Love it or hate it, email marketing is a major part of modern business. In fact, email marketing offers one of your business’s greatest ROI over any other form of marketing. To get the most out of your email marketing, make sure you practice the following guidelines.

14 Quick Improvements to make to your email campaigns today:

1. Get Personal

The average person receives 88 emails per day. However, only 1 in 11 of those receive click-throughs. A great way to stand out in an inbox is to personalize the content your audience receives.

2. Use Segments

Most businesses offer a variety of products and services. In order for email marketing to pay off, it is important to only send emails that interest the reader. A hardware store wouldn’t sell snow shovels to people living in Florida. It wouldn’t make sense. Segments help you identify and deliver content that matters most to your audience.

3. Use Names

Using your subscriber’s name in emails is a great way to make your communications seem more personal. Your customers aren’t a number and don’t like to be treated like one.

4. Establish a Reputation

Your reputation is everything. Make sure that the products you recommend are ones you can stand by. If your reputation doesn’t stand on its own, no one will read your emails.

5. Branding

One of the most important things for a company to invest in is branding. When people see that an email is from a well-recognized and reputable brand, they are much more likely to open it and click through.

6. Use Statistics to Your Advantage

Statistics about your audience matters in email marketing. You should invest in a BI dashboard. It’s time to use it to your advantage.

7. Get to Know Your Audience

Statistics are indicators as to whether your email campaigns are effective. Start paying attention to your statistics before and after campaigns. Learn what your target audience responds well to and use that information to plan future communications.

8. Adjust Sales Funnels

Your metrics give you insight into the success of your sales funnels. What captures a customer’s attention? In what part of the funnel are potential customers backing out? Adjust emails to help improve your sales funnels.

9. Schedule Your Emails

Timing is everything. If most of your emails are being viewed when delivered early on Tuesday morning, use that to your advantage. Your unique audience will have its own preferences, so don’t be afraid to try something different from other businesses in an effort to stand out.

10. Offer the Option to Change the Frequency

You legally have to offer the option for your subscribers to opt-out of emails. However, you may want to offer an alternative in addition to the standard “Unsubscribe” button. Consider offering a reduction in the frequency of emails. This gives your audience the chance to continue hearing from you, just not as often.

11. Don’t Waste Their Time

Make sure you’re not wasting your audience’s time. Meaningless, repetitive emails simply aren’t worth your audience’s valuable time and effort.

12. Test the Waters

Testing is a great way to learn what works and what doesn’t.

13. Testing Campaigns

In order to stay on top of trends, you must experiment. In order to find out if an experiment is successful, use A/B testing campaigns. A/B testing campaigns test the effectiveness of these changes to help you assess and identify what works best for your audience.

14. Compatibility and Responsiveness

More people than ever are using mobile devices to check their email. Tablets, smartphones, and smartwatches are very common. It’s important that you create emails that are responsive and adjust to your user’s device, operating system, or browser.

Audience comes first

If you put your audience first, you can’t go wrong. Provide them with exceptional quality and value and they will respond. Most importantly, use the data you possess to target your email campaigns and ensure you get the most out of this amazing marketing tool.

When it comes to book marketing, there are a lot of fallacies. And by fallacies, I mean outright book marketing lies.

Indie authors hear — and tell themselves — a lot of things that either don’t work, or simply aren’t true. In fact, the list below could go on and on, but instead, I’ve decided to pick some of the most common book marketing lies and share how you can improve. So let’s start by identifying these challenges, and then we can start changing the conversation! So you want to sell more books?

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What #bookmarketing lies do you tell yourself? via @bookgal
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Ready to see which book marketing lies you’ve been telling?

Read on to find out what book marketing lies you need to stop telling yourself, effective immediately.

Lie #1: I’m not good with computers or social media and I don’t know how to do all of that stuff!

When authors tell me that, I encourage them to learn. If you don’t want to learn, then you’d better be prepared to hire someone to do all of this for you. Spoiler alert: it won’t be cheap. If you want to just keep writing, that’s fine, but know that your books will never reach any kind of success. Why? Because books don’t succeed on their own. Your book isn’t the field of dreams, just because you wrote it, people won’t beat a path to your door.

If you’re going to publish a book, get ready to take responsibility for all of the stuff you don’t like to do, or maybe don’t have time to do. You have a few choices: Learn and make time, or  spend the money on hiring someone to do all of the book marketing work – including social media – for you.

Lie # 2: I need a lot of early endorsements.

Having big names endorsing your book is a great thing. But it’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, the way to pull in more book sales. I’ve honestly never seen a direct correlation between a heavy-hitter list of endorsements and selling more books. I often speak with authors who want to hire us to get them early endorsements for their book and are ready with the wish list of big names. Here’s the thing: if you don’t have a particular connection to that person, or persons, I would not make that a priority.

Keep in mind that as book endorsements, blurbs or reviews come in, you’ll find yourself getting reviews on Amazon. By this, I mean that people will likely post them directly to your Amazon book page. And if they don’t land there automatically, you can always add them. To that end, because most of us aren’t printing huge quantities of books, you can also easily redo book covers to add them.

Don’t hold up your book pending a long list of endorsements. Get your book out there and market it like crazy. By being doing so consistently, you’ll find that the blurbs and endorsements will come!

Lie #3: I don’t have a marketing budget. My book will sell on its own.

No, it won’t. No book sells just because it’s pretty or well-written. If you don’t have a marketing budget, of any kind, you should reconsider whether publishing the book now is the right course. You may find it best to wait till you have some money saved up.

Lie #4: I need big reviews from big magazines!

Publishers Weekly is an awesome magazine, as is Library Journal, and others. But having a review in one of those magazines doesn’t guarantee you success. Similarly, not having a review there won’t plummet your book into obscurity. Most of the books we work with have never been reviewed these places and do just fine. Now, if you have the opportunity to get a review there, absolutely go for it. But don’t despair if you don’t.

Lie #5: I have a lot of friends who will help me promote my book.

No, in fact, you don’t. And all those people who said they’d buy your book probably won’t. I know you may think I’m an awful person for saying this, but statistically its very true. Of all the book marketing lies that authors complain to me about, this is the biggest. Don’t rely on advanced promises from people you know. It’s not that they don’t care, but everyone is busy. Expect to not sell a single copy to your friends and family. And then any books you sell, will be a bonus. Managing your own expectations is key here and will help you avoid some serious hurt feelings.

Also, you can ask your friends and family to share your book on their social networks, but will that really move the needle on book sales? It might, if their audience resonates with your book. But in all likelihood they may not have a reach to your readers. So any support from friends and family should be a bonus, not a marketing cornerstone.

Lie #6: I’m a writer, not a marketing person.

You’d better be both because publishing is a business.

When I first started my business, there were a lot of things I didn’t like doing, but initially I did them all. Eventually I was able to make enough revenue that I could start hiring people to do some of the stuff I wasn’t very good at, but at first it’s all you. Even if you hire a marketing company to help you, you should always be engaged in your own success because very few people can afford professional help full time, and for the long haul.

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Even if you’re not a marketing person, you need to market your book! via @bookgal #bookmarketing
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Lie #7: If my book hasn’t taken off in the first month, it probably won’t take off at all.

This is completely untrue. Some books take time, and others take a lot of time. When we work on book marketing campaigns, we sometimes see books that just take off while others take awhile. How much time? Well, that’s anyone’s guess. But keep in mind that most of the more successful campaigns are built on the long runway of book promotion. What’s that? Well, if you’ve ever flown in a plane you know that most planes need a long runway to take off, right? Book promotion is a lot the same way. You need a good head of steam, and a long runway before your book will start to soar.

Lie #8: I’m doing all the right things and my books aren’t selling.

Then you probably aren’t doing all the right things. Maybe it’s time for a solid assessment of what you could be doing more of. Is your book cover strong enough? Is your book synopsis pulling in readers? Do you have enough reviews?

If you answered “not sure” to these three questions, then you probably aren’t doing enough and should add a few more things to your marketing activities. Alternatively, you could spend some coaching time with a professional to get a sense of what else you might be able to do to pull in more attention to your book.

Lie #9: I’m going to write one book and see what happens.

I can understand just wanting to write one book, but my advice is to write more if you want to be an author for a living. You can’t stop with one book. Always have something else in the funnel to give to your readers. Most first books don’t sell like gangbusters. Some don’t sell well at all. But the second book, once it’s out there, often helps to sell your first and so on. This works even if the books aren’t in a series. None of my books are a series, per se, but each book release helps to revive interest in my backlist.

Lie #10: Each marketing effort I do should pay for itself.

Let’s face it, most marketing efforts don’t pay for themselves. Most marketing efforts do well because there are several pieces of marketing going on at the same time. Assessing whether one thing you did in marketing was successful is often pretty tough to do, which is why I recommend that you have several things going on concurrently. Plus the old adage still rings true, that buyers need on average, at least 7 impressions with a product before they buy it, so don’t assume you’ll be an exception to the rule.

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#Bookmarketing is a marathon not a sprint! Be consistent to be successful. via @bookgal
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At the end of the day this list of book marketing lies sums up some all too common excuses that are preventing authors from being successful. Yes, it’s hard work. But starting any business is hard work. And if you didn’t realize that becoming an author was the same as starting a business, this article is even more important to your continued success!

I want to encourage you to turn problems, or roadblocks, into opportunities.

If something isn’t working, find a new way to go about it, or replace it with something new that make end up working really well for you.

If you don’t know how to do something, learn. Knowledge is power and pretty much required for success. Have more book marketing lies I forgot? Or that you think should be included? Feel free to add them in the comments section! And if you found this helpful, be sure to share!

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What #bookmarketing lies do you tell yourself? via @bookgal #indieauthors
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And if you’re unsure of next steps you can certainly check out our assessment, where we’ll give you some in-depth feedback on key areas of your platform, and what you can be doing to improve your position in the market!

In 1993, when my first book came out and before he died, David Sandler called to buy out my Buying Facilitation® model. We couldn’t agree on terms, but he was excited by my differentiation between the sales model and the buying process: “I recognized that the problem was on the buy side, and thought my Sandler method was thinking out of the box. Reading your stuff, I now recognize my focus is still on getting solutions sold,” he said. “I hadn’t realized that ‘outside the box’ meant to shift the focus first to facilitate buying. Well done.”

And yet, after all these years, the problem remains: we’re limiting success and wasting an untold amount of resource seeking those few who are ready, willing, and able to buy: we’re missing a much larger, untapped market of potential (but real) buyers we ignore because our sales outreach doesn’t affect them. By broadening the goal to include facilitating change with those in the process of becoming buyers, by recognizing that a buying decision is a systemic, change management issue before it’s a solution choice problem, it’s feasible to engage earlier (albeit in a different way) and find a much larger population of real buyers.

HOW SALES RESTRICTS SELLING

The sales industry has a singular goal of placing solutions. It’s an industry with solutions looking for a problem. And the paltry results of a 5% close rate have been baked into the system: you accept low closing ratios as the best you can do, hire more sales people than you need, suffer from a sales cycle that is months/years longer than necessary, and lose buyers that will need your solution but don’t yet need or notice the information you provide.

Have you never asked yourself why, with all the capability of finding prospective buyers at your fingertips, you still close only 5% – down from 7% a decade ago (and with much less technology)? And why you continue to waste untold bazillions on staff, technology, and time, chasing folks who will never buy. Have you not recognized that

• the people you target aren’t necessarily buying or buyers,

• you’re expending too much resource on those who will never buy,

• you don’t know the difference between those who will and those who won’t buy?

With the best technology available, the most professional branding and marketing, great content, and a good solid product, you’re losing far more sales than you need to. This much should be obvious: No matter how much new technology, or how many sales methods available to you – regardless of all the ‘new new’ things at your fingertips – you’re still merely closing the low hanging fruit (those 5% who have determined they are ready, willing, able to buy).

A buying decision is a change management problem before it’s a solution choice issue.  By adding a few bells and whistles to your sales efforts you can find people who will be buying but aren’t yet buyers and facilitate their strategic Pre-Sales, non-solution-based decision path that concludes with them buying. Then you’ll close far more than you’re closing now with half the staff and half the time. But it needs different thinking.

SELLING VS BUYING

People become buyers only when there are no other options and a purchase is their last hope for problem resolution. They can’t even accurately define a ‘need’ until the full complement of stakeholders are involved and the scope of any resultant change is recognized. Sales ignores this group because their touch points are different and they are definitely not yet buyers. Yet it’s here they’re more open for support and connection: their path to congruently resolving a problem is confounding; they may forget to bring in “Joe from accounting”, or can’t recognize the full scope of issues until they’ve falsely started down one path to resolution and must start all over.

You’re a subject matter expert in the area of their problem resolution and could really be a support here – so long as you avoid trying to sell and focus on facilitating change first. This is where they will be eager to connect. By only focusing on selling/placing your solution, you ignore 40% of real buyers who haven’t gotten there yet but will.

Ask yourself this: Do you want to sell – or have someone buy? They are two different activities with different rules, needs, and behaviors. Sales is tactical. Buying is strategic. Your tactical focus on placing solutions with Buyer Personas, Opportunity Management, content differentiation, and yes, even Sandler, SPIN etc. offer biased questions and content focused on those few who have defined, and understand, their need and change issues, overlooking those people in the midst of strategic decision efforts who will develop into buyers once they get their ducks in a row. Sellers actually sit and wait while prospects do this anyway. Why not help them! Here what sales ignores:  

1. A buying decision includes a 13 step change management process, the first 9 steps of which are systemic change (not purchase or need) focused; they aren’t ‘buyers’ until step 10 when all of their systemic/change management stuff is worked out, and there is agreement that a purchase is their only option.

2. A problem doesn’t equal a need; a ‘need’ doesn’t equal a purchase. It might turn out that maintaining the status quo is a better option for them; as an outsider, you can never understand why.

3. People aren’t buyers until they’re out of options to fix their problems themselves AND they’ve gotten buy-in to bring in a ‘foreign’ element. The last thing they want to do (precisely, the last thing) is to buy anything. The buyers you seek/find are already at the end of their decision path.

4. Your terrific content isn’t being noticed by people who haven’t yet determined, defined, agreed upon a ‘need’ even though they may become buyers later, or even really need your solution.

5. Your content/selling push assumes that with the right content and message, offered to the right demographic, at the right time, focused on the right need -> purchase scenario, you’ll get in/close – but you’re only reaching those few who are ready OR those in the midst of their research (who may never buy but may call you with questions or take an appointment). They won’t even read or heed your outreach.

6. You’re using a ‘need’ and ‘solution-placement’ filter which restricts your results 95% of the time, causing you (beyond all logic) to push push push push harder or better, against a closed system of people and policies that’s not ready, willing, able to buy.

The problem is not your solution (It’s great. And people can find the content they need on line when they’re ready.); the problem is that the sales model places solutions with people who need them, but does nothing to help facilitate the change elements people traverse en route to becoming buyers and are not buyers yet. Here are the main stages people execute as they seek to resolve a problem (The full set of steps are laid out in my book Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell.):

1. Assemble the full set of stakeholders (including “Joe in accounting”) who spend time understanding the scope of the problem, how it got initiated, and how it maintains itself;

2. Once a problem is defined by all stakeholders, the group tries to resolve the issue with familiar resources to minimize fallout. (This is where they might contact you with questions. They’re doing research, not buying.)

3. Once it’s decided to seek an external solution, they must find a route to resolution that maintains Systems Congruence. So if your users refuse new technology, or your teams function well as they are, you might find a way around a purchase if the disruption is too great. An Outsider can never understand the unique nature of internal dynamics. Can I ever really understand why you don’t stop smoking, or stay in a dysfunctional relationship, or stay in a job/relationship that makes you miserable? Change is always personal.

Notice how these stages are change- and systems-focused, and not accessible to Outsiders with a ‘sales’ hat on. And until they are addressed, there’s no ‘need’ and no ‘buyer’. Btw, I developed these stages decades ago; they apply to anyone making a decision including coaching clients, patients, and employees, and all buying situations regardless of the size of the change/purchase. Whether you merely need to buy a new phone, or go through a merger, the steps of change must be traversed in a way that maintains the status quo (even when it’s unconscious) regardless of need. You wait while people do this anyway; why not find those who CAN become buyers (rather than ‘should’), facilitate their change quickly, and be there with them as they buy – and be with them as they figure out their own unique strategies for change – so long as you avoid trying to sell anything as they’re not buyers yet.

Is it sales? No. It’s a Change Facilitation process I call Buying Facilitation®. By first enabling people to facilitate their buying decision path, you’ll have less competition, close more, stop wasting time selling to those who can never buy, and be true Servant Leaders; you can use your technology, your content marketing, your sales efforts as you are now, but with an additional focus.

WHY AREN’T THEY BUYING? SDM ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

Using the above thinking, here’s a ‘Q&A’ to help you better understand why you’re getting the results you’re getting.

What’s wrong with seeking buyers to place our solutions? Isn’t that what sales is?

Why do they keep talking to me if they’re not going to buy?

Until the entire scope of change is understood and integrated, people don’t understand the perimeters of their need (and when you ask biased questions, the flawed answers you receive often cause you to chase those who will never buy). Before becoming buyers, people must recognize that the cost of change (buying) is less than maintaining the status quo: their ‘system’ is sacrosanct. Would you buy a new car if your spouse would divorce you? Would you bring in a new CRM system if half of your user team would quit, or refuse to use it, or until the tech folks have the time to implement? You know you have to go to the gym more, and eat/drink less. You’ve got a need. Have you signed up for the gym? Stopped drinking beer?

Why are we still getting such a low close rate when we’ve got so many terrific tools at our disposal to introduce our features AND find the right demographic?

Because only a small percent of people you focus on are buyers. Until they’re out of other options AND determined they must bring in something from outside AND have all of their internal ducks in a row, AND have buy-in (Buyer Readiness), your tools aren’t recognized.

