Who isn’t looking for more sales in less time? Hmm, with it being the 4th quarter, it puts even more pressure to deliver more as the clock clicks down fast. I’m no different than any of you. It’s easy to become distracted, and as a result, it’s easy to suddenly find myself far behind in […]

Across industries and across countries, a small number of “superstar” firms are pulling away from the competition. They’re more productive, as the chart below illustrates. They’re also more profitable, more innovative, and they pay better. But why are these companies doing so well? Are they out-competing their rivals, or are they using their size and influence to avoid competition altogether?

One answer to that first question shows up in study after study: superstar firms are succeeding in large part due to information technology.

In a new paper, James Bessen of Boston University provides evidence of that linkage, and of its importance. He finds that the rise in industry concentration – the share of revenue captured by the top firms in a sector – is largely explained by the adoption of IT. His measure of IT better explains the rise in industry concentration than do measures of M&A or entrepreneurship.

Bessen compared measures of industry concentration from the U.S. Census to the share of workers in an industry in IT-related roles. (He excluded tech industries from the analysis since his aim was to study how IT adoption was helping firms, rather than industries that produce IT-related products.) Industries with a higher share of IT workers saw more concentration between 2002 and 2007, even after controlling for M&A activity and several other variables. In separate analyses, he links IT adoption to higher output per worker and higher profit margins. (He also finds some evidence linking lobbying to higher profit margins, but it appears to be less significant than IT adoption.)

Bessen’s findings are consistent with a lot of other data. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee reported a link between IT adoption and industry concentration in HBR in 2008; since then, multiple analyses have linked increased use of digital technology to higher profitability at both the industry and company level. Researchers at the OECD have documented the rise of superstar firms and their relationship to wage inequality, and found that use of IT is one of the primary drivers. Other academic research has found the same.

But why is IT leading to winner-take-all competition? Bessen’s paper can’t answer that, however he raises two possibilities. It could be because “software development typically requires large upfront fixed costs,” meaning that firms that are already pretty large are the ones who can afford to invest in it. If it’s expensive to adopt and get good at IT, it’s more economical for big companies like Wal-Mart that can spread those costs out over lots and lots of products sold.

Or maybe the firms succeeding with IT know something their competitors don’t. Perhaps, as OECD economist Chiara Criscuolo wrote in 2015, “Some firms clearly ‘get it’ and others don’t.”

In their new book Capitalism Without Capital, Jonathan Haskel of Imperial College London and Stian Westlake of Nesta argue that these are two sides of the same coin. They document that physical investment (machines, factories, equipment) has declined relative to intangible investment (software, data, employee training, management). And they argue that the economic properties of intangibles lend themselves to the emergence of superstar firms. First, they argue, intangibles often involve considerable upfront investment, then are cheaper to scale. Second, intangibles complement each other. For instance, research has shown that IT is more effective when paired with good management. Getting the most out of, say, analytics software also requires well-designed processes and effective managers — the two are more valuable together than either would be on its own.

Their argument implies that superstars aren’t succeeding because of IT per se, but because they effectively combine it with other intangibles, like good management, well-known brands, or intellectual property. And, as with IT, each of those can require considerable upfront investment, meaning bigger players are better positioned to take advantage.

This hypothesis is bolstered by another recent paper. In it, John Van Reenen, Christina Patterson, and their coauthors find that industries with superstars aren’t distinguished by more investment in computers, but by more innovation as measured by patents. It’s not IT that creates superstars, but the combination of IT with other intangibles like R&D. Bessen also finds evidence linking intangible investment to higher profit margins. And it’s possible that his measure of IT employees isn’t a proxy for IT investment, but for the intangibles required to make IT profitable.

For an example of scalable intangibles in action, we can turn to McDonald’s. As Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom explains, McDonald’s created a system for running a restaurant, which required upfront effort but then could be scaled across stores. “Once a firm ‘invents’ good management it will then grow rapidly and dominate the market,” Bloom argues. 

 

But like a meal at McDonald’s, this explanation comes with a grain of salt, at least for now. For one thing, as Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School told me, it’s not clear whether good management totally fits the McDonald’s model of upfront investment that quickly scales — good management also requires ongoing investment. Moreover, as Sadun, Bloom, and Van Reenen have documented, cost isn’t the only reason some firms fail to adopt good management practices. Many managers simply don’t realize that their firms are poorly run; something similar could be happening with IT. In other words, maybe firms with terrible IT don’t realize how far behind they really are.

And, finally, although IT is consistently linked to superstar firms, it’s a mistake to write off lobbying, M&A, antitrust, and a decline of entrepreneurship as possible explanations for industry concentration. The nature of competition is changing, in complicated and often contradictory ways. Technology is clearly part of it, as is the trend toward intangible investment. But just as McDonald’s didn’t get where it is solely through one scalable good idea, there’s unlikely to be any single, comprehensive explanation for why a handful of firms are increasingly outpacing all the rest.

Bad news for FedEx and UPS—Amazon is coming to eat their lunch.

Amazon is testing a new delivery service with the intention of making more products available for free two-day delivery, according to a Bloomberg report. The service would also help take pressure off of overcrowding issues at its warehouses.

The plan would put Amazon in direct competition with its longtime partners UPS and FedEx, which currently manage most of the two-day deliveries made by Amazon Prime members. Following the revelation this morning, UPS shares were down 2.3 percent and FedEx shares were down 2 percent in premarket trading. Read more...

More about Amazon, Amazon Prime, Fedex, Ups, and Deliveries

The post How to Increase Sales 5X with a Targeted Outbound Process appeared first on Sales Hacker.

When you think of a call center, the last thing you’d associate it with is baseball. But for those of us who work in contact center workforce management (WFM), the connections are obvious. You might ask, what do baseball and WFM have in common? In short, it’s statistics. Predictive pattern analysis is essential to managing a baseball team, and at Blue Ocean, we live by it, too. It’s what helps us manage call center resources to meet our service levels and operate at peak performance.

“There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.” – Bill James, Author, Statistician, Senior Advisor on Baseball Operations – Boston Red Sox

“Moving the curve” and staying ahead of it are essential in areas like roadside assistance (especially as we gear up for the winter) and grocery service (in preparing for the holidays). When you partner with an outsourced contact center, you play a key role in getting your team in the best position for a championship win. Look at it this way: you’re the team owner. Your workforce management guy is the “team manager.” You can help him (or her) empower the team and take home a win with the use of great data and clear goals.

Here’s how to turn your contact center WFM into champions.

1. Get deep and specific with your historical data

Accurate forecasting begins with looking back on data from the last year to shed light on what may happen in the coming year. The phrase “the data doesn’t lie” is a common one and often integral to our work in data analytics and forecasting. However, the numbers don’t always reveal the big picture. Although all data is relevant, we need to be strategic in how we use it – and don’t use it.

For example, depending on your service offering – from reservations to grocery delivery to tech support and more – your call volume can be impacted by a wide range of anomalies. Sporting events, corresponding holidays (such as the highly rare occasion that Thanksgiving and Hannukah occur at the same time), and website crashes are all times when call volume likely spiked in each of these service offerings. In these cases, when conditions are unlikely to be repeated, depending solely on the data will lead to misinformed workforce management decisions. That’s why you have to get really specific about historical data. Get the whole story.

2. Preach the importance of collaboration in forecasting

It’s not just about historical data. Collaboration across all areas of the contact center is essential to accurate forecasting. Your marketing, sales, or IT departments may not fully appreciate or understand the efforts of your workforce management team, but their departmental plans may have significant impact on how WFM plans to staff a program.

For example, if your IT team knows they are conducting a website upgrade or changes to back office functions, this is critical information for WFM in predicting related call volume. Likewise, if your marketing department plans a promotion or campaign that will impact the number of callers, WFM needs to know.

If the forecast is off, it will have a domino effect on the success of the program. If workforce management gets it wrong, then your departmental team will be off to a bad start, too, making judgements calls from inaccurate information. Although 100% accuracy in forecasting is often unrealistic, the WFM team wants to be as close as possible. Using historical data is one step; strategically using information from other collaborative sources is another critical piece of the puzzle.

3. Keep your eyes on the metrics that matter

“I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second,” said Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, in the baseball movie Moneyball. It’s a philosophy focused on what first steps are necessary to add up to a win. Stealing second base might be tempting, but is not a successful long-term strategy for winning games.

The same philosophy should apply to the goals of your contact center team. If your ultimate objective is brand loyalty in your customers, it’s essential to understand how customer experience in the contact center builds that loyalty. Thus, service level metrics should reflect your brand promise; low Average Handle Times probably won’t be as important as Average Speed of Answer and low Abandon rates.

4. Build the right parameters for your game

Every inning of a baseball game might not be perfect, but it’s the score at the end of the ninth that counts. The same goes for your contact center. If your program operates with a monthly service level contact, you have to be realistic about the smaller half hour intervals that add up to those 30 days. There will likely be intervals and maybe even days that won’t make the service grade, but your WFM will do everything in their power to make sure you are on target by the end of the month. If this isn’t acceptable to your company, you may need to consider upgrading your service level to daily instead of monthly.

5. Give your team the freedom to focus on the future

Although we love statistics, we recognize how easy it could be to fall prey to “paralysis by analysis.” While data can tell us how to move forward in WFM plans, trying to explain exactly why something happened isn’t always to best use of our time. The next call still needs to be answered.

That’s why every service level you choose leaves some room for error. A contract to answer 80% of calls within 30 seconds means that there will likely be a handful of calls (less than or equal to 20%) that are answered after 30 seconds. When a small percentage of calls don’t go to plan, do you want to spend time analyzing them or would you rather focus your team on making the future moves that lead to consistent, high quality service?

When services levels are being met and everything is working smoothly, a ton of preparation was done in advance. Championship teams may make it “look easy,” but you can guarantee every piece of the complex puzzle was in place to help them win.

Looking for more strategies for workforce management success? Check out this infographic:

 

So you say you're ready to start sketchnoting. Maybe you're not much of a sketcher but you take a lot of notes, and are interested in making them more meaningful and interesting, but you're afraid your drawings are too crude. For you, it's important to stress that sketchnotes—although they are inherently a visual medium—do not require drawing ability of any kind.

View the full content here

Keep Your Promise

That’s not so difficult, is it? If you promise something with your headline, keep your word. Deliver what you’ve promised. So: no click-baity headlines for introverts. Instead, prove your point and show us what you mean.

Draw Us in

Don’t hit us over the head with your idea. Let us process all the parts of your proposition. Like most other things about introverts, we process more slowly, and perhaps more thoroughly, than others might. Luckily, we can take as much time as we need if we’re reading. By the way, here’s an article that you might like: Six Facts About Introverts and Social Media that Will Impress Your Friends.

Stop Talking

Seriously. Don’t talk so much. We like some silence, and that can help us as much as anything. If you’re writing headlines, keep them shorter and to the point.

Don’t Use Lots of Useless Punctuation

Any headline with an exclamation point will probably get skipped over. Quotes and an ellipses? Probably not helpful, either. And if you use both an exclamation point and ellipses? Stop right there! Let’s not even start on all the ellipses abuse that’s happening right now. Note that the definition of an ellipsis is the omission of a sentence from one or more words. It’s not to show others that your voice is trailing off. So stop abusing that poor ellipses! Now that deserves an exclamation point.

Use Humor

A little humor never hurt anybody, did it? Humor is one way to Revamp Your Social Media–when used sparingly. Lightheartedness might even be part of your brand’s style. In which case it’s mandatory! Just kidding. Not really.

We Don’t Need Glitter

While we introverts do love cats, we don’t need as much glitter as extroverts do. And by the way, did you know that Introverts tend to be better CEOs — and other surprising traits of top-performing executives? Probably written by an introvert, wouldn’t you say?

Keep it Brief and Inviting

Shorter headlines rock. And another thing? Don’t repeat the headline all over the place in each paragraph, even if it’s good for your SEO. That is annoying to everyone.

Accept That Headlines Are Limited

Sometimes even the best headline can’t convey a message accurately. So, in the body of your article or post, imagery or music may be able to express what the headline can’t. You can only say so much with words. Here’s an article that resonated with me: Introverts aren’t voiceless—they’re quietly powerful.

What Type of Headline Draws You In?

Let me know! And tell me if you’re an introvert or an extrovert. Thank you.

B2B marketers are finding that ad targeting on LinkedIn can help them get their brands in front of just the right audiences. But where should they start when selecting those audiences? This infographic explains how to target your LinkedIn ads. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

UPDATED April 2021

The latest emerging career on the internet is the creation of content. There are different ways to blog across a variety of platforms, that nowadays anyone can be a blogger. Sometimes it feels as if the internet is overflowing with information, with blogs about every industry, niche, and interest imaginable. 

There are different ways of measuring a blogger’s success but one thing is for sure – its influence. Only a blogger of credibility and passion truly influence and inspire readers. There are many bloggers that we can get inspiration from.

Read: Books for Bloggers

Among these influential bloggers are people like Arianna Huffington, Pete Cashmore, and Neil Patel, all of whom love their work and create content they enjoy.

In this list, we’ll discuss 20 of the most influential and interesting online publishers working today. Let’s get started!

1. Arianna Huffington

Huffington Post, Thrive Global

Arianna Huffington is a Greek-American media legend known for creating Huffington Post, a liberal news-media platform that has taken the internet by storm since its creation in 2005. While Arianna Huffington is no longer the editor-in-chief of HuffPo, she built a news empire “during a challenging time for all media organizations.”

In addition to her work on Huffington Post, this female go-getter also founded Thrive Global, a media group that encourages self-help, wellness, and performance.

2. Pete Cashmore

Mashable

Pete Cashmore is the Scottish-born founder of Mashable, a news resource for millennials and tech-lovers. Starting Mashable at just 19 years old, Cashmore fits right in with his fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as a young, disruptive tech guru.

While Mashable was successful as a tech blog, it was Cashmore’s pivot from tech blog to media resource that made Mashable a household name.

3. Neil Patel

KISSmetrics/Neil Patel website

Neil Patel is a marketer, influencer, and entrepreneur who grew up in California as the son of immigrants. His story is an amazing tale of hard work and ambition, in which he emptied trash cans, sold automotive parts, and traveled door-to-door vacuuming houses for free, all in the name of business.

Over time, Patel realized proper knowledge of marketing and software could be the key to his success (that, and creating simple solutions for common problems). After a few startups, Patel and his team have created KISSmetrics, an analytics platform for those looking to succeed in business, this then evolved into his own website/blog for SEO and blogging beginners and experts alike.

4. Rand Fishkin

Moz

Rand Fishkin is the Seattle-born, self-proclaimed “Wizard of Moz,” which is just a simpler way of saying founder, former CEO, and current chairman of the board of directors. Moz was founded in 2004, and today, it’s one of the top SEO resource websites for businesses and bloggers.

Fishkin was a college dropout who simply began working on a blog of his own design. Moz is now a multi-million-dollar company that continues to grow and help internet users.

5. Christene Barberich

Refinery29

Christene Barberich is a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Refinery29, one of the most popular and most-viewed style blogs in the world. Barberich cofounded Refinery29 with a few friends in a small apartment. The blog is now a rapidly growing company with billions of visitors a year.

Not only is Refinery29 a huge success, but Christene Barberich has also proven that blogs with a focus on self-help and personal interests can evolve into something culturally relevant and inspiring.

6. Brian Clark

Copy Blogger

Brian Clark is the main author and founder of Copy Blogger, which is his most successful franchise. Copy Blogger was created in 2006 to help digital creatives with marketing, copywriting, and content creation. This is one of the most influential resources in the blogging and content creation industry. Through Copy Blogger, the legacy of Brian Clark has been cemented in the history of digital art.

Other than this, he also owns Further which is a midlife personal growth newsletter. He also founded Unemployable which is a community that aids freelancers and entrepreneurs.  He has since stepped down as the CEO of Copy Blogger but his influence and legacy remains. Clark continues to contribute content for the blog, giving inspiration for bloggers and influencers worldwide.

7. Collis Ta’eed

Envato

In Melbourne, Australia lives Collis Ta’eed, CEO co-founder of Envato, a company that focuses on self-learning and helping creatives. You may be familiar with Tutsplus, the Envato site with endless tutorials and how-tos. After working in web design and selling stock, Ta’eed co-founded Envato with Cyan Ta’eed, his wife.

If a typical day in the life of Collis Ta’eed is any indication, Ta’eed is a CEO who isn’t afraid to work hard and get his hands dirty. He’s an advocate for communication and organization.

