It’s October and you know what that means? Its B2B Marketing influencer speaker list time again.
One of my all-time favorite conferences is MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston and for the past few years I’ve had some fun listing out a top list of speakers ranked by influence around the topic of “B2B marketing”.
As usual, I used the influencer marketing platform Traackr to import the list of speakers from #mpb2b 2017 and rank them according to a combination of topical resonance and relevance as well as network reach related to “b2b marketing”. Of course, use of their platform in this way is like 1% of what Traackr can do. I imagine they cringe every time I use their robust tool for such a simple list – but hey, they provide me with access and I use the tool as I see fit.
To clarify, my agency TopRank Marketing is also a paying customer of the Traackr platform for clients, where it is used in support of B2B influencer marketing programs for brands like SAP, BMC Software, McKesson and others in ways that are more in line with the platform’s capabilities.
This is a legit list that recognizes people creating content around B2B marketing that resonates with their social following. At the same time, sometimes people take lists a little bit too seriously, so let’s have a little fun here and there with some special “awards”.
First, here are some “compelling” stats about the people on this year’s list:
40% are women
14 are CEOs
4 are CMOs
6 are named Chris
12 have beards
And the “Khaleesi of Content” Award goes to:
Ann Handley@marketingprofs
Chief Content Officer
MarketingProfs
Here’s the 49 additional B2B marketing speakers that came up in the search for influencers:
Michael Brenner@BrennerMichael
CEO
Marketing Insider Group Winner of the “nicest guy you’ll ever meet in marketing” award
Lee Odden@leeodden
CEO
TopRank Marketing Winner of the “Puts himself in his own list” award – actually, it’s legit
Ardath Albee@ardath421
CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist
Marketing Interactions
Katie Martell@KatieMartell
Marketing Consultant
Katie Martell, On-Demand Marketing Winner of “I will always remember the marching band at B2B Forum” award
Christopher Penn@cspenn
Vice President of Marketing Technology
SHIFT Communications Winner of the “You think you know AI? I AM AI!” award
Kerry O’Shea Gorgone@KerryGorgone
Director of Product Strategy, Training
MarketingProfs
Jon Miller@jonmiller
CEO and Co-Founder
Engagio Winner of rocket scientist marketer AND serial entrepreneur award
Doug Kessler@dougkessler
Creative Director & Co-Founder
Velocity Partners Winner of the “I swear and people love me for it” award
Joe Pulizzi@JoePulizzi
Founder
Content Marketing Institute
Also Co-Founder & Board Member, The Orange Effect Foundation Winner of “I’m doing whatever I want from now on” award
Mark Schaefer@markwschaefer
Keynote speaker
Schaefer Marketing Solutions
Brian G. Peters@Brian_G_Peters
Digital Marketing Strategist
Buffer
Michelle Huff@michelle_huff
Chief Marketing Officer
Act-On Software, Inc.
Meagan French@mkfrench
Founder and President
Lotus Growth
Tom Webster@webby2001
Vice President, Strategy and Marketing
Edison Research Winner of “I’m on the same list as Tamsen and she’s kicking my butt” award
Scott Monty@ScottMonty
CEO & Co-Managing Partner
Brain+Trust Partners
Jason Hsiao @jason_hsiao
President & Co-Founder
Animoto
David Berkowitz@dberkowitz
Chief Strategy Officer
Sysomos
Alison Levine@Levine_Alison
Executive Producer — The Glass Ceiling, Follow Your Dream
Chris Goward@chrisgoward
Founder & CEO
WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization
Matt Childs@MattyChilds
Director of Digital Marketing Sales, North America
Brightcove
Melissa Case@startabuzz
Corporate Blog Manager
Citrix
Joe Chernov@jchernov
CMO
InsightSquared Winner of “most epic beard on a CMO” award
If you’re a conference organizer looking for influential speakers on all topics around B2B marketing, then this list might be a good reference for your 2018 planning.
And if you’re attending MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston this week, there’s an entire schedule of talented marketers enlisted to share their B2B knowledge bombs on you including this fine group.
TopRank Marketing will be participating in the B2B Forum with Alexis Hall and Dan Rasmussen attending. Ashley Zeckman and I will also be involved with multiple presentations including:
A big part of leadership is what you do—the example you set, the initiative you take, the priorities you demonstrate.
But leaders also need to be mindful of what they say, as words have the power to shape perceptions and impact your team’s morale, to say nothing of their trust in your leadership.
In this post, I want to look at a few common workplace phrases that have no place in the vocabulary of a truly great, transformational leader. Ask yourself how often you say any of these things!
Phrases for Leaders to Avoid
“This probably isn’t what you want to hear…”
This is something that’s invariably followed by bad news—but with this qualifier, you’re somehow making the other person feel like it’s on them; you shift the issue to their side rather than owning the decision you’ve made. Avoid it!
“Work smarter, not harder.”
This implies to the person you’re speaking to that a) you think they’re a dummy and b) you’d actually like to see them exert less effort. How is this good leadership?
“It just wasn’t meant to be!”
When your team encounters a failure, there’s probably a reason for it. Find that reason, and work on how you can avoid it the next time. Don’t just chalk it up to fate!
“Feel free to offer your input.”
Don’t be passive. If you value feedback from your team—and by the way, you should—then ask for it directly.
“Failure is not an option.”
Sure it is. If you don’t want people to fail, though, then leave the floor open for questions and brainstorming. This cliché just shuts down dialogue.
“There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.”
Why shut down innovation and creativity amongst your team members? Really, why?
“There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’”
Teams matter, but so do individuals! Don’t make your people feel like they’re interchangeable cogs in a machine.
I’d strike all of these platitudes from your speech—because none of them are doing you a bit of good!
Key account management (also known as strategic account management) is a proactive approach to not only winning new business but how you do business. It requires organization-wide change and coordination and it is this that differentiates it from a purely sales-driven strategy.
In this article, I want to explore what differentiates a strategic approach to account management from purely sales-driven methodologies.
What is Key Account Management?
Key account management is linked to your wider business strategy as it seeks to grow your profit margins through the establishment of collaborative relationships with customers that represent high value over the long term. These relationships require collaboration, a degree of transparency and senior buy-in from both supplier and customer sides if they are to work. This means building strong and productive relationships across your own organisation as well as building contacts within your customers.
Strategic account management requires a deeper understanding of the challenges and problems your customers face. Only by understanding your customer’s business can you develop convincing value propositions that propose joint strategies and initiatives to tackle or ameliorate these issues and bring the customer on board. In order to achieve results, resources must be diverted to those customers and projects that are the most strategically valuable.
But what is it exactly that defines a high-value customer and how do you go about selecting key accounts?
Defining your High-Value Customers
Only by deeply understanding your customers can you set yourself apart from your competitors by offering what they really need to boost their own sales and profits. This strategic approach to winning and growing new business is not a one-way transaction approach but one that starts by finding commonalities between your business and your customer’s.
But not all customers are created equal and some will represent far more strategic value than others. Whilst it’s tempting to simply pick your key accounts from those customers that drive the most revenue for your business, this approach is one-dimensional and doomed to fail. Your biggest customers may also be your least loyal and most cumbersome to do business with, whilst some of your smaller or medium-sized customers may be experiencing rapid growth that it would be hugely beneficial to tap into sooner rather than later when your competitors are also descending upon them.
Let’s look at some general rules of thumb to bear in mind when it comes to key account selection:
Growth Potential: Every big business starts off small at some point which is why it’s important to look at current growth and growth potential in your key account selection criteria. Have your customers made any interesting acquisitions? Are they expanding into new markets? Have they achieved a unique brand reputation? All this needs to be considered.
Behaviour and Loyalty: Your customer might be huge but if they display very little loyalty and are genuinely difficult and demanding to do business with, do you want to be investing in them for the long-term? The volumes may be great but the risk exposure may be greater.
A Propensity for Innovation: Strategic thinking is part and parcel of key account management and this has to come from both customer and supplier sides. If your customers are sticklers for doing things the way they’ve always been done and bulk at the idea of even mild change, then treat them with caution.
Willingness for Collaboration: It’s one thing finding potential in a customer but if they don’t show a willingness to sit down and collaborate then you may be flogging a dead horse.
Perception of Value: What is good for you won’t necessarily be good for your customer in their eyes. Good key accounts will ultimately share your perception of value and how it is delivered.
Customer Values and Culture: Values and culture aren’t necessarily things you would look at from a sales point of view but they are very strong indicators in key account selection. The more in common you have with another company, the more likely your respective teams will work well together.
Five Core Differences between Key Account Management and Sales
I want to focus in on some of the key differences between a strategic approach to your customer and the more transactional nature of sales based approaches.
It’s business-wide: Key account management isn’t just about winning new business from your customers but changing the very nature of how you do business with those customers. This links it to overall business strategy and requires buy-in and involvement from various parts of the business outside of sales (HR, IT, operations, etc).
Value isn’t just related to revenue: Whether it’s raw material costs, locality, adaptability, less waste in the production process, better supply chain management, key account management is about creating long-term value for both you and your customer. The end result will allow you to increase your competitive advantage and move you towards ‘preferred supplier status’ with your key accounts.
It’s long term, not short term: Strategic account management is built around creating long-term value instead of simply delivering short-term gains that are transactional in nature. By investing in creating stronger relationships you and your key accounts are able to unlock huge strategic value that will ultimately manifest itself in greater profit margin and increased competitive advantage.
It seeks to establish competitive advantage: Unlike a sales approach which aims to build revenue and profits through an increase in one-way transactional activity, key account management works at a deeper and more strategic level. By tying your success to your customer’s and working at a more collaborative level, you can establish an advantage over your rivals, seeing off any rival bids by positioning yourself as in the know and able to understand and meet your customers’ specific requirements.
It’s customer-focused: Key account management is a ‘customer first’ philosophy and this means that your success is built around and off the back of your customer’s success. By understanding your customer’s motivations and challenges, you can better address them, helping to ensure you as their preferred supplier for many years to come.
To help make it easier for small business owners and entrepreneurs alike, I’ve put together this shortlist of the best 100 PR tips you can use to start building brand awareness now FREE.
1). Pick five to ten media outlets where you’d like to be featured, conduct a Google search to find the right media professional’s name, and add his or her name to a spreadsheet.
2). Research what the media professional covers. Know his or her beat. Read a few articles so you know his or her writing style. Be sure to follow him or her on social media as well.
3). Create a press kit and make it downloadable on your website. Make sure to include your bio, company fact sheet, product/service sheet, previous press clippings, and your headshot.
4). Look for media opportunities by subscribing to the free PR resource: Helpareporter.com. You’ll receive emails daily with inquiries from the media looking for experts and non-experts. You can also look at ProfNet for media opportunities.
5). When you’re ready to start writing your pitch, begin with the headline or subject line. Ask a question or make a provocative statement to pique the media professional’s interest. Limit it to 10 words.
6). The body of your pitch should be between 200-300 words with a 200-word boilerplate or bio. Be sure to include five to seven bullet or talking points. And most importantly, include your contact information.
7). Make sure your pitch is newsworthy and timely. Tie your story to something that’s happening in the news at that moment. Examples include: how to get your best beach body by summer, the Oscars, Christmas, etc.
8). State all of the important information in the first paragraph. Be sure to answer the “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “why”, and “how”.
9). Pitch a story idea or segment idea, not your company, product, or service. You’ll never get a response if you do.
10). Follow up a few days after your initial pitch by email (never call). If you don’t hear back after your follow up, you can follow up one or two more times before moving forward.
11). Include a call to action at the end of your pitch. Ask if the media professional would like to receive more information, do a demo, or receive a sample.
12). Don’t use the shotgun approach where you send one pitch to 1,000 different media outlets at once. (Only send one of the same pitch to five or 10 media contacts at once when you’re announcing a new product or service).
Send customize pitches that will provide real value to the media professional and his or her readers.
13). Although I’m sure you hear it time and again, build relationships with the media. Take the time to send a thank you note after an interview or story run.
14). Make it easy for the media professional to get additional information or samples.
15). Be ready for interviews at any time especially if you plan to do radio interviews.
16). Understand that the media works on short schedules that change consistently so it’s important that you’re flexible and realistic with your expectations.
Don’t tout your media coverage to others until it comes out. There’s nothing worse than telling everyone you’re in a story in a magazine only to find out that the story was cut due to space limitations at the last minute.
17). Never ask a media professional if he or she received your email and when your story is going to go to print.
18). Follow local reporters and journalists on social media so you know what beats they cover.
19). Don’t discount the importance of pitching your story to bloggers. Depending on your industry, some bloggers can be more influential and help grow your brand more effectively than magazines and other online media outlets.
20). Pitch podcasts for interviews. Again, some podcasts reach more listeners than traditional radio outlets.
21). Write clearly and concisely since you only have three seconds to capture a media professional’s attention.
22). Always offer and make yourself available for interviews.
23). If you’re looking to gain more visibility online, answer questions on Quora.com and other question websites. Many of experts do.
24). Always keep in mind when pitching a journalist or blogger, what are some of the best ways you can help with a story?
25). Include your hobbies and other interesting facts into your bio.
26). Include your company website, blog URL, and social media handles in your pitches., and many other Entrepreneur.com, HuffingtonPost.com
27). Offer to guest blog for blogs and online websites relevant to your niche. The top tier outlets accept articles from experts.
28). Offer your story as an exclusive to an outlet where you want to be featured.
29). If you’re holding an event, offer pre-event coverage to help drive sales, attendance, and reach more audiences.
30). Publicity does not happen overnight, so you will need to be patient as you grow your media relationships.
31). Avoid including the words: “premium”, “leading”, “innovative”, and “superior” in your pitches, or they will end up in the trash.
32). Tailor your messages to meet the tone and style of the outlet you’re pitching.
33). Address the media professional by the right name. Don’t address him or her by “Hi there” or “To whom it may concern” unless you want your pitch to end up in the trash.
34). Stay away from generic email addresses like Contact@Magazinename.com. There’s a pretty good chance no one checks them.
35). Team up with a local charity to reach more audiences. Local media love covering cause-related marketing and partnerships.
36). Send your press release over the free wires. PR.com and PRLog.com are the best and offer the best reach free.
37). Make sure to include a link to images via Dropbox.com or on a website within your pitch. Never send attachments because the media doesn’t open them.
38). Add a “Press” or “News” section to your website.
39). Make sure to include “For Immediate Release” on any press release to distribute (unless it’s under embargo).
40). Nothing is ever off the record when it comes to doing interviews so always be careful of what you’re going to say.
41). Become a reliable resource for the media professional. The more value you can provide, the more likely that media professional will be to call on you when he or she has a relevant story for your expertise.
42). Schedule meetings with editors so they can get to know you.
43). Don’t pester the media to find out when your story will run. Rather, set up Google Alerts and monitor social media for any mentions of your brand, company, or name.
44). If you’re going to do a radio or television interview, make sure you have down your sound bites. Remember to talk slowly too.
45). In today’s digital age, be prepared to discuss certain aspects of your personal life.
46). Always be prepared to answer intimate or challenging questions. You can only prepare yourself so much before interviews.
47). If you happen to call a journalist or producer, always ask if he or she is on a deadline. If so, offer to call back at another time.
48). Repurpose old articles and submit to other relevant websites and blogs to gain more backlinks to your website.
49). It doesn’t matter how much publicity you’ve received in the past, you’re never too big to do an interview (unless you reach the same level of fame as the Kardashian clan).
50). Make time for publicity outreach weekly.
51). Keep in touch with the media by asking what a specific editor or journalist is working on.
52). If you want to make an announcement to mass media, try sending a press release over a paid wire service such as PRWeb.com or PRNewswire.com.
53). Make sure you have a dedicated email address for the media. You can use yours as well – just make sure you monitor it.
54). Make sure you pitch the right media professional as there are several that may cover similar or the same beat.
55). The secret sauce to getting media coverage has two elements: 1) the relationship you have with an editor; and 2) how you package your pitch. It’s so important for you to develop relationships with the media if you plan to do your own PR.
56). If you send out a press release, make sure it follows the appropriate format which is AP Style.
57). Be prepared for rejection. You’re probably not going to hear back from 75 percent of the journalists you pitch, but don’t give up. There’s just a pretty good chance that your story is not relevant to what an editor or journalist is covering at that time.
58). If you received a celebrity endorsement, pitch it to the media to see if there’s any interest.
59). If you don’t have funds for blog sponsorships, then offer a gift. Often times, a blogger will be willing to write a review or a post about your product/service in exchange for your product (especially if it is a high-ticket item).
60). Don’t discount the value of freelance writers. Often times, freelancers don’t have as many deadlines to meet as staff writers, so I always urge my clients to connect with the right ones. You can find freelancers in your industry on LinkedIn.com or the contributor section of a magazine.
At a time of profound volatility in the U.S. health system, change management is an essential skill for public and private leaders alike. For these leaders — and young people aspiring to careers as health care managers — one very practical question emerges: What are the critical skills for leading major change in our health system?
As someone who has led large change management projects in both the federal government and a large private health system, my view is that effective leadership of fundamental change requires the following: a commitment to transparency; involving stakeholders so they feel that their voices are heard; making listening a personal priority of the leader; going overboard in communicating; emphasizing that the sought-after change is achievable; and developing a motivating narrative.
Two personal stories illustrate these points.
The first concerns the challenge of creating the meaningful use program for the HITECH Act when I served as national coordinator of health information technology from 2009 to 2011, at the beginning of the Obama administration. The second involves the task of replacing the electronic health record system (EHR) at Harvard-affiliated Partners HealthCare, the largest health system in New England. The latter was a project I led after returning to Partners in 2011. This was a $1.2 billion capital investment, the biggest in the organization’s history.
Both challenges were fundamentally political with a small “p.” And the road to success was in many ways the same.
The HITECH Act, which was part of the federal stimulus program enacted in response to the financial crisis of 2008, tasked the Obama administration and its Department of Health and Human Services with creating a nationwide, interoperable, private, and secure electronic-health-information system. The president made this goal even more formidable by promising that every American would have an electronic health record by 2014.
The HITECH Act provided a wide array of authorities:
As much as $30 billion in new spending under Medicare and Medicaid. This was for incentive payments and supplemental reimbursement for services provided by health professionals and hospitals that became meaningful users of IT.
$3 billion in discretionary spending authority for the national coordinator to set up the national infrastructure needed to support and facilitate the adoption and meaningful use of EHRs.
Authority to write new regulations defining meaningful use of these systems, creating a certification process for EHRs, and specifying standards that would enable records to support meaningful use, as defined by regulation.
The HITECH Act also included constraints — many about timing. Regulations setting out standards had to be issued within about nine months from the time I arrived. Furthermore, payments to providers for conforming to meaningful use were to be available under the law in less than two years — by January 1, 2011. So any infrastructure supports to assist providers in becoming meaningful users had to be in place very fast — by early 2010 at the latest.
How leading providers are delivering value for patients.
Still another constraint — one of those important details that are appreciated by students of management — was that the Office of the National Coordinator that I inherited was tiny (a total of 35 FTEs) and had never written a regulation or made a grant before. There was, for example, no grants-management office even though we were expected to rapidly expend $3 billion in infrastructure grants and contracts to prepare the nation for meaningful use.