Why do they keep talking to me if they’re not going to buy?

During their change process, people research all possibilities. Your solution may be one of them; they’re actually using you for reference to report back to their team, or to figure out their own workarounds, or mention to their current vendor. It’s possible to know on the first call who will be a buyer and who is merely seeking data that will never lead to a purchase – but not with a solution-placement focus.

Why don’t buyers realize they need our solution when it seems so obvious?

It’s only ‘obvious’ to you. The best content, the most relevant solution, will be ignored until they reach step 10 when they become buyers.

Why is the sales cycle so long when there is a solid need/solution match?

The time people take to figure out how to manage change congruently is the length of the sales cycle. As Outsiders, we can never understand the depth of the change management issues: Who is fighting with who? What is the tech schedule? Who will need to be let go? How do internal politics show up? How does their history/future factor in?

The system that holds the problem in place is much more powerful than any solution you can offer. They need buy-in from EVERYONE and EVERYTHING that created the status quo and will touch the new solution. You’ll never recognize “Joe from accounting” who is an unsung influencer, or the fight going on between the sales and marketing folks who need to share budget. It’s not about their need – until it is. And they can’t tell you because they don’t know, or they won’t have found the nut of the problem yet, or you’re asking the wrong questions biased by your need to sell.

Why do buyers make promises they don’t keep? Are all buyers liars?

Buyers don’t lie. The one person you’re speaking with is responding to your biased questions, getting out of the thrust of your sales push, and is giving you the best data they’re willing to give you, or as much data as they have at that point in their 13 step change path. Whatever data they offer is limited by their access to the full Buying Decision Team, and the stage they’re at in their change management. You are, after all, strangers approaching them with a solution placement hat on, asking the wrong questions to the wrong people at the wrong time. As an Outsider you can never, ever have a clue as per the political, personal, strategic decision issues they face. But you can understand they system they decide in, a per your expertise in your field.

Why isn’t our great content being read or acted upon by the larger audience who really needs it?

Needs it according to who? Your research? Your biased questions? Your focus on placing solutions limits your audience and keeps you from getting into the decision path earlier. Are they at the point of seeking workarounds? Is there a team buy-in problem? Have they forgotten to assemble some of the appropriate stakeholders? Are they finding a glitch (political, personal, management-based, etc.)? Your sales, marketing, content, and technology restricts your target market to the low hanging fruit who have clearly defined their need, know they cannot fix their own problem, and have a route to congruent change.

Why aren’t we more successful when we check that they’ve brought in all stakeholders and help them achieve buy in? That’s managing Buyer Readiness, no?

You’re an Outsider. You’ll never understand what’s going on; the questions you pose and the direction you offer are solution placement based; you listen with a biased ear, etc. (Seriously: Read Dirty Little Secrets then call me and I’ll teach you how to do it.) Did they bring in “Joe from accounting”? How are they managing the fight between sales and marketing? Oh – one other big reason: you’re merely speaking with one, at most two, people; you have no reach through the sales model to facilitate change. I can’t say this enough: you’re an Outsider.

If you start as a Neutral Navigator, listen for systems and facilitate them through their OWN decisions with NO BIAS to selling, you can quickly find and serve those who WILL become buyers and help them efficiently manage change. Using Buying Facilitation® KPMG went from a 3 year sales cycle to a 4 month sales cycle with a $50,000,000 solution; Wachovia small business bankers went from a 2% close over 11 months to a 29% close over 3 months; Kaiser went from 110 visits and 18 closed sales to 27 visits and 25 closed sales.  By adding BF to their dummy terminals, Barclay’s helped customers define, and buy, the exact solutions they needed. Help them traverse their change path and sell to those who will buy.

Why don’t more people show up at appointments? Why are so many buyers reluctant to take appointments?

1. All of the stakeholders aren’t involved yet so they don’t even have a clear, complete description of ‘need’. Those who take appointments are doing research (and do WHAT? with your content) and haven’t gotten team buy-in, or the full decision team isn’t on board yet;

2. They know from the first moment of a call that you’ll be pushing YOUR solution and not facilitating them in discovering THEIR own solution. It’s only if you can be an asset to them that they’ll be willing to see you.

What’s wrong with trying to place a solution by ‘understanding need’, or creating a need, or selling?

You can do that, for those who are already buyers understand their need.

I’ve paid a fortune for technology, research into demographics, opportunity management software, scripts, and experienced sales folks – but I’m still not closing all I deserve to close. Why?

Because your efforts are focused on ‘buyer’ ‘need’, and neither of those necessarily correlate with buying anything for those who aren’t yet buyers.

How does Buying Facilitation® find, and close, more real buyers?

            Buying Facilitation® is a Change Facilitation model that works with sales (and coaching, etc.) and includes Facilitative Questions, Listening for Systems, Presumptive Summaries – wholly different skill sets than sales, and includes no bias. It traverses the first 9 steps of change management, in the ares your solution operates in, beginning with immediately ascertaining who is set up to be able to buy, or has a possibility of systemic change and then teaches them precisely how to discover their path to change. By adding BF you not only find the right buyers, but teach those who may not have been able to buy how to facilitate change.  

           With Director #1 above, it would take so long to convince him that his plan was flawed, and then get the other managers who have complied with his plan to acceded to change, that it’s not worth the effort. BF progresses down the change steps and teaches them how to bring in the right people, discover if workarounds are worthwhile, and why they haven’t worked until now. Then it helps them determine how change would need to be addressed – and with BF you can do this on the first call. It will ignore the ones who will never buy, and help the real buyers be ready to buy. So much easier than finding those relative few who have already done this. And it’s much easier than it sounds: you’re just not used to it yet.

IN CONCLUSION

Here is a rule: as long as the sales model tries to ‘find buyers’ and ‘place solutions’, you’ll never sell to anyone other than those who have determined they’re buyers, leaving you continuing to push your solution into their closed system. You can

• discover who is, or will be, starting down the journey that will lead to a decision to purchase something,

• figure out, with a change management hat on, what the journey in your industry, and among your buying market, looks like (or call me and I’ll help),

• then enter with those few on their change journey as they quickly (with your help) figure out how to manage stakeholders, buy-in, workarounds, etc. and become buyers.

By adding outreach, vocabulary, content, that first focuses on facilitating the buying decision path earlier you’ll enlarge your range of buyers by 5x. After all, people must do this anyway before becoming buyers; we might as well join them where they are and facilitate the right ones.

Call me. Together, we can create content, software, scripts to find the right ones – those who WILL become buyers – and facilitate them down their decision path toward effective change and buying.

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For more reading on the subject, here are some ideas: Practical Decision Making, Questioning Questions, Buyer’s Journey, Do You Want to Sell? Or Have Someone Buy? , Influencers vs Facilitators. Or contact me to discuss. Am happy to share what I know. sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

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Sharon Drew Morgen is a thought leader and original thinker, as well as the author of 9 books, including the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, and the Amazon bestsellers Dirty Little Secrets and What? Did you really say what I think I heard? She has designed a Change Facilitation process for sales (Buying Facilitation®), coaching, health care, leadership, change management, and influencing, training it to such companies as DuPont (8,000 people), KPMG (6,000 people), Wachovia, Kaiser, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, IBM, P&G, Sandler Sales, ATT, Bethlehem Steel, Sandia Labs. Her blog www.sharondrewmorgen.com is recognized as one of the top business blogs, with articles on decision making, listening, questions, sales, coaching, etc. She is a trainer, speaker, consultant, and coach. Sharon Drew can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com

How Sales Overlooks Buyers: Essay and Q&A is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

A new study from Process Street in partnership with sales email tool PersistIQ reveals the inside sales outreach of the world’s 281 top SaaS companies, and how they respond when a high-ticket lead (in this case, we used Vodafone) signs up for a free trial or demo.

Using the details of a fictional Vodafone employee to sign up for SaaS products, Process Street automatically collected all incoming outreach including sales emails, marketing emails, and voicemail transcripts. The sales communication has been made public and searchable at InsideSaaSSales.com along with a study analyzing the key trends.

In this article, I’m going to condense the study down to its key elements to give a data-backed picture of how enterprise SaaS companies like Salesforce, New Relic, and HubSpot chase big deals.

Summary of the key findings

• Companies follow up for 9 days before stopping contact
• Companies send one email per day until the end of the cycle
• 65% of companies hand you over to an automated marketing campaign
• Most SaaS companies have two sales contacts per lead
• 74% of companies don’t leave voicemails
• Voicemails are mostly left as a way to follow up with a recent email, and vice versa
• If a company leaves voicemails, the sales cycle length is usually 160% longer
• 7% of emails have a false ‘re:’ in the subject line
• 9% of companies use webinars as a sales tactic
• The average marketing drip campaign contains 3 emails
• MailChimp is the most common email marketing software, used by 49% of the sample

The content and duration of a SaaS sales sequence

An average SaaS sales sequence lasts for 9 days, and consists of one email or voicemail daily for the duration. If, however, the sequence contains voicemails (26% of the sequences analyzed), the sales cycle is longer.

Sales sequences with voicemails are often longer both because it indicates a high-touch sales process and because voicemails and emails are often sent in pairs. Commonly, emails are sent to follow up with voicemails, and vice versa.

For example, this pair from Act-On:

We noticed that as sequences go on, the tone of communication shifts from being minimal and directly related to the goal (securing a demo) to a more benefits-driven tone, reiterating the key features and reminding the lead why they signed up in the first place.

Also, as a backup in case the lead isn’t fully sold or is too busy for a sales call, sales emails tend to contain bite-sized product education, like in this email from Salesforce:

In many cases, sales emails and voicemails open with context, presumably to reassure the lead that the email is relevant to them. Context is commonly phrased like “I noticed”, “I saw that”, and “as per my voicemail”.

Many SaaS companies also send automated marketing emails in addition to those from the sales team.

Marketing automation usage

Just 35% of SaaS companies don’t add the lead to an automated marketing campaign. The remaining 65% that do will send an average of 3 emails, mainly to onboard the user with the software, advertise webinars or send updates from the company blog.

One commonly-used sales tactic, used by 9% of analyzed companies, is webinar invitations. Webinars have been proven in other studies to have a high sales conversion rate.

The top three most used marketing automation platforms among the studied companies are MailChimp (49%), Marketo (21%), and HubSpot (19%).

Since HubSpot (and Marketing Cloud) are both marketing automation platforms inside of CRM products, that also gives us a clue about which CRMs are popular.

You can see the full details of the study in the slide deck below:

The post We Analyzed 1,000 Emails & Voicemails to Understand How the Top SaaS Companies Chase Enterprise Deals. appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Blockchain came to the world’s attention thanks to its role as the underlying technology behind Bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency. However, Blockchain has much farther reaching possibilities than digital currency. Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, has the potential for applications in the stock market, banking, and beyond. One industry that is sure to see disruption from Blockchain is accounting. From audit to bookkeeping, Blockchain has the potential to improve efficiency, reporting, and data access in a way never before seen. Let’s dive in and take a look at how Blockchain is going to change accounting.

Near instant transactions

At the start of a new month, accountants around the world close the books on the prior month. At large companies, this process takes anywhere from a couple of business days to a week or longer. With the release of new technologies and financial systems, the time required to complete the close cycle is shrinking. One of the biggest holdups in a faster close is a lag in transaction completion times. In my days as a Senior General Accountant, I spent hours every month accounting for transactions that were in limbo between various steps in the billing, invoicing, and payment cycle.

With the distributed Blockchain ledger, there is no need for transactions to sit in limbo. There is no need for a delay in processing while systems catch up and run overnight processes. In a world of instant transactions, many month end close processes will be cut down or eliminated completely. Thanks to to speed transactions will be completed, accountants will spend a lot less time worrying about ensuing transactions are reported in the correct month, as they will already be reported when the month closes. And, once transactions are completed, they are locked in and recorded forever. There is no going back to tinker or adjust past transactions in a blockchain.

All assets become trackable

Businesses that focus on assets like stocks, bonds, mutual funds, titles, deeds, and even inventory can be tracked with Blockchain. In fact, assets become more secure and trackable than ever before. As transactions take place with Blockchain technology, it is recorded in the local ledger and then shared across other copies of the same ledger stored by many computers around the world. Each time a transaction takes place, it is sent to every copy of the blockchain for that specific asset or use case.

At this point, everyone has an undisputed copy of the history of that asset. If a share of stock is bought, sold, bought, and sold again, a record is created that can be traced back to the beginning of its existence in Blockchain. Fraud and asset theft will be dramatically reduced with this tracking system, and accountants get benefits too. When trying to track or audit an asset, phone calls, emails, and other detective skills are no longer needed. Just type a few buttons and you can view an entire history of the asset perfect for building an audit log.

Automated reporting and reconciliation

Thanks to the automatic update of the distributed ledger, Blockchain makes reporting and reconciliations easier than ever. When every transaction is recorded in one place with all of the details. It is much easier to program computers to automatically sort and record journal entries. You can view live Bitcoin transactions as they happen at Bitcoin Explorer. Clicking on a transaction brings up the relevant details. All of these are stored by every computer that has an active copy of the Bitcoin Blockchain.

As new blockchains are developed for various applications and uses, different details can be included and stored in the transaction details. Companies and industries can develop their own unique blockchain guidelines to make the technology work perfectly for their unique needs. Whatever those needs are, the accounting and audit teams are sure to benefit from more thorough, traceable, detailed, and fraud resistant transaction records.

Cost savings on audits and compliance

Speaking of traceable records, audit managers should be elated at the prospect of incorporating Blockchain. With Blockchain based data, audits will be faster, more accurate, and better automated. Projects that took weeks and months in the past may be cut down to hours and days. A small audit team will be able to reach further, review more processes, and certify results with better efficiency than ever before.

There is some risk to audit professionals in this new automation and efficiency. I find this true because fewer people will be needed to do the same job. If you work in audit today, getting well versed in Blockchain is a smart career decision. Also think of new ways you can use your audit skills to improve efficiency, transparency, accuracy, and compliance across your organization. You may have a lot more time on your hands to do more value added work on top of your existing audit duties. By proving your value to your employer, you are proving the need to keep you around.

It’s time to embrace Blockchain

Blockchain is coming whether you are ready or not. Some on Wall Street believe Blockchain will be prevalent across the entire financial sector within five years. There is so much potential for upgrades and improvements in transaction technology. We are poised for a revolution that may be the biggest change in accounting since personal computers. This includes when spreadsheet programs landed on every accountant’s desk. It is an exciting time in the accounting and audit industry. It’s time to get aboard the Blockchain bandwagon. It will be impacting your business before you know it.

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More about Online Learning, Mashable Shopping, Shopping Stackcommerce, Shopping Solo, and Shopping Onlinelearning

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Let’s correct the record here about commissions.

Let’s assume that the critics are correct, and that salespeople who are paid commissions will be motivated to win more business, whatever the cost. Even though many people are not really money motivated, let’s pretend for a moment that every salesperson is, and that they will really do whatever it takes to win business and collect their rewards.

That settled, let’s look at what might happen.

• First, the salesperson who wants to make more money will have to create opportunities. Opportunities are generally generated by prospecting, and the primary method for setting the appointments and gaining the commitment for time is cold calling. And like that, we just found out that a lot of people have just bowed out of the “whatever it takes” proposition in the above paragraph.
• Second, they would have to do well enough in front of the client during their interactions to actually be preferred over their competitors, all of whom (in this scenario) are equally money motivated.

So how does one create a preference? Is it by being self-oriented, pushy, smarmy, and aggressive? Is it by selling the client something that they really don’t need or from which they will receive no benefit? The answer is a resounding “No!” This is a recipe for losing deals, not winning them.

You create a preference by being consultative, and for working to be a trusted advisor, a recipe with only two ingredients: 1: trust (the foundation of all relationships, including commercial relationships), and 2: advice (the business acumen and situational knowledge that allows one to provide advice, also now popularly described as “insights”). A self-orientation will end your chances at winning an opportunity as fast as almost anything else. A lack of business acumen will make you irrelevant, and will remove almost all possibility of winning.

If one were to want money, their behaviors would have to serve that outcome, and successful salespeople have long known how to sell in a way that allows them to win, to serve their clients, and to make money.

Why We Pay Commissions

The reason we pay commissions is because the variation in results allows for a variation in compensation, with those who want more money and have the ability to generate more sales being paid for doing so, and with those who are only half as motivated or half as effective to be paid appropriately for the results they produce.

Treating two groups with widely different results the same is to mistreat both groups, with one being paid too little, and the other being paid too much.

Truth be told, we are really commission only salespeople, being paid only for the value we create, what we believe we are worth, and our ability to find the people who see that same value.

The post Why You Should Want to Pay Commissions appeared first on The Sales Blog.

In some ways, virtual reality (VR) represents the promise of the future. It allows us to participate in a setting that isn’t actually present, but feels as if it could be. But in other ways, VR feels like a relic of the past. There’s already a plethora of great technology readily available—smartphones, tablets computers, etc.— so virtual reality doesn’t really bring anything that special to the table. Plus, there’s not nearly as much of a demand for VR as there is for these other devices.

Abigail Posner of Zoo (Google’s creative think tank) feels optimistic about VR, believing it could be the next big thing. At Zoo, her team has led an anthropological study on VR to see how consumers relate to it. As it turns out, there are a lot of brands that are already using this new technology to successfully engage consumers. And it’s not just in the entertainment and gaming industry either; Guinness and the New York Times are some of the brands finding ways to use VR. There’s also statistical data to support it’s development. According to eMarketer, VR is expected to grow from 22.4 million users in 2017 to 49.2 million users in 2019. But even if that growth does in fact happen, will there be a way for marketers to utilize VR’s potential?

