When you crunch the numbers, the most common outcome of even apparently well-qualified complex sales opportunities is a loss - not to an alternative solution, but to the status quo.

“Do nothing” is today’s most powerful competitor. It’s become the most common outcome because organisations often struggle to build a consensus for change and because the easiest and safest option appears to be to carry on as before.

But the real reason is often because nobody - internal champions and sales people alike - managed to create enough contrast between where the customer is today and where they need to be in the future.

It’s blindingly obvious, when we think about it - contrast drives change…

It’s our responsibility as sales people to create this contrast. It’s our responsibility, if we judge that the contrast is currently insufficient, to either stretch the value gap between today’s situation and their future destination to level that will inevitably result in action or accept that the prospect is unlikely to act and politely qualify out before any more of our or their time is wasted.

THE UPSIDE IS NOT ENOUGH

Most competent sales people seek to articulate the benefits of the prospect changing to their solution - they sell the upside. But in my experience, it’s far less common that sales people do an adequate job of identifying and amplifying the downside of sticking with the status quo.

There’s profound buying psychology at play here, you see: following a series of widely-acclaimed experiments, Daniel Kahneman - the Nobel Prize winning behavioural economist - concluded that decision-makers are twice as likely to invest to avoid a loss as they are to achieve a gain.

So our mission to create contrast must start by breaking through the status quo bias and establishing the negative consequences of the customer’s current situation. We need to help our prospective customer to identify and acknowledge the costs and risks associated with sticking with the status quo.

THE POWER OF UNCONSIDERED IMPLICATIONS

We need go beyond the obvious and amplify the pain by introducing the prospect to unconsidered or underestimated implications of their current trajectory. We need to help our prospect’s decision-making group to conclude that their situation is going to get increasingly, uncomfortably and unnecessarily expensive and risky.

In short, before we go ahead and help our prospective customer to model the positive Return on Investment they could generate by investing in a new solution, we need to help them calculate the full negative Cost of Inaction that they will suffer if they were to simply carry on as they are.

Assuming the buying decision is a significant one, someone in authority is bound to ask whether immediate action is really necessary, or whether the project could afford to wait until a future date. We need to equip and enable our champion to confidently explain why any delay will only make the company’s situation more precarious.

GOING BEYOND THE OBVIOUS

This “going beyond the obvious” applies to the benefits of investing in our solution as well. In order to establish this, we need to introduce the currently unconsidered or undervalued benefits of change.

By progressively contrasting the “pain of same” with the “gain of change”, we make it that much more likely that the customer will make a positive buying decision. And by introducing previously unconsidered, underestimated and undervalued consequences, we help to shape the prospect’s vision of what is possible.

But we can go beyond simply establishing and amplifying the contrast between pain and gain. We can also establish a clear contrast between the constraints that have been holding them back (some of which they may have been unaware of) and the unique capabilities that allow us to enable them to reach their desired future state (carefully chosen because our competitors would struggle to claim them and could not deliver them).

I hope you agree with this idea that contrast drives change, and that the vendor that establishes the greatest contrast between the customer’s pains and gains, between their current situation and where they want to be, and between what we can deliver and what every other option would struggle to provide, provides the platform for winning the customer’s business.

CREATING CONTRAST - OR PERPETUATING GREY?

Do all our proposals do all that they could to establish these contrasts? Do our sales strategies ensure that we are always able to identify and stretch the value opportunity for our prospective clients? Or if we were to line up our approach against all the other options the prospect is considering, would they all blend into very similar varieties of grey?

When everything looks grey to our prospect, they will either decide to do nothing, or they will decide to go for the cheapest, safest or most familiar option. If we are none of these, you will lose - and even if we do win, the value of the opportunity will inevitably be lower than it could have been.

Contrast drives change. Grey perpetuates the status quo. What would you rather be seen as?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Apollo is a Fellow of the Association of Professional Sales and the founder of UK-based Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners, home of the Value Selling System®. Following a successful career spanning start-ups, scale-ups and corporates, Bob now works with a growing client base of tech-based B2B-focused high-growth businesses, enabling them to systematically establish their distinctive business value in every customer interaction.

Sales content is a hot topic right now, with companies like Hubspot preaching the value of being able to organize, track, and measure content designed to support salespeople.

If you’re chasing the Millennial audience, you must understand that this group absorbs information in the blink of an eye and makes instant decisions based on what they’ve seen or read.

That’s why you need to invest heavily in visual marketing to attract Millennials, because this type of marketing appeals to their sensibility more than any other type of content. If you’re not implementing visual marketing, here are three reasons you should jump on this fast-moving train.

1. Visual Marketing Targets Social Media Sites Where Millennials Hang Out

While Facebook remains popular with Millennials, several other platforms have emerged to challenge its king-of-the-hill status.

According to Statista, the five most popular social media sites among teenagers and young adults, include:

• Snapchat – 79 percent
• Facebook – 76 percent
• Instagram – 73 percent
• Twitter – 40 percent
• Pinterest – 31 percent

Even a cursory glance at these social media sites should tell you that four of the five platforms have something in common: they are all image-driven or focus on short content.

That means that when you create content to reach Millennials, you need to conform to the dictates of these platforms, which are all about short, entertaining videos, funny pictures, and brief, actionable blog pieces with infographics.

2. Visual Marketing Helps Brand Your Business

Branding is another key benefit of visual marketing, because your visual content is a direct expression of your company’s values and goal.

And multiple studies have shown that Millennials respond to branding if it is perceived as an attempt to explain why a company exists, instead of what a company is selling.

You should include things such as your business logo and company tag line in all your visual marketing, but more importantly, the look and feel of your videos, images, infographics, and games should be consistent, so that your target audience quickly begins identifying that content with your company.

When creating visual content, the first question you should always ask is: What message does this video/photo/graphic convey about my business?

If that message is not consistent with the reason why your business exists, it should not be used as part of your visual marketing strategy.

3. Visual Marketing Helps Your Content Get Shared

Millennials are among the most active group of consumers to share things they love. And sharing isn’t just valuable because it exposes your content to another group of people, it’s also valuable because it means that your audience found your content worthy enough to pass along.

Sharing is a multiplier that cannot be overstated. Whether it’s a humorous video that takes users behind-the-scenes at your workplace, or a funny meme, Millennials like to share visual content much more than text-based content.

And another truism is that pictures, videos and memes generate more comments and likes than any other type of content, largely because images create instant engagement, and if that engagement is positive, users will share and talk about that content with enthusiasm.

Choose Your Visual Content Wisely

When implementing your visual marketing strategy, always choose content that expresses the ‘why’ of your company instead of just the ‘what.’

For example, if your business sells a product that locates lost remote control devices, you could create a short, funny video showing the myriad ways people lose remote control devices, instead of a video that explains how your device works.

Incorporating visual content can help you properly target your Millennial prospects, and turn them from just interested bystanders into long-term buyers.

Look up the history of any modern technology, and you’re taken on a quick-fire tour of antiques, innovations, failures, successes, bubbles, booms, and busts.

Unlike the history of the Roman Empire or Greek poetry, software history is almost immeasurably short.

It’s rich and it’s exciting, but it’s also full of strange developments. Developments that never really went anywhere, but serve as warnings to organizations of the kinds of flops to avoid.

New terminology and seemingly revolutionary inventions have cropped up every single year since the 1960s, but by now most of what formed the foundations for today’s software market is obsolete.

The Department of Defense’s SaaS timeline is broad (and not particularly exciting-looking), but it gets the job done.

In today’s world, the majority of businesses and consumers use software-as-a-service (SaaS). If you define SaaS an application that can be accessed through a web browser and is managed and hosted by a third-party, then Facebook, Snapchat, Google — and many things that most people would just call ‘websites’ — are SaaS products.

In a business sense, SaaS is both a way for customers to access software over the internet, and a revenue model. SaaS is most commonly monetized by providing access to users for a monthly fee. You might’ve seen that on the pricing pages of Evernote, or Dropbox.

Usually histories have some wacky starting point that you’d never have expected, and SaaS is no different.

IBM: a 1960s SaaS company

The closest thing you can get to a visualization of IBM’s 60s SaaS is this:

That’s the IBM 360 Model 67. It’s from 1965, and IBM used these and the computers they developed over the next decade to provide processing power to organizations like banks and government offices.

To give you an idea of the power these computers had, the most advanced IBM 360 (the Duplex) had a 2mb RAM, and, even over a decade later in 1980, hard drive space cost almost $200,000 for a gigabyte. Buying your own machines simply wasn’t an option when you could rent power and space from a dedicated provider for a fraction of the price. The service was called time-sharing.

“Two decades earlier, an IBM computer often cost as much as $9 million and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space and a staff of 60 people to keep it fully loaded with instructions. The new IBM PC could not only process information faster than those earlier machines but it could hook up to the home TV set, play games, process text and harbor more words than a fat cookbook.” — IBM Archives

Computers were still huge and weak by today’s standards, but this development now made them capable of being situated or having data and power hosted in a different physical location to the one they were being used in.

In the 1960s, organizations were focused on developing their own software using the resources of mainframe providers like IBM. While this doesn’t make it software as a service as such, time-sharing is an early location-independent development in enterprise computing that can be seen as a key step towards SaaS.

1970s & 80s: the growth of pre-SaaS architecture

Time-sharing remained popular throughout the 1970s, but as the personal computer market was starting to get on its feet, businesses found that it was financially viable to give each employee their own computer with its own hard-drive and on-premises applications.

An IBM PC being used in an office in 1981

Since smaller, more powerful computers like the IBM PC eliminated the need for mainframe behemoths and time-sharing, the surge of SaaS progression took a bit of a break while it was all the rage to have your own disk space and office applications.

However, it during the 80s that the first ever CRM was developed by Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney in Texas. ACT! was a DOS CRM marketed as a digital Rolodex that allowed businesses to store contact details and sell more effectively to their audiences.

Other early SaaS examples include Great Plains, (which went on to be acquired by Microsoft and turned into Microsoft Dynamics) and Concur.

Applications weren’t graphical at this time. They had minimalist text-based interfaces, and since software didn’t need to handle complex images or Big Data, that didn’t matter.

During the 1990s, graphical SaaS came to the forefront lead by the company that went on to develop the most successful SaaS product in the world.

1990s: the dot com boom

The complexity of software increased at a rate faster than the hardware’s capability of handling it, especially for big businesses running hundreds of thousands of computers. Managing systems and applications of employee’s personal computers became a tangled mess, with IT teams reportedly scrambling in poor work environments to get the inefficient networks up and running.

These technological developments meant that operating systems became larger while hard drive space was still expensive, and businesses needed a way to get the applications on multiple PCs without filling up too much space.

A screenshot of Cognos, a business intelligence suite later acquired by IBM after a sharp drop in share price

The best way to do that? Exactly the same way they did it in the 1960s: host the data on somebody else’s computer.

Software used to be provided to companies on disks, along with licenses that gave the buyer access to some degree of tech support, and a limited amount of updates.

Buyers had the safety of knowing that their software needs were being looked after, but it had its distinct downsides. There were notoriously restrictive contracts, vendors pricing packages as they pleased, and software companies forcing customers to pay hefty upgrade charges whenever a new version came out. Add to this the fact that tech support and maintenance cost extra, and you’ve got a high barrier to entry for companies that could benefit from software but couldn’t possibly afford it.

In the 1990s, today’s giants established themselves. Intacct, NetSuite, and, of course, Salesforce.

But, before we get into that, it’s worth going over one of software histories most irrelevant footnotes: ASP.

The rise (and cataclysmic fall) of ASP

Application Service Providers (ASP) is both software that was being created in parallel to SaaS and a pre-cursor. While it was a necessary stepping stone, ASP’s inefficiencies made it more useful in theory than in practice, especially when implemented in big businesses. The differences are minute and confusing, and, while many software experts try to verbosely articulate them

Writing on ASP as part of SaaS history, Steven J Vaughan-Nichols describes a key issue with the software:

“Most of the ASP applications were version 1.0 quality software in a universe where the desktop versions were at version 3.0. There was no good reason for a business to make a monthly financial commitment for an application that did less than the established software your business had already paid for.”

Rick Chapman, writing on Softletter, a long-running software authority site, condenses the issue neatly:

“The difference between SaaS and ASPs is that SaaS companies make money and ASPs didn’t.”

Let’s put it this way: with ASP, the vendor had to set up your login and environment manually from their end. With SaaS, it was all self-service. You can imagine why ASP collapsed under its own weight and SaaS flourished despite enterprise compliance issues and worries about the stability.

SaaS vendors were successful enough by the early 2000s to keep the market afloat ever since, and Salesforce is a prime example.

Salesforce: the first pure SaaS superstar

Salesforce had the SaaS vision right from the start.

Unlike Concur, Microsoft, Oracle, and Lotus, Salesforce never messed around with physical products or ASP infrastructure — its app was delivered purely over the internet, with access in the browser. Going all in on SaaS gave Salesforce a massive head start, setting them up to become the single most valuable SaaS company ever founded.

A Salesforce presentation showing one of their most successful adverts. The advert depicts software as an antiquated bi-plane crashing down in flames next to the efficient Salesforce fighter plane. (Software ads used to be a lot more interesting than “meet Bob…”.)

Its “No Software” mantra and attitude was controversial, but within the space of one year Salesforce had scaled up to the point where its employees were working full time in hallways and conference rooms because its 8,000 ft office (originally filled with only 10 employees) couldn’t handle the growth.

The SaaS ubiquity of 2010

With Salesforce leading the way, SaaS was finally a proven business model. That forced incumbents like Sage and Oracle to deliver a SaaS version of their products just to level the playing field, and it made SaaS the only option for startups who could see that the future of software wasn’t in cases of 10 disks and a license key, but in the cloud.

IDC estimates that the enterprise SaaS market will be worth $50.8B by the end of 2018, up from $22.6B in 2013.

AngelList lists over 12,000 SaaS startups in its database as of August 2017, and while the exact number of established SaaS companies is unclear, it’s predicted to be between 9,000 and 12,000 with an average valuation of $4.4m.

Blurred lines, and the commercialization of SaaS

At the start of this article, I mentioned how Facebook, Twitter, and other things that we just consider to be websites are SaaS products. By defining SaaS in such broad strokes, it shows that the term is becoming dated, hard to pinpoint, and representative of a massive restructuring of the internet.

There’s basically no difference between SaaS and the internet because the internet is simply a place where HTML, CSS and JavaScript come together in any form or combination to provide you with a page, service, tool, etc..

Netflix, which started out as a mail order Blockbuster competitor, is a SaaS product that I use on my TV along with its local competitor. I’ve got a bunch of SaaS installed on my phone, and a lot those apps are just a wrapped version of a web app distributed through the app store.

JavaScript environments like Node and the improvement of powerful, accessible database languages that can run on cost-efficient Amazon servers means that SaaS can be developed and deployed by people, not just enterprises. Look at the amount of SaaS startups on AngelList, and look outside of the business world at the thousands of passionate people enthusing about SaaS products on Product Hunt every single day.

In fact, with Estonia’s e-Residency program and its plans to build the economy on a local blockchain currency, it could be said that Estonia is becoming the first SaaS country. The history of SaaS is coming to an end while merging into the grander history of the internet and the world at large.

Good founders learn how to be charismatic, confident, and persuasive. Great founders learn something more important.

Here’s the truth:

Most startup founders are really shitty listeners. Charisma can take you a long way, but if you don’t stop to learn more about your customers—if you don’t hear what they have to say—there’s little chance you’ll develop a product that connects with anyone.

Founders usually display bad listening skills by:

1. Talking over prospects and customers
2. Encouraging feedback, but only hearing what they want to hear

In both scenarios, it’s impossible to come away with the information you need. When you’re not listening well, you miss opportunities to gain real insights. I see it happen all the time.

Want to gain real customer insights? Start asking better questions. Get your free copy of my top 42 B2B sales questions right now! 

If you really want to be a better listener…

Shut up

Enthusiasm is great, especially during a demo or sales pitch, but not when it’s at the expense of others. Give people the opportunity to teach you about your product. Let them speak without interruption.

You can’t listen and have an inner dialogue at the same time.

When someone else is talking, don’t think about your next question. Don’t worry whether the conversation is going well. Don’t think about your dog or the emails you have to send. Just listen. Try to walk a mile in their shoes. Listen for clues that will help you explore the root of their problem. Why are they looking for a solution? What factors play a role in their decision? Are they stressed out? Are they confused? Have they been burned by other products in the past? Many times, if you just let them talk, you’ll get answers to these questions and more.

Rely on their voice to shape the conversation, not yours. Before a call or meeting, you might even commit to saying 20% less than you normally say, so that when you do talk, your words have more impact.

Slow down

The faster the conversation, the less you’ll absorb, especially if you’re already thinking about the next meeting or what’s left on your to-do list. It’s impossible to engage in a meaningful conversation when you’re in a rush. So relax. Give yourself plenty of time to understand exactly where the prospect or customer is coming from.