8. Jonah Peretti

Buzzfeed, Huffington Post

Jonah Peretti grew up in California and is the co-founder and CEO of the pop culture phenomenon, Buzzfeed. Before he co-founded Buzzfeed, Peretti also worked with a group of people (including Arianna Huffington) to create Huffington Post. Peretti began Buzzfeed as an experiment of sorts: a platform that would extract popular content and allow people to connect over it.

That’s exactly what Buzzfeed became. Now valued at more than a billion, Buzzfeed provides news, cultural content, and entertainment.

9. Ellarie Noel

Ellarie

Instagram is also a great platform for blogging and content creation. Her niche focuses on single mom lifestyles, business ideas, and beauty. Her followers also love her other content which discusses lifestyle, travel, and product reviews. What is most inspiring about her is that from an unemployed single mom, she has turned her life around through blogging and content creation. Now, she has over a million followers on various social media platforms.

She inspired many single moms like herself to transform into the best entrepreneurs they can be. Noel calls this transformation as being a ‘mommapreneur’. Although she is more popular in the ‘Mommapreneur’ niche, Noel is also a well-known beauty blogger.

10. Stephen Totilo

Kotaku

Brooklyn-based Stephen Totilo is the Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, a niche blog for those who like niche subjects: gaming, “nerd” culture, and everything in-between. Totilo has written about video games for MTV, The New York Times, and Newsweek.

Stephen Totilo has focused on a niche industry—in this case, blogging about video games. Because of his knowledge, interests, and drive, he’s had great opportunities to blog about what he loves.

11. Ryan Schreiber

Pitchfork

Ryan Schreiber is the Founder and CEO of Pitchfork, the indie music blog that continues to guide both musicians and music-lovers alike. Schreiber began Pitchfork in 1995, during a time when the internet was essentially the Wild West. What’s more, he began the blog right out of his Minneapolis bedroom.

Pitchfork is now owned by Condé Nast, the media conglomerate that boasts heavy-hitting brands such as The New Yorker and Vogue. In the beginning, Schreiber was simply a youngster on a new platform, blogging about what he enjoyed (mostly because he couldn’t afford to create a physical magazine). Despite the difficult early years, Schreiber’s “labor of love” paid off—big-time.

12. Leon Ho

Lifehack

Leon Ho is San Francisco-based founder and CEO of Lifehack, the vastly popular lifestyle blog that teaches productivity tips in all areas. After managing a large team, applying business “hacks,” and learning lessons, Ho decided to share his wisdom with others via the blogosphere. Lifehack now has over 12 million monthly readers and counting.

While Lifehack started as a way for one person to share tips and tricks, it has become a major resource for experts and avid learners alike, bringing in numerous authors and subscribers.

13. Valeria Lipovetsky

Valeria Inc

Over the course of the last year, TikTok has become one of the most impressive platforms for influencers. One of these popular and very influential TikTok fashion influencers would be Valeria Lipovetsky. Watching her play and give tips on style, makeup, clothing, and modeling is empowering for many.

Valeria has visibility in a lot of platforms which include TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But she also has a blog where she writes about her experiens being a model, her fashion influences, her style, and more. The model is the CEO of Valeria Inc which is a media company creating personalized brands for influencers, creatives, and digital artists. On top of that, she also has a jewelry line called Leia Collections.

She is not only a fashion blogger, but she is also a young mom of two, and a veteran model since she was 15. She also has content on parenting, health, and wellness.

14. Tim Ferris

Four-hour work week

Tim Ferris is one of the most influential lifestyle bloggers on the internet. His content focuses on how to make life so much less about work and more about living. Through his blog, he creates content about email detoxing, the joys and benefits of automation, mini-retirements, investing, and more.

This blogger is actually made famous by his best selling book – Four Hour Work Week. He advocates what he calls ‘escaping the 9-5’. Who doesn’t want to escape an 8-hour work schedule and live life to the fullest anywhere in the world?

15. Pat Flynn

Smart Passive Income

Right now, being a content creator is a highly-coveted career. Anyone could create a video, a podcast, or a blog but not anyone can create a brand out of it. Pat Flynn became an influential blogger by helping creatives create their own blogs. The blog does not just focus on online creatives but on building online businesses in general. He also owns Green Exam Academy which is a LEED certification tutorial blog.

Not only does Flynn have a couple of successful blogs, but he also has a podcast. He is also the owner of Flynndustries, LLC. He is quite influential because of the inspiration he gives to people. He was originally laid off from his job and he created opportunities from his tragedy. Especially now that people are spending more time at home, because of the same reasons, this is very inspirational. On top of that, creating online content from anywhere in the world is a dream.

Pat Flynn may not be the richest, with only about $2 million in net worth, but he certainly is one of the most inspirational.

16. Jonathan Van Ness

Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Coming from a multiple generations of journalists, he grew up with knowledge and expertise in media. Although he has taken a different route from traditional written work, his social media presence has taken the world by storm. He has his own podcast, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness. Van Ness is also one of the hosts of the popular show Queer Eye. Recently, he also published his own memoir and a couple picture books.

Thinking about taking LGBTQ+ to a whole new level, Jonathan Van Ness is one of the most popular LGBTQ+ influencers in the industry. Not only has he broken barriers with being transgender in fashion, but he has also continuously advocated for many sensitive discussions like HIV awareness, and mental health.

17. Michael Arrington

TechCrunch

Michael Arrington is considered as one of the richest bloggers in the world with average monthly earnings of around $800,000 and a total networth of around $15 million. For his work in TechCrunch, he is named as Time Magazine’s most influential person back in 2008. During this time, many of the well-known blogs of today are just in their early stages. Also, the blogging industry is just about to skyrocket into what it is today making his selection such an impressive prestige and great milestone. Recently, he has ventured into a new trending industry – cryptocurrency.

18. Vani Hari

The Food Babe

Who knew that food can be so influential? The Food Babe is not what you think, it does not create content on baking, cooking, or anything remotely related to recipes. Instead, The Food Babe is a food critic blog. Vani Hari is also a best-selling author best known for promoting food safety, natural food alternatives, and clean eating. She has published books on recipes (The Food Babe Kitchen) highlighting her food safety advocacies. She lobbies towards using the best quality natural ingredients to create the best quality food for consumption. Her goal is to change the food industry and provide safer and healthier alternatives for consumers.

Vani Hari is not just a food blogger, she is also an activist. Her work may have influenced the menu and ingredient selections of a handful of fast-food chains in the US.

19. Brett McKay

The Art of Manliness

Oklahoma man Brett McKay knows all there is to know about “manliness.” As the founder and editor-in-chief of The Art of Manliness, McKay has been writing for men like himself since 2008, while he was studying law. After browsing men’s lifestyle magazines and failing to see articles that interested him, McKay decided to make his own men’s lifestyle magazine—online.

The Art of Manliness is a full-time business for McKay and his wife, Kate. The blog covers applicable topics, such as fashion, business skills, affordable clothing, health tips, and financial tricks. Nearly a decade ago, McKay observed the need for a change in men’s reading; he now garners over 10 million page views per month as of 2017.

20. Susan Yara

Mixed MakeUp

Skincare has gained so much following in recent years that many beauty bloggers shifted from content about makeup to skincare. Susan Yara is one of the OGs on skincare as she is a well-known #skinthusiast. She co-founded a blog called Mixed Makeup. Her work has been featured in People Magazine, The New York Post, CNBC, Businessweek, and more. Besides co-owning Mixed Makeup, Yara also runs a personal blog and owns a skincare line called Naturium skin.

Not everyone has the financial capacity and skin adaptability to test and try skincare to find the best. Her blog has got that covered. Her content includes brand comparisons, skincare type comparisons, testing, and more. This is what makes her blog so influential – taking care of your skin is self-care. Beauty is more than makeup.

Conclusion

These are just 20 amazing bloggers, but there are numerous others. And sure, being a modern blogger can feel daunting, especially considering how saturated the market is. However, if there’s one thing to be learned from the bloggers above, it’s this lesson; writing about your interests can pay off with the right ambition and the proper skills.

These bloggers teach us perseverance is a major step in creating success; they also teach us that learning from mistakes is crucial. Most importantly, these bloggers reinforce one simple truth; it’s okay to pursue new projects. After all, a new project today could be your livelihood in the years to come.

Since the Agile Manifesto was first conceived back in 2001, mastering Agile project management has become the holy grail of many product managers.

And the buzz is justified. According to the VersionOne 2016 State of Agile Report, 98% of participants claim that their organization has realized success from Agile projects. Similarly, other studies have found that an Agile approach can speed up delivery time to market by an average of 37% and raise team productivity by 16%.

As a result, the question around Agile isn’t so much, “Should we try it?” (as the outcomes speak for themselves) but “How can we make Agile work for our company and project team?”

We spoke with five successful Agile teams during research for our Agile guide to software project management. In this article, we’ll share some of their strategies for turning the essence of the Agile Manifesto into action, starting with an accurate, yet flexible, project budget.

Flexible processes lead to accurate project budgets

When a software development project is launched, it’s usually been proposed for one of two reasons: either stakeholders have a ground-breaking idea that they’d like to implement, or they have a pain point that they require a solution for. However, whether the stakeholder will go ahead with the project will likely come down to whether it seems like a good investment.

What’s more, with one in six IT projects having a cost overrun of 200% and a schedule overrun of almost 70%, stakeholders will want the budget for the project (both in terms of cost and implementation time) to be accurate.

Unfortunately, when it comes to software there’s a strong potential for change along the way, much of which could throw your initial budget off course. It might be that during the development of the ground-breaking product, a competitor enters the market. Or perhaps the IT solution to the pain point is too complex for the non-technical members of your stakeholder’s team, requiring a redesign.

To offset these risks, it’s essential that Agile teams:

• calculate an accurate budget that takes into account all key elements required by the stakeholder, in terms of both cost and time commitments
• establish processes that enable the budget to be flexible, in terms of swapping features/elements in and out following stakeholder feedback, so the project can remain Agile without going over budget

4 strategies for establishing accurate project budgeting

The following four strategies will assist Agile teams in being flexible, incorporating input from all stakeholders at every iteration, and delivering a refined product within budget.

1. Ensure all key elements are in the shared project scope

Creating a realistic project budget requires your team to first establish the expectations and requirements of your stakeholders. In order to do this, U.K. software development company IT Enterprise creates a project mind map for each new project, which they share with their client during the project consultation stage.

“Having client requirements displayed in a visual way immediately demonstrates the complexity of the project to both us and the client,” IT Enterprise founder Thomas De Vos shares. “Linking different sections of the mind map allows the team to visualize interactions between different project areas, while defining the client’s user story and how we will go about achieving it.”

A mind map from IT Enterprise

Prior to taking this approach, the team found that client requirements would occasionally slip between the gaps at this initial planning stage. This meant that some features could be missed from the initial project plan and subsequent budget, leading to some difficult conversations and cost recalculations further down the line.

By sharing a visual idea of project scope with the client ahead of any agreements being signed, your project team can ensure that what is included within your project scope (and budget) aligns with your stakeholders’ expectations.

You can then go on to provide a realistic project budget, ensuring that all key features have been considered in that price.

2. Establish a process for refining the budget

Once you have a clear idea of the project requirements, you can begin to calculate what you expect the work to cost.

U.S. Agile development company Praxent uses the cone of uncertainty to develop a realistic budget for their software projects.

A cone of uncertainty from Praxent

“We use the Fibonacci sequence to size new feature requests,” Praxent CEO Tim Hamilton shares. “But staying within scope begins with accurately pricing the product from the very beginning.”

Praxent’s process for establishing a realistic budget begins with three phases covering product definition, product requirements, and UX design:

1. Product definition phase: In this phase, no prices are provided but the concept behind the project is established.
2. Detailed requirements phase: In this phase, the team estimates the general cost of product development, based both off the client’s ability to pay and the perceived difficulty of the project.
3. User interface design phase: In this phase, Praxent creates a clickable software product prototype within the estimated budget, then re-prioritizes project objectives where appropriate, in collaboration with the client. Finally, the team can provide a finalized quote, using the findings from the prototype discovery and usability testing.

The three-phase process enables the team to not only establish the key criteria for the budget, but also set up a collaborative approach, which puts the stakeholders in the driving seat for objective and feature prioritization.

All of this will help towards creating both a realistic budget and a refined product, enabling the stakeholders to swap in and out features while keeping an eye on the budget. But we’ll come back to this in the next point.

As a result, with their budgeting process, Hamilton shares that the Praxent team has been able to manage and even exceed budget and scope expectations for their projects.

3. Use a collaborative solution to manage feature prioritization

One of the key values of the Agile Manifesto is that “changing environments are embraced at every stage of the process to provide the customer with a competitive advantage.”

The ability to adapt to evolving markets and changing business requirements is what makes Agile unique.

However, in order to evolve the project and welcome stakeholder feedback at every project iteration, it’s essential to build a collaborative workflow with your stakeholders for feature prioritization. By enabling your stakeholders to witness project progression transparently, and providing them the power to ‘swap in’ and ‘swap out’ features from sprints, you’ll ensure you provide a product they love, without spilling over budget due to additional features.

Below are two options for collaborating on features.

Track via a physical Scrum board for sprints

Agile development company AndPlus enables stakeholders to manage features via a physical Kanban board for their Scrum task cards, which is shared with clients to track project progression:

“We keep track of scope with our clients by using different colored task cards on our project management wallboard to represent items that were added after a release plan was created. This makes it visually easy (for both us and the client) to identify items or features that were added after the initial project scope, so need to be traded with another feature of equivalent development hours in order to stay within budget, or postponed to a later release.” -Jonathan Roger, operations director and certified Scrum master at AndPlus

A Kanban board

Manage project scope via an online collaboration tool

Software team Praxent takes a similarly visual and transparent approach to scope management by using an online collaboration tool. Their solution displays all data needed to keep clients up-to-date on project momentum, budget health, scope management, and rate of spending.

“The dashboard provides a play-by-play on feature development progress, allowing clients to see the impact it would have on production should they decide to shift direction or re-prioritize,” Hamilton says.

By enabling your clients to track project progress transparently, while controlling feature and budget management, you can ensure their opinion is integrated at every stage, while still ensuring that the project won’t spiral out of hand.

Look for an online task management tool that enables you to include details within each task, such as time estimations, in order to enable transparency over time and budget commitments. That way, you can provide your client with the ability to manage feature prioritization while remaining informed of how the changes will affect the budget.

4. Use your budget as a means to create a refined product

By taking the former steps to ensure your team develops a clear project scope and budget, accompanied with workflows that enable features to be swapped in and out of that scope, you can ensure that your stakeholder does not go overboard with feature requests. This will, in turn, help you to develop a more refined product.

Jói Sigurdsson, founder of CrankWheel, found that cutting back on unnecessary features actually enabled their team to align their business and user priorities.

Through customer feedback, Sigurdsson says, “We discovered that many of our intended features were actually unwanted by our prospects. We’d hear the phrase ‘we could turn off that feature’ a lot, so we did, and ended building a much simpler, more targeted product than we would have otherwise.”

Once you have strong feedback from your stakeholders on the essential features, a Kanban board can assist with feature management. By laying out all tasks within a project sprint, and sharing this sprint roadmap with your stakeholders, you can define a limit on the amount of feature tasks per sprint. This will ensure that the project is not overloaded with tasks, helping you to keep your product both refined and targeted.

How do you manage project budgets?

What are your best methods for taking an Agile approach to project management and budgeting? Share your tips in the comments!

To build and deliver products that customers love, development teams at leading companies like Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, Google, and Facebook focus on experimentation as a critical business process. Engineers and product managers are empowered to A/B test each new product feature in a controlled environment to determine impact to key metrics like engagement, product usage and revenue before launching the feature to everyone.

These companies have all built complex internal software platforms to support their experimentation-driven approach to product development. If you’re looking to adopt the same practice of validating digital product decisions with data, you’ll likely be evaluating how to implement an experimentation platform for your product and engineering team.

Depending on your company’s unique requirements and needs, there are a few paths you can take:

• Build your own server-side A/B testing framework in-house
• Integrate an open source solution
• Invest in a commercial experimentation platform

When considering your options, considering these four areas can help you get informed and determine which solution makes the most sense.

1. Statistical rigor: Do you have confidence in the system and the results it produces?

When implemented correctly, experimentation can help teams quickly identify which features and changes will drive business value, and which will fail. The best teams embrace failure, and try to fail as fast as possible so that they can move on to ideas that work. To fail faster and learn quickly, your teams need to trust that tests are being run correctly, and that the results are accurate.