Abigail Posner discusses VR with host Drew Neisser on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast. She talks about several case studies, describing what Google has found out about the technology and where she expects it to go. You can listen to the episode below:

Based on Posner’s interview, here are the cases for and against VR’s survival.

Virtual Reality Offers a New Brand Experience…

Since the birth of human civilization, we’ve longed to share stories. Whether we are gathering around the campfire, making emotional speeches, or telling co-workers about our weekend down by the river, we enjoy exchanging anecdotes. As a former anthropology student, Posner knows all about the power of storytelling. However, she believes that VR has the ability to transform storytelling into story living.

“From the second you put whatever that headset is on,” Posner says, “you are totally immersed in this experience. And it’s not an immersive story like someone telling you a story; there’s no narrative frame. You’re breaking all the conventions of what you experience until now about story—someone guiding you through, someone telling you what’s supposed to happen, someone giving you the implications that you’re supposed to come away with. Instead, you jump into this experience. You are totally absorbed.”

Posner lists a few examples to explain how story living can work. For instance, she talks about Lipton and how the brand might describe the natural ingredients in its tea to entice health-conscious consumers. With VR, however, the Lipton can simulate the experience of being in the field, picking the tealeaves, and therefore providing users with a deeper understanding of the brand. Posner also mentions a VR game released to help market the 2017 film, Dunkirk. In the game, users can sense what it would have been like to be a WWII soldier. As bullets zoom by and bombers fly overhead, you’re there in the middle of the action. In this sense, VR offers a unique immersion experience that other mediums cannot convey.

But Do People Want to Experience Brands?

As much as marketers may hate to face it, most people don’t like commercials. So if there’s any suspicion that brands may use virtual reality to push a product or service, consumers might not bite. In addition to marketing challenges, there may be some general challenges to getting people on board with virtual reality. VR has been around for a little while now, and yet there are no major indications that people will soon be lining up to buy 3-D headsets. VR’s limited capabilities surely have something to do with this, but the fact that people aren’t generally demanding more of these visceral experiences is a bad sign.

The word “virtual” doesn’t really help VR’s case either. We know that these story living experiences are contrived. We know that those tealeaves we’re picking and those bullets whizzing over our heads aren’t real. And so our engagement with them may feel restricted. The beauty of storytelling is that we can use our imaginations to picture scenes however we like. With VR, we don’t have that option. Although it’s very cool to see things from a new point of view, there’s a somewhat limited scope.

Tying this back to marketers, the fact that this technology doesn’t convey a linear experience suggests that advertisers may not have full control over their own VR programs. If that’s the case, how can they expect to engage with consumers the way they’d like? New technological developments may have the answer to that question. But for now, getting users down lower in the funnel is a challenge with VR.

VR Is Growing…

As previously mentioned, VR usage is expected to expand significantly. Plus, the fact that Google is putting a lot of research into it suggests that the technology might have a bright future. We also know that almost anything is possible in the 21^st century. New startups take off every day, some of which introduce ideas that come out of left field. Just look at how well Snapchat has done. VR also delivers something different, so there is reason to believe it will find a way to break through with users.

Posner explains why brands shouldn’t fear adapting to VR. She says, “I would think that marketers may not be as scared as you think…what VR is really doing is going back in time in a way. It’s going back to the fundamentals of what’s so valuable about brands, which is really getting to the essence and meaning of a brand, of a product in people’s lives.” No matter what becomes of VR, we should be ready to pounce if and when the opportunity comes.

But Will Lack of Convenience Cause a Snag?

VR isn’t sexy yet. It’s this bulky technology that looks ridiculous, and in some cases is probably uncomfortable to wear. To be fair, there are some possible fixes. For example, VR could take a Google Glass turn and become stylish if done properly. But what convenience does it add that our smartphones and computers don’t already have? Although VR has the potential to showcase different kinds of experiences than these technologies, users may not have the attention span or desire to learn VR to its fullest extent. VR might be like the Apple watch – cool to have, but an unnecessary luxury for many. And if that’s the case, then VR’s value to marketers is surely limited.

We’ve Seen VR Work…

Posner describes a few instances where VR has succeeded. These examples are across the board, ranging from entertainment to sports and even to public service announcements. The National Transportation Highway Safety Board experimented used VR to show users how their brain changes after becoming intoxicated. Posner explains, “We created [an] experience where people with a headset with cardboard…can actually start experiencing what it’s like to be drunk. So they are playing games in a bar. And all of a sudden, because of the way the technology works, the voices around you are starting to be slurred. Things are starting to slow down. And so all of a sudden, you as a human being are sensing what it’s like to feel drunk and you recognize, ‘Oh my gosh. This is what my brain is going through as I drink more and more and more. I am understanding the essence of what it’s like to be drunk.’” Since VR has shown promise with the National Transportation Highway Safety Board’s, there’s no reason to believe it can’t work with other organizations too.

The fact that VR can dip into so many genres including education suggests that there are a number of potential avenues for VR to work if it doesn’t fit in with other areas. As we’ve mentioned before, even KFC is starting to use VR to train its cooks. Much of this success still remains to be seen, but the fact that there are early successes on the board for VR bodes well for the technology.

But Will It Last?

Last Christmas, my cousin got a VR headset. He gave it to me to try for a few minutes, so I started looking at 360° videos of my favorite attractions from a certain vacation destination in central Florida. After about 5 minutes, I thought, “well this is cool, but now I want to do something else.” There’s a decent chance that might be the standard reaction to VR in the future. If people are only using it once in a while, what true value does it really give to marketers?

Final Thoughts

My opinion on virtual reality and $1.50 might get you a cup of coffee. Abigail Posner has spent an extensive amount of time studying VR, and for perhaps the most highly respected company in contemporary times. So when she says she sees promise in VR, she may have a point. Although the technology is still far away from where it needs to be, it could eventually make a breakthrough. As long as that potential exists, marketers should have a plan to address VR down the road.

The post Virtual Reality: The next Big Thing or Flash in the Pan? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

If you’re not yet building your email subscriber list and using newsletters to your advantage, you are most likely missing out on a ton of conversions you could be receiving for your business.

Each person on your list is worth at least $1-$2 in revenue per month and at least 20% of your revenue is expected to come from your email list.

In order to tap into that revenue, you’ll need to reach both existing and potential customers with engaging newsletters that capture their attention and build trust.

Newsletters can be a great way for small businesses to share information about sales, discounts, new products or upcoming events. Newsletter still need to ensuring an interaction that feels personal.

Here are a few ways to improve your email newsletters and take them from corny and ineffective to catchy and engaging.

Craft a Persuasive Headline

The first step to creating a successful email newsletter that gets clicks is one of the most difficult. It is crafting a headline that is engaging and informative. The headline is the first thing your customer will see. The headline must be intriguing enough to click on. The title must still be promising something beneficial to the recipient.

Knowing how to craft a useful, reader-friendly email newsletter is crucial. Many small businesses lean toward newsletters that are in the interest of making a sale. It pays to be less about moving units. You want the newsletter to be about making your customers feel they have a close connection with your company.

In a report on subject line comparison, email marketing company MailChimp found that emails with the highest open rates often included colloquial and fun copy. A title that says, “We’re Throwing a Party!” will help your open rate. Whereas those with the lowest open rates were those that included sales language (“Discounted Today” or “Specials Inside”). Additionally, newsletters with subject lines that sounded impersonal and explanatory also saw low open rates.

For your subject line, be personal and friendly—and skip language that’s trying to sell something. Tell your customer exactly what’s in the email in a way that is fun, lighthearted and inviting.

Focus on persuading them to open the email. Even if your newsletter copy is perfect, subscribers will never see it if they aren’t persuaded to open the email in the first place.

Focus on Educating and Entertaining Over Promoting

The content of your email newsletter should also be engaging. According to the professionals at HubSpot, your newsletter should be 90 percent educational and 10 percent promotional.

In addition to including sales tactics like coupons or sales information, add in other content like personal experiences and success stories. Relevant blog posts, photos of your company, industry news, updates about your business work. Teasers for upcoming products or services.

Remember: Your email newsletter reflects your business in both the content and the language. Have someone proofread your newsletter before it goes out to ensure the copy is not only clean but informative and relevant.

Email Consistently

When using email marketing to your advantage, you want to be consistent and send your list an email regularly. It’s a good rule of thumb to send an email at least once a week while some business owners send multiple emails per week.

It all depends on your audience and business model. You don’t want to send too few emails but you still don’t want to annoy subscribers by emailing them every day so you have to find a sweet spot. Being consistent is great because you don’t want to make it seem like you’re just emailing subscribers when you’re selling or promoting something.

Summary

An email newsletter can be a great way to communicate with current and prospective clients. If you’re treating it like a coupon circular, you can guarantee a low open rate—and a lot of missed marketing opportunities. Focus on crafting a killer headline and sharing educational copy that readers will gain something from.

Jean Giraudoux once said, “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” It’s a funny indictment of how to take exactly the wrong approach to authenticity. But too often, brands and marketers miss the sarcasm. We target an audience, then carefully cultivate an image to appeal to them. We create the appearance of a culture that matches theirs. And then we’re surprised when our target audience sees right through it. What if we stopped trying to fake sincerity and turned the whole process inside out? Instead of crafting a culture to match an audience, why not attract the audience that matches your culture? In his presentation at Content Marketing World, adidas’ Frank Thomas shared how the athletic wear company defines their culture and broadcasts it to their potential audience. Frank and his team created Gameplan A, a content hub that expresses the company’s culture. The twist is that the site is for internal and external messaging--same channels, same content. They’re not crafting an image, they’re broadcasting their identity. The content on Gameplan A clearly says, “This is what we are like. If you’re like us, this is your community, too.” That approach makes it easier for people to connect and form a lasting relationship with the brand. Here’s how adidas puts culture at the core of their content marketing strategy.

Culture Is Content Marketing’s North Star

According to Frank, the digital world is so complex and volatile that our go-to tools for audience identification are no longer sufficient. Personas, scenarios, observed past behavior--they all change as fast as we can construct them. Instead of trying to become what an ever-changing audience wants, Frank says, make culture your north star. Define what your brand stands for and you can become a beacon to your most valuable audience. Frank identified four crucial components of a brand’s culture:

• Values. What ethical notions form the foundation of the brand?
• Ideas. What unique ideas arise from these values?
• Convictions. What beliefs drive the brand’s actions?
• Behaviors. How does the brand express these convictions, ideas, and values?

Added together, your values, ideas, convictions and behaviors form your identity. Once your identity is established, you can move from product marketing to culture marketing. As Frank said, “We’re not selling shoes. We’re communicating on behalf of the brand, building trust in our target audience.” Gameplan A aims to build a community of like-minded people, including employees, potential recruitment candidates, but also consumers who might become advocates for the brand. The brand’s culture, expressed through Gameplan A’s content, acts as a beacon for those who share the brand’s values.

How to Express Your Culture Through Content Marketing

When you filter content through the lens of your brand’s culture, you can form stronger, more valuable connections with your audience. Frank explained how his team uses Gameplan A to promote adidas’ culture: #1: Align Internal and External Messaging According to Frank, it’s crucial to start by engaging your employees. Make sure they understand your culture and believe it’s sincere. Then employees can help spread the message to your audience in a more authentic way. When your internal and external messaging share the same culture, you can have a meaningful exchange of ideas with your community: Your audience can actually bring value to your continued cultural evolution.   #2: Find Your Uniqueness and Focus In Sports are adidas’ primary focus. But they’re not just addressing people who love sports--that’s too large a segment to create a meaningful connection with. So they refined their audience segment further, zeroing in on people who are creative, collaborative, and confident: Entrepreneurs and drivers of change. Then they further focused in on those who are actively trying to make a difference, continually self-improving, striving for the new. This process of segmentation, refinement, and focus can help you find the audience most aligned with your brand’s culture. That is, the audience most relevant and receptive to your messaging.   #3: Make Your Personality Shine Once you establish your brand’s culture, don’t hide it on your “About” page. Apply your cultural filter to every piece of content you create. For Gameplan A, Frank created a culture guide that creators can follow to make sure each piece of content meets their cultural DNA. The guide outlines what Frank calls “Mega Themes,” the key topics of interest where their expertise intersects with audience needs. Any new content must address one of these themes to be considered for publication.   #4: Commit Yourself for the Long Haul It takes time to build a culture-driven brand, to build a community with content that expresses your brand identity. So it’s vital to set expectations and allocate resources accordingly. Prepare your team for a marathon, not a sprint, before you step onto the track.   #5: Involve Your Role Models The people who inspire your brand’s culture can make powerful collaborators for co-creating content. Gameplan A curates content from their heroes, and works with them to create original content. But it’s not just about working with influencers--some of your most inspiring role models are right in your community. Gameplan A offers their community the chance to suggest topics, ask questions, recommend content, and even submit proposals for drafting content to be published on the hub.

Keeping It Extra Real

To start building your community of like-minded individuals--your most relevant audience--don’t try to fake sincerity. Start by firmly establishing your brand’s culture. Document the values, ideas, convictions and behaviors that define your identity. Then make that culture the guiding light of your content marketing strategy. When your culture is genuine, shared throughout the organization, and expressed in all you do, you won’t have to chase your most valued audience: They’ll be drawn to you.

The post How adidas Put Culture at the Core of Their Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Plus examples of what make an effective explainer video

Oscar Wilde used to say that experience is the name we give to our mistakes. However,  you don’t need to be as seasoned as good ol’ Oscar to know that. When it comes to video marketing, you can’t afford to make those mistakes in the first place. Especially when it comes to creating explainer videos.

Developing explainer videos capable of summing up who you are in under 90 secs can be truly challenging. You can’t go into it blindfolded and full-out swinging – you need to have some certainties from the get go.

But before diving into the specifics and giving you some much-needed insight on the things that you should never do, there’s a question that perhaps you might be asking yourself right now:

Where exactly do explainer videos fit into my marketing strategy?

Well, if we take into account the classic structure of the customer's journey (and we do), you know, the different stages that a person “travels” before actually purchasing a product or service. Explainer videos fit perfectly into the “Consideration” phase.

Take a look at this image to better understand what I’m saying.

So, after the awareness stage, the prospect already knows what the specific problem is or what he or she needs to solve, and is now deepening the research and assessing the different solutions. Explainer videos are a really useful type of content here since they allow you to summarize the problem, explain how the solution you are offering works, and to introduce your brand in a short amount of time. They are good tools to guide your lead to the next stage of the journey by providing the exact information they are craving at that exact step in their research.

And now, are you ready? I said are you ready? Let’s dive into the mistakes you should avoid when creating your video. Here are the 7 most frequent ones:

1. Dragging it out for too long

In the age where everything has to be entertaining or face oblivion (or worse, indifference), you can’t be boring. And that’s exactly how your video will feel if you make it too long. People have dwindling attention spans, so you can’t overstay your welcome.

Avoiding this mistake is easy to explain but tricky to master. You’ll have to keep the following in mind:

•         Make your message as concise as possible
•         Don’t make your video longer than 90 seconds
•         Use the typical rule of thumb: no more than 150 words per minute

Basically, your explainer video will have a better shot at success if you remember 3 simple words: keep it short.

Let’s watch the following ad, perhaps the epitome of “to the point”:

2. Forgetting who your target audience really is

You won’t sell your product or service to everyone out there. The one-size-fits-all mentality will only have you failing left and right. You’ll end up frustrated and convinced no one.

Instead, accept the fact that you are talking to a specific group of people. Limit your attention to whoever is actually looking for what you have to offer. Craft your message around those potential customers and make it as evident as possible. How? Here are some key points:

•         Use characters that look and behave like your target audience
•         Put them in scenarios that will be familiar to your prospects
•         Be very careful with how you say things – use the words they’d use!

Knowing who you are talking to is the foundation to believable characters and effective messages.

3. Ignoring the value of a good script

The script is the bedrock of all great videos. It’s like the first step in a journey – you need to take it with confidence and a clear sense of where you’re going. Yet, some people take this step lightly and don’t flesh out the script as they should.

An effective video script will have a clear message and provide a brief yet informative look into your brand. It’ll define your characters, your scenarios and what will be said. It’ll also determine the whole video structure, the backbone of it all.

The best way to build this backbone is to focus on 4 aspects or key moments:

• Present the problem – talk about the issues your potential customers are having.
• Introduce your solution – tell everyone watching “you have this problem? Here’s how to solve it”
• Explain how it works – just promising a solution won’t cut it. Show your audience how you’ll solve their problem.
• Call your audience to action – invite your audience to learn more, check some numbers or whatever call to action you wish to promote.

Let’s see one of the most memorable examples of the last couple of years: Yes, you got it, it’s Dollar Shave Club.

This video not only presents a classic structure, subverting its tone a little bit to fit a very refreshing and somewhat sarcastic humor. And on top of a very tight script, the direction is also excellent, managing to converge the words, the camera movements and the actor’s blocking perfectly. Very nice.

4. Neglecting the video’s quality

We’re way past the times where having an ok video was enough. People grew accustomed to high-quality content and won’t even pay attention to anything that looks cheap. So, although you might feel tempted to do so, don’t skimp on your video’s budget.

The right way to look at an explainer video is to see it as an investment. When done properly, these videos can bring in new leads, increase brand awareness and visibility and make you look trustworthy. You can’t get all that without the high-quality factor that makes you stand out from the crowd.

What does high quality mean when talking about explainer videos? Great animation, perfect editing, clean and crisp sound, professional voiceover and a unique tone. That’s a lot of things to tackle but that’s why there are video companies that offer their services exclusively focused on these kinds of videos.

To exemplify all of the factors above, let’s watch this explainer video template conundrum mix, that’s basically everything that is wrong with explainer videos:

Can you see it? Let’s summarize:

• Poor drawing and animation quality
• Lack of branding and customization
• Mediocre direction and script

5. Focusing on features

People don’t want to hear about your complex algorithm and its overwhelming processing powers, at least not at this stage. They don’t care about how well your product tested in some boring test.