Ask questions

Founders don’t need to have all the answers, but they should know how to find them. Many times, prospects already know how to solve a problem—they just lack the clarity to see end results. If you listen carefully and ask the right questions, people often do a lot of the work for you. They generate ideas and insights, which you can then build on to solve their problem in a way they understand.

It’s important to recognize the difference between good and bad questions. “Would you like a more secure phone?” is a bad question—it leads the customer to a foregone conclusion. Who’s going to say no? Everybody wants a secure phone. If this was the only question you asked a group of people, you’d come away thinking they were all your target audience.

The better question is open-ended: “What don’t you like about your phone?”

If security comes up organically—something like, “Well, I just read about how insecure our phones are”—ask follow-up questions. Explore the deeper meaning of insecurity in this context.

Marketing and sales people can learn a great deal from developers when it comes to follow-up questions. When you tell a developer, “I care about security,” most of them will say, “Okay, so what does security mean to you?”

That’s because security is a broad term with many interpretations:

• Are you concerned about the content your children view?
• Are you scared that someone might steal your identity or access your bank account?
• Are you worried about the government collecting data?

When you don’t ask follow-up questions, it’s an indication that you’re not listening closely. And besides, it’s rare that the first answer someone gives you contains all the necessary information you need to understand their problem.

Here’s some homework

Ask yourself: “Who’s the best listener I know?”

Then call that person or meet them for lunch. Figure out what makes them such a great listener. What questions do they ask? How do they respond when you’re frustrated or enthusiastic? What verbal cues do they use? When are they silent?

Study their listening skills and apply them to your own conversations.

Nobody’s a perfect listener

But there are definitely ways to be less shitty. Sometimes you just need to shut up, slow down, and ask the right questions.

Do what you can to live in the moment. Turn off your computer. Find a quiet, distraction-free space. And ignore your inner dialogue. Focus on their words, not yours. If you follow this advice, I guarantee you’ll end up learning a lot about your product and your customers.

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Sales and marketing, marketing and sales. Typically, these two departments regard one another with wary respect at best, and outright hostility at worst. (Think oil and water, not peanut butter and jelly.) But here’s the thing: in order for your business to achieve maximum success, it’s vital for these two teams to work together.

Most businesses are only focused on their bottom line: how many sales did we win in the last month/quarter/year? The bottom line is only part of the story –and it doesn’t tell you what you need to do to improve your sales.

For a more complete picture, focus on the numbers that tell you how well your sales and marketing teams are working together.

Measuring the Right Sales and Marketing Data

There are a lot of things that sales and marketing teams need to consider, from the top of the sales funnel all the way to the sale itself. Measuring your results is only part of it: it’s just as important that you track and analyze other factors for even better overall results.

Here are some examples of additional metrics to track:

• Increase in site traffic to targeted content/locations
• New contacts
• Existing prospect engagement

Website traffic

Website traffic is one good indicator of whether your marketing team is driving awareness. The marketing team should use this metric to respond to visitor behavior on your site and apply that to help increase the number of leads for your sales team.

If you’re lucky enough to see an increase in traffic, take a closer look at where it’s coming from. Are you following user data to see where visitors land on your site and where they go next? Are they going to the pages you want them to go to?

Look at the numbers of visitors, pages per visit, total page views, visit duration, and bounce rate. This will give you an ideas of how your site is doing overall. It will also tell you what visitors are looking at now, and how long they’re looking at it. This information is helpful for both sales and marketing because it helps them figure out what messaging is resonating with visitors and prospects.

Studying traffic patterns will help you make the changes needed to drive visitors to the most important places on your site.

If you’re just starting out using inbound marketing tactics, compare numbers month-over-month and look for trends and positive changes in your visitors’ behaviors. More visitor engagement means you’ll soon see an uptick in sales.

New contacts

Measuring your new contact behavior is also a great way to see where marketing and sales needs to close the gap. For instance, what is the number of new contacts who have unsubscribed from your email marketing list? A low unsubscribe percentage (as in no more than one percent) is a good indication that the contacts you’re acquiring are a good match for your products/services. It also means marketing is doing a good job of reaching the right people with the right messaging.

If you’re using HubSpot, run at least two contacts reports: one on lifecycle stage, to see how many of your new contacts move into each stage over time, and one based on personas to see which personas are growing over time in your contacts and which are lagging.

The lifecycle stage report will give you a clear picture of two things: how many contacts are going all the way through the buyer’s journey and how long it’s taking them to do so. If you notice that a considerable number of people are jumping ship at a certain stage, work with the marketing department to shore that up— create more engaging content, write up a valuable case study, or increase the points of contact within that stage.

As for the length of the buyer’s journey, if you notice that certain stages take longer than others, look at the offerings within that stage. Is there any way to streamline your process to move buyers through the stages a little faster? The sales team should have some input for the most delicate way to move everyone along without causing them to disengage.

Existing prospect engagement

Now back to that unsubscribe rate we mentioned earlier. If you’re measuring how many new contacts unsubscribe, you’ll have a clear picture of another aspect of customer engagement— specifically, those who are NOT engaged! (Engaged prospects don’t unsubscribe.) So if your contacts are the right kind of contacts—they match your ideal customer profile—they shouldn’t be unsubscribing.

Here are a few more things you should be tracking (with some instructions provided) when it comes to your prospect engagement:

• Engagement over time. Try different times to send emails and see which times see more open rates. This trial and error method is worth the time investment if it results in a higher rate of emails opened overall.
• Look at your unsubscribe rate.
• Track how long people actually spend reading your emails. Doing so can help you shorten or lengthen your email messages, depending on how deeply engaged your prospects are.

Automation is everywhere. No, really, it is. It might seem like some new-fangled technology drive, but the fact is we’re interacting with automated systems all the time, from your email newsletter subscriptions to the movies that Netflix recommends to you. Even your basic thermostat at home is an automated system.

And further ‘personal’ automation is slowly – oh-so-very slowly, not to mention expensively – filtering into our homes. Think the ‘Internet of Things’. Think door locks and home CCTV operated by smartphone. Think of a future where people laugh at the ‘good old days’ when people used to manually draw the curtains (yes, automated shades are real because of course they are).

Workplace automation, on the other hand, is well and truly entrenched around the globe. But while the renaissance quietly rolls out across offices and factories, the growth and popularity of such technologies is deeply dividing industry figures.

So, how will automation impact…

Your workforce

One argument that frequently crops up regarding automated systems is the impact of employment. If robots are replacing jobs that were typically carried out by low-paid manual labourers, doesn’t that mean workers are going to face unemployment?

The true answer sits in that ambiguous grey area. Yes – certain jobs will, in time, be relegated to robot roles. No – that doesn’t automatically mean a decreased workforce. What automation actually allows is for workers to work on tasks that require human intelligence. Think of the barcode scanner – one of the most ubiquitous automated systems in the world. Its introduction, far from decimating shop workers, actually led to increased employment.

As our old friends McKinsey & Co. explain:

‘Even when machines do take over some human activities in an occupation, this does not necessarily spell the end of the jobs in that line of work. On the contrary, their number at times increases in occupations that have been partly automated, because overall demand for their remaining activities has continued to grow. For example, the large-scale deployment of bar-code scanners and associated point-of-sale systems in the United States in the 1980s reduced labor costs per store by an estimated 4.5 percent and the cost of the groceries consumers bought by 1.4 percent. It also enabled a number of innovations, including increased promotions. But cashiers were still needed; in fact, their employment grew at an average rate of more than 2 percent between 1980 and 2013.’

And the money saved and gained by businesses is typically reinvested in its workforce, granting them new skills and creating new avenues of employment. Which leads us to…

Your revenue

A business always has its eye on the bottom line. This is one of the great attractions for automated systems – because that increased productivity leads to increased output, which equals increased revenue.

In the academic paper ‘Robots at Work’, Georg Graetz of Uppsala University and the LSE’s Guy Michaels discovered that, between 1993 and 2007, automated systems encouraged the average GDP of countries to leap by 0.37%. That was ten years ago, when automation was still an unknown quantity. Today, that figure is likely to be higher. Indeed, according to technology firm ServiceNow:

‘Highly automated organisations are six times more likely to experience annual revenue growth of 15 per cent versus companies with low automation.’

So, for example, businesses that who are, on average, 61% automated saw more than 20% growth in revenue. Compare this to companies who saw zero or negative revenue growth – on average, just 35% of their business is automated. Automation, then, is a route to the competitive edge. Or, as ServiceNow’s chief strategy officer Dave Wright put it:

‘The financial payoff for automation is one companies can’t ignore.’

Your costs and overheads

Directly opposing that increase in revenue is the cost of automated systems. This is often cited as a major factor when it comes to upgrading systems and automating parts of your business. And there’s no getting around it: If you’re automating, you’ll need to speculate to accumulate.

However, the time between speculation and accumulation will differ depending on your industry and chosen software or hardware. For certain applications, it’s possible to see a near-immediate return on investment.

For example, here at my company, accessplanit (this won’t get salesy, I promise), we deliver training management software for training companies. One of the most popular modules is our online course booking feature. As such, from the moment the system is implemented, organisations can start to accept online purchases. So, for a company that previous didn’t offer such a service or offered poorly designed online booking, it’s clear how they can begin to immediately profit from automation.

Different suppliers will offer different pricing models – from off-the-peg solutions charged at a flat-rate to customised systems with a modular pricing scheme. Or, to put it another way, you pay for the modules that your business actually uses.

Whichever system you choose, there will be a cost. But by the time you’re genuinely considering investing in automation you’ll have done all the appropriate research, including free trials and demonstrations. That means you’ll be armed with an incredibly well-informed idea of what your expected cost-versus-profit will be.

Your business productivity

The most convincing argument for automating elements of a business is the most obvious one: Productivity. Indeed, experts liken the current productivity increase to that of the Industrial Revolution.

The research in ‘Robots at Work’ show that, across 17 countries, the average labour productivity increased by 0.36% between 1993 and 2007. Elsewhere, McKinsey & Company, the global management consultancy, estimate that between 2015 and 2065, automation will jump-start productivity from 0.8% to 1.4%.

Further, Graetz and Michaels showed that the use of robots within the workplace actually led to greater human productivity, adding more value to the economy, compared to productivity levels prior to the introduction of industrial robots.

Which makes sense, really, since automation takes on the repetitive and routine tasks, allowing employees and employers to focus on furthering business objectives.

Offer training and learning development? Get a personalized demo and see our training management software in action.

Influencer relationships are precious. They require a certain amount of dedication, persistence, and careful nurturing to maintain. If you are lucky, you may start seeing positive results instantly. But, most of the time you’ll have to wait for a while to see any kind of positive results.

While influencer marketing can fetch you tremendous results, you should also note that these relationships are very fragile. If you’re not careful, they relationships can fall apart pretty easily.

Here are a few mistakes that can end up killing your influencer relations.

1. Considering it a one-off exercise

Let’s look at a small example. Imagine you reach out to Kristi Hines to promote your new article, she accepts the request, and shares it on her Twitter account. If you’re going to say just thank you and move on, then the relationship is as good as dead.

Sure, you may come out of it feeling delighted at all the traffic you got. But in reality, you just lost a huge opportunity to build on that relationship and achieve greater things.

The Influence 2.0 report cites that this kind of shortsighted view hinders performance, making influencer marketing less effective compared with other strategic programs.

Don’t be blinded by the short-term benefits – those are just one-tenth of what you can achieve. The key here is to put in sustained and focused efforts to grow the relationship.

Not sure how?

Here are a few top tips:

• Create a solid plan. Before you approach an influencer, you should know exactly what you can get out of them.
• Pitch them to become a regular contributor to their website.
• Ask them if they’d like to contribute articles to your website.
• Give them exclusive news about product updates.
• Give them early access to your products or features.
• Share their content on your social media pages regularly.
• Invite them for your podcast/webinar series.

There are a lot more things that you can do. The aim is to stay in touch with them. Develop top of mind awareness, and grow the relationship.

2. Considering it as a transactional relationship

“A transactional relationship is based on an expectation that a favor will be returned in kind.” – John Jarvis

Normally in a transactional relationship, all parties are in it for themselves. These relationships easily fall apart because there’s no attempt from your side to grow the relationship or build an emotional connection. Today, businesses try to avoid this by providing authentic and meaningful experiences to their customers.

The pitfalls of considering influencer relationships as transactional are:

• Reduced impact: The content you produced in collaboration with them may lack authenticity or may even look forced.
• No additional effort from their side: they will try to get away by doing just the bare minimum. All they care about is what they are about to get in return.
• One mistake can jeopardize the whole relationship.
• Such relations will won’t be sustainable in the long run.
• The relationship will never grow.

Influencers may or may not be your customers. But given the kind of returns they can fetch your brand, it is imperative that you consider them like your customers.

Not sure how?

Here are a few ways to build meaningful relationships:

• Make an effort to stay in touch. Festive greetings, casual interactions, notes of appreciation etc.
• Try to use a more personal, friendly tone to your communications.
• Tiny favours. Refer their services to your friends and peers (if relevant); quote them in your articles when possible (and let them know); write a review for their ebooks on Amazon; write a review for their podcast on iTunes.

Whatever you do, it should appear genuine and authentic.

3. Lack of regular communication

Like any other relationship, if you don’t communicate with influencers regularly it will fall apart.

When you have ongoing communication with them, it’s easier to gain top-of-mind awareness and to ask favours.

It may sound simple, but it’s not. If you’re too aggressive, they might feel like being spammed. If you’re too laid back, they might forget you. The key here is to maintain a balance.

Not sure how?

Here are few tips on how to communicate with influencers effectively:

• Help them when required: They may face questions from their audience while promoting your product. If you don’t help them, they will lose face.
• Be clear about what you’re asking for: They may consider vague messages a waste of time.
• Connect with influencers on multiple channels: influencers need not be active on the particular channel all the time, so it’s crucial that you connect with them on multiple channels. Send a connection request on LinkedIn, follow their Twitter profile, add them as a guest to your Slack channel.
• Find areas of mutual interest or concerns and try to build conversations around them: it could be anything from trending topics to the performance of their favourite sports team.
• Observe messaging, email, and even Slack etiquette to avoid miscommunications.

4. Micromanaging them

Your employees don’t like to be micromanaged. How do you think influencers would react?

Influencers normally succeed in building an engaged audience because they know what their audience wants and how best to deliver it. Their audience trusts them as experts, and values their advice.

It’s safe to say that the influencer-audience relationship is built on trustworthiness, uniqueness, and creativity. These are the same values that get compromised when companies try to micromanage influencers.

End result: a subpar campaign! The audience may not feel particularly interested because it lacks authenticity. The influencer could also get called out for being overtly promotional. Let them do what they do best – engage with their audience.

Not sure how?

Here are a few tips to stop you from micromanaging your influencers:

• Don’t interfere during the creative phase.
• Don’t ping them randomly – make sure you schedule a meeting.
• Set realistic goals for the campaign.

Example: Clothing retailer Zara’s #iamdenim campaign helped them gain 4.6 million new Instagram followers in 8 months. One of the major the reasons for the success of this campaign was the kind creative freedom they gave the influencers.

Source: Shane Barker

5. Being inconsistent and unfair

Nobody likes it when they’re treated inconsistently or unfairly.

We’ve seen a lot of instances where the brands act warm and fuzzy initially, but once the influencer completes the task, their tone becomes the complete opposite – cold and indifferent. Sometimes, they’re rude enough to end the relationship without even a thank you.

When influencers dedicate their time and energy for you, it is utterly unprofessional and indecent to leave them hanging. Not only does it leave a bad taste, you might also get called out by the influencer. Furthermore, other influencers may refuse to work with you due to your reputation.

With influencer marketing yielding as much as 11x the ROI of online display ads, you simply can’t afford to treat influencers like that.

Not sure how?

Here are a few tips to avoid such situations:

• Spend time upfront and create a solid agreement. Ensure that both parties are clear about the terms and conditions.
• If it involves any kind of payment or an exchange, make sure you respect it and deliver it on time. In the case of a delay, let them know beforehand, and give an alternative date.
• If the campaign exceeded the expectations in terms of results, make sure you give the influencer a bonus. They shouldn’t walk away feeling under-compensated.

6. Treating them like a marketing channel and not like a human being

Although influencers are not your average marketing vehicle, brands often make the mistake of considering them as such. Here are a few instances:

• They try to impose their brand’s tone or message upon them, stifling their creative freedom.
• They set unrealistic goals and end up overwhelming the influencer.
• They try to implement a one-size-fits-all strategy. But each influencer is different – the characteristics of their audience will vary too.
• Tracking their performance using KPIs of traditional marketing.

To build a successful campaign, it’s crucial that you treat them like you treat your customers – with care and respect.

Another thing brands should note is, through influencers, you have a golden opportunity to reach an already engaged audience. They trust and value the influencer’s opinion. It’s important that you have a well-tailored strategy for approaching and managing influencers.

Not sure how?

