It’s All About Building Trust x 3

By Richard F. Libin, President, APB

Trust is one of the most important and fragile of human emotions. And, it is essential to almost every aspect of our lives that require relationships. In business, it is critical that customers trust that the person, the product, and the business they are dealing with will be honest, reliable and authentic. Lack of trust or trust that has been broken, always leads to one place: lost relationships and sales.

Before customers purchase, they must trust three things:

1. The product
2. The dealership
3. The salesperson

At APB, we refer to this as a Trust Triad, where the customer is firmly in the center of the relationship. The question is, how do you earn this level of trust? It requires thoughtful, planned, and sincere interaction with customers by every employee, regardless of their job, and a management team that is committed to training and educating its team on the process, communication, and other success factors.

First impressions matter. You must look and present yourself professionally, even on casual days. Your image reflects on the business and product you’re selling. Greeting a customer with a positive attitude sets the tone for the entire interaction. If you bring optimism and professionalism to every customer exchange, why wouldn’t every customer feel comfortable working with you? Why wouldn’t they trust you?

First impressions must be supported with exceptional service. Remember, a salesperson’s job is to help customers find the product or service that meets their unique needs, wants, and desires. By listening and focusing on customers’ needs not on selling, you will deliver a superior experience and product or service.

Deliver exceptional treatment consistently through clear communication, active listening, and an honest understanding of customers’ unique reasons for buying. Give every customer the exact class of service you’d expect if you were the customer, whether they buy now, today, next week, or next year. Customers shouldn’t have to transact business to receive exceptional service.

Delivering consistently high service requires a clearly defined process, a positive attitude, and continuous improvement and training. A companywide process ensures that salespeople ask specific questions, collect information that can guide the sales process, and find the right product or service, exactly the same way every time. This consistency can exceed customer expectations and strengthen customer trust in the salesperson.

Monitoring performance and providing additional, ongoing training is essential in determining how well the process is followed, its effectiveness, and how it can be improved. This must happen daily. Even so, it is up to each individual to decide how much training they want. The question is, “Do you want to be adequate or exceptional?” To be exceptional you must take the initiative to learn every day through informal and formal means. 

Building trust - while a never-ending process, is achievable. It demands your commitment to a professional image, consistent, exceptional service, and ongoing education. The rewards from building this level of trust with customers can be profitable now, and in the future.

 

About the Author:

Richard F. Libin has written two acclaimed books that help people of all walks of life improve their sales skills, because as he says, “Everyone is a selling something.” His most recent book, Who Knew?, and his first book, “Who Stopped the Sale?” (www.whostoppedthesale.com), is now in its second edition. As president of APB-Automotive Profit Builders, Inc., a firm with more than 49 years experience working with both sales and service professionals, he helps his clientele, through personnel development and technology, to build customer satisfaction and maximize gross profits in their businesses. Mr. Libin can be reached at rlibin@apb.cc or 508-626-9200 or www.apb.cc.

According to Ignite, lead generation is the method of generating interest in your product or service from potential customers. However, 80% of marketers report that their lead generation efforts are only slightly or somewhat effective. Therefore, it is high time to list some tips that will help you quickly improve your lead generation. This blog focuses on social media and blogging for lead generation as well as lead generation fails.

Social media lead generation

The way people consume media has changed and lead generation has changed as well. These days, rather than brands finding the customers, brands must rely heavily on customers finding them. That means utilizing the internet and social media. One of social media’s greatest strengths is that it allows consumers to build relationships with brands. This no-pressure, conversational style has completely changed the way businesses can market themselves.

How to improve your company’s social media lead generation

To push fans and followers past the conversation phase, brands need to improve their ways of capturing leads. Ignite offers the following six tips:

1. Establish thought leadership

Offer your audience relevant, valuable content, and position yourself as a thought leader in your industry or niche. You become a thought leader by identifying your expertise and routinely updating your networks with the latest information, valuable insights, and ideas related to that subject. Once you have proven to be a valuable resource in your given area, customers will naturally be more interested in your products or services.

2. Share links to gated content

Gated content is content that is currently locked away and that is only accessible if you provide the requested contact information. The gate essentially implies that what lies behind it has more value than what could be found for free in blogs or other media updates, so you must ensure your gated content is a tier above the rest. It is effective because it gives brands the contact information of those that are truly interested in their product or services.

3. Run social media ads

With social media’s ability to target highly specific audiences, it has become one of the most effective ways to put your brand in front of those users most likely to convert. It has even gone a step further with ads designed specifically for lead generation, such as Facebook Lead Ads and LinkedIn Lead Gen Ads that work much like gated content.

4. Host a webinar or Twitter chat

These go hand-in-hand with thought leadership and gated content, with the added appeal of live interaction.

Webinars are a great way to wow fans and followers with your insight and expertise and provide an excellent way to promote like crazy. While live, encourage participants to interact and leave questions or comments and make sure to respond to each one. Your response could lead them back to other resources or engage them directly on social media. Webinars work so well because the value is often perceived as much higher than other forms of free content. And the conversion rate reflects that.

Twitter chats work similarly. Rather than a video, you hold a Q&A via Twitter. You provide the topics and a list of questions and invite followers to participate. You can direct contributors to offers or resources on your landing pages or social media accounts to increase lead generation and retention.

Both of these take a lot of work to do well, but when successful can reap big rewards. Make sure you put in the time and effort required to make them worth it.

5. Run a contest

Running a contest can be a great way to use social media for lead generation but it has to be done properly. There needs to be a prize valuable enough to incite users to enter, but for the purpose of lead generation, it must appeal specifically to your ideal customer.

Make sure you familiarize yourself with the different sites’ rules. Also, pick the best strategy for lead generation: encourage fans to click through to a landing page where they must submit limited contact information, which will help you collect more leads.

6. Measure your social media lead generation

No social media campaign is complete without a way to measure success. To measure the right way, you need to start with a goal in mind. To make that goal as specific as possible, set realistic numbers. For example, identify a specific number of leads you want to obtain from social media for that business quarter. While there are many analytics tools that will help you measure the success of your goals, Google Analytics is one of the best.

Lead generation through blogging

Instapage lists that blogging can establish you as an authority in your field, give people an inside look at your workplace culture, and boost your SEO. By crafting posts that educate your customers on your product or service and the industry it is in, you position yourself as a go-to resource in your audience’s time of need. Not only that, the more valuable pages you publish, the more favorably search engines look at your website. As a result, you will attract more visitors via search.

When visitors get to your blog, you want to pull them in, capture their attention, call them to action, and turn them into customers. Before you can capitalize on their customer lifetime value, you have to capture their personal information. Here are twelve tips to improve your lead generation through blogging.

1. Use CTA’s in the text of your blog posts

Call-to-actions are quite underused in blog posts. If you are writing a post, try including a link in the text of your post to a relevant eBook or white paper.

2. Try the Hello Bar or a similar plugin

The Hello Bar (or a similar plugin) spans your page and includes a CTA that helps you drive traffic to landing pages and squeeze pages without being overly invasive. If users are not compelled to click immediately, it follows them as they scroll to read your blog post.

3. Offer your readers exclusive content

As with social media lead generation, tease your readers with exclusive content that can help them even more than free access to your blog can.

4. Offer your readers perks

If you are the owner of an e-commerce website, a great way to generate leads is by offering your blog readers a chance to buy products at a discounted rate.

5. Try a welcome redirect

If you have just created a piece of content that you think will be valuable to all your readers, consider using something called a “welcome redirect.” The WordPress Welcome Direct plugin allows you to direct your website visitors to a lead capture page before they even reach your blog. Keep in mind, this is a more “in your face” tactic, so it can be an annoyance to your blog visitors. Always A/B test it to make sure it is helping your conversion rate more than hurting it.

6. Leverage slide-in CTA’s

You are reading and scrolling towards the bottom of a blog post, when out of nowhere, a box in the lower right-hand corner of the page slides in, inviting you to download the company’s latest white paper. This is a Slide-in CTA with which you can offer some of your most dedicated readers (those who actually make it most of the way through your blog posts) valuable content related to what their reading. Offer more in-depth content related to the blog post that is being read.

7. Blog summary downloads

Not everybody has the time to make their way through a 2,000+ word blog post. Therefore, offer shorter, downloadable summaries in exchange for a name and email, for those who want to get the key takeaways without having to read the entire blog post.

8. Leverage margin banners

Margin banners are a staple of nearly every blog you have read. Most of the time if you look to the right sidebar you will notice a CTA that attempts to get you to download content or sign up for an email list.

9. Reach out to influencers

This one requires a little more effort on your part. First, you need to identify influencers in your industry. Second, you need to put in the effort to engage them. Like their content on Facebook, retweet it on Twitter, and comment on their blog posts. Make yourself recognizable to them. Third, reach out to them in a way that no one else does. Influencers get thousands of emails a day asking to promote a brand, product, or a blog post. Keep your tone friendly and relatable to increase the chance that you get a positive response.

10. Answer comments with CTA’s

The comments section of an article is one of the best places to generate qualified leads. These people care enough about your content to engage with your brand. If someone asks you for more information on a particular point in your blog post, answer it with a well-thought-out comment. In addition, you should include a CTA to a landing page where they can download an eBook or white paper to get more information.

11. Time-delay pop-ups

After a person has clicked through to a blog post, time-delay pop-ups jump out with phrases like “Join our email list!” or “Download our marketing report!”

12. Employ the use of exit pop-ups

Some of the web’s most prolific marketers employ the use of exit pop-ups to do everything from gain Facebook fans to generate leads.

What NOT to do in terms of lead generation

Doug Davidoff has reviewed hundreds of lead generation programs and he wants to share the three core reasons why so many lead generation efforts fail and how you can fix it. You can learn from these as well!

1. Lack of clear segmentation

When you send emails to the people in your database, do not send the same message, at the same time, in the same way to everybody in that database. This approach is a highly ineffective. Create a clear process for segmenting your database. Identify key categories to build a segmentation strategy. This approach enables you to create a virtually unlimited number of cohorts to deliver, customize and contextualize the messages and the actions your readers take.

2. You are focused on sales

Lead generation and selling are not the synonyms. If you think of revenue generation like a complex manufacturing process, selling represents the finishing portion while lead generation is the initiation. When you are selling, remember that you must cross two thresholds. The first is the “why should I talk to you” threshold. The second is the “why should I buy from you” threshold.

Would your market pay attention to you if you had no product to sell? For lead generation to work, it must create value for the prospect. Actions and communications must be valuable whether or not a purchase occurs if you want them to create value. If you want to create more demand, increase your growth rate and lower your costs of growth. Stop selling so much.

3. Poor sales process design

The vast majority of sales processes are not designed to work with strong lead generation. Usually, if you make a request for contact, the sales process begins like this: blah, blah, blah, about me, we do this, we do that, tell me how it would help you to benefit from my product/service?

The best prospects are looking to learn more. Great lead generation gets you the opportunity to connect with prospects earlier in their journey. If your sales process is not designed with this in mind, your salespeople will hate the leads that marketing creates, and marketing will get frustrated by your sales team’s inability to successfully manage the leads they have worked so incredibly hard to create.

Tips and resources for improving your lead generation through social media

As you have noticed, marketers and entrepreneurs struggle with social media lead generation. In my blog Tips and resources for improving your online lead generation, I list some more tips and resources that can help you improve your lead generation through social media, your website or your blog.

Saying something over and over doesn’t make it true. However, when you’re constantly hearing the same thing over and over with little to no rebuttal, you may start to assume it’s true — simply accepting it as fact without doing any research or critical thinking. And content marketing is no different.

Here’s an example: Whether I’m doing research for an article or brushing up on my own content marketing skills, I see post after post proclaiming that, if your content doesn’t include videos, you might as well go home.

And that makes me feel a bit like the kid who didn’t get invited to a popular classmate’s birthday party, because videos quickly exceed my capacity for patience. I rarely watch those viral videos my friends share with me. Even when I took Copyblogger’s Certified Content Marketer course, I didn’t watch a single video (the default option). I went straight for the transcript every time. When I’m shopping, brands that present their information only in video get scratched right off my short list.

Even when my husband and I watch TV at night, I’m playing games on my phone or doing something else with my hands. I’m apparently constitutionally unable to just sit and watch.

Granted, I’m a word geek — to the point where I sometimes struggle to make sense of charts and infographics. But I couldn’t shake the thought that everyone was gobbling up the “video content is best” mantra a bit too quickly. So, with some gentle prodding from the content heretic whispering in my ear, I decided to do my own research.

Here’s what I learned:

Content statistics don’t lie

The statistics regarding the effectiveness of video content are indisputable:

• Including video in your content makes people 39% more likely to share, 36% more likely to comment, and 56% more likely to reward it with a “like”
• One third of all internet activity comes from people watching videos
• 59% of executives say that they choose video over text when both are available
• Video drives a 157% increase in traffic from search engines
• Including a video on a landing page makes it 53% more likely to show up on the first page of search results
• Blog posts that contain video attract three times as many inbound links as those without

With such overwhelming evidence, you’d be perfectly justified in wondering why I’m wasting time on a post that questions the effectiveness of video content. It comes back to an argument I’ve made numerous times, which is that traffic and engagement don’t necessarily lead to conversions. Just because video content increases engagement, there’s no guarantee that greater engagement will lead to more conversions.

So what’s a content marketer to do? Look at the science, of course.

The science behind content format preferences

ClickTale and Taboola analyzed consumer behavior across millions of pieces of content, and ClickTale’s in-house psychologist, Dr. Liraz Margalit, discovered some pretty important insights.

Text and video content rely on different cognitive functions

As far as our brains are concerned, text and video are like apples and oranges.

• Reading is an active process involving a number of cognitive functions. Our brains have to handle more of the heavy-lifting, such as drawing conclusions, inferring tone, and creating mental images.
• Watching video, on the other hand, is passive and automatic. It doesn’t require the same degree of focused, purposeful attention.

And, thanks to the evolutionary fact that we once needed to save every bit of our mental energy for survival, our brains are naturally lazy, which explains the preference most people have for video content.

Text and video content engage us in different ways

This is a corollary to how the two formats rely on different cognitive processes, but it’s important enough in a marketing context that I think it deserves its own section:

• We engage with text by thinking.
• We engage with video by feeling. Thanks to a process known as the mirror neuron mechanism, videos are a magic potion when it comes to engaging emotion and creating empathy. The mirror neuron mechanism enables us to feel what the people in a video are feeling (although to a lesser degree).

When videos go viral, it’s because people are “catching” the emotions portrayed in the video. But no matter how many views, likes, and shares a piece of content gets, that doesn’t necessarily mean those emotions will lead to conversion.

The visitor’s state of mind adds another layer of influence

Readers’ preference for text vs. video is based on why they’re engaging with your content in the first place. “Unintentional” visitors– those who want to relax or be entertained — are more likely to prefer video, while people who approach your content with a goal in mind tend to prefer text for a number of reasons:

• They can scan the text to find the information they need
• They don’t have to sit through a whole video before discovering it doesn’t answer their questions
• Text makes it easier to go back and find specific pieces of information
• They don’t have to sit through a repeat of things they already know to get to the information they’re looking for
• They’re planning a purchase that requires critical thinking (a house vs. a lamp)

Personal preferences

There are other factors at work, too. One example is the need for control. People who want to do things at their own pace and in their own way may choose text because it gives them a sense of control that video can’t compete with.

Location and context are important, too. Somebody who’s surfing during a boring class, for example, won’t want to attract attention with a video.

(And then you have people like myself, who are just too dang impatient. I can read faster than anybody can talk.)

How do you decide which content format to use?

It depends on the goal for each piece of content. Established brands — Coke, McDonalds, Pampers, etc. — have little need to tell people about themselves or their products, so they may use video to tug on heartstrings (loyalty, nostalgia, etc.) Ads for luxury cars use this tactic, too: While they may mention the car’s features and benefits, they seek to hook viewers in with the implied promise that, “If you buy this car, you can be just as cool/rich/handsome/etc. as the person driving it in the video.”

Text, however, is better for situations in which you’re emphasizing the factual reasons people should choose your product. “Have to” purchases (as opposed to “want to” purchases) are a good example. Emotional appeals won’t work as well when you’re talking about a product or service people would rather not have to buy in the first place. Prescription medication is a good example. While showing scenes of healthy people living productive lives can’t hurt, people want to know the facts: what the drug does, what the side effects are, how much it costs, etc.

A lot of B2B content falls into this category, too.

How to have your cake and eat it, too

Offer the same content in both formats

It’s becoming more and more common for brands to offer both options. My Copyblogger certification is one of the best investments I’ve ever made, because it’s paid for itself multiple times over through the business it brings my way. But I probably wouldn’t have bothered if they hadn’t had the option of reading transcripts of their video courses. (Yes, I really do hate video that much.)

Ramp up the emotional impact of your text

When you get right down to it, words are just another type of image: a collections of lines, swirls, and dots that we’ve been trained to associate with specific meanings. Looking at it from that perspective, there are visual tricks you can use to tap into your readers’ emotions. Different fonts, for example, convey different emotions.

Applying colors to important words is another easy way to convey emotion: Red communicates anger or fear, green communicates action, blue conveys peace and calm, etc. And you can use images within your text — especially human faces and body language — to suggest the emotion you want the reader to feel.

Takeaway

I’m not suggesting that you should ignore content marketing best practices. Most of them come from people and/or brands with a long history of success. The problem arises when you learn about these best practices primarily through headlines and 144-character Tweets. If I relied on those, I’d be looking for another career after concluding that written content is dead and buried.

Here’s the thing: Video is an important part of content marketing. But, as with any other best practice, you don’t want to skip over the fine print. Before you except anyone’s advice (mine included!) run it through the filter of your own experience, instinct, and knowledge of your business and its customers. If you’re just getting started in content marketing, learning about best practices is probably a good move. Just be aware that all best practices were developed for a certain purpose and context. No matter how many times it gets repeated and retweeted, that doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Only you can decided that, and don’t be scared to make a call that goes against the trend.

My inner heretic is happy (for the moment).