What they truly want to hear is how all of those things will make their lives better. Instead of the algorithm’s power, make them see the time they’ll save by using it. Don’t talk about the test, paint the scenario where that test means more security or satisfaction. Don’t throw out pretty technical names for your features, make it clear how those features will solve their problems.

In short, you don’t want your video to sound like a list of tech specs that will only impress the people in the know. Focus on the benefits. Bring your message down to an emotional level. People have to picture themselves using your product and be able to see how good it’ll all be. You can’t get that with a boring list.

6. Sounding too serious

I know you take your business seriously – we all do! However, that doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with your video. I’ve said it above but it bears to be said once again: people want to be entertained. If your video can do it, you’re halfway to marketing heaven.

Of course, being funny doesn’t work for everybody, yet you should consider it before dismissing the idea. A more relaxed tone can go a long way. There are several things you can try to spice things up:

•         Work your story up to a punchline or joke
•         Put in a surprise at the least expected part
•         Do something wacky or really different for your industry

Let’s take a look at the following example:

7. Not planning for launch

Many people worry all too much about getting everything about the video production right that they end up forgetting about planning the next steps. You don’t want to be ambushed by this mistake just a few steps away from the goal line – you need to know what you’ll do with your finished video!

There are several things you can plan beforehand, yet you shouldn’t forget about the top 3, namely:

•         The video in your overall marketing strategy. Where will you use it? What do you want out of it? Which other marketing techniques can you use to make it more visible?
•         The video hosting. Yeah, you’d probably think YouTube is the right answer, always. But why end there? Perhaps it is a good idea to consider other hosts, like Vimeo, Facebook, Wistia.
•         The video on your website. Use it in one of the best places where it can make a difference. Using it in your homepage seems like a must, but does your homepage have the proper space for it?

Many people have already made these mistakes. So, let’s loosely follow Wilde’s thought and let’s name them “collective experience”, an experience from which you can learn without actually having to make the mistakes. Doesn’t that sound great?

For decades, the sleepy U.S. backwater of Point Roberts, Wash., has been overrun by foreigners — Canadians.

They’ve come to buy recreational property, buy cheap gas and dairy products, and drink way too much beer at The Breakers and Kiniski’s Reef Tavern on the Strait of Georgia waterfront.

More recently, as the value of the Canadian dollar dictates, they’ve also come to collect online purchases from shipping and receiving outlets, some so close to the border that individuals can walk across to get their parcels.

Today, a new wave of foreigners is hitting the scenic shores of Point Roberts, south of Tsawwassen — Chinese investors, buying up a marina, golf course and waterfront property for housing developments.

Businessman Wayne Knowles, a Canadian-U. S. citizen who’s lived in Point Roberts for 25 years and has a finger in all the big projects, believes Chinese buyers could be the economic saviour for the 13-square-kilometre peninsula.

“I believe so, thank goodness,” he said. “Their money is coming into Point Roberts, which we desperately need.

“We’ve seen a whole bunch of activity. Point Roberts will be much different five years from now.”

While the vast majority of property buyers in Point Roberts remain non-Chinese (mostly people looking for relatively inexpensive recreational homes), they don’t represent the big-ticket property buyers.

“They (Chinese) are looking for good opportunities and Point Roberts has just been sitting here,” Knowles said. “It’s been a diamond in the rough forever. People are finally coming down here and seeing how beautiful it is.”

Others are taking a more cautious approach. 

Point Roberts has always had economic ups and downs, but little ultimately changes.

Realtor Paul Rusk, another dual citizen, said that when he started in the industry 26 years ago he sold lots for $20,000 apiece and that’s still the case. It can take two years to buy or sell a property, simply because prices fluctuate little and no one has a sense of urgency.

A sampling of recent property sales include: US$164,900 for an 800-square-foot home, built in 1955, with beach rights; $649,500 for a 3,420-square-foot home, built in 1993, on Marine Channel; and US$1.18 million for an architecturally designed 1,833-square-foot home, built in 1995, on a waterfront bluff overlooking the Strait of Georgia.

“Waterfront or view properties have gone up a little,” said Rusk. “But I tell my clients it’s a lifestyle purchase not a financial purchase.”

His clients are not Chinese investors interested in money-making ventures, but those making recreational or lifestyle choices. He laughs at suggestions that people on witness-protection programs are relocated to Point Roberts. “This is the last place. There’s no jobs, and you know everybody who’s here.”

Some of the more high-profile residents of Point Roberts in recent years have included ex-Canucks coach John Tortorella and actor Katee Sackhoff, who rented a home during filming of the TV series Battlestar Galactica in Vancouver. 

As in any community, the interests of business do not necessarily match those of ordinary residents.

Mark Robbins, president of the Point Roberts Taxpayers Association, notes that about 1,300 permanent residents enjoy the peace and tranquillity of the point and can be wary of change.

“A lot of people are intuitively uneasy with change,” he said. “You cross that border and it’s a giant relief, especially at night time — a dark rural community, no sidewalks, no street lights. That’s what a lot of people like.”

But they also recognize the need for more services in the community, where residents are often forced to drive to Tsawwassen to eat out. And few people would complain if development spurred an increase in property values, which have stagnated compared with the soaring values in recent years in Metro Vancouver. Robbins hasn’t heard locals express any negative sentiments toward the Chinese investors, who are spotty visitors to the community.

As Knowles tells it, the new wave of investment started five years ago when a Chinese lawyer friend of his in Vancouver put him in touch with Beijing businessman Gao Zhu, who went on to acquire 51 per cent of Seabright Farm, a relatively pricey strata project being developed by Knowles and another business partner, Anders Kruus of Seattle.

Seabright consists of 62 building lots on 25 hectares on a bluff with ocean views, swimming pool and fresh vegetables for your dinner.  

Knowles said that Zhu is a friend of Beijing billionaire Chen Yihong, chair of China Dongxiang, a sportswear company boasting the popular Kappa-brand products in China and Japan.

Yihong visited Zhu and “fell in love with Point Roberts” and the two teamed up in May 2015 to buy Point Roberts Marina for $27 million, with Yihong owning a 90-per-cent share, Knowles said.

The marina’s old docks are being upgraded and the number of slips reduced to 600 from 900 to accommodate larger pleasure craft. Long-term plans call for housing, a spa, clubhouse, restaurant/nightclub, swimming pool and tennis courts, said Knowles, who is also vice-president of development for the marina. 

Yihong has also purchased two houses and a 2.5-hectare piece of high-bluff waterfront property on Marine Drive worth a total of US$4.6 million, Knowles said.

His purchases may have stirred interest in Point Roberts among other Chinese. “He’s very ambitious … and very well known,” Knowles said. “Once he purchased here, others found out about it. ‘If he’s investing, it must be a good deal.'”

In July this year, Coco Luo, a Canadian permanent resident living in Richmond for the last three years, but originally from Hunan Province, bought the 18-hole Point Roberts Golf and Country Club for US$4.5 million with two partners, all of them real-estate developers from China.

Luo is managing partner, an avid golfer with a 12-handicap, and owns two golf courses in China.

In an interview with the help of an interpreter, she said work is underway to bring the golf course up to snuff, with a projected reopening date no later than spring 2018 as Bald Eagle Golf Club at Point Roberts.

There are also plans to develop a clubhouse and 60 homes around the golf course, with land clearing beginning this month. 

Luo said Yihong is a friend and that investments by him and other Chinese people in Point Roberts “more or less” proved a factor in her decision to buy the golf course. 

She was also impressed by the fact the soils under the course allow for golfing over winter when other courses are sopping wet, and the site’s close location to Vancouver and Richmond, with its high proportion of Chinese immigrants and potential golf clientele.

“It’s not just a commercial project, to just sell all the lots and get the money,” she said, emphasizing the investment coincides with her passion for the sport.

Knowles added that another Chinese-owned company, 1350 Lundrigan LLC, with Richmond investors, in October 2016 paid US$3 million for 10 hectares of waterfront bluff property across from the golf course on Marine Drive in hopes of developing 19 estate lots. Knowles is a consultant on that development.

It’s also worth noting that Kiniski’s Reef Tavern, the last bar standing on the point, is for sale for US$1.6 million. The owner, Nick Kiniski, is son of the late wrestling champion Gene Kiniski, who described himself as “Canada’s greatest athlete,” despite living in Blaine, Wash. “If I had big bucks … I’d redo it all and put a nice condo on top and keep the bar open and live here, but that’s not in the cards for me,” Kiniski told Postmedia News. 

And nearby at an old cannery site on Marine Drive, the faded yellow paint on a prominent wood-frame waterfront building may finally get some sprucing up.

The 17,000-square-foot facility, built in the late 1990s, is proposed for expansion to 37,000 square feet as part of the $15-million development of the 30-room Blackfish Resort — offering much-needed accommodation on the peninsula, complete with a spa and restaurant dining, styled after Tofino’s Wickaninnish Inn.

The dream of Steve O’Neill, a carpenter, is not new. In 2009, the Bellingham Herald trumpeted O’Neill’s plan to create Blackfish Resort. He said at the time he hoped to start construction in 2010 and have the resort open by spring 2012.

What’s taken so long? “I ran out of money,” concedes O’Neill, who holds a contract to develop the property and is in talks with investors. “I’ve put more than $1 million into the project. My whole life savings have gone into this.” He hopes to have the necessary building permits secured soon and a sod turning perhaps by year end. “It’s taken a long time, but it certainly is moving forward.” 

Whether all these good intentions change the face of Point Roberts forever or are simply more bumps on a sleepy country road remains to be seen. 

Dean Jones, owner and CEO of Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty in Seattle, said he is not surprised Point Roberts is starting to catch the attention of Chinese investors. Jones said that over the past several years Chinese investors have become dominant buyers in Seattle’s real estate market and driven price increases, in an echo of the Chinese-investor boom that he said has occurred for the past 20 years in Metro Vancouver. 

He said that increasingly in Seattle and “tertiary” markets across Washington state, institutional and individual Chinese investors are seeking out residential, commercial, and “lifestyle” property assets such as golf courses, vineyards and vacation property.

The trend is partly driven by large investors who realize tourism and immigration from China is on the rise in Washington. Some of these Chinese investors are seeking large assets such as marinas and hotels in immigration-investment programs, he said. Also, as prices skyrocket in major urban centres favoured by international investors in B.C. and Washington, investors are turning their attention to undiscovered markets, according to Jones.

“Point Roberts is a unique little slice of real estate, because it is America, but it’s accessible through B.C.,” Jones said. “It doesn’t surprise me that someone wants the Vancouver lifestyle at a fraction of the price.”

But do a few big investments from China predict a Point Roberts boom?

Jones said believes that the volume of real estate investment from China is so large that buyers are recognizing they can follow fellow Chinese investors into newer pockets of interest and “create self-fulfilling prophecies of rising markets.”

“Once these relatively obscure markets are on the map, it becomes like a self-priming pump,” Jones said.

Rusk, the local realtor, is accepting of the status quo, which includes running through the woods or cycling the back routes with a good chance of not seeing another human being.

“This is how we want it,” he concludes. “This is why we’re here.”

lpynn@postmedia.com

with file from Sam Cooper

 

Some 82% of B2B buying committees now include at least one Millennial employee, according to recent research from SnapApp and Heinz Marketing. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Classroom training.

Those two words can make even the most seasoned professionals cringe. After all, by the time we’re entrenched in the business world, we think we’ve long since left the classroom behind.

But the fact remains, there is still a place for classroom environments in some business scenarios—and immersive sales training is one of those areas. In fact, SiriusDecisions recently released its State of Onboarding 2017, and 73% of top-performing (and even 73% of less-than top performing) organizations still rely on classroom training to onboard new sales reps.

But, it’s not all classroom, all the time.

For training to be successful, variety is essential.

The second most popular onboarding method is self-paced job aids, with 66% of top-performers utilizing this method. This—of course—makes sense in our digital driven, self-service world, especially as digital natives become the majority of the workforce. (Did you know that millennials are poised to make up half of the workforce in just three years?!)

Here’s a glimpse of the most popular onboarding methods directly from the report, which surveyed B2B sales enablement professionals who have been in role at least two years, from 45 different industries. You’ll notice that while both top and low performers utilize classroom training equally, top-performers rely heavily on self-paced job aids, there is a significant delta to low performers, which is quite telling.

Overall, high-performing organizations deploy all 12 of these methods more than low-performing organizations, and it makes sense. We all learn differently, and the best way to impact absorption is providing content in a variety of ways with repetition. It’s a case of using traditional, established methods like classroom training and mentorship with new, innovative ideas such as in-context training, gamification, and formal e-learning. To help sales reps succeed, it’s important to offer options that meet the different ways people learn best.

Taking it into the field

As valuable as it is, no amount of training can replace the real-world practice of talking to customers—dealing with real-world scenarios, special requests, and questions—and that’s why virtually all survey respondents reported that their organizations require first-line sales managers, field sales coaches, or the sales enablement team to formally observe new reps’ field activity in real-life, buyer-facing scenarios. There is simply no substitute for interacting with buyers. You’ll notice that top performers require the most observations—with a quarter requiring more than 20 observations.

Field practice drives confidence, lets sellers practice with an experienced partner backing them, and ultimately helps enforce to the seller that s/he has the support of the organization. Obtaining selling certifications also signifies a certain level of confidence in buyers—that they are working with an organization that values its client relationships and will provide them with sales reps who will work to meet their evolving needs.

How much is enough?

Successfully onboarding sales reps is more of an art than a science. Finding the sweet spot of the right amount of formal and informal onboarding takes trial-and-error and listening to your reps. While it can be tempting to try to cram a lot of information into a short window of time, the best results come from more of a “drip” method—continuous training and support over a longer period.

If you look at average onboarding volume with all delivery methods considered, you’ll see that somewhere between 6-10 days is the most popular amongst high-performing organizations, but those who provide ongoing training outnumber low-performers by 2-to-1. We’ve seen time and again with Highspot clients that ongoing training through in-context, quick-to-consume modules can provide measurable improvements in time-to-close and overall sales volume.

Read more in the State of Onboarding 2017 report

While I have summarized some of the more salient points of the report, if you’re currently assessing your organizations onboarding programs—or even if you’re not—the full report is a helpful, interesting read about how your peers approach sales team preparation.

Ordinarily, you must be a SiriusDecisions member to access its research, but you can download the State of Onboarding 2017 report with our compliments.

We love e-books. They’re an awesome way to build relationships with people, provide valuable content, and, of course, get leads. But a well-crafted e-book takes work: great content, great e-book design, and great promotion. Since you’re putting in the time and energy, you should be getting as much out of it as you can. But a lot of times we see marketers set one live and leave it behind the gate. Sure, it will get some eyes. But there are some simple and clever ways to turn all that great information into even more valuable content.

We want to see you get the most out of your work, so we’re sharing some of our favorite ways to reuse, repurpose, remix, and reinvent your e-books. We hope it inspires you to dig into your archive and give new life to old content.

1) Infographics

Good e-book design is inherently visual, whether you use rich illustrations, eye-catching imagery, or detailed data visualization. These visuals are already on hand, so why not turn them into an infographic or mini graphic? Not only are infographics highly shareable but publishers are eager to enhance their stories with these types of visuals. Turning e-book information into an interesting infographic puts you on the fast track to more views. (Find out more about how to make publishers fall in love with your content.)

Example: We helped Highfive turn data from a company report into a shareable infographic.

2) Webinars

If you want to really build a relationship through content, some good old-fashioned interaction will do it. Your e-book has a wealth of valuable knowledge, which you can easily share via a webinar. These are particularly great because they give you a chance to really demonstrate your expertise, and they give participants a chance to engage, ask questions, and have a personal interaction with you. Also, if you record your first webinar, you can post it as gated content, giving people yet another avenue to the info.

3) Interactive infographics

Interactivity is a great technique to create interesting, engaging content experiences. E-books have plenty of valuable info that might benefit from the interactive treatment. (Heck, you can even make your e-book interactive.) Say your e-book is about small business tax forms; you could make a quick interactive tool that guides readers through filling out the forms. (See the interactive we created for Intuit that does just that.)

Example: We worked with Microsoft to create their Anatomy of a Breach interactive website, which includes animated data visualizations that show how prevalent the crime is.

4) Blog posts

Sometimes people will take a collection of blog posts and turn it into an e-book, but reverse-engineering is a great way to tease the e-book and bring in different audiences. You might turn a whole chapter into a meaty blog post. You might spin a sidebar into an interesting article. You might expand on topics not comprehensively covered in the e-book, then kick readers to the e-book to find out more. It’s a great way to maximize your reach. (Learn more about a divisible content strategy to get ideas to do this.)

5) Presentations & Misc Collateral

When you think about repurposing any sort of content, whether it’s e-books, infographics, or data visualizations, consider every communication touchpoint an opportunity to reuse existing information. You might use an e-book data visualization to enhance a presentation. You might reuse a diagram in a sales brochure. You might even create a visual press release with e-book info. There are more ways to reuse it than you’d think.

Example: We partnered with the Gates Foundation to design a highly visual presentation, using data visualizations to make the information easier to synthesize.

6) Motion Graphics & Videos

People LOVE video and motion graphics. (Haven’t you noticed your FB feed full of them?) They’re easy to consume. Just press play and watch. They can also save time in explaining concepts or delivering a story. Your e-book probably has lots of opportunities to tell a narrative story in a motion graphic.

7) Animated Infographics and GIFS

Animated infographics and GIFS aren’t quite the same as interactives. (Interactives require the viewer to do something that triggers an action; animated content does it on its own.) But they can also be a great way to bring content to life. An interesting data visualization GIF series can enhance a blog post or be shared on social. An animated infographic will catch someone’s eye in a blog.

