With social media, the personal is the professional. If you rely on your online presence as a means to earn money in any capacity, what you say and share on social media matters.

The fact that you might be using a personal account vs. a business account matters not. Rest assured that clients (and potential clients) are looking at both.

To maintain a reasonable level of professionalism, there are some things you should never share on social media. If you do choose to share these things, at the very least be aware of the potential risk.

Negative Posts About Customers or Clients

Recently, Denny’s released a negative Tweet about customers who don’t tip. While the company didn’t call out any customers specifically, the internet definitely clapped back.

Negative posts relating to customers or clients are always a bad idea. These include:

• Arguing or Matching Wits With Customers Online
• Recalling (Even Generically) Stories Where a Customer Behaved Foolishly
• Encouraging Others to Argue With or Shame a Customer Online

If a negative experience with a customer motivates you to post something on social media, wait a few days before doing so. What may come off as a rant while emotions are high, may turn into a useful ‘here’s how you can help us help you’ after you’ve cooled down.

If an angry customer is engaging with you on social media, it’s tempting to fire back. Instead, view it as a customer service opportunity.

You may be able to convert a dissatisfied customer into a happy one simply by treating them professionally and politely, in spite of their behavior. If they’re a troll determined to cause trouble, others watching will notice your professionalism and poise under pressure.

Warnings, Special Offers, And Other Spammy Announcements

• Take these steps by the end of the month to protect your privacy on Facebook!
• If you receive an email from this company, you’ve been hacked!
• A fast food chain is giving away free sandwiches if you Tweet this Hashtag!
• A terrible injustice has occurred and you should be outraged!

These are just a few examples of trending things that may find their way down your news feed. If they are correct and current, you might be doing your friends and followers a favor by sharing.

However, if you are passing along old information or something that has been proven false, that’s pretty embarrassing. Do some fact checking. When in doubt, don’t share it.

Irrelevant Viral Content

Yes, we’ve all seen a picture of the angry cat swimming in the flood waters. Yes, it’s funny. That doesn’t mean it belongs on your social media pages.

Try to limit viral content to sharing posts that are interesting or funny, so long as it is relevant to your audience. Another option is to create a special time and place to share silly content. For example, you could designate Fridays as ‘Friday Funnies’ and share a few funny posts you’ve collected along the way.

Political or Religious Posts

In recent months, you’ve probably noticed many businesses violating this guideline on social media. It’s true that some companies are taking stands on political issues. Rest assured that those businesses are aware of the associated risks and are willing to accept possibly alienating some of their customer base.

When you choose to share your thoughts and opinions on political and/or religious issues, please do so with full knowledge of the risks.

Let’s say your audience, for example, is primarily left of center politically. You could be upsetting people by posting conservative memes or opinions. Obviously, the reverse is true as well.

If you absolutely must post political or religious content, have a plan for respectfully handling backlash or dissent. By all means, don’t argue with your audience. Also, ensure they treat one another with respect when dialogue ensues.

Content That Isn’t Properly Proofread or Edited

Social media may be a casual place. That doesn’t mean your posts can lack polish and professionalism.

Even a few errors can make your content seem amateurish and unprofessional. Be especially careful if you are translating your social media content for international audiences.

Consider consulting a firm such as TheWordPoint.com for additional advice. This will help ensure that your content remains presentable for all of your audience members.

Attempts to Capitalize on Tragedy

On the day that Carrie Fisher died, Cinnabon posted a tasteless Tweet of a picture depicting Princess Leia with a cinnamon roll in place of her signature buns. In fact, it seems as if every time there is a celebrity death, natural disaster, or other tragedy, some brand posts something self-serving, inappropriate, or grossly promotional.

While it may not be as bad as price gouging, this use of social media is at best poor judgment and at worst cynical exploitation. Keep posts to sincere wishes for goodwill and condolences. Or just avoid talking about tragedies altogether if you want to play it safe.

Too Much Overtly Promotional Content

The purpose of social media is to build influence, increase brand awareness, and develop great customer relationships. At least 80% of your social media content should be dedicated to that. Think in terms of informing, educating, entertaining, and engaging.

When you do post promotional content, make sure that there is something newsworthy about it. For example, if you are launching a new product line, holding a great sale, or opening a new location, by all means, let people know.

Content Inconsistent With Branding

Have you ever read something on social media and been confused as to why that company chose to post that content? It’s off-putting to see a familiar brand posting content that doesn’t match their brand message or tone/style.

If it helps, think of your brand as a person. Maybe that person is young, funny, into music, and irreverent. Maybe that person is distinguished, serious, and demanding of respect. If you can’t imagine your brand persona saying something in real life, maybe they shouldn’t say it on social media.

Misleading Posts

Headlines should be attention-grabbing. They shouldn’t be misleading.

The same thing goes for promoting your posts and mentioning your competitors. Avoid making claims that aren’t quite true in order to earn clicks.

If you are calling out your competitors or making claims about your own products and services, be sure they pass the truth test.

Unattributed Content

It’s okay to find and share relevant content to your followers. In fact, this is a brilliant strategy to fill in the holes in your content offerings.

However, be sure to give credit where credit is due. Remember that the poignant quote, brilliant life hack, comic, meme, work of art, or compelling social media post you shared was originally created by someone. They deserve credit for coming up with the idea.

It may take time to track down the original source of a piece to give proper credit. In fact, you will probably notice how rarely you see social media content that has been credited to the creator.

However, it is worth it in the goodwill that you will earn, and the scorn you will avoid in passing off content as your own.

Conclusion

What you put out on social media will play a key role in how you are judged as a person and a business professional. By avoiding certain content and behaviors entirely you are much more likely to create a successful social media presence.

---

Featured Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. View original image on Pixabay.com.

B.C.’s forest sector recently released a new economic study that highlights the fact that the province’s forest industry continues to be a cornerstone of the provincial economy and a significant economic contributor to communities around the province.

The study conducted by PwC shows that B.C.’s forest industry is critically important to families and communities across the province. In fact, 140 communities depend on the forest industry through their mills, manufacturing facilities, forestry and logging operations. Employment-wise, last year, forestry generated one out of every 17 jobs in the province, making it one of B.C.’s largest employers — that’s more than 140,000 total jobs that generate $8.6 billion in wages to workers.

Forestry was an equally important revenue generator for government, providing municipal, provincial and federal governments with $4.1 billion in payments that include stumpage, taxes and fees. The forest industry also contributed $12.9 billion to the provincial GDP with $33 billion in total output. Without question, the province and its ability to make ongoing needed investments in health, education, infrastructure and innovation depends on the financial health of the forestry sector.

Renewable B.C. wood is also in demand around the world with B.C. forest companies exporting $13.7 billion worth of forest products to more than 100 countries in 2016, accounting for 34 per cent of all provincial exports. The United States and its residential construction industry was the top destination for B.C. forest exports, accounting for 53 per cent of the industry’s exports, followed by China at 24 per cent of exports and Japan at nine per cent. The B.C. forest industry continues to work hard alongside the provincial and federal governments to further diversify our products and overseas markets with Korea, Taiwan and India growing as trade partners.

Key to B.C. successfully opening overseas markets is our reputation as a world leader in sustainable forestry. Our industry is deeply committed to preserving the healthy forests that are a part of our shared ecological and natural heritage. Canada has more third-party certified forest than any other nation in the world, with most of B.C.’s forested land certified, meaning we meet internationally recognized criteria for environmental management systems. With that commitment, we planted 259 million seedlings in 2016 alone, and harvest less than one per cent of the timber land each year.

While the findings of the report show that forestry continues to be a key driver of the B.C. economy, our industry is also facing challenges. The lingering impacts of the Mountain Pine Beetle infestation, and the ongoing softwood lumber dispute have been further exacerbated by the devastating wildfires in B.C.’s interior this summer.

Through a determined and collaborative approach in addressing these challenges, the industry will have a strong future, and continue to support British Columbians. We are currently working with the provincial government and communities to understand the overall impact of the wildfires, expedite the salvage of timber, and ensure access to fibre so that our operations can continue to run.

Looking forward, B.C. forestry companies invested $650 million in new capital expenditures in 2016, in addition to the significant amount spent annually on repair and rehabilitation. That level of investment is expected to continue annually over the next five to 10 years. We will also continue to innovate and develop new products — including taller wood buildings — because building with wood helps us all reduce our collective carbon footprint.

For as long as we’ve been a province, B.C.’s forest sector, and the families and communities across our province who are a part of it, have contributed immeasurably to our quality of life in British Columbia. As an industry, we look forward to continuing to grow, invest and innovate, and continuing to be an economic engine for families, communities and the province for generations to come.

Susan Yurkovich is president and CEO of the B.C. Council of Forest Industries; Rick Jeffery is president and CEO of the Coast Forest Products Association.

User-based pricing has gotten a lot of bad press recently. It is generally seen as a lazy pricing metric, used by companies that have not thought deeply about their value metric and how to connect their pricing to value. But there are many cases when user-based pricing is the best approach and should be used.

Stop Per User SaaS pricing; You're Killing Growth by Patrick Campbell at Pricing Intelligently makes a lot of good points, but it is not the whole story.

First, a few definitions. What do we mean by 'value metric' and 'pricing metric'?

The 'value metric' is one of the most important concepts in pricing work. It is the unit by which a user consumes your service that correlates with the value they receive. Let's take a simple example. When I am painting a room and I buy a can of paint I am most interested in how many square feet the can will cover. Different paints have different properties and some cover a surface better than others. Gallons of paint is not a good value metric because it does not correlate well with value. The number of square feet or square meters covered per unit of volume is a great value metric, for paint.

 

One of the first things we do in pricing work is try to understand all of the potential value metrics. We use these to research potential value, build market segmentations and calculate economic value relative to alternatives.

The 'pricing metric' is the unit you price in. For paint, this is most frequently a volume metric. That is what painters are used to paying for, and familiarity can often make buying easier. For software, number of users is a common pricing metric, and it has been for a long time.

There is a simple test to see if per-user pricing is a good candidate.

"If two people share the same log-in do they get the same value as if they each had their own log-in?"

If the two people get the same value when they share a log-in, then per-user pricing is probably a bad idea. For one thing, it encourages cheating. People will be tempted to share their log-in as it does not cost them anything (they don't lose any value themselves) by doing so. If value is not tied to an individual user's use then per-user pricing is not measuring the value.

There are many cases where the software provides value for individual users. If the software is customized for my use then other users will not get the same value that I do. There are many ways software can be customized for me. I may have the various consoles and controls set up to suit my personal style of work. There may be integrations with other applications that are unique to my needs. The software may be tracking my use and using this data to share relevant content.

One pushback I get on this is the example of Microsoft Office and other personal productivity applications. These are almost always priced per-user, and in the past there was no personalization so that is not a justification for a user-based pricing model. My copy of Microsoft Excel looked almost exactly like yours, and I had no trouble using it. These applications go way back before everything was networked and before applications started collecting data on use. There were fewer pricing metrics possible back then and software did not evolve as quickly. The pricing paradigms of twenty-thirty years ago may have a long half life but they are going away.

So, use per-user pricing when the value of the software is tied to its use by a specific user. Using individual data to configure the software and help it adapt to the user is one way to connect an individual value metric to a per-user pricing metric. This is what the skill and expertise management platform TeamFit does. Each user has their own skillmap, and the skill recommendation engine uses information about each individual to suggest skills. Per user pricing makes sense in this case. Another way to justify per-user pricing is to ask people to pay for privacy. This metric is not just relevant to personal productivity software. We expect to see more and more companies offer different pricing based on differing levels of data rights. That is a topic for another day.

Subscribe to our blog

Are you training and coaching your people “principle based selling?” No, I’m not announcing a new sales methodology or trying to infringe on a few companies calling their methods “Principle Based Selling.” We often use the word principle to describe values we hold, for example, integrity, honesty, respect for others. Those are important, but not the subject of this post.

What I’m referring to when I use the term “principle based selling,” I’m focused on identifying the fundamental things that drive sales success for your organization. Do your people understand those base principles, can they leverage them in situations they haven’t encountered before.

What are some of the fundamental principles that drive sales success for your company? Here are some things to think about:

1. What problems are we the best in the world at solving and why? (The why helps you understand your value.)
2. Who are the people (personas) and organizations that have those problems and why are these important issues for them? (This guides your prospecting and qualification.)
3. How do we help them recognize the problem, commit to change, define what they want to do, and engage others in determining the solution/solving the problem? (This drives the insight we provide, understanding their buying process and aligning our sales process to that buying process in a manner that allows us to collaboratively solve the customer’s problem.)
4. How do we hold and value those customers/prospects? (This drives the customer experience we want to create, both in through their buying process and in their implementation.)
5. How do we get things done in our own organization-particularly when we don’t know how to get things done? (This deserves its own post but, but it really is about “Where do I get help when I encounter something I don’t know?”)
6. Why we do things the way we do them? (This helps us understand both how to get work done in our company, but, more importantly, what we stand for and how we want to be positioned in the markets/community. It’s part of what differentiates us and drives our value.)
7. How do we maximize our own personal performances to achieve our goals? (This has to do with our ability to focus on things that produce results and to stop doing things that don’t.)

There are probably a few principles you can add, but there don’t have to be many. You might, fairly, argue that 7 is way too many. In truth, I probably could combine 4, 5, 6.

Think of it, the whole universe of physics and mechanics is guided by only a few underlying principles/laws. So we don’t need many to guide our salespeople.

But why is this important? Why am I even bothering to write this?

The issue is, our people will always confront situations that aren’t described in a playbook or covered in a script. They will face things they haven’t encountered before–though they may have encountered similar situations, “this one is different.”

Grounding our people in these basic principles gives them the ability to figure things out, to be able to address each situation with higher odds of success.

Ironically, most of the trend in sales enablement and programs is exactly the opposite. We are leveraging tools, technologies, content, metrics, organizational models in ways that actually “dumb down the salesperson.” They become so specialized, so scripted, so process focused that they can’t deal with situations that don’t match what they have been trained to do.

Perhaps this is part of what underlies the plummeting data on sales performance.

The problem is, every sales situation has common patterns, but at the same time, every sales situation is unique because our customers are unique. They are people, human beings, who don’t act logically, rationally, or consistently. They change on a day to day basis.

Couple the challenge of dealing with individuals, who may be constantly changing, with today’s consensus decision-making for complex B2B sales, and the number of possibilities skyrockets, just for that deal. Then look at all the deals across all our salespeople, over time–the number of possibilities we have to “design for,” becomes infinite. (And infinity is a pretty big number.)

Clearly, it’s impossible for us to design processes, develop playbooks/scripts that handle even a large number of those situations. Moreover, since they are constantly changing, the life cycle of any script becomes very short.

The reality is, we cannot succeed by being totally prescriptive with what we train/enable our salespeople to do. We cannot keep up with the pace of change or the variability in each deal/situation.

We have to have sales people with the critical thinking/problem-solving capabilities to figure things out. We have to train them in basic principles, so they have the tools to develop the best answers to drive success in every situation they encounter.

Have you developed the basic principles that underlie your company’s ability to generate revenue and create value with customers?

Are you teaching your people how to leverage those principles in helping them figure out what to do in every situation?

Four years ago, the Harvard Business Review published an article that predicted the disruption of the consulting industry as a result of the evolving digital economy. Over the past few years, we’ve seen that disruption start to develop. Consultants are adding digital service offerings to their portfolios and adopting digital tools to enhance their capabilities. They are testing new consulting business models.

Adoption will inevitably be slow in an industry that has not changed much since its inception. However, firms are now seriously rethinking the current billable hour model. Many are also struggling to keep up with talent attrition. Soren Kaplan does an excellent job of laying out the challenges firms have. Their model is largely at odds with how their clients want to work. Customers in the digital economy are increasingly demanding value from day one and customized solutions unique to their specific problems. At the same time, new upstart competitors leveraging data and technology are beginning to make waves. Their clients are starting to ask questions and, as an IBM partner recently offered, “Our clients are seeking a partner that embodies the characteristic of the Digital Enterprise that they seek to become.”

Could we be at a tipping point in the consulting industry?

Our view is that firms need to begin testing new consulting business models that leverage digital applications before they are disrupted. We’ve collected a few of our favorite examples for review.