Over the past couple of years, we have had a lot of conversations with large and small enterprises regarding cloud management and cloud optimization tools, all of whom were looking for cost control. They wanted to reduce their bills, just like any utility you might run at home — why spend more than you need to? Amazon Web Services (AWS) actively promotes optimizing cloud infrastructure, and where they lead, others follow. AWS even goes so far as to suggest the following simple steps to control AWS costs:

1. Right-size your services to meet capacity needs at the lowest cost;
2. Save money when you reserve;
3. Use the spot market;
4. Monitor and track service usage;
5. Use Cost Explorer to optimize savings; and
6. Turn off idle instances (we added this one).

It’s interesting to note use of the word ‘control’ even though the section is labeled Cost Optimization.

So where is all of this headed? It’s great that AWS offers their own solutions but what if you want automation into your DevOps processes, multi-cloud support (or plan to be multi cloud), real-time reporting on these savings, and to turn stuff off when you are not using it? Well then you likely need to use a third-party tool to help with these tasks.

Let’s take a quick look at a description of each AWS recommendation above, and get a better understanding of each offering. Following this we will then explore if these cost optimization options can be automated as part of a continuous cost control process:

1. Right-sizing – Both the EC2 Right Sizing solution and AWS Trusted Advisor analyze utilization of EC2 instances running during the prior two weeks. The EC2 Right Sizing solution analyzes all instances with a max CPU utilization less than 50% and determines a more cost-effective instance type for that workload, if available.
2. Reserved Instances (RI) – For certain services like Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, you can invest in reserved capacity. With RI’s, you can save up to 75% over equivalent ‘on-demand’ capacity. RI’s are available in three options – (1) All up-front, (2) Partial up-front or (3) No upfront payments.
3. Spot – Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity. Since Spot instances are often available at a discount compared to On-Demand pricing, you can significantly reduce the cost of running your applications, grow your application’s compute capacity and throughput for the same budget, and enable new types of cloud computing applications.
4. Monitor and Track Usage – You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. You can also use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.
5. Cost Explorer – AWS Cost Explorer gives you the ability to analyze your costs and usage. Using a set of default reports, you can quickly get started with identifying your underlying cost drivers and usage trends. From there, you can slice and dice your data along numerous dimensions to dive deeper into your costs.
6. Turn off Idle Instances – To “park” your cloud resources by assigning them schedules of operating hours they will run or be temporarily stopped – i.e. parked. Most non-production resources (dev, test, staging, and QA) can be parked at nights and on weekends, when they are not being used. On the flip side of this, some batch processing or load testing type applications can only run during non-business hours, so they can be shut down during the day.

Many of these AWS solutions offer recommendations, but do require manual efforts to gain the benefits. This is why third party solutions have seen widespread adoption and include cloud management, cloud governance and visibility, and cloud optimization tools. In part two of this blog, we will have a look at some of those tools, the benefits of each, approach and the level of automation to be gained.

"...insights for scaleups"

HEADLINES:

LIVE Streaming ScaleUp Summit -- for a price 1/10th the keynote fee of just one of our world class biz thought leaders your entire team can tune into the Summit from the comfort of their home or office. More info below, but first...

Amazon's Pricing Experiments -- the godfather of pricing, Hermann Simon, has a new HBR article highlighting Amazon's pricing strategy post the takeover of Whole Foods. Note's Simon:

In the first week alone, the way in which Amazon announced its price changes at the shelf showed the sophistication it brings to such challenges. For many of their key value items, shoppers saw large, co-branded posters which announced the price change. The posters prominently featured the product name, the former (higher) price, the new (lower) price, and the message "more to come" at the bottom. Including both prices, as opposed to an "X% off" approach, reinforced the fact that many of the changes crossed key "whole dollar" thresholds. Avocados went from $2.50 to $1.99. Almond milk dropped from $3.99 to $2.99. Vine-ripe tomatoes were reduced from $2.99 to $1.99. While price research is not universally clear on the subject, the presumed power of undercutting these psychological thresholds is high.

This helps change the perception -- and the "more to come" is very clever (Simon explains in the article), but across Amazon they might be the lowest priced on the top items, but much more expensive on the rest - equally smart. Simon goes on to explain how Amazon will use pricing strategy to increase the healthy food segment of the market. The point - pricing is a strategic weapon used poorly by most companies. Read Simon's article then read his book Confessions of the Pricing Man. Then become a student of pricing!

Weird but Effective -- the research is clear - vivid visualizations, great inspiration, profound creativity, exceptional insight as well as your mind's most deep-seated programs occur for a moment between falling asleep and waking up - the brief Theta brainwave state of the mind. To tap into this powerful state of the mind, both Thomas Edison and artist Dali had a simple technique. After focusing on a particular idea/challenge, they would relax and allow themselves to fall asleep holding something in their hand (Dali a dangling keychain; Edison some ball bearings). As they entered Theta state their hand would release the item, making a noise that would wake them so they could capture those great inspirations. This short video shares the full story. I'm trying it! Thank you to Sebastian Ross for sharing.

Power of Board Games -- could it be that playing board games makes you a nicer person with better relationships? Note this Quartz article, "As film and media studies professor Mary Flanagan tells The Atlantic, board games prompt us to reflect on 'turn-taking and rules and fairness.'" It goes on to explain:

Another significant feature of board games is that they require several people to sit down in the same room together and concentrate on a shared experience in real time. That is becoming increasingly rare in a world in which we often see our friends and loved ones more on social media than in real life. A recent Atlantic story outlined the sharp rise in teen isolation as an entire generation sits in their rooms, glued to their smartphones, interacting via app. They report higher levels of depression and anxiety than earlier generations, too.

Our family isn't sure Monopoly has been a positive influence ☺, but point well made - and great to see that board game sales high risen considerably.

9x Inc. 5000 (Gazelles case study) -- only 1% of firms that qualify for the Inc. 5000 list make it 9 times. SPro member and longstanding Rockefeller Habits fan, Rajeev Agarwal and his wife Arpita, co-founders of MAQ Software are one of the few. Notes this Inc. article, when asked the keys to their sustained growth:

First, our management team takes a long-term view of our progress-as in looking ahead 25 years. Although being No.1 on any list would be an honor, it is more gratifying for me to appear on the Inc. 5000 list repeatedly since it demonstrates the durability of our business model. Second, our management team is committed to developing an organization with a learning culture. We lead by example to stay technically current. Finally, we stay focused on the success of our customers. Eventually, customers recognize the contributions of key suppliers and come back to buy more.

BHAG, learning, and getting the job done for customers - a pretty simple, but difficult to sustain, formula. Congratulations to Rajeev and Arpata, whom you'll meet at the upcoming ScaleUp Summit Oct 17 - 18 in St. Louis - I think their 9th year of participating!

What I Did Not Learn in B-School -- this is the title of Rajeev's second book - a prolific writer and CEO. Here's a mini-site for the book. It's especially applicable to firms doing business in India - it addresses the execution challenges of doing business in that country.

The Potential Principal -- last week I highlighted Mark Sanborn's new book The Potential Principal. Steve Hall, founder of DriversSelect.com (largest single location auto dealer in US) noted, after appreciating how Mark reframed the idea of potential:

I began to journal about the following questions

• How good of a father could I be to our boys versus how good a father I am?
• How good of a husband could I be to Joy versus how good I am?
• How good a leader in driversselect could I be versus how good am I doing leading our company?
• How much better could I serve God versus how much I am serving Him?
• How good could my health be versus how good is my health?
• How balanced could my life be versus how balanced is my life?

Seems like the right questions - worth pondering this weekend.
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COACHING:

Have you ever wondered if working with a coach might accelerate your company's growth, exponentially? Do you have what it takes to move the dial from good to great? Click here to watch Gazelles International President Keith Cupp describes the four most important attributes of successful clients. Contact us at info@gicoaches.com for more information.

And if you're interested in becoming a world-class certified Gazelles International coach, please go to gicoaches.com/becomeacoach for more information. If you determine that we're a fit and wish to join our premier organization, we invite you to contact our Dir. of Coach Engagement at Amy@GICoaches.com or 877.217.2253 ext.700.

TECHNOLOGY:

Create Accountability – Drive Execution
Click Here to Watch a video example.

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The path to a successful piece of creative content can be filled with plenty of hurdles. You need a great idea, the right skills to execute, and the distribution channels to send it out into the world. Plenty can go wrong. But we find it’s not always those big hurdles that really sabotage your work. It’s the little things you might overlook that can really hurt your creative content: the inefficient communication, the weak infrastructure, the simple oversights.

We’ve seen plenty of these types of mistakes over the years, and we find they can often be sourced to the same issues. To help you do things better, here are 10 mistakes to avoid in creative content creation.

1) A Weak Brief

Creative briefs can be tricky. You want enough information to give a clear sense of goals and objectives, but briefs can be all over the place. We’ve seen briefs that were practically novels and others that weren’t much more than a paragraph, neither of which help much.

2) Leaving Key People Out of the Brainstorm

A great idea is no good if it can’t be executed well within budget. A cool campaign concept is no good if it isn’t tailored for the social platform it’s meant for. That’s why you need your creative team in the room when you’re coming up with ideas.

That can mean everyone from the designer to the PR person in charge of distributing the piece. They can vet and determine whether an idea is feasible or on-goal. This is especially true when you’re working with multiple creators (e.g., a copywriter, designer, and animator).

If you leave them out, you’ll end up with a zombie piece of content that was created piecemeal—and that shows through. For more tips on coming up with better ideas, here are some ways to tap into your team’s creativity.

3) Getting Inconsistent or Disjointed Feedback from Stakeholders

Nothing will make you want to pull your hair out like a flurry of “notes” right before you’re supposed to launch a piece of creative content. You’d think it was common sense to get approval from everyone before moving into major stages of production, but we see marketers forget to do this all the time. Whether it’s a motion graphic script or an interactive wireframe, get sign-off at every stage to save yourself a major headache.

4) Not Following Design Best Practices

Sure, you can still make a pretty piece of content that dazzles your team. But true designers know it’s the little things that turn a good design into a great design. We see this problem time and time again, especially with things like data visualization or information design. (For example, a simple change to data labels or rearrangement of pie slices can greatly increase the efficacy of a data visualization.)

5) Creating Inaccurate Marketing Personas

You should already have marketing personas created so that you know if your ideas will resonate with the people you’re trying to reach.

The problem is that a lot of marketers create their personas from guesswork and their own ideas of who their “dream” customer is. This is just as bad as not having personas at all. To make effective personas, you need to talk, email, chat, survey, and have real conversations with real people. (This also includes connecting with the people in your organization who have these regular conversations.)

6) Lack of Story (or Too Many)

This is one of the most pervasive problems in creative content. Just because you make content doesn’t mean it’s interesting or effective. To make it compelling, you need a strong core story. That means identifying a single narrative and building every aspect of content around it, from words to design. Unfortunately, sometimes marketers get too excited about this, so they pack in as much “story” as they can, creating a dense mess. To avoid this, find out how to tell a single story in a piece of content.

7) Trying to “Sell” in Your Content

One of the most important things to understand is the difference between marketing content and sales content. Marketing content starts a conversation. It’s people-focused. It provides readers value by giving them something that entertains, educates, or inspires them. Sales content is brand-focused. It’s a one-way conversation.

8) Having No Brand Identity

Your brand is the composite of many things, but your voice and visual identity are vital in content. Having none, not following guidelines, or straying too far muddles your brand identity.

The purpose of content is to introduce yourself and begin a conversation. To do this well, you need people to know who you are and why they should trust you. A strong brand identity does that.

9) Spreading Yourself Too Thin (or Trying to Do Too Much)

We see a lot of marketers become a slave to their editorial calendar. Focused on hitting deadlines and churning out volume, they get sucked into the vortex. But volume alone doesn’t serve your goals. Effective content does. It’s better to do one thing well than a bunch of things poorly.

10) Wasting Your Content

Plenty of marketers press publish once and forget about it, but so much of your content can do more for you at every communication touchpoint. You put a lot of work into your content, so get the most out of it. Consider ways to repurpose, republish, or remix content. An e-book can become an infographic; an infographic chart can become a visual tweet.

Remember: Making Great Content is a Process

To make more effective creative content, stay educated, follow best practices, and always experiment.

The countries of the Nordics have become a kind of untapped oasis for tech startups of late. Since 2005, the Nordics — Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden — represent 7% of global billion-dollar tech exits even though they account for just 2% of global GDP. You might say startups in the Nordics are tulessa, Finnish for “on fire.”

Okay, I realize that this declaration coming from a proud Finn and co-founder of a Helsinki-based tech startup may sound a bit pretentious. But that’s not my intent.

Rather, I’d like to highlight some of the lessons I’ve learned while working both in the U.S. and in the Nordics to share some of the best lessons from my experience of Nordic business and distill it for an audience who may be less familiar with the culture than I am.

Here are some management philosophies borrowed from the way Nordics do business.

Challenge overly hierarchical structures

Many companies in the Nordics — particularly companies in Sweden — have a tendency to discuss business decisions in detail in a democratic setting. Some might say, they discuss everything with all employees present. While some U.S. executives might consider that a bit of overkill, it creates a culture of shared decision-making. Traditionally, Swedish managers are considered to be informal and non-hierarchical when compared to managers across other global business cultures.

Indeed, many Swedish companies maintain a flat, non-hierarchical organization when compared to the layers of management seen at other companies worldwide. For example, young leaders from countries like Russia, Ukraine and Poland who have come to Sweden to study management have left recognizing a distinct Swedish leadership style: One that seems filled with easier communication and lower internal competition.

Teams that communicate and work toward a common vision tend to be more efficient. There is less drama, more productivity and often less turnaround. That saying about business being a dog-eat-dog world, it’s just not very relevant within Nordic businesses that adhere to non-hierarchical tendencies. For a manager or business owner looking to build a strong team, it is worth considering if your current managerial structure is the best for your business environment. Perhaps injecting some of the Nordic’s vision for building company management and decision making would go a long way in strengthening your company.

Celebrate team wins and encourage “our” and “we” language

One of the major differences I noticed when I became a manager here in the United States after spending time leading teams in the Nordics was how “me-focused” interviews and resumes are in the U.S. That is by no means a critique of how people build resumes here — a strong resume and emphasis on the value you bring to a company is typically how you sell yourself in an interview with a U.S. company.

Interviews are different in the Nordics. In fact, sometimes as an interviewer, it is often very difficult to get an interviewee to talk about themselves. Instead, their focus is on what the team did and how well they all worked together to tackle a given project or campaign.

Some U.S. companies could learn a lot from those arguably passive interviewees in the Nordics. While it is good to know your value, it is most valuable for a company to have team members who focus on the collective value they provide clients and customers.

At our company and across many others in the Nordics, we really do emphasize the kind of “our” and “we” language that you might find in books on leadership or management, but that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle as employees compete to prove their worth in a company.

Encourage financial transparency

Sharing details about company finances for privately held companies is typically reserved for small, small businesses — i.e. family-run businesses — or progressive companies here in the U.S.

The term open-book management is fairly modern and popular term, coined in the mid 90s. It is the idea that company executives share relevant financial information with employees so they can make better decisions as workers. The theory is that they will perform better if they see themselves as partners and not simply hired help.

Open-book management is something our company and others based in the Nordics subscribe to. In general, a lot of information about companies in the Nordics is public knowledge; you can find out a lot more about a given company through information available online than in other parts of the world. We are big on open data and that carries over in our business culture.

In our experience, we have found that an open-book philosophy has indeed empowered our employees. We take it a step further and have brought on employees as partners, providing them literal stock in the future of our company. It has been another way to empower them.

Believe in your people at all levels

The philosophy of believing in your people ties together everything else I’ve discussed. Essentially, if you really believe in your people at all levels of the company — from the college intern to the CFO — you will entrust them with motivating financial data; you’ll encourage “we” and “our” language from a team working in synergy; and, you’ll essentially be challenging hierarchical structures every step of the way.

We have had some amazing people start working with us out of college and in a matter of months become leaders in our company, taking on director-like roles.

These philosophies are not exclusive to companies in the Nordics. In fact, I’ve seen these sort of management styles initiated at Silicon Valley startups and across the companies in the U.S.

Blending the U.S. focus on data and results with the focus in the Nordics on teamwork and forming a non-hierarchical company could lead to some rapid growth as a company and good team morale. And no matter where we’re from, we all want our business growth to be tulessa.

Despite nearly 60 years of experimentation with artificial intelligence, mankind still hasn’t achieved the goal of creating a machine that can perform all cognitive tasks as well as humans can, also called artificial general intelligence.

In fact, the very notion of AI also is open to widely different interpretations. These days it seems like everything is being called AI, from specialized applications like computer vision systems that detect very specific objects, to mass-market digital assistants like Apple’s Siri, to robots and drones, to ambitious efforts to apply human-level artificial intelligence to solve major problems, like treating disease.

Though some organizations are making significant R&D investments in AGI, most AI companies and startups are currently focused on ANI (artificial narrow intelligence) to perform specific tasks like logo recognition, facial detection and transcription. There is an abundance of engines that perform narrow, specialized processes as point solutions — there are more than 5,000 ANI algorithms available today, with that number set to rise to the millions during the next five years.

ANI is the first step in the journey toward AGI
Humans don’t have just one sense; we possess at least nine — and we need them all to navigate and understand the world. What’s more, the human brain is adept at using these senses in combination, like detecting a large truck is nearby both by hearing the characteristic sound and by feeling the intense vibration. While technology exists today that can target individual tasks such as these human senses, the AI market today is rife with incomplete and single-point offerings. These are then populated by a multiplying horde of algorithms, each with a different purpose, capability and specialty. Currently the AI landscape is confusing and limited. So, what’s needed to bring order out of this chaos?

Businesses incorporating cognitive processing require a concrete, intuitive way to use multiple ANI cognitive engines at once. Deploying several engines in concert results in efficient data processing that can be analyzed and reviewed to produce actionable insights for real life use cases. Businesses need this ability to leverage a combined, robust suite of AI engines in order to make decisions that impact the business’s bottom line.

Data continues to grow, so let’s put machine learning to use

With the number of commercially-available cognitive engines expanding exponentially, this approach will enable coordinated AI to rapidly overtake and even surpass human capabilities. Moreover, with the AI market set to expand by nearly a factor of 60 from 2016 to 2025, this method represents the best way for companies to capitalize on the industry’s growth potential.