Example: We partnered with Takepart to create a set of GIFS that highlights important statistics about veterans’ mental health. Though simple, the animated data visualizations make a powerful statement.

8) Podcast

This doesn’t mean you turn your e-book into an audiobook, but it can provide plenty of fodder to fill a podcast episode. You might use a chapter as a prompt for a roundtable discussion. You might break down a single subject and offer your best tips on it. You might have a debate between two experts. It isn’t always just about repurposing a visual. Information is information, and it can be translated into any format.

9) Microcontent

Microcontent is one of the easiest ways to repurpose all of your content. What is it? It’s the little stuff you extract to use on social, enhance blog posts, seed through your newsletter, etc. A single stat, data visualization, expert quote, or standalone image can help you promote content quickly and easily. Even better, they can be tailored to different types of people, helping you expand your reach.

Example: We collaborated with the Golden State Warriors Warriors to create a piece of data visualization microcontent to celebrate Stephen Curry’s MVP award.

 

Every brand wants to find new outlets to sell their products or services. Channel marketing allows businesses big and small to increase their sales potential by finding new partners (or channels) willing to join forces with them to achieve better sales and profits.

Today, B2B buyers are increasingly gathering the information they need online. This means less reliance on sellers early in the sales cycle. No matter what your industry, you can drive business growth, engagement, and visibility by partnering with a third-party channel marketing service that is focused on delivering the results you need.

What is Channel Marketing?

Channel marketing is a seller’s plan for moving a product or service through the chain of commerce to the end customer. Channel partners can include distributors, resellers, agents, or any other type of company outside your organization.

One of the best ways to engage with channel partners is for the purpose of addressing a specific need or opportunity you cannot satisfy alone. For example, if you lack the internal resources for effective appointment setting, digital marketing strategizing, or partner recruitment, you can leverage the expertise of a third party to handle it for you.

Uncovering the need, length of time to requirement, and budgetary availability of your leads, as well as other administrative tasks like arranging meetings for your sales team to meet with decision makers, can take up a significant amount of time. By taking on organizational functions that would otherwise waste precious internal resources, a quality third-party provider also helps you improve staff productivity.

5 Ways it Pays to Partner with a Channel Marketing Provider

Here are just five reasons it pays for you to use a third-party channel marketing solutions provider:

1. You have access to experts with the right skill sets. This lets you break out various tasks to people who, because they know the most effective techniques for securing qualified channel marketing partners, can help you achieve the best results.
2. You’ll speed up the sales process. Instead of your internal sales people spending half their time generating meetings and hunting down qualified leads, they can devote more time to actually closing sales.
3. Because they are skilled at gathering, analyzing, and prioritizing relevant data, you get through to the right people who are interested in your product or service.
4. A channel expert helps you accelerate growth by accessing a wide range of prospects.
5. You avoid taking team members away from their core competencies by letting someone else undertake the time-consuming task of lead and opportunity nurturing.

Achieving business growth in a highly competitive market is no easy task. Working with an experienced channel marketing solutions provider lets you turn over the heavy lifting of campaign strategies, offer development, and opportunity management to a bona fide expert.

It’s a cost-effective way to find and attract the right partners for your products and services using a specialized, customized marketing program. You’ll improve your success, connect with more qualified candidates, and boost opportunities by supplying your sales team with high-quality, opt-in leads, all of which have a measured impact on revenue.

Since the first email was sent in 1971, the medium has become the prime form of communication for most marketers.

Say what you want about social media or good old-fashioned sales calls – email as a marketing method has proven time and time again that it is simple, fast, affordable, and effective.

Though email marketing has been around for years, it has continued to evolve, with marketers looking for small tips & tricks they can use to boost their open and click-through rates.

Often, however, it’s best to go back to basics.

In this article, I’ll share with you the pillars of email marketing best practices, ranging from simple foundational advice to more technical tricks you can implement.

1. Segment Your List

If the main purpose of your email list is to get more customers for your business, you want to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

That means sending the right emails to the right group of people at the right time – and the best way to do this is to segment your list.

The first thing you need to do is identify your segments. This will vary drastically depending on your business.

For example, the Wishpond blog has lists for social media, growth hacking, and lead generation readers, which determine the different types of content our various subscribers receive. If you were a fitness center, you might create different segments for contacts who are interested in weightlifting, fitness classes, and personal training.

The best way to think about these segments is as different subsets of your target market: how does your product differ in the eyes of different types of consumers?

Once you’ve determined these segments, we’re ready to set up the workflows that will help make creating these segments simple.

Using marketing automation, we’ll create multiple lists of subscribers based on the topics they’re interested in. Let’s look at two ways to do this:

Using a form

This method is rather straightforward – it relies on blog or website visitors to segment themselves using an extra field that you’ll add to your subscription flow.

On your subscription popup or landing page, add either a drop down or multiple choice form field with your list of segments. This gives people a greater degree of choice when it comes to the types of emails they’ll receive.

This is generally a good approach if you’re not as confident in segmentation by pageview (more on that below), or if you believe your subscribers will be likely to want content that spans multiple topics.

Once you’ve created your form field, you’ll set up a workflow that assigns people to certain lists based on the “interest” lead property:

Proactive segmentation by pageview/action

While it’s ostensibly less reliable, segmenting your subscribers based on the pages they’ve visited removes the need to directly ask them for their interests, and is also just a neat way to use marketing automation.

All you need to do is create workflows that segment users based on the pages they’ve converted on, instead of segmenting based on a property they’ve assigned themselves.

Let’s continue with our hypothetical fitness center. I’m running ads to three landing pages for my different segments (weightlifting, yoga and personal training), collecting leads to pass on to my sales team and to market to with email drip campaigns.

I’ve created workflows that send each of these leads to a specific list based on interest, so I can tailor and personalize my drip campaigns to contain content specific to each of these types of people. This maximizes the effect of your email marketing efforts, drastically increasing conversion rate.

Marketing to Segments

Creating detailed segments isn’t worth it if you’re not going to personalize the way you’re marketing to them. Set up a new drip campaign for each of your segments containing content that they would find interesting.

For example, my weightlifting segment might receive emails like “5 Tips to Boost Your Bench Press” or “3 Six-Pack Shortcuts”, while my personal training segment might receive content like “How 95% of Our Clients Achieved Their Goals in 3 Months”. It’s up to you to identify the type of content that will resonate with each segment to maximize the chances you’ll convert them.

2. Spend Time on Subject Lines

When writing our emails, about half of the time we spend on each email is devoted to creating an intriguing subject line.

When writing a subject line, it’s important to keep your eye on the prize – namely, an email open. While a click-through to your final destination (whether that’s content, a landing page, or something else) and a subsequent conversion are the main goals of your email, your subject line is built almost solely to capture your subscribers’ attention and get them to open your email.

Why? It’s safe to assume your subscribers’ email inboxes are a digital Hunger Games arena, with emails from countless businesses (including yours!) vying for those precious, precious opens.

As a result, it’s important to follow subject line best practices to help you survive the mailbox battle royale.

Here are the most important ones:

• Cater to your audience: Write a subject line that connects directly with your audience’s interests. For example, if you’re an apparel company mailing your “Female” segment, you could say something like “Save 40% On Women’s Fall Fashion!”.
• Use merge tags: Though this a tip all on its own, using a merge tag in the subject line itself can have a huge impact on email performance. I know I’m more likely to open an email that has my name in it: “Carlo, you’re one step away from 30 free email templates!”.

• Keep it short: Subject lines that are too long will be cut off in your readers’ inboxes. Keep it as short as possible so you don’t lose the meaning in your messaging.
• Test emojis!: Who says email can’t be fun? Try adding some spice to your subject lines with an emoji or two… But, as usual, test them out and see how your audience responds to them.

• Put a time on it: Generally, people like to minimize the number of things they have to do – which means they won’t take an action unless they feel pressured to do so. Showing how much time is left in your offer (“Only 3 days left to get 50% off!”) will increase urgency and boost opens.

• Communicate value: Your subscribers shouldn’t need to open your emails to see what they’ll get out of clicking through on them. Showing them the benefit right away will make them more likely to click, and will reduce any lurking ambiguity.

Following these should-do’s will give you a solid foundation on which to build your email subject lines, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of this facet of email marketing. Test headlines often so you can see what works best for you and your audience.

3. Keep a Close Eye on Metrics

When it comes to email marketing, the numbers don’t lie. As is the case with all of your other marketing tactics, you should be watching your analytics like a hawk.

Particularly, it’s essential to keep an eye on:

• Open rates: Your open rates are representative of the effectiveness of your subject lines, as well as the “gravity” that your brand name governs.
• Click-through rates: Click-through rates are generally representative of the content within your emails – if it sounds interesting, you’re more likely to get people clicking through. It’s also inherently affected by your offer. A 30% discount on a brand new product, for example, is probably more exciting than a new blog post.
• Bounce rates: As opposed to being indicative of email marketing performance, your bounce rate is a good measure of list health. A high bounce rate might mean an incorrectly imported list, or an old list with stale or inactive emails.
• Landing page conversion rates: Though this isn’t technically a part of your email, it’s an impactful section within your funnel that shouldn’t be ignored. Your page conversion rates are generally representative of on-page conversion rate optimization, but can also be indicative of the expectations you’re setting up for visitors.

Though all of these are important, the first two statistics are the ones that are directly impacted by changes in your email marketing strategies.

Continue testing and optimizing your email campaigns to maximize both of these numbers, and you’ll find your email marketing efforts bring you better results.

4. Use Merge Tags

One of the many benefits of using a single platform to manage your list-building campaigns, your contacts, and your emails is the ability to better personalize your email marketing campaigns based on the information you have on your contacts.

And as far as personalization goes, merge tags are a game-changer, making it incredibly simple to populate your emails with information you’ve gathered from the people on your mailing list.

Their uses vary greatly – whether it’s something as simple as saying “Hey <>” instead of “Hey there!”, or dynamically changing the bulk of the content in your email based on a user’s interests or geographical location, merge tags can take your email marketing efforts to the next level.

Remember, you can only populate merge tags with information you already have about your contacts, whether that’s information they gave you themselves or information you added to their contact profiles based on specific actions they took. As a result, your options may be limited based on how extensive your lead generation forms are.

A few use cases for merge tags:

• Sending your prospective customers information (time, date, etc.) on their upcoming sales call
• Reminding a customer they’re due for an appointment (e.g. “It’s been {{timesincelast_appointment}} since your last checkup!)
• Asking people if they’re satisfied with a purchase (e.g. “Are you happy with your {{lastitempurchased}}?)

5. Hone Your CTAs

Your CTA is the final email touchpoint readers encounter before they’re whisked away to your landing page, blog, or whatever destination you’ve chosen for them.

As a result, you need to craft a CTA that helps push your viewers that extra little bit so they click through and end up at their intended destination.

Experiment with different types of CTAs, playing with their wording and placement to maximize click-throughs. Generally, you want to write a CTA that’s action-oriented and specific to the email they’re reading.

For example, an CTA linking to a blog post about healthy recipes might say “Get 5 Free Healthy Recipes!”, but a discount email might have a CTA saying “Get 40% Off Now!”

6. Create a Simple Branded Design

When choosing your email marketing platform, try to pick one that features a variety of templates. The last thing you want to worry about when you’re fussing over your email copy and subject line is how to make your email look nice.

Take a default template and edit it slightly by adding your logo and changing the colors of buttons, text and other elements to fit your company’s branding guidelines as well as possible. Save this template (or duplicate this email) so you can reuse it in the future and create a consistent experience for your readers.

7. A/B Test Your Emails

As is the case with every other step of your marketing funnel, extensively testing your emails is a key step to finding success and driving sales.

Make A/B testing the emails in your various drip campaigns a habit, so you’re constantly optimizing for the best results to maximize your email marketing ROI.

Though you can test two drastically different emails, I’d test conservatively so you can come away with specific takeaways for each of your experiments. Testing a single element at a time allows you to see exactly what effect each element is having on your email.

A list of things to A/B test in your email:

• Subject line
• CTA text
• Design/layout
• Length
• Copy
• Sender
• Types of content

8. Send a Variety of Content

When you’re first getting into email marketing, it’s a good idea to play with a variety of content types to find out what your audience likes best – don’t rely on existing data to make assumptions about the people who sign up for your list.

For example, our SEO-focused social media content drastically outperforms other content when it comes to traffic, but it pales in comparison to deep-dive case studies and growth hacking articles when it comes to email engagement.

Had we taken our existing statistics for granted, we would’ve started sending exclusively social media content, missing out on precious email opens and click-throughs.

So, get a feel for your audience’s engagement. Do they respond best to list posts? Maybe they like receiving video tips, or simple discounts. Whatever it may be, try sending a variety of content early on so you can come to a conclusion that’s statistically significant.

9. Build Your Own List

As tempting as it may be to give into sites that promise to give you large lists of emails for a couple bucks, don’t.

Besides being morally ambiguous, it’s just not worth it. If you think about email marketing as a whole, your goal is to create an engaged group of customers (and prospective customers) who read your emails and, hopefully, buy your products.

Building your own list – from scratch – means every single person on that list is someone who has converted on a list-building form or signed up for your newsletter, which points to them being people who have at least some interest in your business or products.

Put the work into creating your very own list of subscribers, and you’ll be rewarded with higher engagement, more opens, and increased conversions.

Wrapping it up

There you have it: 9 best practices that will help you create a solid email marketing strategy. Whether you’re new to email marketing or are a veteran of the medium, I hope these tips have taught you a new thing or two.

Any cool new email marketing techniques you’ve seen lately? Let me know in the comments below!

Are you considering firing an underperforming salesperson? Such a drastic step might not be necessary.

But before you solve the problem (or decide it’s not solvable), you must identify what is preventing the rep from meeting or exceeding expectations.

Here are three common issues:

1) They lack the capability to perform the job

In other words, they don’t have the necessary skills, knowledge, or experience. This might sound like a dealbreaker, but if the rep has the desire and ability to learn and improve, you can work through this scenario.

2) They are not putting in enough effort

Sales results can often be correlated with activity levels (calls, emails, meetings, events, etc.). If a rep is not performing well, it could be as simple as the level of effort they are putting in.

3) They do not know what to do

The rep may not know which contacts and accounts to pursue, how to get their foot in the door, or what to say when communicating with prospects.

Knowing the root cause will determine how you use the following tips.

Focus On What to Do vs. What Not to Do

If you have an underperforming sales rep, you are probably not happy with many of the things that they are doing (or not doing). Improve their performance and salvage the relationship you have with them by focusing more on what you want them to do than what you don’t.

When someone doesn’t do something correctly, our natural reaction is pointing out what they did wrong:

• “Don’t do it like that.”
• “You aren’t doing it right.”
• “You shouldn’t have done it that way.”

You can communicate the same point while highlighting the correct action. Not only does this approach improve their performance, it’s also better for their confidence.

• “I would like to see you do it this way.”
• “The best way to do that is ...”
• “Try this next time.”

Provide Sales Training

After you identify what’s preventing your sales rep from performing, review the training that you provide your sales team to determine if it’s an area you are currently helping your reps with. If you are not, providing more training in that particular area will improve current and future performance across the team.

Establish Regular Check-Ins

Set aside time with your reps for one-on-one sales coaching to discuss what is working well and what isn’t. Build an action plan for improving performance and then tracking progress along the way.

Practice Handling Objections and Asking Questions

A sales rep’s ability to surface and resolve objections will directly impact their level of sales performance. If you have a rep that does not know what to do or say in certain situations, you may be able to greatly improve their performance with training.

The same principle applies to questioning skills. If you have a rep who’s not selling enough, observe how they ask questions. Are they willing to probe when necessary? Do they use a variety of question styles to get the information they need? Are they primarily asking open-ended questions?

Increase Activity 

If poor sales performance stems from lack of effort, ask the rep to increase their activity level by setting goals or targets for some of these common activity types:

• Calls made
• Appointments set
• Meetings held
• Events attended
• Leads generated
• Quotes/proposals provided
• Presentations/demos delivered

Incorporate Gamification

One technique to help salespeople increase their activity levels is to gamify selling. Try creating a score for each rep’s activities and results. This can increase their enthusiasm, motivation, and competitiveness.

Role Play

Practice and role play common sales scenarios with your reps. They’ll make mistakes with you -- instead of their prospects -- enabling you to discover and fix where they are going wrong.

Establish an Open Line of Communication

If you have a sales rep that is not doing well, they will likely be confused, frustrated, concerned, unhappy, and stressed. Building a relationship where the rep feels comfortable sharing these thoughts and feelings with you will greatly improve your ability to help and correct their path.

Lead conversion is something every business owner and marketer struggles with, but lead conversion is the endpoint of a long process of building trust through content.

All the content on your website has a single purpose — establishing trust with potential customers.

But the trust dies the minute they see an issue on your contact page.

The whole point of having a contact page is to make sure prospects have both correct contact information and easy access to customer support reps.

In fact, 51% of users believe that thorough contact information is the most important element on any website. Thus, a poor contact page can kill your conversions in a jiffy.

(Learn more powerful lead conversion strategies with the Blue Steele Solutions ebook 13 Steps to a Clear Marketing Strategy — click the button to check it out now).

Lead Conversion Depends on a Good Contact Page

Let’s get one thing straight: If you’re expecting to get any conversions, from simple contacts all the way to high-value sales, you have to first build trust with your potential customers — no one is going to buy from a website they don’t trust.

A faulty contact page with unnecessary, incorrect, or misleading info is not going to go over well with prospects. In fact, 44% of website visitors will bounce off your website (and likely never return) if they don’t get relevant contact information.

If you just felt a surge of anxiety and realized that your contact page is not up to the mark, you don’t have to go through the painful process of an entire makeover for the page. With some smart and cost effective tweaks, you can use the contact page to drive business growth.