However, many companies underestimate the difficulty of collecting data reliably and maintaining their analytics pipelines over time. When events aren’t tracked correctly or analytics integrations stop working, it results in delays and slower experimentation velocity.

In many organizations, the responsibility for setting a sample size and analyzing results typically falls on an analytics or data science team. Some analytics teams who are responsible for analyzing every test find that they quickly become the bottleneck as experimentation scales across multiple teams.

When evaluating a platform for your company, ensure that your analyst team is involved to determine which solution makes it easiest for them to quickly access data and communicate results to stakeholders.

2. Ease of Use: Is the system easy for developers and accessible to business users?

The best teams in the world run thousands of experiments each year to maximize opportunities to learn. Usability for both technical and non-technical users can be the difference between running several experiments in a year and running hundreds or even thousands.

On most product teams, developers will be implementing tests directly within your codebase, so they often make the initial decision about which solution to start with. Many open source tools or homegrown systems operate entirely within code at the beginning. This means that a deploy is required for each new change to the experiment, and that it’s difficult for product managers or analysts to understand what’s happening with running experiments without pulling data out of a database and analyzing reports by hand.

When determining whether a system will be accessible to business users, identify whether it contains remote configuration tools and easy-to-understand UI design. These features help teams increase experimentation velocity by decoupling experiments from deployment, and providing transparency into experiments across the organization.

When it comes to developer productivity, focus on features of the solution like robust documentation and support for multiple languages that will enable the engineering team to spend less time figuring out how to run tests, and more time working on customer-facing feature work. A robust solution will also include APIs that can be used to automate certain task or integrate more deeply into development teams workflows.

3. Total Cost of Ownership: How will the system be developed and maintained over time?

Building in-house or adopting an open source framework typically comes with a relatively small upfront investment. Over time, however, additional features and customizations become necessary as more client-side and server-side teams use the platform, and maintenance burdens begin to distract engineers from core product focus.

To avoid unforeseen maintenance cost, ensure that in addition to understanding your team’s initial set of feature requirements, you’ve budgeted time for bug fixes and considered the more complex features you might need down the road. Will you need to run experiments that are mutually exclusive, or use advanced targeting features? Determine how custom these advanced features will be, and estimate the resources required for building and maintaining them. Anticipating your organizational bandwidth for engineering and maintenance can help you plan beyond initial development, inform your decision to build or buy, and ensure critical features are available when your team needs them most.

4. People and Process: Who will evangelize experimentation culture across your company?

Successful experimentation is as much about culture as it is about technology. The top teams invest in people and process to ensure that cultural change takes root, and that data-driven decisionmaking becomes the norm.

Whether you decide to build an experimentation platform in-house, or invest in a commercial solution, it’s critical to have the right people and processes in place. Identifying the members of your organization who will be responsible for defining key metrics and championing a culture of experimentation company-wide can help ensure you get the most out of whatever solution you choose.

For more insights into whether to build or buy an experimentation platform, and information to help you determine which course of action is right for your organization, download the Build vs. Buy: Implementing the Right Experimentation Solution whitepaper.

Content marketing lies at the intersection of art and technology, so it’s only logical that artificial intelligence comes into play. AI plays a big role in search and it can be useful in creating content, too.

While it’s not known exactly how the Google algorithm works, researchers and marketers have conducted experiments that make a strong argument for topic modeling as a key component of the Hummingbird algorithm. Also, Wired reported last year about how Google’s search engine now uses artificial intelligence to rank content.

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Google’s search engine now uses #artificialintelligence to rank #content via @wired.
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A basic understanding of how search engines interpret text and its quality can help you develop a strategy that produces consistently high-ranking content because topic modeling – done manually or with software – allows you to create blueprints for the best possible content.

In this post, I explore the concept of topic modeling and how it relates to search algorithms. Then, I’ll go over some key strategies on how to develop your content to include all relevant topics, and how you can take advantage of topic model predictions to outperform the competition.

First, let’s dive into what exactly topic modeling is and how search algorithms can use it to rank the billions of pages on the web.

What is topic modeling?

Words and phrases are interrelated, and the idea behind topic modeling is to discover those relationships. When crawling your content, search engines aren’t just crawling for specific words, they’re seeking words with related meaning. This makes keywords, keyword variants, and related topics an integral part of creating contextually rich content. The placement and frequency of each keyword should correlate with how important that term is to your piece.

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Search engines don’t just crawl for specific words. They seek words w/ related meaning. @rakkenbakken #SEO
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• Focus topic – Your main topic (i.e., your target keyword) as well as its variants should be mentioned in the headline, first paragraph, and as frequently as possible while sounding natural.
• Related topics – Each subject most commonly associated with your main topic should have its own subheading within your content to ensure that it’s discussed appropriately.
• Secondary related topics – Somewhat tangential to your focus topic, if your competitors are discussing these related topics, you should too, to improve your chances of ranking. (If you find a secondary related topic is more important than the competition deems it, take that opportunity to differentiate your content and cover it more deeply than the top-ranking pages.)

When thinking about which topics to cover in your content, it helps to think in terms of searcher intent. What questions could your reader possibly have about this topic, and how can you answer them comprehensively? When you achieve this, your content signals to Google’s AI that you’re the authority on that subject – a major factor in ranking.

A note on keyword tools versus topic modeling: It’s true many tools can generate lists of “related keywords,” but there’s a difference in the technology behind keyword tools and topic-modeling software. Keyword tools primarily look at topics that appear together in high-ranking pages and group them together. They don’t look at the number of co-occurrences between terms, semantic relevance, and other signals, so they’re not necessarily informing on the degree to which topics are related. Conversely, AI software can perform this calculation and rank related topics by importance, while taking other on-page factors into account as well.

How to manually create a topic model

Let’s walk through the steps you would follow to manually implement topic modelling for your website.

1. Inventory each page on your site.

To stay organized, keep a spreadsheet. Every URL should have a row, and columns should indicate these points:

• Focus topic
• Quality and comprehensiveness
• User intent bucket (e.g., evaluate, compare, purchase)
• Need for improvement (yes/no)

(Sorting in spreadsheets requires uniform inputs. Identify your target focus topics, a scale for quality, and user intents ahead of time.)

2. Identify gaps in topic coverage.

Once you’ve done this for each page, look at your focus topic column and see which topics are covered in depth, and which have gaps. For the topics with gaps, plan to create new content to cover them.

3. Prioritize pages to update.

For pages you’ve identified that need improvement, identify the subjects related to your focus topic that need to be added. URLs with the most shallow topic coverage should take priority, particularly if their focus topic is important to your business.

The rest is a matter of execution for your content team. You can help them by creating blueprints that detail the ideal word count (based on pages ranking for your focus topic), related topics, and user intent profile for each post. For any piece of content you create, follow this basic framework:

On-page factors

Each page on your site should have a framework that signals to search engines what topics your site covers. These on-page signals are important for SEO, and can provide guidance to make your content creation process more efficient:

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Framework for every site page should signal to search engines what topics are addressed. @rakkenbakken #SEO
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1. Page title or headline – What is your page about? Be clear, succinct, and specific when choosing your titles (but also remember to keep it lively and attention-grabbing).
2. Lead or introductory paragraph – Your readers are impatient, and search engines give weight to your first paragraph. Get to the point in your first sentences, and be sure to include your focus topic for that page.
3. Headings and subheadings – Those H1 and H2 tags in your content are more than formatting codes. Search engines crawl your headings and subheadings to derive meaning from your content.
4. Linking – Internal and external links, as well as their anchor text, are strong signals that tell Google what you’re writing about and the associated content that you value.

A less visible factor to consider is whether your content answers your users’ questions. This is key as search engines favor content that directly responds to queries. Think about the questions your visitors might be asking and provide a thorough answer.

Writing content that speaks to searcher intent thoroughly will get you far, but it really helps to have some tools at your disposal.

Automate the process

Advanced artificial intelligence platforms such as MarketMuse (disclosure: a client and a platform that I use successfully) are available to find topical gaps in your content, identify related topics, and generate outlines and keyword lists to guide you to topical authority. Creating and updating content is much easier when you give your team clear-cut, data-based recommendations in an outline. Alternatively, you could pull organic keyword data from SEMrush and use Excel to filter and analyze it to give you a list of terms for which top content is ranking (i.e., topics you should cover with your own content).

AI solutions can remove a lot of the guesswork when deciding which topics to cover, and because they use technology similarly to the way search engines do, they provide data that produces predictably positive results.

Many content marketers will be satisfied with the information already covered. But if you’re one of those next-level, data-obsessed marketers, read on.

Going more in depth for data geeks

There are several different types of topic models, and, for most marketers, it’s not terribly important to know the minutiae of each one. In general, a topic model is a text-mining method that determines the relevance within a body of text. Topic modeling allows algorithms to analyze vast amounts of web content, assigning topical relevancy to each page and ranking it efficiently and accurately with each query.

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A topic model is a text-mining method that determines the relevance within a body of text, says @rakkenbakken.
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Additionally, it allows for advanced content analysis and search engine optimization software to identify topical gaps in content. When you understand how topic modeling works, you’re better able to plan your content and effectively use the tools at your disposal.

One of the more common topic models for identifying topical probability is latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a statistical model in natural language processing. An LDA model views individual documents within a corpus – or, in search terms, pages within a site – and determines the relevancy of each page to a topic, assigning a percentage for topics mentioned. Here’s a simplified example:

Page 1: There are many delicious vegetarian dishes.

Page 2: A vegetarian diet contributes to a healthy lifestyle.

Page 3: Julia Child was one of the first TV chefs.

Page 4: Julia Child cooked many types of vegetarian dishes.

 

Pages 1 and 2: 100% topic A

Pages 3: 100% topic B

Page 4: 50% topic A and 50% topic B

Using an LDA model, a software platform would be able to infer that the site as a whole is about vegetarian cooking, which also discusses some famous chefs who cook vegetarian recipes. One characteristic of LDA modeling is that a topic isn’t defined as a single thing, but rather a group of related terms.

For instance, topic A in this example would include vegetarian dishes, vegetarian cooking, vegetables, and so on. Topic B would include Julia Child, famous chefs, TV chefs, etc. Having groups of terms within each topic means that search engines can more intuitively pull pages related to a query, even if the person did not search for that exact term, giving the searcher the greatest number of relevant results.

LDA isn’t the only type of topic modeling, however. If you’re interested in taking a deep dive, here are some other topic models to consider:

• Explicit semantic analysis
• Latent semantic analysis
• Hierarchical Dirichlet process
• Non-negative matrix factorization

Additionally, databases such as Google’s Knowledge Graph and techniques such as TF-IDF (term frequency and inverse document frequency; a much more simple method than LDA), co-occurrences, and co-citations all use topic modeling to determine semantic meaning of a body of text.

It’s not necessary to have an intimate knowledge of topic modeling to create a successful content marketing strategy. But knowing how search algorithms categorize pages is useful when deciding which topics to cover, the pages on which they should be mentioned, and how frequently you should write about your core and secondary topics.

Conclusion

Topic modeling plays a significant role in planning and search, in both obvious and subtle ways. Now that you have a basic understanding of how topic models work and how they’re applied to content, it should help you plan and organize your content in a way that puts topics – not keywords – at the forefront of your content marketing strategy. 

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Sign up for our weekly Content Strategy for Marketers e-newsletter, which features exclusive stories and insights from CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose.

Cover image by Wilfred Ivan, StockSnap

The post How Topic Modeling Can Strengthen Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Who is your ideal buyer by position or title?

What kind of compelling value would generate interest?

How do you get that value in front of that buyer?

The post Simple (But Not Easy) appeared first on Alan's Blog.

More and more B2B organizations are deploying account-based strategies. In the high-tech executive suites and grungy boiler rooms across the globe, enthusiastic teams filled with hope are concocting lists, readying programs and shifting resources – people, time and budget – to account-based revenue (ABR) efforts.

Normally, I’m a big fan of diving in, experimenting and then building out a scalable model. However, with both ABR and account-based marketing (ABM), foundational planning is essential. Why?

First off, organizations must determine if an account-based approach is viable for their business. For those that dive in, account-based efforts often start with the sales team who submit their top-preferred accounts.

It makes sense. Sales is on the frontline and has a good idea of what they need to crush their quota. The result is a wish-list that looks suspiciously like the Fortune 1000 list. You know the list: Exxon, Coca-Cola, Walmart, American Express, etc. This feels really good and bolsters our enthusiasm to make it happen, but hardly assures success.

In my experience working with B2B marketing and sales organizations (as well as getting our own account-based strategy efforts underway at Integrate), the move-the-needle results occur when planning, execution and refinement are implemented as a unified sales and marketing team.

Each function plays its role, and often involves finance, ops and even customer support teams. This collaborative approach keeps the company focused on the ultimate goal – generating predictable and profitable revenue.

So, how can you implement a scalable ABR strategy that will add value to the business? Here’s a methodical approach to account-based planning that sales and marketing teams can use to bring predictability and scale into revenue generation.

1. Always start with Total Available Market (TAM)

How big is your market for your products and which organizations make up TAM? Identifying your TAM is one of the most skipped stages in account-based and demand generation efforts; yet it’s the most important step for long-term success. To calculate your TAM, you’ll first determine how many companies exist that fit your profile. This does not have to be precise, but gives a universe to start from.

2. Prioritize TAM by market segments based on existing customer success

In which vertical markets (healthcare, financial services, government, etc.) within your company’s TAM are you seeing the most traction, based on your unique value proposition. Start here for the account list. If you’re still developing specific use cases and applications for various vertical markets, don’t make them part of the account-based strategy, yet. Rather, do some reconnaissance, get a few wins and then profile and move them into your account-based revenue efforts.

3. Use predictive analytics tools and intelligent data sources to identify accounts most likely to buy and/or to be in-market

B2B marketers are increasingly using predictive and intent data as well as MarTech to help prioritize opportunities on a real-time basis. There are good options to trial here. Lessons from many B2B marketing practitioners guide us to make tools and intelligent data an additive layer to TAM and segmentation over time. For planning, here are definitions of intent data and predictive data to go deeper.

4. Match data and MarTech up with your sales team’s wish list

Now pull out that sales team target-account wish list. Data modelling and planning is essential, but doing a “sniff” test with sales executives to define accounts is a good reality check. This will further help prioritize and evaluate the best account-based approach for your business and where to focus your marketing effort.

5. Drill into decision-maker personas within target accounts

It’s important to note – accounts don’t buy anything people do. All the account-based strategy planning in the world won’t be effective unless you:

1. identify the right personas within the target-account buying committees, and
2. have a smart strategy to discover, engage and get a discussion going with these decision-makers regarding their needs and opportunities.

For us B2B marketers, the account-based movement is a good opportunity for us to be proactive and bring a quantitative, informed approach to revenue generation.

When it comes to measuring digital marketing, it’s important to remember that your small business clients only care about the impact your actions are having on their business.

Overburdening them with leading indicators such as likes, shares, and followers should never be your end goal. It should always be clear how these metrics are leading to a business result. Otherwise, you may be doing more harm than good.

Here are some things to think about to show the value of your work through measurement.

Creating a measurement strategy for a small business client

Think about creating a goal-driven measurement framework, starting with a single business objective at the top. When you have an agreed on business goal, such as a confirmed sale or lead, you can then work backward from there.

What did the customer do before giving your client money? And what did they do before that? Keep asking to discover the path of the customer.

Working backward enables you to show the individual paths taken and decide on the best ways of measuring them.

Do different types of clients need different measurement strategies?

Keep in mind that a B2B client may be after leads and sales and a B2C may be more focused on awareness and engagement. The digital channels you use as part of your strategy for each client may be similar. It’s how you present the results of your efforts that will differ based on the individual goal of each client.

Creating an end-to-end measurement process

There’s no question that it’s important to measure your marketing activities, but without knowing the business impact you’re providing, it’s tough to evaluate which marketing activities are working best and for the client to feel confident in the services you provide.

Look for ways to track the whole pipeline so you can understand and show things like sales growth, cost per lead, cost per customer, and what products or services are selling best as a result of your efforts.

Measuring multi-channel digital marketing campaigns

Keep in mind that as you add new channels to the mix, you run the risk of polluting your data. One option is to phase in your activities on each channel separately, so you can measure the impact of each channel as it comes online.