Gartner surmises, by 2019, 50% of analytic queries will be generated using search, natural-language processing, voice or autogenerated. More simply: users will deploy a variety of engines to gather insights across the incredible number of data around them.

Just how much is out there? Analyst firm IDC forecasts that by 2025 the global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes, ten times the 16.1 zettabytes generated last year. The need for cognitive processing abounds, as humans alone are no longer able to keep up with the demand for insightful analysis from all of this data

The solution to an intelligent future: Collaboration
The key to realizing this vision will be the development of an open AI ecosystem that makes the vast array of cognitive engines available in a single online marketplace. Such a marketplace could yield lucrative business opportunities for algorithm developers, application developers and end users.

Much in the way that Salesforce.com’s AppExhange and Apple’s App Store spurred significant investment in software development and led to the rise of the app economy, the establishment of a structured marketplace for AI will be key to facilitating widespread custom development based on a transparent and well-defined economic model.

For companies hoping to harness the capabilities of cognitive engines, this situation presents major challenges. Companies have specific needs that may change over time. These needs could be best served by one of the multitude of algorithms on the market — or a combination of different algorithms.

For example, imagine a company that’s building a robot intended to look and act human. This effort would require one algorithm to make the robot talk, another to allow it to walk, a third to enable it to perceive and understand the world around it — and so on. The difficulty involved with identifying the right engines to perform each task would be daunting, with a high likelihood that the company wouldn’t pick the best engines for each task. While AGI needed to accomplish this remains a potential technology of the future, ANI can deliver on the promise of AI today if properly orchestrated.

This can be accomplished by aggregating cognitive computing algorithms into a single software, utilizing a range of developers extending that platform to a variety of computing environments and developing a transparent app ecosystem. This system or organization corrals the stampede of algorithms, places them into an group and deploys them to deliver real value that meets customers’ specific AI needs.

More simply: When AI remains an open field, with best-of-breed systems working cohesively together, ANI can work towards AGI. With this approach, it’s possible to create AI technology with human-like capabilities — and thus this is clearly a multi-billion-dollar business opportunity over the next few years.

This article originally appeared in Machine Learnings newsletter

If you have trouble tracking your data, here are 3 easy steps to fix your problem

If you have been diligently using Google Analytics and Adwords reports to track the performance of your ads and website to help optimize bids and increase conversion – good for you!

Yet you may see quite a bit of discrepancy in your data. Besides the frustration and confusion, it also makes you wonder whether you’re doing your tracking correctly. There are many factors that affect the consistency and accuracy of these reports, and not all of them are under our control.

However, if you dial in a few things, and get a better understanding of what these reports mean, you’ll be able to get a much clearer picture of your data.

So let’s look into what’s preventing you from accurately tracking your data, and what you can do right away to improve the accuracy and relevance of your reporting:

1. Lack of Tracking

If you aren’t tracking data, data won’t track you down.

To make sure you have the right data, the first thing you need to do is set up accurate tracking. Here’s how:

Replace Email Address With Contact Form

When a visitor contacts you via an email address listed on your website, you lose the ability to track that interaction.

To track all of the contact originating from your website, replace all direct email (i.e. by listing an email address) with a contact form. That will allow you to assign a value to the action.

Having a form on the contact page on your website as a primary CTA is a great start. You also need to audit your website to make sure all email addresses listed in other locations are replaced with a trackable form, or a CTA that links to a form page.

Use Website Call Tracking

Conversions that happen on phone calls are notoriously difficult to track because they don’t happen online.

There are third party call tracking services, but the information gathered is not granular enough to offer insights at the keyword level. Not to mention, it’s hard to get usable data because of the restrictive time frames since these tracking companies rotate out phone numbers every 12-24 hours.

Of course, you can just ask the callers how they heard about your business, but manual tracking is error-prone. Not to mention, someone on your staff has to enter the information manually into a database for future reference.

Thankfully, Google has come to the rescue – at least for AdWords users. Its Website Call Tracking function dynamically replaces the phone number on your website for traffic that comes from an AdWords ad.

Even though it doesn’t report calls from other sources, it’s a valuable tool for heavy AdWords users. In addition, the phone number is valid for 6 months. So you can track conversion over a longer timeframe, and get a more accurate picture of the conversion rate.

Set Up AdWords Call Tracking

Google also offers an option called Call Extension for advertisers to include phone numbers in their ads. Then customers can simply tap and call directly from their smartphones.

With this feature, you’ll be able to track the performance of an ad by seeing how many people get in touch with you through that number. It’s a great indicator of how well your ads are performing.

This feature is particularly suitable for service providers in the “emergency” industry, e.g. locksmith, plumber, DUI lawyer, etc. However, it may not be helpful if you need customers to visit your website before getting in touch.

Track eCommerce Events With Google Analytics

Many advertisers aren’t tracking their eCommerce events properly to correlate sales data with website usage data such as sessions, bounce rate, traffic source, and landing page.

To track all the events that lead up to a conversion, audit and setup Google Analytics, and make sure you’re using the right script to pull in the exact information that’s useful to you.

Many open-source or hosted shopping cart providers have integrated streamlined eCommerce tracking into their software. It may suffice for some, but if you need more granular information, you may have to write your own scripts.

2. Discrepancies

The good news is, you have tracking set up, and you’re getting data.

The bad news is, the numbers aren’t adding up, and you’re pulling your hair out.

Here are some reasons behind these discrepancies, and what you can do about them:

Analytics Sessions And AdWords Clicks Don’t Match

You might expect Clicks from AdWords and Sessions from Google Analytics to match, but that’s not necessarily the case.

These two metrics actually track slightly different things.

Long story short, a click is recorded the moment someone clicks on an ad. However, there are a few more checkpoints and requirements that need to take place before a session is recorded.

Also, keep in mind that a click is a one-time event, and a session occurs over the duration of a visit. For example, if a visitor clicks on an ad once, and clicks again without waiting for the page to be fully loaded, there’ll be a discrepancy between Clicks and Sessions.

Discrepancy Between Revenue and Total Conversion Value

It is, of course, rather disturbing when the Revenue in your Google Analytics (GA) data is not matching up with the Total Conversion Value in AdWords.

Don’t worry, it’s simply because they’re calculated differently. While Revenue in GA is always revenue, Total Conversion Value can be revenue, (if the data is pulled from GA), or an assigned value, which is the same for every type of conversion.

If you want these two metrics to match, you can simply set up the Auto-Tagging feature in AdWords to have your GA Revenue data displayed in AdWords.

The exact method you use is not as important as the fact that you’re measuring your Total Conversion Value. This is the key indicator for the performance of all your keywords, ads, and campaigns to help you optimize your bidding strategy.

Inaccurate Tracking Due To SSL Encryption Switch

Many hosted websites have added an SSL certificate as an effort to prevent cyber attacks. If the setting in Google Analytics was not updated when a website made the migration from an HTTP to an HTTPS protocol, a discrepancy in data will occur.

To update your settings, log into your Google Analytics dashboard, and go to Admin > Property Settings. There, you can change the protocol under Default URL.

Inaccurate tracking caused by such protocol migration can also happen when an advertiser forgets to update the target URL of an ad to point to the new HTTPS protocol.

Even though a server-side redirect will send the visitors to the right page, information will be lost during the redirection, and cause a variety of discrepancies, such as traffic being attributed to the wrong source.

3. Limited View

By default, most reporting platforms are set to show a limited set of data so you’re often looking at a partial view of the total reporting available.

To make sure you’re getting the right kind of data for analysis and optimization, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Attribution

Conversion often happens after multiple visits to your website. AdWords’ Attribution Model can help you understand the impact of various keywords on the conversion rate in your marketing funnel.

These attribution models include first click, last click, linear, time decay, and position-based. They assign different weight to keywords responsible for getting the “click” at different points along a purchasing path.

Meanwhile, cross-device attribution gives you insights into how your customers use technology differently as they near the conversion event.

Applying a different model to your data will likely produce different interpretations, so make sure you apply the same attribution model if you want to, “compare apples to apples.”

Multi-Channel Funnels

If you dig deeper into your analytics and look at Multi-Channel Funnels Attribution (MCFs), you’ll realize that it’s different from a standard Google Analytics report. Specifically, it interprets and reports direct traffic differently.

The reason for the difference is that MCFs do not take campaign cookies into account when reporting direct traffic. Because of this, they often have a larger “last interaction” conversion value for direct traffic when compared to the corresponding traffic source in other GA reports.

Again, there’s no one “right” report to use. Just make sure you’re analyzing the same kind of report from month to month so you can, “compare apples to apples.”

GA Isn’t a Crystal Ball, But…

There are many factors affecting the consistency of reporting, and it’s rarely 100% accurate. However, you can implement proper tracking, reconcile the discrepancies, and be consistent with the kind of report you’re analyzing from month to month. Then you’ll be able to get a better picture of your traffic and visitors’ behavior and improve your sales and conversion.

Hiring is difficult. Hiring salespeople is exponentially more difficult. It is a complex human interaction, and there are wide variances in performance. A work history in sales may tell you part of the story, but some salespeople who succeed in one environment and selling one product fail in another environment—even when that environment has other people who are succeeding.

Here are some thoughts about hiring salespeople. If you are a salesperson looking for work, reverse this and ask yourself these questions:

Did the salesperson pick up the phone and call you? If they did not, why would they pick up the phone and call your prospects? You might use email effectively as part of a prospecting campaign, but you would never use it as your sole method, would you? You would never want your salesperson to spray and pray, would you? You would want the salesperson you hire to give themselves the best chance for success, and that means two-way communication.

Did they prepare for the meeting? Did they have good questions about the business? Did they bring anything to the conversation? Is the person sitting across from you a business person? If they aren’t, can you tell that they are going to grow up to be one? If the only question they ask you is about the product or their compensation, you have cause for concern. Questions about the business are critical.

Is there a reason to believe that your clients are going to want to buy from this salesperson? What are those reasons? There is no better test. Why are your clients going to want to buy from this salesperson? Are they likeable, with fast rapport skills? Do they have the ability to create value for your clients in a meeting?

Did they follow up? Was it by email? Was it by telephone? Was it more than once? You know that salespeople is going to have to follow up. What does it mean when they don’t follow up? Maybe they don’t want the job. Maybe they don’t want to work that hard. Maybe they’ve never been taught how to follow up. A phone call is better than an email.

Did they ask for the job? You want your salespeople to ask for the business when they’ve done enough to deserve it. It demonstrates confidence and commitment. It demonstrates that they aren’t conflict averse, and they are okay hearing “no” and moving forward. You don’t want to hire someone who is going to wait for the client to decide and let them know.

You are hiring a salesperson, not a person. You’re looking for salesmanship.

The post On Hiring a Salesperson appeared first on The Sales Blog.

The only way to be effective at marketing is to start with the current company culture.

I have seen this occur throughout my career. Engagement needs to occur with employees first if it is going to be effective. It really points to a need where companies who are most engaged with their employees will be more effective. Too often this area is overlooked and marketing departments try to be the voice of the whole company.

At most of the places I have worked, management typically worked with at an arm’s length away from everyone. Many people still like this approach, especially those people adverse to any change. Today, companies may need to turn on a dime and regroup. It is critical that people from all departments are on board with these changes. I believe that a closer relationship with employees is vital for true marketing success to work. In the past, marketing departments operated in silos and as a result, they spent as much time promoting the accomplishments of their department as a way to show value.

Today, I look at marketing much differently.

Some of the areas I focus on are the following:

• Creating excitement
• Implementing new themes and reinforcing core values
• Getting feedback on current projects
• Identifying pain points from our employees
• Implement an easy-to-use CRM
• Schedule time periodically to discuss “big projects”

Finally, start conversations with people throughout the organization. Make sure they know you have their backs and they are an important piece in bringing on new customers and retaining current clients. This step is critical and can really build momentum if done correctly. Also, know as a leader, not everyone will be on board. Isn’t that true of the market. Find a way to deal with it and continue to persevere. It’s worth the effort. Take personal responsibility and stand by your ideas. Mistakes will occur, but hopefully, recovery will happen quicker and better decisions can be made going forward.

Website speed is not only a ranking factor, but also important to the user experience and your bottom line. Research shows that for every second delay there is in your website loading, you see a 7% decrease in conversion rate. If you earn $100,000 a day, that adds up to $2.5 million a year!

Images are often a culprit of slow page loading times, because unless they’re optimized, they can be rather large files. Use these tips to optimize your images for size and quality, to keep your customers and the search engines happy.

1. Use Original, Quality Photos Whenever Possible

The more original pictures you use, the better your user experience will be, and the higher the odds you’ll rank on relevant searches. Using stock images can be tempting, but many other people use them, too. You’ll be competing with them in image search, so that’s why it’s best to use original images when possible.

You can have original images either taken in-house with a high-quality camera, or have designers create the images – such as infographics and data visualizations. You can use images to show your customers what your company is like, and to show off images of your products.

The reality is, many users ignore stock photos. The use of high quality original photos will help you stand out in search results, so make sure you’re using them to show your brand’s personality. It will draw more people to your website.

If you must use stock photos for any reason, you can use a tool like Canva to make them your own. You can add text and make small edits to make the image more unique to add to its appeal.

2. Make Use of Photoshop’s “Save for Web” Feature

When saving images in Photoshop, the “Save for Web” feature allows you to experiment with various file types. You can see what they will look like and an estimate of the time they will take to load at various modem speeds to help you optimize the image. If you don’t have Photoshop, you can use a number of online tools to help you edit and compress images:

• PicMonkey: This is a free, easy to use online photo editor.
• FotoFlexer: If you need to work with layers, but want to do so online, this is the photo editor for you.
• Pixlr: This is a user-friendly photo editor, that also comes with a free app for your smartphone. If you need to edit pictures while you’re killing time in line for coffee, this is a great choice for you.
• PicResize: This website has basic editing functions, but for the most part is designed to change the dimensions of your photo.
• TinyPNG: This tool will compress your images to reduce the file size without negatively affecting quality. It also works with JPEG files, too.

3. Use Captions and Alt Text

Adding captions to your photos is an optimization best practice. The caption will appear, generally in a gray box, below the image and explain what you see in the picture. While people may not read your article, chances are high that the caption underneath your image will be something they read.

Captions are beneficial because it is not easy to understand all images right away. Adding a caption provides context for the image which provides more context for the search engines to understand beyond the alt text. Research shows caption see up to 16% more readership which can prove valuable to readers.

Remember, some images can stand alone even though extra value can be added with a caption. Try not to force the caption if you don’t need one.

All text is an alternative to images when a browser can’t display them properly. The alt attribute is used to describe the content of the image file. When the image won’t load, you’ll get an image box with the tag information shown in the top left corner. Make sure the alt text fits with the image and makes the picture relevant.

Adding alt tags to your images can help your website rank better by associating keywords with those images. Google has made comments about the value of alt text on images. They say it provides them with useful information about the subject matter of the photo. The information is then used to determine the best image to return for a user’s search query.

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires alt text for individuals who are unable to see the images themselves before the website can be considered 508 compliant. A descriptive alt text can tell users exactly what’s in the photo. You can check out the SEO Inc WCAG Services we provide here.

4. Add OpenGraph and Twitter Card Tags for the Image

If you want to control the image that’s used when your content is shared on social media websites, you can designate it with a simple code in the <head> section of your website.

<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/link-to-image.jpg” />

If you use the premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, you can set and preview your Facebook post automatically without having to use the code. When you choose the image for social media, make sure to use the original image for the post because image quality is often degraded when used on social media. If you’re using a compressed image, it may lead to a reduction in photo quality.

5. Make Your Images Responsive

If your images aren’t responsive, then you may be inadvertently ruining the mobile experience, which could increase your bounce rate. WordPress versions 4.4 and higher automatically includes this feature. If you’re not using WordPress, you can add the srcset attribute to your images in the code, which makes it possible to serve different images based on screen width.

6. Use Descriptive, Keyword Rich File Names

When it comes to SEO, it is important to create a keyword rich file name that also describes the image. Your image file name alerts Google as well as other search engines about what is in the image.

If you are using an image you took yourself or downloaded from a digital camera, the file name will generally look like this: IMG_5641321.jpg. Change the file name to something that helps search engines understand the image and improve the SEO value period of course this will take a few extra minutes but changing the default image name is always a good idea.

7. Use Descriptive, Keyword Rich File Names

Create and publish an image site map to show where all of your images are, in a single location. This allows Google and other search engines to discover the images on your site more easily. This increases the chances that your images will be displayed in the image search results. Through an image sitemap, you can alert Google to images you upload through JavaScript that crawlers may not have found, or specifically call out the images you want crawled.

Google says you can create a brand-new sitemap solely for images or you can add the information to your existing sitemap. If you are using WordPress, you can use the plugin Google XML Sitemap for Images to automatically create the sitemap for images that has been uploaded to your WordPress media library.

Conclusion

Head on over to PageSpeed Insights and run a test on your website. If Google sees that your images are causing your page to slow down, you’ll get an “optimize images” suggestion. Use these tips, and reupload the images, this time using optimized versions. Run the test again, and you should notice an improvement in your load time.

Effective Consultative sales negotiations serve 4 key objectives:

1. Increasing Deal Size
2. Reducing Discounting
3. Improving win/loss ratios
4. Realizing greater value (proposed vs. closed)

Tips for Effective Sales Negotiations

So, how do effective negotiators keep their goals in tact through the contract? They:

(1) Use Preparation Time 

Sellers must come ready with relevant insights that demonstrate their detailed knowledge of industry specific challenges. This shared knowledge “primes” the customer. Priming is the basic principle of prompting a person to think a certain way. This effect is helpful to sellers who want to encourage a customer to recognize the value of a proposed solution. This influence of the customer’s decisions begins with the first conversation. Effective priming helps customer’s change their mindset from “someone is trying to sell me something” to “this solution can get me to where I need to go.” Priming is trust building. The seller is helping the customer become comfortable with sharing information from their side of the table.