So let’s dive into this topic: lead conversion optimization. Here are five contact page tweaks to help your convert more.

1. Get Your Grammar (and Punctuation) Right

Let’s eat dad!

Let’s eat, dad!

Such silly punctuation mistakes can make your brand a laughing stock of the internet world, or at the very least, make you lose trust in the eyes of your customers.

Users might engage with you for cheap laughs, but they are never going to buy from you. The minute you get your commas or P’s and Q’s wrong, 59% of prospects are already running out the door.

To establish contact page credibility, come up with a solid proofreading system that leaves no opening for grammar nazis to attack. If your contact page copy uses jargon and slang to grab attention that’s acceptable, only if you know the rules well and know when (and how) to break them.

Here are few tips on how you can come up with a proofreading system that allows prospects to build trust:

• Beware homonyms — carefully check words that share the same spelling or pronunciation but have different meanings. Be extra cautious of words like complement and compliment as they can create confusion and lead prospects to abandon your page.
• Read it sdrawkcab — Reading what you’ve written backwards can help you see missing words or slight misspellings that you miss when reading normally as your brain fills in the information that it knows is supposed to be there — reading backwards forces you to evaluate what you’ve written as it really is.
• Check and recheck contact details — It’s the single most important piece of information on your contact page, so you can’t afford to get your contact details wrong. Adding 6 instead of a 9 in your phone number will put a major dent in your lead conversion for the month.
• Get some fresh eyes — To make sure you didn’t miss anything, ask a colleague or a friend to have a look at the copy. A second set of eyes often sees mistakes right away as your friend has no preconceived notions about what you’ve written.

2. Add Images of People, Not Buildings

Your prospects want to be assured that there is actual human involvement in the sales process. When your contact page has a high degree of ‘Human appeal’, users find a certain sense of comfort and lead conversion increases.

Take out that stock image of the shiny buildings or glittery skylines — it serves no purpose. Instead, add images of people, your team members, and provide short bios. This information helps prospects to find the right person to resolve their query.

By highlighting human presence, prospects will perceive you to be people-centric. When leads see you as a customer support engine that cares, there is a gradual shift in their behavior as well.

The Psychology of Reciprocity encourages prospects to show you the same level of care and generosity, and lead conversion increases.

Zapier, a tool used to integrate web applications, has made a conscious effort to humanize their contact page. A series of questions are asked which help reps in understanding the context of each user’s issue. At the same time, users are able to find the right person to resolve their unique issues.

3. Create a Roadmap to Improve Lead Conversion

To increase lead conversion on your contact page, provide links to useful information and label each link clearly. Whether it’s self-service tools or active support, make sure your customers can easily find the precise service they need. The design of the page should support this goal, organizing information as clearly and simply as possible.

The idea is to create a roadmap that helps users easily and quickly find all the support solutions at their disposal and to select the option that’s right for their needs.

First, make navigation easy: Consolidate all support options on one page. When all the information is in one place in a concise, clear, obvious organization, the utility of your contact page shoots up (along with your lead conversion!).

Second, keep your active support vigilant and highly responsive. When prospects send emails, your support team needs to be quick in responding to them.

To be on top of things, every support rep should be extensively trained and shown what to do. Use a shared inbox to assign tasks to each rep and respond to queries effortlessly.

Thus, the efficacy of your contact page depends on your website’s usability and your customer support team’s response time. If either of them fails, chances are prospects will not proceed ahead.

Freshbooks, a cloud-based business accounting application, is a great example of how a business can increase the utility of their contact page by keeping everything in one place.

Whether it’s active support or self-serve resources, everything is available on the same page.

4. Use the Same Brand Elements You Used for Your Homepage

Inconsistency in your branding between your homepage and contact page will slow down prospects and reduce lead conversion rates.

These discrepancies make prospects feel the same way you feel when you walk into a store that looks vastly different inside than it does outside — you feel almost like you’ve been tricked, and you may even turn around and leave. That trust is broken when a lead on your website reaches a page that doesn’t look the way they expected it to.

A homepage is a welcome wagon for users. Establishing branding consistency on every page of your website from the get-go allows prospects to easily move through your website, increasing the probability of lead conversion.

To get you started, here are a few brand elements you need to make sure remain consistent:

• Color — One of the first elements prospects notice is color. Make sure that you apply the same brand colors to your contact page as you have on your home page. If you can’t use your primary color, at least use a secondary color.
• Placement of logo — The placement of the logo should remain the same. Even the alignment should not be compromised.
• Core value offer — Reminding prospects about your core offer is never a bad idea. Use your contact page to re-emphasize your offering, removing any doubts that prospects might have.

Blue Steele Solutions has kept the consistency between its home page and contact page intact. The background is white and the text colors, blue, black and orange, are used on both pages. The re-emphasis of the core offer confirms to leads that they’re in the right place.

Homepage

Contact Page

5. Make Your Website Responsive

Mobile devices account for nearly 2 of every 3 minutes spent online, and Google has been penalizing non-responsive websites for the last two years (at least).

A responsive website is an absolute necessity in today’s world — you need to make sure every page on your website is mobile responsive.

However, there’s one place where even mobile-responsive websites fail — the contact form. Creating a mobile friendly contact form is critical for lead conversion.

A small screen with a complicated keypad doesn’t make it any easier when filling those long and tedious contact forms, so make sure yours displays well and is as simple as you can possibly make it.

To make it user-friendly, cut the long forms into shorter versions, and include only those fields that are necessary.

Ideally, full name, email address, and one phone number, would suffice. This keeps prospects from losing interest, increasing your chances to convert.

Apart from this, make use of collapsable menus and dropdown lists — they can cut down the time needed to browse through a website.

Check out this example:

Final Thoughts on Lead Conversion

To get conversions that surpass your expenses, be proactive when designing your website — Do an extensive brainstorming session on what kind of website you need and how will your contact page fit into that picture.

When you’re clear about the objective of your website, you can more clearly define the purpose of your contact page.

For websites that have been around for a while, employing some of the techniques above can be a simple way of increasing lead conversion and ensuring that you’re not missing out on any potential sales.

Increase Lead Conversions, Traffic, and Retention

If you’re serious about increasing lead conversions, website traffic, and customer retention, check out Blue Steele Solution’s ebook Analyze Your Marketing — 13 Steps to a Clear Marketing Strategy.

Far beyond your website, this ebook will help you look at your current marketing holistically, identify problems and opportunities, and create a marketing plan for the future.

Count the number of times you’ve received emails with opening lines like “Just checking in” or “Circling back!”

Don’t they piss you off?

Your cold email prospects are really no different.

Ankit Prakash of EasySendy backs up that feeling with two shocking statistics:

“The average email open rate is about 22.87% across various industries, which might seem like a significant number. But the average click-through rates on these opens is merely 3.26%.”

People might be opening your messages, but if they aren’t taking action, that’s a failure of your opening line to engage prospects.

If you want prospects to open your messages and get excited about your offering, you need more than the same old, tired, rehashed opening lines.

But first – here’s a quick video to get you in the right mindset for writing killer cold emails:

Here are the WORST email opening lines you absolutely should avoid:

Do better by striking all of the following from your sales vocabulary:

“Hi Prospect, my name is…”

Two problems here:

1. Your recipient can read. They know who sent the message because they saw it in their inbox, next to your email’s subject line. You’ve now wasted their time by repeating information they already know.
2. Prospects don’t care who you are. Not to sound mean, but who you are doesn’t matter when you’re cold emailing. What you can do for your recipient does.

Try This Instead:

Skip the introductory opening line. Jump straight into something that’ll engage recipients, whether that’s a surprising fact, an intriguing question or a clear, concise statement of your offering’s benefits.

“I’m a sales rep for [X company].”

Nobody likes being pitched to – and by introducing yourself as a sales rep, you’re making it clear that you’re about to do just that.

Instant delete.

Try This Instead:

I’m not saying you should attempt to hide the fact that you’re a sales rep from your cold email. You just don’t need to lead with that info. Save the introductions for later in your message – once you’ve caught their attention with the kind of engaging opening line described above.

Recommended Read: How To Write a Cold Email That 33% of Prospects Will Respond To

“I know you’re really busy but…”

Do you know what the second half of this message is?

Even if you don’t state it directly, cold email prospects finish this statement with: “…but I still want to interrupt you.”

We’re all busy. Pandering this way discounts the value of what you have to offer.

After all, your offer should be something so important – so monumental in its impact – that there should be no choice for your prospects but to drop everything and take action.

Try This Instead:

Make your interruption worthwhile. Respect your prospects’ time by offering something that’s clearly valuable – not by minimizing your importance.

“Can you do me a favor”

Don’t make your sales email all about you. Sure, you might need a favor. But what does your prospect need from you before they’ll take action?

Try This instead:

Prove your value before you ask for something. Remove every “I need” or “I want” statement from your opening line in exchange for phrases that focus on benefiting your readers.

Not sure if you’re hitting the right balance? Ask others in your company or network to put a fresh set of eyes on your message. If it reads as too self-centered, they’ll let you know.

“Just checking in.”

Let me be clear. There’s value in following up with cold email recipients. Often, it isn’t that they’re deliberately ignoring you. The timing might just not be right. Following up gives you the chance to reach them at a better time.

It’s the opening line “Just checking in” that I have a problem with. People know how to get ahold of you if they want to. Don’t try to slide in under the radar with this belittling statement.

Try This Instead:

Whether you’re following up once, twice or more often, don’t waste your opening line on something so bland and self-serving. Find different, yet equally engaging ways to demonstrate your value.

Who knows? By testing different questions, data points or value statements in your opening line, you might hit on a winning combination that’ll land you more leads in the long run.

Excessive punctuation (?????? or !!!!!!!)

Image Source: Articulate Marketing

Ever received a message with the opening line “Did you miss this??????”

If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky.

Try This Instead:

Use appropriate punctuation. Like a professional.

Opening lines that miss shared connections

I got a cold email a while back from someone who opened his message with, “Just wanted to introduce myself.”

The problem?

We met in person at a conference a few months before that.

Needless to say, the conversation went nowhere.

Your cold email opening lines are a great place to reference a shared connection or experience, turning a cold message into a slightly warmer one. But that only works if you’re diligent about documenting your relationships and the contact you’ve had with the people in them.

Try This Instead:

Document interactions you’ve had with prospects, then use them to open your sales emails.

Even if you’re using a template-based program to handle your cold email outreach, your provider should offer the opportunity to personalize your opening line based on your connections.

Anything deceptive

This should go without saying, but being deceptive in any part of your cold sales emails – opening lines or otherwise – is a recipe for disaster.

Recently, I received a pitch that opened:

“Sujan – what if I could make you a million dollars richer by the end of the week?”

The sender had my attention, but he lost all credibility getting it. Even if he had a solution that would have put seven figures in my bank account (spoiler alert: he didn’t), he would have needed some pretty compelling evidence to back up that kind of statement.

Try This Instead:

Be as big and bold with your value statements and brand promises as you can, but don’t be deceptive. The short-term wins are never worth the costs to your business in the long run.

Building a Winning Opening Line

At the end of the day, the best cold sales email opening lines are the ones that:

• Capture attention
• Establish credibility
• Make recipients want to read more

If you aren’t sure that your current opening lines are hitting the mark, try split testing them against others that meet these three criteria. You don’t even need formal testing tools to do this – just send one batch using your original opening line and a second using a test variation.

Watch the responses you get. When you’ve nailed your opening lines, you’ll see an increase not only in opens, but in actions taken in response to your message. That might mean clicks, or it might mean replies. Either way, it should mean an improvement in the effectiveness of your cold email campaign.

What other cold email opening lines can’t you stand? Leave a comment below with the worst messages you’ve ever received.

The post Are You Pissing Off Your Prospects With These Annoying Opening Email Lines? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

As your startup grows, what your customers expect from you will change and the volume of their requests will change. You’ll shift from the reactive mode of supporting requests as they happen to the proactive mode of fixing issues before they ever become a problem.

I’ve spent the last seven years building the customer success function at HubSpot. I grew with the team, and played a big role in many of our successes … and failures. Along the way, I’ve talked to hundreds of founders, sales and marketing leaders, customer success VPs, and front-line reps about how to build a customer-first SaaS organization. Here’s how I’d recommend shifting your thinking about customer success as you grow:

Founding Stage (0–5 employees)

At this stage, customer support isn’t your primary focus. It’s likely not even a problem on your radar, nor should it be. Your #1 focus at this stage is product-market fit. Customers are integral to this process because they provide feedback, and every member of your team should be answering support requests, meeting with customers, and thinking about how to build a product that suits the needs of the market.

What to do

• Set up a simple workflow to manage customer requests. This won’t be more than a support@ email address and dedicated support times for each member of the team.
• Meet regularly to review common customer issues and build fixes into your product roadmap.
• Involve your entire team in helping to solve customer problems.
• Stay focused on using customer support as a learning tool to make your product better, and listen carefully–especially to your most vocal, demanding customers.

What not to do

• Don’t optimize for efficiency. Your goal is success. Don’t obsess over metrics like inquiry volume or time to close tickets.
• Don’t let your engineers hack together workarounds that will need to be maintained down the road; provide real engineering solutions to the types of problems new software has.

Early Stage (5–20 employees)

It’s time to hire your first customer-focused employee. This won’t be a “Chief Customer Officer” or a “Customer Success Manager.” They may not even be full-time. This will be someone who is dedicated 100% to helping customers and removing support load from the rest of the team.

Keep in mind that early-stage customer people are different from late-stage customer people. In later stages you’ll want people who think about how to scale through process, training, and systems. Right now you just need someone who cares deeply about helping your customers.

This work is hard and often unglamorous. Play your “founder card” for this person, it will empower them to advocate to engineering to fix recurring bugs and usability issues, push back on sales if (when) they keep selling bad fit customers, and argue with marketing about how to represent the product.

What to do

• Get your communication channels under control. Your customer feedback is coming in through a variety of channels: phone calls to founders, emails to engineers, even the occasional text message. Designate a first official channel (probably a shared inbox and/or live chat) to get in touch with you.
• Add a touch of process, carefully. Set up post-interaction NPS so you can tell if someone is still upset even after an issue is “solved,” start tracking the volume and quality of requests coming in along with metrics relating to revenue (i.e., gross churn rate, dollar-weighted churn rate, upgrade rate), and create some basic email templates to answer the most common questions.
• Start thinking about customer self-service. Write the blog posts that help customers help themselves such as “How to do X-common-goal in our app,” or “How to set up x feature”. Bonus: these articles will make your sales people very happy.

What not to do

Don’t get distracted by shiny things. Your priority is growth, and that’s driven by selling, not by customer success or renewal… yet. There are three very common shiny objects that derail customer success efforts in the early stage:

1. Process improvements to issue routing, issue classification, and automated responses seem reasonable. Don’t do it. Your business model is still in flux, and flexibility is more valuable than efficiency and cost savings.
2. Sophisticated models around churn prediction start looking very tempting. Before you hire a data scientist or implement expensive machine learning software, have a face-to-face conversation with 15 customers.
3. Vocal customers are frustrating and often expensive to support. While it’s not a cardinal sin to lose a customer, be cautious about ignoring your complainers. If you can make them successful they will turn into your most vocal advocates.

Mid Stage (20–100 employees)

Your customer base is growing, and demand for customer support is growing along with it. Your one customer-focused employee has become two (how’d that happen, anyway?), and you’re starting to see the path to having a whole gaggle of customer people very, very soon. You’re asking yourself, “Is this what scale looks like? Or am I screwing up this customer thing?”

What you need to do at this stage is act more deliberately than you have been been so far. It’s time to lay a foundation that you’ll keep for quite some time and do so purposefully. The patterns that you develop at this key stage will grow with you and will spell the difference between running or stumbling as you hit the growth stage.

What to do

• Be intentional about what you measure. For support, add metrics like issue categorization and response/resolution time to your reporting. Start quantifying customer success by tracking lifecycle stages like new customers, successful setup, seeing value, etc.
• Start a knowledge base. Around the 1000 customers mark you’ll know the most common issues customers run into. It’s time to dedicate a full-time person to building your knowledge base and providing customer education support.
• Pick your channels deliberately. You’re outgrowing your shared inbox and starting to think about adding additional channels like phone, forum, and chat. Remember, it’s always easier to add a channel than it is to remove one (customers will recoil at the latter), so be thoughtful about adding new channels to the mix.
• Think carefully about specialization. As you near a team of 6+ you’ll start thinking about specializing. If you do specialize now, it should be around lifecycle stage (e.g., implementation, support). Avoid specializing by customer type (SaaS vs. Ecommerce vs. Automotive) or specific types of problems–your go-to-market is still changing, continue optimizing for flexibility.

What not to do

• Don’t get distracted by cost reduction. Strategies like outsourcing, hiring lower-cost people, or exotic employment offer tempting cost savings to the finance-minded folks. Your team isn’t big enough to really reap the rewards of these efficiencies. Stay focused on revenue growth, not gross margin.
• Don’t use your customer team as a buffer between company and customer. This is so tempting! Watch out for customer teams becoming physically segregated in the office or unplugging from Slack and email–these are the canaries in your coal mine warning you that the customer has stopped being everyone’s job.
• Absolutely no DIY software fixes. Your support and engineering team are tired of the same issues showing up again and again. The quickest solve for your stickiest problems is an admin panel that isn’t good enough for customers, but will empower support to solve a broader range of customer issues. This hack solution fails to solve for the customer and creates an under-maintained thorn in engineering’s flesh. You’ll arrive at the growth stage with sales and marketing pressing the gas while customer success and product struggle to keep up as they untangle years of bad code in the admin panel.

Growth Stage (100–250 employees)

Your company has (mostly) solved product/market fit. You’re scaling, fast. It’s working… congratulations!

