regardless of greater business objectives).

Best for: Companies aiming to drive good results with easy-to-grasp plans that directly tie output to salary, without setting quotas and instead focusing on benchmarks or recommendations.

6. Straight-Line Commission Plan

A straight-line commission plan rewards reps based on how much or little they sell. For example, if a rep reaches 86% of their quota, they'll receive 86% of their commission. If they reach 140% of quota, they receive 140% of their commission.

Although this approach is relatively easy to calculate, it‘s not perfect. So, what’s the issue? You want to encourage over-performance as much as possible. If you're already paying base, getting a rep to hit 140% of their quota from 120% has a greater financial impact than getting an under-performer to hit 100% of quota from 80%.

Plus, a rep may be just fine making 80% of quota — you don‘t want to disincentivize any of your reps to sell because they’re content with a lower salary (which is when you'd incorporate an accelerator).

Best for: Companies that want to encourage over-performance, as getting a rep to hit 140% of their quota from 120% has a greater financial impact than getting an under-performer to hit 100% of quota from 80%.

7. Relative Commission Plan

Create a custom version of this compensation plan in our free sales compensation calculator kit.

Unlike an absolute commission plan, a relative commission plan uses a quota or predetermined target. This target can be based on revenue (X dollars) or volume (X units).

When a rep hits 100% of quota, they make their OTE, which consists of either base salary plus commission or pure commission. For example, if a rep's yearly quota is $60,000, their at-plan commission is $50,000, and their base is $80,000, then their OTE would be $130,000.

Best for: Companies that want to use a quota or predetermined target based on revenue or volume, with reps making their on-target earnings (OTE) when hitting 100% of quota.

8. ‘Draw Against’ Commission Plan

Draw Against commission plans are regularly occurring payments made in advance to the sales rep, or subtracted from the rep’s total commissions. While it seemingly emulates salary schedule payments, they are regular commission payouts given to the employee before they need to earn that money back. If there are remaining commissions after a specific time period, you will payout the remainder.

There are two main Draw Against commission plans.

Recoverable Draws

Recoverable draw payouts are basically loans to employees that you expect to gain back from their earned sales commission. For example, if an employee draws $2,500 per month, they’re expected to earn a minimum $2,500 in commission each month so your business doesn’t lose money. If this threshold is not met, their debts roll over into next month’s pay period.

Nonrecoverable Draws

Typically suitable for newly beginning sales reps, this draw is a payment you will not expect to gain back. It is unlikely for these employees to earn much in commission from the start, so use this draw until their training period is over.

Best for: Companies looking to provide regular commission payouts to employees before they need to earn that money back.

9. Territory Volume Commission Plan

Create a custom version of this compensation plan in our free sales compensation calculator kit.

With a territory volume commission plan, sales teams work with prospects and clients in clearly defined regions. Your reps are paid on a territory-wide basis versus individual-sale basis. Once the compensation period is complete, the total sales are split among the reps who worked in that territory.

This type of compensation plan is a good fit for team-based sales organizations where each rep works towards a common goal and focuses on a specific territory or region. To attract reps to this type of plan and grow your sales teams, you may offer them an attractive commission paired with a well-developed territory.

Best for: Team-based sales organizations where each rep works towards a common goal and focuses on a specific territory or region, with commissions split among the reps working in that territory.

10. Salary Only Compensation Plan

With a salary-only structure, you decide ahead of time how much you‘ll pay your salespeople. It doesn’t matter how much (or how little) they sell, their take-home earnings are set.

A salary-only structure is fairly uncommon for sales teams. That‘s because, without commission, reps are usually less motivated to go above and beyond. After they’ve hit quota, they may relax instead of pushing for the next deal because there's no incentive or reason to continue onward.

Plus, many salespeople love the thrill of scoring commission — the high stakes and competitive nature of earning a commission is often part of the reason reps go into sales in the first place. Not to mention, your top-performing reps may just leave your company so they can make commissions elsewhere.

So, are there any positives to a salary-only compensation plan? They make it simple to calculate sales expenses and predict hiring needs. Additionally, your reps may be less stressed because they don't have to worry about the financial consequences of missing their target or the weight of the competition.

Best for: Companies that want to simplify calculating sales expenses and predict hiring needs, with reps potentially experiencing less stress due to not worrying about the financial consequences of missing targets or the weight of competition.

11. Multiplier Commission Plan

A multiplier commission plan incentivizes sales representatives to exceed their targets and drive revenue growth. You reward reps by multiplying their commission rate when they achieve a certain percentage above their sales target.

For example, if a rep's standard commission rate is 10% and they achieve 150% of their target, their commission rate might be multiplied by 1.5, resulting in a 15% commission on all sales over the target.

Say a rep has a monthly target of $50,000 and earns a base commission of 10%. If they sell $75,000 worth of products (150% of their target), their commission would be:

• 10% commission on the first $50,000 = $5,000
• 15% commission on the additional $25,000 = $3,750
• Total commission earned = $8,750

This plan encourages reps to push beyond their targets. The higher they go, the more they earn. It's an excellent option for companies looking to drive aggressive growth and reward top performers.

Best for: Industries with intense competition or high-growth startups. It’s also effective for product launches, seasonal sales, and expansion into new markets where companies want to establish their footprint quickly.

12. Milestone-Based Commission Plan

A milestone-based commission plan rewards sales representatives for achieving specific milestones throughout the sales process.

Instead of focusing on the final sale, this plan incentivizes reps to complete key activities that lead to successful deals — like setting up demos, securing contracts, or reaching revenue thresholds. Each milestone carries a specific commission amount or percentage.

For example, a milestone-based plan might offer:

• $500 commission for setting up a qualified demo.
• $1,000 for securing a signed contract.
• 5% commission on the first year's revenue once the deal closes.

This structure keeps reps focused on moving prospects through the pipeline and encourages them to prioritize high-value activities.

Let's say a rep sets up 10 qualified demos ($5,000), closes 5 contracts ($5,000), and generates $100,000 in first-year revenue ($5,000) in a quarter. Their total commission would be $15,000.

Best for: Industries with complex sales cycles, like B2B or financial services, where multiple touchpoints and milestones are required to close a deal.

Now, let's look at how to implement one of these types of sales compensation plans on your team.

1. Use asales compensation planner.

There are dozens of potential approaches to and combinations of sales compensation strategies. To ensure you land on the best plan for your sales team, use a sales compensation planning template to calculate how much revenue you can expect and how much reps will be paid.

Featured Resource: Sales Compensation Planner

Download Now for Free

2. Determine your sales compensation plan goals.

The first part of developing a sales compensation plan strategy includes setting your goals — laying out your business objectives is a critical part of any strategy.

So, here are some common primary and secondary goals of sales compensation plans for your consideration. Clarifying your priorities will help you decide how to compensate your salespeople in a way that works for your business.

Remember, your goals may be a mix of the examples below, or look completely different — your targets should be a reflection of what you hope to get out of the sales compensation plan and your unique needs.

Primary goals of sales compensation plans	Secondary goals of sales compensation plans
Grow revenue	Lower expenses
Increase cash flow	Drive sales for a specific product
Increase average contract length	Attract target customers
Increase average deal size	Reduce discounting frequency
Increase percentage of repeat customers	Reduce average discount size
Increase retention rate	Acquire seed accounts
Increase upsell or cross-sell rate	Manage deal flow

3. Choose a type of sales compensation plan.

Now that you have your goals, it‘s time to choose which compensation plan you’ll implement at your company. Refer back to the sales compensation plan examples to review the most common options.