Here are a few points that you should keep in mind:

• Influencers are passionate about their niche: give them enough and more opportunities to explore your product (early-access, inside access, exclusive demos, exclusive interviews with developers etc.)
• Influencers are great storytellers: help them weave a story around your product.
• They’re putting their reputation on the line: Make sure the information you provide them is 100% legit, true, and proven.
• Always be honest with them: never leave them in the dark about your end-game.
• Identifying and tracking the right KPIs.

7. Considering all influencers the same

Influencers are human beings, so, you can’t expect all of them to behave the same. Their needs, motivations, and passions may be different.

Some influencers may not be interested in remuneration. Rather, they might be looking for a helpful resource that they can share with their audience. At the same time, there will be influencers who will ask for remuneration explicitly.

It’s up to you to understand and respect the influencer’s choices. If you don’t, the relationship will fall apart pretty soon.

You can’t ask an influencer who is vocal about privacy laws to promote your latest big data analytics app. It’s doesn’t make sense, and the influencer may feel insulted too.

One reason why they’re influential is the values and beliefs they stand for. You can’t ask them to compromise that. Even if they agree to your request, their audience will feel let down and cheated.

Not sure how?

Here are a few key points to remember:

• Never ask them to do things they’re not comfortable with.
• Don’t use their name without permission – they may have said your product/service is good, but that doesn’t you are allowed to use their name to promote your product.

Wrapping up

At the end of the day, influencers are human beings. They need to be treated as such – with respect and authenticity. This is why building influencer relationships is regarded as a complex yet delicate process.

Avoiding the mistakes above, and you’ll go a long way in building a sustainable and mutually beneficial relationship with influencers.

It’s that time of year! Leaves are starting to turn, the days are getting shorter, pumpkin spice everything has infiltrated the consumables marketplace, and syllabi are in the hands of many students as school is back in session!

While marketers don’t exactly get the summer off, Fall is a perfect time to get back to into a learning and growth mindset with 30 books to stick on your reading list. Each book is written by an influencer that we think not only writes about something worth learning but shares valuable insights on their social channels (you can follow all of them here). Throughout the month of September, each day we will be covering a new influencer and their great book to help you elevate your marketing. We’ve divided the 30 books into five categories:

1. Content
2. Thought leadership
3. Digital marketing
4. Engagement
5. Leadership development

At the end of the month, we’ll be giving away six books each to five lucky marketers!

If you’ve already read one (or more) of the books, we hope you’ll find us on Twitter and share your key takeaways. Read one, read five, read all 30! Treat this blog as the syllabus for your next marketing course.

In this blog, you’ll find 30 books that you can use to jump start your marketing learning this Fall.

MKTG4901:  Content Marketing

Content marketing is a vital part of the Engagement Economy and an important way to develop strong relationships with your customers. If you want to increase brand awareness and provide real value to your audience, content marketing can help you with that and more!

To buff up your content knowledge, we recommend these six books:

Ann Handley’s Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

Ann gives in depth, expert-level guidance through the creation of content across all of your assets. Her goal is to make you look as smart as you possibly can. How can you NOT get excited about that?!

Michael Brenner’s The Content Formula: Calculate the ROI of Content Marketing & Never Waste Money Again

In this book, Michael divides up content success into three stages: 1) how to build the case for content marketing within your business, 2) how to find the budget to establish a new content marketing program, and 3) how to measure success once you’ve implemented your strategy. Michael makes content marketing manageable!

Kyle Gray’s The Story Engine: An entrepreneur’s guide to content strategy and brand storytelling without spending all day writing

Every great B2B company started out as an entrepreneur’s dream. Kyle breaks down how to rapidly get to your brand to the place where you want it to be through actionable and concise strategic moves.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World

This New York Times bestselling author has a few tricks up his sleeve when it comes to building a true connection with your customers across all social media channels. Gary taps into best practices for several different social platforms as well as how to make sure your content aligns with what your customers want most.

Rebecca Lieb’s Content—The Atomic Particle of Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Content Marketing Strategy

Rebecca does a deep dive into how to find the balance between content marketing and content strategy. With years of deep quantitative research under her belt, she’s able to enable her readers to make important decisions in order to get your content to its maximum potential.  

Andy Crestodina’s Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing

In this 4^th edition, Andy digs deep and provides a guide that you’ll be referring to again and again. This book is the result of him talking to thousands of content creators at hundreds of companies across the globe. He proves that not only is content necessary, but it can be fun too!

MKTG4902: Engagement Marketing

Engagement marketing is the use of strategic, resourceful content to engage people and create meaningful interactions over time. It is the marketer’s answer to the challenge they face in the Engagement Economy and it’s the ability to deliver personalized and connected messaging at scale and creating authentic relationships with your customers to drive the idea of wantedness.

Become an engagement marketing master by reading one, or all, of these books:

Bryan Kramer’s There Is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human: H2H

As marketers, we’ve been trained to either speak B2B or B2C, often forgetting we are ultimately speaking to another human being. In this book, Bryan explores communication within marketing and how to find new ways of commonality.

Jay Baer’s Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers

This book shows marketers how to deal with opposition in any channel. Let’s face it: you’re going to deal with haters whether you’re a teeny tiny startup or a big and bold corporate giant. Jay shows marketers how to bring in the human side in order to solve these problems. A must-read for any marketer at any stage in their career!

Amy Cuddy’s Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

Amy’s famous TEDTalk took the world by storm and has, to date, garnered over 60 million views. In this book, she teaches people how to flourish in stressful moments. In the Engagement Economy, putting your best foot forward cuts out the noise and allows you, as a marketer, to make confident decisions to develop stronger relationships with your customers.

Jonah Berger’s Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior

In this book, Jonah delves into the psychology and social sciences behind influence, especially that which we may not immediately see. By understanding the key drivers behind human behavior, marketers can develop a more robust plan to engage their customers.

Mark Schaefer’s Known: The Handbook for Building and Unleashing Your Personal Brand in the Digital Age

Mark provides a step-by-step guide to developing a personal brand, something paramount to success in engagement marketing. As customers are looking to connect on a personal level during their buyer’s journey, developing a personal brand will allow marketers to develop deeper relationships and create a personal relationship with each and every one of their customers.

Philip Masiello’s Think—Engage—Thrive: Marketing Actions To Skyrocket Your Brand In The Digital Age

Think—Engage—Thrive gives marketers a toolbox to engage in today’s data-rich environment in a scalable way. In this easy-to-digest guide, Phil gives a lot of great insight into many industries making it applicable to marketers across the board.   

MKTG4903: Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing can be overwhelming in this ever-changing digital world. With so many channels, which should you choose? Which channel is right for your brand and your brand’s future?

In these six books, you’ll find the answer to these questions and more.

John Jantsch’s SEO For Growth

In this book, John gives an incredibly in-depth overview of SEO strategy and how it fits into a digital marketing strategy. His straightforward approach to search engine optimization allows marketers to develop a strategic plan and dominate their vertical.

Kim Garst’s Will the Real You Please Stand Up: Show Up, Be Authentic, and Prosper in Social Media

Kim’s book isn’t simply a how-to guide, it’s much more than that. She helps marketers uncover their inner voice in order to thrive on social media as well as in the real world. This comprehensive journey will boost anyone’s social media game—from novice to expert.

Josh Turner’s Connect: The Secret LinkedIn Playbook to Generate Leads, Build Relationships, and Dramatically Increase Your Sales

LinkedIn is a vast resource for nearly any job function. In this book, Josh covers scalable solutions within the channel allowing marketers and salespeople to use LinkedIn as a comprehensive resource.

Shana Hyder’s The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue

Social media has infiltrated every facet of marketing today. Shana’s guide gives essential advice on everything from how to put your best social media game out there, no matter the size of your business.

David Kelly’s Social Media: Strategies to Mastering Your Brand—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat

David’s effective guide will help you maximize your brand’s impact on social. The book gives an analysis of specific channels and how marketers can use them best. This critical guide is a great jumping off point for those just getting involved in the social sphere.

Travis Wright’s Digital Sense: The Common Sense Approach to Effectively Blending Social Business Strategy, Marketing Technology, and Customer Experience

This complete playbook gives organizations a wonderful framework for a more engaged customer experience strategy via digital channels. As today’s customer is savvier than ever, Travis aims to make sure that marketers are prepared to meet the customer where they are.  

MKTG4904: Thought Leadership

Establishing your spot as a thought leader in your industry is the backbone of great marketing. To elevate your brand to a thought leadership zone requires buy-in from every facet of marketing.

To get insight from a thought leader, check out one, or more, of the following books:

Matt Heinz’s Full Funnel Marketing

Matt is a nationally recognized, award-winning blogger, as well as the President and Founder of Heinz Marketing. Full Funnel Marketing gives insight into his rich experiences as a B2B marketer and expands on how marketing has transformed within this space.

Arun Sundarajan’s The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

The sharing economy cannot be ignored. From Lyft to Airbnb and beyond, this new business model provides an interesting interruption to the way that business is done. Arun’s expertise in this space gives marketers insight into the inner workings of sharing economy businesses.

Robert Cialdini’s Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Robert is the most cited psychologist of our time, securing his spot as a thought leader. In this book, he outlines specific techniques marketers can use to develop a digital marketing strategy using influence and persuasion techniques. It operates under the premise that in order to change minds, a pre-suader must also change states of mind.  

Marcus Sheridan’s They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer

Marcus’s passion for marketing shines through in this book. Known as “The Sales Lion,” he uses this book to explain how best to turn your customers into evangelists and gives practical advice for marketers in teams of all sizes.

Carmine Gallo’s The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don’t

In this book, Carmine gives advice on how to become a master storyteller, an invaluable marketing skill. He offers lessons from visionary leaders and gives marketers tips to turn their story into an action-based passion machine.

Tarah Wheeler’s Women in Tech: Take Your Career to the Next Level with Practical Advice and Inspiring Stories

Tarah combines practical career advice with inspirational stories from some of the most successful women in tech. She gives advice ranging from salary negotiations to how to start your own company. As an added bonus, there are many puzzles within the book. If you run the code, you’ll get additional content!

MKTG4905: Leadership Development

Growth and leadership go together like peas and carrots, to grossly misquote Forrest Gump.

Whether you’re just starting out with aspirations to one day be a C Suite employee or you’re already at the top, these books will help you develop your skills as a leader, and as a person.

Bill George’s The Discover Your True North Fieldbook

This interactive book takes leaders on a journey to find their authentic leadership style. Bill George, along with Nick Craig and Scott Snook, have taken incredible insights from over 10,000 leaders and helped them discover and live up to their fullest potential while discovering their true strengths.

Aliza Licht’s Leave Your Mark

Aliza’s knack for PR is useful for anyone from a recent college grad to a seasoned professional with years of experience. As a leadership guide, this book gives marketers techniques to comfortably navigate the lines between personal and professional in today’s contemporary working world.

Lolly Paskal’s The Leadership Gap: What Gets Between You and Your Greatness

Lolly helps readers discover what kind of leader they think they are and how to guard against anything from preventing progress. A psychological look into the psyche of leaders at every level, this book offers marketers a perspective into themselves and those who lead them.

Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t

Simon provides an in depth examination of success and failure in teams driven by the principle that the teams that function best are those who would sacrifice for their team. An essential guide for anyone looking to drastically improve their team or build a new one.

Drew Neisser’s The CMO’s Periodic Table

Garnering advice from over 100 marketing leaders from prominent companies across the globe, Drew has highlighted 64 of these interviews in this book. The book offers advice on everything from research and strategy to risk-taking and shake-ups at the top.

Brad Lomenick’s H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle

Sharing his insight from more than two decades of work with leaders from Fortune 500 companies and start-up entrepreneurs, Brad outlines 20 essential leadership habits broken down into three categories: Humble, Hungry, and Hustle. In this guide, you’ll find a way to lead wherever you are in your career path.

What books from this list wound up on your must-read list? We’d love to hear what you’re reading lately! If you’ve got anything that we must read or have already read any of the books we’ve included, please let us know in the comments, engage with us on Twitter, or share this article with someone who is ready to bring their marketing game to the next level.

We are also running a giveaway this month where you can enter to win some of these great books. We will select five winners, one for each category, and they will receive all six books from that category! Please see terms and conditions for more details and enter here.

The post 30 Books to Help Make You a Better Marketer appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

stymeist / Pixabay

Your app is live! How exciting! But how do you make sure it’s a success? A key factor in your app marketing is your staff’s buy-in. If the staff knows and understands the value of the app, they will be able to relay this information to the customer. The more excited and knowledgeable your employees are about this new piece of technology, the better your app will perform. So, it’s time to train your staff on your business’ new app.

Step #1: Overcome Sceptical Employees

Your new app will boost sales, increase productivity, and improve operations. Regardless of these strong benefits, getting every employee on board can still be a challenge. Employees might be skeptical to adopt any new technology, as they are happy with the status quo. According to a study by MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting, 63% managers said that the pace of technological change in their workplace is too slow, primarily due to a “lack of urgency and poor communication about the strategic benefits of new tools.”

The solution to dealing with skeptical employees is allowing them to understand why the app is an improvement from what they had before. The job of a small business owner or manager is to help people cross that bridge, and get them comfortable with the new technology. If your employees see how it will make their jobs easier and better, they will embrace the change.

This is where you state your case, putting forth a compelling “vision for what the technology is and what it’s going to do.” You need to demonstrate that the app offers economic and rational benefits for the business. And even more important is to help them understand what’s in it for them.

For example:

• Higher productivity: Your job will become more efficient, as you will spend less time taking phone orders.
• Higher revenue: With more orders coming in, you will be making more tips.
• Happier customers: With the new loyalty program, you will have more positive interactions with customers.
• Direct feedback loop: Customers will be able to share what you did great and where you could improve.

As a small business owner, think of the ways in which you were persuaded to invest in a mobile app. What convinced you that this was the right decision? What benefits are you expecting to see from its implementation? Your employees are probably going to need the same amount of convincing you needed before you started the app project.

Step #2: Prepare Customized Staff Training

It is important to take into account individual differences like interest and familiarity with digital technology. Some of your employees won’t be able to live without their digital devices, while others might have difficulty using their smartphone. Your training efforts should reflect these differences. Think of your employees who struggle the most with adapting to technology.

There are many different training approaches you can use, but your app training will be most efficient if you take a hands-on approach. A face-to-face training is going to be the most impactful and useful method, as you can personally teach your staff the ins and outs of the new app and allow them to ask any questions they have. We suggest calling a meeting with the entire team and start with a presentation on the new app and its functions.

Part of this training should also consist of setting specific and measurable goals. These training goals should outline what each employee will be able to accomplish with the new app. You can set a quota for new app downloads, for example. Maybe you want at least 20 downloads per week, and the staff needs to work together to reach this. Keep these goals in mind when training starts to ensure that each employee knows how to reach the objective.

However, simply standing in front of the group and showing them the new technology on a screen is not enough. After the training session, give them a chance to test it out. Have everyone download the app to their own phone and experiment with it. Besides understanding the app’s value, they should also be knowledgeable about how each feature works.

Step #3: Make It Fun

Once your business has fully implemented the mobile app, share the positive impact it is having with your staff. Have you seen a steady increase in loyal members? Have orders or reservations increased? Has your business received new positive reviews? Highlighting these quick wins ensure continued support for the app.

You can make these quick wins even more fun by rewarding employees who have effectively incorporated the app in their daily work duties. You can get creative with this! For example, you can organize a contest where the winner is the employee who got the most customers to download the app. Their prize could be a compensation, a special perk, a recognition, or anything else that would get them motivated. You could hang up a running tally of the employees’ scores in the break room to spark some fun and friendly competition. Experiment with gamification to create a buzz around the mobile app amongst your staff.

Step #4: Provide Feedback

Feedback is one of the most important parts of implementing new technology in a business. Open up the communication channels, so your staff feels comfortable sharing both the positives and negatives of the new app. Ask them how they think the loyalty program is working. Ask them how the mobile ordering workflow is treating them. Ask them how the app has improved their daily tasks. Take their feedback seriously, as your employees are the ones using the app every single day. For instance, if they mention that customers aren’t participating in the loyalty program because the rewards don’t get them excited, it’s time to switch it up. When there are issues, you will be able to tackle them before they spread to your customer base. In turn, you can also give your employees constructive feedback on how they are doing with the app.

Conclusion

The only way your new mobile app is going to exceed expectations is if your staff is 100% on board. They hold the power to make the app a huge success. It is your job as a small business owner to get them as excited about the new app as you are. Customers will pick up on this positivity and be more likely to give the app a try.

Thinking like a prospect changes everything. That was the impetus behind today's post which was written from a buyer's perspective. I hope you have fun reading it—and get the point!

“We follow up on new leads that register for a free trial of our SaaS and I’m having a hard time getting them to call or email me back. I would expect that if the leads were cold but these are warm leads (hand raisers). Are we just getting bad leads?”

This is a common problem. A lot of sales people think that just because it’s a “warm lead” that its OK to handle the call a little differently (read: SKIP SALES STEPS)

No matter if you are making cold calls or contacting warm or even hot prospects, you must always lead with a WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM statement.