As you enter the growth stage, your efforts will shift to making the economics of your business work. The key question you’re answering company-wide is: Can we acquire customers and get at least 3:1 return in our unit economics? Your team and investors will be paying close attention to customer lifetime value, and the customer success side of this equation is retention.

Up until now, your customer team has been focused on the reactive work of customer support, and you need to keep doing that. But you’ll also start building a customer success team responsible for the proactive work of customer retention.

The expanded focus on the customer requires a different type of leader who can manage both the existing team, and build your customer success function. This is a critical hire — you want a proper VP of Customer Success or Chief Customer Officer who is strong operationally, deeply empathetic, technical enough to liaise with engineering, and can grow customer success into a growth lever for the business. If you haven’t been cultivating this person internally, don’t compromise or wing it. Turn to your investors, board, or even headhunters to help make this hire.

What to do

• Give your new customer leader a revenue number. This is a hotly debated topic and ultimately one that’s business-specific. The two most common are net revenue and churn. The important thing is that your customer team has a way to tie their value back to the business in a way that CFOs and investors care about.
• Establish models, not just metrics. You have the data volume needed to tap into the predictive power of models. Get an analytical mind on board to answer questions like: When should we hire our next support person? Is it more valuable to get a customer set up or to collect on a contract? What are some easy plays we could execute that would help us boost revenue?
• Invest in permanent systems. Early on, systems are less important than vendors would have you believe. But by now, you’ve learned about your market, product, and how to best serve your ideal customer. Now is the time to pick tooling that matches your service channels, style, and workflows.

What not to do

Don’t ignore your customer team culture. Customer teams, especially support teams, deal with unhappy customers and a never-ending stream of customer needs, often bearing the brunt of the failures in your product and go-to-market teams. This is hard work that inevitably impacts team well-being. There are three things you cannot afford to overlook at this stage:

1. Don’t ignore cynicism and especially watch for this in more tenured people. When (not if) you start to see evidence of cynicism, don’t delay, it spreads. Toxic daily commentary is never worth it, even it comes from someone with valuable institutional knowledge.
2. Don’t tolerate isolation. Err on the side of over-inclusivity by inviting customer teams to engineering events, sales rallies, and shutting down customer support for company events. Customer people tend to be “always on” and have a strong sense of duty, this is a recipe for isolationism.
3. Don’t put process over people. Customer success people are naturally process thinkers, and while process isn’t the enemy, too much will make people feel like cogs in an, unchangeable machine. Your customer team always needs to be empowered to solve for the customer.

Scale-up (250+)

HubSpot’s CEO, Brian Halligan, defines a scale-up as “Pouring resources in fast and getting a big return on them without the wheels coming off the bus.” You’ve identified your growth levers, now you’re going to see if that math scales.

Scaling up comes with CFO and board pressure to gain efficiency, and the natural tendency of a business will be to squeeze customer teams. Remember, making customers successful is a growth driver in your business. You want to keep costs down, but not at the expense of underinvesting in your customers.

What to do

Your actions at this stage should deliver either predictability or cost savings. There are three areas where you need to sharpen predictability:

1. Team growth: Refine your model to accurately forecast the volume of work over time based on customer demand, hiring needs to keep up with that demand, and key assumptions based on how the team operates (i.e., ticket output/person). You should be able to accurately forecast needs across your customer segments.
2. Management scale: As your team grows from a few to a few dozen, you’ll need to scale management. For specialized customer success teams shoot for an individual contributor to manager ratio of 8:1, for less specialized teams 15:1 or even 20:1 is appropriate. Team leads can help you further scale managers by taking on the bulk of mentoring, coaching, and quality assurance.
3. Individual performance: Small support teams tend to be self-regulating, but as you grow, you’ll need to implement individual performance tracking by measuring ticket volume, close times, upsells, etc. at the rep level. There’s friction in this shift, but if you put it off you’ll end up with huge variation in performance across the team, and scaling predictably becomes tough.

Now let’s talk about cost savings. Until now, you’ve implemented automated process with caution. Now is the time to let loose. Start sending automated alerts to customer success managers when customer behavior indicates churn potential or upsell opportunity, automate your implementation workflow, maybe even build a chatbot to start helping you answer some FAQs. Consider hiring a “customer operations” person to focus on automation full-time.

What not to do

I’ve just spent paragraphs talking about operations, analytics, and efficiency. At this stage, you too will spend lots of time talking about operations. And this comes with a critical word of warning: Do not lose your obsessive customer-focus.

• Don’t fall prey to analysis paralysis. You’re tracking metrics like customer health, renewal rate, support interactions, and more. But your customer team needs a north star, not a conglomeration of dozens of metrics. Simplify metrics goals, and be careful about inundating them with so much analysis that they lose focus.
• Don’t lose sight of the sharp edges in your customer experience. Your team has put temporary fixes in place that ask customers to send an email to this address, upload this .csv file, or click this random button. Now it’s time to take process weight off customers and put permanent engineering fixes in place. You’ll also want to audit your support channels — add live chat, phone support, be super easy to work with.
• Don’t ignore the voice of the customer. Get customers interacting with non-customer-facing people; maintain (and circulate) internal lists like “The top 5 customer pain points from last month”; ensure your leadership team is talking to at least one customer a month.

Another big word of caution here: If you’re still in reactive support mode and don’t have any customer functions doing proactive work, you’re behind where you should be. Some companies can get to the growth stage on customer support alone, but scaling up is dependent on your ability to predictably keep and grow customers. You’ll need a dedicated customer success team to make this happen. Don’t delay.

Putting this playbook to work

Most SaaS companies get serious about customer success after encountering a near-company-killing churn crisis. Churn spikes, panic sets in, analysis is done to uncover the problem, success people are hired. It’s rough.

If you can take the pointers offered in this post and implement even half of them, you’ll be a leader in customer success throughout all stages of the growth cycle of your business. The tips and strategies I’ve recommended are not particularly complex or clever–on the contrary, they’re at best just advanced common sense. But I hope that by adding them into your operations today and preparing you with foresight tomorrow you’ll be just a little more prepared for what’s coming your way.

The dollar has been sliding since President Donald Trump's inauguration. Since January, it's lost about 11% versus a basket of its peers.

But it doesn't look like the greenback will see a reversal of fortunes anytime soon, according to Deutsche Bank strategist George Saravelos.

"The dollar is in trouble," he argues in a recent note to clients, in part because of a couple of key changes that are negatives for the greenback.

The first change is that market still isn't pricing additional rate hikes from the Fed, which Saravelos calls "zombification."

Crucially, he's not talking about the possibility of a rate hike in 2017. What Saravelos is talking about here is the bigger picture, long-term uncertainty about the Fed's future decisions, which he says is likely to continue.

Currently, expectations are for just one rate hike through September 2018, Bloomberg's World Interest Rate Probability data shows. However, most of the FOMC will be different come 2018, so it's difficult to predict what that new group of people will do in terms of policy.

The second key change is that the drivers of the foreign exchange market are seeing a fundamental shift. Whereas the FX market used to be driven by monetary policy expectations, Saravelos argues it now appears to be driven by an adjustment to flow balances that have accumulated after the last few years of "unconventional" global monetary policy.

"Part of this imbalance is a structural underweight in European assets, which we have written about in the past," he said. "More broadly however, Americans are hugely underweight in their investment allocations to the rest of the world.

"The easiest way to demonstrate this is by looking at American buying of foreign assets," he added. "Over the last few years Americans have liquidated close to the entirety of their foreign fixed-income portfolio and are likely in the process of reallocating back to the rest of the world. The shrinking in US world relative growth differentials and ongoing political turmoil in the US may have helped catalyse this trend."

Putting those two shifts together, dollar weakness doesn't look like it's going away in the near future.

SEE ALSO: America's teacher shortage is leading some states to lower their requirements to become one

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: GARY SHILLING: No one is making impulse buys online

Given the recent changes to the LinkedIn interface we thought it was time to update one of our popular blogs on how to share an update on LinkedIn.

Status updates are a great way of keeping in touch with your network, reminding them of what you do without being pushy, and keeping you in the forefront of their minds.

To share an update, article or photo from your desktop you need to go to your homepage and you will see this:

Click in the box above Write and article and Image and this screen will appear:

You can then write your status update in the box. Anything you type into the box will appear to all of the people you are connected with at level one, i.e. the people you have invited to connect or vice versa for them to choose to read. As an example of what you could write here’s one I wrote earlier:

It is worth bearing in mind it automatically starts with your name so in my case “James Potter” so remember to start with “is” or something similar or it will look odd.

The good news is also if someone comments or “likes” your status update it gets shown to all their connections too! And all your connections can also see their comments so it starts a conversation and spreads the news.

Once you have finished writing you then just need to click Post and this is what it will look like:

If you’re connected to 500 people and you do a status message every working day for a month, you will have impressed your value and your message 10,000 times or more, assuming no one interacts, so if people comment or like it it goes to even more exponentially.

You can even to it from your mobile, just open up the app and hit the little box with the pen inside, often bottom or top right (or the speech bubble on older versions), and you are off.

To make it an even richer source of insight about you and what you’re up to you can also include photograph (if what you do is visual this is ideal), a URL / web link, a blog post or an interesting website.

So, if you want to keep in touch with your network, make them aware of what you are up to, the value and range of products, services and expertise you offer start talking to people using your status updates.

The trope “there’s an app for that” is quickly becoming “there’s an AI for that.” Want to assess the narrative quality of a story? Disney’s got an AI for that. Got a shortage of doctors but still need to treat patients? IBM Watson prescribes the same treatment plan as human physicians 99% of the time. Tired of waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish writing Game of Thrones? Rest easy, because a neural network has done the hard work for him.

But is all this rapid-fire progress good for humanity? Elon Musk, our favorite AI alarmist, recently took down Mark Zuckerberg’s positive outlook on AI, dismissing the latter’s views as “limited”. Whether you’re in Camp Zuck (“AI is awesome”) or Camp Musk (“AI will doom us all”), one fact is clear: with AI touching all aspects of our lives, intelligent technology needs deliberate design in order to reflect and serve human needs and values.

Biased AI Has Unexpected & Severe Consequences

Software applications used by U.S. government agencies for crime litigation and prevention algorithmically generate information that influence human decisions about sentencing, bail, and parole. Some of these programs have been found to erroneously attribute a much higher likelihood of committing further criminal activity to black defendants. The same algorithms also err in attributing much lower risk assessment scores to white defendants.

According to a study from Carnegie Mellon University, Google served targeted ads for getting high-paying jobs (those that pay more than $200,000) much more often to men (1,800 times) than women (just a paltry 300). Whether the discrepancy is the result of advertisers’ preferences or an inadvertent outcome of machine learning (ML) algorithms behind the ad recommendation engine is unclear. The outcome is that a professional landscape that already demonstrates preferential treatment for one gender over another is being reinforced at scale with technology.

In the field of healthcare, AI systems are at risk of producing unreliable insights even i algorithms were perfectly implemented. Underlying healthcare data is driven by social inequalities. Poorer communities lack access to digital healthcare, and thus the systems capturing critical data to inform algorithms. Randomized control trials often exclude groups such as pregnant women, the elderly, or those suffering from other medical complications.

A Princeton University study demonstrated that ML systems inherit human biases found in English language texts. Since language is a reflection of culture and society, our everyday biases inadvertently get picked up in the mathematical models behind natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Failing to carefully review and de-bias such models has real-world consequences. Google’s Perspective API is intended to analyze online conversations and flag “toxic” content, but unintentionally flags non-white entities like names and food as being far more toxic than their white counterparts.

Gender, economic and racial biases in AI have been widely documented over the last few years. With AI also becoming integral in the fields of security, defense and warfare, how do we design systems that don’t backfire?

Mechanisms and manifestos are a start…

AI systems can’t just succeed in completing their core tasks. They must do so without unintentionally harming human society. Designing safe and ethical AI is a monumental challenge, but a critical one to tackle now.

In a joint study, Google DeepMind and The Future of Humanity Institute explored the possibility of AI going rogue. They recommended that AI be designed to have a ”big red button” that can be activated by a human operator to “prevent an AI agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions.” In practical terms, this red button will be a trigger or a signal that will “trick” the machine to internally make a decision to stop, without recognizing it as a shutdown signal by an external agent.

Meanwhile, the world’s largest association of technical professionals IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) published its General Principles for Ethically Aligned Design covering all types of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. The document sets a general standard for designers to ensure that AI and autonomous systems 1) do not infringe human rights; 2) that they are transparent to a wide range of stakeholders; 3) that their benefits and associated risks can be extended or minimized; and 4) that accountability for their design and operation is clearly laid out.

…but Collaborative Design Is Critical For Success

Hypothetical fail-safe mechanisms and hopeful manifestos are important, but insufficient to address the myriad of ways that AI systems can go wrong. Creations adopt the biases of their creators. Homogenous development teams, insular thinking, and lack of perspective lie at the root of many of the challenges already manifesting in AI today.

Diversity and user-centered design in technology have never been so important. Luckily, as AI education and tooling becomes more accessible, designers and other domain experts are increasingly empowered to contribute to a field that was previously reserved for academics and a niche community of experts.

Three Ways To Enhance Collaboration In AI

1. Build User-Friendly Products To Collect Better Data For AI

Elaine Lee, and AI Designer at eBay, emphasizes that human input and user generated data are critical for smarter AI. If the products collecting requisite data to power AI systems do not encourage positive engagement, then the data generated from user interactions tend to be incomplete, incorrect, or compromised. In Lee’s words, “We need to design experiences that incentivize engagement and improve AI.”

Meanwhile, Google Design’s Jess Holbrook recommends a 7-step approach to designing human-centered ML systems. He cautions against relying on algorithms to tell you what problems to solve and encourage designers to build systems that enable “co-learning and adaptation” between man and machine as technologies evolve. Holbrook also points out that many legitimate problems do not need ML to be solved successfully.

Collaborating with users seems like a common sense procedure, but few companies go beyond cursory user research and passive behavioral data collection. The next step is to enable a productive, long-term feedback loop so that users of AI systems actively define the functionality and vision of your technology, but also perform important tasks like flagging and minimizing biases.

2. Prioritize Domain Expertise & Business Value Over Algorithms

Michael Schrage, research fellow at MIT Sloan, argues that “strategically speaking, a brilliant data-driven algorithm typically matters less than thoughtful UX design. Thoughtful UX designs can better train machine learning systems to become even smarter.”

In order to develop “thoughtful UX”, you need domain expertise and business value. A common pattern in both academia and industry engineering teams is the propensity to optimize for tactical wins over strategic initiatives. While brilliants minds worry about achieving marginal improvements in competition benchmarks, the nitty gritty issues of productizing and operationalizing AI for real-world use cases is often ignored. Who cares if you can solve a problem with 99% accuracy, if no one needs that problem solved? Or your tool is so arcane, no one is sure what problem it’s trying to solve in the first place?

In working with Fortune 500 enterprises looking to re-invent their workflows with automation and AI, a complaint I commonly hear about promising AI startups is this: “These guys seem really smart and their product has a lot of bells and whistles. But they don’t understand my business.”

3. Empower Human Designers With Machine Intelligence

Designing AI is yet another challenge where human and machine can combine forces for superior results. Software developer, author and inventor Patrick Hebron demonstrates that machine learning can be used to simplify design tools without limiting creativity or removing control from human designers.

Hebron describes several ways ML can transform how people interact with design tools. These include emergent feature sets, design through exploration, design by description, process organization, and conversational interfaces. He believes these approaches can streamline the design process and enable human designers to focus on the creative and imaginative side of the process instead of the technical aspects (i.e., how to use a particular design software). This way, “designers will lead the tool, not the other way around.”

The field of “AI Design” is nascent. We are still figuring out which best practices should be preserved and what new ones need to be invented. Greater access to tools and education mean that experts from all fields and functions can help evolve a field that is traditionally driven by an elite few. With AI’s potentially impact on all aspects of our lives, this collaboration will be essential to developing technology that works for everyone, everyday.

Owned content, also known as owned media, is just one part of the puzzle in your PR strategy. An effective strategy also includes earned, shared, and paid media. This post will address how you can most effectively use the content you publish and own to move your brand ahead.

The beautiful thing about owned media is that it puts you in the driver’s seat of your strategy. Is there a particular question that your sales team receives? No problem. Create a blog post that addresses that question. Is there some industry expertise that you want to share? Create an eBook and use that to inspire confidence in your brand.

What is Owned Content?

Content that you own is the content that you create and continue to own throughout its lifetime. This includes your website and every piece of content that you post on your it. For example, this type of content could include:

• Blog posts
• SlideShares
• Infographics
• Visual content
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Website pages
• Ebooks
• White papers
• Case studies

And the list goes on. There are many other creative possibilities for content creation. This is because owned media is a vital part of anybody’s overall strategy!

Blog posts are some of the best pieces of owned content that you can create. In fact, one study shows that B2B companies who only blog 11 or more times per month receive almost 3.5 times more traffic than companies who blog 0-4 times per month.

One of the best things about owned media is that it never expires. Use it as much as you want, transform it from one media to another (go ahead, turn that blog post into an infographic, or multiple blog posts into an Ebook), and even update it. Your content is yours for as long as it exists.

Done correctly, this content is more than personally published and owned media. It can strategically direct your audience down your funnel and toward an end-goal, such as a purchase decision.

One of the best things about owned media is that it never expires

Let’s look at the most effective ways you can use your owned media to reach your business goals.

10 Sure-Fire Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Owned Content

1. Create a Documented Content Strategy

Heard this one before? While it may sound like a broken record, we still felt the need to include this one — after all, studies show that only 37% of B2B companies have a documented strategy.

A documented content strategy keeps your content creation on track. A strategy helps you to visualize what content assets you have, what you need to create, and how to strategically use your content to its fullest potential. Schedule such details as content creation, publication, and shares on social media.