While determining which plan is best for your business, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my overall budget?
• How many reps do I have?
• What types of compensation plans do my competition use?
• What will my salespeople expect out of the plan implemented?

You‘ll also need to determine when you’ll provide the compensation for employees. There are four standard options for paying commissions.

When Customer Signs a Contract

Paying when the customer signs the contract is good motivation for the salesperson at hand because they immediately see the monetary impact of closing the deal.

However, this payment plan can also lead to cash flow problems if there‘s a significant delay between the signed agreement and the first payment (especially if you’re an early-stage business or it‘s a large deal that’s being closed).

When You Receive the Customer's First Payment

Compensating reps when you‘re paid is the most common payment method. There’s less lag between the time of the commission and revenue payments. You can also use clawbacks to incentivize salespeople to focus on good customer fit (rather than just anyone who will buy), which often boosts retention rates.

Note: If you‘re a subscription-based business, this timeline can disrupt your cash flow. After all, if you give a rep commission on the entire contract when you get the first check, you’re paying in advance of the customer's subsequent payments.

Every Time a Customer Pays

Paying each time you get an invoice is ideal if you want to protect your cash flow. Nonetheless, it can be complex to plan if you're on a tight budget, especially if you have a large sales team of reps closing and managing deals.

When Deal Goals are Reached

Also referred to as a tiered commission structure, this compensation plan is made to motivate reps and reward top performers that close a certain number of deals on a monthly basis. After reps exceed a predetermined benchmark, their commission rate increases. This model can also implement commission reduction for those that underperform.

4. Base your decisions on research and data.

Collect data on sales rep performance, customer visits, and segmentation using a tool like HubSpot Sales Hub to identify areas where your team's efforts may not align with your priorities.

Josh Miller, Head of Sales Compensation at CVS Health, adds why this is important in gaining trust in The Sales Compensation Show:

"If you can show that this isn't hypothetical, this is somebody that already happened over here, we designed this is what resulted, this was not what we were looking for.

And the following consequences occurred, that can open up the eyes of the person to realize that you‘re not throwing out something that has a 1% chance of happening, you’re throwing out something that has a 60 to 70% chance of happening."

Using this information builds credibility and support for your compensation plan revamp. For example, analyzing the volume of activity and customer visits relative to different customer segments reveals misalignments between your sales team‘s efforts and the areas you’ve described as most important.

Also, create a framework to collect feedback on individual sales rep performance. Sales compensation professionals have visibility across all organizations and teams, allowing them to identify top performers based on the deals they close and the feedback they receive. Compare this information to current compensation rankings to uncover discrepancies you need to address in your plan design.

5. Prioritize simplicity in sales compensation plans.

Keeping sales compensation plans simple is crucial — but it’s especially important for large organizations. At HubSpot, even with 8,000 employees, we keep commission plans straightforward for sales representatives. This is in line with industry best practices since 86% of companies standardize their compensation plans.

Kat Walenty, a senior manager at HubSpot, underscores the importance of this simplicity in a podcast:

“There‘s a lot of nuances around the other things, the benefits that go with it, how we’re paying against market, finance, like, what are we looking to stiff on? There's just a lot more to it,” Walenty says. “Whereas, maybe we go to the reps with a very simple plan, but, all of the other things around it and getting there are the things that make it very complex and complicated.”

The larger the organization grows, the more variables come into play, making sales compensation an increasingly complex optimization problem.

Trying to incentivize every behavior can lead to incentivizing none, so it's essential to find the right balance within teams and segments.

For example, your sales compensation plan could consist of a base salary and a commission rate of 10% on all sales. Set a clear quota for each representative based on their territory and experience level. If a representative achieves their quota, they earn their full commission. If they exceed their quota, they earn an additional 5% commission on the excess amount.

Prioritizing simplicity in the front-facing aspects of the plan helps keep sales representatives focused and motivated.

6. Choose a payroll software.

Once you've determined your plan goals, type, and payment plan, you can choose a payroll software to assist in compensating your salespeople.

Depending on how long your company has been established and whether or not you have an HR team that handles pay and benefits, you may or may not already have payroll software. If you do, it should be easy for you to incorporate your new sales compensation plan into the software.

If not, you might consider one of the following three popular payroll software options to help you carry out your plan.

• Gusto: This software offers an all-in-one service, which includes payroll, HR, and benefits so you can handle all payment-related work from a central location.
• Intuit QuickBooks Payroll: With automatic payroll tax calculations, paycheck accuracy, and native payroll integration for your accounting software, this option will allow you to focus your time and attention on other important tasks you need to manage.
• Patriot Software Payroll: Patriot is a great option for anyone with a low budget who needs the bare minimum payroll-related features and capabilities.
• Xoxoday Compass: Xoxoday has a ton of different integrations that work well with your existing ERP, CRM, HRMS, HCM, Spreadsheets, or any sales tech stack to centralize and manage all your commission data in one place.
• Incfile's Employer Tax Calculator: While not strictly software, this employer payroll tax calculator tool can estimate tax deductions and withholdings. Incfile’s tool can also estimate hiring costs, pay employees accurately and on time, and better manage temporary and/or seasonal employee payroll.

7. Set quotas and expectations for compensation.

Now it‘s time to set your quotas for your individual reps and/ or your team as a whole. This will allow you to establish expectations for compensation with your salespeople so everyone knows what’s expected of them and how they're going to have the opportunity to make money.

Of course, this begs the question: How do you decide what quota should be? There are two main approaches to setting quotas.

Bottoms-Up Approach

The bottoms-up approach requires you to consider your team‘s capabilities as well as the perceived market opportunity to determine what each territory’s or salesperson's quota should be. The more data you have here, the easier this will be.

Your inputs will vary depending on your product and type of sale, but generally, you'll want to consider the following when using the bottoms-up approach to establish quota:

• Average contract value (ACV) or average deal size
• Average revenue per salesperson
• Number of salespeople
• Number of qualified leads (per month or quarter)
• Percentage of qualified leads that close

These considerations will tell you how many deals a rep should be working and, thus, what a reasonable quota should be.

Alternatively, you can simply multiply the typical number of closed deals by the average deal size. This will give you a baseline number to use for your quota.

But beware — the more successful and experienced your salespeople become, the more deals they‘ll be able to work and the bigger their contracts will be. This means their quota may quickly become inaccurate, so you’ll want to consistently evaluate it if you go with this approach.

Top-Down Approach

With a top-down approach, you combine market data with your revenue targets to figure out what your team needs to bring in.

So, if most companies in your space pay their salespeople in the X to Y range, and your reps need to close Y amount in total for your business to hit the established goal, you can determine a reasonable OTE as well as your optimal team size.

8. Maintain your sales compensation plan.

As your business goals evolve, teams grow, product line changes, and competition adjusts over time, your compensation plan will need to be revisited. Like any business strategy, it's not going to stay relevant forever — what works now might not suit any of your needs a year from now.

Review and analyze your compensation plan to keep your reps happy and motivated. At the same time, don’t revise your compensation too frequently. Research suggests that confidence drops when comp plans are changed frequently. It shows you aren’t confident in the plan.