Different channels play different roles, and you don’t want to discount a channel that may be supporting another. Multi-channel campaigns call for a different measurement strategy than when working with one channel. Use a report like Top Conversion Paths in Google Analytics to help visualize how your marketing channels work together.

Work together with your client to show value

Once you have agreed on a business goal, then you can decide what marketing channels the client might plan to engage in — such as email marketing, social media, SEO or PPC — allowing you to identify the key metrics for each channel.

The main criteria are that you should have the capacity to measure the outcomes and ultimately, the impact on the business with some degree of accuracy.

Remember, the ultimate question you’re answering for your small business client about the tactics and strategies you develop is, “What will that do for my business?”

What are some of your tips for showing the value of your work to clients?

Industry heavyweight Andrew Ng calls AI the new electricity that will transform every industry.

In recruiting, companies are already using AI for their high-volume hiring.

So what are the transformative benefits of AI in hiring? I list the top 4 benefits below.

1. Reducing time to hire

A recent survey of talent acquisition professionals by Talent Tech Labs found 62% consider time to hire as the top recruiting success metric.

Source: Talent Tech Labs

If speeding up your hiring process is important, AI in hiring makes a lot of sense.

An AI algorithm can take a large quantity of data, for example, hundreds of resumes, and quickly screen and find the best 10% of applicants based on your own historical hiring decisions.

Human recruiters screening 200 resumes to 20 resumes would take several days of productivity. AI can do it quickly, freeing up recruiters for more value-add tasks like interviews, relationship-building, or building business cases for HR initiatives.

This is also where AI in hiring has an advantage over just using an applicant tracking system (ATS).

A typical ATS is good at organizing a large volume of applications, but it still generally requires humans to sift through that information. AI does the same work within your ATS in a fraction of the time.

2. Increasing the quality of your candidates

AI is sometimes used synonymously with machine learning, which hints how it can increase candidate quality.

Once AI learns which factors make someone a successful or unsuccessful employee in a role, it can continuously tweak what it searches for and shortlist the highest quality candidates for you.

While AI may never be able to say, “This is the exact person you should hire” (this is where humans come in), it can be extremely effective at weeding out unqualified resumes and putting only quality candidates in front of you.

3. Mining your ATS to rediscover candidates

The ability to mine your ATS is an often overlooked cost-saving benefit of AI in hiring.

To illustrate, we’ll use some simple math. Let’s say you have a job open and receive 100 applications. If we assume 80% are unqualified, that means 20 of those applicants are a good fit.

One person gets the job, and 19 receive the “We’ll keep your resume on file” email. Those resumes are kept on file but essentially disappear into the candidate black hole.

Three months later, you have another similar role open up. Rather than launching into a new time-consuming search process, why not rediscover those 19 prior applicants within your ATS who met the qualifications?

AI can mine your ATS to find those resumes again for you. This helps you source quality hires while reducing hiring time and improving your candidate experience.

4. Sourcing passive candidates

Lever’s data shows sourced candidates are the second biggest group of hires after direct applies.

Source: Lever

Sourcing passive candidates is an important strategy for meeting headcount because according to LinkedIn, only 36% of candidates actively search for a new job.

AI can find passive candidates for you by learning what the job requirements are and then searching through job boards and candidate databases such as CareerBuilder that meet the qualifications.

I can still remember the powerful inspiration I gained from my first reading of Hugh Macfarlane’s “The Leaky Funnel” – the 2003 book that first drew the B2B sales and marketing community’s attention to the concept of the buyer’s journey.

Hugh was the one of the first people to clearly articulate a practical and effective framework for systematically identifying and addressing our customer’s problems rather than simply promoting our products, services or so-called “solutions”.

The strategy clearly works. So why is it, nearly a decade-and-a-half later, that so many B2B sales and marketing organisations still think in terms of driving a sales process (assuming they actually have one), rather than facilitating their prospect’s buying decision process?

Could one of the reasons be that most CRM vendors (including, shamefully, the market leaders) still default to using sales-stage based language in their out-of-the-box labels for the key stages in the opportunity pipeline? If it is an excuse, it’s a remarkably weak one – this only takes a few moments to change.

Of course, it’s not a technology problem – it’s a mindset problem. Most sales leaders, and many sales people, still see their world through the lens of a sales process. Please don’t take this the wrong way – having a defined sales process is way better than having no process at all.

It’s just that our efforts would be that much more effective if we based our selling activities around a deep appreciation of how our prospects actually make buying decisions, and if we believe that our most important role as a salesperson is to help facilitate our prospective customer’s buying decision process.

FACILITATING THE BUYING DECISION PROCESS

Of course, that requires that we break away from a conventional sales mindset. It requires that we develop a crystal-clear view of which organisations and which roles represent our best targets, and which issues represent our best opportunity to deliver uniquely relevant value to these customers.

It requires that we carefully monitor our prospective customers’ current situations, and that we identify the catalysts and trigger events that cause them to become dissatisfied with the status quo. It requires that we base our opportunity management around the key stages in our prospect’s buying journey.

And – of course – it requires that we are disciplined about targeting the opportunities we can win, and qualifying out the opportunities that are either never likely to do anything, or unlikely to buy anything from us.

I’ll acknowledge that no two customers end up behaving in precisely the same way (at least at the detailed level), and that the typical buying journey can vary according to the type of market and the nature and value of the problem and the potential cost of the solution.

Having said that, I believe that we can recognise clear patterns in the typical buying decision process for relatively high-value, complex B2B products and services – the sort of considered purchases that involve multiple stakeholders and can often result, after lengthy consideration, in a decision to stick with the status quo.

A TYPICAL BUYING JOURNEY

If that reflects the commercial environment that you typically find yourself playing in, I’d like to propose the following framework as a relatively reliable initial approach to managing your opportunity pipeline from the buyer’s perspective:

PHASE 0: UNCONCERNED

This is probably the situation most of your potential customers are in, most of the time. They are going about their business, addressing their priority issues, and keeping in touch with what’s going on in their industries, markets and functions. It’s just that the issues you happen to be really good at addressing are not currently on their radar – until and unless something happens to disturb their status quo.

The catalyst for change could be an external trend – or an internal challenge or opportunity – or a combination of the two. It might even be that you have been smart enough to draw the issue to their attention. But whatever the reason, something has clearly changed, and they are now ready to actively explore the issue…

PHASE 1: EXPLORING

Your prospective customer has now recognised that they may have a challenge they need to deal with, or an opportunity they need to take advantage of. Either way, they have concluded that they need to explore the issue, and that they need to both investigate the issue and identify potential solutions.

If and when (and only when) their initial investigations confirm that there is a clear cost of inaction and a compelling reason to act, your prospective customer is now ready to advance their buying journey to the next stage…

PHASE 2: DEFINING

Your prospective customer has concluded that there is a compelling reason to act, and has satisfied themselves that credible solutions are available. Now, their attention turns to defining their vision of a solution and agreeing what their decision criteria should be, what their decision process should look like, and who they need to involve.

It is essential that your sales people are actively engaged with the prospective customer during this critical phase. Once the prospect has established their vision of a solution, identified the options they ought to shortlist and how they will decide what to do, they are ready to move to the next stage…

PHASE 3: CHOOSING

Your prospective customer is now embarked on a serious evaluation of the solution options they have chosen to shortlist. It would be dangerous to assume that all the options under consideration are obvious competitors – they may be considering doing it themselves or entertaining the idea of a radically different approach.

The inevitable stakeholder disagreements need to be resolved, and once the decision team has narrowed their options down to one or a handful of acceptable solutions, and assuming they still believe that there is a compelling reason to act, they may now be ready to move to the next stage…

PHASE 4: VALIDATING

If the proposed purchase is of any significant value, it would be rare if your prospective customer did not have some concerns that they must resolve before they are able to move forward. These might be about the price or the contractual terms – or (more seriously) they may have reservations about doing business with your organisation.

They may want to talk to existing customers, or learn more about what will actually happen after the sale. Until and unless these concerns and reservations are addressed to their full satisfaction, it is unlikely that they will be prepared to move forward to the final stage…

PHASE 5: CONFIRMING

If the purchase is of any significant value, it is likely that it will have to be formally approved by a higher authority. At this point, your competition has shifted from alternative options to alternative projects, and there remains a real and tangible risk that they will decide to allocate their scarce resources to another completely different initiative.

Only if your project clears this final hurdle, will you finally be in a position to receive the order you have been hoping for (and may have already confidently been forecasting for some long-overdue date)…

IMPLEMENTING

Finally, let's not forget that the buying journey isn't over when the customer places an order on us. It's only over when the problem they set out to address has been successfully resolved, and they are happy with our "solution".

THE DYNAMICS OF BUYING

At any point, your prospect can (and frequently will) pause their buying decision process, revert to a previous phase, reassess their priorities or defer or abandon the journey altogether.

At any point, a new stakeholder may enter the decision-making process. Or a new requirement may emerge. Or a new priority may consume the prospect’s attention and divert their resources.

It should be obvious that there will always be plenty of reasons that are genuinely outside of our control that can affect your prospect’s buying journey.

THE CHOICES OPEN TO US

But it’s equally obvious that many of the reasons buying decisions get delayed or abandoned are entirely within our ability to influence. At every stage in the prospect’s buying decision journey, we face choices:

• We can choose to understand or ignore the decision dynamics
• We can choose to apply the strategies and tactics that have been proven to advance the buying journey, or we can ignore them
• We can cling to the false hope that a recent change has not upset the buying process, or we can acknowledge and address it
• We can hope that a weak champion will somehow miraculously bring their colleagues with them or we can seek a stronger sponsor
• We can cling to a poorly qualified deal that by any rational analysis is going nowhere or we can redirect our energies towards more promising opportunities
• Or we can blithely pursue our traditional sales process without proper regard for the prospect’s actual situation or priorities

We can move forwards with our customer, or we can fail without them. We can make the compromises that are often necessary to achieve mutual success, or we can pursue our short-term selfish interests.

We can continue to regard what we do as driving a sales process and we can cling on to out-dated bullshit concepts like “always be closing”.

Or we can embrace the realities of the modern buying environment and seek to understand, facilitate and embrace our prospect’s buying process.

I think you can guess which way I’ll be voting…

If you’d like to have a chat at any time about implementing buying-process-centric thinking in your own organisation, please drop me a line or book a call.

IF YOU LIKE THIS, I THINK YOU'LL ALSO LIKE

• Sell the Difference!
• Contrast Drives Change
• Your Guide to the Value Selling System

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.

Why aren’t sales results improving?

Is it because we don’t really know how to improve sales results? Is it because buying behaviors have changed and sales organizations and their salespeople have not responded? Is it because we don’t know how to create value for our clients inside their process, or that our processes and methodologies have not kept time?

The truth is, none of these potential causes are to blame for sales results not improving.

• There are not a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to knowing how to improve sales results. There are plenty of companies and people who are very good at producing that very outcome. The truth about execution is that it is persistence and accountability that create the change.
• The act of buying has changed. Certainly, there is more information available to buyers, and there are also more options available to them, with markets getting ever more crowded. The process of buying is now so complex as to require greater guidance from salespeople. All this being true, sales organizations and salespeople have changed, many evolving faster than their buyers. The fact that some sales organizations and some salespeople are unaware or unwilling to change is not evidence of a lack of available knowledge.
• There aren’t too many sales organizations that are unaware of how to serve their clients, uncover their challenges, and create an opportunity. The fact that opportunities are not being created doesn’t mean that sales organizations and salespeople don’t know how to create those opportunities. You have to look somewhere else to see what is missing.

If you want to know why sales results aren’t improving, you have to look to leadership, execution, and accountability. You have to look to training, development, coaching, and personal and professional growth. To find what is missing, you have to look deeper than the presenting problem; you have to look at the root cause of the illness. And there, you will find the answer, even if it is painful to look at.

 

The post Why Sales Results Aren’t Improving appeared first on The Sales Blog.

 

Core DNA and the corresponding genotypes offer an opportunity to narrow positioning choices while at the same time ensuring that a company’s position is aligned with its identity. Once you know your genetic makeup and the DNA “set” in which you thrive, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands (even potentially millions) of ways to position your product or service: gluten-free snacks for the toddler set, a temperature-sensitive tea kettle that also brews coffee, adventure tours for extreme skiers, light aircraft for commuters. As it turns out, limiting choice around positioning is more than half the battle when it comes to successful marketing and, in fact, life in general. In theory, an abundance of choices is appealing; in reality, however, it can be incapacitating. Studies have shown that despite a belief, particularly in the United States, that there is no such thing as too much when it comes to choice, an excessive number of options can result in paralysis. In his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, psychologist Barry Schwartz challenges the idea that more choice equates to more freedom and, as a result, more happiness. Instead, he argues, an overload of options can result in increased anxiety, wasted time, and even depression.

Schwartz’s research is supported by that of psychologist Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business and the author of The Art of Choosing, and Mark Lepper, a professor of social psychology at Stanford University. The pair conducted one of the best-known experiments in consumer psychology, the so-called Jam Study, which demonstrated that offering shoppers fewer choices results in increased sales. They found that consumers were 10 times more likely to buy a jam if the number of varieties on display was reduced from 24 to 6. The study showed that 60 percent of the shoppers were attracted to the larger display but only 3 percent opted to buy after sampling on average two jams. However, among those who tasted the jams presented in the smaller array (these shoppers also sampled an average of two jams), 30 percent made a purchase.

Researchers have replicated the Jam Study across a variety of categories, including chocolates, financial services, speed dating, and essay writing. In all cases, the study participants showed greater satisfaction with their choices (or, in the case of the essays, a better finished product) when the number of options to choose from was limited. In addition to requiring more time and effort than people are often prepared to invest, being confronted with too many alternatives— known as choice overload—can result in a psychological burden (decision fatigue) that opens the door to worry about making a bad decision and potentially to feelings of regret and self-blame. Eliminate the excess, however, and the predominant emotion is relief rather than disappointment or the dreaded FOMO (fear of missing out).

It’s the same thing with brand positioning. Too many factors polluting the choice weaken the result; they make the positioning statement a conglomeration of want-to-haves with very little purity or alignment to strategy. This is what leads to the dreaded “all things to all people” positioning: “My product is the first to do X, Y, and Z for market A and improves the performance of X for market B while at the same time pioneering the Y space for market C.” Such positioning results in an embarrassment of abundance and in the end contains so much that it says very little.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Andy Cunningham, excerpted from her new book Get to Aha!: Discover Your Positioning DNA and Dominate Your Competition (McGraw-Hill, 2017).

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Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Keyword research is not something that’s exclusive to your marketing team or SEO geeks. In this article, I’m going to explain how and why salespeople should leverage keyword research to build better content to support their sales conversations. 

Language Matters. Start With Keywords. 

Everyone talks about “building rapport” in sales. They talk about using ads or content or cold emails to drive new prospects.

And yet only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

Why is this number so low? It’s because nobody talks about what you should explicitly be saying to prospects. These are the actual words and language that turn strangers into leads and leads into customers.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to step up your game.

Keyword research is generally reserved for SEOs. And I’ll admit: It’s pretty nerdy. But by using some basic keyword research strategies, you can drive sales by entering the mindset of your customers.

The Worst Keyword Targeting Mistake You Can Make: Slapping the same popular keyword on every single one of your web pages – this isn’t the strategy you’re looking for.

The same goes for that cold outreach template email you copied from PredictableRevenue.com.

Sure, those are good starting places. But the only way to drive more action is to be more specific. If you want to sell your products, use these keyword research tips to make your business stand out in every situation.

Here’s how to do it.

Why sales people need to know the basics of keyword research

Marketers are beaten over the head with the buyer’s journey. But it’s a critical piece of the puzzle for salespeople, too, who usually spend the majority of their time firmly at the bottom of the funnel.

The buyer’s journey can be split up into three major stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage.

Customers in the awareness stage have only just learned they have a problem. They may not know what the solution is, and they certainly don’t know that your product happens to be the perfect solution.

Customers in the consideration stage have decided they want to solve their problems and are busy researching solutions. They may come across your product and evaluate its pros and cons.

Customers in the decision stage are ready to convert. To them, your product is the ideal solution. They just need a push–a discount, a testimonial, etc.–to convince them to commit.

So the buyer’s journey isn’t full of twists and complications. However, don’t let that fool you. This process can last longer than a year according to Act-On.

Fortunately for you, with the right content, you can speed things up.

The best businesses target customers in all three stages of the buyer’s journey. The best of the best use different strategies for each category.