New Consulting Business Models

Bloomberg’s Data-Based Consulting Model

Digitization revolves first and foremost around data. Bloomberg has entered the consulting market by offering marketing strategy, communications, and brand consulting advice. They are staffing up with big firm talent, but they are also leveraging their extensive data set from the terminal to ground their advice in a big data-based approach. Their model is the convergence of a number of business models including media, ad spending, and consulting, all of which are grounded in data. They’re not alone; many established consulting firms, like Accenture, are moving to agency services.

Accenture’s Expanded Value Proposition

Fjord, a global design consultancy recently acquired by Accenture, provides an excellent illustration of the expanded value proposition. Fjord coaches clients on how to use design to improve their businesses. It also makes user-centered design a core part of its own strategy and value proposition. Fjord CEO Olof Schybergson recognized how “elegant simplicity” contributes to more than just the design of a powerpoint or a user interface. Design should be central to every system and process, as it allows for maximum return from minimal effort. Consulting firms of the past have certainly understood the importance of design in their deliverables. But Fjord’s view of design demonstrates how expanding the traditional value proposition can both open the door to new business sectors and improve internal operations.

McKinsey’s Productized Approach

McKinsey Solutions was born from questions about whether the firm was getting the most out of their intellectual property. Firm management took a step back to understand how they could best leverage their collective knowledge of important issues and capitalize on the tools being created across the firm. Today, the firm has over 20 solutions that combine data, analytics, software, and advice. They’ve laid the groundwork for a new consulting business model that evolves with digital opportunity.

Eden McCallum’s Consulting Meets the Gig Economy

Eden McCallum demonstrates how breaking consulting into the freelance world can be highly attractive to both clients and consultants. The London-based firm has established a network of independent consultants who can be matched to clients with hyper-specific needs. The partners of the firm take care of managing client relations and identifying new engagements. Meanwhile, the consultants themselves simply execute the projects. This approach allows for much more transparency and client control. Additionally, it also offers consultants freedom to control how much they work. While still relying on billable hours, this model eliminates corporate expense and allows support at a much lower rate. Consultants are then able to work more closely with clients and focus on delivering successful outcomes.

GLG Introduces the As-A-Service Model

Digital transformation is providing consultants with nearly 40% of their revenue. It also presents an opportunity to explore new as-a-service consulting business models. For consultants, the as-a-service model might involve more long-term, smaller volume projects rather than large-scale projects for a fixed period of time. Subscription pricing, rather than billable hours, might be the new financial model. Offering on-demand services will undoubtedly play a role. While we haven’t seen many top consulting firms going this route yet, some more niche firms are exploring the as-a-service possibilities. Professional learning services company Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) offers one example. GLG provides on-demand professional learning services to clients in a wide variety of industry sectors. The subscription-based service grants clients access to experts through GLG’s network of independent professionals and thought-leaders.

We may not know yet exactly what the ultimate end-product of digital transformation will look like for consultants. What we do know, however, is that the new digital economy demands change to the traditional consulting business model. The good news is that there are a number levers consultants can be testing to meet these demands. What can you be doing to get ahead of the changing market?

It’s not often that data about Metro Vancouver’s much-debated housing market can make a roomful of politicians gasp, but that’s just what happened Monday during this year’s annual UBCM convention.

A trio of experts gave captivated municipal leaders from around the province insight into the affordability crisis plaguing parts of B.C., a look at serious ramifications that could follow, and a glimpse at possible solutions.

David Ley, a geography professor at the University of B.C., helped lay the groundwork for the discussion.

“We are in an absolutely bizarre situation here,” Ley said, presenting 2017 data from U.S. consultancy Demographia that showed detached homes in Vancouver cost 11.8 times median incomes. A ratio of at most three times income is defined as affordable.

Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, put that same relationship a little more simply.

“Where does Vancouver sit? Its (housing) values are between Honolulu and San Francisco at Halifax incomes.” Things are similarly bad in the Fraser Valley, where housing prices are seven times median incomes.

And here’s where those gasps and exclamations of “wow” came in: Yan first presented a slide that showed million-dollar-plus detached homes in Metro to be concentrated in Vancouver. Then he showed another that included household transportation costs paid out over a 25-year period. Suddenly, those million-dollar homes had spread clear across Metro.

“We can’t necessarily sprawl our way out of this housing situation,” Yan said.

Local families have taken on extraordinary debt loads to get into the housing market, Ley said, calling it “a very serious problem just waiting to happen.”

“What if current economic conditions change? What if there was a significant recession or even a small recession? What if interest rates went up two to three per cent?”

Even if those things don’t happen, what will at this rate become is a serious Metro labour shortage, he said.

By 2020, workers in 82 of 88 in-demand jobs will be unable to afford a single-family home in Metro, Ley said, citing a 2015 study from Vancity. And in just 10 years, most people will forgo career opportunities in the region and simply relocate elsewhere, he said.

There are a few things driving the out-of-control market, and it’s not a strong local economy or in-migration from other parts of Canada, Ley said. It’s not a writ large lack of supply, either, the panelists agreed.

In fact, increased supply through redevelopment can actually worsen the problem, Ley said. As an example, he said speculative land assemblies drive up land costs and are eventually converted into high-priced units. Instead, what is driving increased prices is global demand and investment.

“Housing has become a valued asset in an investment portfolio. Capital flows to select desirable locations. Resort locations and gateway cities,” said Ley, who added that Vancouver has become viewed as “a honey pot for global investors.”

Josh Gordon, an assistant professor at SFU’s School of Public Policy, agreed that the problem was foreign money.

“You have to understand supply claims are largely about distracting us from doing stuff on the demand side,” said Gordon, who added that developers simply want to be able to build endlessly for the world’s rich.

He called current demand-side measures like the one-per-cent increase in the property transfer tax on pricey homes, Vancouver’s empty-homes tax and the now-weakened foreign-buyers tax “insufficient and modest.”

For Gordon, what’s needed is a progressive property surtax that is offset by income taxes paid. “What that would do … if you wanted to own property on the basis of foreign income and wealth, you’d have to pay your fair share of taxes.”

Most residents pay for their homes using local income on which they pay taxes that are used for social and other services that make their properties so valuable, he explained. A buyer who uses foreign income doesn’t. And for Gordon, that amounts to a subsidy that a surcharge would eliminate.

Ley pointed to changes in loan regulations, steep and progressive property transfer taxes and sellers taxes to prevent flipping as other possible measures.

There were few hints of optimism in the presentations. 

But Ley had this to offer: “We are at a very promising juncture with a federal government (and) a provincial government that is concerned about affordability in a way we have not had for many years. I see this as a moment of opportunity.”

mrobinson@postmedia.com

CLICK HERE to report a typo.

Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.</p

Lack of engagement is one of the most frustrating parts of social media marketing. If you are not consistent in posting on social media, then if you are lucky, you will sometimes get a like, but no regular follows, comments, or likes. This situation is disheartening and costly, and means that your social media marketing is not delivering to the audience what they expect.

Social media is one of the most famous ways of direct marketing. With social media marketing, you can connect one-on-one with the customers, and you can speak directly to the buyers. This is an opportunity every business owner wants to capitalize on, and it’s possible only through the right kind of engagement.

Here are some of the key steps which you can follow to increase your engagement with your target audience:

1. Stop Them from Scrolling

The first sign of success you will get is when your content is interesting enough that it stops the viewers from scrolling down. The best way to catch their attention is by posting something that they like, want to see, or desire to know more about. To catch the eye of your viewers, you can follow the following steps:

a) Find out why your audience is present on social media

• Chances are, that your audience is on Facebook to read or view the latest news. So, post content with news or current events.
• Your audience might be on Instagram to view photos of their friends and family. So, you should post more of your business’s behind-the-scene photos.
• In this way, if your audience stops scrolling to read what info you are providing, they are more likely to get engaged with your post. Similarly, if they notice any of your team members doing something interesting in a photo on Instagram, they will most likely take the time to look at it.

b) Find out what your audiences do when away from social media

• You can also stop them from scrolling by knowing what your audiences do when they are not on social media and then target that.
• For example, if you are a seller of dog products, you can target dog lovers and can use dogs in your posts. For example, a photo of your team playing with a dog can attract viewers who spend a lot of time with animals.

c) Be funny

• Most consumers come to social media to be entertained. If you forget this, then you will lose your audience’s attention.
• For that continuous engagement, add humor to your posts. People like the humorous posts¾they might share it and tag their friends to watch it.
• Ultimately, your posts will get plenty of likes, comments, and shares.

2. Inspire a Reaction

Facebook has brought a very good feature to increase engagement. They have introduced five new ways by which a person can react to a post: Haha, Love, Angry, Wow, and Sad. This has opened a whole new world of opportunities for businesses. Facebook encourages your audience to react to what you are sharing. These steps can be followed:

a) Use emojis as prompts

To get a reaction more frequently, you can use emojis in your post. By this, the tone is set, and the reader will get to know how you expect them to react. For example, when sharing something humorous, use the laughing emoji.

b) Ask for specific reaction

Sometimes, when you ask for a reaction, you get more engagement, and Facebook’s reaction buttons helps. For example, you can host a contest and award the audience for hitting “love” button rather than just “like.”

c) Ask them to review

You can ask your audience for a review in the comments section on Instagram or in the form of a Facebook reaction. For example, you can share a blog post regarding your industry and ask the people to react through Facebook reactions.

3. Spark Intrigue

Intrigue not only increases the engagement, but also supports your digital marketing funnel. Some ways you can spark intrigue amongst your target audience are:

a) Share some compelling data

You can offer some surveys or compelling data because people love to know the facts. To know more, they will visit your website. Remember not to give everything away on social media. It should be a teaser to encourage them to visit your site.

b) Launch new products and offers

You can tell your audience about the new product to be launched and offer them some freebies. This way you can get more clicks on your website, and when they enter their email address to get freebies, you can get their email addresses also.

c) Stream live videos

You can increase the engagement through videos because videos have audio, eye-catching movement, text, and imagery. Live streaming is the latest way for companies to engage with their audience.

These are some of the ways by which you can increase your engagement on social media. Always remember that to get more comments, likes, and shares on your posts, provide your audience entertaining, inspiring, and intriguing content¾and be sure to do it regularly. Fone Dynamics wants to know what works for you in engaging with your audience on social media; comment below to share your best practices!

I want to start this post out by saying I like Simon Sinek and his books. I believe there is great power in asking “why” but I think too many entrepreneurs and businesses get stuck there. The quote from Simon, “people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe” (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action) is great, but I think it tells only part of the story.

In the video below I share the power of asking “what questions.” While people do care about the “why” behind a product or service, they first care about the “what.” I don’t care how passionate your purpose is, if your product or service doesn’t meet a need, people won’t buy it. People care what you do for them. Then they look for your why.

Here is a link to The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever which I mention in the video.

Video Transcript:

Hey. What’s up, everybody? Welcome to Hack My Growth. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about an extremely powerful question that we need to be asking ourselves when it comes to marketing our business or growing our business or even just trying to get more out of our team in general. Alright, let’s go.

Alright. Before we get started, I just want to make one request. If you like our videos, if you like the content that we’ve been putting out, please hit the subscribe button. That way you can stay connected with us and continue to grow and learn with us as we continue to push the envelope in what we do. Lately, I’ve been reading this book right here, and it’s called the coaching habit. It’s a cool book for anybody who’s into coaching development, leadership development, anybody who’s leading a team or even just leading a business. What this book does is it focuses on seven questions that you can ask your team members, people you’re working with to get more out of them and really to push the envelope, so you guys aren’t just spinning in the same circles that you always spin in.

I think this is important too when we’re talking about growing our businesses and marketing our businesses in the sales process of our businesses because these questions that he gives us in this book really help us get actionable answers. If you’ve watched any of the videos that we’ve done before, I’m really into things that we can act on instead of just thinking of things in a grandiose way and what-ifs, it’s much better when we’ve got questions or data that we can act on. That’s really the purpose of this book. It’s to say less, to ask more questions, and change the way that we work and interact with people. Now, there’s this question that I see so much in marketing communities, and it’s pushed at conferences.

It’s the question why. It’s a powerful question. Don’t get me wrong. I love the question why because it helps us define purpose. Simon Sinek is one of the guys that led the charge on this with Start With Why which is an amazing book. He’s got an excellent TED Talk about it too. It gets to the heart of your purpose for doing what you do. Often what I’ve seen is people just get stuck in why because why can be just really open-ended. There’s no end to the answer why. You can keep asking why and go deeper and deeper and deeper in defining this deep purpose. Sometimes it just gets more ambiguous. I’ve been in conversations where I feel like people are just asking why to seem smarter and it’s kind of annoying and frustrating.

Asking why doesn’t typically end in an action. What does end in an action and is something that almost every single one of the questions in this book starts with. It is what.

• What are you doing?
• What is your product?
• What is its purpose?
• What is it intended to do?
• What are you doing about the challenge that you’re facing right now?
• What have you done?
• What’s the next move?

You see, the difference between why and what is why is open-ended and it goes to purpose which is important, but what gets to the action. It’s about now. It’s about taking that step and doing something. A lot of times when you ask somebody why you’re trying to get more information to fix a problem.

The problem with that is you end up getting in this loop where you’re always fixing people’s problems. That can be a dangerous place to be. If you start asking what questions, what did you do about it? What could you have done better? What could you have done differently? It gets them to the point where they don’t have to sit and ponder very long, but they can think and go, “I could have slowed down. I could have spent more time. I need a product that can meet this need.” It’s not the why. Why gets to the emotion and the connection point, but what gets to the action. I think as marketers, as business owners, we need to start asking what a whole lot more because the power behind what is action.

Action is what leads to growth. Yes, you need a purpose. Yes, you need to tie your business to something deeper, but the real thing that makes people move is what questions because it forces them to take that step. What are you going to do about it? If you’re feeling this pain now, we talk about marketing where we’re pushing on pain points, if they’re feeling this pain, what’s your next move? Not say, “Why would you maybe switch?” That’s just open-ended and doesn’t lead to anything, but if we want action, we need to start asking what.

• What is our product for?
• What is the core components of our business?
• What is the industry we’re in?
• What are we going to do next?

There’s just so many questions that you can get that lead to actionable answers. Starting with what can be extremely powerful. The reason why what questions are so powerful is they don’t leave room for interpretation either. It gets right to the point. Sometimes when you ask somebody why, it can honestly seem kind of offensive. Why did you do it that way? It comes across like that. It depends on your tone and your inflection.

Maybe somebody on your team did a project, and it didn’t go that well. You can say, “Why did you choose to do it that way?” It forces them to be defensive. It forces them to back into a corner. Instead, if you approach that, “What could you have done differently in that situation?” It allows them to reflect and then it allows them to give you an answer without feeling like you were attacking them. That’s another benefit of a what question. Honestly, sometimes, this happens in our marketing where we ask why questions to potential buyers and they end up getting defensive because you’re almost coming across as saying, “What you’re doing is wrong and let me show you.”

That’s the worst way to market to somebody but if you say, “Hey, what about this? What could you have done differently? What would you like to see in this product or in this widget?” Those types of questions are way more disarming and allow them to start spinning out actionable thoughts. Now, you want to test those in the market and track it and see if that’s really what they want, but at least you’re getting something you can move with without offending somebody.

I want to challenge you guys as you start to think about the questions you ask to start asking more what questions to get to actionable advice that you can start to grow and build your business with. Alright, thanks a lot for watching and we’ll catch you next time.

If your target market is under the age of 60, chances are that your email marketing leads will first see your email on a mobile device. It will pop up loud and clear like a shining beacon on the screen of a cutting-edge iPhone, Samsung, or Motorola phone.

If your subject line isn’t relevant, compelling, and clickable, the rest of your content doesn’t matter – it’s gone forever with the swipe of a finger.

Instead of letting your email marketing efforts fall flat, consider the impact your subject lines may be having on your open rates.

Why Subject Lines Matter

The average customer’s attention span – especially when using a mobile device – is exceptionally short. It’s imperative to make a connection in the first few seconds, or the opportunity is gone and forgotten as quickly as it came.

Most of your email recipients using mobile devices will only see the subject line and maybe a line or two of body text of your emails, so your subject lines must immediately convey value and spark their interest enough for them to open the email and read more.