Ensure you're implementing a plan that helps you positively impact your business's bottom line. Build it right the first time and stick with it unless there are significant changes that require revisions.

Sales Bonus Structure

Many companies offer bonuses to sales reps based on certain criteria to encourage business growth, customer retention, or employee satisfaction.

If you‘re confused, here’s a quick disclaimer on how sales bonuses and sales commission differ: Sales reps earn commission based on the volume of units sold, or the revenue obtained from a new customer. For instance, perhaps a sales rep earns 5% commission on every $1 sold. (It's important to note: Commission is one type of bonus that you can offer.)

A sales bonus, on the other hand, can be tied to revenue (for instance, maybe your sales reps receive a $10,000 bonus for every $100,000 worth of revenue they bring into the company), but it doesn't have to be.

Sales bonuses can be tied to other achievements as well, such as if a sales rep increases a customer's lifetime value, or if a sales rep has worked at your company for five years.

In 2022, the most popular formula calculation method was a bonus formula tied to quota performance.

There are different ways to structure your bonus structure. These include:

1. Variable bonus: Your sales rep earns a certain bonus (or commission) for a certain amount of revenue obtained, or when they reach a certain pre-identified achievement.
2. Above-plan incentive (also known as SPIFs): Your sales rep earns a bonus when they meet certain criteria for a specific product or service.

To explore these two bonus options more in-depth, let's take a look at some bonus examples.

Sales Bonus Examples

1. Bonus Off Commission (Variable Bonus)

In this first example, a sales rep will earn a bonus based purely on the amount of revenue they bring into the company. If a sales rep makes a $100,000 deal, they might earn $10,000.

Alternatively, perhaps you give commission based on units sold. If a sales rep makes 10 deals in one month, they might receive a $1,000 bonus.

2. Bonus Off Customer Lifetime Retention (Variable Bonus)

If your goal is to reduce customer churn, you might want to motivate your sales reps to increase customer lifetime value through up-selling or cross-selling to existing customers. One way to do this is by offering bonuses for customer lifetime retention.

For instance, perhaps you award your sales reps a bonus of $5,000 for every customer who signs a 3-year contract and $10,000 for every customer who signs a 5-year contract.

3. Bonus Off Annual Performance (Variable Bonus)

This type of bonus awards employees who've gone above and beyond for the business over the past year.

An example of this would be a bonus given to each sales rep who reached 120% of quota over the past year.

4. Bonus Off Sales for Specific Product or Service (Above-Plan Incentive)

If you've just launched a new product, it could be a good opportunity to offer SPIFs to your sales reps.

SPIFs have pre-defined time frames and criteria. For example, perhaps your sales reps earn $500 each time they sell your new product to a customer. Alternatively, maybe every sales rep who sells 100 units of your new product receives a $1,000 gift card.

SPIFs typically only last for a short period of time. For instance, you might encourage a quick burst of sales on a new product by offering SPIFs to your sales rep for six months.

Begin Creating Your Compensation Plan

Remember, no sales compensation plan is perfect — your priorities are constantly shifting, your reps are always looking for new loopholes, and your prospects are periodically changing their preferences.

Follow the tips above and develop a sales compensation strategy to fit your specific business needs and resources to help drive your bottom-line success.

This post was originally published in July 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

We’ve all experienced that type of prospect. The special type of person who clicks around your website, reads your content, and even comments on your blog posts—with no apparent intent of making a purchase. Naturally, however, you spend the time and money to chase the prospect, right?

Let’s be blunt. Unfortunately, there are leads who will never buy your products or services. Ever. And if they do, not only did they cost an exorbitant amount of money to acquire, they have a greater chance of churning and are unlikely to purchase more than once. They’re also generally finicky. Some may complain about everything. Others may berate your customer support team. These prospects leave your team frustrated and exhausted—and take a toll on your resources (and sanity).

As you know, sales and marketing resources are finite. In other words, no amount of money justifies these customers. Any marketer worth their salt knows that buyer personas can help teams understand their audience and reduce these costly interactions. However, it’s equally essential to bolster your strategy with negative personas.

Why should negative buyer personas be treated the same way as traditional ones—and introduced in any inbound marketing program? This article explains the importance of negative buyer personas and how to introduce them across your organization.

Traditional vs. Negative Personas

Persona development is paramount to the success of an inbound marketing program, no matter the size or scope of your business. Traditional personas embody the type of customer that gives you the most revenue, with the least opposition, over the longest period of time. Buyer personas tell you important information about your target customer including:

• Daily activities
• Frequent challenges or pain points
• Why certain purchasing decisions are made
• Questions they frequently ask
• What might make their life easier

Buyer personas help teams allocate resources, attract leads, and understand what drives people to make purchases. They’re the type of customer that reminds you why you got into marketing or sales in the first place.

So, if buyer personas represent your target customer, then negative personas are pretty much the exact opposite—and hold just as much sway.

Negative personas save organizations time and money by identifying archetypes of who you don’t want to sell and market to. Negative personas enable teams to segment out the bad apples by proactively identifying which types of prospects are a potential drain on resources. Identifying negative personas gives teams a reason to cut ties with prospects.

It’s time to elevate your standards and work with the right prospects. To help identify the best personas, it’s essential to weed out the ones who won’t work with you in the first place. Luckily, if you’ve created traditional buyer personas, you’ve set the foundation for creating negative ones. Let’s review.

1. Talk with Your Team

The first step in building negative personas is hosting a kickoff meeting with your sales and marketing departments to ensure that everyone on the same page. Each department can bring something to the table. While sales will have insights into which factors influence a prospect, marketing can provide important inbound marketing analytics, including:

• Ineffective lead-generation tactics
• Which pages prospects leave
• Which prospects abandon a shopping cart
• Where customers are located

Consulting your internal team can help outline customer pain points, goals, and common behaviors before you even talk to them.

2. Talk to Current Customers

After gathering information from your internal teams, it’s important to validate your assumptions with customer interviews. Talk to customers who have stopped working with you. Interface with prospective customers who have never heard of you. As with traditional personas, it’s important to keep things open-ended. These questions are more likely to generate valuable information and can be used to tailor the behavior of your negative personas.

Leverage Data

Interviewing and surveying customers is also a great way to collect data. For example, you can survey customers with low average sales prices. Or, you can speak to customers with low satisfaction scores. Finally, consider talking to those who love your brand—those who download content and click through your emails—but have never converted into a customer. This can help identify industry and market trends.

3. Build Your Persona Profile

You’ve interviewed customers and prospects. You’ve analyzed data and identified trends. Now is the time to get down to the nitty-gritty and build out your negative personas.

Start by filling in basic demographic information, including your personas’ background, demographics, and identifiers. Like traditional personas, include both demographics and a narrative of the customer’s behavior. This should include a description of daily life, challenges, purchasing behavior, and other factors that you’ve gathered from interviews and previous interactions.

Identifiers, which include demeanor and behavior, can help sales teams immediately recognize red flags. And indicators such as real quotes and common objections help teams identify during phone calls or other interactions. The goal here is to outline less-than-perfect customer behaviors and trends so that your reps can respond quickly when they encounter a Frustrating Frank or Dogged Denise.