You must first PIQUE their interest.

Most sales people will call a warm lead and say / leave a voicemail message or email something to the effect of:

“You recently set up a trial of our (_________) service, so I was calling to get a little more insight into your requirements and learn what you are looking to accomplish”

Now here’s the problem… the prospect most likely is already on to a new fire. Taking the time to educate you on what they need is most likely not high on their to-do list. Even with a warm lead who is interested in solving a problem they have.

However, most prospects are willing to talk to someone that can help them get what they want. There’s a big difference.

LET’S SEE IF THIS ALTERNATIVE EXAMPLE WILL HELP GET THE POINT OF TODAY’S LESSON ACROSS:

Salesperson:

“I understand you’re curious about what type of LEAD RESPONSE you might be able to get by using our drip marketing campaign software as well as what pricing incentives may be available”

Do you see how one discusses “insight” and “requirements” (BORING) and the other discusses a hot button (in this case, LEAD RESPONSE) and “pricing incentives”?

Which call / voicemail / email would increase your chances of responding to? The one that wants to know insight / requirements or one that has promise of helping you get what it is that you are really after?

geralt / Pixabay

Think of your last conversation with a family member. Who was it with? What did you talk about? Where were you when you spoke? It probably took you just seconds to recall it.

When you think about quotidian chats, the conversations usually aren’t that difficult to remember. I can tell you the last conversation with my mother because I remember those conversations because I have a vested interest in that relationship.

You may be wondering, what do conversations with your family have to do with marketing? Marketers are constantly looking for ways to optimize their efforts, driven by pressure for every marketing initiative to generate return on investment (ROI) for their organizations. As time passes in the decision making process, marketing teams need help delivering high-ROI, quality lead generation, and strong customer engagement activity through a variety of content for long-term customer relationships. It’s easier to rely on email and newsletters to reach customers, but research shows that a conversation will yield greater results in the sales process.

To drive sales, inspire loyalty, and deliver ROI, marketers ought to approach their relationships with prospects and customers more like the conversations they have with their family and less like a transactional business exchange. Whether you are using webinars, presentations, or any type of two-way marketing tactic, here are four tips that will help you leverage the art of a conversation to efficiently create better demand generation.

Create New Conversations with Content

Building a relationship through conversations is not easy, but strong content can create a natural conversation starter. Through engaging emails, insightful whitepapers, eye-popping case studies, and visually striking infographics, you can demonstrate thought leadership and invite prospects to engage with you. But prospects are inundated with content every day. Yours needs to stand out for a prospect to become interested in talking with you.

Partner with industry peers, strategic partners, and customers. Brainstorm content ideas together. By collaborating with leaders with different specialties and perspectives, you can develop unique touchpoints for your audience and thoroughly demonstrate why they should build a relationship for your company. Once these assets are created, make the most of them by leveraging them across different channels – including in email, social media, on your website, and in webinars.

Engage Directly and with Purpose

Audience engagement is essential for keeping your prospects interested and attuned to your conversation. Steve Jobs was a master at this skill. He was able to engage and captivate an audience without fail. For example, Steve started his presentations with a ‘why, how and what’ format. He didn’t waste time on long-winded background information about himself or Apple. Instead, he jumped in to cover the big topics of that conversation.

Take Steve’s teachings as proof positive that having a direct conversation in marketing works. People are busy and don’t have time for lengthy expositions. A relevant and engaging conversation can be the difference between a relationship-building, high-impact event that generates you many qualified leads, and one that falls flat and leaves your audience tuning out of the conversation. Try tools like webinars, instant messaging, and chatbots to engage your audience directly and with a purpose.

Interact in Unique Ways

A richly interactive conversation goes a long way. When holding a webinar, think about techniques like polls, hand-raises and Q&A’s. All of these assets provide incredible insight into individual attendees for lead generation through data and engaging discussion. Now think about the other side of the coin; eBooks, blogs or other forms of written content. These examples, though effective in certain scenarios, are simply not efficient when you’re trying to foster a relationship with qualified leads.

Initiate two-way dialogue through your marketing efforts. Try adding surveys to your email outreach or Q&A sections to your webinars. These methods will help you drive and continue a conversation with a prospect, leading to lasting relationships and higher quality leads. As a bonus, interacting with your audience provides valuable individual response data, which is critical to moving prospects further along the sales funnel.

Leverage the Right Metrics

Today, there is an array of metrics that can help drive a conversation. In fact, there are so many that it’s easy to find yourself paralyzed when trying to identify the right ones. For example, a good predictor of webinar performance is the click-through rate (CTR), which tracks how many people are coming to your landing page register and how many don’t complete the form or even start to fill it out. If you have fewer than 25% CTR, you should be spooked because something is not connecting with your audience.

If you are leveraging metrics to make your marketing more successful, then you are making existing prospects and customers more successful. Make sure you are using technology that tracks metrics like CTR so you can make tweaks to your efforts as necessary. Not only will this save you a lot of time, but it will help you gauge and measure progress in reaching your target audience.

These tips are just a few of the ways having a conversation with prospects can help you build some solid leads. Now it’s time for you to go out and start building those relationships. Let’s discuss how they go in the comments below.

They’re refusing to help you.

Your clients have hired you to help their business. They’ve paid for your services and signed on the dotted line. But they’re refusing to do what you’ve asked.

They won’t give you the feedback you’re asking for. They drag their feet on getting you the materials you need to do an amazing job for them. Almost immediately, it seems like they’re actually trying to sabotage their project. It’s as if they’re trying to lose money.

What’s going on?

Why is it that some clients refuse to live up to their end of the bargain?

Credibility.

Low credibility starts the client relationship off on the wrong foot

Clients enter into a relationship with you with perceptions. These perceptions dictate how they see you and shapes how they’ll behave. BJ Fogg, researcher at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, stated there are four kinds of credibility.

1. Earned credibility. This is the kind of credibility you develop with clients who had a positive experience with you. Your customer service is excellent, you provide expert advice and you produce results.

2. Reputed credibility. Hundreds of positive reviews. A referral from an unbiased client whose experience has been positive. They’re pleased with your service so they decide to spread the word. They mention your agency to family, friends and acquaintances – anyone who’s in the market for your service.

3. Presumed credibility. This is all about familiarity and assumptions. A client sees your advertising salvo on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn. “I saw your interview on Business Insider and your guest posts on Forbes.” These clients develop a general familiarity with your brand. A brand they’ve heard of is more credible than one they haven’t.

4. Surface credibility. This refers to a client’s subjective opinion of your agency, brand or service (they’re in-demand, top notch service, they always get results, I think they’re trustworthy, etc.). A client looks at your business, takes stock of what they see and makes a judgment call.

To take things further, each credibility sub-type operates on a continuum. The further you are on the continuum, the more credible organization appears to be.

At least in your client’s mind.

This is incredibly important because agency clients sort the organizations they work with into groups. This sorting process is largely subconscious, it would be presumptuous to assume clients are making these decisions consciously. Here’s why this sorting process is so important.

It sets the tone of your relationship.

The solution? Build credibility in all four areas. Build a strong online review profile, get testimonials from clients, create a website and marketing campaign. Do what it takes to create a reputation that demonstrates authority and credibility.

Why go to the trouble?

Your credibility is a measurement of trust. The more credible you appear to be, the easier it is for clients to trust you. Agency clients are looking for a way to establish a kind of relational hierarchy. They’re looking to answer two very specific questions.

1. Do I need them more than they need me? Any agency that’s prominent, well received, with good standing in the marketplace has power. These agencies are great at what they do and they’re great at communicating their value. Clients approaching these agencies realize it’s an honor to be selected by these agencies. They’re usually on their best behavior.

2. Do they need me more than I need them? Agencies in this category are seen as less credible, though many of them are able to run circles around their more well-known competitors. Clients don’t know enough about the industry to be able to tell these agencies apart. So they go with the metrics they’re familiar with, price, product and service. Agencies in this category chase after clients, amplifying a prospect’s subconscious disdain.

Clients in the second category tend to misbehave.

These clients make one off demands. They’re often uncooperative, difficult to work with and even more difficult to please. Let’s say you’re an agency with clients in the second category…

Does this mean you’re stuck with uncooperative clients?

Not at all.

It means you’ll need to make some changes. Make the right changes and you’ll notice something. A radical transformation in your client’s attitude and behavior.

Here’s how you do it.

1. Don’t treat your clients like adults.

This sounds insane doesn’t it?

“They’re adults, why shouldn’t I treat them that way? Are you saying I should treat them like kids?”

No, I’m suggesting instead that you treat your clients like professionals. Professionals are proactive. They aren’t begged or chased down to fulfill their end of the deal. They won’t need to be told to act in their best interest. Professionals are available and cooperative.

They’re on top of their work.

They’re socially competent A-players who do what needs to be done.

Get clients to live up to their end of the bargain.

Avoid chasing after clients; when you beg, cajole or harass them to keep their end of the deal you create harm.

· Stop chasing after clients and endlessly repeating yourself. This steadily decreases a client’s respect and admiration for you.

· Require clients to earn your attention. Give your clients the benefit of the doubt, do what you can to establish and maintain goodwill. But within that framework of goodwill, expect clients to earn your attention. If they give you what you need to continue working on their project, your project has their attention. If they neglect their project, place them on hold.

· Expect reciprocation. When you invest something, anything in your client’s project, expect something in return. If they ask for a proposal, ask them to set a time to go over the proposal together. If you give them a deliverable, expect feedback and engagement re: said deliverable. If they want you to start, expect a deposit.

Here’s the key differentiator: when it comes to the relationship – how you treat them, kindness, respect, etc. – give without expectation.

2. Let clients choose whatever they want.

When a client believes they need me more than I need them they can fall into a trap. The trap of believing they have the right to choose whatever they want. And you know what?

They’re right.

Here’s why that’s a problem. When agencies accept that lie, they enable unprofessional behavior. Most agencies don’t allow their client to experience the natural consequences of their choices, they take the fall.

What does that looks like?

Let’s say you’re working within a deadline. Client pays their deposit, gives you what you need to get started, and then without warning they stop responding.

If you’re like most agencies, you call the client repeatedly.

You nag, beg, and sometimes even whine. Anything to get your client to respond, which only increases their resistance.

Then, all of a sudden, your client returns.

They dump a large pile of work in your lap exclaiming “I’m in a bind and I need this done by 8PM tonight!” What do most agencies do? They give in, they force their employees to stay late. They neglect their other clients, and they do whatever it takes to get things done.

Their dysfunctional client seems happy at the moment.

But at what cost?

Their other clients are unhappy, employees are burned out and morale has dropped. Agency work quality suffers as a result.

Get clients to live up to their end of the bargain.

Clients should be free to do what they want, provided that they’re willing to accept the consequences. If your client chooses to blow you off you can reach out them with friendly reminders.

Let’s say you’re dealing with an unresponsive client. How would you approach them? Like this:

Hi Jan,

I’m sure you’ve just been busy, but I wanted to quickly check that you received the reports I sent last week.

Here are the changes you wanted to see written up:

[deliverables] I’ve attached it again to saving you digging around in old emails. We’ll need your feedback to get started on this next phase.

Please let me know.

Best,

Andrew McDermott

Nothing about that communication was rude, aggressive or unprofessional. Well, what if they continue to blow you off? Give them the benefit of the doubt and you follow up with them.

Hi Jan,

Have you given up on this project? I’ve kept a slot open in our schedule for your project. If you’ve decided to take things in a different direction that’s no problem.

Please let me know.

Warmly,

Andrew McDermott

What if you’ve followed up repeatedly and they still fail to keep their end of the deal? You give them the consequences of their choice.

Hi Jan,

I haven’t heard back from you re: your project, so I have to assume your priorities have changed. We’ve placed your project/campaign on hold.

Please let us know if we can be of any help in the future.

Best,

Andrew McDermott

Would it be unwise to drop all of your other clients when your dysfunctional client returns with an emergency? Absolutely. A better idea? Have your dysfunctional client earn their way back into your schedule by completing your most recent request.

3. Let clients do whatever they want.

The vast majority of agencies struggle with a hidden problem. They try to control their clients. Not intentionally of course.

If a client refuses to cooperate, we do everything in our power to get them back on track. We do our best to get clients to do what we want them to do. And you know what? That’s understandable. What we’re asking for is, for the most part, pretty reasonable.

Give us what we need to do our jobs.

That’s not at all unreasonable, but it’s still a problem. Why? Because we’re too focused on the outcome we want. Here’s the hidden cause of our problem. We’re too focused on our dysfunctional clients.

But why?

Our sales funnel is empty or depleted. It’s common for agencies to go through feast and famine periods. When it’s good, it’s really good. You’re flooded with work, clients are spending money, they’re engaged – life is good. When it’s bad, it’s really bad. You’re out of work, clients aren’t calling, you’ve got nothing in the pipeline.

When you’re in a bad spot and you only have one or two prospects in the pipeline it’s tough to be objective.

Get clients to live up to their end of the bargain.

Clients aren’t going to ask for permission, they’re going to do what they want to do anyway. You need the ability to do the same.

How do you gain that ability? You keep your funnel full of customers.

That leads us to another dirty secret doesn’t it? Many agencies don’t know how to keep their sales funnel full of qualified prospects! It’s the embarrassing secret many agencies would do their best to avoid discussing.

But it’s true.

If you’re unsure, you do the smart thing. You learn from experts, who’ve built and sold agencies. What if you know how to fill your pipeline but you simply don’t have the time?

You make time.

You do what it takes to fill your funnel and keep it full. Maybe it ‘s guest posting on high traffic and industry recognized sites. Could be a Facebook ad campaign or advertising on Google’s Display Network.

The point is you’re focused on keeping your funnel full.

This gives you leverage, power and the ability to say No. That’s important, because it frees you from a power hungry prospect. Instead of accepting work from a client who refuses to cooperate, you have the power to move on.

Because there are 20 to 30 prospective clients waiting in your inbox.

Your clients need you more than you need them

The vast majority of clients don’t realize they need you more than you need them. Your expertise isn’t something that can be bought.

Cajoling and chasing clients doesn’t work.

Your clients have the freedom to choose, to make their own decisions. Your agency needs the freedom to do the same. You need the freedom to walk away.

Your ability to walk away keeps clients engaged.

It sends the message you need me, more than I need you, believe it or not that’s appealing to clients. But it’s also beneficial. It enables you to approach your clients as an equal. To work with them with the full understanding that both you and your clients can walk away.

It moves your relationship to healthier place.

The agency/client relationship is beneficial to both parties because both of you choose to work together.

When you choose clients, they choose to behave

Most agencies accept new clients. They need to pay the bills so they accept the clients they’d prefer to avoid.

Their clients know.

It’s the reason they fail to keep their end of the bargain. It doesn’t have to be that way for you. With credibility and freedom comes the ability to say No, to expect and receive the behavior you want. Clients will keep their end of the bargain if the right environment is in place.

Give your agency the credibility and freedom it needs to attract the right clients. You’ll find refusal becomes a thing of the past.

B2B content marketing strategy for traditional and inbound marketing

The B2B buying cycle is a long, arduous process. It includes multiple stakeholders with different agendas and an aversion to risk lingering from the last decade’s financial difficulties. Couple the aversion to risk with the new trend of buyers researching extensively before contacting the seller and you get today’s B2B selling environment. It demands a change in strategy from your marketing and sales teams.

Inbound marketing, a method of “pull” marketing, replaces traditional marketing's practice of appealing to the broadest possible audience in the hopes of capturing a single sale. Inbound marketing is more effective and substantially less costly than traditional marketing, and it meshes with new buying trends.

Inbound Marketing: The Definition

Inbound marketing leverages content marketing, email marketing, and marketing automation to build rapport and trust. Sellers nurture a relationship with prospects by offering valuable content that answers the most pressing questions from a specific target audience. Sales and marketing must work closely together to achieve the best results.

The objective of inbound is to attract potential buyers to your solution early in the buyer journey without “selling” to them. Instead, you tailor highly relevant content to your ideal buyer and continue to provide additional information during the lead nurturing and qualification process. You earn the attention of your potential customers rather than demand it.

• No selling or overt promotion.
• Don’t talk about yourself, talk about solutions to the prospect’s pain points.
• Inbound is not the same as advertising.

Inbound marketing lets you keep the momentum of the sale going. Its effectiveness is the result of your deep understanding of your audience that informs the relevance of your content.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is better than traditional outbound marketing and cold calling. Period. Companies that use inbound techniques generate three times the number of leads at 62% lower cost.

• A well-designed inbound campaign provides measurable, repeatable results.
• You obtain more qualified leads that are closer to the end of the sales cycle.
• You have many fewer unqualified leads for sales to waste time on.

Marketing automation easily tracks a variety of metrics that tell you how well your content is performing. Because it is so simple to set up and make changes to an online campaign, you can perform A/B testing; publish two different versions of almost any content to see which generates more leads and results in more sales.