Just consider a pricing page. A customer in the awareness stage probably won’t end up there, but you can expect buyers further along in the process to visit. Because of that, sticking awareness-based language or keywords on your pricing page won’t do you much good.

That means the specific keywords people are using can clue you into whether they’re ready to buy or not. Awareness based keywords include things like “troubleshoot,” “prevent,” and “optimize.” All of the keywords are focused on someone’s problems. They’re not yet trying to find a solution.

Consideration keywords now reflect the subtle change when someone starts looking at alternatives. So you’ll see ones like “software,” “solution,” or “comparisons.”

Let’s revisit that pricing page example now. People looking at the pricing page are thinking of pulling the trigger. They’re not quite there yet. Otherwise, they’d be on a contact or registration page.

See how HubSpot accomplishes this by using words like “software,” “solution,” and “professional marketers” to better match this person’s interest level.

Decision-based phrases will use third-party “reviews,” “pros and cons,” and more.

Next, we’ll look at the ways you can find additional keywords and content ideas for each of the three stages.

Keyword research for the awareness stage

It’s never too early to start selling. Unless you haven’t tested your product yet. But if you have, start easing your target audience into their journey and raising awareness about your brand. By doing this, you can turn them into customers before they even know your business’s name.

Awareness content consists of social media posts, all online ads, email campaigns, and anything else you use to spread the word about your services.  Remember, language matters. Speak the same language as your customers when you build this content. To do that, you need to know which keywords the awareness buyers are using to describe your industry.

So how do you find those keywords? Just open your browser.

Gather intel on Q&A sites

Yahoo Answers has a reputation for being the home of some very exasperating questions. It’s far from perfect. And you need actual answers. You want to see exactly how people are explaining their problem or giving advice so you can better understand how to match their style. You can search topics on Yahoo Answers to see what’s on a consumer’s mind as they’re in the awareness stage.

For example, a salesperson creating an ad for a new car may poke around Yahoo Answers to find out what matters most to the target demographic.

In this question, keywords like “easily modded to be faster” and “slick and run fast” make an appearance. If these words continually show up in other posts, they can highlight these features in their next ad.

Bonus points for incorporating these exact keywords into the ad–or as close to the exact keywords as possible. They may not be the most professional phrases, but they are the ones that will make the most sense to the audience.

Keep an eye on how consumers typically refer to different details.

In this example, the customer says “reliable” instead of “consistent” or “safe.”  That’s a critical detail. The way you improve bottom-line conversions is by increasing each tiny response by a percent or two.

Quora, Quora… and Quora

The 2017 version of this example comes from Quora.

Do a quick search, or look up a specific category, and you’ll quickly get similar (read: better) results. Every recent answer under “marketing automation” is product-related.

If neither of these steps work, try Amazon product reviews.

You can look up books in your space and read the reviews to get a better sense of the problem and pain points people were struggling with when they decided to purchase the solution.

Pro Tip: Learn how to use Quora & SEMrush together to get thousands of impressions, referral traffic and leads – Courtesy of Dan Shure from Evolving SEO.

Take Google autocomplete suggestions

If Q&A isn’t your cup of tea, you can complete similar research using everyone’s (except maybe Microsoft’s) favorite search engine: Google.

According to Pardot, 72% of buyers use Google when in the awareness stage. Tapping into their searches is the closest you’ll ever get to reading your customers’ minds.

You can easily find out what most people are searching for by letting Google tell you.

To begin, make your way to Google and type in a description of your product, like “antivirus software.” Right away, Google will try to predict what you’re searching for.

This isn’t just a prediction. It’s an educated guess based on what others–your potential customers–are searching for.

You can also scroll to the bottom of the page to get additional queries.

Learn from these suggestions. Ask yourself if you’re providing answers to the questions customers are asking most. Maybe that’s something formal, like new collateral. Otherwise, it could be as simple as giving you a few new talking points.

For example, you can better illustrate your features by comparing it to alternatives that people are already familiar with.  No sane person understands “bandwidth” or “gigs” off the top of their head. But “2,000 songs in your pocket?” Now that makes sense.

Research ambiguous keywords

Generic keywords can often send you down the right path. One thing may attract visitors who were looking for something else entirely. You may, by some marketing miracle, still manage to make a sale. But be careful. If the customer wasn’t looking for your service in the first place, they aren’t likely to find much value in it after signing up.

They may become one of the 75% of free trial signups that you never hear from again.

Worse, they may become one of the 3.8% of unhappy customers who complain about your business online.

For that reason, it makes sense to avoid using ambiguous keywords.  

Whenever possible, focus on keywords that only attract your target audience.  

Some ambiguous keywords are obvious enough to require no research. But if you’re not sure whether your latest buzzword is ambiguous, use Wordstream’s Free Keyword Tool to figure it out.

Here’s how it works. You type in your keyword–for example, when writing an ad for an upcoming geology trade show, you may type in “rock history”–and then click Search.

Try this for yourself, and you’ll quickly see that “rock history” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

“Rock history” is more associated with the music industry than the actual rock industry. Meaning, you probably don’t want to make that phrase the star of your content.

Keep using this tool to ensure you’re using the most precise words possible. Even seemingly safe options may not be as safe as you think.

Steer clear of ambiguous keywords, and you’ll avoid all the potential problems that go along with them.

Keyword research for the consideration stage

The competition is at its most fierce during the consideration stage. This is when your potential customer is researching solutions… Your solution… And your competitor’s solution.

It’s your job to make your solution stand out by focusing on what your customers care about. And you can figure out exactly what they care about by using these two tools.

Ask Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a free online tool that can be just as helpful for salespeople as it is for meeting SEO goals.

Working from the same info as Google autocomplete, this website can generate hundreds of long-tail variations of your keyword.

Essentially, it generates five or six-word phrases associated with your keyword. So, if your keyword was “lost iPhone,” a long-tail keyword may be “how to find lost iPhone.”

According to Propecta, 50% of search queries are four or more words long. Writing with long-tail keywords can boost both the relevance and the range of your content.

Without further ado, let’s find those long-tail keywords. Go to Answer the Public and enter your keyword and country.

When you click on “Get Questions,” you’ll receive all the long-tail variations that people tend to type into Google. Highlight the Data tab so you can review this info in its simplest form.

Answer the Public will divide common queries into “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” “which,” “how,” and “are” questions. Check out some of the different questions to get a good feel for what people are searching.

If consumers are searching for it, you should incorporate it into your content. Be the first to provide answers on “how to figure out which antivirus software I have,” and you may attract an all new type of customer.

You can also use Answer the Public to figure out what people in the consideration stage think about your competition. These people have been researching your company, but they may have been researching your competitors, too. Do they have any doubts about those competitors?

An ad, content, or case study about how free antivirus software isn’t safe may be in order.

Borrow from the competition with SEMrush

Speaking of the competition, there’s a reason they’re your competition. Sometimes, they have good ideas, ideas that are even better than yours.

For example, your competitors could be writing about a hot topic that you haven’t produced content on.

So why not borrow those ideas? Take a minute to access the free SEMrush keyword research tool.

In the space provided, type the URL of your competitor, like www.joyofbaking.com.

After clicking “Start Now,” take a look at the dashboard on the left. Click “Organic Research,” and then “Positions,” to get the data that will be most useful to you.

Now, you can see which keywords your competitor is ranking for. By reading through your competitor’s keywords, you can see what their most popular content is about.

If you haven’t incorporated these ideas into your resources, try working them in. Take what the competition is already doing well and do it better.

Keyword research for the decision stage

Conversions aren’t a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Even after a customer in the decision stage converts, they may stick around and buy again later.

Repeat business is your friend, mainly because it costs so much to acquire new customers. According to Econsultancy, for every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them.

Simply put, marketing to a former customer is a lot cheaper than marketing to a new one. And using these research tips, you can give the perfect pitch to that former customer.

Survey your customers about keywords

37% of Twitter users will purchase from a brand they follow, and 67% are likely to buy from a brand they follow. By now, you’re friends. Facebook friends. You probably can’t ask these people anything, but why not ask them how you should market to them?

You know what they say: When in doubt, ask. Here’s how it works.

Go to the Seed Keywords website and click the button that says “Create Your Scenario Now!” It doesn’t require any fee or even any sign-up.

Next, ask the specific question you’re curious about. To reuse the antivirus software example:

Once you create your scenario, you’ll be provided with a URL.

This is the address to share with your social media following. When your followers click on the link, they will wind up on a page that looks like this:

Your customer will then enter their answer to the question–in this case, “best antivirus software”–and hit “Submit.”

Meanwhile, on your end of things, you can view all the suggestions your audience has offered.

These suggested keywords come straight from the people who have purchased from you before or are ready to buy from you now.

By using this tool to understand their perspective, you’ll find the words you want to use when marketing to people just like them.

Review internal site search terms

So how can you read the minds of those in the decision stage who don’t follow your business on social media? It’s called site search!

According to Econsultancy, up to 30% of eCommerce visitors will use internal site search. That’s up to 30% of ready-to-convert consumers telling you exactly what they’re looking for.

After enabling site search in Google Analytics, find your way to the dashboard on the left side of the page. Under “Behavior,” select “Site Search,” and then “Search Terms.”

The page you’ll see next lists the most popular search terms on your site.

But maybe you want more specific information.

After all, you really don’t want the terms that any given visitor is searching for. All you want are the terms that customers who are ready to convert are searching. Customers on the pricing page, for instance.

And you’re in luck. You can easily find that info by going back to the dashboard and selecting “Search Pages.” Here, Analytics will list pages where customers often use the search feature.

Click on a page with a high number of searches to find out what people are so confused about on that page. Or, click on a page like your pricing page to find out what people are searching for when they’re ready to convert.

What are customers at the end of the buyer’s journey searching for next? Once you know that, you can add content that answers those queries, so customers don’t have to make the extra search.

Conclusion

Google isn’t the only one who cares about the words you use.

Using the right keywords in the right content for customers at the right stage of the buyer’s journey will make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your campaign.

Trying to raise brand awareness? Learn how unfamiliar consumers refer to your industry. And avoid using keywords that could be popular in another market.

Providing answers for those in the consideration stage? Get content ideas from a list of long-tail keywords and from the competition itself.

Convincing new and former customers to convert? Use seed keywords and site search to learn what matters most to them.

Sales isn’t about closing techniques at the end of the day. It’s about understanding people. It’s about empathizing with them. And knowing the problems they’re experiencing better than they do.

Getting this information from the prospect on the phone is next to impossible.

Luckily, the answers are already out there. You just need to know where to find the keywords.

The post The Express Guide to Keyword Research for Salespeople appeared first on Sales Hacker.

The success of a trade show campaign hinges on a well-trained and prepared trade show booth staff and the way they interact with prospects and attendees on the show floor. In this post, we outline the best practices when it comes to staffing your booth, assigning roles and responsibilities to staffers and budgeting concerns when it comes to preparing your trade show booth staff for the show floor.

Define Booth Staff Roles and Responsibilities

Before you begin recruiting your booth staff, take time to think about your organization’s goals for the show and make a list of the skills, competencies and knowledge required for your booth staff members.

Once you have made your list, break down the different roles and responsibilities of booth staff members (i.e., greeters, presenters, sales representatives, etc.), and what you expect of them in their assigned role. Vet each potential booth staffer to ensure that he or she can effectively perform the duties required in the manner your trade show program demands.

More Tips for Assigning Roles and Responsibilities:

• Carefully evaluate the personality and disposition of potential team members and assign roles that best fit who they are as people rather than assigning roles based solely on skill and knowledge set alone.
• Make sure that you balance the right mix of skillsets to represent your company.
• Clearly outline expectations and responsibilities so each member of your team can prepare themselves in time for the show.
• Training should be included in the trade show planning process, which includes budgeting for training materials and training time.
• Be clear about goals and expectations so your staff understands what it is your company is looking to accomplish by attending the show.

Types of Trade Show Booth Staff

After you have outlined the roles and responsibilities you believe will lead to success on the trade show floor, you can now focus on matching responsibilities with job titles. Below we list some of the most common roles performed by trade show booth staffers.

Hosts – Hosts specialize in welcoming and registering booth visitors. They also serve as guides, directing prospects to areas of interest inside the booth where exhibit activities such as games, contests and product demonstrations are taking place.

Hosts are your company’s brand ambassadors and are, many times, the first staff members with whom visitors interact. Outside of greeting prospects, hosts can also distribute promotional materials and assist with food and beverage service if needed.

Presenters – Skilled public speakers, presenters are adept at giving live in-booth presentations and demonstrations. Presenters often work in an in-booth theater or stage area and should be your designated product demonstrators and experts. Good presenters will keep your prospects engaged and in the booth by entertaining and educating them on your brand and its capabilities.

Crowd Gatherers – Crowd gatherers take on the host’s role outside the booth, engaging attendees in the aisles and areas surrounding your booth. Crowd gathers ask qualifying questions to gauge attendees’ interest in your products and direct them to your booth to learn more.

Lead Gathering and Sales Staff – These staffers are skilled sales professionals and, as such, they are experts at pitching your products and services and are masters at qualifying attendees. They are also often tasked with collecting lead data and passing off the most qualified prospects to your company’s inside sales staff for follow-up post-show.

Trade Show Booth Staff Training

A well-designed and engaging trade show booth is only as effective as the staff manning the exhibit. An undisciplined and poorly trained booth staff will directly impact your brand’s perception in the public eye —and in turn—the success of your trade show campaign.

Properly training staffers significantly diminish the chances of miscues and increase the overall performance of your marketing program, leading key stakeholders in your organization to feel that exhibiting at trade shows is worth the investment.

Grooming Standards

Having a well-groomed booth staff is essential to projecting a professional image on the trade show floor. Make sure every member of your team understands the importance of maintaining a clean-cut appearance. Untucked shirts, dirty clothing and wrinkled attire can turn off prospects and make your organization seem less professional. Depending on the industry, business casual dress is usually a safe bet, but both formal and informal attire may be best depending on the show.

Approachability and Friendliness

Since your trade show booth staff are the face of your organization, they have to be able to project a warm, professional and friendly demeanor. Staff should smile when greeting visitors, say “please” and “thank you” and use polite language throughout conversations. You may also want to recruit the most approachable and people-friendly employees at your company to staff your booth.

Product Training

Every member of your booth staff should be trained on the products and services you choose to market at your event.

Product knowledge ensures that booth staffers can communicate effectively and enthusiastically, building trust and on the show floor. It also means they can answer questions on the spot and overcome common customer objections.

Sales Skills Training

Your staff needs to know the right way to sell your products and services. Prior to your event, make time for your staff to rehearse your sales pitch and make sure the pitch aligns well with your overall marketing message. Have staffers work in groups and pairs so they can perfect their approach with role-playing.

Staffers should rehearse two pitches: a short 30-second elevator pitch that will grab the attention of prospects and a longer, more-detailed pitch designed the present to value of your products and capabilities and close sales with interested prospects.

People Skills

People skills are essential for sales representatives on the trade show floor. Having a team of booth staffers who possess the ability to understand, relate to and interact with different types of people will undoubtedly help your brand at an event.

More Tips for Training Booth Staff:

• Promote introspective thinking to help team members identify interpersonal barriers that could be stifling their success.
• Teach your staffers how to filter out serious prospects from ones just looking for giveaways.
• Practice listening exercises with your team to help them communicate more effectively.
• Have your team study body language, which can often be more telling than verbal communication.
• Practice stress-coping techniques to help team members better handle rejection or to decompress built-up tension.

Promoting Teamwork with Booth Staffers

To create a winning trade show team, it is essential to look for team players who are not only great sales representatives and marketers, but who also work well in a group setting.

More Tips for Creating Teamwork:

• Make sure your team members align their values and goals with each other and with your company.
• Maintain a high-energy environment that promotes team-oriented solutions and offers initiatives for thinking outside the box.
• Identify the diverse personality types of your team members and learn how to blend them together to make a stronger unit.
• Hold team lunches and activities before the event to encourage bonding.

Establishing Trust with Attendees

Earning the trust of attendees is the most important factor when it comes to interacting with prospects on the show floor. Booth staffers should receive training on how to build trust prior to the show.

Listen to Prospects Needs

Listening is strongly tied to gaining the trust of prospects. While communicating your brand’s message to your visitors is an obvious goal — the ability to listen to their concerns is just as important. It may sound like a no-brainer — but many booth staffers are too focused on pitching products that they forget to actually listen to visitors. Remember you want your visitors to trust you, and one of the first steps in trusting someone is having them really listen to what you have to say.