Though the implementation of the HITECH Act seemed superficially like a technology project, I gradually came to realize that it was much more than that. Nothing in the law required hospitals or doctors to adopt or meaningfully use electronic health records. They had incentives to do so, but they could easily refuse.
In fact, we were actually engaged not in a technology-implementation program but in a huge change-management initiative. We had to convince hundreds of thousands of health professionals and thousands of hospitals and hospital managers to take on the difficult, complex, costly, disruptive, and frustrating task of changing the way they managed what is arguably the most critical resource used in daily patient care: information. We were in a contest for the hearts and minds of professionals running our health care system. This larger battle for hearts and minds conditioned everything we did in applying our authorities and meeting our practical challenges.
First, to create the credibility and trust we needed to lead this movement, we insisted on transparency. We formulated the meaningful-use regulation in public through a series of hearings and public deliberations, which were streamed live. Whenever we faced the option of whether to make a decision in public or private, we chose the public approach. We held scores of open meetings involving our advisory committees during the two years I was national coordinator.
Second, to deepen public trust, we made listening a priority. Understanding that people affected by government policy want to be heard, I took every meeting I could with representatives of health care stakeholders, especially physicians and hospitals. After one meeting, I got feedback about what a great exchange we had. In fact, I had said nothing at all beyond introducing myself at the outset.
Third, we communicated extensively. When we released the proposed rule, we did so with a press event in the Great Hall of the Department of Health and Human Services with a packed crowd. I then went on a national tour — to Tampa, Minneapolis, Tucson, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Burlington, Buffalo, Houston, and beyond — to explain the proposed regulation.
Fourth, we emphasized the feasibility of complying with the meaningful-use rule. We needed to make clear that becoming a meaningful user was not a superhuman task. We wanted adoption to be so manageable that non-adopters would be embarrassed among their peers at golf outings or weekend cocktail parties.
Fifth, we sought narratives — metaphors for what we were trying to accomplish — and I used them repeatedly in my speeches. The one that stuck was an escalator image: We were getting on an escalator toward increasingly sophisticated and powerful uses of EHRs. We were starting on the first step, but the rest would follow in due time.
We also spoke of inevitability. It was inconceivable, we argued, that within 10 years, physicians and hospitals would still be walled off from the information age. They could make the conversion now — with government support — or they could wait and do it on their own. But either way, they were going to have to make the change. They were going to have to get on that escalator.
The meaningful-use program has had its problems, but it did succeed in one of its most fundamental purposes: the adoption of EHRs, which are now ubiquitous in medical practice. In the end, the program got very close to fulfilling President Obama’s promise that every American would have an electronic health record by 2014.
Now let’s turn to the task of implementing a new EHR in a large operating health system that included two major teaching institutions (Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital); multiple community hospitals; a rehab hospital; a nationally-known, inpatient, psychiatric facility; a half-dozen community health centers; a home-health-care agency; thousands of community-based physicians; and the largest non-profit, private, biomedical-research program in the world.
The Partners HealthCare System was already sophisticated electronically. The problem was that it had multiple, homegrown, electronic health records onto which local physician-developer teams had layered a wide variety of specialty specific applications. The result was an electronic tower of Babel that was becoming increasingly expensive to service and modernize. But the key problem was that the records were not internally interoperable, which had become a growing barrier to improving quality and efficiency in an increasingly demanding local-health-care environment.
Before I arrived in 2011, Partners leadership had made the decision to replace all this complexity with a single, commercial EHR. It was my job to lead the process of picking one and rolling it out.
Now, though Partners was legally a single health-care-delivery system, I knew from having worked there for much of my professional life that it was in fact a loose confederation of independent institutions populated by equally independent and skeptical professionals. Winning their support, and that of managers throughout the system, was critical to success. Once again, we were battling for hearts and minds, which meant that many of the approaches we relied on in government were relevant.
Building trust through a transparent decision process was the first strategy we pursued. The initial and critical decision we faced was which EHR to purchase. There were two finalists. To choose, we collected evidence, evaluated the alternatives, and made decisions in highly public and inclusive ways. We invited thousands of professionals to test and rate the two products. We reported the results publicly on a project website. We conducted site visits to health care organizations around the country using the products we were considering. Site visit teams were diverse and representative of major Partners institutions and stakeholders. They rated the sites’ experiences with the EHRs, using a standardized protocol. We reported results on the website.
Then, we held a public debate between advocates of the two contending records — in which teams argued about relative merits before the audience voted. The vote was highly influential in our final choice. This transparent and inclusive decision-making process included an enormous amount of built-in listening and feedback from affected staff, another critical part of the change-management process.
To address the need for inclusive governance and representative decision making, we put in place a governing council for the EHR project. Members included representatives of critical Partners institutions and stakeholder groups. This council approved all major decisions with respect to the choice of the EHR and implementation policy. We then took those approved decisions to senior management of Partners, and ultimately to the Partners board, for final endorsement. Obviously, the fact that a representative body had approved our recommendations enormously increased their weight with management and board members.
As in the case of the meaningful-use program, communication was important. It didn’t require traveling the country, but it did require visiting all the major Partners institutions to speak with their staff and management, to answer questions, and to take in feedback.
Finally, we needed a rationale and a narrative that conveyed the necessity of undertaking this admittedly expensive and disruptive change in Partners affairs. The rationale and narrative focused on the institution’s obligation to its patients. This was conveyed first in a motto: one patient, one record, one billing statement. To make this motto concrete, we made a video of a patient describing how she had had to carry a paper record from one Partners institution to another — all of which had siloed EHRs — as she got care for her breast cancer: surgery at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, chemotherapy at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and radiation at the Massachusetts General Hospital. I recall vividly the impact this video had during a presentation I made to the academic chairs of departments at Mass General. Patients’ stories had an almost unimpeachable legitimacy, even with the most senior Harvard academic leaders.
Before I left Partners to join the Commonwealth Fund in 2013, we had chosen the EHR and begun the rollout of the new IT infrastructure. While that rollout has not been perfect and, typical of such massive implementations, there have been plenty of complaints about the difficulty of using the new record, it has largely proceeded according to plan.
Change management is at the core of everything that public and private institutions are striving to achieve in reforming national policy and care-delivery approaches in order to improve the quality and cost of health care services provided daily to Americans. The effectiveness of leaders in both the public and private sectors in managing ambitious change efforts will determine their ultimate success. And my experience suggests that the skills required in these two sectors are remarkably similar — because change management, regardless of setting, involves convincing human beings to give up something they know for something new and uncertain.
“How can I make my business more referable?” I get asked this question all the time but the question people should be asking is “who do people refer?” Having the answer to that question will better prepare you to take advantage of this powerful marketing tactic.
Having been in this business for decades, I’ve come to the conclusion that people make referral decisions the same way they make purchasing decisions. They decide something is the right price and fits their needs (which is the logical part), and then, they determine they will have more life, impress their friends, boost their confidence, and so on (the emotional part).
Here’s the thing – emotion typically comes first.
In order to increase your odds of getting referred, you need to tap into this emotion/logic formula. People have to believe you can help them and that you will deliver what is promised (logic), but, they must also feel good about helping you, trust that their referral will be treated well, and genuinely like the experience they have with your business (emotion.) The businesses that get the most referrals solve their customer’s problems while also providing a fun or unique experience.
If you are not getting referrals naturally, take a deep look at the previously mentioned formula and how it applies to your customers.
Now, let’s say you run a more serious business, like a law practice, that doesn’t typically have anything fun about it. In this situation, I’d think of ways that your business can make a genuine emotional connection with your clients and make that one of core elements of your business.
I have a lot of opinions on this topic, so below are a few tips I’d recommend implementing to boost the odds of your business getting referrals.
Tips to make your business more referable
Create a referral engine
No, this is not a shameless plug for my book. Creating a referral engine is absolutely essential if you want to bring in consistent referrals for your business. The key to getting more referrals from your existing clients is to create and focus on a referral process that you operate on a consistent basis. Once the process is in place, it will be easier for your customers to refer your business.
I usually suggest that every business build multiple referral programs and offers in each of the following four types.
Direct referrals
With a direct referral program, you simply state to your existing clients an offer for the act of creating a referral that turns into a client. “Refer a friend to our marketing firm and we’ll give you a free website review” is an example of how to use this approach. It’s motivating and describes what the business does.
Implied referrals
This type of referral is terribly underutilized. In an implied referral program you want to do things that make it very obvious you are doing work for someone, without necessarily asking for a referral. This sets up a situation where a friend or neighbor might simply ask you to refer the person running an implied referral program.
Tangible referrals
With a tangible referral, you put something in the hands of your customer that has real value and that they can give to a referral source. The thing we like about this tactic is that you can run it three or four times a year as a low cost, low exposure way to keep referrals top of mind.
Community referrals
There are so many community organizations that need and deserve your support. When you partner with a non-profit player and support their mission, events, and needs you can also offer promotional support by running the occasional promotion that benefits your partner. “When you buy this week or sign a contract this week, 10% of the proceeds go to benefit our community partner” is an example of how this would work.
You can build one program and then simply keep adding to it until you have referrals coming from numerous sources while promoting how referable your business is.
Show your personality and rock the customer experience
People don’t generally remember businesses, they remember other people. Having a personality is essential for getting referrals. When you can develop personal connections with your business, you give them a reason to remember and recommend you to others. Make their experience with your business one that they will never forget.
Target your influential customers and related businesses
Seek referrals first from your most influential customers. Note, these people may not actually be your best customers, but they are the people whose opinions carry the most weight with others.
I’m a huge advocate for building up a strategic partner network for your business, and it’s important to use these partners to boost your referrals. These businesses should provide complementary services to your own.
Build relationships
Building off the importance of strategic partnerships, it’s imperative that you focus on your relationships in an effort to boost referrals. This takes time, but it’s a must because many of your most influential customers won’t provide referrals until you gain their trust.
Offer incentives
Incentives can be tricky. For example, I wouldn’t recommend money offerings alone for referrals as they are poor motivators. Don’t be afraid to test offers to find out what works best. Sometimes trial and error gets you to the best solutions.
I personally believe is far better to work on making your business more likable before you offer any kind of incentive for referrals, but incentives are good to keep in the back of your mind when needed.
Make it easy for people to refer you
Make the ask. What do you have to lose? When you go in for the ask, be sure to do it at the right moment, and that moment is when your customer is likely to be happiest of all, and that is the moment right after they buy something. Use a post-purchase survey online or encourage your customer to write a review. The more you can do to get someone to recommend your business right after purchase, the more referrals you can generate.
Be sure to create tools, education, and follow-up systems as well to rock the referral marketing world.
What makes things catch on?
In Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, he explains there are six essential factors that make things catch on. These include:
Social currency: We share things that make us look good or help us compare favorably to others.
Triggers: Ideas that are easy to remember spread. Viral ideas attach themselves to top-of-the-mind stories, occurrences or environments.
Emotion: Emotions move us in irrational ways. This means that when we care, we share.
Public: People tend to follow others, but only when they can see what those others are doing.
Practical: Humans love giving out advice and tips, but especially if they offer practical value.
Stories: People do not just share information, they tell stories.
Take a look at the factors above and see how you may be able to apply them to your business (you don’t need to address all of them to be effective, but strive for at least a few.
Wha have you implemented in your business to increase referrals?
Ibbaka helps you execute on value-based pricing. This is a pricing strategy where your price is based on the differentiated value you provide to your customers. The alternatives to value-based pricing are cost-plus pricing (good for contracts where the deliverables are poorly defined and controlled by the client), transactional pricing (what happens with commodities), market following pricing (if you have little pricing power) and various forms of auctions (growing in importance as M2M pricing becomes more common).
Use value-based pricing when your offer has meaningful differentiation from your customer's alternatives.
There are some critical concepts buried in that simple sentence.
Offer: what you are selling is more than your product or the subscription. It is all of the other things that you wrap around it: support, a community, training, data services, consulting... The whole product/solution has many attributes and all of the contribute to value.
Value: this sometimes seems like a slippery concept as it has two aspects, economic and emotional. Economic value is the impact you have on your customer's business. Do you help them increase sales by accelerating the sales cycle or improving conversion rates? Do you reduce operating costs by improving process efficiencies? There are two main ways to understand and convey your economic value. Return on Investment models (ROI) and Economic Value Estimation (EVE). ROI is good for comparing very different solutions, but EVE gives a more nuanced understanding. We will look more closely at EVE in future posts, but if you can't wait check out the LeveragePoint website. Emotional value is also critical, even in B2B sales. People buy based on emotion, because it will help them realize some aspiration or at least to sleep more soundly. Value, specifically differentiated value, is the foundation of pricing.
Customer: value is always for a specific customer. Customer can be tricky in B2B where there are often a number of different buyers (business buyer, technical buyer, procurement) and the buyer is not always the user. The interests of all the different buyers and the value that resonates with them needs to be mapped out. Even with procurement there is an emotional component to value.
Alternatives: Pricing is always relative to an alternative, and your customer always has an alternative. The alternative could be your direct competitor, but it is often an internal solution the customer could built themselves or even just doing what they do today. For innovators, the staus quo is often the main competitor!
So, if your offer has meaningful differentiation, you should be executing on a value-based pricing strategy.
What are the key business questions you need to be able to answer in order to do this?
The Key Business Questions for Value-Based Pricing
Customer focussed questions
1. Who should your customer be?
2. How does that customer get value from your offer?
3. What kinds of value matter to these customers?
4. What are their alternatives?
5. How does the customer buy?
6. Can you group customers into segments?
7. Which segments should you target and in which order?
Value focussed questions
8. What are the value metrics for your offer? (The unit of consumption that correlates with how the buyer and user get power.)
9. What are the pricing metrics? (The unit by which your customer pays for your offer.)
The connection between pricing and value
10. Does your pricing metric track your value metrics?
12. If you need a tiered pricing architecture, how many tiers and what is the role of each tier?
13. Are the tiers actually performing their designed role?
14. After you have set prices, how will you monitor them relative to (i) your customer's response, (ii) competitor reactions (you want to be shaping market pricing and not responding), (iii) the contribution of your pricing to your overall goals for customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs?
15. Does your discount strategy support your overall value messaging and pricing strategy or does it undermine it?
At the end of the day, you need to be able connect the value you provide to your customer, with the price you charge and with how the customer is using the offer. The emerging best practice is to connect your value model and usage model to your pricing model and to understand the interactions between them. Pricing is finding new ways to gather and use data to inform decisions and predict revenue. Ibbaka can help you to apply these best practices and to answer the key business questions.
Everything we read about customers and their attitudes about sales people is pretty negative. Customers do everything they can to avoid sales people until the very last moment. To most customer, 600 sales people trapped in a downed plane on the ocean floor is simply a good start.
When one looks at the orientation and focus of most sales and marketing programs, it’s no wonder customers feel that way. From the very initiation of a relationship, it’s all about the sales person, their company, their products.
Think about it, from our very first interactions we aren’t demonstrating that we care, that we are putting the customer first:
We spam them with irrelevant unpersonalized emails, usually in the name of nurturing, but because we haven’t taken the time to know them, we send them everything, leaving the burden to them to sort things out.
In our prospecting calls, we are unprepared, we don’t know who they are or anything about their company. We expect the customer to take their time to tell us what we should have learned in basic research.
Our discovery is limited to learning what we need to know to present or demo our solutions, not learning what they are trying to achieve and why it’s important to them.
We are unprepared in our meetings, choosing to shoot from the lip rather than designing a meeting that creates value for the customer.
Alternatively, our preparation focuses on what we want to achieve to move the deal forward in the process, not what the customer needs to achieve to move their buying group forward.
We don’t take the time to understand our customers and their businesses. We don’t know their strategies, the industry drivers, their challenges in achieving their own goals.
We don’t understand our customers as people–the drivers for success in their role and their personal drivers for success.
We don’t articulate the specific value and results they should anticipate from our solution, and how it helps them achieve their goals.
We don’t connect the dots between the results our solution provides and the strategic priorities of their company, so we can’t help them present the value of change to their management.
We don’t recognize how buyers struggle to buy (actually to solve problems, with buying being one activity along the way.). We don’t help them learn how to buy.
We rush to close, choosing to discount just to get the order, because we didn’t do 6, 8, 9. So we move from value (if we were ever there in the first place), to cost.
We are insensitive to the change and change management issues the customer faces in their buying/problem solving process, focused only on closing.
When we win, we fail to assure the customer is getting the value they expected in their implementation of the solution.
Our account management strategies focus on maintenance and retention, rather than continually co-innovating and improving with our customer.
We are unable to put ourselves in the customers shoes and see things through their eyes. We fail to demonstrate true empathy for them.
We fail to meet our commitments to the customer–even on simple things like showing up on time and being prepared.
I’m sure I can go on, but you get the point. We care about what we care about, but don’t demonstrate, in every interaction, how we care about the customer.
Success in sales is really about caring about your customer. This isn’t some soft, warm, fuzzy, “do-good” mentality. This is about helping our customers achieve their goals and dreams. It’s about ruthless focus on their success, knowing that we can’t be successful without them first being successful.
Caring isn’t that difficult or time consuming. It starts with creating meaningful value in every interaction. The rest is easy.
Do you care about your customer?
As a side note to managers, remember your people are your customers. Do you care about them?
Today’s B2B buyers are wrestling with potentially risky decisions and often-confusing options. We shouldn’t be surprised if they decide to stick with the status quo or choose the cheapest of a set of apparently similar solutions.
I hear a growing number of B2B sales leaders asking: how can we do a better job of identifying and engaging the customers that are most likely to buy, standing out from all their other options, and persuading the prospect to commit to our solution?
Here’s what today’s most effective sales organisations have learned: claiming that you have a better solution isn’t enough - first, you have to show how and why you are different…
Simply claiming that you are better – in the absence of compelling evidence that is directly relevant to the prospective customer’s specific situation – is a bland and meaningless message.
And because every other competing vendor is inclined to do the same, a generic "better" message does nothing to differentiate your offering from all the other competing solutions, and does nothing to help you stand out from the crowd.
The results are predictable, and frequently painful to sales organisations: because their prospective customers see little contrast between the options available to them, they either defer their decision or go with the cheapest.
THE "VALUE ADDED" MISTAKE
The frequently-adopted strategy of claiming a long list of “value added” features isn’t particularly effective, either: unless these capabilities are directly and specifically relevant to the prospective customer’s situation, they are likely to be seen as adding unnecessary complexity and avoidable cost.
That’s why selling the difference is so important: it enables us to stand out from all the other options our customer might be considering in a clear, compelling and memorable way.
“Selling the difference” has two critical components:
Establishing the greatest possible contrast between where the customer is today and where they could get to with your help
Showing how a handful of your most valuable capabilities are uniquely relevant to enabling them to reach this desired future state
Let’s start with the contrast between your customer’s current situation and their desired future state. I referred to this critical concept this in my recent article “Contrast Drives Change”.
MAXIMISING THE VALUE OPPORTUNITY
In this context, selling the difference involves establishing the clearest possible value opportunity in the gap between where your prospective customer is today and where they have concluded (hopefully with your help) they need to be.
Their initial perceptions of the size of this gap are almost always under-estimates. Even if they have already concluded that they need to change, they will inevitably have underestimated the full costs and risks of sticking with the status quo.