Personalized Emails

Most marketing professionals know by now to segment their emailing lists. This is important for several reasons, but the essence behind all of them is ultimately to avoid sending customers the same information over and over.

Today, it’s easier than ever to deliver emails tailored to individual customers and leads. Once you collect a lead or customer’s information, it’s important to leverage that information into effective, personalized messages.

Your recipients are far more likely to engage with messages tailored to their personal preferences and needs than generic marketing emails that are often ignored.

Drip Campaigns

The drip campaign is a fantastic means of leveraging email automation and customer profiles into engaging, valuable lead generation.

As the name suggests, a drip campaign is an automated emailing schedule that “drips” the most relevant content to recipients based on past engagements, their status as a lead or customer, purchasing history, and other factors.

Once you understand how drip campaigns work, you can tailor your subject lines to fit customers’ profiles to capture their interest.

Since a drip campaign factors in individual responses and past interactions, it’s easy to develop subject lines that will appeal to your readers’ interests. A customer is going to be far more likely to open a relevant, personalized email with an enticing subject line than typical marketing messages.

Automated Responses

Automation in email marketing is a double-edged sword. On one hand, automation eliminates a lot of wasted time and allows more control over emailing lists; however, without the appropriate attention to detail and consistent upkeep, automation can cause more problems than it solves.

If you fail to appropriately tailor your automation system, recipients on your emailing lists could start receiving irrelevant or duplicate messages.

This will frustrate them very quickly, and eventually, they will either begin to ignore your emails or may even unsubscribe.

Rather than opening the door to this eventuality, carefully construct your email automation in a way that the messages will have the same impact and generate the same interest as personalized messages.

Instead of delving into the realm of “clickbait,” develop subject lines that will intrigue and entice your readers to open them and learn more.

Even automated messages that convey company news, new product information, or recent events can create engagement with the right subject lines.

Urgency and Relevance are Essential

Ultimately, the people on your email list are there because they at least have a passing interest in your brand, so they’re more likely than not to investigate emails with well-constructed, enticing subject lines.

Experimentation and careful maintenance are going to be crucial to a successful email marketing campaign, so be sure your subject lines do your content justice and encourage your readers to keep engaging with your brand.

When you're struggling to focus, what's your go-to strategy? Reading a few inspirational productivity quotes always does the trick for me. Not only do I feel a surge in motivation, but I remember why I'm doing what I'm doing: Because committment, hard work, and passion will help me fulfill my goals.

Next time you're struggling to connect the small day-to-day details with the bigger picture, come back to this list.

Productivity Quotes for Work

1) "Focus on being productive instead of busy." -Tim Ferriss

2) "If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done." -Bruce Lee

3) "Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year-and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!" -Tony Robbins

4) "There is no substitute for hard work." -Thomas Edison

5) "What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50%." -Susan Cain

6) "Don't worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue." -Tom Rath

7) "I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time -- but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was 'productive.' Time spent with my family and friends was never wasted." -Gretchen Rubin

8) “Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.”
-Leo Babauta

9) “'Tomorrow’ is the thing that’s always coming but never arrives. ‘Today’ is the thing that’s already here and never leaves. And because that’s the case, I would much prefer to invest in today than sit around waiting for an arrival that’s not arriving.”
-Craig D. Lounsbrough

10) “Those who seize the day become seriously rich.”
-Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less

11) "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it." -Steve Jobs

12) "Gentleness doesn’t get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs." -Coco Chanel

13) "Luck is not chance, it’s toil; Fortune’s expensive smile is earned." -Emily Dickinson

14) “Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.” -Paul J. Meyer

15) “Stressing output is the key to improving to productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.” -Andrew Grove

16) “If you commit to giving more time than you have to spend, you will constantly be running from time debt collectors.” -Elizabeth Grace Saunders

17) “Life is too complicated not to be orderly.” -Martha Stewart

18) “My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do.”
-Francine Jay

19) “Never mistake motion for action.”
-Ernest Hemingway

20) “Always deliver more than expected.” Larry Page

21) “If you don’t have daily objectives, you qualify as a dreamer.” -Zig Ziglar

22) “I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.” -Oprah Winfrey

23)“Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” -Peter Drucker

24) “Lost time is never found again.” -Benjamin Franklin

25) “While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.” –Henry C. Link

Hopefully these quotes have kickstarted your drive. Now that you've had a quick (and inspiring!) break, it's time to get back to work.

I just returned from Dublin where I spoke at SaaStock 2017 (what an amazing group of founders and investors!) to share some of the lessons I learned while building out NetSuite’s BDR team.

NetSuite is the world’s leading cloud ERP provider. Founded in 1998, they IPO’d in 2007 and were ultimately acquired by Oracle for $9.3B in 2016. What’s amazing about NetSuite is that their software can literally be used by any company. Every business issues invoices, collects cash and runs a GL – a true horizontal play.

During my time at NetSuite, hiring to keep pace with our growth was a constant challenge and a topic the CEO, Zach Nelson, was passionate about.

By mid 2011 three things happened – first, someone above my pay grade did an analysis and figured out we were not even close to meeting hiring goals to keep pace with growth targets. Second, Oracle had doubled down on college hiring and third, we had two senior sales leaders who were begging for the outbound model.

Note: NetSuite has an inbound marketing engine and grew to an almost $200M/year company with no outbound prospecting.

By February 2012, we decided to spin up our own college hiring program. But there’s one really important thing you need to understand in all of this – lead gen was not our our goal. We started the BDR team to “build” ERP sales reps. We went into year one with the mindset of delivering sales reps, where leads just happened to be the baseline of work.

To start, we hired 18 BDRs (the self proclaimed Original 18 or O18) and had people graduating to Account Executive roles within 9 months. During that first year, we hired 48 more BDRs, increased the average value of inbound leads by 30% and made significant contributions to recurring revenue via outbound prospecting.

To say things moved fast from this point would be a massive understatement. We were flying. We doubled, tripled, quadrupled and just kept opening new teams. I couldn’t hire managers or reps fast enough. When I did, I couldn’t keep them. They were promoted ahead of schedule and pulled into all areas of the sales and marketing orgs. When I left the company in 2016, we’d hired well over 300 people and the team was operating in 6 countries, across 11 offices.

That all sounds great, but I don’t want to paint the picture that things were easy. We made mistakes and learned a lot during this journey.

Lesson 1: Learn from Your Peers

I talked to TONS of leaders in the lead gen space when I was first starting out and heard 3 consistent things: segment your inbound and outbound reps, align them to a rep or sales team, don’t worry about product knowledge. I agree with 2 out of 3:

• Specialize inbound and outbound. Everyone thinks this is about different skill sets and letting people get good at one thing. Sure, it helps, but my real argument is around the value of inbound. You spend a lot of money to acquire those leads and should have someone whose only job is to pick up the phone and call the second someone hits the website. It’s all about focus.

• Product knowledge matters. Not the nitty gritty, how-to of each feature, but the WHY behind the WHAT. How are your customers actually using your product?

• Trust comes with strong working relationships and those take time to build. You are only doing your BDRs a disservice by rotating them.

Lesson 2: Never Stop Hiring

You need a deeper bench than you think and  if you’re playing the volume game, you need to be really good at it. The 3 things we did that really moved the needle:

• Aligned on a hiring profile and consistent interview process. They key is to know what you want to get out of each and every interaction with a candidate.

• Coached our management team on how to interview. BDR managers are often first time managers, promoted internally, figuring out how to hire without a lot of help or support. Our leadership team bought HireVue. We watched game film. We sent feedback. Everyone had visibility into every interview and learned from each other.

• This one took time, but we got comfortable acknowledging when there wasn’t a mutual fit. Sometimes you make a mistake and as the hiring manager you need to take responsibility. Be polite, be caring, but do what is right for the business – your team will thank you.

Lesson 3: Retention is King

It’s expensive to bring on a team like this and you can increase retention rates by focusing on a few key areas:

• Certify everything: Invest in training up front, don’t expect the “just shadow this person” approach to work. You need to find ways to assess, make the learning hands on and ensure that each individual is internalizing the training and can put it to work.

• Train the trainer: Create an army of Subject Matter Experts who can be your go-tos for new hire training and support. Whether it’s competitive intelligence, product modules, processes or partners, there is a lot to learn.

• Coach and develop separately: Coach the skills you need in the job today, but take the time to develop the person for the job they want in the future. If you are having conversations about the job 2 or 3 steps in the future, you will be better able to guide that person and have his or her best interests in mind

• Enable through and beyond promotion: Failure rate in the first 6 months in the next job is going to be WAY higher than in the BDR job. Acknowledge it, plan for it and build a support system.

Lesson 4: Align at All Levels

If you are struggling with alignment, start here to build trust:

• Compensation: Make sure the comp plans of the two teams are in sync. You don’t want to be in a situation where the BDR team is massively overperforming while sales isn’t hitting their number. You have to find the right balance between quantity and quality and ensure everyone is bought in.

• Structure Communication: Establish a clear set of metrics that will be used to measure success, then schedule regular syncs with a structured agenda to review what’s working and what needs to change. This is an exercise in reflecting on the overall business and agreeing on next steps.

Lesson 5: Plan for Big

It’s so easy to get hung up in the day to day. To live in the moment and just get through the work that’s on your desk to get to inbox zero. This is a great way to stop improving. So instead, make sure you’re focused on the following:

• People: If you hire the wrong leader/manager, they will hire the wrong team. I was lucky enough to hire an insanely smart, motivated group of people to lead the team. They were relentless in pushing us to be better.

• Process: The same process (or lack thereof) that works for five people, doesn’t work for 100, or 50 or even 25. You will save so much time and energy if you build something that scales from the get go.

• Technology: We drank our own kool aid, which means we used NetSuite CRM. The Salesforce ecosystem has some really cool applications for sales productivity and we’ve come a long way in the world of automation, but it’s really easy to lose touch with the personal nature of the job. My recommendation is to get your process nailed first and then layer in technology.

Ultimately, NetSuite built an impressive company with over 40,000 organizations using the product. It makes for a pretty good story. But when I look back, what I am most proud of are the relationships built along the way. Since I left NetSuite and joined OpenView, a week hasn’t gone by where I haven’t heard from someone from my old team – to serve as a reference, to show me what they are working on now, to ask my advice, to say thank you. What’s even cooler though is when I hear from the NetSuite leadership team about how well those alumni are doing – the BDR team has had a lasting impact on the NetSuite business as a whole.

While I learned so much during my tenure at NetSuite, the one piece of advice I really hope you take away from all of this is to think of your BDRs as your bench. They’re worth more than the leads they generate today so invest in them and you’ll be surprised by what you get in return.

The post Scaling Lead Gen: Growing NetSuite’s BDR Team to 170 People in 3.5 Years appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Many marketers mistakenly use the same messaging approach for all of their leads and traffic, regardless of where the customer may be in their journey. Failing to account for your customer’s mindset in your communications can be one of the main factors that drag down your conversion rate.

At the same time, message consistency throughout the customer journey is also an important part of communicating clearly. These two opposing forces are part of what makes building successful marketing campaigns challenging, especially if you’re just starting out. The challenge at the heart of creating an efficient customer journey is balancing a consistent message while targeting it to the audience based on their level of awareness.

To help you find this balance, and ultimately increase the conversion rates for your marketing efforts, in this blog, we’ll explore the fundamental messaging guidelines based on the four stages of the customer journey.

The 4 Stages of Customer Awareness

There are four fundamental stages of awareness in the customer journey, illustrated here using a toothache as an example:

1. Unaware: You’re not even aware there’s a problem yet—Your tooth enamel is wearing away, but right now you feel nothing.
2. Aware: You become aware of a problem, but you’re not too concerned about it yet—The tooth starts to tingle a little, but that’s normal, right? It’ll be ok.
3. Thinking: You’re not committed to action yet, but the problem is getting harder to ignore—You’re starting to look up dentists in the local area.
4. Hurting: Now you’re actively seeking a solution to the problem—The tooth hurts a lot, and you need a dentist now.

Most people need to be in the “hurting” stage before they will make a purchase—and they will often put off making a decision for as long as possible until they reach that point.

Overcoming your prospect’s lack of knowledge, and eliminating procrastination once they reach awareness, is the ultimate goal of your customer journey. To get there, you frequently need to start by taking the audience sequentially through their first three stages of awareness. That way when they reach the fourth and final stage, even if your audience isn’t currently “hurting” at the moment, they can vividly picture what the “pain” would be like and will want to take steps to avoid feeling this anguish before it becomes a reality.

Unaware to Aware

If you’re reaching out to a cold audience or your business solves a problem that your prospects won’t obviously recognize, your first communication with them needs to move them from unaware to aware of their problem.

That means you will not pitch your company, its products, or services as it’s still too soon for that.

So many businesses are excited about what they do for their customers—which is a great thing most of the time. However, when you’re marketing to a prospect who is completely unaware they have a problem, telling them about a solution to a seemingly non-existent problem is a waste of your energy.

Instead, you need to nurture the prospect by speaking with them about things they are aware of. Start by discussing top-of-mind concerns and pain points that your potential customer is aware of. Once you’ve established some common ground, you can draw the logical connections to make them aware of their problem.

Imagine you’re a manufacturing company who makes anti-gravity iPhone cases for a rapidly expanding eCommerce business. You’re producing 30,000 units a week, shipping them out to the company’s fulfillment center to be distributed to customers.

What do you have to offer this eCommerce client (or similar clients), in an attempt to sell more anti-gravity iPhone cases? How about faster production windows and speedier delivery times?

“Sound great,” says the client, “but we’re meeting demand in a reasonable time, and we think we’ll be able to stay ahead of demand.”

Opportunity! Your client is currently in the unaware stage. They’re not aware of any potential ramifications if things get really popular.

How to Use This to Your Advantage

You could start with a simple blog post, illustrating the dangers of not keeping up with demand. Give it an interesting, attention-grabbing title, for example, a harrowing title like, ‘The Hidden Reason Why Going Viral Might Hurt You’ and see what happens.

What you’re trying to do, is to educate/show your potential client that if they were to go viral with their anti-gravity iPhone case, that not being able to keep up with demand could lead to a lot of unhappy customers.

This is how you achieve awareness.

Aware to Thinking

After your prospect is aware of the problem, the next step in the customer journey is making them consider a solution. That means first reassuring them that there is a solution to their problem. From there you can explain the details surrounding how your company can help them.

Typically, this kind of information exists as the main call-to-action on your homepage or dedicated landing page. It’s the first thing visitors see when they arrive on your site, your solution to the thing they want. It’s also consistent across your other pages and on social media and email marketing campaigns

To provide message consistency with the first phase of your marketing campaign, you should build upon the examples you used in the previous step. Then in this phase, you can begin to connect those example problems to the solutions your company offers.

Hard numbers are your friends here. It’s all well and good to have a client who’s aware of a potential, hypothetical problem, but you’re trying to sell them something, and they know that. Why should they take your word for it?

Thinking to Hurting (and Buying)

Now that the audience is thinking about a solution, it’s time to convince them to buy and buy now. This often involves “future pacing”—or describing what the future will be like for the audience with and without your product or service.

The word ‘imagine’ can be a powerful keyword that helps set the stage for this type of marketing message. You can also use loss aversion as a strong motivator at this stage.

Get your prospect to think about how bad it would feel if they didn’t have your solution to help them and contrast it with how great it would be if they did.

This kind of messaging exists for both cold and hot prospects. For the colder prospects visiting your site, this kind of ‘imagine’ messaging addresses that initial pang of want they clearly have, since they’re visiting your site. For the warmer prospects, those close to buying, include your ‘imagine’ messaging deeper and closer to the checkout.

To provide message consistency with the earlier parts of the customer journey, you want to make sure that the tone and key phrases you use to describe your products and services match the previous phases.

This is all part of an essential sales and marketing process, right? Identify a potential pain point, agitate that pain point, and then offer a solution.

What you’re trying to do with your offering is provide a possible solution to a genuine problem. At this stage, now that your client is aware and thinking, use that ‘imagine’ messaging to say: Imagine how great it’ll feel when your anti-gravity iPhone case floats by on the ISS. Now imagine the sinking feeling when the spike of traffic that appeared on your website is met with equal fury at the thing being constantly out of stock.