Building trust at this early stage creates an environment that’s conducive to successful consultative sales negotiations. The reason: trust signals fairness. This sense of equitable interests has been shown to bring efficiency to selling. Research published in Psychology & Marketing revealed that by “priming a consideration for fairness, a seller can increase a customer’s satisfaction without sacrificing profit.” Additionally, “Fairness-primed buyers consequently had a more positive attitude toward the seller.”

(2) Lead By Opening

Effective opening starts by recapping common ground. This strategy helps reassert the relationship while ensuring the seller is up to date on all relevant information. The seller is setting the stage for the crucial next step: being the first to position the offer.

Research from Northwestern University reveals that “there is virtually no research that supports the claim that letting the other party open first is advantageous. In fact, it can backfire—and lead to a worse outcome than you imagined.” The reason is found in the anchoring bias.

When sellers make the first offer, they create a center of gravity, an “anchor.” Therefore, the outcome of the negotiation is likely to hover close to the original figure. Social psychology researcher Robert Cialdini Ph.D. explains, “The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion—the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it…what we present first changes the way people experience what we present to them next.”

Additionally, the decision to make the first offer is as important as how the seller makes it. Avoid the timidity that accompanies compromising language. Stating “I want to be around this price” signals willingness to move from the offer. Remain resolute.

Finally, make the offer complete. A piecemeal approach of staggered negotiations only works to prolong the process and frustrate the customer. With a complete offer, sellers can deliver a concise solution without the need to continue talking, a classic precursor to negotiating with oneself

(3) Control By Converting Demands Into Needs

Once the seller has made the offer, it is important to control, or protect, the position. In many cases, a seller, upon hearing a request for a lower price, will protect their pricing by suggesting a reduced solution. However, this strategy doesn’t represent control. Protecting the seller’s position means maintaining the scope of work and the pricing. Many negotiators move to trading too soon without a full sense of customer demands, needs and priorities. As a result, they do not have a fully informed trading strategy and, after offering a trade may witness the customer coming back to nibble for more.

How do sellers manage this challenge? They investigate the customer’s demands. These demands are an expression of an underlying need. By drilling deeper, the seller can uncover these needs. This approach is important because needs (“I need more flexibility in the payment schedule”) are much easier to discuss and resolve than demands (“I can’t pay that much”). The power of a consultative approach is that it effectively reveals these needs through questioning.

Finally, sellers should neutrally acknowledge the customer’s responses to show that they are listening and understand. As a seller listens, they need to begin to think about how they might reinforce value to persuade the customer. Once specific needs are understood, they may identify multiple options for meeting the need do not necessarily require concessions.

(4) Trade to Protect

The seller’s trading strategy will determine how well they maximize their outcome. Effective trading means protecting essentials without unilateral concessions that leave money on the table. Sellers make this work by first understanding how trading is different from concessions.

Simply put, a concession occurs when one gives something up and gets nothing in return. A trade is an exchange; the seller is giving to get. However, trading cannot occur in an adversarial setting. In such an environment, a customer, otherwise willing to trade, may resist at the behest of their ego. Moreover, studies have shown that strong-arm tactics are simply ineffective. Findings published in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review “serve to shatter the myth that adversarial bargaining is more effective and less risky than problem-solving.” The author continues, “the research indicates that a negotiator who is assertive and empathetic is perceived as more effective.”

Trading will be necessary for nearly every negotiation. Therefore, it’s crucial to know the true value of the trades. Knowing this means understanding, and expressing the specificity of the trade to avoid misunderstandings later.

(5) Seek Commitment To Close

When sellers move to close, they must start by reinforcing perceptions of value. Summarize what the customer gains, then check that the terms match the customer’s understanding. This is a crucial part of the conversation because maintaining momentum is what brings the deal to a close. If sticking points persist make them contingencies and instead gain conceptual buy-in. Sustain momentum with specific, actionable next steps in unambiguous language.  Until the seller has a signed contract they have not closed, they have only reached a commitment.

Commitment is loading the gun; closing is pulling the trigger.

Additionally, closing is important in preventing over negotiating which can exhaust the customer. However, sometimes closing is not possible. Why? Deadlocks happen.

When an agreement cannot be reached, sellers must consider the best option before walking away. This minimally acceptable outcome must be clear to the seller before negotiating. If this best option is formulated in the moment, it’s likely to leave money on the table.

(6) Act To Solidify

Follow up is critical. The seller must reinforce trust and credibility even when negotiations are complete. Research published by MIT Sloan Management Review explains that “Formal contracts are often ineffective in taking care of the uncertainties, conflicts, and crises that a business relationship is bound to go through over time.” The research continues, “trust and confidence, have been pointed out in several of the studies as being more effective for the development of relationships than formal contractual arrangements.” When a seller follows up they continue to demonstrate their competitive distinction, maintain momentum and customer respect.

Sellers can begin with an internal debriefing to evaluate the extent to which they met their goals. Every negotiation involves something unexpected, no matter how small. This reflection is an opportunity to consider such events and how to improve in the future.

Externally, sellers need to send a written summary thanking the customer for their time with a possible outreach from a senior leader. This summary should include specifics such as delivery dates, payment procedures, and next steps. These actions help solidify the seller’s reputation which reinforces the customer’s knowledge-based trust. Every time we follow through on a commitment we build knowledge-based trust.

Click here to download Richardson’s White Paper: Winning the Sale Without Thinning the Sale: Negotiating With The Modern Buyer. For more information about our Consultative Negotiation’s Training Program contact us at info@richardson.com or 800.526.1650.

The post 6 Tips for Effective Sales Negotiations appeared first on Welcome to the Richardson Sales Blog.

BY RASHAQA RAHMAN

Monetizing data is a growing topic of conversation globally. The proliferation of data and the Internet of Things (IoT) is providing a lens into understanding customer usage like never before. One that will help drive innovative models for data monetization. Yet, one cannot discuss the opportunities that come with big data without thinking about data security. As pricing consultants, we are constantly thinking about capturing part of the value provided to users through sophisticated pricing models. But how does the underground economy of stolen data and malware operate - do the same principles of supply, demand, value drivers and market segmentation apply? In this blog, I compare how stolen credit card data and ransomware are priced in the underground economy.

Stolen Credit Card Data

The once lucrative stolen credit card data market has become commoditized due to oversupply of data. Previously, the price of stolen cards were differentiated by a) brand (AMEX & Discover fetching less that Visa or Mastercard due to the latter having stricter security measures), b) region where the underground marketplace is located (E.g. US, UK, EU) and c) the type and usability of the data. In recent times, the overall price of stolen card data has commoditized and according to McAfee research, the data has become brand agnostic - the asking price ranging from $5/per card in the US (due to relatively lax card security standards) and between $20-$30/per card in the UK, Canada, Australia and EU.

Currently, the per unit price of cards differ somewhat and fetch small premiums, depending on the type and amount of personally identifiable information. Other than the US, there isn’t significant price differentiation in the global marketplace. However, hackers can still charge a premium (up to $1190) by providing value-added information like account balances and purchase behaviour to the buyers of the stolen data. This information helps avoid security measures and milk more value from the stolen card. In other words, value-based pricing prevails.

Ransomware

Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents access to the users’ systems by encrypting their data and asking for money to decrypt or unlock it. While the stolen credit card market has commoditized, the large influx in the volume of data across industries have had the opposite effect on the ransomware business model.

It is a high growth underground economy, estimated to have cost businesses $1 billion in 2016. The existence of a supporting ecology, such as Ransomware-as-a-Service, means that anyone can be a hacker, purchasing the ransomware/encryption for a lifetime license at $39, and making a healthy ROI. Vendors of these supporting services are able to charge such nominal amounts for the license because they often take a cut out of the hacker’s profits. Pricing model innovation!

Between 2015 and 2016, the average “price” or ransom asked has more than doubled from $294 to $697. Research conducted by the Ponemon Institute shows that the victims of ransomware attacks have a high willingness-to-pay, with 48% of respondents saying their company paid the ransom - $2500 on average. For most businesses, the driver behind the high willingness-to-pay is the opportunity cost of downtime (which can cost anywhere between $5000 and $20,000 per day) and loss of reputation. Furthermore, in the higher end of the spectrum, the attacks are increasingly targeted at the types of companies that generate the highest ROI.

Over the past couple of years, targets for ransomware attacks have been segmented by regional attitudes towards cyber-threats (that inform willingness-to-pay) and the nature of the data at risk. Businesses operating in different global regions display starkly different patterns of behaviour. For example, 97% of American businesses don’t pay ransom, but UK businesses are more likely to pay. Consequently, UK businesses are on average asked to pay much higher ransoms. One-fifth of British companies are charged $10,000 (which is considerably higher than $2500 average) and 3% of UK companies are charged upwards of $50,000.

Data is incredibly valuable, yet the downside risk of exploited data is exponentially higher. As businesses and hackers both race to find new and innovative models to “monetize” data, the burden of risk has shifted from mostly individuals to both businesses and individuals. It remains to be seen how the downside cost of data risk and the price of security is incorporated into the new IoT driven business models. Working out fair ways to share these costs between businesses and consumers will be critical to scalable business models that do not attract regulatory responses.

 

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Emotions are both powerful and complicated. They play a significant role in both our purchase decisions and our future customer loyalty.

Consider for a moment the standout customer experiences that you have experienced with brands you love – or hate. I became a life-long Nordstrom customer years ago when through ill fated circumstances, I didn’t have shoes for my wedding two days before. Not having much time or patience, the helpful sales representative listened to what I was looking for, selected a few options, searched across the country for availability, and sent multiple options and sizes to my doorstep the next day. She was my hero. I experienced tremendous joy and gratefulness for that experience that solidified my loyalty to Nordstrom. It wasn’t the rational aspects of that experience – the price or product selection – that won the day. It was a purely emotional reaction.

According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, 95 percent of our purchase decisions take place unconsciously. While we might think we rely on our head to make well thought out, judicious decisions, research has shown that is wishful thinking. The vast majority of our decisions are made based upon subconscious emotions only to be justified by our rational thoughts. This role of emotions in decision making extends to customer loyalty.

Capturing Customer Loyalty Through Emotion

Customer emotions have also been shown to have a more significant impact on loyalty than a rational evaluation of product or service attributes. In Forrester’s Customer Experience Index of U.S. Consumers, it was found that how an experience makes customers feel influences customer loyalty more than rational measures such as effectiveness or ease in 17 out of 18 industries they studied.

The reality is that despite this strong connection to customer loyalty, most companies have yet to effectively integrate emotional measurement into their CX efforts. Colin Shaw said in his book, The DNA of the Customer Experience, “Emotions are at the very core of the actions buyers take, but yet for years, businesses have ignored them.” Measuring emotions is not easy.

One of the best ways to derive customer emotions today is through unstructured feedback – whether that be survey verbatims, social media, call center notes, or any other form of direct customer feedback. Unstructured feedback by nature allows customers to tell their story in their own words – the good, bad, and the ugly. And while not all customers will express detectable emotions in their feedback, we’ve found in most sources of unstructured feedback – a large percentage of customers will give clues into their emotional state.

Through the use of text analytics and natural language processing (NLP) tuned to detected on average between 8-10 relevant customer experience emotions (derived from many of the leading models of customer emotions), we can identify when customer emotions are present in the customer’s comments at a thought phrase level.

Figure 1: Illustration of Key Customer Emotions Detected in Airline Customer Feedback

Armed with this information, we can use it in several key ways to drive CX outcomes:

1. Identify areas of high emotion for systemic improvement efforts and employee coaching: Given that negative emotions have a significant impact on future customer loyalty, we can use the emotion insights to detect topics that elicit the highest level of negative customer emotion. In the case of the airline data shown in the above example, a further examination of the data set shows that the greatest volume of negative emotions was expressed around the crew, checked baggage, and delays. Knowing these hot buttons, the organization can help develop intervention strategies to either eliminate the root cause of the emotion or, at a minimum, more effectively coach employees to handle these emotions customers have at the point of experience.
2. Trigger customer contact and recovery efforts based upon the presence of negative emotions: At a customer level, we can use text analytics combined with case management and employee alert functionality to trigger employee notifications or cases when relevant emotions are detected in customer comments. This alerts employees that further follow up and customer recovery efforts may be critical to retaining the customer. This approach can also be applied to other sources of customer feedback beyond surveys – such as social media reviews or even call center notes.
3. Further explain the drivers of key outcome metrics: Regression or True Driver analysis is often used to understand the drivers of key outcome metrics. Today most often those models rely primarily on rational variables. But customer decision making is not entirely rational. When emotions are added to regression models to understand the drivers of key outcome metrics such as overall satisfaction or NPS, our research has shown that R-squares improve significantly. In a past study, we saw the R-square increase from 0.48 to 0.65.

People Won’t Forget How You Made Them Feel

While text analytics gives us one way to begin to elicit insight into the customer’s emotional state, there are other approaches from survey questionnaire techniques to gather stated emotions to newer emerging techniques such as facial coding or voice analysis that can help provide a view into the customer’s emotional state. As CX practitioners, it’s imperative that we work to overcome the complexity of this task and recognize its importance to bottom line business results.

In the words of poet Mary Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Emotions are enduring. Tapping into customer emotions needs to be a key piece of any successful CX strategy – both today and in the future.

The future has arrived and video marketing is the key to growth for your business.

According to HubSpot, “4 times as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it and over 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers.” Let’s face it, watching a video is much easier (and often more entertaining) then reading.

Using even a short video, you can educate potential end-users, customers and/or buyers about how your company and your product works to solve their problems and needs.

Putting a face on-camera allows potential clients to see who you are, identify with you personally and build trust without even meeting in person. Videos can be posted online via YouTube and other video hosting sites, and from there they can easily be shared on your website or through email campaigns helping you market 24 hours a day, 7 days a week reaching both a worldwide and local audience.

“YouTube is more commonly used by larger businesses. 71% of businesses with 100+ employees use YouTube, compared to 38% of the self-employed.” (Social Media Examiner, 2015)

Video is now one of the most versatile and highest trending forms of marketing, it’s worth putting in the money to get the exposure you need and there is always a possibility for a huge ROI.

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Video Marketing:

1. Video Builds Trust

Building and maintaining trust with your prospects and current customers is usually a priority. The whole concept of video marketing is to stop selling or cold calling customers and hoping they are interested. Instead let them come to you by giving them interesting and useful information on a subject or need they are looking for.

Demonstrating first-hand how your product works is a useful tip to get your customers “trust”.

People tend to only trust things that they understand. Make your video easy to understand, but informative. Get your point across showing that if your client has a problem your product or service is the way to solve it.

If you manage to touch on the customer’s emotions and let them identify with needs like theirs, it becomes easier for you to sell them a product or service. Infomercials have been doing this for years and your companies video can work for you as we said before, 24 hours a day 7 days a week selling to more customers than you could ever reach personally.

2. Video Explains It All

98% of users say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service. 83% of businesses with an explainer video on their website, said it drove in business.

And to validate the effectiveness, 74% of users who watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service subsequently bought it.

3. Staying Ahead of the Video Curve

The numbers are compelling for the use of video. The goal is then to project ahead of the curve and focus on what drives engagement and if done well it can shoot a company forward unlike any other medium.

By prioritizing quality over quantity, the long-term benefits include a better reputation, stronger loyalty and more monetization opportunities.

4. Video Encourages Sharing

Video marketers must remember that people share emotions, not facts.

Social networks encourage video content with their new features and emphasis on video. Just to name a few:

• Instagram allows 60-Second Videos & Instagram Stories allows 10 second video and live streaming
• Twitter has Periscope which also lets you stream content live
• YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world.

Here are statistics on video sharing and the impact you should make to gain more traffic:

• Including video in a landing page can increase conversion by 80% (Eyeview)
• 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter (Bloomberg)
• 65% of video viewers watch more than ¾ of a video (Syndacast)

-So, get your point across quickly so you don’t lose your potential customer over an uninteresting video.

• Using the word ‘video’ in an email subject line boosts the open rates by 19% (Syndacast)
• 76% of users say they would share a branded video with their friends if it was entertaining.
• 69% of users say they would share a branded video if it contained information that might be of interest to their friends.
• 65% of users say they’d share a video if it was informative
• 31% of users say they would share a branded video with their friends purely because they like the brand.

Only 3% of consumers say they would never share a branded video under any circumstances. In other words, make a great video and 97% of consumers would happily share it with their friends and social networks.

(https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics-2016.html)

5. BUILD A RELATABLE BRAND THAT PEOPLE LOVE

If you show your face to your audience, they identify with you. That’ll build trust with your audience and when you can get your customers to trust you, it’s much easier to sell them on your products.

Video marketing is all about branding. You can build a strong brand using other methods online, but once you make the decision to harness the power of video marketing, you’ll find that you’re facing a much easier journey to small business success.

If you’re like many effective online content marketers today, you’re focused on using your Buyer’s Journey to drive traffic to your website, gain qualified leads, and work to convert those leads to sales. Although this process is relatively effective, some marketers are asking questions about how to make this process even more productive and efficient. That’s where CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) comes in.

CRO works as a system for making more effective use of your existing website content by increasing conversion rates from existing traffic.

Websites that are already designed to convert visitors into customers often produce a sales conversion rate of about 1%. Increasing more sales means driving more traffic to your site. But what if you could increase your rate of conversion from the traffic you already have? If this can be increased to 2% or even 3%, you’ve effectively doubled or tripled your customer base without having to draw in additional visitors to your website.

This, in a nutshell, is CRO.

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are built into content marketing websites, ready and waiting for visitors to turn into leads and then customers. If your website is already set up to attract visitors and turn them into leads, then CRO works as an effective tool to increase conversions and sales for existing visitors. When you analyze and discover why certain website visitors are not converting, you tune elements of your website to make your offers more compelling.

Asking the Right Questions

Access to analytics is critical to understanding how your site is performing and how it can be improved. Some of the questions you’ll need to answer are:

• How do visitors find your site? (Where do they land on? Which content draws them in?)
• What types of referrals bring visitors to your site?
• What are the demographics of your visitors? Age, location, interests, etc.
• Which parts of your site are engaging to visitors? Where do they stay longest?
• At what point do visitors leave your site? Are they bored? Is something driving them away?