Part of selling the difference involves drawing their attention to some of the unrecognised or underestimated implications of their current situation, and helping the prospect to fully understand the impact, costs and risks involved of allowing the current situation to continue.
Here’s why this aspect is so important: behavioural economists tell us that the motivation to invest to avoid a risk or a loss is twice as powerful as the motivation to invest to achieve a gain.
If we only focus on the future upside, and ignore the current downside, we miss the opportunity to grasp one of the most powerful levers of change.
PROVING THE POTENTIAL UPSIDE
Turning to the potential upside, the benefits of change are also often either underestimated or (more commonly) more aspirational than tangible. One of the most frequent reasons why apparently attractive projects fail to get final executive approval is that the business case was unclear or not sufficiently credible.
Selling the difference involves working hard to identify and monetise both the costs of inaction and the projected return on investment and economic impact on our prospective customer’s business.
We need to help our customer to recognise all the positive implications of change, and to monetise as many of these projected benefits in as credible way as possible.
It’s critical that we develop credible business models, case studies and benchmarks of what has been achieved by other similar customers in similar situations. Without such proof points, we run the real risk that the project will fail to achieve final approval.
DITCH THE KITCHEN SINK
When it comes to the other half of selling the difference - showcasing our features and capabilities - the natural inclination is to attempt to come up with the longest possible list of potential differentiators.
This is usually a completely mistaken strategy, and frequently backfires. If we’re not careful, we devalue our uniquely relevant capabilities by burying them in a list of irrelevant features.
Prospective customers discount irrelevant features. They may even wonder why they are being asked to pay for capabilities that they see no current value in, and trigger an attempt to negotiate a proportionate discount.
FOCUS ON THEMES, NOT LISTS
People remember themes, not lists. When we attempt to differentiate our solution, we do so most powerfully by highlighting a handful of truly relevant and thematically related capabilities that it would be hard for the competition to claim with any credibility.
This requires, of course, that our discovery has uncovered the handful of uniquely relevant capabilities that truly distinguish our ability to help the customer address their challenges and realise their opportunities, and that the prospect agrees with our conclusions.
Most of your competitors – at least from my observations – will do a pretty poor job of identifying and positioning their uniquely relevant capabilities. They will often revert to claiming that their solution is “better”.
YOU CAN SELL THE DIFFERENCE
Through a combination of focus and relevant evidence, you can do better. You can show your prospect why they need to change, and why you offer them a better chance of success than any other option.
You can sell the difference. You can stand out from the crowd. And you can achieve dramatically better results by embracing a dramatically different strategy to that implemented by your less imaginative competitors.
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.
The sales profession is a fast-paced, constantly adapting industry with an onslaught of new competitors and niches. As a result, it’s vital for sales professionals to strive for continuous improvement.
11 ways to improve your sales performance and reduce the cost of selling include:
Emphasize Vision and Clarity
A thorough understanding of your business niche can help elevate and personalize your sales pitch. Lack of information can lead to indecision, which in sales can result in time lost and frustrated leads. As a result, address common questions before a sell, specifically by consider aspects like target demographic, budgetary constraints and marketing approach (cold calling, email pitch, event-based, etc.). Make sure to address these issues before beginning anything. The result will likely be improved sales performance.
Strive to Accomplish Set Goals
Set activity goals for yourself to make sales missions easier to conquer. Goals can include referrals per call, calls per day, proposals per month or anything that elevates success with leads. Additionally, record your results, so you can measure progress and track them to help improve on various performance. With goals, you can better focus your efforts and actions.
Provide Standout Customer Service
Fantastic customer service is an excellent way to elevate yourself above the competition. Many sales teams lose leads and current clients over lack of follow-up. To prevent losses, maintain a spreadsheet of active customers and on-the-verge leads, along with the last date of communication. This way, you can see who to follow up with, while straddling the fine line between overly pushy and neglectful.
When following up, address them by name and personalize the email or phone call as much as possible, so they feel valued by your customer.
Address Customer Needs
A product won’t sell very well if it doesn’t fulfill a customer base’s needs. For whatever you’re selling, be sure to have a firm understanding of the target customer, specifically those whose lives will improve by the product or service. Emphasize this need by highlighting features of the service or product that help saves them money and time. Compare the product or service to what the customer presently owns instead, offering the appeal of an upgrade.
Plan Your Questions and Approach
Spontaneity can be great in certain situations, though when approaching prospective customers it’s best to have a plan and questions that are methodical, relevant, interesting and direct. These questions could involve which products or services they are presently using to fulfill a need, in addition to their overall satisfaction and receptiveness to trying something new. Additionally, strive to prepare for common questions they may ask regarding the product or service’s features and advantages, so you don’t sound like you’re thinking on your feet when responding.
Assume Responsibility Without Gloating
A successful sales team involves all individuals working toward a shared goal. Team leaders should keep a steady composure, advocating for strong sales and work ethic. Although it can be productive to applaud team members for achieving sales goals, it’s important to express praise without gloating or disparaging others in the team who have yet to meet their own goals. A sales team with vitriol might let their conflict and anxiety bleed into a sales pitch, putting leads on edge.
Aim for Maximum Time Efficiency
People manage their time in various ways, and different methods work for different people. Some rely on a more traditional notebook approach, while others use a time-planning app like Planner Pro. In sales, time management is crucial for success, as a variety of tasks are always at hand. Follow-ups, geographical mapping, pitch creation, meetings and more make up a typical day, and forgetting a single task or two could result in chaos. Use a time management approach or app to prevent scheduling catastrophe.
Intelligently Monitor Sales Performance
Measuring sales performance helps you calculate the value of a sales team. Many businesses establish a quota, wherein a salesperson’s progress is measured based on their ability to meet that quota. In addition to this, the nature of a team entails collaboration. One employee may be doing work comparable in quality to others even if it doesn’t reflect in meeting the quota. For these situations, it’s important to have a firm understanding of each team member’s tasks, so a team member does not undergo an unfair review despite putting in good work.
Opt for a Real Conversation When Possible
Sales pitches in email or voice messages can accurately convey information on a product or service, though most potential customers need more than that to be convinced. Potential clients often prefer it when you speak directly to them since they can ask questions that can be pivotal in their purchase decision. Speaking in person also enables salespersons to figure out a customer’s needs and explain how they can address those needs.
Maintain Composure When Opposed
Salespeople will encounter leads who seem intent on criticizing the service or product within the pitch. While they may want to hang up and move on to another lead, these situations provide an opportunity to learn something. As long as the seemingly irate lead is still on the line, use the conversation as a way to find issues that you can address with future customers. The lead may have some legitimate gripes that you can address in the future. Beyond that, quality composure and being receptive to their viewpoints can lead them to gain trust in you, perhaps ultimately resulting in a sale.
Listen to Leads
It can be tempting to rush through everything on your pitch but to capture the attention and trust of leads, you need to focus on their points and concerns. Ideally, you can weave your pitch points into conversation naturally, while addressing their questions and providing a personalized reason the product or service would be beneficial.
These 11 tips are important for anyone on a sales team to keep in mind, as they can lead to better relationships within your sales team and with customers while sustaining recognition among the competition and your business niche in general.
Recently, I asked my colleague Dan Sally, a HubSpot and sales veteran, what he thinks is the most important skill a sales rep should develop. His response was profound.
"It’s the ability to determine, out of all the people you speak with, who is actually going to buy something from you," he said.
Our idea of what defines a great salesperson has evolved throughout the years. First it was the relationship-builders, then the consultants, then the Challengers.
But Dan’s remark made me think that a whole new category of reps are on the rise: Qualifiers. They’re the reps who can pinpoint the prospects who will buy vs. the ones who won’t, and spend their time accordingly.
One of my favorite strategies to separate real buyers from casual ones is assign homework to my prospects. Here’s how to use this tactic to qualify your prospects.
Where you spend your time makes or breaks you
Sales success is dependent on resource allocation.
In any given month, quarter, or year, you only have so many waking hours to get your prospects over the finish line. You can be the best consultant, product expert, negotiator, or Challenger in the world, but if you spend your time on prospects who are not going to buy, it’s all for naught.
This principle is simple: Spend your time influencing people who are actually qualified to buy, and you will be a successful salesperson.
How do you know who actually is qualified to buy? That’s where things get tricky.
Qualifying is no easy task
On a fundamental level, you need to know three key things to effectively qualify a prospect:
Fit: Do they actually have a problem/goal that your product and/or service can help them solve/reach?
Desire: Do they actually want to solve this problem or reach this goal?
Ability: Do they actually have the means to act on this desire immediately?
If the answer to even one of these questions is "No", odds are you’re building a deal on a foundation of popsicle sticks (hopefully they are at least the kind that have jokes on them).
Fit and desire are relatively easy to assess, because the prospect can reliably provide this information. All you have to do is ask them straightforward questions around their process, objectives, and frustrations. But ability is much more difficult to suss out, and is the step that makes qualifying so tricky.
When it comes to their ability to implement a product, prospects are unreliable narrators. Ability is not something you can determine by simply asking them a question.
Here’s a real scenario that demonstrates why.
Fit and desire are not enough to drive action
Earlier this year, a VP of sales booked time on my calendar to evaluate the HubSpot CRM and Sales Pro tools.
We quickly established fit. HubSpot CRM would solve his core problem -- his team hadn’t adopted their current system.
After digging into the repercussions of this lack of adoption -- for example, no forecasting for the sales team or any activity tracking -- it became clear he truly wanted our solution. So I checked the box on desire to change.
I then asked a disqualifying question: Did he truly have the time and ability to enact this change given the effort required (including a data migration and internal process changes)? In a convincing manner, he responded yes.
At this point, I got "happy ears” and was so confident the deal was coming in I took an hour to help him set up the CRM. Then he no-showed to our next meeting.
Fast forward two weeks and numerous reschedules and no-shows, when I received the following (paraphrased) email:
Hey Sam,
Apologies for the drop off, but due to other commitments we are unable to devote the time and resources to see this change through.
Let’s circle back to this in Q4 -- I really appreciate your help.
Best, Prospect
I was devastated. I had spent a lot of time -- my most precious resource -- on a deal that was ultimately unqualified.
Here’s where I went wrong: While I believe his desire to change was 100% sincere, I incorrectly assumed that he could act on it based on his word alone. In order to truly qualify and determine if he had the ability to act on his desire, I needed a completely different kind of answer.
Prospects who are serious about buying will demonstrate their commitment
Sometimes a pointed question is all you need to disqualify someone who does not have the ability to change. But in this case, it was not enough.
When I reviewed this call with my manager, he suggested I give the prospect “homework” next time.
"The only way to test for action is by having prospects demonstrate it,” he said.
Human beings love to please and are prone to wishful thinking -- a dangerous combination when you are qualifying. We need to make sure buyers aren’t just telling us what they think we want to hear, or what they want to believe.
I designed an assignment that anyone who was truly serious about moving to our CRM would need to take prior to a purchase. Going forward, whenever I encountered a prospect similar to the VP of sales above, I asked them to complete the homework before offering up my time to help them.
I began to notice that prospects who took the time to complete the homework typically bought, while those who didn’t complete it wouldn’t buy. By introducing this extra step into my sales process, I not only closed more deals, but was also able to spend time helping my best prospects.
How to design a good homework assignment
The approach I used works especially well for software since you can leverage a trial or freemium version of your product and create tasks for the lead to complete in the system, but you can find equivalent tasks for any sales process.
1) Pick a piece of content that educates the prospect.
This could be anything: Reading a case study and/or blog posts, watching videos, or attending events can all be great ways to get your prospect to show if they truly have an ability to act on their desire, while helping them determine if they really are a good fit for your product. This makes it a win-win, not just an ask.
2) Make the workload significant.
The homework should be substantive enough that its completion is meaningful, but not so daunting that it is unrealistic or unfair to expect the prospect to complete it -- this could end up unnecessarily discouraging them. Make sure your homework is actually adding value and isn’t just busywork.
3) Provide structure.
Make the required tasks and criteria for completion as explicit as possible. I like to use numbered lists so it is clear what my expectations are, and the prospect can track when they have completed the work.
Additionally, it is imperative to put a strict due date on the homework itself, typically marked by a prescheduled meeting to go over questions.
Test for action by asking for it
Here’s how assigning homework works in practice.
First, I get buy-in from my prospects that they’re willing to complete an assignment. I usually say the following:
In order to make sure this solution is the right fit for your process, I would recommend walking through a few steps in the software before our next call so you can get a better feel for it. Do you think this would be helpful? If so, I can send them over."
Then, I send them an email template I’ve set up with the assignment outlined in detail. Here's the one I use:
Hi [Prospect],
As discussed, here are some steps I think will help you get a real feel for the system and whether or not it is right for you:
[Custom recommendation based on what I've already learned about their sales process]
Customize your deal stages to fit your process (help guide)
Work a real deal from prospect to close in the system (help guide)
Once you have completed these steps, if you find the system is working for you, book some time with me and we can go over any questions and/or next steps.
Get stuck? Try the knowledge base, and if they does not work feel free to reach out to me directly.
Sam
The assignment is long, but every step will add value to someone who’s serious about buying. Prospects who aren’t will disqualify themselves, and you can invest your time elsewhere.
Time is a sales rep's ultimate resource, and the best performers know that you have to allocate it selectively with the prospects that are actually going to buy.
Buying requires change, which requires action. There is no better test of action than asking for it. Give your prospects homework and then invest in the ones who have the ability to act on their desire. I guarantee your close rates will go up as a result.
It’s (thankfully) not often that a famous football player is accused of a double homicide that leads the LAPD in a slow-speed chase on national television, inadvertently scoring the Ford Bronco the most memorable unpaid visibility of all time. A lot has changed since the 90’s, and, as our world becomes increasingly digital and interconnected, the way we consume media and retain information also continues to evolve. As it stands, we’ve adjusted to the inundation of digital marketing via mental tunnel vision and by employing applications to block ads for us. Anyone who has ever searched for a product online is familiar with what can be summed up as being stalked around the web; in my particular case, because I visited jewelry designer Pamela Love’s website some time this past month, Pamela Love product ads “follow” me to any site privy to my browsing history. Whatever annoyance I felt was negligible, until I was forced to look at ads for $450 jewelry alongside an article on the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. Pamela Love’s marketing team isn’t to blame; it’s the fault of an algorithm that doesn’t discriminate product from content. However, experiencing that cognitive dissonance means I now have a negative association with Pamela Love’s products. These digital marketing methods are very much embedded in the online ad culture and will continue to be a means of distributing sponsored content. Still, I would argue that to further perpetuate these marketing habits will only exacerbate the public’s growing distaste towards sponsored brand presence and encourage the use ad blockers.
Where retargeting is an example of informed but non-contextual digital marketing, ads built around a story represent the other end of the marketing spectrum. Major labels commission reputable ad agencies that know how to frame their brand in a relevant narrative. But smaller companies that don’t have that luxury still know that a strong story — a reason why for the product — resonates. In 2014, toy startup Goldieblox produced an ad that won a four-million dollar Super Bowl spot. That Goldiblox ad then went viral, resulting in sales that have increased 7000% since. People voluntarily view and share ads that embed the product inside of a quality story, and the positive emotional footprint casts the brand in a favorable light, which encourages spending. When we look towards the future, the evolution of programmatic advertising in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) calls for us to set a precedent for advertising practices that resist problematic 2D digital marketing methods. Designing an unskippable ad in VR and AR means matching an immersive platform with narratively immersive sponsored content.
Ideally, sponsored content is woven into a narrative that can be assimilated into the plot. We’re not going to walk out on the Ant-Man movie because a short and comedic sequence features our protagonist working at Baskin Robbins. Though Paul Rudd’s infinite charisma certainly helped, the feature was well received by fans and generated Baskin Robbins 64.9MM views and $6.5MM media value in return on investment. The advertisement is obvious, but, by making the brands part of a narrative, viewers don’t necessarily process those brands as ads: they create an experience. Delivering sponsored content through a narrative respects the viewer’s time because it doesn’t prevent him from enjoying the content he intended to consume. When well executed, it also respects the viewer’s intellect, as he can and will recognize a brand’s presence.
Whatever you may think of the Kardashians, the Kardashian-Jenner empire has a masterful command of marketing across a multitude of platforms; Kim Kardashian: Hollywood became a massive hit mobile game when it launched in 2014, and, according to a 2016 report by Glu Mobile — the game’s developer — Kim Kardashian: Hollywood has been downloaded 42 million times, and has been played for 3.3 billion sessions. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, via partnerships with various fashion and beauty retailers, allows players to purchase and dress their avatars in limited editions items favored by Kim Kardashian.
One of the more successful integrations in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood had renowned fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld join the game as a character with a special storyline and a virtual boutique that sold in-game ready-to-wear items. This promotion was timed to match the launch of Lagerfeld’s e-commerce site, allowing players to visit the site a day early. By the end of the month, 2.5MM players had visited Karl.com. Though the nature of the game lends itself to a more seamless integration of brands and designers — Olivier Rousteing, Judith Leiber, and Nars, to name a few — the game also comes with a community of players who have a vested interest in Kim Kardashian’s world.
When sponsored content can’t seamlessly coexist in a game’s plot or setting, adopting a self-aware and comedic edge can produce a similarly favorable response. Final Fantasy XV, with day one shipment and digital sales exceeding five million units, is an example of a higher fidelity game that embraced sponsored content. The success and endurance of the Final Fantasy franchise owes itself, in part, to the rich and immersive fantasy worlds the characters inhabit. Despite its fantasy driven narrative, FFXV managed to incorporate several product placements into their game, some of which were better received than others. A particularly inspired bit of marketing involved the Nissin Cup Noodle. Fans were captivated and engaged, generating fan art, blog posts, community conversations, and YouTube videos, all about Nissin Cup Noodle.
The Nissin Cup Noodle placement was unique because it was part of playable quest. A quest is a series of tasks, guided by a storyline that the player can complete in exchange for a reward. In the story crafted for Nissin Cup Noodle, the player’s companion is an instant ramen superfan, and, to make him happy and thus receive a bonus reward, the Player needs to acquire the Nissin Cup Noodle. The quest takes you on a journey to hunt down your companion’s favorite ramen ingredients to cook and enjoy with your teammates. Engaging in the quest also rewards the Player with a scene that is only attainable through the quest’s successful completion. Is a branded instant ramen quest out of place in a fantasy world? Sure. Dedicating an entire quest to Nissin Cup Noodles lampshaded its absurdity; it had a sense of humor about itself, and it played into a character’s established narrative.
So which product placement was poorly received in FFXV? The American Express logo lazily stickered onto a store window didn’t endear itself to fans. The choice of product placement was viewed as world-breaking. The placement’s greatest sin was not that it was a blatant advertisement, but that it disrupted the fantasy and didn’t serve a narrative purpose. The American Express brand won’t suffer for it, but players vacillated between irritation and apathy, creating no engagement and setting a negative precedent for future use of sponsored content.
While brands and marketers will continue to experiment with ways to be memorable and unskippable at scale within existing mediums, I am most intrigued by the possibilities of storytelling in virtual reality (VR), an industry that received a record breaking $1.8B in funding in 2016. VR is still in its nascent stages, but it’s a medium that has the potential to tell stories in ways that can leave people with lasting emotional footprints. As is the case with any form of technology, there will be those who wish to exploit it. This is why it is important for those pioneering the technology behind VR to aim for quality in their approach, protecting this new ecosystem, so that it can thrive and achieve long-term success. For now, most of the VR content accessible to the general public comes in the form of 360-degree films and video games. But VR won’t be exclusive to video games, nor will VR be platform specific, because, as VR technology evolves it will be ubiquitous, spreading to ever corner of the web through WebVR (3D web browsing). With that said, VR is the future evolution of programmatic advertising, and it is in our best interest to get it right.