Inbound marketing fits with the online research trend that has been growing for years. Over 70% of B2B buyers begin gathering information on their problem and potential solutions through general internet research. Their research may be 90% complete before they ever contact you. To build awareness, you need to generate content for them to find.

More advantages:

• You have continuous lead generation to your website.
• You receive insight into the ROI of your marketing budget.
• You can optimize your lead acquisition based on data.
• You learn more about your leads during their buyer’s journey.

In 2012, the average cost per lead for traditional marketing was $346 while the average cost per lead for inbound was $135, an impressive reduction that may be even larger now.

Inbound marketing increases your visibility online through the power of SEO and keyword research tied to your content. When you regularly publish new content, your search engine ranking improves even faster and you are found more easily and more often by prospective buyers.

It’s All About the Funnel

Inbound marketing uses the sales funnel to segment prospects and provide the right content. The buyer’s journey through the funnel is typically broken into three segments:

• Top of Funnel - TOFU
• Middle of Funnel - MOFU
• Bottom of Funnel - BOFU

Different types of content work best for each segment. For example, at the top of the funnel (TOFU) these types of free content work best:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Social posting
• Short videos
• Website pages

During their journey through the top of the funnel, you may begin gathering a small amount of information from prospects, enough to allow you to begin a nurturing campaign through email.

As they receive your nurturing sequence emails, you can begin to provide premium content in exchange for more information to help you understand the prospect’s business and pain points. Content for the middle of the funnel (MOFU) provides value. Prospects at this stage are willing to trade information to obtain:

• Ebooks
• White papers
• Case studies
• Webinars

As prospects reach the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), they have defined their problem and identified a short list of solutions. At this point, you want to provide content that verifies their choice. They need product specific information that overcomes any objections and helps them reach a decision.

• Testimonials
• Free trials
• Demos
• Product videos
• Competitor matrices

On the way through the funnel, you have gone from providing thought leadership and educational content to more specific content that helps prospects define their problems and educates them on potential solutions. Finally, you get the chance to “sell” and promote your offering as the best solution for their problems.

Getting Started with Inbound Marketing

Are you ready to do some inbound marketing?

1. Determine what questions your content needs to answer and develop a buyer persona, which is a well-researched example of your ideal customer.
2. Perform an audit of your existing content and identify any gaps.
3. Develop content to fill the gaps and repurpose old content in new ways.
4. Determine the best social media networks to share your content.
5. Identify the proper metrics to measure how well your content performs.

Content can come from anywhere.

Put several related blog posts together into an ebook. Create a webinar or video out of a white paper. If you have a page of FAQs, write a blog post or produce a podcast for each to provide a deeper answer.

Each piece of content can be shared on social media and premium content placed behind a form.  Create a landing page and link to it from your social media accounts or nurturing emails to give your prospect a chance to give you more information.

Use an analytics suite like Google Analytics to monitor and track the performance of your content and website. Use the results to fine-tune the content and measure the ROI on your marketing budget.

There is over a decade of statistics and evidence substantiating inbound marketing’s outperformance of traditional marketing. Inbound costs less, is more effective, reduces your time to close, and provides metrics to show you how well you spent your money.

The question isn’t “Why would your B2B company implement inbound marketing?”

The question is:  “Why wouldn’t you?”

By Robin Crompton and Susannah Thorpe

Researchers have discovered some 50 footprints at Trachilos in Crete that are nearly 6 million-years-old. It looks like they may be from a hominin – a member of the human species after separation from the chimpanzee lineage. But, as the authors point out themselves, the findings are highly controversial – suggesting human ancestors may have existed in Crete at the same time as they evolved in Africa.

So what should we make of it all? If the footprints are confirmed to be from a hominin – additional studies are needed before we can know for sure – it is unquestionably exciting.

The oldest known human footprints, from Africa, are by Australopithecus. So who made the Trachilos footprints?

Researchers have discovered some 50 footprints at Trachilos in Crete that are nearly 6 million-years-old. It looks like they may be from a hominin – a member of the human species after separation from the chimpanzee lineage. But, as the authors point out themselves, the findings are highly controversial – suggesting human ancestors may have existed in Crete at the same time as they evolved in Africa.

The oldest known human footprints, from Africa, are by Australopithecus

So what should we make of it all? If the footprints are confirmed to be from a hominin – additional studies are needed before we can know for sure – it is unquestionably exciting.

The oldest footprints confirmed as hominin are the Laetoli series, which date to 3.65 million years. The Laetoli series, found in Laetoli, Tanzania, are now known to have been made by the early human ancestor Australopithecus. It was up to six feet tall had foot function pretty much indistinguishable from our own.

The candidates

So what kind of two-legged creatures have roamed Europe or nearby countries? We have abundant fossil evidence of great apes in Europe at the time of the Trachilos footprints, but no confirmed cases of hominins. Apes go as far back as 13 million years ago, such as Pierolapithecus from Barcelona. Two million years later, the pongine or orangutan relative Hispanopithecus lived in the same region. Excellent skeletons of both indicate they were probably partially walking upright.

The ape Dryopithecus and the possible hominin Graecopithecus from Greece were also around. The latter is about 7 million years old, but unfortunately no skeleton has been found except for skull and teeth. Slightly older at about 9 million-years-old are the very complete postcranial skeletons of Oreopithecus from Italy, which was unquestionably walking on two legs – and probably in trees as well as on ground. We don’t know for sure, but it might also be a hominin.

The Trachilos footprints don’t show any such discordant character

In Kenya, there was Orrorin, also slightly older than Trachilos. It lived in trees but walked on two legs, completely upright. Orrorin was quite likely a hominin or a very close relative of the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, although human-like in all ways. Importantly though, we unfortunately lack evidence of the feet, so we cannot compare it with the Trachilos footprints.

Slightly younger than the Trachilos prints, Ardipithecus from Ethiopia, is a generally accepted member of the human lineage. Like Orrorin it could have been close to the common chimpanzee-human ancestor, but looked more like a modern human: Homo sapien. It is becoming increasingly clear that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees had limbs and trunk (a postcranial skeleton) much more like our own than like those of living chimpanzees.

Gorilla prints?

So what or who made the Trachilos prints? They are certainly convincing as real footprints, from the few pictures provided in the paper. The age estimate of 5.7 million years also seems correct. The prints do have a narrow heel compared to our general idea of what human footprints look like, as the authors note. But that could easily be matched by the shape of human footprints walking in wet mud, such as in an estuary – which may have been the case. They have a big toe placed quite close to the others, like our own, but so do the feet of gorillas.

Gorillas now appear to be in some respects a good model for what the gait (and ecology) of the earliest human ancestors might have been like, moving on two legs on the ground as well as in the trees.

The fact is that human footprints and foot function vary enormously between steps as a consequence of the complexity of our anatomy and ability to make choices from a large range of functional strategies to maintain stability. Human foot pressure, which is the way force is applied over the sole of the foot to the ground, overlaps with that of orangutans and pygmy chimpanzees, and probably even more with that of gorillas. So in some circumstances a human foot could look like that of a gorilla.

A Silverback gorilla

If all 50 of the Trachilos prints were made freely available to other scientists as high resolution laser scans, we would have a decent sample to assess their variability and compare them to other fossil and recent footprints and foot pressure records. And indeed, the researchers behind the study told The Conversation they are aiming to release all their data at some point.

This would give us a good chance of saying who made them. As it stands, they could as well be those of gorillas – which separated from us over 10 million years ago – as those of a member of our own human lineage such as Oreopithecus or Orrorin.

Robin Crompton is Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease, University of Liverpool. Susannah Thorpe is a reader in Zoology, University of Birmingham. You can read the Trachilos researchers’ own article about their footprint discovery here.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

• China announced a crackdown on "ICOs" — issuing of new virtual currencies;
• Wording of edict makes all cryptocurrency trading illegal, according to eToro China exec.

LONDON — China's crackdown on "initial coin offerings" may be much wider than first thought, potentially making all cryptocurrency trading illegal.

The People's Bank of China (PBoC) on Monday outlawed ICOs, a method of raising money by issuing new digital currencies. The trend has become hugely popular, with over $1.5 billion raised using this method in 2017 alone.

However, the wording of the PBoC edict also suggested that trading and usage of all cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, is now illegal in China.

The PBoC said that virtual currencies that are "not issued by the monetary authorities... do not have legal status equivalent to money, and can not and should not be circulated as a currency in the market use."

The PBoC added that "any so-called tokens financing trading platform shall not engage in the exchange of legal currency and tokens." It even goes so far as to ban platforms from "provid[ing] pricing, information, [and] intermediary services."

Adam Efrima, the operations director of trading platform eToro in China, described the ruling as a "huge deal," saying: "It's bigger than most people think it is."

Efrima, who first alerted Business Insider to the far reaching nature of the PBoC ruling, said: "I don't think the Chinese government are against blockchain and high-level blockchain development, I think what they're trying to do is take down scammers."

But he added: "Cryptocurrency related exchanging and trading activities are officially forbidden. If you interpret the law literally then you cannot engage in any crypto exchange — crypto-to-crypto or crypto-to-fiat."

"What we're seeing in the market is a lot of Chinese people in the market getting scared," he said.

He said he now expects a regional crackdown on Chinese operators as municipalities follow the PBoC's lead and issue bylaws.

Commenting on the effects the law could have on the global ICO market, Efrima said: "It's huge. There's not a quality project that's not doing a road show in China right now. An educated guess is that this will be very, very negative."

But he added: "In the long run, it might be good as there'll be less projects and less scams and that could support the price of Ethereum."

Separately on Monday South Korea also announced a crackdown on digital currencies. Business Korea reports that a government task force on Sunday concluded that "digital currencies cannot be considered money and currency, nor financial products," and pledged to "strengthen levels of punishment," for ICOs.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A $16 billion hedge fund CIO gives an easy explanation of quantitative trading

“Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything,” wrote Paul Krugman more than 20 years ago. “A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise output per worker.”

There is a virtuous cycle between productivity and people: Higher levels of productivity allow society to reinvest in human capital (most obviously, though not exclusively, via higher wages), and smart investments result in higher labor productivity.

Unfortunately, this virtuous cycle appears to be broken. Productivity in most developed economies has been anemic. In the decade between 2005 and 2015, labor productivity in the US as measured by GDP per labor hour was less than 1% for 7 of the 10 years, according to the OECD. And wages are stagnant. US unemployment hit its lowest level in 16 years this past May, yet wage growth has been sluggish compared with similar periods in the past. Of course, low productivity can depress wages, but in recent decades, wages haven’t grown as much as expected even during periods of robust economic productivity growth. “For most of the last half-century — 84 percent of the time since 1966 — average wages have grown more slowly than would be predicted based on productivity and inflation growth,” The New York Times reported. During much of this time, it has been shareholders, not workers, who have reaped the benefits of higher productivity.

All of this raises a chicken-or-egg question: Are we suffering from low productivity because we have underinvested in human capital? Or are we unable to invest in human capital because structural factors are permanently reducing productivity?

The evidence suggests the former: We could improve productivity if we stopped systematically underinvesting in human capital. The most direct and obvious investment is increased wages. Beyond wages, other forms of investment in human capital include education and training, improved healthcare, and other, less obvious investments, such as the time and space to explore new ideas and professional development opportunities. In research for our book, Time, Talent and Energy, my co-author Michael Mankins and I found that such investments do indeed pay off: The top-quartile companies in our study unlocked 40% more productive power in their workforce through better practices in time, talent and energy management.

Let’s look at three investments — in wages, time and energy — that could reinvigorate the productivity cycle:

Wages. Higher investment in wages does not need to come at the expense of customers and shareholders. In The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, demonstrates how the best retail companies align their customer value proposition with their operations strategy and their approach to human capital. Customer advocacy and employee engagement are inextricably linked in the examples Ton uses, allowing those companies to create a better customer experience, higher quality jobs and better financial outcomes for shareholders. Small and large companies alike are experimenting with these concepts. Managed by Q, a cleaning and office services company in New York City, decided to pay employees higher wages than the prevailing market rate. In turn, the company is achieving lower levels of employee and customer churn, and correspondingly lower employee hiring and customer acquisition costs. The compounding and virtuous effects of increasing customer and employee advocacy more than offset the higher cost of wages. At the other end of the size spectrum, Walmart has committed to investing $2.7 billion in its associates through higher wages, better benefits and enhanced training.

Time. Our careless treatment of time represents a shocking level of underinvestment in human capital. For knowledge workers, time is incredibly scarce. Our research suggests that, on average, managers have fewer than seven hours per week of uninterrupted time to do deep versus shallow work. They spend the rest of their time attending meetings, sending e-communications or working in time increments of less than 20 minutes, a practice that makes it difficult to accomplish a specific task and in the worst cases can lead to employee burnout. We know that great ideas that drive breakthroughs in productivity come from human beings with the time, talent and energy to innovate.

One step in reversing this trend is to start treating hours like dollars, with a real opportunity cost. Companies should seek to systematically eradicate organizational drag — all the internal complexity that leads to inefficient and ineffective interactions. Giving managers more time to do deep thinking can unlock innovations that can have a significant impact on productivity. Companies that follow the Toyota Production System use Kaizen events to improve productivity on the manufacturing line. That requires pulling workers off the line and giving them the time and space to make processes leaner or to devise innovative work methods. Similarly, many organizations are experimenting with using Agile sprints beyond the traditional areas of product development and innovation. A well-run sprint takes talented, cross-functional team members out of their daily routines and focuses them in weekly increments on creating breakthroughs in products or processes. Both Kaizen events and Agile sprints are investments in innovation and human capital productivity. Many tech companies have experimented with giving employees unstructured time to explore new ideas such as LinkedIn’s InCubator, Apple’s Blue Sky and Microsoft’s Garage.

Energy. Perhaps the most transformational thing a company can do for its workforce is to invest in creating jobs and working environments that unleash intrinsic inspiration. This is the gateway to the discretionary energy that multiplies labor productivity: An inspired employee is more than twice as productive as a satisfied employee and more than three times as productive as a dissatisfied employee. Yet, only one in eight employees are inspired. We measure organizational energy through employee engagement, and despite decades of investment in engagement programs, levels of engagement remain systemically and stubbornly low.

As companies think about how to change this, they should focus on the jobs that will survive into the future. The forces of creative destruction inevitably will continue to eliminate some work through automation, digitalization, or the virtualization of work, but these same forces also create new types of work and jobs. Creating inspiring jobs and engaging working environments requires holistically addressing the factors that drive employee inspiration, which we outlined in Bain’s pyramid of employee needs. This includes more autonomy and agility as well as inspirational leadership. Companies like IBM are working hard to deploy design thinking throughout the enterprise. Others, such as ANZ, the Australian-based banking giant, have committed to adopting Agile at scale in less than a year, following some of the proven practices used by Spotify, the music streaming company.

For too long, business objectives and management philosophies have focused on efficiency over productivity. This has not only resulted in less investment in human capital but has also delivered lower total shareholder returns despite a period in which the cost of capital (and thus the cost of investing for growth) has been extraordinarily low. It’s not money that’s in short supply; it’s good growth ideas.

Robert Gordon, a macroeconomist at Northwestern University, has shown that periods of breakout productivity in the United States were not the result of capital deepening (applying more capital to each hour of labor), but of what economists call total factor productivity, a catch-all measure for the impact of technological innovation. Who has these inspirational ideas and translates them into productivity-driving innovations? People do. This is why we believe that human capital, not financial capital, is often your scarcest resource. Reinvesting in this scarcest resource could unlock new levels of labor productivity for the economies and companies around the world that are sorely in need of it.

• There are fundamentals all great public speakers master.
• We spoke with the last four Toastmasters International world champions of public speaking.
• Their advice applies to everything from a TED Talk to a presentation to a few colleagues.

Being a great public speaker requires much more than confidence.

It's about connecting to audience members on a personal level and leaving them with a satisfying message they can act on.

We spoke with some of the most talented speakers around the globe —the last four Toastmasters International world champions of public speaking: Dananjaya Hettiarachchi (2014), Mohammed Qahtani (2015), Darren Tay (2016), and Manoj Vasudevan(2017).

Each winner beat out around 30,000 competitors over a six-month-long competition, the largest of its kind.

They explained how anyone can become a better speaker by practicing several basic skills. These same tactics work whether you're giving a TED Talk to 2,000 people or a presentation to 10 of your colleagues.

Here are seven techniques they all agreed help them win their competitions.

SEE ALSO: The world champion of public speaking breaks down his winning speech, from word choice to body language

Determine your message and let it define your presentation.

Hettiarachchi said a common mistake beginners make is basing their presentation around a topic rather than a message.

Think of your message as a thesis statement, and make it as clear and concise as possible.

For example, when Tay was crafting his speech last year, he said he initially went into it wanting to tell an amusing story. "That really got my speech message very diluted and disconnected," he said.

His mentor told him he needed to start from the beginning and determine his message before writing another word. He settled on: "We are all our own worst bullies, and the best way to deal with that is by fully acknowledging the presence of negative thoughts in our mind rather than fighting or ignoring them." Tay said that the elements of an engaging speech flowed more naturally after he clarified this.