Useful CRO Tools

Simple testing and research offers insight into your visitors, answering the above questions. A few of these tools include:

• A/B split testing – an effective tool to determine how your visitors respond to particular adjustments to your site.
• Persona research – is another way to pinpoint preferences for your target customers, allowing you to design your site, content, and even make SEO decisions based on demographics, personality, values, and lifestyle.
• User surveys – allow you to get into the brain of your buyer, helping you to determine how effective your website has been to visitors.

Once you better understand who your visitors are, what they are doing, and what drives them away, then you can adjust your website to better meet their needs and turn them into conversions.

CRO Strategies

Depending on the results of your data, you may want to incorporate some of these CRO adjustments:

Content Changes

If your old content is drawing in visitors but they leave quickly, you may find that it could benefit from a refreshing rewrite. Blog or article titles may draw people in, only for them to find that the content is outdated and not useful. Identify your blog posts that are receiving high levels of visitors but not a lot of conversions. Adjust your content to make the CTA clearer and provide motivating offers directly related to the topic.

Text-Based CTAs

Some web visitors immediately close pop-ups, no matter what they say. Writing calls to action into your content helps to lead visitors more gently to conversion, without the feeling that they have been interrupted or coerced into something. The HubSpot blog, for example, generates more leads from text-based CTAs than graphical ones.

Action Driven Copy

Make sure that your content points visitors in the direction you want them to take. Without an overt sales pitch, your site should always be seeking to identify reader pain points and helping them to solve problems, ultimately through the use of your product or service. Give visitors concise instructions – download, find out, determine ROI are good action based instructions that encourage visitors to convert.

Chat Invitations

Some visitors simply want to get their questions answered immediately. Offering the option of a chat box keeps visitors from having to search for the Chat option on the page they are visiting. Make the box accessible but not annoying.

Conversion Rate Optimization offers an opportunity to dig a little deeper, cultivating the relationship you have with existing web visitors and leading them further through the Buyer’s Journey. As you continue to tweak and develop your website, your attentiveness to the CRO process will earn your company a strong payoff.

The other day I got an email.

It was from LinkedIn, informing me that I would soon be able to “share and record videos” directly on the platform.

(Apparently this feature is being rolled out to their most influential contributors first — I’ll take it as a compliment, then.)

It’s news those of us in the B2B space have been waiting patiently for, like a labrador with sad eyes, for years.

Previously on LinkedIn you could only share videos from other sites. You couldn’t upload video natively onto the platform, as has become so ubiquitous on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. If you shared a link from YouTube it would embed itself and start playing in-stream (with the sound off), but the experience was still a long way behind most other social platforms.

This update finally brings LinkedIn kicking and screaming into the modern video-mad world. Expect it to start hitting your news feed in the next few months.

Sadly I can’t share with you the square, Instagram-esque video LinkedIn has created to announce this update, because I can’t yet see a way to embed LinkedIn video content on other sites (hopefully this will be rectified soon). You’ll just have to view it by clicking here.

Sharing and recording will be done via the LinkedIn app. Initially only individuals will be able to post native videos, but company videos are said to be coming soon.

What LinkedIn Native Video Means

We already know video is amazing for B2B brands on social. In fact, we wrote a whole guide about it not long ago.

It included stats like:

• Facebook & Instagram users find video 5x more engaging than images
• On the top 10 brand pages on Facebook, videos are shared 12x more than text and link posts combined
• From 2015 to 2016 average video shares on Facebook more than doubled

Video is hands-down the best way to reach time-poor people with short attention spans as they scroll through their social feeds. Moving images grab hold of the caveman part of your brain telling you to pay attention and get emotionally invested.

But Facebook isn’t always the best place for B2B marketers — not everyone is happy to think about work outside of work hours, on a platform they associate with friends and family.

Now we can avoid that problem by reaching busy employees in a suitable social environment with engaging, interesting, useful video content. Here at Skeleton we’ve found incredible success using LinkedIn to reach new members of our target audience, so we’re very excited to finally be able to start testing with video.

Success with Video on LinkedIn

Will it work? Well, the beta version of LinkedIn video resulted in 20x more shares than any other content on the platform. That’s even better than the Facebook stats I mentioned above.

Sounds like a win to me.

So, if video on LinkedIn is set to blow up as much as it did on Facebook — with the dramatic rise in viewership and engagement that entails — then this is a great time to start speaking with its 500 million global users.

There will definitely be a competitive advantage for those B2B brands that jump onto this opportunity first. But you also need to think through what you can offer on LinkedIn with video before you go rushing in and spamming your entire network. Like any other type of video marketing, consider who you’re talking to and what unique value you can provide them.

Otherwise you might find you’ve blown your first and only chance to connect in a totally new way with your audience.

We’ve been thinking about what kind of video content is most likely to succeed in this brave new world. Here are our top 4 suggestions for how you can build your brand and gain new customers with video on LinkedIn.

4 Ways You Can Take Advantage of New LinkedIn Video

1. Educate Your Audience with Video

Teach your audience something new. Give them direct, useful, actionable advice. They’ll see you as a helpful authority and may well think of you if they need assistance in the future.

Your video doesn’t need to be overly long or complex. This short, simple example from Hootsuite could just as easily be created and shared on LinkedIn. Make sure you understand your potential customers and can offer them the kind of advice they’re hungry for and you’ll do well.

2. Show Your Human Side

Ok, this is a video from us. But I think it’s a great example of how video can can help B2B brands (like us) come across as more human on social media.

A glimpse behind the scenes like this shows that there are real people in your business and allows leads to engage on a more authentic level. You can film your team at an event, on an away day or just doing what they do in the office. As long as you keep it semi-professional, this can turn a faceless brand into a living, breathing group of people.

3. Share Compelling Case Studies

Salesforce have created a whole series of gorgeous case studies that would be perfect on LinkedIn. They’re customer-focused, feature lots of honest emotion, and draw you quickly into the story.

As long as you create case studies with an emotionally compelling angle, that focus heavily on the pains of your clients and how you managed to solve them, I think this could be a form of video content that does incredibly well on LinkedIn.

4. Promote your Latest Offering

As I said before, we find LinkedIn a great platform for converting new qualified leads. We may see even better conversion rates once video is properly rolled out.

Once your leads are aware of you, it’s time to start encouraging them to take action of some kind. This might be downloading a free resource, signing up to a webinar or even getting in touch with sales. Whatever it is, keep it light and focus on the benefits. Here’s a great example of Moz explaining why you should check out their Keyword Explorer tool.

Hopefully that’s given you some ideas for how you can use video on LinkedIn to complement the rest of your social, video and content marketing efforts.

Every business owner is concerned with being profitable. For brand new business owners, bringing in revenue and getting a return on your investment of time and money can be a top concern.

Fortunately, generating income is not as difficult as it sounds. Here are few tips to help make your business profitable and start receiving payments within the first month.

Focus on Finding New Customers Daily

You should be spending the majority of your time finding and talking to new customers. You’ll want to network, attend events, set up sales calls, and send cold pitches.

It will seem like a lot of work at first, but it’s the best way to start generating the revenue you need. Whenever you’re tempted to do mundane tasks, work on finding new customers instead. Skip organizing your filing cabinet, reworking your business logo, checking your email, or updating the content on your website. Just don’t.

Follow Up With Existing Leads

This should be secondary when it comes to taking the first action. Check with existing customers or clients or people you have worked with in the past. Follow up with and announce your new business to see if they’d like to do any work with you.

If they are not in need of your products or services at the time, they still might know someone who is and be able to refer you to them.

Use Resources Wisely

On one hand, you have to generate income to become profitable. But you need to keep your expenses low if you want to keep any of that hard-earned cash. That’s why profitable small businesses always use their resources wisely and avoid paying for unnecessary gadgets or advertising that doesn’t work.

Focus on free or affordable resources first. Free social media scheduling sites and organization tools like Asana for example. Be cautious when outsourcing and paying others to do certain tasks for you.

You can always increase your business expenses when you start making more money, but if you can DIY certain tasks on your own at first, you’ll see a greater profit quicker.

Advertise Effectively

All products and services require different marketing strategies. If your product is something that is appealing to a large group of people, consider advertising with digital coupons or with Facebook ads.

If your product only appeals to a small niche market you might want to leverage your email list more to boost conversions.

Start with one advertising method, then feel free to explore others to test things out. If you start out doing 10 things at once, you won’t have any idea what works and what doesn’t so be sure to pace yourself.

Summary

There’s no magic secret formula to generate automatic income for your new business. These tips will help get you develop a solid strategy to get your business off the ground and earn money rather quickly.

Focus on putting yourself out there and dedicate lots of time to networking and connecting with potential customers and clients. Then, utilize paid resources wisely and don’t overlook the power of advertising.

We live in a business world that is dominated by data. In fact, data is one of the most valuable commodities today. It forms the basis of any successful marketing or ad campaign, is driving some of the biggest tech acquisitions, and is literally fueling the rise of Artificial Intelligence—a technological revolution that’s already changing the face of every industry it touches. What’s more, it’s readily accessible: with relative ease, companies can acquire incredibly precise data on their customers and prospects (although this overabundance of data comes with its own challenges too).

The rise of what some are calling the “Data Economy” also comes at an opportune moment for B2B marketing and sales in particular, as they move increasingly towards account-based frameworks. Of course, ABM has itself been enabled by the rise of “Big Data” and all the exciting opportunities that come with it. Chicken vs. egg questions aside, B2B marketers’ increased ability to obtain and use unprecedented levels of data presents them with a perfect opportunity to excel at ABM.

In this blog, I’ll cover how data plays a significant role in the success of account-based marketing (ABM) and what that means for marketers.

ABM is Personal

First, there’s the fundamentally targeted nature of ABM. The term account-based marketing can be somewhat misleading: you’re still engaging with and selling to leads within your target accounts, so it’s no less personal in that regard. But ABM actually requires an even greater measure of targeting and personalization than a purely lead-led approach.

To quote Leadspace VP Product and Partnerships Travis Kaufman from the recently-published The State of Account-Based Marketing report:

“To succeed at ABM, you must understand the company characteristics as well as the characteristics of the individuals within those organizations. Having this understanding allows you to align your teams around critical accounts that need focus and build programs designed to engage the people who influence the purchase decision.”

Specifically, to actually engage with an account, you need to:

• Compile a list of qualified, named accounts to target. This is itself a highly data-driven process, which will require constant monitoring and adjustment as you gradually refine your profile of your ideal account by learning from won/lost deals.
• Identify the key influencers with buying power within each account.
• Identify other peripheral influencers who could potentially sway a decision. Stakeholders like HR, Finance or IT might not actually sign off on the purchase, but may need to be consulted, and could be required later to facilitate its implementation.
• Compete for these people’s attention with personalized content, in a content-overloaded environment. This requires understanding their interests, needs, pain-points, and other important factors affecting their propensity to buy. This may include the compatibility of their existing technology stack as well as other details like the level of interest or engagement to ensure the content you’re serving is relevant, and what platforms are best to reach them on.
• Have an understanding of the site-level context of any given account: You need to know whether the company you’re targeting is actually an “account” in its own right, or if it’s actually a branch (e.g., subsidiary, local branch, franchise) of a larger parent account. If the latter, which site should you be targeting, and is anyone already effectively selling into this account at a different site level?

To do all of this you need highly granular data on both the individual and account level. You then need to combine account- and individual-level data to gain a holistic view of the entire account.

Keeping Up=More Data Than Ever

ABM requires building an intricate network of intersecting intelligence on both accounts and leads instead of keeping track of a single lead. Apart from being a challenge in itself, ABM practitioners need to be plugged into the constant changes and developments in data across both the account and individual level:

On the account level: If a company enters/exits a buying cycle, or alters the relevant budget, or changes its technology stack, or makes a significant new hire, or moves buying power/job responsibilities among its leadership, etc.

On the individual level: Simultaneously, you need to watch if any of those influencers you are engaging with or trying to reach are getting promoted, moving department, changing job function or leaving the company.

Again, this requires a lot of granular data, in real-time—far beyond the basics like job titles, company size, industry, and so on. Today, this kind of highly detailed personal data is available, and marketers who make do with only basic, superficial data sets like job title are at real risk of being outmaneuvered.

Personalize Your AdTech

Among the most exciting developments in B2B marketing, execution is the evolution of personal ad targeting.

Until recently, unlike their counterparts in the consumer industry, B2B marketers could only target company IPs for online ad campaigns, as opposed to specific individuals. Unsurprisingly, this basic method generated meager returns: if you’re blasting content at an entire company—from the CEO down to every junior intern—the vast majority of those it reaches are totally irrelevant.

But B2B AdTech is catching up, finally. We see platforms tap into the oceans of big data potential to enable personal targeting that’s on-par with the B2C equivalent. That’s ideal for enabling account penetration, by targeting the right people inside your target accounts with relevant content consistently, wherever they’re browsing.

ABM can’t be ignored right now. It’s no surprise that the majority of B2B companies, of all sizes, are adding ABM as a strategy within their marketing plan. Have you incorporated ABM yet? What successes have you had with it? Tell me about your experiences in the comments.

 

The post How the Rise of Data is Fueling ABM Success appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Think of the traditional sales funnel as a casualty of today’s digital innovations. The internet, mobile access and smartphones, and the social networking web have transformed the current sales landscape into one where the funnel no longer applies.

According to a survey done by SiriusDecisions, the buyer’s journey is now 67 percent digital. Our current unrestricted access to information has changed the way people make purchases. Buyers go through the sales funnel not from the top down. Instead, they come in at varying stages, navigate the funnel erratically, and consume content at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

This puts your content marketing – as well as its offshoot, video marketing – in the forefront. Is your content marketing aligned with what your sales team needs, in order to do the job of developing relationships and closing deals? Is your sales team armed with marketing collateral suitable for the new sales environment?

How People Consume Content Today

A study by the 2014 Marketing Leadership Council of CEB (now known as Gartner) claims that 57 percent of the purchasing decision have been made even before a customer meets a salesperson. This has limited marketing’s capacity to educate and influence, which are some of its primary roles.

Access to information is at the heart of this reality. People are consuming content in increasing levels. According to research done by Hubspot Research in 2016, video content tops the list, followed closely by social media, news and long form business content. Of these sites, Facebook has the most impressive increase, up by 57 percent.

Mobile usage is on an uptrend too. In fact, it has surpassed desktop usage, as of 2016. Here, social media and video content are in close contention for the top spot, at 52 percent and 49 percent, respectively. Mobile notifications have likewise increased by 34 percent, beating conventional content aggregators, such as RSS.

Video Consumption Trends

It is worthwhile to note video content’s increased prominence as the leading content format for regular and mobile internet use. According to the Hubspot research, almost half the respondents watch at least an hour’s worth of videos a week. Leading video sites, Facebook and YouTube, likewise peg their views at billions of videos each day.

Interestingly too, another study – this time by Forbes – says that 75 percent of surveyed executives view work-related videos regularly, almost half of which are done through YouTube. Of these, 65 percent are spurred into action, such as visiting linked business websites. Another 53 percent extend what they had seen on video format by conducting further research. This behavior is shared across all executive age levels.

Content Consumption and its Implications on Marketing

All this implies an evolved B2B and B2C consumer. Buyers have become sophisticated, making the most of information that’s literally at their fingertips. They get online when necessary, wherever they are. They look or ask for information. They can make decisions on the spot, even without the intervention of a sales rep.

The biggest challenge for marketing and sales teams today is penetrating this web of information, such that you are still able to extend your message to your target audience. Research suggests that videos are the top format to get your full message across. Of course, this does not mean abandoning other content formats; there are advantages, depending on your industry.

In the past, we’ve used the sales funnel to map your buyer’s journey: to see where your customers are, and to know and provide the information that they need and the marketing collateral your sales team needs. We need to rethink this funnel to consider the new realities of the digital sales landscape.

Why the Traditional Sales Funnel No Longer Works

Take the story of Sephora, as shared by its CMO Julie Bornstein. Sephora is a French chain of cosmetics stores that has been around since the late 1960s. As with others in its industry, it has relied on marketing to generate brand awareness. Word of mouth from its advocates or brand ambassadors helps too.

Bornstein and her team has seen how the sales landscape changed in the digital age. Everything had to be “quicker, faster and further.” So, they brought together all the stages of the funnel and instead, created a community.

Within the community, people can discover solutions to their problems and learn about products. Users from different stages of their buyer’s journey can ask questions, decide/ change their minds, and perhaps eventually buy. They might even end up at an actual store, where a beauty specialist can assist them. But, even before that happens, a good amount of discovering and learning has taken place. It’s not far-fetched to think that the customers who do go to the store have made up 57 percent of their minds.

This kind of approach to marketing is no longer unique. Others are beginning to take this non-linear path. The biggest critique of sales funnels, after all, is their linearity, which does not jive with the need to be “quicker, faster and further.”

Everyday Example of a Non-Linear Buyer’s Journey

Sephora’s case is not an isolated one. For both B2C and B2B businesses, customers are taking it upon themselves to learn about their options first. They visit company websites, support forums, blogs, review sites and social media venues to find out more about the product they’re interested in. They talk to friends – and even non-friends, for that matter, as long as they can be reached online – for recommendations and expert opinion.

Even on a typical e-commerce site, such as Amazon, discoveries are made each second. A customer is a click away from buying or changing their minds.

The Customer Decision Journey: An Imperfect Alternative

Rethinking the sales funnel is a way of understanding the new buyer. It gives us an idea where their touchpoints (opportunities for engagement) are, and how we, as marketers and sales professionals, can extend a helping hand.

The funnel alternative Customer Decision Journey was popularized by McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm. Here, the funnel is completely removed from the buyer’s journey. Instead, the process is a circle with one’s purchasing decision at the core.

And while this is inherently better than the sales funnel, it is still lacking. It still puts the purchasing decision or transaction at the center, which is not the case for customers. As software company SAP Digital’s Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Becher says: “…The pivot is the experience, not the purchase.”

The Customer Engagement Journey

The need to not make the purchase the center is best reflected in the case of advocates. Advocates are brand ambassadors – or fans or followers, to use social media parlance. Today, you don’t need to buy in order to become an advocate. As Twitter’s Global Brand Marketing VP, Joel Lunenfeld says: “You no longer have to be a customer to be an advocate. The new social currency is sharing what’s cool in the moment.”