Now it’s a real pain, a real hurt. Your client understands the problem and the effect it could have on their fledgling business and potential profits.

Enhancing the customer journey is all about finding where potential customers are at in the funnel, and giving them what they need to move on through. That usually comes in the form of identifying a pain point, agitating it, and then offering a solution.

You can’t jump right to the end of a sales journey without first taking in the scenery along the way. You can’t cure somebody of what ails them until they know what it is that’s bothering them. Consider your prospect and where they’re at in the customer journey and be smart about how you can move them from one stage in the journey to the next until they become a customer.

With your example of the painful “hurting” scenario fresh in their minds, most prospects will be ready to switch on the spot.

Remember it’s called a journey for a reason. To get your audience to the point where your customers are ready to buy, you have to start by going through the first three stages of awareness. By implementing the guidelines from above, you now can do just that.

I’d love to hear about what you have done to enhance your customer journey. Is it similar to what I’ve described? What might you implement? Let’s keep the discussion going in the comments!

The post Enhance Your Customer Journey in 4 Steps appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

“The challenges of creating great software and the challenges of creating great marketing share increasing similarities in a digital world. They’re both juggling an explosion of digitally powered interactions in a tornado of constant change and innovation. They’re both creative and intellectual disciplines that rely on human insight and inspiration, and a new kind of teamwork, to produce remarkable experiences in highly competitive environments.”
– Scott Brinker, Hacking Marketing

At Stryve, we’re all about agile marketing. It’s the only way to thrive in a digital world. The waterfall mindset in marketing is dead. Digital requires you to move seamlessly between the creativity of social interaction to the science of conversion optimization and analytics. And it requires a massive mind shift to do so.

But how do you transform your team into an agile marketing powerhouse? Our experience has taught us it’s an incremental process. One that requires a simple approach to getting started. These four steps will get your team started in no time.

Educate Your Team on Agile Marketing

This is where things go wrong right away. A CMO or marketing leader will announce “we’re going agile.” Great. What does that mean? Why are we doing this? How do I fit in? What the heck is agile marketing? Before rushing forward, take a step back and educate your team by doing the following:

1. Run an info session on agile marketing. Start with the Agile Marketing Manifesto. If your team gets on board with this, you’re well on your way.
2. Read Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker. Then blog about it, like we did. Then do a working session discussing the key elements of the book. It’s the best book on agile marketing on the market. Know it cold.

If your team doesn’t understand agile, you’ll never get them on board. You need them to understand the HOW and WHY of agile.

Go Kanban with Trello

Kanban is a process for visualizing workflows originally developed by Toyota. It then extended into software development. Now it’s becoming the standard for digital marketing teams. There are plenty of Kanban platforms. If you like Jira, go with it. We’re big fans of Trello. We don’t feel comfortable recommending anything else. Before you can start your agile marketing, set up a kanban board on Trello. Below is an example of one we use. This one is pretty simple. Typically for more complex projects, we’ll use Done, Working On This Week, In Review, In Queue and Backlog as our headers. But there are a variety of approaches. You can also find more examples here.

Our Marketing Activities Trello Board

Run a Pilot

Don’t implement an agile marketing system across the board right away. Start with a small pilot with some basic agile principles. Don’t worry about perfect execution. Start with the fundamentals and get familiarized with them. Here’s how to run a quick pilot.

1. Start with a small project like a webinar or ad campaign
2. Do the basics. Pull together a scrum, plan and run a sprint, run a retrospective, optimize and run again.

Too many agile marketing teams aim for perfection from the get-go. It’s more important to get a feel for how agile works, then optimize over time.

Measure More by Measuring Less

Don’t try to measure everything. This leads to data puking. Lots of data. No idea what it all means. Start with a few KPIs that provide a baseline understanding of performance. These KPIs need to be tied to your objectives. For example, if you are running webinar campaign, you can start with the basics:

1. Clicks and open metrics (emails and ads)
2. Landing page interaction (depth of visit, bounce rates etc.)
3. MQL metrics (sign-ups, webinar attendance)
4. SQL metrics (BANT, call-qualified and sales figures)

Seasoned agile marketers will find a lot of gaps in using these few metrics. But we need to keep things simple to start. Over time you can layer on metrics and make connections. For now, let’s stay with the basics.

We’re Comfortable with Simplicity

Experts in digital tend to overwhelm their audience. Whether it be clients, colleagues, or conference attendees, there’s a tendency to communicate about the edges of innovation. We talk about glorious end states, where everything is measured, personalized and targeted. Where you can respond to any opportunity at any time. But the reality is that most marketing teams need to evolve over time. And to do that, you need to keep it simple to start. Agile is a process, not an end state. It’s an approach. And the best approaches are simple.

So get started, keep it simple, get better over time. Before you know it you’ll be running an agile marketing powerhouse.

In today’s talent market, voluntary turnover rates are at an all time high. With the average turnover rate across all sales industries being 11.5 percent – software sales holding the top spot at 15.3 percent turnover – it’s more crucial than ever to create a work environment your sales team doesn’t want to leave.  

With a record setting 51 percent of today’s workforce stating they’re watching for new opportunities regularly, Human Resources (HR) Leaders need to improve and maintain the aspects of their organization that top performing salespeople value most. These aspects include competitive compensation structures, training programs, opportunities for professional growth, flexible work location and schedule, and vacation time.

But there is another tactic HR Leaders can leverage to reduce sales force turnover and that is sales team building activities – both one-on-one and group based.

In this article we list and discuss the five most effective sales team building activities and how they help foster a work environment that builds employee loyalty, improves job satisfaction rates, and reduces voluntary turnover.

---

Skip to section:

Conduct stay interviews
Have collaborative huddles
Foster a team-based selling environment
Create a team scoreboard
Implement gamification
Facilitate side projects
Corporate Community Initiative (CCI)
Activities with remote employees
Download stay interview questions

---

Here is a list of the five most effective sales team building activities HR Leaders can use to reduce turnover rates:

1. Conduct “Stay Interviews”

Stay interviews are an effective way of gaining insight into what your employees enjoy most about their role and the organization, and on the flipside, what they don’t like.

It is a proactive approach designed to address any internal issues that may cause voluntary turnover, versus a reactive approach, which involves conducting an exit interview once a sales rep decides to leave.  

This one-on-one sales team building activity works as a trust fall exercise to keep a workforce engaged and on your team. It develops trust with your sales reps over time as you take steady action to follow through on promises of improvement. Some of these improvements could be with company culture, role attributes, company leadership, etc.

Susan Seip – HR Director at Easterseals Louisiana and former HR Manager at Geocent, states:

“It’s a relationship review. What’s your relationship to the company, the project team and your manager and what is within our purview to do to make those better? Stay interviews encourage managers to sit down and have a structured talk with their teams about what works and what doesn’t work for them.”

As HR Leaders build trust with their sales teams, sales reps are more likely to proactively share underlying concerns. As long as their HR Leader follows through with necessary action, they will continue to work with HR to improve their role and the organization.

The success of these interviews is dependent on the interviewer’s ability to remain open-minded and use both the positive and negative feedback to improve employee experience and employer brand.

For existing employees, conduct your stay interviews once per year during a slow business period. Conduct them all within a few weeks of each other so you can then take what you’ve learned and make any necessary changes.

For new employees, conducting stay interviews after their first 30 days and then again at 90 days is recommended.

When conducting the stay interview, questions should be broken down into three categories:

1. General questions to break the ice and gain insight into the employee’s feelings about your organization.

2. Questions relating to the employee’s role.

3. Questions that provide insight into their level of satisfaction with compensation and company perks.

You may also want to include time at the end of the interview for employees to include any information you may have missed, or to provide any additional suggestions.

Our list of stay interview questions:

Examples of general questions:

Do you believe that your work has meaning? How can we work together to make your work more meaningful? Is the organization providing you with opportunities to grow and develop as a person and as a professional? What would improve your opportunities? Do you feel that you have the necessary control over your job to perform most successfully and productively? What type of feedback would you like to receive about your performance that you are not receiving now? From me? From coworkers? Do you respect the amount and kind of leadership that you receive from the senior managers?

Examples of role specific questions:

Do you believe that your work has meaning? How can we work together to make your work more meaningful? Is the organization providing you with opportunities to grow and develop as a person and as a professional? What would improve your opportunities? Do you feel that you have the necessary control over your job to perform most successfully and productively? What type of feedback would you like to receive about your performance that you are not receiving now? From me? From coworkers? Do you respect the amount and kind of leadership that you receive from the senior managers?

Examples of sales specific questions:

Do you believe your sales goals are attainable? What can we do to make them more attainable? Is the organization providing you with enough sales support to do your job successfully? What kind of support would help you in your role? Do you feel that your goals are clearly set? How can we work together to create clear goals? What kind of feedback would you like to receive from your manager during your performance review? What can we do to make performance reviews more enjoyable and effective? Do you respect the amount and kind of sales leadership that you receive from senior management? What can we do to improve our leadership efforts?

Examples of compensation and perks questions:

Do you think your compensation is in alignment with the local market? What would you like to see in the employee benefits package that is not currently offered? When you consider the employee activities, events, parties, company sponsored sports teams, company paid race entries, company provided meals and snacks, and family activities, which would you like to see continued?

Please note: The stay interview questions are available for download at the end of the article.

Do stay interviews really work and are they worth the effort?

One organization that has experienced success implementing stay interviews is NOVO 1.

After implementing stay interviews with over one thousand employees, their voluntary turnover rate immediately decreased by 20 percent.

Mary Murcott – Founder and President at Performance Transformations Inc. and former President and CEO at NOVO 1, states:

“We build walls between us and employees by asking opinions in anonymous surveys which protect us from looking in their eyes and hearing their words. Maybe down deep we have a fear that they will ask for something and we’ll have to say no. We can’t become a great company unless we ask, listen, and then consider every reasonable request.”

2. Have collaborative huddles

A collaborative huddle is a group-based sales team building activity that serves a different purpose than a sales meeting. While sales meetings often include updates about:

• Previous sales activity (number of meetings, cold calls, presentations, etc)
• Pipeline status
• Goal status
• Deal status
• Scheduled sales activities  

A collaborative huddle addresses mistakes and obstacles your sales reps are presented with. And your team pools their talent and skills to find a solution.

Collaborative huddles are an important sales team building activity because a continuous obstacle that goes unaddressed can cause a sales rep to become unmotivated and disengaged. As a result, they may look for opportunities elsewhere.

Some obstacles include:

• A client who’s hesitant to work with them
• Going up against a big name competitor to win a deal
• Issues penetrating a target account
• An unsatisfied or disgruntled client

Also, two heads are in fact better than one, according to Scientific America. People perform better and make more intelligent decisions when they put their heads together, versus working alone. It allows open communication and collaboration to address challenges that sales reps may not be able to solve on their own.

“An idea is a network,” says Steven Johnson during his TED Talk titled:  Where Good Ideas Come From. “I’ve been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? I’ve started calling it the “liquid network,” where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other — that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.”

To implement this sales team building activity, HR Leaders need to ensure their sales leaders are scheduling regular meetings so sales reps can collaborate on their issues. 

Advise your sales leaders that these huddles can be held on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, and can be combined with their regularly held sales meetings to save time. We recommend setting aside 20-30 minutes at the end of the sales meetings to allow your team to collaborate on their issues. Depending on the size of the sales team, your sales leaders may need to schedule more or less time.

3. Create a team-based selling environment

A team-based selling environment is where a group of salespeople work towards a common sales goal. Each rep is closely connected with their team members and combine their knowledge, experience and skills to prospect and develop new business as a group.

Creating a team based selling environment is beneficial because top performing salespeople work to engage with their colleagues and coordinate their abilities to hit their targets.

With the amount of sales teams who practice team-selling increasing from 22 percent to 49 percent, team selling now accounts for 44 percent of the overall impact on a company’s profitability.

This means that HR Leaders have the opportunity to not only increase employee engagement and decrease sales turnover, but also increase profitability through team selling.

A large media company saw great success in a team-based selling environment. They invested in an internal social-networking platform with a goal of getting their sales reps to exchange information about complex accounts. As a result, cross-selling increased, sales cycles decreased and conversion rates went up.

Here are some examples of sales team building activities HR Leaders can use to create a team-selling environment:

Create a scoreboard

Having a scoreboard does more than just keep track of how your sales reps are doing against their targets. They foster healthy competition amongst the sales team and they help your sales leaders understand what aspects of their sales process are working and what’s not.

This sales team building activity is another way HR Leaders can be proactive about making necessary process changes to keep sales reps loyal and engaged.

For example, your sales leader notices there is a drastic difference between the amount of presentations given and the amount of deals won. HR Leaders can address the issue by helping to facilitate workshops and improve on presentation and follow-up skills.

Bob Ruffolo – founder and CEO of IMPACT, states:

“Sales success requires great salespeople in a great system.
You can get by with one or the other, but top performers can only do so much with a broken process and most likely won’t stick around”

When creating the scoreboard, make sure your sales leaders hone in on what metrics are important and over what period of time they will be measured. The scoreboard should include each sales rep’s name, their specific targets and their actual results.

Examples of metrics your sales leaders may include:

• Individual quotas for each sales rep (if you do a team quota, list the overall target and the revenue each sales rep has generated to achieve the collective goal)
• Level of activity (number of cold calls, sales meetings, trade shows, etc)
• Number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)  
• Pipeline size
• Number of deals closed (new and existing business, or a combined target)

Some tools your sales leaders can use to create the scoreboard include:

Implement gamification

Gamification is used to describe the application of traditional game elements to other activities to encourage engagement and drive. In a selling environment, HR Leaders can use it it to encourage collaboration and healthy competition amongst the team.

While gamification is often associated with younger generations – such as millennials – it can be implemented and used to motivate all generations. Top performing salespeople are driven individuals who have a desire to compete and win. Gamification fulfills these desires.

One organization in particular that has had success after implementing gamification into their selling environment is Stanley Black & Decker. Their goal was to bring in gamification to drive results with their more seasoned salespeople, especially those who tended to resist new technology.

The results they achieved were a 29 percent increase in pipeline activity, a 43 percent increase in documented opportunities and 70 percent of employees showed engagement.

Before choosing the kind of gamification to implement, help your sales leaders determine their goals by having them think about this statement:

If our sales team did more of X, or did X more effectively, we would hit our targets this quarter/year.

Once the goal is established, determine what gamification is most effective in achieving your sales leader’s desired results.

Some gamification options to provide your sales leaders include:

1. Leveraging their peers

To encourage collaboration on your sales team, create a system awarding points when sales tips are exchanged. It facilitates a team-selling environment while aiding reps in achieving their individual targets.  

2. Taking a new product to market

If your sales team isn’t talking about the new product with their clients, create a leadership board that rewards reps when they pitch it. HelloWorld used this concept and created a hashtag that was logged into Salesforce by the sales reps. As a result, they saw the product sales increase by 230 percent and the product pitches doubled.

3. Leverage your sales process to increase win rates

Collaborate with your sales leaders to analyze the sales process and determine what stage holds the highest win rate. Once that is determined, run a contest that gives points once the sales reps move an opportunity into that stage. This not only advances opportunities but it also helps keep your client data accurate.

4. Selling a particular product or service

If you have a product or service you want sold quickly – perhaps sales for this particular product are down or you have a new product launching – create a contest that awards points every time a sales rep successfully sells said product or service.

4.  Facilitate side projects outside of their role responsibilities

Using side projects as a sales team building activity is a way for HR Leaders to increase their sales reps’ sense of purpose within the organization – which fosters loyalty and decreases voluntary turnover.

They allow your salespeople to feel like their role has a greater impact on the company as a whole. In fact, 78 percent of millennial employees say it’s important to have side projects as another area of growth opportunity.

In a recent interview with HR Magazine, Anita Rai, Employment Law Partner at Taylor Vinters, stated:

“…most people do not know how to bring their ideas to fruition, they might be open to developing their idea with their employer. This will help the employer keep a hand on what is going on with their employees and how they are feeling, as well as potentially lead to interesting business opportunities,”

When considering what kinds of side projects to offer your sales team, think about these areas of the project:  

• The format in which it will be given
• The time they will be allocated
• The results you would like to achieve.