Successfully segmenting negative personas can result in a lower cost per lead and cost per customer, resulting in higher sales productivity. Thus, it becomes clear why negative personas should be treated the same way as traditional ones—and introduced into any successful inbound marketing program.

Do you have any additional suggestions on implementing negative personas? Be sure to leave a comment below!

Your website has a tough job. It must appeal to your site visitors in a way that encourages engagement and moves those visitors toward action, and it must do this without necessarily knowing anything about your visitors when they first arrive.

It must appeal to your site visitors in a way that encourages engagement and moves those visitors toward action, and it must do this without necessarily knowing anything about your visitors.

Once a visitor has been on your blog or connected with you via social media or email, you have much more information to work with — assuming you have good CRM and marketing automation tools in place.

But even without that information, your site needs to do the following:

• Address prospects’ problems or pain points
• Educate
• Demonstrate your experience and expertise
• Prove effectiveness of your solutions
• Build trust
• Provide a way to reach you

With all that is required of an effective marketing website, the planning and strategy that go into the site before the first line of code is written will have an enormous impact on how well your site performs. The tips below will make the process more productive.

Good Website Copy will Make or Break You

When it comes to content marketing, having great website content can make or break all of your marketing efforts.

You not only have to create copy that resonates with your current customers but you also have to keep your future customers in mind.

With only a few seconds to grab website visitors’ attention, your website content needs to tell a story that engages, adds insight and educate your visitors. Copy should be memorable, thought-provoking, useful, and interesting.

If you can’t capture your visitors’ interest, they will quickly leave your site to go to your competitors.

To get you on the path to writing great website content that your future customers will love, I’ve outlined a few tips below.

Focus on Your Customers’ Interests

When people are seeking information online it’s to find answers, to relieve their pain points or solve a problem.

Website copy needs to address the questions that your visitors have.

You need to anticipate their needs and focus all of your content on the reasons why these visitors are coming to your site in the first place. So, while you’re writing copy, take yourself out of the equation and focus on the future customers that might be reading it instead. There should be more “you” than “we” in your writing.

Take yourself out of the equation and focus on the future customers and focus on your customer’s needs and what they are looking to read instead. Your website copy and blog articles should be more about the customer and their problems and pain points than about you.

Let’s be honest; no one cares about you or your brand.

Accuracy is a Must

Factual mistakes, half-truths, and outright misleading information can and will do real damage to your company’s reputation.

You’re putting out information to be known as a thought leader; if your content isn’t correct, you’ll be known as the opposite: as a company that people can’t and will not trust.

Accuracy is critical with grammar and spelling. You don’t want preventable and dumb mistakes to make you look bad, so have someone else proofread content before uploading it to your website.

Put Thought into Your Headlines

Your headline is the first glimmer of information that your website visitors will see.

The headline needs to capture their interest and make them click on your link to read more.

You want to excite and engage them.

The headline maybe the sole reason someone decides to read your content or not.

You need to make sure your headline is actually related to the information you’ve written on your page—no one wants to feel like he or she was tricked into coming to your website with a click-bait headline.

Originality Matters

Creating original content will not only help you with your search engine rankings, but your visitors will appreciate it too. Rehashing the same old ideas and concepts as your competitors won’t help you stand out in the crowd. No one will seek out your information if he or she has heard it all before.

Rehashing the same old ideas and concepts as your competitors won’t help you stand out in the crowd. No one will look at you as a thought leader if your information if they have heard it all before.

Bring Value

Unless information is useful to the reader, what’s the point of writing it? Your website content should be educational, so your readers can learn from it. After all, they’re seeking out information so they can become more knowledgeable. It should also be actionable, with tips and advice that they can apply to their own lives—but without telling them what to do. Simply writing down your thoughts without truly thinking about how valuable it is, will be a waste of time and resources.

Your website content should be educational, so your readers can learn from it. It should solve a pain point or assist with managing a problem.

People are seeking information so they can become more knowledgeable and make better, more informed decisions.

Content should also be actionable, with tips and advice that they can apply to their own lives—but

without telling them what to do.

Simply writing down your thoughts without truly thinking about how valuable it will be a waste of time and resources.

Use Different Mediums

Not everyone wants to read a blog post to figure out an answer to a question.

Some people would rather watch videos, view infographics, or listen to podcasts to gain knowledge.

So when you create website content, mix up your delivery methods so you can target as the many types of learners as possible.

Gain Traffic with Great Content

Poor quality and misinformation on website content will get you nowhere. In fact, it will damage your reputation, potentially permanently.

Taking the easy path and not putting in the time and effort it requires to create awesome content won’t attract and entice your future customers. To gain traffic, your website content needs to be exceptional, so focus on your future customers, pay attention to headlines, be original, provide value, and create different types of content.

To gain traffic, your website content needs to be exceptional.

Focus on your future customers, pay attention to recent headlines, blog comments and similar for ideas of what their pain points are.

Most of all, be original, provide value, and create different types of content.

Ask for Action

Every page of your website should lead naturally toward one thing: the next step in the buyer’s journey.

That might simply be the next page on the site, subscribing to an email or newsletter, downloading a white paper or eventually reaching out for contact with your sales team.

The difficult task here is balancing the need to maintain this tight focus while also presenting the visitor with reasonable options for their next steps. Again, planning and strategy will determine what those options should be and how they should be presented.

If you’re successful at defining success, moving prospects toward that end goal and giving them opportunities to engage and commit, you will have created all the elements for success.

You’ll have a content marketing site that converts visitors to subscribers, subscribers to leads and leads to clients.

Sales management can be grueling work. Sales leaders are tasked with driving motivation in their reps, teaching them the technical skills they need to make a sale, tracking their productivity, making sure sales outreach is in line with marketing-approved messaging and much more. To top things off, most sales organizations are working under a tremendous amount of pressure, trying to beat the clock to make monthly and quarterly sales goals.

With all these competing factors and data points, managing a sales team with the aid of a CRM system may seem like a good idea. However, sales people notoriously despise CRM systems. And, it’s easy to see why. For many organizations, CRM systems add just another to-do item on an already overworked sales team. It’s a lot of following a process, tracking every action, checking the boxes. In other words, it can be an administrative hassle that no one goes out of their way to embrace.

What is your goal as a sales leader?

As a sales leader, you may feel like you don’t many alternatives to a CRM system. At the end of the day, you must track time and progress. But what if there was an automated method to track the progress of your team and the individuals on it – a way that would cut the hassle of a CRM system and allow everyone to move faster?

Count on dashboards to track your entire sales funnel.

If your CRM system is becoming more of a hassle than a help, it may be time to evaluate dashboards as a sales management tool. Dashboards accomplish your core goal: to manage your team and demonstrate progress to your company’s leadership team. But they take things farther than a CRM ever could by making the data visual and easy to share. And, at the end of your day, your sales team is still held accountable and you’ve cut out the hours it takes for you to consolidate data or run reports.

Do the following sales dashboards fall in line with the data that you need to track?