Those who wish to bring branded content to virtual reality should take lessons learned from existing marketing habits by adopting the best practices with sensitivity to fit VR. I believe sponsored content can be done in VR, at scale, and with a level of quality never before seen in other digital mediums. Ideally, the presence of sponsored content in VR shouldn’t disrupt your enjoyment of the content with which you’ve chosen to engage. Ads are ubiquitous in our physical world and digital world, and many of us have conditioned ourselves to ignore them. VR has the potential to be many things, but VR itself comes with an inherent expectation of full immersion; we want to respect an individual’s virtual space and experience, or we risk her taking off her headset and rejecting the medium all together. Easier said than done, right? Let’s break down how this might work out.
Consumers value transparency, so this example involves obvious product placement. By using intelligent targeting to approximate what you like, a 3D representation of the brand will be present in your VR experience. If you’re interested in what you see, you can activate the content by “shaking” or “picking up” the object, which could teleport you to a new branded world — think Disney Land, but virtual — or, as a trigger to initiate branded playable content (a quest, mini game, etc.). I want to emphasize that Users have the agency to choose whether or not they want to engage with the sponsored content. And, because VR is a data environment, analytics collected from this medium is of the highest precise quality, which will allow us to understand what you prefer and what annoys you so that it won’t be served to you again in the future. Interaction types are customizable by the marketer. Follow-through is also customizable by the marketer. As for doing this at scale, digital shelf space is unlimited and personalizing content to individual users will not cost you anything. Of course, the success here relies on brands and marketers to create engaging and captivating storylines and worlds; but the end result leaves a positive emotional footprint. Because VR is a sensorial experience that 2D mediums cannot give, it’s also a lasting impression, akin to the memories we make from personal experiences.
Social media platforms have allowed us to curate our lives to fit the story we want to tell, and, by the same token, we hit “follow” for the stories we want to consume. We love a good story, and we hate having our time wasted by an aimless tangent. If there’s a narrative diversion from point A to point B, point Z needs to enrich the path to point B. People want to discover new things, but they hate being subjected to what they find irrelevant, or worse, offensive. The ways in which we communicate narratives — oral storytelling, ink, online publishing — change and evolve, but the power of storytelling transcends time. When we look to the future, VR is the next shiny new thing. It’s also a thing that has the capacity to maximize emotional footprints in a way that 2D experiences cannot; every frustration felt when confronting unwanted ads will be amplified. Digital browsing should be more sophisticated over time, yet we ostensibly expend mental energy ignoring retargeted ads or we spend time and money to find effective ad blockers. Unless we want VR micro-aggressions to feel like a literal assault on our senses and invasion of our personal space, we cannot apply 2D online ads in VR. Micro-aggressions in VR would make for a fantastic Black Mirror episode (“15 Million Merits” has an example of this nightmare), but I don’t think we want them to be an actual reality.
I want us to come together as an industry to design ads that are fitting for virtual and augmented environments, without 2D cross-medium contamination. Our adventures in 2D ad navigation have taught us what not to replicate. Setting a standard in VR won’t be easy, but putting the work in now means we won’t have to fix problems later. VR intrigues me. I translated my love for video games into a career as a monetization game designer — my job is to design for delighting people, and with that experience, I know storytelling is key for monetization (and key to figuring out how monetization works in the VR industry). VR advertising is a marketing proposition that delivers results to brands and marketers because it entertains the user. With a breadth of possibilities in VR, lazy content is unforgivable. Marrying sponsored content with mindful narratives can combat ad fraud and cut down on the need for ad blocking, and, with virtual reality, there’s a whole new scope of storytelling ideas to realize.
This article was originally published on Medium.com and reprinted with permission.
We’ve all been there — bland conferences where attendees trudge through endless rows of booths, scan their tags dutifully, and feign interest in yet another predictable sales pitch. Those conferences bore and lose relevance quickly.
However, there are best practices you can follow to keep your conference relevant year after year. Knowing what attendees want, delivering that consistently, and cultivating an environment that allows attendees to bond is the formula for success that can apply to many different sectors, even in industries like IT where professionals get a bad rap for being “antisocial.” If you create the right environment, you’d be surprised how many IT pros get excited to see each another and offer up bear hugs.
Put your customer needs first
It’s easy to get too caught up in the financial aspects of a conference. But focusing on profit or growth targets leads some conferences to cram in rows of booths and sell sponsorships to practically anyone, while forgetting about their customers’ needs. Inviting in hordes of sponsors and attendees and scanning badges is not an authentic experience. Care first about the experience you create for your customers, and they’ll return not because their job demands it, but because they want to.
At Spiceworks, we host an annual IT conference called SpiceWorld, but it’s not your typical humdrum tech conference. We’ve created an enthusiastic following with a one-of-a-kind experience, and we’ve stuck to that experience, sometimes at the expense of short-term revenue. We put our attendees first and look at the event as part of our overall business strategy to help everyone in IT get better at what they do… all while having fun. We’ve even had two IT pros get married during our conference! By always putting customer needs first, this allows you to set the bar for what must get done, and then everything else follows.
Ask and deliver
Your customers have a job to do, and they’re attending your conference to find help and get better at their jobs. It’s important for them to trust you’re on their side and you have their best interest at heart. Talk to them regularly to learn exactly what they want from the conference. Find out what their biggest challenges are and what topics interest them. Let them review the conference sessions and use those ratings to go back and improve some of the experiences the next year. Asking and then actually delivering builds trust, creates authenticity, and keeps attendees coming back.
Pick great vendors and show them the ropes
It also pays to give attendees a genuine opportunity to learn from the vendors at your conference. Attendees want informative conversations that go beyond the typical marketing spiel. And vendors want to sell to people who can benefit from their products and potentially recommend them to others. When authentic, this exchange goes beyond the standard conference model.
Remember that your vendors are not just there to sell their product – they’re there to sell the conference and your brand. Make sure the vendors are aligned with what your company stands for. And educate them on the experience attendees expect so they can put their best foot forward and create the experience you want while driving the results they need. It’s a win-win for both parties. To differentiate your conference from the pack, vendors must up their game because they’re a significant part of the experience.
Hire speakers who excite
Having attended countless conferences and endured some lackluster openings, we know the keynote must be engaging. It’s the one time you have all the attendees in one spot for an hour or two, so you must deliver. I once attended a conference where the CEO talked for 45 minutes about the company vision, and he was interesting enough. But then the next hour and a half featured the biggest sponsors on stage pitching their products – it was a disaster. Don’t make this mistake. You don’t have to hire the biggest name in the industry, but find someone who can engage the audience, offer practical advice, and bring in some laughs.
Experiment without fear
Never be afraid to try new things. In 2016, for example, we premiered a series of 15-minute tech talks on the showroom floor, but with no pitching allowed. The program was packed every session and got great reviews, so it will return. It always comes back to delivering exactly what your audience wants.
And don’t be afraid to try something new and fail. The willingness to reinvent the experience is what keeps people excited. For us, our attendees know that if something doesn’t work, we won’t do it again, even if it means it will cost us because a sponsor paid for that experience.
Do the heavy lifting for attendees
Make it easy for attendees to convince their managers to let them attend. For SpiceWorld, we provide a “convince your boss” email template so our customers can just fill in the blanks, show the costs to their bosses, and make a compelling argument. Find what works for your customers to help them articulate the value of attending your conference.
Honor and encourage your traditions
Consider a buddy program where new attendees pair with the event veterans who can guide them through the conference and offer some companionship. Enthusiasm from veteran “buddies” not only welcomes new customers, but also helps them feel like they’re part of the family. This passing on of conference traditions is important to keep those traditions alive every year.
Our traditions include a legendary afterparty and sense of camaraderie that harkens back to our first conference 10 years ago with only about 50 people at an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. Although we’ve grown into an event with about 2,500 people, we still host an afterparty and see a lot of informal hanging out when the conference ends. Right after the closing remarks, it’s tradition for Spiceworkers, attendees, and sponsors to grab a beer together on their own time.
A sense of partnership and goodwill between conference holder and attendee creates a priceless brand experience. The cost of your product or service becomes almost inconsequential if you have your customers’ back and vice versa.
Back in the old days, having “global reach” meant businesses had to (literally) set up shop and ply their wares on foreign shores. Fast forward a few short generations later and practically any business can rightly claim to have a worldwide presence without ever setting foot in the places where their customers are.
To really achieve strong global reach, however, you need to develop and follow a sound brand expansion strategy first. This allows you to clearly define the image you want actual and potential customers to equate with your company or solution, as well as to set your product apart from those of your competitors.
If you take a look at global B2B brands that have managed to carve out a decent slice of both market share and mindshare in different parts of the world today, you’ll find that their brand expansion activities all boil down to the following 10 key ingredients:
#1. Local Audience and Market Segments
Named the world’s most valuable B2B brand for the second consecutive year by WPP and Kantar Millward Brown, Microsoft is a company that’s able to balance its global reach with a local focus. To help it stay locally relevant within its many different markets worldwide, the company employs a Global Readiness team that enables Microsoft to respect and comply with various geographic and cultural requirements arising from its worldwide operations.
Image source: brandquarterly.com
Because customers’ priorities and experiences vary from one market to another, it’s important that you “localize” your brand expansion strategy to suit a particular area’s profile. Craft a brand message that appeals to specific niches or segments in your target region, and deliver that message in the language and tone that that particular audience uses.
#2. Identity and Values
Another global B2B brand that consistently tops rankings is General Electric (GE). The company owes much of its success maintaining its strong global presence to its uniquely recognizable brand identity and values. For an organization that offers a diverse set of products and solutions in over 180 countries, defining an overarching identity can be a bit of a challenge. That’s why GE always goes back to its brand story to communicate what it stands for.
Brand expansion requires a unique identity that your prospects and customers can readily associate with your company. Find that promise that your company alone can deliver and place it at the core of your brand’s narrative.
#3. Consistency
With operations in 220 countries and territories worldwide, logistics titan DHL is a case study in global branding consistency. During the company’s transition from domestic mail to global logistics, DHL ensured international consistency by touching all aspects of its rebranding efforts–from the color of its delivery fleet all the way to its company-wide brand ambassador employee program. Today, the entire organization strictly adheres to a set of corporate identity and design rules that govern every marketing campaign and material it uses.
Source: retail-loyalty.org
Offering a consistent brand experience for your current and upcoming customers across borders goes beyond using the same set of colors and typography in your marketing materials. It’s about letting people experience your company as a whole, wherever they come across your brand.
#4. Logistics
Coming up with a compelling promise forms only one part of branding–being able to deliver on that promise is another. Few international B2B brands can do logistics and supply chain management quite like Intel. Aside from manufacturing industry-leading processors and chips, the company is also known for supply chain innovations that guarantee its products reach customers no matter what or where. So, carefully planning how you ensure that your solutions get delivered is a vital part of the brand expansion.
There’s an old saying that goes: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals study logistics.”
#5. Scale and Scope
SAP is a global B2B brand with scalability at the core of its reputation. Not only does the company enable its customers to scale operations and business activities effectively, SAP itself is the end result of a massive scaling-up strategy that transformed the organization from an ERP company into the end-to-end digital solutions powerhouse that it is today.
The real measure of scalability for your brand expansion is how well your business is able to meet the demands of growth in a market–such as pursuing more opportunities or keeping up with tighter production schedules. If your organization is unable to handle scaling properly, your brand can suffer as a result.
#6. Competition
One B2B brand that’s clearly crushing its competition is Amazon, particularly its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division. With over 1 million active enterprise users under its fold, AWS clearly leads the cloud services market while rivals like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud lag way behind. Gartner points to AWS’s significant competitive advantage in terms of core services, geographic coverage, and sales strategy as the main reason why the brand has such a dominant market position.
Source: rcpmag.com
Expanding into new markets means inevitably going head-to-head against competitors (both local and foreign). Whatever your relative strengths are over your competition, these should serve as guideposts for shaping your brand expansion strategy.
#7. Outreach and Exposure
Oracle stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the world’s most valuable global B2B brands today. This is in no small part due to the level of targeted outreach and exposure the Oracle brand maintains, especially toward C-level and executive segments where brand visibility matters most. Oracle uses a combination of educational and promotional content to help position its brand as both a trusted resource and a reliable partner.
It goes without saying that social media and the Internet have leveled the playing field when it comes to brand visibility and exposure. The tools to reach out to and engage any target market on the planet are readily available out there (most of them at almost no cost). The key challenge is knowing how to use these platforms in ways that align with your brand expansion strategy.
#8. Thought Leadership and Influence
Consistently ranked as one of today’s most valuable and influential B2B brands, Salesforce is comfortably perched as the CRM market’s undisputed leader. It owes a great deal of its brand value to its reputation as an innovator (for pioneering and shaping SaaS) and as a trusted source for business and technology insights.
In the current B2B setting where the buyer mostly leads the way, the best thing you can do during brand expansion is to try and influence how your audience perceives your company’s image. Control is pretty much out of the picture. Brands that thrive today are those which their audiences view as reliable experts.
#9. Company Culture and Commitment
Cisco is a great example of an organization with its brand seamlessly weaved into its company culture. It’s “People Deal” relates the company’s mission to “connect everything, innovate everywhere, and benefit everyone” into its worldwide workforce, ensuring employee buy-in of Cisco’s values.
Brand expansion requires firm support and commitment from your team or organization. That’s because, as a Fortune report points out, company culture is “incredibly important” in building B2B relationships and hence needs to reflect your branding message, too.
#10 Barriers and Hurdles
What do you do when the government of a country you’re trying to expand into labels your company as a security threat and severely restricts operations?
That was the situation communications equipment manufacturer Huawei once found itself in when the company tried to enter the $30-billion U.S. telecom equipment market but got mostly banned because of alleged links to the Chinese military. Huawei was able to find another way to tap into its target market and is now supplying smaller (regional) U.S. carriers, with equipment sales steadily growing each year.
Regulations and restrictions are only two of the barriers to entry you need to take into account when trying to expand your brand into new markets. Language and cultural barriers can significantly influence the outcome of your brand expansion efforts, as well as factors like the costs of doing business in that region and the amount of risk you’re taking on.
The Takeaway
With the right brand expansion strategy, global reach is well within the grasp of any business, regardless of size or maturity. While we’ve focused on relatively large and well-established B2B brands in this post, the fact is that physical distance is no longer an obstacle for anyone when reaching out to your target audience and customers.
Quality leads are the fuel that make all companies run. No company is too big or too small to get around this law of growth.
And in order to get quality leads, you’ll need to have quality people who specialize in generating and developing quality leads.
But early on in younger sales teams, most of the reps take on all the responsibilities in the sales process -- from prospecting to closing.
The problem is that this leads to your sales team becoming “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
You want to have a Super-Bowl-winning football team? You can’t have 11 Tom Bradys playing every position on the field -- you need talented but specialized quarterbacks and running backs, receivers, and linemen.
In the same way, you can’t expect your company to “win” if your salespeople are trying to “play” every position. As soon as possible, you want to specialize the team into different roles.
So, how do you go about creating this new and specialized sales team?
There’s a lot to it, but here are four keys that will help you build a sales development team that will win.
1) Don’t scale too quickly
When most managers build a sales team, they scale too quickly.
The temptation is hard to resist. If you have a documented process for lead generation, setting appointments, and a script for closing deals, trying to get as many new reps on board as possible so you can skyrocket your revenue makes sense.
However, when you’re bringing on new hires, you’ll have new challenges to deal with that you wouldn’t normally have if you were selling by yourself.
You’ll have to train them on your process, get them up to speed on your industry and your business, and potentially teach them sales techniques if they don’t have a lot of experience.
On top of that, you’ve got other risks: Are your sales reps coachable? Are they willing to learn new things, or do they think they know everything already? Are they good at reading people?
Sales development reps also typically have higher burnout rates compared to other sales roles, which means you need a solid hiring process that you can repeat over and over again.
If you scale too fast, you risk getting in over your head too quickly, and you might have to lay off some of your team members down the road.
2) Implement proper incentives for compensation
It’s important to have the right incentives in place so your employees are driven to hit their targets. Usually, salespeople are motivated by money (among other things), so it makes sense to have compensation at the top of the list. (While money is not necessarily most important motivator, it’s definitely how sales pros keep score.)
The challenge with SDRs is that they’re not directly responsible for closing deals, so you can’t solely incentivize them on deals closed.
You want to pay your SDRs to drive a high volume of leads, yet you don’t want to comp them on poor-quality leads -- or your closers won’t be talking to the right people.
For example, your compensation structure might be divided into “points,” where you give a certain number of points for every meeting set, a higher number of points for every meeting that’s actually held (i.e. the prospect shows up to the call), and an even higher number of points for every prospect that’s closed.
3) Set proper expectations up front
Even though it’s standard for the sales function to be divided into different roles -- like Sales Development Rep (SDR), Account Executive (AE), or Customer Success Managers (CSM) -- the specific definitions of and responsibilities for these roles often vary from company to company.
Make sure your new SDR candidates have a clear picture of every task and activity they are expected to perform daily, so they can understand what it will be like to work on your company’s SDR team.
Many times a sales rep may come into a SDR role wanting to close deals -- so they ask how long before they are “promoted” to AE (or a closing role). But their reasons for wanting to do so aren't always because they love closing -- sometimes, it’s because they see “closers” as being higher up the ladder.
If you set expectations and let them know that they’re specialists in prospecting and qualification, and your AEs are specialists in discovery and advisory, you’ll have a better chance at making your SDRs feel great about their work -- and stick with you for the long term.
4) Hire for attitude, not just skill
When it comes to hiring SDRs, attitude and aptitude can be worth a lot more than skill.
The "experience” an SDR needs to prospect and qualify new customers can be acquired pretty quickly. As long as you have a script and workflow they can follow, and it’s the right person, you can check off that "experience” requirement.
Finding SDRs with the right attitude is far more difficult.
Can you train them? Do they have empathy? Are they determined? How do you know they’ll stay consistent, even after having a long string of failures and rejections? Will they burn out quickly?
These “soft skills” are much harder to teach. They are personality traits that people develop over time, not qualities that can necessarily be trained quickly on the job. That’s why you should look for these traits early on in the interview process, and craft your questions appropriately.
For example, instead of asking them how many appointments they set in their last job, you might ask them to tell you a story about a time they were repeatedly rejected -- but persisted anyway.
You might ask them to sell you on a product of their choice to see if they come off as salesy, or if they ask good questions before diving into the pitch.
You might ask them to tell you about a time they had a tough time relating to someone, but ended up breaking through and doing it.
Skills are important, but for SDR roles, attitude and personality is far more important.
Hiring a team of SDRs is largely about timing and expectations.
Many managers (especially ones) are tempted to scale too fast -- which eventually results in layoffs, productivity loss, and lower morale. Instead of taking a massive leap forward, they end up taking a few steps back.