As Vasudevan told us, when developing a presentation, you should have every line you say pass the test, "Does this further my message?"

Focus on adding value to your audience.

Vasudevan explained that ahead of a presentation, there's an obvious question that easy to overlook: "Why should the audience members even listen to you?"

Whether you're giving a speech or showing PowerPoint slides to your colleagues, you should empathize with your audience. Determine what you can teach them and cut anything that could appear self-indulgent or redundant.

As Vasudevan said, your speech is not about your ego; it's about your message. Make sure that message is worth listening to.

Speak as if you are having a conversation.

Vasudevan said that for nearly the entirety of his winning speech, "I'm looking at someone and talking to them. It's a huge audience, but I keep picking some random person who's interested in listening to me and I look at the person."

He said that when you are in front of a large audience, you may need to add some drama to your gestures and delivery, but you should still speak as if you were talking to a friend across the table from you. It's about establishing a genuine connection with the audience.

As Hettiarachchi told us, "A speech should be conversational, not theatrical."

No matter what size organization you work for, you have decisions to make – or at least discuss – prior to jumping into the evaluation of marketing automation providers. Don’t rely on the vendors to become the experts in your business processes, people, systems, and data. You must get your house in order first.

Once you get the green light to acquire a marketing automation system, start the review process to better identify which vendor is right for your organization with these 10 questions.

1. Is there an internal team set up to manage the evaluation and eventual implementation?

It’s an exciting time when you’re finally given that OK to research vendors, and it’s easy to start downloading white papers and calling contact-us numbers, but have you really involved enough people in the conversation?

It’s not uncommon to hear of halfway-completed implementations that come to a sudden stop due to internal processes breaking or people left out of the initial conversation who now want to suggest a change. Getting the right people involved early is key to a smooth and successful implementation.

Don’t let #marketingautomation installations come to a stop because internal processes break. @jphautomation
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Here is what an evaluation team might consist of:

• Marketing and sales leadership
• Experienced sales team members
• CRM administrators
• Folks from event, customer service, and IT teams

It’s important to make sure you’ve accounted for all the departments that could potentially be impacted, and given them a seat at the table so they are engaged throughout the evaluation and implementation process.

Start by setting up one-on-one meetings with key players from each group, taking time to understand how their department functions and what processes they have and might want to improve on or develop. Assign tasks to these key stakeholders and work diligently with them to develop a vision for how marketing automation can benefit them.

Get an understanding of your IT and CRM administration departments’ knowledge and experience with system integrations as they will most likely play a big role in the eventual implementation.

Here is a breakdown of how to do it:

• Select departments which may benefit or be affected by a new system implementation.
• Set up initial process-sharing meetings with departments and identify key stakeholders.
• Create new and/or gather existing process documentation.
• Educate and get your stakeholders excited about the general benefits of marketing automation.
• Create your implementation team and plan to set up recurring meetings.

2. What internal and third-party tools does your company use? Which ones must remain? Which ones can you live without? Which ones would be nice to add?

Just as you should get to know the thought processes that may be impacted by a new marketing automation system, you also want to take inventory of your internal and external applications. These tools may be assisting with data storage, event and webinar registration, data appending/cleaning, or social behavior, and analytic reporting.

Take inventory of internal & external apps before talking w/ #marketingautomation vendors. @jphautomation
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Assuring that you know what you have and how it’s used is helpful leading into your research or conversations with vendors as many of the vendors have a wide variety of third-party tools that can be integrated with the platform to help streamline processes you already have.

Get to know the owners and/or administrators of these internal and third-party tools, and ask them:

• What functions does it perform, and what departments/people benefit from its use?
• Is this an internally built or third-party purchased tool?
• If third-party, what is the current contractual status?
• How long has the company had it? Is it actively in use?
• What makes this tool successful? What things would you like to see changed or improved?
• If another tool was a better fit, would we be able to replace this tool?
• If unable to replace, why?

Based on all the information you have gathered, create an internal tools list and prioritize it based on “to keep” or “to replace with approval.”

3. How large is your contact database across all internal systems?

Your initial thought might be to just take your marketing or subscriber database under consideration, but what you should consider is all the other data within your organization that might be available to you. Database size is one of the primary factors that often determines how much you pay for a marketing automation system, so it’s important you consider all data sources.

Database size is a factor that determines how much you pay for a #marketingautomation system. @jphautomation
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Is your sales team using a CRM disconnected to your current marketing systems or is it still using Excel to manage new and old client data? If one of your marketing automation goals is to streamline your outreach to customers (and it should be) then make sure to account for this sales data. Is marketing the only department that is collecting lead gen data, or do other departments have collection forms (i.e., contact us, download, sign-up)? Gathering all this data not only helps you get a more accurate quote, but it paints a more complete view of your audience.

4. How clean and accurate is your internal database?

Now that you have uniquely identified all the data within your company, it’s important to evaluate both the quality and accuracy of these data sources. Having large amounts of data at your disposal can be a great thing, but if it is inaccurate and unreliable then it may cause more harm than good. Nobody wants to receive an email with the wrong personalized first name, or be addressed as a customer when they have no clue who your company is. And you don’t want to have emails bouncing left and right, landing in junk folders, or reported as spam.

Data cleaning and appending services on the market can help you update large groups of records, but I suggest you first use a tool like Excel to clean your data in some of the following ways:

• Count the number of duplicates by email address, then count the number of records which match by first name, last name, and company.
• Create columns for all the profile data points (name, title, company, industry, etc.) and begin to clean and create consistency across all values.
• Organize behavioral activity (such as record creation dates, download, and subscription sign-up dates) in new sheets and use a combination of formulas and “vLookups” to associate activity with each unique subscriber. From here you can evaluate which records are likely to be the most up-to-date.

5. Do you have a standard set of fields and values for which you collect data?

If you have multiple departments leveraging and benefiting from the data collected through the new marketing automation system, then it would be wise to have a set of standardized fields and values for both segmenting and reporting.

For example, if you have two departments collecting “industry” data, are both groups’ labels and input values the same? If using different systems to manage the data, are the API names for those fields the same?

Create a list of fields and values used throughout the company to collect and manage data, then organize them by their uniqueness to one another, as well as their usefulness to the company’s objectives.

6. Have you created an inventory of all your internal offer assets, forms, landing pages, email templates, etc.?

Whether your implementation (which you will be paying for) takes two, four, or six months or longer, part of that time will be focused on building some impactful campaigns for launch. Rather than chew up valuable time and resources during your main implementation phase, take stock of existing assets ahead of time and organize them by department and/or which product they promote. Next, determine which of these assets have expired or will soon, which will remain in place post implementation, and which need to be re-evaluated.

Inventory your “offer” assets to quicken launch when #marketingautomation platform is ready @jphautomation.
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7. What is your budget for this project and does the platform build in flexibility for potential year-over-year price increases?

Setting a budget will certainly help you initially narrow what marketing automation vendors you look at. But since the needs of every organization tend to change over time so might the functions of the marketing automation product you purchased.

The good news is many of these systems have third-party integrations that can support additional features you may not have considered. If internal processes have changed to the point where you need assistance outside of the available resources you have, a number of good consultant companies can guide you to your goals.

Keeping this in mind, be sure that you spend time considering and potentially budgeting for this additional functionality and services that may be available and work with your internal team to determine how these things might benefit you, not only now, but in the future.

8. Do you know what vendor questions to ask?

Staying organized throughout the vendor evaluation process is critical to a streamlined and successful implementation. However, this can prove to be difficult when your inbox is flooded by numerous sales reps vying for your attention and providing critical information as to why their tool is the best. Emails become misfiled, deleted, or otherwise ignored all because you’ve become overwhelmed by all the information.

That is why creating your own Q-and-A document (answers supplied by vendors) is valuable. It gives you a consistent way to seek answers to your standard marketing automation questions and business critical questions posed to each vendor the exact same way. This allows for an easy side-by-side comparison of vendor answers.

Create a Q&A doc for easy comparison when talking to vendors. @jphautomation #marketingautomation
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Keep your questions organized by a category, such as email, segmentation, integration, training, etc. This helps the vendors expedite the answers, ensuring that the right departments are fielding the right questions.

Click to enlarge

9. What browser(s) does your internal IT team support?

This may seem trivial, but depending on the politics within your internal organization, getting an internal IT team to standardize the use of a new browser recommended by your potential vendor may prove difficult. As part of your internal IT team discussions, find out what browsers are supported and which ones are unacceptable.

10. Did you create a wish list?

If you didn’t, then make one. Although it may not be as exciting as the one you would have made up as a child, it’s still a nice thing to keep handy when looking into vendors. Since your research up to this point likely explores a lot of the benefits of marketing automation, take time and think through all the reasons you’ve decided to move in this new direction. Take into account the conversations you have had with leadership and different departments, as well as those outside your organization who are familiar with the space.

Conclusion

I hope that these questions as well as answers have shown how important it is to internally analyze and understand your business processes, systems, and goals before you spend too much time evaluating marketing automation vendors. Sadly, I’ve seen it all too often, once vendor evaluations are underway, internal pressures can quickly mount to select someone. You’ll be amazed at how much easier it is to evaluate vendors when you’ve been able to answer these questions first.

Sign up for our weekly Content Strategy for Marketers e-newsletter, which features exclusive stories and insights from CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to reading his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 10 Questions You Should Answer Before Evaluating Marketing Automation Vendors appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Last year, Massachusetts passed the first law in the U.S. banning employers from asking job candidates about their salary history. Since then, several other cities and states have followed suit or are considering similar legislation. The topic has sparked some heated debates and even resulted in a lawsuit in one city, brought by the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce.

The intent of this type of legislation is to address the gender pay gap by ensuring that low pay doesn’t follow women from job to job and compound over time. PayScale, the compensation data and software company where I work, regularly examines trends and questions regarding employee pay, so we conducted a survey to better understand the relationship between the salary history question and the gender pay gap. What we found surprised us and almost everyone we’ve shared the data with to date — from career counselors to gender equity advocates to employers and employees who thought they were doing things right.

Between April and June of this year, we asked 15,413 job seekers who visited PayScale.com to evaluate an active job offer whether they disclosed their pay at previous jobs at any point during the interview process. The possible responses were:

• (A) No, and the employer did not ask.
• (B) No, but the employer asked.
• (C) Yes, the employer asked about my salary history.
• (D) Yes, I volunteered information about my salary history.
• (E) I do not recall.

The respondents were also asked a number of detailed questions as part of PayScale’s ongoing employee compensation survey about themselves and the employer they were considering — job title, location, years of experience, industry, age, gender, etc. When examining findings around potential gender pay gaps, we controlled for all of these factors with the exception of gender to ensure we were comparing similar individuals seeking similar jobs at similar companies.

The widely held assumption is that revealing your salary history, especially if the number is below market value, could negatively influence the offer made by the employer with whom you’re interviewing. However, this study revealed that a woman who was asked about her salary history and refused to disclose was actually offered 1.8% less than a woman who was asked and did disclose. Meanwhile, if a man refused to disclose when asked about salary history, he received an offer that was 1.2% higher than a man who did.

As with any data analysis, individual circumstances may vary, so it’s entirely possible that sometimes revealing your salary does negatively influence your offer. However — at a macro level — that’s not typically what’s happening. These findings seem to undercut the whole premise of banning the salary history question in order to level the playing field for women when it comes to compensation.

But why would not talking about salary history impact a compensation offer negatively for women and positively for men? Our analysis didn’t reveal the answer, but based on some well-known studies that exist around unconscious bias, I have two hypotheses.

• People react negatively when women negotiate for higher pay. We know from numerous studies that women face a “social cost” that men do not when they initiate salary negotiations, regardless of the gender of the person with which they’re negotiating. By not disclosing their salary, the women in our study may have signaled to a potential employer that they were intent on negotiating — and were punished for it. Women, it seems, may be penalized for sending this signal, while men are not.
• Employers may assume women who refuse to disclose pay earn less. Whether it’s conscious or not, employers may be jumping to conclusions about a woman’s salary when she declines to reveal it. The fact that a pay gap still exists for women is well documented; most hiring managers are likely aware of this issue. Does the gender of the candidate refusing to disclose pay, then, affect an employer’s perception of what that candidate is likely paid (i.e. that a woman likely has a low salary)? In the absence of information, what information is being assumed?

In our study, both male and female refusers tended to earn more in their current jobs than the candidates who revealed their salary history, regardless of whether they were asked or volunteered the information. What an employer didn’t know, in this case, potentially hurt some of our respondents, as offers made to these women were less than those made to women who disclosed salary.

There is a lot more research to be done on this topic area at PayScale, but in the meantime, it’s clear that asking salary history is having a negative impact on female job candidates, just in a different way than was previously believed. In addition, it’s worth remembering that there’s likely a double standard taking place with any salary history request: When employers ask about past pay, they’re asking for a level of transparency from the candidate that they’re often unwilling to meet themselves. Try asking a group of recruiters or hiring managers whether they’d consider including salary ranges in their job postings. I expect you’d be met with an awkward silence.

The bottom line is there’s a better way to approach this situation. The most typical reason employers offer for asking about salary history is to ensure they’re not putting candidates through the interview process who are already earning more than the budget available for the position. However, there are some misguided motives at play as well. Some employers are trying to determine what to pay for a position by asking a handful of candidates. Other employers are hoping to save on budget by lowering an expected offer based on a candidate’s current pay. These are not good reasons for asking salary history and generally don’t result in the right outcome for either the candidate or the employer.

What can employers do instead?

• Stop asking the question. The relationship with a potential new employee should get off to a good start, so don’t put them in the awkward position of having to decide what to reveal about their previous pay. Avoiding the question gives a better impression about the way pay is set at the organization.
• Price the job, not the person. A candidate’s current salary should have no bearing on what an employer is willing to pay for a particular position. Compensation should be a data-driven decision based on the current value of a given position in the talent market. Certainly, a candidate’s unique skills may place them lower or higher in the pre-determined range, but their current salary shouldn’t be the basis for determining their pay.
• Tweak the process for setting pay expectations. If the reason for asking salary history is to establish whether a candidate is above the available budget for a position, there are other ways to get to that same answer. Employers could ask about a candidate’s salary expectations. Or they could consider a bold step and try sharing the range for a position. They can make clear that the candidate will be placed in the range based on their specific skill set or experience level.

The negotiation process is an opportunity to start a healthy conversation about the way pay is established and managed at an organization. Rather than approaching it as a way to save money, employers and hiring managers can use pay negotiations to build trust with a candidate — man or woman — right from the start.

It remains to be seen whether legislation banning employers from asking the salary history question will have any positive impact in terms of closing the gender pay gap. On the one hand, if what’s happening is unconscious bias from employers toward women who refuse to answer the question, then not being able to ask may alleviate some of the gap we’re seeing in offers to female disclosers versus refusers. If, however, the real issue is around employers filling in the salary blanks differently based on gender when candidates don’t share their current salary, a ban on asking for pay history may not get the job done.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

Despite the talk, the training, the tools, and everything else sales people have been exposed to and have access to, it is still interesting (disappointing) how fast most sellers, even those who hit quota, will resort to product in a sale. They may want to pretend that they are not, they may want to dress things up, but in the end what they deliver is a Pitch. While many will argue that as long as it gets the job done, except it is that view that leads to inconsistencies in results, rather than predictable outcomes that result from professional selling, rather than professional order taking.

One reason many resort to pitching is their failure to understand the business drivers behind the purchase the buyer is undertaking. This is especially prevalent with many one trick pony companies, where each product, and thereby each sale, is just one singular component in “the stack”. This allows reps to fall into the trap of knowing their slice best, and not having to worry about the big picture. To be clear, this laziness is present and abundant in other sales teams as well, it is just most prevalent with products that address one particular need.

The problem is that economic buyers do not set out to buy things. They usually set out to achieve things, at times these can be simple things that do not require a lot of process, like “I need to buy toner”. But with “solutions”, or more involved purchases, buyers are more often driven by a result they are trying to achieve. They often don’t care how that result is achieved as long as it is legal and cost effective. Which is why pitching product, or features, or even ROI’s lead to longer sales.

The ‘pitch” is usually centered on “how, and how well, we do what we do”, just think of your average “elevator pitch”. Some evolve to what makes “the how we do that” by adding what makes their process unique, hence the Unique Selling Proposition, but it is still about what we do and how, not necessarily why that is good for the buyer, just that it is unique from the others doing a similar thing. Still little about the outcomes, and “what’s in it for the buyer”. This leaves the buyer to figure out how well the pitch aligns with their objective.

Some smart marketers figured out that if they change the label to Value Proposition, from selling Proposition, they could catch more fly with that honey. But still a pitch.