• Lead Funnel: Yes, every CRM has some sort of lead funnel. It’s a cool little graphic that looks like a funnel and tells you the number of deals and value. But, what is it NOT telling you?
  > How long have the leads have been in each stage?
  > What is the average sales cycle of each rep?
• Top Sales Reps: Everyone knows who the top reps are. The question becomes, how easily can you quantify their production based on the behavior of their deals along the sales cycle?
  > Are top sales reps actually behavior cohorts?
  > Do you have the details to translate their success into teaching opportunities?
• Accountability: Does every rep receive an expectation report each morning?
  > Can every rep know what things they can do immediately to be more successful?
  > Is their success or failure a surprise? Do they see it coming?
• Executive Sales Report: Can you take all your sales data and roll it up into a no-nonsense snapshot of where you’re at for the day, the month, or quarter? Are you able to easily provide your executives the KPIs they count on in a format that won’t give either of you a headache?

Make an impression.

Sales dashboards reduce much of the administrative complexities that come with CRM systems. But they also serve to make a bright impression on your management team. Concise, visual reports that are easy to understand and share are a win, regardless of where your sales numbers stand.

 Born out of a frustration with recruiting within the peninsula-trapped City of San Francisco, Terminal is a platform allowing companies to tap into talent abroad. Starting with campuses in Kitchener-Waterloo, Montreal and Vancouver, the startup aims to plant physical flags in as many of the world’s global talent centers as possible. Terminal is being run by… Read More

Not too long ago, I had a suggestion from a member of my team to provide the sales team with coloring books. Coloring books might be something that is fine for some groups, but not mine. As a manager, I look to provide everyone on my team with everything they need to get the job done. And yes, that includes a relaxed working environment, but I drew the line on having team members color at their desks while they were making sales calls. As I said, I’m not running a daycare.

I think there are occasions when staff doesn’t realize that although businesses are looking to empower their teams, they’re still running a business.

In today’s flatter, less hierarchical, and team-oriented companies, there can be situations when members forget they’re at a job. Managers and team leaders still want results, whether it’s money or social impact. In fact, many managers prefer to work with individuals who see the bigger picture and great team players. A team player looks beyond their own work to what is good and right for the broader group and company as a whole.

If you work at a company where your managers try to support the team’s efforts with employee perks, remember that the best team members are also those who are giving their bosses what they want to see in results.

If you want to be a team member that supports your manager or leader, here are some quick ideas to help you set yourself apart from the others and standout in the eyes of your boss.

1. Understand the Goals of Your Boss: Understand the macro and micro goals that your boss has to accomplish. These should be in addition to your goals. Figure out ways to excel at your goals and also ensure that your manager achieves some of his or her goals. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to walk into your manager’s office and ask him or her what else, in addition to your work, you can do for them. Your aim is to show your value, not just demonstrate that you’re a worker who can achieve the goals of your job. Showing value comes in addition to your work.
2. Eliminate Excuses: Your boss doesn’t care about the reasons that can come up when something failed or went wrong. Yes, they care about the facts so there is learning, but they’re not interested in excuses. They want to know what happened, facts as to what went wrong, and what is being done to rectify or improve the situation. If you have a failure or an obstacle, your manager wants to know what your thoughts and recommendations are for overcoming them. Eliminate anything that ever sounds like an excuse from your vocabulary. They’re not interested. Ask yourself instead, how are you going to solve the problem or make it an opportunity for improvement and learning?
3. See Something, Say Something: Often more junior people have the chance to see any issue––or something that can potentially become a serious matter or opportunity––because they are involved in the day-to-day work. If you see something that can become a golden opportunity or a challenge, say something and provide your ideas about how to handle it. By speaking up, you will help your boss see that you’re keeping your eyes not just on your job, but on the overall higher-level issues.
4. If You’re On Time, Your Late: The reality is, and you might not like this one, but there remains a bias at work for the morning. Researchers have been able to see to some extent the bias that managers tend to have toward those people who are in the office early. Even if you stay late, your boss likely sees you in a better light if you are early to work. More than likely, your boss is in the office early. If you’re making the same commitment, you’re differentiating yourself as someone who cares about the broader organizational goals.
5. Under-promise, Over-deliver: One of the biggest mistakes more junior people make is to over-promise. Instead, when you’re in the process of developing goals, understand what you’re sure to meet, and then give those goals to your boss. Then create a separate set of goals that you will strive toward which exceed the metrics that you provided to your boss. As you measure yourself against your goals and not the ones you gave to your boss, your manager will quickly become aware that you’re over-delivering.
6. Complain Less: Your boss has a lot on his or her plate, and although they want to understand and be informed about issues, the last thing you want to do is to complain. Make it a point to be “complainless.” Complaining is when you take a situation and offer no solutions. Don’t complain. Instead, be one of the team members who foster a collegial and professional working team environment. And, when you are debating ideas or solutions to challenges or opportunities, be the person who’s always looking for the productive path forward.
7. Master Your Manager’s Communication Style: One of the most effective sales techniques that many salespeople learn is to match the communication style of the person to whom they’re speaking. If your manager is someone who wants things to be told to him in bullets on a single page and in as concise a way as possible, the last thing you’ll want to do is to offer your boss a monologue or a 10-page plan. That kind of presentation will be the fastest way to lose their attention. Alternately, if your boss prefers to brainstorm with you during a face-to-face meeting that will take up two hours your day, that’s what you need to do. Match the style of your manager, so they are more inclined to pay attention to what you have to say.

To stand out with your manager and team leader, you have to build a relationship. In fact, it’s essential that you create a healthy relationship. The next time there’s a new position open within your company, your manager will more easily see you in the role if he or she already thinks you’re a star player. And, when the time comes that you consider leaving the business, asking your manager for a LinkedIn recommendation or reference will be easier and better because you’ve always set yourself to be a great team player.

One of the most challenging decisions freelancers, solopreneurs, and independent consultants face is how much to charge for their time and expertise. What if people complain that you’re overpriced — or, even worse, walk away from a deal with you entirely? But the answer isn’t swinging to the other extreme and asking a fee so modest you’ll ultimately resent it.

As I discuss in my book Entrepreneurial You, you can’t do good work for others if you can’t keep yourself in business. Charging a fair price is what allows you to create long-term value. Here are four things to keep in mind to become more comfortable charging what you’re worth.

Underpricing sends a bad signal. We all know the danger of overpricing: You lose the deal. But underpricing can be just as perilous. Author Kevin Kruse learned a lesson about understanding one’s value a number of years ago from an unexpected source: someone he was trying to hire as a speaker. At the time, Kruse was running a nonprofit life sciences association, and his job was to organize the annual convention. The board had a specific person in mind for the keynote speaker, and even though Kruse had a budget of $30,000, he wasn’t sure he could land the speaker, who was a New York Times best-selling author with an Ivy League doctorate and a heavy media presence.

But when Kruse called, the author quoted a shockingly low fee: $3,000. “From the outside,” Kruse says, “it looked like he had all the signs of success and credibility, and we would have gladly paid literally 10 times his asking price.” As it was, Kruse wondered if the author’s low fee scared a lot of people away, thinking he must be an inexperienced beginner onstage. Price is often a proxy for quality, and when you put yourself at the low end, it signals that you’re unsure of your value — or the value just isn’t there. Either can be alarming for prospective clients.

Develop a network of trusted peers. Those who make purchasing decisions usually aren’t keen to reveal their standard rates, because they possess an informational advantage. If you don’t know that the going rate for a given contract is $10,000, and you ask for $5,000, in their mind it’s a win-win. You’ve gotten a number that makes you happy, and they saved money. But if you later find out that you’re earning less than others, it’s a bitter disappointment. The antidote is to develop a trusted peer network that can provide you with honest information about going rates and terms. You might feel nervous raising your fees — but if you discover that everyone else is getting $10,000, it’s a lot more comfortable.