Other times, they might focus too much on getting people on board who have the “right experience” instead of people who have the right attitude to stay consistent when times get hard -- even after they have a long string of failures or back to back rejections.
But if you scale gradually, perfect your sales process, and set proper expectations throughout your hiring process, you’ll have a highly productive SDR team on your hands that will help you close more deals.
Before taking an Account Based Sales & Marketing approach, Schneider Logistics was seeing maybe 1 out of 5 leads engage successfully. In speaking with many other complex solution-sales companies, I am finding that has become a growing trend.
This happens because most of the leads being delivered by marketing and inside sales are not able to be fully qualified, and as a result many fall outside of the ‘wheel house’ of our network. For example, clients may not have US-based supply chains, may not use LTL as their primary transportation mode, may have specialized equipment requirements, or may be outside of our ideal spend range.
Sales teams have been clamoring for better quality leads since the first solution ever sold. “Why should I spend time hunting when I can spend time closing?,” we’ve asked…and we’ve known the answer as well.
We need quality leads to enable quality close rates – and that takes time.
Prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process.
Most complex solutions and technology companies are heavily differentiated within a specific market. Inside of that market, they flourish at a 50% or higher win rate. But outside of that niche, the win rate can drop to single digits.
Because it’s a complex service and a specific audience, they are not able to purchase lead lists, cold call, or automate marketing like a transactional sales company. Instead, they rely on an experienced Inside Sales team to identify and engage their audience. Inside Sales must then have an undying passion for the greatest challenge of all: to move the needle by sheer numbers.
Through brute force, they will find the 10% of the market who are already open to buying. Incidentally, our competitors are using this same technique to pursue this same 10% of clients.
The numbers will work, but only so fast.
By making a certain amount of contacts each day by phone, email and on LinkedIn, we will inevitably find the 10% of our market who are open to change. Then, by maintaining monthly contact for 1 to 3 years, we will wait patiently to find the window in which they’re open to a conversation.
This process works but, unfortunately, it takes time. Without first having a conversation, we’re not able to show clients a compelling reason to consider the full value of our solution.
Meanwhile, Outside Sales is left to carry two heavy burdens:
To develop sudden, on-the-spot value props for the receptive prospects we do find
To develop their own strategy for breaking the status quo with the other 60% of the market, who were notresponsive to lead gen but who are known to be an ideal fit
This same logic applies to ‘stuck’ deals, where prospects have engaged in discussions, but the deal is not moving forward in the funnel because they’re not able to clearly see a differentiator.
Further, since our competitors are using this same approach to target this same 10% of the market, and because our clients are unable to see any strategic differentiators, we end up in RFP rate battles.
94% of buyers conduct their research online prior to engaging Sales (Accenture)
The modern, educated buyer now uses Google to qualify sales people before returning contact. They find our LinkedIn profile, and decide whether we appear valuable and educational enough to re-organize their priorities.
The good news is that the modern, educated sales force can take advantage of this situation. Since customers are coming online to discover our personal brand and our differentiated value prop, we can intentionally place those key details right where they would like to find them.
When at least 57% of all buying decisions are made before Outside Sales enters the conversation, it’s no surprise that breaking through the 10% barrier remains a difficult task to tackle.
Enter: Account Based Marketing.
Difficult, but not impossible. There is a better way.
In the ‘ABM’ process that fits between inside and outside sales, Marketing does a deep dive research on specific, targeted accounts. This is necessary to discover the unique insight that will help to shift their thinking from the pink “not interested” area up into the orange “open to buying” zone.
LinkedIn profiles are built to speak to specific audiences with commercial insight.
Talking points are engineered to create a re-frame or ‘aha moment.’
Success stories are crafted to show a relevance to influencers and decision makers.
Relevance is demonstrated at all 4 levels: industry, company, rank and personal.
Prospecting can now build trust, credibility & demand for the Sales process.
Armed with relevance and insight, Sales is able to use LinkedIn to create the window for demand, rather than wait for it.
CEB’s studies have also shown that the single largest factor in client loyalty is the sales experience (53%), so making these small shifts suggests we can improve account longevity as well as win rates.
Some ‘traditional’ sales leaders believe it’s not possible.
Oracle’s VP of Sales recently described to me that he believed it was impossible to generate demand and that LinkedIn could only be used as a ‘listening’ tool to wait for the right window. However, the VP of Sales at Schneider Logistics has proven Challenger, ABM and Demand Generation to be fruitful.
As one example, a $400k account had been unresponsive to prospecting for over 4 years, so Sales & Marketing agreed to take an account based approach. Content was created to help Sales teach the individual contacts within the account about the gaps between TMS systems and Logistics provider technologies. The stories were built to show how the gaps impacted the employees personally, rather than speaking about impact to the ‘company.’
Within a few short months, because they had created differentiation among their market, applied a personal relevance, and ‘lead with’ commercial insight crafted specifically to ‘lead to’ their solution, they had soon opened – and closed – an opportunity that was previously considered untouchable.
In addition, this approach created:
A 75% sales funnel win rate for ABM-targeted accounts
A 3-month reduction in the average sales cycle, and
A 3378% ROI on the marketing budget
“A lead developed by social selling is 7x more likely to close.” – IBM
Through ABM, marketing creates an improved experience to the client, to inside sales, and to outside sales by enabling one cohesive line of conversation all the way from Open to Close. While our competitors are struggling to close on 1 out of 3 leads, we can now plan for 2 out of 3 when applying Account Based Sales & Marketing through LinkedIn.
In the current environment, many contract service providers, LSP’s, 3PL’s, consulting and technology firms are looking for opportunities to increase efficiency, add new channel partners to better support customers, invest in updated technology, or simply to boost and stabilize results across multiple sales teams. These improvements can be achieved when personal brands are aligned with your insight and success stories, and designed to ‘lead to’ rather than ‘lead with’ your differentiated value prop.
Bitcoin was hatched as an act of defiance. Unleashed in the wake of the Great Recession, the cryptocurrency was touted by its early champions as an antidote to the inequities and corruption of the traditional financial system. They cherished the belief that as this parallel currency took off, it would compete with and ultimately dismantle the institutions that had brought about the crisis. Bitcoin’s unofficial catchphrase, “In cryptography we trust,” left no doubt about who was to blame: It was the middlemen, the bankers, the “trusted” third parties who actually couldn’t be trusted. These humans simply got in the way of other humans, skimming profits and complicating transactions.
Bitcoin sought to replace the services provided by these intermediaries with cryptography and code. When you use a check to pay your mortgage, a series of agreements occur in the background between your financial institution and others, enabling money to go from your account to someone else’s. Your bank can vouch that your money is good because it keeps records indicating where every penny in your account came from, and when.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies replace those background agreements and transactions with software—specifically, a distributed and secure database called a blockchain. The process with which the ownership of a Bitcoin token will pass from one person to another—wherever they are, no matter what government they live under—is entrusted to a bunch of computers.
Now, eight years after the first blockchain was built, people are trying to apply it to procedures and processes beyond merely the moving of money with varying degrees of success. In effect, they’re asking, What other agreements can a blockchain automate? What other middlemen can blockchain technology retire?
Can a blockchain find people offering rides, link them up with people who are trying to go somewhere, and give the two parties a transparent platform for payment? Can a blockchain act as a repository and a replay platform for TV shows, movies, and other digital media while keeping track of royalties and paying content creators? Can a blockchain check the status of airline flights and pay travelers a previously agreed upon amount if their planes don’t take off on time?
If so, then blockchain technology could get rid of Uber, Netflix, and every flight-insurance provider on the market.
People
Satoshi Nakamoto
If the blockchain were a religion, Satoshi would be God. This anonymous hacker is responsible for writing the Bitcoin white paper, releasing the first Bitcoin code, and inspiring legions of blockchain developers. Many have sought to reveal his/her/their identity, but to this day that information remains secret.
Those three proposed applications aren’t hypothetical—they’re just a few of the things now being built on Ethereum, a blockchain platform that remotely executes software on a distributed computer system called the Ethereum Virtual Machine. In the blockchain universe, Ethereum, which has its own cryptocurrency, called ethers, is by far the project that is most open to experimentation. But zoom out and a diverse collection of potentially disruptive innovators floods into view. New groups are pitching blockchain schemes almost daily. And the tech world’s titans don’t plan to miss out: Microsoft is offering its customers tools to experiment with blockchain applications on its Azure cloud. IBM, Intel, and others are collaborating on an open-source blockchain initiative called Hyperledger, which aims to provide the bones for business-oriented blockchains. Meanwhile, many of the largest banks—the very institutions that blockchain pioneers were trying to neutralize—have cobbled together their own version of the technology in an attempt to stay ahead of the curve. And even Bitcoin, which runs on the first and most successful blockchain, is being retrofitted for applications its designers never dreamed of.
Pretty much without exception, these new blockchain projects remain unencumbered by actual mass adoption. No single blockchain concept or strategy has yet revolutionized any industry. Bitcoin itself is used by no more than 375,000 people in the entire world on any given day, according to Blockchain.info. But the investor dollars are pouring in, and proposals are floating and colliding like tectonic plates on a hot undercurrent of hype and intrigue.
When the mantle cools, which blockchain platforms will persist, and which will slowly sink back beneath the surface? To make any kind of prediction, you’ve got to understand what a blockchain really is and what it does. The place to start, logically enough, is with Bitcoin.
How Do Blockchains Work? The Bitcoin Example
All illustrations: Nicholas Little
In 2009, an anonymous hacker (or group of hackers) going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto unveiled the first entirely digital currency. The technology worked on the principle that, at its foundation, money is just an accounting tool—a method for abstracting value, assigning ownership, and providing a means for transacting.
Cash is the historic means of accomplishing these chores. Simply possessing the physical tokens—bills, coins—equals ownership, and it’s up to the individuals to negotiate transactions among themselves in person. As long as cash is sufficiently difficult to replicate, there is no need for a complete accounting of who owns what portions of the money supply, or for the details of who the various holders were of a single $50 bill going back to when it was printed.
However, if you could piece together a running tabulation of who held every bill, then suddenly the physical representations would become unnecessary. Banks and payment processors have already partially sublimated our physical currency into digital records by tracking and processing transactions within their closed systems.
Bitcoin completed the transformation by creating a single, universally accessible digital ledger, called a blockchain. It’s called a chain because changes can be made only by adding new information to the end. Each new addition, or block, contains a set of new transactions—a couple of thousand in late August—that reference previous transactions in the chain. So if Helmut pays Hendrieke a bitcoin, that transaction appears at the end of the chain, and it points to the transaction in which Helmut was previously paid that coin by Helche, which in turn points to the time before that when Helche was paid the coin by Halfrid, and so on.
Bitcoin’s blockchain, unlike the ledgers maintained by traditional financial institutions, is replicated on networked computers around the globe and is accessible to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. A class of participants on this network, called miners, is responsible for detecting transaction requests from users, aggregating them, validating them, and adding them to the blockchain as new blocks.
Hacks & Heists
2016
Shortly after the Distributed Autonomous Organization debuted on the Ethereum blockchain, someone siphoned US $60 million in ethers from this autonomous version of a venture-capital fund. In a bold move, the Ethereum developers rewrote the blockchain code to return the money.
Validation entails both verifying that Helmut actually owns the bitcoins in his transaction and that he has not yet spent them elsewhere. Ownership on the Bitcoin blockchain is determined by a pair of cryptographic keys. The first, called the public key, resides in the blockchain for anyone to see. The second is called the private key, and its owner keeps it safe from view. The two keys have a special mathematical relationship that makes them useful for signing digital messages. Here’s how that happens: Helmut takes a message, combines it with his private key, does some calculations, and ends up with a long number. Anyone who has the original message and knows the corresponding public key can then do some calculations of their own to prove that the long number was in fact created with the private key.
In Bitcoin, transactions are signed with private keys that correspond to the public key most recently associated with coins being spent. And when the transaction gets processed, those coins get assigned a new public key.
But the main role of miners is to ensure the irreversibility of new transactions, making them final and tamperproof. The method they use for doing so is thought to be the most significant contribution that Satoshi Nakamoto—whoever he or she is—made to the field of computer science.
Ensuring irreversibility becomes necessary only when you invite anyone and everyone to take part in the curation of a ledger. If the Bitcoin blockchain were being run by a single bank with a set of known validators operating under a single jurisdiction, then enforcing the finality of transactions would be as simple as writing it into company policy and punishing anyone who didn’t follow the rules.
But in Bitcoin, there is no central authority to enforce the rules. Miners are operating anonymously all over the world—in China, Eastern Europe, Iceland, Venezuela—driven by a diversity of cultures and bound by different legal systems and regulatory obligations. Therefore, there is no way of holding them accountable. The Bitcoin code alone must suffice. To ensure proper behavior, Bitcoin uses a scheme called proof of work.
How Does Proof of Work Secure Blockchains?
First, let’s be a bit more specific about the problem that public blockchains are trying to solve with proof of work. In this open peer-to-peer network, miners—whoever is running the bitcoin code—are receiving news of transactions and gathering them to create a new block. They are doing so in competition with one another, because the first to create a valid block gets paid (in bitcoins) for that service. In this situation, what’s to stop a miner from deleting previous transactions in the blockchain after they have been added? While this type of reorganization does not enable a miner to steal coins, it could be used to spend the same coins multiple times. For instance, I could go to some unwitting merchant and pay for a cup of coffee with bitcoins. If I were a miner, I could later go into my version of the Bitcoin blockchain, remove the transaction, and send the modified chain out to my peers, thereby redepositing the bitcoins I spent back into my own pocket.
Therefore, it is crucial that all miners on the Bitcoin network have the same copy of the blockchain, and that all changes and transactions are irreversible. “The fact that they’re all playing the same music is very important for the music to sound good,” says Stefan Thomas, a developer for Ripple, a bitcoin-inspired digital currency.
Things to do with a blockchain
Self-Driving Cars
Cars can now drive themselves (sort of). Isn’t it about time they got an allowance? The blockchain startup Oaken Innovations is looking into equipping self-driving cars with cryptocurrency wallets for minor expenses like paying tolls and buying oil changes.
To keep all the musicians in sync, the Bitcoin mining software makes it very expensive—in terms of computing power and, therefore, electricity—to add new blocks and even more expensive to change blocks further back in the record.
Any miner trying to add a new block must also provide a cryptographic proof to go along with it. In order to produce the proof, the miner digests the new block through multiple rounds of a hash function—a computation that takes a chunk of data of arbitrary length and reduces it to a meaningless alphanumeric string with a fixed length, called a hash. To make the process more challenging, the blockchain algorithm demands that the resulting hash start with a certain number of zeroes. The difficulty comes from the fact that there is no way to predict what hash any given data set will spit out, and so miners run the computation over and over on their validated blocks, each time inserting a random number into the data set. When that number is changed, a new hash results. When at last the miners get the correct number of zeroes, they’re done.
The first miner who finds a satisfactory hash then announces the new block to the other miners, who check it and append it to the full version of the blockchain that they are harboring on their computers. For performing all this work, miners collect a reward of newly minted bitcoins as well as any mining fees, which users voluntarily tack onto their transactions in hopes of pushing to the head of the line.
Think of hashing as a way of locking the blocks on a chain. Suppose you have a lock that requires a key to close. You also have a huge pile of keys at your disposal, but you don’t know which one will work. You have to try them one by one. When you finally find the correct key, you leave it in the lock so that anyone can check that it’s the right fit.
Theoretically, this work and the payoff that miners receive act as incentives for good behavior. Bitcoin miners are heavily invested in the network that they serve, both in the electricity they consume and in the hardware they buy. Therefore, the thinking goes, they should be disinclined to damage the currency in any way, including by taking any actions, such as double-spending, that might call into question the integrity of Bitcoin and devalue the currency.
Such attacks are further thwarted because the cost of changing the contents of old blocks is compounded by each new block that gets added to the chain. When a new block is made, it contains the hash of the one before it. Any changes in old blocks will result in invalid hashes for all subsequent blocks. Therefore, it is impossible to insert bogus modifications into a previous block without having to repeat all the work that was performed after that block. In that lock analogy, it’s as though the design for the lock at the end of the chain depends on all the locks that came before it. So changing one lock in the middle of the blockchain means having to find new keys for every lock after it.
By forcing miners to provide costly proofs and then repaying them for their work, Satoshi created the first viable peer-to-peer digital currency. But he also solved a more general problem that had vexed computer scientists for decades—consensus. Bitcoin, which has never been knocked off-line for any substantial period of time over the past eight years, reliably incentivizes a network of potentially dishonest participants to process transactions and secure a single version of those events. The result is an ever-growing chain of data that anyone with an Internet connection can inspect and add to, and one that has proven remarkably impervious to attack.
How Can You Use a Blockchain to Do Other Things?
It turns out that such a system may be useful for much more than just money. Almost as soon as Bitcoin debuted, people began imagining what other kinds of applications you could run on a blockchain if you generalized the technology. When miners validate transactions, they are really running small programs that process the data and deliver a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on the transaction request. But what if they could run more complex programs, like the software for a social media network? And what if the blockchain were used to represent data other than simple currency transactions, like messages on an online forum?
Things to do With a Blockchain
Educational Records
Educational Records: Most people would change some detail of their school records if they could. Today, principles and the fear of being caught keep us honest. But tomorrow it might be the blockchain. Sony and IBM are creating a new blockchain for tracking and storing diplomas, transcripts, and other kinds of educational records.
Although these ideas were around from Bitcoin’s inception, it would take several years and a 19-year-old computer science student in Toronto to make them popular. In 2013, Vitalik Buterin devised an entirely new blockchain called Ethereum. The goal of Ethereum was to take what Bitcoin had done for currency and expand it into other realms.
Like Bitcoin, Ethereum uses a blockchain that has its own currency, called ethers. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum uses transactions that are miniprograms, called smart contracts, that can be written with an unlimited amount of complexity. Users can then interact with programs by sending them transactions loaded with instructions, which miners then process.
In practice, this means that anyone can embed a software program into a transaction and know that it will remain there, unaltered and accessible for the life span of the blockchain. Theoretically, with Ethereum, you could replace Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Spotify, or any other digital service with new versions that would be invulnerable to censors and transparent in their policies, and which could operate indefinitely in the absence of the people who created them.
“The amazing thing is you can put a computer program on that network…and, similar to Bitcoin, everybody on the system can agree on exactly what happened and when it happened…I think that’s a profound idea,” says Joseph Lubin, a founder of Ethereum, who now runs Consensys, a Brooklyn-based incubator for decentralized applications.
What’s a Permissioned Ledger?
Concurrent with Buterin’s attempts to use blockchain technology to make a world-spanning computer, another trend was pushing the technology in the opposite direction, toward a more closed and controlled iteration of Satoshi’s masterpiece. In September of 2014, a group of financial institutions—including Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan—formed a consortium, called R3, to explore how blockchains might improve the efficiency of payments between banks. [To see how far this has gone, read “Wall Street Firms to Move Trillions to Blockchains in 2018,” in this issue.]
It didn’t take long for these institutions to realize that the open structure of blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum ran counter to their needs. Of primary concern was the anonymity of users, who on open blockchains are represented by alphanumeric public addresses, providing no indication of their real-world identities. Banking laws in the United States and elsewhere forbid such anonymity. “We have to know particularly who our participants and counterparties are on these platforms,” says Tim Swanson, the director of market research at R3.