To truly be unique, you should define your value vis-à-vis objectives the buyer is trying to achieve, results they are looking to deliver to their business. To do that you have to think more like they do, less like the day to day user of the product, and more like the ultimate beneficiary of the output of your product. To do that, you need to look at the world through their perspective rather than the product or sales perspective. I seriously doubt your buyers are reading the latest sales book, sales guide, or someone’s thesis on resurrecting some secret black art. They are more likely reading business books related to running their business, and the latest in that thinking. For every one of my posts you read, you should read a post written not for sales people, but your buyer, read an engineering blog, consume a journal from the professional association of your buyer. Read anything that allows you to have a conversation with your buyer about their world, not yours. That conversation will take further than the best value prop or USP. It’ll help you avoid driving your buyer to think “pitch – please”.

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IKEA isn't just innovating in their design process, they are innovating in their customer research approach too

Global home furnishings and meatball brand (IKEA sell 150 million meatballs a year), IKEA of Sweden already innovate in their democratic design approach when producing new products, but now they're taking a leading approach with their customer insights: chatbot surveys.

The IKEA concept already works to make their products attractive, functional, sustainable, accessible and affordable. IKEA are the masters of efficiency and it seems that they are working with their research agencies, to take this approach to customer insight.

The world of market research and insight has somewhat an obsession with innovation, researchers are always looking for new ways to gain insights, hence big data, online communities, shorter surveys (though I question whether many are actually getting shorter). But in the day to day, researchers tend to stick with the same old quantitative and qualitative methods and IKEA clearly does see the value in the survey, but they (along with their insight agency) conducted a customer satisfaction survey with a twist. They turned the survey into a chatbot.

Marketers are starting to embrace the chatbot, Pizza Express have used Facebook Messenger chatbots, as well as Marriott and Heineken. But chatbots aren't used so much for customer feedback.

Let's have a look at what IKEA did, why it was a great way to get customer insights and finally how you can do something similar.

Using chatbots for customer satisfaction

Rather than the usual survey structure, IKEA created a chatbot, called ORC.

In typical IKEA branding, they say "Hej!" in Swedish, they offer an incentive and a link to terms and conditions of taking part. It's friendly, appealing, doesn't look like a survey and is fully branded.

The survey uses emojis, it asked qualitative questions and quantitative questions.

They finish the session with some demographic questions.

Why is this survey so great?

I love this survey for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it's less about length and number of questions. It's more about gaining insight and having a conversation with customers. How many questions were there in the survey? I couldn't tell you. It was also a little longer than expected, but there is no progress bar or question numbers, so participants won't realize - again because it's a conversation.

It's easier to reply and seems simpler to reply because it's not a traditional survey. It also offers a real variety of question types and styles, whilst being conversational. It's also rooting around like a survey normally would, but it feels more conversational.

It allows you to collect a lot of information in one session too and this is encouraged by the language used ("you've been awesome today").

There are most likely some cons though:

The questionnaire can be written like a normal questionnaire, but you need the addition of a full script to be produced for every answer. It's also probably much longer to program and for many researchers, there's the issue of getting their heads around another platform. But does it pay off? It's highly engaging and there is only one way to find out: try it.

Let's think of this from the user's point of view though: the survey below (not by IKEA) is not very user-friendly, engaging or inviting. It's time for insight to innovate! If you want responses, you have to work for them.

What are other companies doing to innovate in the customer insight sphere?

The insight world is focusing on automation. According to the latest GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) report, there are a number of techniques which researchers are starting to automate, as part of innovating their research. Analysis of test data, project design, matching suppliers and buyers amongst other areas are being automated.

The GRIT report also summarises a number of research agencies and research buyers (clients) who are innovating too.

System1, previously known as BrainJuicer has come top or ranked highly for a number of years, their approach to insight is regarded as innovating. They innovate on ad testing and brand tracking.

Unilever, Google, Coca-Cola and Facebook are ranked highly as innovative by respondents of the GRIT report.

So just how are researchers innovating? According to a previous GRIT report (2016 Q3-4), mobile surveys, online communities and social media analytics are the emerging methods used by both buyers and suppliers. There's been an explosion in the number of research agencies and software as a service (SAAS) companies offering online communities: even panel companies like Toluna have developed an online community offering. Online communities are a little complex to set-up but offer fast turnaround and are cost effective to run, reducing the cost of insight collection compared to "traditional methods".

Social media is also hugely important - marketers are taking advantage of platforms which crawl social networks for comments about brands, to understand customer sentiment towards a brand. I expect this area to grow and become more established over time, for example just crawling social media doesn't always produce useful insight, projects can be more targeted and researchers may end up using technology less and simply delving into social media more manually. Or perhaps they will use social media to ask questions with their audience more - a more conversational approach, like chatbots perhaps?

Customers may not always like surveys, but they love conversations.

If I could offer you only one piece of advice for making your sales kickoff a massive success, it would be this: Coordinate the content into one integrated whole. Let me explain.

It is rare that you get your entire sales force together in one place for a few days, so everyone is going to want time with the whole group, and a good many people on your team are going to want certain workshops. You are never going to have enough time, but you know that.

It’s also expensive to put together a sales kickoff meeting. You have to deal with logistics, hire keynote and content speakers, handle catering, and deal with entertainment. All of this is critical, and it is more work than most people recognize.

It is important that the sales force is entertained and educated, but it is more important that they return back to work with the ability to take action on what they learned. This means one of your primary goals should be to weave all the content together, building to the outcome that you want.

Keynote speeches must be entertaining. They also have to contain some major learning outcome. A great keynote can provide the content that creates a mindset shift in the sales force. That mindset shift serves as the platform on which to build the rest of the content.

Breakout sessions need to educate, and they should teach new skills to accompany the mindset shift enabled by the keynote. This is where mistakes are usually made, and they usually begin with content around product. Product is important, and salespeople need a deep understanding of what they are selling. The mistake is to provide product content alone, separated from the mindset shift and separated from the sales skills.

This can very easily be improved by connecting the product to the theme, and then tying it tightly to the skills being developed in the breakout sessions. Here is a quick example.

Let’s say your keynote speaker talks about how buyers have changed the way they buy. The skill set training might be around identifying where the buyer is in their process, requiring the salesperson to leverage that information to open a conversation about the new outcomes enabled by the product.

The integration of content around the outcomes you are trying to enable isn’t easy to do, and there is no chance you won’t have content that falls out of your major outcomes. But it is still the best way to ensure that you achieve the result of having your salespeople leave capable of doing something they were not capable of doing when they arrived.

The post My Best Advice for Your Sales Kickoff appeared first on The Sales Blog.

dimitrisvetsikas1969 / Pixabay

Inbound marketing is a continuous cycle of creating, distributing, and promoting helpful content and resources to your potential audience and customers. The goal of inbound is to help prospective buyers solve an issue or answer a question so that they remember you when they’re in the market for your product or service. As opposed to outbound marketing in which companies actively try to sell services through traditional media campaigns such as TV, radio, and retargeting, inbound marketing takes more of an audience-based, educational approach to catching prospective buyers on their own time through great content.

Gated vs. Ungated Content

When it comes to creating content, there are two ways you can distribute: You can “gate” the content behind a form, or you can leave it ungated and openly accessible. In determining whether to gate a specific piece of content, you need to consider the value you’re providing readers.

What’s the Difference?

Gated content requires users to share some basic contact information in exchange for the content. Example: A user shares his or her name, email address, company, and location in exchange for an article, infographic, e-book, and so on. The screenshot below is an example of gated content:

Ungated content is completely free and doesn’t require the user to share any personal information in exchange for the content. Example: A user lands on your blog and downloads a PDF without giving you his or her name or email address. The screenshot below is an example of ungated content:

How Do You Develop Gated Content?

To determine whether to gate content, you need to take a little time to gauge the value of the content. For example, if you’re investing time and resources to create an extremely helpful, all-inclusive “how-to” guide for your customers, you can most definitely capture contact information in exchange for the content. In the world of sales and marketing, contact information is the most valuable commodity. By continually gathering contacts and building a database of user activity, you begin to build a list of leads for your sales team to work with in the future.

So, where do you start? How do you determine the type of content that will be helpful to potential customers? You work with your sales team.

Your sales team is your boots and ears on the ground; they’re the people working directly with potential customers, and they know the questions that clients are asking, the problems that they encounter, and the issues that they need help with. In fact, one of the best ways to brainstorm content ideas is to sit down with your sales team and throw out all the questions that it receives on a daily basis. Doing so will give your content creation team a variety of topics that you can build content around, from helpful blog articles to in-depth ebooks and webinars.

Examples of Content That Should Be Gated Include:

• White papers
• Checklists
• E-books
• Webinars
• Infographics

Examples of Content That Can Be Ungated Include:

• Blog articles
• Interviews
• Case studies on the company website
• Basic product/service overviews

How Does Gated Content Help Sales?

In the world of inbound marketing, there’s nothing more valuable than generating sales qualified leads (and, ultimately, customers). Sales qualified leads, or SQLs, are those companies or individuals who have moved through the Buyer’s Journey and are closest to making a decision on a product or service. They are the leads most likely to turn into a customer today.

Gated content helps sales teams tremendously because of the context it gives on a call. A salesperson, for example, can call on a prospect who has downloaded an e-book and talk specifically about any questions that the prospect might have, if he or she found it helpful, if he or she is currently in the market to buy, and so on. As opposed to outbound sales in which there’s cold calling and there’s absolutely no context for a call other than to make a sale, inbound marketing takes a much more consultative approach, and it’s that gated content that can help give salespeople the context to have a great first call.

Why Getting Your Sales Team Involved Matters

It’s not enough to have your marketing team members brainstorm topics they think would be helpful and base content on that. And it’s not enough to write all of your content based on keyword research. To find the ultimate success in content marketing, you need to involve your sales team. Find out the questions that the team is asked, the objections that clients have, what content the team has used in the past that has been helpful for clients—and let them show you where to start.

Another key reason to get salespeople involved in this process is to help determine the most valuable information that they would need captured on the form to download. Remember that your salespeople will ultimately be calling on these leads, and knowing what information will be most helpful to them on those initial calls is key.

Your sales team is the most vital part of your business, and it needs to be involved in the content creation process. The sales team’s involvement in content creation helps produce better content overall and helps align sales and marketing so that everyone is on the same page and can work toward the same goal.

If you have any experience in sales, you’ve probably heard stories are the best way to persuade prospects.

And it’s true: People enjoy listening to stories far more than they enjoy being sold to.

According to a study from two Yale University psychologists, our brains process metaphorical and literal information the same way. The researchers told participants the experiment was starting shortly. But it had already begun as soon as one of them started to struggle carrying an arm full of folders. He asked a volunteer to hold his coffee for a second.

Some volunteers were asked to hold iced coffee, while others were asked to hold hot coffee. Then, volunteers read the description of an individual.

Those who were holding the warmer cup said the individual had a “warmer” personality.

This is why stories are so powerful. They help us “connect the dots,” uncover patterns, and even understand how buying a product can help us get a desired result.

Let’s discuss how you can leverage stories to close more sales deals.

The Anatomy of a Persuasive Sales Story

Using stories in sales can be much more persuasive than just relying solely on data, logic, and facts to communicate how you can help your customers get a specific result.

Here are a few key components of a great story: 

• A hero: Someone your audience can relate to. 
• Stasis: The situation the hero is in when the story starts.
• A trigger: An event that triggers a “transformation.”
• Tension: Obstacles or challenges the hero must overcome.
• The crossroads: Where the hero makes a decision that leads to the transformation. 
• The resolution: The hero (and other characters) should have been changed for the better. 

Here’s an example of what a story outline might look like if you’re, say, selling sales software to automate email outreach:

The Hero

Bob is a sales manager at a software startup with a growing sales team.

Stasis

His sales reps were spending hours and hours every day sending emails, connecting on social media, and making phone calls to ideal prospects -- like any effective sales team should be doing.

Trigger

Bob noticed in the weekly and monthly pipeline reviews the team’s conversions from qualified leads to demos and demos to won deals were slowly declining. Looking back over the past three months, sales were down by 30%. Something had to be done -- and fast.

Tension

Bob started analyzing the team’s data to understand what was going wrong -- and it looked like his salespeople weren’t properly qualifying leads, identifying their clients’ key pain and goals, or sending well-written, personalized emails.

So he began researching different tools and solutions that could help improve his sales team’s performance. Eventually, after searching several companies, he found fourletter.io.

(See how I inserted my company into the story we’re telling?)

The Crossroads

Bob was evaluating other, cheaper options. But he found sales teams that worked with fourLetter in the past had an average of 62% increase in selling skills, leading to a 20% increase in total conversions.

He decides to try the program for a month.

The Resolution

Bob’s sales team now enjoys a higher quantity and quality of leads. Their emails, calls, meetings, and follow up strategy improve as well. Not only are they more productive, average conversation rates increase by 28%.

At the end of the quarter, Bob gets a promotion.

Your customers should face similar challenges and desire a similar transformation so they’ll see themselves as the hero of your story and relate to the experience.

Create a “Story Toolbox”

While the outline of a story is relatively constant no matter what type you’re telling, there are a few different types of stories you should have in your toolbox to effectively communicate what your company does, your product features, how you’re better than the competition, etc.

The “Who we are” story

People tend to assume that customers don’t really cares about their life story, details of their personal life, or how they built their company from nothing.

This isn’t true.

If you frame it in the right way, your “origin” story can help bring your customers closer to you and make you seem more human.

Customer success stories

These stories are perfect for written case studies or testimonial videos.

Sharing stories of your successful customers from different industries, backgrounds, and challenges shows customers how your product will work for their specific company.

Everyone believes that their company is different or that their specific challenge is somehow unique … until they hear stories of other customers in more or less the exact same position.

Your product story

The story of your product has to do with how your product changed and improved over time. Why did you create certain features? Why did you decide to build your product in the first place? Did you have some personal experience with the problem you’re trying to solve?

Communicating these details makes you more relatable to your customers. For example, check out how Push for Pizza communicated their story through this ad.



Fusing a storyline into your messaging and putting different stories in your toolbox lets you craft more persuasive sales messages and ultimately, close more deals.

Working with large numbers of smaller influencers is a logistical challenge, and requires the right set of tools

How would you like to recruit an army of influential people -- each with hundreds or even thousands of loyal followers -- to promote your brand?

If this sounds good to you, then you understand the rising popularity of micro-influencer marketing. Micro-influencers can sway opinions, there are millions of them, and many are already eager to work with brands. In fact, you likely already have micro-influencers among your brand’s customer and fan base.

Ready? Not so fast. In order to get results with micro-influencer marketing, you need to scale your campaign across hundreds, even thousands of influencers (depending on your needs). These are real people, not ad units, and there’s no simple way to automate the process of getting these individual influencers to promote you, let alone handle logistics like negotiation, content creation, and payments. You’ll need to understand the complex ecosystem of influencer marketing tools, services, and techniques to achieve ROI in your micro-influencer campaign.

Micro-influencers are loosely defined as bloggers or social media influencers with 100,000 followers or fewer. Studies have found that these smaller influencers have greater engagement, loyalty, and sway with their audiences than the big-name celebrity influencers. However, to achieve scale in your marketing campaign, you need to work with a large number of these folks, which presents some logistical challenges, such as:

• Finding the right influencers
• Contacting them (and getting responses)
• Negotiating terms
• Manage the content development process
• Paying influencers
• Following up
• Tracking success

Scaling an influencer marketing campaign requires solid planning, great communication, and a smart combination of the right tools.

First, determine your needs

This may seem obvious, but I’m surprised how often I’ve seen marketers dive into influencer marketing without fully outlining their needs.

What are your marketing goals?

One common trap that marketers fall into is to jump into an influencer campaign without fully thinking through their marketing objectives. For example, some marketers assume that once they convince a few popular Instagrammers to post images of their product, the sales will start rolling in. Quite the contrary. Instagram promotion can work for some categories such as fashion or travel, but can fall flat for other categories.

As a first step, determine what outcome you’d like to achieve from your influencer campaign. What do you want?

• Build awareness?
• Drive sales?
• Gather leads?
• Email signups?
• Increase your social media followers?
• Get reviews?
• Unboxing videos?
• SEO links?
• Stunning imagery?

What platforms and formats are you targeting?

Based on your goals, you can then determine which platforms and formats you’d like to target for your campaign. Keep in mind that the end goal of any influencer marketing campaign is the creation of some form of content. It can be a YouTube video, an Instagram post, a pin on Pinterest, a Tweet, or a blog post.

Who is your target influencer?

Once you have an idea of the content you’d like to create, and which platforms are a best fit for your brand, then you can begin to define the right influencer for your campaign.

• How many followers?
• What do they talk about?
• On which platform(s) do they drive engagement?
• Audience characteristics. Age, gender, location of their followers should match your target customers.

Now that you’ve outlined your goals and your target influencer, the hard part begins of actually finding these influencers and convincing them to promote your brand. Broadly speaking, you have three major options for doing this, 1) tap into an influencer marketplace, 2) build your own database (DIY approach), and 3) partner with a full service influencer marketing service. There are pros and cons to each, and a wide range of influencer marketing tools to help, and based on my 3+ years of running influencer marketing campaigns, I’ve laid out some of the best options for you here.