Debbie Madden, CEO and cofounder of Stride – an agile software development consultancy, based in New York City – explains that for 13-years she has been holding quarterly open space meetings where the entire company comes together for a whole day to discuss new ideas:

“Almost every single cool thing at Stride has come out of our Open Space meetings. It’s not a hackathon, so we’re not creating ‘products.’ We’re creating policy. [An] amazing idea that came out of a Stride Open Space is our monthly Lean Coffee. We talk as an entire company about the single most important issue facing our team at the time. The issue is self selected and voted on by all of Stride.”

Some projects you could facilitate include:

1. Peer mentorship opportunities  

Going through the onboarding experience can be daunting and is filled with the pressures of ramping up. Tenured sales reps have knowledge about the company, its products and services, its clients, and best practices.

HR Leaders can have tenured sales reps provide lessons on products and services, sales best practices, and much more. The new sales reps could also shadow the tenured sales reps in the field as they move through their sales cycles.

As a result of peer-lead teaching, your new sales reps can experience a 2 percent increase in sales training “stickiness” – which refers to how well information in retained – according to the Sales Leadership Council.

Having the tenured sales reps teach the new sales reps bridges the knowledge gap, decreases ramp up time, and offers the tenured sales reps opportunity to improve their leadership skills.  

2. Two second lean

Salespeople are busy and often so focused on hitting their targets that they don’t have time for side projects. However, encouraging them to practice “two-second lean” allows them to work on a new project and decrease the time needed for everyday tasks.

These “two-second lean” projects could include simplifying the way information is inputted into the CRM, decreasing travel time, or simplifying how expenses are submitted.   

3. Professional certifications

Earning a professional certification not only validates you sales rep’s expertise but it also gives your clients a higher level of confidence in your business. Your sales team will become more engaged since you are invested in their professional development and helping them take the next steps in their career.

Companies like Microsoft, IDC, CompTIA and Novell have experienced increases in productivity due to their professional certifications preparing employees for their day-to-day challenges.

Some professional certifications you could offer include sales methodology training, seminars for presentation skills, leadership skills, etc.

5.  Have a Corporate Community Initiative (CCI)

Companies that encourage community involvement not only distinguish themselves from their competitors, but also see the benefits of happier employees. Community involvement as a sales team building activity shows your sales reps that their role serves a larger purpose.

In a recent study done by Deloitte and Points of Light Institute, 74 percent of the white collar workers who participated in their CCI stated that it had a positive effect on their careers.  

In addition:

• 83 percent of professional women reported that their CCI developed their leadership skills
• 78 percent reported improvements in their communication skills
• Over 50 percent reported improvement in other workplace skills.

Below are some examples of companies who leverage CCIs to develop their employees’ skills and grow their employee bond:

Dow Corning

An employee was sent to Bangalore, India to participate in Dow’s international volunteer program. This program sends employees on a pro bono basis to work with NGOs and entrepreneurs in emerging countries.

One employee, an electrical apprentice, worked for four weeks with a local community and a team to improve the manufacturing process at Sustaintech – a local clean cookstove producer.

Throughout the experience, this employee learned leadership, problem solving, and out-of-box thinking skills. After returning to work, she stated she was excited about her future with Dow and hoped to move up in the company in the future.

Team One

Employees from Team One’s Atlanta office take over for the staff at the Atlanta Children’s Shelter one day every month. The volunteers look after the children so the shelter staff can hold their monthly meetings. The volunteers also help with classroom decorating and provide creative projects for the children.

An Account Coordinator stated the volunteering has deepened her understanding of the advertising industry and corporate philanthropy. She attributes her professional development to the volunteer program and gained valuable skills to help her work effectively with coworkers and clients.

Doing these activities with remote employees

More and more salespeople are doing their job remotely and at different times of the day. From 2012 to 2016 the number of remote employees rose by four points, taking it from 39 percent to 43 percent.

This means that employees have fewer face-to-face interactions with their managers and coworkers, and they’re communicating more through e-mail, instant messaging and conference calls.

To ensure HR Leaders are conducting effective sales team building activities with remote employees, we recommend using video conference software. Video conferencing encourages both participation and more face-to-face interaction.

Video conferencing is particularly useful for collaboration meetings, team-selling activities and side-projects.

Some video conferencing tools you can leverage include:

With CCIs and stay interviews, bring your remote employees into the office once or twice per year. As stay interviews are done annually and during slow business periods, bringing them in for a face-to-face meeting yields better results.

Decrease Your Voluntary Employee Turnover

Using sales team building activities not only decreases voluntary turnover rates but also increases employee loyalty – which is the heart of successful companies, according to Entrepreneur.

The more employee loyalty HR Leaders facilitate, the more the sales reps will go above and beyond to help their organization improve and succeed. Loyal employees share their expertise, they boost morale, and they consistently hit their sales targets.  

Keeping your sales team engaged and feeling positively about your organization will help ensure your turnover rate stays to a minimum and your top sales talent continues to generate revenue and profitability for your organization.

---

Download your list of Stay Interview Questions here.

Back to the top

The post 5 Sales Team Building Activities That Reduce Turnover Rates appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

If the most high-end product, service, or solution that you sell was available at the lowest price in the market, selling would be easy. So easy, in fact, that it wouldn’t be selling at all; it would be order-taking.

The price of an offering is based on the value it creates. Products, services, or solutions that create value require a greater investment to make or deliver, and therefore, they require that your client make a greater investment in obtaining those outcomes.

You will have prospects and clients that want a level of value with a required price beyond what they are willing or able to invest. You will have clients who ask you to provide them with the additional value that comes only with the greater investment at a much lower level of investment. Because they know the greater value is available, they want that additional value.

Some will demand more than they are willing to pay for, insisting that you should include it, that it should be standard, that it is integral to the outcome they need. These folks will have product offerings with similar pricing levels based on the value they create, and a good many may cave in and provide additional value without capturing the value necessary to deliver that value. Others will happily take a loss, losing money on transactions, and attempting to make it up on volume.

A useful operating philosophy is to decide that anyone can have anything they want, provided they are willing to pay for it.

This means that you are not only going to have to justify the additional value by describing the greater outcomes, something your client is already well aware of when they ask you to deliver it for free, but also that you justify the investment you need to make in delivering that additional value.

The post Your Client Can Have Anything They Want appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Managers spend an inordinate amount of time in pipeline reviews. Largely, I think this is the result of lack of clarity of what they want to accomplish in pipeline reviews or too great a focus on the numbers and not what produces the numbers. (but these are topics for other articles.)

Probably 95% of all pipeline reviews I sit in are wasted efforts. The manager will start reviewing the pipeline, immediately finding a deal that catches her eye, deciding to deep dive into that. Guess what, all of a sudden the pipeline review has become a deal review!

The conversation goes on, eventually, the manager has finished harassing the poor sales person about the deal, they go back to the pipeline review, the conversation continues, she finds another deal and the cycle starts all over.

In the end, the key question we have to answer about the pipeline is never answered: “Do we have a healthy pipeline that enables the sales person to make their numbers.”

I spend a lot of time on Pipeline Reviews in Chapter 23 in Sales Manager Survival Guide. It focuses on the fundamental things we want to understand in the review:

1. Do we have a high quality, high integrity pipeline? I’ll let you review the detail in the book, but the net is: If you have crap in the pipeline, deals that are only wishful thinking, then everything else is wasted effort. The pipeline has to be high quality–regardless how bad it looks after you clean it, now you can figure out what to do about it.
2. Do you have sufficient volume in your pipeline? Simply, do you have a sufficient quantity of deals and dollar volume of deals to achieve your goals?
3. Do you have sufficient velocity in your pipeline? Having the right volume is meaningless if those deals are stuck. It’s critical to look at flow. Generally, things like total sales cycle, days in stage, movement from stage to stage are great indicators of velocity.

You may be scratching your head at this point, thinking, “OMG, to understand the pipeline we have to have a sales process that our people are using!” That’s the funny thing about the pipeline, if you don’t have a sales process that your people are using rigorously, it’s impossible to build a pipeline that is meaningful. All you have is meaningless data based on individual opinions and wishful thinking.

But let’s assume you have these basics in place, what are some things you want to look at to get more insight into the pipeline and help coach your people to improve performance? Some thoughts:

1. Product mix: If your company has a wide product mix (i.e you have more than a single product line), you want to make sure the sales person is selling the entire product line. Think about it, if you have two product lines, and two sales people each making their numbers at $5M, but one sells only one product line, and the other has sold $2.5M of each, which is doing better? It’s the second, because she is executing the company strategy, selling the entire portfolio. The first, in fact, is under performing–even though he is making is number. He’s missing all the opportunities for the other product line in his territory. You want to make sure there is a good mix across your product lines and the sales person isn’t just selling his favorite product.
2. Customer mix: This is similar to the product mix concept, is the sales person focusing only on a few customers, selling to them, or are they covering a large number of customers in their territory?
3. New qualified deals: This may be similar to customer mix, but what is the sales person doing to bring new deals into the pipeline? Too often, we focus on the bottom of the pipeline and what’s exiting (hopefully won) and not on the new opportunities coming into the pipeline. It’s important to look at what new deals are entering. Are their enough? Are they the right kinds of deals? Are they the right quality? If this is a problem, you need to look at the sales person’s prospecting activity.
4. Balance in $ Volume and Deal Volume. I’ll pose this scenario. The healthy pipeline volume for each of your 3 people is $1M each, your average deal size is $100K, which would mean the healthy pipeline would have 10 deals. Lets say sales person A has 10 deals with a total value of $1m or more. Sales person B has 1 deal, but it’s $1M. Sales person C has 50 deals at an average of $20K each. You can probably see where I’m going. while all the pipelines are “healthy” from a $ value basis, there are some real challenges with the pipelines from sales people B and C.
   1. As a side example, you’ll want to look at win rates on a deal volume and $ basis. Recently, I was doing a review with a very excellent sales person. His win rate on a $ basis was more than 3 times his win rate on a deal basis. What’s that mean? Well, he’s very good at winning the high value deals, but not great at the low value deals—which represents a coaching opportunity. The win rates are unlikely to match (other than in a theoretical world), but if there is a huge difference points to some challenges and opportunities for the sales person.

I’ll stop here. Get the fundamentals of pipeline management right with your people. Make sure they understand their own healthy pipeline metrics—it’s different for each person. Make sure they have healthy pipelines or you are helping them figure out how to build healthy pipelines. Over time, look deeper into the pipelines to make sure they reflect the core priorities and strategies of the organization.

When I proposed bringing relevance back to offline retail through a tightly designed online experience to offline utility loop, I also criticized attaching new technological features, without context, in hopes of boosting the engagement metric. Despite my reservations about how tech innovation has been put into action, I am enthusiastic about our future with virtual reality (“VR”) in retail. Online and offline commerce are interconnected and need one another to sustain growth.

If we are to invest resources towards integrating a new digital channel, VR is the breakout star because VR can create personalized pop-up shops on demand, ushering in the next iteration of live digital experiences that doesn’t separate viewers from experience.

Smart retailers, whose businesses continue to flourish with the times, deepen community favorability by mindfully linking physical experiences with popular digital mediums to inform who they are in relation to you. In December 2016, streetwear brand and retailer Kith organized a pop-up shop in Aspen and used Instagram stories to merge its designed-for-Aspen products with the experience of being in Aspen. Global Kith fans had a real-time window into the limited-time event, while Kith’s physical presence helped build a community in Aspen. Pop-up shops are temporary, but Kith Aspen was not the first time Kith refined commerce through share-worthy offline retail experiences. Over the past couple of years, Kith expanded its retail locations to actively foster a community online and offline.

Using Kith’s online to offline model as the framework for better practices in commerce, there are two key points:

• First, Kith’s physical retail spaces are designed with community in mind, because an engaged community evangelizes a brand with user-generated content. This sense of interconnectedness adds soul to brand-generated content.
• Second, Kith used Instagram stories as an in-the-moment window into their brand experience, which adds a level of intimacy that is a step up from a curated photo post. Brands want their “live” stories to reach a global audience, so they leverage tools on platforms like Instagram and SnapChat to try and bridge that physical distance.

VR can be a valuable addition to, or completely replace, digital tactics like Instagram or SnapChat stories, because VR has great potential to imprint the senses of belonging and community that 2D digital mediums attempt to fake while pretending there isn’t a glass screen that separates here from there. That quality alone makes VR an attractive addition to digital marketing and advertising.

We oft repeat the Silicon Valley mantra, “move fast and break things,” but we need to strike a balance between launching an idea and iterating until it resembles an actual concept, versus launching a mindful idea and iterating to perfection. When it comes to VR, a fully interactive experience, taking that mindset to extremes can be a detriment to the growing ecosystem.

It’s time that we use VR’s available tools to remove the barriers and revolutionize the way we connect with one another.

Why is Kate Moss in 360-degree-video?

Charlotte Tilbury’s 360-degree-video advertisement, featuring Kate Moss, is an immersive video ad that tried to break the glass screen between you and their world. (*A simplified explanation: Charlotte Tilbury’s ad is an example of a passive VR experience, as opposed to an interactive VR experience.) Unfortunately, the ad’s goal was lost somewhere along in production because the ad did not leverage the impact 360-degree-video can have as a storytelling tool (1,2); the ad’s execution rendered 360-degree-video as a trendy tech gimmick. We live in a big world, and there are probably people who enjoyed this 360-degree experience with Kate Moss, but I was personally unable to find a convincing reason anyone should glimpse Moss’ world.

A more consumer relevant ad could have been a “hang out with Kate Moss while she gets ready with the perfume” experience. However, the ad would still be an example of applying emerging technology as an afterthought rather than integrating emerging technology as part of the online-to-offline experience. At the end of this experience, I felt no call to action to visit a local retailer or to seek out more digital content.

True VR Is the Key to Long-Term Engagement and Sales

VR has the potential to impart a lasting emotional footprint, but there is little long-term value in creating a VR experience unless it is a holistic integration into the online-to-offline experience. As we’ve seen in Instagram’s and SnapChat’s shoppable stories, an obvious standardization to a VR experience would be adding the “BUY NOW” feature as a call to action. To follow such methodology is lazy, and VR would fail to become nothing more than a passive-aggressive, online-to-online sales channel. Retail giant Alibaba is exploring a future where we shop in virtual malls from our homes; unfortunately this brings us back to how e-commerce growth tends to plateau without a physical tether.

Olivia Kim, Nordstrom’s Director of Creative Projects, is adept at mixing installation-like experiences with the insatiable thirst for a great selfie. Nordstrom’s Seattle flagship, as part of a Nordstrom and Hermès partnership, has a “pop-in” that showcases colorful silk scarves that hang from vertical racks. Dubbed “Silk Experience Room,” there’s also a giant hanging mirror for the selfie-inclined. Though Kim states that the objective of her in-store experience is engagement over sales, she also helped Carol Lim and Humberto Leon catapult Opening Ceremony from a hidden gem to an internationally recognized curator of downtown cool, and it happened by making Opening Ceremony the place to visit.

If we were to build the Nordstrom Silk Room Experience in VR and ensure that it is a mainstay of the online-to-offline loop, it needs to deliver an experience that is immersive and entertains with active participation. After all, if we limit VR to passive sensory-limited replications of real life, why would anyone choose VR over social media content? Though VR can’t engage all five senses, a fun way to interact with the scarves, while reinforcing the brand narrative, could be to teleport the customer to the source of the inspiration. The experience could be a journey outside central Rome, during which you help the designer find their favorite childhood pasta restaurant and learn the paths less traveled (by tourists). Or, since no one has to clean up virtual messes, participants could also pretend to be Olympian ribbon dancers, and a flowing color trail left behind by each twirl can showcase the scarves.

Social Pop-Ups in the Near Future

VR experiences don’t have to be single-person exploration. Facebook is among the giants betting big on social virtual world experiences. Facebook’s existence owes itself to understanding that humans are social beings, and while it can be nice to retreat into your own virtual world, positive peer-to-peer interaction is more emotionally stimulating. When applied to imparting utility in a VR pop-up shop, the experience can expand to include social shopping. VR pop-up shops can provide a shared environment where we connect with our friends and family to ask for their opinions between colors and styles. Or, in an interactive VR experience, friends and family could also “travel” and participate in a branded expedition together. Emailing, text messaging, and video chat have all played a part in revolutionizing how we communicate and collaborate, but those mediums don’t have the ability to let us engage with someone as if they were right beside us and living the same moments.