Financial institutions are also legally required to protect customer data and control its export across national or regional lines. Given that public blockchains replicate the entire transaction record on every computer in the network, it’s impossible to restrict the chain of custody while using them.
Thus was born the “permissioned ledger” approach to blockchain technology. In a permissioned ledger, the identity of people adding blocks is known, and data in the system is viewable only by selected parties. Because the right to create new blocks is assigned by the people who run the code rather than by a lottery, there is no need for proof-of-work mining or a cryptocurrency to pay for it.
This kind of system is intended to be used in situations where all participants on a blockchain already have a small degree of trust among them but want to simulate the services of a neutral third party, as might be the case with banks when settling international wire transfers.
Last year, R3—which recently raised US $107 million from more than 40 institutions—released its first permissioned ledger, Corda. And Corda already has a competitor; J.P. Morgan, which left the R3 consortium this past spring, has released its own permissioned ledger, called Quorum.
The permissioned-ledger approach has also spread beyond banks to other industries that find themselves serving as guardians to sensitive customer data. Many of these projects are built with tools provided by Hyperledger, an open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation and backed by big tech firms. Hyperledger is building products for companies that want to work with smart contracts but are hesitant to embrace open blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
“People have to understand the actual concerns and the regulatory requirements that entities such as banks, insurance, and the health care industry have to adhere to. They cannot afford the risk and uncertainty that is introduced by some of the open systems,” says Jonathan Levi, creator of Hacera, an access-control management system for blockchains.
How Are Smart Contracts Really Going to Work?
Regardless of what flavor of blockchain wins in the end, the smart contracts that will run on it will need a variety of supporting technologies. These supplementary technologies are now being developed, to little fanfare, in the shadow of the blockchain carnival. And they will be absolutely crucial to the expansion of blockchain technology.
“Once you’ve got smart contracts, a whole host of problems arise,” says Ari Juels, a codirector of Cornell University’s IC3. These problems fall into a couple of categories.
For one thing, blockchains can’t store much data. That’s going to be a problem for the many projects that, for example, propose to live-stream video over the blockchain—there’s nowhere to put the video content.
The Bitcoin blockchain records the inputs and outputs of every coin on the network, as well as the content of an additional field that allows for up to a mere 40 bytes of metadata per transaction. That’s all.
Another problem with putting contracts on blockchains is that blockchains by themselves don’t know what’s going on in the real world. That’s a problem if, say, your smart contract is a flight insurance system, because it needs to know when your flight really takes off and lands. Blockchains were never designed to query websites. “Anything they learn about the outside world has to be injected into them,” says IC3’s Juels.
Ideally, developers will devise schemes for storing and accessing data in ways that do not reintroduce the weaknesses—vulnerability to censorship and a reliance on potentially dodgy humans—that blockchains were invented to avoid. To accomplish that, developers will have to carefully consider which “trusted parties” they can actually trust.
The problem of storing static data might be solved with distributed file sharing services, such as Protocols Labs’ Interplanetary Database or Storj Labs’ decentralized cloud storage system. These are systems that would enable people all over the world to rent out surplus space on their hard drives. Such schemes would work for a blockchain-based smart contract system because the data would be redundantly stored on multiple computers around the world, and thus would always be available and difficult to censor.
As for importing real-time data into a blockchain, this could be handled by what blockchain developers are calling “oracles.” These are services that get paid for reliably querying sources of real-time data and feeding it to smart contracts on the blockchain.
At IC3, Juels has implemented an automated oracle called Town Crier [PDF]. It’s meant to ensure that data injected onto a blockchain comes from a trustworthy source and hasn’t been tampered with. It uses a “trusted software” enclave on Intel processors. The chips run code behind a cryptographic shield but still provide proof that the program was executed as promised.
Where’s All the Money for This Stuff Coming From?
If the many digital services that modern society has come to rely on are to be rebuilt on blockchain technology, then someone is going to have to pay for all of the engineering and research that will have to be done.
But how do you get money for those functions when what you’re trying to do is create a technology that—if it succeeds—will destroy the valuable data many enterprises survive on? Ideally, open blockchains, like Ethereum, entrust custody of data to the people who created it, giving them the option to choose how they share it. In such an environment, it is no longer feasible for a company to survive off a business model that harvests and sells its customer’s browsing behavior, purchasing history, or location data. Nor could blockchain companies rely on the restricted possession of their intellectual property, as programs on an open blockchain are there for everyone to see.
Nevertheless, a potential funding mechanism for blockchain-based businesses has already emerged: A new trend in blockchain funding called initial coin offerings (or ICOs, after initial public offering, or IPO) has turned out to be wildly lucrative, although legally questionable.
Groups that choose to fund their projects with ICOs design their smart contracts in such a way that a user must own an app-specific coin in order to use the app. These groups then create a bunch of the coins before their launch and sell them on the open market.
In the nondigital world, it would be like someone opening a laundromat where you could use only custom coins to run the machines. And so, instead of just getting investors, the owner stamps out a bunch of coins to sell to the public, which can then be traded at prices determined by the value of the laundry service.
To date, over half a billion dollars has flooded into blockchain companies by way of token sales, and the last few months have seen an eye-popping acceleration in the rate and price of new offerings. This July, a blockchain project called Tezos set a record by raking in over $200 million with an ICO.
Such astronomical investments have led some observers to complain that there is a grim hypocrisy at work. “The blockchain entrepreneurs who are pushing these schemes are really demonstrating all the avarice and cupidity which they ascribe to standard financial services” and government-backed currencies, says Preston Byrne, the cofounder of Monax Industries, an open platform for blockchain developers. “So, when the money starts flowing in their direction, they’re becoming equally careless about the public—whom they once were.”
However, others argue that the ICO, as a new class of investment vehicle, is just as disruptive as the applications being funded.
“Money is not the root of all evil. Equity is the root of all evil,” says Joel Monegro, who left Union Square Ventures to start Placeholder, a new fund devoted exclusively to blockchain technologies.
His argument, which is often repeated by blockchain startup leaders, is that giving founders and employees equity in a company encourages them to hoard that wealth rather than use it to improve their products.
An app-specific coin, on the other hand, is not only a financial instrument but the means for accessing a technology. It follows that the more people use a service, the more demand there will be for the token required to access that service.
“My incentive as a company is not to extract more profits but to get more usage, because the token appreciates in value with the usage of the service. You completely flip the incentives,” says Monegro.
In the United States at least, the ICO binge has likely come to an end. In late July, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sent a chill through the startup scene. It issued a warning that many of the ICOs reviewed by the department fell into the category of securities and would therefore be bound by its rules.
Nevertheless, the trailing edge of the tsunami of ICO cash is still washing up on the shores of the industry. Only time will tell if it’s put to good use.
“Times have changed, and very quickly. Some of us early adopters, who struggled financially three and four years ago but held onto their beliefs and their coins, are very well off now,” says Hacera’s Levi. “We still need Bitcoin and Ethereum to operate at larger scales, and enterprises need to decentralize more and secure their sensitive data. We are now facing a new and different kind of a challenge: Given the vast amounts of money invested, it remains to be seen how many old-timers and newcomers will stay true to the cause and continue to work to change the world with the technology that already changed theirs.”
My last test drive of a General Motors vehicle was in 2009, a blazing yellow Camaro, the classic muscle car. It cranked out between 295 and 427 horsepower, depending on the model, and looked like it would eat kittens on sight. Still on the market, the Camaro is a car manufactured mostly for men with egos that are either too big or too small, depending on your psychoanalyst.
As I wrote then, the Camaro is a symbol of the greatness of the internal combustion engine that will continue to blow away the namby-pamby green electric cars of the fantasy future.
Of the coming all-electric GM Volt, I scoffed: “The Camaro will be more a part of the (auto industry) recovery than pipe dreams about Volts and lithium batteries and electricity fill-up locations.” The Volt was one of those “green things that might never make it to 60 miles per hour.”
Well, that was 2009. Let me tell you about my latest test drive, a blazing metallic orange GM Bolt, the auto giant’s 2017 follow-up to the Volt. It may not be Camaro furious, but it is fast, with 286 foot-pounds of torque and snappy acceleration that can take the Bolt to 60 miles per hour in about 6.5 seconds.
Varoooom.
Or rather, no varoom. Silence, practically. The Bolt is no muscle car, but its all-electric carbon-free system smoothly produces power that can deliver enough pep and speed to triumph over any street and expressway. It feels cool to drive, has a digital dash with all the data, an impressive infotainment system along with a four-door spread that contains plenty of back seat room and SUV-like space behind.
Reconsider the e-car
It is clear that electric vehicle (EV) technology is evolving quickly and that many of today’s apparent limitations – range is still a major issue – may be overcome tomorrow. As global manufacturers compete with new models and battery technology there will be a growing market for EVs. Even by today’s standard, the Bolt is a great car and I may buy one – even though the campaign for electric vehicles makes no economic sense.
Nobody should believe that fun-filled EVs are going to blow away the internal combustion engine over the next couple of decades. Nor should anybody accept the idea that electric vehicles are a great liberating technology that will rescue us from the alleged stranglehold of big oil and big government authoritarianism. The EV is not going to drive us into clean freedom and individual self-determination.
From top to bottom, the global e-car movement is a state-managed attempt to reshape the global economy away from fossil-fuel based internal combustion power toward electricity-based power.
The very existence of electric vehicles is a product of the biggest big government intervention scheme since Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward into agriculture collectivism in China and C.D. Howe’s Wartime Industries Control Board in 1940 to take over most of the Canadian economy to defeat Hitler. Now we have a war on carbon instead.
According to plan, by 2040, or some such date, the dirty carbon-based internal combustion engine will be outlawed and replaced by the clean and cheap electric motor.
There’s 150 years of history leading up to the Bolts, Teslas and e-Golfs of today. In his 2001 book, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History, economics professor David Kirsch documents the brief rise and fall of the U.S. Electric Vehicle Company, an EV pioneer that failed more than 100 years ago. If failed for the simple reason that it could not compete with fossil-fuel engines or overcome electricity hook-up and supply problems. No big-government dictated the winner in the battle to replace horses. “Public policy was not an important component of the process that produced the internal combustion-powered automobile,” concludes Kirsch, “but it will likely be instrumental in the transition away from gasoline.”
That’s an understatement. Behind the Bolt, the e-Golf and other EVs is the hand of big government – from development costs to the retail price of the car to the supply and price of electricity and on into the future need for massive expansion of electricity generation. How many new mega-hydro dams or nuclear plants will it take to go electric?
In Ontario, GM prices a basic Bolt at $44,000 – but if I buy one the province will give me a subsidy of $14,000. That comes on top of whatever aid GM received from U.S. governments.
And then there’s the electricity. The government will pay for half the price of a new fast power charger. Otherwise, e-cars can be charged more slowly on 120v or 240v outlets. The murky pricing of electricity creates misleading beliefs about the cheapness of filling up batteries for maybe $2.50.
Terence Corcoran, electric car skeptic
By my calculations, filling up the Bolt with 60 kilowatt/hours of Ontario power will cost somewhere between $5.50 during off-peak overnight hours or $11 during peak hours. For that I should able to drive 250 to 300 kilometres. To get 250 kilometers out of a Chevy Cruz (rated at 100 kilometres on six litres of gas) would cost $17. So there are savings.
But wait. About one third of the gasoline price is taxes, worth billions to governments that use the funds to help build roads. So when a driver who switches to electricity says he’s saving hundreds of dollars a month, at least a third of the savings is avoided taxes, essentially another EV subsidy.
More subsidies and mandates are going to be needed to install electric fill-up stations and new hydro distribution systems, locally, provincially and nationally. In Norway, the government’s e-car subsidy regime – including exemption from 25 per cent taxes, toll-free driving on toll routes, free public parking, free use of public transport lanes – is costing the government so much the plans are to be phased out.
As for power supply, at least big oil is a competitive industry. Instead of freedom, EVs promise to deliver us into the hands of government electricity monopolies run by politicians. In many provinces, electricity is a shambles of policy and pricing. The transition to electric transportation will expand their central planning grip over the economy.
It’s Kay versus Corcoran in the great electric car debate
Longer term, the great EV leap forward will require massive new investments in electricity generation. Ottawa’s long-term anti-carbon energy plan says that by 2050 Canada will need 278 terrawatts (a trillion watts) of new electricity capacity just to cover the forecast demand for electric transportation. Vancouver energy consultant Aldyen Donnelly says that would mean building at least 40 new hydro projects similar to British Columbia’s Site C dam project between 2020 and 2050. That implies 1.3 new, large dams each and every year – at a capital cost of at least $16 billion per year including related transmission infrastructure costs.
Improbability is no deterrent to e-car planners. Every day there are calls for more. Electric Mobility Canada, backed by industry and others, wants Ottawa to budget in 2018 for an EV exemption from the GST and funding for a national network of charging stations.
It may seem a great leap to go from admiring and even buying a GM Bolt to damning the concept of electric vehicles as a big-government intrusion. My take is that EVs are an expensive niche market that could develop over time.
Meanwhile, if everybody wants to subsidize my Bolt, who am I to argue? It’s a great car. Great drive. As for energy use per kilometre, I drove 62 kilometers, but the range indicator on the flashy dash said I had used up 100k. It was hot and the air conditioner seems to have burned up more than a third of kilowatt consumption. The cold-weather heater would do the same. Maybe there’ll soon be a special subsidy for EV climate control systems.
E-cars are quick and quiet. But are they the future of driving?
Read what Jonathan Kay has to say about liberty, regulations and his switch to electric
For decades, we have heard that emerging markets are poised for huge growth that will yield even greater prosperity. But a long list of obstacles always seems to be getting in the way of realizing this potential. Startup accelerator programs have been touted as one path to faster progress. Much like their famed Silicon Valley counterparts, emerging market accelerators aim to boost startups’ potential for raising growth capital. We wanted to examine whether the boost that accelerators give in emerging market contexts is different from similar programs in North America or Europe. Our research shows that the effects of acceleration are remarkably similar for entrepreneurs across countries and even continents. Unfortunately, mismatched goals between investors and entrepreneurs as well as a potential cultural bias may both prove to limit the positive effect that accelerators have in emerging market contexts. Regardless, accelerators still have an important role to play that can help position entrepreneurs for success.
When we began collecting data in 2013 to explore differences between startup acceleration in emerging markets and in high-income countries, we expected stark differences. Business environments in most emerging markets are complex and can be difficult for even the most experienced entrepreneur to navigate. So while running any startup is tough, we assumed that launching a new business in Mombasa would be much more difficult than running one in Menlo Park. However, we were surprised to find far fewer differences in the effects of acceleration than we had expected.
Our most recent report with data on over 2,000 ventures from 42 accelerator programs, shows that across country settings, accelerated ventures grow at significantly higher rates compared to ventures that applied but were not accepted into the accelerator program. Surprisingly (to us anyway), the average effects of acceleration on equity and debt raised were nearly identical in emerging market and high-income country contexts.
More About the Research
Since 2013, the Entrepreneurship Database Program at Emory University has been partnering with accelerators and entrepreneur support programs to collect detailed data from entrepreneurs during their application processes. These entrepreneurs are then resurveyed every six months to gather valuable follow-up data. You can examine our data and methodology here.
We were also surprised to find that emerging market ventures are typically older than startups applying to accelerator programs in high-income countries, are earning more revenue, and have hired more employees. Despite this, ventures in high-income countries attract roughly twice as much early stage investment as these promising emerging market ventures. Without acceleration, emerging market ventures are simply not able to attract the investment that is consistent with their underlying promise. And while emerging market accelerators programs are similarly effective at pushing capital into their ventures, acceleration alone is not closing this investment gap.
In interviews, investors in both emerging market and high-income country settings consistently report having more difficulty sourcing quality deals in emerging markets. Nearly all pointed to both the quality of the founding teams and HR risk as important factors — regardless of where the venture is based. However, at least on paper, emerging-market entrepreneurs are just as experienced and committed as high-income country entrepreneurs. In fact, entrepreneurs from emerging-market country contexts typically have the same or higher levels of education, work experience, and prior entrepreneurial experience as their high-income peers at the time of application. Yet, investors still report a lack of commitment and entrepreneurial experience in these entrepreneurs, which they say makes it difficult to invest in some markets compared to others.
Based on these findings, we believe that a main challenge when it comes to spurring early-stage investment in emerging markets may not be the actual quality of entrepreneurs, but perceptions about their quality and potential. Here are some suggestions that might help accelerator programs in those countries to better support these entrepreneurs.
It’s not all about venture funding. Accelerator programs are most successful when they provide the right help to the right people. Our research indicates that many emerging market entrepreneurs prioritize building their skill set or refining their product and marketing strategy over connecting with potential investors. In addition, while they are seeking to grow their businesses (and are investing as much of their own money on average as U.S. entrepreneurs, just over $50,000) they typically seek more modest amounts of outside investment and are not typically working towards an acquisition or IPO.
Accelerators should take the time to understand and align with these entrepreneurs’ needs and recognize that not all startups require venture capital funding right away. The most successful accelerators identify the respective entrepreneur’s specific financing needs rather than assuming that there is one path to success and scale.
When it is about venture funding, hone in on the best matches. When entrepreneurs are ready for investment, accelerators should do the work to make sure the right investors are in the room. They should also ensure that this investor access is more than a cursory pitch. As one entrepreneurship expert suggests, “Pitch sessions might be fun, but curated matchmaking may be more useful.” Accelerators need to understand exactly what investors are looking for and actively match pipeline for them, not just arrange for pitch sessions en masse.
Finding talent is critical. Beyond thoughtful investor introductions, helping entrepreneurs handle hiring and HR is an area where accelerators can be extremely helpful. Accelerators should help start-ups develop a talent strategy alongside their financial strategy. Whether it’s attracting founders or focusing on first hires, it’s important that entrepreneurs have a clear plan to attract and retain the best talent. Organizations like Open Capital Advisors, the Amani Institute, Shortlist, Creative Metier, and Village Capital are all developing tools to address talent issues in emerging markets, and many of those tools are free or open source.
Acknowledge implicit bias. One of the more complicated issues accelerators need to manage may be investors’ implicit bias. It’s no secret that gender biases affect investment decisions, in both high-income and emerging markets. Investors in emerging markets must also become aware of similar implicit biases that lead them to under-value entrepreneur credentials or misinterpret cross-cultural communication styles. In the latter respect, one of the acceleration experts whom we interviewed said, “We’ve seen that foreign (typically U.S.-based) investors in emerging markets find it easier to invest in expat founders because of cultural ease. They may even overlook key risks — such as lack of work permits or weak business track record — because among expat entrepreneurs the pitch is polished, confidence is high, and there is no language barrier.”
Our previous research corroborates this view. We found that in emerging markets, “transplant” founders raised twice the amount of equity than “local” (native-born) founders had. Other research has shown that for investors evaluating a pitch, business fundamentals matter less than their perception of character and trustworthiness, and the entrepreneur’s openness to feedback. Accelerators should consider modifying the standard pitch-session approach and find ways for the true potential of emerging market ventures to be appreciated.
We are excited by these initial findings. Our research indicates that accelerators have the potential to spur more growth but need to be aware of what can hamper investment in emerging market entrepreneurs. To level the playing field in a global marketplace, accelerators are in a unique position to help investors and entrepreneurs better connect and by doing so combat biased perceptions that cause misalignment in the first place.