A strategy without goals is like an empty bag — it will just fall flat. So, create goals for your content, such as increased website traffic or thought leadership. Write down these goals, make sure that your entire team knows what your goals are, and create ways to measure your progress toward these goals.

2. Create Visual Content

Don’t underestimate the value that visuals can bring to your content. Images have an incredible influence on engagement levelst. In fact, researchers in one study found that colored visuals increased people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.

Create content that is visual by nature, such as infographics and SlideShares. Even in non-visual content, such as blog posts and ebooks, include visual graphics that enhance your content.

Use a free visual content creation tool such as Canva to create flawless graphics for your audience. Choose from pre-formatted sizes that make it easy to share on any social network, and use their endless supply of stock photos, elements, and text to enhance your graphic.

Video content is rapidly growing in popularity across all audiences. In fact, when it comes to products, customers reported that they were 4 times more likely to watch a video than read an article — so play on that! Create videos on industry tips and tricks, popular issues that your audience faces, as well as your products and how to use them.

3. Share on Social Media

Social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are a great way to reach your audience and direct them back to your website.

The problem that many companies run into is the short life that content has on social media. For example, most content reaches the majority of its audience on Twitter within 3 hours, and on Facebook within 5 hours.

How do you compensate for such a short social media shelf-life? Share your content on your social media networks multiple times. Find out when your audience often takes to social media — what days and times — and post your content during those times.

4. Include in Your Email Marketing Campaigns

According to one study, three quarters of companies view email as either “good” or “excellent” in terms of ROI. Promoting your content in your email campaigns can increase your content’s visibility.

You could send out emails with the specific goal of highlighting your created content. You could also include a few pieces of content to include at the bottom of your other email campaigns. Whatever way you choose to do this, emails are a great way to introduce your audience to new content.

5. Aim for Thought Leadership

Thought leaders are authorities in their industry — ones who audiences look to for insights and opinions on industry matters. Owned media and thought leadership go hand in hand. Content, such as a website, gives you a platform to showcase your industry expertise and build a reputation for thought leadership.

There are various ways to establish thought leadership. First of all, be helpful — answer the questions that trouble your audience. Be the first to provide insightful solutions to the problems that your audience faces.

Be genuine and human — create content that has a voice and draws people into a written conversation. People follow and admire leaders who are authentic — so make sure your writing conveys the real you.

Owned media and thought leadership go hand in hand

6. Showcase User-Generated Content

Encourage your customers to engage with your brand. Create contests with incentives that get your customers to share their stories and even photos of how they use your product or service. Once you have this, it becomes valuable owned media with the power to draw in your audience.

Show your audience how past customers are using and loving your product to make their work easier. This kind of word-of-mouth content gives a nod of approval to your brand from third parties, which is just the kind of recommendation that audiences want.

7. Amplify Peer Content

Create content that draws attention to your peers — other experts in your industry that create amazing content. This builds valuable relationships within your industry — relationships that you can rely on in the future.

Exactly how can you do this? Write a roundup post that links to key content from your peers on a certain subject — consider this one we did on calls to action. Interview fellow experts within your industry, and use those quotes to enhance your content.

This kind of owned media will attract their audience in addition to your own.

8. Address Your Entire Funnel

Many brands make the mistake of focusing too heavily in one area of their funnel — either in the beginning of the buyer’s journey, or more in-depth content that addresses the end of the buyer’s journey.

Instead, try to balance your content creation on all three parts of your funnel — from the initial curiousity of an audience, down to when they’re ready to buy.

Write blog posts that address preliminary questions or problems that your audience has. Consult with your sales team to see what problems potential customers face, and then create content that addresses each one. This could be blog posts, infographics, or videos.

But don’t forget to create content for the bottom part of your funnel. This could include Ebooks, white papers, and case studies that go in-depth into problems and provide proof of industry expertise. This kind of content convinces those readers who are on the verge of a purchase decision that you are the brand to trust.

9. Be Consistent

Consistency is a key component of effective content creation — if your audience gets bored waiting by their inbox, you might run the risk of their moving on to another brand’s content.

Create a regular schedule of content publication within your content strategy. As we mentioned before, companies find the most success in posting 11 or more times per month — so start scheduling content publication around twice a week to hit that goal.

10. Go Out with a Strategic Call to Action

Content without a call to action is a dead-end for your strategy. Make sure your audience knows how to take the next step from passive reader to engaged follower.

Use language within your calls to action that motivates your audience and creates a feeling of anticipation. For example, Last Chance! Download Your Free Copy creates a sense of urgency, and Sign Up for Our Free Email Newsletter conveys the value behind the offer.

Everything from language to size to color matters when you create a call to action. So research the best ways to create calls to action, and see the powerful results you can get.

Key Points to Remember…

• Attract your audience with visual content such as graphics, videos, and infographics
• Address every stage of your funnel within your content
• Share your content at various intervals on social media to get traffic back to your website
• Use motivational calls to action to wrap up your content and show your audience their next step

Start planning today on how you can incorporate owned content into your overall PR strategy.

You’ve spent countless hours and dollars (well, the dollars aren’t countless to the finance team) to build the marketing technology stack that perfectly fits your organization’s needs. You researched all the available technologies, how they integrate with one another, and the effort needed to implement new systems. You talked with both Marketing and Sales to see how these platforms would improve their day-to-day lives and bring the two teams closer together.

But have you thought about how your marketing technology stack aligns to your buyer’s journey? In the end, all of these platforms should be serving the ultimate purpose of helping you understand your buyers and meet their needs. However, many organizations can lose sight of this end goal when going through the process of building their marketing technology stack. With all of the attention focused on upgrading processes, integrating systems, and training users, the most important piece of the puzzled—the buyer—can get lost in the shuffle.

Today’s buyer is more well-informed and knowledgeable about their needs and the solutions that exist to meet those needs than ever before. And they don’t trust that sellers know how to speak their language. According to SiriusDecisions, 82% of decision-makers don’t think sellers are prepared when they meet. Being unprepared can be the result of a handful of things: improper training, difficult-to-find content, no quick access to important industry and organization news, and an inability to truly understand the buyer’s needs before meeting with them. The best solution to this problem is to leverage technological solutions that prepare sellers to interact with buyers at every stage of their journey.

From the first interaction to the last (hopefully the signing of the dotted line) a piece of your marketing technology stack will be instrumental in ensuring your buyer feels like you understand their needs. Syncing those solutions up with the buyer’s journey will position your team for success and prevent them from falling through the cracks.

A marketing technology stack that is aligned to the buyer’s journey will follow a logical progression of capturing the right information about the buyer and funneling that information to the right teams at the right time. Important information such as what content resonated with the buyer will reveal insights that help sellers begin conversations on a deeper level and immediately get to the heart of the matter.

On the flip side, a properly aligned marketing technology stack will provide Sales with all the tools they need to prepare for their interactions with buyers. The technology stack should be properly integrated to provide sellers with all of the relevant information they need in the systems they work in the most. Product updates, industry changes, competitor info, and anything else that would help a seller do their job should be available at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

When you are thinking about how your marketing technology stack is structured, don’t just consider internal implications. Take the time to think about how each solution within your marketing technology stack is positioned to help you meet your buyers’ needs.

Growing your firm using a network of partners is a tried and true method to grow with minimal cost. Partner relationships are fragile compared to hiring a traditional salesforce. After all, partners do not have long term investments and agreements used in the franchise world. If a partner is discontent or sees a more valuable opportunity elsewhere, your program may start to erode.

Set The Foundation For An Effective Partner Program: Vision

Whether you are looking to grow your current partner program or start a new program, vision is the critical foundation. For the best results, your vision sets your program apart from others. Remember that your partners always have the option to leave the program or make it a low priority.

What Is Your Vision For The Firm?

In 3-5 years, how will your company transform as a result of interacting with your partners? Your vision will likely include product, financial measures and partner engagement. For example our software product will grow new capabilities from an app marketplace, grow 10% in revenue annually and engage partners in an annual conference. This long term vision will then inform your next steps on how to design the details of your program.

Tip: Minimize the use of vague terminology and feel-good phrases that could be used by anyone in your industry. Your vision should be distinctive.

How Do You Align With Your Partner’s Vision?

Partners come in different shapes and sizes, so it will be difficult to appeal to all of them. Rather than guess what your potential partners want from the program, go out and talk to them. The tools and techniques of the lean movement can be helpful here. To prepare for the discussions, use resources such as Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy by Cindy Alvarez. For example, a small firm may have a limited brand presence in the market. In that case, a national brand may attract by partners eager to enhance their reputation by association.

Tip: Your research should cover two distinct segments – companies that already participate in a partner program and non-partners who might fit your plan based on other criteria.

Ideas From Industry Leaders

Two technology giants are well known for their successful partner programs. Let’s explore those programs in depth to identify how the firms have developed these programs over time. While both of these examples come from the software industry, the examples can be transferred to other industries.

Salesforce.com Case Study

Salesforce.com has invested heavily in growing through partners. Consider the different ways that the firm engages partners to grow together:

• Marketing and Lead Generation. Through the Salesforce App Exchange website, Salesforce.com partners receive leads from prospects who are looking for help with Salesforce products. The platform also includes the capability for clients to leave reviews about their experience.
• Salesforce has a large catalog of certification programs covering different job roles such as developer, administrators, and architects. These certifications enable partners to deliver projects with confidence.
• Partners have several avenues to connect with each other. The annual Salesforce conference in California draws over 100,000 attendees and includes a variety of programs dedicated to partners. Also, the company has an online community
• Product Enhancements. Salesforce partners and software companies have the opportunity to create custom software apps such as Mailchimp for Salesforce (email marketing) and Docusign for Salesforce (an e-Signature service).

As with any other business strategy, a deep commitment to partners does require some trade-offs. For example, there is a constant concern about competing with partners. For instance, Venturebeat pointed out that Salesforce is competing against its analytics partners. If you are perceived to be directly competing against partners, that move does not support partner enablement.

The Microsoft Approach to Partners

Microsoft’s approach to partners has commonalities with Salesforce and distinct elements. In contrast to Salesforce, which is focused on the business market, Microsoft sells to companies and individuals. In the past, Microsoft largely relied on retailers to sell products such as Office. Microsoft enables partners to become successful using several methods. For the end customer, working with a partner often makes sense in cases where configuration, consulting and other support are needed to obtain the most value from the products.

• Recognize Successful Partners. The need for recognition, especially by peers who understand your achievement, is practically universal. Microsoft has capitalized on this need by offering an extensive award program. For example, Microsoft offers several types of partner awards such as Country Partner of the Year Ward, Public Sector Awards, and Competency Based Awards. Individuals can also seek out the “MVP” (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional). Many Microsoft partners promote these awards on their websites and other materials.
• Focused Online Communities. An online community of Microsoft enthusiasts has some value. For partners, there is, even more, value in specialized groups for market research and prospecting. For example, if a partner focuses on Microsoft Project then joining a group like Microsoft Project User Group would be worthwhile.
• Technical Support. Microsoft partners rightly take pride in their technical knowledge. However, enabling partners to thrive means offers technical help. At this time, Microsoft enables partners by supporting Dynamics, Office 365 and Azure.
• Gamify Certification Training. Signing up to earn yet another technical certification may not be appealing. What if there was a way to encourage your partners to do just that? Microsoft’s partner levels (g., Silver and Gold) offer one way to do that. After all, if your partner earns silver and sees gold next on the list, they are likely to keep on engaging. This ladder of certifications is also a way to help partners stand out from each other in the marketplace.

Introducing The Partner Toolbox: Ways To Enable Your Partners’ Growth

With the groundwork in place, we can turn our attention to the tactics you can use to enable partners to become more successful.

1. Sell The Benefits of The Partner Program

Explain how your partner program drives positive business results for the partners. Once again, Microsoft’s approach is instructive to consider. Their case studies library shows numerous examples of partner companies earning more. For example, CRM Partners grew organically and by acquisition by focusing on Microsoft partners. The business case for joining a partner program may be clear in the abstract, but it is much more valuable to specify the details. Periodically interviewing partners for case studies is an excellent way to keep your partner program grounded in reality.

2. Seek Feedback and Act On It

Many of the world’s leading companies carry out annual employment engagement surveys, and the same process adds value to partners. This is an advanced strategy to use only after your partner program has been underway for at least one year. Use a combination of quantitative measures (e.g., on a score of 1-5, how satisfied are you with Acme’s partner program?) and qualitative measures (e.g., “What aspect of working with us is most frustrating for you?”). For survey methodologies, look into adapting proven systems like Net Promoter Score. Once you receive the results, identify one or two ways to improve the partner experience.

Tip: Offering a small incentive such as a draw for an Amazon.com gift card is an excellent way to encourage your partners to complete the survey.

3. Marketing

You might assume that channel partners will do all the heavy lifting when it comes to sales and marketing. If you want to stay competitive with other opportunities, you will need to offer marketing support. For example, you might offer run a website like Salesforce.com’s App Exchange that provides leads. Alternatively, you may offer marketing collateral assets such as white papers and case studies about your product. You may also offer a list of preferred service providers such as Microsoft’s listing. Finally, look for ways to make it easy for partners to come together and compare notes.

4. Training

By increasing the skill of your partners, you will help them to become more productive. Training is especially valuable in two scenarios: rapid expansion and significant product development. If your industry is growing rapidly, partners will need support training their new staff. In these cases, training is an excellent way to add value to partners. For the best results, combine several training options include informal options (e.g., a monthly “office hours” session for partners to ask technical questions) and formal options (e.g., certifications, webinars and traditional seminars).

Tip: Your training offerings do not have to exclusively relate to your firm’s products and services. You might also hold sessions on topics such as project management which will help your partners to become more effective.

5. Encourage Partner Loyalty

If partners depart from your program in significant numbers every year, you have a problem. Assuming your partner program is essential to your success, loyalty and retention elements are critical. Take a page from consumer oriented companies that stimulate loyalty through discounts and points programs. For example, consider offering partners a 5% discount on your product after they have been an active partner for two years. For additional insight on the loyalty programs, read “The Loyalty Leap: Turning Customer Information Into Customer Intimacy” by Bryan Pearson.

6. Recognize Partner Success Through Award Programs

Awards and honors are an underrated strategy to engage partners and connect them to your brand. As noted above, Microsoft has long been a successful player in recognizing the achievements of its partners. Fortunately, you do not need to be a multi-billion dollar company to launch a successful award program. To engage partners through awards, provide recognition they can take to the bank (i.e., get your partners in the press). Finally, make it easy for your partners to share the news – provide graphics and badge icons for them to display on their websites.

What goes into a successful award? Generally speaking, there are two components: tangible and intangible. The tangible aspect is an item of value such as a cash bonus, a gift card, a case of wine and so forth. The intangible component – which may be equally if not more valuable in some cases – speaks to the psychological benefit of recognition. To maximize the intangible reward component, carefully think through how and when the award is presented to your partners. Whether you choose to present at an evening gala style event or a less formal event, make sure you include a short speech that highlights the partner’s specific accomplishments.

7. Become The Trusted Advisor To Your Partners

Beyond the product they sell for you, partners have a variety of business needs. Once you have the foundation for an effective program in place, look for further ways to add value to your partners. If your partners are nearing retirement age, you might organize a succession planning webinar for your members. Alternatively, if your partners are in high growth mode, then they may appreciate your support in hiring qualified staff by hosting a partners-only job board. Ask yourself what questions your partners have and how you can support their growth further.

Investing in trusted advisor programming for your partners is a long term strategy that is best suited for established partner programs. If you launched your partner program is new, we recommend deferring this program to the future.

Resource: For additional ideas on adding value to your partners, check out “Networking With the Affluent” by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley. Do not let the age of the book or some of the examples stop you – there is gold to be discovered in that book.

8 .Reduce Partner Friction

Do partners find it easy to do business with you? If your partners have to complete paper forms and other processes to get work done, you are likely to frustrate them. If partners find your website and other resources difficult to access, engagement will suffer. To proactively address this issue, consider appointing a staff position dedicated to partner relationship management.

Final thoughts on partner engagement

Attracting, growing and retaining partners is a proven way to grow your business. As Microsoft and Salesforce.com show, you can achieve tremendous growth by working with your partners. However, these programs require strategy and investment to succeed. Recognize that your partners

In the comments section below, share one example of how you have engaged partners successfully in the past year.

Having an active blog for your personal brand is an important marketing tool in which your brand can build a strong reputation and attract more leads and sales. The type of blog is essential for reaching the right target market effectively.

There are two types of blogs that can work for your brand depending on the needs of your audience, and your niche. These are either personal or business. Knowing which one to build on will enable you to know more of what to write about, and develop your content marketing strategy. Here are several ways to discover which one is right for you:

• The human to human approach – Personal blogs are more popular than ever online, especially with leading influencers. This not only creates more trust for your personal brand, but also helps your audience relate to you on their level. Having that face-to-face interaction helps create a brand personality that they can become familiar with.
• The business information approach – If your company is more about providing a product or service then this style of blog can work well for you as you inform your community. The education and valuable content is a great opportunity to give them what they need and establish long-term customers.
• High visibility – Each type of blog needs to include an good opt-in in order to attract interested subscribers. You could set up a free video, report, eBook, ect. that they can download first. Once they have said yes this is the starting point to nurturing your audience and growing through word-of-mouth.
• Become the trusted source – Create a series of how-to articles and/or videos with email announcements to build authority. These types of blog posts are well received by readers, especially as it answers their questions and meets their needs. After a while they will see you as a go-to brand, especially as you offer regular incentives for them.

Start to see your personal brand’s blog as a relationship building tool that will keep your community growing and active. Connect with other leaders in your niche and provide a mix of content such as webinars, live videos on Facebook, infographics, slideshows, ect. in order to maintain your readers’ interest.