You can’t think your way into being comfortable — you have to act. Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit and the proprietor of a successful training firm, recalls that in his early days, “I was charging people around $200 for four one-hour calls per month.” He quickly found himself exhausted and decided to raise his rates to avoid burnout. How did he get comfortable asking? “At a really tactical level, it’s just practice,” he says. “Somebody once said to me, ‘Your going rate should be fear plus 10%.’” I love that, because it’s like, what’s the level you’re comfortable saying, $1,000? All right, add 10%, so it’s $1,100. Now, go say that in front of a mirror 20 times. You’ll feel like an idiot, but what happens is the phrase loses some of its power.”

You can slowly test market demand. This strategy doesn’t work for negotiating a job salary, which happens once and then benchmarks you for as long as you’re with that employer. But if your business model entails working with multiple clients, you have more flexibility to experiment with pricing, steadily and incrementally increasing your rates until you feel you’re earning what you deserve. “I still have one client paying me $500 a month because he’s grandfathered in after years of working together,” says Jenny Blake, author of Pivot. “But the next time you pitch to a client, it’s $850, and the next time, $1,000.” If you hit a level where clients start to resist, you can consider freezing or reducing your rates until you’ve built up other income streams or increased your reputation in some other way (landing a marquee client, or starting to write for a prominent publication) that may justify a higher fee.

Setting your rates is one of the most stressful decisions professionals face. It directly affects your ability to attract clients and create a meaningful quality of life for yourself. Plus, it hits at core insecurities we might harbor: What’s so different about my product or service? Am I actually worth that amount?

Those doubts might prompt us to lower our rates and ask for less. But, if you have a good sense of market norms and you’re not requesting something outlandish, that’s a mistake. As Kruse’s experience hiring the underpriced speaker shows, price is often a perceived proxy for quality. If your skills and abilities can justify it, ask for what you deserve. In the end, you may well get it — along with more respect.

Many firms have the potential to be high-growth superstars. These high performers come from every corner of the professional services universe. Some are large and some small, and they serve a diverse array of clients.

But far too many firms fail to achieve their growth potential. Why?

The knowledge to ignite growth is readily available. Yet somehow, sustained high growth never happens at most firms.

Often, the problem lies between a management team’s ears. They build their strategic plans upon faulty assumptions and outmoded beliefs.

High-growth teams look at things differently. In this post, we identify five traits of high-growth firms. If your leadership team is lacking any of these traits, you will be hard pressed to take your business to a place where it can deliver consistently high growth and profits.

Belief that you can grow

“We’re too large to grow quickly.” “We’re too small to compete against the big firms.” “Our industry is too competitive.” If there is one thing otherwise intelligent professionals are good at, it’s generating excuses why they can’t grow.

Naturally, if you believe you can’t grow, you will never try. Your firm will grind in low gear forever. Other firms won’t try because they are afraid to fail — if you don’t try, you can’t fail. The logic is flawed, yet it’s still appealing to some.

As with any business goal, success is never certain. But failure is guaranteed if you don’t try.

What you need is a mindshift — a dogged belief that growth is possible and that your team can make it happen. There may be many valid reasons you aren’t growing today. You just need to identify them, then eliminate them one by one.

Courage to be different

It’s very easy — and oddly comforting — to look to your peers for marketing guidance. If “everyone” calls themselves full service or has a blue logo, there must be a good reason. Right?

Wrong. Don’t anchor yourself to your competitors. That’s an anchor that will sink you. Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s right. In fact, that’s a sure-fire indicator that you are missing a huge opportunity — one that’s happening in different waters.

The whole point of differentiation is to be, well, different from your competitors. And when that difference provides an important benefit to a segment of potential clients, you’ve got a true competitive advantage.

The roots of this blind spot go back to our evolutionary past. We humans are herd animals. Fitting in feels safe. Being different feels dangerous. But when it comes to marketing and business development it pays to take some risks and stand for something.

Respect for reality

If there is any overriding conclusion to draw from the last 30 years of cognitive and behavioral science, it is that humans are not by nature fully rational creatures. Strong emotions often influence and distort our perceptions even when we think we are being “realistic.”

It’s easy to find people and anecdotal evidence to support our biases and opinions. But we can counterbalance this weakness with research and science.

Using research and provable facts as the basis for making decisions can be immensely powerful. In fact, high-growth firms are much more likely to conduct frequent research on their target clients to uncover opportunities for growth.

So what does your team need to do? Believe in science and embrace research. Separate your assumptions from those things you know to be true. Recognize that anecdotes and opinions are not facts. And remember that snap decisions based on “gut feeling” can be very risky to the health of your firm.

Love of learning

“That’s the way we have always done it” is a very dangerous phrase in today’s fast-changing world. At a time when half of human knowledge becomes outdated every 2.5 years, no professional can avoid new learning.

But how do you approach it? Is learning something your firm embraces or avoids? And do you define learning as mandatory continuing education only, or is it something more?

Firms that love learning about their clients’ industries and the challenges they face are far better equipped to anticipate and address clients’ emerging and needs. And firms that love learning about their technical specialty are positioned to innovate and demonstrate thought leadership. What is your firm’s commitment to learning?

Nishith Desai Associates, an India-based law firm with offices around the globe, decided to make learning an integral part of their firm culture. So they dedicate the first hour of each morning to learning. When they aren’t doing independent study, everyone in the firm participates in live or virtual sessions. For a firm their size, this commitment represents an enormous investment, but it has paid tremendous dividends. They were named Asia’s most innovative law firm by The Financial Times. They have successfully built their world class reputation around their knowledge and creative thinking.

While your firm may not be able to make this level of commitment, that doesn’t mean that you can’t value and support new learning. Knowledge is power. But in an era of rapid change and increasing competition, those who value learning have the greatest power.

Mission mentality

Having a clear focus and a well-defined goal are important to motivating and directing growth. This single overriding focus is something we call a “mission mentality.” When people are counting down the days until their retirement or chasing their personal priorities they are not working as a team to achieve a common goal.

Today’s professional services firms are complex organizations. They often have matrix structures and many practice areas with autonomous professionals working on complicated client projects. Add in a rapidly evolving environment and intense competition and you have a recipe for stress and confusion.

When everyone in a firm has a clear understanding of where they are headed and are working together to get there, growth is much easier to achieve. The mission becomes more important than any individual’s priorities.

Firms that have multiple competing goals are at war with themselves. We’ve seen too many firms let conflicting partner-level priorities torpedo growth of the overall firm. Don’t let it happen to yours.

How do you think like a high-growth firm? The five traits I’ve described above are crucial, and a firm has to embrace them at every level of the organization. Of course, that means starting at the top with the leadership team. You may have to work hard to purge the habits and assumptions that are holding you back. But once you get everyone excited and headed in the same direction the obstacles to sustained high performance become easier and easier to overcome.

What if you could sum up all of your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats with a straightforward exercise that could guide your organizational strategy for years to come? Would you do it?

Of course you would. And the good news is that the groundwork for this type of exercise has already been laid out.

It’s called a S.W.O.T. analysis, and in this article we’ll look at what S.W.O.T. analysis is, how to do it, and several examples to follow for your own analysis.