Memorable kinetic experiences like these are what you can impart with VR as a digital tactic that reinforces the online-to-offline loop. The goal for a VR experience is to deliver a strong narrative and utility.

VR Was What Brands Have Been Unable to Articulate All These Years

When creating a VR experience, the entire virtual world is a data environment, giving you precise measurement and metrics on engagement, specifically the subtleties in ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ that can’t be gauged by an impulsive tap of a button. This data can be leveraged to deliver more individualized experiences on demand.

VR pop-up shops can function any way you want, from wild experiences unlike anything in real life to live product rotations for each unique customer. Shelf space is unlimited and using the aforementioned VR-unique data environment, the consumer has a personalized inventory that doesn’t inundate them with unwanted content. People can have access to in-house stylists from around the world and socialize with them for product advice, or unite with friends and family to explore a shared virtual space. Social shopping could also be a community hang out spot where people can meet other fans of your brand.

VR is the medium brands and tech companies have been trying to mimic in 2D, developing and using tools like “stories” and “live” to bring everyone closer to the experience. Innovative brands have done impressive work within the limitations of tried and tested online tools, and I believe that, rather than searching for ways around the glass screen, it’s time that we use VR’s available tools to remove the barriers and revolutionize the way we connect with one another.

This article was originally published in Advertising Week and reprinted with permission.

Customer satisfaction not only drives revenue, it’s also the source of testimonials and case studies – the cornerstones of most marketers’ conversion strategies.

Positive words from your customers build trust and motivate other customers. In fact, most B2B marketers consider customer testimonials (89 percent) and case studies (88 percent) as the most effective content marketing tactics, according to a Salesforce post mentioning B2B content marketing trends.

But getting your loyal customers to participate in a case study is easier said than done. It’s often the hardest part of executing a case study. It’s no small thing for your best customers to take time out of their busy schedule to talk about how your product or service has helped them. Add in the concerns about sharing proprietary information, regulatory hurdles, company policies, and lengthy review cycles and creating a case study is a challenge.

---

Getting customers to agree to participate is often the hardest part of a #casestudy, says @SashaLaferte.
Click To Tweet

---

Follow these tactics to help persuade your customers and get them excited about participating in your marketing case study.

Create a formal submission and request process

Many companies have formal rules for providing testimonials, which can extend the process if you want to have them participate in a case study. Your customer may have to consult with a legal department and/or senior management just to get approval to proceed.

That is why the first tactic to grow your case study pipeline is creating a formal process.

---

The first tactic to grow your #casestudy pipeline is creating a formal process, says @SashaLaferte.
Click To Tweet

---

Meet with your customer success, sales, and marketing teams to explain why case studies are necessary to the success of your marketing strategy – and ultimately, sales. Use these compelling marketing case study stats from Boast to beef up your pitch.

Next, create a formal document that outlines how to submit marketing case study opportunities. Detail how frequently sales or customer success reps will submit names, and the time commitment involved after a customer agrees to participate.

---

Ask sales reps to submit names of possible #casestudy subjects, advises @SashaLaferte.
Click To Tweet

---

Create a case study request email template for your internal teams to use to make requests of your customers. Consider modifying one or more of these case study request templates.

Offer employees a bonus

Take your solution to the next level and offer team members incentives for recruiting customers to participate in case studies. This can be effective particularly if you’re struggling to get case studies due to a lack of suggestions or cooperation from other teams within your company.

The drawback to this method is that it’s a bandage approach. Incentivizing employees with money could fix your problem in the short term, but it might be costly in the long run. It also could encourage subpar submissions. Thus, create a short-term incentive plan and communicate your long-term approach to all in your organization. Use the short-term time to get the support of the relevant department heads to motivate their teams to suggest happy – and willing – customers.

Provide value to the customers doing the case studies (and explain it to them)

Case studies are often innately valuable for a customer too. Explain how your customers will benefit from participating. Tell how you’ll link to their website, describe their positive results on social media, and give them publicity through email. For video-based case studies, offer them use of the B roll in their own promotional materials. It’s a win-win.

---

Explain the value of a #casestudy for your participating customer, says @SashaLaferte.
Click To Tweet

---

Find alternatives if customer policies restrict or forbid case studies

Company policies that restrict or forbid some customers from participating in case studies are a big roadblock. Sometimes you can get customers who have restrictive policies to agree to a case study that doesn’t identify the company by name. While this isn’t nearly as impactful as having a brand name, it can show potential customers how your product works for similar companies. And you still get the benefit of a positive testimonial.

If you have the time, another option is to do a group case study that compiles reviews from several customers. Interview a large sample of your customers and create a case study based on the average results seen by your customers. This makes the information anonymous and provides statistics around your customers’ opinions to use in other marketing materials.

If you’re still not having any luck, try a different approach and start small. Build that case-study relationship over time. First, ask for a one-sentence quote or permission to put the company’s logo on your site as a customer.

Get going

Case studies provide proof of concept to potential buyers and drive your audience further down the funnel. They also serve as a powerful sales-enablement tool. But to create a case study, you must have a customer willing to share their experience with your product or service. Creating a plan to secure that permission – and enlisting your internal teams to help – is essential for short- and long-term case-study success.

With so many tactics available, content marketers can feel overwhelmed. If you read one industry blog a day (or a week), make it CMI’s newsletter – the expert insight on tips, trends, and more can help narrow your options and make the ones you pick more successful. Subscribe today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute 

Editor’s note: We appreciate Curata’s support of Content Marketing Institute as a paid benefactor. This article was reviewed and edited independently to ensure that it adheres to the same editorial guidelines as all non-sponsored blog posts.

The post How to Get Customers to Participate in a Case Study appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

Risk and certainty are not the same, but listening to the way many speak, it is easy to get the impression that even native English speakers often mix and interchange the two.  In most instances or conversation this misuse (or abuse) of the two may not matter or have tangible consequences, but in sales, well, they do.

At a basic level, with risk we are dealing with the known or experience backed estimate or assumptions.  If we look at actuarial work, they assess the risk, based on data and other factors, and then calculate what it will take to cover or mitigate the risk.   

Certainty speaks to the unknown, right out of the dictionary:

not clearly identified or defined; a fire of uncertain origin. 

Certainty or uncertainty may be a component of the factors people will use to calculate risk, but it is always the unknown element.

When it comes to selling it is not a question of right or wrong, but ensuring the seller and buyer are talking about the same thing, otherwise we sellers, may be introducing unnecessary risk into our sales.

Buyer may be uncertain about a number of things related to their purchase, which impacts the level of risk they perceive.  Some of that uncertainty may be around the new direction they are embarking on that may require services like yours.  Others may be certain they are on the right path, but uncertain you are the right travel mate or partner embark with.  One way to manage this is providing insight and knowledge to help the buyer understand, and reduce their uncertainty.

Some believe they do this but they do not.  An example would be ROI calculators or marketing contrived scenarios.  These are not bad, but are usually product or vendor centric.  They take a “real life” scenario, which is usually not based on the average experience, but the absolute best-case scenario, usually one your current buyer does not always relate to.  This adds to their uncertainty about whether you understand what they are looking to achieve, adding to both their uncertainty and the risk to you getting the deal.

According to The B2B Buying Disconnect – TrustRadius 2017, buyers find sellers focus on providing material that buyers don’t find very useful or trustworthy, they don’t trust all vendor claims, nor do they expect to, especially when sellers overemphasize selection criteria that aren’t important to buyers.  But buyer do want something that vendors have in but fail to fully leverage, satisfied customers, prospects want hands-on experience with the product and insights from customers.   A clear indication that sellers are adding to the uncertainty with their approach.

Sellers often know the outcomes or impacts they seek, but have no clear ideas on how to get there.  This is where sellers make the mistake of only focusing on risks they perceive prospects may focus on while comparing providers.  When they do this instead of dealing with the buyer’s uncertainty first, they are adding risk to their chances of winning the deal.  Sellers need to understand buyer uncertainty, once they have removed, minimized or isolated the buyer’s uncertainty sufficiently, they can turn to dealing with the inherent risk. Sellers actually increase the risk in the deal if they do not deal with uncertainty first, especially if that uncertainty is not around vendor, but on the means to an end, specifically their objectives.  By failing to deal with uncertainty, they elevate risk.

One way to deal with this, as I have stated in the past, is to leave the product in the car, and go in with the goal of understanding their objectives, gaps and hurdles in their way to achieving those objectives.  This will help them articulate their uncertainty; you can leverage the tension between what they want and what is driving their inability to achieve them, the very things causing their uncertainty.  Creating clarity, removing doubt, will not only allow them to attribute value to dealing with you, but also reduce perception of risk on their side.

Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.

Join Now!

The post Risk vs. Uncertainty appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

A quick look at Google Trends comparing Influencer Marketing to other marketing disciplines shows a near hockey stick growth trend. Since my team consults and I advocate, write and speak about influencer marketing so often, people often ask me: “Is influencer marketing a real trend?”.

Looking back on my experience in digital marketing over the past 20 years with the advent of disciplines like SEO, social media and content marketing, I’d say the momentum around influencer marketing has many of the same characteristics. It’s here, it’s still early and will continue to grow.

While working with influencers isn’t all that new, my experience talking about influencer marketing with B2B brands (and many agencies) has taught me that many B2B marketers are not fully aware or confident about where working with influencers fits in their marketing mix.

The good news is that we’ve been in the thick of B2B influencer marketing and content marketing for the last 6-7 years. Starting with experiments, we evolved our offering by practicing what we preach and introducing best practices and process to our clients. Today we’re delivering influencer content marketing services to major B2B and B2C brands including SAP, LinkedIn, State Farm and 3M.

To learn what we’ve learned, I invite you to check out the following 5 events where I will be talking about influencer marketing from essentially 5 different perspectives. From New York to San Francisco to Milan, there’s something for everyone.

Learn Influencer Marketing for Influencer Marketers

Sept 26: New York
Influencer Marketing Days #InfluencerDays
Keynote: B2B Influencer Marketing: Top Trends, Examples & Opportunities
The irony of this presentation is that I will be in New York as an influencer for IBM and while there, giving a presentation on influencer marketing at an influencer marketing conference! It’s like influencer marketing inception!

Learn B2B Influencer Marketing

Oct 4: Boston
MarketingProfs B2B Forum #MPB2B
Solo: From Why to ROI: B2B Influencer Marketing Case Studies for Success
One of my all-time favorite conferences of the year, B2B Forum is where I get to truly geek out on B2B influencer marketing with some of the smartest B2B marketers in the world. And there’s Ann Handley too – who would want to miss hanging out with her? No one!

Learn About ABM & Influencer Marketing

Nov 7: San Francisco
Dreamforce #Dreamforce17
Solo: The ABCs of Influencer Content for ABM
Salesforce event staff have told me I will have a room that can seat 800, which might not seem like much for a conference with 90,000+ attendees, but I’ll take it. Companies that use marketing software are definitely great potential clients for TopRank Marketing.

Learn About SEO & Influencer Marketing

Nov 9: Las Vegas
Pubcon #pubcon
Keynote: In Search of Influence
Brett Tabke gave me a shot at speaking early on in my career and because of a longstanding client conference date that conflicted with Pubcon, I haven’t been able to attend in many years. Now I’ll be giving a keynote to the community where I got my start in marketing and I can’t tell you how much that means to me. My hope is that the presentation will mean something to the amazing search community.

Learn About Content & Influencer Marketing

Nov 15: Milan
SMXL #smxlmilan
Masterclass: Content Marketing & Influence Integration
I will be back in Milan to talk about content marketing with an influencer marketing flavor to the hungry Italian marketers converging on Milan. This event will also give me the opportunity to connect with my European search marketing pals.

5 Steps to Influencer Marketing Awesome

I know it’s possible you might not be able to attend the conferences listed above. So I’ll share a few tips to provide some direction for those just getting started with the idea of incorporating influencer collaboration with their marketing. Broadly, there are some universal truths to influencer marketing where content is the marketable asset produced. Here are 5 worth paying attention to:

1. Be specific. When setting goals for what’s possible, define your topic of influence specifically. Focus topics drive influencer identification as well as influencer content, SEO and social media themes.

2. Be the best answer. Map focus topics to your normal content, SEO, advertising and media relations plans.To be the best answer wherever customers are looking and influenced, it’s more effective if there is continuity of message across channels where buyers discover and consume solutions content.

3. Give to get. Brandividuals that play the game of influence will respond to compensation early, but most niche and brand influencers require romance. Start recruiting through social engagement long before you ask influencers to collaborate.

4. Collaborate to create. Invite influencers to make something together that drives the influencer’s objectives while at the same time, fuels brand objectives. At a minimum, influencer engagement results in content co-creation that can be repurposed by the brand for demand gen programs. Also consider the power of pride. When influencers invest in creating something that makes them look good, they will be inspired to share and help your brand reach new audiences.

5. Measure smart. Inputs, outputs and outcomes of influencers and their communities relative to your content collaboration is essential. When content is part of your influencer collaboration, then you’ll have all the measurement opportunities with any other content marketing program as well. The key is to map KPIs of working with influencers to business goals for your brand.

Whether you are in New York for Advertising Week, Boston for Marketing Profs B2B Forum, San Francisco for Dreamforce, Las Vegas for Pubcon or Milan for SMXL, I hope to see you so we can connect and learn from each other about the amazing world of influencer marketing.

Do you have proven community management, content and influencer engagement skills? Work with TopRank Marketing! If you are an experienced influencer marketing professional and would like to join a team that is fast tracking growth and working with some amazing brands, then be sure to check out our careers page or contact me directly: lodden at toprankmarketing .dot com.

---

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2017. | Learn Influencer Marketing 5 Ways | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post Learn Influencer Marketing 5 Ways appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

How many loyalty cards do you have in your wallet? Between coffee-shop stamps and gas station points and consumer rewards, it’s likely there’s quite a few (in fact, the average American is a member of 29 loyalty programs — even though they’ll only use half of them this year).

Just one look at the recent Air Miles fiasco and it’s clear that these programs are a hassle for companies, too.

Study after study has shown why they just don’t work. You essentially discount your brand in exchange for customer data, which feels cheap and tawdry. In the long run, it doesn’t yield economic returns — studies have shown that companies with a higher spend on loyalty programs earn, on average, 10 per cent less than competitors. The reality is, do any of the cards you have really compel you to head back to the store?

For companies, I think a dose of brutal honesty is in order. In the end, loyalty programs are about gathering information from your customers. If you want that precious data, be up front about it and give them a compelling reason to share it.

Real loyalty, in my mind, starts with showing buyers you have integrity, heart and soul — a purpose, personality and sense of values that transcend your logo. Eighty-nine percent of consumers in the U.S. say it’s shared values that drive their brand loyalty, not discounts.

And this is where corporate social responsibility — i.e. charitable and giving programs — and loyalty unexpectedly converge. These are usually thought of as two separate initiatives, but they don’t have to be. With a loyalty program that’s tied into a giving program, you enable customers to actually give back instead of getting punches on a card or piling up miles they’ll never use.

I’ve thought about his a lot lately. I was never exactly happy with DavidsTea’s Frequent Steeper program — not only was it complicated to manage, it cost us millions of dollars in product each year and did nothing to drive our already-loyal customers to the store. When I launched my newest venture, I wanted to get this right. We recently rolled out a very different kind of loyalty program at Mad Radish: for every order a customer places on our app or online, a serving of fresh vegetables is donated to a local food charity on the customer’s behalf.

• CIBC divorce from PC Financial shines light on bruised loyalty card industry
• Canada's Engage People wants to shake up global customer loyalty programs

After trying it for two months — and giving away more than 1,000 servings of produce — I don’t think we’ll ever go back to a “Buy 9 Get the 10th Free” model. For other entrepreneurs looking to reboot their loyalty programs, here are a few principles we learned along the way.

Pick the right partner
If you’re going to tie loyalty with giving, it has to truly make sense for you and your customers. The right initiative should be intrinsic to your core business and its mission, not an afterthought. It’s not just about presenting a novelty cheque to charity once a quarter.