These and many other fascinating insights are from the Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review study published this week, Reshaping Business With Artificial Intelligence. An online summary of the report is available here. The survey is based on interviews with more than 3,000 business executives, managers, and analysts in 112 countries and 21 industries. For additional details regarding the methodology, please see page 4.
The research found significant gaps between companies who have already adopted and understand Artificial Intelligence (AI) and those lagging. AI early adopters invest heavily in analytics expertise and ensuring the quality of algorithms and data can scale across their enterprise-wide information and knowledge needs. The leading companies who excel at using AI to plan new businesses and streamline existing processes all have solid senior management support for each AI initiative.
Key takeaways include the following:
72% of respondents in the technology, media, and telecommunications industry expect AI to have a significant impact on product offerings in the next five years. The technology, media and telecommunications industry has the highest expectations for AI to accelerate new product and service offerings of all industries tracked in the study, projecting a 52% point increase in the next five years. AI-based improvements are expected to deliver Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) gains in the Financial Services and Professional Services industries as well. The following graphic compares expectations for AI’s expected contributions to business offerings and process improvements over the next five years by industry.
Customer-facing activities including marketing automation, support, and service in addition to IT and supply chain management are predicted to be the most affected areas by AI in the next five years. Demand management, supply chain optimization, more efficient distributed order management systems, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that can scale to support new business models are a few of the many areas AI will make contributions to the in the next five years. The following graphic provides an overview of operations, IT, customer-facing, and corporate center functions where AI is predicted to contribute.
84% of respondents say AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage. 75% state that AI will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures. The research shows that AI will be the catalyst of entirely new business models and change the competitive landscape of entire industries in the next five years. 69% of respondents expect incumbent competitors in their industry to use AI to gain an advantage. 63% believe the pressure to reduce costs will require their organizations to use AI in the next five years.
Despite high expectations for AI, only 23% of respondents have incorporated it into processes and product and service offerings today. An additional 23% have one or more pilots in progress, and 54% have no adoption plans in progress, 22% of which have no current plans. The following graphic provides insights into the current adoption of AI with survey respondents.
By completing a cluster analysis of survey respondents based on AI understanding and adoption questions, four distinct maturity groups emerged including Pioneers, Investigators, Experimenters, and Passives. 19% of the respondent base is Pioneers or those organizations who understand and are adopting AI. The study says that “these organizations are on the leading edge of incorporating AI into both their organization’s offerings and internal processes.” Investigators (32%) are organizations that understand AI but are not deploying it beyond the pilot stage. Experimenters (13%) are organizations that are piloting or adopting AI without deep understanding. Passives (36%) are organizations with no adoption or much knowledge of AI.
Pioneers and Investigators are finding new ways to use AI to create entirely new sources of business value. Pioneers (91%) and Investigators (90%) are much more likely to report that their organization recognizes how AI affects business value than Experimenters (32%) and Passives (23%). One of the most differentiating aspects of the four maturity clusters is understanding the differences and value of investing in high-quality data and advanced AI algorithms. Compared to Passives, Pioneers are 12 times more likely to understand the process for training algorithms and ten times more likely to comprehend the development costs of AI-based products and services.
Organizations in the Pioneer cluster excel at analytics expertise versus competitors and have exceptional data governance processes in place, further accelerating their AI-driven growth. Pioneers are excellent at change management, citing their senior management’s vision and leadership as a foundational strength in accomplishing their AI-based initiative Early adopter Pioneers are also adept at product development, capable of changing existing products and services to take advantage of new technologies.
61% of all organizations interviewed see developing an AI strategy as urgent, yet only 50% have one done today. The research found that regarding company size, the largest companies (those with more than 100K employees) are the most likely to have an AI strategy, but only half (56%) have one. The following graphic compares the percentage of respondents by maturity cluster who say developing a plan for Al is urgent for their organization relative to those that have a strategy in place today.
70% of respondents are personally looking forward to delegating the more mundane, repetitive aspects of their jobs to AI. 84% believe employees will need to change their skill sets to excel at delivering AI-based initiatives and strategies. Taking this approach provides career growth and a chance to become more marketable for many whose jobs that are being increasingly automated. Cautious optimism regarding AI’s effects on employment dominates early adopter organizations, not dire fatalism. The bottom line is that AI is providing opportunities for career growth that will only accelerate in the future. Those that seize the chance to learn and earn more will end up having AI removing the mundane tasks from their jobs, leaving more time for the most challenging and rewarding work.
The events industry is a fast paced one and is set to grow all around the world. According to a report by Business Visits and Events Partnership (BVEP) the event industry is worth £40 billion in the UK with conferences and meeting accounting for £19.9 billion. With events beginning to shape visitor economy globally, we’ll continue to see how this will be impacted by technology.
Mobile Tickets
Mobile is transforming every industry on a global level, and the events industry is no exception to this change. One way this has innovated events is through ticket buying systems. The usage rates for mobile apps has increased over the years and consumers now expect a fully integrated mobile experience when attending exhibitions, forums, and conferences.
Wearable Technology
Like Mobile technology, the market for wearable tech continues to grow and find new niches. Despite reports of sales of the Apple watch, smart watches lead the market. A massive development from the events world is that consumers can now use Eventbrite on both Apple Watch and Android Smart watches!
With the market size of global wearable technology set to increase to over US$ 4 billion in 2017 tech innovators can easily gain entrance with just a show of their wrist as well as capture memorable moments and information from your event.
Live Streaming
As services like Periscope, Facebook, and Instagram Live continue to gain momentum, the idea of live streaming is becoming more popular and mainstream to event organizers. The use of this platform is a great opportunity to continue an engagement stream with delegates who are unable to attend the event, and could ultimately lead to the growth of ticket sales in the long term.
However, some event organizers worry that live streaming could potential encourage customers who would have paid for a ticket to stay at home instead and access the event’s content for free through one of these streaming services.
Whatever view you take, streaming technology is something to keep on your radar.
Event Personalisation
Event personalization is a great development to help organizations collect valuable information on their attendees which can be analyzed to create more powerful and customised event experience.
This form of personalization will make your audience feel special. Allowing them to pick and choose what aspects of the event suits them, from the choice of sessions to attend to organizing meeting with other attendees, can increase engagement and loyalty. The more you can personalize events to cater to meet individual objectives you will definitely see an increase in attendance.
Personalised experiences are becoming more and more popular and attendees are increasingly expecting both the communication about an event and the live experience to be tailored to them in some way. Technology makes this level of personalization possible.
The phrase “public relations” doesn’t accurately define the role of PR in the future.
So said the 2017 Global Communications Report, from the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. The survey found, “87% of PR executives believe the term ‘public relations’ does not describe their future.”
Why?
The evolution of digital media has forced the integration of previously distinct marketing disciplines. The lines have blurred and functions are now interwoven.
Is this the end of the road for the public relations professional? Will the function of communications be subsumed permanently by marketing?
No, I don’t think so. It’s just the opposite.
The approach of the classically trained PR professional, who has diligently acquired technical and digital skills, is permeating marketing. This has been evident in marketing trends over the last decade, where core PR tenets have been a unifying enabler.
PR is the link to SEO. The influence of PR was clear in search marketing when Google became the new front page. It’s still true today. If you want to earn backlinks, you have to do something new and unique. Directory submissions and pitching to fix old broken links is often fruitless work.
PR steered the approach to social media. We saw PR in the rise of social media, where authenticity reigned and rejected commercialization. You can’t win over a reporter over with an advertisement, and as it turned out, readerships and social media had a lot in common.
PR the first to inbound marketing. The PR approach was apparent too in inbound marketing – earning attention and forgoing interruption marketing. It’s called earned media because it cannot be purchased.
PR in content marketing. Today, content marketing in many ways is guided by the same editorial principles inherent to effective PR: trust, education, utility and in some cases, entertainment. As I’m prone to say, PR is the best-kept secret in effective content marketing.
These ideas are not new. For example, a 2010 survey of 966 PR professionals I led for a former employer, Vocus, drew similar conclusions. The results, in part, prompted the company’s then CEO to observe that marketing increasingly looks more like PR.
PR isn’t being subsumed by marketing – it’s influencing a better approach to marketing. PR isn’t diminishing in business value, it’s more strategic than ever. PR isn’t becoming less important – it’s becoming more important.
So, while I agree with the conclusion, that the term “public relations” might be less fitting in the future, that doesn’t in any way diminish its role in the marketing mix.
Indeed, successful businesses will seize on this as an opportunity because the future of marketing looks more like public relations.
As of 2016, tech industry turnover rate was 560,250 professionals per month, reaching a ten year high in the United States. With no sign attrition will naturally decrease, organizations are compelled to consider hiring and retention strategies that prevent the expensive turnover of their technical assets. The following strategies are those that achieve the best results.
Get Strategic about Hiring IT Consultants
On the surface, the decision between direct hire or contract employees might appear to have no bearing on your employee retention strategies. However, hiring an IT professional as a direct hire employee when the position should be contract can actually trigger employee attrition.
The most common reason IT professionals search for or take a new job indicates the subtle influence employment type can have on turnover. According to a Spiceworks survey, 69% of IT professionals leave their job to advance their IT skills. How many of those IT workers leave because of their own evolving technical interests versus a lack of sustainable technical challenges for them from the start? The exact number is hard to gauge, but the problem can be lessened by giving careful consideration to which positions are made direct hire and which are contract.
For example, if a position only requires a circumscribed skillset or does not provide many opportunities for technical growth, companies are often better off hiring IT consultants. That way, they can get the best performance out of a candidate while maintaining control over unexpected attrition. Contracts can always be renewed to meet ongoing needs. Plus, consultants are less likely to leave a position before a contract expires.
Use Management to Spark Engagement
Strong employee engagement often corresponds with higher employee retention rates. Tech employees who are energized by their daily challenges and work environment are less likely to seek out other opportunities. Yet companies cannot leave that level of engagement up to chance in the current candidate market. Management teams needs to be proactive about how they interact with IT professionals if they want to limit their employee turnover.
Gartner employee engagement studies show that managers who practice these habits are more likely to have a higher percentage of engaged employees:
Being Open and Approachable – The extent to which a manager makes his or herself accessible and available for feedback has an impact on engagement. At least 54% of employees who strongly agree that their manager is open and approachable are engaged compared to only 2% of those who strongly disagree with the statement. When employees feel comfortable in their work environment, they are naturally more willing to explore new solutions and challenge old assumptions, further investing them in their work.
Setting Performance Goals – Giving proactive guidance to employees increases their engagement significantly. About 69% of employees who strongly agree that their manager helps to set performance goals feel engaged compared to only 8% that strongly disagree. Not only do employees feel accountable, but they feel that their work is recognized when they hit those performance targets.
Focusing on Employee Strengths – Allowing IT professionals to engage in their strengths more regularly might seem obvious, but the results when done right are exceptional. Approximately 67% of employees who strongly agree that their managers focus on their strengths are engaged compared to 1% that strongly disagree. Managers who are conscious of their employees’ strengths not only garner the best ROI from projects, but reinforce the value of their work.
Recruit in Ways that Lower Employee Attrition Rates
The work of lowering employee attrition rates starts long before you hire an IT professional. The sourcing and screening process are indispensable to finding candidates from the get-go who will remain with your company for a longer tenure. The exact strategies will vary between companies based on their industry and culture, but the following tactics continue to prove successful for top tech companies:
Using Data in Your Candidate Search – Data on your workforce is an incredible resource for lowering employee attrition rates. Information on the source of candidates, historic levels of employee engagement, performance metrics, and other data can help to develop improved hiring criteria that predict who will remain with your company long-term. Hiring with predictive analysis not only cuts down on attrition rates, but has the potential to improve employment overall.
Pipelining Candidates in Advance – Out of necessity, most companies are reactive rather than proactive with their hiring practices. They lack the time to engage in marketing and engagement activities with technical and cultural candidates prior to an immediate need. When they do pipeline prospects, often with the assistance of IT recruiting companies, they have better success eliminating candidates from consideration who will contribute to premature employee attrition.
Want to learn more about competitive hiring strategies that limit your future employee turnover? Get your free copy of 11 Hiring Tactics That Get Tech Companies the Best Talent, our eBook exploring the different hiring strategies that get the best long-term results.
Have you ever noticed how happy people are when they are buying things? What about you? How did you feel the last time you took delivery of your new car? Was it the new car smell? The finish? The wheels? The look? The brand? What about the last time you bought a new smartphone, tablet or notebook computer? And how happy were you when you moved into your house or apartment? When you installed the swimming pool, bought the boat, renovated the kitchen, painted the house, bought new furniture, the flat screen TV, or a new wardrobe? Happy buying extends to vacations and even sporting goods. It never ends! The excitement from these purchases tends to last much longer than the moments themselves.
So if we all love buying stuff, why do salespeople struggle so much when they try to sell stuff? Why isn't it as friction-free as an abundance of happy buyers would suggest it should be?
The financial sector is in luck. New technology has introduced it to newer tools in the form of software provided by Fintech companies. At the rate the Fintech industry is growing right now, financial institutions such as banks and accounting firms will have a lot of products and services to choose from.
For FinTech companies, on the other hand, the growth of the industry also means updating their current marketing arsenal. Success is measured by the number of leads a company generates periodically, and it makes perfect sense to up the ante in terms of lead generation and appointment setting.
This remains to be a challenge for a lot of service providers as financial software and hardware can be a hard sell if the right strategies are not applied. For sure, content marketing is the right way to go since most of these companies want to secure better relations with their audience on top of improving their lead generation game. What’s more, for an industry that is all about communicating the technical side of things, Fintech can greatly benefit from pushing content across multiple digital channels.
Still, the use of content for Fintech has yet to enter the mainstream as companies prefer to make use of the usual stuff (i.e. white papers). Of course, technical papers and blog articles are effective in their own right, but the thing is, it’s hardly content marketing.
A limited understanding of content can actually spell trouble for Fintech companies, if not muddle up what they have set out to do in the first place. In fact, the 2016 B2B Benchmarks Report by the William Mills Agency has pointed to at least three challenges that are hounding B2B companies, Fintech included:
Producing engaging, informative and effective content (60%)
Measuring the effectiveness of content (57%)
Creating content consistently (57%)
Added to that, most Fintech companies struggle with the limited resources they have and the minimal expertise they have to make do. But mostly, it is more an issue of whether or not a Fintech company is comfortable with so and so marketing strategy. There is a perceived unwillingness to use a diversified content mix owing to the idea that Fintech touches on the most serious sentiments of the businesses to which it is catered.
What most Fintech companies don’t get is that newer marketing trends are available and it is important to pay attention to these trends. For Jerry Goldstein of the William Mills Agency, being able to take heed of current content practices can also improve a marketing team’s capabilities in handling leads. He then cites how content effectively led to greater marketing and sales alignment, which we all know can spell success for a Fintech company.
Again, it is just a matter of applying the right strategies. Luckily, we are able to provide the most important of these in the form of the following:
Pay attention to keywords.
Generating leads through your landing page is a matter of using the right (and the right amount of) keywords. They are essential to get your product the visibility it deserves and eventually acquires the right people from a sea of prospects. For this, you have to list down the possible keywords your audience may use and create content based on these keywords.
Go social.
Forget everything you know about social as a Fintech company. Reach out to your prospects the way how your best friend reaches out to you when you need him the most. Social media can be that best friend, especially when you need a little boost in terms of generating quality leads. After all, businesses today also scout for solutions through Facebook and other social media avenue.
Craft enticing propositions.
Marketing is all about convincing people. In this sense, you can never really draw in the right prospects if you craft lackluster propositions that fail to meet their expectations and demands. Listen to what your audience wants and build your message from there.
Consider the timing.
If you are going to announce a trade show or any corporate event for that matter, hold your content until the big day arrives. That way, anyone who already knew about the event in advance can maintain a certain level of interest that will surely get them glued on the event.
Engage market influencers.
Allow yourself some time to interact with market influencers. Not only will they provide you important knowledge in marketing your Fintech products, but they can also improve your brand’s visibility. Prospects will be more than willing to engage you if an influencer mentions you in a tweet or write the guest post on your blog.
Strategize with your sales team.
Planning a clear marketing campaign involves figuring out what content to include that will attract quality leads. In this case, you will need your sales team to collaborate with you and hear their concerns. This, in effect, will result in better lead nurturing as sales will prompt marketing to adjust their efforts.
Grab a copy of our FREE EBOOK, The Ultimate Lead Generation Kit Ebook! Updated with links to the best and latest techniques that will help generate quality sales leads for your business
Regardless of the niche that you are trying to penetrate, the beginning is bound to be difficult, and most startups barely survive.
Let’s face it; you are not the only person in your niche with a great business idea. Despite that, what really matters in business success is not the strength of your idea, but the strategies that you employ to make your business a success.
With about 90% of businesses failing within the first five years, it is clear that the odds are stacked up against you. To be part of the successful 10 % of businesses that live long enough to make considerable profits, you need to be smarter than your competitors.
Here are 4 crucial things you need to do to ensure that every step of your startup gets you closer to reaching its full potential (and maybe making you millions while you’re at it).
1. Build a solid business plan
A business plan is a document that elaborates your plan to achieve your business goals.
It all starts with the goals. Important goals that you should define when creating your startup include;
Define your customers and locate them
Build your product
Launch your product
Milestones to reach before your launch
Reach x amount in revenue by y number of years
With a list of the goals you want to achieve and the timeline you want to achieve them in, it’s time to start creating a plan. What steps will you take to bring you closer to your goals?
A plan helps you have a clear picture of the decisions you’re going to take, the resources you are going to need and the potential setbacks that you may face.
By creating a formal business plan, you are increasing your chances of success by up to 16%. By failing to plan first, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Does your product or service fill a need in the market? Are there people who are willing to buy your product?
Let’s face it. One of the key motivators behind your startup is making money. If you’re not making money, how will you pay your bills?
One of the biggest blows your startup can suffer after you’re up and running is to run out of product demand.
Product demand drives sales. Without customers who need and want your product, you’ll have no one to sell to, and you’re headed down a path that leads to failure.
To ensure that your business remains profitable, you have to ensure that what you’re offering your customers is in demand and that it’s good enough to give you an edge over your competitors.
How do you create a product that’s profitable? Do market research. It’s that simple.
Before launching your startup, you need to invest a lot of your resources into knowing who your target customers are, what they need and where you can find them. If you realize that your product isn’t in demand, you can go back to the drawing board and figure out what to do.
According to The Balance, Market research shows you where the opportunities are. This means that even before you launch, you’re destined for success.
3. Maintain a healthy cash flow
As your startup grows, you’ll need money to invest in big projects that take you the extra mile.
Saving and reducing your budget doesn’t cut it. You have to have enough money to fall back on when you need to make a huge financial leap such as venturing into a new market or introducing a new product.
To keep growing, you need to maintain a strong cash flow. This means that the money coming into your business should be more than the money going out. It has little to do with spending within your means and has everything to do with increasing your assets, resources, and value to ensure that when you need to grow, you have the necessary resources to finance it.
When your business is making just enough money to survive, but not enough money to grow rapidly, you need external sources of money. There are two ways to get the funding you need.