Knowledge is Power

Your visitors are coming to your booth to learn about your products and services, so your booth staff should be as knowledgeable as possible. Attendees want to be able to trust that your company is an expert in its field, so be sure to spend time educating staffers on products , industry trends, your company’s competitive advantages and your booth campaign.

Politeness
It is crucial for both you and your booth staff to be as polite and well-mannered as possible when engaging prospects on the trade show floor. Spend time teaching staff how to politely converse with different personality manage types and how to professionally unhappy visitors, vendors or competitors.

More Tips for Establishing Trust with Attendees:

• Make sure staffers shake hands with every visitor entering your booth.
• Maintain eye contact when engaging with prospects in conversation.
• Smiling and being friendly can go a long way in establishing trust with attendees.
• Present positive body language with visitors during conversations.
• Remember to say “please”, “thank you” and “excuse me” to illustrate respect and politeness.

Budgeting

Your booth trade show staffers are the most effective—and sometimes most expensive— trade show marketing asset. The personnel that staff your booth make up an average of 20% of your event marketing budget, so pay close attention your staffing expenses.

• The cost of getting your staff to and from the show needs to be carefully planned. Most hotels and airlines have group rates that can help drive down expenses.
• Designate one member of your trade show team to book travel, lodging and transportation for the group. This tactic will help simplify the coordination of group packages and deals.
• Communicate expense limits to your trade show staffers. If your organization does not have an official travel and expense policy for trade shows, consider drafting one that includes per diems on travel, hotels, dining, tipping and entertainment.
• Purchase your airline tickets early to secure lower fares. Tuesdays are normally when you’ll find the lowest fares.
• Your staff needs to travel between the hotel and the show. Some events will provide shuttles or other transportation for attendees, but your team may need to find alternative transportation methods. Be sure to budget for taxis, buses, trains, rental cars or other methods if necessary.

So you want to grow your business? Great, now comes the hard part. Marketing takes a lot more than an impressive catch line or a cool logo. In today’s hyper-competitive digital landscape it can be hard for businesses to know where to start. Inbound Marketing can be a very powerful way to drive leads, but not all inbound is created equal.

Inbound marketing is a strategy centered around drawing customers to products and services using techniques like content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. While these methods have become increasingly popular over the past few years, many companies jump right into them without much thought. This action often leads to poor results and frustrated business owners.

As the owner of an inbound agency, I’d like to say that Inbound is right for everyone, but that’s just not the case. So how do you know if Inbound Marketing is right for your business? Below are five things to consider when determining if Inbound Marketing is right for your company.

A Targeted Niche Audience

Many people think they need a huge audience to be successful online. But did you know that the most successful products online tend to be more niche? When you go broad, it’s much easier to get lost in the noise. But when you are targeted and precise, you have a much louder voice.

It can be tempting to go after the large market, but trust me it’s harder than it looks. Focusing in on a smaller, more targeted group is the way to go. In “Crossing the Chasm,” by Geoffrey Moore, he talks about the importance of getting early adopters on board. Early adopters are a small core, group of people who are passionate about your product.

Inbound Marketing works best when you can deliver your message to a targeted, niche audience. Getting your audience onboard with your message is key to your long-term success. In fact, 68% of online buyers will spend considerable time reading content published from a brand or business they that catches their interested. (The CMA) Your target niche audience is the group that will carry your message to the masses. Before starting with Inbound, make sure you know who benefits most from your product or service.

Compelling Product

Having a great marketing message is pointless if you don’t have a compelling product. Now, this doesn’t mean your product has to have lots of flair; it just needs to meet your prospects needs.

I’ve seen inbound work in very high-tech innovative industries as well as more traditional, less “sexy” industries. What matters is that you have a product to solve a pain point. Here are a few questions you can ask about your product to determine how compelling it is.

1. What does a prospect expect from it?
2. What problem does it help them to solve?
3. What value would they put on it?
4. What other products in the marketplace would they consider instead of this?
5. What do they like about the other competing products on the market?
6. What are the existing products on the market lacking that yours has?
7. What would help them decide to change to your product?
8. Would they even consider using your product if they are already using a competitor’s version?

These questions will help you better understand your product as well as your positioning in the market. Having a compelling product is crucial to developing an inbound marketing campaign.

Moderate to High CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value)

Having a medium to high customer lifetime value (CLTV) is another essential aspect to consider. Inbound Marketing is a long-term strategy and often has many levels in the lead nurturing process.

While many see Inbound as a quick way to grow, the fact is it does take time. If your company needs to sell a ton of low-priced product fast, Inbound may not be your best approach. But if you have a moderate to high CTLV, than Inbound can be not only a beneficial strategy but also can be cost-effective. In fact, the cost of 3 out of 4 Inbound Marketing channels is less than the price of any Outbound Marketing channel. (Mashable)

So you may be wondering, how do you calculate your CLTV? Understanding your CLTV can help your business answer some critical questions according to propeller CRM:

• How much can we comfortably spend on marketing and sales for customer acquisition?
• How much should we spend on customer service to retain an existing customer?
• Who are our most valuable customers and how can we better target this demographic for future sales?

Here’s a quick example of the simple CLV formula in action:

Let’s say a company generates $3,000 each year per customer with an average customer lifetime of 10 years and a CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) of $5,000 for each customer.

The company could calculate CLV like this:

$3,000 * 10 – $5,000 = $25,000

As you can see, this makes it easier to justify the sales and marketing budgets required to land new customers for your business.

The Right Resources (Time and/or $)

Before starting with Inbound, you need to be sure you have the right resources. If you are going to do Inbound yourself, you are going to need time. If you want someone to help you out, you are going to need capital.

For those of you looking to take on Inbound in-house, you will need to have a basic understanding of content marketing, SEO, social media as well as strategy development. Having the right tools is also key.

If you don’t have the time, then you’ll need to hire some help. Before hiring any agency, take some time and learn about them. Impact Brand does a great job of laying out what to look for in an Inbound Marketing agency. Here is a brief overview:

1. Case Studies / Customer Proof
   2. Desire to Develop a Strategic Plan
   3. Ability to deliver a variety of Inbound Marketing services
   4. They Practice What They Preach
   5. Focused on the Success of Your Business
   6. Values Transparency

Commitment to Your Goals

Inbound is not for the faint of heart. You must be committed to your goals if you are going to see results. When I began implementing Inbound for myself, I wrote three pieces of new content each week for a year before I really started to see a return on my investment. That’s right; it took over a year. But that foundation has led to more than 10x growth in revenue.

Make sure that you set both long-term and short-term goals. The long-term goals will keep you focused, and the short-term goals will help keep you going. Success never happens overnight, but what you put in each day starts to compound over time. If you are considering Inbound, you need to have the heart to stay in the game for the long haul.

While Inbound Marketing is a trendy topic, it’s not for everyone. But for those that meet all or most of the criteria above, Inbound Marketing can pay off huge in the long run.

If you’ve got even the most basic understanding of marketing, you probably know that there are two common methods: inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

What’s the difference? They’re both used to bring in customers, right? Well, yes, but that’s where the similarity ends. Let’s dig in and get the lowdown on the tactics that are the hallmarks of each type of marketing, so you can decide which is best for you.

Outbound Marketing

For centuries, marketers have been trying to get people to buy their products— even before the term “marketing” existed. Our friends at HubSpot created this fun infographic that shows you exactly how far back marketing stretches, and how it has changed over the course of the 20th century.

Outbound marketing is intrusive. It demands that prospects pay attention. It uses a variety of methods to get the word out about products or services. Here are some of the most popular outlets for outbound marketing:

• Print and direct mail marketing— Practically since the advent of the printing press, there have been advertisers schilling their wares. The first magazine was printed in America in the mid-18th century, and they’ve been filled with ads ever since. Then there’s direct mail. Every time you open your mailbox, it’s full of catalogs, flyers, and other “junk mail” that goes directly into the recycling bin. Despite its bad rep, it continues to be a popular source of advertising. As a matter of fact, in 2015, marketers spent $46.8 billion on direct mail.
• TV and radio ads— When the radio became popular in the 1920s, advertisers began sponsoring shows. As television came on the scene, the radio shows died out, but the ads stayed put. Turn on the car radio, and you’ll likely be inundated with ads between songs. Marketers became aware of the popularity of television and created creative and innovative ads to capture the attention (and the wallets) of viewers. (That’s not to say that all ads are created equal— for every Apple “1984” ad, there’s a local car dealer awkwardly hawking his upcoming sale.)
• Telemarketing— You just sat down to dinner, and before you can enjoy your first bite, the phone rings. You answer, and it’s a telemarketer. Sigh. Since the early 1980s, businesses have been spending billions of dollars to place millions of calls per hour.
• Billboards— Billboards first popped up in North America in the late 19th century, but they didn’t become ubiquitous until the early 20th century. If you’ve ever passed a two story picture of a burger and pulled off onto the next exit to eat lunch, the billboard has done its job.

What do these methods have in common? They’re tough to avoid. Sure, people can change the channel when a commercial comes on, flip past the ads in the magazine, or toss the direct mailers as soon as they walk in the door, but they can’t stop them altogether.

Outbound marketing lacks personalization, which makes it less effective. It’s tough to tell what’s working and what’s not. As an outbound marketer, you won’t know if the direct mailer you sent last month, or the radio ad running at the same time brought a customer to you. Outbound means that you often lack the data needed to adjust your tactics and your budget.

Here’s the biggest issue with it— it’s expensive. How expensive? Well, it’s estimated that an outbound marketing campaign costs 62% more per lead than its inbound counterpart. In other words, you’re paying more to irritate people who aren’t necessarily interested in what you have to offer.

Inbound Marketing

The term inbound marketing was first coined by HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan in the late 1990s. The seeds for inbound marketing were sown before then, with ideas such as permission marketing and relationship marketing. Both of these focused on taking a less aggressive and more personalized approach to selling, creating lasting relationships with satisfied customers over time.

Here’s a quick rundown on commonly-used inbound marketing tactics:

• SEO— SEO, or search engine optimization, helps your page rank higher in internet searches. There are several search engines used by people around the globe—Google alone fields 40,000 searches per second— and it’s important that your website is ranked high on the list of responses to certain keywords or key phrases. How do you do that? We can help, regardless of your level of knowledge.
• Content marketing—More and more businesses are incorporating blogs into their websites, and you can thank content marketing for that. Content marketing gives businesses the opportunity to inform and educate their consumers without being too “in-your-face” about it. They offer the information, and consumers can find it when they’re ready for it. With that in mind, it’s important to have content that’s relevant to all stages of the buyer’s journey on your website. That way, you can meet your customers where they are.
• Social media— If you don’t have an account on at least one social media platform, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity to connect with your audience. You can interact with actual customers, developing a relationship over Twitter or Facebook that will earn you their loyalty over time. Additionally, you can score major points by directly addressing customers who have problems with your service or product. Here are just a few companies who are doing social media right.
• Email workflow— No, we don’t mean spam. We’re talking about carefully crafted emails that are sent at particular trigger points throughout the buyer’s journey toward becoming a customer. These emails offer valuable information and useful content that a customer can use. The right email at the right time can pull a lead further down your marketing funnel and closer to being a paying customer.

Why is Inbound Marketing Right For You?

The advent of inbound marketing marks a shift of power— now, the power resides with the buyer rather than the seller. The buyer isn’t dependent on the sales team to inform them about the product anymore. The internet brings them all the information they need, and they can get answers to their specific pain points without having to sift through tons of non-relevant information (or a sales pitch).

Inbound marketing is significantly less expensive than outbound, and it’s more effective. For example, an estimated 14.6% of SEO leads result in a close, while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate. You can measure the success of your inbound campaign via A/B testing, (so you can see which email subject line gets more opens, or what Call-to-Action gets more clicks).

Another bonus of inbound marketing is its agility. If you determine that your TV ad isn’t garnering the results you hoped for, you’re kind of stuck. You’ve shot it, and paid for the time slots in advance— there’s not much you can do. If you launch an inbound campaign and find that it’s not as successful as you hoped it would be, you can rework it on the fly. Change the keywords, revamp the content, switch social media platforms — it’s significantly easier to switch things up when it’s all digital. (It’s also a lot cheaper.) You don’t have to wait until your budget is replenished, by which time you’ve probably lost a portion of your audience.

We believe inbound marketing gets measurable results that impact your bottomline— and we’re not the only ones. Inbound marketing makes sense for a lot of businesses who are seeking a new way to boost their sales numbers without increasing their marketing budget.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

Lately I have had a chance to sit in on a number of “opportunity reviews”, and it is interesting how the format and tools have changed, the plot and the theme have not changed much beyond the costumes, props, and players.

Real or Fantasy

What was striking is that for the most part, these “events”, fall in to one of two groups, they are either objective, fact based exercise, leading to a realistic view of their opportunities, with the conviction one gets when one is fully engaged and working the opportunity.  The rest, they are much more subjective based, open to how people feel about what happened, with or without input from the buyer(s).  This has allowed the former group to act and speak about their pipeline with conviction backed by results, the subjective group, spends more time rationalizing the outcome than driving it.

It would be easy, and unfair, to blame sales people for this, but in many ways, it is the fault of their managers, and others in the organization that are paid to enable sales.  First, when it comes to opportunities, it should be less about reviewing, and more about moving them forward to a win.  Even after all the advancements in tools and other aids, many managers, especially those new to the role, look at these gathering from the wrong angle.  Above I referred to these rituals as an “event”, when they need to be ongoing process, reviewing the specific actions of the buyer, and planning and taking the next appropriate steps; do that and your pipeline and the opportunities in them, will fare better than if you’re just performing a CYA routine.

Of late, what has helped those with the subjective approach has been the rise in statistics they can present to support their cause; again, when you’re looking for cover, stats are great.  On the other hand, when you are looking to win deals, you want to evaluate things much more objectively, you want to examine the facts as presented by the interactions with the buyer(s), this ensures you are focused on things that lead you to quota, and maximize your most precious resource, time.

Statistics

A new wrinkle is now available to the subjective group, one they feel lends a bit of weight and validity to what they are doing, namely statistics.  Thanks to the sales tools and technology, there are more stats than ever available, and sales managers being the creative lot they are, are using them to shore up the state of opportunities in their pipelines.  Stats are good, but much more malleable than facts.  I’d much rather work with sales people who can present probabilities based on actions taken by the prospect, and all the people involved in the decision, than on comparing a current deal to statistics gathered in past leads.

While it is true that there are many similarities between deal of the same product to generally similar companies, when you get close enough to read the numbers, they all unfold in their own way, even within broad parameters.  Each deal is different enough, that looking at stats derived from a collection of varied deals over time, to figure out how things may turn out in a current deal, does little to help you close that current deal.  On the other hand, if you look at opportunities based on actual things the prospect has said and done; your ability to speak to specific elements of the decision you need them to make.  How well you know the why, how, and what of their decision, based on what they say, and more importantly do, will have a greater impact on your success, than doing regression on a series of unrelated deals.

Execution – Everything else is just talk

The more you can stand and defend a deal based on actual things in the deal than subjective elements, the more likely you are to make right plan, take the right actions, and win based on the merits of each deal, than a regression model of the last 100 deals; especially since those have been won, and this one is still up for grabs.

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Can you ever be sure you’re hiring the right salesperson?

When I first wrote this article, we were in a very different place, with unemployment at an all-time low and sales hiring a top priority.

Man oh man, how the world has changed so quickly!

Whether your company has paused hiring, topgrading, still hiring, or will be in the future, having the right people for your business and stage will ALWAYS be a priority.

With so many great candidates hitting the market and juggling a laundry list of competing priorities, are you prepared and equipped to handle that volume while understanding who is truly right for your business?

It may seem like you’re always taking a blind bet on a new hire, but there’s a way to rig the game in your favor so you win more often than not.

That secret weapon is a hiring scorecard.

In this article I’m going to show you how to create and implement a hiring scorecard so you can make the right hire, the first time.

The cherry on top? You’ll be able to download the interview scorecard template that I use with my clients.

If you’re a job seeker, never fear! Part two of this scorecard series will help you create a sales interview scorecard to land that sales role you’ve been dreaming about.

The Power of the Scorecard

Recently, a client of mine was feeling unsure about a highly qualified candidate.

The candidate gave all the right answers to all the typical questions. She had all the right skills and her numbers were incredible, but the chemistry was lacking during the on-site interview.