For instance, you don’t need to own a Tesla to follow Elon Musk on social media and be excited to see what he will do next. You don’t need to cook like a chef or be near any of his restaurants to watch Gordon Ramsay’s cooking demos on YouTube. But, what you become is an advocate. You are engaged with their brands, and would likely share interesting content that comes from them.

Credit card company Visa’s Chief Brand Officer, Antonio Lucio, explains this as making the relationship the center, instead of focusing on the purchasing decision or transaction. He says that: “When you change from decision to engagement, you change the entire model.”

He argues that today, there are a lot more opportunities to engage than to transact. And, while this does not quickly translate to sales, it develops a relationship that will be worth more than one transaction.

Aligning Marketing with Sales

“… Getting the sales and marketing teams to synergize is organizational goal number one. Every success grows from their collaboration and free exchange of ideas, because you can’t serve the customer right when your best people are working blind.” – Marshall Lager, Managing Principal at Third Idea Consulting, a social CRM and SMM consulting company.

The Sales Funnel and Customer Decision Journey will always be there, referred to – even by us – every now and then. It is an easy way to compartmentalize the movement of our leads and customers. Within the limited capacities of these models, they can still work on certain situations.

However, this shouldn’t hinder us from learning the true buyer’s journey – the one that goes “quicker, faster and further.”

After all, what we really want is to align the content marketing that we do with what our target audience needs – and what our sales teams need, as well. To do this, it is best to leave these two models up in the attic to gather dust.

Any approach or model that hinges on transaction or the purchasing decision is bound to miss out on the limitless engagements made possible by digital technology. Content is key to these engagements. In fact, it is of utmost importance during that span of time our market hasn’t reached out to our sales team. It is how we penetrate a web full of information and get our message across. And, further down the buyer’s journey, it is what we need to arm our sales teams with: engaging, useful content.

So, in choosing a framework through which you can align the efforts of your marketing and sales teams, remember these:

• The path to purchasing is no longer linear. Our customers follow a web of information, and go back and forth (up, down and around), before making a purchase. In some cases, the buyer’s journey takes months at a time, and after viewing several content. In others, it can take seconds.

• There are several dimensions to social influence. It is no longer the sole function of your marketing team to build your brand. The internet does some – if not, a lot – of the work for you. Keep track of your online reputation. There are several free and paid tools you can use for this.

• Don’t disregard your advocates. Whether or not they’re customers, these advocates have a social clout that can be to your advantage. When planning your content and video marketing strategies, keep them in mind.

• Focus on the relationships that you build with those you engage with through your content and video marketing. Don’t put transaction or the purchasing decision as your end goal; the digital sales landscape does not work that way.

• And, whatever you do, measure. You won’t likely get to the best approach to an aligned sales and marketing on the first try. (And no, perhaps not even on the second nor third.) There will be a need to calibrate and recalibrate your approach, until you learn the common paths taken by your customers.

Do so methodically, through available analytics tools. Make sure to measure important metrics, over a period of time, especially when you recalibrate your approach.

There are a lot to look forward to with marketing and sales teams that work together to take on the immense digital sales environment.

Some people got a great high school education. But some of us were sent to an evangelical Christian school, where we learned that evolution is a lie, Columbus was a cool dude, and Catholics are faking it. For us, and anyone else who suspects their education could use a revisionist refresh, there’s the free YouTube…

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Thanks to communication tools like Skype, chat, and email, face-to-face meetings sales meetings are less common than they used to be.

But they haven’t grown obsolete -- and may never. After all, nothing can replace the effects of sitting and talking to someone at the same table.

Case in point: An April 2017 study from Cornell University found in-person requests are 34 times more successful than those made over email.

The advantages of face-to-face meetings

Face-to-face communication is often better than online meetings for six reasons:

1. It’s easier to build rapport
2. You can more accurately gauge the other person’s mood, desires, and hesitations
3. It feels more intimate
4. It can be more efficient, since you can hash things out in one conversation rather than sending multiple emails back and forth
5. You’re more likely to keep the other person’s attention
6. You can mirror their body language, which helps you put them at ease and gain their trust
7. You’re less likely to have miscommunications

When to have face-to-face meetings

Even if you’re an inside salesperson, there are still opportunities to sit down in person with prospects. According to Steve W. Martin’s survey of sales leaders, 20% of inside sales reps can make field sales calls when necessary.

Here are some scenarios a face-to-face meeting would make sense:

• It’s a much larger deal than normal
• It’s an average size deal, but there’s a big opportunity for expansion
• It’s an important deal and you think it’s in jeopardy
• It’s a normal deal but you’re going to be in the area
• Your champion wants to introduce you to other potential customers
• Your prospect is going to be at the same event as you

And of course, if you’re an outside salesperson, you’re going to face-to-face meetings all the time.

So now that you understand the importance and place of face-to-face meetings in the sales process -- no matter what type of rep you are -- let’s dive into best practices.

How to Have a Face-to-Face Meeting

First Impressions

It takes mere seconds for someone to form an impression of you. And once they’ve decided what you’re like, you’ll have an extremely difficult time shaking that perception. If you're going to focus on any part of the meeting, make it the first minute.

Timing

Nothing makes you look unprofessional like running late. But arriving too early doesn’t help you, either -- it can make you seem like you’re overly eager or have a wide-open schedule, which can lessen your perceived influence and power.

Try to arrive between five to 10 minutes before your agreed meeting time. That’s the sweet spot between “prepared” and “desperate.”

Courtesy

Being polite to everyone you meet, from the CEO to the security guard, is crucial. Many sales have been lost because the rep was dismissive to someone they considered “beneath” them. Your prospects will correctly take this rudeness as a sign you’re not the best person to do business with.

With that in mind, acknowledge the receptionist, your prospect’s assistant, and/or anyone else who you interact with. It takes two seconds to say, “Thanks for your help, John,” but it won’t be forgotten.

Preparation

If you’re giving any sort of presentation -- from a casual one in front of three people to a formal one before the entire buying committee -- ask for access to the room beforehand so you can set up.

Run through your slides a few times, test the lighting and acoustics, and make sure all your tech works. Taking these precautions will alleviate your stress (so you’ll sound more confident) and help you avoid embarrassing and/or time-consuming issues during the presentation itself.

Appearance

Pick your clothes carefully -- they’re a huge component of your first impression. Visiting your prospect’s office? Ask the person handling the administrative details (the date and time, arrival instructions, etc.) what the dress code is like.

If you’re meeting your prospect at an event, go by the event’s recommended clothing style. Maybe it’s jeans and sneakers -- or maybe it’s business casual. Following suit will ensure you and the other person will be wearing similar outfits.

Perhaps you’re meeting them at a restaurant or coffee shop. Do a bit of social media research to get a sense for their style. Do they show up to work in a suit? You should lean formal. Are they always in flip flops? They’re probably going to look laid back for this meal.

When in doubt, remember it’s better to be overdressed than under.

Handshake

Your handshake should be firm but not overly tight. If you can see their knuckles turning white, or they grimace, loosen up -- literally.

Posture

Make sure you stand up when they enter the room. Your posture should be excellent at all times; not only will you look more confident, your voice will sound steadier and more sure as well.

Eye contact

Maintaining eye contact shows poise and power. That being said, too much eye contact will come across as creepy. Try to look at the other person 60 to 70% of the time.

Nod and smile

Visibly reacting to your prospect’s comments will make them feel gratified. When they make a good point, nod your head to show your agreement. When they crack a joke, laugh. When they pay you a compliment, smile. When they discuss bad news, frown.

It sounds basic, but sometimes when people are stressed they adopt a poker face. That can make it seem like you’re cold or unfriendly -- definitely not the persona you want to be remembered for.

Conversation

Even if you’re there to talk business, make sure to have a few minutes of light conversation before you dive into the nitty gritty.

Talking about non-work things builds rapport and gives you the chance to get to know each other as people. You don’t need to discuss their favorite sport or thoughts on the weather; instead, before the meeting look for unique commonalities or interesting aspects about them you can bring up. For instance, if they just posted a picture of their recent trip to New Orleans, you might say, “So I saw you just got back from New Orleans. That’s where I got married! It’s one of my favorite cities in the U.S.”

Agenda

When it’s time to transition from small talk to the meeting itself, say something like, “We’ve set aside [30 minutes, an hour] for this. Does that still work for you?”

This shows you’re ready to talk business and is a good preliminary to setting the actual agenda.

Jeff Hoffman recommends asking if you can have a tour of the office or factory if you finish a little early. Not only does everyone love a meeting that wraps up ahead of time, walking around with the buyer gives you a chance to further build rapport and learn more about their company.

Next, highlight the main objectives or discussion items of the meeting.

Finally, ask, “How did that sound? Is there anything else you’d like to go over today?” Making your prospect part of the agenda-setting process makes them feel like your partner, rather than your audience, and ensures you don’t skip a subject they care about.

Notes

Prospects are always flattered when you take notes during meetings. You clearly think their opinions are important, or you wouldn’t bother writing them down. Taking notes also helps you preserve your true perceptions of how the conversation went and what the buyer said. It’s easy for your memories of the meeting to change after a day or week.

Listen

Make sure you’re not dominating the conversation. Even when you’re giving a demo or explaining your proposal, your prospect should be getting plenty of airtime.

Letting them talk keeps them engaged and makes the meeting feel like a conversation rather than a monologue.

If they’re not saying much, you may need to prompt them. Ask, “What are your thoughts so far?”, “How does this sound to you?”, or “What other questions do you have about [subject]?”

Body language

There’s a simple and easy way to seem like you’re in sync with your prospect: Subtly imitate their body language. Mirroring is scientifically proven to build rapport.

So if they lean forward, do so as well. If they cross their arms, cross yours too. If they tilt their head, tilt yours as well.

Just make sure you’re not being obvious. Wait a few seconds before copying them, and don’t mimic absolutely every move they make (for example, if they scratch their head, you shouldn’t scratch yours.)

Wrap-up

When you’re getting close to the scheduled end time, say something along the lines of, “We have [X minutes] left. I want to make sure we’ve talked about everything you wanted to -- I have [Y slides left], but is there anything you’d like to discuss?”

This shows you’re attentive to their needs and value their input.

You should also confirm the next steps. Those will depend on where you are in the sales process; if this was an intro meeting, you’ll probably want to schedule another one, while if you just finished a product demo, you should ask them to review the proposal.

Once the meeting is over, thank everyone and shake their hands again.

Follow up

The same day -- or the next morning, if you had a later meeting -- send a thank-you note to the person who organized it, as well as your main point-of-contact. (That might be the same person, or it may be the EA and your champion.)

Express appreciation for their time and hospitality. In the email to your prospect, reiterate the next steps, let them know you’re available if they have any questions or concerns, and mention a rapport-building point ( like “Thanks again for the book suggestion. I just finished chapter one, and it had me cracking up.”)

It might seem like a small gesture, but it shows you’re a true professional and will treat them well if they decide to do business with you.

Face-to-face meetings tend to be more stressful than virtual ones. But they pay enormous dividends. Your relationships will be stronger, your presentations will be more convincing, and most importantly, your deals will be bigger.

Researchers at IBM have developed a new approach for simulating molecules on a quantum computer.

The breakthrough, outlined in a research paper to be published in the scientific journal Nature Thursday, uses a technique that could eventually allow quantum computers to solve difficult problems in chemistry and electro-magnetism that cannot be solved by even the most powerful supercomputers today.

In the experiments described in the paper, IBM researchers used a quantum computer to derive the lowest energy state of a molecule of beryllium hydride. Knowing the energy state of a molecule is a key to understanding chemical reactions.

In the case of beryllium hydride, a supercomputer can solve this problem, but the standard techniques for doing so cannot be used for large molecules because the number of variables exceeds the computational power of even these machines.The IBM researchers created a new algorithm specifically designed to take advantage of the capabilities of a quantum computer that has the potential to run similar calculations for much larger molecules, the company said.

The problem with existing quantum computers – including the one IBM used for this research — is that they produce errors and as the size of the molecule being analyzed grows, the calculation strays further and further from chemical accuracy. The inaccuracy in IBM’s experiments varied between 2 and 4 percent, Jerry Chow, the manager of experimental quantum computing for IBM, said in an interview.

Alan Aspuru-Guzik, a professor of chemistry at Harvard University who was not part of the IBM research, said that the Nature paper is an important step. “The IBM team carried out an impressive series of experiments that holds the record as the largest molecule ever simulated on a quantum computer,” he said.

But Aspuru-Guzik said that quantum computers would be of limited value until their calculation errors can be corrected.

“When quantum computers are able to carry out chemical simulations in a numerically exact way, most likely when we have error correction in place and a large number of logical qubits, the field will be disrupted,” he said in a statement. He said applying quantum computers in this way could lead to the discovery of new pharmaceuticals or organic materials. IBM has been pushing to commercialize quantum computers and recently began allowing anyone to experiment with running calculations on a 16-qubit quantum computer it has built to demonstrate the technology.

In a classical computer, information is stored using binary units, or bits. A bit is either a 0 or 1. A quantum computer instead takes advantage of quantum mechanical properties to process information using quantum bits, or qubits. A qubit can be both a 0 or 1 at the same time, or any range of numbers between 0 and 1. Also, in a classical computer, each logic gate functions independently. In a quantum computer, the qubits affect one another.

This allows a quantum computer, in theory, to process information far more efficiently than a classical computer.

The machine IBM used for the Nature paper consisted of seven quibits created from supercooled superconducting materials. In the experiment, six of these quibits were used to map the energy states of the six electrons in the beryllium hydride molecule. Rather than providing a single, precise and accurate answer, as a classical computer does, a quantum computer must run a calculation hundreds of times, with an average used to arrive at a final answer.

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Chow said his team is currently working to improve the speed of its quantum computer with the aim of reducing the time it takes to run each calculation from seconds to microseconds. He said they were also working on ways to reduce its error rate.

IBM is not the only company working on quantum computing. Alphabet Inc.’s Google is working toward creating a 50 qubit quantum computer. The company has pledged to use this machine to solve a previously unsolvable calculation from chemistry or electro-magnetism by the end of the year.

Also competing to commercialize quantum computing is Rigetti Computing, a startup in Berkeley, California, which is building its own machine, and Microsoft which is working with an unproven quantum computing architecture that is, in theory, inherently error-free. D-Wave Systems, a Canadian company, is currently the only company to sell quantum computers, although its machines can only be used to solve certain optimization problems.

Content marketing is still here. It may be as old as the hills, but the benefits are not going away, and the vast majority of brands are still interested in content. Agencies, therefore, have to make sure they are providing effective content marketing solutions to clients.

However, if we were to say that all content is good, we would be telling a bit of a lie. Content still needs to be of the highest quality, and if you’re working for a client, you need to make sure it is of the highest quality you can muster.

Digital agencies also have to bear in mind that their clients will be looking for expertise too. If a brand itself can create its own content (or feel that it makes sense to) then the work for digital agencies will disappear.

The business goals thing

Every digital agency will be asked at an early part of a client relationship a simple question. This question can prove hard to answer though, and this is because confidence and understanding of content marketing have to be there first.

The question is: why do we need content?

The client may add more to the question too. They may say that they have visitors and that their site looks great. They may also query the value of the content itself. Answering the question well can be the difference between adding to the value you bring to your client and losing out on business. Tying into business goals around growth and expansion, or even just lead gathering, makes the answer even stronger.

Basically, the reason why brands need content can be broken down into one word: value. This value is shown in two areas. Firstly, good content will bring in new website traffic. This provides the brand with more prospects. Secondly, good content gives the brand an opportunity to convert visitors, via the website, into buyers. So it boils down to offering even more value to your client and the brand.

There are two main ways to deal with the first area of attracting new visitors to a website. The best way is to develop high quality blog content that informs and educates the audience. This content should demonstrate the authority and experience the brand has.

Blog post writing is now in a state that, done right, can truly present your client as a thought leader. With audiences turned off short ‘seen it all before’ content that has essentially been rewritten, it’s the perfect climate for a strong brand to produce truly thought-provoking and intelligent content.

If that is something that your agency can develop, it should become part of a strong marketing plan. Essentially, an audit of your client’s customer base and what their interests are will be helpful.

Then, a content calendar can be drawn up for the coming year. Blog posts around those interests and needs are then planned, and will build up a knowledge base that your client’s audience will truly appreciate. Out of this comes social sharing, and therefore more visits to the website.

The other way to deal with site content (and keeping it fresh) is to produce news items around the industry your client is in. This is all about keeping your finger on the pulse and then creating news items around what is happening, along with your agency’s expert opinion on what is going on. This takes less time than original blog content, and it also shows the audience that your client is right there in the moment, and knows what matters to the audience.

So that’s how new traffic arrives through content. What about what happens when they get to the site?

Conversion-based content marketing

The other kind of content (different to the traffic attraction kind) is the conversion-based work your digital agency should be offering to clients. Here, the content is designed specifically to turn the site visitors that arrive into paying customers. So right there you can see how a digital agency can present two packages to clients, one for traffic and authority building, and one for conversion of new leads.

The very best way to ensure this happens is to show true authority. Your client will need to present themselves as an industry leader. As well as great blog content and news content, you also have to dig deep into authority building work.

Dense, detailed how-to guides help in this regard, and that’s why so many brands who have authority develop how-to series blog and article content. It draws people in, and helps them. But on top of all that, it also presents the brand as an expert voice. People are reassured by quality and expertise, which is why this conversion-based content is so powerful.

This expertise needs to be obvious in all areas of the site, from product descriptions, all the way to white papers and reports that are produced and given away to site visitors. By showing expertise, you are pulling site visitors along towards buying.

Back to those goals

No brand wants to stagnate. By making it clear that there are two strong ways in which content marketing helps a brand reach its goals, you can make a good case for content marketing. It should be part of every digital agency’s work, and brands will certainly understand that a website is not static in nature.

Fresh, useful and well-written content around that site keep it moving forward, and bringing in more loyal customers. If anything, content marketing is now more important than ever.

When tech giants stumble, the entire tech world feels the resulting aftershocks. Sometimes, the tremors can even reach the distant shores of sales and marketing land, giving us not only fodder for the watercooler but also valuable life lessons that can help us become better at what we do.