What is a S.W.O.T. analysis?

S.W.O.T. stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

S.W.O.T. analysis is just one of the tools in a project manager’s toolbox, along with things such as project management software and SMART criteria, and it can be very helpful during strategic planning and decision making.

S.W.O.T. can be used to analyze teams, projects, businesses, organizations, or even individual products. In fact, you can use it to make routine decisions in your everyday life.

What to have for breakfast? S.W.O.T. it. Where to go this weekend? S.W.O.T. it. How to lose weight? S.W.O.T. it.

If S.W.O.T. analysis sounds a little ambiguous it’s because it is very open-ended.

S.W.O.T. analysis is basically a framework for making calculated, informed decisions.

In a S.W.O.T. analysis, you essentially take a long, hard look in the mirror—preferably as a group—and determine what your organization is really good at, what it could get much better at, areas for growth, and what external factors could undermine your efforts.

S.W.O.T. analysis doesn’t so much help you determine what to do, as much as it helps you determine whether or not to do something. In other words, S.W.O.T. analysis is less of a crystal ball and more of a compass.

The ultimate goal of S.W.O.T. analysis is to match strengths with opportunities to determine a clear path to success, or uncover weaknesses that could be exploited so that they can be avoided in your organizational strategy.

In this way, S.W.O.T. analysis informs risk management.

S.W.O.T at a glance

Here’s a quick glance at each element of S.W.O.T.

Strengths: What is your team really good at? What do you offer people that others can’t or don’t?

Weaknesses: What are some things that your team is not very good at, that others do much better?

Opportunities: What are some areas that your organization could thrive in that it isn’t currently taking advantage of?

Threats: What are some external factors—competitors, consumer demand, economic conditions—that could make it more difficult for your team to succeed?

You’ll notice that the first two letters focus on things that you have some control over internally, while the last two focus on external, environmental conditions that your organization will have to respond to.

A free S.W.O.T. analysis template to get you started

Here’s a S.W.O.T. analysis template that you can copy and fill in with your own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then, in the next section, we’ll look at what to do once you’ve filled out the template. We’ve also included some example S.W.O.T. analyses below, using this same template.

Once you have filled out the S.W.O.T. worksheet, it’s time to turn your brainstorming into tangible next steps.How do I use a S.W.O.T. analysis?

Start by looking for connections. If you can draw clear lines between strengths and opportunities—say your sunglasses business caters to young people and you have an opportunity to open a new location near a college campus—it’s a good time to be aggressive.

On the other hand, if your weaknesses and threats seem to outweigh your strengths and opportunities—say you’re a traditional printing company and the industry is being overtaken by digital press—it may be time to come up with some new objectives, like expanding into digital markets.

5 S.W.O.T. analysis examples

Here are some basic examples of S.W.O.T. analysis so you can see how it’s done.

1. Banana for breakfast

Strengths Potassium and vitamin c Portable Good value	Opportunities Banana split Topping on cereal Frozen bananas
Weaknesses Not filling enough Peel is slipping hazard Small ripeness window	Threats Missing out on an apple Banana allergies Losing the heartiness of oatmeal

Strategy: The cost, nutritional value, and versatility of the banana make it a wise choice, despite its negligible shortcomings and different options.

2. Weekend trip to the lake

Strengths Tranquility A body of water Starry skies	Opportunities Go water skiing Have a campfire Drink a beverage on the porch swing
Weaknesses Waterfront prices Machete-wielding killers Gators	Threats Missing out on a weekend at the beach Getting bit up by mosquitoes It rains all weekend

Strategy: The natural beauty and the selection of outdoor activities makes the lake a tantalizing destination for a weekend getaway, but its high cost and risk of bodily harm could warrant a look at other locations.

3. Jog after work

Strengths Calorie burn Fresh air Sense of accomplishment	Opportunities Meet your future significant other Be filmed for a viral video Discover a briefcase full of money
Weaknesses Sweaty clothes Hostile commuters Shin splints	Threats Getting attacked by a feral cat FOMO when you see cyclists speed by Missing out on the camaraderie of CrossFit

Strategy: The combination of getting your cardio in and giving yourself a chance to find a mate, internet fame, and/or riches far outweighs the downside of dodging traffic and having to do laundry afterward.

As you’ll see below, S.W.O.T. analysis can also be used to make project management decisions in the workplace.

4. Free or open source project management software

Strengths Free Community support makes open source more agile Basic versions are often easier for new users	Opportunities Try out PM software without a financial commitment Save company resources for the annual holiday party Stick it to the man by using open source
Weaknesses Limited features Limited customer support Infrequent updates	Threats Missing out on all the extra features of paid software Your open source PM software is abandoned by the developer Trying to get customer service on a free version in the middle of a hectic project

Strategy: Free project management software has its limitations, but can be a good fit for small teams or freelancers looking to try it out for the first time. But it is not a replacement for full featured project management software.

5. Hiring a summer intern

Strengths Energetic and hard working Up on the latest technology Cost effective	Opportunities Learn about hip music and TV shows Learn new slang They could turn into full-time employees
Weaknesses Takes time to train them They have to go back to school at the end of the summer They’re still learning	Threats They could fall asleep at their desk They might cut out early on a Friday to go to a music festival They use your training to get hired at a rival company

Strategy: With preparation and proper expectations, summer interns can be cost effective and productive.

S.W.O.T. are you waiting for?

Now that you know a little bit more about S.W.O.T. analysis and have seen a few examples, it’s time to try out S.W.O.T. analysis with your team!

Content marketers rely on high-quality content to generate leads. In fact, last year 85 percent of B2B marketers said lead generation was their most important content marketing goal, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

But it’s not enough to just slap any old brain fart behind your landing page. What kind of content is best to hit your lead gen goals? It’s whatever motivates your audience to volunteer their name, email address, and/or other information. It needs to be something substantial, with information they can’t find anywhere else.

Sound familiar? If you said white paper or ebook, you’re right! According to ImpactBND, 80 percent of users said they’d provide their email for a white paper or ebook. Consumers are even more likely to share their information in exchange for white papers (76 percent) than ebooks (63 percent). White papers and ebooks, however, are not the same thing. What’s the difference?

Think of ebooks as the cooler, younger sibling of the white paper. A white paper is typically an in-depth look at a more narrowly defined topic than an ebook. An ebook is more conversational in tone, less scholarly, and may present an overall look at an issue, trend, or industry, rather than a deep dive into a particular problem or solution. (Check out The Ultimate White Paper Template [Free Download] for the definitive guide to writing a white paper.)

Like a white paper, an ebook addresses a hot topic. But while a white paper generally presents original research or findings, an ebook can include original content, collect or mine product reviews, or curate content that has appeared in other formats. For example, a common form of ebook repurposes blog posts and adds additional related information from industry experts and thought leaders.

Here’s a quick summary of the differences between ebooks and white papers. It comes from Ann Handley, MarketingProfs Chief Content Officer and co-author C.C. Chapman’s book, Content Rules.