For our program, for instance, we partnered with Community Food Centres Canada (CFCC), a national nonprofit focused on giving low-income families in need access to fresh, healthy food. Rather than giving away canned and processed stuff, they build community food centres where the emphasis is on creating a space where people come together, cook together and eat together. Our business is about proving that healthy food can be delicious, so this was a natural fit.

Consider keeping it local
I think there’s something empowering and gratifying about helping people in your own backyard. This makes sense from a giving perspective, but also from the perspective of energizing your customer base to take part.

I have tremendous admiration for one-for-one giving programs like those at Warby Parker and Tom’s shoes for making a huge difference in the lives of people around the globe. At the same time, one of the things I love about working with CFCC is that we’re donating fresh vegetables to people an hour away.

Increasingly, companies — even those with global reach — are thinking locally when it comes to giving, for these very reasons. Telus, for one, has branded its charitable efforts “Give Where You Live,” investing in hyper-local causes (such as the Bipolar Disorder Society of BC) and challenging employees to donate volunteer hours.

Incorporate technology and make it real
Here’s where giving programs can take a cue from loyalty initiatives, especially in terms of integrating technology and gamification. Being able to track and quantify your individual charitable impact adds a level of personal investment and commitment. We spent a great deal of time developing an app that logs each donation so that users can see in real time how many servings of veggies we’ve given away and what their own contribution is.

The idea of wedding a loyalty program to corporate giving may feel a little unconventional. But, really, if the alternative is trying to bribe customers with stuff they don’t really want or value, then why not give it a try? At the end of the day, it represents a way to build a bigger, more meaningful kind of loyalty, not just with buyers but with the community at large.

David Segal is the founder of Mad Radish and a retail thought leader. He’s best known for bringing radical innovation to a 5,000-year-old product category with the launch of DAVIDsTEA.

Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI published it last year. We’re sharing it now because promotion of your content – and practical steps to do so – are always needed.

Marketers often pour their efforts, resources, and budgets into developing an e-book only to move on once the landing page is live. Your e-book could be the next game-changing, Content Marketing Award-winning, produce-into-a-major-motion-picture piece, but without promotion, nobody will click, download, read, or even see it.

Promoting an e-book goes beyond creating a landing page, tweeting a link, and emailing it to your customers. Those are the staple moves, much like serving turkey and dressing at Thanksgiving dinner.

---

Promoting an e-book goes beyond a landing page, a tweeted link, & a customer email, says @amandalnelson.
Click To Tweet

---

Great e-book promotion touches all phases of the sales funnel and requires involvement from multiple teams within your organization. A collaborative, planned approach to e-book promotion not only generates leads, but it also catches the eyes of your best prospects.

Here’s a look:

 

Top-of-funnel promotion

Your top-of-funnel efforts likely cast a wide net. You know some information about this audience so you can target accurately, but you don’t know them as well as you know your best customer. Therefore, this is the place to slice and dice your promotion the most. People digest content in different ways. The more you chop it up and share it, the more e-book buzz you’ll create.

Try these tactics, making sure that the e-book always is the call to action:

• Turn each chapter into a blog post on your corporate blog.
• Record someone from your team reading the e-book and launch it as an audio book.
• Run a webinar with the author, featured thought leaders, or brands.
• Create an infographic with the e-book’s tips, tricks, or quotes.
• Tweet with quotes, stats, or tips from the e-book.
• Host a Twitter chat on the topic.
• Post snaps and Instagram stories with featured quotes or tips.
• Contact influencers and ask them to share it (give them an exclusive sneak preview for even more exposure or buzz).
• Write a guest blog post for sites covering the topic.
• Include the e-book in two or three places on your website, such as the home page, resources section, customer log-in page, and sidebar callout.
• Turn it into a printed book and give it away at conferences, booth exhibits, etc.
• Write email and phone scripts/outlines about your e-book for cold outreach by sales or business development representatives.

---

For top-of-funnel #e-book promotion, turn each chapter into a blog post, says @amandalnelson.
Click To Tweet

---

Middle-of-funnel promotion

If you generate a thought leadership, top-of-funnel e-book, you might think your promotion efforts stop at the top of the funnel. That is not the case. Other departments and audiences can benefit from your e-book, which will ultimately lead to revenue for your organization, which should be an end goal for you, too.

The middle of the funnel is where you get existing prospects to raise their hand and move closer to the sale. This is probably the toughest part of a marketer’s job. If you have great content and a strong reach, it’s not hard to get net new leads into your database. A simple download is all you need to get the process started. However, to get those leads to commit to a demo or free trial takes more work. Your e-book can help.

---

Your e-book can get leads to commit to a demo or free trial, says @amandalnelson.
Click To Tweet

---

Consider these middle-of-funnel ideas:

• Work the e-book into your nurture program(s) or drip campaigns.
• Share on your organization’s forums or community site.

• Create a content pack for existing prospects, including a case study, e-book, one-sheet, etc.

• Include the e-book in your newsletters.
• Provide the e-book to employees in many ways so it’s easy to access and share, including:
• Post or file on team collaboration platform
• Link to landing page
• Give direct link to e-book (e.g., after-form complete page or PDF link)
• Shelve in content library
• Click to tweets and click to share on LinkedIn

 

• Ask partners to send it to shared partners and networks.
• Print it and include it in a care package to customers and prospects.

• Enter your e-book in marketing contests.

Bottom-of-funnel promotion

The bottom of the funnel is where sales takes the lead. Imagine the funnel as a road, and you’re driving down it. As a marketer, you’re in the driver’s seat for the top and middle of the funnel. You control the content, the message, the promotional approach, etc. When you reach the bottom of the funnel, the salesperson takes the wheel. The salesperson is in charge of closing that deal. However, you don’t hop out of the car, you get in the back seat. You can still help, and that e-book is your admission ticket. Here are some ideas to support bottom-of-funnel promotion:

• Attach the e-book to first-call presentation decks.

• Use it to develop email or phone scripts and templates for existing prospect outreach.

• Print it and give it to salespeople as takeaways or leave-behinds for meetings.

Don’t get overwhelmed – think of this post as a tapas menu, where you can pick and choose the tactics that work for you. As you promote your e-book, you’ll quickly learn what works (and what doesn’t work). From there, you can hone in and focus on the successful tactics. Soon, you’ll have a well-oiled machine for not only creating great e-books, but also for getting them out there for the world to see and devour.

---

Think of your e-book promotion options like a tapas menu. Pick what tactics work for you, says @amandalnelson.
Click To Tweet

---

We’re following Amanda’s advice. Check out a wealth of content marketing resources in the Content Marketing Institute e-book library, from The Essentials of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy to Digital Governance: A Primer for Content Marketers.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Editor’s note: This back-by-popular demand post has been updated because promotion of your content — and practical steps to do so – are always needed.

The post 27 Things You Can Do to Promote Your E-Book appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

What if there was one change to your sales process that would make 53% of prospects likelier to buy from you -- and 63% feel more positive about you, 59% believe your business cares about them, and 55% likelier to trust you?

You’d probably implement it immediately.

But this question isn’t hypothetical. The change in question is enabling your prospects to message you.

Every month, people exchange billions of messages with companies. Messaging is their second favorite way to communicate with businesses. And that’s not changing anytime soon: Nearly 7 in 10 customers expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.

Customer Expectations Are Changing

These days, prospects don’t have the time or patience to find your website, fill out a request to speak to a salesperson or schedule a demo, be routed to a rep, receive an email, and set up a meeting. Such a high-touch, manual process means it can take days, even weeks before they can learn the answers to their questions.

In contrast, sending a message and getting a reply takes mere seconds. This process is even quicker, easier, and more convenient if they can interact with you from multiple platforms -- Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, email, etc. -- without losing their previous messages.

Not only is messaging better for buyers, it’s also beneficial for businesses. You can add value to your prospects’ lives in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort. Gaining their trust and learning about their situation and needs more quickly means you’ll close more quickly as well. The speedier your sales process, the more deals your sales team can close.

You might be thinking, “Okay, these results sound great. But how do I answer all these messages from prospects? I’d have to hire a bunch of reps to sit at their computers and do nothing but respond to chats.”

Here’s where bots come in. A bot is an AI-powered tool that performs automated tasks. The most well-known bots are chatbots, meaning you use them by having a conversation.

Bots and messaging are a powerful combination.

Immediacy

Bots offer immediacy that’s unrivaled by humans. To illustrate, imagine two of your reps are active when a hot lead visits your website. She has a question about pricing, so she clicks the “Chat with a salesperson” button. Unfortunately, both reps are helping other people and can’t respond right away. After a minute of waiting, the prospect gets impatient and leaves the site.

Now imagine you have a bot who’s equipped to answer product questions. The prospect asks her question, receives an immediate answer, asks a follow-up question, and gets a second response. At that point, the bot marks this lead as “qualified” and passes it to a live salesperson who will learn more about her needs. She ends up buying at the end of their conversation.

Scale

Not only are bots faster than people, they can also help an infinite number of queries at once. A rep can juggle three to five conversations at any given time, depending on how complex the questions are. However, bots aren’t restricted by these limits.

That means you can have a huge flood of buyers looking for information via chat without compromising quality -- or response time.

Intelligent routing

Of course, there are some aspects of selling that will always be better-suited to actual people. Real people offer much that bots cannot: Intuition, empathy, humor, the ability to deal with ambiguity, and more. Bots aren’t meant to replace humans; they’re meant to take over the more administrative, lower-value tasks currently sucking up reps’ time so they have more bandwidth for important sales activities.

That’s the final piece of the bot puzzle: Smart handoffs. Once a bot has identified a good fit prospect, they can pass them to a rep. Not only does the rep have immediate insight into the prospect’s situation and needs, the bot has already helped them become a trusted advisor.

The messaging and bot revolution is underway. Meet your customers where they’re at, answer their questions quickly and efficiently, and serve up qualified leads to your salespeople.

Editor's note: HubSpot has acquired Motion AI, which enables everyone (developer or not) to build bots. Learn more here.

As online business owners, I think a lot of us have had our heads turned by stories of people who have five, six, even seven-figure launches for their businesses. These Cinderella success stories are so compelling, and they seem to be EVERYWHERE!

But the fact is, despite all the success stories you may have seen or heard, a LOT of online launches fail. Or, if they don’t outright FAIL, they certainly don’t live up to goals or expectations.

I couldn’t find statistics specifically on the types of online info- or service businesses many of my customers have, but research has shown that (depending on the industry) the average failure rate of a new product is between 30% and 49%.

Let that sink in: Nearly HALF of all new products launched fail.

Chris Ducker suggests that 90% of internet business startups fail within the first 120 days! That’s mind boggling — and if you’ve made it past the 120-mark, give yourself a pat on the back.

Regardless of the actual numbers, we can postulate that the percentage of launch failures is pretty high. But why is that?

Let’s assume that you have a product (not always true!) and that you already know that people want / need it. Leaving aside the problems of production or funding or those sorts of things, a launch’s failure almost always comes down to one thing:

Marketing.

And problems with marketing can be broken down into a few different problems:

1. You don’t have enough leads.

Maybe the biggest problem I see with my clients is that they don’t have enough leads to turn into prospects to turn into the number of sales they want to see. It’s really just math: You need exponentially more leads than you want sales.

2. You haven’t overcome objections.

I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money. I don’t think it will work for me. If you’ve ever sold anything, you’ve probably heard every variation of these objections — but are you actually addressing them at any point during your launch? And, beyond the time and money issues, it’s vital to research and figure out what other objections your key potential customers might have so that you can speak directly to those objections.

3. You haven’t made the offer feel urgent.

Urgency is a big deal. Sometimes launches have urgency built-in — the cart closes on a certain day, or there are a limited number of spots available, etc. But sometimes even that isn’t enough because you haven’t addressed why the person must take action right now. Even with a product that is always available, there is something that the customer is missing or giving up or not addressing by not making the purchase right now — and you need to remind them of the cost of delay in order to create urgency.

4. You haven’t made the offer personal.

No matter what you’re selling, the customer needs to know not only that the product or service is good, but that it is right for them. Lots of business owners resist niching down, because they feel as though their product or service would be good for anyone! But I can’t think of a single product or brand whose niche is “everyone;” even products like Coca-Cola and brands like Wal-Mart have specific people and communities they appeal to. Your marketing, especially for a launch, needs to make it exceptionally clear who the product or service is perfect for — and who it’s NOT right for — so that potential customers can self-select. And, to take it a step further, you want them to be excited to self-select so that they will make a purchase.

5. Your audience is exhausted.

Your list is not an unlimited resource. Let’s pretend you launch a program to your list of 1,000 people, and you make 10 sales. Great. But now everyone in that pool of people has seen the offer and made a decision about whether or not it was right for them. If you try to sell the same product to those remaining 900 people, only a very small percentage will change their mind. OLD leads don’t convert at the same rate as NEW leads. The point is, your list is a limited resource, and so you must continuously be replenishing it (see No. 1) in order to continue to sell.

How do you avoid these problems?

What I most often see is that if people try to address these potential problems, they go about it too late.

If you are trying to address these problems exclusively on your sales page or while your cart is open, your chance for success goes WAY down.

Because that’s too late. By the time you’re asking for the sale, many times people have already made up their mind, and you have only moments to try to influence them.

Instead, your marketing plan for your launch needs to be addressing these issues weeks, and even months before you ever try to sell something.

Why?

Because I know that most of you are looking to build a relationship with your customers — not just a transaction. And it’s so much more effective to start that early, well before you’re asking them to plunk down their cash.

For example:

• Need more leads? —> Create tantalizing lead magnets (events, videos, downloads, etc.) well in advance of your launch so that you have plenty of time to nurture those new people.
• Need to overcome objections? —> Use content to demonstrate how the investment (of time or money or both) is worth it or the return the customer can expect. Addressing frequently asked questions (or SHOULD ask questions) through content is also effective.
• Need to build urgency? —> Content that demonstrates the risk of inaction can be extremely effective.
• Need to make your offer more personal? —> Build case studies or demonstrations into your content marketing so that your potential customers can see how your product or service meets their exact needs.

Take a moment to think about your next launch and ask yourself if you are structuring your marketing to guard against these common problems. And take a moment to download my launch content checklist below to help organize your thoughts.

Retail-apocalypse is not a new headline, and with exceptions like high-demand and limited-supply pop-up shops, the majority of physical retail experiences are not worth our time. As a monetization game designer with three top-100 grossing apps, I am perplexed why brands believe the cure to their dismal sales lies in making their own app or posting pictures on social media. Spoiler alert: nobody cares about your app and your posts are bordering spam.

I believe we need to let die the misconception that our holy grail solutions to revive enthusiasm for in-store shopping involve overhauling a store with iPads to replace clothing racks or applying next level technology like artificial intelligence and smart voice technology to an overall experience. Until we perfect the integration of digital technologies into a commerce experience, we should learn from where we failed in how we approached designing the core online-to-offline consumer experience. As our day-to-day lives become increasingly digital, to create a strong online-to-offline experience, we must redesign the physical retail experience around delivering utility that mutually benefits the consumer, retailer, and brand.

A Bullet-Proof Online-to-Offline Experience Means Millions In Sales The First Hour

Legendary makeup artist Pat McGrath’s launches is one of my favorite examples of delivering utility (something that adds beneficial value to your life) in physical retail stores to consumers, retailer, and brand. McGrath started her own line of makeup in 2015 with a focus on limited time products that reflect her extraordinary runway aesthetic. Her recent release, a lipstick collection, was available only via her web store on July 19th. Like her previous launches, it sold out immediately and with no known date for re-release. The next and last launch phase makes the lipsticks available exclusively through mass beauty retailer Sephora (online and select stores) on July 29th.

Though Pat McGrath does not currently have a brick and mortar store, Sephora is about as ubiquitous as Starbucks. Sephora was also perceptive enough to secure a partnership with McGrath, giving McGrath’s launches “pop-ups” inside major Sephora locations. Leading up to the release, the product hype was marketed digitally through content that constantly and consistently primed fans to be excited, entertained, and engaged for weeks. McGrath’s Instagram teased fans daily with visually engaging content that included color swatches, video tutorials, and glossy behind-the-scenes sneak-peeks.