Behind every botched rollout or embarrassing recall is a nugget of sales wisdom waiting to be cracked. In today’s post, we’ll dissect five failed products from tech’s “Big Five”–Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft–and find out what we can learn from these titans in their lesser moments.

Amazon Fire Phone: Adequate is not enough.

In 2014, Amazon unveiled the Fire Phone, marking the online retailer’s entry into the highly-competitive handset market. A little over a year later, the company completely ceased selling its debut smartphone amid dismal sales and steep discounts.

The Fire Phone, as many industry watchers now believe, is arguably Amazon’s biggest flop. The phone had “adequate features” such as 3D graphics and the Firefly function which allowed users to scan and identify thousands of items. But, to carve out a decent share in a market long dominated by Apple and Samsung, adequate simply wasn’t good enough.

In B2B selling, it’s highly unlikely you’re the only provider your prospect is looking into. So, don’t just go for a checklist of features when comparing your solution with that of a competitor. Dig deeper into your organization’s characteristics and relate these to a story of how you’re uniquely able to deliver a benefit or solve a pain point.

Apple Newton: Timing is everything.

Today, most people equate the Apple brand with quality and design excellence, but it can be easy to forget that Apple has also seen its fair share of products that ended up as spectacular flops.

One of these was the Apple Newton, a pioneering device in the personal digital assistant (PDA) space, released in 1993. The product was considered visionary when it debuted, but it suffered from a number of major flaws, including its unreliable handwriting recognition software. The Newton’s marketing materials touted the handwriting feature as its main selling point, but character recognition was still in its infancy when the product was launched. Still, when the technology finally matured enough, the Newton was outclassed by newer and smaller PDA devices.

Although a commercial failure, the Newton’s impact can still be felt today. The idea of making the computer fit in the palm of your hands originally took shape in the Newton. It was quite plainly ahead of its time. So, if a prospect says no to your pitch today, don’t write him off as a lost opportunity right away. It’s just probably not yet the right time to consider your offer.

Facebook Home: Fit doesn’t mean intent.

As the youngest company on this list, it’s understandable that Facebook has taken quite a number of product development missteps in its 13 years of existence. But few are more worth reviewing than Facebook Home, a Facebook-focused user interface designed to replace the home screen in a variety of Android devices.

Facebook Home was launched in April 2013 and immediately garnered poor reception. Users complained that Facebook Home’s almost-exclusive focus on Facebook got in the way of other apps, while others voiced privacy concerns over its level of access on user data. Apart from releasing a couple of updates later that same year, Facebook has all but pulled the plug on the product in the face of low adoption rates.

Anyone in B2B sales can look at the entire Facebook Home saga as a cautionary tale on misreading prospect fit for purchase intent. The main thinking behind the interface was to “make it about people, not apps” since people mostly do social networking on smartphones. Facebook Home’s designers mistook this aspect of device usage as a signal that Android users were willing to give up widgets, docs, and app folders, so the design team left these features out.

In B2B selling, fit and interest are only the starting points when determining whether a prospect is going to turn into a buyer. You need to look at prospect intent (e.g., prospect activities like searching by company name, requesting a product trial, viewing pricing pages, etc.) before aiming for a close.

Google Glass: Always be following up.

Inducted into Sweden’s Museum of Failure last month (alongside the Apple Newton), Google Glass is either a world-changing idea that has yet to see its time or a footnote to the company’s never-ending innovation story. Either way, Google Glass was a massive flop, and there’s a ton of reasons why it failed–including a basic marketing mistake: not following up.

Google Glass’s marketing slip-ups began with how the company decided to initially promote the product, and these gaffes continued throughout much of the device’s brief commercial life. Before being made available to the general public in May 2014, Google Glass units were sold to qualified “Glass Explorers”, a select group of early adopters and celebrities that acted as the product advertisement.

At first, this appeared to be a brilliant PR stunt with Google generating a decent amount of buzz around the product. But Google Glass’s marketing team failed to capitalize on the initial product hype by being unable to clearly communicate what Google Glass exactly was. If you ever try to drive awareness through PR, the only way to turn this into demand is to follow it up with a clear value proposition.

Microsoft Zune: Find products for customers, not customers for products.

If you haven’t heard of Microsoft’s Zune music player, you’re not alone. The Zune was Microsoft’s failed attempt to take on the iPod and, judging by how history unfolded, it was one of the biggest tech flops of all time, with the former barely making a dent in the latter’s market share.

The Zune was launched in 2006, a full five years after Apple released its iconic audio device. Amid lackluster sales, Microsoft released a final version in 2009 and discontinued support for the device in 2015.

There are as many reasons for Zune’s demise as there are Zune post-mortems ever published. But one very interesting side of Zune’s story was Microsoft’s failure to position the device as an iPod alternative. The Zune had features that the iPod didn’t have, but Zune’s target users (most of whom were iPod users themselves) weren’t convinced that Microsoft’s music player solved a pressing issue or fulfilled an urgent need.

In the end, a product’s ability to solve a problem or pain point is what converts prospects to buyers. As Seth Godin puts it: “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”

The Takeaway

Even with the vast amounts of talent and resources at their disposal, the Big Five still mess up from time to time. But the business of innovation is a trial-and-error process, so it’s possibly because of (and not despite) these product debacles and the ability to learn from them that Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are what they are today. The same is true in B2B sales: flops are inevitable, so embrace failure and learn from it.

This post originally published at The Savvy Marketer.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Inc. here.

When ranking the list of professions that are likely to be replaced by AI, sales is often way down on the list, along with chiropractors and preachers.

The rationale for such predictions are that sales is still considered a high-touch profession. A recent survey showed that in certain industries, people would rather buy from someone who is charismatic and fun even if that salesperson doesn’t know their product well. Respondents preferred that charismatic-but-dim salesperson to someone who knows their stuff but is on the dull side. That seems to bode well for those fear who their job will go the way of VCRs.

Or does it? There’s a new wave of AI startups that purport to use machine learning to automate much of the sales process, including prospecting and pitching. Those in sales shouldn’t feel threatened by such tools though. Rather than take your job, AI will help you do it better.

AI for sales

Most sales conversations aren’t archived so whatever transpires is lost forever. But startups like Gong and InteractiveTel are regularly recording those conversations and transcribing them to look for opportunities to sell or salvage an existing relationship. For instance, IntractiveTel, which works with auto dealers, might flag words like “unhappy” and “speak with a manager” in incoming calls. It will then send a transcript and an alert to a manager, who can intervene. Others, like Cogito (an OpenView portfolio company), use such data and machine learning to coach reps and agents to be more empathetic on sales calls. The promise of such technologies is that by looking at the data, best practices will emerge over time. For instance, Gong has found that top salespeople ask 10.1 “problem questions” per hour while average salespeople ask around 6.3.

Other AI-enhanced tools aimed at sales pros include Conversica, whose bot, Angie, sends 30,000 emails a month and analyzes the responses to find hot leads and homepage-based bots that lure visitors into conversations. There are also numerous AI-based personal assistants out there, including x.ai and Julie Desk that will schedule meetings on your behalf. If you have six meetings a day, Julie Desk promises to save you five hours a week.

IA not AI

The tools discussed above really fall under the heading of IA rather than AI. That is, while they use aspects of artificial intelligence to magnify their effect, they are really about intelligence augmentation – making humans better at their tasks – rather than replacing them at doing those tasks.

This is unambiguously good news for sales professionals because a salesperson’s life is filled with administrative tasks. Sales pros spend an inordinate amount of time trying to contact prospects and then reestablishing understanding of where that buyer is in the sales process before they execute the conversation. Research shows that salespeople only spend about one third of their time selling. About 20% of their time is spent on administrative tasks.

AI-based tools then might be the productivity boon that salespeople have been looking for, especially if you can automate grunt work like scheduling meetings, filling out paperwork and making cold calls.

Well, maybe not the latter. Proponents of cold calling like Jeb Blount claim that they can achieve a 15%-80% contact rate with voice calls versus a 14%-23% open rate for cold emails.

Those rates make intuitive sense: Which would you prefer, a form letter that’s been cut and pasted to hundreds of others or a personalized pitch, perhaps delivered over the phone with a real person on the other end? If the answer is the latter, then you understand the importance of the human touch in sales. Then you also understand why the day when sales are carried out by salesbots interacting with buyer bots is still decades away.

The post Salespeople fear not, AI is here to help your bottom line. appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Acquiring your first customers is more art than science. You don’t have spreadsheets full of data to pull from, you don’t have existing segments, and you’re not even sure who specifically will buy your product. You’re just testing out different methods to “see what sticks” and what you should double down on.

The tactics you should be using to get your first 100 customers are a mix of both marketing and customer development. With each tactic, you should aim to not only get a new customer, but also find ways to dig deeper into who they are and what they’re interested in. You need to really know who these people are that are buying from you more than anything else, and then use that information to increase your ROI.

Most entrepreneurs reflexively turn to paid advertising when trying to get their first customers. But in reality, there are a variety of ways you can get initial traction, including leveraging other people’s audiences, using online communities, targeting the right social networks, and more.

Here’s a comprehensive list of tactics you can use to get your first 100 customers.

1. Ask Your Audience

A quick way to do some customer development is to reach out to your existing network and ask them specific questions about your product and market. If you’re creating a product for a specific niche, then chances are you know people who are in that niche already.

You can also run through your existing LinkedIn contacts, find people who are in your industry, and send them an e-mail like this one:

You’d be surprised how many people are willing to help.

One of the biggest reasons new businesses fail is that founders don’t talk to customers. It’s easy to believe that you already know everything about your target market and convince yourself that they definitely need your product. But the best marketers are humble enough to talk to their market and validate their hypotheses, even if they know they’re correct.

For example, Hiten Shah did many hours of customer interviews for a project he was working on around helping startups raise money. As a prominent entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who has raised money from some of the biggest venture capitalists, he’s already talked to hundreds of people who have asked him for advice on the topic—but he still did customer interviews.

Though you don’t want to sell anything during your interviews, you can ask the people you talk to whether they would like to be added to a private email list where you send out updates every now and then on the progress of your venture. Down the road, they could turn into your first customers.

Additionally, take one step outside of your network, and step into the individual networks of your prospects. Make sure to ask the people you reach out to for introductions to others who might have an interest in what you are offering. Even if someone might not be a good fit for your product, there’s a good chance they will have a colleague who is.

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2. Conduct Market Research on Twitter

A good way to find potential customers who are experiencing the pain you want to solve is by searching online complaints. Social networks like Twitter are an easy way to do this.

For example, if the product you’re looking to create competes with Salesforce, you could for search something like “Salesforce is complicated” in Twitter. Here are a couple of comments that come up:

You could reach out to those users directly, and ask them to chat more about why they think Salesforce is complicated so that you understand how to make your product better.

Other online forums can be good for this as well. If you search “Salesforce is too complicated” in Google, you’ll find a lot of forums and blog posts on which users discuss why it’s hard to use. You’ll get a better sense of the problems that your product will need to solve and the features that will have to come with it. You’ll have a clearer understanding of the words that your market is using to describe their problems, so you can write perfect high-converting sales copy when the the time comes.

When you do searches like these, you also can either confirm or disprove your hypothesis. For example, if people aren’t searching for solutions to Salesforce problems, or you’re seeing a small amount of search results in Twitter or Google, then there might not be a big enough pain point to solve.

Once you get on the phone to chat with these potential customers, be sure to ask them whether it would be okay for you to stay in touch and send updates every now and then on your future product. This way, you can both do your market research and build a list of potential beta customers.

3. Conduct Research on Quora

Another customer development tool at everyone’s disposal is Quora. Quora is a site where you can browse and post questions on a virtually any topic. It can be a great way to gather a large number of answers from people in your target demographic about the product you’re trying to sell.

(Editor’s Note: We recently did an interview with Sarah Smith from Quora on our popular Social Pros Podcast… check it out!)

Quora’s demographics consist mostly of college educated professionals. Because Quora got its first users through tech news sites like TechCrunch, many of its users work in technology. Some of the most followed topics include investing, computer programming, mobile, and software engineering. You can post questions about the pain points you’re trying to solve in some of these areas and see what answers you get.

For example, check out this question where a Quora user asks, “What are some significant pain points in the real estate market that could be solved with software?” There are over 10 in-depth answers to the question by real estate professionals and others with experience in the market. If you were trying to create a product to solve pain points around Hadoop, an answer like this would be invaluable. You can find similar, in-depth answers across topics like personal finance, CRM systems, sales, marketing, and more.

You can measure how much an answer resonates with people by the number of comments and upvotes it receives. For example, the answer to the Hadoop question above received over 100 upvotes and a few positive comments. That shows that other Hadoop users are likely facing the same problems.

If you find an insightful answer to a relevant question in your industry, you can message that user and ask to set up a phone call in order to uncover more details about their problems, then add them to your beta list.

4. Adopt a Customer Development Tool

Most marketers know that tools like Qualaroo and SurveyMonkey can help you understand your audience better. But did you know that they can also help you generate more leads and customers?

If you already know what your ideal customer profile looks like, then all you need to generate more leads is to create a survey that qualifies your prospects. For example, GoodBlogs used Qualaroo to boost registrations by 300 percent for one of their clients.

GoodBlogs helps businesses create user-generated content. One of their clients is the largest livestock trailer manufacturer in North America, and they launched a site for horse lovers through GoodBlogs. When visitors landed on their site, they were shown a Qualaroo pop-up that said, “Do you own a horse?” If they answered “yes,” they were asked to input their email address to receive special offers.

You can do the same thing for your niche. For example, here’s an example of how Qualaroo used its own service to generate leads:

For this process to work effectively, all you need is just one leading question that qualifies your prospects. It could be as simple as asking them, “Do you need [X solution] to [Y pain point]?” If they answer “yes,” immediately ask them for details like their name, email, and/or company name, and treat them like a lead. You’ll only have to set this up once. From there, you’ll have a steady stream of qualified leads coming in from your site directly.

5. Use Your Email List to Launch

One of the best ways to guarantee sales when you launch your product is to launch through an email list. There are many ways to build an email list from scratch. For instance, you could reach out to people one-on-one through social networks like Quora or Twitter to do your customer development and then add them to your launch e-mail list. We’ll get into some other tactics you can use to build your email list below. For now, let’s dig into how to craft your launch sequence to get as many sales as possible.

A profitable launch sequence usually consists of adding value to your subscribers in the first few emails, then persuading them to buy your product in the last one or two emails. Nathan Barry used the following launch sequence formula to get $16,000 in sales from just 1,200 subscribers:

• Educate your audience. Nathan’s first two emails were long-form, educational emails that are designed to build up authority among the audience and show them why they should listen to you. You can talk about your background, how you started what you’re doing now, and so on. You can also use these emails to build curiosity and get people excited to read the rest of your emails in the series.
• Describe your product. Once you build authority on your subject and build intrigue at the beginning of your funnel, you should start describing your product. The purpose of this email is to tell readers about your product and the hopes and dreams that it’ll help them accomplish, as well as the fears that it’ll help alleviate.
• The launch. Next, it’s time to actually launch the product. Keep this brief and to the point, telling your readers that you’ve opened your product to the public.
• The final educational email. After you open your product to the public, you want to reinforce confidence in the product and end it with a strong call to action to buy. You want to show your audience that your product will help them do something or achieve something that isn’t possible with their existing products. One way to do this is by documenting case studies and testimonials.
• The hard sell. The final email should be a hard sell that persuades readers to buy, and have elements of urgency baked into it. For example, maybe you limit registration to only 10 beta users or close registration at a specific time.

This outline covers all the basic elements of a profitable launch sequence—building anticipation, adding value through educational material, and providing a sales message asking readers to buy your product.

6. Pay for a Spot on Betalist

You’re probably aware of sites like Product Hunt or Reddit that feature products or posts that get a lot of upvotes from the community. But there are also sites like Betalist, where you can pay to be featured in front of a large technology audience.

Many startups have used sites like Betalist to rapidly generate a list of early bird signups. Take FrontApp, for example, a product that helps teams work more efficiently. They used Betalist to generate 400 high-quality signups in just a couple of days.

FrontApp wanted to get beta users for their product, so they decided to go directly to the source and test out some “beta user” communities. Sites like Erlibird and Startupli.st help startups get their first signups by featuring them in front of a targeted group of users, so FrontApp submitted their product to these sites.

FrontApp got the best results from Betalist: They paid $49 to get their product featured on the front page and received about 400 signups (from a total of 832 direct visits). And because many Betalist users are early adopters in the startup world, several of them wrote articles about FrontApp after seeing it featured on Betalist, which resulted in even more inbound links.

These sites typically work best for a consumer product audience. But if your product resonates with the community, you could get hundreds of qualified signups in a matter of days.

7. Get in Front of Someone Else’s Audience

One of the quickest ways to build an audience of your own is to find other brands that have an audience similar to what you’re trying to build and bring them over to your own platform. Trust is a big factor when persuading people to buy, and if you leverage someone else’s platform to build your own audience, you’ll be able to “borrow” the trust they’ve built with that audience as well.

Pipedrive is a sales management tool that helps sales teams close more deals.

They used these two tactics to get tens of thousands of paying customers:

• They applied to incubators. Pipedrive was initially growing at a rate of about 10 to 20 percent per month by the fourth month. They skyrocketed their growth by applying to startup incubators and accelerators like AngelPad, YCombinator, and Seedcamp. In this way, they were able to meet people who ran those organizations and get invited to events, which helped them interact with many other entrepreneurs. Eventually, Pipedrive got accepted into AngelPad, where they were able to pitch and talk to a lot of people over a span of three months. One of the biggest benefits of getting accepted to a well-known incubator is the credibility that comes along with it. Not only do investors take you more seriously, but you also get access to hundreds of other entrepreneurs through the incubator network—and many of them could turn into paying customers.
• They ran affiliate deals. Pipedrive knew that their audience consisted of price sensitive marketers and entrepreneurs, so they decided to promote a discounted deal on AppSumo, a company that promotes other tech-related products to a massive audience. AppSumo has promoted quite a few tech products in the past, including KISSinsights, Shopify, and ToutApp.