Ebooks	White Papers
Broken into smaller chunks—designed for skimming and scanning	Long and linear—a deep read
Concept-centric—based on ideas and trends of interest	Data-centric—often based on formal research
Visually heavy—main text supplemented with call-outs, bullet lists	Text-heavy
Casual and collegial—a conversation among equals	Formal—impressive expert speaks to you

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80% of users say they’d provide their email for a white paper or ebook.
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Benefits of Ebooks and White Papers

Both ebooks and white papers offer many potential benefits. They are typically more time-consuming and expensive to produce than blog posts. But whether your goal is to generate leads, increase brand awareness, or educate customers, gate this valuable content so that you can collect visitors’ information.

Here are four reasons to add eBooks or white papers to your content strategy.

1. Generate Leads
   Ebooks and white papers are two of the best ways to generate leads, especially for B2B marketers. B2B customers now have access to many sources of information before making a purchase. They like to make use of them. The sales cycle can be long, and you need timely, relevant, and useful assets that motivate readers to download a copy and return to your site for more.
2. Build Thought Leadership
   An ebook or white paper with exclusive content can define a category or present unique information or reflections on an industry. This builds thought leadership. Many experts use ebooks as calling cards to generate speaking engagements and appearances at industry conferences. Even if it’s self-published, an ebook burnishes your reputation.
3. Enhance Customer Education
   Ebooks and white papers help educate customers so they can decide if your product or service is right for them. They can also help customers use your product or service, and get the most out of their investment.
4. Share Expertise with Your Target Audience
   An ebook or white paper can provide detailed insight into an area of expertise that connects your company with a particular audience. Tailor the contents to their specific needs by addressing the pain points of a particular persona. This helps engage customers and turn them into brand ambassadors.

How to Choose Between an Ebook and White Paper

Determining whether you should create an ebook or white paper is actually quite simple. Start by answering these three questions:

1. Which would your audience prefer? Are they looking for information that’s easy to absorb and quick to implement? Or do they want a detailed dive into a niche area of the topic you’re covering? The more specific your audience’s interest, the better a white paper will meet their needs.
2. Which is better for this type of content? Is your topic a high-level overview? Can it be broken down into actionable steps? Or does it require supporting details and deeper explanation? Information that can be presented in scannable chunks is better suited to an ebook.
3. What time and resources do you have to create? White papers can require a significant amount of original and third-party research. That’s not to mention lead time for gathering quotes, creating graphs, and organizing visual depictions of data. If you don’t have the time to devote to a white paper, then an ebook will be a better bet.

Review the differences between these content types, weigh their benefits, and select the format that’s best for you. When you’re ready to start building, check out Curata’s white paper template or ebook template to help you get started.

The post What’s Better for B2B Marketers, Ebooks or White Papers? appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

4 Ways to Connect When Customers Are Drowning in Options

 

A classic sales principle teaches us to give prospects a choice between one thing and something else rather than between something and nothing. That approach made perfect sense in decades past, but it becomes exponentially more complex considering the multiple “somethings” consumers can choose from in the modern business world.

There are too many options available today. Offering consumers a choice between only two or three options might seem restrictive, but most of us have so many options that we feel overwhelmed. Psychologist Barry Schwartz explored this concept extensively in his bestselling book "The Paradox of Choice." At a certain point, the flood of potential options becomes white noise. 

A confused customer buys nothing. Plus, a team of Swedish researchers found that customer confusion also kills brand loyalty. To close sales in the age of endless distractions, you must upset the status quo of customers and cut through the noise of our frenzied culture. 

How to Connect With Your Target Customer 

Considering how much information inundates the average consumer every day, it might seem impossible to break through the chaos by offering fewer choices. It is actually much easier than you might think. Modern companies must make true emotional connections with their target audiences to stand out, but many businesses still overdo it. Keep your sales process simple by focusing on four principles: 

1. Tell a Story

Everyone loves a good yarn. Find ways to use your product to tell the story of your brand. Above all else, make it conversational. Part of the problem is everyone hollering, “Look at me!” at potential customers. That approach leads to speaking at them instead of with them. 

When you make it conversational, you can paint a picture of how consumers overlap and interact with your product or service. You can create a narrative that shows them how your product or service might change their lives. Craft a story that offers a solution to a problem rather than one that tries to sell a product.

 

Apple is a great example of a company that tells a story instead of solely listing the benefits and features of its products. The strategy helps customers see themselves as owners of Apple products and enjoying life more because of the company's innovative technology. Its marketing delivers a layered, consistent, and compelling message that Apple products will make you happier. 

2. Be Consistent With Your Target Audience

Once you have started to tell your story, make sure you are delivering a consistent message across your touchpoints: your website, your social media, your customer service reps, your mission statement, and your sales team. Every element should say the same thing, with all sectors of your business embracing a consistent narrative. 

When your brand tells a consistent and compelling story, your sales team gains an edge when making calls. Many companies are so large that their brand message gets out of alignment, with their website saying one thing and their social media delivering a completely different message. The conversation ends up disjointed, broken, and misfiring with potential customers. 

Think of Walmart or Starbucks. Is each location different, or do they all look and feel similar? Customers are more satisfied and less stressed when they have a consistent experience. Starbucks delivers a consistent atmosphere and familiar layout when customers walk in the front doors, regardless of location. 

Think of your salesperson as the top of a marketing pyramid. Everything should back up whatever he or she is saying to potential clients. Consistency makes it easier for customers to understand your product or service, fosters trust, and removes the stress of trying to sort conflicting messages. 

3. Talk Less, Ask More

A sales conversation is like a date: Nobody wants to go out with someone who talks only about himself. Connect with your customers personally and professionally, learning everything you can about their goals and obstacles. What are they feeling? 

Upset the status quo by asking them directly about their concerns and obstacles. People will listen to you if they like you, but they will buy from you if they trust you. Asking good questions that demonstrate interest will help foster trust. You also might uncover information that will help you in the sales process, such as the true motivations of your customers or other people involved in purchasing decisions.

4. Establish Trust with Customers

Once you establish trust with customers, you form a personal connection that focuses on their individual needs. When a salesperson does more listening than talking, consumers open up and share their true desires. This opens the door to connect your product to the problem the consumer hopes to solve. 

Head to the nearest Chick-fil-A for a real-world demonstration of a client-centered experience built on a foundation of kindness. Customers enjoy the pleasant experiences when they dine in a Chick-fil-A, but the sales team also appreciates the consistent, friendly atmosphere. I have had the pleasure of training Chick-fil-A store operators and managers, and I can confirm that trust permeates every facet of the brand. 

Trust is the foundation of any healthy relationship and the key to great sales. A client-centered company makes work easier for your sales team, with fantastic client experiences serving as a driving force behind the culture of your brand. 

A Mutually Beneficial Relationship

The best thing you can do for your sales team is to shift from a transactional approach to a relational mindset. The modern sales process is not about offering consumers millions of options and trying to get as much money as possible; sales is about helping consumers solve a problem, fill a need, or live a fuller life. 

A sales process focused on creating an emotional connection and building trust reduces the pressure many sales professionals feel on a routine basis. Customers and salespeople can work together, trying to find a solution that works for everyone. When collaboration becomes to the goal of every sales interaction — regardless of whether it leads to a sale — your brand will be on the right track.

 

 

Michael Ray Newman is the president and CEO of ZZI. ZZI transforms businesses, changes lives, and trains people to be leaders. Michael has committed his life to helping others and inspiring employees with high energy and higher expectations. Follow ZZI on Facebook and Michael on Twitter.