In my experience, getting caught up in shiny objects (like great numbers) during the hiring process is a straight line to Disasterville, and when the cost of a bad hire is painfully significant, it pays to take a measured approach.

Fortunately, my client used their hiring scorecard to sidestep a costly mis-hire.

By identifying what was important, realizing all salespeople aren’t created equal, and asking a series of important questions that probed below the surface-level statements, my client uncovered that the candidate didn’t align with what they needed.

Turns out, the candidate was scared, rather than excited, about their exit strategy.

Although the hire didn’t make sense at that time, the candidate could very well be a tremendous asset later. Luckily, because my client identified the problem early, the disaster was averted with no bridges burned!

What’s more, that scorecard reduced my client’s hiring process time by 37%, which allowed them to invest that time on other priorities instead.

A hiring scorecard allows you to consistently make thoughtful hiring decisions based on the factors that actually predict success in your organization and within the role.

Case in point:

Your roadmap to success

Let me be clear, not all candidates are created equal, and not all businesses need the same thing. A hiring scorecard is both the roadmap for the hiring process and the compass that points to the right hire for your role and the stage of your business.

The power of a scorecard reduces the margin for error.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the validity or predictive power of a typical unstructured interview is around 20%.

That means, if you’re not interviewing in a structured fashion, you only have a 1 in 5 chance of actually making a good hire (yikes). But that also means salespeople entertaining a new gig only have a 1 in 5 chance of deciding to work with you once you deliver your exciting offer.

If you haven’t defined what you need and why you need it, how will you know a good hire when you meet them?

In fact, psychology tells us that we’re blind to what doesn’t align with our current goals.

In a famous experiment called the Gorilla Test, participants were told to watch a video of people playing basketball and count how many times the ball was passed. Since the participants were focused on counting, less than half saw the gorilla walk into the frame, beat its chest, and saunter off slowly.

 

In other words, you stand a very low chance of finding an ideal candidate if you’re not looking for them specifically.

That’s why it’s so important to define what your ideal candidate looks like before the hiring process begins.

A hiring scorecard helps you pinpoint these quantifiable factors and evaluate candidates against one another according to your requirements. It also keeps everyone on the hiring committee on the same page.

And that’s not all. Because scorecards help ensure you hire the right person for the job, using a scorecard to evaluate and interview candidates can reduce churn by as much as 50%.

How to Define Your Ideal Candidate

The first step in building your hiring scorecard is determining your end destination. What does your ideal hire look like? You need to visualize who this person is.

Ask yourself:

If the new hire is exceeding expectations in the next 6–12 months, what does that look like? Why?

Conversely:

If the new hire is struggling in 6–12 months, what does that look like? Why?

Also:

What are the top performers in my current team doing? How? Why?

And:

What’s missing from the members of my team who are struggling? Why?

Write down everything that comes to mind, and separate the list into “must-haves” and “must-avoids.”

Your “musts” are the deal makers and deal breakers that outline your ideal candidate persona (just like your ICP in sales). Once you’ve set the boundaries with “musts,” get very specific about the necessary skills, traits, behaviors, and experiences that you’re looking for.

Every factor you list will help you assess candidates and cross-reference them against one another during the hiring process, so be sure to define exactly what you need and why you need it. Ask and answer in-depth questions about what you need from the person, their workflow, their processes, how they’re enabled, etc. For example:

Do we have a lead generation strategy in place, and what does that really look like? Or will this person need to find their own leads from scratch?

According to Gallup, only half of employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work. A hiring scorecard will help you get granular about role requirements, take the emotion out of the hiring process, and ensure success for your new employee.

If you’re unsure of what questions you need to ask yourself about your ideal candidate, here are some examples:

• Why am I hiring?
• What does my buyer need, and what is my market telling me?
• Who do I need now?
• What specific tasks does this person need to do to be successful? For example:
  • Complexity of the deal
  • Mindset
  • Coaching
  • Reporting/Modeling
  • Communication (internal, external, written, and verbal)
  • Sales chops
  • Technical chops
  • Adaptability
  • Curiosity
  • Cross-functional collaboration
• What sales system do we use? Are we a Challenger Sales shop, and if so, does the person we hire need to know those methods? Most importantly, how do they apply them?
• What specific KPIs do we need this person to achieve?
• What’s not getting done today/tomorrow without this hire?
• Is our organization ready to support this hire? If so, how?
• Who is involved in the interview process, onboarding process, and ongoing support and training process?

This is a team effort.

Have everyone involved in the hiring process evaluate and weigh in on the score criteria to ensure alignment. The last thing you want is to derail your search because the hiring team isn’t aligned and is unsure about what’s important. This can lead to an icky candidate experience that can come back to haunt you and your organization.

Don’t Lose Sight of the Long Term

Here’s the hard truth: Who you need today is likely not going to be who you need in five years.

Hiring for “right now” is like taking one step forward and two steps back. Jake Reni says it best:

I’ve never regretted under-hiring, and/or slowing down my hiring process. I have always regretted hiring too soon or over-hiring my reps.

It’s important to take an honest look at the skills and traits you need to get to the next level but also leave room to grow in years to come. Failing to do so can negatively impact your potential growth, especially in enterprise sales.

After all, top-performing salespeople want to be part of winning teams where they can make an impact.

According to the State of Startups Survey 2019, the ability to make an impact on a company is the top-ranked (55.1%) reason candidates join a startup.

(Source)

If you don’t provide opportunities for advancement — or if you’re churning salespeople constantly — you will develop a bad reputation, and it will come back around like a bad boomerang.

6 Key Questions For Long-Term Hiring

Here are six questions to ask yourself when trying to hire for both your immediate needs and future growth.

1. What’s our mission? Why are we doing what we’re doing? (A truly qualified hire is aligned with your big-picture goals).
2. What is our 3-5 year plan?
   1. Expansion strategy
   2. Stability
   3. New markets
   4. Going up/down market
   5. Funding
3. Do we need someone who can achieve results in a leadership position? (side note: this is a post all in itself)
4. What type of salesperson do we need?
   1. Executive-level presence with a strategic thought process to boot
   2. Inbound or outbound
   3. Enterprise or SMB
   4. Master social seller
   5. High-volume transactional closing machine
5. Do we need a lone wolf? Or do we need a team player?
6. Do we need this person to come into the office? Or can they work from home? Given the current landscape, how might our position on this change in the future?

Building Your Sales Interview Scorecard

Once you’ve defined your ideal candidate, it’s time to create the scorecard you’ll use to evaluate and interview potential hires.

Because of all the work we’ve done defining our ideal candidate, this is actually the easiest part.

This can be done quickly and easily in a spreadsheet, with the ideal traits and criteria along the top, and space for the interviewer to rate or score each candidate on how well they meet those criteria below.

In each section you should include key items that you want your interviewer to discover or dig deeper into.

Based on the qualifications of each candidate, the interviewer will assign a rating/score to each section which determines how well the potential hire matches up to your ideal candidate.

This document will serve to guide the interviewer through their questions, while also helping the decision makers to quickly assess the candidate afterwards.

According to SHRM via Hubspot, ”the most effective [interview scorecards] prompt the interviewer to choose a rating — ranging from poor to excellent — based on the candidate’s answers.”

This is my interview scorecard template. You can use it as a starting point to create your own ideal hiring scorecard.

Implementing the Sales Interview Scorecard

Once you’ve got your interview scorecard template, it’s time to use it.

Review the scorecard before an interview. In particular, review the candidates’ profile, resume, and LinkedIn profile to pinpoint specific questions that relate to each category.

Based on the answers, assign a score of 1–10 in each category.

After the interview, calculate the average score across all categories of the scorecard. You can also assign an added weight to categories that you consider mission-critical. By counting certain areas double, you can ensure your final average reflects your real needs.

This helps you understand:

• Where you need to dig in further
• What stands out
• What’s missing
• How the candidate compares to your current team
• How they compare to other potential candidates

Next, it’s time to calculate your minimum acceptable score for each category.

For example, an average of 7.5 is my minimum acceptable threshold because it means that we’re not a perfect match on 25% of our questions.

Voila! You now have an objective, results-oriented evaluation of each candidate.

A well-designed scorecard should make it easy to narrow the list of qualified candidates, as it did for this colleague, after I gave him my interview scorecard template:

 

The beauty of the hiring scorecard is that it helps you make decisions without getting bogged down by emotions. You hold yourself accountable to evaluate every candidate at the same standard without any bias.

The Dos and Don’ts of Using A Hiring Scorecard

Your hiring scorecard is only as helpful as it is accurate, comprehensive, and detailed.

Here are a few pointers for getting the most out of your scorecard and using it to make the best hiring choices.

Do: Get specific about what success and failure look like.

As I discussed above, you and your team should get specific about the traits of your ideal salesperson. If you don’t go into detail, your persona will be sloppy and your scorecard won’t be helpful.

Do: Ensure that everyone in the interview process uses the same scorecard.

The hiring committee should all have access to the same information when evaluating candidates. Plan to discuss the scorecard together as a team while you’re creating it, both before interviews and after.

One of our clients made an offer but had to retract it when they discovered the candidate had lied during the hiring process. After uncovering the inconsistent behavior, we created a custom interview scorecard template and shared it with every person involved in the hiring process to help them circumvent issues like these in the future.

This is easily avoidable when you embrace the power of a hiring scorecard.

Do: Review your scorecard regularly to make sure it’s up-to-date and accurate.

You’ll want to refine your scorecard over time because your hiring needs are always changing.

I recommend scheduling time every quarter to evaluate your scorecard based on the performance of your current team and the insights you’ve gained from the hiring process.

If you’re not hiring regularly, though, reevaluating your scorecard before a new hiring process should be plenty. This way, you can be sure you’re training yourself to interview optimally (instead of falling for the same tricks over and over again).

Do: Go slow to go fast.

Quality hiring is directly linked to growth. The best companies take their time during the hiring process because they know rushing to fill seats can lead to costly mistakes in both the short- and long-term.

Good begets good. Finding the right candidate (the first time) cuts down on the risk of a bad hire, but it also cuts down on recruiting time and cost. Meanwhile, this helps minimize disruptions to your company culture and solidifies your reputation as a good place to work.

Making the right decision takes time, and going slow helps create a flywheel of success that pays dividends over time.

DO: Keep going.

You may not see results from a hiring scorecard immediately. The best salespeople are almost always employed and not actively looking for a new role. They’re good at what they do and have a great job because of it!

Trust that your scorecard will guide you to find the best person for the job versus rushing into a bad hire.

Do: Define your “why.”

To get people who believe in your mission and produce results accordingly, you need to be intentional about hiring. This starts with knowing your “why.”

As Simon Sinek discussed in his massively popular TedTalk, what underlies the most important, attractive, and successful organizations is their “why” — their underlying values.

When these core values are defined, it becomes very easy to attract the right people to your camp.

For example, people flock to Apple and remain loyal, not because they make smartphones, but because people love the brand. Apple’s brand identity is well-defined, and it resonates with users.

(Source)

The best salespeople want to believe in what they are selling. And more than that, they want to believe in the business they are building by selling your product or service.

“Why” is your personal standard and the key differentiator in the hiring process. Salespeople who align with your “why” are great hires.

Don’t: Change your scorecard during the hiring process.

Your hiring scorecard is only accurate if it’s consistent for all candidates. Don’t change it during a set of interviews.

Otherwise it will become impossible to properly measure candidates against each other.

Don’t: Change too many things on your scorecard at once.

If you restrict your diet to learn what you’re allergic to, but then add too many foods back at once, you can’t know what you’re reacting to when you have an allergic reaction. A sales interview scorecard is no different. If you change too many variables at one time, it’s hard to know what made the difference in the hiring process.

The goal is to be able to track progress so you know which aspects of a sales candidate are most important to the position you need to fill, and so you can make better hires over time.

If you do/don’t do these things, you’ll be squeezing every last ounce of performance out of your scorecard and making sure you hire the best person each time you need to fill a vacancy.

Don’t: Forget to tally your results and compare the data to your team’s performance.

Being able to tie the results on your scorecard to the performance of your team is a key part of keeping your scorecard up-to-date and effective. Comparing your hiring record to your team’s performance allows you to ensure you’re making the right choices.

Putting it all Together

Implementing a hiring scorecard into your hiring process can be boiled down to 5 simple steps.

1. Create your scorecard. Use the interview scorecard template I use, or create your own from scratch.
2. Review your hiring scorecard against your sales team’s performance to make sure it’s up-to-date. Depending on your hiring frequency, you can do this quarterly or before a new hire.
3. Make sure the entire hiring committee is using the same scorecard. Schedule a time to debrief to discuss the scores before and after interviews to prevent gaps in communication.
4. Keep a record of the data after each round of interviews. Compare this data to your sales team’s performance and adjust the scorecard accordingly.
5. Talk about your results with the candidates, and use this as an opportunity to collaborate. It’s a great way to see how they take feedback, clear up any miscommunication, and get better together.

A hiring scorecard is the best way to clearly navigate the hiring process, avoid the painful effects of a mis-hire, and identify and evaluate candidates.

So, create your candidate persona, galvanize your hiring team on the key traits before you start the hiring process, and whatever you do, DO NOT figure it out as you go. Go into the hiring process with a plan, and you will improve your hiring.

It’s as simple as that.

Do you use an interview scorecard template in your hiring process? How is it working for you? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Use This Interview Scorecard Template to Win the Top Sales Talent appeared first on Sales Hacker.

I’d like to think we can all learn from not only our own mistakes, but also from each other’s. I want to share with you the biggest mistake I made in my career, and it happened to be as a co-founder and Sales VP.

I was a co-founder of a software company called Open Environment. We developed middleware to help large companies connect various back-end systems. As a startup, my role began as the sole salesperson, and as we grew, my role quickly progressed into sales manager. Within four years I was the head of sales, leading a team of 35+ sales reps, sales engineers and a small group of consultants.

Just being around as a company after three years is reason to celebrate for most startups. But we weren’t just surviving, we were thriving. We went from revenue of under $1 million in our first year to nearly $15 million by year four.

As a result of us doing really well, we dreamed of taking our new company public. The founders all got together and we decided to recruit the CEO of one of our Fortune 500 customers to be our CEO.

How My Mistake Started

The new CEO joined our team, helped us raise new financing, and ultimately took us public.

As the Sales VP, I had my finger on the pulse. I knew exactly how much each rep was bringing in and what each rep needed to achieve for us to hit our collective goal.

Once our new CEO was on board, we sat down to talk about strategic growth and how we could meet our new – and aggressive – benchmarks.

For me, it was a simple case of math. I knew my reps were maxed out at how much they could each pull in, so my answer was to add headcount. My sales approach was to invest in our team, because without a sales team, you really can’t grow a business.

I tried to lay it out for the CEO that an investment in people was the best investment we could make at that time. Logically, if we were increasing our sales goal, then we should also increase our sales force. I pushed hard for more headcount, but my logic was met with strong resistance.

The new CEO had come from a different industry – he never sold middleware, or anything to business, before. He had an approach to sales that didn’t take into account what we were selling, or how we had been successful thus far in achieving our sales goals. He just didn’t want to invest any money into hiring more reps.

The Big Mistake

As the head of sales, anything that happened, good or bad, was on me. So although I’m referring to this as “my biggest sales mistake”, we all know it’s a collective company effort, but I took the fall as the one in charge.

My mistake was that I lacked the numbers to articulate my sales approach. Not only did I not have all the data, but I didn’t completely grasp how the numbers worked together to get us to that end result. It wasn’t necessarily a simple equation of more people equals more revenue. There were other factors involved, and although I was, in the end, correct in my assumption, the CEO was focused on those “other data points” that he thought could swing the pendulum.

Our CEO didn’t budge on hiring, our existing reps sold all they could, but we didn’t make our goal. Our stock depreciated in value by 75%, and we literally lost $200 million dollars in market valuation.

And this all because I didn’t have the numbers to argue my case that my sales approach was correct.

Learning From My Mistake

As a result of this experience, I made it my mission to focus on all of the metrics involved in the equation of sales success. Having data to back up your sales approach is the key to leveraging your way of thinking – especially when talking to a C-level executive.

Here are the numbers that matter for predicting sales success:

• total goal
• average deal size
• win rate
• % of leads that result in a  proposal
• leads generated
• maximum # of leads a rep can handle

What I then did was to build out a detailed spreadsheet to model how these numbers relate to each other, and to the final goal. By moving the dial on certain data points, I was able to realize where my focus would net the greatest impact in reaching our target. (By the way, if you want a copy of this worksheet and guide to see if your team is on goal to reach your number, you can request it here.)