Connect with influencers by tapping into an influencer marketplace

When it comes to contacting influencers, you can either contact them directly or via a marketplace. Direct contact requires you to build a list of influencers and reach out to them directly, usually via email. Marketplaces offer you an existing directory of pre-qualified influencers which you can browse or search, or some will even match you up with influencers based on best fit criteria.

The upsides of using a marketplace are speed and efficiency. You can skip the time-consuming steps of building a list of influencers, finding their contact information, and communicating with each one separately. Plus each marketplace will typically have certain parameters for their influencers, such as YouTubers, or influencers within particular categories, which can speed your search process.

Famebit

Famebit is the most popular marketplace for reaching YouTube influencers. Famebit has over 70,000 influencers in its marketplace, and has the added cachet of actually being owned by YouTube (Google acquired it in 2016).

On Famebit, you simply list your campaign, select the types of influencers you want to work with, and then you can either invite influencers or influencers will apply to promote your product. Famebit charges 20% of the fee paid to the influencer.

Octoly

Octoly is another popular YouTube marketplace. Similar to Famebit, you can list your product and campaign in Octoly’s marketplace and either receive applications or invite YouTubers to promote you.

Octoly’s unique aspect is that brands cannot provide monetary compensation to influencers, their system works around free product samples only. This may work for smaller YouTubers, but larger influencers will typically require a fee so may not be listed on Octoly.

Influenster

Influenster is a very popular shopping community site which caters to small influencers who like to review products. They have 3 million influencers on their platform who post product reviews on the Influenster website.

As a brand, you can submit your product to be included in one of their “VoxBoxes” which are boxes of free product samples they ship out to their influencers.

This is an easy way to get your product in front of small influencers and regular shoppers who will review your product and mention it on social media. Influenster has a strong community of beauty influencers, as well as lots of influencers who talk about food and cooking, home and health products.

Build your own database of influencers

The downside of listing in a marketplace is that you may be limited in the customizability of your campaigns. Marketplaces set their own parameters around what types of influencers they list and the types of campaigns that can be run. Either you’ll be limited to influencers on a specific platform such as YouTube or Instagram, or you’ll be limited to certain review formats.

If you need greater customizability in your campaigns, you’ll need to create your own database of influencers and handle outreach on your own. Luckily, there are a wide range of tools to assist you with this too.

How to find influencers

One of the most common ways to discover influencers through the content that they create. Depending on your target media or platform, just search for content that’s similar to the content you’d like to create (reviews, unboxings, imagery)

If you’re targeting YouTube reviews, then a great place to start is to search YouTube for reviews of products similar to yours, and build your list based on who is creating great content. Likewise for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Google for bloggers. You can start by searching on each platform for content you like.

You can also use one of the many influencer search tools available. These tools are designed to help you search through content and lists of influencers to speed up the process of locating influencers.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is probably the most popular tool for searching for influencers. You can search for content.

Buzzsumo will show you content relating to your keyword that has the greatest visibility in terms of social shares or linking sites. You can target either the author of the content or the people who shared it on Twitter.

You can also search directly for influencers by keyword:

Buzzsumo will show you key statistics like blog authority and Twitter followers. You can add influencers to lists to follow up with later.

Ahrefs Content Explorer

Another useful tool is Ahrefs. While this is primarily an SEO-focused service, Ahrefs has a very nice content discovery tool called Content Explorer which is similar to Buzzsumo’s content search feature.

Ahrefs includes some powerful filtering options - you can filter by publication date to find only recent posts, or even by word count, say if you’re looking for in-depth content only.

Buzzstream Discovery

Buzzstream (which we’ll discuss again below) is one of the most popular CRM tools for managing communications with influencers. However, they recently launched an influencer discovery service called Buzzstream Discovery which is another great way to find influencers.

Discovery works similar to the influencer search feature of Buzzsumo, where you search directly for influencers by keyword. Buzzstream Discovery has great coverage of influencers and provides very useful stats on each influencer’s level of engagement and activity.

How to contact influencers at scale

Once you’ve developed your list of influencers to target, you’ll need to get in contact with them. Typically the best way to do this is via email. If they have a blog, you can usually find the contact information there. Otherwise, you can try messaging them on the various social platforms, but typically you’ll have the best luck with email.

However, if your list is large, say hundreds or even thousands of influencers, you’ll need some tools to automate this process.

Buzzstream Outreach

Buzzstream is best known for its excellent Outreach service. Buzzstream Outreach is a full CRM system designed primarily for blogger outreach, but over time it has evolved to be a capable influencer outreach system.

On Buzzstream you can create Projects which act like folders to contain all your contacts for a given campaign. These contacts can include bloggers or social media influencers.

You can either add influencers through Buzzstream’s Discovery service (mentioned above) or you can upload your own list. Once you add contacts, Buzzstream will automatically crawl the web for contact information for anyone you add to your project.

Once a contact is loaded to your Buzzstream project, you can access their profile and email them directly from Buzzstream.

You can also email them from another email client, and as long as you connect your email server to Buzzstream, all communications will be tracked in one place. This is a great way to collaborate across team members in case multiple people are contacting influencers in your project.

Gmail and Google Sheets with Extensions

Of course, sometimes the old fashioned way is the best way. Gmail plus Google Sheets is a simple but very effective way to manage a large outreach campaign.

There are some great browser extensions you can install for Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox which can aid in finding contact information for large numbers of websites.

Hunter

Hunter is a very popular extension which will automatically find contact email addresses for any site you visit.

Buzzstream buzzmaker

Buzzstream makes an extension called the Buzzmarker which will not only find contact email addresses but will streamline your entire process by automatically navigating you to all the sites in a given project, while it picks up contact information for each one, which you then manually approve as you go.

Gmass

If you need to send emails out to a large group of people, Gmass is a powerful extension for Gmail that makes this easier. The way Gmass works is simple. After installing the extension, you just setup your email distribution list in Google Sheets, then setup your email template in Gmail, using variables to populate with various data items such as First Name and Website Name. Then send the email using Gmass in Gmail, and your mass email will be sent out with a click.

Gmass will track open rates and click rates for you, so you can easily A/B test different email templates.

Full service influencer platforms

Yet another way to scale an influencer marketing campaign is to use a full-service influencer marketing platform. These combine some of the advantages of the flexibility of building your own database with the speed and efficiency of working with a marketplace. Unlike structured marketplaces like Famebit or Octoly, full service platforms enable you to create your own style of campaign whether it involves smaller or larger influencers, YouTube videos or blog posts, Pinterest pins or Tweets, these platforms let you define your campaign needs. They also act as marketplaces, connecting you with influencers in their network, often helping you connect with the right ones based on your campaign needs.

Tomoson

Tomoson is a popular full service influencer marketing platform. On Tomoson, you can define your campaign needs, and through the platform you can connect with influencers to promote your campaign.

Tomoson’s network includes micro-influencers on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and bloggers, and they support sponsored content features, unboxing videos, and social mentions.

Tomoson’s platform helps you manage all your communications with influencers and aids with processes such as tracking packages for product samples.

Tomoson also tracks campaign analytics for you, so you can see clicks, engagement, and even conversions for your campaigns.

BrandBacker

BrandBacker is another full service influencer marketing platform which helps you connect with influencers. Brandbacker connects you with their network of influencers and offer agency-type services to help you craft your campaign and find the right influencers to promote it. Brandbacker also provides mention-tracking services, so you can monitor mentions of your brand and content created about your brand across social channels.

The big picture

The challenge of running a micro-influencer marketing campaign is that you’ll need to coordinate with a large number of influencers. Finding, contacting, negotiating with, monitoring, and reviewing content created for a campaign can be a logistical nightmare.

Influencer marketplaces are a great place to start if you’re looking for a relatively simple promotion such as YouTube reviews or Instagram posts.

If your needs are more complex, or you know you’re looking for a specific type of influencer, you’ll need to build your own database of influencers and contact them yourself. To scale a self-managed influencer outreach project, you’ll want to use outreach tools such as Buzzsumo, Buzzstream, and Ahrefs to speed up the discovery and contact processes. You can also utilize some simple extensions for Chrome and Gmail to make this process more efficient.

Finally, if you’re comfortable making a commitment to a single vendor, full service influencer marketing platforms can help you with the heavy lifting of contacting and coordinating with influencers, while providing you with useful campaign performance analytics as well.

Concord90 / Pixabay

You’ve read a well publicized book filled with new ideas, attended a super-charged, inspired conference or webinar, participated in your mastermind or peer group and you are on fire. You come back to the office ready to go, excited to share what you’ve learned with your sales team and you experience what I call “the letdown.”

Your team doesn’t get as excited as you. They just don’t. Maybe it’s because they don’t see your vision or perhaps you haven’t conveyed it with as much excitement and intensity. Or maybe it’s because you’ve worn them out a bit.

I love “shiny new objects.” I want to try them out, understand how they work and then see if they fit into how we work. I consider it part of my job to seek out new things and understand if they can add value to what we do. Yes, it means that I disregard 95% of them, but that’s okay. I also want to try tools that will help us be more productive, sell more and serve our clients better. Several of the tools we used five years ago are not on our radar any longer. And others are our must-have, go-to tools that we couldn’t work without.

Leaders who are passionate about their own professional development, who engage in learning through industry or peer groups often find themselves filled up with great ideas they want to share and encourage others to, especially their salespeople, embrace.

I have noticed that sales teams are fatigued. They can’t keep up with the pace of change within some organizations or are in organizations where the pace of change is so slow they’ve fallen asleep and lost interest waiting for leadership to join the 21st century. (If you think those companies don’t exist, they do. I recently met a CEO who declared that he and his leadership team made an executive decision five years ago not to use LinkedIn or have their employees use it. Need I say more)?

Here are 5 ways I see sales team fatigue:

1. In the first few minutes of discussing their sales strategy, I get a simple eye roll. They claim there is no plan and every time they’ve tried to implement something, no one pays attention. Why would there be a team of people with are charged with a role as important as sales with no strategy. Solution: Does your top competitor have a sales strategy? Find a company who has disrupted your industry in some way and see if you can determine their sales process. Study their sales process and determine if you can create something similar.
2. Salespeople are being asked to do more production/administrative work which takes time away from selling. Hey folks, buying Salesforce is not the answer to less admin work. Salespeople bogged down with more tech tools and no training, coaching or reinforcement grinds them to a halt faster than anything. Solution: Ensure the investment you’ve made in tools and technology pay off by tailoring those tools and platforms to your team; provide ongoing coaching, training and updates so your team stays engaged and adoption is consistent and high.
3. Sales leaders haven’t actually used the tools they ask their salespeople to use and don’t understand how they do (and often don’t) work. They, the sales leaders, have been sold themselves on something without pressing the buttons and using said technology, platform or device. Solution: As a sales leader, use the tools as your salespeople do. Do they work the way you thought they would? The more you understand the tools they are required to use, the more you will understand if they deliver what they are supposed to, and where the opportunities, and even the gaps, are.
4. Sales leaders, maybe for the sake of their sanity, try to build a one-size-fits-all salespeople program rather than creating at least a couple of pathways for sales success. Why not have specific sales programs or projects that salespeople can tap into? Solution: Not everyone is going to embrace social selling, so does it make sense to make it a requirement? Although I think it’s critical to embrace it, how about not mandating it from the beginning but creating a pilot where success can be demonstrated more definitively with those who are eager to engage in social selling? The others will either come along or realize they need to move aside. Are you a leader who recognizes that not every sales person, even the most profitable, seasoned or gifted is going to be spirited by engaging socially?
5. Salespeople give up on being creative and inspired. They are beaten down by the Excel spreadsheet full of calls made, meetings set up, proposals drafted, won and lost. Don’t get me wrong, I get the need for all of that, but those numbers in and of themselves may not tell the whole story. Solution: The more sales leaders provide a framework for sales success that inspires their salespeople to take responsibility for generating their own leads through referrals and their network, distinguish their personal brand and expertise through knowledge-sharing, the better. Let your salespeople become rock stars. Put them on the highway and let them drive. If they get off on a particular exit, there may be a reason and they may find out it’s a good shortcut or a dead-end. Either way, they learn and add that experience to their memory bank.

For the salespeople in companies where it’s strategy and tactics du jour, there is rarely enough runway to test if something works before something new interrupts it. Cycling in and out constantly is tiresome for most people. It also becomes hard to measure success.

Which leader are you?

The one who tires everyone out with shiny new objects? The one who doesn’t present any new ideas or strategies?

Either way, your goal should be to figure out which one best defines you and consider how you can recalibrate yourself and your management to re-engage your salespeople.

If you’re the shiny new object/idea leader, choose your strategy and tools and commit to them for at least three months, or even better, six months. Pay attention to what works and what doesn’t; stay with it unless of course, it becomes so off kilter. One of my clients implemented a Center of Influence campaign for five months and in the end, the Excel spreadsheet highlighted the following:

• 45 new 1st time face-to-face meetings
• 34 proposals
• $391,000 new business won
• More than $1 million in lifetime value

The CEO, my client, committed after testing several other ideas. Once he committed, he stayed the course. Why only five months? He sold his company. The new much larger company commented they didn’t have a sales process as focused and successful as his.

By the way, today is a great day to begin. Why? This post is publishing at the end of August and more people gear up for September than January. We are wired from the time we are young to gear up for back to school and we move from being the student to the parent of students; so much of our life is geared to a September through June mentality. I know I do. And, most of my colleagues, friends, and clients do too. I feel the September buzz in the air. So take advantage of September and I am confident it will roll right into the new year without the typical January business hangover.

As part of a client project, I recently reviewed numerous manufacturing company websites. These companies sell very expensive, very complex products. The products don’t sell themselves.

Before making a sale, manufacturers need to educate prospects about their (prospects) problems and how to solve them. But the websites did nothing of the kind.

Many, if not most, were, at best, glorified product catalogs. They were long on product specs but short (as in not at all) on problem solving.

The sites told readers a lot about what they could buy but almost nothing about why they should buy.

Worst of all, there was no way to engage with the company other than to use the “Contact Us” form. They failed the most basic test of a B2B website ― to generate sales leads.

Lost Opportunities

You would think that an effective lead generating B2B website would be a “must have” for B2B companies. Apparently not.

According to Artillery, a B2B marketing agency:

“For many B2B companies, lead generation is still rooted in more traditional methods such as referrals, advertising, direct mail and cold calling. The idea of generating leads from a website is less familiar to an enormous swath of the business-to-business world.

Many companies have had successful business momentum and reputations to carry them along for years. But with the economic downturn of recent years and Internet advancements that have changed the way people buy, many firms are struggling to catch up with how best to use their websites to develop new business.”

An ineffective website represents a huge lost opportunity to both generate qualified leads and reduce sales costs.

Why You Need a Great B2B Website

This following graphic from Venture Harbour suggests that a company’s website should be one of the company’s best source of leads:

Also, most buyers learn about a B2B company’s products from the website, not from a salesperson.

Consider these statistics:

• 93% of the B2B buying processes begins with an Internet search (Source: Pinpoint Market Research).
• Buyers can be anywhere from two-thirds to 90% through their purchase before first contacting the seller (Source: Forrester Research).
• 91% of B2B buyers never respond to an unsolicited inquiry (Source: No More Cold Calling).

BUT

• Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your B2B website are not ready to buy (Source: Marketo).
• 73% of all B2B leads are not sales ready (Source: MarketingSherpa).

That means that websites must first “hook” prospects and then “reel them in” with relevant information and offers.

How to Make Your B2B Website a Lead Magnet

Here are five ways to make your website a lead magnet:

1. Website Traffic―Driving traffic to your site is not the subject of this post. But suffice it to say you’ve got to have the right SEO and social media programs in place.

The goal is to get the right people (with your target profile) to find you. If they don’t, what’s the point of a great website?

2. Compelling Content―Your site needs to educate your prospects with relevant content. It has to help readers navigate each stage of the buying process:

• How to understand my problem.
• How to solve my problem.
• How to buy from you.

3, Calls-to-Action―An effective B2B website should offer multiple opportunities for visitors to take action. Action steps could include downloading a report, subscribing to a newsletter, or registering for a webinar.

This demonstrates a level of interest on the part of the visitor. In exchange for getting (presumably) valuable information, a visitor completes a form with his or her name and email address.

That converts a visitor into a lead. You can then “nurture” the lead with emails, articles, and other communications to guide him or her through the buying process.

4. Client Information―Tell your visitors about your customers. List your customers by company name and provide case studies. This tells visitors a lot about your target market, your services and products, and the problems you solve.

5. Bios―People buy from people, not from companies. At the very least, include the bios of your senior management team on your site. Put a human face on your business.

The Internet: Your Most Cost-Effective Sales Channel

Many complex B2B products require significant interaction between buyer and seller. This includes numerous meetings, phone calls, and email exchanges. Your website can’t help with that.

Use your highly compensated salespeople to close deals, not generate leads. Let your internet marketing programs do that. It’s a far more cost-effective approach.