Find investors to back you up. Business investors are always looking for growing startups that show promise in making them money. If you have a great product and an elaborate business plan, it’s not hard to find investors to invest in your startup. Relying on investors allows you to focus on growing your business without worrying about where you’ll get the funds to grow your startup.
Take a loan. Taking a loan from a friend or a family member can ruin your personal relationships if your startup fails. This is why about 8% of all startups use business loans as their primary source of funding. To ensure you succeed, do some research on local firms or banks that offer small business funding in the form of loans. You’ll need the loan to invest into your business and then pay the loan off when your business picks up and starts generating profits.
Finances are a tricky topic for most startup founders. It’s a good habit to know where you’ll get your funding from even before you need the money. It’ll help you look for the best solutions available and avoid last-minute mistakes.
4. Spend within your means
Bad spending habits guarantee that you will fail in future. This is true in life and business as well.
Simple math proves that if you spend more than you’re making, you’ll eventually run out of resources.
During the first few months after launching, many business owners lose track of their spending. There is too much to do, and too little time to take inventory of everything. They spend way too much of their money of non-essentials, and in the long run, they realize too late that they’ve run out of cash.
When you start a business, it’s very easy to imagine you’re going to make profits within the first month, but that isn’t always true. Most startups rely on their capital for a few months before they start making money.
To ensure that you are spending the right amount of money, come up with a list of your business’s essentials. Everything else can wait until you’re more financially grounded.
Do you need to hire more employees to survive? Do you need bigger office space? Do you need paid vacations for your team? The key thing is to identify what you need to survive and only spend just enough money on that.
In summary
The lifeline of startup success is the decision-making abilities of the founder. For every startup that succeeds and blossoms into a profitable business, there are hundreds of others that launched and failed, and others that no one will ever hear about.
Don’t let your startup fail. Learn from the mistakes of startups that excelled and ensure that your startup not only survives for the first few years but also thrives to outperform its competitors and make handsome profits for you and your investors.
I was in the audience for a panel looking at sales, and the future of sales (yes, another). What made this a wee bit more interesting is they actually had some buyers on the panel, bringing a level of reality often absent from such affairs. One CEO made a comment that at first seems basic, but when expanded on his experience, it was easy to see why we as sellers think we are doing something, the buyer completely misses, or misinterprets.
He spoke of how he measures a good meeting, a simple measure, but as he says often not achieved by sellers. He feels that is a meeting with a sales person makes him think, look at something in a tangibly different way as a result of the meeting with the rep, and best of all, if he learned something new. If the seller was able to challenge some of his assumptions, and preconceptions, it often led to one or more of the above measures. He was asked if he had heard of the Challenger Sale, and if those were the type of sellers he was looking to work with? He said he was aware of the book, and as he said he has had “the pleasure of participating in meetings where sales professional challenged in the way the book spells out, and others, where the sales people just play point-counterpoint, the only challenge there is making it through the meeting.”
Many in sales will agree that it is the role of a seller to educate their buyer, the question is how that is done. Think back to school, who were the best teachers, the ones that made you think, reconsider your view, and help you take on new concepts and practices? While there is a Madison Ave image of the teacher, a lecturer dispensing information and lessons. These are the ones where you sat in class and asked if it was on the test, if so you retained it, if not, why take up storage space.
However, most people remember those teachers who left a lasting mark or impression; more importantly, taught them how to think about a scenario or situation, in a way that leads to analysis and understanding. These educators, the best educators, start with engagement. Engagement is more than just being present, many executives sit through meeting, nod politely, but not be engaged. No engagement = no understanding = no purchase.
To engage, you have to get them to think, as Gerald Bostock told us, “I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think”. Getting them to think takes questions, planned, scripted questions based on experience, and expertise. The right questions interrupt a racing mind; while they may be in the room, most busy buyers are thinking about the next meeting, or the one after that. Good strategic questions, based on your 360 Deal View work, keep the buyer present, and open to ideas they would miss when drifting in though. At the same time, as Dorothy Leeds explains in her The 7 Powers of Questions: Secrets to Successful Communication in Life and at Work, questions get people to think, and that’s always good, especially these days.
Evidence of engagement is when they are not just willing to share info, but crucial information about gaps in their thinking, and how they can address the issues you are exploring with them. Meeting that advance the buyer’s knowledge, also advance their confidence, and willingness to buy something other than what they thought at the start of the meeting. We have all been to meetings where there was a lot of information exchanged, but no one left any smarter, or more willing to buy. As with most good education, it has a purpose and a destination, so should your sales meetings.
Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.
In the early days of any business, your main goal is just to hustle and get customers.
If you’re part of the founding team, chances are you’ll be out there making calls yourself, sending emails, scheduling appointments, qualifying customers, and closing deals.
And it makes sense. There’s no point in building a team when you don’t have the revenue to cover the costs yet.
On top of that, selling can be a great way to understand your customers at a deep level -- you’ll get insight into your prospects’ objections, fears, hopes, frustrations, and more.
But after a certain point, once you have some revenue coming in, it’s probably not worth it for you to be selling.
Your time is better spent managing team members, defining strategy, speaking at events, or doing other higher-level tasks to grow your business.
Even if you decide to continue doing sales, it may be smart to scale. For example, if you’re making 20 calls per week and closing one out of every four prospects, your results could potentially triple by adding another one or two sales reps to your team.
How do you really it’s the right time to build a sales development team?
Build a Scientific Sales Process
“If I could just find a rock star sales rep in my industry who can just help … you know, close deals …”
Nope. Nope. Nope.
CEOs, founders, and management -- it is your job to learn and build your sales process. Only after you have a tried-and-tested blueprint should you begin hiring salespeople.
In other words, you can’t simply educate them on your market and your product and expect them to bring in sales. If you do, you’re more likely to lose money than make it.
You must first build your sales process or hire someone to help specifically with developing it. And make sure that someone has experience building sales teams at young companies or startups (not a “rock star” sales rep at a Fortune 5000 company).
What do I mean by “sales process”?
At the very least you need to have a sales system that is reliable and consistent enough to measure your sales activities (inputs) and predict results or sales (outputs).
Why? Because you want to understand your total costs of hiring an experienced sales development rep to help you grow sales versus the potential total revenue you can bring in. This helps you hire at the right moment.
To illustrate, here’s a simplified version of the sales process equation I use with the sales teams we work with.
The Sales Process Equation
TL x LC (%) x OC (%) x WD (%) x ADS = SF
TL = Total Leads
LC = Leads Converted
OC = Opportunities Converted
WD = Won Deals
ADS = Average Deal Size
SF = Sales Forecast
Now it’s more science than art.
Take Jon Snow (no, not that Jon Snow.)
This Jon is CEO of Snow Shovelers. He lives in an area where it snows a lot, so business is pretty good for Jon.
But Jon begins to wonder if he can get even more business with some additional sales help.
Jon knows his current outreach efforts generate approximately 50 leads per month.
He reviews average conversions for the year and finds 80% of his leads agree to a phone call.
He then looks at his phone calls and sees 75% ask for a quote.
Finally, he notes 50% of quotes lead to customers.
He also calculates his average deal size is $1,000.
Using the sales process equation, we can understand how much 50 leads are worth to Jon.
50 x 80% x 75% x 50% x $1000 = $15000 in total monthly sales
Jon realizes that although an experienced sales development rep may not be as successful as he is (since he’s the CEO), he does know the right person can come close to hitting $15,000 every month.
And since Jon has a well-documented sales process, he’s ready to start interviewing applicants for his first sales development rep.
You want sales today. I get it.
But no successful builder builds a house without a blueprint first.
Blueprint. Builders. House.
Sales process. Sales reps. More sales.
Build your sales blueprint before your sales development team -- and instead of having a “good sales month,” you’ll have a good sales system capable of generating business for many months to come.
Though many salespeople despise prospecting, it’s an important part of sales.
Unfortunately, the majority of reps use ineffective and outdated sales prospecting techniques, instead of the effective practices that could actually lead to a higher volume of well-qualified leads (and make them more partial to prospecting).
Just like every other aspect of the sales process, you need to put in the effort and focus required. This is the only way to prospect efficiently so that you don’t waste your time on unqualified leads that aren't suited for your product or service.
Use these modern sales prospecting techniques to help you better find leads who you can serve, engage, and eventually, convert to customers.
Sales Prospecting Methods
Sales prospecting methods are any way a salesperson conducts outreach to source new leads or engage with existing leads. Effective prospecting methods can vary by sales organization and industry and can include email outreach, social selling, event networking, and warm outreach over the phone.
Traditionally, there were two very different types of prospecting: outbound and inbound. Outbound was an approach that required the salesperson to conduct "cold" outreach in which they called and emailed prospects who had not opted in to speaking with them.
Inbound sales took the opposite approach, encouraging salespeople to build relationships with their prospects and call or email only those prospects who had expressed interest in their product or service.
Today, most sales experts agree the best approach to sales prospecting is a combination of both inbound and outbound selling.
1. Make warm calls.
Your initial contact with new prospects doesn't have to be — and in fact, shouldn't be — completely cold. It can be incredibly useful to warm up your prospects before making the initial contact.
You can increase your chances of a warmer reception by familiarizing the prospect with your name or your company affiliation before you make your first call or send your first email.
A few ideas as to how to achieve this: get introduced by a shared connection, comment on a piece of content the buyer shared on social media, or "like" a status update or job change announcement on LinkedIn.
2. Become a thought-leader.
By establishing yourself as a thought leader or subject matter expert in your industry, you can establish your credibility and trust before reaching out to new prospects.
Ways to establish yourself as a thought leader include starting a blog, writing guest articles for industry publications, and speaking at trade shows and conferences.
This also helps you familiarize your leads with your name before the initial contact, which was discussed in the first technique.
By changing your position from salesperson of products and services to a provider of solutions, you can increase your chance of getting referrals from happy customers.
Draw on these referrals when it comes time for you to introduce yourself to a new prospect. When you become a resource for your clients, before and after the sale, they’ll remember your help and will be willing to help you in return.
4. Reference a script.
For new salespeople, referencing a basic script while prospecting can help them reduce uncomfortable pauses, use the right language, and respond to common objections.
Experienced, seasoned sales representatives often recommend not using a script in order to sound more natural during conversations.
However, some do still use a script — it’s just so ingrained in their minds that it comes out sounding natural and unrehearsed. But whether you use a script or not, make sure to actively listen to your prospects and customize your conversation based on their needs.
5. Don’t sell.
Prospecting is the first step in selling, but in and of itself, it is not selling. It’s about sourcing leads who can then be qualified and entered into the sales funnel. Only once these steps have taken place can the selling begin.
If you want to be successful in today's sales environment, you need to focus on building relationships while prospecting. Start selling too quickly and you’ll put undue pressure on the prospect.
Building a foundation of trust can help you and the prospect become more comfortable with each other, so once selling techniques come into the picture, they’ll be more effective.
6. Follow up.
Keep the prospect in the loop and follow up at each step of the deal. Whether you're confirming a time for your next meeting or sending over additional resources, an email or call helps you build a relationship with your point of contact.
And it gives you the opportunity to further establish yourself as a trusted resource for the prospect, rather than simply following up with "just checking in".
By blocking off time to prospect, you'll be better off in the long run because you're actively filling your pipeline, which often results in more conversations and better win rates.
9. Spend time on social media.
Implement a social selling strategy and meet prospects wherever they are. It's likely that a fair amount of people who've researched your product are active on social media (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). Answer their questions and share content that's relevant to their research.
And your social selling activities can have a positive impact on your sales. In fact, companies who use social selling practices regularly are 40% more likely to hit their revenue goals than those who don't have a social selling process.
10. Host a webinar.
Webinars are a perfect place to source leads, because you know the attendees have a demonstrated interest in the topic. Partner with another organizations in your industry to host a webinar on a mutually beneficial topic.
After the webinar, poll your audience to see who's ready to learn more about your product/service. Consider a polling form that asks them to answer "Yes" or "No" to statements like "I'm ready for a demo," or "I'd like to learn more about [Your company name.]"
Follow up with those who responded positively to your poll or post-webinar survey within 24 hours, and schedule time for them to learn more. And don't give up on those who said they weren't yet ready to buy.
Place them into nurture campaigns, and stay in touch over the next few months to see if their buying position changes.
11. Ask for referrals.
If you're not asking for referrals, you're leaving your most reliable prospecting well untapped. Once you've successfully closed new business, ask your prospect or champion if there's anyone in their professional network you might connect with.
It's also a good idea to use follow-up communications over the next few months as another moment in which to ask for new connections.
For example, after your customer has onboarded (and is happy with their experience) ask, "I'm so glad you're already finding value in Sunrise Staffing Software Solutions. Is there anyone in your professional network who might also benefit from chatting with us?"
12. Network at events.
First, find the right events to attend. Identify why people are attending a certain conference, if the agenda has topics relevant to your ideal customer, what the size of the community is, and the overall purpose of the event.
If you sell project management software to entry- and mid-level designers, you might want to avoid a conference targeted toward design leaders or creative directors who aren't in the weeds with the types of software their designers are using.
Once you identify the events that will give you the greatest ROI, map out which sessions you'll attend, which happy hours or networking events you'll work, and whether or not your company will have a booth or speaking presence there.
13. Answer questions on Q&A forums.
Seek out ways to educate your audience on trends and best practices in your industry — and eventually educate them on your product.
Online forums, like LinkedIn Groups and Quora, allow likeminded people to post questions to the group members or audience and source answers from experts in the field. Join these platforms, and start by listening.
Get used to how people pose questions, review what is and is not allowed, and chime in on a few conversations before answering questions yourself. Once you've built some clout in the community, identify questions you can answer without bias.
For example, if you sell machinery for large agricultural operations, you might answer a question someone asks about the impact of AI on farming.
For example, if you sell a PPC tool, you might join the weekly #PPCChat, in which chat runners or guest hosts share a discussion topic ahead of time and industry folks share their thoughts and questions."
Questions are shared by the chat host and participants chime in with their answers using the chat hashtag.
Prater says, "Show up to these chats regularly and know when to contribute and when to listen. You’ll make connections with people each week, and you can ask if it’s alright to follow up with a few of them offline, after you’ve built foundational rapport."
Don't just stick to the same old sales prospecting playbook because it's what you've always done. Practice different techniques until you find the right mix of modern and effective sales techniques that effectively support your prospecting efforts and your sales goals.
I have been earning a living from search engine optimization for over 12 years and I’ve tried every tactic at one time or another.
Ever since Google started dropping algorithmic bombs around 2011 (think Panda, Penguin, and so on), SEO industry behavior has changed. Most SEO services have moved back onshore and “real” SEO is now an integrated part of holistic marketing.
That means legit SEO companies have become web designers, social media strategists, reputation managers and yes, content marketers.
In order to succeed, we as marketers and business owners must build our own audiences, strive for niche authority and become influencers. As such, I just recently started getting booked on podcasts and have been stunned by the benefits.
So Much Value in So Little Time
Pound-for-pound, I have never seen a tactic that has produced so many wins, with so little effort:
Unbelievable access to a highly engaged audience. In one 20 to 40-minute interview, with little preparation, you can access hundreds to thousands of highly targeted listeners. If this top ten list stopped here at #1, this by itself is all the reason you need to consider a podcast guesting campaign.
Easier than guest blogging. Guest blog posting is one of the most popular forms of content marketing. But it’s a grind because it takes a lot of time to write really good educational content (like I am doing right now on a Saturday morning), and there is a lot of spam and outreach noise that website owners have to deal with. Sure there are a lot of professional blog outreach services you can outsource to, but they can be pricey. The beauty of podcast guesting is that you get to be published on the host’s blog with valuable organic links via a show notes page (example).
Real personal connections. One of the big surprises to me was the feeling of friendship that develops during an interview. The fact that two people (the guest and the host) have each other’s undivided attention for an involved discussion creates a bond that can turn into collaboration. For example, in my own experience, hosts have offered to make personal introductions to other influential podcast hosts. Huge. Huge. Benefit.
High content production value. Most established podcasts, and even newer ones, put a lot of effort into production, including professional sound, editing, creating custom web graphics, and writing a custom show notes page that includes guest bio information, key takeaways, and resource and contact links.
Cross-amplification on steroids. When a podcast goes lives, there’s this cool feeling of a mini-launch that results in a highly shareable piece of content. Hosts are happy to have interesting guests, and guests are excited to be interviewed. The nature of the way podcasts are produced and distributed (audio, web page and often video) makes them much more shareable than typical blog posts – resulting in more likes, shares, tweets, backlinks and traffic.
Free long-form blog posts. I have found that some podcasts hosts will provide full interview transcripts on their show notes pages, but most don’t. When they don’t plan to publish the transcripts, I have asked hosts if I can transcribe the show at my own expense and post on my own site as a blog post. No one has ever said no! This is a great way to get really good, unique content on your site with no effort (and very little expense if you use a transcription service).
Increased dwell time. Dwell time has been a hot SEO topic for the last year or so. While Google does not directly acknowledge website dwell time as a ranking factor, most SEO experts believe there is a direct correlation between a page’s rankings and the amount of time users spend on the page. Podcasts, when embedded on a website, are unique because listeners are much more likely to listen for longer periods. A two-minute video seems really long because it commands all of your senses. But a podcast of 20 minutes goes by really fast because you can be doing other things while listening. Thus, embedding a podcast audio file on your site (as part of #6 above) may help your SEO efforts.
New trust badges and bragging rights. As you are interviewed on more podcasts, your reach in terms of the caliber of shows begins to snowball. In the 30 or so I have done this year, each one is better than the last. For example, next month I will be on John Lee Dumas’ highly popular podcast Entrepreneur on Fire – and plan to use this as an “as seen on” eye candy for my websites.
Online reviews. One of the things I’ve done, that most guests don’t, is send a request for review feedback right after the show. This allows me to not only get reviews on important review sites, but I also repurpose these into testimonials for my websites. Again, just the review equity from this alone make podcast guesting worth it.
Oh yeah, Sales! You can get lots of leads by being a guest on podcasts, but you can’t sell during the interview – this is a big no-no. Your job as a guest expert is to share your story and educate. If listeners like and learn from what you say, you will get leads by nature of being an informative guest. I have probably had at least $100,000 in new business (annualized) for my agency in a few short months, and it has definitely boosted book sales.
Putting My Money Where My Podcasting Mouth Is
Podcast guesting is so valuable, in fact, that I partnered with John Jantsch to create a podcast booking service called Podcast Bookers. We did this for a couple reasons:
John’s been podcasting since 2005 and gets pitched daily by folks that want to be on his popular podcast. He knows what makes for a compelling pitch to hosts and where the gaps are with respect to podcast booking service providers.
After interviewing podcast booking services and using a few of them, I saw how the service is executed in a one-dimensional way. Yet, I see so many more SEO benefits to podcast booking that no one is taking advantage of, so I just had to start my own service with a brand new approach.
Whether you use our specialized service, another podcasting booking service, or even your own direct outreach, I promise that if you are prepared, have an angle and a story to tell, you and your clients can use podcast guesting to skyrocket your influence and authority.
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
Today’s B2B buyers are wrestling with potentially risky decisions and often-confusing options. We shouldn’t be surprised if they decide to stick with the status quo or choose the cheapest of a set of apparently similar solutions.
Bob Apollo