The Good News

There is a light at the end of every dark tunnel. Although we lost $200 million in market capitalization, we launched some new products and the company rebounded. And we eventually we sold it to a larger publicly traded software company.

I also came out of the experience with a better knowledge of how to articulate and execute sales success. If you want to learn more about how these valuable numbers can help you exceed your sales quota, then I’d love to share that with you. We have created a spreadsheet and guide to help you calculate your team’s chance at meeting their goal. Request your own copy today. Hopefully this will help you avoid a 200 million dollar mistake, like mine!

By downloading this content you are agreeing to receive periodic emails from OpenView.

The post The Biggest Mistake I Made as Head of Sales appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Have you ever spent months designing and building your booth to showcase your incredible products and wow the trade show crowds? Perhaps you’ve devoted days to perfecting every word and graphic for your presentation at a conference. Then, despite nailing your booth or presentation, you’ve been disappointed in the results. The event did not produce the return on investment (ROI) you had anticipated. Leads trickled in and then wasted away.

It’s an all too common problem.

That’s because marketing leaders tend to pour all their energy into the most visible parts of an event: the sizzle. While doing so, they forget to do the hard work of creating a robust process for recruiting and engaging attendees and following up on leads afterward.

In this blog, I’ll give you 13 marketing tactics to boost your event ROI before, during, and after your events.

Attract Your Ideal Prospects Before the Event

For event success, you need the right people to attend. Here’s how to ensure they do.

1. Invite People!

It should go without saying that you need to invite people to an event. However, many organizers just expect visitors to arrive at their booth when the doors open or to choose their conference session from the many options during the same time slot. Send an email or direct mail invitation, allowing attendees to plan.

2. Go Beyond Email Invitations

While you should send an email—it’s inexpensive and can’t hurt—there is a risk of letting it do all the heavy lifting. In the lead-up to an event, there’s a lot of email competition and it’s all too easy for recipients to hit the delete button.

To stand out from the crowd, you should also do something personal. Use your inside sales people or a B2B telemarketing service to follow up on the phone. It’s a good way to get the attention of decision-makers. Even if you don’t reach them directly, they’ll likely listen to a voicemail message.

If you do reach a live person, you’ll have an opportunity to learn more about their interests and discuss with them how they can benefit from the event.

3. Do It Again

There’s power in numbers. While one call can make an impact, two are even better. Remember, your prospects are as busy as you are, so remind them about your seminar or to visit your booth a couple of days before the event.

4. Add Some Marketing Magic

Reach out to people indirectly as well. You can include information about the event on your website and promote it via LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

5. Fill Calendars

Your salespeople and top executives’ time is valuable. You don’t want them to waste their time talking to each other in the booth or checking out the swag table of a competing company. Ensure they’ll be productive by scheduling appointments with decision-makers when you’re on the phone.

Pre-Event Planning for Post-Event Follow-Up   

According to InsideSales.com, 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Because of this, you can’t wait to determine your lead follow-up strategy until you return from the event.

6. Prepare for Data Collection

Once you get to the event, it’s too late to decide what information you need to collect about your leads. Contact details alone will not help you get ahead of your competitors.

Whatever data you decide you need, create forms that make it easy for your reps to collect it. By noting the problems people are trying to solve, you can strengthen your ability to respond rapidly with relevant information. After all, notes on the back of business cards tend to be disorganized and all too easy to lose.

7. Know Who’s First

Decide how you will prioritize your leads. How will you score them to determine which ones are hot, warm, or not worth your time? You want to get back to the hot leads first so you don’t lose the opportunity.

8. Plot Your Follow-Up Tactics

There are multiple ways you can follow up after an event: email, direct mail, social media, phone calls, and online conferences. Decide which tactics you will use before your event.

Perhaps it’s a combination of tactics that will work best for your company. It may vary based on the personal preferences of your leads. One person might respond best to a LinkedIn message. Another may prefer a phone call. It’s important to go to your prospect’s preferred channel.

Also, you may need to create content for follow-up fodder, such as ebooks, webinars, direct mail pieces, and demonstrations which will create additional touchpoints for your prospects but more work for you on the front end.

9. Make It Easy

Because you need to implement your follow-up tactics as rapidly as possible, you have to work intelligently.

That means creating a series of email templates before the event to make it easy for reps to reach out to leads. They can personalize them as necessary based on the information collected at the show. For example, you might have an email that says, “From our conversations at the show, I understand you’re struggling with (fill in the blank). You’ll be happy to learn our (fill in the blank) product can help you to….”

You’ll also want to create a series of talking points for salespeople to use in their follow-up telephone and online conversations.

At the Event

You’ve put in all of your pre-work to make your event succeed, but how can you best handle the event itself?

10. Designate Someone to Run Interference

You’re at the event to promote your business. But guess what? There are plenty of salespeople there who’d love to sell to your company too. Designate someone to intercept reps who come to your booth, ensuring that you can focus on what you’re there for.

Reap the Rewards after the Event

You’re back from the event, tired from long-days and hectic travel. Sadly, it’s not the time to relax and move onto the next project. Now it’s time to lock in the payback.

11. Shape Up Your Data

You’ll be more efficient if you scrub your data. Eliminate duplicates, append information to leads already in your database, and identify where critical data is missing, such as phone numbers or industry information. A third-party tool can help fill in the data gaps.

12. Implement your Follow Up Tactics

You planned, so follow-up should be easy. Put those plans into action immediately to gain the advantage of being first out of the gate.

13. Be Patient and Persistent

It’s human nature to want the sales to materialize quickly. You may be lucky with some of your prospects. However, most will not be ready to buy today. So don’t consider your follow-up to be a once and done thing. Plan and execute a nurturing campaign—a series of persuasive emails or a periodic newsletter that keeps your company in the forefront of their minds.

By following these tips, you’ll do much more than create an awe-inspiring booth or presentation. You’ll also get results from your efforts. More qualified individuals will spend time with your salespeople and executives at the event, you’ll come away with more comprehensive information about them, and be able to follow up successfully, converting leads into sales more efficiently. And isn’t that why you plan events in the first place?

What do you do to ensure your events succeed? What might you implement after reading this article? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

The post 13 Marketing Tactics to Boost Your Event ROI appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

How does Elon Musk think?

That’s what I aimed to discover while researching the habits behind his unbelievable success. Musk is arguably the most impressive living human being on earth. For proof, here's his track record: 

Oh yeah, and he’s one of only two people to found three billion dollar companies. Not bad.

The crazy part is he doesn’t care that he’s worth billions. In fact, he’s annoyed with journalists asking about him. He wants them to ask about the bigger, worldly problems he's trying to solve. He’s not focused on his existence, he’s focused on the existence of humanity -- sustainable energy, clean transportation, and interplanetary space travel. 

How does he think? What are his mental frameworks? What makes him tick? I scoured through dozens of interviews to unravel his six most compelling lessons … and turned them into actionable exercises. 

These lessons (and accompanying exercises) have changed my life. 

Elon Musk Advice

1. Seek criticism
2. Challenge your existing beliefs
3. Narrow your focus
4. Create a back-up plan
5. Practice for failure
6. Have a big impact

Complete the following exercises, based off the psychology of Elon Musk, and they might change your life, too.

Access the exercises to follow the lessons:

Click here to access the Google Doc and Evernote worksheets

Lesson 1:
Seek criticism

Criticism is like exercise. In the beginning, it's tough. But it slowly shapes us into healthier people and leads to many long-term benefits. While compliments create contentment, criticism creates improvement.

And when your mission for SpaceX is “interplanetary co-existence” and Tesla “transforming sustainable energy for humanity” (yes, those are Elon Musk’s words), you cannot be content. For example:

“When I spoke with someone about the Tesla Model S, I didn’t really want to know what’s right about the car. I want to know what’s wrong about the car.

When my friends get a product, I ask them to please not tell me what they like. Rather, tell me what you don’t like. And if I’ve asked that a few times of people, then they will start automatically telling me without me having to always ask the question."

 "You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong."

- Elon Musk 

Lesson 2:
Challenge reality (by understanding the fundamentals)

Einstein said, “You can’t solve problems with the same thinking that caused them.” Musk couldn’t agree more.

For example, people have said battery packs will always be expensive, because they’re expensive to make, and that’s just is how it is. Yet Musk realized when you break down batteries into their fundamental components (cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, polymers, and a steel can) and build your own batteries, costs go down dramatically.

This led to Tesla Energy, or revolutionary energy storage for sustainable homes and businesses. By challenging the status quo, Musk developed home energy storage that's causing radical change.

Most of us aren’t creating revolutionary shifts in energy consumption. So how does this lesson apply to the rest of us? Simply put, it means questioning when someone (or yourself) says, “That’s just how it is and how it’s always been.”

Upset the status quo. Ask tough questions. Explore the fundamental truths behind the challenges in your life. Explore how things really work by making “why” your favorite question to ask.

 "Boil things down to the most fundamental truths. Then reason up from there."

- Elon Musk 

Focus on signal over noise 

Elon Musk isn’t the only billionaire preaching the power of focus. Warren Buffet had his notorious “not-to-do list.” Steve Jobs consistently preached a focused mindset by saying, “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” And according to Noah Kagan, Facebook employee #30, Mark Zuckerberg once said, “I will not entertain ANY idea unless it helps Facebook grow the total number of users.”

Musk follows the same principles. Except he will not entertain any idea beyond product development. For example, many companies put more money into marketing than they do engineering. Musk would rather minimally promote an incredible product than promote the living hell out of a mediocre one:

“At Tesla, we’ve never spent any money on advertising. We’ve put all our money into R&D, engineering, design, and manufacturing to build the best car possible. When we consider spending money, we ask, 'Will this create a better product?' If not, we don’t proceed with spending the money.”

Stephen Covey calls this putting first things first. Focus on what matters, ignore the rest.

 "Will this activity result in a better product? If not, stop those efforts."

- Elon Musk 

Lesson 4:
Make failure an option (by defining a contingency plan)

I believe inaction is caused by fear. Particularly, the fear of failure. We don’t apply for our dream job, because we’re afraid we won’t get it (which makes us feel crappy about ourselves). We don’t approach the attractive person across the room, because we’re afraid we’ll say something stupid. We don’t start a company, because we’re afraid we’ll waste our money and fail.

When you’re starting a company with a mission for interplanetary exploration, failure is a viable option. Instead of throwing in the towel, Elon Musk anticipated failure and created a contingency plan for SpaceX:

“If we don’t get the first SpaceX rocket launch to succeed by the time we’ve spent $100 million, we will stop the company. That will be enough for three attempted launches.”

What happened to the first launch? $30 million later, it failed. The second? $60 million later, it failed. On the third and last attempt, SpaceX successfully launched. This won a $1.6 billion contract from NASA for 12 resupply flights to the station. Not bad Elon Musk, not bad at all.

Was Elon Musk afraid of failure? Absolutely. But did he create a plan to address possible failure? Yes. And that’s precisely what made him put rockets into space.

 "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

- Elon Musk 

Lesson 5:
Remove worries (by living the worst-case scenario)  

After defining worst-case scenarios and addressing solutions to potential problems (i.e. a contingency plan), we can still feel afraid. The best way to remove fear is by literally putting yourself in that horrible situation and asking how you feel.

For example, when Elon Musk decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur at 17 years old, he forced himself to live off $1 per day (the typical struggle of an entrepreneur). At that time, he lived mainly off hot dogs and oranges.

Elon didn’t do it because he was poor. He did it to see if he had what it takes to lead the life as an entrepreneur. And since he was successful with this experiment, he knew that money wouldn’t be an issue.

Experimenting with a reduced income showed Musk he could do it. This pushed him into entrepreneurship. 

 "I figured if I could live off a dollar a day then, at least from a food stand point, it's pretty easy to earn $30 a month."

- Elon Musk 

Lesson 6:
Solve Problems Beyond Yourself

Many of us (I’m guilty of this myself) focus on finding a fun, secure, and challenging job that makes us happy. We ask about the salary. About the benefits. And the culture. But are we asking if our work is making an impact on the world? Are we using today to solve tomorrow’s problems? Are we forward thinking?

Elon Musk didn’t ask himself, “What are some of the best ways I can make money?” Instead, as he left PayPal, he asked himself, “What are some of the problems that are likely to affect the future of humanity?”

Musk never mentions profit in interviews. He discusses SpaceX's goal to make humanity into a multi-planetary species, or Tesla's goal to accelerate the world's movement toward having most electric cars.

He solves problems not to improve his world, but the world.

"If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it."

- Elon Musk 

An Honest Reflection 

Will I ever start the next Tesla, SpaceX, or other company that’s literally changing the course of humanity? Honestly, probably not. What I will do is continually apply Elon Musk’s mental frameworks to improve my life. 

When I receive a compliment, I’ll ask what I can improve. Faced with a tough problem, I’ll break it down into the fundamentals. When distracted, I’ll remember the billionaires all have one similar trait -- focus. I won’t be afraid of failure because I'll make it an option (and live it). And finally, as my life progresses, I’ll challenge my existence by continue to evaluate worldly problems and what I can do to help.

Encourage criticism. Dissect the fundamentals. Focus on high-impact activities. Push myself to failure. Challenge my limits. But most importantly, solve problems beyond myself.

Will you do the same?

Grab the Google Doc and Evernote resources.

What will it be like to sell in 2020? Perhaps you are thinking that far ahead, but more likely you’re worried about getting results now. Recently, I did have the chance to ponder this exact question.

Going deep on details

I was approached by Vistage Research to consider what selling would be like over the next three years and provide my insights for an eBook they are soon publishing on the future of sales called, Customer Growth: Decisions for the SMB CEO.

There’s a great deal I can say on the topic, but for the eBook I was limited to 200 words. Since I couldn’t comprehensively delve into the subject there, I’ll go deeper here. First, let’s start with the topic of technology and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in sales – Will it disrupt or enhance sales in the future?

More or fewer salespeople?

In 2015, Forrester Research predicted that one million U.S. B2B salespeople would lose their job by 2020. This finding may be supported by the rise of organizations and individuals buying goods and services through on-line purchases, unaided at all by salespeople. However, I am still a firm believer that a growing number of complex and value-added services will require the intervention of a human to sell them. Further, there is a segment of the population that actually values interaction with humans.

Additionally, there continues to be an enhanced pursuit of sales efficiency and effectiveness. Frequently, this involves some aspect of phone selling instead of getting face to face, because the customer prefers the ease of it and the sales organization benefits from the efficiency and cost savings.

The evolving sales organization

Where it once was uncommon to have “inside” salespeople actually close business, it is now commonplace. So, what does this mean for the future?

With increased advances in AI, the smart sales organization will use this technology to evaluate the effectiveness of its sales staff. The efficient and focused sales organization will leverage AI by reviewing reactions to certain phrasing, wording, and interactions. It will attempt to use this data to duplicate the sales conversations that work and eliminate the ones that don’t.

AI can enhance salespeople not replace them

Sure, a sales organization can streamline further by using voice prompts and AI to engage the customer at the start of the sales process and do this without any human involvement, but it will only work for low value services, in my opinion. For other types of selling, I firmly believe that better skilled salespeople will become more valuable, the more AI and technology are involved in sales.

Those individuals that are committed to improvement, are adaptable and seek continuous growth and learning, will be valued highest in our future sales world. They will also benefit the most from the feedback and knowledge that AI can provide because they will strive to adapt their conversation style and phrasing to produce better outcomes.

We don’t need to be scared that technology may streamline some sales processes. Rather, we need to embrace the learning that can come from the increased use of technology.

Technology can help in other ways

AI can be used for more than actual conversation analysis. There are numerous other technologies to aid your sales team in qualifying leads, finding leads, staying connected to leads, and scoring leads.

I’m intrigued by all of these, however I am not an expert on them. If you really want to learn more about the technologies that aid sales, go to www.smartsellingtools.com, where Nancy Nardin continuously analyzes the latest and greatest selling technologies available.

What to do now

Knowing that the salesperson of the future will need to continuously adapt and grow, it might make sense to hire for that quality now. The rate of change isn’t slowing down anytime soon, so future adaptability will be key.

In conjunction with Objective Management Group, we analyze individuals’ ability to change, adapt and grow. We can effectively and empirically measure these qualities – the most important components of a successful salesperson. Let me know if you’d like to learn how your salespeople rate for these critical skills.