It takes a lot of work to build credibility and trust with an audience, so one of the most efficient ways to get sales is by leveraging other people’s audiences and borrow their credibility. You can do this by going to conferences and industry meetups like Pipedrive did or leveraging existing online communities (which we’ll talk more about later in this article).

Another great way to level up on this method is to find an influencer who has a problem that your product or service can fix and then fix it for them. Not only will you be able to leverage their platform in the future, but you will have gained a priceless early-adopter to spread the word about your business, furthering your credibility within your niche.

8. Start Guest Posting

At its core, guest posting is another way of leveraging other people’s audiences to build your own. It’s a tried and true approach that has worked for many businesses. For instance, Buffer, a social media automation tool, used a guest blogging strategy to get over 100,000 customers within nine months.

Here are a few key points to keep in mind in order to get the most success from guest blogging:

• Be patient. According to Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, he wrote around 150 guest posts over a span of nine months. His early posts barely drove any traffic back to his site, and it took a bit of time until they started to get traction.
• Measure the right metrics. When asked about the amount of traffic his guest blog posts were generating, Widrich said that he focused more on signups than traffic, since that was the metric that was closer to the bottom line. It’s easy to get caught up in measuring things like page views, likes, and shares, but the real ROI of content is determined by the number of paying customers it helps you generate over time.
• Post on the right sites. When you’re guest posting, it’s important to find websites that cater to your target audience and post on those sites. The sites where Buffer found guest blogging opportunities were BloggerLinkUp and MyBlogGuest. You can also use websites Medium or Quora, where you can publish your content directly instead of pitching someone.

Here’s an example of an e-mail that Widrich used when pitching editors from large sites:

Hi guys,

As a guy just starting out with a few basic web design lessons, I found onextrapixel extremely helpful, so just a quick thank you on that note. 

I wanted to ask if you are interested in a guest post that I have drafted, which I titled “10 Tools to Make the Most of Twitter.” It covers the latest Twitter Tools, which help me a lot to stay productive. 

I hope you can let me know if you think the post could be interesting to you.

For reference on my writing style, I published recently on: [list links to other publications]

Best,

Leo

The first line is a personalized note to thank the editor for a recently published article. Next, instead of sending the entire guest post to the editor immediately (and overwhelming them), you should ask them whether they’d be interested in reviewing a draft. The last line helps the editor get a sense of what your writing style is like to see if it would be a good fit for the publication.

• Don’t overwhelm yourself. One of the biggest mistakes that new bloggers make is agreeing to huge blogging commitments immediately. For example, you might decide that you want to post one to two times per day, but that’s a bad idea if you’re just starting out. According to Widrich, he set the goal of writing one post per week to start off. Then he upped it to two per week, then he wrote three per week, and so on. Eventually, he was able to write two to three posts per day, but this takes a while to work up to.
• Notice the other benefits of guest blogging. The benefits of blogging aren’t just limited to traffic or lead generation. If you’re providing other businesses with writing, then you’re actually doing them a favor—and that helps build relationships. For example, Widrich was able to build relationships with sites like Treehouse, Social Media Examiner, and SocialMouths over time by providing them with free content. When you develop relationships with people at major platforms like this, it might turn into other opportunities down the line: You could potentially do an affiliate deal with their audience, a joint venture partnership, or something else that’s mutually beneficial and profitable. Remember that one of the ways to generate your first paying customers is by leveraging other people’s platforms; popular blogs in your niche that already have traction are great examples of audiences this. Once you develop a relationship with the blog owner or editor, ask them to promote your content to their email list or if you can run webinars for their audience with an opt-in link, etc.

If you make content marketing a priority, it can be incredibly profitable for your business. Buffer grew almost entirely through content marketing, as did KISSmetrics, HubSpot, and other similar companies.

9. Focus on SEO

Search engine traffic can also be a good, reliable source of paying customers. The problem is that, for many industries, it’s becoming harder and harder to rank high for competitive search terms because there’s growing competition. If you’re targeting marketers or entrepreneurs, you’ll be facing tough competition for search terms in your niche. In fact, influencers like Neil Patel, Noah Kagan, and companies like HubSpot and KISSmetrics already own the top spots for many relevant keywords in the industry.

So how can you still generate traffic and leads through search despite all these competitors? One way to do this is by focusing on long-tail keywords. Instead of trying to rank for “SEO tools,” try to rank for something more specific like “the best SEO tools for B2B startups.” If you consistently publish high-quality, long-tail content over time, you’ll generate a significant amount of traffic.

A simple way to generate long-tail content ideas is by looking at the most viewed questions on Quora for your specific niche. Let’s say you’re selling a product in the marketing niche. You could start by going on Quora and typing “marketing” into the search box.

Next, click on the topic “Marketing” and then select the “Topic FAQ” tab.

Under this section, you’ll find a list of some of the most commonly viewed answers within that topic. For example, here are a couple questions under the “Topic FAQ” section for Marketing:

This gives you a bit of insight into what potential customers are looking for. You might want to create content on how entrepreneurs in specific niches (e.g. family therapy, medicine, law, etc.) can optimize their marketing, or write content on how major companies structure their marketing efforts.

Long-tail keywords can help you generate a large amount of monthly traffic that can convert to leads. For example, Tamal Anwar boosted his search rankings and traffic by writing content around longer variations of existing keywords.

10. Try a Cold Email

One of the most straightforward ways to get your first customers is through cold email. It’s relatively easy to find the email addresses of your prospects, and it’s easy to reach out to a high volume of people relatively quickly. Here’s an example of a cold email template that got one B2B company over 16 new customers.

According to HubSpot, this email template generated a 57 percent open rate, a 21 percent response rate, and 16 new customers. There a few reasons why this email worked so well:

• Enticing subject line. The subject line for this email was “10x [prospect company’s] traction in 10 minutes.” This is a pretty appealing subject line because it shows the type of results the prospect can expect and how much time it will take to get those results. It builds curiosity and intrigue.
• Enticing offer. Notice how this e-mail immediately describes the offer in the first line: “I have an idea that I can explain in 10 minutes that can get [company] its next 100 best customers.” It tells the prospect that the phone call will only take 10 minutes out of their busy day and gives an exciting offer (helping the company get its next 100 best customers).
  
• Social proof. Social proof is a strong form of credibility. Since you have limited time and space to capture your prospect’s attention through a cold email, you can use social proof to help boost your response rates. In this example, social proof was conveyed through the line, “I recently used this idea to help our client [SaaS company / competitor] almost triple their monthly run rate.” People want to know that you can help them with their specific situation, so if you’ve helped their competitor or some other company in their space, they’re more likely to believe that you can also help them.
• Strong call to action. The email closes with a CTA to schedule a quick call to share the idea. Here, the prospect is reassured that the call will only take 10 minutes—and the marketer tells them exactly what to expect on that call (sharing an idea).

According to the article, you should be getting a 10 percent response rate through your cold emails. If you’re below that number, chances are your emails need some improvement.

Once you know how to craft your cold email, you have to find a list of prospects and their email addresses. If you’re familiar with your niche, it’s usually not too difficult to find a list of prospects. For example, if you’re in the tech space, you can use sites like AngelList and Crunchbase to find a list of companies and filter them by criteria like number of employees, location, and more.

The problem typically lies in finding their actual email addresses. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools available to help you do this. Email Hunter, for example, lets you find email addresses by company domain. You just have to input the company’s domain name, and all publicly available email addresses associated with it will be shown below.

Email Hunter lets you search 150 domains for free every month and has plans that start at $49/month if you want to search more.

Another tool called EmailBreaker provides you with the email formats for a variety of companies.

Not all domain names will have their email formats listed, and some email formats might be incorrect, but EmailBreaker is able to correctly identify email formats for most domains.

11. Run Paid Advertisements

Most new entrepreneurs turn to paid advertising as their main source for getting their first customers. However, there’s a lot of conflicting information out there about using paid ads as your first channel of acquiring customers.

Some people like Kristian Tanninen say that paid advertising should only be used by companies that have existing products on the market. Other entrepreneurs believe that paid ads should only be used to scale a sales process that has already been proven through other lead gen sources. But other marketers say that paid traffic is the fastest way to drive leads when you’re first starting out.

When you do run paid advertising, you want to make sure you’ve got a high-converting landing page where you can drive your prospects. Here are key elements of a high-converting landing page:

• Unique value proposition in a concise headline
• Image or video showing context of use
• Core benefit statement
• Request for information from the visitor (email, name)
• Strong call to action
• Trust elements (social proof, testimonials)
• Social sharing elements

You can run paid ads on a variety of channels when you’re first starting out, but these are the most tried and true channels:

• Google AdWords. Google AdWords lets you target prospects when they’re in the “decision” stage of the buyer’s journey. According to Pardot, 72 percent of buyers turn to Google to learn more about their pain points, so you can present your product to them exactly when they’re aware of their problem and have the desire to fix it. You can bid for targeted keywords in your space to get your first customers. If you’re selling content marketing services, you might run targeted ads to specific niches with keywords like “content marketing for healthcare technology companies” or “content marketing for FinTech companies.” This way, you’re likely to get a higher click-through rate at a lower cost.
• Facebook advertising. The biggest benefit of advertising on Facebook is how specific you can get with your advertisements. You can target by interests, locations, and even behaviors (i.e., moving to a new location, buying a house, etc.). Adidas ran a soccer-related Facebook advertising campaign specifically targeting users who were interested in soccer. According to the case study, their Facebook page reached over one million people and boosted brand awareness between eight percent and 21 percent.

12. Reach Out via LinkedIn

LinkedIn messages are an alternative to cold email that can yield a higher conversion rate for your business. There are a few inherent problems that can make your cold emails convert at a low rate, but a big part of it is how impersonal the medium is. Although it can be done, it’s harder to communicate your credibility, your offer, what your company does, and still sound human. If you reach out to people on LinkedIn, your message could have a more “human” touch because of the fact that they can see your full profile.

There are two ways you can reach out to people on LinkedIn:

LinkedIn Inmails: Inmails are private messages that you can send to anyone on LinkedIn who is not your connection, but you’re only given a certain amount every month. After you exhaust that amount, you have the option to purchase Inmails individually, typically around $10 each. Inmails are different from regular messages that you can send to your connections on LinkedIn—regular messages are free, but Inmails can be quite expensive. You could use these to pitch to high value, potential early-adopters that are not inside your network, but they most likely will have other social media accounts that you easily reach them on.

Sponsored Inmails: Sponsored Inmails are different from regular Inmails in that they let you send out your message to thousands of professionals at a time, whereas regular Inmails can only be targeted individually. LinkedIn actually recommends this feature for lead generation specifically, and recommends promoting webinars, ebooks, etc. to boost conversion rates. For example, check out how LinkedIn used sponsored Inmails to promote their marketer’s guide.

Duke University also used sponsored Inmails to boost their conversion rates. According to this case study, they weren’t able to communicate the value proposition of their Cross Continent MBA program (a program that lets professionals across the world get their MBA without leaving their jobs). They used sponsored Inmail to target prospects by their seniority level, education, and location. They used LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities to only target professionals who would likely be qualified for the program. Duke was able to tell prospects about their Cross Continent MBA program and have a call to action that encouraged readers to sign up for more information with their email address.

They saw a conversion rate increase of 400 percent in certain geographic regions. As an added bonus, their cost per lead was 10 percent lower than on other marketing channels. They also were able to reduce their closure speed from 18 months to just six months, a 300 percent boost.

LinkedIn Messages: Another approach to lead generation you can take is messaging your connections directly, which is completely free. You can use LinkedIn’s advanced search feature to find a list of targeted prospects, connect with all of them, and then message the ones who accept your connection request.

Adding prospects as connections is one way of “warming them up” before reaching out with your pitch, and could boost your response rates.

While you’re likely to get more quality leads from LinkedIn, their cost per lead is also relatively high compared to other social networks like Facebook.

13. Interact with Subscribers One-on-One

While you might not have a lot of money when you’re first starting to get customers, you do have one big advantage over more established companies: You have more time. And that means you can give your subscribers more one-on-one attention than a big company can.

The best way to develop a long-term relationship with a subscriber and build a deeper level of trust is by interacting with them on a more personal basis. According to Forbes, recipients of one-on-one interactions are more likely to share their positive experience on social media and stay loyal to your company over the long term.

In fact, Gary Vaynerchuk took this exact approach to building his audience over a span of many years. For example, he once asked his followers whether they needed anything, and one fan named Daniel replied that he needed eggs.

Most entrepreneurs wouldn’t have have continued the conversation, but Gary went on to ask for the Daniel’s address. An hour after sharing his address, Daniel received several cartons of eggs at his apartment.

Daniel went on to write about his experience on Medium, and became a fan for life.

While you don’t have to go out of your way to send your subscribers groceries, you should ask them to respond to your emails, and try to respond to as many as you can. Keeping that communication channel open is important in discovering what your subscribers really want you to provide. Most of them, by default, assume that you are too busy to read what they have to say. Make them feel special. Show them that you have their best interests in mind.

14. Turn to Your Online Community

Online communities can be a great way to get your first customers. Online communities are essentially scalable versions of industry conferences—you’re able to interact with like-minded people, offer something of value to them, stay in touch, and potentially get some new paying customers.

When you go to a conference, you don’t want to go in and hard sell everyone you meet on the first interaction. If you do that, chances are you’ll turn off everyone you talk to and close the door for a mutually beneficial relationship. A better approach is to get to know them, understand their problems, and follow up later.

Similarly, you don’t want to spam an online community with promotions and links to your website before they get a chance to know who you are. You have to add value to that community first, and the way to do that depends on the community you’re trying to get involved in. Here are some targeted online communities you could join:

• Hacker News: Hacker News is one of the biggest news sites in the tech industry. The target audience is web developers and software engineers. Posts on the site talk about the latest developments in the tech world, and products and blog posts that get on the front page tend to generate significant traction. Hacker News gets over 1.6 million page views and 100,000 unique visitors a day. If you link up a popular post that gets traction within the community, you could land on the front page and get tens of thousands of visitors to your site.
• Product Hunt: Product Hunt is a forum for discovering cool tech products from around the world. Its initial users included venture capitalists and startup founders from the Bay Area. They also have in-person meetups with hundreds of attendees. Many tech companies have used Product Hunt as a launching pad.
• Tropical MBA: TropicalMBA is a targeted group of location-independent entrepreneurs (many of whom sell SaaS products or services). Members pay a quarterly subscription fee to be part of the group, where they help each other out with challenges that come with growing a business. By paying to be part of a group, you can increase your chances of getting higher quality customers.
• Facebook groups: You can also join and add value to Facebook groups within your niche. Some groups are more valuable and targeted than others—typically, Facebook groups that are started and nurtured by influencers in an industry tend to have pretty high-quality discussions. The Startup Chat’s Facebook group is a great place to interact with entrepreneurs and marketers that listen to The Startup Chat podcast.

The best way to add value to an online community is by first getting a feel for the kind of topics that resonate within that community. What kind of posts are getting the most engagement? What’s getting the most upvotes or likes?

One easy way to add value to virtually any group while also building a list of potential customers is by offering free “office hours” to help people solve the pain point that your product solves. For example, if you have a SaaS product that helps people improve their sales process, you might post about a “Sales Process Q&A session” where you let others in the group schedule a time on your calendar to chat about improving their sales process.

This way, you can get a better understanding of your market and their pain points on the call, and also ask them in a non-pushy way whether they’d like to be part of a beta user list.

Check out how this Facebook user is offering free office hour sessions to help people dismantle their fears and mental barriers around public speaking:

If you offer to give your time to help members of the group, you’ll both build a deeper relationship with members of the group (which could result in more paying customers) and develop your credibility within the group.

15. Offer Your Audience a Free Trial

This ties in with using Betalist. When moving out of the beta stage, offering a free trial or a free option for your service is a great way to get more customers. These two pricing methods have become standard for a good reason: Users won’t really know if a product is right for them until they give it a test drive.

If your product is something that you believe would not work well in this pricing structure, make your introductory cost low enough so customers will feel comfortable making the initial investment, yet high enough so that they don’t question the quality of what you are offering.

16. Build Social Proof

Although it might be difficult to leverage the more popular sites early on, getting social proof is a goal that you should always be working towards. If guest posting and platform leveraging is a way to put your face in front of your audience, social proof validates that your face is a trustworthy one.

There are many ways to do this. You can:

• Find influencers who would love your product and have them market it in their own way.
• Find press in your niche to generate buzz for future launches.
• Create buzz on your own via social media.

And, of course, you can do a combination of all three, in addition to other methods on this list.

A company that has done this very well is Stash Invest. Stash Invest has an app (called Stash) that helps its users start investing with only five dollars. Leveraging the audience (via emails and on-site ads) of the popular financial management site Mint, Stash offers its audience five dollars to invest just for downloading the app. They basically give users money! By virtually eliminating the barrier to entry and working with already trusted brands, Stash went from 50 thousand to 500 thousand Stashers in just one year.

17. Blog on Your Own Site

I put this one at the end of the list because although it is not a requirement, it’s become quite commonplace for businesses to have a blog section on their site. But having a blog means nothing if you don’t deliver great, consistent content that your target audience actually needs.

You might be asking yourself: If you’re already driving leads through guest posting and leveraging other platforms, why blog again on your site? Think of your main blog as a hub for all the valuable content that you have already spread across online communities in your niche—the spokes. All you have to do is repurpose the content from your website to fit the style of your brand.

If, in the future, you’d like to do more than just provide a service—if you want to become a trusted influencer within your industry—starting a blog now is a good step in that direction.

Keep in mind that the strategies that will take you from zero to 100 customers aren’t the same strategies that will take you from 100 to 1,000 customers. At the beginning, you might be putting in a lot of your own time sending out cold emails, LinkedIn messages, or crafting paid advertising campaigns. You might be interacting with your subscribers one-on-one, asking questions and responding to every email. You might be going on sites like Quora to source long-tail keywords and writing content around that to generate traffic from search.

There are a variety of different ways to acquire your first 100 customers. And they’ll all typically involve some form of doing things that don’t scale.

What tactics have helped you generate the most customers? Let us know in the comments!

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on SingleGrain.

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The post Get Your First 100 Customers with These 17 Strategies appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.