Those like myself, who are willing to brave crowded spaces to spend upwards of $100 on eyeshadow and lipstick, do so because the utility we acquire goes beyond wanting to wear a luxurious product. We make time to go to a physical store to interact with the products, engage with makeup artists for application tips, and to potentially buy a coveted product that is not only beautiful but also limited in stock and time – what Park Avenue calls exclusivity marketing!

A Lucrative Cycle

The cycle begins by Pat McGrath establishing a digital experience that drives traffic to a local Sephora, which delivers utility through an on-site experience, which then funnels people back to McGrath’s digital channel or Sephora’s digital channel – where social proofing and organic, user-generated content reinforces a deeper buy-in to the brand’s narrative. The execution is perfect.

Digital experiences designed with a holistic viewpoint that respects the end-to-end shopping experience from iPhone to clothing rack are the ones that perform well. This means having a point-of-view and/or lifestyle people want realized. Cosmetic manufacturer Benefit’s core narrative is the “perfect brow to reveal your prettiest self.” The company has over 2,000 counters in 30 countries, and, like any modern company that sells a product, they maintain a digital presence which reminds consumers of their narrative. Benefit’s Brow Genie is a personalized digital experience that acts as a bridge to their in-store Brow Bar, where waxers are trained in “unique brow mapping.” The Brow Bar is an incentive to visit Benefit’s boutiques and counters, and, because the Brow Bar is built into their retail locations, it doubles as an opportunity to introduce people to other products. Of course, the store visit doesn’t end there; you loop back to their online channel to continue the Benefit experience – possessing the “perfect brow.” By building on their narrative, Benefit’s retail sales were expected to surpass their targeted $100 million within the first six months of launching its brow-centric sets.

Nike Knows How to Optimize Digital and Physical Experiences

Curating the right “vibe” in the digital sphere makes a brand’s aesthetic aspirational, but brick-and-mortar has the advantage of being a hub for social interaction. Nike continues to thrive because they understand that experiences that connect the physical and the digital are what triggers human connection – not flashy, stand-alone tech gimmicks that are trending today and forgotten tomorrow. In 2016, Nike opened a massive retail space in NYC that features a mini indoor basketball court and soccer enclosure, as well as a treadmill that simulates runs in various locations. The store itself is an event, merging “the place to be” with Nike products. Nike has vast resources, yet they chose to invest in a brick and mortar space because they understand in-store experiences with worthwhile utility are an integral factor in maintaining brand relevance. In a Forbes column, Steven Dennis argued, “Without a compelling store footprint, a brand’s relevance will likely decline and its e-commerce business almost certainly will falter,” because, “store productivity numbers, taken in isolation, no longer get at the heart of a brand’s overall performance in an omnichannel world.”

Any Brand Can ‘Just Do It’ Like Nike

Nike has the advantage of being one of the world’s largest corporations, with massive online and offline reach, but any brand can galvanize brick-and-mortar hubs to serve their respective communities. Founded by Ronnie Fieg, Kith (as in Scottish phrase “kith and kin”) opened its first store in 2011 and has since morphed from sneaker empire to trendsetting fashion brand. Like Pat McGrath’s cosmetic line, Kith’s product launches are exclusive and limited. Despite high-volume domestic and global e-commerce sales, Kith’s Flatbush Avenue store in Brooklyn underwent a $2 million renovation in 2015. A key part of that expansion was Kith Treats, a cereal and ice cream bar. In a profile Jian Deleon wrote about Kith for Business of Fashion, Fieg explained, “Some kids can’t afford to buy an article of clothing every other week or every month, so they can leave with a taste.” The branded spoons and shoebox-styled bowls are all very instagrammable marketing, but Kith Treats leans into the community aspect of giving people a physical space to hang with their friends and family. Deleon noted that Kith’s teenage customers often stay for a few hours rather than browsing and leaving. That positive in-store experience carries over to online engagement, then back to the store to repeat that social experience.

The Key: Utility

Mary Meeker’s yearly market research revealed that, “Retail store closings may break a 20-year record, and e-commerce growth is accelerating 15% Y/Y growth.” Based on these numbers, some major offline retailers are making an aggressive shift into the online to online business model. However, current retail innovators have demonstrated through their investments in physical spaces that operating solely online is not enough to flourish. Digital content presents an aspiration that we want to be “in” on, but an offline store has the potential to a give people an experience that feels exclusive but is not exclusive.

Smart retailers recognize the decline in brick and mortar retail is not because of e-commerce. Consumers are evolving and becoming more digitally savvy as time passes. Thriving retailers also know humans can be resistant to abrupt change. We live in a time where everything from our music to our clothes to our food are mash-ups of the traditional and the new, and it would be short-sighted to believe that our relationship with retail cannot successfully apply this concept. To restart the online-to-offline flywheel, your online content should be designed to promote offline traffic that delivers increasing marginal utility to the consumer. No one wants to feel like they wasted their time: Make the effort to deliver utility, and the people will cycle back in return.

This article was originally published in Advertising Week and reprinted with permission.

Since my first yoga class, I’ve been so grateful that I discovered this ancient activity and philosophy. Through breathing and posing practices, I have become much calmer, especially when I’m under stress.

I also came to an understanding that yoga is truly for everyone: each one of us is able to find our inner peace and strength. In fact, over the past two years I have convinced many of my friends to join the yoga community, all of whom have experienced the benefits yoga brings.

Yet, when I started to write for Capterra’s project management blog this summer, it still surprised me when I realized how much project management relates to yoga practice. These two subjects share so many connections that I believe every project manager could benefit both personally and professionally from practicing yoga.

Doubts? Questions? Hesitations? Let me tell you the top five lessons I learned from yoga that are absolutely essential to every project manager.

1. Set an intention

Each yoga class starts with a few minutes of breathing practice; the instructor might ask you to bring your awareness inside and set an intention for the day’s practice. Your intention could be someone or something that you want to send your love to, such as yourself, your families and friends, or your pets and plants. It could also be something you want to cultivate yourself, like patience or positivity. No matter what it is, it is a powerful act to motivate your body and mind so that you can keep your effort focused throughout the practice.

Setting an intention is also very important for project managers to plan and execute any project. In reality, a project might have multiple objectives, so it’s even more important to clearly state each one and develop effective metrics. This way, team members can direct their efforts to the desired outcomes and achieve better performance.

2. Keep the big picture in mind

If you ask your yoga instructors how long it will take until you get a six-pack you probably will be disappointed. Because unlike other types of workouts, yogis do not worship a “perfect” body image; rather, yoga focuses on connecting the mind and body together so that the whole body can move coordinately.

Project managers should also focus on the whole of a project. As business problems become more and more complicated, you need to zoom out from the minute detail to see the big picture. Stubbornly focusing on the details will likely waste your time and energy that you could otherwise use to think about the difficult, high-level questions.

3. Breathe through change

We have all experienced change in our lives; it might be as complicated as a new job or a breakup; or as simple as your favorite cafe no longer making your usual breakfast croissant. No matter what it is, most of the time, change is not welcomed: it breaks the pattern we are used to and brings stress to our body. What’s worse, due to our inability to think clearly under stress, when something goes wrong, other parts of our lives typically will be affected as well.

In the project management world, change is more frequent; even with extensive planning, no one can predict the future perfectly. However, there are ways to manage that change.

As Goethe once said, “knowledge is not enough, we must apply.”

To successfully apply these best practices to deal with changes in real life, project managers need to stay calm and mindful.

Mindfulness is not just a popular buzzword, it actually helps your brain to make better decisions. Yoga teaches mindfulness through deep breathing and meditation.

 

Pause your reading for a moment, and follow me: In-ha-le through your nose, ex-ha-le through your mouth, hoo~ Doesn’t that feel good?

A clear mind allows you to observe and analyze change more carefully; rather than rushing through decisions or getting stuck on unexpected difficulties, you are able to focus your time and energy on the most critical issues. More importantly, when you are calm, you are more likely to see stressors as a challenge rather than a threat and that alone increases your probability to do better work. Yoga is one of the most effective ways project managers use to de-stress.

4. Take small steps to overcome difficulties

Like other sports, there are beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels for yoga practice. When I first started, I wanted to be perfect at every pose but I was always told to take small steps. Later, I realized that only through those small steps did I learn how a pose moves through variations and find the essence of a pose.

As a project manager, you might encounter all kinds of difficulties: conflicts between team members, changed requirements from the stakeholders, or the lack of necessary resources for deadlines.

No matter what kind of difficulty it is, it is important to take small steps and focus on delivering value constantly instead of trying to achieve everything at once.

This is also the underlying principle of the Agile methodology which is a project management process focused on communication, work efficiency, collaboration, and quality. A key concept in this process is to learn from the small steps and the mistakes so that you can accumulate knowledge and experience to move forward.

 

Take small steps. Small steps make a big difference in the long run.

5. Be patient and persistent

The biggest lesson that yoga has taught me so far is to be patient and persistent. I can’t remember how many times I wanted to quit because I could not do a certain pose or I felt frustrated with my practice. But soon, I realized that I needed to acknowledge and accept my imperfection. It’s part of me. In fact, nobody’s perfect but everyone has the potential to learn and improve.

This is extremely important for project managers because it’s almost impossible for a project to be perfect all the time. And you need persistence and patience to take your team a long way. In particular, you want to set achievable goals based on your team’s real capability; and as your team grows and the project progresses, you can lead your team to achieve more and more objectives.

 

Deal with your capacity, my friend. Don’t rush things. Be patient and believe in yourself. When the time is right, it will happen.

Ready to jump onto a yoga mat?

Have you practiced yoga before? What are your thoughts on its connection with your profession? Share your insights in the comments below. And remember,

 

Don’t peek. Look inward, and stay mindful. Let your inner light shine.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog that gives you tips to improve your conversion rate optimization (CRO). It is called 29 Handy Tips for Amazing Conversion Rate Optimization. The blog explained CRO and gave tips for beginners and for those more advanced; for some of these, you do not need resources. This week, I read a great article by Rich Page that lists twenty-five ways to increase online sales without needing resources, so I wanted to share that information with you. After that, I have found three tools that can help you convert more too.

25 tips and free trials to increase your online sales and conversions

Page has created a list of twenty-five tips and free trials that you can use to increase your online sales and conversions. Not spending extra money sounds good, right? Here is the list:

1. Improve your homepage headline with CoSchedule’s headline checker.

The more engaging and magnetizing your headlines, the higher chance that your visitors will stay on your website and purchase, particularly on your homepage.

2. Offer a free incentive like an eBook or consultation to capture emails.

Getting your visitor’s email means you can follow up using email marketing and get your visitor to purchase in the future.

3. Analyze your form drop off rate using a free trial of Formisimo.

Having confusing or unnecessary fields in your forms will lower the chances of visitors completing them.

4. Use short testimonials on your homepage to build more social proof.

Improving your testimonials is one of the best ways of increasing social proof and sales. Make them short and focused on benefits, and use photos or logos to make them believable.

5. A/B test a radically new homepage with Google Optimize.

Testing a radically different improved homepage (style, layout, and improved focus on call-to-actions) will have a high chance of increasing your sales. This new free tool helps you do this quickly and easily.

6. State your unique value proposition clearly on your homepage above the page fold.

Do not presume visitors know the benefits of using your site rather than that of a competitor.

7. Create landing pages for your PPC traffic with a free trial of LanderApp.

Do not just send your paid search visitors to your homepage. Rather, build more targeted landing pages for each of your keywords to increase visitor engagement and sales.

8. Add a tagline under your logo to help explain your unique value proposition.

Your logo is one of the first things visitors see. Showing a tagline right under there quickly explains your unique value proposition to your visitors.

9. Use a free trial of Olark to get live feedback from your visitors.

Using a free web chat tool to ask visitors their issues and what they think is lacking will help you come up with great ideas for improving your website.

10. Mention ’100% Safe and Secure’ in your cart and checkout pages.

Reducing visitor’s purchase worry on these pages, where it will be highest, is key for reducing cart abandonment and increasing sales. Adding this simple wording with a trust seal will really help.

11. Get website usability feedback from visitors using a free trial of TryMyUI.

This tool helps you gain great feedback and website improving ideas from people using your website.

12. Run an A/B test for the subject line of your next email campaign.

Your emails are an extension of your website, and testing them can also have a huge impact on driving more high-quality repeat traffic.

13. Try buying or signing up on your own website to check for issues.

Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and see how easy buying or signing up is and what could be improved. Additional tip: get your mom or dad to try too.

14. Run a free test at FiveSecondTest to find what your visitors think.

It is important to understand your visitor’s initial reactions to your site. If they do not understand it, they will not stay and convert.

15. Reduce the risk of purchase for visitors with prominent guarantees and free shipping.

Prominently show money back guarantee seals and offers for free shipping (and ideally free returns) on your homepage and product pages.

16. Get rid of your homepage slider and replace with a good static image.

Homepage sliders often have too many slides and slide too quickly. A powerful image and headline can often work much better.

17. Improve your web page load time using Google Page Speed.

Reducing page load time helps decrease the chances of visitors leaving prematurely and Google gives rankings boosts to websites that load quickest.

18. On your forms, clearly state that you will not spam your visitors.

To increase form completions, make sure you clearly state that you will not spam visitors or sell their email address.

19. Try a better e-commerce platform using the BigCommerce free trial.

Rather than trying to improve your e-commerce site, consider switching to another platform with built-in conversion optimization best practices.

20. Use Browserling to check if your website looks broken on any browsers.

Even slight differences in how browsers show CSS can make a website look broken, increasing website exits and reducing sales. This tool helps you check quickly.

21. Add a good call-to-action button at the end of your web pages.

Make sure your key pages do not have a dead end: show visitors a good call-to-action at the end to check out your other content/products.

22. Create a mobile optimized website using a free trial of Dudamobile.

Make sure you better meet your visitors’ needs on their smart phones. This service lets you convert your existing site into a mobile friendly version.

23. Create major use cases for visitors and make sure your homepage solves them.

Make sure your homepage helps visitors easily achieve their most common tasks (use cases). If you do not, they will leave and find another site that does.

24. Discover what your visitors are really doing using Hotjar.

Do not presume you know what your visitors are clicking on. This click heat map tool helps you understand better and make improvements. Fortunately, it has a basic free plan.

25. Declutter your side bars to focus on your most important content.

Side bars often become very cluttered and visitors may miss key content in them. Declutter yours to show only the most important content relating to your key goals.

How to Convert Way More Traffic into Sales Without Spending Extra Money http://bit.ly/ConvertTrSa

Click To Tweet

3 tools to improve your conversion rate

The tips above do not cost you anything and most of the tools mentioned have free trials or free basic plans. In another recent article, Thomas Smale lists three tools that can help you improve your conversion rate. Two of them have free trials too and one only costs three percent of generated sales, so if it does not work, you do not pay anything. That is worth a read too, right?

1. GrooveJar

GrooveJar is a tool to boost your conversion rate. It is a popup solution that helps convert nine percent or more of your visitors into leads by utilizing psychological triggers and urgency to get them to act. It will then automatically send an email campaign to new subscribers and urge them to make a purchase, thereby increasing your conversion rate.

You can immediately start generating more leads, leading to more sales, given the right email strategy. People do not always purchase the moment they land on a website but they may sign up to receive emails from you. This gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with them and convert leads through nurturing. GrooveJar offers a 14-day free trial.

2. MageMail

For Magento users, MageMail is a tool for delivering triggered emails to your audience. It can put your email marketing on virtual autopilot and help you increase your sales by five percent to ten percent.

You can easily set up a variety of campaigns, including abandoned-cart reminders, product-review requests, recommendation emails, purchase anniversary and birthday emails, customer re-activation campaigns and more. This makes personalized marketing easy and can drive highly targeted traffic back to your site to make purchases. It can also boost the credibility and social proof of your website. MageMail costs three percent of generated sales.

3. Wheelio

Wheelio allows you to set up exit-intent, time-trigger, and tab-trigger pop-ups that grab the attention of your visitors and invite them to sign up to receive communication from you through gamification. Your visitors are rewarded with coupons. These are not just given; they are earned, which makes them more valuable in their eyes. Wheelio boasts a nine percent conversion rate and has a free trial of seven days.

Quickly improve your lead generation

I hope these tips and tools enable you to convert more of your traffic into sales.